Queue jumping and jostling are as common as long queues in India. Perhaps it is true, as we are told time and again, that the former is a result of the latter. But I still wonder: why all this jostling, manoeuvring, scheming to get ahead of others, especially where there is also so much evidence, even in the same queues, of superhuman patience, perhaps resignation, usually an outward blindness toward the man or woman who sneaks in ahead?It is one of the Himalayas of unknowns that confront the stranger here. And perhaps I have it all wrong.
Apparently not all Indians tolerate queue jumping, however, as was demonstrated to us a few days ago.
We had jumped off a bus into a row of waiting moto-rickshaws (three wheeled taxis), all eight or so drivers asking us, simultaneously, as is the case here, where we want to go. I speak to one of the quieter ones, arrange a price, and we are about to jump in when the driver is verbally set upon by his mates. Apparently he is jumping from the last in queue to the first, and they are not pleased. We stay out of it, the harangue continues, they agree on another driver, the fellow with the cab at the other end of the row, and off we go.
It was the first time in our experience that Indians have openly objected to queue jumping, then took steps to gain their rightful place in a queue. Something similar occurred a few days ago in another rail station. I watched a man step from nowhere to the head of a queue, but then immediately get singled out and heatedly berated by other men. When he refused to move, the others persisted until a uniformed woman appeared, whereupon increasing numbers of men joined the fracas. The woman eventually pulled the queue-jumper aside and seemed to lecture him at length, then sent him packing to the end of the line.
A more typical example of all this took place a day earlier at a branch of the India Post Office. We had joined what appeared to be a queue: two men lined up for the wicket, us behind. It wasn’t long before a kind of scattered ‘queue’ began to form behind and around us. Then the man immediately behind me began to push with such force into my back (perhaps he was being pushed in turn) that I leaned back and shuffled my feet, landing accidently on his toes, whereupon I heard a moan, then a voice in Hindi, perhaps saying something like “Sir, you are bloody well standing on my bloody toes.” I lifted my foot ever so slowly, then turned and told him, rather absurdly and presumptuously in English, that he needn’t push me, we’ll all get to the wicket eventually. His slight smile said he got my meaning.
But moments later – I have just reached the wicket – here he is again, elbowing in along the counter towards the wicket from my left. I lean forward, spread-elbowed along the counter, absurdly, like a Packers’ lineman. The guy has already jumped ahead of two women who are now pressing in on my right. Betty is guarding my rear! Further back is a lengthening slapdash Indian queue spreading like the Indus delta across the room.
When our business is done, I turn my back to Mr Sore Toes and wave the two women to the wicket (their rightful place after all), then hear behind me a disgruntled something in Hindi, perhaps appealing to the other men in the by now pressing multitude – “What!!? Did you see that? Those women first? They just arrived! I was next! I was standing right here! I’m first! ….” – as we walk away.
Perhaps he said nothing like this. Perhaps no one else cared but us. We also see astonishing patience with long queues: railway station queues, their length, the hours people stand passively especially defy description.
At the same time, however, we experience so many people in India seeming to need to get ahead at all cost and often at risk to themselves and others.
Take drivers of anything on wheels, for example. They seem to share one rule of the road: an utter disregard for driving lanes. Moto rickshaws can move, eight or so abreast in an ever-shifting staggered mass down a two-lane road. Cars, motorcycles, rickshaws, pedal bikes, and push-cart drivers squeeze a centimetre ahead of the next tire or bumper at each stop or moment of gridlock, which is never a “stop” at all but rather a constant, restless manoeuvring, then a burst ahead, all at once, pell-mell, into the traffic sludge ahead. Every vehicle a few months old is often covered in scrapes and dents. Vehicles regularly clip one another, although astonishingly (considering the 1.3 billion) collisions seem rare … although we have heard a cart, driver and mule thrown into the ditch by our passing bus, a motorcyclist knocked flat and a few upturned hulks of buses and lorries along the roadside. But most everyone just keeps driving on, rushing to the next moment of gridlock.
It makes we wonder whether the same approach applies to the New India of commerce, politics, technology and schooling? All those “special tutoring” and exam-honing shops and “campuses.” The daily reports of bribes demanded by examiners and potential employers, “public servants” with a contract in their pocket, the mix of thuggish and fantastic schemes to get to the top in business and/or politics. In such a world, the self-regulation of that small group of auto rickshaw drivers seems all the more notable, even admirable.
When we ask Indians about this rush to get ahead, to get to the wicket first, we mostly hear one response – given as a complete explanation: “India has so many people. So many.” “Do you know how many people live in India?” “There’s more than a billion Indians….”
At first the response seemed glib, a kind of shared packet of an answer. But the element of truth in it has started to feel more real with each passing day. India, with its 1.3 billion people, especially in its thronging cities and towns (and except for those who can buy space around them), feels like a place, a space, that has become nightmarishly shrunken. It begins, most immediately for us, with the scarcity of space: to drive, to walk, to travel by bus and train. All that mobbing around bus doors, scrambling for a seat. Then there’s the queue-jostling and scheming. But do many Indians feel something of this same scarcity in the quest for work, for liveable incomes, for places up the social-economic ladder in an India that urges everyone forward and upward?
Perhaps there is also sense in India that, without something extra – an elbow, the clip of a bumper, a bribe, a cheat sheet, sneakiness, thuggery, brazenness – one can never move ahead in the queue and perhaps never reach the wicket at all … never get those grades or that job or that important signed slip of paper, never get that ticket home, never get ahead under New India standards. Or never get far enough ahead or above to satisfy that singular ego in the multitude.
In our experience, queue jumpers are variously surprised or indignant when challenged. We never know how conscious any of this is. Yet others in the queue seem (with such hesitation, or is that reserve?) to cheer us on with the slightest smiles or nods. More often, though, people appear puzzled or uninterested at our resistance. What’s the fuss about?
It could well be that what we see as queue jumping – abnormal, impolite, aggravating behaviour – is here not recognized by many people as anything unusual. The man, emerging from well back in the queue, who suddenly sticks his 100 rupee note through the wicket grate and demands a bus ticket as the person at the head of the queue is in the middle of arranging their own, seems never to have been challenged for doing this. For him we are the abnormal ones.
The scramble ahead, the scramble upwards. And the dents and scrapes and bruises? Maybe bad karma. Maybe an accident borne within. Maybe I’ll make my revenge next time. Maybe “just India.” So far not enough people are asking.
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