I don’t have a ‘no hitchhike’ policy, but I do have some rules as I have always felt it is better to err on the side of caution. The factors that determine whether I would let a person hitch a ride with me are dress, age, time and gender. For example, a shabbily dressed youth is a definite no for me, and I am more likely to turn down a request for a ride during nighttime, even if all other factors pose no risks.[break]
Rules, however, don’t always work. A lot many times, whether you heed or ignore a request for hitchhiking depends on the state of your mind. Personally, I have always been ambivalent on the matter and the very first hitchhiker with me turned out to be a case in point for those who advocated against the idea.
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It was about 11pm and I was riding home from office. I stopped when I saw a man ahead raise his hand. It was dark and I couldn’t figure out his age or see how he was dressed. From the silhouette, I could make out that he was of medium height and middle aged.
But I regretted the decision to stop the moment he opened his mouth to ask me where I was heading. The man was totally drunk. Scooting away and leaving him there didn’t seem to be the right thing to do after stopping with an intention to help. Though he seemed much older, he addressed me with a deference you expect of a man in need.
“Dai, I’m in trouble. My wife delivered a baby today but I wasn’t allowed to stay at the hospital in the night,” he said.
“No wonder why!” I told myself.
“Drop me at Min Bhawan, hai Dai,” he said.
I asked him to hop on. All along the way I sat tight and alert, anxious that he might just be waiting for an opportunity to rob me at knifepoint. Though I was looking ahead, all my focus was on the back pocket of my jeans, worried that he might pull out my wallet. I had to ride slowly as I was apprehensive that the drunk pillion rider might tumble off.
He kept muttering something in his drunken slur. I nodded occasionally, deliberately trying to avoid getting into long interaction. The man, I thought, might be trying to divert my focus from my pocket.
I stopped at Min Bhawan and the man got down. He said thank you and “write down my phone number.”
I was confused. “Why?” I said.
“I’m a taxi driver. You might be in need sometime,” he said.
“Oh! That’s okay,” I said.
“No, no. Do write it down,” he insisted.
I took out my cell phone, asked him to give the number and pretended as if I was saving the number 9841...
Next, it was a well dressed middle-aged man walking with a visible forward thrust common among officegoers who have to report on time in the morning. He heard the whirring sound of my bike and waved a hand. I stopped and he just hopped on. No request, no explanation proffered.
“Till the main road,” he said. “I am a little late today and I missed the bus.” That was all he spoke apart from a straightforward “Thank you” after I stopped on the main road.
But with this man I felt totally comfortable and assured that nothing could go wrong. That was probably I had no reasons to get suspicious with this man.
Out of the few people whom I have offered ride on my bike, a lady with a bulging jhola still puzzles me. She was coming from the opposite direction and signaled me to stop. She asked me where the road she was on led to. I told her where it did. Then she asked me where I was heading. I told her that too.
“Can you drop me somewhere along the way?” she asked.
Since I was heading toward the direction she came from, naturally, I was suspicious of her motive. When I politely asked what made her change the course, she said, “Well, I’ll go to the place I was heading to some other time.”
Now, she seemed to me like one of those nagging old women who like pestering people just for the fun of it. But she proved me wrong. She got down at Baneshwor and before she left, she said thank you and apologized for “troubling you.”
It is the kind words like these and the feeling that nags you when you leave somebody in the lurch that oblige me to continue to heed to the hitchhikers’ call, turning a deaf ear to all the prudent arguments I hear against hitchhiking.
The writer is a copy editor at Republica and can be contacted at amendrapokharel@gmail.com
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