Night Journey

The trucks occupied my mind on the rain-washed weekdays as I waited for the cozy bus which sucked me into the routine of school. But I never spoke with anyone there about trucks or night journeys. Sometimes, after my bi-weekly NCC drill, if it got late while waiting for my father at this office, we would drive back home past the vanguard of the convoys. In the shadowy, halogen-swathed streets, they would bear down on us and then race past, disappearing into the darkness around the frayed edges of the town, on to the national highways.

'Where do they go?' I often asked my father, as he leafed through his files. 'Aizawl, Kohima, Imphal, Itanagar', he would say, not looking up from the files that so occupied him for most part of the day. I longed to be with them on their night journeys into the unknown, which I knew only through wonderful names. At school, in the geography they taught, they told us nothing about these places, and neither could the slant-eyed boarders who went home there during winter holidays. In the dots and crosses we marked on the map during the term exams, I only had to remember the big industrial cities and trading ports of the dusty plains, which was from where the trucks apparently came with their loads of fruit, vegetables, grain and fish. I had seen the names painted above the windscreen, 'All-India permit for Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh/West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya…' I only had license to roam until dark.

But it wasn't as if I had never taken the same road as those caravans with their black water containers made of strips of tire rubber, their sides decorated with tridents, birds, flowers and eyes that looked at you. Once, there was a journey during some sudden crisis when we traveled past the lumbering vehicles with their long tail of dust-clouds, and saw them parked with lines of drippy washing and coir charpais next to some tiny gurgling spring. And on the same trip I seem to rememberjust after Sonarpur on National Highways 44a truck lying upside down like a little toy on the parched riverbed below.

But that was the extent of my travels. NH 44 was all I knew, for I never saw what dramatic change took place when 44 became 45. My father had been to all these places, he had traveled throughout by road in the past, but now preferred to fly unless it was a short trip to Guwahati or Silchar. Once, on the way home one of those late evenings, I asked him why he didn't go by night along the road. 'Too risky', he replied in his usual monosyllables, but it was enough to fill my mind with the untold, exotic dangers of carrying supplies to far-flung places. When he felt more inclined to talk, he would tell me of the machinegun-manned checkpoints that came down with the dusk over the streets of Kohima or Dimapur. Or of the masked men who walked into his friend's office one day and shot him dead. These stories didn't make me apprehensive of my father's weekend tours. I felt envious instead, even if he was going by air.

I was alone with Moon, our jolly, hefty driver one of those evenings, waiting for my father to come back with some files he had forgotten, when I asked him how one could get to travel with those trucks. 'Well now, when I was riding those trucks, nearly fifteen-sixteen yeas ago', he began. He must have seen the surprise in my eyes (You, Moon, on those trucks, and you never told me…), for he settled back as he always did when he had a story to tell. 'Now, when I was riding those trucks, that was nearly fifteen-sixteen years ago, that was the thing to do. I wanted to learn driving and though I hung around the bus terminus and taxi stands, no one would teach me. So,' he paused to examine his betel-stained teeth, 'so, I ran away from home.'

Dusk had come down hard on the Additional Secretariat building, lifeless now that almost everyone had gone home. A few drivers hung around with the night guards, solitary windows gleamed in the building that had suddenly masked itself, and I could hear the traffic on the cross-roads in front, the hoarse rasp of heavy engines pumping thick black blood, the whine of giant bodies breaking free. 'Now in those days, for someone like me who wanted to drive, that was the only thing. In those days, you understand', he warned. 'I'll teach you to drive next year. But anyway, I pleaded with this big Punjabi driver to take me with him. He was on his way back through Assam, West Bengal, U.P., all the way back home to Ludhiana, where his boss owned fifty trucks and there were hundreds of small guys like me hanging around to become drivers. But still, he took me.' I listened in silence to this hidden past. 'I traveled for three months with the Punjabi, he made me carry water and wash the windscreen and press his legs. But at night, after he had emptied a bottle…you know… he would teach me to drive.' Moon trailed off.

'Then?' I asked. My voice must have conveyed my excitement: what about all the places you saw, what did you feel when, hands on wheel, your headlights sliced through the night, when at break of dawn you found the towns gently yawning at the sun along the valley in all those places, what robbers and highwaymen did you run into on those at least forty-three other national highways that surely exist on the surface of the earth?

'Then? Two years riding trucks as a helper, finally driving them for another four years, six driving city buses, and then the department milk vans and now, finally, I'm the director's driver and tomorrow's a beautiful day because it's a Suuuunday', he sang out, his throat and belly wobbling with the effort. 'No, it isn't a beautiful day because there's still an inspection tour', he groaned. My father came back and we started off for home, not even the promise of learning to drive next year outstripping the excitement of the night journeys that Moon had embarked on, and the way he had begun it all.

No, I didn't run away from home, though it became a part of the fantasies that spun around in my head when the classroom hours dragged on for ever in the long afternoons and the sound of engines was silenced by the pine trees that curtained off the outside world. I didn't learn to drive either, not next year, it seemed I never would, that day when Moon dropped my father back for the first time in that green Ambassador plastered with 'We have a jumbo problem--save elephants' stickers. For once, Moon wasn't carrying any files, just a little package that was the farewell gift for my father from the department he had served for thirty-seven years. He looked at Moon as they sat with their forgotten cups of tea. 'See if you can find a small second-hand car, Moon, then, maybe…' We all knew the subterfuge, he didn't have the money to pay Moon even a minimal salary, let alone buy a second-hand car. But Moon smiled, 'Yes, saab, of course, my wife thinks I should relax more now. I think I know of someone who wants to sell a good Fiat, just perfect for us.' He cried as he went down the steps all the same.

In the coming days, I saw my father lying awake at night for a long while. The trucks seemed to disturb him and he would sit up in bed at times, when headlights flashed in the dark. Maybe he was remembering the road, for all his outward prosaicness. And I? What time did I have for those chariots of the dark as they fled the change that seemed to overtake all who sit and wait? As I waited, the world that I knew was crumbling, and not even the pine trees could cordon me off any longer from the sound of bombs and cries, the smell of roasted flesh that was fanned towards us on the night wind. Riots had broken out on the eve of my pre-university exams, and as the town got sucked into a vortex of mayhem and curfew, the only sounds at night were the fierce purr of police jeeps as they circled us like beasts of prey.

No, don't imagine for a moment that life around us was like those vignettes from the riot-rocked plains which came alive in newspapers and television from time to time. Even in the middle of the madness that had come over my hometown, sanity was never quite jettisoned. There were deaths and stray gunshots, there was fire, but still many people insisted--during the long curfew-ridden monotonous afternoons--that things would be normal again. I jerked from day to day towards the exams, and my parents stayed away from any discussions about the future. But I knew it couldn't last. What with the riots, my father's retirement and the end of my schooldays, it all meant that change was gathering its forces around me. Sometimes I felt I was bound to go trucking at last, at other times I would wonder about more mundane things such as where my parents would live, what and where I would study, until my watch would hurry me back to pages and pages of equations. And engines were never quite as interesting when reduced to two-dimensional drawings on paper.

On the last day of the exams, I walked out of the gnarled old building with a sense of relief. It was the middle of April and the weather was that strange, capricious creature which flirted with winter and summer every changing hour. The curfew had been reduced now, from seven at night to dawn, so the town had limped back almost to normal. I took the slow winding road back to our home, my depression and fears momentarily lifting. Our house could be seen a long way off from the other end of the arm of the 'u' that cradled it, across the shallow gorge that ate into the road. But I must have been dreaming, because I was only ten feet from the staircase when I saw the cars parked in front, my uncle's circus-striped Standard Herald prominent among them. Inside, my father was stretched out on the bed mumbling incoherently, my uncle talking to him in a very loud, self-assured voice. 'Wait downstairs for the ambulance', he said, as he saw me.

My father came back in my uncle's comic-strip car after three weeks in hospital. He was well enough to sit, but that was about it. We had begun to make arrangements to shift to the plains, where my father had built a house I had never seen except in blue-pencilled plans.

My uncle was indefatigable. He visited us daily, once on the way to his chamber and again while coming back from there. One by one, all the middle-class odds and ends that my mother had acquired over the years and stored -- mostly under the beds -- had to be taken out, dusted and packed. The curtains were stripped off the windows on the last night. I lay awake late, looking for the first time into the blackness. There were no beams to follow now, since the trucks left town just before the curfew hours began. We were setting off next evening, travelling at night when it was cool. The truck with our belongings would leave first, the taxi later with my parents and me. I would not be on the truck, though my books, my cricket bat and tennis racket were roughing it out. My uncle had brushed me off when I mildly suggested whether it might not be a good idea for me travel with the goods, in case they got damaged. 'You'll go in the car, it's much more comfortable, and besides who'll accompany your parents?'

It was a long, drawn-out summer dusk as the truck was packed, the sides securely lashed with tarpaulin and ropes, and waved off. Only we waited, the human baggage, in that gentle twilight for the taxi to arrive. Just before seven, when night has come down on a crystal-studded sky, we move. Everything is in order: the weepy faces of the women, the silent, bare house, the excited handshakes from my former classmates, my father wrapped and cushioned against future shocks, and my mother's last gesture of supplication, hands raised to her unseen, silent gods, It is only the solemnity, the people gathered around, and the fact that there is no green Ambassador and one fat, jolly driver that says this is not the promised holiday trip arrived at last. We set off, the head-lights picking out an already deserted town, gathering speed on the main road. The shops are nearly shut, under the halogen lamps the glint of leather and steel of a police patrol. We are out of the town before the curfew tolls, silently looking at the hazy outlines of meadows and tree clumps we have always taken for granted.

We picked up the small convoy of trucks an hour later, each of them laboriously moving towards the cliff-face to let us pass. And then for a while only the sound of the engine, the swaying of two arcs of light, the world framed in tar and stone. We passed Jowai, a small highway town asleep amid the vacant stare of solitary lamps outside shops and garages. The world around was in slumber, nestled in a cocoon of routine, but I was moving. I was alive, responding to every twist and turn, my senses registering the sudden gleam on the dashboard, the engine as it moved beyond the second wind that every athlete must be content with. The locked gates outside a timber camp, heaps of coal along the road, the sudden shape of a fox frozen in the lamp, it all grows upon me like a fever as the road gets steadily worse and the car bounces over boulders, swerving past them when space allows. I sit back for the last leg, we are descending sharply... and I remember. There is a whiff of lime in the air. Probably the same trees that had come to my rescue many years back, when coming back from my grandfather's funeral I had been overcome by nausea. I remember, and dream, of border countries where the only wheeled traffic is olive-green in colour, I see road-gangs piled upon the back of trucks releasing a hundred bidis into the air, I hear the scream of terror and see, in a close-up view, the contorted face of a driver suddenly jolted awake by the earth coming apart at the seams; like old pictures from issues of the National Geographic thumbed at school, the road comes alive that night in the technicolour of my dreams as somewhere in the background my father's voice tells me the complete story, connecting together scraps garnered from the years, past and future.

It was still dark when the driver woke me on a long bridge faintly lit, lined with alien-looking soft-drink hoardings. 'Which way?' he asked.

'Huh?'

'Which way to your house from the main junction?'

'Link Road'.

'Don't know where that is, you'll have to guide me.'

I looked back helplessly at my mother. 'It's, it's near the State Bank', she stuttered. 'Take left and keep going. I'll tell you when to turn' a clear voice spoke out from the dark. My mother and I stared at him for a moment. My father was sitting upright and awake, the man who had had to be carried to the car, the silent passenger slumped back, seemingly beyond waiting and the excitement of journeys and their ends.

We turned off into a narrow lane and stopped in front of a house, its fresh lime-washed walls reflecting the headlights and the slow dawn. My father spoke again. 'That road' he said, gesturing back, 'leads to Aizawl. And then you can go beyond, to other places'.

Siddhartha Deb is a Presidency College graduate who now works as a journalist in New Delhi.