Never Mind the Bullocks (35 page)

They were invariably unhurried; whether in the thick of urban chaos or on a small country road holding up a mile of traffic,
they were amblers, less concerned with their speed than with the concentrated, easy plod of putting one foot in front of the other. Their calm bearing and phlegmatic eyes blinked away the flies and put to question any concept of speed or hurry. They were the true champions of the road because only they really knew how to travel.

It occurred to me that for the past three months, as though employed by the Graces to protect me from myself, the bullocks had been slowing me down. Every time I'd run into them, I was induced to stop and take a breath. Why was I always hurrying? What did an extra hour on the road matter, when there was so much ground to cross and such a wealth of watering holes along the way? When there were centuries – behind us and up ahead – and hundreds of roads to explore and leave our hoof prints on, where was the necessity to keep running today?

Make like a bullock, the bullocks said, and enjoy the ride.

Shit!' Thor gave the gearstick a brutal rattle and, kicking his feet at the pedals below, turned the key in Abhilasha's ignition for the third time. For the hat trick, she did exactly what she'd done on the two previous attempts, lurching forwards with a hacking whine as the engine exhaled and cut out once more. I piped the squeak of a far more radical reaction withheld; Thor vengefully thumped the steering wheel. Rain pounded down while the cars and buses surrounding us crooned their disapproval of the Nano's standstill. Bicycles and pedestrians ploughed through the pools of brown water on the ground and slipped by, filtering out around Abhilasha in a fugitive stream.

This was extremely delicate territory and I had to proceed with caution.

‘Was your foot on the clutch?'

‘Yes, it was on the clutch,' he said peering down into the footwell, ‘unless that's the brake.'

Thor sneezed violently and swore into the tissue he held up to his mouth. A colony of mushrooms that had grown around the base of the gearstick during the monsoon, along with the mysterious demise of the car's air conditioning, had rendered the atmosphere inside so murky that it set off his allergies and inflated his sinuses to red-hot levels.

‘And was the gearstick in first?'

He shoved it again. ‘Probably not. What the hell do I know? Why can't everyone just drive automatic cars?' Sneeze.

‘Because manual ones are much more fun. Once you get the knack of them.'

A very loud horn of ear-shuddering decibels entreated us to move. Thor rolled down his window and tried to follow the direction of the noise. ‘Okay, I'm trying! Just give me a break will you, asshole?'

The crowd was ruthless. Their honking threw us deeper into a vicious circle of failure. The mounting sense of performance anxiety had all but completely dashed Thor's hopes of ever being able to start the car again, and the longer we stayed in the middle of the junction, the more I felt the urge to throw my dupatta over my head and bury myself deep in the passenger seat, in a bid to convince myself that none of this was really happening.

‘Okay, gearstick in first…'

‘Before you do that, maybe turn the engine on? Leave the gearstick in neutral for now?'

I discovered that if I framed my commands as questions, the effect was not nearly so ignominious. The loud horn from behind resumed its campaign. This time Thor directed his wrath at the rear-view mirror.

‘What? What? What do you want from my life? Why's everyone getting so pissed?'

‘I think he wants you to move a couple of feet out of the way?'

‘I'll move a couple of feet up his…'

Another sneeze and we finally began to move forward, this time at the rate of a mercifully controlled crawl.

Thor and I were back in Pondicherry, contending with the three-way challenge of monsoon rains, sharing Abhilasha and our first few weeks of cohabitation in a flat we rented on Cazy Street, among the tinny-voiced mosques of the Muslim
Quarter. On returning to Europe and sizing up the diminutive dimensions of Thor's Berlin bachelor room, I had suggested we return for a six-month sabbatical in India, where I would begin to write this book, Thor would write programming code and together we would live the life of Monsieur et Madame Riley among the finer fripperies of France's former fiefdom.

By the standards of a small German Hoff-crib, our apartment in Pondicherry was near-palatial: two bedrooms, three living rooms – one of which was a study with a delightfully large oak desk – and a terrace that housed a jungle of creeping plants that the monsoon had defibrillated into life and that I felt I needed to keep a vigilant eye on lest they devoured us in the night. Large fans hung from the ceiling of every room and spun constantly in an effort to dry out the fibres impregnated with the dampness of the seasonal rains. The colonization of all soft furnishings and fabrics by sharp-smelling dusty white fungi, as well as the clear evidence of rats and cockroaches inhabiting our abode, sealed the conviction that for me, housekeeping in India would be a similar experience to driving; namely, fraught with challenges.

Our landlady took pity on me and sent help in the form of an immensely powerful woman by the name of Elisa, who arrived every morning and spent two hours washing the floors, airing any cloth that was susceptible to fungal infestation, cleaning the kitchen to within an inch of its life, and storing everything gastronomically appealing to the rodent race in large glass jars in the larder.

On Cazy Street, Abhilasha rested her wheels by the roadside. Figuring I had had enough long-distance driving in India for one year, I had shipped her over from west to east, tacking her onto the back of a consignment of brand new Marutis that were also crossing the country. While stationary, she provided a roof over the head of a stray dog we named Muttley, who took
up permanent daytime residence in the drier, shadier confines of her undercarriage, occasionally popping up to our flat after mealtimes to see whether he could profit from any leftovers.

Abhilasha was an indispensable accessory to our south Indian existence: while the rains lasted, she was our shelter for trips to the supermarket; when the weather got better, we took her on excursions to the beach, on trips up to the nearby visionary kibbutz-like community of Auroville, and even on weekends to Chennai via the verdant East Coast Road that runs along the side of the Indian Ocean.

In the expanding spirit of our new relationship, Thor and I both made extensive efforts in the direction of self-betterment: he applied himself to the task of driving a stick-shift car on what was for him unequivocally the
wrong
side of the road, and I put my mind to dispelling the demons of my own domineering nature. Progress was slow for us both: he accidentally ground the gearstick to a rough snarl and I inadvertently sighed; he had trouble with a parallel park or came close to another vehicle and I lunged for the door handle, in spite of myself. Thor maintained (and continues to do so) that the root of the problem was not his shaky driving skills, but my own inexhaustible opprobrium, which is a credible theory and is still a work in progress for me.

When we weren't locked into a driving power deadlock, neither of us could fail to notice that Abhilasha was no longer basking in the same light of congeniality cast by her fellow countrymen as earlier in the year. By the time we arrived in Pondicherry, the Nano wasn't selling nearly as well as Tata had predicted. In fact, the future looked increasingly bleak for the little car. The last weeks of that year were among its most ignominious, marked by a piece in the
Hindustan Times
about Nanos offered as stimulus to health workers in Bhopal to inspire extra incentive in the city's vasectomy drive. ‘Get
someone neutered and win a Tata Nano!' was one of a rash of sardonic blog headlines that chronicled the wheels-for-balls trade-off that was the insult following injury a month after it had been announced that the Nano's sales had dropped to a paltry 509 in November 2010 – almost seven times fewer than at the same time the previous year. The I-told-you-sos began to rain down: what had once seemed like the poster car for the Indian dream was morphing into something much less covetable: a sales flop with an embarrassing association to the neutering of Madhya Pradesh.

Why was the rest of India not buying into the dream that Tata was trying to sell? Safety concerns and spontaneous fires aside, to me what was really at the core of the Nano's shortfall was the way it had been launched and marketed. It had been touted as the People's Car set to change the face of motoring in India, which was no small claim. Whether or not the car's instant entrance into the limelight was a deliberate move by Tata, worldwide attention on launch was unavoidable and meant that the car's post-launch mechanical, financial and promotional tweaks had to be performed under a great deal of scrutiny. Too much publicity might have set the Nano up for a fall.

Its catchy price tag shot it to global fame as the World's Cheapest Car, which is a wonderful achievement if you're an engineer, but perhaps less impressive if you're the person on whom a cheap car confers the stigma of a skinflint. In its attempts to carve a niche in the car market by producing a more affordable product, Tata had paradoxically alienated its target customers by making them feel that driving a Nano would be a humdrum and even degrading experience. If it's true that a person's choice of car stands for what he aspires to, it follows that only an individual with very low self-esteem would pick his wheels from the bottom of the pile.

It was my opinion that if Tata wanted to revive the fate of the Nano, it needed to revise radically its idea of who the car would be aimed at. Hip-looking, low-cost city cars were not going to go down well with practical-minded country dwellers, supposedly the target market. Instead, Tata needed to look to the people who were initially seduced by the Nano – cityfolk. More specifically, I thought it needed to appeal to the new generation of drivers: the kids with smartphones, iPods and iPads who had enough cash to buy a cheap car, but fell short of that chauffeur-driven Hyundai. The Nano's social mission was completely incongruent with the car itself.

A new, improved Tata Nano was in fact launched in 2013 to the strains of a freshly engineered tagline: ‘Celebrating Awesomeness'. Out went the demure adverts showing happy families driving through the countryside, and in came a new campaign of bright colours, loud music and fashionable kids dancing in the streets with an air of reckless consumer abandon. Celebrity designer Masaba Gupta and model Sarah Jane Dias were called in to bear witness to the car's new-found ‘epicness' and ‘kickassness', while the company rebranded the range in a fresh palette of colours (‘mojito green', ‘papaya orange') and added youth-friendly features like a Bluetooth-enabled MP3 stereo and keyless entry.

Whether the Nano's revamped image will boost sales remains to be seen, but it appears that
celebrating awesomeness
has notched up a bit more cred than the car's original incarnation, with the ad getting upwards of 5 million hits on YouTube within the first month of airing. The promises keep coming: a diesel version of the vehicle in 2014, and the prospect of an international launch some time in the future. The European Nano has been on Tata's drawing board for years, but still seems to have got no further than a mouth-watering promo for a super-space-age car called
the Pixel, which was revealed at the Geneva Motor Show in 2011.

A recognizable cousin of the Nano, the Pixel in its current concept form is all CGI flare and futuristic design: the doors flip up into the sky like rabbit ears, the front wheels turn at 90 degrees to allow for effortless parallel parking and U-turns in narrow streets, and the interior details are controlled by a smart tablet sleekly placed on the dashboard. The website and company promo video have had me literally salivating into my laptop, while secretly nurturing the hunch that no vehicle that cool could actually ever be real
and
affordable.