I might be giving the impression I found Indian people to be bad drivers. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: I think Indians might be the best drivers in the world. The more miles I clocked up with Abhilasha, the more I realized that, contrary to the impression of utter chaos when I first landed in Mumbai, traffic in India did move to an impressive kind of algorithm, albeit one that was hard to discern at first. It was a bit like crowd theory at a rave or during rush hour at a busy train station: lots of humans crammed into a small space, each of them freestyling in their own particular direction, but somehow avoiding mashing into one another through the tiny instinctual corrections of movement.
With my mounting hours of experience, I began to realize that the trick was to treat it like a dance and get into the groove – not to think too much, but instead to act on intuition. I learned as much as I could from the drivers around me, and when one day in Pondicherry I saw a car passing on the street with a rectangular roof rack that read Super Star Driving School, I knew what I had to do.
It occurred to me as I entered the school, just opposite the train station, that I might not exactly fit the profile of Super Star’s average pupil. Frantic exchanges were passed between the six or so men who were manning the office and whose relaxing afternoon I had clearly shattered with the sledgehammer of my presence. My Parish of Grouville licence was studied with the usual mix of curiosity and ridicule while I feebly piped up that I also had an international one, though I feared that the laughable, now dog-eared document might incite even further mirth on their part. India has been converting to smart-card driving licences for several years now, using state-of-the-art embedded chips that store information about drivers, their safety records, history of chronicled offences, past car ownerships and so on. It was an efficient, high-tech system way ahead of many first-world countries, which seemed tremendously at odds with the grimy, anarchic reality of the roads outside.
The general gist of the commotion fuelled by our linguistic shortcomings appeared to revolve around the question that since I already had a driver’s licence, why did I need another one? I explained as articulately as I could using only bare-bones sentence structure and mime: ‘India – driving – very – chaos.’ I rapped on my chest bone. ‘I – need – help.’
A round of consensual nods Mexican-waved its way around the room before one guy eventually stepped forward and introduced himself as Kathi. He would, by the looks of it, take a chance on me. He led me outside to a Tata Indica parked next to a huddle of motorcycles and a loitering cow.
Kathi’s detailed introduction to the basics of ignition location, handbrake kinetics and horn functionality implied that he for one didn’t take my Parish of Grouville credentials seriously at all, and was bent on treating me with the kid gloves he believed I deserved. When he finally allowed me to turn on the engine after a protracted period of foot-pedal explanations that were carefully monitored by three of his colleagues who held vigil from the pavement, I wasn’t sure if I was capable of driving any more. Predictably, I stalled, lunging the car forwards and sending the adjacent cow galloping down the road.
Our first encounter while trundling down the street at a speed that would make a sloth blush was a man in a shortened dhoti cycling a home-made cart with long steel rods hanging off the back in an arc that meant their end trailed along the road surface. Kathi gestured that I should overtake the vehicle, adding that a mid-manoeuvre parp of my horn was very much ‘compulsory’. From then on, at just about every obstacle, junction and overtake, Kathi shouted out ‘make ha-ran!’ with life-and-death zeal. A motorbike stopped in the middle of the road ahead of us and on Kathi’s imperative I held down the Indica’s ha-ran in a deliberately exaggerated and hammy misinterpretation of his instruction.
It was as though, due to Kathi’s insistence on treating me like a dumb wench behind the wheel, I actually became one. I felt plain naughty, and in the mood to vex Kathi to his limits. A few seconds passed and I was still holding down the horn. Kathi lurched towards me and pushed my hand from the button.
‘Okay, okay, okay, long ha-ran not necessary.’ But it was a fraction of a moment too late for the dismounting motorcyclist, who was clearly and rightly enraged by my extended show of (apparent) aggression towards him. For his part, Kathi was exasperated and couldn’t bring himself to answer my simple query, ‘Do you think I just made that man angry?’
Besides driving slowly past the police station, not using my horn in front of ashrams and other religious institutions, and not driving over the yellow line at the side of the road (which Kathi dubbed the ‘danger line’), the driving tips I was getting from my Super Star instructor were pretty slim pickings. I tried to up the stakes by suggesting we drive over to a busier road. Kathi was disinclined. No, no and no; absolutely not. This was my first lesson and I needed to get used to driving on the small roads before I could graduate to mixing in with the main street traffic. The fact that I had already driven thousands of kilometres from Mumbai seemed to have little effect on his decision.
The driving lesson was not producing the desired result. I had signed up to tap into some local knowledge about how to handle Indian roads better, but Kathi’s lack of faith in my skills was proving to have the very undesirable effect of actually making me a worse driver. I could feel my confidence ebbing further with every junction where Kathi saw fit to slam down the instructor’s brake in his own footwell ahead of my own better-timed intention to do so a split second later.
The final straw came as we were pulling out onto a main road near the end of the lesson. An old man wobbled towards us from our right on a wiry bicycle. ‘Go, go!’ Kathi egged me to pull out in front of the man.
‘But there’s a cyclist coming,’ I protested.
‘Vehicle is always coming,’ Kathi reasoned. ‘You don’t stop here.’
I could see his point. If I stopped to give way to every bike, car, cow and truck that crossed my path, I’d still be somewhere near the McDonald’s in Navi Mumbai. But much to Kathi’s growing irritation, I was not able to cut up an elderly gent on a bike. Call it spinelessness, call it stupidity, call it the genetic backwash of most noble Chaucerian gentillesse, I just couldn’t be so damn rude. I might be a deferential, bumble-arsed Englishwoman, but if that meant having good manners towards the elderly, then I would stick to my guns and uphold my values.
Back at HQ, his feet on solid ground and in the presence of his boss who’d just arrived, Kathi’s tone changed from disparaging to reasonably encouraging. I asked for a rating on a scale of one to ten and he gave me a six after some consideration. Was I good enough to take the Tata Nano up to Delhi? Kathi fell silent and knotted his brow.
‘Okay, okay, okay! But still you need four or five more classes.’
I whined in protest and insisted he give me one good reason. He held up an instructive finger. ‘Because in India, road is very traffic is.’