Rajat Ubhaykar's Blog

Think truck drivers, and movie scenes of them drunkenly crushing inconvenient people to their gravelly deaths come to mind. But what are their lives on the road actually like?

In Truck De India, journalist Rajat Ubhaykar embarks on a 10,000 km-long, 100% unplanned trip, hitchhiking with truckers all across India. On the way, he makes unexpected friendships; listens to highway ghost stories; discovers the near-fatal consequences of overloading trucks; documents the fascinating tradition of truck art in Punjab; travels alongside nomadic shepherds in Kashmir; encounters endemic corruption repeatedly; survives NH39, the insurgent-ridden highway through Nagaland and Manipur; and is unfailingly greeted by the unconditional kindness of perfect strangers.

Imbued with humour, empathy, and a keen sense of history, Truck De India! is a travelogue like no other you’ve read. It is the story of India, and Indians, on the road.

Get your copy here.

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From Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

‘From Plassey to Partition and After’ is that rare unbiased book on modern India. Objective and comprehensive, it is the one and only book you need to read to grasp the complex contours of modern Indian history. What distinguishes it from other books is that the author Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is careful to treat modern Indian history as a site of intense contestation. He doesn’t thrust a particular narrative in your face, like Bipan Chandra pushes his Marxist nationalistic narrative of India’s freedom struggle in India’s Struggle for Independence. Rather, Bandyopadhyay recognizes that freedom meant different things for different socio-economic groups and furnishes a well-researched summary of various historiographical strands.

He also incorporates recent academic work on economic history and explains modern political developments in the context of material conditions, marking an illuminating shift from the usual personality & ideology centric approach to historical events. For instance, he writes that Pakistan was presented as a ‘peasant utopia’ to the peasants of East Bengal, which would liberate the Muslim peasantry from the hands of Hindu zamindars and moneylenders, thus representing a break from existing agrarian relations. He also writes about the balancing act Congress had to perform between indigenous capitalists and the working class. He writes that working class support for the Congress was, in general, weak – industrial workers in Bombay had meanwhile thrown in their lot with the Communists – with the exception of Bengal where their fight was against the British capitalists.

He also writes about how caste relations played a role in the success of Congress-led mass movements. In general, many 19th century peasant movements with a significant element of self-initiative were co-opted into the Non Cooperation Movement. Regions with no pre-history of peasant mobilization remained quiet during so-called ‘national’ movements. And regions with long-standing resentments often spiraled out of the hands of Congress leaders and turned violent. The movement was controlled and successful primarily in the region where dominant peasant communities such as the Mahishya caste in Bengal and Patidars in Gujarat held sway over lower caste agricultural labourers. Regions with more cross-caste mobilization, such as Awadh, tended to turn violent.

The book is a scholarly achievement, a task made all the more difficult by the proximity of the period under study. The only thing this book needs are some section headings between the relentless paragraphs. This will help the reader mentally categorize the various crisscrossing strands and combine them to harvest an accessible account of this complex period. This quibble aside, From Plassey to Partition is easily the most enlightening book on modern India I’ve read. Highly recommended!

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Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Land of Seven Rivers is an oversimplified, inaccurate history of India with a pronounced nationalistic tilt (Sanyal seems to believe in the Out of India theory, though he is not confident enough to proclaim this outright). His writing is substandard and lacks the nuance essential to good history. (I would recommend John Keay’s India: A Brief History for an unbiased, accessible, almost poetically written history of India)

I find it difficult to understand what Sanyal set out to achieve with this book. The subtitle claims it to be A Brief History of India’s Geography, but that it most certainly is not. It reads more like a collection of random, often interesting, facts laid down chronologically; facts that have more to do with the various phases of urbanization in India than geography. Geography, at best, provides a background to historical events in this narrative. The Saraswati river (predictably) makes many appearances in the book, as Sanyal traces the historical evolution of Indians’ geographical knowledge through textual sources like the Vedas, Mahabharata and Ramayana. Another major theme in this book is India’s trade links with other cultures and places, through which India exported its culture and civilization. Sanyal writes about this with typical nationalistic pride that is tinged with nostalgia for the glory days.

However, what’s most annoying is how Sanyal constantly marshals silly parallels between India’s past & present in a bullheaded attempt to prove India’s civilizational continuity (not that I deny it). He also makes up wild theories without providing any source for the same, which totally ruined his credibility for me. He constantly attempts to buttress his point that Indians were not an ahistorical people, as most Western scholars are wont to assert. In this, I partly agree with him. However, if one compares our sporadic, hagiographic record-keeping to the almost obsessive, detached documentation of ancient China, we fare poorly. Sanyal’s primary argument to prove Indians’ historical consciousness is the Ashoka edicts and how succeeding dynasties (Guptas, Tughlaqs as well as the British) inscribed their names on various edicts and hence saw themselves as the inheritors of an ancient civilization. And lastly, he has a massive boner for the lion, both as an animal and as a signifier of royal authority that has followed India down the centuries and today graces India’s official emblem.

The Land of Seven Rivers ultimately is a book that believes in the questionable motto: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Please avoid. There are much better history books out there.

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Neon Noon by Tanuj Solanki

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is difficult to review a book as unabashedly experimental and self-indulgent as Neon Noon, so rare is it in the annals of Indian English literature, with its history of social realism and plot-centric novels. It is admirable how unwavering the book’s commitment to solipsism is, how it chooses to make a bold departure from Indian literary tradition. The book’s protagonist T (a semi-autobiographical version of the author Tanuj Solanki) is a corporate minion living in Mumbai, nursing a heartbreak caused by his breakup with Anne-Marie, his white French girlfriend. T sleepwalks through his soulless job and bemoans ‘the cult of the five-day week and the two-day weekend in which love is only allowed in the wrinkles of time that have not been smoothened’. The reasons behind his breakup are left ambiguous, but are hinted at by interspersing passages in the book [hint: it involves an unborn French-Indian son].

To add to T’s misery is the fact that T is that tortured creature – an aspiring novelist – a ‘compulsive archivist of himself’, forever obsessed with the idea of translating reality into words, and vice versa. T spends the bulk of his time converting his experiences into succinct, forceful sentences, a process he believes essential to becoming a writer. He is a faithful narrator of his own life. In that sense, the book is being read as it is being written, and written as it is being experienced, in classic stream of consciousness fashion. At a few places, Solanki even breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader, usually to aid him in fathoming a narrative leap or to apologize for some literary deficiency. Neon Noon is simultaneously about T finding relief from his lovesickness through obsessive documentation and about his discovery of his artistic voice [which is brooding and serious].

At the level of plot [since the first question most ask is “Story kya hai?”], the book is about a broken man made whole by an affecting encounter with an enigmatic whore in Pattaya. But to even think of this book at this base level is to take away from its multilayered charm. Solanki’s writing is often digressive, but reading through his ruminations, which vary from critiques of liberal capitalism to an exploration of the French language, you are often ambushed by strikingly beautiful sentences, rambling streams of words that unerringly find their way to fertile meaning. It is these sentences that lend Neon Noon its literary quality and elevate it from a hedonistic tale of cavorting with Thai prostitutes to something more subtle and redemptive. Sample this description of a Thai brothel, at once euphemistic, insightful and eloquent, as a place where “mid-sized capital and mid-sized enterprise waltz together to present the world’s oldest value proposition in glitzy red, inescapable allure”.

The book sometimes feels disjointed, arising from the fact that the first few parts of the book are independent short stories that have been stitched together to yield a novel-length book. But these short stories provide a necessary background to the protagonist and add flesh to T’s character. And the disjointedness is only felt in retrospect upon finishing the book, not while one’s reading it. However, one major criticism of the book is its humourlessness. If only the protagonist could view his own misery in a lighter vein from a cosmic plane, it would have made for a more entertaining read [but probably wouldn’t have made the book possible]. Also, I did not understand the point of the unborn son, unless it is T’s obsession with this imaginary character that precipitates the breakup. But then, these are the inevitable quibbles to an engrossing, melancholy novel that will eventually tug at your heartstrings. Recommended!

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A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t even know where to begin gushing about this one, so panoramic is its scope and so delightful its literary charms. Vikram Seth’s 800,000 word magnum opus is lengthier than War and Peace and more compulsively readable than a well-paced soap opera. It is an event in one’s life. I call it a soap opera, because fundamentally, the plot is a family drama, revolving around the wooers of its principal character, Lata Mehra.

Set in the early 1950s and written with a forceful simplicity akin to R K Narayan, it covers 18 months in the entwined lives of four families – the Mehras, Kapoors, Chatterjis, and Khans – and through these characters proffers an intricate peek into a most fascinating (and neglected) period in Indian history. It is an uncertain era when India is transitioning from feudalism to democracy. The First Great General Elections are to be held in 1952 and the central legislative event is the abolition of the oppressive zamindari system, and with it, an entire way of life: courtesans, Hindustani classical musicians and purana khidmatgars. Caste is beginning to make itself felt in electoral calculations, and Nehru remains a force to be reckoned with. On this level, A Suitable Boy is painstakingly researched historical fiction. Seth writes with a level of detail that is unreal. As one reviewer notes, “he writes with the omniscience and authority of a large, orderly committee of experts on Indian politics, law, medicine, crowd psychology, urban and rural social customs, dress, cuisine, horticulture, funerary rites, cricket and even the technicalities of shoe manufacture.”

A Suitable Boy is undoubtedly one of the biggest achievements of world literature and will remain one of my all-time favourites. I feel lucky to have read it at this point in time since I can’t wait for its sequel coming out next year, the appropriately titled A Suitable Girl.

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The gold game’s afoot in China.

Easy Money

In June 2015, China declared having bought 604.34 tonnes of gold. It’s last declaration before this had come in April 2009, when it had declared to having bought 454 tonnes of gold.

It couldn’t have bought such a huge amount of gold all at once given the limited supply of the yellow metal. Between April 2009 and June 2015, China regularly bought gold. It only declared it all at once in June 2015. The country had followed a similar strategy before April 2009, as well. It had last declared having bought 99.5 tonnes of gold in December 2002.

Hence, even though China has been buying gold all along, it has chosen to do so quietly, instead of going public with it. The reason for this was fairly straightforward. Gold is a thinly traded commodity, and hence, it makes sense for China to keep accumulating gold at a slow and regular…

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He was a quiet man. He sat there, stroking the rim of his nose absent-mindedly, his face modestly contorted in a frown which lent his personality an air of concentrated disgust. His face was scarred from the battles of youth: acne. The angry boils of his teenage years had cleared, but that had made no difference, they had merely settled, made themselves at home.

His clothes were unremarkable, a brown checked shirt, neatly pressed black trousers and recently polished cheap black shoes. He looked no different from everyone around him. It characterized the bourgeois. He didn’t know that. But he knew that was no measure of him. There was a difference. He knew it.

“Buddy, I’ll mail you the terms and conditions of our company. Go through it and intimate me of your acceptance. We’ll love to have you on our team.” the loud-mouthed HR representative, Manu negotiated with the new joinee on the adjacent table.

He looked up to see Manu, who had been looking in his general direction, smiling at him. He smiled back quickly. He hoped the smile had reached his eyes, he didn’t know. He went back to staring at his computer screen.

“One, two, three, four, five , six, seven, can you believe it?”, the pretty girl behind him chimed.

“What? What?”, her friend asked, excited.

“There are seven people wearing green today. Awesome no?”

“Just like that day with all those pink dresses. I think there were more pinkys though.”, said the guy sitting on the opposite computer, the one who was always surreptitiously stealing glances at her. The girls started giggling.

At lunch, that day, no one solicited his company. He bought ice cream to feel better. He proceeded to sit on an empty table in the cafeteria, the cone in hand. Sweet, quiet, purposeless contemplation.

“Aur Dubeyji, having lunch alone today?”, a voice interrupted him. It was the IT guy.

He merely smiled, not because it had been a rhetorical question, but because that was all he could do. The perfunctory and the frivolous held no interest for him, so he thought. His perpetual nervousness had cost him the hearty spontaneity which familiarity and proximity engender.

On the way back, in the empty elevator, he had time to look at himself in the mirror. He didn’t like it. He noticed an older body which wasn’t representative enough of his potential. He didn’t feel too good.

He had a report to give the boss in half an hour. He felt confident about that. He had nothing to report, with all the right reasons. His boss was always undecided on what he wanted, whether this was part of a larger scheme, he didn’t know. He had a nagging suspicion that information was held from him, that he was a mere pawn, another cog in the wheel. The larger picture was hazy and all he happened to desire was clarity.

After reaching his seat, he took a long sip from the water bottle carrying the sticker of his name. He had once gone through half the bottle in a hurry, only to realize that it wasn’t his name on the sticker. He had then emptied half his bottle into it to make it seem undisturbed. He had been careful ever since.

He went through what he was going to say in his mind. He knew he had to sell it well, otherwise it would just mean more pointless toiling, another day to kill. After he had done all he could, he picked his large notebook and set off. He had a purpose, at last.

“May I come in sir?” he knocked on the door.

“Yes, yes, come on in.” He entered, his notebook held across his chest.

“So, what have you got for me?”, the boss swivelled around from his computer to meet his eyes with a piercing gaze that had seen him through to the top.

“Nothing much, sir.” He realized he had gotten off on the wrong footing.

“What I mean, sir, is that there doesn’t seem to exist a reasonable degree of correlation between inflation, money supply and IIP.” The boss held the tips of his finger together and closed his eyes. That was not a good sign. This was his listening position. He was a incisive reasoner and a practiced listener. Right now, he wanted to hear a good reason. Fortunately, he had one prepared.

“Sir, the predictive nature of our model hangs on our ability to predict the change in the trend of inflation. Now, autocorrelation can give us that, but only with a lag. It has no predictive quality. The prediction of the change in the trend has to be accounted for by external factors like IIP and money supply, which simply do not provide us with enough information to make a reasonable estimate.” He had stated his case. He was satisfied. He had been succint and sensible, much suited to the boss’ taste. “The model is doomed to failure.” he wanted to add, to deliver the finishing blow.

The cabin was deathly quiet.

“Have you tried the seasonally adjusted values?” the boss inquired, his eyes still closed.

“Yes, sir.” he said hurriedly. He had not. He thought there wasn’t much value in that. Seasonally adjusted values merely smoothened the variations arising due to the seasons, but the inherent lack of correlation was nagging him.

“Okay, so what do you want to work on?”, the boss got out of his reverie.

He did not know what to say. This had been too easy. The haze returned. He couldn’t see clearly. He could not comprehend why all his hard work of months was going to be led to waste. Suddenly, he didn’t want what he had wanted. He wanted some form of resistance, something to tell him that he had not been a fool. He didn’t understand the pawn had the king under check. It was a victory, albeit minor. He would, eventually. Right then, he despised being a pawn.

“Sir, I wanted to work on the debt market, understand the contribution of the major participants and how the market works in the real world.” he said.

The boss nodded his head, his eyes closed again. He stood there, the notebook held close, hopeful and perplexed.

“I’ll think of a project appropriate for you and let you know by tomorrow. Till then I want a neat report of what you’ve been doing.” He nodded. He did not feel as glad as he had imagined. He realized he hadn’t been doing much all these days.

He walked back to his seat. The feeling began to sink in. He had been released from the anguish accompanying the feeling of being on a wild goose chase, the hopelessness which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t find the goose because somewhere inside you don’t want to.

He thought he had seen the slightest hint of a smile on the boss’ face when he was leaving. He drank some more water, a faint smile playing on his face.

When he reached home, his wife noticed and complimented his good mood, said that he should be more like this. He rolled his eyes and told her it wasn’t that simple.

The next day, he smiled confidently at the receptionist and wished her a very good morning. He reached his desk and noticed the new face in the usual crowd. He sat and got down to making the report. Soon, Manu arrived, the new guy in tow, making all the introductions, doing his job.

“Ashish, this is Pratik.” Manu began. He awkwardly turned his head away from them, his face slightly lopsided, one of his eyes slightly smaller than the other. Manu went on, “He works with the fund accounting team. He’s been here with us for around a year. This is Ashish, he is a project trainee who has joined us for an intern lasting, what two months?” he asked offhandedly.

“Yes, sir.” Ashish replied dutifully. They looked at each other and smiled.

“Manu, it’s Alok, not Pratik,” Manu’s assistant reminded him. She looked awfully embarrassed.

“Oh, I am so sorry.” Manu was suave as always. “Ashish, meet Alok.”

He forced himself to meet eyes with Ashish.

“Hi. Have a good time here.” He shook hands with the newcomer and smiled. It took an effort.

After they had gone along to make further introductions, he sunk his head and closed his eyes. He knew he was different. He was better than them.

The old gods are dead. The new idols of liberal, democratic techno-capitalism are ‘rockstars’, to use a tellingly overused term.

They are aspirational deities, Schrodinger’s cats who’re simultaneously anti-establishment and of the establishment: people elevated by the (social) media into perfect, endearingly flawed demigods to fulfill our Enlightenment-era tendency to venerate individual genius.

Rockstars can now be found in almost every conceivable field (except those involving manual labour): Justin Trudeau, the rockstar politician; Elon Musk, the rockstar technologist; Steve Jobs, the rockstar businessman & visionary; Neil Gaiman, the literary rockstar.

We have start-ups falling over each other to hire rockstar software developers. Hell, we even have a rockstar RBI governor, arguably one of the most unsexiest jobs around before the advent of the articulate, stylishly bespectacled Raghuram Rajan.

If anything, the fact that ‘rockstar’ is now used to deify politicians, technologists, entrepreneurs, programmers and writers, everybody but musicians, is proof that while rock music may be commercially dead, its erstwhile practitioners still set the benchmark for fanatic devotion.

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A soldier keeps watch as trucks pass through NH39

By no stretch of imagination is Dimapur, the commercial hub of Nagaland, a pleasant place to live in. On a damp Sunday morning, it feels like I have walked into a tropical war zone — there is a strange uneasiness in the air and the roads have been chiselled away by passing trucks and frequent downpours into an uneven slush of concrete and mud: a consequence of frictional forces and persistent civic indifference.

I walk towards the railway station and discover the level of filth to be shocking, particularly for the northeast, which is much cleaner than mainland India on average. Open gutters overflow onto the street and mounds of garbage cover the side of the street, as gaunt cyclerickshawallahs heave past me. A large pool of stagnant water — black as crude oil and the abode of mosquitoes that hover close to its surface — lies right opposite the station. Roadside vendors sell cheap track pants, fruits, bangles and other fashion accessories right beside it, in what appears to be the main market of the town. A flyover passes above our heads and as I look up, I see a couple of Naga policemen looking down and observing us, making our position as obvious outsiders clear to me.

That this crumbling town happens to be one of the most important railheads in the northeast, particularly vital for the economies of Nagaland and Manipur, is easily forgotten. During the battle of Kohima in the second World War, reinforcements and goods for the Allies were routed through Dimapur by rail and road, towards the war fronts of Imphal and Kohima. Today, almost all goods headed for Manipur and Nagaland, which include cereal from the Food Corporation of India, first arrive to Dimapur by goods train.

After being unloaded from the train, the goods are transported by trucks along NH39, which stretches from Dimapur in the plains to Moreh on the Indo-Myanmar border, passing through the undulating Naga and Manipur hills, crossing the cities of Kohima and Imphal in between.

Hear my train a comin’

I soon turn from the road and enter through the broken remains of an iron gate to find myself near an endless rust-coloured train, comprising 42 bogies, 21 of which are loaded with 20 tonne of potatoes each. It’s quite a sight: rows of trucks as far as the eye can see, one for each train bogie, with labourers carrying bulky sacks on their heads, moving in and out of the bogies with stopwatch frequency, sweat pouring down faces that are crumpled in a look of exhaustion and concentration, as they negotiate the inclined ramp that constitutes the path from the bogie to the truck.

Bihari labourers do most of the hard labour, hauling heavy gunny sacks for a measly sum of Rs.2.5/sack

 I find out that a group of local Marwari traders in Dimapur has booked the train. A couple of traders are supervising the loading and unloading, noting down details in coarse, discoloured notebooks. They tell me that the potatoes are to be transported to Imphal by trucks, most of them six-wheelers. One truck is assigned per bogie, carrying 20 tonne each, far exceeding its designated capacity of nine tonne. The traders don’t even attempt to hide this fact, just as one doesn’t bother to conceal a banal reality. Again and again, I discover routine overloading as a common thread that ties the transportation industry in India together across state borders.

Bihari labourers do most of the hard labour, clad in lungis or baggy shorts, their clothes and bodies covered in fine, golden potato dust that envelops the insides of the bogies as well. Inside the bogie, the labourers work in pairs to drag the heavy gunny sacks, using a pair of tongs to hitch it to shoulder level, and then haul them on their heads — cushioned bygamchhas — to the waiting trucks.

They earn #2.5 per sack, 6% of which goes to a broker, a measly amount for what is clearly punishing work. Loose potatoes that have fallen out of holes in the sacks are collected in a plastic bag and whisked away or handed over, depending on whether a supervisor is around or not. Faint echoes of the Lord’s song being played on loudspeakers with accompanying guitar can be heard amid the loading and unloading, a jolly Sunday routine that’s quite incongruous with the pervasive filth and caginess of Dimapur.

I go around trying to chat with truck drivers, only to be alarmed to learn that essential goods such as foodgrain and oil are escorted by paramilitary trucks in 200-strong convoys, since the highway is host to a dozen insurgent groups that extort unofficial ‘taxes’ from drivers. However, many of the truck drivers travel outside the convoy, in small groups often united by language and geography.

It turns out that on an average, the highway is blocked for 60 days a year due to frequentrasta–rokos by the insurgent groups and other political stakeholders, the major ones among whom include the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) (divided into two splinter groups, NSCN-IM and NSCN-K), the Kangleipak National Liberation Front, the Communist Party of Kangleipak and many other organisations turning a variety of ideological, tribal and ethnic grudges into armed revolutionary movements. The recent killing of 18 soldiers by the NSCN-K in an ambush further intensified tensions and given rise to an atmosphere of palpable insecurity. In effect, I discover it is safe to call NH39 the most dangerous highway in the country.

Highwaymen

Hustling for rides is an affair riddled with uncertainty, but its complementary twin, serendipity, also makes an occasional appearance. You never know who you are going to stumble upon. I am told that the best place to find stationary trucks in Dimapur is the Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL) petrol pump, the cheapest destination for long-distance vehicles. I head there in a rickety auto, passing deserted shopping arcades and slammed shutters along the way. Nagaland, being a Christian-dominated state — Christians constitute 85% of the population — comes to a virtual standstill on Sundays.

More than diesel costs, the biggest cash-guzzlers on this highway route are policemen and insurgents

I am relieved to see trucks parked haphazardly on the premises of the petrol pump and jump out to make enquiries. It is lunchtime and most of the trucks are missing their masters. Finally, I see a couple of men idling inside a truck and approach them.

One among them, a compact man with a receding hairline dressed in summer clothes — a blue-white checked lungi and a brown baniyan — calls himself Avirup Roy (name changed on request) and proclaims himself a Bengali from Dharamnagar in Tripura. He’s been driving all over the northeast for the past 25 years.

In a sing-song Bengali accent, he begins to tell me the break-up of his expenses for one trip to Imphal. Typically, his Marwari seth receives ₹26,000 from the client, of which he pockets ₹8,000 and hands over the remaining ₹18,000 to the drivers. I’m surprised to note that diesel constitutes just half of his expenses. The food and intoxication expense comes to around ₹1,000, but the biggest cash-guzzlers are the policemen and the insurgents, who he refers to as andarwalas or ‘underground’. Roy claims to pay ₹8,000 per trip to both combined.

Fear and loathing 

The insurgents are more sophisticated. The tax they extort depends on the goods the truckers are ferrying. For instance, they demand more if the load is cement or iron — compared with potatoes and other ration — proportional to the value of the goods transported. Many drivers tell me it is foolhardy for them to try and evade the insurgents, since unlike the police, they usually have smaller vehicles at hand, using which they can easily overtake the truckers.

Upon catching up with the audacious escapees, the insurgents beat them black and blue and take away all the cash they have on them. “Risky kaam hai. Thappad toh mandir ka ghanti jaise bajata hai. Andarwala apne mann ka malik hai. Kisi ko bakshta nahi hai,” says Roy. He adds that there is no real difference between the policemen and the insurgents. “Ek ghar mein ek bhai policewala hoga aur doosra andarwala,” he says, only half-joking. And they work together in a climate of connivance. “Chor-chor chachere bhai hote hain,” he says, but with no humour this time.

It was only last year that insurgents — allegedly so, because the police never did find the guys who actually did it — hijacked Roy’s Mahindra four-wheeler on NH39. They brandished guns and asked him to flee if he cared for his life. He did as he was told. Roy says he has not seen his vehicle since then. “Zindagi barbad ho gaya hijacking ke baad,” he says. He had bought the Mahindra only a year before it was taken from him and had managed to recoup only a bare fraction of his investment.

Truck drivers travel by night when blockades by the police and insurgents are fewer and unmanned

He had taken a loan of ₹665,000 to buy the vehicle. When he went to register a case, the policemen demanded a bribe of ₹25,000 just for filing an FIR. In all, he says that he has spent an amount of ₹200,000-250,000 on the policemen, the dalal who filed a case with the insurance company, as well as the officers of the insurance company who came to conduct a fact-finding survey about the case. After all this effort, he says he has been able to recover ₹216,000 from the insurance company, a net loss for him. He’s now defaulting on his monthly EMI of ₹12,000 to the bank because of the loss of livelihood. “Magar bank ko hijack se koi farak nahi padta hai,” he says.

He was compelled to start all over again as a helper on a truck, back to square one after 25 years of experience, thanks to a former ustad who offered to let him accompany him on his truck. “Family ke jaise hai. Mushkil mein help karte hain. Majboori ka naam Mahatma Gandhi hai,” he says with cryptic glee. He says that their owner is going to buy a new truck soon, which he hopes to start driving within six months and draw a full salary. Presently, Roy has to rely on the kindness of his ustad.

They have just finished eating lunch in the truck and the ustad is evidently busy spending some time alone, puffing at his beedi, looking out the other window, clearly not in a mood to communicate. He gets a salary of ₹5,000 per month from his boss. Roy doesn’t get any salary but he sustains himself and his family on the money their boss hands over for expenses. In order to avoid taxes, Roy and his ustad travel by night, when blockades by the police and insurgents are fewer and are often unmanned. He claims that it takes ₹30,000 to make the journey during the day, compared with ₹18,000 in the night, often lesser, the remainder going straight into Roy’s pocket.

Blockade Blues

Other truckers arriving from Imphal soon join us, and I realise my worst fears have come true. They tell me about rumours that the road to Imphal is blocked for now, obstructed by Mao Nagas near Mao on the Manipur-Nagaland border. According to them, the situation was tense over there after shots were fired and a couple of trucks were set on fire, their drivers jumping away to safety in time. The truckers tell me to come back the next day if I want to hitch a ride, since no truck driver will be plying the highway that night. I have no option but to obey them and despondently return to the shady motel I’m putting up at.

I feel a pang of anxiety. Fear courses through my veins with renewed vigour and I question myself: should I actually go ahead with this? I consider returning to mainland India, to more familiar environs where the only people you have to worry about on highways are the police. I realise the blockade could extend indefinitely, while travelling at night carries its concomitant risks of hijacking and looting. I wonder if the trip’s worth the risk at all. But, of course, I know the answer.

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A Gujjar family has finally found a ride and are loading their belongings, which include cloth bags bound by coir, and bundles of wood to keep them warm in the mountain pastures

The sun is high up in the sky and a column of dilapidated trucks trundling past kick up an opaque cloud of dust, enveloping everything in a fine layer of golden brown grime. I discover the muddy imprint of a dust-sweat admixture when I wipe my forehead with a handkerchief. The mercury has easily crossed 40 degrees Celsius here at the Transport Nagar along the NH44 in Jammu — a vast unpaved transitory home for trucks — much to everybody’s discomfort, and the ferocious sun beating down mercilessly is making my head throb. This must be the forewarnings of a sunstroke, I think, and plod to the nearest watermelon stand.

As I feel the sweet, lightly spiced juice splash down my throat, I recall the purpose of my visit: to hitch a ride from this sweltering truck depot to salubrious Srinagar in the Kashmir Valley, a distance of just 300 km along NH44, but a world apart climatically. I had been hoping to hitch a ride immediately upon my arrival in the depot at around noon, but had spent the last couple of hours chatting with truck drivers.

They told me that trucks plying on NH44 follow a convoy system and leave for Srinagar after dark. It is a constraint of the narrow, mountainous two-lane roads that compels truck traffic to be directed towards Srinagar and Jammu respectively on alternate days, to avoid undue traffic snarls. After midnight, the convoy is flagged off from Udhampur, around 80 km from Jammu towards Srinagar.

I am resigned to spend a few hours in idle waiting when I receive an unexpected call from Farooque, one of the truck drivers whom I had given my number and requested to inform me when he’s leaving. “Haan, dus minute mein nikal rahe hain,” he says at around 3 pm and asks me to meet him near an SBI ATM in the terminal. My joy knows no bounds and at that point, even a blast of hot highway breeze is preferable to drowning in my own sweat. I just want to get moving away from this stubborn heat and head towards the misty mountaintops.

Misty mountain hop

Farooque, a lithe 35-year-old with a nervous crinkly smile and twinkling eyes dressed in drab grey trousers and a checked T-shirt, always prays before starting his journey.

The route is full of treacherous winding roads and he needs all the supernatural assistance he can get. His truck is a sturdy red and green six-wheeler with stylish sliding doors, the first that I have seen on a truck.

It has 786 (a number used as a protective talisman among South Asian Muslims), Ya Allahand Ya Mohammad painted in bright colours on the front and back. The designs on the cabin interior and truck exterior are minimalistic with just abstract geometric shapes etched on sun-mica, in adherence to the tenet of Islam that prohibits the depiction of any living creature. The goods Farooque is transporting is a whole lot of urea, 20 tonnes of it, more than double his truck’s capacity of nine tonnes. They are to be used on apple trees that grow in the higher reaches of the Kashmir Valley, primarily in the districts of Baramulla, Anantnag, Kupwara, Kulgam, Shopian and Pulwama.

The sliding doors close with an exclamatory sound and just like that we’re off, out of the dusty terminal and onto the narrow lanes of Jammu. I notice there’s no left-hand mirror on the truck and point it out to Farooque. He jumps out at a petrol pump and fits a mirror into the socket in a jiffy. He’s clearly quite experienced and upon inquiry, he tells me that he’s been driving since the past 15 years, five of them on probably the toughest road in India to drive on: the Srinagar-Leh highway. I instantly feel safer. If he’s still alive, he must be good. This is confirmed later, when I am mildly alarmed to see him drive with his elbow, drinking water with his left hand and talking on the phone with his right. Not recommended at home!

Soon, we’re on NH44, a well-paved four-lane highway with even a divider to boot. I ask Farooque if the road is consistently good up to Srinagar. He laughs and says: “The road’s like this till Udhampur, for around 60-70 km. After that, the road gets bad and also quite dangerous. Even this road hasn’t been constructed by the sarkar. Private contractors have constructed roads from Jammu to Udhampur by cutting tunnels.”  It turns out he’s partly right and the road has indeed been constructed on a PPP model. But I am also able to sense how incompetent and apathetic the government is thought to be here.

The sun is blazing through the truck window, the hot breeze isn’t helping as much as I thought it would and I find myself daydreaming about the sylvan Kashmir of picture postcards. The Tawi river is our constant companion for quite some time, gleaming and twisting amid a boulder-strewn landscape of stark beauty, while monkeys chatter on the bare branches of trees.  These monkeys are remarkably acclimatised to the highway life. They even look either ways before crossing the road!

We pass diminutive temple-shrines of Sufi pir babas, reputed to grant every mannat a devotee asks for and a sombre reminder of Kashmir’s historical association with composite Sufi culture.

Nomadic lives

We must have travelled around 30 km from Jammu, trudging on inclines at 20 kmph and advancing on level ground at not more than 45 kmph, thanks to overloading, when I notice a group of lanky young men standing by the side of the road, thumbs up in the air, cloth bags lying by their side, hustling for a ride.

Farooque seems reluctant at first but eventually brings his truck down to a crawl and shouts out from the window. “2,500 rupaye lagenge,” he demands brusquely. I’m puzzled. I discover the said amount is for ferrying four sawaaris, cloth bags containing all their belongings as well as a bundle of wood, right up to Sopore, a distance of around 300 km.

While they negotiate the price, I find myself getting nervous about how the seven of us are going to fit inside the cramped truck cabin. Eventually, Farooque decides they’re not worth the trouble and I heave a sigh of relief.

But as we go on, it becomes an increasingly frequent sight to see people hunkering on both sides of the road and I begin to sense a pattern at work here. An Afghan-looking man donning a polka-dotted turban seated on his haunches along with a kid, his belongings scattered around, stares at us dolefully as we whoosh by. “Mahine bhar ka season hota hai garmiyon mein. Yeh sab Gujjar pahaadi ilaake ki taraf jaa rahe hain apni bhed bakri charane,” Farooque informs me.

I ruefully think about how Farooque is foregoing a decent sum of money, around ₹1,500, to be earned by ferrying them, on account of us occupying space in the cabin. I consider offering him some cash as compensation. Farooque declines it when I do later. “Aap hamare mehman hain,” he says firmly. I ponder on how the same hospitable treatment isn’t meted out to the Gujjars: markers of ingrained feelings of suspicion and hostility that settled folk harbour towards nomads.

These Gujjars and Bakarwals, comprise 30% of Jammu & Kashmir’s population. While some of them have settled down, many of them, especially the Bakarwals, still follow the age-old rite of biannual transhumance: the seasonal movement of entire flocks and families to lush sub-alpine and alpine pastures, often above the tree line, a practice known as behak.

Usually, several households move together in a group called kafila.Previously, the Gujjars used to carry their belongings on horseback, a mode of transportation that has been replaced by trucks now. By September, they move back to the plains to avoid freezing winters in the Vale. They are accompanied by fierce dogs that guard the flock from wild animals in the meadows.

Their traditional migratory route is almost parallel to the Jammu-Srinagar national highway, and the sight of flocks of bleating sheep and goats reluctantly walking on the highway, herded by two to three young boys armed with sturdy lathis, is extremely common. These herders typically choose to walk on the highways after dusk to avoid the searing heat; many of them take a shorter route using well-worn mountain trails.

After declining several prospective Gujjars and Bakarwals, Farooque finally slows down beside a man along with his aged mother, partly out of pity. The man, Salim, has beady eyes and is wearing a white kameez flecked with specks of dirt along with a shocking pink ring on his finger. Farooque demands ₹1,500. The man counters with an offer of ₹1,000. They haggle for a while and arrive at a price of ₹1,300. We help his elderly mother through the high door of the truck. The man throws his belongings on top of the truck and jumps in. He takes off his shoes — yes, most nomads wear shoes to help traverse tricky mountainous terrain –— and our nostrils are immediately assaulted by a vile stench. “Throw those socks out,” Farooque instructs the man. He obliges, but the smell persists. It is then I notice that his feet look diseased, like they’ve been immersed in hot water for eternity: wrinkled, swollen, bulbous feet with flies hovering near them.

His mother looks mortally ill, constantly coughing and wheezing, and Salim tells me that he’s taking her to a hospital near Srinagar. “Bhed bakri ka kaam karte hain. Hawa badal gayi hai, isiliye upar jaa rahe hain,” he says. He has a flock of around 200 goats and sheep which his brother is herding via mountain trails. He says his brother makes a living by selling wool and dairy products, also using forest produce to supplement their milk-heavy diet. “Pahadon mein jhuggi baand ke rehte hain,” he says. He converses with Farooque in Dogri, a dialect similar to Punjabi spoken in Jammu and surrounding districts, but also speaks Kashmiri and Urdu, along with his native Gojri language. Farooque himself is a Dogra Muslim from Rajouri district.

Lifestyle in peril

We stop around 45 km from Jammu when Farooque sees a few truckers, part of Farooque’s informal retinue. They have picked up a large party of Gujjars: a solitary goat and his kid, two elderly women, a couple and their little daughter, along with the husband’s cousin in his early 20s. They have cloth sacks bound by coir rope that contain utensils and enough apparatus to set up a tent. The Gujjars bring a goat and a kid — to keep the goat lactating — along with them to meet their dairy needs on the way to the pastures. It’s getting dark by now and I can see the lights of Vaishnodevi from where we are, shimmering on an otherwise bare mountain.

The other truckers, Liaqat and Javed, who are also brothers, are cleaning their trucks quite meticulously, splashing water on every visible part of the machine and scrubbing it with a cloth. Liaqat, a dark brooding hulk of a man standing tall at 6’4, has clearly had some bad experiences with women. His truck proclaims, “Take poison but not believe on girl”. He tells me that he usually doesn’t let Gujjars travel with them since they stink, but that he relented when he found that Javed had already made a commitment. Javed, a lanky man with a shapely beard and a ready smile, is charging ₹5,000 from the Gujjars for transportation, not an entirely insignificant amount.

They soon get down to prepare food on a gas stove, a simple meal of dal-chawal. All Kashmiri truck drivers carry food supplies with them on their journeys. Dhabas in Kashmir are a few and far in between.

Also, massive unpredictable traffic snarls that snake through the mountains are common because of the narrow rundown roads. In the winters, when the highway gets snowed over, it can take up to 10 days for truckers to cover 300 kms from Jammu to Srinagar. In such circumstances, lack of food supplies can very well mean starvation.

 After dinner, we drive for a while and stop some distance before Udhampur. The truckers decide that it’s time for a nap.  The plan is to join the convoy that’ll be flagged off from Udhampur around midnight. It’s getting a little chilly and everybody lies down on blankets by the side of the highway, waiting for the signoff.

It’s getting difficult to see anything. Mohammed Arub, the Gujjar cousin, approaches me and it’s only when he lights up a bidi do I see him. “I will probably never get to talk to someone educated like you again. So I have a request for you. Can you please get me a job somewhere? We cannot subsist only by herding sheeps and goats anymore,” he says. Gujjars mostly earn their living from sale of forest produce, dairy products and wool, which Arub says is becoming unsustainable. A study conducted by Dr Mohd. Tufail of Jawaharlal Nehru University on the economic characteristics of Gujjars and Bakarwals, observes: “They [Gujjars and Bakarwals] go to the forests for collecting fuel food, leaves for their animals, wild fruits for the household consumption and for market sale as well. One of the most important collections is of the medicinal herbs from the pasture lands like Buti Mali, which is one of the costliest herbs that is being sold in Srinagar.”

Arub tells me he’s studied till Class 8 and requests me to find some job for him. But when I ask him what kind of job he’s looking for, it turns out that he’s not really open to working outside J&K. “I know all the secret mountain trails, I can take you to places where you won’t even find a mobile signal. I can be a good guide here. I know all about the medicinal herbs, how to find food, and how to keep wild animals away. If you know any tourists or foreigners who are coming to Kashmir, I can help them,” he appeals. He even confides in me and tells me of an herb that grows in isolated areas — places where the sound of dogs, donkeys and girls can’t be heard -— the possession of which makes women desire the owner. His sustained enthusiastic pitch makes me feel quite useless at this point, I tell him I will try my best, and note down his phone number.

It is then I realise that modernity is taking a terrible toll on the traditional pastoral lifestyle of Gujjars and Bakarwals. Dr Tufil also notes, “We found that their major chunk of income comes from livestock earlier, but now it is shifted towards other categories such as land resources, labour works, tourism, business and government jobs.” Arub’s younger brother himself is studying in an engineering college in Jammu.

After some hours, Liaqat gets a call from a cousin who’s at the Udhampur naka informing them that the convoy has started moving. We get going and in the reshuffle, I find myself in Javed’s truck along with Arub, the Gujjar couple and their child.

Dilapidation blues

At dawn, we stop so the truckers can bathe underneath a waterfall and I find myself surrounded by sparkling streams, sheer cliffs and distant snow-capped peaks: a throwback to the Kashmir depicted in old Hindi movies, except that 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 floods of September 2014, or have always been like this. One can never be sure since the roads are consistently bad after Udhampur; loose rocks line the edges of the highway overlooking ravines, making it quite a nail-biting experience to travel.

We pause for a while after we find out that one of the trucks in our retinue is positioned precariously at the edge of a cliff after the driver dozed off at the wheel. Javed shouts at the driver to get his act together and carries on. Recently, the J&K state government has taken note of the dismal condition of roads and has earmarked ₹4,000 crore for the ‘state-wide road upgradation programme in the state for the current fiscal’. The Baramulla-Benihal railway line 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.

The J&K policemen dressed in light blue 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. Policemen try to stop our truck four times during the journey and Javed is successful in dodging them every time, turning his steering wheel abruptly to make stoppage impossible. Once, a policeman runs along beside our truck on a slight incline, waving a lathi at Javed. He sarcastically tells the police to take his money tomorrow, upon which the policeman moves to strike him with the lathi, which Javed deftly dodges.

But it’s not as if the truckers with me are the epitome of law-abiding citizens. Upon crossing Ramban, a small town by the Chenab river, we make a stop at a dhaba after Liaqat gets a call from a friend in the know; the deputy superintendent of police is lying in wait ahead, a man known to charge up to ₹2,000 from overloaded truckers.

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 salary of ₹5,000-8,000 per month. Clearly, lawlessness is embedded in the way our country functions. As usual, nobody is to blame; it’s the ‘system’.

The real Kashmir

Towards evening, we near the Jawahar tunnel, a 3 km long, single-lane tunnel after which “Asli Kashmir shuru hota hai,” in the words of Javed. “We have to drive at the same speed inside the tunnel. We can’t accelerate,” Javed tells me. Once we cross the tunnel, I see ‘STOP FOR CHECKING’ barricades every few metres ahead. Barbed wire makes a distinct appearance, often fencing tourist stop points idyllically named ‘Titanic View Point’.

After an hour, we stop at the Jammu-Kashmir tax collection naka. All our trucks are overloaded, which typically entails a hefty fine, a variable amount depending on how overloaded the truck is, but Liaqat says that a bribe of ₹900-1,000 to the clerk is sufficient to avoid any penalty, irrespective of the quantum of overloading. Clearly, the state is losing out on a lot of revenue. The only person Liaqat seems to be wary of is the vigilance officer. He tells me of a time when he was about to hand over his usual bribe to the clerk and the clerk refused to take it. Bewildered, he turned around, only to find the officer standing right behind him!

The Gujjars typically hitch with truckers only until after the Jawahar tunnel, at which point they disperse along mountain trails towards known pastures. Around 20 km after we cross the tunnel, Arub says that his point of departure is imminent and promises to ring me up. He takes his feet up on the seat, puts his arm around me affectionately and I notice that he’s not taken his shoes off. When I ask him the reason, he says, “So that my stinky socks don’t bother you people.” I laugh and promise to call him too. They disembark in a hurry and make their way on a dirt path leading off the highway, shadowy figures in the twilight.

We soon settle down for a sumptuous dinner of rajma-chawal. I have stopped caring how far Srinagar is anymore, stopped trying to catch a glimpse of milestones, most of which are terribly mutilated anyway. Liaqat tells me we’ll rest for the night and reach Srinagar the next afternoon. I was thinking we’d reach earlier, but I’m not disappointed. Instead, I submit myself to the moment; truck journeys are inexplicably improvisational in nature and I find myself giving in to the uncertainty. As I’m about to settle down for a good night’s sleep, I notice on the truck a self-contradictory statement that perfectly captures the spirit in which most of India’s hardy souls lead their lives: ‘Work like a coolie, live like a prince’. That’s not a bad way to live, I think to myself, and drift off to sleep, dreaming of Srinagar and asli Kashmir.

This is the second of a six-part series on the highway economy.

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