Never Mind the Bullocks (20 page)

‘Can I please have everybody's attention?' Radhika commanded with a zeal I knew I couldn't come close to emulating. Most of the class eventually hauled their gazes from their laptops and phones. I wished for a moment I could be as uninteresting to the rest of India as I was to the first-year Communications students of Pondicherry University, who clearly saw me as some irritating interlude in their lesson break. Radhika gestured towards me. ‘This is Vanessa. She is a journalist from the UK who is doing a very interesting project here that she has come to talk to you about today. Dileep! Where is Dileep?'

A hand went up at the back of the lecture hall.

‘Dileep, will you please turn on the fans?'

Dileep shot up and sprinted over to the fan controls. Five sets of blades overhead started whirring, necessitating that all conversation be held in tones very close to yelling.

‘So I will leave Vanessa to tell her story. Please ask her questions at the end. Anything you like. Anupama, Deepa, make sure you take notes; you can write an article about this for
The Inquirer
.'

The Inquirer
? This was escalating out of control. What I was about to say was to be set in stone in the student rag. Every word would be immortalized, unretractable, howled at over beers at the student union. And in the face of such pressure, who emerged but my stuttering Hugh Grant alter ego?

‘Right. Well, um… hello. Nice to be here. Um… (bugger).'

It was painstaking, but it seemed I had no choice and I launched into my story. An hour later, all the students were still sitting upright and looking earnestly in my direction. They appeared curious, a fact that shocked and terrified me at the same time. Until this point, Abhilasha had been my little bubble in which I was sailing untouched through a sea of adventure, doubt, frustration and repetitive strain injuries. It was true that I had been writing missives to the outside world via my blog, but every time I went to publish a new post, it didn't occur to me that someone, somewhere would actually end up reading it.

To my amazement, the Nano Diaries Facebook page had by then accrued a thousand or so followers, most of whom were people I didn't know, and of these the large majority were young Indian men. On top of that, our journey was starting to reap a bit of press interest. A woman, coincidentally called Janelle Nanos, had contacted me for an interview for
National Geographic
's ‘Intelligent Travel' blog (a title I thought in my case could be construed as wildly ironic), which then led to emails from
CNN Go
,
Budget Travel
magazine,
Asian Correspondent
and a Mumbai tabloid called
Mid Day
. We eventually even got a radio interview with
Voice of America
and a mention in the
Washington Post
. Abhilasha and I were
garnering celebrity status and – quite surprisingly – people seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing. Perhaps this wasn't the world's worst idea after all.

‘I think it's great to see a woman do what you are,' Radhika told me, smiling over her glasses as we tucked into fried rice in the university canteen after my stutterthon. ‘It's so brave.'

I told her I quite honestly didn't think my gender mattered either way. A woman was just as capable of driving a car as a man, after all. Some studies even showed females to be better drivers. Surely the fact that I was a girl didn't make much difference.

Radhika didn't agree. A bit of an idiosyncrasy of Indian society, she was a mum who loved travelling alone with her daughter. She told me stories of when her little one was a baby and she would strap the child to her chest and a rucksack on her back and hop on a bus or a train from Delhi up north to the mountains or south to Goa and Kerala. ‘A lot of people would approach me and tell me what I was doing was wrong. They said, “Alone! Where is your husband? You should be with your family,”' she revealed very matter-of-factly.

I was amazed. In the time I had been driving alone, I had encountered nothing of the sort. Was it Abhilasha's charm that was too distracting for people to see that she actually contained a single, husband-less female, or was it the colour of my skin that prevented the people I met along the way from airing their real opinions and instead led them to pump me for information about the Nano's fuel-to-performance ratio? However, I told Radhika, there was one thing she could do to help stack the fates a little better on my side…

Radhika assured me that consecrating Abhilasha would not be a problem; she suggested I have the blessing performed right there in Pondicherry and immediately dispatched the ever-acquiescent Bagalavan to follow me on his motorbike to the Manakula Vinayagar temple in the centre of town. Particularly appropriate in that it was dedicated to none other than Ganesha himself, the temple came complete with its very own elephant, who went by the name of Lakshmi, and who stood obediently outside the main entrance. Lakshmi's main job appeared to be taking coins and bananas from faithful devotees and nervous tourists and in return imparting
darshan
, a blessing, in the form of a light pat on the head that made most recipients quiver and screech.

Following Abhilasha's recent manhandling on our way from Kanyakumari to Tiruchirappali, I was very wary of the lumbering, runny-nosed proboscidea. However, Lakshmi appeared to be a different class of elephant altogether: elegant, polite and decked out in some rather attractive ankle bracelets. She seemed quite happy to dole out blessings to anyone who tossed her a prize, and I eventually succumbed to her charms and flipped her a ten-rupee coin. I figured garnering a bit of goodwill with a real-life Ganesha could only further my cause of maximizing favour with the gods.

Bright-faced and businesslike, Bagalavan wasted no time in rushing me towards a kiosk inside the temple, where he pushed some rupees over the counter in exchange for a couple of flimsy tickets. We took these around the corner where a Brahmin appeared, ready with his assortment of materials for the ceremony. Wearing a dhoti and a thread looped diagonally across his bare chest and over his shoulder, he was balancing four limes and a pot of deep red sindoor on an aluminium tray with a burning oil lamp soldered onto the end of it.

Bagalavan disappeared somewhere and I was left grinning at the Brahmin over the smoke of his oil burner. I pointed towards Abhilasha and his expression became grave as he nodded his head in a gesture of acknowledgement. Bagalavan returned with a garland of marigolds, which we hung from Abhilasha's rear-view mirror, as well as a line of jasmine for my own hair.

And so the ceremony began. The Brahmin started by standing in front of the Nano's bonnet and applying dots of sindoor on her headlights, number plate and a spot on the windscreen that fell roughly where her forehead should be. Then he circulated his burning oil lamp around to the driver's door, where he got in (my maternal gut clenched at the sight of an uncovered, smoking oil lamp thrust deep inside her delicate and presumably flammable interior) and proceeded to dab bits of sindoor powder around the steering wheel and dashboard. He then placed a lime underneath the front and back tyres, before moving around to her posterior, where he applied more sin-door dots to her rear lights and number plate. The remaining limes were duly placed under Abhilasha's left tyres and all that remained was for me, my own forehead now also sindoored, to get in and slowly drive forward, thus making limeade with Abhilasha's treads.

As quickly as it started, it was over. Abhilasha, smoky and powdered, had now officially been blessed and sanctified. As far as the gods were concerned, she was all right and well worth keeping a divine eye on. Ganesha beamed up at me from the dashboard as the Brahmin hovered by my open window.

‘Ma'am, you must give him a little baksheesh,' Bagalavan informed me from over the holy man's shoulder. I gave him a fifty-rupee note and he went on his way.

‘So is that it?' I asked Bagalavan, incredulous that this all-important act of karmic insurance had been so fleeting, simple and, er, cheap.

‘Yes, ma'am. That is all. Now you are safe to drive and you will be protected from all accidents.'

Excellent, I thought. Pricey insurance policies be damned, I now had a much more powerful source of indemnity on my side. I thanked Bagalavan – who seemed eager to be dismissed, as I guessed Radhika had piled him high with jobs for the day – and set off with Abhilasha for a celebratory croissant.

Later that afternoon, I was taking the Nano through the narrow lanes of Pondicherry's Muslim quarter looking for the front porch of the man with whom Thor and I had left a bundle of our washing hours earlier. As I rounded a corner, I had a weird rush of uncoordination and took the turn too tight. The laundry man's ironing table hove into view as I felt an almighty scrape on the right-hand side of the car. I stopped dead with a stomach-churning wince of recognition as I turned to see that I had rubbed Abhilasha against a concrete lamppost; a bit like how a cat would rub up against your leg, only to the teeth-clenching sound of grazed metal.

‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit!'

The laundry man stood on his porch watching me with the curious inertia of a doctor sloth.

‘Shit!' What to do now? I figured that if I kept moving forwards, I would inevitably draw out the scratch even further. Going backwards seemed a much more sensible option, so I put Abhilasha in reverse and tried to extricate her from her concrete clinch.

Another hideous rasping noise. It seemed that my attempts at retracting my imbecilic action had piled stupidity on foolishness. We were back where we started, except that Abhilasha now had two enormous scrapes along her right rear haunch.

I looked down at Ganesha, who was as indifferent as the laundry man. He gave me no clues where to go next. Why had this happened? Weren't we supposed to be protected? Irony
didn't begin to describe the situation. The heat-withered marigolds still hung from the rear-view mirror, the sindoor clung to the steering wheel and bits of lime remained freshly wedged between the rubber grooves of Abhilasha's tyres. Here we were, four hours after our blessing (our fifty-blimming-rupee blessing, I inwardly snapped) and we were in the midst of our first accident of the whole trip.

And what an accident. This was not one to regale audiences with; it was hardly the stuff Hollywood car crashes were made of. There had been no errant rickshaws crossing my path; no buses swerving ferociously into my lane; no drunken lorry drivers falling asleep at the wheel and taking the Nano head on. It was a bright and sunny day, I had been driving on an empty road at 10 kmph, and the only extenuating factor in the entire incident was my own stupidity. I had scraped the lamppost with all the composure and grace of a pissed vagrant falling against a wall. And then I had reversed for more.

The laundry guy was still staring at me. He hadn't moved a muscle. I mentally willed him to get back to his ironing, as his proximity to the accident and the fact that he was the sole human witness of my injudicious manoeuvre put him first in line for unfair retribution.

I swung Abhilasha's wheel hard to the left and managed with only a small additional scrape to free her from the lamppost's clutches. I pulled her up outside the laundry man's porch and got out to inspect the damage. It was as bad as I imagined: there was a series of thin, wavy lines stretching from the tail light all the way to the hinge of the passenger door that had scraped away the paintwork and exposed the grey metal underneath.

‘Shit!'

I turned to face the laundry man, who continued in his wordless contemplation of the scene. I put my best anger-management skills into action as every ounce of my being was
channelled into the act of politely asking him for my washing back, not for the chance to furnish him with a knuckle sandwich. He reached for a pile of familiar folded clothes that had been placed on a stack of newspapers behind his ironing table. He then quoted a price that was Rs 30 more than I had agreed with his wife that morning. My blood pressure rose to mass-murder levels, and the man seemed to instantly recognize the killer instinct in my eyes. I handed over the agreed price and he accepted without a word. Not looking twice at Abhilasha's mangled haunch, I got back in the driver's seat, ripped the marigolds from the mirror and sped away from the laundry-wallah's house.

I might be giving the impression I found Indian people to be bad drivers. In fact, it's quite the opposite: I think Indians might be the best drivers in the world. The more miles I clocked up with Abhilasha, the more I realized that, contrary to the impression of utter chaos when I first landed in Mumbai, traffic in India did move to an impressive kind of algorithm, albeit one that was hard to discern at first. It was a bit like crowd theory at a rave or during rush hour at a busy train station: lots of humans crammed into a small space, each of them freestyling in their own particular direction, but somehow avoiding mashing into one another through the tiny instinctual corrections of movement.