Driving Ms. Puri: Up the Wall and otherwise

As if the omnipresence of a certain long haired Neanderthal in d-school wasn’t a constant reminder that my esteemed erstwhile employers have given me the boot (I’d say overlooked, but who am I kidding), every day at around 21:00 hrs the three missed calls on my phone bring back memories of my summer of woe with annoying regularity. Whoever said that men are unreliable clearly hasn’t met my mystery-man-missed-caller (even I only vaguely recall ever having met him) who will without fail, 7 days a week, at the hour in question give me a call. No no… correction, missed call, 3 in fact.

Ring…ring…ring…silence
Ring…ring…ring…silence
Ring…ring…ring…(you get my drift)

(actually I hate all the ring-tones on my phone so it’s always on silent mode. Its actually more like vibrate…vibrate…vibrate. But you try saying vibrate…vibrate…vibrate without sounding obscene)

So this person is in love with me. He told me so himself. And he’s fairly convinced so don’t try talking him out of it. Trust me I have tried…alas in vain. The last time we spoke (which was funnily enough the first time we spoke) I was trying to explain to him that it was illogical to fall in love with a complete stranger. Which is when he shot back in an injured tone and informed me that we were anything but complete strangers. We’d met in Dehradun. He was the driver who took me to Mussourie for a day for some asinine internship field visit. He sat in the front… I sat at the back. Lets just say for him it was “love at hind sight”.

Though I have a lot of faith in the potency of my charms, this was just a smidge too much too swallow. Anyone else would have showered him with expletives, but I thought the guy needed help so I tried to reason with him. My superlative psychiatric skills were totally wasted on him. Well… not totally. They were only repulsive enough to make him avoid conversation with me. The missed calls keep coming though.

I’ve stored his number under “anotherslime”. “another” because he was preceded by truly-mystery-man-caller cum stalker a.k.a. “slime”. There was a guy with character. He allegedly got my number while sitting next to me in a shared auto on the way to Batra (who’d have thought going to the movies could be so terribly injurious to health). Now he really and truly loved me… to the extent of following me home and in and around Kamla Nagar. A die hard romantic.

But back to drivers… I’ve met quite a few colourful characters in my time. There was the guy who bamboozled my poor unsuspecting parents into an antique shop in Srirangapatnam in the hope of earning a commission from the owner (to whom he bore a striking resemblance… familial nepotism zindabad) and fell asleep on the wheel (no I’m not being poetic… I’m talking genuine real life slumber) and almost got us all killed. He was funny… I liked him. And our driver in Leh, who in response to a request for a performance of a local song gloriously belted out, “pardesi…pardesi…jaana nahin…” rescued us from the brink of death (teetering uncertainly on the edge of a hill with nothing but rocks to break your fall) and in return asked us to take a photograph so he could send it out to local matchmakers.

Then there was my all time favourite, the driver during a trip to Sikkim. If Marlon Brando were a Bhutanese taxi driver he would still not be as cool as ‘Dazu’ (which is what we called him, Bhutanese for elder brother I think). He had a leather jacket, listened to GnR and assorted Nepali rock bands, smoked classy cigarettes (or smoked ordinary cigarettes classily…same difference). On our way to Nathu La our party apparently didn’t have the requisite number of security passes, so a friend and I (the two tinier people in the contingent) were smuggled in under blankets and shawls!

At that time I’m afraid I was the smitten one, I kid you not. If he had only asked me to run away with him I would have emphatically said “yes!” and jumped into the passenger seat singing something sufficiently corny to the effect of “drive me to the moon and let me dance beneath the stars…you are all I long for…” blah blah…

Being a big fan of seemingly endless car journeys I’m bound to come across some more interesting specimens. As for whether next time around will be a close encounter with penury, death or cupid? Watch this space.