On the Road Again (and Again and Again)

Driving Lesson in India

On the Road again (and again) 

Text by Richard Ross  

Pictures by Leela Ross and Richard Ross 

If you want to get off the beaten path, you might have to embrace it. Driving in India requires a certain level of risk. Remember that most of the drivers around you believe in reincarnation. To minimize or mitigate this danger, one needs instruction. Fortunately, lessons are readily available and cost about $8 per hour. 

 I am traveling with Leela, my 16 year-old daughter, who is self-confident and capable, but with already two minor accidents in her brief vehicular career, any instruction helps. Perhaps Geico offers a discount for multiple schools of driving instruction.  

So, we enroll for instruction in lorries, automobiles and auto rickshaws at the Kannan Driving School in Madras, now known as Chennai. It seems the perfect way to unravel the mysteries of the sub-continent.  

A young woman, dark, south Indian and neatly dressed, sat before a poster of all road signs of the country. This grid presents a clean, precise western sense of order. This false security stops at the door.  

We climb in a 1964 Ambassador deluxe sedan. White and rusty, it’s slightly reminiscent of a Rambler; a little rounder and more “Mission Impossible” looking. As India is on the other side of the planet, so the orientation of the driver is reversed—automotive bizarro land. The wheel is on the right, shift on the left, and driving is always on the “wrong” side of the road.  

Before I turn the key, the instructor takes a deep breath, makes serious eye contact and reveals the scariest instructions: “This is a horn. Honk the horn.” Dolphins have a high frequency clicking; ants use their antennae—Indian drivers honk. The horn is not used as an expletive, to convey danger, urgency nor any Western use—rather it is used to express a presence. It announces the existence of driver as well as vehicle. 

As Eskimos have multiple words for snow, there are multiple sounds of the horn in India. For example, “We are close enough to you so that we can see the direction of the threads on your bolts” calls for two toots in short burst. But one gives a longer burst for: “We are passing you in the oncoming lane as we are on a single lane road on a bridge, and there is a large bus 50 feet ahead coming at me at 70 kilometers per hours, and perhaps you would be kind enough to let me get in front of  you.” It doesn’t seem to matter that you are in the process yourself of passing an auto rickshaw and a cow.  

America offers roads that we blindly accept as straight, and shoulders that offer some recourse in emergency. Indian roads, even the highway running on the west coast from Niger Coil Junction at the tip up to Delhi, offer more, well, “variety” is a kind word—maybe even a bit generous.  

This is a list of the traffic one might encounter in the course of one kilometer:  a small SUV, motorcycle (Enfield, made near Madras), cow, elephant (holding palm fronds, walking from temple to temple), dog, bicycle, auto rickshaw, bicycle rickshaw, several people walking from market, black-clad pilgrims walking to temple in the thirty-second day of their 41-day pilgrimage, as well as several ubiquitous Ambassadors, all looking like the same model regardless of the year of manufacture. 

  Running parallel to the road crawls a train, vintage early Lionel. If it had a bell it was ringing; a horn, it was honking; a voice, it was bleating, barking or talking. The roads in India are not a place for solitude.  

Rules of physics vary here. Think of satellites circling the moon to gain momentum for interstellar journeys. So too small vehicles escape the gravitational field of the larger buses and lorries, careen over the theoretical center line and re-enter the gravity of their own lane. The center line is a concept rather than a hard and fast rule. Usually, you should keep one set of tires on the line, but left or right seems a little too discretionary, too optional for western rules of order.  Possession is 9/10s of the rule of the road. This is not Highway 101. 

I push down on the clutch, shift up on the column into second. The pedals are built for smaller people and my knees are almost touching my chin as I shift. There are press-on letters identifying the name of driving school that obscure most of the windshield. No one has mentioned braking at any point.. 

I am learning to let go. Driving means literally learning to go with the flow. I am beginning to feel the subcontinent and my driving improves. A few turns through streets near the Meenakshi Temple, filled with carts, vendors, taxis, animals, waste, people, people and more people. 

 Honk, pause, honk, honk. No one gets mad. In Los Angeles this would be road rage -- Smith and Wesson time. Here it is as unimposing as a nod, a gentle wave of the hand. 

Graduating to Rickshaws 

Arriving in Cochin, the pearl of Kerala, we are ready for a more challenging assignment, auto rickshaw lessons at Dhanya Driving School. 

Our instructor is the shimmering 22-year-old Neesha. Wearing a white sari, Neesha’s raven black hair is woven with jasmine, and her mouth opens to reveal a Chicklette-white smile.  

I enter the rickshaw and Neesha puts her lovely brown hands over mine and shows where the horn button is. “Try the horn; honk the horn. Now we are ready.”  

Her hands are controlled and powerful as she runs through the gears on the left handle bar and the accelerator on the right. The brake is so obscured and my foot so big that she brakes if the occasion arises, which it rarely does.  

As I gain some facility in the course of an hour, her hands lighten until they are only brushing the backs of mine. She is such an apparition, I am distracted and almost forget to honk. 

The auto rickshaw is a modified, underpowered, Vespa-like motor scooter. In place of the passenger seat is a surrey-covered cage with a padded bench seat. While normally this would hold two, a family of six will frequently emerge—as circus clowns pile out of the sputtering vehicle in the center ring.  

A final passage 

The last vehicular leg of our trip is a taxi ride at 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day, when we are finally relegated to the role of passengers. The trip from Vellore is almost three hours to catch an early morning flight home from Madras. Cutting through the pre-dawn dampness, flanked by rural rice fields, there is absolutely nothing on the road. We are in a half sleep, excited to be returning after three weeks “on the road.” My dreams are punctuated by the horn, every two minutes, two beeps. This was the process where the driver was announcing his presence to Shiva, Krishna or Rama. Visually, India is a circus, 3 rings, nine screens all running on fast forward.  Acoustically it is an orchestra, with all sections mute but an uncompromising horn section.  

I almost pity the Angeleno driving a 65 mph in their sterile clones--Hondas, Mazdas, Toyotas along predicable freeways, no punctuations of bicycles, tricycles, cows or elephants to break the monotony. It’s just too quiet.  

Noisy, chaotic, and overwhelming--in truth I miss the honking, the song of the road, the rhythm, the chant of India. 

If you go: 

Once you get off the plane, it is such a demanding flight, try and find a decent hotel close to the airport and decompress. Many of the Indian hotel chains are inconsistent from one property to another. The Trident is a good chain, convenient to the airport, not expensive and a good place to reassemble. The Trident in Kochin is one of the most service oriented hotels on the planet--(rohit@tridentcochin.com or jaideep@tridentch.com). Rental car hires are very reasonable, usually 5 rupees a kilometer and 100 extra per day for the driver, or about $25/day for an air-conditioned chauffeured Avis car. The flights redefine interminable and if you have mileage to upgrade, this is the time. Remember that some of the partners that airlines tout are good for code-sharing and accruing mileage, but will not allow upgrading within their system. For example, United partners with Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa, but you can use United miles to upgrade on Lufthansa, but not Singapore. Read the fine print, before you book.