I came within a truck’s width of dying on the highway last week, and the strangest part was how ordinary the whole thing felt, because the truck was sitting in the fast lane, doing forty, with its tail lights off, on a moonless stretch where it was essentially a building parked across the road, and I only discovered it when my headlights did. Damn! I flashed and honked and swung left with my heart somewhere near my throat, and the truck held its line like nothing had happened, which is the part that stays with me, the complete absence of awareness that it had just been a participant in somebody’s almost death. This is driving in India. I have been doing it for years, and I need to write about it before I fully make my peace with it. I am not 😬 a very good driver myself, so this is a confession and not a lecture.

Lane markings are one of humanity’s cheapest inventions and also one of its most misunderstood, because paint on tarmac is a language, a continuous broadcast telling every driver where to be based on how fast they intend to move. We drive on the left in India, which means the left lane belongs to the slow and the heavy, the middle lane is for cruising, and the rightmost lane is the overtaking lane, the fast lane, reserved for passing. The whole system sorts vehicles by speed so that nobody ever has to brake for somebody else’s destination, and it costs nothing to run, and it demands exactly one habit from every person on the road, which is to keep left unless you are passing. When everyone follows it a road moves like blood through an artery, and when nobody follows it the sorting collapses and the road becomes an argument, and on Indian roads the argument is settled by whoever owns the biggest vehicle, which is how we ended up with a country where the fast lane is mostly a truck parking lot moving at the speed of suspicion. Are we comfortable letting the fastest lane belong to the slowest vehicle? I don’t think so!

Actually, before anyone reaches for the class explanation, let me reach for it first, because I know the lives truck drivers live, the trip based pay and the eighteen hour shifts and the sleep debt and the schooling that ended early, the way the entire logistics economy leans on their exhaustion, and I hold no grudge against the men inside those cabs. None of it changes the arithmetic though, because the fast lane is the one place the slowest thing on the road cannot be, and class has no vote in physics. A car doing a hundred meeting a truck doing forty in the overtaking lane produces a wall of braking that ripples backward for kilometers and turns one man’s route into two thousand people’s delay. In plain English; one slow truck in the fast lane turns a thousand evenings into one long brake light. Crawling slowly in the fast lane is a bully tactic whether the bully knows he is bullying or not, and a truck running dark at night is the same tactic with the lights off, a moving wall that everyone else must detect and dodge and absorb. Common sense would put the slowest vehicle in the slowest lane and keep the fast lane for passing, and common sense is free, which is what makes its absence here so expensive.

The newest menace on this menu is a vehicle class the state built an escape hatch for. The law caps low powered electric vehicles at 25 kilometers per hour, and the smallest of them, is exempt from registration altogether and treated like a bicycle, no plate, no license, no insurance, nothing to trace, and the e-rickshaws that are supposed to carry green plates mostly run without them anyway. So they cruise at 25 in lanes built for 60, or they get their controllers tweaked past 40 where no camera can identify them (or atleast none that I have seen), and when one of them cuts across three lanes of live traffic no challan can find the rider and no registration can be pulled up, because you cannot fine a vehicle that officially does not exist, and so no case can actually be filed. Picture a two lane road with three of them riding abreast and you have the whole country in one image, the entire road consumed by its slowest movers, and a kilometer of cars stacked behind them going nowhere, while the traffic cop at the intersection watches it all the way a man watches weather.

The police are bystanders in this circus and I do not say that lightly, because most times enforcement in India happens in bursts, a week of checks after a minister says something and then back to zero, and every day of zero teaches every driver on the road that the rules are decorative. The Ministry of Road Transport’s own report for 2023 counted 4.8 lakh road accidents and 1.72 lakh deaths, which is twenty people every hour paying with their lives for how this country drives, and the ministry listed overspeeding as the top killer with wrong side driving and lane indiscipline right behind it. Thats the government publishing its own report card on our collective refusal to read paint. Degrees change nothing here either, because I have watched postgraduates in German sedans treat lane markings as abstract art, while I have watched unlettered cab drivers merge with surgical courtesy, so the road simply rewards nerve, the willingness to take the most and yield the least, and the biggest vehicle wins until the day it does not come home.

Here is the part I keep circling back to, that a country is a promise between strangers, and the road is where we test that promise every single day at speed, because brotherhood is talked about in temples and flag speeches, and it really lives in the two seconds you spend checking your mirror before you change lanes. Feeling the pain of the other is the entire syllabus, because the truck driver who feels the two hundred cars stacking behind him moves left, and the e-rickshaw rider who feels the bus bearing down on him hugs the edge, and the sedan driver who feels a pedestrian’s terror lifts his foot. And a country where nobody feels anybody’s pain cannot be fixed by expressways because the expressways just carry the indifference at higher speeds. Those of us who follow the rules toil day in and day night and pay for the ones who refuse to, in hours, in fuel, in blood pressure, and sometimes in blood, while the rule breakers lean on their horns and shout their way through our patience. I do not know when this changes, maybe when enforcement stops being a news cycle, maybe when a generation grows up watching its parents use the indicator as something other than a rumor, and until then I will keep driving like the paint means something, alone in my lane, flashing my lights at dark trucks, hoping the language catches on.

Tweet to me about the last time a stranger on the road stole an hour from you. I am @troysk704.