Truck de India!

by Rajat Ubhaykar

  We must have travelled around 30 kms from Jammu, trudging on inclines at 20 kmph and advancing on level ground at not more than 45 kmph, thanks to overloading, when I notice a group of lanky young men by the side of the road, thumbs up in the air, cloth bags lying by their side, hustling for a ride. Farooque seems reluctant at first but eventually brings his truck down to a crawl and shouts out the window. ‘2,500 rupaye lagenge (It’ll take Rs 2,500).’ I’m puzzled. I learn the said amount is for ferrying four sawaaris, cloth bags containing all their belongings, along with a stack of firewood, right up to Sopore, around 300 kms from where we are. While they negotiate the price, I find myself getting nervous about how so many of us are going to fit inside the cramped truck cabin. Eventually, Farooque decides they’re not worth the trouble, and I heave a sigh of relief.

  But as we go on, the hitchhikers hunkering by the side of the road become increasingly frequent. I begin to sense a pattern at work here. An Afghan-looking man donning a polka-dotted turban seated on his haunches, his belongings scattered around, stares at us dolefully as we whoosh by. Who are these people?

  ‘Gujjar hain,’ says Farooque. ‘They have a month long season in the summers, when they head towards the mountainous areas to graze their sheep and goats.’

  I can hardly believe it. I have stumbled upon the ancient rite of transhumance practiced by the pastoral Gujjars and Bakarwals, wherein entire flocks and families rush en masse to lush sub-alpine and alpine pastures to escape the summer heat. By this point, after a month on the road in the heat haze, I’m well-acquainted with this urge for escape. We’re all summer refugees here.

  Typically, several Gujjaar households move together in a caravan or kafila, accompanied by fierce sheepdogs that guard the flock from wild animals in the meadows. In olden times, they used to carry their belongings on horseback, a mode of transportation that has now partly been replaced by trucks, considering their traditional migratory route is almost parallel to the Jammu– Srinagar highway. They leave in May and by October they move back to the plains as the temperatures in Kashmir dip below the freezing point.

  As a city slicker, it is difficult to even conceive of such a lifestyle. The groups of people lining the highway seem to me like anomalies in the modern world. Or maybe modernity has just failed to arrive as far as they’re concerned—it’s this phenomenon they’ve heard exists in places like Mumbai and Delhi. It’s a reminder that India is a place where multiple centuries jostle with each other in plain sight, for locked into the crosshair of my smartphone camera are a nomadic people whose lifestyle has not significantly changed all through the march of the centuries. Except for the newfangled truck rides, of course.

  As the sun wanes, the sight of bleating sheep and goats reluctantly trudging on the highway, marshaled by two or three young boys armed with sturdy lathis, becomes commonplace. The Gujjar-Bakarwals usually choose to walk on the highways after dusk to avoid the searing heat. Some of them also take an alternative route passing through well-worn mountain trails, many of them ancient trade routes that have now ceased to exist in public memory. In fact, when the government started the reconstruction of the defunct Mughal Road in 2005, it was the Gujjars and Bakarwals it approached to trace its forgotten path.

  After ignoring several prospective hitchhikers, Farooque finally slows down beside a man and his wizened mother, probably out of pity. The man, Salim, has curly hair, beady eyes and is wearing a white kameez flecked with specks of dirt, with a shocking pink ring gleaming on his finger. Farooque demands Rs 1,500. Salim counters with an offer of Rs 1000. They haggle for a bit, and arrive at a price of Rs 1,300. We help his elderly mother through the high door of the truck. The man throws his belongings on top of the truck and jumps in.

  He takes off his shoes—yes, most nomads wear shoes to help traverse tricky mountainous terrain—and our nostrils are immediately assaulted by a vile stench. ‘Throw those socks out,’ a disgusted Farooque instructs him. Salim obliges, looking slightly sheepish while at it. But the smell persists. I look for its source and notice that his feet look diseased, like they’ve been immersed in hot water for an eternity—wrinkled, swollen, bulbous feet that have flies hovering near them.

  His mother looks mortally ill, constantly coughing and wheezing. We make space for her to lie down. Salim tells me he’s planning on taking her to a hospital near Srinagar. ‘Bhed bakri ka kaam karte hain. Hawa badal gayi hai, isiliye pahad jaa rahe hain (I’m a shepherd. The air has changed around here, so we’re moving to the highlands),’ he says.

  His family owns a flock of more than 200 goats and sheep which his brother is herding via mountain trails. They make a living by selling wool and dairy products, also using forest produce to supplement their milk-heavy diet. ‘We live in makeshift tenements in the mountains,’ he tells me. He converses with Farooque in Dogri, but also speaks Kashmiri and Urdu, along with his native Gojri language. Farooque himself is a Dogra Muslim from Rajouri district.

  I ruefully think about how Farooque is foregoing a decent sum of money to be earned by ferrying hitchhikers, on account of my occupying space in the truck cabin. I consider offering him some cash as compensation. But Farooque declines it when I do so. ‘Aap hamare mehman hain (You are our guest),’ he says firmly. The same refrain, once again.

  I ponder about how the same hospitable treatment isn’t meted out to the Gujjars—perhaps markers of ingrained feelings of suspicion and hostility that settled folk harbour towards nomads, though truck drivers can be said to be a combination of both. One class of nomads looking down on another.

  We stop around forty-five kms from Jammu when Farooque sees that some truckers helming a total of five trucks, part of his informal retinue, have picked up a large party of Gujjars. There’s a bleating goat and kid, two elderly women, a couple and their little daughter, along with the husband’s cousin in his early 20s. They carry coir rope sacks that contain utensils and enough apparatus to work up a roomy tent. The goat and kid is to help them meet their dairy needs on the way to the pastures. They haul the goat on top of the truck and the cousin gets busy plucking grass for it to feed on. It’s getting dark by now and I can see the lights of Vaishnodevi from where we are, glimmering on an otherwise bare mountain.

  The other truckers, a pair of brothers called Liaqat and Javed, also Dogra Muslims, are cleaning their trucks meticulously, splashing water on every visible part of the machine and rubbing it clean with a cloth. Liaqat, a dark brooding hulk of a man standing tall at 6 ft 4 inches, has clearly had some traumatic experiences with women. The mudguard of his truck proclaims, ‘Take poison but not believe on girl’. He tells me he had it painted after his wife eloped with another man. I don’t have the heart to press for further details.

  Scratching his barrel chest, he tells me that he usually doesn’t let Gujjars travel with them since ‘they stink’. But he relented when he found Javed had already made a commitment. Javed, a lanky man with a thick, shapely beard and a ready, if somewhat suspicious, smile, is charging Rs 5,000 from the Gujjars for transportation, not an entirely insignificant amount.

  They soon get down to preparing food on a gas stove: a simple meal of dal-chawal. All Kashmiri truck drivers carry food supplies with them on their journeys, unlike most other drivers in India. Dhabas in Kashmir are few and far in between. Also, massive unpredictable traffic snarls that snake through the mountains are common because of the narrow rundown roads. Even if a single vehicle breaks down, a mile-long traffic jam is guaranteed. And in the winters, when the highway gets snowed over, it can take up to ten days for truckers to cover the 300 kms from Jammu to Srinagar. In such circumstances, lack of supplies can very well mean starvation.

  After dinner, we drive for a while and stop some distance before Udhampur. The truckers decide it’s time for a nap. The plan is to rest for a while and join the convoy that’ll be flagged off from Udhampur around midnight. It’s getting a little chilly and everybody lies down on blankets that are unfurled in any convenient place—by the side of
the highway, on top of the truck, in the cabin, anywhere except the middle of the road.

  I spread a blanket and am about to lie down on the highway’s edge, when Mohammed Arub, the Gujjar cousin, approaches me. It’s only when he lights up a bidi do I see him.

  ‘I will probably never again get to talk to someone educated like you. I’ve only studied till eighth class myself,’ he says. ‘So I have a request. Can you please find me a job somewhere? We cannot subsist on herding sheep and goats anymore.’

  I ask him what kind of job he’s looking for. But it turns out he’s not really open to working outside J&K.

  ‘I know all the secret mountain trails here,’ he says. ‘I can take you to places where you won’t even find a mobile signal. I can be a good guide here. I know all about medicinal herbs, how to find food, and how to keep wild animals away. If you know any tourists or foreigners who are coming to Kashmir, I can guide them.’

  He even confides in me and tells me of an herb that grows in isolated areas—more precisely, places where the sound of ‘dogs, donkeys and women’ can’t be heard. ‘The possession of this herb makes the owner irresistible to women,’ he claims. It’s all very intriguing but his sustained, enthusiastic pitch makes me feel quite useless at this point. I tell him I will try my best, and we exchange phone numbers.

  Talking to Arub, I become aware of the terrible toll modernity is extracting on the traditional pastoral lifestyle of Gujjars and Bakarwals, because of which some are opting to settle down, though they certainly know how to hedge their bets. Within a family, one son typically continues practicing the family trade while the other takes his chances with modernity. Arub’s younger brother is studying in an engineering college in Jammu. Arub tells me he’s still herding goats and sheep so his family can pay his brother’s fees. ‘Hopefully, when he gets a good job, I can stop doing this,’ he says, and expertly climbs the truck to join his slumbering family on the roof.

  Around midnight, Liaqat receives a call from a cousin who’s at the Udhampur naka, informing him that the convoy has started moving. We are immediately aroused from our slumber by urgent shouts, and in the slight reshuffle, I find myself in Javed’s truck along with Arub, the Gujjar couple and their child.

  At dawn, we stop again. The truckers proceed to bathe underneath a waterfall, while I wander around for a bit. I find myself surrounded by sparkling streams, and the sheer cliffs of the Pir Panjal framed by distant snow-capped peaks—a throwback to the Kashmir depicted in old Hindi movies of the 60s and 70s, except the gorgeous scenery is interrupted by the presence of men in olive green uniforms with guns pointed nowhere. The roads are narrower with patchy stretches in between that have either been washed away in the recent floods, or have always been like this. One can never be sure since the roads are consistently bad after Udhampur.

  There’s the Baramulla–Benihal railway line, which is a lifeline for commuters and has eased passenger traffic on NH44, but for truckers, things have only gone from bad to worse, especially after the floods. Loose rocks scurry down the edges of a cliff as we drive towards Srinagar, which means I’m silently praying for our collective well-being every time there’s a tricky curve in the road.

  We pause briefly when we find one of the trucks in our retinue positioned precariously at the edge of a cliff, a few centimetres from certain death. Apparently, the driver had dozed off at the wheel. Javed shouts at the driver to get his act together and carries on.

  For truckers like Javed, the armed forces are a benign presence. Javed’s arch nemesis is the J&K police. Policemen dressed in light blue uniforms that resemble Mumbai municipal school uniforms, frequently try to stop us, but Javed is steadfast in evading them. He maintains a scornful attitude towards the police, thinking of them not as upholders of law and order, but as extortionists in uniform earning haraam ki kamaai (dishonest money), describing them using a variety of imaginative profanities.

  Policemen try to stop our truck four times during the next few hours but Javed is successful in dodging them each time. He resolutely refuses to slow down when he spots them and then abruptly turns the steering wheel at the last moment to make stoppage impossible. Once, there’s an incline right after the police check post. A potbellied policeman runs along beside our truck as it struggles to negotiate the incline, waving a lathi at Javed. Javed snarkily tells him to take his money tomorrow. The enraged, out of breath policeman takes a desperate shot at Javed with his lathi, which Javed deftly evades.

  But it’s not as if the truckers with me are paragons of lawfulness. Upon crossing Ramban, a small town by the Chenab River, we make a stop at a dhaba after Liaqat receives information from a friend that the deputy superintendent of police is lying in wait ahead, an incorruptible man known to penalize overloaded trucks according to the book. All the trucks in our retinue happen to be overloaded. Their bosses do hand over a modest amount for such exigencies. But being street-smart and avoiding such ‘unnecessary’ overheads is a big way how most truckers supplement their measly salaries of five to eight thousand. Clearly, lawlessness is embedded in the way our country functions. As usual, nobody is to blame; it’s the ‘system’.

  We set off in an hour, only to get stuck in a traffic jam. A man uses this opportunity to approach our truck for chanda (alms) meant for the construction of a new mosque nearby. Javed hands him hundred rupees. The man blesses him for his generosity and gives him a receipt for his donation. Towards evening, we near the Jawahar Tunnel, a three kilometre long, single-lane tunnel after which ‘Asli Kashmir shuru hota hai (The real Kashmir starts),’ in the words of Javed. ‘We have to drive at the same speed inside the tunnel. We can’t accelerate,’ he says, as we crawl through the claustrophobic tunnel. As soon as we cross it, I begin seeing ‘STOP FOR CHECKING’ barricades every few metres. The presence of CRPF and army personnel becomes ubiquitous. Barbed wire makes a distinct appearance, often fencing tourist stop points idyllically named ‘Titanic View Point’.

  After an hour, we stop at the J&K tax collection naka. All our trucks are overloaded, which typically entails a hefty fine, a variable amount depending on how overloaded the truck is. But Liaqat says that a bribe of Rs 1000 to the clerk is sufficient to avoid any penalty, irrespective of the quantum of overloading. Clearly, the state is losing out on a lot of revenue on a regular basis.

  The only person Liaqat seems to be wary of is the vigilance officer. He tells me of a time when he was about to hand over his usual bribe to the clerk and the clerk refused to take it. Bewildered, he turned around, only to find the vigilance officer standing right behind him! Nothing happened, thankfully.

  The Gujjar woman, whom I’ve not had a chance to converse with properly, walks past us. Liaqat glares at her. It doesn’t take long for his stare to turn into an unmistakable leer. The woman adjusts her dupatta and walks on.

  The Gujjars typically hitch with truckers only until after the Jawahar Tunnel, at which point they disperse along mountain trails towards their preferred pastures. Around twenty kilometres after we cross the tunnel, Arub tells me that his point of departure is imminent and promises to call me. He puts his feet up on the seat and I notice he’s still wearing his shoes. ‘I haven’t taken them off in the entire journey. It’s so my stinky socks don’t bother you people.’ I laugh and promise to call him too.

  They disembark in a hurry, gather their firewood, pick up their goat, and make their way on a dirt path leading off the highway, cutting shadowy figures in the twilight. All of a sudden, the truck seems so much more spacious. I stretch my legs.

  We haven’t eaten anything the entire day apart from some biscuits, so I’m ravenous when we settle down for a sumptuous dinner of rajma-chawal at a Vaishno Dhaba. I have stopped caring how far Srinagar is anymore, stopped trying to catch a glimpse of milestones, most of which are illegibly mutilated anyway. Liaqat tells me we’ll rest for the night and reach Srinagar the next afternoon. I feel a momentary twinge of disappointment, but I let it go. Truck journeys are inexplicably improvisational i
n nature. I surrender myself—body and soul—to the uncertainty.

  As I’m about to settle down for a good night’s sleep, I notice on the truck a self-contradictory statement that perfectly captures the spirit in which most of India’s hardy souls lead their lives: ‘Work like a coolie, live like a prince’. That’s not a bad way to live, I think to myself, and drift off to sleep, dreaming of Srinagar and asli Kashmir, thrilled to finally feel the night chill infiltrate my bones. And guess what. There really are no mosquitoes.

  Part Two

  INSURGENCY

  NAGALAND AND MANIPUR

  In the Shadow of the Andarwalas

  The rain clouds hang heavy over the sky when I reach Dimapur early in the morning, and in the grey gloom, it doesn’t feel like a pleasant place to live in at all. It feels like I have walked into a tropical war zone. There is a strange uneasiness in the air. The buildings are battered, and the roads have been chiselled away by passing trucks and frequent downpours into an uneven slush of concrete and mud.

  I’m starving, so I buy a plastic bag full of litchis from a woman selling them by the roadside. Evidently, this is litchi-growing country. Though not as luscious as the Muzaffarpur variety, they are sweet and satisfying. I devour them all.

  I set out to find myself a room. I’m not far from the railway station, and lodges are aplenty so it doesn’t take me long to find one. A piece of paper pasted on the grimy off-white wall of the room warns me rather sanctimoniously, ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Please keep the room clean’, to which someone has appended in pencil—‘Because we don’t clean it’. I burst out into laughter. Wish people got awards for this sort of thing, I think to myself. As far as I’m concerned, they are humour heroes. I inspect the room and note that the witticism is justified.

  I crash on the bed, and turn on the TV, since no hotel room experience is complete without a disinterested dose of television. Also, I’m curious to see what channels they play in Nagaland. I see that DD National is playing but the sight before me is confounding—a woman in a sari is reading out the daily news in… Sanskrit? I can’t believe my eyes. It’s my first glimpse of how absurdly archaic the TV programming of the Indian nation-state can seem, especially in the frontier regions of the country. Or is it perhaps a hare-brained ploy to culturally influence these restive regions by literally Sanskritising them? I can’t say.