The Transport Company
You can read the previous chapters here:
Chapter 1- The Introduction
Chapter 2- The Taxi
Chapter 3- The Garment Factory
Chapter 4- The Materialist
Chapter 5- The Policeman
Chapter 6- The Brat Guitarist
Ebenezer has been an inter-city trailer driver for the Martin’s Transport Company for 28 years. His association with Bucky Martin, the proprietor of Martin’s Transport Company, goes way back in time, when both used to work for a construction firm, as truck drivers. One day Bucky caught the owner of the construction firm “red handed”, while he was trying to bribe the structural engineer, in return for a fake tensile strength report of the flyover the company was constructing. Bucky confronted the owner and blackmailed him to break the news out to the media, if he didn’t get compensated handsomely. And that’s how he struck a deal with the owner of the company and got a severance package, which was good enough for him to start a transport company of his own. As he parted his way from his employer, he also on boarded Ebenezer as his first employee for his newly moulded Transport Company. Ever since, Ebenezer has working for Bucky and making him richer, one payload delivery at a time.
Bucky has never been a man ethics and creeds, and nothing has changed in the past 28 years. The only thing that has changed in him, is his ego, which has now gone through the cosmos. Money has blinded him, so much so that all he wants in his life is money, by hook or crook. The process does not matter to him anymore, the outcome needs to be profitable and beneficial for him. He indeed has made a lot of wealth for himself, with his unethical & unprofessional ways, but in the process, he hasn’t made any effort to make even a single well wishes for himself. Anyone, who is associated with him, directly or indirectly, does not like him. His policies towards his employees have also not been of a friendly nature. Baring Ebenezer, none of his employees has ever made a complete year of employment with him successfully, due to his oppressive and unfriendly policies.
And here is Ebenezer, at the afterhours of a hot and humid April night, making his way through the dark and silent stretches of Pune-Bangalore highway, driving one of Bucky’s trailers from Mumbai to Bangalore. In Ebenezer’s mind, this moment appears to have stopped and he has started get a sense of Déjà Vu. The darkness of the motorway has somehow crept into his soul today, and unknowingly & unsuspectingly he has begun to succumb to the hollowness of this unpleasant sentiment. Driving through barren & uninhabited long stretches at nights has been his forte throughout his life, but something is undeniably off today. There is something running on the back burner, which has been constantly wearying him off from inside out. A man becomes most vulnerable when his mind and heart rage a war against each other. For a person with as heavy heart, as Ebenezer’s, this condition is anything but expected. With the wrath of storm building within him, from the last couple of months, and a completely different stream of conflicting emotions turning themselves into a tsunami of thoughts, Ebenezer has lastly reached to a brink of breakdown. This is exactly the situation when one’s mind starts to play its tricks and slowly sets into a state of delusion.
These long and exasperating journeys, throughout these past years, have already shattered Ebenezer’s body, but now his mind has also started to show its wear and tear. All these years, Ebenezer has done everything, good or bad, that he was asked to do by Bucky, without asking a question or without giving any second thought. Simply put, he has been a part of almost every unethical engagements that Bucky has taken up & concluded till date. But ever since he has learnt about what happened to
Tony, another driver who used to work for Bucky, Ebenezer’s conscience has woken up. This sudden awakening of morality took place about two months ago, when Tony was on his way to delivering a payload of illegally smuggled electronics items to one of Bucky’s long-time customers, in his trailer. That’s when the Anti-Corruption Bureau officials raided the trailer and arrested Tony, on the charges of smuggling. Even though the goods loaded on that trailer were not his, he was accused & later convicted for 7 years, in the court of law. And to Ebenezer’s surprise, Bucky was the author of Tony’s conviction, as he himself scripted everything with the help of his influential back channels. By doing so, Bucky evaded the justice system with ease and as a consequence of that, now an innocent person is behind bars, suffering for the sins committed by someone else.
Scuffling through the sway of emotions while trying to withstand the tide of emotions, Ebenezer didn’t realize when the first day light broke through the horizon and how the total stretch of 620 Mile got covered by him. As Martin’s Transport Company’s trailer parking lot appears in the field of his vision now, he makes up his mind to convey what he has been wanting to, in the last few months. He parks the trailer at the stipulated spot and replays what he would say to Bucky, in his head. “Look- Bucky, I have been with you for a really long time. Our friendship dates back to the days when you were also a driver. I have supported you relentlessly, without asking any question. Haven’t I? But now my old body has given up on me and I need a break from this, for good. I hope that’s not too much of a demand from my side and you would happily grant me a farewell, so that I can embark upon my next journey to spirituality and peace of mind”. By the time his preparatory rehearsal completed in his head, he was already standing in front of Bucky’s office door, waiting for his turn to come.
Question: Has Ebenezer really changed as a person or is it just his selfishness and fear of getting caught which is driving him to part his ways with Bucky?
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