Riding Naps: My Unfolding Voyage 37

He will go out, start the engine and then come back to arrange things to be carried along: laptop, the lunch box, a bottle of health drink and the like. He will go back and forth a number of times to ensure that all that he wanted to carry are inside the vehicle. Then, he will finally go out, place these things on the seat adjacent,  place himself on his seat, plug-in the belt and close the door. Now you have to wait for a while before you can see any movemennt. He will now check the controls, meditate for few seconds, use the reverse gear and step on the accelerator. He is readying to take-off..  His Mercedes rolls out of the house and on to the street, turns , straigtens and then slowly moves ahead to gather speed. He is on his way to the office . He will now drive for an hour at least and he will not fall asleep. When I sit beside him when he is driving us, I would tend to fall asleep if the car in on the highway for more than 15 minutes. He will stop me from taking that enjoyable nap by getting me into a convesrsation.. Nowadays, I sit in the back and my wife sits beside him so that he has difficulty in noticing and interfering with my nap. As a child, this person, my younger son used to fall asleep while in a bus or cab or car: now he cannot because he is always on the driver's seat.

Nap while on moving automobiles is one of the wondeful things I have enjoyed throughout my life, because, except for a brief period of about four years, and that too at sporadic intervals and for durations of maximum 20 minutes, there was someone else who would be driving the automobile. I have been moving in personal cars only during the last 20 years or so. Earleir, I had to travel by charterd busus or public buses, trains or trams or cabs for commuting to work place or travelling to anyway where else within the city of residence or nearby suburbs. I had always tried to take the opportunity of a refreshing nap. The seeds of this napping behavior started early when I started going to college. Those days it used to take about 35 minutes from my residence to the college gate during morning peak hours: five minutes on foot and waiting for the vehicle, 10 minutes on bus and 20 minutes on tram (now, it may take between 50 to 60 minutes because traffic has grown, passangers and pedesterians have exploded, road crossings have remained the same in number and the roads have failed to expand).  I would get a comfortable seat at the tram terminus at Belgatchia for a 15 minute nap as the tram would go first to Shyambazar, then take the Cornawallis Street and College Street on its way to the Esplanade, on the  north-east corner of the sprawling greenary of the Maidan Region. For three years I had to travel on this route for the colleges I had attented, but the rides were not as smmoth as it were in the beginning because of the explose growth of passangers and pedesterians. Still later for about seven long years,  I had to experience the increasing agony of traveling to my first emplyer's office in the 1970s.

But going to college from home and coming back provided enjoyable napping rides in 1963. But studying in the college involved a bit of travelling within. The first year Bachelor of Arts class had about 80- 90 students.  But only time they would sit together is when the classes were for English and Bengali, generally  for about 10 /11 hours a week. But they were majoring in different subjects. For example I was major in Economics with another 10 / 11 students. We would have classes together for about 3 hours a day or about 18 hours a week. But all of us would not be having the same mionr. My minor was Mathematics : we were about 35 students in Mathematics attending together about 6 hours a week. So, unlike in the school we would be shifting from one class room to another, the class rooms spread of three floors.  The classrooms, and the class hours had to be so assinged that no student had to be simultaneously present in two classrooms dealing with two different subjects of his choice. This assignment problem solution would necessarily result in some students having no classes during a particular hour of the day and some rooms remaining vacant. These off- the class periods were for gathering in student common room for plaing chess or table tennis or doing some roaming around. This also provided an incentive to skip classes: for example, if one had an off-period or two, followed by a minor or language/ literature class and then nothing else, one would think of leaving college as soon the off-perio starts. In any case for the students, the scores in the major (honours) subject was what counted for their future studies and employment: in the minor and language papers they had just to pass. But you could not afford to stay away from all classes for minor and language subjects as there was a minimum (possibly 70%) attendence requirement for each subject.
After 4 to 5 hours at the college, I would earn a justified nap returning home. An additional justification would specially arise for skipping language/ literature classes at least one day a week. My elder brother disliked my taking a nap while in the moving car. Do did my wife till reluctantly she had to tolerate this: and, she found a good way to voiding my soring: listening to Hindi flim songs and RabindraSangeet of her choice. But I always felt that if Napolean could take short naps of 10 minutes or so while riding on a horse, why not I give my mind unrestricted freedom while I am asleep on a moving car.