Part 3 of Truck Drivers After Dark
Engine Only
Nine tonnes over the paper, twelve hairpin bends, no brakes left, and a helper who has agreed to carry the difference on his own chest.
Basu came down the dhaba steps two at a time with the tea still burning his fingers, and his helper was already under the trailer with a stone in each hand.
"Put those back in the box, Kiran. We are going down."
"It is nine tonnes over, anna."
"It is twenty-one on the docket, and the docket is the paper the police read."
"I stood at the quarry and counted." Kiran backed out into the rain, soaked to the shoulder. "Twelve slabs more than the paper says. Granite. Thirty tonnes, near enough."
"Did you eat?"
"I ate at eleven."
"You did not eat at eleven. You put your plate in front of the cleaner boy and drank the water."
"I was not hungry."
"It is two in the morning and we are nine hundred and seventy metres up," Basu said. "Eight hundred and seventeen of that we give back tonight. Twelve hairpin bends. A ghat is a mountain road cut into the side of a hill, in case the quarry did not tell you that either."
"They told me."
"All of that height wants to be at the coast by six. So do I."
The booking agent picked up on the fourth ring, awake and pleasant.
"Nine over," Basu said.
"Twenty-one on the docket."
"If anybody weighs me it is twenty thousand rupees, and two thousand more for every extra tonne. Thirty-eight thousand. Out of whose hand, Sathish? Yours?"
"Who is weighing anything at this hour, in this rain? Godown by six. They are casting a floor at seven."
"I have been on the seat since three in the afternoon."
"So has everybody. You have done these twelve bends two hundred times."
"I have a boy on the seat beside me, and I pay him out of my own day. That is how it works, if nobody told you."
"Then do not take a boy."
"He is seventeen."
"Godown by six, Basu."
Basu put the phone in his pocket. Kiran had not got into the cab.
"Anna. Somebody is sitting on the load."
"Then use the mirror and tell me what he looks like. The near one, on your side. The glass on my side went in April and the owner has been saying next month ever since."
"He is up on the ropes with his back to us. Sitting cross-legged."
"Colours?"
"Flat colours, like paint. Horns. Teeth out. A moustache curled at both ends, in that red they use."
"And the axle housing?"
"Bare metal, anna. Nine years our devil was painted on that housing to keep us off the rocks. Now the metal is bare."
"Get in."
"Anna."
"Get in and shut the door."
Kiran got in and shut the door and sat with his hands flat on his knees.
"Gear only," he said. "On a hill like this you hold the lorry on the engine and you keep your foot off the brake."
"Where did you learn that?"
"My last driver."
"And where is he now?"
"He took a shop. Vegetables."
"A man leaves a seat in this line to sell vegetables?"
"He left it."
"Channel in twenty metres," Kiran said.
"I know where the channel is. They cut a drain across the road twenty metres before every bend so the water crosses in concrete and not on tar. Two hundred times I have crossed that one."
The chassis kicked over the drain and Kiran's head knocked the pillar.
"Twelve of these," Basu said. "Then flat road and breakfast at the bottom."
"Not with thirty tonnes."
Which was the whole of it. A brake gets rid of nothing. It turns height into heat and hands the heat to the air, and tonight the hill was eight hundred metres deep, the air was water, and the drums were four pieces of cast iron he could cover with his two hands. Nine tonnes over is nine tonnes of extra heat into the same four drums. That is all overloading is on a ghat. It is not a fine. It is arithmetic.
"Jeep," Kiran said at bend four. "One light."
"He will not stop."
"He will not stop."
Basu stood on the pedal. Thirty tonnes sat down and held.
"One," Kiran said.
"One what?"
"Tonne."
A lining does not soften by degrees. It grips and grips and then at some temperature it lets go completely, and a drum that hot swells outward and walks away from the shoe, so the pedal goes long: same foot, same push, knee straight before anything bites. By bend five his knee was straight. By bend five the cab smelled of steam and scorched lining, coming up through the floor on his side, which is the side that runs hot on a left-hand hill.
And the lorry still stopped when he asked it to.
"That should not work."
"It is not working," Kiran said. "It is him."
"Then say it properly."
"He gets the lorry down. He will not let it be heavier than the gear can hold. Every time you press, he lifts a tonne off it."
"Off to where? A tonne does not go nowhere."
"Somewhere that says yes."
"How tight is eleven?" Kiran said.
"Fourteen metres of radius on the inside and nine metres of road across the top of the turn. Rock on the inside, the drop on the outside. There is no third thing to hit. Then sixty metres of straight and the same again."
"How long is sixty metres?"
"At this speed, three seconds."
He leaned on the pedal at seven. He leaned on it at eight.
"Why are you still pressing?"
"Because it is still stopping."
"It is stopping because he is holding it."
"Then he can hold it two more bends."
"Four," Kiran said. "Five. Six."
"Stop counting."
"Bus," Kiran said at nine.
"I see him."
"There is room for one of you."
"Hold on."
Basu braked hard. The slabs shifted, the trailer talked about it, and thirty tonnes pulled up like a bicycle.
"Seven," Kiran said. "Eight."
"Kiran."
"Nine."
Then he looked across.
Kiran was pressed back into the seat, chin down on his chest, one hand still flat on the door pillar, and his arms had gone the grey of the road.
"Nine," Kiran said again, from underneath it.
"Nine tonnes."
"Yes."
"Since when?"
"Since the top. You were on the phone. I told him yes."
"Yes to what. Say me the words you said."
"That he can put it on me until the bottom." His mouth was barely moving. "Somebody has to hold it, anna. He does not care who. He only cares that the lorry gets down."
"And your last driver?"
"He said yes for one bend. Then he told me to say it for the rest, and after that he was very kind to me."
Three bends left, no drums, a boy in the left seat with nine tonnes standing on his chest, and a pedal that would go on working for exactly as long as Kiran did.
"Then I put it on the bank here and we wait for light."
"Until the bottom, anna. He said the bottom. Not the morning."
"If I keep my foot off it, we go over the edge at eleven. Both of us."
"Then keep your foot on it."
"You are carrying nine tonnes."
"There are three bends."
"You cannot lift your head."
"There are three bends," Kiran said.
"There is a third thing to hit."
"You told me yourself, anna. Rock, or the drop."
"The hill. He takes whatever is extra. So I will leave him nothing extra to take."
The code wants an escape lane every two kilometres on a long descent, a reverse grade with a barrier across it to catch a lorry whose brakes have gone. There is not one on this road. So he built one out of the hill. He ran the near-side front wheel up the cut bank and the slope ate the speed, and the lorry came to rest half up it with the nose in mud.
Then he was down in the rain chocking his own wheels, because his helper could not lift an arm.
"That is my work," Kiran said.
"Tonight it is not. Can you feel your hands?"
"No."
"Your feet?"
"They are somewhere."
"Count for me."
"Nine, anna. Still nine."
"Then give me the knife out of the door."
"Anna, that is four lakh of granite. Four hundred thousand rupees of somebody else's stone."
"Yes."
"They will take it out of your pay for two years. And your job after that."
"The knife, Kiran."
The near rope went, then the far rope, and both tailgate pins came out with a kick.
"What have you done?"
"I have made this lorry legal."
"Twenty-one is legal. You are making it nothing."
"Nothing is under twenty-one."
"And if he will not give it back?"
"Then I carry you into the godown at six and put you down in front of the floor they are casting at seven."
A hairpin is banked one in ten, ten centimetres of fall for every metre across it, so a lorry leans into the turn instead of falling out of it. Tonight that bank was going to work for him and not for the load.
He knocked the chocks away and took eleven fast, on the outside. Thirty tonnes of granite left the bed in one long grinding slide and went into the trees below the road, and the trees took a while to stop.
"He is standing up," Kiran said. "He is off the bed and he is looking at me."
"Then shut your eyes."
The trailer came up light. In the mirror there was only rope.
"Bend twelve," Basu said. "No brakes at all. Second gear and the engine. If you are going to pray, pray now."
"Second gear will hold thirty tonnes?"
"Second gear will hold nothing. There is no thirty tonnes."
"My arms have come back, anna."
"Then hold the door."
The near-side board scraped rock the whole length of the turn. Then the road went flat and stayed flat.
"Flat," Kiran said. "One hundred and fifty-three metres above the sea. No cargo and no job."
"Thirty-eight thousand was the fine for nine tonnes," Basu said, "and I threw thirty off a hill for nothing."
"You threw nine," Kiran said. "The rest was his fee."
He got down with the torch and walked back along the trailer, and Basu heard him laugh once, with nothing in it.
On the rear axle housing the devil had company. A second figure, small and thin, a stone in each hand, the paint on it still wet.
Kiran held up his thumb. It was red to the knuckle, and he had not touched anything.
"Anna," he said. "Come and look at me."