India · 2010s
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An Indian journalist rides with truckers across 10,000 kilometers, tracing road freight through work, hospitality, corruption, danger, and regional difference.
Long-haul drivers form a culture of their own, with its own customs, wit, sayings and bonds. They speak of the truck as an affectionate 'she', a companion standing in for the wife and home they rarely see. Truck painters call themselves artists rather than craftsmen.
When officials can stop a vehicle and demand money under vague rules, the people being stopped stop telling them apart from thieves. To road workers a police barricade and a robber's knife do the same job: they take a cut. A fine charged with a receipt under a deliberately loose rule is extortion wearing bureaucratic clothing.
Trucks routinely carry about twice their legal load, because owners say that is the only way to avoid losing money. The danger is built into the economics of the trade rather than chosen out of recklessness. Drivers are cogs in a large freight machine whose pressures they did not design.
The helper in a truck cab is always the one sent for drinks and cigarettes or to sort the paperwork. That looks like exploitation, but it is how he is trained into the trade. Running the small errands is the first stage of learning the road.
From outside, truckers are often treated as a single disreputable caste. Spending long hours beside them replaces that label with particular people, their dangers and their friendships. The road also teaches outsiders the drivers' patience: what is meant for you will come when it has to.