Never Mind the Bullocks (4 page)

Within the space of ten minutes, we had swerved, ducked, blown our horn and been honked at more times than I could count. And yet Puran executed all these manoeuvres with impressive ease. He'd give a motorbike in front a terrifying rapid-fire blast of the horn before flooring the accelerator to overtake him within inches of hitting an oncoming truck, while simultaneously pointing out to me the rows of leather shops on the outskirts of the infamous Dharavi slum,
where he used to work before he landed a job as a company chauffeur.

Mumbai's drivers, I concluded, had to be stout-hearted mini-Buddhas. Only a Zen-like ability to detach oneself from this chaos, coupled with the reflex capacity of a Shaolin monk, could pull someone like Puran through years of sitting behind the wheel. And yet, if unflappability was the requisite for professional road users here, then where the heck was all this aggression coming from?

From the safety of my bed that night, far from the revs and horns and exhaust fumes of the great urban road beast outside, I decided that only hard facts could comfort and reassure me. As enchanted as I was at the prospect of discovering India by car, I had no intention of doing so at the cost of my life. I went online to try to find a silver lining in the cloud of my potential annihilation.

It turned out that although the odds of my making it back alive were not great, there was some comfort to be gained at the prospect that they could be worse. The World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Road Safety told me that India clocked up 16.8 road traffic deaths per 100,000 people in 2007. It was a hell of a lot more than Britain's impressive figure of 3.59, but then it was also less than countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which were losing between 38 and 40 people per 100,000 to road accidents each year.
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Cheer up, I thought; at least you're not in a war zone.

Puran called me the next morning, offering his driving services for another day. This time, I was forced to decline gracefully. ‘Today, Puran,' I said, trying hard to hide the wobbles in my voice, ‘
I
will be doing the driving.'

Puran protested. ‘Ma'am, please, it is really no problem for me to come.'

‘No, no really. It's fine, thanks. I need to start somewhere, don't I? I'll be just, um, fine.'

And I was. For the first part, anyway. From when I put the keys in the ignition right up to the bit when I drove up to the front gate of Akhil's building – Michael Schumacher himself couldn't have done it better. But slowly, the gates opened and the reality of a late Wednesday-morning Mumbai revealed itself to me.

This was it: I was going head first into an initiation by fire. My first instinct was to pray. I noticed there was a small plastic figurine of Ganesha stuck to the dashboard, which I presumed had been put there by Mr Shah. I knew little about Ganesha barring that he was an important Hindu god with the head of an elephant and that he was particularly revered for being a skilled remover of obstacles. It followed that he was popular with drivers in India and was to be seen fronting many a dashboard or hanging from a large number of rear-view mirrors. Although I wasn't a Hindu, I figured it could do me no harm to post a protection request at the door of the local divinities. After all, I was on their territory now.

Ploughing forward at the mercy of weekday traffic, I realized that my appeal to Ganesha was not so much a prayer to preserve me as a plea to spare me the embarrassment of writing off the car on our first excursion. That would be just awful.

A lane led from the gates to the intersection of Bhulabhai Desai Road and August Kranti Marg. I stopped the Nano at the threshold of the main road and took in the sight before me. Mumbai's cars were out in force, and they were pissed. There was a nasty snarl-up at the crossroads accompanied by a nerve-clenching dissonance of horns. At the junction, I watched the traffic speed past me. The vehicles were moving at about 30 kmph, bumper to bumper, then stopping dead in
their tracks when the lights turned red and filling up every square inch of the road. I took a deep breath. How the hell was I going to infiltrate this mass? Whether moving or still, it was solid, impenetrable.

My one secret hope had been that the Nano's celebrity status might work in our favour in such situations, and that fellow drivers, roused by the glory of India's new darling, would politely step aside and let us go wherever we wanted. But India's love for the Nano didn't stretch as far as gratuitous chivalry. We were no better or worse than all the other vehicles that vied for the tiny space the road afforded us. It wouldn't have mattered if I were a Porsche or a rickshaw: the struggle was the great equalizer, and I was on my own. This was, after all, the world's largest democracy.

The thought gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, which was immediately shattered by a sharp klaxon from behind. I looked in my rear-view mirror to see the face of an irate taxi driver, egging me on to take the plunge. Now I had nowhere to go but forward. Shit.

First things first, I went for the indicator, a token gesture given my options. I was stalling for time, hoping that a huge, gaping hole would open its jaws in the middle of the road and swallow me up, thus sparing me the trauma and inevitable humiliation of what I was about to do. Another blast came from behind. I winced and put the gear stick into first. I tapped the accelerator and let up the clutch ever so slightly. We moved forward about an inch to the sound of another, much longer and angrier horn from behind. I snapped back at him. ‘Give it a rest will you, asshole! What the hell do you expect me to do here? Just ram into the traffic?'

He responded with another beep and moved forward enough that the Nano could surely feel him breathing down the back of her bumper.

I put out another inch, and another, holding my breath and hunching my shoulders, bracing for what would be the inevitable impact of metal at my side. No one was relenting, but neither was anyone crashing into me. I didn't stop to think about it, I just kept going, edging the Nano's flattened nose further and further out into the road. There were angry-sounding beeps and honks but, as if by a miracle, the other cars started circumventing us. How was this possible? Within seconds I had pulled out completely and joined the flow towards the traffic light, which quickly turned red and forced us to another stop.

I had done it, I thought. I had negotiated my first merge into a main road and had lived to tell the tale. The sky was the limit; Mumbai was my oyster. I was born to do this, born to be the traffic doyenne of… My roll of elation was interrupted by the light turning green again and I realized that in order to go in the direction I had planned, I needed to make a U-turn at the junction. Feeling nothing less than superhuman after my exit from Akhil's road, I swung to the right and began to dig my way into the crowded lane that was moving the other way. Thinking on my toes, I took advantage of a couple of metres' space in front of a bulky bus that was hobbling towards us and clearly having trouble gathering speed. I let rip, hauling my button-wheel to the right and getting in the space right before the bus, much to the driver's annoyance, which he expressed with a succession of galled horns.

‘Bite me!' I imagined calling back over my shoulder.

My first U-turn. I was on fire. I released a reserved whoop, and another – ten minutes later – after cranking the gearstick into third for the first time. Ebullience manifest in the driver's seat; this was it, I was doing it. Our first foray into the Mumbai traffic, the Nano and I, and here we were, minutes later, still rolling and definitively not wrapped around a lamppost. And if we could get through Mumbai unscathed, the rest of India
would be a breeze. In a rush of maternal tenderness, I smacked the wheel with congratulatory ardour. ‘Nice going, Abhilasha!'

Abhilasha. It was a name that my now ex-boyfriend had suggested to me when he caught wind of my purchase. It meant desire, wish, aspiration and affection in Sanskrit. I had initially spurned the idea of naming the car, never having been much into the practice of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Yet since he had offered up the token with such sincere poignancy, I felt compelled to bring it along. A bit of my past mixed in with my present; something old to mix in with this something new.

Despite this epiphany, that night I lay in bed under the flickering ceiling fan while images from the day's traffic returned in post-traumatic flashback sequence. My brain was trying to process the abundance of incomprehensible and counter-intuitive events I had witnessed from behind the wheel. The worst, and most embarrassing of all, had been my attempt at a parallel park. Stopping outside a street stall to buy a bottle of water, I figured I'd give the manoeuvre a whirl, just to see how I could handle it with my pint-sized steering wheel and no passenger-side window. The results had not been encouraging.

The space that had opened itself to me was bookended by a grey Maruti and a bullock cart carrying a menacing-looking gas tank. The spot was Nano-sized, which is to say it was tight. Unfamiliar with the dimensions of my new car and somewhat inhibited by the explosive potential of the nearby gas tank and the judgemental gaze of its guardian bullock, the operation took me several attempts to execute, though my efforts did provide an amusing diversion for a group of taxi drivers on their tea break. Finally a couple of the guys for whom the pain of the tragi-comedy was too much to bear broke off from their mates and came to help me wiggle my way in. There was a flurry of raised hands, beckoning me in every direction, then
sporadically making me slam down the brakes with horrified expressions on their faces and urgent beats on the Nano's posterior as I came close to blemishing her perfect yellow paint-work. Cars were passing at very close quarters, honking their horns in outraged protest at my blocking the road, and I broke out in a sweat as I heaved the wheel from one side back to the other.

The whole dire episode almost ended in another disaster as a passing teenage boy came so close to the side of the car that I actually clipped his elbow with the wing mirror. Mortified at having caused my first human casualty, I rolled down the window in haste, ready with heartfelt apologies. The lad was frozen to the spot, fixing me fearfully before embarking on a soliloquy of regret. I tried to reassure him it had been my mistake, but he wasn't having any of it. We parted, awkwardly.

So, back in Naresh Fernandes' office, I was being served my backside.

‘The last thing India needs is another 100,000 cars on the road,' he said, continuing his tirade against the automobile industry, the private sector and scum like me that were needlessly polluting and congesting his country for nothing short of apparent larks. He was currently referring to the Nano's famous pre-order list and gesturing at the jammed-up Keshav Rao Khadye Marg four storeys below, whose upwardly wafting cacophony of klaxons and horns provided a grumbling backdrop to our conversation.

I started to flush: in my eagerness to take my new Nano on the journey of a lifetime, I had turned a blind eye to the opinions of the car's detractors. There was, of course, a whole counter-Nano community whose slant on the car ranged from
its being a bit shabbily made to its being an unmitigated disaster for Indian society.

The first peeps of dissent I uncovered came, unsurprisingly, from the e-pages of Topgear.com. Its review of the car ran under the headline ‘Cheap Trick' and could be summed up in the quote: ‘What can you get for the price of a sofa? Not a lot, in all honesty.' The article drew particular attention to what
Top Gear
perceived to be the car's cloudy safety aspects, concluding, ‘Exactly what those [safety] requirements are remain unclear, but at least the Nano should be safer than a scooter. Or, say, hopping.'
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The eco-activists were also pitching in on the matter: ‘This car promises to be an environmental disaster of substantial proportions,' proclaimed Daniel Esty, professor of environmental law at Yale, just after the Nano's release.
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Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Panel for Climate Change and director-general of the Energy Resource Institute, made his position clear by stating he was ‘having nightmares' about the car,
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an attitude that was echoed by environmental activist Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment, who asked the stinging question: ‘Cars cost us the earth. Can we afford it?'
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In an article in her environment fortnightly,
Down to Earth
, she launched an attack on government subsidies for the auto industry that completely disregarded the public transport sector. ‘As the Nano rolls out, think about how we subsidize the car and tax the bus,' she said, illustrating her point by reminding her readers that in many Indian states, buses paid twelve times the tax of cars.
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