'White Lilies': Life and death on the mean roads of Delhi
Vidya Krishnan's account of grief and on what it means to confront the finality of death in her new book
In one of my interminable internal monologues, I told myself that it was, statistically, a matter of time for someone I loved to die on these streets. Everyone has a story about the ugliness we encounter on the streets, behind wheels. I have covered such stories, and I have driven past such accidents. Everyone in Delhi knows someone who died in a road accident. Like people in Paris are likely to know a baker and people in London are likely to know stock market analysts.
The story I carry in my bones is repeated over and over in this city. We are, after all, recklessly driving a tank on crowded streets, without seat belts and traffic laws. The government, while doing nothing at all about it, records approximately 3,00,000 deaths in road accidents annually. For context, that is around 50,000 more deaths than from tuberculosis, the deadliest infectious disease. Any other country would want to do something about it—not India, where we will never run out of people.
If you’ve lived in Delhi, you have for certain witnessed the macabre sight of a road accident: a shredded tyre, a mangled frame of steel, a bloody shoe, shattered glass. And if you truly belong to Delhi, you’ve simply driven past it without registering the violence because it has not happened to you. Not today, at least.
In the forty years that I have known Delhi, its population has doubled. The number of cars, however, has quadrupled. The city has more cars than Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai combined. This is likely because Delhi also has wider roads on which we can all be crammed together. All of us with bad tempers, abusive bosses, bad marriages and cheating partners take out our anger in the only place where no laws apply and we have absolute power: the mean roads of Delhi.
There is so much death on Delhi’s streets that everyone—courts, police, media, the rest of us—is unfazed when we run into it. We drive past it, moan about the traffic, in some cases steal from the dying person, but never pause, truly slow down enough to change or even to think of a different way to be. This is us. And our eyes have adjusted to how ugly that is.
My grief had broken down the act of driving into the several trivial, careless acts of brutality we commit behind the wheels. The casual violence of honking at a pedestrian or overtaking a smaller vehicle or speeding in a residential neighbourhood, all of it made me retch. I was suddenly faced with the reality of how ordinary my grief was; how ordinary it was to die on the roads of Delhi. It had been going on for a good while, without me, in something of a parallel world, where people died on the streets or a bus ran over a family. It meant nothing to me because it wasn’t someone I knew.
I used to be a careless, foul-mouthed driver who thought of pedestrians as a nuisance as I rushed to a job where, frankly, if I reached ten minutes late or even an hour late, no one would care. But I had to rush, rush, rush.
In Delhi, we are all in a hurry. Quick meals, on-the-go coffee, fleeting conversations. The speed in and of itself is the destination as we hurtle towards dead-end jobs and dead-end lives. We don’t slow down because, if we did, it would give us time to think about how we behave. How what we do affects people around us. That, for certain, would haunt us for the rest of our lives.
Grief makes you slow down, look at horrifying moments in slow motion. Perhaps for that reason, life as well as driving can get scary if you slow down long enough to really look at the people on the roads: the children begging at traffic signals, the constable inhaling poisonous fumes day in and day out. If you saw them as flesh and bone, if you started noticing the rich inner lives of people you’ve trained yourself to unsee, you might have to change. It might make you worry about pedestrians and cyclists. If you could really slow down and feel the weight of it all—bad driving, ghoulish behaviour, hurled abuses—you might collapse under ugliness of it all. It is easier to be blind.
After Ali died, it was difficult for me to unsee how driving works in India, which has one of the most brutal and hierarchical ways of organising traffic known to human society. To outsiders, the traffic may seem chaotic, but that’s the reductive view of someone who has not stewed for a lifetime in Delhi’s traffic. Those of us who’ve known only this know how far from chaos it really is. We know that Delhi’s traffic is, in fact, governed rigidly by the pettiness of power and is an intricate dance of dominance with hierarchy etched into every engine’s roar and every brake’s squeak. That unmissable element of class warfare is entirely representative of our lives lived off the road; no rules apply to the powerful, and the powerless aspire to breaking rules so they can get a small taste of power.
Excerpted from White Lilies, with permission from Westland.
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