Road rules! More like suggestions, lose guidelines, an Indian head wobble to bureaucracy and order. Riding Indian roads has a poetry, an ebb and flow. It can offer up heart stopping moments and times of utter bliss and freedom.
The roads of India range from wide, smooth super highways, through to collapse backwater roads that leave you questioning if you should have reset your GPS. Everything in between includes unfinished by-passes that hang over towns like fallen alien craft awaiting the right pockets to be lined or re lined.
To the sweetest hard-surface tracks traversing salt lakes stretching to infinity with a white temple as you beacon in the distance.
What I love most though is the absolute demand riding in India requires of you to get out of your head, step away from the lazy expectation and assumption that rules and regulations create. A kind of entitlement that actually separates from others and can bring about the most self-absorbed road rage because the rules tell you, you are right! To get out of that ego space and into your intuitive heart. To ride with an awareness, a willingness to include everyone around you and really listen with all your senses.
When crossing 2 lanes and you note the slightest turn of the opposing scooter riders’ bars, as he has just anticipated to go around you. But in milli seconds, watching to see if you have agreed and understood together.
Waiting at a junction and you end up chatting with the Auto beside you, or when a young lad rides up beside and asks the ubiquitous question; ‘Where are you from?’
All along you are in something bigger than you and it can be a joy. But my joy could appear another’s nightmare if it is being witnessed through the eyes of worry or fear. India asks you to leave that behind, or at least to acknowledge it, take a big breath and join in!
In the thousands of kms I have ridden in India, solo, but more often two up with Yasmeen. I have only had one fall. On a soft sand track at dusk, a large Mahindra Bolero truck ploughed towards us with lights on full. I pulled up to the side of the narrow track only to be confronted by a high sand edge. With low speed and minimal movability, we experienced front wheel wash out and hit the sand. A soft landing, but a hard exhaust trapped Yasmeen’s ankle.
But here is the miracle that India offers up, as the truck shovelled on past. Either ignoring us or if I am feeling generous, never noticing in the first place. The first person to stop on a wee Honda 110cc that are everywhere in the rural lands of India. Was not just a local villager trying to be helpful. No, the first person to pull up beside us, was the local doctor who had just come off duty.
He kicked his side stand, ignored my embarrassed dismissal of his care and knelt down beside Yasmeen to check her with a thoughtfulness and kindness that humbled me.
These are the roads of India, yes there can be accidents, yes there are more obstacles and animals to dodge, avoid and slalom around then you would count on a corporate dairy farm in New Zealand.
But she gifts you a sense of peace, clarity and presence that you may be lucky to find on day 10 of a mindfulness meditation course.
She replies to any distress with a helpfulness and care bordering on miraculous and these roads will ask you to question carefully. Do we really do better under more rules, or do the majority of human beings as a whole, actually want to get about without causing drama to others?
Have we become a better people by following rules created by others?
Or have we lost how the road once belonged to everyone and in knowing this reminds us to that we are part of the whole and not separate to it.
Perhaps if we all allowed ourselves to live with our intuitive radar on, our reactions and outrage securely packed in the deepest part of our pannier. And let that secret smile reach our mouth that comes from riding with an open heart. The world may turn a little more smoothly.
