So we had this driver called Younus. A cheerful enough fellow he was. A fairly decent driver and there were two things that made him special. He knew bikes…and he often allowed me to drive Dad’s car.

What I was too young to realise at that age however was that he was Hyderabadi and tended to exaggerate. For instance when he told me that he had driven my friend’s Plymouth to Bangalore in 4 hours or something, I knew instinctively that he was pulling a fast one (because in those days Hyderabad-Bangalore was often a 16 hour trip with an overnight stay in Kurnool). But I was stumped when in response to my doubt he clarified that he had taken a shortcut.

We tolerated fast ones like this because he was otherwise quite a nice fellow. Always had a smile on his face. And on long journeys he was of great mechanical assistance. For example at Shimoga, when our gasket blew because of our Jog Falls climb, he managed to get us to the Guest House and spent the next day at the workshop fixing a new head gasket which essentially meant an engine overhaul.

But the story he told me once about speeding is what stuck in my mind and I remember him fondly till date.

You see we were all learning how to drive, and I would take my father’s Fiat 1100d for a drive to the Tank Bund everyday and clip from one end to the other at speeds close to a hundred kmph. Which was perhaps the car’s outer limit. One day I got caught and Dad admonished me and warned me of the dangers involved, but Younus…

Younus got totally upset that his training had obviously not made an impact on me. So he launched into a story telling session that was supposed to start with ‘kahanis’ of his prowess and end with a bit of ‘gyaan’.

You think you can go fast Baba? he asked derisively. What is the top speed you can achieve? And when I said 100kmph or something close, he snorted and told us that the Plymouth he used to drive he used to go so fast that the needle would start reading slower numbers,,,like 10 or 20.

Needless to say I looked at him with confusion and disbelief. He then described how he was going so fast, going so fast…that the meter…when it reached its outer limit…just skipped the finish point and started registering speeds once again. So thanks to the clockwise nature of the arrangement, the meter, having run out of digits to keep pace…60, 70, 80, 90, 100…and again…0, 10, 20 and so on.

So a speed of “20” was actually 120 kmph according to the double clock system. And when he was really flying, his speedometer would read 100 for the second time…but those were dangerous speeds mind you.

Luckily I was intelligent enough not to be gullible. And like I told him once when he was crossing the limits of factuality…I too was a Hyderabadi.