Ramesh Kumar
Pitch dark it was all around. Nothing visible. One
can hardly see beyond two feet. February it was. The double carriageway
National Highway 56, linking Benares or Varanasi as is popularly known with
Lucknow, remained silent. No vehicles at all. I could not fathom what the time
was then: four? Five? No idea.
Anil Pandeyji’s snoring from
the upper berth was discernible: loud and clear. Poor guy. He was in deep
sleep. Somehow, I managed to snuggle out of the more comfortable lower berth.
The fog outside had made the huge expanse of Tata truck’s front glass too
opaque, adding to the sea of darkness pervading there already. Hardly a feet
away, I noticed a bundle over the bonnet sandwiched between the two front
seats. That ought to be Parvez Khan, second driver of the vehicle. Pandeyji, the
senior most driver, commandeered the ship carrying 26 tonnes of Tata Steel’s
wire rod for Ludhiana. It was a stock transfer from the company’s Jamshedpur
mother plant.
Pandeyji’s mission was to cross the 1,650 km stretch
crossing five states – Chattisgarh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab –
in six days. We had been flagged off by Ramesh Benniwal, fleet
commander of Credence Logistics, at the Transport Nagar in Jamshedpur just before sunset two days ago.
That’s when the entry/exit restrictions had been lifted permitting heavy
commercial vehicles to ride onto the Tatanagar tarred road: National Highway
33.
It was Valentine’s Day (February 14, 2011) and Credence’s Arvind Ambo quipped through SMS,
“What a way to celebrate your Valentine’s Day in the company of drivers!”
Valentine Day or no, my trip was planned well in advance. Moreover, if one has
to celebrate ‘love for one’s beloved’, it can be any day. Why only February 14?
I rubbed my eyes and succeeded in locating my
spectacles, lying next to the make-shift pillow. My biological clock was
working fine and it was time for bowel movement. So I surmised that it ought to
be past four because for fifty five years that’s how my bowels have been functioning.
Wake up at the pre-fixed hour, empty one’s bowels, brush teeth and gulp down a
hot cuppa: sugarless tea or coffee. In that sequence. This programme has not
changed much all my life. Why should it today?
The only hitch was that I simply had no clue as to
how to extricate myself out of this narrow 8 x 5 feet Tata horse-cum-trailer
cabin. No way I could get out without disturbing the young Khan tucked in a
bundle over the bonnet. Gathering courage, I
hissed: “Parvez!” I did not want to wake up Pandeyji.
A startled Khan woke up and sensing my urgency, made
space for me to exit and thoughtfully handed a two-litre Pepsi bottle filled up
water. What else, but for morning ablutions! It was no shock for me since it
was not my maiden outing on a truck. I had been on a similar binge a few months
ago. The only difference was the payload and destination: the payload was eight
Hyundai cars for Delhi delivery from Hyundai Motor India’s Irungattukottai
manufacturing facility in Tamil Nadu and the distance was 2,800 km. With driver
Umesh Rana and assistant Pinto Kumar Sahu, I had
crossed Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and
Delhi over seven days.
That’s when I realized that it would be next to impossible
to look for a proper western toilet to relieve myself every morning. The young
Rana – hailing from Chattisgarh – understood my predicament but could do
nothing. “There’s no option, sirji,” he advised while offering a plastic
bottle – a two-litre Aquafina PET bottle
– on the first night at Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu incidentally my
birthplace! Tears welled up. What a shame! Am I going to defecate in public
place? Even if this chore has to be done behind the bushes, still it would be a
public place.
...
This is a truncated portion of Chapter ONE of my maiden book, 10,000 KM on Indian Highways published in November 2011.
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