Kaliram Saina likes to walk. Whether he’s assigned the demanding afternoon shift or the night shift – there are three eight-hour shifts in all – he finds time for his daily hour-long walk. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, sometimes both, and as he lives in Kapashera, a mere two kilometres from the Delhi–Gurgaon Expressway, it’s also how he gets to work.

Booth number 34 is Saina’s office on the night we meet him. The Delhi–Gurgaon Expressway has 36 booths in total: each of these booths is equipped with a computer that monitors the number of cars that pass the booth, a live CCTV stream, a printer that prints toll receipts, extra print rolls, a cash tray, a speaker that beams radio messages from the control room and an air conditioner. Not all air conditioners work.

Standing inside Saina’s cabin, it’s not the line of vehicles queuing that stands out – there’s never enough time to look up – it’s the wall of sound. The collective buzz of a thousand expectant engines and the constant ‘woosh’ of the booms as they go up and down, mixed with the rattle of a dot-matrix printer and the proximate hum of the air conditioner give Saina’s cramped 2’ x 8’ cabin a disproportionate sense of importance. But with over a lakh of vehicles passing through this toll each day, you could argue that this significance isn’t disproportionate at all.