Of Bumps, Baby Bumps and Other Barriers

 [This piece was originally published in My Kolkata on March 15, 2024.  You can read it here.  This is the pre-edit  version. ]

Bumps and other Barriers

[The author drives wherever he can, encountering a few avoidable bumps in his daily commute or his visits to other cities. Here’s his irreverent take on our streets, our traffic and the ups and downs of driving.]

Several years ago I was enamoured of the movie My Fair Lady. The words of one song in particular stayed with me long after. Here are the first two lines: “I have often walked down this street before / But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before”

Walking down the streets of dear old Calcutta (sic), amusement made me link the words to the journey.  As an adolescent I wrote about that somewhere and recall that it was largely about the Kolkata Mud Digging Agency (KMDA). The pavement and much of the road, in old Calcutta, hardly stayed beneath my feet.  Potholes, open drains, and other traps for the unwary were par for the course.  But then Calcutta improved and the potholes diminished in size and frequency too.  Calcutta became Kolkata and some of us graduated from bicycles to motorcycles and then cars.  And that’s when we realised the next two lines of the song:

“All at once am I / Several storeys high” - which brings me to the topic with a bump!

Bumps planned and accidental.

On my regular route, travelling down a little stretch of Palm Avenue from Adi Ballygunge to Mayfair Road one encounters no less than eight speed breakers.  Call them axle breakers, suspension killers or anything you like, it is a tribute to the ups and downs of driving in the city.  Closely clustered together, they could even be mistaken for a hurdles course had you not known that they have another purpose.  They are all home made and designed to ensure that all traffic crawls past the shanties that dot the stretch. Almost at parade speed but salute you must not for fear of losing grip of your steering as you negotiate the KMC water tanker, multiple receptacles and people doing their power lifting with buckets.

These bumps, lovingly laid by locals who steamrolled the road-roller guys into creating them, are often referred to as “shahid minar” - martyrs’ memorials - to commemorate some unfortunate who may have been disabled or have lost a life at that spot. Always due to speeding traffic, never due to the martyr who sashayed across the road without a care. 

Carpet Bombing

Very rarely, if at all, are these bumps designed by road engineers or do they follow a pattern of compliance. The process is pretty simple. The road repair people arrive on a sunny day and proceed to make their tea - an absolute given under any circumstance in Kolkata. This gives the signal to the local toughs to arrive with bricks - often multi use brickbats - which are then laid out lovingly in a line across the road. The masala mixture that is then laid down in a carpet over the road, calmly rolls over the bricks and they are now set in stone. Bad metaphor, but could this be sweeping things under the carpet? As a special concession to two-wheelers, there might just be a section on both sides which is left at the road level. But who really cares for six inches of road?  My friend has a Harley-Davidson which is so low slung that he needs to get off and wheel his bike over the bumps. I’ve seen a Maruti 800 or two teeter-tottering on the crest of a bump.  I’ve heard these bumps referred to as pahar, mountains in the local parlance.

Totally accidental (no pun intended) is the actual carpeting which is randomly spread across the road in patches with the suggestion of a road roller doing one up and down in between tea breaks. This results, as you will all bear out, an uneven road surface that, though unintended, produces a bunch of “baby bumps” on what could otherwise be a flat carriageway. Add to that the sudden pop-ups of sewer holes (earlier called manholes, but with gender equality the name has changed and person-holes just doesn’t cut it). These metal monstrosities are usually way above the road surface in the forlorn hope that one day the carpets will catch up and we will all be level. In avoiding these you may have brushed a future shahid and been the unwitting cause of another speed bump.

Sleeping Policemen 

In countries less informed than ours, they call these speed breakers “sleeping policemen”. Apparently because while the world drives, the bumps act as speed police! We Kolkatans can easily imagine one of our paunchy coppers lying down for his siesta, pockets and tummy a-bulge with the day's takings, doing unconscious duty on the roads. But wipe that image from your mind as you negotiate the turns and twists around the Ice Skating Rink.  For some unknown reason, in the middle of the day, conscientious cops drag metal guard rails into the middle of the road to slow down the traffic. They are staggered so that three lanes become two which merge into one so that a game of Tetris gets into war mode. Cars that are turning right are stuck behind others who are hoping to move forward and all the time there’s an eye on the blinking green arrow that might suddenly disappear, thwarting their hopes. Believe me, it’s a video game in real life. And the one policeman who isn’t sleeping jumps out of the bushes to hand you a challan when you make an illegal turn (Game Over music).

Comparisons are bad

Friends who visit Kolkata and have sat in the passenger seat while I drive grit their teeth and cringe away from the door as I squeeze past people, parked bikes and pavement shops protruding into the street. They often comment on the terrors of driving, never on my skills. But it took me a trip to Kerala, one to Bengaluru and another one to Goa to appreciate how we have peacefully adjusted to driving in Kolkata. Football pitches which stretch endlessly from one town to another, masquerading as roads, tempt one to drive with gay abandon.  I’m sure my car picked up a few speed tickets as I drove from Palakkad to Alleppey to Cochin and a dozen places in between. Don’t they have bumps?  They do.  About a hundred metres from said bump there are huge warning signs telling you they are near.  When you hit the bump, you might not notice it.  A gentle rumble under the tyres alerts you to the existence of the “rumble strip”. In parts of Bengaluru - no the name has nothing to do with our State - the bumps are hardly discernible as you do not travel fast enough to notice them. On some stretches travel is not a word that you would use for the massive parking lot that probably moves in relation to the planets! 

Last month in Goa there were stretches that one could coast along peacefully while the bumps only appeared, with sufficient warning, at crossroads and near busy townships. However, they also had the Atal Setu which soars above the Mandovi, Panjim and a few of the busy streets, depositing you well away from the chaos of the city. Panjim or Panaji is a motorist’s nightmare. It shares one thing in common with old Calcutta - digging. What appears to be unplanned digging reminded me of our good old days.  Cables being laid, drainage being repaired, and possibly some random digging for logging MNREGA work days? Whatever it is, the city had absolutely no parking available. But parking woes can form the backbone of another story, another time. Till then let’s just fist bump and walk.