THE DESIGNATED DRIVER
In a car full of slightly hysterical, and sometimes violent, senior citizens of Team t2, the Designated Driver, one of the youngest members of the team, was calm. She drove like Schumacher when needed, tackled odds with elan and could easily make a living driving a taxi anywhere in the world. Provided, she finds her way to the pickup point.

Ten minutes before the registration starts, Team Huntage is bathed in dust standing along the Bypass, trying to call her, with terse text messages in reply: “Am driving.” Finally a call comes through and an indignant voice says she has been at the pick-up point for long. “Opposite Spencer’s.” No, she was not on the EM Bypass, because apparently, “the Bypass is opposite nowhere, where you guys are standing is just opposite land, not opposite Spencer’s”. #facepalm

Despite repeated urgings from us, she does not ram into the car that cuts our team car off while reversing. She calmly executes a U-turn in a narrow bylane in Ram Bagan. She handles the demise of her car’s air conditioner exceptionally well. She has extraordinary patience with the Noble Navigator who gets lost even with a Google map and eager helpers who yell “left” when they mean right. The only betrayal of nerves? For five seconds in Tangra when she screams at NN, “It is called a bloody horn, stop saying pyan pyan!”

She’s the reason why the team is thinking of participating in the next The Telegraph car rally. #SoProud

THE NOBLE NAVIGATOR
He’s the only man in the car, so of course he’s the navigator. Because, when men yell “right” they generally mean right and not left. I concede, as a driver, I should keep my eyes peeled and try to familiarise myself with more roads than the one that goes from home-to-work-to-home but I find myself plugging into music as soon as I’m in the back seat. And having spent my life in south Calcutta, my knowledge of north Calcutta is grossly inadequate. But one lives and learns. Now I might be able to find my own way to Tangra. But not to Rabindra Sarani, no.

NN, it turned out, was entirely dependent on Google maps. Which is useful only if the phone is not being used to Google clues and make frantic calls. So the only other way to get anywhere is to cruise along, stick your neck out and holler for directions from grinning or grimacing pedestrians. Whilst racing, NN became particularly active, especially in narrow lanes that housed more people, children, dogs and cows than cars. Here he would helpfully have his paw firmly on the horn, and imitate the sound it emitted. “Pyan pyan!” he insisted. “Press the pyan pyan. Like this, pyan pyan.”... “IT’S CALLED A BLOODY HORN!”

And so Huntage ended with one driver and three navigators. The Road Rager gnashed her teeth when she suspected people of slowing us down; “Hit them,” was her indignant navigation advice. Advice ignored, prison evaded. The Pacifist Poser directed placidly from the back seat; “Slow down at the yellow light,” was her bland advice. Advice taken, accident evaded. NN hopped out to hotfoot it back and forth from the elusive yellow umbrellas and insisted on selfies in the setting sun when all of us were grimy and exhausted. And of course, our friends, the enthusiastic boys on the road, who kept an eye out for harried Huntagers to direct them towards the sites. One of them led us to the Armenian Church in Tangra on his bike. Noblesse Oblige. 

THE ROAD RAGER
The oldest member of Team Huntage, RR, killed three people and maimed seven in the three-and-half-hours we drove around the city. We mean, if everything she screamed out came true, at least three people would be dead and numerous others maimed. 

She was revved from 7.30am when she lit into DD for confusing pick-up points. The minute we got the clue-sheet in our hand she started screaming out search words like she was threatening the gods of Google. The Google gods seemed suitably cowed and we had the answers to two clues and most of the third within 10 minutes of starting. Her reaction to the early success? “Yes! Yes! We’ve got three! We are brilliant! I am so happy! I will punch that taxi driver’s face!” Thank god the air conditioning in the car was working at that point and the windows were rolled up. Her other screamed instructions mostly had to do with running people over and ramming into cars that tried to block our way. At one point, when NN was outside the car and looking for a spot he got a frantic call from RR who was screaming into the phone saying, “Can you see that red car? It tried to block our way. Throw stones at it!” So glad RR wasn’t carrying her brand new air-gun.
On the way to the third site, DD asked NN to take the passenger seat, apparently to navigate. We suspect it was because she wanted RR relegated to the back seat. It did nothing to tone RR down. She muttered, screamed insults and threatened with abandon, right down to the award ceremony. Yep, you guessed it, we did not place. But we did crack all seven clues. *smug smile*

THE PACIFIST POSER
When you have someone like RR in the back seat, raring to kill and plunder, DD at the wheel doing a Schumacher at every turn and shouting “I am driving into nothingness” every now and then, and NN constantly glued to his phone when not advising to “do the pyan pyan”, you need one soul to keep calm and help finish cracking the clues. Enter the Pacifist Poser, never the pacifist at work, in fact quite the rabble-rouser, who remained astonishingly unfazed by all the Huntage madness. “Stop at the red light DD….Wear the seat belt, it’s for your safety…. Calm down RR, it’s just a fun hunt…. Just look up Ram Bagan on the Google map NN, instead of taking selfies,” so went her instructions in a bored monotone, as she googled clues herself, and not hysterically. When the time came to tie a turban outside Vivekananda’s house, she won the day by deftly twisting the saffron cloth around NN’s head, in a style Swamiji himself would have been proud to imitate. PP lost her cool only once, snapping at her phone-a-friend lifeline with a curt “You are useless!” when that poor soul was befuddled by the clue. 

THE CAR
I wear Anokhi clothes, have lived to adulthood being stylish and efficient and if I’ve been blue, it’s only because I’m painted so. A Santro, I was once driven by a staid old man until his hot-headed, less gentle daughter took over. And in my old age I find myself being bullied into a wild goose chase by the boisterous Team t2, who clambered in, sweaty and shouting, blocking the rear-view with their biceps; it was an accident waiting to happen! Not that I mind a rough game now and then, but it is a bit of an assault on my sensibilities when the heaviest one starts dancing, seat belt strapped on, in the front seat. From the wetlands to the river, from upscale Outram Street to the annals of north Calcutta, they wandered all over, urging me to run over somebody or the other. #Shudder

They don’t know directions, scratch that, they don’t even know their left from right, they don’t know what a horn is called and God forbid, if I had a puncture. No surprises, I lost my cool. And they, surprisingly, kept theirs despite the non-functional air con and still kept going and finished a rally.

If they mend their manners, I might let them take me to a real rally some day. Sniff.