Speed demons on two wheels

Karachi
Time was when I pedalled around on a bicycle on Karachi’s busy roads and streets, sometimes with a little sister or brother on the crossbar. I didn’t even wear spectacles then.
Today, I hate to even cross the same roads, having learnt to be extra-cautious about motorcycles after a number of close calls. Not many years ago, a fellow journalist was quite seriously injured by a motorcyclist as he returned from work late at night. His injury was all the more serious since at middle age, he can be considered an old case of diabetes.
As for myself, in the early 2000s, a motorcyclist riding at breakneck speed could have left me maimed, or worse, as I was crossing a road with the customary caution I have developed.
He spared me by inches by quickly applying the brakes, but he still had to swerve to avoid hitting me. I bet he must have been amused at my silly near-death scream. A few years later, I was actually hit – right on the kneecap.
Thank goodness it was a light, glancing blow, and thank goodness the motorcyclist was slowed by the parked vehicles on the side-street he had entered. His response to my avuncular chiding at his rashness was an insolent glare.
As I was coming to work one recent afternoon, I had an unsettling experience of another kind. The motorcyclist, a balding middle-aged man, seemed to be in a tearing hurry to get to the petrol station on the other side of the road.
So he cut right across my rickshaw’s path to reach it. There would surely have been an almighty crash if the rickshaw driver hadn’t applied the brakes just in time. Afterwards, the elderly Pathan kept shaking his head in disgusted disbelief at the man’s devil-may-care recklessness, muttering choice words of abuse for someone who could have wrecked his rickshaw and got him in deep trouble with the police for no fault of his own. To say nothing of what would almost surely have happened to the man and his motorcycle, and to the driver and myself.
On another recent occasion late one night, a rickshaw I had just hired was slowly making a U-turn when – thud! – it was hit by a motorbike. Encouraged by the fact that it was midnight, with no policeman around, the man blamed the rickshaw driver for the hit. He didn’t stop at that.
He removed the rickshaw’s ignition key to force the driver to straighten up the motorcycle’s front wheel which had gone out of alignment from the impact, returning it only after the driver had complied by going on his haunches to do the job. It was almost miraculous the rickshaw suffered only minor damage.
Again, as I left a shop on one of the broad footpaths still remaining in Karachi’s once lovely Saddar area, a man who had just started his bike immediately went into high gear, coming straight at me as I walked to the road. During the row that followed, he said that I was to blame. How on earth? Because, he replied, I had left the shop “too quickly” (“aap bohot tezi se baahar nikle”).
Until the late-1980s, footpaths were strictly for pedestrians’ use. Since then, however, they have been increasingly arrogated by Karachi’s motorcyclists. To claim his right of way on the footpath, a motorcyclist would typically beep at you with impatience. This isn’t confined to footpaths, though.
Visiting a graveyard in the Malir area for the burial of a cousin back in 2006, I found that the graveyard’s narrow path between its gates at opposite ends was being used by motorcyclists as a convenient two-way shortcut to the entrances at opposite ends. The motorcyclists expected the mourners to move on or disperse to make way, or rudely asked them to comply.
Not many years ago, a pedestrian on a footpath was hit from behind by a motorcycle; luckily for him, he wasn’t hurt. It goes without saying that a quarrel ensued, but one of the motorcyclist’s comments was quite unexpected: “You were not being watchful” (“Aap dekh kar naheen chal rahe the”).
The victim’s response to the taunt was a slap to the man’s face. Heaven knows how many incidents of this kind take place on Karachi’s roads and footpaths, going unreported because they didn’t degenerate into violence more serious than slaps and fisticuffs.
Still more frightening is a motorcyclist roaring past you in darkness on roads and footpaths alike, headlight and taillight off; doubly so when the surroundings are almost pitch dark during blackouts from power failures.
A good one-third of our motorcyclists seem to have had their silencers removed, just for the heck of it. In which case, high-decibel sound pollution combines with air pollution when motorcyclists, as well as drivers of other poorly maintained vehicles, take to the road emitting smoke.
Add to this the motorcyclists who are unlicensed, and those who are underage; some, from their face and height, as young as 15, 14?
And, unless you relish the thrill of having your heart in your mouth, beware the daredevils doing wheelies on roads!
Don’t get me wrong. I am not some anti-motorcycle crusader. Four-wheel vehicles – cars, wagons, trucks, tankers and the rest – are driven just as rashly because of the rapidly receding respect for traffic rules, in a city once famed for its civilised traffic and strict adherence to these rules by drivers, cyclists and pedestrians alike. None of these vehicles, though, is quite as capable of plowing into knots of people as a motorcycle is.
To address its traffic chaos, Karachi has to start somewhere. Starting with its motorcycles couldn’t be a bad idea. Any suggestions?
The writer is a senior assistant editor at The News International.
Email:asim.ghani@thenews.com.pk