Rules of the Road

by C&K

Impatience is endemic in India. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on India’s roads. Our initial experiences with the roads were either short stints in taxis and rickshaws, or as pedestrians crossing the streets, where self-preservation takes on new meaning. Just as there are so many people here, jostling to get a piece of the action, so too are there many vehicles, all fighting to get more than their fair share of the road.

However, our major India driving episode came after we fell ill in Jodphur. We both fell victim to the inevitable Dehli-Belly, and so lost several days of good travel time. Combine this with the fact that we were travelling during Diwali (a major festival) and the auspicious wedding season, the mass migration of 1 billion Indians back and forth across the country makes it difficult to obtain expedient train tickets. And so we were confronted with a choice: abandon the northwest part of Rajasthan and gradually head south, back towards to Mumbai, and possibly never see this part of India properly; or hire a car.

So we hired a car. And unless you have a deathwish, you also hire a driver. Not that hiring an Indian driver guarantees your safe passage, mind you. But it does mean you’re in for one hell of a ride.

Before falling ill we had secretly snickered at some other traveller’s car hire woes, thinking that it was very colonial of them to come to India and hire a car with a driver. Yet we found ourselves doing this very thing a week later so that we could get the most out of our time in Rajasthan. The proprietor of our Jodphur guesthouse arranged it all for us, and ended up renting his own car to us—a little Hyundai sedan—with a driver that was trusted and known to him. Our driver knew very little English, which was supposed to be of benefit to us, since he wouldn’t constantly be trying to get us to stay at dodgy guesthouses for a commission. While this was true, it sometimes proved difficult to communicate the most basic of requests to him, or to ensure that he was eating and sleeping at regular intervals.

And so we set off through Rajasthan, with a planned loop of Jodhpur-Jaisalmer-Bikaner-Pushkar-Ranakpur-Udaipur. This was to take us six days by car; via train, the same trip would have taken about twice as long.

As we pulled out of the guesthouse driveway, I noticed something familiar: through some strange stroke of fate, a small Canadian flag sticker adorned the dashboard of our hired car. I hoped it was a charm of good luck that would help whisk us safely to our destinations. Nevertheless, Katherine had the first-aid kit at the ready in the back seat.

It’s not like we ever expected to drive on the designated (left) side of the road. And it’s not that we are unaccustomed to crazy drivers and strange road rules; having travelled some tiny roads in Greece and some backroads in Nicaragua we are somewhat initiated to these things. But combine “me first” as the order of the day and “might is right” as the unwritten Indian road rule, throw in a few disintegrating roads for good measure, and it results in more than just a few near-misses.

All Indian drivers seem to jockey for pole position on the highway. We realize that this occurs at home, too, but at home it typically happens on nicely paved divided highways. In India, your driver is dodging bathtub-sized potholes, people, cows, and other vehicles as if it’s some kind of video game. All this just so that he can get to the front of queue and subsequently slow down, allowing the entire process to repeat itself indefinitely.

Normally “might is right” is the road rule; if you’re bigger, you have right-of-way. If you’re smaller, you’re screwed. (Not reassuring when you’re in a tiny little sedan.) It doesn’t matter what lane you’re in, or how fast you’re driving, this rule applies. Except that if a cow steps onto the highway while you’re barreling along at 100 kph you’d better hope there isn’t a giant, industrial-sized truck on collision course with you, because your Hindu driver will choose ramming the truck over hitting this sacred animal.

It truly doesn’t matter what speed you’re traveling at, careening off the highway and onto the road shoulder (which is not paved) is routine. Not solely reserved for avoiding vehicle-swallowing potholes, this last-minute maneuver can also be used to evade cows or oncoming vehicles. In fact, all livestock is avoided like the plague, even if it means pulling out into a collision-course with oncoming traffic.

Headlights are only turned on in the last, waning moments of dusk, as if this will usefully prolong the bulb life. Indicators are used not to signal your intention to pass or your intended direction at intersections but to show oncoming drivers where the edge of your vehicle is located! We were somewhat confused as to why everyone was flashing their brights at us in the dark; we thought perhaps one or both of our headlights was burned out. Nope! Turns out this is just as easy way of telling everyone else where you are when your lights are off at night. (We also suspect that this is why many Indian rental cars are white—they’re easier to see at night.) We drove for the first and last time at night on our very first afternoon of driving—never again!

And the noise! Our driver’s hand was on the horn for more time than it was spent actually steering the car! The phrase “Horn Please” adorns the bumper of all lorries, and regardless of the literacy rate this advice is taken very seriously, as horn blowing seems to be the national pastime next only to cricket. By day six I was pretty sure my headache was from the incessant horn blowing.

In addition to the polite requests to toot one's horn, the other common bumper-sticker typically contains biblical references, such as "In God We Trust" and "God Bless Us."  After a few days on the Indian roadways, we realized that this is probably in the hope that a little divine intervention might see the vehicle (and passengers) safely through the day.

Our driver was pretty good, though. He responded to our concerns about tailgating and then blindly overtaking big trucks after we yelled and screamed a couple of times. Besides typical Indian driving habits he was also quite responsible; we performed a sniff test every morning to make sure the driver wasn’t hung-over, and to our knowledge, he never was.

Nevertheless, after a couple of days of driving under these conditions Katherine refused to sit in the front seat. She also refused to sit behind the driver on the right-hand side of the car—should we get clipped by on-coming traffic, it would likely happen on the driver’s side. This meant that, for the vast majority of the trip, I got to share the front seat with our driver. Our radio didn’t work well and the CD player skipped—not that it really mattered, since our only choices of CDs were some horrible Bollywood soundtrack and something that was labeled “English Rock” but most certainly wasn’t. But one day I realized that I had a song stuck in my head, perpetually repeating itself. I focused a bit and found that it was the chorus from Chris Cornell’s “You Know My Name”:

“Arm yourself because no one else here will save you

The odds will betray you…

…are you willing to die?”

As you might imagine, I wasn’t reassured. When I started to sing outloud, neither was Katherine.

The worst near miss came when a human-laden motorcycle careened onto the highway from some hidden side road. Our driver tried to ditch the car, much to our dismay—so much for “might is right.”  As horrible as it sounds, it would have been safer for our car to have taken out the motorcycle and all its various passengers. I think one of the motorcycle passengers actually reached out and pushed the motorbike away from our car. After some serious direction changes at high speeds and a little slamming of the brakes, everyone was okay save for a healthy bout of swearing in Hindi and English.

We arrived in Udaipur alive, albeit with nerves somewhat frazzled. To say that we were on edge by the time we pulled into Udaipur is an understatement. We paid our driver the balance of the rental and driver fee, and after debating between ourselves about the tip, gave the driver an extra 500 Rs. After all, the guy did get us to our destination safely, and he looked after our backpacks while we went into temples or monuments. All Indian drivers drive like this; it’s not as if we’re rewarding his crazy driving habits—it’s endemic, right? Besides, he was on the phone to his family several times throughout the week, and we thought a little extra might help them out.

Suckers! We discovered the next day, through a connection with our Jodphur guesthouse where we originally rented the car, that our driver promptly went out and got himself liquored in Udaipur. He subsequently decided to drive back to Jodphur that afternoon, and during one of his infamous tailgating-then-passing-blind routines he had a head-on collision with a truck! Even though the front of the car had been smashed in and his face was a little cut up the car was still driveable, and he limped into Jodphur where he hid his employer’s car in his own garage. The guesthouse proprietors, being fairly well-connected in Jodphur, soon found out about their driver’s little escapade. They apparently arrived at his house in the afternoon, pulled him out of bed, took him to look at the car, and in true vigilante-justice style proceeded to beat the crap out of him.

Ahhhhh…India.