I am haunted by one of my worst fears every time I head out on my motorcycle. The scene plays out in my mind in rich detail. I am driving at 50 even 70 or sometimes even more on a clear stretch of road.
The dirt tracks and the half-built brick houses skirting the road zoom by, uncaring. I negotiate a particularly sharp bend with ease, only to suddenly come face-to-face with a lungi-clad man trundling across the road.
He has absolutely no business being there on a rickety bicycle, shoulders stooped, head bent, eyes unseeing. I react abruptly. My brakes latch on too quickly. My motorcycle shudders, protests, slides, and throws me off. I tumble smack into the thorny trees that adorn the side of the road. The silver-haired close-cropped old man stops, looks around, adjusts the twin bunches of strung-together-at-the-feet live chickens that dangle upside down from his cycles handlebars, and then rides on, unmoved. He has not even seen me.
Folks, I watch too many movies.
There are variations to that plot, of course. Sometimes its a galloping, drooling, cud-chewing buffalo that obstructs my path. Sometimes its a bunch of shepherded goats that cause my doom. Without fail, all of them serve to make me watchful, even edgy, when I drive. Sometimes, it is the drunken driver harassing me to stop beside the road. I know that I am being unnecessarily sensitive. I suppose that the few years I have spent abroad have made me so. But ever since I have begun driving in Chennai again, already noticed a lot more things than I used to earlier. Traffic here was never really very orderly. But now supreme chaos reigns as bicycles, two-wheelers, autos, cars, vans, trucks, bullock carts, fish carts, and public transportation are all thrown together on the same hastily-cobbled-together, pothole-ridden, patchy set of roads. It is a touch irksome to watch khaki-clad men, lunch boxes wrapped in yellow cloth-bags and firmly ensconced in the carriers of their bicycles, noodle along like ants during rush hour and eat up half the road.
Especially when the public-transport buses and members of the elite fleet operated by MTC insist on driving diagonally and eating up the other half. These moth-eaten behemoths dont have to follow any sort of rules, I suppose. They load themselves to dangerously full sideways tilt in the mornings. They regularly set up shop in peak traffic to pick up passengers at ill-positioned bus-stops and to allow the conductor to finish issuing tickets before his next ’’stage.’’ He is often a nasty state government employee, that one. Some of his clientele, particularly the college kids who ’’foot-board’’ these buses and entrust their bags, their drafters, and their attention to the cooped-up women folk segregated into ’’ladies only’’ seating are no less nasty. Posture all you want, mate and just dont spit on the road while youre at it. There is only so much dodging that I can do. Then there are these share-a-ride vans that have suddenly mushroomed all over. These vans are shockingly overloaded, and are driven by madmen who could not have possibly gotten their licenses legally. Each such contraption also has a conductor, a fellow whose feet are perpetually spliced between the vans doorstep and the unfastened door. He holds the door half-shut during the journey, and as the vehicle swerves and careens on the road, so does he. Till he spots his cargo. Then he bangs loudly on the door and the van stops dead in its tracks. He loads his goods, surveys the scene, resumes his perch, and bangs the door again to get the van going. Some day I am going to wrench one of these guys away from his nest and tussle with him publicly. Some things that I observe irk me more than most others. Take the auto-rickshaw drivers, for example. They continue to behave shiftily. They uniformly and steadfastly refuse to run their charge-meters. Instead, they haggle like fishmongers with their customers. You can spot their bluff if you know your route, but if you dont, expect to be fleeced. The bids often begin at twice the regular fare, and will stay there if you are a new kid in town. Talking with them doesnt help; they refuse to listen to reason. All of my barbs, delivered in chaste Chennai Tamil that strange degradation of Tamil, that language of daily transaction here that people from interior Tamil Nadu often find rude and offensive are met with smiling and head-nodding tolerance.
I hear the same reasons fuel prices have gone up; routes have suddenly become circuitous. After a while, I give up. So I have now reluctantly re-accepted the fact that certain things wont change. The long-distance trucks and buses will always be a menace. They will always swoop down upon the roads and blow sand and bits of gravel into your unsuspecting face. The construction-material iron rods that they carry on poorly-lit roads will continue to stick out dangerously; nobody will understand that the measly little red rag that flaps limply at the end hardly serves any purpose. The water-supply lorries, the ones that periodically spout water on their fellow travelers, the ones that coax me to have only one child, that exhort me to harvest rain water and occasionally also remind me to ’’sound my horn’’ will continue to supply water in their leaky rust-laden containers to this water-strapped coastal city. The signaling systems that watch over railway-gate crossings will continue to exhibit extreme conservatism on busy railway tracks and add new footnotes to the art of causing swift and needless traffic clogs.
Certain things wont change. There are no two ways about it, I suppose. But after a long day at work, when I have to negotiate blaring horns and irate drivers and senseless noise pollution and general callousness, I cant help thinking that this is not the India that others read about, the India that R. K. Narayan depicts with quaint old-worldly charm. This is not the India that I see glorified in travel brochures. This is not ’’Incredible India’’ that puts on its best faces and treats white-skinned tourists and American dollars with exaggerated reverence sometimes. As far as I am concerned, out here on the roads and it saddens me to say this is an indifferent India is all that I see.