Bicycle hireLoose on the streets of Thanjavur

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

After a thali at the aptly-named Central Cafe I stroll through the city streets of Thanjavur, marvelling at the controlled chaos. Earlier on in my travels, at Puri, I had thought about hiring a bicycle; I had demurred, chosen to walk instead, feeling that life was too precious. I am more emboldened today. As I pass a stall hiring bicycles, I decide the time is ripe for taking my life in my own hands.

The cost is reasonable. I choose a bike with sturdy brakes, as this, I feel, is going to be the most important feature.

I start off slowly. I have no destination in mind. I decide to head south.

At a junction at the end of South Main Road I come across a traffic policeman who is gamely trying to orchestrate proceedings. He makes gestures which don't seem to make sense but which everybody, apparently, understands. Not wanting to misinterpret him I stay close to another cyclist and survive my first junction. I keep going, turning next down Ghandhiji Road. All is well until an autorickshaw swerves out from behind a bus, angles in front of me, churning up dust and forcing me to jam on the brakes. This is the wrong thing to do. Another cyclist nearly rear-ends me. He curses me as he passes. Stopping, as I should have known, is the most confusing action and the ultimate last resort. The most astonishing thing about the traffic on the streets of India is its fluidity. Driving becomes a contest, perpetual motion being the name of the game. Speed should be as great as possible while brakes should be used sparingly, tickled rather than applied.

As I continue on I witness many erratic swerves like the one that caused me to stop; but rather than halting, the surrounding traffic absorbs the motion, like a stone thrown into a pond, with an ever-diminishing cascade of swerves until all is right again. I see cyclists, guilty of rash manoeuvres, who induce a complicity of rashness in the traffic bearing down on them. And the traffic keeps moving. No harm is done.

Do drivers in India, I find myself wondering, have to pass a test before they are allowed to menace the roads? And is there a highway code or is it just common sense that everyone is flagrantly disregarding? But there is at least one rule here: the rule that the bigger you are, the more right of way you have. Might is most assuredly right on India's streets. Buses and tankers are at the top of the food chain, trucks just below them, Ambassador Novas next in line, then autorickshaws, cycle-rickshaws, bicycles, bullock-drawn carts (camel-drawn in Gujarat and Rajasthan), and, lastly and leastly, the pedestrians, who are obliged to use the roads due to a general lack of pavements - what scraps of roadside paths that exist in the country tend to be occupied by hawkers and their wares.

Previously I had thought of walking as a brazen exercise. Taking the saddle has given me a new perspective. How pitiful the pedestrians look now, skulking along just out of the gutters, cowering to the very edge when a bus or truck blares its horn and roars past. The only things lower than the pedestrians are the animals of the streets, the dogs, hogs, fowl, stray goats. The sacred cows are the one thing not to fit into this well-ordered scheme of things, occupying a grey area in between: because while, wherever they go, they have right of way, immune from harm - no one, naturally, will risk bruising one and so harming his karma - they are constantly subjected to the ringing of bells, the tooting of horns, the blare of hooters, telling the cows the road is not theirs, they have no status on it, and hut, get out of the damn way (hut, Hindi for "go", "clear off", is also very useful for warding off the unwanted attentions of rickshaw wallahs and other pesky importunists).

I spend two hours cruising the streets, heading further south, over the canal, past small temples and schools and hospitals, waving at schoolchildren who shout out hellos, enjoying my brief elevation, one place higher on the highway food chain. Despite several close calls, I decide I have enjoyed the experience. But for most of my return to the bicycle stall, I walk, pushing the bike beside me. The balminess of the day and my youth fill me with an unshakable will to live. I decide that, for the foreseeable future, mooching along at the edge of the roadside will be good enough for me.