An Indian Girl's Guide To Driving

If you have a weakness, my driving instructor quips,

it is that you are full of fear. What I hear is half-parent,

half-poem. My father and sister stand slack-jawed staring

at our wrecked car. (They are like a slow-motion movie).

I nose-dive into action – push the fender back into the

exposed mouth of our car. I can hear the slap of desert

wind against my cape. Nothing makes me forgive people

like learning I have something to teach them. How unlikely

they will remember that dust-up in Tijara like I do. Metaphor,

my therapist offers, is central to moving forward. Ignition.

Accelerate. Let go. How embarrassingly simple, yet I stall

the car in five lane traffic. I am a stutter stuck mid-throat

one hundred cars honking at me to just spit it out. I picked

the wrong season to learn – distracted by the red daggers

of silk cotton trees, the fists of dust storms whirling across

the windshield. In India, there is a part-myth about bad women

drivers I am desperate to disprove. I want to drive like my father

fast, steady, fearless in roadside brawls. No matter how soft I cradle

the steering wheel, I know I am tentacled around it. Fear is as

natural to me as spit. All I want is to be swashbuckling,

to reign my fear with the sweep of a seatbelt, to have my dashboard

light up like a siren, to make my own way through the world.