by Vanessa Able
Looking out at Vivekananda’s rock among the white horse–tipped waves, my legs, back and right wrist throbbing from the day’s drive, I had a feeling I could learn something from the sage about the levels of endurance necessary for travelling in India. From under a ceiling fan in a room at his ashram – we decided that since we couldn’t (be arsed to) visit the Swami’s rock, we could at least spend the night at his digs – I came across an inspiring quote of his: ‘What I want is muscles of iron and nerves of steel, inside which dwells a mind of the same material as that of which the thunderbolt is made.’
‘Blimey, he wasn’t aiming low, was he?’
Thor, who was a fan of the Swami’s, concurred. ‘I think he’s sending you a message from beyond the grave to pull yourself together and put a sock in it.’
I growled at him from the bed while rubbing my calves.
‘Since you won’t let me drive, I mean. That’s what you’re going to get.’
And so all talk of my driving gripes was henceforth banished. There were people out there walking, cycling, riding camel-back the length and breadth of the country, and I was moaning because sitting in a comfortable air-conditioned seat was getting a bit too much for me. Out, out with the malingering mardy grouser, I resolved, and in with the thunderbolt mind. I concluded that with the dawn there would rise from Kanyakumari a transformed, refreshed Nano driver, and it would be the first day of the rest of our trip.
Kanyakumari gave Thunderbolt and Thor a VIP’s send-off via a quiet, smooth road that cut through miles of wind farms whose blades spun silently and unwitnessed. So filled was I with fresh resolve for the trip, I had announced to Thor after a few minutes studying the map that morning that we would make Pondicherry, a former French union territory on the east coast that we had marked as our next destination, in one shot; all 600 km of it. Thor was sceptical, but humoured me for the sake of preserving my newfound reservoir of welly. Plus it meant going through a town called Tiruchirappali, which gave us hefty mileage in terms of pronunciation yucks.
An hour later we were on the NH7, which turned out to be the dual carriageway of my dreams, or at least the road I would have given Abhilasha’s spare tyre for during our journeys on the national highways in Kerala. It was driving bliss. After hours plodding down the west coast, cursing rural roads and all the obstacles in their many manifestations, Abhilasha was finally in her element, cruising at a euphoric 90 kmph on newly laid tarmac where vehicles were in their correct lanes and moving in the direction they were supposed to be. We were set to cover 300 km in four hours, a distance that would take at least double that time on the auxiliary roads. I eulogized to Thor the wonders of modern highways and their innate civility, and began to wonder if this marvel of a road wasn’t a gift from the gods, mediated by Vivekananda himself as a reward for my new stoic resolve. My AFS, CFS, RHWS and SBHS were already fading into the past.
There was little argument in my mind: a few well-placed highways between strategic locations and cities in India would do wonders to alleviate congestion on the smaller roads and in the villages, which themselves acted as complex speed breakers to hordes of long-distance traffic. As if to affirm my feeling, every few kilometres, Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh beamed down from information banners posted by the National Highways Authority of India. I presumed whatever was written on the lengthy signs was a manifesto of the same progressive ideals of twenty-first-century transport that I was busy expounding to my increasingly bored companion.
After all, the NHAI was one branch of the Indian government that really had its work cut out: although India could boast the same road density as, say, the United States, around half of those roads were an unpaved, dusty, rocky affair more suitable to gritty off-roading than transporting freight and passengers from one place to the next. I had read (not without a heavy sense of foreboding) that it could take truck drivers anything up to 65 hours to drive the 1,375 km from Mumbai to Delhi24 (a mind-bending average of about 13 kmph), and that the delays cost businesses millions of rupees in revenue. The cause was simple to diagnose but hard to fix: bad roads, horrible traffic. Thousands of villages were sometimes cut off from their neighbours due to dirt tracks that disintegrated during the monsoon. And even along the routes where concrete had once been laid, maintenance was so poor that the roads often ended up with enough craters to pass for the surface of the moon.
‘Our roads don’t have a few potholes. Our potholes have a few roads’ was the famous remark by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in the late 1990s when the NHAI – by then a decade old and with little to show for its ten years of existence – decided to get ambitious and put into action a plan for a modern highway to connect India’s major cities: Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Delhi. It was a much called-for undertaking in a country that had seen nothing in the way of major road building in the five decades since the Brits had shipped their last cement mixer back to London. The project was called the Golden Quadrilateral, and once it was completed, the NHAI began to set its targets much higher.
Under the leadership of Congress minister Kamal Nath, the Authority headed for the stratosphere in 2009 by declaring a target of 35,000 km of highways to be built in the next five years. With the government coffers not even marginally primed for such an enterprise, it was decided that India’s roads would be opened up to private investment, both foreign and domestic. The idea was that independent companies would be invited to build the roads – a significant policy change – and be allowed to operate them, earning revenues through toll booths. It was a bright idea that was unfortunately coming at a time of global economic crisis when it was tough enough to get a company CEO to invest in so much as a bus ticket, let alone a high-risk, low-return road-construction project in India. And although Nath did manage to attract some investors, his ambitious targets couldn’t be met, as banks soon reached their lending limits for the enormous amounts of cash the project required.25 An extra spanner was also thrown into the works over the sticky issue of land-acquisition rights. Mr Nath’s task was unenviable.
All too soon, our dream road began to show signs of fallibility. At one point Thor and I realized that all the other traffic had petered out and Abhilasha was the only car on the road. Why this had happened was a mystery, but we figured we must have been talking and missed the sign for a diversion.
‘What shall we do? Should I turn around?’
‘Hell, no! This is amazing, our own private road. I actually organized this especially. It was a surprise, just for you. Tell me you like it.’
‘Actually, it’s my every fantasy come true. It’s like being in a school or a museum after hours. I feel the urge to do something extremely naughty like a wheel spin in the fast lane, or driving all curly-wurly-like.’
Just as I was about to start tracing ribbons across the road, a massive pile of rubble appeared in our path and brought Abhilasha to a grinding and rather pensive halt.
‘Hmmm.’
‘Indeed.’
‘What do you reckon?’
‘I reckon let’s keep going. I mean, it might not be perfectly paved all the way, but at least there’s no traffic. Think of all those suckers who took the diversion and are most probably labouring in a jam on a tiny road all the way to Tiruchiru-whatsitcalled right now.’
I edged forward. Although the empty road was beginning to inspire in me some rather eerie feelings of postapocalyptic isolation and fear, I didn’t want Thor to think I was soft. After all, it was Thunderbolt at the helm today. I was Nanogrrrl.
But another few hundred metres further ahead we encountered a very final and entirely non-negotiable impediment; quite simply, there was no more road. I’m not talking a gradual fade-out or tarmac that blended into rocks and dust. I mean that the road came to an end, followed by a long and terrifying drop, like in Road Runner. A trusty highway that had delivered us safely under the smiles of Sonia Gandhi (who, now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen in a good while) just cut out, ceased and di
sappeared. I slammed on Abhilasha’s brakes and we skidded to a standstill a few metres before the precipice, to the mild interest of a group of female labourers who were taking their lunch by the side of the road.
The smell of burning rubber wafted through Abhilasha’s AC vent. I stopped to catch my breath and turned to Thor, who was rubbing the arm he had thrown across my chest as we lurched forward.
‘Is this actually happening?’ I asked him feebly.
‘Well,’ he said, checking the state of the cigarettes in his chest pocket, ‘that’s definitely the end of the road.’
The road had finished, but only for a few metres. There was a half-constructed bridge up ahead that would one day continue the trajectory of the NH7, presumably all the way to Madurai. One day; just not today. I felt misled, betrayed, downright stupid. We hadn’t clocked on to what all the other vehicles obviously knew: that the unbroken NH7 was still a dream, one still under construction, stone by stone, by the team of four skinny women who were heading towards us with a small child in tow.
I presumed they were coming to check that we were all right after nearly meeting a Looney Tunes end off a half-built flyover. Instead, they surrounded the car with shady smiles, put their hands out and pointed to their mouths.
They were petitioning the wrong potential benefactor. If ever I was in a generous mood, it was not right now and it was not towards what had been a most passive audience in the face of our near-annihilation; the only humans, in fact, privy to one of Abhilasha’s most traumatic and humiliating moments. We locked the car doors, spun a dust-raising U-turn and headed back along the deserted motorway in search of the elusive diversion we had neglected to follow that would inevitably be a speed bump–filled, pothole-laden route of a thousand villages. But there was no choice. And of course, I could call on my newfound inspiration, the travelling monk Vivekananda, to furnish me with all the equanimity I’d need to get over the demise of what had been the best road ever, and the accompanying transport dream it had shattered.
Disenchanted by the failure of the NH7, I began to execute a revision of my previous highway-exalting rhetoric. Motorways sucked, I told Thor. They were enormous and merciless in the way they sliced through villages, leaving nothing but a big concrete obstruction for farmers who were plagued with the task of getting their herds of goats and cows from one side to the other. Just as I was clearing my throat to move on to pollution and our modern-day obsession with speed, an elephant with a brightly painted face lumbered into view, galumphing from side to side with a man balancing sleepily on its back. On spotting Abhilasha, the elephant was visibly moved; on spotting the elephant, Abhilasha slowed down to a mesmerized stop. What were they doing on the deserted highway? The elephant stepped up its pace and came lurching towards us at what seemed from the nervous recesses of the driver’s seat to be stampede speed. Thor flung open the passenger door and jumped outside, at first I thought out of sheer cowardice, until I realized he was filming the beast as it attempted to destroy the Nano. If we were going down, at least Thor would have some gruesome footage to leave behind, for the news networks and any future documentarians to play with. The elephant saw his opportunity in the window that Thor left open, and pushed in his trunk as far as it would go from the passenger side of the car.
Now, if you’ve never had an elephant’s trunk groping blindly around your dashboard while you sit and quiver only inches away like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, I can assure you it’s an unsettling experience. I was sure there was an outside chance it would end in my own dismemberment. After a few moments, however, I realized that the elephant’s bristly grey trunk was actually looking for something specific, and on reaching my handbag, it seemed it had hit the jackpot. Concerned I may be on the brink of a most unorthodox stick-up, I gave it a tap on the trunk hard enough to communicate my displeasure, but still light enough not to ignite elephant rage.
At the top of the long list of things I never knew about elephants (next to the fact that they can swim) is the truth of their disturbing proboscises; namely, that they are, or can be, extremely runny. Either this particular elephant had a cold, or it was the practice of all these oversized mammals to leave a trail of pungent mucoid slime in the wake of their nasal gropings. In any case, I soon had a very slimy car interior. As I searched around for something with which to wipe its runny nose, the elephant’s trunk reached for my hand, having given up on lifting anything from my bag. I gave it another little pat before deciding that was about as much cross-species intimacy as I was comfortable with, and hit the button to nudge up the electric window. Nelly got the message and the trunk beat a hasty retreat. Meanwhile, its owner had dismounted and I got out of the car to greet him, hoping to quiz him on the practical challenges of travelling in India by elephant. But this guy was not here for small talk. He simply held out his hand for a spot of payback.
I was irked. ‘Are you serious? Your frigging elephant just covered the inside of my car with stinking trunk slobber and now you want me to give you some cash?’
The man managed to maintain his hopeful expression. I turned around to see his steed fondling Abhilasha’s exhaust pipe in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. Thor pulled me back in the car before my temper bubbled over, and I started the engine with a humph. Abhilasha stank; there were massive goblets of slime dripping from the dashboard, the passenger seat and even bits around my handbag. I swore revenge on elephantkind while Thor cleaned up the fusty trail of slime with a packet of wet wipes.
We were barely a hundred metres closer to the exit road when we were animal-ambushed once again. An old man who was attempting to manoeuvre a flock of about sixty sheep across the road was succinctly illustrating my earlier point about the inconvenience of motorways for livestock-herding shepherds. The scene was risible. Abhilasha was rendered immobile as sheep swarmed around her bodywork from all sides, bleating acquiescently and tripping over one another. With the Nano jammed in the middle of a sea of Ovis aries on a half-built deserted motorway, I had no option but to turn off the engine and surrender my will to heaven. What surprised me most was that the shepherd seemed unfazed by the prospect of any other car approaching, of which I knew there was a fair chance. He stood upright and dignified, a greying scarf around his head and a checked dhoti wrapped around his waist and brought up between his legs, brandishing a long stick with which he knocked at the tarmac as he slowly picked his way through his flock and continued as though he were leading the animals through the fires of hell to the promised land.
My vision of arriving in Pondicherry before sundown was, of course, a pipe dream. We made it as far as Tiruchirappali (whose name we finally discovered is commonly and quite sensibly shortened to Trichy) when it was starting to get dark and I reluctantly called it a day. We’d been on the road for almost ten hours and I was exhausted, between almost driving off the edge of a motorway overrun with vicious beasts and the hours of bumpy rural roads that had followed.
That night we lay in bed under an air-conditioning unit, a premium perk that Thor had sweetly insisted on as reward for the day’s travails, at the appropriately named Breeze Hotel, which had a view over a deserted car park. I was worn out and a tad peeved.
‘You think I’m a loser,’ I mumbled.
‘Why on earth would I think that?’
‘’Cos we didn’t make it to Pondicherry.’
‘600 kilometres was one hell of a goal, little Thunderbolt.’
‘We could have done it, if it wasn’t for that pesky break in the motorway. And the elephant. And all those sheep.’
‘You know, you’d do well to lower the bar on your driving ambitions, just a tad. You’ll make yourself crazy.’
‘Hmph.’
‘Cut yourself a little slack.’ He took my hand. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to prove something, would you?’
‘Hmph.’
‘Hmph?’
‘Hmph.’
The other elephant, the one that had been with us inside the Nano all day, had been duly addressed.
9
DIVINE (CAR) INSURANCE – Consecration and Catastrophe
PONDICHERRY; KM 3,041
If you’re going to be colonized, I mused as I tucked into a ham and cheese pancake while Thor and I debated the idea of an evening of jazz and surrealist poetry at the Alliance Française, be colonized by the French. After all, they’re the one nation with a god-given knack for bringing the chic into the wilds of the developing world due to their staunch refusal to leave their cultural and culinary foibles at home. Climate, geography, local economy and distance from Paris have never been factors in discouraging the French from carrying on as though they were in the thick of the Champs-Elysées. From lobster and foie gras luxury on Caribbean islands like St Barths and the twee-latticed wooden porches of New Orleans to the flouncy neoclassical flourish of the Opéra de Hanoi, there’s a tangible thread that runs through the former French colonies that would read something like: ‘Well, if we’re stuck out in this trou du cul du monde, we might as well make the most of it. Châteauneuf du Pape, anyone?’
Pondicherry was governed by the Tricolore until 1954, which was a good few years after the British left India. Its moulding at the hands of various Franco–Tamil architects over the centuries left a genuinely pretty town replete with churches, cultural centres and big mansions surrounded by courtyards and beautiful walled gardens worthy of filling several issues of World of Interiors. Compare the cutesy, picturesque, bougainvillea-adorned streets of Pondicherry with Lutyens’ monumental brick and mortar–fest around Delhi, and you’ll get a fair idea of the difference in Franco- and Anglo-colonial styles.
More than half a century after the administration packed their Louis Vuittons and left, Pondicherry is still fragrant with the essence of Gaul: the gridded streets of the old French Quarter (today referred to rather uncomfortably as White Town, which I had to presume was a reference to the skin colour of its former inhabitants rather than the few remaining whitewashed walls) were named after notable Frenchmen with Indian connections, like author and philosopher Romain Rolland, Admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez and François Martin, Pondicherry’s first governor-general. Many former colonial houses had been converted into fancy hotels, restaurants, internet cafés and boutiques; menus around town boasted relatively impressive wine lists to go with their Steak Frites and Croque Monsieurs; and the boulangerie Baker Street seemed to be frequently filled with homesick Frenchies munching on croissants and pains au chocolat that were a fair replica of the ones they’d be buying back home. In short, there seemed no better place to spend a romantic few days prior to leaving Thor at his ashram – which was only three hours away in Chennai – than in India’s own Little France.
