A Driving Holiday Of India: Why Not To Go
By Jon Hall

As with many ex-colonial Asian countries, India has slowly degenerated into a small steaming mass resembling what just thumped off your bumper bar at night while making 100 kph. The roads in India, much like the whole country, are a rubbish bin. Dressy middle aged women eat chocolate bars on Nehru Road and throw the wrappers to their feet in one graceful and decisive motion. And the road itself is a toilet. You never have to wonder where the toilet is in India, because you're standing on it. The back of a long distance bus had a sign in Hindi and elaborate pictogram, the message of which was 'Don't crap on the pavement, and wash your hands after you do'.

With all this going on there's no room left for actual traffic on the Grand Trunk. But there is anyway, in tinny, clamorous, haywired hordes: Mahindra jeeps made with WW 2 Willy's tooling, Ambassador sedans copied from fifties English models, motorcycles and scooters of equally antique design, obsolete Twinkie shaped busses with trails of vomit from every window like zebra stripes, and myriad top-heavy, butt-spring, weaving, swaying, wooden bodied Tata trucks, their mechanicals as primitive as butter churns.

The first time you look out the window at this melee, you think, India really is magical. How, except by magic, can they drive like this without killing people?

The answer is they can't. Jeeps bust scooters, scooters plow into bicycles; bicycles cover the hoods of Jeeps. Cars run into trees. Busses run into ditches, rolling over on their rounded Twinkie tops until they're mashed into unleavened chapatis of carnage. And everyone runs into pedestrians. A speed bump is called a sleeping policeman in Jamaica. I don't know what it's called in India. Dead person lying in the middle of the road is a guess. There are both kinds of obstructions in every village, but they don't slow down traffic much. The animals get clobbered too, including sacred cows, in accidents notable for the unswerving behaviour of all participants involved. Cars often hit cows- with no change in speed or direction from the car, no change in posture or expression from the cow.

But it's the lurching, hurtling Tata trucks that put the pepper in the marsala and make the curry of India driving scare you coming and going the way dinner does. The Tatas are almost as wide as they are long and somewhat higher than either. They blunder down the road, taking their half out of the middle of the road, brakeless, headlightless, on treadless tires, moving dog-fashion with the rear wheels heading in a direction the front wheels aren't. Tatas fall off bridges, fall into culverts, fall over embankments, and sometimes Tatas just fall- flopping onto their sides without warning. But most of all Tatas collide, usually with each other and in every possible way. Two Tatas going in opposite directions snagged rear wheels and pulled each others axles off. And they crash not just in twos but threes and fours, leaving great smoking piles of vaguely truck-shaped wreckage. What little space is left on the road is occupied by one of two surviving drivers camping out until the next collision comes. In the epitome of Indian driving, the splintered bodywork of one of these catastrophes was decorated with a small, metal plate reading: LUCKY ENGINEERING. So next time you think to yourself that a holiday in India is just what the doctor ordered, just remember this small piece of advice: don't go.

Jonathan Hall, April 2003
Watch out for my next series of 'Rape Mysteries' under the pseudonym Scarlet O'Bronte- Rape Be Not Proud; Rape Comes for the Archbishop; Night of the Living Raped; Rape Takes a Holiday.

Note- This article was based upon the experiences and memories of relatives, friends and family.