While office mavens like Vinod handle the systemic bribes, Singh takes care of the petty cash out on the highway. Throughout any journey small bribes must be paid to uninitiated tax inspectors and policeman encountered at random. Singh said he works on an incentive-bonus plan. His regular monthly salary is two thousand rupees, or about seventy dollars at present exchange rates. But at the start of each trip, the boss hands over an estimated bribe allotment of about two hundred to three hundred rupees, depending on the going rates. Then, it is up to Singh to make it to Calcutta without spending more than this allotment on actual bribes. Whatever he doesn’t pay out to police and bureaucrats, he keeps. Some months, he said, he earns an additional one thousand rupees this way, plus more for fees charged to hitchhiking passengers and kickbacks from truck repairmen.
Shortly after midnight Singh paused to rest at a bustling dhaba, or truck stop, beside the moonlit highway. Santosh jumped down quickly and began to dig mud from the truck’s tires with a stick. Two dozen or so Tatas surrounded us in the pale light. Boy waiters wandered among the trucks carrying clear glasses filled with milky tea. Singh took a glass, stretched his legs, and pulled out a flask of whiskey.
“We can’t live without it,” he said, dumping the tea and filling his glass with malt. “The time is short—so I like to drink the whole bottle at once.”
As he did, I asked about life on the road. He said he spent much of it sitting in truck stops. “These places are run by the powerful people of the area—goondas [thugs]. You have to be a powerful goonda to handle these truck drivers. You will find drugs, liquor, opium. Everything is available.… Generally, everyone is available on the road. Calcutta is famous for prostitution. In Bengal [the state surrounding Calcutta], a beetle is more expensive than a prostitute. Drivers are homosexual. They enjoy each other, prostitutes, whiskey, drugs, and beer. Before I got married, I did the same thing.”
People in urban areas are just beginning to talk about homosexuality, and gays don’t broadcast their preference. One of the first gay men’s magazines didn’t come out of the closet far enough to print its address on copies that just “appeared” at newsstands in cosmopolitan Bombay. But in the guise of a religious experience, homosexuality is perfectly alright. At a festival in Tamil Nadu, men dressed as goddesses wed male “gods” and the presiding deities aren’t content until the “marriages” are consummated.
—Mary Orr, “India Sketches”
The difficulty, he continued, is that “there’s no respect from the police, no respect from the drivers. At least in Bengal they respect the driver and call him ‘sir.’ You can drive the whole state and pay one rupee. In other areas, even if the papers are all right, they will arrest me without a bribe. We pay on the spot, officially and unofficially, so I’ve never been arrested. But there are bandits, too, working with the police, and sometimes those people try to find a way to stop the truck. But I find a way out. The fleet owners and drivers travel in convoys in some areas. Bihar is notorious. There are night robbers. Even here. If we wanted to go past Etah tonight, we would have to drive in a convoy.”
Singh runs this gauntlet in his Tata truck six times each month—five days down to Calcutta from Delhi, five days back, three round trips per month. No holidays, no sick pay, no overtime. Yet he feels in some ways a privileged man. “The road is my house,” he said that night in the truck cab, belting down his whiskey. And then, smiling and gesturing to the trucks parked around him in the dark: “We are the road kings.”
At dawn the countryside awoke. Bullock carts and horses rattled down the road. Goats wandered through the dirt courtyard where the trucks were parked. The air was heavy with mist, dung, and spice. Even before the sun struck the treetops, men and women trudged by the dozens from nearby villages to the surrounding fields and back, bent under the weight of wheat, sugar cane, and corn. Purple bahya flowers rose in a pond across the highway. Cranes and herons bathed among them.
Singh lay passed out on an exposed wooden cot, sedated by his whiskey. Beside him a Muslim truck driver filled bucket after bucket of water at a well, carried the buckets to his truck, hoisted them by rope to the top of his trailer, and dumped the water into the bin. I watched this for half an hour, sipping milky tea, before finally asking Vinod to inquire why the driver seemed so determined to fill his truck with water. The Muslim explained that he was carrying coal from Calcutta to Delhi and wanted to add some weight to his load before he arrived. He gets credit for the extra weight on delivery, he said. On the Grand Trunk Road, everybody has an angle.
Impudent goats woke Singh, who shouted abuse at Santosh, who scrambled to bring tea and hustled to wipe off the driver’s seat inside the truck. Soon we were rumbling east again. On a five-kilometer stretch, we honked our way past the following: one small boy hitchhiking, a bullock cart out of control, two cows running amok, bicyclists toting heavy burlap sacks, a horse-drawn rickshaw carrying a smartly dressed family, nine cows and two boys swimming in a muddy water hole, a bullock cart carrying a load of sticks, one behind it carrying a family, three men sleeping at the roadside with their heads protruding onto the asphalt, a herd of goats grazing on the road, a herd of cows crossing, dogs, pigs, bicycle rickshaws, and camels.
A police constable flagged us down, climbed in, and demanded a free ride to the office. As we rumbled along, I asked why all the cops we met wanted a handout. “It should not be that way,” he said sheepishly. “But they only pay us eight hundred rupees a month and we have to work twenty-four hours a day. That is not enough money.”
As we weaved ahead Santosh leaned out of the cab, waving to the other drivers to move aside. Sometimes they did. The policeman fell asleep and began to snore. When we reached his office, Santosh shook him awake and helped him down.
The partnership between Santosh and Singh was uneasy. Most of the drivers and assistants on the Grand Trunk Road are Sikhs or Muslims—outsiders to mainstream Indian society. But Santosh is a Hindu. He was raised in Bihar state, a poor region traversed by the highway, where banditry is endemic. Fleet owners sometimes hire Biharis as assistants in the hope that their local knowledge will lessen the risk of hijacking. For this, and his ability to pry mud from truck tires with a stick Santosh earned about seven dollars per month. When we had parked that afternoon at a truck stop called Hotel the Great Papa, whose shabby sign bore the motto “Love Is Sweet Poison,” Santosh said that he was worried that his boss, whose friends and colleagues are mainly Sikhs, might never teach him how to drive the truck, and that he would be stuck as a poorly paid assistant for years to come. “My main motivation is to be a driver,” he said, glancing nervously at Singh, who was asleep on a cot below him. “If he won’t give me a chance, I will go someplace else. A good driver must have sympathy with his assistant, must give him a chance and teach him.”
Santosh, eighteen, also confessed to a series of romantic entanglements not unlike those of truck drivers celebrated in American country music. Two years ago his family arranged a marriage to a thirteen-year-old girl in his Bihar village. But he said he had not seen his wife since the wedding—she was too young to consummate the relationship. Meanwhile, Santosh said, he had been having an affair with a fourteen-year-old who had recently been forced into marriage with a fifty-five-year-old Calcutta man. He said he saw the girl on his three-day stopovers. “She needs me,” he remarked.
No matter what, he said, he would never return to village life or to the small farm tended by his family. With all its risks and hardships, the road was a better living. “Some day,” he mused, “I know that I will die in a truck.”
Steve Coll also contributed “The Die Is Caste” to Part IV. Both stories were excerpted from his book, On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia.
She is a Punjabi woman, formidable, with callused hands, a “don’t fool with me” temperament and a blunt conviction that women are routinely discriminated against in India, and certainly in Calcutta. She decided she would do what she could to break down a few walls.
/> “My husband and I owned a taxi that we would lease to drivers to drive,” she explained. “One day, I had an argument with a driver and he refused to drive. I got angry and said, “OK, I’ll drive.”
While many women drive their own private cars, not so much here in Calcutta but in New Delhi and Bombay and in other cities, it’s unheard of for a woman to be a chauffeur, a bus or truck driver, or a taxi driver. Assumptions about a woman’s place, about what she can or cannot do, especially when it comes to manual labor, are deeply rooted.
Women can haul sand and cement in baskets on their heads to construction sites, but they cannot lay the bricks. Women can sweep gutters with stoop brooms, but they cannot drive the trucks that spray water on the roadways. Women can use hand hoes in the fields, but they cannot drive the tractors.
“Often when passengers get in the cab and see me,” she said,“they say: ‘Oh, sorry, sorry madame. Oh, madame, sorry, please.’ I laugh. I say, ‘Don’t worry. I’m the taxi driver.’”
—Edward A. Gargan, “A Back Seat to Nobody in Fight against Sexism,” The New York Times
The Suffering of Eve
JIM LANDERS
Laws which protect women in India fail under the weight of its culture.
BHANWARI DEVI LEARNED ABOUT LIFE AS A VILLAGE WOMAN OF India wrapped in dust, cooking smoke, and faded garments meant to last a lifetime. She was engaged before she was born, married at age seven and the mother of four when she was about twenty-five.
In 1985, a strong personality won her the start of a very difficult education. Social workers took her to Jaipur, the capital of the state of Rajasthan, for two and a half weeks of training in the rights and privileges the law offers Indian women.
Bhanwari came back full of ideas. She urged the women of Bhateri to learn to read. She warned the men that child marriage is illegal. When she told the police about the planned wedding of a one-year-old girl to a two-year-old boy, the men of the girl’s family vowed that Bhanwari would never again raise her head in the village.
Five of them came after her on a September evening as she was weeding her field.
“They raped me,” Bhanwari says. “They made my husband watch.”
In a determined, sad voice, she tells a story that says much about violence and women in India, a country where discrimination is deadly and perhaps 30 million females are “missing.”
Bhanwari says she doesn’t know her age. Her husband, Mohun Lal, guesses that his wife is thirty-six or thirty-seven years old. Their youngest daughter, Rameshawari, is thirteen. Seven years ago, she married a boy who is now a laborer at a nearby village.
“I was not a social worker then,” Bhanwari apologizes. “If I had this awareness then, I would not have allowed it.”
India’s consitution requires equal pay for equal work by men and women. Its laws ban wife-beating and mental cruelty, child marriage and dowry, sexual enslavement, rape, and sexual harassment, known as “Eve teasing.”
Bhanwari Devi, the woman at the heart of this story, saw her struggle for justice vindicated in 1994 when the men who raped her finally were arrested. Their families asked her to drop the charges; she refused.
—Jim Landers
But much of the law fails under the weight of three thousand years of celebrating sons and despising daughters.
Sons inherit. Sons bring parents wealth, a dowry worth as much as four years of a bride’s family’s income. A son is also essential in a Hindu family to light a parent’s funeral pyre and open the way to heaven.
Daughters bring financial hardship, then leave to become servants of another family.
Some female infants are killed: smothered beneath a placenta, fed poison or abondoned in the wild. More often, they simply get less than their brothers of the food and medicine needed to survive. Among children younger than five, the death rate is three times greater for girls than for boys.
British demographers who conducted India’s first census in 1901 found whole villages with no girls. They called them “blood-red villages.” The census counted 972 females for every 1,000 males.
Across India, it has since gotten worse. The sex ratio in the 1991 census was 929 females for every 1,000 males. (The U.S. ratio is 1,050 women for every 1,000 men.)
Tradition and technology combine today so that a female in India is in danger from the moment she is conceived. Hundreds of thousands of Indian parents use sex-determination tests to plan families of sons. Amniocentesis or ultra-sound tests showing a female fetus are followed by abortions.
The practice began in the late 1970s. The number of abortions performed because of sex-determination tests since then is unknown. By June 1982, The Times of India estimated that 78,000 such abortions had taken place.
The practice became a national issue in 1982, after the male fetus of a prominent Bombay official was aborted by mistake.
The birth of a girl may bring regret, even grief, to her parents. One New Delhi mother of two girls described it as giving birth to a stone.
Discrimination is such that the Indian government’s 1992 action plan for girls declared “She has the right to survive” as its first premise.
The plan says mothers are more likely to breast-feed sons than daughters. Boys are more likely than girls to get treatment for the diarrhea that kills 1.5 million Indian children every year. Boys are more likely to be inoculated against disease and much more likely to go to school.
The typical Indian girl lives her life in a farm village. She grows up illiterate and with two-thirds the calories she needs to achieve her height and weight potential.
One in four dies before age fifteen. The others marry in their teens. They have eight or nine pregnancies, six live births and raise four children before dying at age 59.
More than five thousand Indian women are burned to death each year by husbands and in-laws seeking higher dowries. (A widower is able to remarry and collect a second dowry.) Dowry itself has been illegal since 1961, but the practice is increasing.
Women’s rights advocates say they had hoped Indira Gandhi would act vigorously to enforce the laws protecting women during her tenure as prime minister. But Mrs. Gandhi, who dominated Indian political life until her assassination in 1984, was unsympathetic to the feminist movement. She joked about her male colleagues that she was “the only man in my Cabinet.”
Mrs. Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, was more active as prime minister in bringing women into government before his assassination in 1991. He created a Ministry for Women and Social Welfare, and supported the grass-roots programs that ultimately led Bhanwari Devi into government service as a village worker in Bhateri.
Bhateri sits behind a range of red and chalk bluffs, its small huts spilled in the hollows. Goods come to Bhateri in carts pulled by camels or on the backs of elephants. Trucks are rare. A car attracts a crowd of gawkers.
As if dowry deaths weren’t enough, an other abomination still practiced, though illegal, is sati, or widow burning. As Elisabeth Bumiller writes in her book May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India: “Sati had once been common in India, particularly among the Rajput feudal warlords who built the palaces and forts that still rise from the rocky landscape of Rajasthan. Scholars are not sure of the origin of the practice, although there are early references to it in the historical accounts of the ancient Greeks and Scythians. In India, references to sati first appeared in the Hindu epics, dating from about two thousand years ago. Five of the god Krishna’s wives were believed to have immolated themselves on his funeral pyre; four of Krishna’s father’s wives had done the same. The custom is named after Sati, the wife of the god Shiva.”
—JO’R and LH
Bhanwari and Mohun Lal, her husband, have a two-acre field and a milk cow. Their oldest daughter, married when she was fourteen, lives in another village. Daughter Rameshawari and her two brothers still live at home.
Each year, following the counsel of astrologers, villages throughout Rajasthan arrange mass weddings am
ong brides and grooms as young as one-year-old.
Bhanwari says she does not remember her wedding to Mohun Lal.
“She was seven, and I was nine,” Mr. Lal says with a smile. “We were engaged even before we were born.”
Much of Hindu India’s legal literature—most of all the Manu Smrti, or Lawbook of Manu—provokes fierce controversy among other Indians because of its institutionalization of caste and other socially retrogressive behavior. In an age of equality, the Manu code is unacceptably male chauvinist on the role of women. “Her father protects her in childhood, her husband protects her in youth, her sons protect her in old age—a woman does not deserve independence,” it says. If women are permitted to run around unguarded, it adds, “they would bring grief to both the families.”
—Barbara Crossette, India: Facing the Twenty-First Century
They began living together when she was about fourteen.
Since 1955, India has required a girl to reach age eighteen before she can marry.
Rajasthani village children are usually married by their tenth birthday. A girl continues to live in her father’s house, at least until her first menstrual period. Then it is the father’s duty to inform the boy’s family that his daughter is sexually mature and ready to live with her husband.
Travelers' Tales India Page 46