Every time I get on the road in Lahore, I feel like I’m on the Knight Bus. And so is everyone else.
My nephew (my driver) is cool as a cucumber while cars hurtle around like (it seems to me)
bumper cars (just almost but never quite there). We found ourselves in a snarl of cars going in every direction in a tight space yesterday and I thought, wow, I would absolutely lose it if I was driving, GET OUT OF MY WAY YOU STUPID DRIVER, but it took just a couple of minutes to get out of the seemingly hopeless configuration. People seem to communicate like with their minds (“I’m just going weave my way into this non-
existent lane between two busy lanes” “Sure, yar, go for it, but I’m gonna go a nanosecond ahead of you” “Hello small children I’m going to blow past you, don’t diverge from your path even a millimeter” “Lalalala yeah sure, whatever”). The degree of skill and awareness it takes to do this, day in and day out, in extremely busy traffic, blows my mind.