Ninad had been driving the Santro for eight months now — errands mostly, his mother's saree emergencies, his father's files left at the office, the occasional late-night run for medicine when his grandmother's knees acted up. He knew exactly how much clutch it needed on the slope outside the society gate, exactly which gear it complained in.
He also knew, with the particular certainty of nineteen, that it was not a car anyone would ever call powerful.
The Fortuner arrived on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, Deshpande kaka's son Yash — home from his first semester in Bangalore, tall now in a way Ninad still wasn't used to — was reversing it out of the gate with the effortless boredom of someone who'd been driving SUVs his whole life, though everyone in B-wing knew this was his first week doing exactly that.
"Want to see something," Yash said, catching Ninad at the gate that evening, and didn't wait for an answer.
He took the ramp out of the society hard, and the Fortuner didn't so much climb it as ignore it — no scrape, no strain, nothing like the careful half-clutch dance Ninad performed every single time in the Santro. On the main road, Yash overtook a bus in one clean pull, the engine barely raising its voice.
"Two hundred horsepower," Yash said, like a fact he enjoyed saying out loud. "Your Santro's what, sixty?"
"Sixty-eight," Ninad said, and didn't enjoy saying it.
He drove the Santro home from tuition that night with the windows down, and for the first time in eight months, the gear changes felt like effort rather than habit. He noticed the whine on the incline he'd never noticed before. He noticed the air conditioning wasn't really air conditioning, more a suggestion of one. He noticed his own hands on a wheel that had always felt like enough, and didn't, tonight.
At dinner he was quieter than usual, and it was his father who finally asked, setting his phone face-down — the signal, always, that something was coming.
"Yash gave you a ride."
"Word travels."
"Watchman travels." His father almost smiled. "You've been quiet since."
Ninad turned his glass a half-rotation on the table, not drinking from it. "It's just — you feel it, Baba. In that car. Like the road actually listens to you. Ours, you're always asking it nicely. That one, you just tell it."
His father didn't answer right away, which was its own kind of answer, coming from him.
It was Ajji, shelling peas at the end of the table without looking up, who spoke instead.
"Your Ajoba used to say something about that," she said. "Not about cars — we didn't have such worries in our day, thankfully, or I'd never have heard the end of it from him about a car, of all things." A pod cracked between her thumbs. "He used to say the mind is like fire. Give it fuel, it doesn't get satisfied — it gets bigger. Wants more fuel."
"That's not really what I meant, Ajji."
"I know exactly what you meant," she said, not unkindly. "You meant power. I'm only telling you power is fuel too, beta. Today it's an engine. Tomorrow it's a promotion, then a bigger house than the promotion bought you, then something after that. The fire doesn't stop being hungry just because you feed it once."
Ninad didn't have a response ready for that, so he didn't offer one.
Saturday morning, his father asked him to take the Santro for its service, alone this time — the first time he'd been trusted with it beyond the neighbourhood. The service center was across town, past the flyover, in traffic that required real driving, not just the careful crawl of familiar streets.
He merged into the flyover traffic without the polite hesitation he usually drove with. Found the gap, took it. Held his lane through a stretch where three other cars were jostling for the same six feet of road, and didn't flinch when a Scorpio leaned on its horn behind him.
It wasn't the Fortuner. It would never overtake a bus in one pull, never make the incline outside the gate feel like nothing.
But somewhere past the flyover, changing into third gear on a clear stretch of road, windows down, engine doing exactly what he asked of it and nothing more, Ninad noticed he'd stopped thinking about the Fortuner altogether. Not because he'd decided to stop. He just had, the way you stop noticing a sound has ended — not in the moment, but a little after, when the quiet finally catches up with you.
The small brass Krishna his grandfather had fixed to the dashboard years ago faced the road, same as always, flute worn smooth at the mouthpiece from a decade of thumbs resting there without thinking. Ninad had never once wondered why it was angled outward instead of toward the driver.
He wondered it now, briefly, and then the signal ahead turned green, and he let the thought go the way you let go of a lot of things while driving — not resolved, exactly, just set down somewhere you could return to later, or not.
Scripture/Source: Inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 3, Verses 37-39 — Krishna's teaching that desire, born of passion, is like a fire that is never satisfied, however much it is fed. Not a direct verse translation; adapted as an original story.
The Lane Arjun Didn't Take — A father and son, a different kind of pull to keep up with everyone else, and the same quiet choice to stay in your own lane.
Vocabulary (5)
2. Match the Words (5)
3. MCQ (5)
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5. Fill in the Blanks (5) — Word bank: effortless, jostling, flinch, incline, hesitation
6. Short Answer (5)
7. Creative Thinking (2)
8. Character Reflection
9. Creative Writing
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