Maharashtra Herald
670 words

Confessions of a Driving Tutor

I have a wife. I have a car. So the wife needs to drive the car. So she needs to learn diriving. That’s it. The beginning is as simple as that, but what follows is nowhere near simple.

The first step, my wife assumes, is to find a driving school instructor. Several Yellow Pages and phone calls later. she has decided upon one whose owner impresses her with his sales pitch. He offers a package that includes night-driving, reversing and slant-parking. I pooh-pooh them all, saying I can teach her all that and more. He can teach any vehicle, including the Tata Sumo. I say even if he can teach truck and bulldozer driving, all she needs to know is the Maruti 800. She says he can also teach driving the figures ‘S’ and ‘8’. I say even I teach all the alpha-numeric characters of the key board, all she needs to know is the ‘I’ and the ‘U’.

The only place where a driving school can be useful, I concede, is in getting the driving license. For everything else, I am more than enough.

So the next day, we begin, our early morning walk giving way to early morning drive. I start with the basics, literally the A-B-C (standing for the trinity of Accelarator-Brake-Clutch). As long as I show her how to start the car and get it moving without bucking as if in a rodeo, all I need is limitless patience. But when she gets the hang of it and it’s time to shift up and down gears, while controlling both speed and direction, I realise I need another quality: a strong heart. Either you have that, or you have an extra set of of controls under your feet, like the driving school instructor has (that’s the second advantage I concede to him).

At 20 kmph, the car seems to me veering wildly off control. I have never seen so many hens, goats, dogs, babies and old men crisscross the road at precisely the last moment. My feet work furiously in the empty air, pressing imaginary brakes and clutches, while I slump in my seat and shut my eyes. (Hospitals should use this as a cardio-stress tester instead of treadmills.) Miraculously, we and everybody else emerge unscathed.

But the scariest part is yet to come.

My wife says she feels confident enough to test the real traffic. She has had enough of driving in secluded lanes in the wee hours. I gulp. Does she realise what she’s saying? She intends to cross the University Circle at 9:30 amd on a weekday? Yes, I gulp again.

After invoking the blessings of all the 33 crore gods, we start. I give clear-cut instructions for road safety. Stay in your lane. Do not overtake from the left. Indicate before you turn. Move to the right beforehand, if you need to turn right. Honk only when required. Keep as far as you can from PMT buses. Ditto for pedestrains, cyclists and street dogs. Watch out for lighning-quick manoeuvres from auto rickshaws. Don’t swerve away suddenly to avoid potholes. Follow traffic lights, slow down on seeing amber, heed the traffic cop. Pray and proceed.

I must give her credit for trying at first. But she forgets either one instruction or the other, and I keep yelling and sweating in spite of the air-conditioner. Later, she asks: Do you really think it is possible to follow your instructions and drive here? She says she can learn quicker on her own if I don’t accompany her. No way. But she has made up her mind.

Two weeks later, she says I can check out her progress. Far away, the traffic light turns amber. She floors the accelerator, swerves to the right, honking away to glory, just manages to cut off another car from turning before the light turns red, yells back at the infuriated driver of the other car, and whizzes past the traffic cop.

She turns to look at me expectantly. I nod. Yes, you have learnt driving, I say.