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Authors: Vanessa Able
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and the car in front, now I was driving with my nose practically buried in someone elseâs exhaust pipe. Instead of heeding lights and signs, here I looked to other vehicles for tips on how to proceed.
It wasnât all bad, though: Abhilasha and I had reached Pune by what is generally thought of as the best road in India. The Yashwantrao Chavan Expressway (named after the first chief minister of Maharashtra and former deputy prime minister) is a six-lane motorway with all the trimmings Iâd expect of any major artery in the world: toll booths, refreshment stops, fast and slow lanes, a smooth surface, and even a neatly manicured median. The first part of our cruise to Pune passed with littleincident, feeling fairly uneventful after the previous dayâs assault course to Nagaon. For a brief moment, I almost found myself yearning for a rebound into the rush of chaos and I noticed the adventurerâblogger in me had deflated a little. What if all roads in India were more like this and less like the NH66 down to Alibag? What would I have to write about in my blog if driving around India only involved cruising on tranquil expressways and stopping for the odd sandwich or Styrofoam cup of chai?
No sooner had I had that unsavoury thought than fate saw fit to throw subject matter at me in the form of an obstacle. I had been overtaking a truck in the fast lane, accumulating speed on a temporarily flat stretch of road that marked a break between hills. Notching up the revs, I was parallel to the truckâs front mirror when I became vaguely aware of what looked like an object in the fast lane â our lane â up ahead. At first, I didnât believe my eyes, thinking it was a mirage, but when it was still there another split second and twenty metres later, I concluded there was something in the road that Abhilasha and I were hurtling towards at high velocity. Immediate action was required. Swerving was not an option, as the truck I was overtaking was right beside me to my left, so I hit the brakes, hard. In the same moment as the truck passed me, I hauled the wheel to the left and got into the lane behind him, missing the thing ahead of me by inches.
âHoly mother of god!â I managed to spit out after the initial shock of what had just occurred sank into my rational brain. That had been extremely and most unacceptably close: hitting a large, stationary object at 80 kmph would certainly have ended in tears. And probably blood and mangled yellow metal. But we were alive and well, and as my heart regained a steady beat and the gut gremlins returned to their lair, images of the thing flashed back. I had initially perceived it from a distance as a large, rectangular piece of metal, and had assumed it wasdebris, perhaps something that had fallen off the back of a lorry or a garbage truck and missed by the highway maintenance crew. But on getting a better look as I screeched past, tyres burning a rubber stench into the tarmac, I realized it was in fact a sign. And not only was it a sign, it was also a sign that had been very carefully and deliberately placed in the fast lane of an expressway. And, to pop the glacé cherry atop the whipped cream tower of irony, the sign read âGo Slowâ.
I laughed out loud: I had nearly been killed by a road sign that had been put there in earnest to try to save my life. A few dozen metres down the road, a group of workers were digging up something on the central reservation, and I deduced that the sign had been put there for their benefit, most likely by their own hands. Though the well-meaning nature of their misguided intentions was plain to see, I nevertheless embarked on a ten-minute cathartic monologue, lecturing the men on why using traffic cones to gradually reduce and close off a lane was accepted and expedient practice around the world.
The expressway incident hardened my conviction that my arrival in Pune, Maharashtraâs second-largest city lying 150
It wasnât all bad, though: Abhilasha and I had reached Pune by what is generally thought of as the best road in India. The Yashwantrao Chavan Expressway (named after the first chief minister of Maharashtra and former deputy prime minister) is a six-lane motorway with all the trimmings Iâd expect of any major artery in the world: toll booths, refreshment stops, fast and slow lanes, a smooth surface, and even a neatly manicured median. The first part of our cruise to Pune passed with littleincident, feeling fairly uneventful after the previous dayâs assault course to Nagaon. For a brief moment, I almost found myself yearning for a rebound into the rush of chaos and I noticed the adventurerâblogger in me had deflated a little. What if all roads in India were more like this and less like the NH66 down to Alibag? What would I have to write about in my blog if driving around India only involved cruising on tranquil expressways and stopping for the odd sandwich or Styrofoam cup of chai?
No sooner had I had that unsavoury thought than fate saw fit to throw subject matter at me in the form of an obstacle. I had been overtaking a truck in the fast lane, accumulating speed on a temporarily flat stretch of road that marked a break between hills. Notching up the revs, I was parallel to the truckâs front mirror when I became vaguely aware of what looked like an object in the fast lane â our lane â up ahead. At first, I didnât believe my eyes, thinking it was a mirage, but when it was still there another split second and twenty metres later, I concluded there was something in the road that Abhilasha and I were hurtling towards at high velocity. Immediate action was required. Swerving was not an option, as the truck I was overtaking was right beside me to my left, so I hit the brakes, hard. In the same moment as the truck passed me, I hauled the wheel to the left and got into the lane behind him, missing the thing ahead of me by inches.
âHoly mother of god!â I managed to spit out after the initial shock of what had just occurred sank into my rational brain. That had been extremely and most unacceptably close: hitting a large, stationary object at 80 kmph would certainly have ended in tears. And probably blood and mangled yellow metal. But we were alive and well, and as my heart regained a steady beat and the gut gremlins returned to their lair, images of the thing flashed back. I had initially perceived it from a distance as a large, rectangular piece of metal, and had assumed it wasdebris, perhaps something that had fallen off the back of a lorry or a garbage truck and missed by the highway maintenance crew. But on getting a better look as I screeched past, tyres burning a rubber stench into the tarmac, I realized it was in fact a sign. And not only was it a sign, it was also a sign that had been very carefully and deliberately placed in the fast lane of an expressway. And, to pop the glacé cherry atop the whipped cream tower of irony, the sign read âGo Slowâ.
I laughed out loud: I had nearly been killed by a road sign that had been put there in earnest to try to save my life. A few dozen metres down the road, a group of workers were digging up something on the central reservation, and I deduced that the sign had been put there for their benefit, most likely by their own hands. Though the well-meaning nature of their misguided intentions was plain to see, I nevertheless embarked on a ten-minute cathartic monologue, lecturing the men on why using traffic cones to gradually reduce and close off a lane was accepted and expedient practice around the world.
The expressway incident hardened my conviction that my arrival in Pune, Maharashtraâs second-largest city lying 150
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