... and your hands upon the wheel


It's the evening and I am driving back home. For a few seconds, I look away from the road across in the direction of the Agara lake near Koramangala, which has little or no water. I look back and the large head of a large cow is approximately 24 inches from my windshield. I must be travelling at 50 kilometers an hour. My heart stops and so does my breath.

What happens next is as synchronized as anything I've seen. I watch myself swerve the steering wheel left, aware that there was no traffic on my left or following close behind. I watch the cow swings its head right, just as the car swishes past its nostrils. I see the cow partly close its eyelids.

Everything happens literally in a blink or less.

Thankfully, no contact is made. I drive on homewards. Phew! The cow mouths obscenities. I apologise. I am a safe driver, and I do account for cows ... just not the ones that appear out of thin air when you are looking at something that isn't really there.

I had something on my mind for the length of my drive, and I wonder if what happened, or was about to happen was an answer to my question.

Even if it was, I cannot decipher it, or I choose not to, although at some level I know I have decided.

.................................


I am home and I put on my running shoes and plug in my earphones. The clouds have already gathered. This is going to be great run if the rain stays away. For one, in the terribly crowded place on this planet where I live, today, I will have a very large ground to myself. There is nothing better then running on soft earth, under thick black clouds and against stiff winds.


I reach the ground and the drizzle begins. I pause under a tree. This is not so bad after all. You must let the rain drench you at least three times a year, if not more.

The drizzle is light, almost pleasant. I start the run and the drops are now bigger. Before I know it I am soaking wet. I run to the nearest large tree and stand under it, Pink Floyd still streaming into my ears.

The tree cannot offer much protection, but one cannot care anymore. Across the ground, the rain is now screaming down at a fierce angle, creating waves of spray and dust which rush along the ground, lift off and fly into my face ... an angry Indian rain, no less.

I last time I saw something similar, although infinitely more dramatic was when I parked my car by the side of the road on Highway 1 in California, on the side of a cliff about about 200 feet high, and shot a video of the kilometer long waves of the Pacifc as they made their way from the bowels of their disturbance to the shore.


I wait under the tree and the ground is now soaking wet, a mirror of gray. I begin to run on the road skirting the ground and make my way home. My clothes are heavy and I run as quickly as I can on the pavement, scaring the umbrella carrying folks who look up in the twilight to see a rather large guy with a big head, hurtling towards them in a soaking black shirt and black tracks. For a few moments, I am the cow in their windshields.