Truck de India!

by Rajat Ubhaykar

‘Ustad is like family to me,’ says Roy. ‘Only family helps you during times of trouble. Majboori ka naam Mahatma Gandhi hai.’ It’s a curiously cryptic phrase he uses, likely a reference to Mahatma Gandhi’s picture on Indian currency notes, possibly implying that the source of all of man’s desperation is lack of money.

  Roy certainly hopes to earn more of it. Right now, the only light he sees at the end of the tunnel is the expectation that their seth will buy a new truck soon, which he’ll start driving within six months and draw a full salary. Presently, Roy has to rely on the kindness of his ustad.

  Unlike his ustad, Roy doesn’t get a salary but sustains himself and his family on the money their boss hands over for expenses. In order to avoid taxes, both official and unofficial, Roy and his ustad travel by night, when blockades by the police and insurgents are fewer and are often unmanned. He claims that it takes Rs 30,000 to make the journey during the day, compared with Rs 18,000 in the night, often lesser, the remainder going straight into Roy and his ustad’s pockets.

  I don’t entirely understand the unsaid arrangement Roy has with his ustad. Sometimes, I wonder if they themselves do. My inability to grasp these ad hoc arrangements may be because of how far removed I am from their world of day-to-day living. But even then, the terms of their arrangement are so innately hazy. It’s as if the terms shapeshift with the circumstances, broadly guided by a spirit of adjustment and co-existence.

  How else does this vast nation of over a billion people not break out into anarchy squabbling over limited resources? Perhaps, it’s because of the people’s perpetual willingness to adjust, to bide their time. A lot has been said about the remarkable resilience of the Indian civilization. Well, let me just say this. India goes on, because it adjusts.

  I bid Roy and his ustad goodbye, but not before slipping five hundred rupees into Roy’s hands. He doesn’t protest. Instead, he repays me with a word of advice. ‘Be careful in your travels. Anything can happen here. The andarwalas are everywhere. Only two months ago, twenty soldiers were killed in an ambush on NH39 in Manipur.’

  I realise the probability of anything untoward happening to me is miniscule, considering the andarwalas don’t normally target regular truckers. But I can’t help but feel a twinge of fear. There is disquiet in the hills. Should I just head back to the mainland? To more familiar environs ? But of course, I know the answer. I resolve to return the next day. I must see NH39 for myself.

  Amar Akbar Anthony

  Hustling for rides is an affair riddled with uncertainty, but its complementary twin—serendipity—also makes an occasional appearance. You never know who you are going to stumble into. When I return to the petrol pump the next day after lunch, it doesn’t take me long to find a truck. The kindly manager asks the pump attendants to inquire with the refuelling drivers if anyone were going to Kohima and would be willing to take me along. One of them soon agrees.

  I climb into the truck just as the driver is settling the bill. There are two others with him. Bollywood songs from the nineties play on the stereo as we hit the road—Kumar Sanu crooning away maudlin numbers to glory. It’s almost as if much of subaltern India is still encased in a comfortable time warp when Indian pop culture’s worldview was limited to love, vengeance and heartbreak, blind to the glitzy aspirational overtones of contemporary Bollywood culture.

  Hindu idols adorn the centre of the truck’s windshield—Shiva, Durga, Lakshmi, surprisingly Brahma, and even a southern god with a mean moustache and an elephant for his vaahan. ‘Our Marwari seth in Dimapur is a very devout person,’ says Mohammad, the sombre Bengali man from Kokrajhar district in Assam who is helming the truck, dressed stylishly in a denim jacket and jeans.

  Mohammad tells me they are headed to Imphal with thirty three tonnes of mutter (peas)—more than double the truck’s capacity. However, they’re not planning to go all the way to Imphal right now, due to the violence in Mao. The three of them mainly just want to get out of Dimapur to escape the humidity of the plains and catch a wink in the cool air of the hills. I can’t disagree with the sentiment. These here are men after my own heart.

  They make for a curious trio. The swarthy man with sinewy arms sitting next to me is David. Wearing a jet black ganji and grimy blue jeans, David is a Munda tribal from Jharkhand settled in Karbi Anglong district of Assam. I’m curious. How did he end up in Assam?

  He tells me he’s lived there all his life. His parents and grandparents were workers in a chai bagan or tea garden. Considered one of the original inhabitants of India, the Mundas were among the many adivasi tribes who came to labour in the tea gardens of Assam as indentured workers during the colonial era. Today, the Tea-Tribes, as they’re termed, number in the millions and constitute nearly one-fifth of Assam’s population. David is one of them.

  The third person is Rahul Boro, a Hindu Bodo also from Kokrajhar district in Assam. Rahul is an enthusiastic slip of a boy, all of nineteen years, with not a shade of hair darkening his cheek. Unlike Mohammad and David, who seem jaded and grim, Rahul is exuberance personified, his zest for life overflowing out of his puny frame.

  ‘Rahul, David, and Mohammad. Together, we are the Amar Akbar Anthony of trucking,’ he says, preempting my feeble joke. The three, however, are not just the worn out embodiments of Indian secularism. As representatives of three different ethnolinguistic groups—Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Indo-Aryan respectively—they also reflect the fragile ethnic balance of Assam, which has seen waves of migrants settle on its fertile river valleys at different points in history, a sort of India in miniature. This weight of history means that Assam today is an overwhelmingly multi-ethnic state, where festering issues of identity are caught up in an endless tussle for scarce resources, providing fertile soil for nativists to wreak havoc.

  Three years ago, Kokrajhar, the district Rahul and Mohammad hail from, saw massive clashes between the Bodos and the Bengali Muslims, who are often stereotyped in Assam as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants or miyas. More than four lakh people, mostly Bengali Muslims, were displaced in the Kokrajhar riots. Tens were killed.

  The Bodos and the adivasi Tea-Tribes too have a long history of animus. Several clashes have been reported intermittently in many districts. The latest bout happened just six months ago. One of the many reasons behind this is that in spite of being marginalized tribes, the Tea-Tribes, unlike the Bodos, don’t enjoy Scheduled Tribe status in Assam, where the state considers them recent immigrants.

  I briefly contemplate if I should ask my companions their views about these issues, but decide against it, considering I don’t want to upset the ethnic balance of this truck either.

  Nevertheless, I find that this diversity has its practical advantages. Between the three of them, Mohammad, Rahul and David manage to speak eleven languages: Mundari, Nagamese, Assamese, Hindi, Bhojpuri, English, Bengali, Punjabi, Kachari, Dimasa and Manipuri. Eleven languages! The rest I can come to terms with, but how do they know Punjabi? It turns out Rahul trained under a Sikh ustad in Punjab (as if Amar Akbar Anthony needed an Amarinder to complete the metaphor), which is where he picked up the language.

  ‘Seekhna padta hai, warna maar khaayega sab jagah (You have to learn the language or you’ll get beaten up everywhere)!’ he laughs, rubbing his cheek that’s smarting from a hypothetical smack.

  We soon come upon a green-coloured gateway with ‘Welcome To Hill Area: Nagaland’ written on it, formalizing our gradual entry into hilly territory. Ah, the promise of cooler climes. I notice that the supporting pillars of the gateway are plastered with posters of smiling Nagas in dance formations, sporting colourful varieties of traditional clothing and headgear.

  Next to it is an advertisement for the Hornbill Festival. It is an annual event organized by the government where representatives from all the Naga tribes assemble to display their tribal diversity and entertain tourists. Visitors to the Festival get to sample Naga cuisine, participate in contests such as Naga chilli eating (one of the hottest chillis in the world), play tradition
al games, and ‘for those interested, one may seat with the youths and elderly people of the tribes alike and interact with them’.

  The whole idea, while well-intentioned, seems somewhat patronising and distasteful to me. It is reminiscent of colonial-era exhibitions such as the Exposition Universelle conducted in Paris in 1889, where a ‘Negro Village’ comprising four hundred negroes was among the star attractions.

  Perhaps, there is no better way to promote tourism and tribal traditions than conducting events like the Hornbill Festival. Perhaps, it’s what the Nagas themselves want. Or perhaps, this is natural for a state which seems to believe in the ancient adage—Nagamese in the streets, Sanskrit in the sheets. Perhaps, for the tribes of North East India, the state still has a coloniser’s gaze, with the anthropologist’s urge to exoticize.

  We soon reach a checkpoint, and as if to remind us of the state’s coercive presence, we spot some pretty Naga women in combat fatigues with automatic rifles casually slung along their shoulders. I’m astounded. I’ve never seen anything like this in all of India—confident women with lethal weapons patrolling the streets like it’s their domain. Not that it stops Rahul from eyeing them covetously.

  ‘Aankh ka shauk hai bas. Shareer ka nahi (It’s only for the eyes, not for the body),’ he clarifies, before jumping out with some papers and cash to register our entry into the hills. As the junior-most member of this truck, it is his job to manage the officials on the way. He’s handed over five thousand rupees at the start of the journey. Whatever he manages to save is his.

  We are ascending the hills now. Our truck’s speed slows down drastically, which allows me to inspect the scenery more carefully. Wisps of mist hang over the lush hills. Clumps of banana trees line the sides of the road. We pass numerous ‘Tobacco Kills’ boards that feature incomprehensibly gruesome photos of cancerous lungs and mouths. Beautiful Baptist churches (affiliated to various tribes) with towering steeples peep through the foliage now and then. Roadside stalls selling pineapples make an appearance.

  The roads, built by the Border Roads Organization (BRO), are in bad shape. The BRO, however, more than make up for the bumpy ride with a succession of exceptionally witty road signs, the most well-meaning of which is: ‘Those who want to save fuel, raise your right foot’. Talk about saving lives while saving money. Maybe BRO should start an advertising agency on the side, I think to myself.

  David lights a cigarette. Between the three of them, they finish five packs of cigarettes in a day. With nothing else to do, lighting cigarettes and passing it between them is the only ‘timepass’, apart from listening to music, and watching movies on the LCD screen in the truck when they’re not on a trip.

  Rahul extracts a wad of pirated movie CDs held together by a rubber band for my perusal. Most of them are movies starring Akshay Kumar, who’s their undisputed favourite. David tells me they recently watched his movie Gabbar together and enjoyed it greatly.

  ‘In Manipur, however, these CDs could get us in trouble. Bollywood movies have been banned by andarwalas there. They say watch movies in their own language,’ he says. The separatists, who wish to steer clear of Indian culture, condemn Bollywood as an insidious effort to ‘Indianize’ Manipur. The last Bollywood movie to be screened in Imphal was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998. Instead, the separatists trace their identity to the 12th century Kangleipak kingdom which ruled over Manipur before it was Hinduized in the 18th century under the influence of Vaishnavism.

  We pass many eating joints on the way. Most of them are called Manipuri Rice Hotels. They are wooden establishments that serve pork, fish, chicken and rice, a sharp contrast to the vegetarian Vaishno dhabas that abound in north India. As if to compensate for this, I soon spot one called Highway Punjabi Dhaba. It’s not entirely surprising. Wherever the Sikh drivers go, Punjabi dhabas follow. Dhabas, after all, don’t just serve food. They are essentially safe houses where a trucker can feel at ease among his own.

  A little later, we stop at a wooden-floored dhaba balanced on stilts at the edge of the hill. It’s called Panthoibi Manipuri Rice Hotel. I find out Panthoibi is a goddess worshipped by the Meiteis of Manipur, who has now been Sanskritized as a manifestation of Durga and is worshipped every Navratri like in the rest of India. The Meitis previously practiced the animistic religion of Sanamahism, but now mostly profess to be Hindus. Nevertheless, some important deities continue to survive. Hinduism assimilates without annihilating. Panthoibi…

  Mohammad calls for special lal chai—a spicy, tangy blend of black tea, sugar, rock salt and lemon that’s the default choice of chai in these parts. Considering the North East also grows much of India’s tea, I imagine this is how the beverage is meant to be consumed, with none of the copious quantities of milk that is the hallmark of dhabas. I certainly prefer it. We order another round.

  The view from the hotel is beautiful—it is twilight and the green expanse of undulating land before me is imperceptibly fading into blackness. The red tea, the green hills, I think I could stay here a while.

  Mohammad loosens up under the influence of tea. ‘He doesn’t drink any alcohol na, that’s why,’ butts in Rahul. Mohammad tells me he and David have had a long association. They were introduced by David’s brother who used to be a road contractor. David, who was already a trucker then, took unemployed Mohammad under his wing as his chela. He taught him everything he knew about trucking, and the two drove all over the North East for two years, before parting ways.

  So recently, when David lost his job and was disowned by his family for daring to opt for a love marriage, it was time for Muhammad to return the favour. He took David in out of ‘bhaichara’. Or you could very well call it guru dakshina. David is now waiting for Muhammad’s seth to buy a new truck in Patiala which he hopes to start driving full time. That’ll put twelve thousand rupees on the table every month and help him take care of his wife and two children. David tells me he is clear about one thing in life—he wants his children to have a prosperous future and the only way he knows that can happen is through English-medium education. It’s also the reason he quit alcohol. He used to be a raging alcoholic earlier, like many of the workers in the tea plantations he grew up in, but has curtailed his consumption now. ‘What people don’t realize is when you’re an alcoholic, you tend to burn through your money before you can destroy your liver.’

  We head back to the truck. Rahul changes the music and starts playing English songs. ‘We’ve all got different music tastes here, you see. Mohammad likes hip-hop, I like DJ and David likes classic oldies,’ he says. ‘My favourites are Justin Beiber and Rihanna. Right now, I have six songs of Rihanna and eleven songs of Beiber in my USB.’

  He knows a great deal about America and its culture. His one ardent wish is to go to Los Angeles and visit his Facebook ‘friend’ Alicia who he’s been chatting with for over a year. ‘They’ve just released the iPhone 6. When they release the iPhone 10, that’s when I’ll make my entry in America to buy it,’ he laughs. I wonder if Rahul has made his grand entry in America by now.

  I am touched by his innocence and optimism, seemingly untarnished by the harsh ways of the world. As night falls, and we wind through the hills, his cheery outlook towards life and excellent taste in music considerably brightens the mood in our truck. I feel safe with these three. Maybe, the insurgents won’t get to us after all.

  Rahul tells me it has only been a year and half since he entered the trucking ‘line’, as a graduate khalassi. When he went to Punjab to train under an ustad, the grizzled, burly Sikhs had a difficult time believing that diminutive youngsters like him were truck drivers for real. The drivers in the North East are on an average much younger than their Punjabi counterparts. The occupation itself is relatively new here.

  His Sikh ustad was hooked to bhukki, but kept it away from him. I ask him if he has any other vices. At nineteen years of age, they’re the fairly standard ones—booze (only English, he specifies) and cigarettes. Mohammad doesn’t drink. David is a reformed alcoholic. Rahul
has only just started drinking. They’re in different stages of their drinking career. ‘Let’s plan a session tonight, eh, what say?’ he asks me. ‘I miss the company.’

  It is pitch dark and I am expecting to see shadowy figures emerge out of the thicket of trees lining the road anytime now. But no such thing happens, and we stop of our own volition at a place called Kiruphema for a cozy dinner at a Bengali establishment called Maa Kali Dhaba. The place is all wood, and as I discover, serves a remarkably generous plate of dinner, comprising rice, fish curry, aloo bhaja, and silli—a local delicacy comprising boiled, salted leafy vegetables. ‘It’s good for gas,’ Rahul informs me. A waiter wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt moves amidst the tables with repeat servings.

  It is also the first dhaba so far in my journey where I see female customers. When a woman with a baby on her back supported by a cloth sling walks in and occupies a table, no heads turn. The baby sling is commonplace in Nagaland—an ingenious way to manage childcare with work, though I imagine the women’s spines may not appreciate them being human kangaroos.

  Nonetheless, Nagaland is where the masculine monotony of my highway experience has been regularly interrupted, first by the female paramilitary soldiers, and now the woman in the dhaba. But this surface empowerment conceals the fact that Nagas are a deeply traditional, patriarchal society, where women are excluded from all decision-making positions in village society. The Naga Hoho, the apex Naga body, still excludes women.

  Nonetheless, the woman’s presence makes me realize that if there are women around, you feel instantly safer. This may be due to the ingrained patriarchal notion that if a place is safe enough for a woman, it’s safe enough for you. Or perhaps, it is the presence of women that makes men ‘civilized’, by taming their instinct for domination into something more accommodating. It’s been my experience that men, left to themselves, are quite prone to unnecessary displays of bravado.