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Authors: Steve Coll

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Besides keeping an eye on me and translating, Vinod had another purpose in traveling to Calcutta. His regular job was as a repo man who chased down truck drivers who defaulted on loan payments. If a driver “absconded,” in the Indian phraseology, Vinod tracked him down and tried to get the truck back. Two absconders were believed to be hiding out somewhere in Calcutta and Vinod intended to find them. Normally a few threats and shoves were enough to get the job done, he said. But sometimes he had to go to court. He explained his craft, telling a story about a repo man he knew, whom I will refer to here as Rajiv. Once, traveling by rail to a provincial capital where two repossessed trucks were tied up in seemingly endless litigation, Rajiv found himself by chance in a first-class compartment with two senior judges from the relevant court. Sensing opportunity, he broke out a bottle of whiskey, poured generously, and then explained his legal predicament, gently asking the esteemed judges if they had any advice for a man in his position. The judges cited a few vague statutes. Later, asleep, Rajiv felt himself being shaken awake by one of them, who summoned him to the corridor. The judge handed Rajiv a slip of paper containing the name of an attorney in the provincial capital and told him to contact the lawyer. Within a week, he had funneled a fifty-thousand-rupee payment through the lawyer to the judge and he had his trucks.
 
While office mavens like Vinod handle the systemic bribes, Singh takes care of the petty cash out on the highway. Throughout any journey small bribes must be paid to uninitiated tax inspectors and policeman encountered at random. Singh said he works on an incentive-bonus plan. His regular monthly salary is two thousand rupees, or about seventy dollars at present exchange rates. But at the start of each trip, the boss hands over an estimated bribe allotment of about two hundred to three hundred rupees, depending on the going rates. Then, it is up to Singh to make it to Calcutta without spending more than this allotment on actual bribes. Whatever he doesn’t pay out to police and bureaucrats, he keeps. Some months, he said, he earns an additional one thousand rupees this way, plus more for fees charged to hitchhiking passengers and kickbacks from truck repairmen.
 
Shortly after midnight Singh paused to rest at a bustling
dhaba,
or truck stop, beside the moonlit highway. Santosh jumped down quickly and began to dig mud from the truck’s tires with a stick. Two dozen or so Tatas surrounded us in the pale light. Boy waiters wandered among the trucks carrying clear glasses filled with milky tea. Singh took a glass, stretched his legs, and pulled out a flask of whiskey.
 
“We can’t live without it,” he said, dumping the tea and filling his glass with malt. “The time is short—so I like to drink the whole bottle at once.”
 
As he did, I asked about life on the road. He said he spent much of it sitting in truck stops. “These places are run by the powerful people of the area—
goondas
[thugs]. You have to be a powerful goonda to handle these truck drivers. You will find drugs, liquor, opium. Everything is available.... Generally, everyone is available on the road. Calcutta is famous for prostitution. In Bengal [the state surrounding Calcutta], a beetle is more expensive than a prostitute. Drivers are homosexual. They enjoy each other, prostitutes, whiskey, drugs, and beer. Before I got married, I did the same thing.”
 
The difficulty, he continued, is that “there’s no respect from the police, no respect from the drivers. At least in Bengal they respect the driver and call him ‘sir.’ You can drive the whole state and pay one rupee. In other areas, even if the papers are all right, they will arrest me without a bribe. We pay on the spot, officially and unofficially, so I’ve never been arrested. But there are bandits, too, working with the police, and sometimes those people try to find a way to stop the truck. But I find a way out. The fleet owners and drivers travel in convoys in some areas. Bihar is notorious. There are night robbers. Even here. If we wanted to go past Etah tonight, we would have to drive in a convoy.”
 
Criminal gangs, some of whose leaders are prominent elected politicians, have risen in the last two decades to dominate commerce across northern India, as the Nehruvian state has faltered under bankruptcy and self-interested leadership. For ambitious members of lower and middle castes in the north, the gangs provide a rapid means of social and economic mobility. To achieve influence, the leaders drape themselves with the flags of the major political parties—the long-dominant Congress Party, the leftist Janata Dal, and the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party—and sometimes they put their electoral services up for bids. One of the most notorious mafias runs the coal fields. Others dominate road building and public housing construction. P. R. Rajgopal, a retired senior Indian police officer, cites an estimate that half of the senior officers of the public-sector trading companies in northern Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and most populous state, are involved in corruption. There are, of course, many Indian civil servants, perhaps even a majority, who struggle against great odds and temptations to remain honest—their moral courage is all the more remarkable because it goes unrewarded by the system. But there can be no doubt that corruption within the Indian bureaucracy is extensive, even systemic. Officers at nationalized banks routinely demand kickbacks of up to 25 percent before disbursing loans. Since, in the Nehruvian model, government dominates the economy, access to government office is the key to acquiring wealth. Bureaucrats, judges, elected politicians—nearly everybody has the chance to skim at least a little from the public till. It’s just that in the northern states, the skimmers tend to be better organized and better armed, which occasionally leads to conflicts between rival gangs battling for control of particular regions and industries. Kidnapping industrialists for ransom is a booming business these days. The man who was my travel agent in New Delhi for two years disappeared one afternoon after a squad of Uttar Pradesh goondas showed up in his office and asked for a meeting. A passerby found the man’s poisoned corpse dumped on a roadside near the Grand Trunk Road in Etah.
 
Singh runs this gauntlet in his Tata truck six times each month—five days down to Calcutta from Delhi, five days back, three round trips per month. No holidays, no sick pay, no overtime. Yet he feels in some ways a privileged man. “The road is my house,” he said that night in the truck cab, belting down his whiskey. And then, smiling and gesturing to the trucks parked around him in the dark: “We are the road kings.”
 
At dawn the countryside awoke. Bullock carts and horses rattled down the road. Goats wandered through the dirt courtyard where the trucks were parked. The air was heavy with mist, dung, and spice. Even before the sun struck the treetops, men and women trudged by the dozens from nearby villages to the surrounding fields and back, bent under the weight of wheat, sugar cane, and corn. Purple
bahya
flowers rose in a pond across the highway. Cranes and herons bathed among them.
 
Singh lay passed out on an exposed wooden cot, sedated by his whiskey. Beside him a Muslim truck driver filled bucket after bucket of water at a well, carried the buckets to his truck, hoisted them by rope to the top of his trailer, and dumped the water into the bin. I watched this for half an hour, sipping milky tea, before finally asking Vinod to inquire why the driver seemed so determined to fill his truck with water. The Muslim explained that he was carrying coal from Calcutta to Delhi and wanted to add some weight to his load before he arrived. He gets credit for the extra weight on delivery, he said. On the Grand Trunk Road, everybody has an angle.
 
Impudent goats woke Singh, who shouted abuse at Santosh, who scrambled to bring tea and hustled to wipe off the driver’s seat inside the truck. Soon we were rumbling east again. On a five-kilometer stretch, we honked our way past the following: one small boy hitchhiking, a bullock cart out of control, two cows running amok, bicyclists toting heavy burlap sacks, a horse-drawn rickshaw carrying a smartly dressed family, nine cows and two boys swimming in a muddy water hole, a bullock cart carrying a load of sticks, one behind it carrying a family, three men sleeping at the roadside with their heads protruding onto the asphalt, a herd of goats grazing on the road, a herd of cows crossing, dogs, pigs, bicycle rickshaws, and camels.
 
A police constable flagged us down, climbed in, and demanded a free ride to the office. As we rumbled along, I asked why all the cops we met wanted a handout. “It should not be that way,” he said sheepishly. “But they only pay us eight hundred rupees a month and we have to work twenty-four hours a day. That is not enough money.”
 
As we weaved ahead, Santosh leaned out of the cab, waving to other drivers to move aside. Sometimes they did. The policemen fell asleep and began to snore. When we reached his office, Santosh shook him awake and helped him down.
 
The partnership between Santosh and Singh was uneasy. Most of the drivers and assistants on the Grand Trunk Road are Sikhs or Muslims—outsiders to mainstream Indian society. But Santosh is a Hindu. He was raised in Bihar state, a poor region traversed by the highway, where banditry is endemic. Fleet owners sometimes hire Biharis as assistants in the hope that their local knowledge will lessen the risk of hijacking. For this, and his ability to pry mud from truck tires with a stick, Santosh earned about seven dollars per month. When we had parked that afternoon at a truck stop called Hotel the Great Papa, whose shabby sign bore the motto “Love Is Sweet Poison,” Santosh said that he was worried that his boss, whose friends and colleagues are mainly Sikhs, might never teach him how to drive the truck, and that he would be stuck as a poorly paid assistant for years to come. “My main motivation is to be a driver,” he said, glancing nervously at Singh, who was asleep on a cot below him. “If he won’t give me a chance, I will go someplace else. A good driver must have sympathy with his assistant, must give him a chance and teach him.”
 
Santosh, eighteen, also confessed to a series of romantic entanglements not unlike those of truck drivers celebrated in American country music. Two years ago his family arranged a marriage to a thirteen-year-old girl in his Bihar village. But he said he had not seen his wife since the wedding—she was too young to consummate the relationship. Meanwhile, Santosh said, he had been having an affair with a fourteen-year-old who had recently been forced into marriage with a fifty-five-year-old Calcutta man. He said he saw the girl on his three-day stopovers. “She needs me,” he remarked.
 
No matter what, he said, he would never return to village life or to the small farm tended by his family. With all its risks and hardships, the road was a better living. “Some day,” he mused, “I know that I will die in a truck.”
 
Shortly after Santosh made this forecast, a truck passed us going in the opposite direction. Its entire front end and windshield had been ripped away but for the driver’s seat and the steering column poking up from the engine. The truck seemed to be running fine, bound for New Delhi with a full load.
 
We slept in a roadside dhaba managed by a white-bearded Sikh who approached me as I lay stretched on a wooden cot to announce that he had just ingested a large amount of opium. Thereupon, he sat down and volunteered his life’s story in manic, singsong English, occasionally rising to careen around the dirt courtyard at points of emphasis. He had been a sailor on a Greek cargo ship and had traveled to Germany, Holland, and America, where he had been particularly impressed by New Orleans, Seattle, and the “great city” of Norwalk, Connecticut. “I loved the sea, but it brought me nothing—only this little hotel,” he shouted. If he liked the traveling life, why not become a truck driver? “I thought about becoming a driver, but now I would like to stay in one place. I have seen most of the world, but now I am in India. When in India, it is better not to think of other places.”
 
We bathed each morning at the outdoor public wells, stripped to our underwear beside the main highway, soaping ourselves into great froths of lather. Evidently short on entertainment, large crowds of local villagers gathered to watch the white man wash himself. There seemed to be much amusement over whether, in leaning awkwardly across the well on the slippery bricks, I would fall in. Fellow bathers gestured and offered suggestions, whether helpful or devious I could not make out since I lack fluent Hindi and it seemed a ridiculous time to insist on translation. Singh lounged on rope cots with other Sikh drivers and tried to explain me to them. “He is telling them that you say that in America they have trucks that make ours look like pullcarts,” Vinod reported. But I had said no such thing. “He is only trying to win influence with his friends,” Vinod said.
BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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