Truck de India! by Rajat Ubhaykar

Author:Rajat Ubhaykar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S India
Published: 2019-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

At dawn, we stop again. The truckers proceed to bathe underneath a waterfall, while I wander around for a bit. I find myself surrounded by sparkling streams, and the sheer cliffs of the Pir Panjal framed by distant snow-capped peaks—a throwback to the Kashmir depicted in old Hindi movies of the 60s and 70s, except the gorgeous scenery is interrupted by the presence of men in olive green uniforms with guns pointed nowhere. The roads are narrower with patchy stretches in between that have either been washed away in the recent floods, or have always been like this. One can never be sure since the roads are consistently bad after Udhampur.

There’s the Baramulla–Benihal railway line, which is a lifeline for commuters and has eased passenger traffic on NH44, but for truckers, things have only gone from bad to worse, especially after the floods. Loose rocks scurry down the edges of a cliff as we drive towards Srinagar, which means I’m silently praying for our collective well-being every time there’s a tricky curve in the road.

We pause briefly when we find one of the trucks in our retinue positioned precariously at the edge of a cliff, a few centimetres from certain death. Apparently, the driver had dozed off at the wheel. Javed shouts at the driver to get his act together and carries on.

For truckers like Javed, the armed forces are a benign presence. Javed’s arch nemesis is the J&K police. Policemen dressed in light blue uniforms that resemble Mumbai municipal school uniforms, frequently try to stop us, but Javed is steadfast in evading them. He maintains a scornful attitude towards the police, thinking of them not as upholders of law and order, but as extortionists in uniform earning haraam ki kamaai (dishonest money), describing them using a variety of imaginative profanities.

Policemen try to stop our truck four times during the next few hours but Javed is successful in dodging them each time. He resolutely refuses to slow down when he spots them and then abruptly turns the steering wheel at the last moment to make stoppage impossible. Once, there’s an incline right after the police check post. A potbellied policeman runs along beside our truck as it struggles to negotiate the incline, waving a lathi at Javed. Javed snarkily tells him to take his money tomorrow. The enraged, out of breath policeman takes a desperate shot at Javed with his lathi, which Javed deftly evades.

But it’s not as if the truckers with me are paragons of lawfulness. Upon crossing Ramban, a small town by the Chenab River, we make a stop at a dhaba after Liaqat receives information from a friend that the deputy superintendent of police is lying in wait ahead, an incorruptible man known to penalize overloaded trucks according to the book. All the trucks in our retinue happen to be overloaded. Their bosses do hand over a modest amount for such exigencies. But being street-smart and avoiding such ‘unnecessary’ overheads is a big way how most truckers supplement their measly salaries of five to eight thousand.

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