Never Mind the Bullocks (34 page)

‘You're leaving already?' The Maharaja blinked at my suitcase as I brought it clunking back over his porch. I nodded, trying not to let the combination of my hangover, the fact that I was embarking on my last journey with Abhilasha, and the close encounter I'd just had with the degenerate primate reduce me to tears.

He suddenly brightened. ‘How about a peg of gin before you go?'

I protested that I couldn't possibly imbibe another drop and that to do so before the 600 km final push down to Mumbai would be downright imprudent.

The Maharaja raised a pedagogic finger. ‘A colonel friend of mine – fine fellow – once told me that a peg of gin before a journey keeps you focused on the road.'

I wondered if it was the same colonel fellow who was supplying him with military-issue whisky. Conceding his point, I continued to stand firm on the grounds of common sense.

‘I just… I've really just had enough.'

Finally consenting to my departure, the Maharaja thoughtfully fingered his moustache and pulled me in for one last word.

‘That car of yours…'

‘The Nano?'

‘Yes, the Tata Nano… What will you do with it at the end of your trip? Will you sell it?'

Actually, I had no idea. I was leaving the country in a matter of days and had no plan for Abhilasha's wellbeing, other than leaving her in Akhil's capable hands. I hadn't had the time to find a buyer, although it seemed that now, at the last moment, one was making himself known to me.

He smiled and stepped in closer. ‘If you decide to sell it, then please call me. I would like to buy it.'

I tried to imagine the Maharaja behind the wheel of a Nano instead of his grand old Ambassador, and realized I'd misconstrued him: despite the antiquated India of royalty and palaces and tiger hunts that the old man embodied, he obviously had his finger on the pulse of the nation as much as any of his younger countrymen. If the Maharaja was ready to make the transition from Ambassador to Nano, then everyone was.

It occurred to me that of all the potential bidders I had met, the Maharaja was the person I would most have liked to bequeath Abhilasha to. But I wasn't really sure if I could knowingly subject her to the same fate as his Ambassador. I wondered if he'd try to take her out hunting, and if he'd always down a
quick gin before hitting the road. The last thing I wanted was for her to get on bad terms with the dogs of the village after some unfortunate incident with her bumper. Though who was to say that after a peg or two of gin, the Maharaja wasn't a far better driver than I was anyway?

I was 200 km from Mumbai, the end within my grasp, when the effects of a third Red Bull on an empty stomach began to kick in. The decision to drive 600 km after a night's whisky-swilling was a questionable one from the outset. I was tired, hungover and frankly a bit naffed off that I was on my way home. The NH3 that led down from Indore to Nashik and then continued all the way to Mumbai was not a bad road: not the Golden Quadrilateral by any stretch of the imagination, but the traffic flowed in an orderly manner with only a few roadblocks and one overturned lorry to disrupt the stream. Still, things moved slowly. The distance dial seemed to be dragging its digits to Mumbai as I fought to ignore the thumping in my brain and keep my eyes open, despite their insistence on closing and sending me into a deep and peaceful sleep at 50 kmph.

With better planning, I could have spent the night in Nashik, but given that my flight left the day after tomorrow, I wanted to be back in Mumbai that night. With the finishing line just over four hours away, I began to feel the composure sift out of me. The nauseous effect of the hangover had prevented me from eating, and the will to get to Mumbai with as few pee stops as possible meant I had drunk very little, with the exception of the three Red Bulls I had necked in order to stave off the Sandman at this very crucial stage in the journey. After eight unbroken hours at the wheel since leaving Omkareshwar, I was beginning
to feel a strange numbness in my limbs, my heart was beating fast and I had difficulty focusing on the road.

Deciding it was time for a break, I pulled into the first petrol station that presented itself. Its garish green lighting did nothing to ease the growing panic in my veins, as I stared at the pump attendant down the barrel of the long, dark tunnel that now framed my vision. I had to work to breathe. My body was cold and disconnected and I could barely discern my extremities as I sat dumbly watching the guy fill Abhilasha's tank. When he was finished, I thrust a handful of rupees at him from my wallet and, without waiting for the change, hauled the Nano over to a quiet corner of the station forecourt and turned off her engine.

I realized I was having some variety of panic attack. Sharp, prickly adrenaline coursed through my body; I felt beaten, utterly powerless and terrified, in a petrol station miles from anywhere at 10 pm on a very dark Indian night. It was like I'd suddenly been dropped into the middle of a nightmare, from where my now overactive paranoia was telling me that the two attendants were about to forcibly eject me from the forecourt in accordance with station policy that forbade single foreign females to have a meltdown on company property. I cursed Red Bull, and all of the world's caffeine and sugar. I cursed military-issue whisky. I cursed the roads, the cars, the stones and every inch of tarmac that now separated me from comfort and safety.

I thundered through my options with the grace and rationality of a charging hippo. What the hell was I going to do? How was I going to get out of this? I feared that if I stayed put, undefended in the butthole of nowhere, I would end up with my face in
Mid Day
for reasons other than my quirky driving exploits. But there was nothing I wanted to do less right now than go back to the blinding lights and dodgem manoeuvres
of the highway, which I honestly thought would be the end of me.

Disoriented, panicked, knackered, I was ready to throw in the towel. So I did what any other daredevil in my situation would have done: I called my mum. On hearing her voice, the childish tears began to flow. Sir Edmund Hillary might not have blubbed to his mother just minutes before reaching the summit, but had he done so, he would have been bolstered in his final steps.

‘Come on,' she pep-talked me, ‘you're so close. Just 200 km – that's like two hours!'

‘Make that four,' I whined. ‘It's so far. I just… just can't do it…'

‘Yes, you can!' she insisted. ‘Drink lots of water and keep going.'

I wiped away the tears and after a few turns on shaky legs around the forecourt and the fast ingestion of half a litre of water, I decided I had no choice but to set back out on the road. I took a very deep breath, turned on the engine and nudged Abhilasha towards the station exit. By now it was completely dark and all I could see were the bastard bright lights of oncoming vehicles. They were moving towards me quickly, almost haphazardly, as I stared out to my right for a breach in the flow. The intensity of concentration sparked off another wave of jitters, and I told myself that if I was going to make it to Mumbai tonight, I had to release every clamp in my nerves and joints and float my way back to the city.

I rejoined the stream almost unconsciously. I slowed down and veered to the side of the road, where I could take shelter from the traffic rumbling past me to my right, and from there I counted my deep breaths and locked into a steady 50 kmph, keeping my eyes only on the one tiny bit of road I could see in Abhilasha's headlights. I held the wheel at its lowest point,
barely tapping it with my fingers when we needed to budge a little to the left or the right. And when the cars coming from the other direction blinded me, I didn't swear at them and curse the lack of road markings, I simply steered on in the darkness, pushing Abhilasha forward with the blind faith of the deeply religious or the clinically insane.

It was the final surrender. As though I hadn't tempted the fates enough these last three months through my allegiance with an economy vehicle on the world's most deadly roads, I had raised the stakes for the finale by first intoxicating myself with large amounts of Royal Choice, and then trying to repair the damage with excessive energy drinks, while driving an inordinate distance that I would not have previously attempted even on a good, sober, sunshine-happy day.

I stopped looking at the clock; I stopped counting the kilometres; I stopped worrying about how fast I was going. Instead, I allowed myself to be overtaken by some primeval version of myself whose only concern was getting me to Mumbai, eventually, in one piece. All the will and effort drained out of me, leaving a blinking, breathing, driving automaton. Lights danced in front of me, cars moved around me, trucks blocked me on all sides, and all I did was keep moving forwards, slowly, steadily, as though in a dream.

It must have been about two o'clock in the morning when Abhilasha caught up with a crowd of bullocks moving languidly by the side of the road, plodding forward through the night on their way to god only knew where, led by a pair of crooked women, one bent at the waist and the other brandishing a staff about twice her height, both of them harbouring a strength that went beyond their years and appearance. Where they could be taking the animals at the dead of night I had no idea, but I felt like riding with them for a few minutes, so I slowed down and joined the herd, ploughing forward at bullock miles per hour.
I wound down the window and heard a couple of low drones that I hoped were bovine approval of our presence and not a groaning consensus to run us off the road.

As we moved together with the beasts, I began to feel the sensation of once again inhabiting my own body. I reached out to a small calf whose head was bobbing along right by my window and gave it a little scratch behind the ear. I was coming back.

The last few hours of driving on autopilot back to Mumbai demonstrated that a certain Indian road prowess had cemented itself into my subconscious. Although driving with my eyes shut, jedi-style, was still not quite an option, I realized that steering Abhilasha through this confusion of vehicles actually required little in the way of will and effort and much more in the way of opening myself up to the innate rhythms of the road. Becoming one with the car, as my father had once said, meant more than merely driving it as fast as possible. It meant finding my own number within the great traffic marathon.

By the end of the journey, my overall cruising speed was something in the region of 35–40 kmph. At the beginning of the trip, this sluggish rate would have inspired in me the wrath of a woman scorned by her Sat Nav. Had I been driving blindfold? Or had I gone in reverse the whole way? Did we just make the journey with four flat tyres, or had I switched the engine off, cut a hole in the floor and walked us there, Flintstones style? It seemed that no matter how focused I was on the road, I could never pick up our average velocity above crawling speed. And no matter how hard I tried to chill out and enjoy the scenery, I couldn't stop that fact from irritating the living daylights out of me. I had spent several weeks in a state of sustained denial, stuck on a learning curve that would have scuppered all of Pavlov's theories of repeated conditioning in intelligent animals.

The animals themselves were a large part of the menace. One of the most common causes of delay was the sudden appearance on a country road or highway of a mob of sheep, goats, cows or bullocks, with the odd elephant or camel thrown in, depending on the region. They would surge around Abhilasha in an orchestrated pincer movement that quickly engulfed us and forced us to a
standstill. The animals may have been low down on the pecking order but in some ways they wielded more power than any other road user.

This was especially the case for the cow and her gelded husband the bullock. As the weeks wore on, I came to believe that the sacred bovines were probably the most intelligent road users of all, imbued as they were with confidence, stability and ethereal traffic-stopping powers of which Abhilasha could only dream. After three months of battling against the tide of Indian traffic, of swimming upstream in my attempts to figure out the rules and carve out for myself some kind of knowledge base that would give me an advantage over other drivers and get me to my destination in half the time, I began to grasp that instead of looking to the rickshaws and truck drivers for tips on how to stay on top in the road race, I should have been looking down the line to the oldest and most experienced travellers around. The bullocks, I finally fathomed, were the guardians of the unwritten rules of the country's roads: they had been lumbering along them for millennia, aeons prior to the rumble of the first motor engine. The noisy new machines of the twenty-first century are a blip on the bullocks' epic timeline, one they tolerate with enduring dignity.

The castrated workers of the bovine world, bullocks are variously employed as farm hands – pulling heavy ploughs to till the fields – or as a form of transport, hauling people or carts piled with hay between fields and villages and marketplaces. Late in the afternoon, on their way home from work, they spread out along the route, kicking up dust with their cloven hooves and heading forward in a single-minded drove, mob-handed, horns painted and sauntering from their skinny shoulders and haunch bones, their tails swinging like pendulums, indiscriminately slugging passing objects with a flick of their snaky appendages.