It was a Friday morning. We were on our way to the hospital. Our appointment with the doctor was an hour later. The destination was only 10 kilometers away. But, the traffic on the road was moving at a snail’s pace and driving us crazy.
My usually calm husband P, was frowning and clicking his tongue. "Where are all these people going on a Friday? Isn’t anyone working from home today?", he pronounced between brakes and accelerations.
I turned on the music in the car audio. It had a soothing effect on the three of us. We were lost in the magic of the melodies when a loud noise jolted us.
An auto in the front had stopped all of a sudden, without prior indication. P had slammed the brakes instantly and had stopped short of jamming into the auto. However, the two vehicles had already touched each other.
As expected, the auto driver emerged out of the auto and started walking towards our car. A slow-motion walk might have suited the scene, accompanied by a background score. But, the driver was in no mood for such an extravaganza. He reached our car in seconds.
P rolled down the window. They saw eye to eye. I expected a flurry of verbal abuse to start any moment. The driver threw slurs at my husband in an animated way. But, the language was Kannada, thereby preventing any injury to the husband’s ego.
A man of few words, my spouse blurted out a few incomprehensible syllables, one of which I could decipher as "Sorry". The driver stood in silence for a second and then walked back to the auto.
I thought he had gone to get his phone, to load the Google Translate app. We waited patiently. P maneuvered the car and parked it on the side of the road, in anticipation of the battle.
But, to our surprise, the auto moved on.
P sat in the car gaping at the auto for a while. I shook him and brought him back to his senses. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled coyly.
I was disappointed to see the auto leave. I wanted to hold the driver’s neck and scream into his ears that it was his fault for having stopped the vehicle abruptly in the middle of peak traffic and that the apology offered by my husband was null and void.
I also wanted to proclaim that, this was the first time that my better (read: worse) half had hit (rather, grazed the surface of) a vehicle, in his 30 years of driving around the country.
I also wanted to prove to the world that, I had a better vocabulary than the two men in conflict. Sigh, what an opportunity lost in no time!
P restarted the car. As the car picked up speed and came in line with the auto, the driver gave us a nasty stare. I reciprocated by rolling my eyes, trusting well that the driver got all that I wanted to convey in that fraction of a second. Why waste energy yelling and fighting when my eyes could convey a million words (unparliamentary, of course)?
