It was absolutely still. Up from the hills, where Silk Cotton trees were laden with scarlet blooms, strains of music wafted to our ears — from a grassy knoll came the twangy notes of a hard rock guitar, while Metallica rasped elsewhere. Groups of men were standing, laughing and chatting. Someone had lit up a stove to brew tea. Others had found shady nooks perfect for a light daytime snooze. Although readers may conclude we were in a giant picnic of some sort, we were actually in a traffic jam en route to Shillong city from the airport. Since we’d just disembarked from a tiny plane that seemed as if it had descended only by the force of uncontrolled gravity into Meghalaya’s serene valley, we were oblivious to the carnival-like atmosphere of the traffic jam.
“When do you reckon this will open up?” I irritably asked our driver. He pondered the question and replied, “Last week, the jam lasted overnight. But today it doesn’t look that bad. I’d say we should clear it in three hours.” It happened every day, he said. “Some time ago, when one of our ministers was stuck in a similar jam, he eventually reached home two days later on a friend’s motorcycle…” Having done his best to allay our apprehensions, he switched on the radio and closed his eyes.
We weren’t as sanguine, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to be. So we decided to leg it instead of waiting for the jam to clear, and asked the driver to catch up with us when he could. As we trudged uphill on the two-lane road, the row of trucks stretched endlessly ahead. “There’s so much development, so much coal mining. All these trucks you see are carrying coal to the plains from the Jaintia Hills,” the trucker ahead of us said. The government, he said, was building a parallel highway to this road to bear the load of this increased traffic. “Then we won’t have such jams,” he said. Locals, he said, usually came prepared for the traffic jam. “If we’ve to catch a flight, we keep an extra three hours in hand. If we’re travelling with children, we make sure to keep lots of snacks and water,” he said, “anyway there’s always music to help pass the time!”
As we walked past rows of trucks standing in the left lane while the right stood majestically empty, I had a question just begging to be asked: “Why not drive on the wrong side of the road just to clear the jam?” This was the mentality that caused, not cleared traffic jams, I was frostily informed by a trucker who was happily pressing on his horn in sync with the music blaring from his radio. “That’s the difference between Khasis and plainspeople. People in the plains lack patience and politeness — virtues we value highly here!” he said. Slightly ahead, we saw a policeman. He’d been toiling for hours to open the gridlock, caused by the sheer volume of vehicles on that narrow road. Soon vehicles came pouring downhill, and it was a matter of time (only two hours later) before our taxi caught up with us.
Later in Shillong, I thought about the locals who encountered such jams everyday. The Shillong Times routinely reported lives lost, trains/flights missed and many more fallouts of Shillong’s traffic. Although the image of people peacefully dozing by their trucks as strains of Dylan wafted in their ears would stay with me for a while — I wondered how long the highway to Shillong would continue to test the fabled Khasi virtues of patience and politeness.