Never Mind the Bullocks

by Vanessa Able

  As far as first impressions went, I felt more at home in this town almost entirely populated by Tibetans in exile than at Christchurch Cathedral in rainy Shimla, built by my people to remind them of home. This was probably because of the fact that the Tibetans are joined in their mountain abode by a transitory population of foreigners who come to be near the Big Guy, the Dalai Lama himself, his temple and all the smaller seminaries his presence there has sparked. As I pulled up the hill and onto McLeod Ganj’s main street, it became immediately clear that the town was a priority stop for the modern hippie: foreigners not shaven of head and clad in saffron were long of hair, scant of shoe and bedraggled of clothing. It appeared that the Little Britain of Shimla appealed more to Punjabi tourists, while contemporary travelling Brits – along with their European, Antipodean and Israeli counterparts – much preferred the coloured flags and prayer wheels of Little Tibet. Where there are Western travellers, there are ethnic handicrafts, coffee shops, wi-fi cafés, bookshops and even sushi restaurants. It was a strange kind of homecoming; a sudden immersion into a community specifically designed to cater to my latte-drinking, internet-using, book-reading ways.

  For the first time after two-and-a-half months of driving around India, I could hear England English spoken with northern, southern, West Country and east London accents. The words ‘Darren, will ye get us twenty of them Gold Flake from ’t shop?’ wafted through Abhilasha’s window spoken in deep Lancastrian tones that never made me want more a slice of Hovis bread and a cup of Bovril.

  Tired, sick and all driven out, I felt like the little town was welcoming us with open arms; or rather, the Tibetan woman at one of the hotels up the hill was. She actually did spread out her arms – in horror – when, using my last ounce of energy, I unceremoniously dropped my bag and all its contents at the threshold of her property before almost losing consciousness outside the front door. She gathered my belongings with matronly zeal and showed me to a bare-bones room that was immaculately clean with a view over the lush valley below.

  ‘Eat charcoal!’ Thor messaged me as I collapsed on the bed and thumbed news of my condition through to him.

  ‘Argh, don’t, I want to puke.’

  ‘No, seriously, eat charcoal. It’s the miracle drug.’

  ‘What would you know? You never get sick.’

  One of the few things that irritated me about Thor was his steely constitution. Being of a mildly competitive nature, I’d got annoyed at his capacity to maintain digestive equilibrium when I was often shuffling off to a loo. To boot, he was a vegetarian, which probably gave him an upper hand in protecting him from the threat of meat gone wrong.

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘You mean actual charcoal, like the stuff you find in fireplaces?’

  ‘Like the stuff you draw with.’

  ‘Barf!’

  ‘Yeah, but you take a tablet, you don’t have to munch on a lump of coal.’

  ‘And what does it do?’

  ‘It absorbs all the bad stuff in your guts and turns your poo black.’

  ‘Okay, well, there might be some in the fireplace down in reception. Shall I go and look?’

  Thor, caring and well intentioned, was saved from further sarcasm by a knock at the door. It was the Tibetan woman from downstairs, who appeared like an angel in my doorway with a cup of hot ginger, lemon and honey, and a bowl of Tibetan noodle soup.

  ‘Adopted Tibetan Mum saves the day,’ I texted. ‘No need to go foraging for ashes after all.’

  ‘Good news,’ Thor replied. ‘Now lie back and dream of England.’

  ‘Or Lhasa.’

  ‘Whichever suits.’

  RULE OF THE ROAD #7

  Don’t Drive (Too) Silly

  ‘If you are married to speed divorce it’ read the sign jabbed into the side of the road on a curve where, had the directive by the Public Works Department of Uttarakhand not been blocking my view, I would have seen a sweeping panorama of staggered hills rising from the seemingly bottomless valley below. I had been exercising my horn in the wake of a lardy-arsed coach for the past fifteen minutes, waiting for a long and straight enough stretch to afford me the visibility to pass as well as the runway to build up enough speed, but no such strip was forthcoming. Welcome to the start of the Himalayas, land of surprisingly well-paved (and, I had to admit, so far at least well-behaved) roads. Nevertheless, just like the rural highways on the plains, I was already feeling the familiar rise of frustration with the speed at which things generally moved.

  The Uttarakhand PWD had obviously anticipated my impatience and was doing everything in its power, as far as erecting encouraging and creative road signs was concerned, to get me to chill out and slow down. Around the next bend flashed the words ‘We like you but not your speed’, cleverly playing on my personal insecurities as well as jabbing at my guilt glands for the numerous attempts I’d half-started at a perilous overtake of the coach ahead. ‘Whisky is risky’ declared another sign with undeniable poetic flair, after the defiant coach had pulled up to deposit its load of Korean passengers at a roadside dhaba.

  As steep slopes gaped hungrily to the side and the road, only intermittently dotted with railings or concrete bollards, curved round at angles that sometimes felt like we were pulling a full 360, it became clear that traffic authorities in the north of India had additional reason to encourage safe driving along the mountain routes. Either that, or they had a lot more time – and possibly mind-altering drugs – on their hands, if evidence procured on a later web search was anything to go by. It seemed the most creative road-sign wordsmiths lived up in Kashmir, and displayed their work along the hazardous roads of Ladakh, especially the notorious Manali to Leh route, considered one of the most deadly in the world. A blogger called Ajay Jain had compiled a book and site on the subject called Peep Peep Don’t Sleep (a title derived from a real sign), in which he catalogued a mass of inspired driving decrees from the Himalayan highways. My favourites had to be ‘Fast won’t last’, ‘No race no rally, enjoy the beauty of the valley’, ‘Road is hilly, don’t drive silly’ and the virtuosic ‘Safety on the road is safe tea at home’. Genius.

  It seemed the PWD had no qualms whatsoever in issuing quite graphic warnings to hammer the point of cautious driving home. ‘Your family waits for you not for news of your accident’ read another, more maudlin post, while ‘Drive like hell and you will be there’ held little hope of salvation for fast drivers. I thought whoever came up with ‘Better Mr Late than Late Mr’ displayed fine lyrical promise, while ‘Darling, do not nag me, as I am driving. Instead turn your head and enjoy the nature charming’ was worthy of Larkin.

  I had been a little nervous about hitting the Himalayas. I imagined the madness and diversity of traffic on the sub-Himalayan highways transposed onto narrow rocky mountain passes; a frightful prospect. But it seemed, at least from Shimla going north, that the roads here were in much better nick, as were the vehicles travelling on them, which in any case were far fewer in number. But as with everything, when one headache dissipated, another reared up: while the roads were no longer congested, now they were all over the shop. They would often skirt the very edge of a rock face, as chasms yawned just centimetres from Abhilasha’s tyres without a barrier to separate me from certain death by plummeting into the unknown darkness, and twist and turn with the scary turbulence of a cobra with an acute itch. At the heart of the problem were the hulking buses and trucks, for which the narrow roads, steep inclines and sharp turns were a pestilent wasp in their cloddish ointment. Once I got stuck behind a large vehicle, like the Korean tourist coach, I would be obliged to hover at its rear like the flies that hover around a horse’s tail and wait there until an opportune moment for overtaking, which was usually not before the vehicle pulled over for a break.

  No sooner had I got past the Koreans than I quickly caught up with a Tata lorry, whose backside was painted orange, yellow and red and emblazoned with the words ‘Super-Star’. It was emitting thick clouds of grey smoke that infiltrated
Abhilasha’s interior to the point where I didn’t know whether it was better to roll down the windows and at least mix the inevitable added rush of fumes with some fresh air, or maintain the drip-feed exhaust pipe in a Ziploc effect that was currently playing itself out. I nestled in at its rear, sighed and resigned myself to painful sloth and early-onset emphysema.

  A few minutes later, I was jolted out of a creeping somnolence and mounting nausea by the ear-splitting horn of a truck that was attempting to pass me and the two lorries in front with phenomenal spunk, given that we were all struggling against a fairly steep incline while approaching a blind bend. I flinched as the truck slugged doggedly past, all the while keeping its horn pressed and flashing its headlights with the frenzy of a strobe light on speed. The whole manoeuvre took about half a minute during which I barely drew breath, expecting that a car might come bombing down the hill from the opposite direction at any second and end up battered into the truck’s front grill. Call it luck, fate or good karma, the truck made out like a bandit and finished at the head of the queue, puttering off into the distance.

  Looking in my rear-view mirror, I could see a line of cars gathering impatiently behind me, which also started to overtake one by one, while I pulled over as far as I could to let them pass. It was not my proudest moment, and I concluded in a rush of outraged self-righteousness that there was no time like the present to master the art of the perilous uphill, blind-corner overtake. I had to adapt to my environment and become the cool and nifty mountain driver; it was time to channel Bond.

  As another truck passed me to my right at a speed that barely warranted an overtake, I caught a glimpse of a bus heading towards us from the oncoming lane. I could hear it bleat out its warning via a tremendous horn, a protest to which the truck to my right responded not by yielding, but by giving an indignant parp of its own instrument.

  Reason dictated that by this point the truck that was blocking the opposite lane might slam on its brakes and settle for sliding in behind Abhilasha as the oncoming bus passed. But the driver clearly had no such plans and instead headed for the tiny space between me and the big gassy truck. I silently petitioned my maker, god, Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, not to let it all end here; but then there was another, more stubborn part of me that thought, like hell am I letting the truck get in ahead of me just because it won’t slow down. So instead of slowing down to create some space for the truck to pull in ahead of me, I kept my foot firmly on the accelerator, moving uphill with a determination mixed with the terror of annihilation and the vindictiveness of a moment of road rage.

  What I didn’t anticipate was what happened next: the bus that was trundling down the hill suddenly slowed down and pulled over so that the overtaking truck could pass. Headlights were still being flashed with great urgency and all horns were crying out in unison, but I realized this was in essence an act of extreme politeness and consideration, and it was taking place before my very eyes. As the truck that nearly ground me into the rocks to my left carried on puffing up the hill, I reflected on the implications of what had just happened. It was road courtesy of an ilk I had not witnessed until now, and if this behaviour was anything to go by, it went a long way to explaining the ostensible kamikaze overtaking tactics practised by all who flung themselves fanatically into the blind curves of these narrow mountain roads. If people coming in the opposite direction were on constant vigil as to the possibility of turning a corner and finding another vehicle in their lane, they would slow and swerve to accommodate. After all, the vehicles going uphill at this point were hardly breaking 30 kmph. How dangerous could it be?

  My confidence began to mount as I toyed with the accelerator pedal and teased myself into giving it a squeeze. Abhilasha roared internally, but only moved forward marginally, due to the angle of the slope and the size of her engine, which was a few strokes short of Formula One. Still, if lardy-bum trucks could do it, so could we.

  I began to indicate, probably much to the delight of the bright blue three-wheeler pickup piled high with tomatoes that was sniffing at Abhilasha’s exhaust pipe. There was a curve up ahead, but wasn’t there always? I pulled the Nano’s nose out to the right, pushed her into second gear and floored the accelerator for all she was worth, mimicking the trucks’ frantically urgent musical horns with my own psychotic bugle of beeps. Her little engine began to gather speed and soon we were neck to neck with the back tyre of Farty Pants. The giant tyre at that moment looked about twice our size.

  ‘Come on, come on, come on!’ I urged Abhilasha, leaning forward in my seat as though shifting my weight by a few centimetres would make any difference at all to her acceleration. We were now parallel with the front cab and we were still making good speed. It was all over in about fifteen seconds. We were ahead of Guff Breath and behind the truck in front, which by now had accumulated at least two more vehicles at its bow. One down, three – or possibly four – to go.

  Reeling from the success of my first mindless overtake around a blind bend, I went straight into the next one. Soon we were at the head of the queue and free to continue on an open road. I punched the air. ‘Yesssss!’

  The Russian roulette quality of this highly dangerous manoeuvre had raised my serotonin levels past quietly confident to acutely cocky, and I was now taking Abhilasha around the snaky roads as fast as she could go. We whizzed past buses, zoomed away from gas tankers, even left the odd well-meaning SUV in our dust.

  Something in me had changed: I was no longer the cautious, law-abiding driver who had first driven in India two months ago. To add to my tally of new driving vices, I was now also executing suicidal mountainside passes, blasting my horn as though my life depended on it (which, when I come to think of it, it often did) and completely disregarding the cautionary signs and signals that had been erected for my benefit. I felt like I had been possessed by a devil, a demon of the road that had just named me queen. Uttarakhand Public Works Department be damned – I was married to danger and had no foreseeable plans for divorce. After two months on the road, I was becoming a bona fide Indian driver.

  15

  DEFLATED IN DELHI – How Not to Deal with a Blowout

  NEW DELHI; KM 8,975

  You moron!’ I screamed at Delilah, who seemed quite chuffed with her decision to direct me down a very crowded passage heaving with people shopping from shoulder-to-shoulder tungsten-lit booths that sold bits of ribbon and elaborate wedding hats. This was a pedestrians-only street, a fact that was clearly evident from the withering scowls and tuts Abhilasha and I were receiving. Oblivious to my pain, Delilah instructed me to hold course for another 200 metres.

  ‘This isn’t even a street, it’s a frigging shopping mall!’ I yelled, pulling her plug.

  Thrusting the Nano into reverse, I looked behind us to see that the crowd had already closed in our rear. Through the front windscreen, it was the same view. We were trapped. All I could see were people: hands, arms, wrists and palms as they pressed against the sides of the car to get around us. I heard the word ‘Nano’ repeated over and over again, in slightly more irritated tones than I’d been used to so far. A man in a white tunic riding a bicycle that was stacked beyond its credible capacity with hand-stitched sacks knocked angrily on Abhilasha’s roof. He made a gesture with the hand that wasn’t holding up his faltering load that gave me no information whatsoever other than the fact that he and the gathering mob were growing highly peeved.

  I shot him back my best effort at an equally peeved ‘Well, what do you want me to do, mate?’ before a kindly shop owner jumped down from the podium of his store and decided to try to take charge of the situation. He carved out a space big enough for himself to stand in front of the Nano, and beckoned me to move forward. I winced. How on earth could I shift even an inch? There were two old ladies bent over the front bumper, leaning against the bonnet under the weight of the crowd of people behind them. But the shopkeeper was insistent: I had to try to move forward or there was a strong chance we’d be there until morning. I revved the eng
ine ever so slightly and let up my foot from the clutch as gently as I could. We started to roll. I was terrified as to what the two old ladies would do, but they seemed to take the new situation very much in their stride, rolling themselves around as the car advanced. The flow of people ahead split into two side streams as we literally ploughed through them; I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. We seemed to be moving at about the same rate as the crowd that was stuck behind us, some of whom were actually holding on to the Nano to give them a more stable advantage against the oncoming tide of pedestrians.

  The heart of Old Delhi was not, as I was fast discovering, primed for motor vehicles. That came as a bit of a surprise, given that the rest of the city had so far triumphed on my own personal scoreboard of Indian urban traffic infrastructure. I had made the journey from the mountains in the north via Amritsar, the Sikh holy city just a stone’s throw from the Pakistani border, in a matter of days. Back down in the plains, the heat was once again on full blast, and I was eager to get to the capital where I knew a host of cooling mod cons would be waiting for me.

  Thanks in part to a recent drive by the Commonwealth Games Committee to make it presentable to visiting dignitaries, Delhi had become home to some of the best roads and highways in the country. Central Delhi had had a head start with the spacious avenues that lay between the monumental government buildings and bungalows constructed by Edward Lutyens in the early years of the twentieth century. The city was already a place of sidewalks, flyovers, roundabouts and pedestrian crossings when the Commonwealth Games Committee moved in with its budget of Rs 80 crore (£8 million), which went a long way in polishing the city’s arteries into the state of a better-oiled machine. I even spotted a few signs put up by an NGO campaigning for noise reduction that pleaded with drivers to refrain from using their horns. The latter strategy, though admirable, had little effect, but the former elements came together to create a symphony of road usage that was – after almost three months of bumping over potholes, dodging goats and zigzagging between pedestrians who had nowhere else to walk but the slow lane of the highway – pure manna from the gods in driving heaven.