What I Saw On The Road

Hours and hours and hours of riding in a car at night, from one nowhere town to another throughout Tamil Nadu for trainings.  A giant tanker truck, coming straight at us; a western-style four lane highway without warning becomes a rocky dirt road, more trucks still coming straight for us.  Every vehicle, including ours, uses only high beams, except to flash that we are passing - on the right, on the left, down the middle.  Signs say "Respect lanes"; meaning unknown to all.  And people: men standing on the roadside, back to the traffic, in that characteristic stance which immediately says "taking a whizz"; people squatting, less immediately obvious, but no doubt the purpose; and people walking.  On two nights now, there have been thousands of people walking along, spread out for miles, all barefoot, many with children, going to some temple for some special puja (prayer) to some particular god.  They'll walk for 3 or 4 days, through the night, into the morning, and sleep in the fields in the heat of the day.  On the first night they were all carrying small yellow bags with the god's picture, and most were wearing orange skirts - dhotis (man-skirts) - or orange sarees - and some were pulling carts covered in artificial and real garlands of flowers, statues of the god and general wildly colorful decorations.  On the second night, they were carrying orange bags and wearing turquoise skirts and sarees - different god, different puja, same idea.  They walk on the shoulder of the road, sort of, but that's dirt and rock, so many walk on the road itself, sometimes fairly far out onto the road.  It's black as night (well, it is night, after all) and the only light is from those high beams, which suddenly illuminate crowds of them right in our path.  When the road is paved, we're moving at about 50 mph, whizzing by them (we stop to whizz as well) and I know that some will die, because last week I saw a dead person in the road, nothing to do with pilgrims.  A not-too-quick flash of blood and flesh and a white dhoti;  I said to the driver, knowing the truth, "An animal?" "No, a person." he replied, as he touched his face in the ritual pattern of pujas. 
My host mother waits up for me whenever I'm coming home from one of these trips.  Tonight I got in at 2:15 am, just a little later than I'd predicted on the phone.  We embrace and she goes to bed, saying now she can sleep.