Traffic
For K.
There is a traffic policeman in our city who has been a member of the force for ages, living in a quiet corner where no cars pass.
He grew up on a highway; during the night trucks carrying wares would drive past his house and all the other houses that lined this long road that led to Rohtak, most of which were inhabited by refugees from another nation who had flocked here at the call of Partition in hordes, like flies, the single largest exodus in recorded history for which cities had to be built in order to accommodate for the incoming traffic. The newcomers, apart from requiring homes, also needed to move about, like everyone else, they too needed streets to walk on, like everyone else.
***
There have been accounts —entire volumes–dedicated to the study of traffic patterns of specific districts, cities and even exceedingly small towns. These (traffic) experts explain not only the particulars of traffic statistics, but also the psychological effect, for instance, a slight curvature on a street may impress upon a motorist.
The road that led to the highway across the railway track was soon replaced by a well constructed underpass, rendering the earlier road futile, and the only sister I really had went hurtling through the windshield, crashing into a truck carrying red bricks, rendering her unconscious for nineteen months before leaving us.
Her boyfriend, driving the jeep, escaped. V. F Babkov, in his book on road construction and traffic safety does not fail to mention that country roads, in particular–if my memory serves me correctly– when lined with especially tall, thick trees could distract motorists’ horizon, so to speak, lulling them to sleep. Her boyfriend left the hospital premises with a slight scratch on his scalp that was barely perceptible. Very little efforts were made by us to speak to the boy or his family after the crash.
***
Albert Camus left us suddenly while experiencing a car accident and a talented and reputed Bengali writer died in a tram-car. It makes me think of those individuals who die in cars that have come to a complete rest.
***
Egon Schiele painted thin train stations as landscape, and though he was fond of traveling, I wonder whether growing up the son of a station master, spending time at train stations, watching trains come and go, made up for all that unnecessary travel.
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In a film, Ryan Gosling plays his usual accustomed dead-pan demeanor as a driver complicit in various crimes he chooses to disacknowledge, contending that his task is to merely navigate the streets, to manipulate the movement of other motorists.
***
An illegal immigrant, who for a living drove a taxi, decided to not take up residence for fear of all the possible legal consequences that could ensue. Instead, he slept in the back seat of his car, curled up like a dog and used public bathrooms to bathe and wash his two sets of clothes, apart from which he had no other belongings. He spent most of his life in his car and truly felt safe only whilst speeding down roads at breakneck velocity.
***
Hurtling down in his van, the taxi driver, in order to save fuel, switched off the engine and relied on the decline of the hill to map his momentum.
***
In 1912, not long after meeting Felice Bauer in the home of Max Brod, Franz Kafka would sit down and write what would later be dubbed his writerly breakthrough and would dedicate this story to F. The protagonist of this short story, Georg Bendemann, at its conclusion, hurls himself into a moving traffic of cars, the sensation of which Kafka, in his diaries, compares to an orgasm.
***
Unlike many other writers, he insisted on writing his short stories in the midst of the hustle and bustle of his (asbestos) factory, while glancing occasionally at balance sheets, and monitoring his employees. His father had gifted him this factory, an opportunity to raise a veritable business–as Jewish fathers are wont to do– with his brother-in law, a business that he ran to the ground very quickly; I would like to imagine that it was here, in the asbestos factory where he composed his stories on the backsides of tally sheets and reports, in the midst of all this traffic.
***
The rickshaw wallah who drove us across the city, past traffic jams, cutting corners, used to check in on both of us, independently, long after we were no longer part of this long uninterrupted flow of traffic; and because we could not see each other as frequently as we would have liked, and spend time with each other in the open streets of our city, so well laid out by the municipal corporation, we spoiled each other with gifts, a constant traffic of gifts, talismans we held onto as possible farewells.
***
An old woman who was in fact quite young spent most of the latter half of her life reading only novels, most of which she would receive in the post. Intimidated by the ever-growing street traffic which she would watch with a keen eye during her idle moments, she preferred to buy her books from curators, book sellers and even publishers whose services she would avail by calling them directly on the telephone. They would send her books via registered mail that could on occasion take an inordinate amount of time. There had, however, not been a single time where the post failed her. That, notwithstanding, she insisted on drawing a limit of how many packages she would receive every week, for were she preoccupied with work that week, tracking these packages would cause her much anxiety. She had even deciphered and created her own tracking system over this protracted period of buying books and having befriended mailmen, whom she would on occasion invite home for tea. In some instances, she had even intercepted mail delivery by meeting a certain postman in the middle of a street while running errands. She was an active receiver, and many of the booksellers spread across various cities would grow frustrated and would gently remind her that receiving mail did not really require any deliberate effort on her part; the post would complete its job without her.
This woman, however, drove herself mad, tracking the post; on occasion she would ask booksellers to refrain from sending packages on certain weeks, especially those during which she was busy with some arduous tasks. She, afterall, needed the requisite energy to be prepared to receive the mail. She had developed over time a fallen name amongst booksellers which was really quite unfortunate; they considered her mentally ill; nobody understood that her anxiety was as authentic as any other emotion, such as love.
***
We spent much of our love enroute, hanging out of auto-rickshaws, relying almost entirely on the certainty of spending most of our precious hours, hand in hand, stuck in traffic, that very same traffic in the thickets of which we would see each other last.
Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash
