This shaadi season, I discovered the ultimate glitch in the matrix – a woman driving a Thar in a sari. A visual contradiction so severe that it threatened to crash a valet’s internal server.After attending a big fat desi wedding reception recently, the silk-sari-clad me and my plus-one waited by the hotel lobby entrance for the valet to bring around the car. The car – a machismo-oozing, socially infamous – Kali Thar.The SUV halts in neutral, the engine humming rambunctiously loud over the whispers of luxury sedans. The valet walks straight to my plus-one – an incredibly drowsy, ready-to-doze-off man – and hands over the keys with a respectful nod.Of course, a woman in a sari and heels is not going to ‘man’ a vehicle four times her size late at night.The man, who is only looking forward to plonking himself in the passenger seat, belting up and napping as we make a two-hour journey across NCR, simply shrugs and points the valet to me.Error 404. The valet’s face goes through fifty shades of confusion – he looks at the car, then back at me – the outfit is giving ‘jal lijiye’ but the vehicle is more ‘gaddiyan unchiyan rakhiyan’? Eventually, he fixes his face with a polite smile (as he must have been trained to) and hands over the keys to me.On an average jeans-and-sneakers day, I’m already a threat to public safety with the double whammy of “Women aren’t good drivers” and “Thar is for the rude and the reckless.” Add to it a high-maintenance attire, and it’s just “brace for impact!” anxiety all around.In the West, a fragile-looking Bella Swan can drive a 1953 Chevy pickup, and no one bats an eyelid. In NCR, driving a Thar in a sari is treated as a matter of public safety, or an unreleased Rohit Shetty stunt. Every person within my ten-metre radius keeps watching me in grim anticipation, waiting, for inevitable female driver errors to happen – setting off wipers to signal a right turn, getting distracted by a slipping pallu, or pressing the pedal instead of brakes because of pointy heels.That night, however, I had a tiny victory. Triumphant, I hopped into the driver’s seat – sari, heels, jhumkas, et al – recalibrated the seat and mirror settings to my liking, and drove off into the night.The next time you see a woman in a sari manning a Kali Thar, control the urge to be ZNMD’s Arjun and say, “Tum, drive kar sakti ho?” Just let her be a rock chick in a hard rock world. – This rant comes from a female driver Saptaparna Biswas, who believes that one day the valet will hand her the keys first
