What I Learned About India by Hitchhiking With Truck Drivers

You have to have a certain, maybe even unhealthy, level of obsession to embark on a project as dangerous and wildly unpredictable as the one Rajat Ubhaykar had in mind. 

Spread across four months in early 2015 and two months in the summer of 2018, Ubhaykar went on an unplanned hitchhiking trip across the length and breadth of India, all of it with a faint hope that truck drivers along the way would trust this stranger in their midst and let him into their colourful lives. 

“Even after seven decades of India’s independence from the British, there was nothing in travel literature about truck drivers,” the 30-year-old former journalist based in Mumbai told VICE. “I was always fascinated with open roads. Our urban lives can be so planned and boring, where everything is predictable and laid out before us. But that’s not the case with truck drivers at all.” 

Regardless of his fascination with the roads of India and the men plying them on their fatally overloaded trucks, there were very real fears of getting robbed, sodomised, mauled, or even killed. He acknowledges this in the prologue of his 2019 book, Truck De India, in which he documented this extraordinary project. 

Ubhaykar was clear about the kind of project it was going to be: There was to be no itinerary, and only a vague semblance of the direction he was going to take. “It would’ve been a logistical nightmare coordinating with truck drivers and checking and rechecking my plans all the time,” he said. “And so, spontaneity was the only way to go if I had to keep my sanity intact.” 

Throughout the book, we see heartwarming stories of how truck drivers across India wouldn’t allow him to pay for the meals he had with them, and how they would share their deepest secrets without any inhibitions. 

Ubhaykar, who today works in the finance department of the Indian railways, started off on a hot, dusty morning in April 2015 from Bhiwandi, a town on the outskirts of Mumbai previously inhabited by Muslim weavers. Over the past couple of decades, it’s emerged as a preferred logistics and warehousing hub for e-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart, and companies like Samsung and BMW, thanks to its geographical position that helps them skirt taxes and local land laws. 

“The first truck I got into from Bhiwandi was headed to Delhi,” he recalled. “It had ‘Road King’ painted on the back of the vehicle. In many ways, it set the tone of the journey.”

Apart from regaling Ubhaykar with an impeccable playlist of local Hindi and Punjabi songs, both the drivers (who took turns at the wheel because the government required it) shared tales of everything they’d seen or heard – from the ingenuity of a factory in the north Indian city of Lucknow that can manufacture up to 25 trucks in half an hour through its assembly line, to the grisly sight of corpses rotting by the roadside during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. 

“The success of this project purely depended on strangers,” he explained. “I hitchhiked on almost 35 to 40 trucks across India during its course.”

The hitchhiking process varied across geography and the temperament of the region he found himself in. “Initially, I’d go to the local transport offices to get in touch with truck drivers, but that took time. In north India, I found that striking up conversations with drivers at petrol pumps and roadside eateries was helpful, while in south India, the old-school way of sticking your thumb out helped.”

Ubhayakar gave himself a shoestring budget for this so that he could better understand the world of truck drivers. “If it was an overnight journey, as it often was, I’d sleep in the crammed truck itself. If I reached a town, I’d sometimes shack up in a cheap roadside lodge.”

The journey came with its share of strange incidents, too. 

Once, he was in the northwestern state of Rajasthan and had hitched a ride on a truck headed to Delhi, when the driver asked him if he’d like a quickie with a sex worker in the bushes by the roadside. Roadside eateries – locally known as dhabas – used to provide a safe haven for highway sex work. But cops had started cracking down on that scene, forcing it to move to unsafe places like highway shoulders.

“I was certainly taken aback,” Ubhaykar recounted. “The trip was not going to be just some boring ethnographic study of truck drivers. I also wanted to have fun, although that was hardly my idea of fun. The drivers were completely uninhibited. I remember how within the first few minutes they asked me if I had English porn on my smartphone. However, what really interested me was how our idea of love and intimacy is steeped in privilege, whereas in the hinterlands, infidelity and sex work enjoy widespread acceptance.”  

However, Ubhaykar had to steel himself if he had to truly see and understand it all. As he writes in the book, the gut-punch came when, at a local dhabha, he saw an underage boy working as a waiter, being casually fondled by truck drivers for a second or two before letting him fetch their food. 

The children on India’s highways, we learn from the book, are expected to act and even carry themselves as adults from a very young age – evident even in the loose, chequered shirts and boxers that such boys often wear, clothes clearly meant for adults. 

Later, he also heard devastating stories about the drug crisis in Punjab from another truck driver.

“He told me how his own brother was so severely consumed by drugs that he had used every pore of his body to inject drugs, not even sparing his genitals as a last resort,” he said. 

Ubhaykar slowly realised how the road carried a myriad of stories far removed from what the urban existence in Mumbai had accustomed him to, and the kind of sociopolitical discourse you tend to have while living in a metropolis.  

“The job of a journalist is that of a voyeur and a parasite, too. There is a morbid curiosity but you can’t do much either. There is obviously shock and guilt, and perhaps, hope that writing about it will change things.” 

When Ubhaykar’s truck odyssey changed course and headed towards the insurgency-hit areas in northeast India, he dreaded getting caught in the crossfire. However, what he discovered was something he never expected – insurgents, referred to as “andarwalas” by the truck drivers, ran a sort of parallel administration. 

“Unlike other insurgency-hit areas such as the tribal regions of central India, the insurgents in northeast India don’t operate from forests but are out there in the public glare,” he said. “They have integrated themselves into a parallel administration of illegal revenue and tax collection quite efficiently.”

Or in the words of a truck driver quoted in the book: “More often than not, within the same family, one brother could be a cop and the other could be an andarwala.”

Ubhaykar spent his birthday in 2015 on the road, too. By then, he had reached the colonial-era hill station of McLeod Ganj in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. In what he described as one of his best birthdays to date, he came upon a labourer playing chess by himself in a dhabha. When he managed to strike up a conversation, Ubhayakar knew he’d found his birthday companion.

“It was surreal to say the least,” he said. “I remember how he told me to never trust foreigners because they never reveal their real names. We spent the whole night drinking in celebration, and stuffing ourselves with cheap roadside Tibetan delicacies. The beauty of that moment made me realise that perhaps it’s this that separates travel from tourism.” 

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