Portraits of the driver as a young man - II.

Sunsets and sunrises are the among the most common motifs in art and aesthetics, yet they never bore you or cease to hold your imagination. Out in the open, on a highway in the middle of nowhere, watching a sunset all by yourself makes it a first hand, close up experience, much like riding across nowheres, that makes you feel closer to, in proximity with nature, with the sunset.

Sunflowers! Bad photo, but REAL sunflowers! Not on TV or in a tourist album, not even a fleeting glimpse through a speeding bus or train, but field after field of glaring yellow running away to infinity - right here, right now, right around me. I hopped off the highway, parked on the side road that coursed through the midst of these fields, sat down upon a the edge of a little bridge. Their calm was infectious. It helped that it was late morning, and that I'd been driving since sun-up and so was in need of a break, so much time could be spent here.

This was another of the times when I wished I had a much better camera. This was a swampy stretch that I viewed from the ledge of a cliff outside Hospet on NH13. I parked upon the stones on the roadside, regretting as one does on such occasions - that things like these, those that we love the most are those that we cannot stay forever with. Some half an hour was all that could be devoted, for sundown, alas, approached, and a town had to be gotten to before dark, before the killer trucks would begin to go on the attack.

Portraits of the driver as a young man - III.

The Re-loins stations. Very neat, very well kept, amazingly spacious and comfortable - with hygienically prepared horrid tasting food - it tasted equally bad in the couple of stations I went to across three states. The perfect places to stop over and take a nap, after you've had lunch elsewhere.

Eh? Why should I give a caption for every pic?

That's un-burn.

The phantom steed.

Still life with unkempt hair.

Having taken Friday off, I was going on this ride this weekend. As I went by upon the Bombay highway near Khandala, I saw the road sloping downwards and swiveling away to the right without warning. It is a matter of complete amazement to me as to how drivers and riders actually pass by it and manage to stay alive, given that they go along the preceding straight at 80 and upwards, and thus hardly have time to notice the curve.

Of course, they that do crash may be considered fortunate, for, if you manage to clear the first curve at 80, there's no way you'll get past the next one that lies just 20m ahead unless you're at under 30 with your foot hard upon the brake, which curve is comprising of a road contorting itself into a grotesque reflex angle, making you wonder about the purpose of such a road, one so unnavigable. This second curve, unlike the first and like the subsequent ones, doesn't offer you the cushion of a wall to crash into – you miss the road, you fly off the cliff.

But then, such are the roads that surmount the ghats, that lace through the hills, as I found through the weekend that these curves inaugurated. It was just that I was new to driving on this sort of terrain. On these, or for that matter on any hills, your most important assets are your brake and your horn. You can forget your accelerator at home.

**

Death is a familiar passer by upon the Bombay Pune highway. Two motorcycles lying lacerated upon the ground in small puddles of glass shreds – giving no hints about the fate of their riders, one lorry 10km ahead, rammed into the wall of the tunnel causing a mile long clot in the traffic behind, another lorry lying overturned further ahead, with an enormous smear of red upon the tar around it, 3m of the all too frail and inadequate stretch that was the railing gone missing, having been driven through, making all too obvious the fate of the car which'd have sliced through it and taken a leap down the rock face.

Amid the mile long congealing of the vehicles, a police van flits by noisily, an ambulance rushes in with its shrill alarm. Slowly the crowding gawkers disperse, one particular motorcyclist weaves away amid the 4 wheelers to the front of the traffic jam, the jam dissolves, we all instinctively move into gear 4 and begin to accelerate, firmly convinced that it always happens to someone else.