Streets of India

The trip to the Taj involved two five-hour bus rides between Delhi, where the planes were, and Agra, where the Taj is. The physical distance is 127 miles. We were lucky to make it in five hours.

First there are the legal barriers. Many roads in India are built by private industry, which then gets to collect tolls for a few decades until they make enough money. Road taxes are collected by each individual state as vehicles cross state borders. The booths that collect these fees are understaffed, and long lines are standard. Imagine traveling across the US if you had to stop and pay every time you entered a new state.

Then there are the other drivers, and I use the term loosely. Indian traffic follows the British paradigm of driving on the right, but only usually. Seeing someone driving against the stream of traffic is commonplace. I even saw a police car going the wrong way without warning lights or sirens. Trucks carrying farm produce are customarily so overloaded that they look like pumpkins and, also customarily, frequently overturn, stopping or impeding traffic. Motorcycles and motorbikes, sometimes carrying as many as five passengers, zip in and out of lanes with suicidal indifference, and many intersections and roundabouts are negotiated without the aid of signals or even signs.

Our way led through villages where the road, though paved, was so narrow we could look into the houses as we passed. Cows, water buffalos, pigs and goats lay beside the road or wandered almost within reach, not only in the countryside, but on the streets of towns we drove through. (Cows, by the way, are sacred, but water buffalos are not, even though water buffalo milk is richer than cow milk. Our guide was a fountain of unexpected information.)

One needs a driver's license to drive a car, truck, or bus (though our guide said the system is so corrupt that virtually anyone can get one), but anyone, licensed or not, can drive a tractor or other farm implement. We were driving along after nightfall at a fairly good clip when the driver of a tractor ahead of us simply stopped in the middle of the road and walked away. The tractor, of course, had no lights and, had it not been for the skill of our driver, we would have been in an ugly crash.

Many vehicles in India have no mirrors. It is considered the responsibility of someone who wants to pass another vehicle to announce his intention by honking his horn. Sometimes you even see "please honk" bumper stickers. It means, among other things, that you will not be able to nap during a long bus ride. There are,however, some very melodious and unusual honks to be heard.

Roadside trash is inescapable. Not just occasional discarded wrappers or out-of-date newspaper , but decaying muddy collections of plastic and metal so old it's impossible to tell what the pieces once were. Garbage is dumped everywhere and left to rot. There is no way around it: India is filthy with an ancient, ground-in griminess that defeats even the idea of clean.

Not that recycling is unknown. Cow patties are collected and dried to use for fuel -- we saw countless "haystacks" of dried dung everywhere, the raw materials carefully sculpted into discs the size and shape of Frisbees and left in the sun until dry enough to stack and store. And brick structures are disassembled once they can no longer be used and the bricks are resold by the roadside or trucked to a new building site.

I will close this by telling you about the Sanskrit on the walls between fields in the country. Everywhere on the low brick fences that separate farmers fields are painted what look like Sanskrit slogans. They are carefully executed with black shading to emphasize the elegant curves of the letters. I assumed they must be quotations from the Rigvedas or the Bhagavad Gita, put on the fences to ask the gods for good harvests. Not so. When I asked the guide about them, he smiled in embarrassment. Apparently they are ads for sexual products, the rough equivalent of email spam advertising non-prescription viagra. Some things are universal.