On South Asian roads, where the chance of being accidentally blind-sided is high, horn-honking is an act of courtesy. Should it ever become an Olympic event, the Indians would have a leg up for technical prowess, but the Pakistanis, who like to wire snippets from Western popular songs into their steering columns, would score well for creativity. Once, stuck at the Khyber Pass, I listened to a Pakistani truck driver push his way through a traffic jam leading into Afghanistan by using a horn that played at deafening volume the refrain from Never on Sunday. Cars and trucks peeled out of his way just so they wouldn’t have to listen to the damned tune anymore.
Inside our spacious Tata cab, Singh kept his distance and projected a hard, lonely demeanor. He deferred to Vinod and myself and worried about our comfort. At the same time he bullied his assistant driver, a poor Bihari named Santosh, unmercifully. This seemed to reflect the unspoken hierarchy of our traveling party, with myself at the top by virtue of being a foreign guest, Vinod next by virtue of his Brahmin birth, which he advertised at every opportunity, then Singh, and at the bottom Santosh, who was of a caste similar to his boss’s but earned one tenth his salary and suffered in apprenticeship. Whether one chose to see this hierarchy in terms of old identities such as caste or new identities such as economic status, there was no denying its palpable presence inside our truck. Among my three companions, groveling deference from below and spiteful bullying from above seemed to be the guiding principles.
Hunched with hooded eyes over the steering wheel, Singh spoke laconically about his past. He said he was born as a Jat Sikh, an unruly subset of India’s minority Sikh religious group, whose male members traditionally wear turbans and never cut their hair. (Jats are a peasant farming caste group that can be either Sikh or Hindu.) On the small farm in rural Punjab where Singh grew up, his status was ordained by tradition but his opportunities were defined by modernity. His ancestors had been farmers and soldiers, but after dropping out of high school, he took to trucking because the money was good. Now he was independent, even upwardly mobile. He wore a shiny gold watch and said he sent one hundred rupees a month home to Punjab to his wife, whom he wed in an arranged marriage in 1984. Those he left behind in the village were trapped now in the Sikh separatist insurgency, in which more than five thousand people, mostly Sikhs, die in shootouts, bomb explosions, and police killings each year. In any event, apart from the war, farming bored him, Singh said. He preferred to be on the move. “I’ll drive until my body quits.”
Or until the road kills him. Daring and reckless behind the wheels of their massive vehicles, India’s truck drivers are modem heirs to the traders, conquerors, robbers, and religious seers who have traveled the Grand Trunk Road for centuries. Several hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mauryan emperors laid the first tombstone-shaped mileage markers between Kabul and Calcutta. In some ways, not much has changed on the highway since then. As ever, the road is vividly dangerous. More than one thousand truck drivers, passengers, and pedestrians die in accidents along the highway each year. Its shoulders reveal an almost surreal display of wreckage: trucks lying smashed and upside down in ditches every thirty to thirty-five miles, buses wrapped around trees, vans hanging from bridges, cars squashed like bugs. Sections of the road are controlled by bandits who hijack trucks several times a month, sometimes killing the drivers. Corrupt policemen demand bribes at every checkpoint and throw drivers in jail if they don’t oblige. And in rural areas, if a cow or pedestrian is run over, mobs of villagers attack, burn trucks, and lynch drivers in revenge—a peril of which Bhajan Singh would twice be reminded on the road ahead.
In some ways, the Grand Trunk depicts what is unsettled and unfinished in South Asia. The road is the backbone of commerce in the northern subcontinent, and commerce is perhaps the most powerful force churning up change in the region these days—raising expectations, dashing expectations, rearranging old caste, class, political, and religious orders. V. S. Naipaul traveled around India recently and described what he saw and heard as “a million mutinies now.” At least half a million of them concern money.
We paid our first bribe almost immediately. An inspector waved us down and demanded tax papers. In India’s Nehruvian, “mixed socialist” economy, taxes on commercial goods are supposed to be paid by truckers at every state and city border. The system is partly a legacy of the old European feudal idea, carried abroad by the European colonialists, that whoever controls the road—bandit, prince, thug, foreign imperialist—takes his tribute. In India, the tax goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, the Nehruvian state has claimed authority but has shared its booty with the bandits and thugs, some of whom are in its employ, others of whom just rush in where the state has left a void. Modem truckers, like the traders of old, have adapted nicely to the system, foraging inexorably toward profit wherever it can be found. Since following the official rules and paying all the official taxes would bankrupt most transporters and bring commerce to a halt, the trucking companies have developed an intricate, shifting system of bribes paid to bureaucrats and police to keep the wheels turning. Private tribute has been substituted for public tribute. The Nehruvian state may be going broke as a consequence, but its employees and their allies are doing rather well.
~~On The Grand Trunk Road -by- Steve Coll
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