by Vanessa Able
It turned out that although the odds of my making it back alive were not great, there was some comfort to be gained at the prospect that they could be worse. The World Health Organization’s Global Status Report on Road Safety told me that India clocked up 16.8 road traffic deaths per 100,000 people in 2007. It was a hell of a lot more than Britain’s impressive figure of 3.59, but then it was also less than countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which were losing between 38 and 40 people per 100,000 to road accidents each year.4 Cheer up, I thought; at least you’re not in a war zone.
Puran called me the next morning, offering his driving services for another day. This time, I was forced to decline gracefully. ‘Today, Puran,’ I said, trying hard to hide the wobbles in my voice, ‘I will be doing the driving.’
Puran protested. ‘Ma’am, please, it is really no problem for me to come.’
‘No, no really. It’s fine, thanks. I need to start somewhere, don’t I? I’ll be just, um, fine.’
And I was. For the first part, anyway. From when I put the keys in the ignition right up to the bit when I drove up to the front gate of Akhil’s building – Michael Schumacher himself couldn’t have done it better. But slowly, the gates opened and the reality of a late Wednesday-morning Mumbai revealed itself to me.
This was it: I was going head first into an initiation by fire. My first instinct was to pray. I noticed there was a small plastic figurine of Ganesha stuck to the dashboard, which I presumed had been put there by Mr Shah. I knew little about Ganesha barring that he was an important Hindu god with the head of an elephant and that he was particularly revered for being a skilled remover of obstacles. It followed that he was popular with drivers in India and was to be seen fronting many a dashboard or hanging from a large number of rear-view mirrors. Although I wasn’t a Hindu, I figured it could do me no harm to post a protection request at the door of the local divinities. After all, I was on their territory now.
Ploughing forward at the mercy of weekday traffic, I realized that my appeal to Ganesha was not so much a prayer to preserve me as a plea to spare me the embarrassment of writing off the car on our first excursion. That would be just awful.
A lane led from the gates to the intersection of Bhulabhai Desai Road and August Kranti Marg. I stopped the Nano at the threshold of the main road and took in the sight before me. Mumbai’s cars were out in force, and they were pissed. There was a nasty snarl-up at the crossroads accompanied by a nerve-clenching dissonance of horns. At the junction, I watched the traffic speed past me. The vehicles were moving at about 30 kmph, bumper to bumper, then stopping dead in their tracks when the lights turned red and filling up every square inch of the road. I took a deep breath. How the hell was I going to infiltrate this mass? Whether moving or still, it was solid, impenetrable.
My one secret hope had been that the Nano’s celebrity status might work in our favour in such situations, and that fellow drivers, roused by the glory of India’s new darling, would politely step aside and let us go wherever we wanted. But India’s love for the Nano didn’t stretch as far as gratuitous chivalry. We were no better or worse than all the other vehicles that vied for the tiny space the road afforded us. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were a Porsche or a rickshaw: the struggle was the great equalizer, and I was on my own. This was, after all, the world’s largest democracy.
The thought gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, which was immediately shattered by a sharp klaxon from behind. I looked in my rear-view mirror to see the face of an irate taxi driver, egging me on to take the plunge. Now I had nowhere to go but forward. Shit.
First things first, I went for the indicator, a token gesture given my options. I was stalling for time, hoping that a huge, gaping hole would open its jaws in the middle of the road and swallow me up, thus sparing me the trauma and inevitable humiliation of what I was about to do. Another blast came from behind. I winced and put the gear stick into first. I tapped the accelerator and let up the clutch ever so slightly. We moved forward about an inch to the sound of another, much longer and angrier horn from behind. I snapped back at him. ‘Give it a rest will you, asshole! What the hell do you expect me to do here? Just ram into the traffic?’
He responded with another beep and moved forward enough that the Nano could surely feel him breathing down the back of her bumper.
I put out another inch, and another, holding my breath and hunching my shoulders, bracing for what would be the inevitable impact of metal at my side. No one was relenting, but neither was anyone crashing into me. I didn’t stop to think about it, I just kept going, edging the Nano’s flattened nose further and further out into the road. There were angry-sounding beeps and honks but, as if by a miracle, the other cars started circumventing us. How was this possible? Within seconds I had pulled out completely and joined the flow towards the traffic light, which quickly turned red and forced us to another stop.
I had done it, I thought. I had negotiated my first merge into a main road and had lived to tell the tale. The sky was the limit; Mumbai was my oyster. I was born to do this, born to be the traffic doyenne of… My roll of elation was interrupted by the light turning green again and I realized that in order to go in the direction I had planned, I needed to make a U-turn at the junction. Feeling nothing less than superhuman after my exit from Akhil’s road, I swung to the right and began to dig my way into the crowded lane that was moving the other way. Thinking on my toes, I took advantage of a couple of metres’ space in front of a bulky bus that was hobbling towards us and clearly having trouble gathering speed. I let rip, hauling my button-wheel to the right and getting in the space right before the bus, much to the driver’s annoyance, which he expressed with a succession of galled horns.
‘Bite me!’ I imagined calling back over my shoulder.
My first U-turn. I was on fire. I released a reserved whoop, and another – ten minutes later – after cranking the gearstick into third for the first time. Ebullience manifest in the driver’s seat; this was it, I was doing it. Our first foray into the Mumbai traffic, the Nano and I, and here we were, minutes later, still rolling and definitively not wrapped around a lamppost. And if we could get through Mumbai unscathed, the rest of India would be a breeze. In a rush of maternal tenderness, I smacked the wheel with congratulatory ardour. ‘Nice going, Abhilasha!’
Abhilasha. It was a name that my now ex-boyfriend had suggested to me when he caught wind of my purchase. It meant desire, wish, aspiration and affection in Sanskrit. I had initially spurned the idea of naming the car, never having been much into the practice of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Yet since he had offered up the token with such sincere poignancy, I felt compelled to bring it along. A bit of my past mixed in with my present; something old to mix in with this something new.
Despite this epiphany, that night I lay in bed under the flickering ceiling fan while images from the day’s traffic returned in post-traumatic flashback sequence. My brain was trying to process the abundance of incomprehensible and counter-intuitive events I had witnessed from behind the wheel. The worst, and most embarrassing of all, had been my attempt at a parallel park. Stopping outside a street stall to buy a bottle of water, I figured I’d give the manoeuvre a whirl, just to see how I could handle it with my pint-sized steering wheel and no passenger-side window. The results had not been encouraging.
The space that had opened itself to me was bookended by a grey Maruti and a bullock cart carrying a menacing-looking gas tank. The spot was Nano-sized, which is to say it was tight. Unfamiliar with the dimensions of my new car and somewhat inhibited by the explosive potential of the nearby gas tank and the judgemental gaze of its guardian bullock, the operation took me several attempts to execute, though my efforts did provide an amusing diversion for a group of taxi drivers on their tea break. Finally a couple of the guys for whom the pain of the tragi-comedy was too much to bear broke off from their mates and came to help me wiggle my way in. There was a flurry of raised hands, beckoning me in every direction
, then sporadically making me slam down the brakes with horrified expressions on their faces and urgent beats on the Nano’s posterior as I came close to blemishing her perfect yellow paint-work. Cars were passing at very close quarters, honking their horns in outraged protest at my blocking the road, and I broke out in a sweat as I heaved the wheel from one side back to the other.
The whole dire episode almost ended in another disaster as a passing teenage boy came so close to the side of the car that I actually clipped his elbow with the wing mirror. Mortified at having caused my first human casualty, I rolled down the window in haste, ready with heartfelt apologies. The lad was frozen to the spot, fixing me fearfully before embarking on a soliloquy of regret. I tried to reassure him it had been my mistake, but he wasn’t having any of it. We parted, awkwardly.
So, back in Naresh Fernandes’ office, I was being served my backside.
‘The last thing India needs is another 100,000 cars on the road,’ he said, continuing his tirade against the automobile industry, the private sector and scum like me that were needlessly polluting and congesting his country for nothing short of apparent larks. He was currently referring to the Nano’s famous pre-order list and gesturing at the jammed-up Keshav Rao Khadye Marg four storeys below, whose upwardly wafting cacophony of klaxons and horns provided a grumbling backdrop to our conversation.
I started to flush: in my eagerness to take my new Nano on the journey of a lifetime, I had turned a blind eye to the opinions of the car’s detractors. There was, of course, a whole counter-Nano community whose slant on the car ranged from its being a bit shabbily made to its being an unmitigated disaster for Indian society.
The first peeps of dissent I uncovered came, unsurprisingly, from the e-pages of Topgear.com. Its review of the car ran under the headline ‘Cheap Trick’ and could be summed up in the quote: ‘What can you get for the price of a sofa? Not a lot, in all honesty.’ The article drew particular attention to what Top Gear perceived to be the car’s cloudy safety aspects, concluding, ‘Exactly what those [safety] requirements are remain unclear, but at least the Nano should be safer than a scooter. Or, say, hopping.’5
The eco-activists were also pitching in on the matter: ‘This car promises to be an environmental disaster of substantial proportions,’ proclaimed Daniel Esty, professor of environmental law at Yale, just after the Nano’s release.6 Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Panel for Climate Change and director-general of the Energy Resource Institute, made his position clear by stating he was ‘having nightmares’ about the car,7 an attitude that was echoed by environmental activist Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment, who asked the stinging question: ‘Cars cost us the earth. Can we afford it?’8 In an article in her environment fortnightly, Down to Earth, she launched an attack on government subsidies for the auto industry that completely disregarded the public transport sector. ‘As the Nano rolls out, think about how we subsidize the car and tax the bus,’ she said, illustrating her point by reminding her readers that in many Indian states, buses paid twelve times the tax of cars.9
So, despite the fact that there were masses of people desperate to get their hands on a Nano, there was also a large number of Indians for whom the car didn’t stand as a liberator of the low-income belt, but rather as a giant pain in the ass that would add more traffic to the already over-congested roads.
Naresh Fernandes was one of these people. It was becoming clear to me that he was not, like me, a driving enthusiast. He was a public transport kind of guy, and as far as he was concerned, an army of shiny new Nanos flooding the market and seducing the country’s emerging new middle class could only spell congestion doom.
I asked Naresh how he got around the city and he replied by train – like the 6.3 million other Mumbaikars who choose to commute via the suburban rail network every day to avoid the traffic clogging the city’s arteries. It might be an environmentally friendly, socially responsible alternative, but Mumbai’s trains were also straining under the weight of their passengers. A staggering 3,700 people die on their way to work in the city each year10 – by being pushed out of overcrowded carriages, electrocuted by hanging cables when sitting on the roof or crossing the tracks and getting flattened by an oncoming locomotive. Naresh argued that rather than piling its roads up with more vehicles, India needed first to resolve the existing issues with its public transport system.
‘The situation we now have in India is a lot like what happened in pre-war America, when the motor lobby effectively blocked all prospects of a public transportation network,’ Naresh explained. I was nodding like a plastic St Bernard. He continued, making the popular comparison of the Nano to the Ford Model T, America’s own ‘people’s car’, a century earlier. It was a historical moment that not only initiated the modern concept of the production line but also marked the genesis of the United States as a nation of cars and not trains. The resulting impact on society, urban planning and the environment, not to mention a foreign policy driven in large part by the politics of oil, has been immense. Could India go the same way? Was the country really at such a significant crossroads? Surely the railway system in India – admittedly outdated and flawed in many aspects – was extensive and functional in a way that it had never been in the US? And should we expect a private company like Tata to care about issues of public transport? Was it not doing India a favour by furnishing its people with an alternative to asphyxiation by overcrowded train carriages, high-octane roof surfing and a gruesome flattening on the railway tracks?
I began to spin with the symbolic consequences of the task I was about to undertake. I was in over my head and probably should have taken advantage of a break in the conversation to make my excuses and leave. I felt like a bumbling Englisher, a parachute hack of the worst variety, an opportunist about to contribute nothing but another (fuel-efficient) death machine to the people of India. What had until this moment been a harmless voyage of discovery in the only vehicle I could really afford had suddenly evolved into a brutal crusade of devastation and destruction. I was kicking myself. Nano Schmano. I should have constructed a biodegradable windsurf with wheels that was partially fuelled by recycled waste and the tears of children. Now that would have been a worthier pitch; virtuous even. I could have gotten Bono or Bob Geldof or Arundhati Roy on board. They could have helped me plant some trees in my wake to make up for the tarmac erosion for which I would inevitably be responsible.
But the fact remained that I was the owner of a (nearly) new Tata Nano and only days away from embarking on a three-month drive around India. And all I needed was just a hint of encouragement.
Now it was finally time to make a dent in the 10,000 km journey, I suddenly found my safe, burrowed, Queen of Sheba–like existence in Akhil’s apartment very appealing. It had been more than a week since I had arrived, and I hadn’t lifted a finger in the direction of self-sufficiency. There was Mohan who cooked, and his younger brother who cleaned, washed my clothes and returned them to me ironed and interleaved with pages from a month-old copy of the Times of India. There was Puran who still called every day to see if I needed his services, clearly sceptical of my assertions that I was now self-driven.
And then there was the marvellous Akhil, who made intermittent appearances between meetings and business trips, only materializing for an early breakfast or late at night. I had awoken groggy and jetlagged on my second morning in Mumbai to an enthusiastic rapping on my bedroom door. I opened it to find my beaming friend dressed in British Airways pyjamas, suggesting I accompany him for a series of yoga stretches and pranayamic breathing exercises on his terrace. A platter of eggs and toast was then laid out before me, while Akhil munched away on a bowl of chilled sprouts, insisting that his was the breakfast of champions. The same evening he returned with a bottle of red wine, a local product he had just discovered and maintained was excellent. We had a glass to the amplified notes of a Mozart piano concerto that he blasted at top volume to demonstrate the power of his new surround-sound syste
m that ran through the whole apartment, terrace and all. Mohan then brought each of us a cup of Horlicks, and Akhil retired to his desk for more work.
When he wasn’t there, I padded around the marble floors of his apartment, inspecting his book collection under Mohan’s watchful eye. There was no doubting it: I was ensconced in the lap of luxury, living in an India that belonged to only a tiny minority, and the longer I stayed, the harder it would be for me to get out and see the rest. Large city apartments inhabited by upper- and middle-class citizens with a significant disposable income were the domain of only about 6% of the country’s population. Akhil’s place was a world away from the standard of living endured by the majority of India’s people who continue to subsist below the poverty line, something I figured would become clear as soon as I worked up the bottle to leave and see what lay beyond the sugar-coated gates of Breach Candy.
This cloistered time was conducive to reflection. If I stuck around for too long during the day, the empty flat would start to amplify my own feelings of solitude and disorientation at having come so far in such a short time. Under the steady gaze of a collection of Chopra novels, my thoughts began to stray from matters of the road to matters more interior. A bombshell attack of nostalgia for my previous stable couple-life in Mexico City would assail me from time to time and I would go out onto Akhil’s terrace to contemplate the muggy Mumbai skyline and try to exhale the weight that hung between my ribs. The bewildering space that remains after the departure of a partner is a gap that’s hopelessly difficult to fill. The only thing to do was dig in and wait for the other parts of my life to expand and dissolve the hole by means of slow erosion; in the meantime, I would bury my emotions under the avalanche of this all-consuming mission.
Looking south from Akhil’s terrace, I could see a recession of skyscrapers lining the coast. They disappeared into the miasmic cloud of mist or pollution that’s on perma-hover around the city, masking the horizon, so I couldn’t quite see the point where the sky and the earth came together. And whatever that obscured point in the distance, be it road trip heaven or hell, that was my target. It was time to leave.
