by Vanessa Able
Deciding it was time for a break, I pulled into the first petrol station that presented itself. Its garish green lighting did nothing to ease the growing panic in my veins, as I stared at the pump attendant down the barrel of the long, dark tunnel that now framed my vision. I had to work to breathe. My body was cold and disconnected and I could barely discern my extremities as I sat dumbly watching the guy fill Abhilasha’s tank. When he was finished, I thrust a handful of rupees at him from my wallet and, without waiting for the change, hauled the Nano over to a quiet corner of the station forecourt and turned off her engine.
I realized I was having some variety of panic attack. Sharp, prickly adrenaline coursed through my body; I felt beaten, utterly powerless and terrified, in a petrol station miles from anywhere at 10 pm on a very dark Indian night. It was like I’d suddenly been dropped into the middle of a nightmare, from where my now overactive paranoia was telling me that the two attendants were about to forcibly eject me from the forecourt in accordance with station policy that forbade single foreign females to have a meltdown on company property. I cursed Red Bull, and all of the world’s caffeine and sugar. I cursed military-issue whisky. I cursed the roads, the cars, the stones and every inch of tarmac that now separated me from comfort and safety.
I thundered through my options with the grace and rationality of a charging hippo. What the hell was I going to do? How was I going to get out of this? I feared that if I stayed put, undefended in the butthole of nowhere, I would end up with my face in Mid Day for reasons other than my quirky driving exploits. But there was nothing I wanted to do less right now than go back to the blinding lights and dodgem manoeuvres of the highway, which I honestly thought would be the end of me.
Disoriented, panicked, knackered, I was ready to throw in the towel. So I did what any other daredevil in my situation would have done: I called my mum. On hearing her voice, the childish tears began to flow. Sir Edmund Hillary might not have blubbed to his mother just minutes before reaching the summit, but had he done so, he would have been bolstered in his final steps.
‘Come on,’ she pep-talked me, ‘you’re so close. Just 200 km – that’s like two hours!’
‘Make that four,’ I whined. ‘It’s so far. I just… just can’t do it…’
‘Yes, you can!’ she insisted. ‘Drink lots of water and keep going.’
I wiped away the tears and after a few turns on shaky legs around the forecourt and the fast ingestion of half a litre of water, I decided I had no choice but to set back out on the road. I took a very deep breath, turned on the engine and nudged Abhilasha towards the station exit. By now it was completely dark and all I could see were the bastard bright lights of oncoming vehicles. They were moving towards me quickly, almost haphazardly, as I stared out to my right for a breach in the flow. The intensity of concentration sparked off another wave of jitters, and I told myself that if I was going to make it to Mumbai tonight, I had to release every clamp in my nerves and joints and float my way back to the city.
I rejoined the stream almost unconsciously. I slowed down and veered to the side of the road, where I could take shelter from the traffic rumbling past me to my right, and from there I counted my deep breaths and locked into a steady 50 kmph, keeping my eyes only on the one tiny bit of road I could see in Abhilasha’s headlights. I held the wheel at its lowest point, barely tapping it with my fingers when we needed to budge a little to the left or the right. And when the cars coming from the other direction blinded me, I didn’t swear at them and curse the lack of road markings, I simply steered on in the darkness, pushing Abhilasha forward with the blind faith of the deeply religious or the clinically insane.
It was the final surrender. As though I hadn’t tempted the fates enough these last three months through my allegiance with an economy vehicle on the world’s most deadly roads, I had raised the stakes for the finale by first intoxicating myself with large amounts of Royal Choice, and then trying to repair the damage with excessive energy drinks, while driving an inordinate distance that I would not have previously attempted even on a good, sober, sunshine-happy day.
I stopped looking at the clock; I stopped counting the kilometres; I stopped worrying about how fast I was going. Instead, I allowed myself to be overtaken by some primeval version of myself whose only concern was getting me to Mumbai, eventually, in one piece. All the will and effort drained out of me, leaving a blinking, breathing, driving automaton. Lights danced in front of me, cars moved around me, trucks blocked me on all sides, and all I did was keep moving forwards, slowly, steadily, as though in a dream.
It must have been about two o’clock in the morning when Abhilasha caught up with a crowd of bullocks moving languidly by the side of the road, plodding forward through the night on their way to god only knew where, led by a pair of crooked women, one bent at the waist and the other brandishing a staff about twice her height, both of them harbouring a strength that went beyond their years and appearance. Where they could be taking the animals at the dead of night I had no idea, but I felt like riding with them for a few minutes, so I slowed down and joined the herd, ploughing forward at bullock miles per hour. I wound down the window and heard a couple of low drones that I hoped were bovine approval of our presence and not a groaning consensus to run us off the road.
As we moved together with the beasts, I began to feel the sensation of once again inhabiting my own body. I reached out to a small calf whose head was bobbing along right by my window and gave it a little scratch behind the ear. I was coming back.
RULE OF THE ROAD #8
Mind the Bullocks
The last few hours of driving on autopilot back to Mumbai demonstrated that a certain Indian road prowess had cemented itself into my subconscious. Although driving with my eyes shut, jedi-style, was still not quite an option, I realized that steering Abhilasha through this confusion of vehicles actually required little in the way of will and effort and much more in the way of opening myself up to the innate rhythms of the road. Becoming one with the car, as my father had once said, meant more than merely driving it as fast as possible. It meant finding my own number within the great traffic marathon.
By the end of the journey, my overall cruising speed was something in the region of 35–40 kmph. At the beginning of the trip, this sluggish rate would have inspired in me the wrath of a woman scorned by her Sat Nav. Had I been driving blindfold? Or had I gone in reverse the whole way? Did we just make the journey with four flat tyres, or had I switched the engine off, cut a hole in the floor and walked us there, Flintstones style? It seemed that no matter how focused I was on the road, I could never pick up our average velocity above crawling speed. And no matter how hard I tried to chill out and enjoy the scenery, I couldn’t stop that fact from irritating the living daylights out of me. I had spent several weeks in a state of sustained denial, stuck on a learning curve that would have scuppered all of Pavlov’s theories of repeated conditioning in intelligent animals.
The animals themselves were a large part of the menace. One of the most common causes of delay was the sudden appearance on a country road or highway of a mob of sheep, goats, cows or bullocks, with the odd elephant or camel thrown in, depending on the region. They would surge around Abhilasha in an orchestrated pincer movement that quickly engulfed us and forced us to a standstill. The animals may have been low down on the pecking order but in some ways they wielded more power than any other road user.
This was especially the case for the cow and her gelded husband the bullock. As the weeks wore on, I came to believe that the sacred bovines were probably the most intelligent road users of all, imbued as they were with confidence, stability and ethereal traffic-stopping powers of which Abhilasha could only dream. After three months of battling against the tide of Indian traffic, of swimming upstream in my attempts to figure out the rules and carve out for myself some kind of knowledge base that would give me an advantage over other drivers and get me to my destination in half the time, I began to grasp that instead
of looking to the rickshaws and truck drivers for tips on how to stay on top in the road race, I should have been looking down the line to the oldest and most experienced travellers around. The bullocks, I finally fathomed, were the guardians of the unwritten rules of the country’s roads: they had been lumbering along them for millennia, aeons prior to the rumble of the first motor engine. The noisy new machines of the twenty-first century are a blip on the bullocks’ epic timeline, one they tolerate with enduring dignity.
The castrated workers of the bovine world, bullocks are variously employed as farm hands – pulling heavy ploughs to till the fields – or as a form of transport, hauling people or carts piled with hay between fields and villages and marketplaces. Late in the afternoon, on their way home from work, they spread out along the route, kicking up dust with their cloven hooves and heading forward in a single-minded drove, mob-handed, horns painted and sauntering from their skinny shoulders and haunch bones, their tails swinging like pendulums, indiscriminately slugging passing objects with a flick of their snaky appendages.
They were invariably unhurried; whether in the thick of urban chaos or on a small country road holding up a mile of traffic, they were amblers, less concerned with their speed than with the concentrated, easy plod of putting one foot in front of the other. Their calm bearing and phlegmatic eyes blinked away the flies and put to question any concept of speed or hurry. They were the true champions of the road because only they really knew how to travel.
It occurred to me that for the past three months, as though employed by the Graces to protect me from myself, the bullocks had been slowing me down. Every time I’d run into them, I was induced to stop and take a breath. Why was I always hurrying? What did an extra hour on the road matter, when there was so much ground to cross and such a wealth of watering holes along the way? When there were centuries – behind us and up ahead – and hundreds of roads to explore and leave our hoof prints on, where was the necessity to keep running today?
Make like a bullock, the bullocks said, and enjoy the ride.
STARTING OVER – From Nano to Pixel
Shit!’ Thor gave the gearstick a brutal rattle and, kicking his feet at the pedals below, turned the key in Abhilasha’s ignition for the third time. For the hat trick, she did exactly what she’d done on the two previous attempts, lurching forwards with a hacking whine as the engine exhaled and cut out once more. I piped the squeak of a far more radical reaction withheld; Thor vengefully thumped the steering wheel. Rain pounded down while the cars and buses surrounding us crooned their disapproval of the Nano’s standstill. Bicycles and pedestrians ploughed through the pools of brown water on the ground and slipped by, filtering out around Abhilasha in a fugitive stream.
This was extremely delicate territory and I had to proceed with caution.
‘Was your foot on the clutch?’
‘Yes, it was on the clutch,’ he said peering down into the footwell, ‘unless that’s the brake.’
Thor sneezed violently and swore into the tissue he held up to his mouth. A colony of mushrooms that had grown around the base of the gearstick during the monsoon, along with the mysterious demise of the car’s air conditioning, had rendered the atmosphere inside so murky that it set off his allergies and inflated his sinuses to red-hot levels.
‘And was the gearstick in first?’
He shoved it again. ‘Probably not. What the hell do I know? Why can’t everyone just drive automatic cars?’ Sneeze.
‘Because manual ones are much more fun. Once you get the knack of them.’
A very loud horn of ear-shuddering decibels entreated us to move. Thor rolled down his window and tried to follow the direction of the noise. ‘Okay, I’m trying! Just give me a break will you, asshole?’
The crowd was ruthless. Their honking threw us deeper into a vicious circle of failure. The mounting sense of performance anxiety had all but completely dashed Thor’s hopes of ever being able to start the car again, and the longer we stayed in the middle of the junction, the more I felt the urge to throw my dupatta over my head and bury myself deep in the passenger seat, in a bid to convince myself that none of this was really happening.
‘Okay, gearstick in first…’
‘Before you do that, maybe turn the engine on? Leave the gearstick in neutral for now?’
I discovered that if I framed my commands as questions, the effect was not nearly so ignominious. The loud horn from behind resumed its campaign. This time Thor directed his wrath at the rear-view mirror.
‘What? What? What do you want from my life? Why’s everyone getting so pissed?’
‘I think he wants you to move a couple of feet out of the way?’
‘I’ll move a couple of feet up his…’
Another sneeze and we finally began to move forward, this time at the rate of a mercifully controlled crawl.
Thor and I were back in Pondicherry, contending with the three-way challenge of monsoon rains, sharing Abhilasha and our first few weeks of cohabitation in a flat we rented on Cazy Street, among the tinny-voiced mosques of the Muslim Quarter. On returning to Europe and sizing up the diminutive dimensions of Thor’s Berlin bachelor room, I had suggested we return for a six-month sabbatical in India, where I would begin to write this book, Thor would write programming code and together we would live the life of Monsieur et Madame Riley among the finer fripperies of France’s former fiefdom.
By the standards of a small German Hoff-crib, our apartment in Pondicherry was near-palatial: two bedrooms, three living rooms – one of which was a study with a delightfully large oak desk – and a terrace that housed a jungle of creeping plants that the monsoon had defibrillated into life and that I felt I needed to keep a vigilant eye on lest they devoured us in the night. Large fans hung from the ceiling of every room and spun constantly in an effort to dry out the fibres impregnated with the dampness of the seasonal rains. The colonization of all soft furnishings and fabrics by sharp-smelling dusty white fungi, as well as the clear evidence of rats and cockroaches inhabiting our abode, sealed the conviction that for me, housekeeping in India would be a similar experience to driving; namely, fraught with challenges.
Our landlady took pity on me and sent help in the form of an immensely powerful woman by the name of Elisa, who arrived every morning and spent two hours washing the floors, airing any cloth that was susceptible to fungal infestation, cleaning the kitchen to within an inch of its life, and storing everything gastronomically appealing to the rodent race in large glass jars in the larder.
On Cazy Street, Abhilasha rested her wheels by the roadside. Figuring I had had enough long-distance driving in India for one year, I had shipped her over from west to east, tacking her onto the back of a consignment of brand new Marutis that were also crossing the country. While stationary, she provided a roof over the head of a stray dog we named Muttley, who took up permanent daytime residence in the drier, shadier confines of her undercarriage, occasionally popping up to our flat after mealtimes to see whether he could profit from any leftovers.
Abhilasha was an indispensable accessory to our south Indian existence: while the rains lasted, she was our shelter for trips to the supermarket; when the weather got better, we took her on excursions to the beach, on trips up to the nearby visionary kibbutz-like community of Auroville, and even on weekends to Chennai via the verdant East Coast Road that runs along the side of the Indian Ocean.
In the expanding spirit of our new relationship, Thor and I both made extensive efforts in the direction of self-betterment: he applied himself to the task of driving a stick-shift car on what was for him unequivocally the wrong side of the road, and I put my mind to dispelling the demons of my own domineering nature. Progress was slow for us both: he accidentally ground the gearstick to a rough snarl and I inadvertently sighed; he had trouble with a parallel park or came close to another vehicle and I lunged for the door handle, in spite of myself. Thor maintained (and continues to do so) that the root of the problem was not his shaky driving ski
lls, but my own inexhaustible opprobrium, which is a credible theory and is still a work in progress for me.
When we weren’t locked into a driving power deadlock, neither of us could fail to notice that Abhilasha was no longer basking in the same light of congeniality cast by her fellow countrymen as earlier in the year. By the time we arrived in Pondicherry, the Nano wasn’t selling nearly as well as Tata had predicted. In fact, the future looked increasingly bleak for the little car. The last weeks of that year were among its most ignominious, marked by a piece in the Hindustan Times about Nanos offered as stimulus to health workers in Bhopal to inspire extra incentive in the city’s vasectomy drive. ‘Get someone neutered and win a Tata Nano!’ was one of a rash of sardonic blog headlines that chronicled the wheels-for-balls trade-off that was the insult following injury a month after it had been announced that the Nano’s sales had dropped to a paltry 509 in November 2010 – almost seven times fewer than at the same time the previous year. The I-told-you-sos began to rain down: what had once seemed like the poster car for the Indian dream was morphing into something much less covetable: a sales flop with an embarrassing association to the neutering of Madhya Pradesh.
Why was the rest of India not buying into the dream that Tata was trying to sell? Safety concerns and spontaneous fires aside, to me what was really at the core of the Nano’s shortfall was the way it had been launched and marketed. It had been touted as the People’s Car set to change the face of motoring in India, which was no small claim. Whether or not the car’s instant entrance into the limelight was a deliberate move by Tata, worldwide attention on launch was unavoidable and meant that the car’s post-launch mechanical, financial and promotional tweaks had to be performed under a great deal of scrutiny. Too much publicity might have set the Nano up for a fall.
