Never Mind the Bullocks

by Vanessa Able

  Minutes later, the game was becoming tiresome. Thor was getting impatient, and without warning he swung open Abhilasha’s door and strode towards the offending lorry. A minute later, he was back in the car.

  ‘This crap drives me crazy.’

  ‘What’s going on up there?’

  ‘There’s like five guys supposed to be unloading that lorry. It’s full of massive sacks of flour or rice or something. But they’re not unloading it, they’re just standing there, shooting the shit, waiting.’

  ‘What are they waiting for?’

  He turned to face me and executed a perfect Indian head wobble. Then he opened and closed the fingers of his hand to imitate the gesture that was the national symbol for five minutes. I giggled.

  ‘Pfive minutes only.’

  In my experience so far, ‘pfive minutes’ had usually been employed to excuse a task that would take longer than was acceptable or comfortable for any of the parties involved. It was as much a sign of appeasement as it was any accurate prediction of timing, and I soon came to learn that the actual time it was referring to could represent anything from three minutes to an hour. Five minutes later, we hadn’t moved an inch. I turned the engine off, though I still enjoyed giving a little toot on the horn to coincide with the sporadic eruptions of noise from the cars in front and behind us.

  ‘See, everyone’s sitting in their cars beeping their horns, but no one’s actually doing anything,’ Thor protested. ‘I swear, if they don’t move their arses in the next sixty seconds, I’m going to get up there and move those sacks for them.’

  I was appalled. ‘You wouldn’t. Would you?’

  Indeed, another minute and he was out of the car and striding with purpose towards the men around the stationary truck. Through the muted glass of the windscreen, I saw him gesticulating at the guys, who didn’t seem moved to respond. Seemingly frustrated by their lack of reaction, Thor took it on himself to open the door of the truck and climb in. The quick illumination of the vehicle’s rear lights implied the engine had been started. Abruptly, all of the men who had been standing around not moving the sacks jumped in unison and sped over to the driver’s door. One of them, presumably the driver from the look of mortal panic on his face, opened the door and started shouting and gesticulating into the cabin, while I closed my eyes and tried to reconcile myself to the fact that week two of my new romance could well end in a public lynching.

  I half expected to see Thor crawl out of the driver’s seat of the truck, wilting from the anger of the gathering crowd, but instead he bounced out, apparently undeterred and grinning from ear to ear, and made his way to the back of the truck. Some more conversation was exchanged, before he jumped into the back, on top of the pile of sacks, and began to haul one up into his arms. It looked spectacularly heavy, but he didn’t flinch, instead completing his gesture by passing the sack down into the arms of one of the men waiting on the road, who in turn passed it to another, who piled it by the side of the road. Two other men jumped up on top of the sacks to join Thor and soon there was a chain of sacks making its way out of the back of the lorry and onto the side of the road. I noticed the beeps of the cars around me had stopped and I wondered if everyone was as beguiled – and a tiny bit excited – by the spectacle as I was.

  When Thor returned to the Nano, he was panting, sweating and covered in flour. I wondered to what extent I was to blame for the episode by having previously undermined his road masculinity. I could think of little to say but, ‘Wow. You showed them.’

  He patted down his pockets in search of his cigarettes, trying to get his breath back. ‘Yeah. That guy got really pissed when I started up his engine.’

  ‘I thought they were going to kill you.’

  He laughed. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Well, yeah. They thought you were about to nick their lorry.’ I nearly added, thank god you didn’t try to reverse it.

  ‘And would you have run out to try and fight for my life?’

  ‘What, and leave Abhilasha here, alone and vulnerable?’

  Thor frowned. ‘I feel bad, though. I think I burst one of their sacks. I was just so angry that I grabbed it wrong and ripped it a bit.’ He slapped his hand down over his T-shirt and a cloud of flour dust rose into the air. ‘I must have lost them quite a bit of flour.’

  The truck finally empty, it started to move forward down the street as all the cars that had been stuck behind it restarted their engines and rolled forward. The flour now floating around the Nano settled like a tiny snowfall over the jagged peaks of our previous conversation. Where we had hardened, I began to feel us softening towards one another once more. Perhaps, I thought, our idiosyncrasies could eventually be fine-tuned to a form of good teamwork.

  ‘What the hell were they waiting for in the end?’

  ‘Fuck knows.’

  The market was putting up too much resistance, so we decided to forgo it in favour of a trip to the sea. We headed north to a beach called Serenity, which had already been invaded by a mob of Euro-hippies dressed in varying styles of tie-dyed sarongs wrapped around their heads and hips. Some bikini-clad girls were dousing themselves in the ocean in a way that might have looked incredibly tempting were it not for the audience of fishermen their antics had gathered to the shoreline. They sat on the edge of their brightly coloured grounded boats, fiddling with nets and shooting side glances at every shrieked ‘Putain!’ coming from the water. I badly wanted to swim, but I wanted to do it unobserved. We met an American woman who lived on the beach called Kasha, who gave us directions to head south for more complete serenity at a place called Paradise Beach.

  At Paradise, we found Eden. It was a low promontory of sand separating the Indian Ocean from a quiet inlet that was actually the mouth of the Sangarabarani river. The light of late afternoon had already smoothed the landscape down to deep-baked putty and we arrived just in time to feel the day slowly exhale around us. With not a fisherman in sight, we left our clothes in a heap on the sand and waded into the ocean, which was tepid and foamy.

  Thor ran straight for the waves while I remained stationed at knee level, frightened as I always have been of currents and the undertow of big breakers. I’d heard that many people had drowned on this coastline (outside of the 2004 tsunami, which devastated the area) and, given how well my odds were coming through on a daily basis as far as driving was concerned, I didn’t much fancy challenging the fates at sea as well as on land.

  So for the second time that day, I sat back and watched Thor from a distance, doing things that I couldn’t. He was lit by the sun that was setting behind us and shining out over the inlet, as he bounced in and out of the waves that intermittently consumed him, then spat him back out. At intervals, he emerged with his eyes red, his nose streaming snot and his hair stuck to his face, spouting a mini-fountain of water from his mouth. A seagull took a break from its business to join me on the water’s edge until its attention was snatched by a dead, inflated blowfish that bobbed slowly by. I felt like Thor, the seagull, the blowfish and I had been here for centuries.

  We dried off on the sand. The ocean was behind us, rough and raging, though settling into an evening murmur, while the river ahead of us was smooth as a lake of glass. The world turned pink as the sun eased itself down.

  ‘Do you forgive me for crashing your car?’ Thor asked.

  ‘You didn’t crash it. You just rearranged the bumper a tad. It was nothing compared with what I did to it the other day.’

  ‘Put that way, I suppose it was quite a skilled manoeuvre.’

  ‘For sure.’ I scuffed about in the sand to lie with my head on his belly, a bony-flesh pillow that tightened to cradle the weight of my skull. ‘Do you forgive me for being horribly aggressive? In the passive sense?’

  ‘Only if you promise to chill out a bit and stop trying to steer everything past your impossible goals.’

  He kissed my head. We had emerged from a tunnel of weirdness and things were better than before we went in. Thor had a way of turnin
g conflict into something constructive, so that instead of bashing one another down with the dead blowfish of recrimination, we were instead tending to one another’s sore spots. It was an answer to a yearning I never knew I’d had.

  ‘Do you think that if we’re good driving long distances in India in a small car in the blistering heat, that we’ll be as good back in the real world?’ Thor asked.

  I had been wondering the same. Back in Europe, or wherever we were destined to see one another again, would I slip back into my old habits of finding fault in every nook and cranny of the relationship? Were we just drunk on India and looking at one another through Kingfisher goggles? And yet, when I thought about it more soberly, there seemed to be nothing discernible in our current togetherness that in any way relied on India, driving, Abhilasha or the outside temperature. Instead, there was an effortless fellowship that seemed to override any anxiety I might have had about what lay ahead. There seemed to be no question about what would follow, since it was quite clear to both of us that we came next.

  Although Chennai is undoubtedly loved by many, to me the city formerly known as Madras was a featureless urban sprawl and one long traffic jam, punctuated with transvestite panhandlers at traffic lights and islands of irritable traffic police. It was the only place in India where I was indignantly cajoled into paying an official Rs 100 fine (that means I got a receipt and the cash presumably didn’t go into the officers’ holiday coffers) for running a red light,26 and where I met with the fury of one very angry cop who stopped me for talking on my phone while driving. It was a grave offence that I managed to neutralize through a combination of Jedi mind powers and my increasingly refined Margaret Thatcher impression. I told the cop, in assured, low-pitched tones, that I had in fact been consulting the device for directions and could he possibly tell me how to get to that damn elusive Mount Poonamallee High Road? In a spectacular turnaround of temper, he stopped yelling and quite helpfully pointed me in the direction I knew I had been going all along.

  The district of Manapakkam that was home to Thor’s ashram was a suburban neighbourhood defined by a strange and uncomfortable mixture of ramshackle housing and residential comfort, set in the shadow of the growing skyscrapers and cranes that lined its periphery. Middle-class pillbox houses, whose rough cement walls looked like they had been freshly popped out of a rubber mould, stood streets away from a slummy bog whose mountains of noxious debris steamed a stinking slow burn as goats, hogs and dogs spent their days picking through the junk that humans left behind. Nearby were the gates to the ashram, called the Sri Ram Chandra Mission. A security checkpoint waved us onto a palm tree–lined pathway that led to a large covered pavilion that was the centre’s main meditation hall. Chipmunks scampered between the branches of trees as birdsong filled the air and men and women strolled the grounds with looks of happy intention. It was a sunny bell jar of a sanctuary within a world that was developing at breakneck speed, and when the gates closed behind us, they shut off the noise and bedlam outside. I could see why, once Thor had arrived here, he was loath to go anywhere else.

  Our digs were situated just around the corner of the ashram’s back gate in the homely outbuilding of a house belonging to a French couple, Marion and Hénoc Marceau. It was an arrangement for which I was very grateful after I spied the communal dorms in the ashram, which would have meant sharing a large concrete floor with hundreds of other devotees and, I feared, the odd rodent.

  A friend of Thor’s for almost twenty years, Hénoc had moved to India as a boy with his family, and decided to stay when his parents and brother eventually returned to France. Despite his decades spent in the country and the kerfuffle endured in the name of acquiring Indian nationality, I had the feeling that Hénoc and his wife were, like me, still having trouble nailing Chennai’s redeeming features. Caught in the overlap between an international spiritual centre, an IT park and the developing world, the slightly surreal realm within their four outer walls contained a red-brick house and a smaller cottage with a garden occupied by a cat called Kiri, a pair of Lhasa Apsos, a stray pup called Leia and a domesticated squirrel called Lilu, who had befriended a thus-far nameless gecko. With the exception of outings to the ashram and Marion’s job as a schoolteacher in the city, the pair appeared to prefer bedding down at home, blessed as they were with plenty of greenery, household appliances and a DVD collection primed for a decade of Siberian banishment. Any mention of having to venture beyond the limits of Manapakkam inspired in them both pained expressions of reluctance.

  Nevertheless, this didn’t mean they could keep India from their door: their garden attracted an endless stream of visitors, Europeans from the ashram as well as the local neighbours, who appeared quite taken with the floral and faunal abundance of their abode. And the Marceaus were exemplary in their capacity for hospitality, accepting the incursions on their privacy with admirably cheery compliance and greeting everyone who dropped by with a drink and the offer of a seat on the garden swing.

  Happily nested on said swing, it was all I could do to drag myself up and plan the next section of my route. I had decided to head north and inland towards Hyderabad, a city of stunning historical architecture that I had visited once before and remembered for its unfathomable draw. Hyderabad was 700 km away, which I figured would require at least one overnight stop along the route. The choices weren’t abundant: an agitated search through the Lonely Planet’s Andhra Pradesh chapter had informed me I was about to enter a large swathe of the country where guidebook-endorsed hotels were few and far between. After some deliberation, I settled on a government hotel in Nellore – a large town on the east coast, north of Chennai.

  Whether I was succumbing to a wave of road weariness, or whether my impending departure from Thor was taking its toll, I noticed that my resolve to continue the journey had begun to slide. Since the afternoon at Paradise Beach, there had occurred a shift in my psyche that no longer required me to sit in a car for the next two months, urgently burning rubber and clocking up miles. If I was honest with myself, all I really wanted to do right then was stay in Manapakkam with Thor, the Marceaus and their menagerie. Thor was due to spend another week there before heading back out to Berlin, where we agreed we’d meet when all of this was over. Eager not to cake the situation in too much nostalgic crud, I exercised great willpower in not falling to my knees and begging Thor to take me to Germany with him. Instead, I tried to sound cool and optimistic when he asked me where I’d be staying that night. Oh, in a place called Nellore, I piped.

  ‘I’ve never heard of Nellore.’

  ‘Oh really? That’s strange. It’s not far from here and it’s so well known for its, er, mica.’

  ‘Its what?’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll be just fine.’

  ‘Of course you will, little Thunderbolt. Just take it easy.’

  Given that Nellore was relatively close, I tried to delay my departure from Chennai as long as possible. It was 4 pm when Abhilasha and I trundled off (not daring to look at Thor waving in my rear-view mirror), which was just the right time to meet the rush-hour traffic coming to a complete standstill. Two hours and enough creative cursing to fill an Eminem lyric book later, we began to move around the northern outskirts of the city.

  Crossing the border from Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh, the landscape flattened out and we finally picked up speed. As the massive Pulicat Lake passed unseen somewhere to our right, the sky began to fall through several shades of crimson. It was a picture worth freezing – an open and now relatively unimpeded road, a vast surrounding panorama, a sky slowly sinking into darkness and a few tungsten beacons blinking here and there on the horizon. I felt like the lonesome cowboy, riding off alone into the sunset with a throbbing heart and a fistful of rupees. So I had left my lover behind: what did I care? The road was mine once more. I had over 6,500 km left to drive over India’s feral topography, and the journey started right here. I gave Abhilasha a jolly good cuff around the wheel to celebrate.

  11

 
SMART CAR – More for Less for More

  HYDERABAD; KM 3,941

  As far as I could see, the Nano’s popularity was showing no signs of recession. Passing through towns and villages, we were treated to the kind of reception more appropriate to a troupe of touring, puppy-dispensing tycoons. The enthusiasm was unremitting, and surprising to me. It was only a car, after all. How exciting could it be? I tried to imagine similar levels of adulation poured on, say, a Mini driving through an Oxfordshire village: kids dropping their games to run in its wake, screaming its name like they were trying to draw out the spirits from its frame; adults stopping dead in their tracks for a gander, knocking on the windscreen at traffic lights to ascertain the exact fuel-to-distance ratio – it wasn’t probable. I mean, I liked the Nano – and in some ways I was even beginning to love Abhilasha – but I wasn’t about to start sprinting down the road after one.

  Nevertheless, the sustained hype did make me wonder. Was it the Nano’s elusiveness that made it so appealing to the masses? Once it went on general sale, how would the market reflect its popular celebrity? Were people ready to put their cash down on what might be a passing fad?

  Before arriving in Hyderabad, I’d been introduced to a professor at the Indian School of Business there called Reuben Abraham. He’d been recommended to me for his expertise in emerging markets, and as such I hoped he might be able to shed some light on the behaviour of the Indian consumer.

  ‘You should come down to ISB to see what the future of education in India looks like,’ Reuben wrote to me after I sent him the awkward ‘you don’t know me, but…’ email. They were bold words that duly perked my interest. Besides, I didn’t have much choice: the 450 km round-trip detour I’d taken to see Hyderabad had been rendered futile by the fact that most of the city centre was currently out of bounds. On arriving at the Taj Mahal hotel, an establishment whose appearance fell a few tacky architectural flourishes and luminescent signs short of tallying with its name, I learned from a Mr R. Janardhan at reception that a series of local Hindu–Muslim skirmishes had closed off most areas of note in the city, where the police had cracked down on residents and enforced a curfew.