It’s a damn Lexus. It’s often a Lexus, unless it’s a Mercedes, an Audi or a puke yellow Porsche. Behind the wheels of these cars sit assholes. These assholes think they know how to drive, because someone at the Road Transport Authority decided through a battery of tests calculated to assess your driving skills, that they were qualified to have the permission to bring their bad attitude and their shoddy manners to the Dubai streets. These tests are useless since very obviously they fail in keeping idiocy off the roads here.

Dubai’s main highways are wide affairs, five or six lanes on each side of the carriageway. Which makes the chances of driving alongside morons five or six times higher. The maximum speed on these is 120 kilometers, the minimum 60. No one of course drives at 60, since it can kill some Ferrari driver, of boredom. So what do they do? They disconnect that wiring in their brain which allows for the neurological tabulation of consequences, and they drive like nothing’s gonna stop them now, or ever. And often, and belatedly, things do – other cars, other drivers, the police, death.

It’s only anecdotal, but I estimate one accident per week I’ve been driving in Dubai. The last terrible one I witnessed was of a completely charred car (it was black top to bottom, side to side and still smoking when I passed it). It sat at the carriageway separator of the main highway, Sheikh Zayed Road, at an angle of 30 degrees, surrounded by a dozen policemen and two ambulances. What would have been four minutes of journey time from the point I started to the point of charred car, turned into 48 minutes (add 33 seconds for rubbernecking). My ballooning bladder was so pissed off.

Was I part of the problem? Sure, I slowed down in obvious voyeuristic curiosity to check what had made me very late for my meeting. Did I say a quick prayer for those who may have died? I did offer a simple peace on them. Did I think this was natural selection? For those who had crashed and burned through reckless driving yes it was. Other innocents dragged into the carnage – no. Two other crushed cars topped and tailed the burned one. Each must have contained someone loved by a family, someone on his or her way to achieve a task, naively taking their life for the day for granted.

Some quick googling tells me that in the first 59 days of 2014, motorists in Dubai clocked up almost half a million traffic offences across the emirate. This ludicrous number equates to nearly 8,500 violations every day throughout January and February last year. The top offence was speeding, second was parking violations, third was not wearing a seatbelt and the fourth was using a mobile phone. Yes, texting about those cute Chanel sunglasses you bought at the mall, cost you your life. Totally worth nothing now that you can’t wear them since you most probably died.

I thought I’d seen it all: Mumbai’s streets are imploding with cars, cows, oxen, handcarts loaded with bricks/trashbags/officechairs/magazinestiedupinstrings, vegetable sellers, foodstalls, autorickshaws, cyclists, motorcyclists and countless pedestrians. Pedestrians spill onto the roads because there are no pavements. Pavements don’t exist on account of any or all the above being on the pavement too. In this miasma throbbing with plant, animal and human life, any speed over 20 or 30 kilometers is impossible. So, while manuevering around a tempo bursting with eighty live chickens squashed into 12 wire coops, slowness is not a choice, it’s a state of being. Mumbai though has a method in its vehicular madness – it accommodates for all the flora and fauna and 20 plus million inhabitants collectively sweltering in the city. Everyone understands, everyone knows, there are few accidents. They are mainly prevented because they couldn’t happen in the first place. Parking violations are often unrecorded officially since official palms are greased unofficially. Seatbelts are always worn unless there’s a crackpot geriatric taxi driver who believes the times are getting worse and he’s not buying into it. In the end, your car will have a dent or two, its chassis will be shot ploughing in and out of potholes the size of tandoor ovens, but you will (most probably) not die if you drive in Mumbai.

The other places I have driven are the US, several countries in continental Europe, Britain and Iceland. American drivers are hard to categorize as a collective seeing that I only drove comparatively short distances for short bursts of time. They do like their cars however, and they do love driving. They don’t mind being stuck in horrendous traffic. It’s intuitive since if you love your car, you’ll be driving on streets with others like yourself – accounting then for all the jams. The motor lovin’ also means respect for other motorists. People tell me there’s plenty of crazies zooming around the wide open roads of America, Mustang Sallying it. I didn’t encounter these, but I don’t doubt they exist.

The Western European highways flourish under sensible drivers, full of lovely motor manners (unless you happen to be in the leftmost lane of an autobahn driving at a speed that thrills you, when you notice in your rearview mirror a BMW hurtling at you with what is perhaps an extremely annoyed German inside, who wants to tell you a thing or two about ausfahrting out of his way).

The UK was much the same – polite Britons wiggling around each other, the country’s main arteries less able to gulp traffic smoothly at bottlenecks, cars snaking round and round the larger urban areas of London, Birmingham, Bristol etc. London itself is built with such supportive public transport infrastructure that even as you are rocked, lulled and then rudely jerked around by the Tube, you know you have only a few meters to walk to your destination, everything is so well connected… you rarely feel the need to drive your own vehicle. The Underground, buses and taxis make London easy to get around, but they also give locals (née tourists who never returned or students) the right to cuss at a train which stops endlessly between St Johns Wood and Baker Street and remain tolerant of a mouthy black cabbie. Still there are few major accidents and fewer deaths by numbnuts who think they own the city.

Iceland has its own stupidity on the roads, but a respect for life keeps most drivers on the sane side of speedy. Reykjavik’s downtown area has thin streets, thin ice on very cold winter mornings, thin chances of surviving should someone start to drive really fast under those circumstances. Sense eludes many of us, some from time to time, few very often. Most local drivers in Iceland fall in the former category – doing silly things, but never anything catastrophic. So there are truckloads of parking disasters but rarely does anyone die because Jon Jonsson decided to take his volcano-sized 4×4 for a spin downtown. Icelandic vehicular idiocy is limited to 3 am wheelies at quiet roundabouts in commercial areas of the city. These screechies are done by bored late-teens who have their driving license but not their drinking license. It’s not very exciting, but that also means it’s not a prelude to death.

And that brings me back to Dubai, the most-deaths-by-driving capital of my subjective understanding of the places in which I have navigated behind the wheel of a car. Each day I wear my sunglasses and drive my pragmatically chosen Honda CRV into the blinding Emirati sun, I pray to the elephant headed god to protect me. I adjust the shiny silver cross dangling talismanically from my rearview mirror. I gulp every time a car lexusly (replaces recklessly) changes lanes ahead of me, I stick to the middle lanes of Sheikh Z, I hope I live to see another Dubai day. Inshallah.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hello! I’m Peri Desai

I’m Peri, welcome to my space. In it you will find stuff that moves me, maddens me, captures my attention, makes me question its truth. You will read what makes me curious, annoyed, energized, joyful, vulnerable.