It was one of those dark rainy evenings when you were fighting
the road and trying to reach your destination on time so that your hungry
children could have their dinner on time.
I had started very early in the morning to Sambalpur and
Hirakud with my wife and two kids on a road trip to experience the natural
beauty of our state. Spending time with children witnessing their sibling rivalry
and remembering yours and realising how similar in spirit and yet so dissimilar
in shape these events are with that of yours. As nature's canvas opened up through
the windscreen of our car, the kids realised how many things they needed to
know about and with that came thousands of questions. It was a rewarding
experience.
By the time we started our return leg, my eldest daughter of
fifteen years had forgotten the initial sadness of not having her friend come
with us, opined that this was perhaps the best family outing she had ever had and
what she learnt from this trip would be useful in doing her project for the
School Science Exhibition. You feel good in spite of the pain you have undertaken.
Tired of driving for the last 16 hours, we crossed Badkera,
just before Angul around 8.30 pm., quite aware that we were almost one and a half
hours away from Dhenkanal and dinner at Dhenkanal would take one more hour; I
was visualising reaching home well past midnight. I was in two minds about whether to
continue my journey to Bhubaneswar or stop at Dhenkanal for the night. My
confidence in doing close to 22 hours of driving on this kind of road was
slowly waning.
The road scene slowly changed. From our solitary car
tearing through into the darkness of the night to slowing down to the parked truck-lined roads in front of roadside hotels that had just started serving
their customers early dinner in total
darkness. Absolutely dark - with few oncoming
trucks and vehicles blinding you, you train and squint your tired eyes to see
beyond the glistening water drops on your windshield to ensure that you don’t ram
into the back of a parked truck whose driver hadn’t bothered to leave the
hazard lights blinking.
Just ahead, you see the road suddenly getting wider and with
no trees on the side, you are at a loss to assess the width of the road. You spot
a row of trucks parked on the left of the road distinguishable only from their
backlight and try to avoid brushing against them by maintaining a sufficient gap
from them. As you move ahead you see a mound of broken and abandoned concrete
structure and avoid that by steering further to your right. The oncoming small
vehicles and median to your left make you realise that what you are standing
on is the abandoned toll gate at the entrance of the Angul Township which you
had crossed this morning and you are on the wrong lane with one brave auto
auguring his solitary head beam into your car.
A few seconds of eye-ball-to-eye-ball later I regained my composure
to realised that I was on the wrong side and needed to correct my course. Lost,
whether to make it to the next available cut in the median and take a left turn
or back off, I waived the driver to move to the side. The auto pulls up by the
side of my right window to tell me something. I lowered my window to realise
that the autowallah was ferrying some 5-6 people, mostly young men with their women
folk back to their village and they were returning to after enjoying some fair
at Angul- high in spirit.
The visibly angry autowallah with the air of a local
community leader chose to castigate me by telling me in an admonishing tone why I
couldn’t see the road and warned me that had I proceeded further, the police
would have penalised me for the lapse. I told him that because of the dark
night, I couldn’t see the road suddenly dividing into two and there were no road
signs warning me of that. Suddenly the young, barely out of his teen passenger
sitting at the back of the auto spotted my glasses perched on my head and
snapped with a sarcastic tone ‘How will you see the road if you keep the glass
above your head’ to this his newly wedded wife and other co passengers burst
out into peals of laughter.
This language can’t capture the sarcasm and disrespect the sentence packed. Completely flustered and choosing not to react to this unprovoked abuse by a young fellow, I chose to reverse.
About ten minutes into the road I heard the sobbing tone
of my son saying ‘Baje Loka’ meaning a bad person; my teenage daughter joined in
in an equally disturbed tone and said had there been that so-and-s0 uncle he would
have given this man two tight slaps. And I suddenly found myself drawn into the
discussion even though I neither wanted my kids to witness the abuse meted out
to me nor wanted to discuss it further. I reasoned what can we do if they
are ill-mannered? We shouldn’t go down to their level and fight with them on
the road? To that my son says but Papa he is so much younger than you. Why did he
misbehave with you?
I could sense that their childhood hero had fallen before
their eyes. The false sense of security and pride that my perceived
invincibility had given them for years lay shattered on the ground and they are
standing bare and shaken in that wet dark night. Shaken with disbelief as to how
could their Papa instead of pulverizing a minor street loafer like a film hero,
choose to take the indignity and walk away. They created a wall of silence between me and them, nursing their bruised and battered ego, all on their own. And we
drove on. While driving, my mind was in turmoil -whether I did the right
thing by leaving the place or I should not have let my children down.
Wish I could tell them that it's always not wise to jump at
every challenge and provocation we face every day, sacrificing the larger goals
of life – even if we are right. Couldn’t ask them that, would they have liked
to see their papa mouthing the same bad words that hurt them and rolling on the
road fighting loafers? What would have happened if this argument had led to a
bigger fight involving many bystanders? What if someone had tried to hurt all
of us in the car – just not me?
The kids had gone to sleep by then and moreover, I already had
lost the right to explain being a fallen hero.
