The Driver

He woke up as he always did in the morning

Misty and cold yet for him waking

And boiling some water in the saucepan

Bought in the Sunday Haat by his wife from a man

Known to be a philanderer who drank too much,

For tea and some to bathe was no longer a problem as such.

For years, though, he didn’t remember how many exactly

He had been doing the same day after day and at precisely

Seven as the wall clock in the right wall of the only room

In the house showed with a somewhat occult doom,

He took out the car parked on the verandah he and his

Family shared with three other families the men of which were neither his

Friends nor foes as for either he didn’t have time to waste

Though he knew one of them, the oldest, was not half as chaste

As his (and the others’ too he believed) wife thought him to be

For once, he had seen her with a local lady having tea

And smoking at a place and time he had no business to be.

Driving up the slope thinking who for the day were his passengers gonna be;

(Not that he cared; he had seen all types)

The ones from the big city who’d come for the hypes

That had been built up by the government of late about

Smaller towns and even smaller villages a small way away though doubt

All of them would always about the accuracy of all the superlatives

About the places being wettest to cleanest and the others- natives

From the nearest city in the plains to simply escape the heat

Or just to after a long week’s work cool their feet,

He took out with his left hand from his grey

Trousers’ pocket the paper, which would say

Where his passengers for the day were to be picked up

From and before which he could have his second cup

Of tea and buy his day’s stock of cigarettes and kwai

And brace himself for the day on a mental high

As the first day he had driven a car and instantly

Decided that this was what he would do incessantly

Till the day he could hold a steering and press a clutch.

And in his career of two decades (at least), from a dopy Dutch

To a motor phobic film actress whose name he always forgot

He had driven in a career, unscathed so far ,the whole lot.

But today is a new day and the lake is placid

And the horizon is, for a change, vivid.