I was unusually late again going home last night and it was a new experience once more. This time, from a different point of view. When I walked out of the office block to my car, it was well past 7:30 pm, but the skies were unnaturally light, sort of like twilight on an early spring day. The street and compound lights were on, but there was a kind of gleam that pervaded the whole area, as if there was a landing strip nearby, or else we were in the halo of amazingly sharp strobe lights. As I got into the car, apologising to the driver for not leaving at the usual time, he remarked on the light, too, saying that it felt like there was a big storm coming.
And there was a storm, though it was not very big. By the time we had driven a couple of blocks down, it was raining, a steady, persistent drizzle that slowed down traffic and loosened the mud and dirt ingrained into the roads. As a result, cars, bikes, scooters and pedestrians alike skidded gently towards each other, sometimes stopping in time to avoid collisions, sometimes breaking a headlight or denting a fender. Every now and then, when traffic could least afford to slow to almost a stop, there would be two cars stopped in the middle of the road, their drivers out in the rain, peering through the gloom at their vehicles and yelling damply at each other.
Gradually the light changed. The night darkened, the rain fell harder, the traffic slowed more and my nerves went from being on edge to practically tipping off it. My feet hurt, my legs ached, my head rattled with a mixture of exhaustion and irritation. The windows of my car misted every now and then and the air-conditioning felt strangely cold. Outside, tyres made hissing-shushing noises on the tar, the monotonous hum broken by annoyed honking from peevish horns and an occasional irate yell from a bad tempered and probably tired taxi driver cursing a pedestrian darting through the stream of vehicles.
It was risky driving. And it needed more presence of mind and alertness than either my driver or I had at that moment. Luckily, we could not progress with any speed and crawled forward without mishap or mayhem and got closer and closer to home with each turn of the wheels. And then, just as we were exulting the fact that we had got to the last stretch without any problems and not too much of a lag from our usual time, it happened. No, nothing happened to us or the car. But there was fairly major trouble on the road and we slowed again to just below a crawl.
It was at that last flyover before the highway to home-ground. As we glided up the stretch of the on-ramp to the bridge, my driver – who was admittedly more alert and awake than I was, bless him – said something under his breath that sounded rather rude and then veered off to the side-service road. That woke me up and I sat bolt upright and demanded to know where we were going. With infinite patience (he knows me well by now), the driver explained to me that traffic up ahead was stuck, all six lanes of it, and we were going to try and bypass the sticking point with a little clever manoeuvring. From below the level of the bridge we could see the cars waiting to go somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was away from there, that’s where. Smugly, we drove on, albeit inch by slow inch, and got to that somewhere, anywhere, that’s where ahead of the people who were above us and now far behind us.
From our vantage point we could see that there was something toppled over on the bridge, something that needed the help of a horde of policemen and a tow truck. Further on, we saw a car stopped at a point almost at the base of the down-ramp of the bridge, its nose mashed into the engine, a man holding his head sitting in the front seat. My driver peered into the rearview mirror to try and figure out what had happened. I just wanted to get home.
As we drove home, a little faster now, one image stayed clear and sharp in my mind. When we were below what was perhaps the highest point of the bridge, I had looked up to the road and seen something that seemed to embody the spirit of my city: indomitable, persistent, strong and enduring. An elephant plodded darkly through the rain, its bell clanking, its legs moving on and on and on towards a destination still unknown…
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