Midday Musings

I can’t remember having touched the steering wheel of a car let alone driving one. But life in the US is not so smooth without a car plus I always have to be dependent on others – the public transit or my husband. So I had to learn to drive which was ok. Or so I thought.
The immediate problem was I had to obtain a learner’s permit first and in order to do that I had to scan the details of a 60+ page book issued by the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). That was my main obstacle. I tried going through the book so many times. Remembering the blood alcohol content allowed in the bloodstream of drivers or the proper usage of fog lights and high beams didn’t quite appeal to me and each time I tried to read the book I either dozed off or found something else which seemed infinitely more interesting than the book. Even the history text books of school would have made my list of interesting things at that point.
Since my progress with the book was going nowhere the actual process of driving was also being delayed. Fed up with the delay Santa (shortened version of my husband’s name) took matters in his hands. Described below is a result of that action.

I was three months old in the US. It was almost ten pm on a weekday. We were returning home after one of our nightly excursions (read shopping for home goods) when a light bulb blinked in Santa’s brain. He suggested that I drive the car.
What? Who? Me? Drive? This car? Is he out of his mind?
He said he knew a desolate lane beside the Caltrain track near our house which had a speed limit of 30 mph, and not many cars travelled that road. I could learn to drive there. Though the idea sounded totally crazy to me it appealed to my adventurous side and I jumped in; as the Bengali saying goes uthlo bai to cuttack jai.
We changed seats and I buckled up for life in the fast lane. Now his car is a stick shift where you have to constantly synchronize your hand and feet movements in changing gears and pressing down/releasing the clutch. I had seen drivers in India change gears but who knew there was so much activity going on with the foot too? I mean I knew there was an accelerator and a brake and I somehow had this idea that you used one foot for the accelerator and the other for the brake. Now I found out that the left foot manages the clutch and the right foot has to manage both the accelerator and the brake. What if I press the accelerator instead of the brake? Mistakes can happen after all; car companies should consider redesigning.
Anyway the first thing I learnt was to press the brake and I was told repeatedly “anything happens you press the brake”. With the first application of my brake the car grunted to a thudding stop. I could see the pain on Santa’s face as his precious SLK 230 groaned and grunted under my antics. Nevertheless we continued. I drove at 5 mph, on a 30 mph road, to the other end of the lane and Santa drove it back to the starting point. Why didn’t I drive it back to the starting point? Because some backing and u-turn were involved in the process, which needless to say, would have been too much for me. I was on my second lap when suddenly I heard Santa say, “Shit! Oh shit. Oh shit. Police behind us. Stop the car, stop the car…brake brake…press the brakes.”
With the police behind us I forgot everything about how to brake smoothly and with my application of the brakes the car just lunged forward and came to a sudden stop.
“Roll down your window. Put your hands on the steering wheel. Don’t make any movement. Always keep your hands in sight,” Santa told me.
This was all so scary. I did as he told me.
The officer went ahead in front of us and for a fraction of a second we were hopeful that he was after someone else. In our excitement we were considering switching places when the police car turned around, lights still on and came in our direction.
Damn!
“Sit still. Let me do the talking,” I nodded my head in response.
The police car stopped near us in the opposite lane.
“Are you guys lost?” the officer asked.
“No sir, we were just going home,” Santa replied.
“Ok. But you can’t drive so slowly when other people are around. And the way you stopped you almost caused me to hit you.”
“I am sorry officer.”
“You should be more careful.”
“Yes officer.”
“Drive safely.”
We nodded our heads and waited for him to leave while I pretended to get the ignition started.
When he was safely around the corner we exchanged places as fast as we could and rushed off home. Thank god he didn’t ask for my license. On second thought, that’d have made for another interesting story; or not. I wonder how interesting life in prison would be!

Seven months after this incident I finished reading my driver’s handbook and was finally ready to take the test, i.e. after rescheduling test dates a couple times.
Went to the test centre, took the test and failed the first time. 6 mistakes were allowed in a set of 30 questions, I had 7! Damn!
Santa, the ever optimist that he is, forced me to take the test again—immediately. His logic was that I know all the stuff and of the two errors one was a ‘silly mistake’ (didn’t people make silly mistakes in math?) and I ‘misunderstood’ the other question. “So you see…you can clear this. Take it now, since you are already here,” he kept telling me.
“Ok…but if I flunk this time you are responsible,” I told him and walked reluctantly to the test area.
After spending forty minutes on thirty questions I walked to the examiner, a Chinese lady, with my answer sheet. She goes tick, tick, tick on page one. Only one mistake. Good. She turned the page. Tick, tick, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong…oh my god…I lost count of the crosses. “Seven mistakes…too bad”, she told me with a smiling face. Not again.
“You can take the test two more times,” she told me. “Next time study hard,” she said as she turned my answer sheet and saw that this was my second time.
“Oh…this is your second time. Only one more chance left. Study hard and then come,” she told me.
Now it was time for Santa to face the music. I gave him a stern “I told you” look which transformed itself into a verbal form as soon as we exited the test centre. What did he have to say? Let’s not go into the details and just say that he dropped me off at Michael’s, my favorite art store, so that I would cool down.
That evening I went through my answer sheet again. I was pretty sure I had made the right choice regarding the meaning of a road sign. The sign was of a ‘two-way traffic’ but the examiner marked the correct answer as a ‘divided highway ahead’. Didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know driving but I had been going around in a car for the past nine months and at no time did the particular sign look like a ‘divided highway ahead’ sign. I checked with the DMV book and yes! I was right. So that reduced my errors to six.
Once Santa came home he went through the answer sheet once more and found out one more error on the part of the examiner regarding a lane changing question. That reduced the number of errors to five. He told me, “Let’s go to the DMV tomorrow and straighten things out”. I wasn’t so sure if they’d accept but the reminder of one more test promptly made me agree with him.
The next day we went to the DMV. A different person was at the examination centre. He agreed on the lane changing question and gave it to me. Down to six. I could have my license now. I’d have left matters there, not bothering about the other question. I could’ve lived with one more error as long as I got my license. But the stickler that he is, Santa wouldn’t let go and he took up the sign question with the examiner. The examiner didn’t accept the sign question and tried to feed us some logic which neither of us understood. (I wonder if he heard himself speaking.) So Santa asked to speak to the supervisor.
The supervisor accepted that I was correct and admitted that there was an error in their answer sheet stencil, the corrected version of which the examiner did not have. So the errors were down to five officially and I came out beaming with my learner’s permit. What better gift could I have given my husband for his upcoming birthday? The actual driver’s license, maybe. But for now the learner’s permit was enough.
By the way, on his next birthday, I drove him to a restaurant as a licensed driver – my gift to him. Though the gift was a good one (as Santa admitted) what transpired between us in that one whole year as I took driving lessons from him could very well be made into a soap opera.