Truck de India!

by Rajat Ubhaykar

  In that case, they couldn’t have found a better spot to dispense with their dua. Bhiwandi is the terminal node of the Mumbai–Delhi highway, which carries 40 per cent of India’s traffic, and connects key economic centres like Ahmedabad, Surat and Jaipur. It’s the perfect place to play on the emotional vulnerabilities of truck drivers venturing on a fresh trip, and make a quick buck, quite officially I might add. (The micro-economy of the Indian state can be inclusive in practice. It doesn’t shy away from co-opting transgenders if it makes everyone some money. In the past, Patna city revenue officials have engaged them to embarrass errant shopkeepers into coughing up unpaid taxes in return for a 4 per cent commission.)

  We pass by an engineering college. Rajinder cranes his neck to eye college girls, taking in his last fill before plunging into the desolation of the highway. But Shyam has his eyes set on the road. He is a dignified man, with an uncommonly regal bearing, and an air of authority that is casual, brash and affectionate in equal measure, befitting the title of ‘Road King’ painted on the back of his truck.

  Most importantly, his taste in music is impeccable. Our journey begins with thumping Punjabi trucker songs about lost love, being on the road, and drinking oneself to death—a litany of desi daru, whisky and rum. This is followed by ghazals which can be paraphrased as ‘peene ka shauk nahi, peeta hoon gham bhulane ke liye (I don’t particularly like to drink, I drink only to forget my sorrows)’, the lyrics of a near-suicidal song by a musician called Sagar, who Shyam tells me is popular in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.

  Curiously, Shyam himself claims to be a teetotaller. And it is evident—his face is remarkably fresh, and he looks younger than his forty-five-year-old self. Rajinder has no such compunctions. He describes himself as a reformed alcoholic, albeit one who still drinks occasionally. He is a shrunken man, an archetype of the stunted, malnourished mazdoor, dressed in a soiled shirt whose original colour is no longer discernible.

  Rajinder takes immense pride in sustaining himself on sheer willpower. He seems to suffer from a kind of self-destructive pride in his endurance that sometimes becomes essential to surviving the gruelling conditions of working class life, especially in the so-called ‘informal’ sector in India. He claims to function days without sleep, and to prove his mettle, announces that he is not going to be sleeping through the night. Shyam breaks out in disbelieving laughter.

  It is dark by the time we reach the Gujarat border checkpost. We spend more than an hour waiting for our turn to come, wiping the sweat that trickles down our faces. When we finally approach the checkpost, I find that the place is crawling with CCTV cameras, making it inconvenient for officials to collect bribes. So the attendants are tasked with asking truck drivers to steer away from the glare of the cameras to a little clearing in the parking area so they can discreetly collect Rs 100 as token bribe payment.

  The highways in Gujarat are so slick they’ve attained the soulless efficiency of the autobahns and freeways of the West. The glare of the streetlights and the headlights of passing vehicles coalesce to illuminate the road like a stadium, and all I can feel are the floodlights on my face, carpeting the road.

  But then, a little before Bharuch, where the Narmada river meets the sea, we get stuck in the most interminable traffic jam. Shyam explains that the six-lane highway narrows down to a double-lane bridge, a 125-year-old colonial relic over the Narmada. The result is a massive traffic snarl extending for twelve kilometres all the way up to Ankleshwar. Moreover, there are separate bridges for heavy and light vehicles, which means an even longer waiting time for our truck.

  ‘And where are we?’ I quaver.

  ‘Ankleshwar.’

  Twelve kilometres in this jam. I brace myself for a long wait.

  I surrender to the music. Shyam has moved on to old classic Hindi songs by Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar and Mohammed Rafi. And Rajinder is, well, talking. ‘I was born in Patiala,’ he says. ‘In the Prajapati community. A potter caste, but we are considered shuddh. Even the pandits bought their clay vessels from us. Since the last twenty-five years however, I’m based in Delhi. The thing is, I ran away from home when I was fifteen or sixteen after a row with my parents. I don’t even remember now what we fought over but I didn’t go back home for the next twenty-two years. I only saw my father six years ago.’

  So Rajinder was a runaway. I couldn’t help but think of a week ago when I had met another runaway—a cashier in a ‘dance bar’ at the Kalamboli Truck Terminal on the outskirts of Mumbai. It was an unlikely establishment, surrounded as it was by garages, weigh bridges and the general grime of the truck terminal. The sun was blazing mercilessly that day and when I ventured in partly out of curiosity and partly to seek relief, I was greeted by blinding strobe lights, no customers, and undernourished twenty-something girls in glittery, sequined salwar kameez flailing their limbs half-heartedly to ‘I’m a Barbie Girl’. A grotesque time capsule of the 90s.

  The cashier there told me he had unceremoniously left his village in Bengal after an agent promised him a job in Dubai for Rs 1.5 lakh. The agent in turn absconded with his money, and the cashier had been staying put in Mumbai for the last three years to avoid loss of face. He said he will go home when he has enough money. ‘When will that be, you think?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, the phrase pregnant with infinite uncertainty. He would be the first of many runaways I would meet during the course of my long journey.

  After Rajinder ran away from home, he adopted his seth’s family as his own. ‘I consider Kapoor Seth my bhagwan. He’s always treated me like a son. They were a joint family, until a servant who was part of his son’s dowry package engineered a rift between seth and his brother. After that, it was never the same.

  ‘My seth had a heart of gold but he could also be really frightening when he wanted to. Once, a driver ran away with my seth’s goods in collusion with the agent. My seth and I laid a trap for the agent near his home and ultimately found him hiding in the cowdung biodigester. The seth locked him up in a basement, squeezed a revolver inside his mouth and asked him to return the goods, or face the consequences.’

  However, notwithstanding these dark detours, Rajinder displays an endearing, childlike curiosity, especially about science. He asks me questions like: why is it night in America when it’s morning in India? What causes eclipses? He even claims to like watching Discovery Channel when he has the chance.

  At the same time, he educates me in his own way. Rajinder tells me something I had no idea about: that the Qutub Minar staircase was shut to the public after tens of children died in a stampede in the early 80s. (I find out later that this is true.) That the film star Dharmendra ran away from home with Rs 6,000 in his pocket (and served as his inspiration). That the Tata Motors factory in Lucknow can manufacture up to twenty-five trucks in half an hour in its assembly line. That an entire baaraat got lost in a medieval-era bhool bhulaiyya (labyrinth) in Mehrauli, never to emerge again. About the moist corpses rotting by the roadside in Delhi after the Indira kaand (her assassination).

  It’s all intriguing but I’m only half-listening; in spite of myself, a considerable chunk of my attention is focused on my growling stomach. Thankfully, Shyam soon decides to stop at a dhaba, a little distance off the highway.

  It’s a sprawling place, full of charpoys that are bisected by wooden slabs serving as tables. Plastic water jugs, and a plate full of chillies and onions are a permanent fixture on the slab, refilled from time to time by the waiters. Some truckers take evident pleasure in pouring the water into their mouths from all the way up high, so I can clearly see the cascading stream—like Ganga descending from Shivji’s matted locks—and trace its path by the gulping muscles in their throat.

  Business for many of these dhabas, especially in Gujarat, has been slow. Earlier, they occupied prime real estate right by the highway. But the spree of flyover construction has bypassed many of them. Now cars and trucks just zoom above them, oblivious to their presence. Only the regular patrons bother to t
ake the underpass leading to the dhaba. Shyam is one of them.

  The food, when it arrives, is fresh and piping hot. As we are digging into the dal-chawal, roti and aloo mutter, an earnest looking sardar called Inderjit Singh walks up to us. ‘I thought you look educated so I just thought I should introduce myself,’ he says to me. When I tell him I’m writing a book on truck drivers, he exclaims I must write about him.

  ‘After all, I have an English medium B.Com degree but I still drive a truck. I wanted to do an MBA abroad but my father, who runs a transport business, enlisted me in the line. It’s been thirteen years since I’ve been doing this. I hope God does not give a father like mine to anyone. Would anyone else force his only son to become a truck driver? He had the money but still didn’t let me do an MBA,’ he says, quite anguished, before taking off in a hurry. Apparently, his father’s diktats include timely delivery of the load.

  After polishing off our plates, Rajinder and I walk to the unlit courtyard of the dhaba. He asks if I’d like to try some desi daaru. ‘As you know, Gujarat is under Prohibition. But the adivasis here brew hooch in their homes and supply it to the dhaba.’ When I politely demur, Rajinder proceeds to borrow a cigarette and asks me, out of the blue, whether I’ve ever seen a ghost. I shake my head cautiously. Going by the glint in his eye as he lights the cigarette, it seems Rajinder is in the mood for some horror stories. The encroaching darkness seems to demand it.

  In Rajinder’s fevered imagination, the highways are a site of horror—both real and imagined—with grisly accidents furnishing a ready supply of disgruntled souls eager to stalk the highways in vengeance.

  ‘The correct way to identify a ghost is by the absence of its shadow. All that business about inverted feet is false,’ he tells me quite authoritatively. In the meantime, other truckers in the dhaba, mysteriously drawn by the prospect of ghost stories, join us outside, and launch into stories they’ve heard. We form a loose semi-circle in the dhaba’s courtyard.

  ‘There was a driver who died in an accident,’ begins one. ‘It is said he haunted his own truck because of his khoon se lipta hua purse (blood-covered purse) left behind which preserved his soul. This would cause the current driver to catch glimpses of the dead driver seated beside him. It was only after the appropriate rituals were performed, that the bhoot attained moksha.’

  Some stories have sentimental twists worthy of Bollywood. ‘In Barghat, Madhya Pradesh, a driver is said to have married a bhootni,’ says another. ‘The bhootni was a woman killed on the way to her wedding. She would stand on the highway dressed in her bridal gear, asking for lifts, claiming to be a runaway bride.

  ‘One day, a truck driver gave her a lift, got talking, fell in love with her, and eventually married her. He took her home. For a while, life seemed blissful for the young driver. But soon, his neighbours began telling him strange things. They said that when he’s out on the road, it’s as if his wife disappears. They never saw her talking to a neighbour, or taking the garbage out. Not even a chance glimpse. The driver was intrigued and one day, he decided to sneak into the house without informing his wife. He peeped into the kitchen, and to his shock, saw an arrangement of bones lighting the stove. He panicked, and shouted. The bhootni understood her husband now knew the truth about her. She regained her human form, drew him close, and told him that she could have killed him long ago. But she didn’t, and since he loved her like a husband, he had relieved her of her earthly duties. And holding him tight, she disappeared into thin air.’

  Others have historical settings. A veteran trucker, whose thinning grey hair matches the wrinkles on his face, tells me that the jinns in Fatehpur Sikri didn’t allow the British to lay a railway line. The tracks the British laid during the day would be transported into the hills by an inhuman presence during the night.

  Shyam is a creature of the night. He prefers driving in the dark. The roads are emptier and the cops less bothersome. He has an arrangement with a dhaba in Rajasthan, close to the Gujarat border, where he sleeps for a few hours in the morning before setting off again. It seems Rajinder really is serious about not sleeping the whole night. He sits right by the side door, one leg hanging outside, staring into the night, while I fight sleep by training my eyes on the white painted strips on the road that vanish into the blackness behind.

  The music continues. Rafi, Lata, Asha. A truck with Vegetable Express written across its back zooms past us. I ask Rajinder why it’s called Express. ‘That’s because these vegetable mandi trucks are the fastest of the lot. They cover the distance between Delhi and Bombay within a day. Ekdum Rajdhani ki tarah (Just like the Rajdhani train). The drivers even eat at the steering wheel. Near Udaipur, a person waits for them with dinner. They don’t have the time to go to dhabas. When one guy eats, the other drives. It’s a non-stop journey for these guys. In fact, the owner of the truck hands over Rs 64,000 for diesel costs compared to 32,000 for our driver since they drive at inefficient speeds to get the truck there on time. For all this hard work, they get an inaam at the end: between three to five thousand rupees. It’s a lot of money if you think about it.’

  The roads are much darker in north Gujarat. The brightly illuminated Surat–Ahmedabad stretch is past us. I wonder if any highway robbers prowl this desolate stretch in the night. The conversation has ebbed and I feel the need to intervene. ‘Rajinder Bhai, have you ever encountered highway robbers?’ I ask.

  Pat comes the reply. ‘Oh, have I not? But first, let me explain to you the tricks robbers use to loot trucks. The most common way is to plant nails on the road. It’s what the amateurs do. But others are more shaatir— cunning. Some of them pose as ambulance drivers, edge in front of the truck, force it to stop and then relieve the drivers of all their cash. I remember fifteen years ago, some ambulance thieves didn’t just take your cash. They would kidnap the drivers, stuff them in their ambulances, remove their kidneys, and dump them by the wayside. There’s good money in that, I’ve heard.

  ‘Others are in cahoots with dhaba owners. They slip in a sedative in your tea and then have a car follow your truck, knowing that the driver will feel sleepy in some time. And once the driver stops the truck, they strike. Thieves in hilly areas use other tricks. They throw rocks at trucks going downhill forcing them to lose control, upon which they loot the drivers.

  ‘I have myself dealt with these robbers. In the Hasimara jungle in Bengal, I have fought off bandits with my bare hands. They would hide in the canopy of the jungle and jump on unsuspecting trucks and throw the goods by the road. In the ghats of Jharkhand, robbers would jump on the trucks when it would be in ascent, cut off the ropes and relieve the truck of its goods. I’ve seen all this, and more.

  ‘One time, when I was driving a truck near Jharia in Jharkhand, we picked up one lady Naxalite as sawari. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time. The khalassi with me thought she was a prostitute so he began teasing her. She immediately asked me to switch on the light, took out the gun she was packing and placed its mouth on the khalassi’s forehead. I’ve never seen a more frightened guy in my life.

  ‘But let me tell you Rajat Bhai, it’s way better to die of a bullet shot than die of AIDS. No death can be worse, trust me. I’ve seen three to four close friends die like that. I couldn’t even recognize them when I saw them a few months before their death. They were like sucked-up, spit-out mangoes. Usually, in my experience, Jammu and Himachali people catch it in Bombay, pass it on to prostitutes in Rajasthan, and eventually to their families at home.’

  An indefinite amount of time passes. Rajinder shows no sign of ceasing his torrent of stories, and in spite of myself, I find myself dozing off, before an imperious Shyam announces, ‘Oye Rajinder, let him sleep yaar.’ Rajinder graciously obliges.

  When I snap awake, it is already morning. Eight o’clock. I discover we’ve just parked at an old Punjabi dhaba owned by a Sikh known to Shyam. I jump off the truck. There’s a communal tank next to the dhaba, crowded with truck drivers in varying stages of undress furiously so
aping away the journey’s residue. They seem to labour under the impression that more foam implies more cleanliness, clearly relishing the soft white froth that envelops their bodies. When I approach the tank to wash my face, I find that the soaps are communal too—colourless slabs of indeterminate make washed off all their vitality by a procession of hands.

  We order an aloo paratha each. But before the prepubescent boy who takes our order can reach the kitchen to relay the message, he is whisked away by a man seated on a chair onto his lap. He tickles and fondles the boy’s genitals through his pants in full public view, while the boy protests half-heartedly, trying to break free and simultaneously bursting into shrieks of mirth. Going by the reactions in the dhaba, this seems to be perfectly normal. I am stunned.

  It’s shocking how outside its liberal havens, attitudes towards children in many parts of India seem to have ossified in the medieval era. Child sexual abuse is terrifyingly normalized. Unlike America, where childhood is disappearing with the advent of mass TV and internet, it seems the concept of childhood never really gained mass currency in India in the first place.

  We often think of childhood as an intrinsic stage of life. But the surprising reality is that it was invented only recently to denote a separate category of people. Prior to the appearance of the printing press and the advent of mass literacy, children above the age of seven were regarded as miniature adults or ‘little men’. Seven was the age they achieved verbal proficiency, after which no special leeway was granted.

  The adult world today does its best to protect children from disturbing information, especially regarding ‘shameful’ sexual matters. Most of these ‘adult’ secrets are revealed in a calibrated manner, as part of the elaborate process of initiation that we know as education. It goes to say that without school, without books, without shame, our state and society wouldn’t have needed to ‘invent’ childhood.