by Vanessa Able
When I finally arrived at the hotel Shanthi, where I had stayed years before during my first and second trips to the town, I was ordered to go to the local police station by the manager of my hotel. He had motioned at a sign above his head while I was filling out the guest register: ‘Foreigners visiting Hampi should compulsory register their name in district police office of Bellary’.
‘Seriously?’
The manager nodded gravely.
‘The office is at the end of the bazaar, left side. You should go there tomorrow morning, immediately,’ he said, leaning forward to intone conspiratorially, ‘It is better, to avoid trouble.’
Trouble? I had always thought of Hampi as a small, unassuming tourist spot of moderate archaeological interest, but it was turning out to be more like the O.K. Corral at Tombstone, if the ongoing security measures were anything to go by. The main – and really, only – street of Hampi reminded me of what the frontier towns of the new America must have looked like in the early days of the settlers, minus the cool wooden buildings and a saloon. One long, straight road bordered by food stalls, shops and cheap hotels that led to – something that probably wasn’t a feature of the wild west – a temple with a massive ornamental tower, a gopuram, and a resident elephant.
At the police station, I was obliged by the duty officer to sit and read a laminated list of fourteen commandments hanging from the wall that spelled out what might be in store for me in this dusty halfway town. Some of the rules, like ‘Do not wander alone at any time with valuable things and cash’, were common sense, but there were others that were a tad more unsettling. Rule number eight warned, ‘No eatables or beverages given by unknown persons should be consumed’. I thought of all the times I had been offered food by strangers in India, whether on a train, bus or boat, or waiting in line for something or other when the odd puri or bhaji would suddenly be produced and offered forth amid an uncrumpling of newspaper and a shimmer of plastic bags. Could it be that the ostensibly well-meaning donors of these comestible gifts were in fact malevolent criminals looking to knock me out with a racehorse dose of Rohypnol and have their wicked way with my luggage?
I heard a cowbell ring somewhere in the distance as a breeze blew a few leaves over the threshold of the police station. I half expected to see a pile of tumbleweed blow down the main street. I read on: ‘Strolling around the Hampi ruins after sunset is not safe. Hence return to your room before sunset.’ Blimey, a curfew. No watching the sun go down by the banks of the river for me, then. The next rule that caught my eye upped the stakes somewhat: ‘Do not go to interior places lonely. There is possibility of getting attacked by robbers, thieves and rapists.’
Jesus. Was this for real? The officer behind the desk, satisfied I had absorbed the information before me (I hammered the point home by taking a photo of the document, assuring him gravely that it was for revision purposes), handed me a large book in an advanced stage of decomposition and asked that I fill out my name and the information decreed by the various columns. My nationality, birthday, father’s name and mother’s name were all required, and, not being in a particular hurry, I filled them out with flair, curving my sticky-uppy and hangy-downy letters and putting little spirals above my is.
On my way out, chuckling inwardly at the prospect of how life would look if I really were the lovechild of Dolly Parton and Cliff Richard, the policeman called me back. I turned apprehensively, suddenly terrified that this small-town pen pusher might actually be better acquainted with the celebrities of my childhood than I had given him credit for. But instead, he pointed solemnly at another poster I had missed on the way out. It was a series of mugshots of three mustachioed faces that I presumed were the local Crips and Bloods. The pictures were so fuzzy, you wouldn’t be able to pick the men out in a line-up were they standing right in front of you. If you squinted your eyes a bit, one of them actually looked like the policeman himself. I thought to tell him so. He was not amused, nor did he seem flattered by the comparison. I left swiftly, stepping out with a touch of trepidation into the lawless Hampi morning.
I tried to shrug off the officer’s warnings and spent the following hours suspiciously regarding the other travellers loitering by the riverside. The day passed rather uneventfully and with the exception of a hungry mobbing by a group of monkeys and a subsequent goodwill drubbing by a gang of schoolgirls that left me bereft of a banana and all the pens I was carrying, I managed to escape the town unscathed. But the psychological damage had been done: the officer’s words had taken root in the caverns of my paranoia, and started to creep out with their sharp, spindly fingers as I drove out along the deserted NH67.
In contrast to so many other highways I had taken, on the road from Hampi to Gooty I went for ten or fifteen minutes at a time without seeing another vehicle. The fuzzy faces of the bandits I had poked fun at in the police station were now appearing in my mind’s eye, squinting out from behind a tree or scowling at me from a rocky outcrop. I had read several stories of highway robberies in the Indian press in the last year, usually reports of gangs who had been captured along with bags of cash and a veritable arsenal of weapons, sometimes even blindsiding their victims by dressing up as women. And since it was only the mobs who had been nicked who were making the headlines, I shuddered at just how many operatives must still be out there, roaming free and lying in wait for unsuspecting small yellow cars.
The Times of India wrote chillingly of one particular gang who had been operating in Gujarat and focusing their game mainly on trucks: ‘Their modus operandi was brutal and effective: Any truck going through a deserted stretch of highway would be overtaken with a vehicle and forced to stop. The driver and his assistant would be beaten and left bound and gagged by side of the highway while the truck and its goods would be stolen.’19
Keen not to be left bound and gagged by the roadside while some tranny highway(wo)man made off with Abhilasha and most of my worldly possessions, I positioned my travel-sized can of hairspray at grabbing distance on the passenger seat and worked on perfecting my John Wayne scowl. I pitied the vigilante who faced such a terrifying combo.
At Gooty, we turned south to join the NH7, which forms the gist of the country’s north–south corridor, a 2,369 km-long spine from Varanasi to Kanyakumari. By all relative standards a well-heeled road still in the process of being built, the highway bore all the hallmarks of a reconstruction project in full swing, but perhaps on a public holiday: a bunch of abandoned diggers were parked at various junctions along the way and the only workers to be seen were drinking chai by the roadside. Despite the ostensible mooch speed of construction, most of the highway was already a fully functional dual carriageway, with the odd exception of several miles of tarmac here and there where one half was closed off (by use of a haphazard arrangement of rocks, traffic cones, police tape and hand-painted signs) and the road was reduced to a lane in each direction.
This frequent changing of sides clearly confused some drivers, or perhaps just encouraged reprobate opportunists. Careering in the fast lane on a completed stretch of the highway, I was – quite obnoxiously – blaring music by way of a set of battery-powered speakers with the windows down and flooring Abhilasha’s revs for all she was worth. At one point we reached the shaky zenith of 95 kmph, the fastest land speed recorded by our team to date, when I saw what looked like a truck approaching from a distance, head on, in my lane.
A quick glance at the traffic moving to my right told me I hadn’t gormlessly missed another diversion. To all intents and purposes it was highway business as usual, and yet there most definitely was a truck coming at us, in the fast lane, from the wrong direction. The road was mercifully devoid of many cars, so I swerved quite easily to the left and let the truck pass with an exasperated bleat of Abhilasha’s horn. Our protest was met with a nonchalant expression from the driver who indignantly flashed his lights at us, as if our presence in our rightful lane had somehow inconvenienced him.
My disbelief sustained and continued to mount well af
ter his passing. How, just how, was that possible? You can’t do that. You cannot do that. It’s so plainly, utterly, painfully, blatantly, patently, flagrantly wrong to drive in the fast lane of a highway in the wrong direction. Where to start with the wrongness of it all? I felt my Osho conditioning begin to seep out of the window, and in this particular case I wasn’t sad to see it go. After all, there was madness, which was sort of fun, and then there was consummate lunacy, which I simply couldn’t condone.
The experience of a last-minute curve out of the way of an oncoming truck must have traumatized Abhilasha as much as it did her driver, as just after our life-saving swerve and my consequent stream of maligned outrage, I began to notice she kept veering towards the hard shoulder. When I straightened her out to move in a straight line, her steering wheel was crooked and pointing in the wrong direction. From the dingy recesses of my sparse mechanical knowledge, I managed to dust the cobwebs off a diagnosis: misaligned steering. That meant that a visit to the mechanic was in order – and soon – as I was also dimly aware that an unaligned steering wheel could spell all manner of problems like bald tyres and, um, other structural troubles.
Our entry into the centre of Bangalore was marked with the usual one-handed shuffling of inadequate notes and jabbing at the badly prepared maps on my iPhone while crawling in traffic and trying not to let my attention wander too far from the bumper ahead of me, lest Abhilasha end up in a compromising situation with a dirty exhaust pipe. In the confusion of this navigating–driving juggling act, I followed a car in front of me making a right turn that crossed over an empty lane at a red light.
No sooner had I executed the manoeuvre than I found myself face to face with a traffic cop holding out his hand for me to stop.
We’d been nicked.
I pulled up by the side of the road with that sinking, name-called-out-in-assembly feeling and rolled down the window. The policeman bent and surveyed the mess of bags, clothes and plastic bottles strewn over the passenger side and back seat. He muttered something illegible, of which I only caught the word ‘Nano…’ We were joined by a second policeman, to whom the first turned to talk in conspiratorial whispers. He came back to me and started to speak gravely.
‘Madam, you have committed an offence,’ he said in a weary, scum-like-you-need-to-be-weeded-out kind of tone. ‘There is no turning right on this red light.’
For a second I was speechless. Had I actually found a rule to break?
‘Turning right on this red light is not permitted,’ the policeman repeated, in order to hammer home the fact that I had done the unthinkable.
Figuring the officer might not take too well to me laughing out loud in the face of his accusation given our current context (even as we spoke, cars coming from behind me were zigzagging like drunken moths to avoid Abhilasha and honking loudly in protest at the legal altercation blocking their route), I decided instead to adopt the look of a forlorn tourist with outrageously winsome puppy-dog eyes.
‘Officer, I am terribly sorry,’ I said with an overstated sincerity that made me sound like a seductive Margaret Thatcher. ‘I didn’t know it was illegal to turn on a red light here.’
He didn’t flinch. ‘Licence, please.’
I rummaged around in my bag and pulled out a slightly dogeared States of Jersey international licence. He looked at my glued-on photo with a little suspicion before handing the document to his colleague. It was hard to tell with his back turned, but I presumed the pair were having a jolly good giggle at the Parish of Grouville crest and the shaky signature my mum had faked in a bid to expedite the licence, for which I had applied only three days before my departure to India.
Leaning back into the car, the cop did look amused. ‘No problem, madam,’ he said. ‘Only a hundred rupees fine.’
‘One hundred rupees!’ I exclaimed with the well-crafted look of award-winning amazement that was one hundred per cent facetious.
The officer suddenly took on the air of an auctioneer. ‘Yes madam, only one hundred rupees. Very cheap!’
Was this my cue to barter? Flummoxed by the direction our exchange was taking, I decided to opt for a different approach; an old trick I had learned from my days dodging attempted fleecing at the hands of the traffic police in Mexico City.
‘All right,’ I replied. ‘One hundred rupees it is. Only, can I have a receipt?’
The officer’s smile wavered and he squinted at me.
‘A receipt,’ I repeated. ‘I will be requiring a ticket.’
The policeman ignored my request, reaffirming that one hundred rupees was an excellent deal. His half-outstretched hand implied it was absolutely fine with him if I just went ahead and handed it over.
‘Yes. No, I agree, officer. A hundred rupees is a most, um, generous, sum. But I will need you to write me a ticket. You know, a fine. Just to keep things official and above board and all that.’ My Maggie-T accent had reached such heights of clip-piness I feared it might roll over into Dame Edna.
The officer referred once more to his friend.
I called to them both out of the window. ‘Actually, I’m on my way to the police station right now. Foreigners’ registration. Why don’t you come with me and we can do all the paperwork there together?’
The smile had disappeared from his face.
‘The Police Commissioner’s Office is just around the corner, isn’t it?’ I asked, relieved I had by chance clocked the now-vital piece of information on my phone’s map seconds before making the illegal turn.
My licence was thrust back through the window and into my hand.
‘Okay, go, go.’
‘Go? But what about the fine?’
‘Okay, okay, no problem.’
‘But really, it’s no bother to go to the station; it’s just down the road…’
The two men had already lost interest and walked away, their chai money lost to obstinacy and a yellow Nano. I was pleased with myself for having wheedled my way out of a fine, but part of me would have been happy to pay. After all, here was the law enforcement I had been looking for; here was a shadow of the rules I had been craving. That it was tainted by the pall of corruption was neither here nor there. I had finally done something I wasn’t supposed to do in India – an illegal right turn on a red light – and it felt like home.
RULE OF THE ROAD #3
Horn OK Please
Many a cautionary Indian road tale attests to the imprudence of truck drivers owing to the alleged over-consumption of marijuana, booze or doda, an opium and betel-nut tea. Suspicious urban legends or not, further evidence of truckies’ psychedelic tendencies can easily be seen in their trucks themselves and the brightly coloured paintings that adorn the exterior bodywork, often accompanied by lights or bunting. Added to this are the giant horns and long spindly antennae the drivers are wont to pimp their rides with, as well as depictions of Ganesha, Hanuman and the saintly faced Shiva, surrounded by varieties of bizarre flora and fauna. Put all together and the trucks easily come to resemble Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ bus: an electric kool-aid doda-and-weed ride into the mind-bending Indian night.
While some drivers (or the artists they commissioned) are more imaginative than others in the picture department, the rest compensate for a lack of visual stimuli by showing instead a flair for poesy of which the beat writers would be proud. The vehicles’ posteriors are most frequently inscribed with great words of wisdom: some of them read like spiritual bumper stickers, like ‘God is great’, ‘God is one’ and ‘God bless you’, while others carry a more nationalistic undertone – ‘India is great’, ‘Jai Hind’ and ‘I love India’. A number of them bear more jovial messages like ‘Welcome’ and ‘Good luck!’ or useful driving tips like the ironic ‘Use dippers at night’ (as though it were an option), ‘Stop!’ and simply ‘Relax’. The remainder are a series of mysterious non sequiturs like the very popular ‘Wait for side’, a riddle I’ve never been able to crack, and almost as ambiguous as the ‘Awaaz Do’ that I had started to see on
more and more vehicles in the Hindi-speaking north. Roughly translated, it means something like ‘Make yourself heard’, which is another way of expressing the single most common phrase painted on the backs of lorries, ‘Horn OK Please’.
At first, I thought I got the gist: please horn, OK? For the enormous trucks that rarely made use of their rear-view mirrors, it was essential to let them know of your desire to pass. However, I did find myself pondering, especially after several hours of chevron hypnosis, that there might in fact be more than one way of viewing this curious assemblage of words. Was ‘horn’ a command or a simple noun in this case? How to interpret the combination of the collaborative ‘OK’ with the supplicatory ‘please’? The more I thought about it, the less sense the phrase made and the more the three words appeared to have accidentally collided with one another to make a vaguely baffling bumper sticker.
Senseless haiku or not, the horn is without doubt the single most important component of a car in India. The horn is not an everyday phenomenon; it’s an every minute to every second occurrence. Just as English is the country’s lingua franca, handy for ironing out conversational difficulties in a nation with 22 other official tongues, the horn is the major method of communication between its hundreds of millions of road users. It’s a dialect, a currency, a complex system of signage and exchange that, through a gruelling process of trial and error, I was slowly beginning to fathom.
The most important preconception for me to tackle when it came to diving into the hooter game was that horns always implied hostility. During Abhilasha’s maiden voyages in Mumbai, the sound of any horn within a twenty-metre proximity had me spinning around to find the perpetrator, as though every beep and parp of the road was exclusively aimed in my direction. But what I gradually came to learn – and this did wonders for my blood pressure – was that the horn covered most forms of road communication that might in other cultures be transmitted through the indicator lights, mirrors and various other subtler forms of road etiquette.
