Lucknow notes: In the streets of Lucknow

WARNING: The following write-up is based on real life stressful situations and hence contains content that some readers may find confusing. Reader discretion advised.

I have been to Lucknow earlier, more than once, but I had not noticed the traffic in the city. Earlier, it did not seem very different from the chaotic traffic that you find at most places in India. But this time, it seemed worse than chaotic.  It was like watching children run around in a Crèche. No signal or lanes; only random movement of vehicles. If someone feels like taking a left turn, they take just take it. There are no concepts like look left – look right, yield, traffic direction or even U turn. People just do what they want to and the responsibility to avoid accidents is left to others on the road.  My experiences on Lucknow roads during the final seven days of 2017 were a “phantasmagoria of fear, terror, grief, exultation, and finally breakdown” (the quoted piece is from the song Voyage 34 by Porcupine tree and phantasmagoria means a sequence of real or imaginary images like those seen in a dream). I am not sure if I can illustrate these feelings through words but I am sure these words are good enough to bring back memories many years from now.

The drive from airport to our destination went without incident till we were a circle (or chowk) away from the destination. The circle was choked ... Ah no! I should have said “the chowk was choked”; so here I go again. The chowk was choked to the brim. Vehicles were plying from every side to every other side of the circle. I am sure all of you know that a circle has infinite sides and that gives an idea about the complexity involved in crossing that circle. The taxi driver managed to get the car across the circle but found the left into the service road choked. He uttered a non-profane curse and twisted the steering wheel to the right. He went right around the circle and drove perpendicular to our path from the airport. This seems like one of those problems in velocity and vectors. Now, can you tell me what the driver’s next move would be to get me to the destination? What is it that you say? No idea, is it? Well, go right back and read from the beginning of this paragraph. Go on now and expect me to spoon feed you. So he went a few kilometres before he took that next move (which you should have found by now) and many minutes later we reached our destination which was right in front of our eyes many minutes earlier.

If you found the earlier paragraph confusing and practically unreadable, you have got an idea about how it feels to drive or be driven in Lucknow.  It is like a peaceful college graduate playing a video game in which he brutally kills a million “enemies” to reach level God. There is no reason or meaning to it. Why would a graduate want to kill a million people to reach a level called God? The traffic in Lucknow has a similar meaninglessness associated with it. Why are people stopping when the signal is green? Why are they zipping at great speeds when the signal is red? Why are they so intent on denting other’s vehicles? Don’t they realize their own vehicle will be dented? Why is the whole city swamped with metro construction? Only the side lanes are not affected by it all the main roads are affected by metro. What looked like a beautiful wide road a year back has become a single lane road to hell today! Why can’t people understand that service roads also have directions? You cannot just go in any direction in a service road.

Continuing the story on our journey from the airport, I forgot to mention that the destination I mentioned earlier was not our final destination. We were dropped midway by the taxi from the airport. At the midway point, we transferred ourselves and our luggage to a friend’s car and went to his home in his car. It was not as complex as the sentence sounds but yes, in involved a minimal amount of coordination. This friend of ours, a Lucknowi, is one of the most peaceful persons we know. For the past few years, we have been considering sending his name to the Nobel peace prize committee. We believe he is certainly as peaceful as Obama, if not more. This peaceful fellow gets into the driver’s seat and turns into a monster. He drives his car through every little space is available (and sometimes not available) on the road. He uses the car horn and brake to the same extent. Anyone trying to cross his path is playing with his/her life. When he starts moving the vehicle, it keeps moving. I wish the stereo in the car played “Nothing gonna stop us now” in a loop. The icing on the cake was to hear him yell at a motorcyclist attempting a death across his car. He yelled “suwar” at the motorcyclist. We could not believe he yelled “suwar”. What! Did I hear you say “So what! Its only suwar after all”. “Suwar” means pig, which for genetic reasons is considered an insult by humans. Usually, this word by itself is not a profanity. Let me illustrate - “YOU PIG!” I just called you a pig; are you offended? No, of course not! Some of you might even be amused by this. But I am not talking about me, a usually-normal-but-sometimes-evil person. I am talking about a person who is on par with Dalai Lama and Obama. Such a person uttering “suwar” is an event as disturbing as global warming.

I don’t think I will ever be able to drive through the streets and road of Lucknow. My initial thoughts were that there are no rules in Lucknow. But I was wrong. The traffic in Lucknow follows extremely complicated rules. I am not sure what these rules are. As a matter of fact I don’t think any human being, including the ones in Lucknow, is aware of it or its existence. The rules seem to be wired inside a Lucknowi’s subconscious and he just follows it without knowing what he/she is doing. I am sure aliens a few light years away are observing the traffic and coming up with simulation models and algorithms using a set of powerful super-computers. They would be publishing their findings during the next Intergalactic Mathematical computation and simulation analytics conference.

You might ask how I realized that rules exist and that it is all not chaos. Well, I am like that fellow Neo in the movie “Matrix”. I found a glitch in the algorithm; a blip in the everyday happenings. Let me explain. You are driving through a street and come to a main road. You want to take a right but you find a divider or median sitting right in the middle of the road. What will you do? First, you will curse. Next you will take a left. Then depending on your urgency level you will either drive half a kilometre or ten kilometres prior to finding a gap in the median. You will then take a U-turn and find yourself going in the right direction. This, I believe, is what most of us will do. What? What did you ask? Oh! You did not understand the “level of urgency” bit is it? Let me explain. Say, you have a wound on your finger which bleeds at a rate of one drop a minute. This is enough to get you worried about your future on this planet and you rush to the hospital. Let us say you run into this unwelcome median situation. You urgency to get to the hospital would ensure that the next gap in the median is 10 km away. On the other hand, let us say you are driving to a party with a set of friends who believe they are your friends due to the fact that you are embarrassed to tell them that you don’t think they are your friends. For you this is a terribly awkward situation.  Even the most interesting moments of this party would turn out be excruciatingly boring. You drive to this party hoping to be stuck in a political rally. But the roads are clear and you are ahead of schedule. At that moment, you come across this welcome median situation. Your hopes raise; you pray for the next gap to be a city away. You turn and find the gap in median less than half a kilometre away. The party is on baby! These illustrative examples should clarify the meaning of the phrase “level of urgency”.

Oh god! I am lost! Where was I? Ah! Yes, I remember, the median on the road situation. When a  Lucknowi run into this median, he/she does not turn left and search for gaps in medians to do U-turns. She/he turns right, right into the oncoming traffic and rides on the left edge of wrong side of the road right besides the median till you find a gap in the median and swerve your vehicle to the right side, which is the left side of the road. You might say this happens everywhere. No it doesn’t; not the way it is done in Lucknow. It is done with so much ease that I believe Lucknowi babies are born with this ability wired into their brains. My peaceful friend and a taxi driver did this manoeuvre with the same amount of ease. It had to come from someplace deep in their sub-consciousness. The chaos I perceive is only a cover up for some complex algorithm that is beyond my comprehension.

There were so many incidents on the roads that I have lost track of it. Each incident was more bewildering than the previous and the fact that my peaceful Lucknowi wheels was behind the wheel made the trauma worse. On the final day, hours prior to the start of our journey to the airport, our friend backed his vehicle into another person’s car. We heard the faint scrunch from the kiss between the cars. The two drivers shouted some mild obscenities from within their cages and went their respective ways. This is the glitch I was talking about. It’s not normal; any other city the two would have got out and indulged in verbal diarrhea for hours. But in Lucknow nothing happens. There is something amiss here.

I heard about incidents that proved were bad drivers from a lady whose husband declares her driving rash. At the mention of her rashness, her daughter quips “but her father was worse. He is the worst driver the world has seen. He drives at 100 km per hour within the city and at 150 outside. It was terrifying!” The lady waited patiently for her family to comment on the driving abilities of her family and her and then continued with her story. “There was a ladies night at the club. As I was driving through the parking, a Verna belonging to a Government official pulled into a vacant place right before my car. I let the car pass and once I was confident the car was parked properly, I continued. As I was crossing the parked Verna, its driver reversed it suddenly and rammed into the passenger side of my car. Just like that my two month old car had a dent. The driver turned out to be a lady who got out of the car, checked the cars with a lot of concern on her face and then gave me a sweet sorry. I was furious and had I not been in the club would have clubbed her. Later, I went in and gave her a piece of my mind. How can she drive a Government vehicle? Does the Government not give a driver? She has the nerve to break rules, ram into my brand new car and then say sorry. Surely, she will remember me every time she finds herself behind the steering wheel.”

I have always found taxi drivers to be a great source of information and during many of my travel talk about their lives and get their point of view about life in their respective city. During this trip, I found a gentlemanly sardar, Satnam, driving an Uber. He greeted each of us with a “Good evening” as soon as we got into his clean cab. We were impressed and decided to use his service for our trip to airport for the return trip. I found him to be a careful driver on the freeways but inside city he proved to be a complete Lucknowi. There were many instances when he took a right from the left edge of the road and in the process cut across all the traffic going straight. Curiously, the people going straight seem to be equipped with the premonition about this and to take care of the situation with minimal emotion.

One evening, the fog set in all of a sudden. We got into a shop and fifteen minutes later, when we got out, the whole place was swamped in dense fog. Visibility was poor and the street lamps accentuated the fog’s movement.  Satnam had just dropped a passenger when the fog settled down on Lucknow. According to him, sudden setting of fog is a sure reason for accidents. People drive at high speeds and are usually unable to reduce speeds at the time the fog sets in. This leads to serial accidents, especially on the highways. According to Satnam, there were a number of such cases on the highway leading to the airport that evening too. This was corroborated by our friend’s relations too.  As soon as, the fog set in Satnam decided to stop service and go home. He had another car with Ola. He called the driver of that car to check how he was doing and ask him to go home too. The driver responded that he was already home and there was nothing to worry. Satnam ended the narration by saying “Woh mere se samajdhar nikala” (“He turned to be smarter than I”).

Satnam seemed a happy man who was proud of his sons. He said that one of his sons, studying in an engineering college near Bangalore, had created an app that the police are using to track criminals. His other son studies hotel management. His dream is to sell his flat in Lucknow and setup a plush Dhaba on one of the properties he owns just outside Lucknow. He then talked about his travels once a year from Lucknow to his village in Punjab, 880 km away. He usually goes in the car. He stops at all the Gurudwaras en route. He mentioned that all big Gurudwaras have rooms and dormitories that are available at nearly no cost. These are clean and cosy places that anyone can keep for a night and if you want you can make a donation for the Gurudwara itself.

The roads are filled with interesting events and people. Most times we are so lost in our thoughts that we miss these events and people.