With seventy kilometers of your drive from Bagdogra airport behind you, you cross out of the state of West Bengal and into the state of Sikkim.
This takes four and a half hours and the full 110 kilometers to Gangtok, where the school is, takes seven.
But do you know the sort of road that gets you to a private beach? Where “Is that not the Willards headed this way, no doubt departing for cocktails as we go to see the sunset? Shall we not pull over and wave as they pass?” is common practice?
Here, in terms of width and condition, that road is the sole lifeline between two states in northernmost India, a road whose 1000 hairpin turns might cause you to ask your driver if his arms get exhausted turning the wheel so much except that, in the first place, you do not want to distract him from the motorcycles that weave in and out, the cows, dogs, and monkeys he must avoid, the buses and trucks altogether too big to be here for which he must make space (which he does by jamming into the side of the mountain or putting, it seems, his tires (and yours) on the edge of the cliff you always see as possible to plummet down and, in the second, because while your focus is on survival, his is on passing as many vehicles as possible.
Though no non-native driver would attempt to pass another vehicle here at all (there is never enough straightaway to do so), like everyone else, your driver just goes for it by pulling into oncoming traffic and trusting that both the “about to kill you” car headed at you and the one you may only have gotten halfway past in the attempt, will jam on their brakes and/or do their own dance against the mountain-side or cliff edge because they all follow rules you only begin to intuit after ten or fifteen heart attacks and after you decide mere terror will be better than shouting out some deities name each time your driver embarks on this maneuver, a decision which, it should be clear, does not mean you grow to love the constant honking or fail to notice that the three times you come to a full stop and must inch forward for thirty minutes not because of construction, “pedestrians,” or poor road conditions but because of landslides are three times you might have been crushed by falling stone rather than merely being delayed by it.
Shocked, at first, by the lawlessness and apparent selfishness of the drivers, the whole thing begins to reveal itself as a sensible response to a failed road system, a response that may even mirror the millions of near-misses that help biking in Amsterdam weave ex-pats, Dutch, immigrants, and tourists into a citizenry.
While the positive side of all the near misses on the drive remains opaque for now, crossing state lines means interfacing with Indian beurocracy and the up and down of that should really occupy the next post.