After some hairy driving this weekend, Brownie was reminded of his first trip to Mumbai. I had taken some friends who had never been to India before. To get home from the airport, we took an old British-style taxi with the standard mustachioed man behind the wheel.

The black and voluptuous vehicle skirted around the fringes of fashion strips raucous with middle-class movement, and it coughed through the congestion of the largest slums in the world. The roads we traversed weren’t so much shared as they were prostituted. For a menial fee, our driver maneuvered past cattle and rickshaws and bikes and scooters, giving each a lewd and intrusive squeeze. He tucked in the car’s sideview mirrors — an extra palm’s length of breathing room must have felt like a country road.

As we grew more silent and he more confident, our cabbie engaged in an incessant game of chicken with other driwers. When street lights died with power shortages, he, along with his driwer-buddies, jammed the intersection into gridlock. He was nonplussed when the automotive jigsaw fell into place and no one was able to go anywhere.

When he got us out of that mess, he decided to show off the Indian advent of flyovers and toll roads to the tourists. And I thought of all that fermented below.

That was our introduction to Mumbai. It was also our taxi driver’s office.

In a country where you’re hard-pressed to rent a car that doesn’t come with a driver, cabbies are often your tour guides. They’ve been entrusted with the roads of India. Whether the roads were already muddled beyond navigation, or if their dodgy practices made it that way, I’m not sure.

It doesn’t matter. In such violent times, you have to support your troops. We saw these men — with wheels of steel, tempting 60 km/h pieces of shrapnel, navigating what we came to call the impending threat of imminent (and sometimes instant) vehicular death (IVD) — as heroic.

So, in honor of our Indian transportation mercenaries, I’ve marked my calendar Horn O.K. Please Day!