Shadow Driving

It is far more interesting driving a bus then being a passenger inside one. I realized this the other day when I had an opportunity to be behind the steering wheel of a passenger bus. It was a memorable experience, a childhood dream almost come true, and also a revelation about how the road transport corporation plays with the lives of its passengers, and a lot more. The experience would not have been possible had I not taken a snap decision.

When the bus driver told me there were not seats in the bus except in his cabin, I agreed to it. There was no choice as all the buses were full and it had been a long and tiring wait for me. I had been traveling almost all week on work and wanted to get back home for the holiday. I wanted to be home in time for dinner so I got threw in my bags and climbed into the cabin. I sat on a long seat which was actually a bed for the second driver because it was a long distance bus. However the other driver was somewhere inside. I was not exactly driving the bus but sat behind the driver’s seat within reach of the steering wheel, the gear stick and if I stretched my legs, the brakes and the accelerator too would have been accessible. So it felt as good as driving the bus and appeared to be a lot of fun but it was otherwise.

I had thought there was nothing like traveling in a SUV but I discovered that it was nothing compared to traveling in a big bus sitting right behind the driver. The driver was one of those lean, wiry guys who are cool and unflappable in any situations. He was cool alright but he was also the sort who gives others on the roads moments they will remember all their lives. I watched him overtake enormous trucks at impossible moments with other vehicles approaching on the opposite side. He would keep overtaking while looking in the rearview mirror on the left to see if we had passed until the drivers of the oncoming vehicles pressed the horns in panic or slowed down completely. At the last moment just when it appeared like a collision was inevitable, he would give the steering a turn and veer the bus away. It was quite hair-raising for me to watch and I wondered how the people in the vehicles we just passed must have felt. After some time it began to feel like fun and I was actually looking forward when we would have trucks to overtake.

After a while it fell dark and the only time the driver opened his mouth was when out of the darkness loomed the rear of a ‘Volvo’ bus. It did not have any lights at the back and were it not for some last minute braking we would have certainly rammed into it. I wondered how the driver of the ‘Volvo’ was driving without brake lights and endangering the lives of the people inside. A little later when it started to rain heavily I discovered something similar in our own bus. I had wondered why the driver was not switching on the windshield though it appeared like we were peering through a waterfall. The lights of the oncoming vehicles blinded us, the lights getting magnified because of the cascading water and the falling raindrops on the windshield. I asked the driver, in fact whispered into his ears because his head was just inches away. Very coolly, he told me the windshield wiper was not working since ages!

For the next two hours I sat tensely on the edge of the seat. I watched the driver take the bus without a windshield at high speed in heavy rain on a national highway with hundreds of large vehicles moving in either direction. I marveled at the driver’s skill, or should I call it guts, in driving the bus in that condition. Now every time he overtook a vehicle I closed my eyes unable to take the tension. Cars and two wheelers simply careened off the road to get out of our way as we approached, horn blaring loudly. Only when the bus reached the four-lane stretch with a divider did I start breathing easily because there was no danger of colliding head-on with anything.

Just when I began to relax, he took out his cell phone to answer the calls he was getting. He got four calls in a span of one hour. It hadn’t stopped raining and in fact it grew heavier when the bus finally entered the city. However it did not deter the driver from talking on the cell phone. I also noticed that the instrument panel too had no lights. Now and then he rose from his seat, with the bus in high speed, to wipe the condensation on the inside of the windshield. This too made me very nervous. I wondered if I had taken the right decision to get into this bus.

But I forgave the driver all his faults for just one reason. When we heard the sirens of an ambulance, he blew the horn loudly scattering the vehicles ahead of us and careened to the left giving a wide berth to the speeding ambulance. Though he did not have any concern for those not yet dead in his bus at least he thought of those in an ambulance. By that one act the bus driver earned my appreciation though I did not tell him.