After about two months of nervously guiding a battered Maruti around my colony in the early hours of the day, I decide it’s time for the first step – a learner’s licence.

The Sheikh Sarai Road Transport Office, the one meant for South Delhi, is located off a busy BRT road, and presents a dingy, smelly façade that one has come to associate with any sarkari-daftar where one “gets work done”. The timings are 8.30 am - 4 pm for the public - Saturdays and Sundays closed. There are separate counters for renewal of licences, applications for new ones, commercial and non-commercial vehicles. The people standing in queues, mostly auto drivers who grumble about standing here all day, kindly point out the counter for ‘kachcha licence’ when I ask.

When an officer appears at my counter, I turn on my brightest smile, say a namaste and make my request. The officer replies with an equally sweet smile, “Office closed. Come tomorrow.” It is 4 o’ clock in the evening. I turn on my pleading eyes and say, “Sir, please sir, ghar se door hai.”

It works. The officer huffs, comes back with a sheaf of paper and thrusts it at me. I smile again, thank him profusely and slip out. It’s true; I think triumphantly, everything gets done when you ask with a smile.

I go the next day armed with my ID proof (voter’s ID card) and a proof-of-birth certificate (class tenth board results) – originals and two photocopies.

There is a form requiring proofs of medical fitness – eyesight, blood pressure etc – to be signed and stamped by a doctor. I go to a clinic conveniently across the road from the RTO, and the doctor asks me if I’m colour blind. I say no, and that is it. He ticks a few boxes on  the page, even looks over the rest of my form and tells me to fill out things I’ve missed out. He asks for Rs. 50 before putting his stamp on the page. “Nothing gets done without payment!” he tells me, cheerfully.

Back inside the dingy RTO, I shuttle between the counters on the ground floor and the second floor. There is one counter to deposit my forms and photocopies. One counter to deposit the fees and take a receipt. One to deposit the receipt, sign on a digital pad, and get a photo clicked, sitting at a booth across from a digital webcam.

Next, there is a line to give the learner’s licence test. I get ushered in front because I am a woman, and ask for the test in English.

The question paper has twenty multiple-choice questions on everything from road signs to what to do when a motorcycle overtakes you from the left. The paper is a laminated one, and there are suspicious pen-markings on one option for every question. The markings seem to be correct, judging by the marks on the questions to which I do know the answers – so I stop trying, submit my test in less than five minutes, and ask when to collect the licence. “Test ko pass karogi toh hi milega.” the officer teases. “Come tomorrow at 4,”

The thought of a driving test makes me nervous. My friends have had a rainbow of experiences. A friend at East Delhi didn’t have to give a test at all. The one in West Delhi said the officer signed her forms after an hour-long wait, no car in sight. A friend in Chawri Bazaar had to drive around a circular track. He failed for not having put on an indicator. He went back the next month, paid off a tout, and got his licence. However, the friend in Civil Lines was asked to reverse and park a car and passed her test fair and square.

After the mandatory 90 days of having a learner’s licence, we reach early one morning and register for a driving test. Almost everyone in the line is accompanied by an “agent”. Waiting outside for an inspector to appear, I watch as two of the applicants who were behind me zip ahead with their tests, wishing me best of luck as they headed home. My father’s driver, who has come with me, is impatient. After an hour of waiting, he goes off and returns, saying he’s haggled with a tout for 700 rupees. In the market surrounding the RTO, in front of a shop sits the tout, a board above his head declaring him to be a Notary for All Kinds of Papers. He is filling out the licence form for a woman, who tells me she has failed the test twice already, and that paying off a tout is the only guaranteed way of passing. Form checked out, money handed over; the tout gives me a slip of paper and sends me off with an “agent”. The agent has a few words with an inspector now standing on the side of the road, and gives him the slips gathered from three more hopefuls.

The agent asks me if I know how to drive, and I squeak, ‘ji Haan!’ He fills in the field that I can drive a two wheeled vehicle as well, invents a registration number for my two-wheeler. A rickety white car appears and I get into the driver’s seat, the agent in the passenger’s. The others, who are applying only for a two-wheeler licence, get in the backseat. Now comes the best part. The agent asks me to sit back, and angles himself in such a way that though he’s sitting on the passenger side, but it’s his feet controlling the pedals, his hand on the steering wheel. Stunned, I start the car and keep my hands on the two-ten position as I “drive” down the road, take a U- turn, stop at the red light, take another U-turn and return to where we started. We get off, the inspector marks us all as “passed” in his fat register and it’s all over.

My only real contribution to the “test” is that I put on my seatbelt and flicked the indicator lights on.

Somewhere I’ve read that the bureaucracy, for all its rigid efficiency and claims to transparency, is an alienating institution – perhaps, this is how human creativity expresses itself, finding the spaces in between to bend the rules, satisfying its desires where its needs are taken care of by the structure. The arrival of my driver’s licence in the post a month later brings a bittersweet feeling. I can legally drive on Delhi roads now. But on roads populated by drivers “licensed” like this? Ah, well. It’s common knowledge that stepping out on Delhi roads is, above all, an act of faith.