by Vanessa Able
‘You want to see a cool trick?’
‘Wait, you’re not giving these to the monkeys, are you? They’ll lynch us for them. We’ll die of rabies before we even get to Kerala.’
‘No, we’re going to feed them from the safety of the car,’ Thor assured me, grinning.
He opened the passenger window about an inch, to the curiosity of the monkeys who were closing in on us at an unsettlingly fast speed.
‘Hang on. You can’t feed monkeys biscuits, can you? We’re in a national park. Isn’t there some law against that?’
‘It’s just a few digestives,’ he answered, taking one of them from my hand and holding it through the gap in the window. The largest of the attendant group of langurs saw his opportunity and lunged at the biscuit, grabbing it out of Thor’s hand. Almost instantly, two of his companions jumped onto the windscreen, while I could hear from the patter of feet that there were at least another two on the roof. Four or five tiny clawed hands were grasping at the air through the open window. We were under attack: it was like being in a monkey car wash. I went for the button and pushed the glass back up as the simians withdrew their mitts just in time.
‘They’ll kill us,’ I squealed.
Thor was laughing. ‘And just how do you think they’re going to push themselves through such a tiny gap in the window? What are they, David Blaine monkeys?’
After my heart rate normalized, I conceded that actually it had been quite something to be set on by a cluster of langurs.
‘OK, I’m going to try.’ I prodded my window button until the glass had lowered just enough to allow for a biscuit to be posted through the slit. It was grabbed out of my hand before I even had the chance to clock the approaching beast, who appeared from nowhere and had most likely been lying in wait on the roof. I kept pushing the digestives through the gap in the window, and they kept being snatched from my hand. When they were all finished, the monkeys disappointingly showed no gratitude; they simply scarpered off into the trees, sugared up and satisfied.
Once we were out of the national parks, the highland landscape of the Western Ghats opened to swathes of gleaming green tea plantations and teak forests in an area called Nilambur, whose smaller roads and absence of noisy traffic gave it the air of the Swiss Alps. We pulled over at a village where a group of kids were playing in the river, screaming at the top of their lungs as they flung themselves from a wooden jetty into the water below. When we parked, delight with the water quickly transformed into fascination with us and the Nano, which after a few minutes became a preoccupation with my camera and a series of increasingly dangerous diving stunts exuberantly performed for the benefit of a photo.
Thor, egged on by the kids’ enthusiasm, came very close to ripping off his own shirt and jumping into the water, before I warned him of the combined dangers of water-borne parasites, freak river currents and wet clothing on nice clean Nano upholstery.
The jumps finally exhausted, Thor turned to magic and riled the boys with a series of disappearing coin tricks that elevated us to a low-level celebrity status among the children, a situation that was spiralling into chaos as I found myself surrounded by a dozen or so wet little bodies requesting pens and my country coins. We got back into the safety of the car and locked the doors.
‘All right, I’ll admit it just once that I’m glad you came,’ I told Thor.
‘Not bad, is it, our little road trip?’
No, it wasn’t, not bad at all – even though it was never supposed to be our little trip, it was supposed to be my brave mission. But things were different with two of us. Playing with kids and inciting monkeys to attack the car for biscuits were things I’d never think to do if I was on my own, or just wouldn’t dare. This whole co-pilot thing was working out – for now.
We rejoined the NH67 and slowly descended back to the coast via the town of Malappuram, finally hooking up with the trusty NH17 that had been skirting the seashore all the way from Goa and beyond. Back at sea level, the road straightened out and Abhilasha was once again immersed in the black mist of trucks, buses, three-wheelers, motorbikes and the rest of the increasingly familiar, eclectic cast of the Indian traffic palaver. I was back to swerving, overtaking, honking my horn, flashing my lights and swearing at oncoming vehicles encroaching on my lane.
A rude awakening after the peace of the Nilgiris, the situation was soon compounded by yet another opportunity for self-annihilation courtesy of the local road authorities, in the form of a series of speed barriers set out to control the flow of the traffic headed south. The system involved placing two large metal gates within a couple of metres of one another on either side of the road and at right angles to oncoming traffic, in a way that tended to bring vehicles (okay, maybe just my vehicle) to a panic-stricken halt rather than a slow stop.
I noticed the first barrier only a few seconds before I nearly ploughed Abhilasha into it. I slammed on the brakes and swerved around it in time, thanking Ganesha there hadn’t been another car in the opposite direction to break my speed once and for all.
Then began the usual post-close-call flood of expletives. You can’t – I began to lecture whoever had put the barrier there, using Thor as my medium – you simply cannot put a big metal gate right across a highway with no prior warning, lights or traffic cones. It was plain dangerous, ridiculous, stupid… And who the hell were they trying to slow down anyway? The vast majority of vehicles hauling themselves along this sorry excuse for a road (as it had now become in my enraged eyes) were surely in themselves speed-control measures enough: overweight flatulent lorries, bullock carts, decrepit buses, rickshaws or bicycles, all of which were tootling along at an irritating 40 kmph, usually right in front of me.
There was another speed-control feature on most national highways: villages and towns. Every ten minutes or so, by the time we had overtaken a long line of trucks headed by a tractor pulling an enormous trailer piled with earth and were cruising at a happy 60 kmph, we’d find ourselves in the thick of a village and its resident herds of goats and wandering dogs, buses in the middle of the road, markets whose stallholders you could high-five as you drove by, cows crossing the road and the mandatory group of school children who would run after us shouting their enthusiasm: ‘Nanonanonano!’ All these factors contributed to keeping our average speed maddeningly slow with so much ground to cover.
By the time the second set of speed breakers rolled around, I was ready for them. I slowed down in time to avoid hitting the first barrier and even managed to read the text printed on a sign attached to it that advised, ‘Kill your speed; life is only once.’
‘Wait a minute: life is only once?’ I consulted Thor, who, despite not being an expert in Hindu cosmology, was still more clued up than I. ‘I thought life here in India stretched on and on through endless rebirth cycles and, what are they called, kalpas?’
It was a belief system I had thought could go a long way in explaining the laissez-faire approach to motorcycle safety, for example. The absence of helmets and protective clothing as well as the proliferation of riders on a standard two-wheeler appeared to speak tomes about the travellers’ innate faith in fate and detachment from their current human forms. And I never had to look very far to see drivers hell-bent on catapulting themselves into the next life as soon and as creatively as possible: right ahead of me was a barefoot youth on a TVS scooter with a television set wedged between his knees and a bundle of iron rods at least a couple of metres long balancing behind him perpendicular to the road, while just in front of him was a three-wheeler van holding about three times its capacity of passengers, guys perched on tiptoe along the minute wooden ledges attached to the outside of the bodywork, holding onto the roof (home to another five or so passengers) for not-so-dear life.
But on the NH47 at least, the traffic authorities were very much at odds with the road users. By denying drivers and roof-riding passengers the prospect of rebirth, they were flying in the face of Hindu values and a philosophical system that had been millennia in th
e making. Maybe this was done in the hope that by presenting life as a unique phenomenon rather than one chapter in an infinite series of returns, they might be able to instil a keener sense of caution and self-preservation in road users.
Then Thor said, ‘Kerala’s a Communist state, isn’t it?’
Of course! Kerala had been the first place in the world to elect a Communist government back in 1957, and since then various regroupings of Marxist parties had held power, always endorsed by the ballot. Currently in government was the Left Democratic Front, which had ruled in intermittent terms since 1982. Was it possible that the road authorities here – in a state modelled on Soviet and Chinese forms of government – were appealing to motorists on a very humanist level not to let their belief in infinite future incarnations get in the way of a little prudence in this one?
According to a 2009 report by the National Crime Records Bureau, despite having a fairly high accident rate, Kerala had the second lowest rate of deaths in road accidents in any state after Goa, with less than 10.8% of accidents ending in a fatality. Compared with Arunachal Pradesh’s 48% or Bihar’s chilling 52%,22 that’s a fairly good figure and implies that though accidents do happen in Kerala, they tend to be of the milder, scratchy bumper variety.23 I began to think that the Marxists might be onto something after all, until I noted in the same report that Kerala sadly also held the record for the highest suicide rates in all of India.
‘Well, that’s a cautionary tale about godlessness, don’t you think?’ Thor remarked.
I gave the dashboard Ganesha a little tap. ‘What do you reckon we get a little Lenin or a Che to keep him company? Make sure our bases are covered?’
‘Not daunting enough. I reckon, up the stakes and make it a Stalin or a Mao. Or even a Kim Jong Il. Let’s see fate fuck with us then.’
RULE OF THE ROAD #4
Full Beams or Bust
Most rural highways are hardly lit – if at all. After sunset, drivers are usually swallowed into an all-encompassing obscurity that finds no relief in any form of street lamp, cat’s eye or even white chevron to guide the way and show up the divisions of the road. Inventing them mentally (as per the advice of the Delhi Traffic Police) is one thing, but making up the actual edges of the highway in the absence of any illumination whatsoever is another. Therefore, full beams are required, and in their glow, the boundaries of the grey tarmac become sufficiently apparent.
This works well enough until the gloom beyond the scope of one’s own headlights begins to brighten and a pair of lights shining at about as many hypergiant lumens as the Dog Star appears from over the horizon. Full beams meet full beams. Here, I would shield my eyes and automatically dim Abhilasha’s headlights in anticipation of the oncoming vehicle doing the same. But one of the first lessons I learned on the road after just hours in India was that it never did. The Other Vehicle invariably kept its lights on Absolute Wither until we had passed one another and the car/truck/bus (whatever it was; I had no chance of being able to make out the form lurking behind the glare) had disappeared behind us, out of sight of my rear-view mirror.
The same thing kept on happening: a pair of scorching white headlights approached us from the opposite direction, Abhilasha lowered her full beams as she believed was customary, and the approaching vehicle ignored her gesture, refusing to reciprocate, and carried on, its blinding lights blasting through the darkness, bathing every object within reach of its rays in a miasmic white mist – which was all well and good except for the blindness bit. A lifelong night-time opener of cracks in curtains and ardent aficionado of the bathroom nightlight, I’ve never been a big fan of all-out murk. However, in fighting deep blackness with unbridled dazzle, I realized that the drivers I was encountering were serially blinding other road users: while we were scrambling about in the glare of fully charged headlights, the sides of the road disappeared from view, so if there was something up ahead like a bend, an ox cart, a cyclist, a rickshaw with gammy rear lights, even a pedestrian, I was none the wiser. The only way to remedy this temporary blindness – and I think you know where I’m going with this – was to switch on our own full beams in turn. This was a vicious circle, a snake eating its own brightly lit tail; a negative feedback loop that, as Gandhi almost certainly didn’t say, left the world blind.
I decided to employ a little reproachful reasoning. When the next car approached us, instead of deferentially lowering Abhilasha’s headlights, I flashed them, in order to try to bring attention to the fact that someone was behaving like a total road jerk. The first car completely ignored the gesture, as did the second and third. They probably presumed Abhilasha was suffering from some kind of electrical malfunction. The fourth vehicle to pass us flashed us back, as though we were chums sharing a jolly greeting from across the road. The strobe method was also proving dishearteningly ineffective.
I was at pains to understand the logic behind this insistence on using full beams. Surely it made sense that if everyone lowered their beams, we’d all be able to see the road we could not see by this ridiculous, suicidal lex talionis that was rendering an entire country of drivers visually impaired.
I realized with a heavy heart that there was no choice in the matter. I reverted to the old maxim: when in doubt, switch your headlights to full and frazzle the retina of anyone within flashing distance. Right or wrong, it was the only way.
8
SOUTHERN COMFORT – A Swami’s Words of Wisdom
KANYAKUMARI to TIRUCHIRAPPALI; KM 2,442–2,819
For a brief but seminal ten minutes, Abhilasha was the southernmost car in all of India, parked as she was in a no-parking zone by a wall at the lowest point on the Indian subcontinent: Kanyakumari. It was a photo op worth risking a fine for: the giant statue of Tamil poet-saint Thiruvalluvar towered stoically on a rock among the waves in the background, and as Abhilasha posed, she attracted the attention of a couple of souvenir merchants, a candy-floss salesman and a Polaroid photographer, who were far more impressed by her fuel-to-mileage ratio than they were by the fact that our team had reached a veritable landmark in our journey that day.
Touching 2,442 km on the odometer meant that a quarter of the trip was pretty much in the bag, and I thought Kanyakumari, the town at the extreme end of the whole country, was an appropriate place to mark the achievement of the first quarter. From where we were, looking out over Cape Comorin, the spot where the Indian, Arabian and Mannur seas all came together, we had nowhere to go but back up again. And we had arrived, Thor told me, in the footsteps of Swami Vivekananda, the famous Indian sage who had stood on this exact spot back in 1892 after an epic journey of pilgrimage to discover his homeland.
A geographical coincidence separated by nearly 120 years was, however, where the resemblance between the Swami and myself ended. Vivekananda, a mendicant monk at the time, was armed with nothing but a staff, a bowl and a couple of books (rest assured that neither of them was the Lonely Planet) as he spent four years cheerfully traversing India on foot and occasionally by train. Despite all the modern comforts of an air-conditioned car, guidebooks, GPS and a thermos flask, I, on the other hand, still found copious occasion to grumble about my travelling conditions. Exalted to have reached the end of India, the Swami plunged himself into the waves and swam out to a large rock a few dozen metres off the mainland, where he sat for three days in divine contemplation. I bought a chai in a paper thimble off a man on a bicycle and tried to think of a convincing excuse for not taking the small ferry across the choppy sea to Vivekananda’s Rock, where a memorial now stood to the great Indian sage. The best reason I could come up with was the most obvious one, namely that my tummy didn’t like the look of it.
Thor tried to tempt me into the sea via the beach at the end of town, where fully clothed Indian tourists were tentatively taking on the waves up to their thighs, but frankly, my impulse to follow Vivekenanda’s lead and throw myself into the water in a life-affirming gesture of merriment was soured by a succession of churlish torrents of irritation. The triflin
g reason for my annoyance was a combination of the plodding journey times (the drive from the beach resort of Varkala, where Thor and I had snuck in a couple of nights, had taken double Delilah’s predicted time of three-and-a-half hours) and various physio-neurological consequences that were beginning to manifest as a result of my dogged refusal to let Thor drive.
I christened them Accelerator Foot Strain, Clutch Foot Strain and Right Wrist Strain: three conditions of irksome discomfort that had befallen me after excessive pedal pumping and one too many emergency turns of the wheel. There was also Speed Bump Hallucination Syndrome, or SBHS, the result of repeated ordeals incurred by hidden speed bumps, potholes, rocks and other features of the road surface that involved steep inclines, declines or outright drops, culminating in skull-rattling jolts and some worrying thumps from Abhilasha’s undercarriage. So tortured had I been by the continuous bombshell appearance of these demons, which were often extremely well camouflaged into the road surface, that I naturally became more adept at spotting them. Such unremitting concentration on the shapes and forms of the tarmac passing under Abhilasha’s front wheels gave rise to the aforementioned syndrome. This tended to manifest after several hours on the road: my SBHS-riddled brain would spy some kind of obstruction up ahead and before I knew it, a subconscious process took place where my aching, AFS-afflicted right foot went for the brake, while the CFS-plagued left calf stretched towards the clutch and the RWS-addled hand tried to curve the wheel. It was the teamwork of a pitiful company of invalids that often saw me slowing down in the middle of the road, only to realize sheepishly that I had just come to a stop before the shadow of a tree, or a patch of grit fallen off the back of a passing lorry.
