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found this on my flash drive, written a few months back..
Highway friends
Must be a common happening but was seeing it for the first time even though I travel a lot by road.
Had to reach pune by 12, caught a cab from vashi at 9:30. Nice jovial newspaper guy driving an indica, mungda playing on the car’s player and maiden on mine. The car jam-packed with newspapers, just space enough for another passenger on the back seat. In fact the car was so heavily loaded that we had to stop a couple of times due to some strange sound coming from the rear, finally realizing that it’s just the mudguard touching the road due to the heavily loaded dickey. We stopped for a tea n smoke after an hour’s drive, somewhere on the expressway. Nice friendly banter going on with the driver and the only other passenger. I was surprisingly cheerful considering I had just quit my job a day before and my lovely ex-girlfriend refused to meet me again. All was fine till then as we proceeded towards pune. Suddenly the driver started swerving the car crazily on the expressway, from left to right and then right to left. I was shit scared, just about managed to remove my headphones and give him a scared ‘why’ look. He just looked back coldly and swerved again. By this time I managed to mutter something, my voice drowning in a truck’s mad honks from behind. The driver finally looked at me, smiled n said “He’s a friend”. ‘Oh..!!’ I managed to mutter as both our car and the truck aligned parallel to each other. As the driver raised his hand to greet his friend the truck driver honked crazily in acknowledgment. After another minute or two of swerving, cutting lanes and honking we were off on our way after both of them ended this friendly encounter with a goodbye honk each.
How he managed to recognize the truck is beyond my understanding, cuz the way I see it all trucks look the same. But this guy definitely knew how to find his friends, after all he had been driving on this road night after night since the past 4 years.
Finally I cajoled him to take a slightly different path which would drop me near my home. Bid my new friend goodbye, wondering how different our lives were. Saw the time, 15 minutes to midnight both of us on time.
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