April 13, 2006

If I am alive today it is due entirely to the efforts of some angel above. And to my own very conscientious and careful driving, of course. An army of water tankers, trucks, trailers, buses, taxis and private cars try their best to crush me as I do my daily trip up and down the route. Recently, my first gear refused to work as I was driving home, hungry and tired, on the green and flower-filled Korangi Road. The signal turned green and my new, sixty-day-old car wouldn’t budge as I struggled with its gears under mounting panic.

The horn of the giant trailer behind me started to sound like bombs exploding. When the driver revved up his powerful engine and added his own shrieks and bellows to the mayhem, in desperation I put my car in the fourth gear and lo!, it moved. How I made it home with only one gear working is an experience I’d like to forget.

Two other forms of locomotion put the fear of God into me. One is the motor bikes that seem to scurry like ants in and out, around and under my car. When I blew my horn the other day at a biker that raced right across the front of my car moving briskly on the Baloch Colony bridge , he had the gall to turn around and glare at me angrily. If I hadn’t braked furiously, and swerved hard to save him, facing the risk of my car being hit from behind, or striking the railings and falling down the bridge, he would have been lying dead under the wheels of my car. And the annoyed look on that biker’s face seemed to ask why I was honking at him. Didn’t I know that in his view it was my duty, not his, to save his life?

When I used to read about the death of young bikers on the road, callously mowed down by some hit and run fiend, my heart would bleed for them. These youngsters were the pride and joy of their parents and the future hope of the country. Silently, I would curse the cruel bus driver, ( it’s always racing buses that are at fault} and pray that he would be caught. But, no longer. The drivers of the rashly driven buses may be the agents that snuff out the young bikers’ lives. But surely, it is the men riding the bikes who are themselves responsible for their own lives!

How or why have the bikers abdicated their own responsibility for their lives is not clear. What is crystal clear, however, is that today these men have come to believe that they can perform all kinds of acrobatics on the traffic glutted roads, and it is the bus, water tanker and other vehicle drivers duty to save them and protect them. They overtake you from the right, left and front, they zigzag through the traffic at top speed and think nothing of racing so close to your car that they knock out the side mirror.

So now when I read of some poor young lad knocked to his death by an overtaking bus, my reaction is: It’s his own fault. He should have known that bus drivers are charsees and you have to be extra careful around them. Same with truck, taxi, and all the other drivers.

Granted that among all the drivers on the road the most vulnerable are the motorbike drivers. For them death is just a patch of wet road away. Or a slight knock by even the tiniest car. But does their defencelessness make them more careful? On the contrary. Even rickshaw drivers, who also ride a motorbike, are safer than these bikers. In their obsession to race ahead, they will squeeze through the narrowest gap, charge in front of a speeding vehicle and perform other dangerous derring-dos. The funny thing is that it is no longer young men showing off on their speedy machines, who risk their necks on the road. I often find myself having to swerve and save a heavy-set man with a wife and child riding with him. He appears totally unconcerned about his family as he dodges between the heaviest vehicles. And ever so often one reads of a biker’s family members dying on the road along with him.

The tragedy is that pedestrians are even more unconcerned about their personal safety than the bikers. And almost daily they get killed needlessly on the roads. I have to work really hard with brake and steering not to crush one or two pedestrians of all ages under my wheels every few days. Again, I no longer blame rash and careless bus drivers for running over some of them almost daily. Doesn’t the jaywalker have eyes? Can’t he see the vehicles charging up and down the road? But no, arrogantly the man and even the child will start crossing the road on foot, expecting traffic to come to a halt for him. Their pride gets in the way of their safety. I try not to mourn for their deaths, reported daily in the papers. They should have watched out for their safety.

Here are a couple of tips for the traffic police. Instead of pulling up bikers to the roadside for monetary negotiations, the officials in white uniforms should order them to stay on the left of the road where traffic is relatively slow. That will ensure their safety, and mine.

Since the police are reputed to own many of the murderous buses and tankers on our city roads, it should be easy for them to control the drivers. They should be ordered not to race, overtake or stop in the middle of the road, or wherever they spot a passenger. If they observe just these three orders, traffic will become a lot smoother and instead of abuse, people will shower the traffic police with praise and prayers for their health and long life.

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