Never Mind the Bullocks (21 page)

With my mounting hours of experience, I began to realize that the trick was to treat it like a dance and get into the groove – not to think too much, but instead to act on intuition. I learned as much as I could from the drivers around me, and when one day in Pondicherry I saw a car passing on the street with a rectangular roof rack that read Super Star Driving School, I knew what I had to do.

It occurred to me as I entered the school, just opposite the train station, that I might not exactly fit the profile of Super Star's average pupil. Frantic exchanges were passed between the six or so men who were manning the office and whose relaxing afternoon I had clearly shattered with the sledgehammer of my presence. My Parish of Grouville licence was studied with the usual mix of curiosity and ridicule while I feebly piped up that I also had an international one, though I feared that the laughable, now dog-eared document might incite even further mirth on their part. India has been converting to smart-card driving licences for several years now, using state-of-the-art embedded chips that store information about drivers, their safety records, history of chronicled offences,
past car ownerships and so on. It was an efficient, high-tech system way ahead of many first-world countries, which seemed tremendously at odds with the grimy, anarchic reality of the roads outside.

The general gist of the commotion fuelled by our linguistic shortcomings appeared to revolve around the question that since I already had a driver's licence, why did I need another one? I explained as articulately as I could using only bare-bones sentence structure and mime: ‘India – driving – very – chaos.' I rapped on my chest bone. ‘I – need – help.'

A round of consensual nods Mexican-waved its way around the room before one guy eventually stepped forward and introduced himself as Kathi. He would, by the looks of it, take a chance on me. He led me outside to a Tata Indica parked next to a huddle of motorcycles and a loitering cow.

Kathi's detailed introduction to the basics of ignition location, handbrake kinetics and horn functionality implied that he for one didn't take my Parish of Grouville credentials seriously at all, and was bent on treating me with the kid gloves he believed I deserved. When he finally allowed me to turn on the engine after a protracted period of foot-pedal explanations that were carefully monitored by three of his colleagues who held vigil from the pavement, I wasn't sure if I was capable of driving any more. Predictably, I stalled, lunging the car forwards and sending the adjacent cow galloping down the road.

Our first encounter while trundling down the street at a speed that would make a sloth blush was a man in a shortened dhoti cycling a home-made cart with long steel rods hanging off the back in an arc that meant their end trailed along the road surface. Kathi gestured that I should overtake the vehicle, adding that a mid-manoeuvre parp of my horn was very much ‘compulsory'. From then on, at just about every obstacle, junction and overtake, Kathi shouted out ‘make ha-ran!' with life-and-death zeal. A
motorbike stopped in the middle of the road ahead of us and on Kathi's imperative I held down the Indica's ha-ran in a deliberately exaggerated and hammy misinterpretation of his instruction.

It was as though, due to Kathi's insistence on treating me like a dumb wench behind the wheel, I actually became one. I felt plain naughty, and in the mood to vex Kathi to his limits. A few seconds passed and I was still holding down the horn. Kathi lurched towards me and pushed my hand from the button.

‘Okay, okay, okay, long ha-ran not necessary.' But it was a fraction of a moment too late for the dismounting motorcyclist, who was clearly and rightly enraged by my extended show of (apparent) aggression towards him. For his part, Kathi was exasperated and couldn't bring himself to answer my simple query, ‘Do you think I just made that man angry?'

Besides driving slowly past the police station, not using my horn in front of ashrams and other religious institutions, and not driving over the yellow line at the side of the road (which Kathi dubbed the ‘danger line'), the driving tips I was getting from my Super Star instructor were pretty slim pickings. I tried to up the stakes by suggesting we drive over to a busier road. Kathi was disinclined. No, no and no; absolutely not. This was my first lesson and I needed to get used to driving on the small roads before I could graduate to mixing in with the main street traffic. The fact that I had already driven thousands of kilometres from Mumbai seemed to have little effect on his decision.

The driving lesson was not producing the desired result. I had signed up to tap into some local knowledge about how to handle Indian roads better, but Kathi's lack of faith in my skills was proving to have the very undesirable effect of actually making me a worse driver. I could feel my confidence ebbing further with every junction where Kathi saw fit to slam down the instructor's brake in his own footwell ahead of my own better-timed intention to do so a split second later.

The final straw came as we were pulling out onto a main road near the end of the lesson. An old man wobbled towards us from our right on a wiry bicycle. ‘Go, go!' Kathi egged me to pull out in front of the man.

‘But there's a cyclist coming,' I protested.

‘Vehicle is always coming,' Kathi reasoned. ‘You don't stop here.'

I could see his point. If I stopped to give way to every bike, car, cow and truck that crossed my path, I'd still be somewhere near the McDonald's in Navi Mumbai. But much to Kathi's growing irritation, I was not able to cut up an elderly gent on a bike. Call it spinelessness, call it stupidity, call it the genetic backwash of most noble Chaucerian
gentillesse
, I just couldn't be so damn rude. I might be a deferential, bumble-arsed Englishwoman, but if that meant having good manners towards the elderly, then I would stick to my guns and uphold my values.

Back at HQ, his feet on solid ground and in the presence of his boss who'd just arrived, Kathi's tone changed from disparaging to reasonably encouraging. I asked for a rating on a scale of one to ten and he gave me a six after some consideration. Was I good enough to take the Tata Nano up to Delhi? Kathi fell silent and knotted his brow.

‘Okay, okay, okay! But still you need four or five more classes.'

I whined in protest and insisted he give me one good reason. He held up an instructive finger. ‘Because in India, road is very traffic is.'

PONDICHERRY to CHENNAI; KM 3,041–3,213

Your blessing was very luck,' the spray-paint technician at Manakular Motors – Pondicherry's certified Tata garage – assured me, sucking his teeth and running his fingers along Abhilasha's newly sprayed backside after I'd rattled off to him the previous day's sequence of events. ‘With no blessing, accident is very bad,' he stated with certainty. I couldn't argue with his reasoning, but it did little to lessen my rage over the fact that Abhilasha's perfect yellow complexion had been tarnished with scratches of karma gone askew, and that putting right the damage was now costing me ten times what I'd paid at the temple.

Still, she was back to fine fettle, sparkling clean and her graze erased, which in turn put me in good spirits as I drove back to rescue Thor, who was passing the morning programming from the terrace of our hotel. We had decided to spend one more day there before heading up to Chennai, where our journey as a couple would come to an end. Though Thor was visibly eager to get back to his ashram and I was growing impatient to head up north, the impending separation lingered like the threat of a distant storm; prone to horrible bouts of amorous wistfulness, I tried not to think too much about what life on the road would be like post-Thor, vaguely reasoning that since things had been just fine before he joined me in
Bangalore, they would surely continue to be just fine after he left.

Two weeks of travellers' intimacy with my redheaded mathematician had pretty much sealed my conviction on what had been an uncanny hunch the first moment I clapped eyes on him: providence was somehow heavily invested in our union. I had always been easily seduced by the veneer of romance, and as such had an awful track record for making myself scarce before the first-date roses had started to wilt. When affairs did develop into relationships and the question of ramping up commitment floated to the surface, my enthusiasm had always turned into emotional paralysis. I concluded I was an awful stickler, exasperated by every tiny flaw and painfully aware that the perfection I thought I was looking for was unlikely to exist beyond the realm of romantic fiction. It was a maddening realization that I dragged away from the last break-up I initiated – which I swore would be my very last – and hung around my neck for the few short months before Thor came to Bangalore and restarted the cogs of affection. In a flash, I went from the conviction that I was destined to stew in a state of perennial dissatisfaction to the sunny thought that there might be hope of salvation after all.

This time
is always different; but this time really was. In a rush of ardour, I went a bridge too far by uttering the fateful words: ‘Might you like to drive?'

Thor scanned my face for evidence of a ruse. ‘Really?'

I handed him the keys.

‘Wait a minute. What happened to Little Miss Control Freak? Where'd she go?'

‘I just, you know, thought you might like to give it a go. Just from here to the market. It's not far.'

‘Well, if you're sure.'

I wasn't sure. You can never be sure. You can only jump in the right direction and hope you don't hit a rock, or a bit of scaffolding. The ten-minute drive from the Swades Guest House over to where Mission Street crossed Nehru Street saw me white-knuckled in the passenger street, straining myself to the point of internal rupture not to play back-seat driver and exclaim on each occasion (about every five seconds) Thor came heart-stoppingly close to knocking over a cyclist or not braking in time to let a cow cross the road. His horn technique was aggressive and his relationship with the gearstick shaky, by the evidence of no fewer than four stalls in the first third of the journey – each of which was accompanied by a torrent of impressive curses.

When it came to parking in one of the streets that surrounded the market, whose edges were already replete with motorbikes, rickshaws and cars, Thor's quick reverse produced a dull crunch as Abhilasha's rear bumper ploughed into some scaffolding behind us. He turned to me with a look of sheepish panic.

‘Shit, what was that?'

‘I'd say that was probably you reversing the car into the scaffolding behind us.'

‘Shit! I'm so sorry. Do you think it's bad?'

‘I daren't look.'

We got out of the car and went around reluctantly to inspect the rear. It wasn't so bad. The bumper had taken a minor hit in the form of a scratch on the left side, and apart from now being cocked at a subtly rakish angle, there was little evidence of the collision. That was more than could be said for the wooden panel at the base of the scaffolding the Nano had reversed into. There was a long crack stretching belligerently from one edge of the wood to the other in an accusing grimace that suggested we get the hell out before anyone caught wind of our accidental vandalism.

‘Maybe I'll take it over to another spot,' I suggested gently, aware that I was far less irked by Abhilasha's disfigurement at Thor's hands than I had been at my own, and yet the rubber blades of passive aggression were nonetheless sharpening against my guts.

‘Yeah, I can't get used to these stick-shift cars,' he admitted, a bit defeated.

As I sat back down in the driver's seat, I felt bad for him and indignantly stroppy at the same time. ‘They're
hideously
difficult to manoeuvre,' I lied. ‘And on top of that, you're driving on the wrong side of the road here. This is piss easy for me; I was brought up driving on the left. But it must be a complete
nightmare
for you.'

‘Well, it would be had I managed to go further than ten minutes without writing off the bumper.'

I put my hand on his knee and likely irritated the lifeblood out of him with condescending kindness. ‘It's alright. You know, you'll have another opportunity. We'll try again tomorrow.'

This was also a lie. I had already decided that after that initial display of driving dexterity – or lack thereof – there was no way I'd let Thor near the driver's seat again. I knew it was one of those points early on in a relationship when little episodes give a sense of the bigger dynamics that lie in wait. The die had been cast: from the moment Abhilasha's bumper hit the scaffold under Thor's supervision, the roles had been apportioned – I was the driver, the authority, the wearer of gloves, hat and driving pants. Any future attempt of Thor's to get behind the wheel would invariably result in a distrusting nervousness on my part that would be so formidable as to completely incapacitate the poor guy, preventing him from being able to drive with any degree of unselfconsciousness and so bringing the situation tragically full circle.

Probably out of loving-kindness and possibly out of fear of further recrimination for his negligent reverse, Thor refrained from addressing the palpable psycho-bitch atmosphere that had expanded to occupy the Nano. I felt the hairy scrub of its backside as I remembered my father manifesting similar behaviour during the road trips of my childhood, when one small motorway skirmish forever banished my mother from sharing the driving on long-distance journeys.

In search of another parking space, we rounded a corner on the edge of the market and came to a standstill on a small road lined with open-fronted shops and zigzagged by deliverymen zipping in every direction hauling boxes, crates and sacks on their shoulders. It was a picture of industry, save for a large lorry standing idle three cars ahead of us that was the opposite of industry and ostensibly the cause of the choke-up. We strained to see from our seats exactly what was going on, but were egged on by the chorus of horns around us to join in and add our parp to the fray.