Most rural highways are hardly lit – if at all. After sunset, drivers are usually swallowed into an all-encompassing obscurity that finds no relief in any form of street lamp, cat’s eye or even white chevron to guide the way and show up the divisions of the road. Inventing them mentally (as per the advice of the Delhi Traffic Police) is one thing, but making up the actual edges of the highway in the absence of any illumination whatsoever is another. Therefore, full beams are required, and in their glow, the boundaries of the grey tarmac become sufficiently apparent.
This works well enough until the gloom beyond the scope of one’s own headlights begins to brighten and a pair of lights shining at about as many hypergiant lumens as the Dog Star appears from over the horizon. Full beams meet full beams. Here, I would shield my eyes and automatically dim Abhilasha’s headlights in anticipation of the oncoming vehicle doing the same. But one of the first lessons I learned on the road after just hours in India was that it never did. The Other Vehicle invariably kept its lights on Absolute Wither until we had passed one another and the car/truck/bus (whatever it was; I had no chance of being able to make out the form lurking behind the glare) had disappeared behind us, out of sight of my rear-view mirror.
The same thing kept on happening: a pair of scorching white headlights approached us from the opposite direction, Abhilasha lowered her full beams as she believed was customary, and the approaching vehicle ignored her gesture, refusing to reciprocate, and carried on, its blinding lights blasting through the darkness, bathing every object within reach of its rays in a miasmic white mist – which was all well and good except for the blindness bit. A lifelong night-time opener of cracks in curtains and ardent aficionado of the bathroom nightlight, I’ve never been a big fan of all-out murk. However, in fighting deep blackness with unbridled dazzle, I realized that the drivers I was encountering were serially blinding other road users: while we were scrambling about in the glare of fully charged headlights, the sides of the road disappeared from view, so if there was something up ahead like a bend, an ox cart, a cyclist, a rickshaw with gammy rear lights, even a pedestrian, I was none the wiser. The only way to remedy this temporary blindness – and I think you know where I’m going with this – was to switch on our own full beams in turn. This was a vicious circle, a snake eating its own brightly lit tail; a negative feedback loop that, as Gandhi almost certainly didn’t say, left the world blind.
I decided to employ a little reproachful reasoning. When the next car approached us, instead of deferentially lowering Abhilasha’s headlights, I flashed them, in order to try to bring attention to the fact that someone was behaving like a total road jerk. The first car completely ignored the gesture, as did the second and third. They probably presumed Abhilasha was suffering from some kind of electrical malfunction. The fourth vehicle to pass us flashed us back, as though we were chums sharing a jolly greeting from across the road. The strobe method was also proving dishearteningly ineffective.
I was at pains to understand the logic behind this insistence on using full beams. Surely it made sense that if everyone lowered their beams, we’d all be able to see the road we could not see by this ridiculous, suicidal lex talionis that was rendering an entire country of drivers visually impaired.
I realized with a heavy heart that there was no choice in the matter. I reverted to the old maxim: when in doubt, switch your headlights to full and frazzle the retina of anyone within flashing distance. Right or wrong, it was the only way.