The (Himalayan) taxi-driver from Hell
Hiring a driver-and-car in India for a trip in the mountains is convenient but risky. Without a word-of-mouth recommendation you have to go with a gut-feel and a prayer; and hope-to-god that the driver holding you hostage isn’t a suicidal maniac.
My wild taxi-ride from Kathgodam railway station in the foothills of Himalayas to Delhi airport was a prime example of why the wise Indian traveller avoids the tourist-taxi. To be sure it was a extreme case; but I wager every traveller in India has at least one such story.
A cab ride wasn’t a part of my itinerary. But my train ticket remained wait-listed, the state bus looked uncomfortable and dingy, and I had no other alternative. Amongst the riff-raff drivers vying for my fare at the taxi-stand, one driver stood out. He was a clean-cut, twenty-seven year old man with pleasant demeanour and brimming in professional courtesy. Our car, a white Swift Dzire, was his personal vehicle.
Chitchatting about economy, tourism in Uttarakhand, the road conditions and the upcoming general elections, he appeared smart. He opened a taxi-agency four years ago after failing get a government job. He owned four cars. Other than his penchant for gabbing on his mobile while driving (against which I politely protested once or twice to no avail) he was a personable fellow. The ride was scenic, and the hours went by smoothly.
But everything changed once we reached the outskirts of Delhi.
As the curtains fell upon the day, all one could discern in the fading light of the setting sun was dust and fumes and concrete. There was flyover construction everywhere and bumper-to-bumper traffic as far as the eye could see. I wasn’t worried, my flight was still a good four hours away; but my driver was frantic. Having arranged a fare back to Haldwani from Delhi over the phone whilst driving me, he needed to rush to make that fare.
A few minutes later, a siren of an ambulance came from behind. And that’s when the drama began.
The ambulance, white in colour with a navy-blue cross emblazoned across its side-doors, cruised two lanes to our left. He slowed, swerved to a left and accelerated — indifferent to the irritated honking of neighbouring vehicles — to change lanes. Wash-rinse-repeat, and now we were bang behind the ambulance, tailgating it. The red-blue-white lights of ambulance flashed in his eyes. The sirens, the honks exterminated any traces of serenity of mountains that I experience for the past week.
“Sir,” he explained, “The ambulance must be going to AIIMS, following it we could reach the airport quick. Otherwise we will be stuck here for hours.”
A skilled driver — he braked, accelerated, swerved, clutched and changed gears blindingly fast. The pedals, the steering wheel were but extensions of his limbic system. Stopping, screeching, he let no-one come between him and the ambulance. Not even the pesky two-wheelers. Like the drafter behind the lead cyclist in a Tour-de-France peloton, we rode the wake behind the ambulance, to gain 20–40% speed over the rest of the traffic.
Peering through the tinted windows of ambulance’s backdoor, its interior alternating between the ghostly-orange light of the passing streetlamps and the darkness of the night, I could barely distinguish its five occupants. An old man lay on the stretcher with an IV drip attached to his veins. To his right was a couple: Further from the backdoor, was a scrawny middle-aged man; he wore a white kameez and dhoti and his head was wrapped in a turban; his long, bony, sun-dark face was adorned with a sharp nose, bushy eyebrows and a greying moustache that covered his upper lip. His wife wore a mint-coloured salwar kameez with silver zari patterns and a large leafy golden nose-ring that every now-and-then caught a ray of orange-streetlight — villagers. On the other side were two younger men in white shirts, perhaps medical attendants.
Cruising at thirty-ish kmph now, he cleared the first gridlock quickly, and let the ambulance go its way. I relaxed, I pulled the seat back, and hoped for a smooth-ride ahead.
But twenty minutes later we spotted the same ambulance come towards us. Driving against the traffic! Facing a bigger gridlock ahead and its critically-ill patient running out time, the ambulance turned back, to drive against the traffic. On the wrong side, to ferret another way out. My driver paused, his face hardened, and then he u-turned to follow the ambulance. The two of us retracing the path we had just crossed; the ambulance a shield-wall against thousands of headlights advancing ominously towards us.
He reflexes went overdrive. He drove in second gear. The engine roaring incessantly, he maintained less than a feet’s distance from the ambulance. He slammed the brakes. He hopped on the gas pedal. He swerved left. He swerved right. All in tandem with the ambulance.
Thirty minutes later we reached an opening in the highway. When the ambulance turned left, the gap between us grew larger and a two-wheeler tried to insert himself between us. He rolled down the window and shouted at them, gesticulating his hands like a madman, “Can’t you see, we are with the ambulance, let us pass, you bastards.” They backed down, and we resumed tailgating the ambulance, which had now u-turned back into the highway.
Now on the other side of the highway, moving towards Delhi but on the wrong side — with thousands of headlights barrelling down upon us — all I could do was clutch my head in despair and curse myself for not putting a stop to this when I could have. It was too late now. He was committed to this maniacal course of action. For what seemed like forever, he drove behind the ambulance against an incoming (much lighter) traffic on their way out of Delhi, and making good time compared to the traffic jam on the other side — road-laws abiding side of the highway.
“Don’t worry, sir, we will be getting off the highway and taking a shortcut through a village,” he said to me.
We reached the shortcut forty-five minutes later. When the ambulance turned into shoulder of the highway, it was stopped by the police. They questioned the ambulance for a minute and let them go. My driver was worried, “We are done for,” I thought. He turned to me and said, “We need to tell them that we are relatives of the patient. But if they see your suitcases in the back …”. The khaki-clad constables were on their motorcycles. There were two of them. I saw the driver went out to talk to them. I saw them look at me. I could see clearly from their expressions, that they did not believe us. How could they? The patient and family in the ambulance were villagers, and two of us were dressed like city-slickers in comparison. But to my great surprise, they let us off.
Before getting back to his seat, he went up to the ambulance and asked the driver to confirm that they were heading to AIIMS hospital. And then returned to his seat, ready to complete the journey. This display of brazen, barefaced shamelessness made me cringe. Through the shortcut, through a small town square, through the empty by-lanes and its broken tar roads, drafting behind the ambulance attached to its rear bumper like a suckerfish nuzzling itself under the fins of a shark to cross the ocean effortlessly — we bypassed that second gridlock and reached Delhi.
Just as we took the exit for the airport, the driver heard some rattling sounds. We caught a flat tire. Karma had struck back — it could have been worse: a head-on collision, a mowing down of a pedestrian, a night in jail for breaking the laws of the road and that of basic human decency — & although he fixed the flat tire in just fifteen minutes and dropped me off at the airport in time, perhaps (part of me certainly hoped) he missed that return fare back to Kathgodam.
