Right of Way

It's the antique car show in Frostburg this weekend, and a lot of fancy cars are driving by with people having fun in them. And I just heard a horn beep.

In India, many different kinds of horns punctuate every trip to anywhere. On the open road, between cities, the most common are lorry horns, loud shrill blasts that rival the roaring of the engines. They tell villagers they're approaching, warn animals and small children off the road. Lorries also use their horns at curves in the road, of which there are many in the mountains, to tell other drivers to find a spot to get out of the way. At night, you're supposed to dip your lights, but more likely you'll get a horn blared instead. The lorries get the right of way over everyone else, and their horns say so.

In the old days, the lorries all had air horns, with the rubber air bulb within easy reach of the drivers hand so he could give a quick honk-a whenever he needed to. Nowadays, they're mostly electric.

The long distance busses blast their horns in the same way, but many busses have unique musical sequences, very loud. If you're riding the bus you need to get to know your bus horn, because when the driver finishes his lunch you need to be back in your seat when he blows the horn, or have a very good advocate, so you won't be waiting for the next bus. If a bus meets a lorry at a curve, the bus has to move out of the way.

As you get closer to the city, of course the volume increases, by number and by frequency. Now you can hear, in order of right of way: large government and VIP vehicles whose sophistocated single-tone horns let foot traffic know to pay attention; city busses don't have fancy horns as often, but drivers are never afraid to hold the note for as long as it takes to get the right passengers for the trip; taxis use smart, multiple beeps to communicate the importance of their trip; minibusses used for mass transit get a slightly lower rank and often have a caller, the driver's apprentice, who adds his voice to the long drawn-out horn tone to announce routes and departures; then come any number of private cars -- each driver develops his own rhythm, put-puts and motorcycles whose high squeaky horns give them away, cycle rickshaws and bicycles who use the same metalic ringer to establish their spot on the road. Horse drawn tongas, ox- and camel- carts and coolie-drawn cargo carts get last place, using the drivers' sticks to play the spokes on the wheels as they roll.

It all works amazingly well, if you follow the system.

Smells Like Yak

There's a funny sweet smell in the van, especially when we turn on the heater, in winter. We know that smell; it's antifreeze. We've had leaks before. When we finally have a chance to get it looked at, it turns out there's a pernicious leak into the inside of the van, right under the driver's feet. Don the Mechanic patches it up for us.

Next time I ride in the van, it doesn't smell like antifreeze anymore. It smells a bit like mechanic. But it's a little bit different. I sniff again. "It smells like yak," I say. 

My husband laughs, "You are the only person I know who would actually know what yak smells like!"

Once when I was pretty little -- little enough so I can just barely remember it -- my family went on a trek to Jomsom. I was so little they had hired a coolie just to carry me, in a basket on his back. One day we came to a wide-open, barren plain, high in the mountains, that was strewn with round black rocks. I remember my coolie put my basket down and cracked a rock open for me, and inside was a fossil of a curled up sea creature. Even at that young age, I was pretty impressed. We were high in the Himalaya in a dry plateau! I still have that fossil somewhere.

In my memory, I walked across the high plain without my coolie. The wind was so strong my mom and I leaned into it steeply while we walked. On the far side there was an old plane wreck, perched at an odd angle, empty windows leering hauntingly, just begging to be explored.

As we climbed the gentle slope out of that flat valley, we passed a yak train loaded with wares to trade or sell in far away places. The yak drivers asked, "Kahaa jaane ho?" Where are you going? It's the polite greeting on a trail in the Himalaya. I remember being given some cubes of yak cheese to suck on. The locals ate the cheese dry and hard, so that they could carry it with them for days and savor the flavors and nutrition.

That night, in my memory, we stopped at a village home to spend the night. Our family sat in the dark kitchen around the cozy cooking fire with the family whose home it was, while our coolies chatted in the shadowy corners. Behind them, the family's yaks munched solemnly and peacefully near the manger.

I don't know why the van smelled like that. We don't have to worry about antifreeze anymore though, because now we drive all-electric.