I decided. The ride back was necessary. I was full with thoughts of the place, and I wasn't sure whether I loved it or hated it, but it was time to go. The food, much as it had brought me back to a new kind of health, was quickly becoming unpalatable. My body was beaten, but even if it couldn't survive 13 hours through Indian traffic, it needed comforts that simply weren't locally available. I missed Punjabi style food. And I missed lemon cart misadventures with Kate. But, the best way I could express the obstacle to this salvation is that it would take 13 hours of driving across a physical distance equivalent to a 3 hour drive from Seattle to Portland on I-5. Ten hours extra of what? The difference is due to JANDE-eliciting roads (Just Another Near Death Experience). The difference is due also to crazy cars, crazy cattle, and crazy pedestrians in the way. And every slow down, no matter what it is or how much it cares, will be acknowledged with the compressor horn to end all compressor horns.

Could I make it? I wondered this as I climbed aboard in the early morning. With vivid memory did I recall the incoming ride - the greatest vehicular fright of my life. I rode with a driver whose spidery arms constantly flung madly at the loose steering wheel, sending us through a series of switchbacks along a hillside that was slowly but surely sliding away. There was nothing to keep our top-heavy van from rolling downhill if it tipped over a paltry knee-high concrete barrier. I gave myself vertigo from looking over the edge. At times it was like looking down from a skyscraper... perhaps a kilometer high down to the valley - I kid you not. Mister spiderarms eventually discovered that he'd put so much pressure on one tire that it was low on air and eased us better into the turns. He filled it up later and it burst. Yeah. Nightmare.

But this was a new day. The man driving was a Hindu, the first non-Muslim I had spoken with for over a week. I was happy to be leaving, but I wasn't sure what to expect. My mind was functioning uncharacteristically, and I hoped that I was up to the day ahead. It turned out better than I could have hoped. I learned how to join the trance, and here is what I found.

A certain amount of entertainment on the roads of India is automatic for anyone who appreciates linguistics. One can't help but take satisfaction that, even when surrounded by Hindi, an odd moment of Road English will pop up, like a sign asking drivers to "Be gentle on my curves." Or a message on the radiator of a carriage truck: "non-stop". Or "BRO brings people of the remote into the main stream." A poem reading: "Some like gold ship, some like silver ship, I like friendship." An entirely white bus, except huge blue lettering on the back saying, "MISSILE". And I also love the contrast between the two views of painting STOP on the back of a vehicle. At times they're painted on a background of a red heart. Other times they have black and skullbones behind the letters. I was waiting for the two together but I didn't spot it. Road signs also offer cautionary wisdom such as "Better to be late than Mr. Late." Perhaps the wisdom was hijacked? Oh and not to be forgotten: a bus with "OH GOD SAVE ME." At first I laughed, and then I wondered: seriousness or sarcasm? Perhaps there was more to this.

In India, Hindu temples are everywhere. Just off the road. In the forest. At the top of mountains. But I have begun to feel that there exist Hindu temples of today that transcend form. Religious scholars have long attempted to demarcate the borders of the Hindu faith, but this is impossible, often overly generalizing and artificially text-authoritative. Regional differences are significant, and one village's concept of Ganesh or Shiv (Shiva, Siva?) can fluctuate wildly from another village nearby.

Heck, if you want evidence that one Indian thinks a lot differently from another, the roads are the place to see it. That's why there's so much honking to make sure everyone understands: this piece of steel ain't stoppin'. But beyond even that, I found it fascinating that the signal light is used not to signal that one is passing, but to ask the person behind you to pass. I take that back, sometimes it could also mean you're going to pass. What a morbid hilarity of a potential miscommunication! And, it's also common for vehicles to have their hi-beam headlights on all the time at night. What I found especially curious was that my driver, like many other drivers on the road, would dim his lights for a few seconds to acknowledge an oncoming car, and then both would flick the hi-beams back on as the two cars came within about 20 meters. At night I witheringly tried to save my retinas behind a trusty wool hat.

Fortunately, we left in the morning, and I was partway through reflecting on India's many beautiful ambiguities when our vehicle reached a 2.5km long one-lane tunnel through a mountain. Soldiers waved us through and we began our journey through the depths of the earth. As we passed through the archway, the driver reached over to the dashboard, and switched on what I had previously assumed was merely a snowglobe without the snow (I hadn't looked that closely) He flipped a switch and, to my enjoyment, a little portable plastic shrine lit up, and a series of red LED lights began their electronic circumambulation around its plastic deity. Made in India? It worked: the tunnel journey went without any surprises, and as we passed back into the light. The driver gratefully deactivated his deity.

Shrines, at the very least, follow the Hindu man everywhere. As I bounced along the potholes and braced the dashboard during heavy brakes, I sometimes looked over at my Englishless driver and his ferocious concentration. I began to elucidate, or perhaps hallucinate, a Great Truth. The roads of India were in and of themselves a long interconnected Temple of Tarmac.

You'll see the Temple of Tarmac's worshippers everywhere. Bus drivers have full-on boxes lying on the dashboard for their good fortune. Other drivers have little plastic snowglobeish shrines. But the really special thing is that, though Ram and Shiva and Ganesh and Krsna top off the pantheon of deities, for this moment there are specific deities to help you through the journey.

Who are these deities? They go by many names. They are written sometimes in Devanagari or Arabic script, but surprisingly, the majority of the time they're brandished in English. For English is the contemporary power language. And no one is served by a powerless deity. And these are traffic roads, made for a new century that is unfamiliar with old gods and old words. English is the native tongue of this Temple of Tarmac, even though the typical worshipper, much like my driver during this 13-hour ride, is the Indian who hasn't the ability to speak let alone read the language.

But for all of his illiteracy, I should say that I owe him the courtesy of remembering his name, but I'm not sure that I do. I know it sounded something like "Ramas." We didn't talk much, except to mock the baksheesh-demanding Punjabi police and tariff collectors after they'd swindled a few rupees through the driver's window. There is a common prayer of India that consists of a simple repetition of the name of Ram. Spoken over and over. Repetition. Closer to godliness.

Then what is the true value of repetition? Are all repetitions mantras to the new secular world? If you follow it so far, then you're well on your way to the Temple of Tarmac, and there's no lookin' back once you're arrived. That's right, welcome to the Temple of Tarmac. You're in for bumps and bashes and screams and horns and placid eyes and hooves and seed packets and pissing lines along the gutter and chapatis and pickles and oh-i-love-those-pickles and accha and thike and namaste and smiles and smiles and stares aplenty. Ticket please? Twenty rupees. Baksheesh. Spoke the projector screen. It seemed so worldly, this unworldly place I had grown so close to. That I could live in. That I was trying to explain: how could it be so... India?

I looked in front of me, to the back of a bus, and there stood the newest iteration of the repetitive prayer that the Temple of Tarmac had spoken to me hundreds of times that day. But this time, I saw the artistic flourish for what it was: the deity of BLOWHORN. And then its variant: (HORNPLEASE). Then I saw the deity of WAIT FOR SIGNAL. And the more rarefied deity of USE DIPPER AT NIGHT. And then the whole technicolor temple lit up before me, its oranges and greens and blues and reds and blacks and yellows. And no, I don't think I was tripping.

There it was before me, a series of repeating words, transformed into their true significance: deities. The Temple of Tarmac plowed onwards, packed with trucks and buses and cars, each broadcasting to those behind the names of the colorful protectors of the road, as they belched and bathed in each other's black exhaust. And I loved it. I had somehow merged the appreciations of a devout with the American graphic designer, relishing, even through the physical suffering, the simultaneous love and irreverence that Indians (who mightn't understand English) devoted into paintings of English words road deities onto their trucks. They were all incredibly intricate, diverse, and beautiful but unreadable typography unless you were 3 meters away (which you often were). I don't know why I ever expected Helvetica font.

I was entranced. At the lunch stop, I chose to endure the strange looks just for the opportunity to snap some close-up photos of trucks while their drivers dined nearby on their chapatis. Then I discovered that the faith didn't just stop at ornate English words, but also included a pattern of iconography, consistent yet always unique. It was certain that a person existed whose lifelong study was the painting of road gods on road vehicles. It was a pleasant character to imagine, even more pleasant to imagine engaged in an arm-waving argument with a superior over the extent of creative license.

It might seem preposterous, but really, when it comes down to it, when you're shuffling in and out from various large vehicles that all have these paintings, mixed with clever rhymes or Sony logos on their bumpers, you have no option but to read and listen, meditate and ultimately... worship. Escape into a smirking bliss while the cacaphony ensues around you.

As the gods would have it, we arrived safely. I can only wonder what Ramas thought of me and my overt fascinations when he dropped me off that evening. I can only say my own part - that I now considered him quite literate in his own very privileged way.

An Epilogue

Kate and I had lunch a couple days later at my favorite restaurant in Dharamsala, and per usual they proffered us the day's newspaper in English. There in the front page's left margin was the tragic news that a bus had overturned and fell down a ravine. One said 24 were killed. Another said 25. Having survived some of those preposterous switchbacks just days before, I was chilled to the spot. The chai suddenly tasted like espresso. This marks twice now, once in Argentina, and now in India, that I have missed a deadly bus accident by mere days.

What more a place that needs shrines and temples than the ever-claiming road? May all of you take care on the roads ahead. I am eternally gracious for my fortune on the Temple of Tarmac. And if there's one thing I wish I'd bought it India before leaving, it is a plastic electronic shrine.

P.S. BLOWHORN is the bestest God ever.