A spring morning on a jacaranda avenue: violet trees meeting over the road, bougainvillea spilling over the garden walls, petals blowing across the traffic. You drive a lime-green rickshaw, and you do not stop. You do not jump either — one tap swerves you into the other lane.
Two lanes, and one tap is always the other one: tap anywhere and the rickshaw swerves across, tap again mid-swerve and it turns round. Flower carts, donkey carts and potholes in the kerb lane; school vans, motorbikes and buses in the fast lane. Slip through the gap between two of them. Three dents and you are out.
Fares wave from the kerb lane — a schoolgirl, an uncle, an aunty with her shopping — and they hop in if you drive past them there. The fast lane is safer and pays nothing. Get out of something’s way with no time to spare and it is a “bal bal!”: that pays too. The further you drive, the faster it gets and the thicker the traffic.
Play it now, free, in your browser
No ads. Not a banner, not a pop-up, not a “watch a video to carry on”. A run is a minute or two of weaving through traffic, and none of it is ever interrupted. No download, no account, nothing to install, and once you have opened it once with a connection it plays with no connection at all — on a plane, in a lift, anywhere with no signal. Really offline: nothing it does needs the internet.
It runs in any modern browser on a phone, a tablet or a desktop. On a keyboard, Space swerves, and the left and right arrows choose a lane.
Questions, ideas, or something not working? Write to fawaz_ahmed@live.com.
Whip the cloth out from under a table of the good china and keep everything standing, while the table fills up toward the edge.
A balloon that will not stay up on its own, over a rooftop at golden hour. Tap to bat it back up; the parapet is the line.