Never Mind the Bullocks (16 page)

‘No, madam, please, no money!'

‘No money?' What was this, a TV show set-up?

‘No, free service, madam.'

‘What? Why?' Surely this was a ruse. I didn't really believe him until he handed me Abhilasha's keys ten minutes later, my little yellow companion gleaming like the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The man didn't stick around for a palm of baksheesh or even a mild show of gratitude; he simply turned on his heel and marched back towards the garage.

‘Thank you,' I called out after him, a bit choked. He looked around, surprised, so I tried to think of a good follow-up.

‘I'm very, very… satisfied.'

The man smiled and continued walking. I sat down in the newly vacuumed driver's seat to find the steering wheel perfectly aligned and the floor covered with large pieces of brown paper that wished us ‘Happy Motoring'.

MYSORE to FORT KOCHI; KM 1,709–2,105

The drive south began in the regal city of Mysore, a place we opted to overlook entirely in the name of clocking up some decent kilometres after a week's hiatus in Bangalore. This was in spite of the
Lonely Planet
's claim that it was ‘one Indian city that deserves a slower pace'. The pace Thor and I opted for resulted in a total of twelve hours in its vicinity: seven asleep, two eating, one cursing the hotel's slow internet, and a further two hours stuck in traffic on the way in and out. A cheeky ten-minute peek at the Maharaja's floodlit palace through the crack in its closed gates before dinner was the closest we got to any appreciation of the architecture there, a fleeting encounter that was a symptom of my diminishing urge for cultural edification in the face of the growing compulsion just to keep on driving.

It was while we were leaving Mysore for Fort Kochi, the old colonial fishing port on Kerala's coast, that Thor finally dropped the question that gave air to a Pandora's box of worms.

‘Would you like me to drive at all?'

The tone of his voice betrayed the prospect that getting behind the wheel of the Nano was about the last thing he had any desire to do. But perhaps he felt compelled, after a week of having me taxi him around Bangalore, to offer to pitch in with the driving. For my part, I had absolutely no intention of even
offering Thor the wheel. The primary reason was that despite the emotional-physical gumption his presence was inspiring in me, I was still harbouring traces of guilt in view of the fact that I had originally intended to make this journey alone. Taking a lover had been an unforeseen development and infringed a little on my single-girl-hero self-image. To compensate, I decided that at least I would ensure that I planned and drove the entire route. Up to now, this had seemed a situation that suited Thor well, since he hadn't exhibited any special flair for map reading, nor a vocalized preference for any particular style of driving.

‘I was hoping to drive the whole route myself,' I said. ‘It's important to me. Like a sort of a challenge, you know.'

Thor brightened. He was visibly relieved as he lowered the backrest of the passenger seat.

‘Great. You be the boss, then.'

And so I was, at least as far as the roads were concerned. I was route planner, executor and chauffeur all in one, and occasionally it went to my head, in as far as I found myself commanding my companion to double-check a particular road or run out to ask directions from a savvy-looking passer-by. Still, my bossiness seemed to roll off his back: Thor was my happy partner who controlled the music, passed me the water, fed cookies into my mouth as I drove and lowered the window from time to time to stick his head out to smoke.

After Mysore, our route towards the coastal town of Kochi followed the NH212 down to the national parks of Bandipur and Mudumalai that mark the intersection of the three big southern states, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and form part of a much larger highland area called the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. Thor and I were particularly excited by the website's inventory of fauna that suggested a safari might be on the cards: tigers, leopards, elephants, pythons and hyenas all inhabited
these parklands in the company of more fantastical-sounding animals like four-horned antelopes, giant flying squirrels and mugger crocodiles.

As our path through Bandipur progressed along a road that wound through dense, leafy scrub, however, I had the sinking sensation that the closest we would get to any of the aforementioned beasts would be through the pictures of tigers and elephants that hung from the trees and carried sombre warnings not to disturb the wild animals or make any sudden noises to alarm them. Within seconds of spotting the first such sign, we were overtaken by a rickshaw parping his horn with gusto. Another passed us a few minutes later with similar pomp, as did another, then another. Deeply peeved by the prospect of their horns scaring off potential wildlife, I secretly supplicated the tigers and elephants to take traffic matters into their own hands, if they found the sound of the horns half as irritating as I did.

By the time we passed through Bandipur and crossed into Mudumalai, we spotted a couple of wild elephants between the branches of roadside bushes. Thor bade me pull an emergency stop and he jumped out with a camera to get a closer look at one that was bathing in the stream below. It was a spectacular sight, and strangely intimate. As soon as he sensed our presence, however, the elephant turned to the opposite bank and made up its steep slope with a sprightliness I had never before witnessed in an animal larger than a Labrador. It seemed we had made some kind of incursion on his modesty.

The tigers, leopards and giant flying squirrels were nowhere to be seen, but one group of animals we couldn't avoid were the langur monkeys who roamed in tribes and hung out menacingly by the side of the road as though daring us to slow down enough to warrant nicking a wiper. As we drove by one particularly large group of the animals, Thor had me stop the car
again. He tore the side of the packet of digestive biscuits we'd been eating and emptied the remaining few into my hands.

‘You want to see a cool trick?'

‘Wait, you're not giving these to the monkeys, are you? They'll lynch us for them. We'll die of rabies before we even get to Kerala.'

‘No, we're going to feed them from the safety of the car,' Thor assured me, grinning.

He opened the passenger window about an inch, to the curiosity of the monkeys who were closing in on us at an unsettlingly fast speed.

‘Hang on. You can't feed monkeys biscuits, can you? We're in a national park. Isn't there some law against that?'

‘It's just a few digestives,' he answered, taking one of them from my hand and holding it through the gap in the window. The largest of the attendant group of langurs saw his opportunity and lunged at the biscuit, grabbing it out of Thor's hand. Almost instantly, two of his companions jumped onto the windscreen, while I could hear from the patter of feet that there were at least another two on the roof. Four or five tiny clawed hands were grasping at the air through the open window. We were under attack: it was like being in a monkey car wash. I went for the button and pushed the glass back up as the simians withdrew their mitts just in time.

‘They'll kill us,' I squealed.

Thor was laughing. ‘And just how do you think they're going to push themselves through such a tiny gap in the window? What are they, David Blaine monkeys?'

After my heart rate normalized, I conceded that actually it had been quite something to be set on by a cluster of langurs.

‘OK, I'm going to try.' I prodded my window button until the glass had lowered just enough to allow for a biscuit to be posted through the slit. It was grabbed out of my hand before
I even had the chance to clock the approaching beast, who appeared from nowhere and had most likely been lying in wait on the roof. I kept pushing the digestives through the gap in the window, and they kept being snatched from my hand. When they were all finished, the monkeys disappointingly showed no gratitude; they simply scarpered off into the trees, sugared up and satisfied.

Once we were out of the national parks, the highland landscape of the Western Ghats opened to swathes of gleaming green tea plantations and teak forests in an area called Nilambur, whose smaller roads and absence of noisy traffic gave it the air of the Swiss Alps. We pulled over at a village where a group of kids were playing in the river, screaming at the top of their lungs as they flung themselves from a wooden jetty into the water below. When we parked, delight with the water quickly transformed into fascination with us and the Nano, which after a few minutes became a preoccupation with my camera and a series of increasingly dangerous diving stunts exuberantly performed for the benefit of a photo.

Thor, egged on by the kids' enthusiasm, came very close to ripping off his own shirt and jumping into the water, before I warned him of the combined dangers of water-borne parasites, freak river currents and wet clothing on nice clean Nano upholstery.

The jumps finally exhausted, Thor turned to magic and riled the boys with a series of disappearing coin tricks that elevated us to a low-level celebrity status among the children, a situation that was spiralling into chaos as I found myself surrounded by a dozen or so wet little bodies requesting pens and my country coins. We got back into the safety of the car and locked the doors.

‘All right, I'll admit it just once that I'm glad you came,' I told Thor.

‘Not bad, is it, our little road trip?'

No, it wasn't, not bad at all – even though it was never supposed to be
our
little trip, it was supposed to be
my
brave mission. But things were different with two of us. Playing with kids and inciting monkeys to attack the car for biscuits were things I'd never think to do if I was on my own, or just wouldn't dare. This whole co-pilot thing was working out – for now.

We rejoined the NH67 and slowly descended back to the coast via the town of Malappuram, finally hooking up with the trusty NH17 that had been skirting the seashore all the way from Goa and beyond. Back at sea level, the road straightened out and Abhilasha was once again immersed in the black mist of trucks, buses, three-wheelers, motorbikes and the rest of the increasingly familiar, eclectic cast of the Indian traffic palaver. I was back to swerving, overtaking, honking my horn, flashing my lights and swearing at oncoming vehicles encroaching on my lane.

A rude awakening after the peace of the Nilgiris, the situation was soon compounded by yet another opportunity for self-annihilation courtesy of the local road authorities, in the form of a series of speed barriers set out to control the flow of the traffic headed south. The system involved placing two large metal gates within a couple of metres of one another on either side of the road and at right angles to oncoming traffic, in a way that tended to bring vehicles (okay, maybe just my vehicle) to a panic-stricken halt rather than a slow stop.

I noticed the first barrier only a few seconds before I nearly ploughed Abhilasha into it. I slammed on the brakes and swerved around it in time, thanking Ganesha there hadn't been
another car in the opposite direction to break my speed once and for all.

Then began the usual post-close-call flood of expletives. You can't – I began to lecture whoever had put the barrier there, using Thor as my medium – you simply
cannot
put a big metal gate right across a highway with no prior warning, lights or traffic cones. It was plain dangerous, ridiculous, stupid… And who the hell were they trying to slow down anyway? The vast majority of vehicles hauling themselves along this sorry excuse for a road (as it had now become in my enraged eyes) were surely in themselves speed-control measures enough: overweight flatulent lorries, bullock carts, decrepit buses, rickshaws or bicycles, all of which were tootling along at an irritating 40 kmph, usually right in front of me.

There was another speed-control feature on most national highways: villages and towns. Every ten minutes or so, by the time we had overtaken a long line of trucks headed by a tractor pulling an enormous trailer piled with earth and were cruising at a happy 60 kmph, we'd find ourselves in the thick of a village and its resident herds of goats and wandering dogs, buses in the middle of the road, markets whose stallholders you could high-five as you drove by, cows crossing the road and the mandatory group of school children who would run after us shouting their enthusiasm: ‘Nanonanonano!' All these factors contributed to keeping our average speed maddeningly slow with so much ground to cover.

By the time the second set of speed breakers rolled around, I was ready for them. I slowed down in time to avoid hitting the first barrier and even managed to read the text printed on a sign attached to it that advised, ‘Kill your speed; life is only once.'

‘Wait a minute: life is only once?' I consulted Thor, who, despite not being an expert in Hindu cosmology, was still more
clued up than I. ‘I thought life here in India stretched on and on through endless rebirth cycles and, what are they called,
kalpas
?'