Chapter 2: The Van

My eyes were on the road. My mind was beyond it.
The answer!!! The answer!!! Oh yes!!! Oh, I’m going to tell Anita! That will teach the bitch. I know the answer! Oh, I need to tell someone!
I clutched my left hand into a fist and powered it up determinedly. My left hand, mind you. I spit in the face of all you right-handed bastards who have made me feel inferior over the years.
I sped up my little silver Maruti. The traffic on these roads wasn’t really capable of handling the exhilarating speed of 32 km/h, but I was feeling a little adventurous. My palm pressed down on the horn, and I pressed it down parallel to the movement of my right foot on the accelerator. Nothing was going to stop me today. Go! Go! Go!
I should write it down. I should write it and sign and date it. I took my left hand off the gears and let it blindly wander around the backseat in search for a piece of paper amongst the rubble. My eyes were still on the road. My mind was way beyond it.
I turned to be faced by a wide road, which had had its wideness thoroughly exploited by a group of angry protestors.
“Rahul Vij, Murdabad!” said their voices and their posters, “Rahul Vij, Murdabad!” I tutted and slowed down as the mob drew nearer.
I didn’t know this Rahul Vij. And neither did I know of what sin that he had committed to invite the wrath of this mob. What I did know, that his sin had caused dozens of jobless adults to march on the street to spite him; and now they were slowing me down. My thoughts had already sped away.
One of the more creative angry protestors was carrying an effigy of what I can only guess was Mr. Vij. I knew that they would be planning to burn it down. Nice – I puffed my mouth and then blew the air out – Lets all scandalize him by forming a faction to burn an effigy. Jobless retards.
I slowed down even further. One of the retards came and knocked on my window. I sighed and lowered it.
“Rahul Vij, Murdabad,” he said, and handed me a colourful pamphlet, decorated by a face vaguely matching the effigy up front. Next to the face were some slandering words in large angry fonts.
I cordially ripped apart the pamphlet into four pieces and handed it back to him. “No, thank you very much.”
I pulled my window back up, but not before he had bellowed in another warning ‘murdabad’ in my sensitive ears. My feet pressed down hard on the accelerator. My hand pressed down hard on the horn. The herd blocking the road quickly parted and I victoriously drove through.
But then, like a group of stray dogs, the mob began to run after my car. In my confusion I only sped up even further. I’m not Rahul Vij, am I?
Screw them. I know The Answer. So I went back to my initial plan of finding a piece of paper to write it down on. My hand shuffled in the back seat. Stray, retarded, pissed-off protestors followed me. I went faster. And all this while, I wasn’t really there.
Several more of the protestors had stopped a bus ahead, conveniently in the middle of the road to provide the maximum amount of discomfort and irritation to any other commuters. I didn’t stop; instead I found a gap small enough on the bus’s right to speed past.
What I had unfortunately, momentarily forgotten, is that buses are big. And that Big Things can hide other things. It was probably because of the current occupation of The Answer in my neural system. I don’t know – it could even be all the promised long-term memory loss from all the drugs. But I hadn’t touched that stuff since college either.
College! When all that mattered was lighting a joint with the twins and listening to Thin Ali’s old tape of 'The Chronic'! I reminisced for a costly few seconds. It was truly going to be a painful coincidence that the after-effects of all the seemingly flippant marijuana smoke came to haunt me this very instant. Damn you, peer pressure.
I say this because behind the bus was a large white van that came charging down the road from the other side. The concept of driving lanes was still fairly alien to this city. The driver of the van must’ve been mistaken for a Rahul Vij too, because I saw a spark of familiar irritation in his eyes before his vehicle rammed into mine.
It was a little too late for me to turn. Both the Van and my Maruti were flirting with speeds foreign to these, thin, overcrowded roads. The Van was slightly faster, and its momentum pushed my Maruti into the static bus I had just overtaken.
Shit.
Glass shattered from all around, falling on me from various sources. As I plunged forwards into the windscreen, I didn’t feel too guilty about not wearing a seatbelt, though. No one wears a seatbelt here. The almighty review of stupidity and if onlys can’t blame me for that.
But it can blame me for being distracted by the answer.