DIRT KINGS
“we stand on the dirt and not in it!!”
By Joshua Cherian Varughese
Prelude:“All we did was grind a little bit more dirt at various dirt tracks. But we did it in such a way that the world stared agape”
The black moisture laden soil sifted through my fingers back into the ground as I crushed it in my fists. My nails were long muddy; my black hair had turned brown with tonnes of dust in it. Grease was all over me. I was ‘dirty’ in the words of the outside world. People who knew me would probably not have recognised me. It had been two years – for me ‘two years’ was a long time - but I knew I never felt it all the time. I had walked it as if it was a week or two. I knew I could do it for a long time before I’d be tired of it. (I usually get tired of stuff very fast)
It’s not a story that I have to tell; it’s not an anecdote with well built exaggerations and interesting metaphors. It’s an account from the heart of a boy becoming man. I was a boy when I started doing what I do , back then I did it just because I loved the idea. But slowly it shaped me – my hands became hard in texture but smooth in handling spanners, cutters, knives and various other machines; my heart became hard as it learned to fail and not be defeated but it became soft to my brothers around me. It taught me to be who I am inside and not to be what I was not. I thirsted for victory – to stand and shout on the stands with my veins swelling in my neck, the name at the sound of which my hair stands up straight – DAKSH. It taught me to lead when there was no leader, to be led when there was one. It taught me to laugh when there was no reason to and to smile at raging storms. It taught me brotherhood of those whose shoulders which would stand against mine no matter what stood before us.
(My brothers who are made of the same substance that I am made of. Those brothers who’d pull their ‘lubb dubbing’ hearts out of their chest at the sound of an engine roaring. Those brothers who’d gladly stand in my shoes if they had to - when I went through trouble. I remember a man who disrespected one of my brothers a couple of days back – my heart skipped a beat, my blood boiled, I stepped in front of that man and my brother looking the man in the eye as if to say “Now you talk to me, bugger”)
Somewhere an engine chocked and died out. Some other engines were still running of those who were still trying to prove their mettle. As I stood in that dirt track where I had been for several days in the past two years, I knew that I had proved myself. It took time, hard efforts, guts to dream dreams that my fellows never dared to dream. But now at the end of two hard years, the shapeless dirt racing ‘car’ that my brothers and I built had proved a better machine against the dirt. As I sat in the afternoon sun with its rays beating down my shoulders, with crowns of the dirt track all over me (dirt and grease), I knew I was more a man than I was the day before.
We bleed, we sweat, we burn, we get tanned, our clothes smell, our hair endlessly unkempt but when it comes to dirt racing we just keep on rolling – NOTHING STOPS US!!
