Never Mind the Bullocks

by Vanessa Able

  The tour over, I drank the entire contents of the bottle of water from my bag and sat down in the shade to make like a Bhutanese monk and contemplate the sprawling peepul tree that stood within a walled garden on the south side of the temple.

  At dusk, when the temperature had dropped enough to allow the non-essential functions of my brain to kick back in, I was approached by a smiling middle-aged monk in yellow robes. We had no language in common and so proceeded to communicate mostly by way of hand gestures and the mutual exchange of detritus at the bottom of both our bags. He showed me his passport, which told me that his name was Le Van Chung and that he was Vietnamese. He then curiously insisted that I take a photo of his passport picture page; a strange request, which for some reason I felt might be insulting to refuse. I went ahead and snapped his document, before he quite rightly asked if he could return the favour.

  Once again, the grizzly paw of suspicion took a swipe in my direction. Exchanging images of each other’s passports was an unprecedentedly bizarre activity. My more rational intellect told me to relax, that the man was clearly a mendicant: his head was shaved, he was clad in holy cloth and his arms were dripping with prayer beads. This was most probably his way of getting to know people and gleaning the information that his language skills prevented him from doing: small-talk basics like name and country data. There was nothing peculiar about that, was there? But then the gremlins crawled out from their lair and whispered in my other ear – he could be an identity thief, a human trafficker, an undercover agent, a con artist, a (gasp!) Naxal… After all, the guise of the benevolent monk would be perfect for reeling in unsuspecting single females already batty from the heat. I kept my eye on him even after he left to meditate by the temple entrance, and didn’t let him out of my sight until I decided to head back to the Kirti.

  Back in bed, lungs heaving and sweat drying off under the force of the huge overhead fan, I began to come to my senses. The chances that Le Van was a mastermind criminal or local Marxist rabble-rouser were very small indeed. Occam’s razor dictated that he was basically just a nice old chap with a quirky way of making friends.

  That decided, I realized a problem remained: the issue here was not the über-friendly Le Van, nor was it the Naxals. The problem, as it revealed itself to me in a moment of lucidity, was the joint prongs on the pitchfork of my own predicament: namely, prolonged periods of time spent with nothing but my own paranoid ranting for company within, and all-encompassing mind-bending heat without. And on the back of that rather calming and incisive thought, Occam’s razor also added that it was high time I got the hell out of the plains, before I started to have a meltdown of nerves.

  I turned to Google Maps and checked out our options. We needed to get north as fast as possible, to the foothills of the Himalayas where temperatures were in the blissful 20s. I decided we would head for the state of Uttarkhand, which contained the closest highlands in the direction in which we were moving. I set my sights on the town of Nainital, a small holiday resort at the start of the foothills that, according to Lonely Planet, was an attractive and upbeat place built by homesick Brits who wanted to be reminded of the Lake District. That suited me just fine, but a few moments of measurement brought with them the grim tidings that this pseudo-Cumbrian mountain paradise was still 1,000 km away, which realistically meant at least another three days on the road. Between the Buddha tree and Nainital, we’d have to overnight in Varanasi (although, remembering how much I had loved the city the first time I visited, I was tempted to stay on) and again in Lucknow before finally escaping the oven that was the northern plains.

  As I settled down to sleep, I tried to think what the Buddha might do in the same situation. He would probably use his infinite wisdom to accept the trials of the heat and see through the illusion of the pains of extreme high temperatures and lethargy, I thought, resolving to take my future cues more from the stoic Buddha and less from Scooby Doo in the face of 50 degrees Celsius. But then I remembered what Buddha, a native of this area, actually did: come the summertime, Shakyamuni would gather up his disciples, find a suitable spot of serenity and batten down the hatches for the next three months, thus starting the tradition of the annual summer Buddhist retreat.33 Now that was smart. And so I drifted uncomfortably off to sleep in the grim knowledge that Buddha himself wouldn’t attempt the journey we were about to embark on the next day: a 250 km drive to Varanasi over tarmac roads hot enough to make a thousand-egg masala omelette.

  My hopeful plans for leaving before daybreak were scuppered by a slumber so log-like that not even the irritating sound of a phone alarm sustained over 45 minutes managed to scratch the bark of my deep REM.

  After finally being frog-marched into consciousness by a protracted banging at the door from a shy youth who had been obliged by some higher power to ascertain that I was checking out that day, my departure was then further delayed by an email I received from Thor with the alarming header: ‘Check this out and please don’t explode and die!’ Inside was a link to an article in the Hindustan Times that almost made me want to leave Abhilasha in the Kirti parking lot and take the first plane out to wherever, with nothing but a Dear John scribbled on a Post-it and stuck to her windscreen by way of explanation.

  The headline, which jumped out at me from the screen bearing all the marks of a Hitchcock horror sequence, dismally read: ‘Second Nano Catches Fire: Tata Motors’. With a bleak sense of foreboding, I went on to read the harrowing tale of a brand new Nano that had burst into flames a few days ago on its way to being delivered to a dealership near the town of Vadodara in Gujarat. The article only stated that a Tata spokesperson had announced that the company was sure a design flaw was not to blame. I found little comfort in his reassurance and was frustrated by the newspaper’s lack of information about how the fire started. A cigarette left to burn on the passenger seat? A stray firework that made its way into the gas tank? I hoped against hope that the explanation was ludicrous and highly unlikely; that of all the things that might have ignited the flames, what it definitely wasn’t was a faulty spark plug that would incite a recall of the 30,000 Nanos already on the road all over India. Or, come to think of it, anything connected with driving long distances in temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius.

  I went straight to a YouTube broadcast by CNN-IBN that displayed the words ‘Nano: Trial by Fire’ across the screen in block letters, accompanied by a dramatic action-sequence soundtrack and the heart-rending image of Abhilasha’s doppelgänger in an advanced stage of immolation. I watched reluctantly as the report showed the charred remains of a grey Nano being loaded onto the back of a truck and covered solemnly with a white shroud. IBN’s man on the ground, Varun Kumar, stood boldly facing the camera and recounted in his best Breaking News tones how the fire had started in the rear of the vehicle and worked its way quickly to engulf the whole body. He went on to interview an auto analyst by the name of R.K. Dhawan. Dhawan, sporting a huge moustache and a baseball cap that undermined his senior years by at least two decades, spoke with cloudy authority about the problems of new-fangled fuel-injection systems. Kumar concluded with the staunch observation that Tata might be seeing its dream sales figure reduced to ashes.

  The readers’ comments that followed the articles and videos gave me pause for thought. Posts such as ‘It’s a toaster oven on wheels – a piece of SHIT car!’ and ‘It has become devil. It should be banned’ suggested that glowing national support for the little car might not be as widespread as I had assumed. The critics were harsh: ‘What u expect for peanuts!’ exclaimed an outraged user called Sahilkind, while Jam from Bangalore pulled no punches in saying, ‘Tata Nano is crap. Please suggest your friends and family members not to go for it, if anyone is planning to. Saving li’l money at the cost of lives is not wise. Thank you.’

  TheMrRajaG was hardly so polite: ‘This is a bloody fucking car,’ he said, before telling the story of his neighbour who had his Nano ‘thrashed’ by an autowala and had to have two doors replaced. He rounded off his
tale with the deduction that the Nano was a ‘plastic toy car fucking good for kids’.

  ‘An expensive way to get someone cremated on slum-dog standards’ was the insightful response from YouTube user Telears, while cyclops621 responded to the footage of the burnt-out car by chillingly laying open his own emotion. ‘Hahahahahahahaha…’ he wrote, with brazen honesty.

  But the haters in turn had their own detractors: ‘Shame on you whoever you are,’ wrote parthakaroy, joined in his defence of the car by athjuljmatthew, who claimed, ‘There is nothing wrong with the nano’, and Porusable, who added his own endorsement: ‘On the whole, the tatanano is a fantastic performer.’ The Nano’s supporters went on to point out that many makes of cars had either spontaneously combusted or undergone safety recalls, including Marutis, Toyotas, Lamborghinis and Ferraris. One user even pointed fellow commentators to a site called The Truth About Cars, which reported no fewer than 190,500 cases of cars bursting into flames in the United States in 2009, a figure that put these two Nano incinerations well into perspective.

  At the extreme end of the spectrum of opinion were those who went as far as absolving Tata from all responsibility for the blaze by positing conspiracy theories that were very much in line with my own hopes. ‘This is a deliberate adverse publicity by the scared competitors,’ wrote parthakaroy, who went on to make the excellent point: ‘In India, have you ever seen the fire tenders rushing in as soon as a car is engulfed in fire? Here you have the fire tenders, newsman, camera absolutely ready before the event happened.’

  Still, the conspiracy theories could only comfort me to a certain point. I went on to read that there had been more spontaneous Nano fires the previous year, with at least three reported incidents in Delhi, Lucknow and Ahmedabad. These had been attributed to a faulty switch in the steering column and the public’s mind was supposedly put at rest by a quote from a Tata spokesperson, who claimed his company had ‘comprehensively checked all the Nano cars that are on the road’.

  I did the math: I wasn’t sure exactly when Mr Shah had taken delivery of Abhilasha prior to selling her on to Prasad, but I calculated it must have been in late 2009, which meant my beloved steed was probably of the same generation as the faulty switch brigade, and had not, to the best of my knowledge, been comprehensively checked out by Tata or indeed anyone (barring the Brahmin in Pondicherry, but the less said about that the better). The blazing cars on YouTube might well be acts of subterfuge, but the fact remained that there were now the twin spectres of faultiness and a potential singeing hovering in the air like a defective button on a steering column that was about to plough into my skull.

  Eager for a toehold of optimism from which to chase the phantoms away, I navigated back to the IBN clips page and found an interview with Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of Autocar India, who according to the headline was about to enlighten us as to What’s Going Wrong With The Nano. ‘When cars are reduced to ashes, it’s very difficult to find out exactly what the problem is,’ he said rather darkly, though he went on to suggest a shoddy fitting in the spot where fuel comes out under pressure, or an electrical wire meltdown, which didn’t mean much to me on a practical level. At that moment, the presenter echoed my own desperate petitions by asking Sorabjee, ‘If I was going for a drive in a Nano, what should be the one thing I should look out for?’

  ‘Well, keep your eye on the rear-view mirror!’ the editor cheerfully quipped.

  So that was that: one hour’s worth of trawling the internet for some source of comfort or useful information, following the revelation that the car I was driving for thousands of kilometres through burning hot terrain had been reclassified from ‘The People’s Car’ to ‘Incendiary Death Trap’, had borne no fruit. I was none the wiser than when I pulled into Bodh Gaya two days before, except that now I was condemned to carry the burden of knowledge and the millstone of paranoia for the next few weeks, or at least as long as Abhilasha didn’t ignite into a big yellow conflagration.

  When we finally did get to put very hesitant wheel onto very hot road, the sun was at its highest in the sky and the tarmac was so heated it was emitting a dizzying Will-o’-the-Wisp-like mirage that upped the illusion of oncoming speed bumps by about 300%. At one point I was convinced that a haystack strapped to a cart pulled by a tractor up ahead was a shackled Gruffalo on its way to the government labs. On top of the worry of a Nano inferno, I was also mildly concerned for Abhilasha’s diminutive tyres: we had already seen dozens of signs along the highways warning motorists not to go over 70 kmph for fear of a blowout, and I figured that speed plus 40-something degrees plus incredibly small rubbers was a sure-fire formula for an afternoon spent accumulating heat stroke on a Bihar roadside while scratching my head and trying to figure out which end of my toothbrush was most suitable for prising off Abhilasha’s rear hubcap.

  14

  THE RAJ BY CAR – Mr Kipling and the Henglish Drizzle

  NAINITAL to McLEOD GANJ; KM 7,491–8,329

  Varansi, India’s most beautiful, historical, holy city, came and went like a garbled chimera: as the mercury hit 47, I was aware I was hotter than I had ever been in my life. Hotter, in fact, than I thought it was possible to be. On arriving there in the early afternoon in the middle of a power cut, I could do nothing but sit on the terrace of my room overlooking the bonfires of the Scindhia Ghat – one of the city’s open crematoriums – and catch the occasional waft of flesh-scented smoke, while meditating on the sensation that even without the help of an open flame, my own organs were also on their way to a good browning.

  After a circular exchange with the lad at reception precipitated by my supplication for a room with air conditioning (his argument, resting on the reasonable tenet that an air-conditioned room would be a waste of money given the power cuts they were currently undergoing, stood staunch in the face of my desperate assertion that I was willing to take my chances either way), I spent the night shrouded in wet towels, cursing the intermittently spinning overhead fan until dawn, when I stepped outside to find the temperature had halved and I could once again form a rational thought. That singular notion was to get the hell out of Varanasi and up to the mountains as fast as Abhilasha could possibly go without herself combusting.

  Still, before leaving I took the famous dawn trip on the Ganges in a small wooden boat that coincidentally had the TATA logo hand-painted along its side. My captain was a teenage boy overflowing with enthusiasm for his hometown. As we paddled the length of the city, past the hundreds of people gathering at the riverside ghats to perform their morning puja34 ceremonies, the kid pointed out and explained every last detail of the towering skyline that lined the river.

  It was my second time in Varanasi (during my first visit, I had memorably spotted two dead bodies – one of a baby – and an expired cow floating past my morning tour boat) and I was in no doubt it was one of the most remarkable places on earth. The morning light and rising mist threw the mediaeval-looking buildings behind into a saturated relief, framing the colours of the bathers and their candles and flowers that floated down the river in a spectacular shifting composition. Everything I looked at was beautiful and exotic and otherworldly, and happily the whole trip passed without so much as a hint of a floating corpse.

  I could have stayed there for a month, but by 9 am, the celestial furnace was beginning to fire up and my survival instincts kicked in. I bid Varanasi a reluctant goodbye – it’s not you, it’s me; the timing’s all wrong – and huffily hauled my bags into a cycle rickshaw, returning to the outskirts of the old city where I’d been obliged to leave Abhilasha; even she was too large for the centre’s archaic little streets.

  From ancient Varanasi, I set out westwards on the NH2, which ran the course of one of the world’s oldest highways: the Grand Trunk Road. Like the Silk Road and other bygone trade routes, this was a key element in the movement of citizens, goods, defending armies and invading forces for two thousand years, and now formed part of the Golden Quadrilateral, the high-tech, high-speed highway connecting I
ndia’s four largest cities. As I cruised along the barren dual carriageway towards the town of Allahabad, I remembered Rudyard Kipling’s eulogies of the road in Kim (‘such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world’); it was a sentiment that stuck a chord with me, though on this particular stretch there was little on the NH2 that appeared to correspond to Kipling’s accounts.

  As the landscape between Varanasi and Allahabad flattened into the Gangetic Plains, I tried to imagine the ‘green-arched, shade-flecked’ thoroughfare that, in the nineteenth century at least, would have been lined with up to four rows of trees. Today the sweep of road was more desolate, the heat having parched the land to a degree where dust clouds rose from the surrounding countryside to lift up a grey-brown haze. Kipling’s descriptions of people on the Trunk Road, shrouded in orientalist fantasy as they may have been, were still vivid and sometimes even familiar: the ‘long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs’; the ‘women with their babes on their hips, walking behind the men, the older boys prancing on sticks of sugar cane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as they sell for a halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their betters from cheap toy mirrors’; the newly released prisoners, marriage processions, money lenders, soldiers on leave, jugglers with ‘half-trained monkeys’; Akalis, the ‘wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh devotees’; the Ganges water sellers, cotton wagons and Changars, the women in charge of building the railways: ‘a flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed, blue-petticoated clan of earth-carriers, hurrying north on news of a job, and wasting no time by the road’.