Dylan and Jasper share a morning commute. I join them, of course, so I don’t feel left out, and because at 19 months old, Jasper isn’t quite at the point where he can march himself into school on his own yet. We set off at 8.30am from IndiaBulls, drive the ten minutes to Dylan’s construction site where the boys do their goodbye fist-bump and baba disappears through the gap in the hoarding. Jasper comments on all the blellas carried and ‘ats worn by the streams of mans walking down the same road to their own places of work, and we set off towards his school, The Mango Tree in time for his 9am class. Jasper’s favourite bit of the journey is when we hit roadworks, which we do every few hundred metres. He makes sure I am having as much fun as he is, by shouting “mama, mama” at me as he rocks and rolls from side to side with every pothole we hit. He giggles like a maniac every time the car bumps and then eyeballs me with an anticipatory smile on his face when we hit a patch of properly surfaced road. Most of the roadworks are the result of construction of the new, underground Mumbai Metro which is due to be operational in part, at least, in early 2024, but some of it is just general wear and tear from what can only be described as an erratic driving culture. I am glad Jasper enjoys it so much, and that he’s unaware that in other parts of the world, hitting a pothole at just the wrong angle and the wrong time wouldn’t result in you taking the wing mirror off the car driving centimetres away from you. But I suppose it wouldn’t be India if you couldn’t reach out and touch someone inside the car next to you.
There are rules for driving here, because without rules there wouldn’t be fines and without fines, the traffic police would be out of pocket. I think I have worked out how the road markings work: if there is one line down the middle of the road, this means 3 lanes of cars (one in each space, and one cruising down the middle of the line). If there are 2 lines down the road, this can accommodate 5 lanes of cars. The winner seems to be the person who manages to switch lanes the most times in a 100 metre stretch. Fortunately, our driver doesn’t seem to have a competitive bone in his body, and we mostly stick to one, slow lane, taking in all the best potholes.
A big chunk of our drive to work/ school/ home again is lined with beautiful street art, particularly along Dr Annie Besant Road, where there are huge, bright murals that were painted as one of a number of public art initiatives designed to uplift the streets of Mumbai. There seems to have been a flurry of ‘how do we improve the city streets’ actions taken in Mumbai in recent months. There is the #nohonkday on Wednesdays, which aims and fails to encourage people to reduce noise pollution. There are also purportedly ‘Sunday Streets’ areas where cars are banned from driving on Sunday mornings in order to encourage less polluting activities such as ‘cycling, walking, skating and yoga’. I am still unclear as to how one ‘yogas’ themselves from A to B, but I suppose if you just kept adjusting your downward dog in the same direction you’d make some progress. My favourite is the news I have found around how many drivers have been caught and penalised for ‘wrong side driving’. Giving it a catchy name makes it sound like a hobby.
“What do you do in your spare time?”
“Oh, I’m like anyone. I like honking, painting and wrong-side-driving.”
Since last week, all the traffic police seem to have been issued with brand new waterproofs, in vibrant yellow, making them look very much like fishermen, with pavements as pontoons, as they look out over the flooded roads playing I Spy People Doing Naughty Things. They are instructed to clamp (geddit?) down on illegal parking in the middle of junctions, motorbike riders without helmets (including the pillion passenger, following introduction of a new rule that only came in a few weeks ago), and of course, wrong-side-driving. I don’t have anything to benchmark against, but my assumption is that the traffic in Mumbai has dramatically improved in recent months or years. It’s either that or we underestimated just how stagnant the Yangon traffic was, because we were definitely warned about traffic more than is merited by what we’ve so far seen. I have yet to be caught in full gridlock here, unlike in Yangon where the block on which my office was located would often turn into a snake eating its own tail, until someone would finally accept defeat and break the chain by driving off to find an alternate route.
Admittedly, we don’t do all that much driving, having structured our life carefully to avoid it, and given that it’s really, really rainy at the moment. We just have to hope that they don’t fix all the potholes at the end of this monsoon season or Jasper will have a very disappointing ride to school next term.
Murals on Dr Annie Besant Road.
The widely ignored no honk day initiative.
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