http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2011/11/30/the-hungry-monster

The Hungry Monster

My knowledge on car-race, adrenaline pumping (the fact that I had to google the spelling of adrenaline, which before this I had spelled as ‘adreline’ shows how extensive my knowledge is on what I am about to write about), action flick movies (another term I picked out from a conversation that I have no idea how I got involved in) is limited to Fast and Furious and 2Fast 2Furious trailers. I was about to include Cars but I realized that is a different genre which might take away the gravity of this matter at hand.

I usually like to sit at the back of the micro, pull up my legs to lightly support my already-seated body and put all the weight of my head onto my palm; and lean onto the window. The sight outside is like an enormous monster, gulping down vehicles of shapes and sizes; a brown, dusty monster with a black pitched tongue, giving off steam as the vehicles are swallowed up. And every time the micro I travel in participates in this race to death, I cringe with fear and anticipation while the passengers traveling along looking like zombies that fear no calamity, the bhai looks unabashed by the speed of the micro as his self-propelled body contorts into various gymnastic movements; and the driver skillfully (and at times, without) maneuvers the already menacing piece of automobile.

I have heard news of micros crashing into pedestrians, bicycles, motorbikes, tempos, micros, buses, and trucks; far too many times, to let my mind and body relax as the micro gears up as soon as the driver gets a hint of a competitor from his side-view mirror. The bhai starts to bang onto the sides of the micro like a crazed, possessed shaman and the driver dai hollers (in his mind I suppose, or in mine) as another micro turns up into sight.

From the window I am leaning on, I can almost feel the gasps being taken by the passengers in the other micro; and I feel for them; just like I feel for my life. Isn’t it a weird concept: we trust our lives onto strangers who could or could not be bothered any less or any more about the fact that we choose inadvertently his vehicle to travel by? Isn’t it just so unnerving: the fact that the driver dai does not even glance back to make sure his passengers are still seated onto the seats?

Am I trying to blame the driver dai for his part of ignorance while I silently pray for the race to be over and get off the micro at the first sight of my stop? Yes, perhaps. Because he is the one with an officially certified license, and I am a naïve who refuses to learn to ride a scooter. Because the traffic authorities allow such licenses to be distributed, and here I say distributed because for surely, they aren’t doing a good job on ‘certifying’ and ‘validating’ these licenses.

And because, the brown-dusty-black-tongued monster is always hungry.          

 

Microphile loves to travel however, since her fantasies of travels into the Egyptian pyramids and Saharian deserts are, well, mere fantasies; she makes do with the hazardous amount of traveling she has to do in micro-buses, aka, micros. She loves to read while traveling in micros. All that traveling has most probably caused some spinal/brain injuries that she is unaware of; while she continues to travel by micros every morning; observing the mundane and writing about them in this blog.

http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2011/11/30/the-hungry-monster