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| Camels on Road to Jaipur |
JAIPUR, INDIA From New Delhi to Jaipur is 250 kilometers, minimum of five hours. Narayan, my Brahmin driver, doesn’t speak English so I record my impressions in silence. It’s raining, sometimes in torrents. The traffic vacillates between a standstill and a crawl. The highway so flooded in places cars stall trapping the passengers inside and ahead a loaded bus is stalled. How are the people going to get out? The water must be up to their thighs. My driver seems to know the tricks of navigating to higher ground, aggressively honking his horn to eek out a passage through the drenched mopeds, pedestrians, autos, trucks, tuk tuks (motorized rickshaws), gaeys (holy cows), stray dogs, camels, and even an elephant or two. A woman in a sari, ankle deep in water, pounds on the side of the public bus in front of us, but is not admitted. We pass a progression of men carrying a rain soaked linen wrapped body on a slab. A scene I’ve witnessed several times before. Narayan slows to a near stop and signals the Hindu sign of respect. Suddenly we’re through this mass of humanity and speeding along an open freeway — billboards everywhere — most in English. Not for long though, we hit a muddy construction patch of the highway that we bump and slosh through. We encounter more odd shaped vehicles crammed with families, a bus so full that people sit on its roof. Here and there, busy open-air filthy ramshackle stores, restaurants, and workshops pop up along the side of the highway. The rain isn’t stopping the people from going about their business. We hit one of several toll plazas. The rain lets up and we start to make good progress.
