Driving with Muslims or Buddhists

When an American or European person first drives on Thailand's streets it seems insane and impossibly dangerous. The majority of Thai people on the road have purchased their driving licences illegally without ever taking a class and such things as fast or slow lane, lanes themselves, or even double yellow lines dividing oncoming traffic are completely ignored. People drift from one lane to another, on any two-lane road everybody drives in the fast lane and it is not unusual to find people driving against the flow of traffic even on highways. Red lights are optional, and are generally taken as more of a suggestion to slow down and look both ways. Since Thailand is a feminine and courteous society, however, nobody beeps or gets angry when another driver does something that puts one's safety at risk. If one wants, for instance, to pass the slow moving car in the fast lane ahead, instead of beeping rudely, one moves into the thousands of clueless buzzing motorbikes that drift all over the slow lane and pass the slow moving car from the wrong side and lane. This reflects the feminine attitude as shown by the nicest compliment a Thai person offers another: 'He/she is greng jai- jai guang' generous and considerate to others.

Driving in some Muslim societies is equally insane and dangerous but in a very different and masculine way. In the northern frontier of Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan everyone beeps. When? At what? Well, all of the time and at anything that moves: other drivers, chicken beside the road, bag blowing across the road... now, you might think that aside from the cacophony created by all the beeping, the effect for drivers would be the same as no-one beeping, but no! The aggressive Muslim in his strictly male world has taken this fact into consideration and no matter how old and beat up his vehicle, he has gone to the expense of installing a customised horn, each car (like mobile phones) looks for his own sound and the only thing they all have in common is decibel level. I even noticed mopeds with simulated Mack truck horns.

At one point I was passenger in a van driven by someone I knew, a friend of a friend, maybe fifty years old, big grey-white beard but no moustache or hair on his head, dressed in shalwa and tupee, and driving me through Peshawar at night. We're going down a dirt road with no sidewalks bordered on either side with a market, the road ahead and behind full of milling crowds. He drives either with his high beams on or no lights at all. We are ploughing through the crowds, beeping with desperate urgency, bouncing through potholes and mud with near misses to all sides when an extremely old man, frail and bent, sees us coming towards him. The old man quickens his pace as much as he can but with mincing steps hardly accelerates at all. Ahmed, the driver, is looking with laser-like concentration but doesn't slow, I unconsciously push back in my seat pumping the non-existent brakes on my side. Now we are just inches from him, he still hasn't cleared our path, we are going far too fast to brake in an emergency, when... Ahmed swerves by the minimal amount necessary to pass the old man just an inch or two on the other side of the glass of my window... the old man throws a look of fear and outrage back over his shoulder, his face lit like Boris Karloff in our high beams. Ahmed turns to me and laughs with hearty, boyish glee.

The agreed upon modus operandi on the road is that whenever there is another vehicle visible you race to within inches of its rear bumper or its side and beep insistently and incessantly. If you catch the other driver off-guard or manage to intimidate him, you race in front of him even if there is literally not enough room for the volume of your vehicle but if the manoeuvre means a few cars must screech or swerve to accommodate you, no-one is upset, they will even give each other triumphant smiles as they pass and then the car they just passed moves to within inches of his rear bumper and beeps and swerves trying to overtake him in his turn.

The Buddhist femininity (The Thai (Theravada) Buddha is pictured as androgynous, symbolising the fact he was on a higher plane than one where gender is relevant) expresses itself in cooperation, where the Muslim competitiveness has at its root the firmly ingrained attitude that if it is the appointed hour of your death, nothing (like driving carefully) can save you, and if it is not, than nothing can harm you.