‘If you are married to speed divorce it’ read the sign jabbed into the side of the road on a curve where, had the directive by the Public Works Department of Uttarakhand not been blocking my view, I would have seen a sweeping panorama of staggered hills rising from the seemingly bottomless valley below. I had been exercising my horn in the wake of a lardy-arsed coach for the past fifteen minutes, waiting for a long and straight enough stretch to afford me the visibility to pass as well as the runway to build up enough speed, but no such strip was forthcoming. Welcome to the start of the Himalayas, land of surprisingly well-paved (and, I had to admit, so far at least well-behaved) roads. Nevertheless, just like the rural highways on the plains, I was already feeling the familiar rise of frustration with the speed at which things generally moved.
The Uttarakhand PWD had obviously anticipated my impatience and was doing everything in its power, as far as erecting encouraging and creative road signs was concerned, to get me to chill out and slow down. Around the next bend flashed the words ‘We like you but not your speed’, cleverly playing on my personal insecurities as well as jabbing at my guilt glands for the numerous attempts I’d half-started at a perilous overtake of the coach ahead. ‘Whisky is risky’ declared another sign with undeniable poetic flair, after the defiant coach had pulled up to deposit its load of Korean passengers at a roadside dhaba.
As steep slopes gaped hungrily to the side and the road, only intermittently dotted with railings or concrete bollards, curved round at angles that sometimes felt like we were pulling a full 360, it became clear that traffic authorities in the north of India had additional reason to encourage safe driving along the mountain routes. Either that, or they had a lot more time – and possibly mind-altering drugs – on their hands, if evidence procured on a later web search was anything to go by. It seemed the most creative road-sign wordsmiths lived up in Kashmir, and displayed their work along the hazardous roads of Ladakh, especially the notorious Manali to Leh route, considered one of the most deadly in the world. A blogger called Ajay Jain had compiled a book and site on the subject called Peep Peep Don’t Sleep (a title derived from a real sign), in which he catalogued a mass of inspired driving decrees from the Himalayan highways. My favourites had to be ‘Fast won’t last’, ‘No race no rally, enjoy the beauty of the valley’, ‘Road is hilly, don’t drive silly’ and the virtuosic ‘Safety on the road is safe tea at home’. Genius.
It seemed the PWD had no qualms whatsoever in issuing quite graphic warnings to hammer the point of cautious driving home. ‘Your family waits for you not for news of your accident’ read another, more maudlin post, while ‘Drive like hell and you will be there’ held little hope of salvation for fast drivers. I thought whoever came up with ‘Better Mr Late than Late Mr’ displayed fine lyrical promise, while ‘Darling, do not nag me, as I am driving. Instead turn your head and enjoy the nature charming’ was worthy of Larkin.
I had been a little nervous about hitting the Himalayas. I imagined the madness and diversity of traffic on the sub-Himalayan highways transposed onto narrow rocky mountain passes; a frightful prospect. But it seemed, at least from Shimla going north, that the roads here were in much better nick, as were the vehicles travelling on them, which in any case were far fewer in number. But as with everything, when one headache dissipated, another reared up: while the roads were no longer congested, now they were all over the shop. They would often skirt the very edge of a rock face, as chasms yawned just centimetres from Abhilasha’s tyres without a barrier to separate me from certain death by plummeting into the unknown darkness, and twist and turn with the scary turbulence of a cobra with an acute itch. At the heart of the problem were the hulking buses and trucks, for which the narrow roads, steep inclines and sharp turns were a pestilent wasp in their cloddish ointment. Once I got stuck behind a large vehicle, like the Korean tourist coach, I would be obliged to hover at its rear like the flies that hover around a horse’s tail and wait there until an opportune moment for overtaking, which was usually not before the vehicle pulled over for a break.
No sooner had I got past the Koreans than I quickly caught up with a Tata lorry, whose backside was painted orange, yellow and red and emblazoned with the words ‘Super-Star’. It was emitting thick clouds of grey smoke that infiltrated Abhilasha’s interior to the point where I didn’t know whether it was better to roll down the windows and at least mix the inevitable added rush of fumes with some fresh air, or maintain the drip-feed exhaust pipe in a Ziploc effect that was currently playing itself out. I nestled in at its rear, sighed and resigned myself to painful sloth and early-onset emphysema.
A few minutes later, I was jolted out of a creeping somnolence and mounting nausea by the ear-splitting horn of a truck that was attempting to pass me and the two lorries in front with phenomenal spunk, given that we were all struggling against a fairly steep incline while approaching a blind bend. I flinched as the truck slugged doggedly past, all the while keeping its horn pressed and flashing its headlights with the frenzy of a strobe light on speed. The whole manoeuvre took about half a minute during which I barely drew breath, expecting that a car might come bombing down the hill from the opposite direction at any second and end up battered into the truck’s front grill. Call it luck, fate or good karma, the truck made out like a bandit and finished at the head of the queue, puttering off into the distance.
Looking in my rear-view mirror, I could see a line of cars gathering impatiently behind me, which also started to overtake one by one, while I pulled over as far as I could to let them pass. It was not my proudest moment, and I concluded in a rush of outraged self-righteousness that there was no time like the present to master the art of the perilous uphill, blind-corner overtake. I had to adapt to my environment and become the cool and nifty mountain driver; it was time to channel Bond.
As another truck passed me to my right at a speed that barely warranted an overtake, I caught a glimpse of a bus heading towards us from the oncoming lane. I could hear it bleat out its warning via a tremendous horn, a protest to which the truck to my right responded not by yielding, but by giving an indignant parp of its own instrument.
Reason dictated that by this point the truck that was blocking the opposite lane might slam on its brakes and settle for sliding in behind Abhilasha as the oncoming bus passed. But the driver clearly had no such plans and instead headed for the tiny space between me and the big gassy truck. I silently petitioned my maker, god, Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, not to let it all end here; but then there was another, more stubborn part of me that thought, like hell am I letting the truck get in ahead of me just because it won’t slow down. So instead of slowing down to create some space for the truck to pull in ahead of me, I kept my foot firmly on the accelerator, moving uphill with a determination mixed with the terror of annihilation and the vindictiveness of a moment of road rage.
What I didn’t anticipate was what happened next: the bus that was trundling down the hill suddenly slowed down and pulled over so that the overtaking truck could pass. Headlights were still being flashed with great urgency and all horns were crying out in unison, but I realized this was in essence an act of extreme politeness and consideration, and it was taking place before my very eyes. As the truck that nearly ground me into the rocks to my left carried on puffing up the hill, I reflected on the implications of what had just happened. It was road courtesy of an ilk I had not witnessed until now, and if this behaviour was anything to go by, it went a long way to explaining the ostensible kamikaze overtaking tactics practised by all who flung themselves fanatically into the blind curves of these narrow mountain roads. If people coming in the opposite direction were on constant vigil as to the possibility of turning a corner and finding another vehicle in their lane, they would slow and swerve to accommodate. After all, the vehicles going uphill at this point were hardly breaking 30 kmph. How dangerous could it be?
My confidence began to mount as I toyed with the accelerator pedal and teased myself into giving it a squeeze. Abhilasha roared internally, but only moved forward marginally, due to the angle of the slope and the size of her engine, which was a few strokes short of Formula One. Still, if lardy-bum trucks could do it, so could we.
I began to indicate, probably much to the delight of the bright blue three-wheeler pickup piled high with tomatoes that was sniffing at Abhilasha’s exhaust pipe. There was a curve up ahead, but wasn’t there always? I pulled the Nano’s nose out to the right, pushed her into second gear and floored the accelerator for all she was worth, mimicking the trucks’ frantically urgent musical horns with my own psychotic bugle of beeps. Her little engine began to gather speed and soon we were neck to neck with the back tyre of Farty Pants. The giant tyre at that moment looked about twice our size.
‘Come on, come on, come on!’ I urged Abhilasha, leaning forward in my seat as though shifting my weight by a few centimetres would make any difference at all to her acceleration. We were now parallel with the front cab and we were still making good speed. It was all over in about fifteen seconds. We were ahead of Guff Breath and behind the truck in front, which by now had accumulated at least two more vehicles at its bow. One down, three – or possibly four – to go.
Reeling from the success of my first mindless overtake around a blind bend, I went straight into the next one. Soon we were at the head of the queue and free to continue on an open road. I punched the air. ‘Yesssss!’
The Russian roulette quality of this highly dangerous manoeuvre had raised my serotonin levels past quietly confident to acutely cocky, and I was now taking Abhilasha around the snaky roads as fast as she could go. We whizzed past buses, zoomed away from gas tankers, even left the odd well-meaning SUV in our dust.
Something in me had changed: I was no longer the cautious, law-abiding driver who had first driven in India two months ago. To add to my tally of new driving vices, I was now also executing suicidal mountainside passes, blasting my horn as though my life depended on it (which, when I come to think of it, it often did) and completely disregarding the cautionary signs and signals that had been erected for my benefit. I felt like I had been possessed by a devil, a demon of the road that had just named me queen. Uttarakhand Public Works Department be damned – I was married to danger and had no foreseeable plans for divorce. After two months on the road, I was becoming a bona fide Indian driver.