"You pay him fifty rupees," says my guide, "and you can relax. You have already failed his test. You are lucky he didn't tear off your learner's permit; in that case you would have lost all the money paid so far!
"Next time you go to him, r-r-i-p it goes. There is just no point. This is how everything works here, this is just part of the system," he explains.
"Could we focus on what was wrong with my hand signals, will you?" I am being curt.
We are standing outside the RTO building in the merciless heat of Kanpur summer. A few minutes back, I had been talking to the drivers license inspector through a grilled window. He sat at his desk some distance off, and a peon carried my papers across to his illustrious majesty. He had asked me two hand signals. Though it is twelve years since I have driven in India, I am quite sure the "stop" signal I had shown was correct - hand raised, palms forward. The left turn signal I had shown, palm moving in circles, is what I remember, but here I was a little less confident. The inspectors returned the papers to me, via peon, saying I did not know the rules so I had failed.
My guide Prakash is from the shop outside the gates that sold me the forms. My contract with him is very clear: he is to tell me where to go next in the multi-step procedure, and I am to pay him twenty rupees. So far it has been a big help: I could have easily floundered for hours shuttling from window to window and desk to desk. No hanky panky business of any kind, I had told him - I would carry my papers myself at all times, and go through all the queues.
It started with filling up the form, getting the amount endorsed from desk 2 in room 9. Desk2: names from M-Z, desk1: A-L. Other desks - out for chai. Go to the counter outside and pay 50 (my tout wants to get it done from inside the room and jump the queue...) No receipts since he is making a "consolidated" one. Go to another counter, get an endorsement for 25 rupees, since I want a "computerized" card. Apparently there is less opportunity for corruption if you get a computerized card, so the RTO folks try not to mention it. The old manual business is thriving side by side. Back to counter 8 and pay this amount separately. The fifth station is the drivers' license inspector babu.
A number of people are sitting in a room. One of these, sitting alone on one side of a desk, is the inspector. His job seems considerably more sedentary than the test inspectors in New York or Delhi many years back. We enter the room and I talk to him, but he signals us to come outside a grilled window. The test can only be conducted at a distance, apparently. At this my guide takes me aside, saying that I am to be given the driving test. It is one of the mysteries of nature how this was not clear to him all this while. So he brings me to a list of signs painted on the wall: I had better know these signs. Indeed there are some that are not familiar, so I take a few minutes looking at them. This is where he begins his litany: if I fail, I lose all my money. A mere 50 will fix all and I can simply go home. Everybody does!
I had ignored him, and now I have failed the hand signal test. So the tout wants me to pay the going rate and pass the test the "automatic" route. I think that maybe he is my problem: being seen with a tout leads everyone to expect the normal returns.
"Look, please stop asking me to bribe him." I tell him, "I am just not interested. Find out what was wrong with my hand signals, will you?" Living in India, it is not that I am above paying bribes; just that I try to do what little can be done without it.
Anyhow my man doesn't seem to know much about hand signals either. He can't tell me why I had failed. "Do you have a driver's license?" I ask him.
"But of course," he replies, a little indignantly. Having a license obviously has nothing to do with knowing the signs.
Back to the building. Prakash is behind me, droning about losing deposits. Some doors have nameplates jutting out into the corridor above. One of these is open and there is a man at a big desk talking to someone. I knock on the door and stand. He looks up.
"Is some information available on hand signals," I ask him, "Would you be having something like a leaflet?" (Ambitious)
"We do not provide any such information here. You can go to the dealers," he says.
"Well, if I may ask you a favour, could you tell me what the hand signal for stop is?" I ask.
He shows it and it looks just like what I had done.
"And for left turn?" I ask. Again it looks the same.
I thank him and leave. He is most probably a rather senior man, and the only reason he entertained me was perhaps because I asked him in English. My guide, who had disappeared in the shadows, joins me again.
Empowered with this new knowledge I now return to the babu inspector's room, this time through the door. What had I done wrong, I ask him politely. "I am not here for training drivers," he says, "you should join a driving school," and he waves at a couple of people who have been sitting across his desk throughout. These gentlemen, he says, own a driving school.
So this is how he expects to be paid eventually, I think to myself, through his cronies in the driving school. I am preparing for a rise in the temperature of conversation, when the driving school proprietor speaks. "Arrey, why don't you just take his road test," he tells his friend the inspector. He is trying to help me.
So I take the opportunity to ask him, in front of the inspector, about the hand signals. The left turn is the same (hand turning the same way as the steering), but for the stop signal, I should indicate slow down first (two up and down motions), and THEN do the stop sign.
"OK," I ask the inspector, "so I didn't do the slow down, but isn't that more than the 'stop' signal?"
"But your left turn was also faulty: your hand was not straight," he says. (Suddenly I think of Aesop's fox whose water was being fouled by the downstream lamb.)
The driving school owner butts in again. Do I know how to drive? Of course - I have been driving for fifteen years now, I tell him. Then where is my license? Well, I had been driving abroad. Where? In the US. Then the conversation veers off - oh that must have been right hand drive then, and was it hard to adjust etc. But with the magic US connection, the battle has unfortunately degenerated. The inspector agrees to give me a road test. I am applying for both motorcycle and car, and though the motorcycle is not physically necessary, I need the license number of a two-wheeler, he says. Again the driving school owner comes to my rescue. "Arrey kya hai!" he says, and scribbles a plate number on my form. The legal purpose of this numberplate is that presumably I brought it for taking the test or some such... if it is not needed, then why bother? The procedures are also set up so as to encourage this type of petty corruption. But I am really thankful and leave to do my test, which is to drive a figure of eight. The inspector will observe through his grilled window.
The tout scrambles up to me and says, "This is the final chance. He fails you now, and rip it goes. Drive fast, as if you have been driving forever."
Following his advice, I get into my Maruti oven and zip through an eight in buccaneering taxidriver style. Suddenly my tout runs up with an all-is-lost look. I have been asked to do the english "ek" he says. "Ek?" I ask. "Yes, ek," he confirms, "Do it between those boulders there." I am quite mystified by this "ek", but I go up to the boulders and do my best at tracing out a "1". The serif at the top is achieved by reversing. Maybe he wants to see me reverse through the gap, I think. I park the car and return to the window.
I wanted you to do a figure of "eight" he says. But that was the first thing I did, I tell him. And I try to explain the "ek" problem. "Your driving is very rough," says the mandarin. "And what do you mean, reversing like that? Anyhow, come in and collect your papers."
Which means that I am to get my license. The inspector signs the photographs which show me wearing glasses. I am not wearing them now since I don't need them much, and certainly the inspector couldn't be bothered - I could have been Abu Nidal and still our man would have signed the picture unhesitatingly.
The forms are deposited in yet another window. I am to pick up my license after 4. I pay my man his ten rupees, but he wants bakhseesh now that I have the license. What bakhseesh, I ask him, this was a contract, and anyhow you were of little help. But maybe he was; we went to a total of ten windows. I give him a little extra. OK, he says, but don't tell my partner about this.
His dishonest world spreads out from the office and onto his friends in the booth and possibly to his wife and family; in this whole wide world he is an unit of one; alone. It is a sad testament to the dehumanizing culture sprouting from a overbearing bureaucracy.
The sun is screaming through the windscreen. The bazaar sprawls over the pavements rich in colour. I roll down the window and steer onto the overheated air of GT road, a mystic stamped and scribbled receipt proudly in my hand.