The night before had been…well a night! Dr Bryan Higgins had slept on the beach – he had been so ‘smashed’ and he hadn’t only been drinking!
His cousin Greg Higgins could only remember snatches of a bombshell who had danced so close to him that he had no choice but to let the night have its way. Now he reclined lazily in his seat, a can of beer between his knees, completely relaxed as he breathed in the evening air. The Willys’ hood was down, the windscreen was flat against the bonnet and Bryan was on his left, flooring her pedal and letting her fly.
Behind the shade of his sun-glasses, Greg closed his eyes, listening keenly too the hum of the 1958 Hurricane engine and smiled to himself in satisfaction. If Dad were alive, he would have been a proud man. The left-hand drive Willys, Ol’ Betsy as Greg fondly called her, was as probably good as the day she had been new, some forty years ago when his dad bought her as a young man. He and Bryan were on the highway, just entering the outskirts of Bangalore and it was late evening. They had driven a long way, starting early that morning and taking turns at the wheel and Bryan had been driving for the last 100 miles or so.
It had been a wild party in Goa the night before. The two cousins had driven up from Landsend, an Anglo town about 80 miles south of Bangalore, just for a change of scene and had nicely blended in. Bryan Higgins had made love to his beer, and to a superbly rolled smoke that his cousin had cheerfully handed him. Greg had done more than that, and being unmarried and unattached (he had only the week before broken up with his umpteenth girlfriend) a one-night stand for him was…well just a one-night stand. He felt somewhat hung over and the beer, perhaps his 20th can on that 400-mile drive back had helped splendidly.
Bryan, a doctor by profession had tanked up on lots of water and had popped an aspirin that morning before they had begun the drive back.
The men had made several stops along the way, to nonchalantly relieve themselves by the side of the road, to stretch their muscles, to indulge in a few smokes and to let Betsy’s engine cool. Despite the ‘stops,’ they had made good time. Greg had not been drunk – but as the law went, he wasn’t supposed to be driving – a rule he flouted with a lurid epithet that got Bryan smiling.
“So,” the doctor cleared his throat. “You gonna call her?”
“Her? Who?”
“The Russian.”
“The Russian?” Greg looked confused for a moment. Then it dawned on him that the bombshell had been Russian.
“Ah,” he then said, raising an eyebrow when he remembered. “Naw. Don’t have her number and don’t know her name.”
He found a cigarette and lit up. “A very, very…” he smiled at the memory “…eager woman. Only thing she swore too much.”
“What?” Bryan asked and when the purport of his good-looking cousin’s nonchalant comment actually sank in, he cleared his throat and asked, “when the hell did you learn Russian?”
“Me? I haven’t,” he answered with the cigarette bobbing between his lips. “She dirtied up nicely in English.”
He took in a deep drag from his cigarette and subsided into silence, watching the landscape sweep along as they sped down the highway. He thought no more of the Russian. Like the girl he had broken up with the week before, that kind came and went like shadows – instead a smiling face with a spray of fading freckles and bright honey brown eyes dawned in his mind and he blinked behind his glares to get rid of the image.
Julie Whyte – How he just wanted to…bury her under his pain of rejection, under his self-pity and under the shadows that came and went like faceless, nameless ghosts. And as he stared unseeingly at the hills whizzing by, a whisper of a bitter smile touched the corner of his lips. He could do without Julie Whyte – she could marvel at the engagement ring on her finger and get all starry eyed over her upcoming wedding – whenever that was. The travesty of a smile vanished; the thought of another man just touching her filled him with rage. The half full beer can crumpled like paper in his powerful hands and went crashing to the road, its fizz spraying out.
“You okay Greg?” Bryan asked.
“The darned thing was flat,” he growled and then realising that he had allowed his sweetheart to get the better of him, like he always did, shook the fury off and smiled at Bryan.
“Pull over Doc,” he said. “We’ll give her engine a rest and then I’ll drive.”
“You sure you wanna drive?”
“As sure as shite,” he returned and Bryan slowed down to a halt by the side of the road under the shade of an old, spreading tree.
Both were big, powerful men, Greg perhaps an inch taller and more athletically built than his cousin. He was 24 and despite being part of the corporate world in Bangalore, he still loved his game of football every morning at dawn; come mist or rain Greg would be out with some of his friends rouging it out until it was time to get his act together for work. Bryan was in his late twenties, recently done with his medical internship in Bangalore, choosing to practise back home in Landsend. Married for the last two years he was already the proud father of one tough little boy and had sworn not to have any more children until Greg found himself someone he could spend the rest of his life with. Greg had laughed that off. He had found someone he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Only thing she had wanted to spend the rest of her life with someone else!
Greg smoked another cigarette, downed another beer and hopped into the driver’s seat. In seconds they were off again.
It was quite late when they hit the grinding city of Bangalore with all its heavy truck traffic and smoke and dust. If they had been driving straight to Landsend, Greg would have turned left off the highway and avoided the city, but he was going back to his apartment. Bryan would drop him off there and drive on alone to Landsend – at least, that had been the plan when they had left Goa. They had been somewhere near the city’s Industrial area when, in the midst of all the noise and the traffic, a group of policemen, strategically placed just after a traffic signal flagged them down to check for drunk-driving.
“Oh! Bloody hell,” Bryan commented.
It was inevitable. The Willys without its hood stood out like a sore thumb. Worse still the two men, Anglos and fair skinned stood out like bigger sore thumbs. Their community of people were the usual high school drop outs, the party goers, the drunks and the womanisers. The men were considered the least responsible, most of the time out of jobs, demanding daily allowances from their mothers and wives and secretly getting the house ‘ayahs’ pregnant. The cops were no less aware of this unflattering reputation and in the blistering heat of the dusty night, all they noticed was the Willys and the two white men. Promptly they were labelled Anglo party goers on a Saturday evening and were shrilly flagged down.
“Oi jeep!” one yelled. “Hoodless jeep! Stop!” and Greg pulled over to his left.
“Jeez,” Bryan commented. “How high are you?”
“Enough to melt that breath-analyser!” Greg quipped as a cop came up. This was a portly man with a paunch that fell over his protesting belt. He stank of sweat and his neck glistened in the heat of the night. Though there were five or six policemen about, immersed in the activity of booking and billing, this tubby cop appeared to be the only one running around with the gadget, shoving it into peoples’ faces. At times he even leaned forward to take a whiff of someone’s breath! Nasty bloody job, Greg mused. Drivers who failed the test were quickly relived of their licences so that they could go through the procedure of being booked. The others – the clean ones – were nastily told to move on – it was sweaty business to run around with a breath-analyser, and it was absolutely disgusting to take a sniff of someone’s breath and find no alcohol on it!
They only held up the line!
The cop bobbed around the motor cycles and cars, demanding papers, waving motorists away and finally came up to the Willys, instinctively moving to the right of the vehicle. Shoving the breath analyser into Bryan’s face he ordered him to blow – Greg watched astonished for a moment, confirmed in his beer fogged mind that he was the man at the wheel and stared at Bryan again. He leaned forward against the wheel as his cousin blew into the device; the cop checked the reading and ordered him to blow into the tube again, and Bryan blew his heart merrily into it. The cop checked the instrument one more time and finding nothing, leaned close and asked Bryan his name.
At that moment the doctor wished he hadn’t brushed his teeth in the morning, but he had – the cop was already ordering him to get going and waddled away to his next victim. Greg languidly started up the Willys and eased out, winking at a cute girl on a bike, whose boyfriend was now going through the ordeal of pulling out his papers and negotiating with the disinterested inspector.
They were far down the road in seconds and howling in laughter even before the flabbergasted girl could react and tell the cop of his blatant oversight.
