Dan and I are back in India. We were here eight years ago for a wedding and loved what we saw of the country and its people. But we didn’t have nearly enough time and didn’t see half of what we wanted to see. So here we are again. At the moment, we are exploring the state of Kerala. Two days ago, we arrived in Thiruvananthapuram–also known as Trivandrum for the multisyllably impaired–the capital and (with a population of some 750,000) the largest city in Kerala. By way of contrast, we are now in Varkala, on a very beautiful beach.

Kerala is the densest state in India, and you can see it on the roads. There is a whole lot of traffic here. Of course there is a lot of traffic all over India, and the truth is, even though we lived through the traffic in Delhi and it changed forever our concept of “heavy” traffic (By comparison, there is very little heavy traffic anywhere in the USA)–the truth is that we’d forgotten the real experience.

So there you are, let’s say, driving down a two-lane road (one lane in each direction) which is marked with a white line down the middle. The white line does not require anyone to stay on their side of the road–it is only a suggestion. So let’s say you are passing a bus that is going slower than you are. And coming right at you is a truck, which is passing an automobile, which in turn is passing a motorbike. So there you are, the five of you racing toward each other on a two-lane road.

This isn’t a unique hair-raising experience here. It’s a way of life. That’s what the horn is for. In the space of an hour-and-a-half drive from Thiruvananthapuram to Varkala, this probably happens two hundred times. Or more.

So what happens?

Magically, the road widens. Time slows, but at different rates for the different drivers. The passers speed up a little. The ones being passed slow down. Some of you slide over toward the dirt edge of the road–careful not to hit the pedestrians or the parked cars. And somehow you and the truck and the bus and the car and the motorbike all slip by each other when an instant later, for a second or two, the road closes back down to two lanes again.

It’s nothing special. Just ordinary traffic on an ordinary road in India. And it works because the drivers here all have a cooperative mind-set. It works for everyone because everyone wants it to work for everyone. There is no road rage.

We can’t capture it in a photograph; it’s all too fluid. Dan says he’d like to get just one minute of video–any one minute would probably do–of driving down the road here. I’ve got the camera, but I can’t seem to make a video. I just can’t take my eyes off the dance.