Ring Road
They built the Outer Ring Road to direct traffic away from the whirlpool of downtown and shunt impatient vehicles into a crooked, breakneck orbit. It fits the city like a fifteen-year-old belt. Nudging inwards as a reminder of past circumferences. Spilled over on all sides by the insistent bulge of new business.
And it isn’t the only one – along with the Inner Ring, and the impending Core and Peripheral Rings, the city will soon seem like a target from a sky-perspective. No more missing monsoons. (Paris is the same way – a spoked wheel, thanks to Napoleon III and Baron Haussman; I have rarely seen the city between rains. Fluke? )
It’s an odd anatomy for a city of speed. Circles, one would think, are not the ideal way for a semi-caffeinated driver to get to his destination. Ideal or not, though, the road injects the veins closest to the city’s skin with the breath and movement of a commuting populace at nine in the white morning.
The outermost part of the outer ring whirls clockwise, as traffic careens along the left side of the road. This left-side-affinity was inherited from the British. The careening… who knows? They careen in an attempt to funnel wind through cracked windows and the exposed bones of rickshaws, to dry the marks on the fabric beneath arms, to outstrip the puffs of stormcloud gray rolling from their tailpipes, perhaps. It’s a doomed effort – careening is difficult with five lanes of vehicles, people piled generations high on laps, braiding across only two long-faded lines. But the scooters weave relentlessly, lean smoothly, criminally away from vertical; babies laugh, swathed in dupattas and clutched to the bosoms of unperturbed mothers perched behind unhelmeted fathers; rickshaws putputputput, hack and restart, squawk indignantly, cut across medians; sedans, flowers pendulum-ing beneath the rearview mirror, shift gears like water flowing downstream; traffic careens, careens, careens, tracing tiny straight lines across the Ring Road like they can somehow recapture the shortest distance between Point A and Point B–
