Never Mind the Bullocks

by Vanessa Able

  My two days of hiding in Delhi started as I rolled through the guarded gates of a neighbourhood called Sundar Nagar. I was staying with a friend called Paul de Bendern, who was working as the bureau chief of the regional Reuters. I basically had the house to myself, since Paul was off doing Reuters-type stuff all day and his photographer wife Lynsey was dodging bullets somewhere dangerous for the New York Times. While Lynsey was doing the work of a real journalist, embedded on assignment, I was embedded in their apartment, basking under the cool breeze of their many air-conditioning units, using their wi-fi and downright abusing their Nespresso machine. Aside from catching glimpses of Paul pounding the treadmill and eating boiled eggs in the morning, I saw little of him until after work, when he managed to extricate me from the house and, like a perfect host, deliver me straight to the five-star Aman Hotel, courtesy of his Mahindra Scorpio and Rakesh, his personal chauffeur. There we drank cocktails and ate tapas with foreign hacks, before moving on to gin and tonics on the lawn at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

  It was a louche and lazy couple of days with little output and much navel-gazing. The only vaguely constructive thing I managed to attain was a transaction via the internet that ensured my passage home, one week from then. It was a tight deadline, but the apathy had to be shaken off, or I knew I could stay like this in Delhi for ever.

  The afternoon before we were due to leave, I decided to take Abhilasha for a spin around Delhi’s historic neighbourhood. I was hoping we would catch at least a glimpse of the iconic Red Fort and Jama Masjid, on a jaunt designed to scrape off some of my own residual guilt for having done absolutely nothing even vaguely interrogative in the last 48 hours. From Sundar Nagar we breezed along the avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi: past the Imperial Hotel, the monumental India Gate, the labyrinthine Connaught Place. I kept on due north, to around New Delhi train station, where the old city mingled with the new. Here, the roads started to narrow and the traffic began to crowd in on itself. I kept going in the direction of Old Delhi Railway Station, spurred on by Delilah who seemed determined to get us there via only the most densely crowded streets possible. It was goodbye Lutyens’ Delhi, hello again traffic anarchy.

  However much the Commonwealth Games Committee had spent sprucing up Delhi’s roads, it appeared that its plans had not quite reached the limits of the Old City. Perhaps it hoped that as long as officials and athletes kept south of Connaught Place, they’d go home with the impression that India’s traffic myth was merely malicious propaganda spread by competing-venue cities. Turning into Chandni Chowk, the one-time stylish main street of the Mughal Empire, we were met with an operetta of engines, horns and human bellows set against a collage of shop signs, adverts and lights, all woven together by the tangled mess of overhead electricity lines. I was in no doubt that the usual Indian road rules were back in play.

  Afternoon was turning to evening as the rush-hour traffic chugged along, interspersed at every available opportunity by people wading their way through the slow-moving stream, carefully balanced sacks bobbing above the car roofs, women lugging shopping bags or holding their children aloft out of the way of the unpredictable wheels. Pumping the clutch while crawling forward, I figured our drive-by sightseeing plans might need to go on hold. Delilah, however, seemed to have a different idea, and like the wazzock I am, I followed her traffic-dodging directions down a small alley that after a few metres thinned to about a foot from the tip of each of my wing mirrors.

  After grappling to get some kind of sheepish hold on the crowd-plough technique, I continued driving Abhilasha through the market for what felt like a lifetime. We wormed our way along the entire 200 m stretch of very crowded road until finally, just when the end and a much larger intersecting street was in sight, I got a sharp rap on my windscreen from a stick-wielding policeman. I reluctantly wound down my window, and for a moment considered handing over Delilah as a goodwill bribe in a gesture that would also conveniently rid me once and for all of her pestilent poppycock suggestions. The policeman frowned when he saw my face. I’m not sure whom he had been expecting, but they certainly didn’t match my description. His hesitation was my hot iron.

  ‘Officer?’ I squeaked, mouse-like and vulnerable.

  ‘This road,’ he boomed, quickly coming to his senses and pointing at where I had just come from, ‘is cars not permitted!’

  I looked behind me at the heaving crowd with exaggerated surprise.

  ‘Oh really?’ I blurted, trying to sound casual. ‘I must have missed the sign.’

  He was a big bloke with a moustache you could fit on a large broom and a pockmarked face that looked like he’d been in the firing line of a squadron of peashooters. He didn’t come across as one for my usual mind tricks, so I tried another tack.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m very, very lost. And my GPS is not working.’ It was a brief sob story, bereft of drama or much cause for compassion, but ingrained with the vital element of the transferral of blame onto an inanimate object that made it almost impossible for the cop to get any angrier with me. He crumpled his forehead and wearily waved me on, eying me dubiously until I was out of sight.

  Back on the roomy highways of South Delhi, we returned to speed, bombing past the signs to Defence Colony, which I imagined as a neighbourhood fortified with cannons and nuclear warheads and marksmen stationed around the encircling ramparts. But we didn’t get that far: just past the Jangpura metro station, Abhilasha started to shiver, then shake, then enormously shudder with a force that was more than mere fallout from her snowplough experience in the old city. Struggling to keep the wheel straight, I pulled onto a slip road and cut her engine, fearing the worst. The source of the problem was not hard to detect: her left rear tyre was deflated and spread flat under the weight of the car.

  Flummoxed, I knelt down to inspect the damaged element. The source of the puncture was a mystery: I couldn’t see any lacerations in the rubber that would account for the sudden loss of air. I reflected that maybe one of the shoppers I’d nearly pulped in the Old City might have thought a quick slash of a knife appropriate retribution for the abomination we’d committed. And I wouldn’t blame them. Or maybe it was simply the sheer exhaustion of nearly 10,000 km of road and Abhilasha pleading for a little R&R and attention (I was yet to take her for her third service, which was due given our lofty mileage). Whatever the reason for the blowout, the fact of the matter was that I was sat by the side of a busy slip road in the dark of the Delhi night, a lone woman in trouble intermittently floodlit for the world to see. Having only once single-handedly changed a tyre many years ago in the murky backwaters of my driving past, I figured this was not the moment to get back into practice; first back to Sundar Nagar, then this one-woman pit-stop team would kick into action.

  With a nagging doubt that perhaps driving for fifteen minutes on a flat tyre might not be the wisest idea either, I set off slowly, trying to hold the steering wheel steady. I felt the Nano wobble and convulse, wincing through the pain of her deflated shank as the sporadic thwack of the edge of the hubcap hitting the tarmac sent my shoulders up around my ears with each new strike. I imagined sparks spewing out from our left rear end as we kept sheepishly to the extreme slow lane usually reserved for cyclists and handcarts. My fellow drivers were also concerned: one rickshaw-wallah slowed down beside us and motioned urgently for me to stop while making furious gestures with his spare hand that I feared indicated some kind of firework display emanating from Abhilasha’s posterior. I smiled diffidently and replied by raising my thumbs in a manner that would have confirmed his original suspicion that I was an irremediably clueless halfwit with a penchant for Nano-sadism.

  We made it to Sundar Nagar, but not without having reshaped the hubcap into something resembling a battered gong. I cursed physics and damned its immutable laws as I searched under the passenger seat for the large plastic wallet I had never opened but had always suspected contained materials for the remedy of flat tyres. Sure enough, out dropped a contraption res
embling a giant iron grasshopper and a metal wrench. Supplementing distant experience with online assistance from a website called artofmanliness.com, I got to work jacking up the rear of the Nano, surprised at just how simple and ungruelling a task it was. The next step, according to the site, was to remove the lug nuts, which I deduced must be the massive screws that were sticking out through the hubcap. From then on it was plain sailing; the new tyre was retrieved from the tiny space under the front bonnet and fitted, and the bolts replaced.

  There was one thing that concerned me, however, and that was a diagram on artofmanliness.com illustrating the order in which these lug nuts should be refitted and tightened: the drawing assumed at least four, if not five bolts in the wheel. Abhilasha’s diminutive three wasn’t even brought into consideration for the complicated pentagram formations that were apparently essential for a safely attached wheel. I just pushed on the wrench until I thought I’d break it and resolved to take Abhilasha to a tyre shop in the morning for a second opinion, and to check I hadn’t put it on back to front.

  The next day, through a relayed chain of directions that started at the petrol station just outside Sundar Nagar and ended back in Jangpura Extension close to where the blowout had originally occurred, I finally got to a tyre shop that was more accurately a kind of a street-side walk-in closet for all things black and treaded. There was hooped rubber everywhere, hanging from the ceiling, from hooks on the walls, piled up in wobbly columns and arranged into various combinations to make the required office furniture. Sitting on one of the tyre-loungers were a couple of barefoot lads in jeans and perfectly pressed blue shirts. Alarmed at my arrival, they jerked to attention. I pointed them in the direction of my handiwork on the rear wheel.

  One of them knelt down and ran a judicious finger around the distended hubcap, grimacing. I shrugged with heavily feigned indifference and, by way of distraction, led them both around to the front bonnet, from which I produced the mangled former back tyre. The lads took it from me and one of them, all the time holding the object at arm’s length as though it were blighted with the plague, began to shake it and watched with disapprobation as a pile of rubber shavings floated down around his feet. He looked up at me, trying to put a polite lid on his clear disbelief at my crackbrained behaviour. Had I driven far with the flat tyre? Um, no, I lied. Well maybe for a few hundred metres; a kilometre possibly. Two, tops. Glancing down at the pile of rubber bits that now almost came up to his ankles, I know I didn’t have a case. I was no expert, but I figured this was the debris from the estimated six-and-a-half kilometres I’d driven on the expired tube. The dented hubcap was just one more piece of hard evidence piled against me.

  A heated discussion ensued in Hindi between the two mechanics that threw out the odd recognizable word like ‘Nano’, ‘tyre’ and ‘tube’ and involved a lot of earnest head-shaking. The mechanics told me that under no circumstances could I continue to keep driving on the spare tyre. It was actually not big enough to be used as a rear wheel, being the size of the smaller, front tyres. So we would need to fix the old tyre and replace it in its original spot.

  Would that be possible? I asked.

  He looked down at the tyre and gyrated his head. It was a yes–no tie-breaker.

  Pulled in by the irresistible magnetism of a yellow Nano, a few passers-by also stopped to get a look-in at the action, and within minutes we were Jangpura Extension’s number one attraction. A friendly grey-bearded Sikh gent pulled me to one side and whispered with concerned exigency, ‘I think you must have driven at least four or five kilometres with this flat tyre,’ he said.

  ‘Um, actually… yes, I did,’ I confessed, suddenly mortified at what this might imply to the gent: that I was lazy, stupid or plain frivolous. I had no excuse to hide behind. I was speaking the truth, and as I did, I watched the consequences of my indolence play out before me: one of the lads was resolutely beating a mallet into the dents of the damaged hubcap while the other was refitting the tyre he thought he’d repaired, but it was refusing to inflate. He removed it again and banged it about a bit more, but to no effect.

  The proceedings were being monitored by an older guy in a long-sleeved shirt – I presumed he was the manager – who had rocked up and perched himself on top of a rubber column, from where he took over the chair of the debate that was still raging over what to do about the tyres. The frequency of the word ‘tube’ suddenly increased and within minutes one of the lads appeared with a brand new long black inner tube.

  ‘Really?’ I exclaimed. ‘But shouldn’t tubeless tyres not have tubes? Isn’t that the point?’ Nobody understood what I was saying anyway. Barely had I voiced my protests than the inner tube was fitted and inflated, and the boy was bouncing Abhilasha’s back wheel up and down the tyre-shop courtyard.

  The Sikh gent returned to my side. ‘I can see that you are religious,’ he said to me in another whisper.

  Why on earth would he think that? He pointed at Abhilasha and the now slightly faded stickers of Shiva and Lakshmi I had pasted to the rear windscreen somewhere back in Karnataka.

  ‘Oh yes, those!’ I exclaimed, deeply embarrassed at the levity with which I had attached them.

  ‘Belief in God is very important,’ he intoned gravely. ‘It will keep you safe on the road.’

  I nodded and mumbled something about covering all my bases. I had no intention of shaming myself further after the driving-five-kilometres-with-a-flat scandal, and I wasn’t sure now was the right moment to engage in a debate about the advantages of religious faith over pragmatic caution while driving. Luckily, attention on the shop floor soon turned from the triumph of the inner tube to what seemed like a far more pressing matter around the area of Abhilasha’s front wheels. It was a chance discovery that further vindicated my Sikh friend’s belief in divine intervention, and my own in the power of a good mechanic. What I had failed to notice, and what might have proved a bit troublesome had it not been uncovered at that particular moment, was that both of the tyres were worn completely bald down their left-hand sides, the rubber so eroded that a network of tiny fine wires was showing through from the undertread.

  The garage manager shook his head. This was not good. I mirrored him, executing what felt like my first perfect Indian head wobble, my neck joints having significantly loosened over the last few weeks. I tried to ascertain from him why they were bald down one side only, but the answer was not forthcoming. I put it down to Abhilasha’s chronic steering misalignment and made a mental note to point it out to the garage where I took her for her next service.

  Whatever the reason, the fact was that new tyres were clearly in order. Whether or not the right ones were in stock was a cloudy issue, but eventually two new wheels were produced and within a couple of hours we were back on the road with one tubed back tyre and two spanking new ones up front, only a couple of thousand rupees lighter of pocket. It might have been more, but the price of the service had been rigorously negotiated by the Sikh gent, as some kind of reward for my apparent spiritual diligence, and as a token of our devotional camaraderie.

  16

  ONE FOR THE ROAD – A Right Royal Knees-Up at the Maharaja’s Table

  OMKARESHWAR; KM 10,396

  It was all over, sort of. On the NH47 in Gujarat, somewhere between the towns of Nadiad and Godhra, Abhilasha clocked up exactly 10,000 kilometres since leaving Mumbai.

  It was an exultant moment: the trip target that had seemed like an insuperable mountain three months ago had finally been reached. I resisted the urge to slam on the brakes and perform a victory dance as the odometer’s unit clock slowly turned from the expectant nine to the triumphant zero while we were crossing a bridge. Instead, I waited till we were on the other side before swerving into the dust and stones of the hard shoulder in front of a Coca-Cola–sponsored dhaba. I took a photo of the distance dial fronted by a very pleased-looking Ganesha and another from the outside of Abhilasha looking quietly complacent as the highway traffic passed us, oblivious to our achievement. Trea
ting myself and half a dozen flies to a scalding chai, I reflected on our accomplishment: 10,000 big ones through the world’s most notoriously barmy driving country and here we still were, rolling and, but for a few bumps and grazes, largely unscathed.

  Back in the car, I held Abhilasha by her wheel. A knell sounded somewhere in the distance that I knew marked the beginning of the end. We’d done what we set out to do; in one sense it was all over, but on the other hand, we still had a thousand or so kilometres of high-octane highway to go before the end of the road in Mumbai. Not sure whether this was a happy or a sad moment, I thrust the key back into Abhilasha’s ignition and decided that come what may, this called for a celebration. And I knew just the person I wanted to celebrate with: the Maharaja of Omkareshwar.

  I had first met the Maharaja years ago when I stumbled on the guesthouse in his old family home by the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh during my backpacking days. My enduring memory was of a ripe old fellow with a prodigious moustache, a penchant for hunting and an insuperable love of whisky. I remembered going on a drive with him in his old Ambassador; I spent the whole ride sitting aghast in the passenger seat as he drove at great speed through a thick crowd of pedestrians without so much as a flinch of hesitation. No injuries were sustained by the general public, but we did manage to elicit a pained yelp from a dog that failed to dodge the bumper in time and went limping off into the bushes. Memories of the Maharaja had stayed with me over the years and I was determined to track him down a second time. After a protracted online search for his phone number, I was able to call him and inform him of my advent. He had absolutely no recollection of me, but was nonetheless ostensibly pleased at the prospect of my arrival.