One Last Drive...

We sold our car today. Not a big deal really. If you go to sites like bikroy.com, you can see hundreds, if not thousands of second hand cars being sold everyday all over the country just online. Add a few hundred more offline everyday. It's very normal, not a big deal.

We have sold cars before too when I was still a kid. But this one feels different, very different. You see, this was the car I first learned to drive with and gave my first driver's license exam. Got into my first road traffic accident, good times. This one took my driving "virginity" if you may!

I had a real connection with it. Somehow it understood what I wanted to do, almost as if I was telepathically telling it to bend the body and get me out of those narrow, narrow corners of the crowded city. I swear there have been instances I wondered how the fuck did I not brush against that wall, the roads were so narrow. And yet, almost every time I got the car out, unscathed from the craziest of the "চিপা গলি"s one can imagine.

I had previously sat at the driving wheels of cars when I was younger. I used to sit on my father's or uncle's laps and move the steering around and occasionally they'd take their foot off the brakes and let the car move half a centimetre and I'd feel like I've climbed Mount Everest. The matter of the fact is, I was barely making out with those. Never made it to second base.

But with this one, it was home run and beyond!

It is while driving this car that, the very me who never swears in front of people lost all filters and came up with gems like "চোখ কি **ন্দেত ঢুকাই রাখসেন?" It is also while driving this car I came up with my বাণী চিরন্তন :

One who can drive on the roads of Bangladesh can drive in the fucking pacific ocean.

This became quite famous in my friend circle!

This car was bought when I was in my early teen years and stayed with us as I transitioned from a teenage boy into a man. Along the way I learned to take responsibility of my younger bother and elder sister. I may not have been the eldest child of the family, but I was the eldest son.

And when you are the eldest son, not matter your position in the hierarchy in terms of age, you have to step up and become the eldest child. And I did that at a very early age when one day, my father bestowed upon me the responsibility of driving my sister and my brother to their early morning classes and picking my sister up from late night classes. In a country like ours, you just can not trust drivers with the most precious of gifts, a daughter, a sister.

To this day, I still believe that is what triggered my transition into a man who knows how to take responsibility. So no, this was not just a car. Not to me at least.

As fate would have it, I got to drive it down some of my most favorite roads in the city for the final ride...

I ignited its engine to take it out of the garage for one last time, I patted the dashboard as an old friend pats the back of the other before goodbyes, "So long my friend, so long!"