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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 June 1999 Issue No. 434 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 June 1999 Issue No. 434
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Safe driving
By Fayza Hassan
After over ten years of driving on the "wrong" side of the road, I did not dare, on our return from Australia, to venture outside my little neighbourhood at first. I hired an instructor. Actually, I hired several in quick succession, only to discover to my utter dismay that they all subscribed to the same school of thought. "Go on," they would urge as the traffic lights in front of us turned red, "step on it." The trick was to beat the odds by whizzing through the intersection, crossing the path of on-coming traffic. Of course I didn't. For a while, I stubbornly ignored the screeching brakes of cars behind me whose drivers had never in their wildest dreams anticipated that someone would take a change of lights so seriously.
I was also very self-righteous about giving right of way to those engaged in roundabouts before me, and put up stoically with the snickering of my teachers who had never heard that there was actually a rule in some instruction book spelling out the correct way to do it. "I'll go have a glass of tea and join you later," one of them told me mockingly. "You will still be here tomorrow afternoon," said another, beginning to read his newspaper. A third simply tried to reach for the gas pedal, which he pressed violently. He was fired on the spot, but the next one was not any better. "Driving is like going to war," he informed me. "Someone wins, someone loses. Which one do you want to be?"
I wanted to be the one who survived, but I soon realised that he was right. This was indeed a game with victors and vanquished. Tennis and golf had changed in my lifetime from a gentleman's pastime to a deadly confrontation. Why not driving? If I wanted to graduate from my sedate tour around the block, I would have to get my act together. First I decided to brush up on some choice slurs. Driving through Cairo in the past, I had learned quite a few. My long sojourn in a country where tongue-lashing matches with perfect strangers who just happened to share a strip of highway with you were rather unpopular, however, had considerably diminished my erstwhile aptitude at giving as good as I got.
Taxi drivers would teach me what I wanted to know, I thought. To my surprise, I discovered that things had changed. No one seemed to bother with other people's encroachments on their driving space. They were all too busy following their own erratic path. No matter how provocative road manners seemed to have become, they invariably failed to draw my driver-of-the-day's fire. Instead of abusing offenders, he would come dangerously close to them, apparently completely unaware of their presence. He would start and stop whenever he felt like it, change lanes for no reason, meandre for a while then proceed at top speed once more. I would just close my eyes, expecting the worst. Once, one of my taxi drivers drew to an abrupt halt in the middle of a busy main street to retrieve the cigarette which had fallen in his lap. I pointed out to him that we had just miraculously avoided causing a major pile-up. He did not understand what I was talking about. "We have reasons for doing what we do," he informed me cryptically. He did point out that there were very few accidents, considering the number of cars on the road. I reflected that he was right. Considering the total chaos of the traffic, it would have been normal not to ever make it to one's destination without having at least one accident. Yet this was not the case. Such a feat surely required special skills. I just had to find out which, and then practice them, I told myself hopefully.
Finally it dawned on me. I was dealing with a generation completely different from mine, one that had been born to traffic jams and the necessity to get where it was going, regardless. It was a deadly battle that the new drivers were waging, one in which there was no place for niceties and the right of way. They had thrown the code away and were using their wit, improvising according to needs and circumstances. They deserved sympathy, not hatred. The murderous thoughts that I had been harbouring seemed suddenly ridiculous.
I began to accustom myself to the idea that, if there was any opportunity to do something that I considered foolish, the driver behind or beside me would take it at once, because it made perfect sense to him/her. Expecting the worst all the time, I spared myself a great deal of anguish. I looked on serenely at men driving home with the newspaper open in front of them and women steering their way past huge buses with bounding infants sitting on their lap. Cell phones also make for extra risks now, but who is counting?
In time, I have become so apathetic that I barely raised an eyebrow the other day when I saw a truck coming towards me on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. Actually, having swerved brutally to avoid it, for a crazy moment I felt disoriented. Which one of us was mistaken? Was I coming or going? Finally I decided that it did not matter. I had avoided a head-on collision and therefore I had won that round.
