We took a hair-raising taxi ride into Bombay. The rush-hour traffic was a nightmare, - not from dementia, as in Tokyo, nor from exhuberance, as in Rome; not from malice, as in Paris; it is a chaos rooted in years of practised confusion, absent-mindedness, selfishness, inertia, and an incomplete understanding of mechanics. There are no discernable rules. The little Fiat cabs are old, but not as old as they appear; a few years of the Bombay free-for all have aged them beyond their years. Our taxi's bumpers were tied on with wire; the steering wheel had a play of about fifty degrees. It also appeared to be firing on about one and a half cylinders, and the driver had difficulty in maintaining any revolutions. Consequently, when he achieved any momentum he was reluctant to lose it, so that we would always swerve rather than brake, with a steady obligato on the horn.
Everything went too fast for safety, too slow for speed. The pedestrians abounded, swarming like white butterflies in vague suicidal trances, either in violent conversation or in mindless reverie. A place of especial peril was the zebra crossing. On approaching one of these sanctuaries, all drivers crowded on an extra spurt of speed and charged accross horns blaring.
Some miles outside Ajmer the road divided: two equal trails forked left and right. The sign: 'To Jodhpur' was clean and newly painted, with two arrows pointing impartially in both directions. Indian sign painters do not presume to make decisions for other people. A man herding goats by the roadside said that in all probablility the right fork led to Jodhpur, but he had no powerful conviction about it; we suspected he'd never given the matter any serious thought.
National Highways are good enough roads, yet everyone who lives along the route still thinks of it as a country lane, a personal convenience, a useful surface on which to doze by day, to spread the drying grain, to perambulate the flocks, to hold wedding feasts and family celebrations. The solitary cyclist wobbling dreamily on the crown of the road four hundred yards ahead, aroused by the horn, will falter and swerve for half a minute, undecided until the last second whether to swerve wildly to left or the right. Two truck drivers rattling along in opposite directions, will recognise each other as they pass and brake grindingly side by side, wholly blocking the highway, while they shrill out their greetings, exchanging reminiscences until they reluctantly go their ways, releasing the road at last. But during that pause the road, apparently running through an uninhabited desert, has become miraculously peopled with villagers, crowding round the car to chat, to sell nuts or mangoes, to ask you where you are from and where you are going, to beg or to stare.
Mr Singh drove us well, with a practised indifference to all around him, good or bad. Far ahead of of the car would appear a small crowd of peasant women spread all over the highway. Mr Singh would lean on the horn. Nobody would pay the least attention. The car hurtled on, the crowd would scatter casually, almost absent mindedly. Refusing to slow down in the least we would miss several of them by milimetres, without for a moment interupting anyones' conversation.
Once we stopped at a roadside teahouse contrived from odd boards and sheets of galvanised steel. Half a dozen country customers sat watchfully around; our arrival stopped their conversation. After a while I had a feeling like that of Kafka's K in The Castle, surrounded by peasants in the anonymous Inn.