by Vanessa Able
In addition to the French accent, Pondicherry had other merits: it was the kind of town where Christians, Muslims and Hindus appeared to live quite contentedly side by side in their respective quarters; mosques, churches and temples stood within streets of one another and were often subject to varying degrees of stylistic overlap. Not far from the Alliance Française was a bright turquoise building I had presumed was a Hindu temple until its caretaker spied us and pulled us inside for a gander. He asked Thor hopefully if he was a devotee of St Anthony before showing us the interior of a Christian hall with a thatched leaf ceiling held up by bamboo poles. There was a pink altar at one end containing a small statue of the saint surrounded by flowers and cherubs in a vibrant, cacophonous style that would have been more at home among the colours of Holi than the usual sober décor of a Christian church.
We emerged after a lengthy chinwag with the custodian (who was disappointed by my scant knowledge of St Anthony and all his good deeds) to find Abhilasha relaxing on Suffren Street with the insipid obedience of a well-trained hound at a dog show. Her jovial, upwardly pointed headlights demonstrated blissful indifference to what lay outside the phlegmatic streets of the French Quarter, as well as what seemed like a lightly flirtatious bearing directed towards a rather handsome Hyundai that was parked right in front of her, bumper to bumper in an Eskimo kiss. The car was sparkling grey, its bonnet draped with a garland of marigolds and its headlights daubed with large dots of red powder. I imagined it was these decorative details that had attracted Abhilasha to the dishy vehicle in the first place, though I doubted she knew that in fact they were tell-tale signs that this particular jalopy had come fresh from the car showroom via a Brahmin’s benediction.
When a new car is purchased in India, barely does the ink dry on the registration papers than the owner makes a beeline to the local temple, where a priest marks it with a sign of divine insurance. Even for the non-religious, a car’s spiritual servicing is considered as important as checking its brakes and testing its horn; having it blessed before taking it out on the road greatly increases one’s chances of not being pulverized under the wheels of an articulated lorry.
I had also read about the Ayudh Puja ceremony (a festival to mark the worship of implements, especially cars and other motor vehicles) and thought it to be an excellent idea. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder whether the respect afforded under the sanctimony of a Brahmin was some form of guilty and superstitious compensation for the extreme lack of consideration that seemed to kick in once the car was safely out of the temple and on the roads. Was it basically okay to drive like a maniac before going into a temple and begging your god for forgiveness for all the heinous traffic sins you’d just committed? Was this obeisance to one’s car in a whirlwind of incense and a sprinkling of powder a bit like wiping clean one’s weekly sins at Sunday confession? And did such attention to a car’s spiritual wellbeing mean that one was then covered by the ultimate divine insurance company?
Contemplating the flashily garlanded Hyundai that looked like it was trying to get its leg over Abhilasha, I began to wonder whether I had such godly protection. Had Mr Shah of Mumbai thought to have the Nano blessed before selling it on so quickly? And even if he had, did the blessing only apply to the current owner or to the car’s future proprietors as well? The issue seemed laden with complications, and I was beginning to think that Abhilasha and I might be at a disadvantage. How could we possibly compete with all the other cars on the road, the ones with swastikas (of the Hindu variety, the holy symbol that embodies a great spiritual thumbs up, and not, I presumed, of some local Nazi drivers’ movement) dangling from the rear-view mirror and little framed pictures of Shiva and Lakshmi next to the ignition? Looking around at the other cars parked on the street, I realized that all of them carried some sort of talismanic trinket, ranging from the religious as far as the political. My favourite was an arrangement of stickers on the back of a Mahindra Verito that displayed the petition ‘Jesus Save Me’. The stencilling was detailed and intricate and looked like it had taken someone the best part of a week. Whether it had occurred to them that they had paradoxically also reduced their chances of earthly salvation by almost entirely blocking all visibility from their rear window was another matter.
I decided nothing would be left to chance. Our dashboard-bound three-inch plastic Ganesha did not necessarily guarantee adequate divine protection. I wanted more; I wanted the full monty. Exactly how to have Abhilasha properly consecrated became the next big question. Did it matter that my name wasn’t on the registration papers? Should I wait until Dussehra, the Hindu festival celebrating the victory of good over evil? Could a non-Hindu feasibly waltz into a place of worship and demand that her car be blessed?
I decided to consult Radhika. She was a professor of media studies at Pondicherry University to whom I’d been introduced by a fan of the Nano Diaries blog, a Mumbai professor by the name of Mangesh Karandikar, who contacted me when he saw we were passing through town. He insisted I meet his colleague, a ballsy Delhi-born educational crusader, who, it took me under a minute to realize, was also a most frenetic soul.
‘Excuse my appearance,’ she said breathlessly, as I followed her striding lead through the corridors of Pondicherry University’s Communications Department. ‘It’s just that I haven’t been home for ten days now…’
‘Where have you been?’ I asked, thinking she looked just fine and trying to keep up.
‘Here at the department!’ she exclaimed, turning round to face me, her eyes fizzing. ‘I have no problem with sleeping on the floor of my office. We’ve been so busy…’ she started, before her attention was pulled away by a lad hauling a large cardboard box in our direction.
‘Bagalavan!’ she cried out.
‘Yes, ma’am?’ came a voice from behind the box.
‘Bagalavan, do you have all the recording equipment in there?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Well, fine, then take it to my office and make sure you lock the door behind you.’ She turned to me. ‘We have so many problems with this recording equipment, it’s driving me crazy. Last week one student lost a microphone from the department’s store, and two days later a tripod went missing.’ Radhika put her hand to her temple and grinned. ‘Every day I have migraines from this job. My nerves are all wrecked, you know…’
We came to an abrupt stop outside a large door in the department. I was puzzled, as I thought Radhika and I were meeting for coffee. I had left Thor blissfully programming in a café in order to come out for a bit of girl bonding, but instead of lounging in the university canteen, Radhika and I seemed poised to enter a lecture theatre. She put one hand on the door and looked at me with academy-award-grade supplication. ‘Can I ask you for a favour?’
I began to cringe in anticipation of what she might be about to say.
‘Would you talk to my Year One Media Studies group about your project?’
‘You mean… give a lecture?’ I stammered. Public speaking came somewhere near sticking my head in a basket of irate cobras on the list of things I’d rather not do if that’s all right, thanks.
Radhika threw her hands up in exaggerated astonishment. ‘Noooo! Nothing like that; nothing so formal!’ She leaned in towards me and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I think these students could learn a lot from listening to you. About your journey, your blog, your process… There are some girls in there who are frightened even to take a bus on their own. I want them to be inspired. Can you do that?’
Inspired? How on earth could I inspire a group of late teens into anything but a pre-lunch nap? I was flummoxed. What was there to say? I had bought the world’s cheapest car, mostly because I didn’t have the cash for that coveted Toyota Innova, and had decided to come to India on the back of a failed relationship while chasing after some lost nostalgic notion of the Indian dream that these students would probably think was utterly cheesy. In addition, I’d spent the last two weeks fawning over the ginger-haired French A
merican in my passenger seat; I was a living breathing soft-focus road romance, who spent most of my time planning routes, cursing Delilah and complaining about pain in my legs and lumbar region. What on earth could I pull out of my backside to galvanize a class of media studies kids?
‘But… but I haven’t prepared anything…’
She grabbed my arm and smiled in a way that was both placatory and expertly guileful. I realized I wasn’t getting out of this one. The lecture hall doors swung open and not one single student looked up.
‘Can I please have everybody’s attention?’ Radhika commanded with a zeal I knew I couldn’t come close to emulating. Most of the class eventually hauled their gazes from their laptops and phones. I wished for a moment I could be as uninteresting to the rest of India as I was to the first-year Communications students of Pondicherry University, who clearly saw me as some irritating interlude in their lesson break. Radhika gestured towards me. ‘This is Vanessa. She is a journalist from the UK who is doing a very interesting project here that she has come to talk to you about today. Dileep! Where is Dileep?’
A hand went up at the back of the lecture hall.
‘Dileep, will you please turn on the fans?’
Dileep shot up and sprinted over to the fan controls. Five sets of blades overhead started whirring, necessitating that all conversation be held in tones very close to yelling.
‘So I will leave Vanessa to tell her story. Please ask her questions at the end. Anything you like. Anupama, Deepa, make sure you take notes; you can write an article about this for The Inquirer.’
The Inquirer? This was escalating out of control. What I was about to say was to be set in stone in the student rag. Every word would be immortalized, unretractable, howled at over beers at the student union. And in the face of such pressure, who emerged but my stuttering Hugh Grant alter ego?
‘Right. Well, um… hello. Nice to be here. Um… (bugger).’
It was painstaking, but it seemed I had no choice and I launched into my story. An hour later, all the students were still sitting upright and looking earnestly in my direction. They appeared curious, a fact that shocked and terrified me at the same time. Until this point, Abhilasha had been my little bubble in which I was sailing untouched through a sea of adventure, doubt, frustration and repetitive strain injuries. It was true that I had been writing missives to the outside world via my blog, but every time I went to publish a new post, it didn’t occur to me that someone, somewhere would actually end up reading it.
To my amazement, the Nano Diaries Facebook page had by then accrued a thousand or so followers, most of whom were people I didn’t know, and of these the large majority were young Indian men. On top of that, our journey was starting to reap a bit of press interest. A woman, coincidentally called Janelle Nanos, had contacted me for an interview for National Geographic’s ‘Intelligent Travel’ blog (a title I thought in my case could be construed as wildly ironic), which then led to emails from CNN Go, Budget Travel magazine, Asian Correspondent and a Mumbai tabloid called Mid Day. We eventually even got a radio interview with Voice of America and a mention in the Washington Post. Abhilasha and I were garnering celebrity status and – quite surprisingly – people seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing. Perhaps this wasn’t the world’s worst idea after all.
‘I think it’s great to see a woman do what you are,’ Radhika told me, smiling over her glasses as we tucked into fried rice in the university canteen after my stutterthon. ‘It’s so brave.’
I told her I quite honestly didn’t think my gender mattered either way. A woman was just as capable of driving a car as a man, after all. Some studies even showed females to be better drivers. Surely the fact that I was a girl didn’t make much difference.
Radhika didn’t agree. A bit of an idiosyncrasy of Indian society, she was a mum who loved travelling alone with her daughter. She told me stories of when her little one was a baby and she would strap the child to her chest and a rucksack on her back and hop on a bus or a train from Delhi up north to the mountains or south to Goa and Kerala. ‘A lot of people would approach me and tell me what I was doing was wrong. They said, “Alone! Where is your husband? You should be with your family,”’ she revealed very matter-of-factly.
I was amazed. In the time I had been driving alone, I had encountered nothing of the sort. Was it Abhilasha’s charm that was too distracting for people to see that she actually contained a single, husband-less female, or was it the colour of my skin that prevented the people I met along the way from airing their real opinions and instead led them to pump me for information about the Nano’s fuel-to-performance ratio? However, I told Radhika, there was one thing she could do to help stack the fates a little better on my side…
Radhika assured me that consecrating Abhilasha would not be a problem; she suggested I have the blessing performed right there in Pondicherry and immediately dispatched the ever-acquiescent Bagalavan to follow me on his motorbike to the Manakula Vinayagar temple in the centre of town. Particularly appropriate in that it was dedicated to none other than Ganesha himself, the temple came complete with its very own elephant, who went by the name of Lakshmi, and who stood obediently outside the main entrance. Lakshmi’s main job appeared to be taking coins and bananas from faithful devotees and nervous tourists and in return imparting darshan, a blessing, in the form of a light pat on the head that made most recipients quiver and screech.
Following Abhilasha’s recent manhandling on our way from Kanyakumari to Tiruchirappali, I was very wary of the lumbering, runny-nosed proboscidea. However, Lakshmi appeared to be a different class of elephant altogether: elegant, polite and decked out in some rather attractive ankle bracelets. She seemed quite happy to dole out blessings to anyone who tossed her a prize, and I eventually succumbed to her charms and flipped her a ten-rupee coin. I figured garnering a bit of goodwill with a real-life Ganesha could only further my cause of maximizing favour with the gods.
Bright-faced and businesslike, Bagalavan wasted no time in rushing me towards a kiosk inside the temple, where he pushed some rupees over the counter in exchange for a couple of flimsy tickets. We took these around the corner where a Brahmin appeared, ready with his assortment of materials for the ceremony. Wearing a dhoti and a thread looped diagonally across his bare chest and over his shoulder, he was balancing four limes and a pot of deep red sindoor on an aluminium tray with a burning oil lamp soldered onto the end of it.
Bagalavan disappeared somewhere and I was left grinning at the Brahmin over the smoke of his oil burner. I pointed towards Abhilasha and his expression became grave as he nodded his head in a gesture of acknowledgement. Bagalavan returned with a garland of marigolds, which we hung from Abhilasha’s rear-view mirror, as well as a line of jasmine for my own hair.
And so the ceremony began. The Brahmin started by standing in front of the Nano’s bonnet and applying dots of sindoor on her headlights, number plate and a spot on the windscreen that fell roughly where her forehead should be. Then he circulated his burning oil lamp around to the driver’s door, where he got in (my maternal gut clenched at the sight of an uncovered, smoking oil lamp thrust deep inside her delicate and presumably flammable interior) and proceeded to dab bits of sindoor powder around the steering wheel and dashboard. He then placed a lime underneath the front and back tyres, before moving around to her posterior, where he applied more sin-door dots to her rear lights and number plate. The remaining limes were duly placed under Abhilasha’s left tyres and all that remained was for me, my own forehead now also sindoored, to get in and slowly drive forward, thus making limeade with Abhilasha’s treads.
As quickly as it started, it was over. Abhilasha, smoky and powdered, had now officially been blessed and sanctified. As far as the gods were concerned, she was all right and well worth keeping a divine eye on. Ganesha beamed up at me from the dashboard as the Brahmin hovered by my open window.
‘Ma’am, you must give him a little baksheesh,’ Bagalavan informed me from o
ver the holy man’s shoulder. I gave him a fifty-rupee note and he went on his way.
‘So is that it?’ I asked Bagalavan, incredulous that this all-important act of karmic insurance had been so fleeting, simple and, er, cheap.
‘Yes, ma’am. That is all. Now you are safe to drive and you will be protected from all accidents.’
Excellent, I thought. Pricey insurance policies be damned, I now had a much more powerful source of indemnity on my side. I thanked Bagalavan – who seemed eager to be dismissed, as I guessed Radhika had piled him high with jobs for the day – and set off with Abhilasha for a celebratory croissant.
Later that afternoon, I was taking the Nano through the narrow lanes of Pondicherry’s Muslim quarter looking for the front porch of the man with whom Thor and I had left a bundle of our washing hours earlier. As I rounded a corner, I had a weird rush of uncoordination and took the turn too tight. The laundry man’s ironing table hove into view as I felt an almighty scrape on the right-hand side of the car. I stopped dead with a stomach-churning wince of recognition as I turned to see that I had rubbed Abhilasha against a concrete lamppost; a bit like how a cat would rub up against your leg, only to the teeth-clenching sound of grazed metal.
