Never Mind the Bullocks (13 page)

The experience of a last-minute curve out of the way of an oncoming truck must have traumatized Abhilasha as much as it did her driver, as just after our life-saving swerve and my consequent stream of maligned outrage, I began to notice she kept veering towards the hard shoulder. When I straightened her out to move in a straight line, her steering wheel was crooked and pointing in the wrong direction. From the dingy recesses of my sparse mechanical knowledge, I managed to dust the cobwebs off a diagnosis: misaligned steering. That meant that a visit to the mechanic was in order – and soon – as I was also dimly aware that an unaligned steering wheel could spell all manner of problems like bald tyres and, um, other structural troubles.

Our entry into the centre of Bangalore was marked with the usual one-handed shuffling of inadequate notes and jabbing at the badly prepared maps on my iPhone while crawling in traffic and trying not to let my attention wander too far from the bumper ahead of me, lest Abhilasha end up in a compromising situation with a dirty exhaust pipe. In the confusion of this navigating–driving juggling act, I followed a car in front of me making a right turn that crossed over an empty lane at a red light.

No sooner had I executed the manoeuvre than I found myself face to face with a traffic cop holding out his hand for me to stop.

We'd been nicked.

I pulled up by the side of the road with that sinking, name-called-out-in-assembly feeling and rolled down the window. The policeman bent and surveyed the mess of bags, clothes and plastic bottles strewn over the passenger side and back
seat. He muttered something illegible, of which I only caught the word ‘Nano…' We were joined by a second policeman, to whom the first turned to talk in conspiratorial whispers. He came back to me and started to speak gravely.

‘Madam, you have committed an offence,' he said in a weary, scum-like-you-need-to-be-weeded-out kind of tone. ‘There is no turning right on this red light.'

For a second I was speechless. Had I actually found a rule to break?

‘Turning right on this red light is not permitted,' the policeman repeated, in order to hammer home the fact that I had done the unthinkable.

Figuring the officer might not take too well to me laughing out loud in the face of his accusation given our current context (even as we spoke, cars coming from behind me were zigzagging like drunken moths to avoid Abhilasha and honking loudly in protest at the legal altercation blocking their route), I decided instead to adopt the look of a forlorn tourist with outrageously winsome puppy-dog eyes.

‘Officer, I am terribly sorry,' I said with an overstated sincerity that made me sound like a seductive Margaret Thatcher. ‘I didn't know it was illegal to turn on a red light here.'

He didn't flinch. ‘Licence, please.'

I rummaged around in my bag and pulled out a slightly dogeared States of Jersey international licence. He looked at my glued-on photo with a little suspicion before handing the document to his colleague. It was hard to tell with his back turned, but I presumed the pair were having a jolly good giggle at the Parish of Grouville crest and the shaky signature my mum had faked in a bid to expedite the licence, for which I had applied only three days before my departure to India.

Leaning back into the car, the cop did look amused. ‘No problem, madam,' he said. ‘Only a hundred rupees fine.'

‘One hundred rupees!' I exclaimed with the well-crafted look of award-winning amazement that was one hundred per cent facetious.

The officer suddenly took on the air of an auctioneer. ‘Yes madam, only one hundred rupees. Very cheap!'

Was this my cue to barter? Flummoxed by the direction our exchange was taking, I decided to opt for a different approach; an old trick I had learned from my days dodging attempted fleecing at the hands of the traffic police in Mexico City.

‘All right,' I replied. ‘One hundred rupees it is. Only, can I have a receipt?'

The officer's smile wavered and he squinted at me.

‘A receipt,' I repeated. ‘I will be requiring a ticket.'

The policeman ignored my request, reaffirming that one hundred rupees was an excellent deal. His half-outstretched hand implied it was absolutely fine with him if I just went ahead and handed it over.

‘Yes. No, I agree, officer. A hundred rupees is a most, um, generous, sum. But I will need you to write me a ticket. You know, a fine. Just to keep things official and above board and all that.' My Maggie-T accent had reached such heights of clip-piness I feared it might roll over into Dame Edna.

The officer referred once more to his friend.

I called to them both out of the window. ‘Actually, I'm on my way to the police station right now. Foreigners' registration. Why don't you come with me and we can do all the paperwork there together?'

The smile had disappeared from his face.

‘The Police Commissioner's Office is just around the corner, isn't it?' I asked, relieved I had by chance clocked the now-vital piece of information on my phone's map seconds before making the illegal turn.

My licence was thrust back through the window and into my hand.

‘Okay, go, go.'

‘Go? But what about the fine?'

‘Okay, okay, no problem.'

‘But really, it's no bother to go to the station; it's just down the road…'

The two men had already lost interest and walked away, their chai money lost to obstinacy and a yellow Nano. I was pleased with myself for having wheedled my way out of a fine, but part of me would have been happy to pay. After all, here was the law enforcement I had been looking for; here was a shadow of the rules I had been craving. That it was tainted by the pall of corruption was neither here nor there. I had finally done something I wasn't supposed to do in India – an illegal right turn on a red light – and it felt like home.

Many a cautionary Indian road tale attests to the imprudence of truck drivers owing to the alleged over-consumption of marijuana, booze or
doda
, an opium and betel-nut tea. Suspicious urban legends or not, further evidence of truckies' psychedelic tendencies can easily be seen in their trucks themselves and the brightly coloured paintings that adorn the exterior bodywork, often accompanied by lights or bunting. Added to this are the giant horns and long spindly antennae the drivers are wont to pimp their rides with, as well as depictions of Ganesha, Hanuman and the saintly faced Shiva, surrounded by varieties of bizarre flora and fauna. Put all together and the trucks easily come to resemble Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' bus: an electric kool-aid
doda
-and-weed ride into the mind-bending Indian night.

While some drivers (or the artists they commissioned) are more imaginative than others in the picture department, the rest compensate for a lack of visual stimuli by showing instead a flair for poesy of which the beat writers would be proud. The vehicles' posteriors are most frequently inscribed with great words of wisdom: some of them read like spiritual bumper stickers, like ‘God is great', ‘God is one' and ‘God bless you', while others carry a more nationalistic undertone – ‘India is great', ‘Jai Hind' and ‘I love India'. A number of them bear more jovial messages like ‘Welcome' and ‘Good luck!' or useful driving tips like the ironic ‘Use dippers at night' (as though it were an option), ‘Stop!' and simply ‘Relax'. The remainder are a series of mysterious non sequiturs like the very popular ‘Wait for side', a riddle I've never been able to crack, and almost as ambiguous as the ‘Awaaz Do' that I had started to see on more and more vehicles in the Hindi-speaking north. Roughly translated, it means something like ‘Make yourself heard', which is another way of expressing
the single most common phrase painted on the backs of lorries, ‘Horn OK Please'.

At first, I thought I got the gist: please horn, OK? For the enormous trucks that rarely made use of their rear-view mirrors, it was essential to let them know of your desire to pass. However, I did find myself pondering, especially after several hours of chevron hypnosis, that there might in fact be more than one way of viewing this curious assemblage of words. Was ‘horn' a command or a simple noun in this case? How to interpret the combination of the collaborative ‘OK' with the supplicatory ‘please'? The more I thought about it, the less sense the phrase made and the more the three words appeared to have accidentally collided with one another to make a vaguely baffling bumper sticker.

Senseless haiku or not, the horn is without doubt the single most important component of a car in India. The horn is not an everyday phenomenon; it's an every minute to every second occurrence. Just as English is the country's lingua franca, handy for ironing out conversational difficulties in a nation with 22 other official tongues, the horn is the major method of communication between its hundreds of millions of road users. It's a dialect, a currency, a complex system of signage and exchange that, through a gruelling process of trial and error, I was slowly beginning to fathom.

The most important preconception for me to tackle when it came to diving into the hooter game was that horns always implied hostility. During Abhilasha's maiden voyages in Mumbai, the sound of any horn within a twenty-metre proximity had me spinning around to find the perpetrator, as though every beep and parp of the road was exclusively aimed in my direction. But what I gradually came to learn – and this did wonders for my blood pressure – was that the horn covered most forms of road communication that might in other cultures be transmitted through the indicator lights, mirrors and various other subtler forms of road etiquette.

The most common application was during the overtake: I learned that in India, it's only courteous, just before passing someone – any vehicle, not just a truck – to give them a quick honk of warning. If someone is crossing lanes in front of you on a highway, a triple beep is most useful in giving them a better sense of their room to manoeuvre, while a well-timed, well-mannered parp is usually enough to gain access from an obstructive vehicle at a traffic light. Abhilasha's humble horn also turned out to be an excellent shepherding tool when faced with herds of sheep, goats, cows and bullocks strolling over highways, or making their way down country lanes, as I discovered that even India's ungulates were savvy to the parley of the road.

There were many different types of horns, from drum-shattering sirens and vuvuzela-inspired rackets to novelty musical beepers and those squeezy rubber parpy things championed by
The Great Gatsby
. On the highways at least, a good horn really sorted the wheat from the chaff as far as mobility was concerned. The drivers of trucks and buses, for example, displayed a penchant for ear-piercing musical numbers that were loud and fearsome enough to make the earth tremble. One of those coming from behind with an alarming intensity of Doppler shift was extremely efficient at making me move, as I learned quickly that the sound would be emanating from a large and unusually speedy lorry on a suicide mission. Such vehicles were wont to drive remarkably long distances with the horn in a state of constant depression, a tactic I can't say I didn't admire just a tad.

I often thought the Nano's horn was not quite as powerful as it could have been. Later on in the trip, it even started to give off little quivers and shakes like a soprano in a bad state of training and after three chain-smoked packs of Lucky Strikes. I began to think that other drivers who couldn't see the source of its wee hoot thought they were dealing with a two-wheeler, as that was often the amount of space they allotted for passing. Or sometimes
they didn't move at all, a flagrant defiance of my newly discovered road lexicon that invariably brought out in me what came to be known as The Spirit of
Braveheart
.

The
Braveheart
Tactic involved emulating at least the attitude (if not the terrifying volume) of a cross between a fearless, warmongering William Wallace leading his armies into battle, and the king-of-the-road stratagem employed by the previously mentioned monster trucks who drove with their horns on perma-blare. If the vehicle ahead of us gave me so much as a few centimetres to work with, I would go postal with the blasts, shooting them out in rapid fire so the vehicle in question could know exactly what kind of psycho they were dealing with. As I passed in bloodthirsty mode, I kept the horn going all the way till the end of the overtake. If Abhilasha had a face, it would have been red by this point.

All of this was hugely satisfying, and once I began to enjoy myself, the horn was all mine and trigger happiness set in. Old lady crossing the street ahead: ‘BEEEEEEEEPPPPPP!' Dog sauntering happily in the fast lane of the highway: ‘BEEEEEEEPPPP!' Cow about to lay itself at perpendicular angles to the oncoming Nano: ‘BBBBBEEEEEPPPPPPP bloody BEEEEEPPPPPPPP!!!'

Horn please? Okay, and then some.

BANGALORE; KM 1,562

The machinations of gastro-intestinal upheaval in India are rarely worth going into. To me, puzzling over the causes of near-perpetual Delhi belly is about as useful an activity as debating the existence of beings in the metaphysical realm: whether they're there or not, shit will invariably keep on happening. So in the same way, no matter which school of thought I subscribed to – be it the eat-anything-you-can-get-your-hands-on creed or the treat-all-food-with-high-suspicion doctrine – I always eventually ended up with an incendiary sphincter. For every several portions of street food I'd apprehensively eaten – uttering a silent prayer as I nervously ingested lunch from a dubious banana-leaf bowl – it seemed I was just as likely to be sent running to the loo after dining at an air-conditioned restaurant with tablecloths, proper menus and waiters with name badges. My best guess was the pithy excuse that I had a sensitive stomach and needed to be fed tasteless, starchy comfort food (read toast and eggs) at every available opportunity to balance out the spicy, oily fare that sustained me the rest of the time.