A hilarious road trip tale

By Yaajyaansh Bhardwaj

HONK! HONK! “Move ahead, you lazy buffoons!” yelled my dad at the top of his lungs to the fellow cars in the traffic jam. It was around 7:30 pm when we left our home to buy some medicine. But even after an hour, we had only managed to crawl 500 meters! Anyway, the jam scenario was created something like this: stray cows were blocking the road in the middle, and the dogs, who felt they didn’t have any better work to do, started to chase and bark at the cows.

This, in turn, made the fat, jolly cop on the side of the street, who was up till then pretending to keep an eye on the traffic, go to stop the dogs. This triggered the dogs to bite the cop! The red light, choosing that moment as the time to break down, acted like icing on the cake.

This made my dad feel hopeless to get out of this jam, and it also made him lose his temper (anybody would have lost their temper by that point in time, but I was chill). I started looking for some sort of entertainment, so I turned on the radio, only to remember that it could only be used as a clock since the antenna had been chewed up by our dog earlier (dogs are really naughty, aren’t they!). It showed the time as 8:00 pm. Only 30 more minutes had passed, but it felt like 2 hours, so officially we had been on the road for one and a half hours! The jam felt like my Sanskrit classes (although Santosh ma’am teaches pretty well, it seems endless, tiring, and confusing for me). I took out my phone to pass the time and asked Siri for some fun facts. You wouldn’t believe the first fun fact it gave us: “The average time a person around the globe spends in traffic is around 70 days in their lifetime.” From that point on, my belief in God got stronger than ever before because this clearly couldn’t be a coincidence. Of course, such facts are not coming just to taunt us; God is reminding us of his heavenly presence.

Luckily, some more so-called ‘traffic’ police (or more like jam police to me) were called in, and we were eventually out of the mess. We started moving, just to discover that our car’s petrol was down to half a bar, and I doubted if we would be able to make it to the gas station without pushing the car, which became our next goal. But we did make it eventually without any hassles.

On reaching there, extremely tired and frustrated from the jam, my dad told the gas filler to hurry up and fill up the tank. He did as he was told and gave us the bill, which is when Dad realised something horrible. Something as horrible as leaving the car keys inside the car! He was speechless for a couple of moments, and also since this was becoming our lucky day, obviously his wallet and his phone were locked in the car too. By then, it was clear we didn’t have any option except to call for help. So we yelped for help from Mom by borrowing someone’s phone. Mom arrived in about 10 minutes to where we were, which was seven times less than the time it took us to reach the same place.

We paid the money, opened the car, and sat in it. We finally reached the pharmacy without any more weird stuff in 10 minutes, just to find a signboard on the door that read, “SORRY, BUT WE’RE CLOSED ON WEEKENDS.” At this point, things got a bit too funny for me, and I leaned a lot from this typical & classic road story!