Pigs on Motorcycles
Christmas 2008

After only a few days in India, my head muzzy with jetlag, still nauseous from the smell and the newness of the country, I learned that a motorcycle is just as good as an SUV and that a two-stroke scooter makes a perfectly good pickup truck.

I saw a woman riding a motorcycle with her three children. The eldest, probably about to be a teenager, sat at the back holding his barely-school-age brother in place behind their mother. In front of the woman sat her daughter, a girl of seven or eight, who I suppose was best trusted not to wiggle or obscure her mother’s vision. Not one wore a helmet, and they were all laughing as hard as they could. You’d never see anything like that in America, and in a way it was stranger, more foreign, than all the Ganeshes and saris and dosas in India. It woke me just a little from my culture-shocked haze, and I began to keep track of all the things I saw on two-wheelers.

Animals are common. If I go out a couple times a week, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll see a couple of chickens hanging upside down like reluctant bats, one on each side of a two-stroke’s wheel. Once I saw a dog sitting on the front of a motorcycle. He was a clean, fluffy, gold and white dog, and someone had marked his forehead with a vermillion tika. He sat in front of his master looking proud and serene the prow of a ship, whizzing through traffic as if it were nothing at all for him. Less confident was the tiny calf, draped over the saddle between two men. It probably was not bound for slaughter, but its face had the blank expression of a creature that can understand absolutely nothing that it sees.

Stalks of bananas and bunches of coconuts are such common cargo that I barely notice them anymore. I need a foreign visitor to come to to town and seize my arm, shrieking, “oh look!” before I notice a two-stroke sputtering past, its hindquarters completely obscured by green fruit.

I still notice the gas tanks, though. I’m used to the national disregard for public safety, but I can’t get used to the sight of a cyclist weaving through traffic with cars and buses skimming by those tanks, missing them by bare inches on either side.

Of course, there have been plenty of other interesting things: a motorcycle whose passenger was carrying a plate of glass as wide and tall as his arm span; another passenger carrying a section of pipe at least three times longer than the motorcycle; a driver uneasily cuddling a case of water in his lap, while his passenger clung to a stack of three behind him; a passenger, this time on a scooter, who held a rainbow-colored umbrella over himself and the driver as they puttered past.

The mail-woman rides a regular bicycle, panniers of letters on each side, and the tea woman makes her rounds of the local offices with a hot urn mysteriously but securely fixed to the back of her bike. She’s not the only one to have a shop on wheels. Some men sell greens from paniers or baskets that they carry on their bikes, and other sell plastic buckets and water jugs. Like the coconut men, the back part of their bike or scooter remains invisible, but theirs is cloaked under an oddly-shaped stack of bright red, green, and blue.

India is not the only country in the world whose citizens take a pragmatic view of what a two-wheeler can carry, though I think that here in rural Tamil Nadu we get the most variety. In Vietnam, where two-wheelers are the vehicle of choice, I saw plenty of things being carried. My favorite was a cage full of black snakes strapped to the back of a motorcycle, whose driver barreled along in front of the taxi that was taking me to the airport. I watched the snakes weave back and forth until I was practically hypnotized, and felt glad that I wasn’t driving.

I’m a little frightened to name the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen on a two-wheeler. Every time I think I’ve seen it, something stranger floats into view. But there was the case of the Cambodian pig, which I cannot get out of my mind.

It was Christmas day, 2008, late in the morning. I was awfully tired from getting up early to watch the sun rise at Angkor. Nevertheless, I was not dreaming when a motorcycle whizzed past my tuk-tuk, carrying on the back of it a pig. It was no piglet, but a grown-up healthy pig. It lay on its back, feet in the air, and I saw that it was tied to two narrow boards that kept it from flopping limply in an arc over the saddle. It was perpendicular to the motorcycle, so I had a good view of the whole pig, which lay perfectly still. I decided that it was dead, and that I had become an unwilling participant in a pig funeral cortege. I stared at it, fascinated, wondering who had figured out how to tie such a big pig safely onto a motorcycle, and how many people it had taken to lift the poor creature onto the vehicle.

Later, napping in my room, I realized that the big had had no visible wounds. Maybe it had been alive? But that presented another question, namely how do you catch a pig and hold it down while tying it securely to the back of a motorcycle?

I went out again that afternoon. I visited “the silk farm,” a place where beautiful ladies sat on the floor with strands of silk flowing through their fingers, moving bobbins back and forth to weave ikat patterns in the fabric they wove, and receiving the extra silkworms to eat with their lunches as a perk of the job. On the way back, a motorcycle whizzed past my tuk-tuk, carrying on the back of it a pig. It was another grown-up healthy pig, possibly a sibling of the one I had seen earlier, as it seemed about the same shape and size. Certainly it was tied to the motorcycle in exactly the same way, feet in the air, supported by two boards. I had not ceased marveling when another pig-carrying motorcycle sped past, and then another. The last one slowed a bit as it overtook the tuk-tuk and I saw the animal wiggle one of its legs just the smallest bit. The pigs were alive!

I felt grateful for that, even though I knew that it might not be for long. It is far nicer to remember fat, living pigs darting past, living dangerously on their motorcycles.

But I’m still left with the burning question: How do you tie a pig to a motorcycle? I can imagine looping rope through coconut stems or banana stalks, around buckets or baskets, wrapping and tightening and knotting until my hands hurt but I am satisfied that my things are safe. I can even imagine, when I force myself, flying along behind a driver I don’t quite trust, clinging for dear life to a child or a windowpane or a section of pipe. But I still cannot imagine, really cannot picture how those pigs made their ascent to the backs of their motorcycles.

Roses

There's a bus stop down the street and around the corner. It's in front of the kidney center, which is surrounded by a moat of raw sewage. I wait there about once a week for the bus to the main bus stand, holding my breath and hoping to see the number five speed into view.
Last week when I stepped out onto the main street, I saw confetti in the road. There's no sidewalk, just a paved road for the cars and a smelly, dusty shoulder for anyone unfortunate enough to be walking. And that day, the road was covered with bright pinky-red and white confetti. No, the red was rose petals. I peered down at my feet as I trotted along. The white bits were long and thin, and for a moment I thought they might be jasmine petals. But they were puffed rice. I looked up. The street was still covered with rose petals and puffed rice, and a few whole roses lay in the road as well. I pictured a wedding car strewing flowers and rice as it passed. It didn't seem likely, though. Weddings are so common, and I've never seen such a thing before.
I remembered seeing a funeral procession long ago, my first year in India. The man pushing the wheeled bier kept reaching up to the garlands that hung just above his forehead to pull off a few petals and drop them along his path. But those were marigolds. Today's carpet of flowers was not for a funeral.
As I turned the corner, I smelled roses over the ordinary myriad of odors. Perhaps they had poured out rose water as well. How else could the fragrance of roses compete with reek of an open drain? But the road was strewn with petals far as the eye could see. I remembered the Ganesh temple down the way just out of sight, and imagined an open cart with a silver statue of the god inside. Perhaps it had moved slowly up the street as priests and devotees showered the god with roses and rice.
Who knew? Probably everyone else in town, but not I. I was just grateful as I waited for the bus and smelled the flowers.