Music: Blue Scholars – Second Chapter
9:16 Pacific Time
March 26 2008
Without even realizing it, I clench my teeth and suck in air quickly and audibly, almost every time I ride in a Tehran taxi — my instinctual physical reaction to the frightening proximity of myself to the driver of the adjacent speeding car. I’m not afraid, per say, of my own personal impending doom, but rather that one of these cars is going to bounce off of the other like billiard balls, creating chaos that will multiply exponentially as the cars around it have mere fractions of a second to react.
In California, they taught us to drive defensively. Its axioms largely boil down to keeping a safe distance between oneself and the cars to the side and in front so that if something sudden did happen, that reactions would be swift and safe, to prevent something from happening. Here, it’s almost as if drivers are taught the opposite, to accelerate, careen, and move agressively with the deftness of a fighter jet pilot. Frequently, I’ve been close enough to an adjacent car to touch it with a slightly extended index finger through the lowered window more than once.
Every car pretends that it’s essentially the only car on the road, and largely ignores the lane markings, that is, when there are lane markings. When drivers vaguely try to respect them, it’s more of a suggestion than a requirement. Cars — taxis especially — often creep into the adjacent lane, or better yet, straddle the lane markings. On the highway, that’s not such a huge deal, as there’s less stray objects to be concerned with, but in the city, that translates into cab drivers not thinking twice about swerving out of the two lanes of regular, slow-reacting traffic, to slide into the shoulder, mere inches past unfazed folks waiting for a bus and parked motorcycles.
When pedestrians cross the street, there’s an unspoken, acknowledged gaze that happens between them and us. There’s no one staring down the other, where the driver slows down to yield to the foot traffic, or the walking one holding back her children to protect them from this maniacal machine. Nothing changes, the car maintains its velocity, the people maintain their distance, and again, get one too many inches within my comfort zone.
I’d think that driving defensively applies ever further when sitting in the cockpit of a larger vehicle, but clearly I’ve never been a student of the Tehran Driving School. Last weekend, when we were all piled in a minibus going to my great-grandmother’s funeral service in Qom, we had tried to reach the Shrine of Massoumeh. Our bus was tightly packed in two lanes of traffic, right up against a line of parked cars on the main street, just across a canal from the shrine. Our traffic moved at a maximum speed of perhaps eight miles per hour when we weren’t stopped altogether. At this rate, it would take us until nightfall to reach the shrine. The driver — a man who earlier successfully managed to take of his large jacket, steer and smoke a cigarette — clearly perceived this problem as well.
Traffic in the opposite direction moved with the same lurch, and with no barrier of any kind to stop him, the driver smoothly executed a U-turn into a meter-long opening that magically appeared. Before I even had a chance to clench my teeth, all of a sudden we were facing the same traffic, but this time in the opposite direction. We’d given up on visiting the shrine.
“That was ballsy,” I said softly to my father, who didn’t hear me.
I guess it’s a good thing that Cousin Amir failed his Tehran driving test eight times before finally being allowed to join this hallowed legion?
Addendum (March 30 2008):
Today, I went with Afshin and his wife Leila to Darband, a really awesome hillside village similar to Darakeh. On the way back, we caught a cab driven by a young driver who was bumping some Persian pop music on the way down. We zoomed down to the square at the bottom of the hill where he promptly tried to dodge the established slow moving traffic by dodging the other cars parked haphazardly about alongside a few shops. This strategy would have worked had there not been a bus parked there with them, and he didn’t have enough room to finagle his way through. Not deterred, he executed the fastest three-point turn I’ve ever seen, and zoomed around the bus and quickly got in line of the single lane of crawling traffic.
The adjacent lane of traffic coming towards us had much less cars, and was blocked by someone turning into a driveway, leaving a distance of perhaps eight car lengths free. Not going to let this opportunity pass him by, our intrepid driver floored it, and perhaps three seconds later found himself staring down another car trying to advance in the direction that it was supposed to. Totally unfazed, he grabbed the passenger seat, cocked his head around, and spun into reverse, taking us back to the square again. The car advanced and passed us and continued on its way, but then less than 30 seconds later, another car halted the opposing traffic by turning again into the driveway.
Without missing a beat, our driver accelerated back to the same spot and incredulously managed to sneak into an opening that was going the proper direction without holding up traffic for more than 10 seconds.
In the backseat, Leila and I looked at in each with amazement and fear.
