Sweat pours down his back and stains his shirt as he fights the controls. His left hand grips a metal lever connected to a small wooden box by way of a brass gear. This lever controls the amount of electricity that is allowed to pass from the overhead streetcar wires down to the motors beneath the carriage. By carefully, but forcefully, manipulating this lever the driver is able to increase the speed of the beast, releasing bursts of roaring power as we climb the steep hills. It is a real, physical battle in every sense of the word.
Category: <span>Essays</span>
Essays from Patrick Cumby
Here’s where I ramble on about stuff I care about.
The river is sluggish and bright blue against broad sandy banks and a distant tree line, many miles away across the rice fields. At the water’s edge, a small enterprise of bamboo stalls sells dusty packaged cookies and water bottles brought here by jeep. Background music from a battery-powered radio; we are many miles away from the nearest electrical pole, the lyrics in a strange language. Little girls in what look like Disney princess outfits (but that pass as normal here), boys in blue shorts and white school shirts, some torn and threadbare but all immaculately pressed. One boy has a pink My Little Pony backpack so dirty that the imprint is barely visible; his white uniform shirt has a gaping hole under one arm. He climbs out to the end of a rickety scaffolding that hangs out over the water and dangles there like a monkey, hooting and laughing. In America every adult present would be panicking and the ferry-keepers would be worried about litigation, but here no one cares.
Priyom’s mobile phone rings just as he wrenches the steering wheel away from the abyss. To my horror he reaches for the phone, answers and shouts something unintelligible before dropping it to the floorboard and returning his attention to the unfolding disaster. In the back seats my wife and I both gasp and grab the seatbacks in front of us as we lurch toward the edge. I know the tires are going to slip over, but then we are back in the boulderish rubble of the landslide, jouncing so violently that my head bangs sharply on the side window.
Priyom stops the car, eyes wide. A tinny woman’s voice (his wife?) is yelling from the phone which is now on the floorboard. “Holy shit,” says my wife as she looks over the crumbling edge of the asphalt into the rainy valley. In front of us, the road is gone.
When I was eight years old, my mom helped me write a note introducing myself to the world. We tied the note to the string of latex helium balloon and released it into the Georgia sky. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever done.
I waited impatiently for a response. To where would the balloon fly? I imagined it soaring over exotic lands, mountain ranges, even oceans. I imagined another little boy in a strange foreign place looking up into the sky and seeing a little black speck floating high overhead. I imagined my balloon alighting somewhere in a green field of grass; a kid like me seeing it, picking it up, reading my note. I’d included my address so he or she could respond.
Imagine one square mile of tiny dark cavities, tumbled on top of each other inside a giant crumbling termite mound of brick, concrete and construction scraps. Imagine the entire assembly covered by a sun-baked crust of rusted sheet metal, blue plastic tarps and a deep insulating coat of filth and trash. Imagine that a million people live in the dark spaces beneath this crust, crammed more tightly together than at any other place on Earth. Do the math: that’s 1,200 people per acre. My home in North Carolina is on one acre, where I live with my wife and dog and cat. I try to imagine 1,200 people in my house. My imaginations fails.
He’s a young guy in a red Ferrari jacket with close-cropped hair, knockoff Italian shoes and a neatly manicured Tony Stark beard. If he speaks English, he doesn’t admit it. He just bobs his head and smiles warily at my cheery “Good Morning” and insists on carrying my heavy backpack to the car. He’ll be my driver for the next three weeks as I explore the isolated Brahmaputra floodplain, an area sandwiched between Bhutan, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar and connected to mainland India by a narrow sliver of land known as the “chicken-neck.”
Image-wise, Priyom is the exact opposite of Kal, my driver in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Where Kal had been conservative and staid, Priyom is sleek and stylish in a Fast-n-Furious kind of way. I quickly discover that this image also applies to his driving style. If riding with Kal was nail-biting, riding with Priyom is downright heart-stopping. Kal rarely exceeded 50KPH. Priyom rarely goes less than 100 unless a collision is imminent, at which point he jams the brakes and somehow slides between the careening bus and the fully-loaded lorry (with a couple of centimeters to spare), honking furiously and also dodging the inevitable bicycle or scooter. At the time of this writing I’ve been with Priyom for fifteen days, during which not one single vehicle of any kind has passed us. Not one. As far as I can tell, Priyom is the fastest driver in all of India.
Starting with the rushing throngs of Mumbai and moving into the slightly less hectic but still as dense southern states of Goa and Kerala, there hasn’t been a moment of silence since I stepped off the airplane. Not even in the countryside of Munnar, a supposedly relaxed rural area of tea plantations and high mountains have I escaped the sometimes annoying, occasionally mystifying, often beautiful but always present sounds of the Indian civilization.
On the inside back cover of the very first international travel book I ever bought (Peru), there was a list of supposedly common Spanish phrases and their English translations. Tucked between Where is the bathroom, please and How much does this cost was a phrase that, at the time, I found quite funny:
I prefer to have my surgery in the United States.
I can’t remember why I thought it was so funny, but the phrase stuck with me and now my wife and I use it often in jest in our travels, when we are about to do something we know to be risky. Before we try the raw-egg-and-fish in Sao Paulo, or before we accept a ride from a shady cab driver at midnight in Morocco, we look at each other and laugh and whisper:
I prefer to have my surgery in the United States!
It’s become a light-hearted mantra for us, a verbal talisman that hopefully protects us from ever having to say it for real. Today, though, for the first time ever, the humor is completely missing as I head to a government hospital in rural India as a patient.
My driver Kal is tired. I can tell by the way he’s rubbing his face. This makes me nervous. Driving in India takes intense concentration at all moments, and even a momentary lapse can mean that you either 1) run over a slow tuktuk or pedestrian, or 2) get squashed by one of the careening buses or heavy trucks which slow down for absolutely nothing.
Driving on any Indian road is dangerous enough, but the curvy, narrow roads of Thekkady are particularly deadly, as the occasionally skull-and-crossbones roadsigns continually remind me. Problem is, not only is he tired, he is also in a hurry, and I’m not sure why.
This post is part of a series of micro-travelogues called Seven Weeks in India. To see all the posts in this series, click here.
My driver’s name is Kal, and he will be taking me everywhere I want to go over the next eight days while I tour the southern Indian state of Kerala. Sounds cool, right, to have a private driver to chauffer you around, leaving you stress-free to enjoy the trip? A driver that is also a local guide who can point out interesting sights and activities along the route and explain the background to what you are seeing? A driver who is at your total disposal 24 hours a day?
Yes, but… this is India, where nothing is ever as simple or as easy as it first seems.