Ubhaykar - Truck de India!: a Htichhikers Guide to Hindustan

TRUCK DE INDIA!

Rajat Ubhaykar trained as an electrical engineer at IIT Kanpur, and went on to study journalism at the Asian College of Journalism after a stint in management consulting. A recipient of the PoleStar Award in 2016 for his reportage, his work has appeared in publications such as Mint, Outlook Business, Roads & Kingdoms, and Madras Courier. He lives in Mumbai, and spends his spare time reviewing books, collecting trivia, and exploring Indias archaeological sites. This is his first book.

TRUCK DE INDIA!

A Hitchhikers Guide to Hindustan

Rajat Ubhaykar

Dedicated to all the truck drivers who tolerated this nosy stranger in their midst

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

~ John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

We are great wrestlers

Each morning we gird up our loins

To fight against hunger and nakedness

Making and breaking plans is our training routine

Tactics we employ are deadly

We seal our lips when we should speak out

We die of thirst when we should quench it

We vow to continue the fight when we should ask for bread

We bring down great wrestlers

By forcing their necks under our knees

We live like donkeys toiling in the fields

Even then we are great wrestlers

Each morning we gird up our loins

~Lal Singh Dil

Satthar

(Translated by Trilok Chand Ghai)

Prologue

Youre planning to do what! exclaimed an old friend to me, his eyebrows disappearing into the lush crop of hair that fell on his forehead. Are you sure youve thought this through? I hadnt. It was the onset of summer. The sticky April heat was making itself at home in Mumbai, and we were lounging at our favourite dive bar with a couple of tall beers. I was about to set out on an ill-conceived journey, the mention of which evoked eager expressions of interest in polite social settings, and prompted incredulous snorts in more frank ones. My project, as I had taken to calling it, was to explore India, not by car, motorcycle, bus or train, the choice of saner people, but hitchhiking with those who call its crisscrossing highways homeIndias much maligned, or as my friend warned me, deviant truck drivers.

I cant say exactly where the idea came from. But I like to think it had been coiled up inside me since the time I first set my eyes on the open road, its boundless horizon representing a world of change from the boxed-in Mumbai of my childhood. The memory is still fresh in my mind. It was the late nineties. Summer vacations were on. My extended family was stuffed into two Tempo Traxthe men in the front, the women in the middle and us children bundled in the backheaded from Mumbai to our native village in coastal Karnataka. We were excited because it was the first time we were hiring a vehicle instead of taking the traina sign of encroaching prosperity.

It was an exhilarating, exhausting trip, frequently interrupted by urgent, strangled calls for the vehicle to be stopped so someone could throw up. Songs from Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai played on loopit was the only cassette we had carriedand the resulting trauma was such that I still feel vaguely seasick when I hear the song Pyaar Ki Kashti Mein.

Staring outside the window on that trip, the wind tousling my unruly hair, I remember being struck by a sort of epiphany, that India is bigger than the boundaries of my imagination, or anyones, for that matter. You didnt have to go to the scale of the cosmos to imagine something vastIndia was enough. Even as a child, it made me aware of the insignificance of my own little life, when confronted by the sight of Indias multitudes, its green fields skirting the highway, the pools of mirage water shimmering on the distant hot tar. I had fallen for India, heart, mind and soul.

It was also the first time I saw trucks in their natural habitat. I remember being fascinated by them their vivid colours, their discordant musical honks that rattled my eardrums, the lingering scent of diesel fumes they left in their wake, the cryptic personal quotes that I hastened to read before we overtook them. In my juvenile imagination, truckers werent deviant. They were free as the breeze, cruising over the cheek of our vast nation without a care in the world. Naturally, the very idea of their life and the possibility of someday travelling with them appealed to me as the stuff of high adventure.

It was to be over a decade before this subliminal desire was fulfilled. However, I cant say it was entirely out of choice. I had set out in 2009 on an impulsive trip from Kanpur to Shimla with a couple of college friends similarly thirsty for adolescent adventure. After a series of setbacks, we had found ourselves stranded on the highway twenty kilometres before Shimla. It was ten oclock in the night. The chill was creeping into our bones. Public transportation had shut down for the day. After multiple failed attempts at thumbing down vehicles, we had almost reconciled to walking all the way back when a kindly truck driver, not much older than us, took us in, and agreed to ferry us to the city.

He had Bollywood music from the nineties playing on the stereo. We didnt speak much during the brief journey, but after he dropped us, I fished out fifty rupees from my pocket as his well-deserved due. To my surprise, he firmly declined. Theres no need. It was on the way, he protested. It was the first time in my life someone had refused to accept money.

I was intrigued. I wanted to read more about the lives of truckers like him. Once I returned to Kanpur, I remember scouring the internet for a book about truck drivers, only to come up empty handed. I couldnt believe it. Considering the pivotal role they played in the nations economy, surprisingly little seemed to have been written about them. Perhaps, that was the moment the seed of writing a travelogue took root in my mind. As the saying goes, write the book you always wanted to read.

My resolve only strengthened over the next few years in college, which I spent listening to music by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers, among others, which romanticized the inherently free state of man. Songs like Free Bird, Truckin and Ramblin Man almost harkened me back to a primordial state of man, when nomads and pastoralists lorded over the planet, a time when it was natural to not be stuck in one place. I grew increasingly convinced that truckers constituted a distinct subculture, leading rugged lives in the shadow zones of our desk-bound civilization. I began to envision them as romantic figureslonesome cowboys astride their metallic steeds. My gestating project, however, was motivated not just by an angsty desire to escape the stifling constraints of careerist society, but by a craving for adventure, and curiosity about what lay in the vast world beyond the bubble I inhabited.

After graduating, I spent an unfulfilling year slumped at the desk of a consulting firm in Gurugram, crunching numbers on spreadsheets and changing font sizes in Powerpoint presentations, before eventually delving into journalism, perhaps propelled by this roving curiosity.

And a couple of years thereon, equipped with the basic tools of the journalistic trade, I felt I was ready. It had to be soon. A whimsical journey such as this is best undertaken in ones early 20s, when lifes crushing responsibilities havent acquired their full force.

There was no itinerary, and hardly any semblance of a route plan. There couldnt be. Goods transport in India is subject to a variety of dilatory influences, and I didnt want to spend half my time tele-coordinating with truck drivers in varyingly loud stages of transit. The logistics would be impossibly frustrating. It would kill all the fun. I knew that if I was to emerge from this trip with my sanity intact, it had to be spontaneous.