by Vanessa Able
Its catchy price tag shot it to global fame as the World’s Cheapest Car, which is a wonderful achievement if you’re an engineer, but perhaps less impressive if you’re the person on whom a cheap car confers the stigma of a skinflint. In its attempts to carve a niche in the car market by producing a more affordable product, Tata had paradoxically alienated its target customers by making them feel that driving a Nano would be a humdrum and even degrading experience. If it’s true that a person’s choice of car stands for what he aspires to, it follows that only an individual with very low self-esteem would pick his wheels from the bottom of the pile.
It was my opinion that if Tata wanted to revive the fate of the Nano, it needed to revise radically its idea of who the car would be aimed at. Hip-looking, low-cost city cars were not going to go down well with practical-minded country dwellers, supposedly the target market. Instead, Tata needed to look to the people who were initially seduced by the Nano – cityfolk. More specifically, I thought it needed to appeal to the new generation of drivers: the kids with smartphones, iPods and iPads who had enough cash to buy a cheap car, but fell short of that chauffeur-driven Hyundai. The Nano’s social mission was completely incongruent with the car itself.
A new, improved Tata Nano was in fact launched in 2013 to the strains of a freshly engineered tagline: ‘Celebrating Awesomeness’. Out went the demure adverts showing happy families driving through the countryside, and in came a new campaign of bright colours, loud music and fashionable kids dancing in the streets with an air of reckless consumer abandon. Celebrity designer Masaba Gupta and model Sarah Jane Dias were called in to bear witness to the car’s new-found ‘epicness’ and ‘kickassness’, while the company rebranded the range in a fresh palette of colours (‘mojito green’, ‘papaya orange’) and added youth-friendly features like a Bluetooth-enabled MP3 stereo and keyless entry.
Whether the Nano’s revamped image will boost sales remains to be seen, but it appears that celebrating awesomeness has notched up a bit more cred than the car’s original incarnation, with the ad getting upwards of 5 million hits on YouTube within the first month of airing. The promises keep coming: a diesel version of the vehicle in 2014, and the prospect of an international launch some time in the future. The European Nano has been on Tata’s drawing board for years, but still seems to have got no further than a mouth-watering promo for a super-space-age car called the Pixel, which was revealed at the Geneva Motor Show in 2011.
A recognizable cousin of the Nano, the Pixel in its current concept form is all CGI flare and futuristic design: the doors flip up into the sky like rabbit ears, the front wheels turn at 90 degrees to allow for effortless parallel parking and U-turns in narrow streets, and the interior details are controlled by a smart tablet sleekly placed on the dashboard. The website and company promo video have had me literally salivating into my laptop, while secretly nurturing the hunch that no vehicle that cool could actually ever be real and affordable.
Thor and I returned to India to get married. The date of our wedding was almost two years to the day since I had bought Abhilasha and conceived of the madcap notion of driving 10,000 km around the country. Prior to meeting Thor, I had never seriously entertained the prospect of marriage, and so my reaction in the face of his proposal (I cried solidly for two hours between bouts of trying to convince him I was shedding tears of joy) came as something of a shock to us both. It was an unequivocal yes, made all the more emotive by the speed at which our circumstances had turned around. Two years might be a long courtship by some standards, but in my own contemporary world of long engagements and perennial relationships that segued into parenthood long before vows were even verbalized, it was a shotgun wedding.
We had decided our union would best be sealed in Chennai, at Thor’s ashram, under the authority and with the blessing of Mr Rajagopalachari. We emerged early one January morning to join no fewer than ten other couples who were all tying the knot the same day, and together we sat at the front of a large auditorium filled with the friends and families of the other newlyweds, who numbered in their merry thousands. One by one, the couples were called up onto the stage, where they were festooned with heavy garlands of flowers and given large boxes of sweets to hand out to the exuberant crowd. Our number came up last and Thor got up and strode towards the stage, while I waddled behind him, tripping over the hem of my inexpertly arranged sari and jingling from my hennaed wrists and ankles like the village cow. Our vows were said for us at lightning speed and Chariji held our hands together while we exchanged rings to seal the deal.
After the ceremony we were set upon by hordes of well- wishers – mostly complete strangers – as we basked in grinning post-nuptial delirium, sweating under the weight of the pounds of roses hung around our necks and taking pictures with people we’d never met before whose families had adopted us in a brief moment of wedlock rapture. The Marceaus held a party for us that night in their garden, complete with disco lights and a Franco-Indian soundtrack that was everything I would never have imagined, but had me dancing in my sari till I thought I’d collapse.
The next day, we rode off in Abhilasha. Hénoc had bought her from us before we left Pondicherry and now gave us back the keys for a honeymoon burn. A faint rattle from her undercarriage provided the traditional newlywed tins-and-cans ditty as we waved off the Marceaus and their mini-zoo and set out on Highway 55 towards the sea and the beautiful East Coast Road.
Abhilasha’s AC had been fixed and she was in fair fettle, given the number of miles she now had to her name. Her shiny yellow surface was clean, but only I knew that behind her wheels and compounded into her nooks and crannies were the remnants of thousands of miles of road: the black fumes from the hallucinogenic lorries, the particles of dirt we threw up every time we flew over a speed bump or dipped into a pothole, the smut of the evening bonfires or the dust that hovered in the air above the scorching earth. It was the same sooty blanket that hung over the shoulders of all the itinerants we had passed: the rickies and truckies, the bus drivers and motorcyclists, the suited professionals driving their clientele in black cars with tinted windows, the cart pushers, the boy racers, the cyclists and the walkers; the guys at the pumps and the roadworks crews, the diggers, dumpers and layers; the farmers, the cattle herders, the quick sly dogs, the impervious camels and heavy-footed elephants, the shepherd boys with their armies of goats and the women hiking home at dusk with cloth-bound stacks of firewood balancing on their heads; the yelling kids, the chorus of hellos, the traffic light hawkers and the people sleeping, eating and praying by the sides of motorways; the crowded towns and the placid villages, the cities under construction and the locked-up gates of the bubble communities; the vast ocean beaches and the starry skies, the wide-open fields and the flat and arid landscapes, the mountains that were monumental and lush and the rivers that ran rugged brown, foamy and fertile, or just plain dry. Everything and everyone was flecked with the identical road dirt, and the splattered forms of dead insects and bird poo that now covered Abhilasha and undeniably me and my husband too, and the great big, lumbering bullocks.
EPILOGUE
Some bonds are hard to break, others are locked in a pattern of eternal return. In the autumn of 2013, I regained official custody of Abhilasha from Hénoc Marceau, who was having trouble selling her following his decision to move back to France. At around the same time I was by chance due to return to India for a month-long publicity tour; it seemed to me that the stars were aligning and that this was a sign from the cosmos that Abhilasha and I were due an encore.
We were reunited at 6 am in a parking lot in Andheri West, a suburb of Mumbai just a few miles from the airport. Thor and I had just landed there a couple of hours earlier, and were still drowsy from the flight. Hénoc’s friend who had been looking after Abhilasha had broken his leg in a car accident a few days earlier. He’d had Abhilasha’s keys in his pocket at the time and now they were bent out of shape.
But they still worked. As the Nano rattled into life, I w
as assailed by a sense of amazement at the 10,000 kilometres I’d attempted in this little car that, after the bulked-out 1993 Audi Cabriolet I’d been driving in Rome for the past two years, felt more like a mobile jerrycan. Abhilasha’s Frisbee-sized wheel was very heavy to steer, her gearstick seemed stiff and her brakes were incredibly sensitive.
We spent several nostalgic days together driving around Mumbai and, as soon as I got used to the traffic again, we were back on our old form, weaving in and out of jams, honking for all we were worth and rather ignominiously running out of petrol in the full flow of evening rush hour by the Flora Fountain.
My departure loomed and still I couldn’t bring myself to think about selling Abhilasha again. I toyed with other options: the most appealing was to palm her off on one of my friends or acquaintances in the city who’d take temporary custody of her, but (understandably?) none was biting. A man I met at the British Council offered to raffle her off at his office Christmas party, but that plan also eventually fell through. Up to the evening before my departure I was in a sustained state of denial about where I could leave Abhilasha (the airport car park seemed as good a last resort as any), when the day was saved by a photographer friend of a friend who happened to have a spare parking space at his apartment in Bandra, Mumbai’s hipster neighborhood of the north.
I dropped the Nano off at her new home just hours before my flight and was pleased to see that this particular part of Mumbai, right next to the sea and with the quiet air of a fishing village, was possibly one of the nicest parts of the city I had seen to date. Sea air corrosion notwithstanding, Abhilasha was in a beautiful spot and in good hands.
She now spends her days bombing around Mumbai on photography assignments. I draw comfort from the knowledge that she’s being put to good use, that she’s there for me should the need ever arise, and that our partnership is sealed until the day I’m made an offer I can’t refuse.
NOTES
1. Back in 1994, this was an easily forgeable folded pink slip with a glued-on passport picture, stuffed into a plastic sheath. My only form of portable ID for many years, it got me duly laughed out of pubs and clubs the world over, and flatly denied entry into some of the more pedantic drinking venues in the US.
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/asia/08ihtroads.html?pagewanted=all
3. This was the figure in 2009. The number of road deaths in 2011 jumped to over 140,000. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-08/india/32123122_1_road-accidents-road-fatalities-road-deaths
4. WHO Global Status Report on Road Safety, 2009.
5. http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/Tata-Nano
6. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/01/09/how-green-is-a-mini.html
7. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/worlds-cheapest-car-boon-or-bane/
8. http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ratan-tata-will-be-a-hero-if-he-made-a-bus-like-nano/56973-11.html
9. http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sunita-narainisright-right/353011/
10. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-20/mumbai/31373302_1_lifeline-poles-accidents
11. Indian National Crime Records Bureau.
12. Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, 2011.
13. World Bank.
14. I later discovered that five vehicles per kilometre of road is a national average made from wildly disparate statistics. In fact, the number of vehicles per kilometre of road in Mumbai stands at 674. http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Mumbai/Mumbai-has-674-vehicles-for-every-km-of-road/Article1-829604.aspx
15. My Mumbais and Bombays were in a perpetual muddle; and not just here, but in every city that had recently changed its name in India. What I realized was that within the cities, opinion was split as to which name to use, and so a mixture of both appeared to be the norm. Hence, Bangalore can be Bengaluru, Madras can be Chennai and Calcutta can be Kolkata, depending on your (or my) mood and/or political inclination.
16. Pavan K. Varma, Being Indian, Penguin India, 2005.
17. One crore = a hundred lakhs or 10,000,000.
18. Though not cows. I was beginning to understand that cows were a whole different story, exempted from the directives on account of their divine standing.
19. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-14/ahmedabad/28122955_1_inter-state-gang-gang-of-highway-robbers-gang-members
20. A popular clothing and fabric chain.
21. Persons of Indian Origin.
22. I’m not counting the rather outlandish and clearly erroneous results for Dadra and Nagar Haveli, a Union Territory squished between Maharashtra and Gujarat whose death rate is 100% based on a reported 45 accidents in all 45 of the state’s registered cars that resulted in 45 fatalities, or the Lakshadweep Islands’ 200% based on a single accident in 2009 that killed two people.
23. It could also mean quite simply that Malayalis are more diligent in reporting minor accidents to the police.
24. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-11/india-to-pay-for-highways-for-first-time-in-14-years-freight
25. http://washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-MBQ2AW0D9L3501-03KFPD9FO6DULNCQ08IA3IP0CI.
26. In my defence, the light was a superfluous item placed in an inconspicuous (I could almost say hidden) spot along a one-way, intersection-less road that had no discernible reason to require traffic to stop at that particular point. I sensed a crafty fundraising drive on the part of Chennai’s traffic department.
27. He is now India’s Prime Minister.
28. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/55427.stm
29. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080111/jsp/nation/story_8769282.jsp
30. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-05-09/inside-the-tata-nano-factorybusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice
31. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Engineering-the-Nano/articleshow/2693758.cms?
32. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/lingerie-delayed-as-517-billion-india-jam-idles-trucks-freight.html
33. I later found out that by ‘summer’, historians in fact meant the time of year we in the West traditionally refer to as summer – that is, from June to September – and not the actual hottest time of the year on the subcontinent, which would be April and May. This means that Buddha and his buddies were escaping the incessant rains of the monsoon (for the sake of not harming any wee beasties during the course of their travels) and not the ferocious summer heat; so Buddha was infinitely more hardcore than me, as we all initially suspected.
34. A religious ritual, in this case performed in the waters of the sacred river Ganges.
35. ‘Mandalay’.
36. ‘Gunga Din’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Akhil Gupta in Mumbai and his assistant Prasad CG, without whom the journey would not have been possible.
And then to everyone who made a donation to the Nano Diaries project: Mum and Dad, Steve and Hannah Shellswell, Jon Meldrum, Dom Goodman, Olly Lambert, AOMAC, Charles Strasser, Robb Ellender, Ljilja Lainovic, Dijana and Dobrica Vukcevic, Mike and Jean Barnes, Dorothea Evans, Chris Gothard, Sacha Lainovic, Jason Sanchez, Can Esenbel, Balamurugan Manoharan, Jan Pearse, Richard Norman and Vamsi Mohun.
Another big shout-out to my agent Sherna Khambatta and the team at Nicholas Brealey, as well as the very talented Hiromi Suzuki Asakura who drew that lovely map on the front cover.
Thank you to the friends who softened the blows of long-distance travel and who provided support and advice, or allowed me to share their homes and the delights of creature comforts. Special big-ups to the Korgaonkar family, as well as Reuben, Petra, Hénoc, Marion, Hadleigh and Paul.
I’m grateful to Ratan Tata and to the folks at Tata Motors who have shown encouragement and cooperation, and who have refrained from filing any legal action against me.
Thanks to my parents and my husband Thor for all their support and patience in the face of my refusal to get a proper job.
Thanks to ever
yone in India. You truly deserve your title as the most hospitable nation on earth, as well as the mantle of the country of the craziest drivers. Yes, you lot who drive like your pants are on fire: just take care and watch how you go.
Also from
NICHOLAS BREALEY PUBLISHING
The Kama Sutra Diaries
Intimate Journeys through
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Sally Howard
Sally Howard, a self-confessed child of the Western Sexual Revolution, sets out on a ‘sexploration’ through modern India, travelling by train, plane and auto-rickshaw.
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And it’s a revolution that’s full of fascinating surprises and contrasts; for India – the land that gave us that exuberant guide to sexual pleasure, the Kama Sutra – is also the land where women remain cloistered in purdah while teenage girls check out porn online; where families bow down to a conjoined phallus and vagina, the ‘Shivaling’, while couples fear to hold hands in public; and where the loveless arranged marriage is still the norm.
Colourful and compelling, The Kama Sutra Diaries reveal what India has to tell us about modern-day love, sex and sexuality.
Paperback ISBN 978-1-85788-589-7
eISBN 978-1-85788-960-4
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