Never Mind the Bullocks (5 page)

So, despite the fact that there were masses of people desperate to get their hands on a Nano, there was also a large number of Indians for whom the car didn't stand as a liberator of the low-income belt, but rather as a giant pain in the ass that would add more traffic to the already over-congested roads.

Naresh Fernandes was one of these people. It was becoming clear to me that he was not, like me, a driving enthusiast. He was a public transport kind of guy, and as far as he was concerned, an army of shiny new Nanos flooding the market and seducing the country's emerging new middle class could only spell congestion doom.

I asked Naresh how he got around the city and he replied by train – like the 6.3 million other Mumbaikars who choose to commute via the suburban rail network every day to avoid the traffic clogging the city's arteries. It might be an environmentally friendly, socially responsible alternative, but Mumbai's trains were also straining under the weight of their passengers. A staggering 3,700 people die on their way to work in the city each year
¹⁰
– by being pushed out of overcrowded carriages, electrocuted by hanging cables when sitting on the roof or crossing the tracks and getting flattened by an oncoming locomotive. Naresh argued that rather than piling its roads up with more vehicles, India needed first to resolve the existing issues with its public transport system.

‘The situation we now have in India is a lot like what happened in pre-war America, when the motor lobby effectively blocked all prospects of a public transportation network,' Naresh explained. I was nodding like a plastic St Bernard. He continued, making the popular comparison of the Nano to the Ford Model T, America's own ‘people's car', a century earlier. It was a historical moment that not only initiated the modern concept of the production line but also marked the genesis of the United States as a nation of cars and not trains. The resulting impact on society, urban planning and the environment, not to mention a foreign policy driven in large part by the politics of oil, has been immense. Could India go the same way? Was the country really at such a significant crossroads? Surely the railway system in India – admittedly outdated and
flawed in many aspects – was extensive and functional in a way that it had never been in the US? And should we expect a private company like Tata to care about issues of public transport? Was it not doing India a favour by furnishing its people with an alternative to asphyxiation by overcrowded train carriages, high-octane roof surfing and a gruesome flattening on the railway tracks?

I began to spin with the symbolic consequences of the task I was about to undertake. I was in over my head and probably should have taken advantage of a break in the conversation to make my excuses and leave. I felt like a bumbling Englisher, a parachute hack of the worst variety, an opportunist about to contribute nothing but another (fuel-efficient) death machine to the people of India. What had until this moment been a harmless voyage of discovery in the only vehicle I could really afford had suddenly evolved into a brutal crusade of devastation and destruction. I was kicking myself. Nano Schmano. I should have constructed a biodegradable windsurf with wheels that was partially fuelled by recycled waste and the tears of children. Now that would have been a worthier pitch; virtuous even. I could have gotten Bono or Bob Geldof or Arundhati Roy on board. They could have helped me plant some trees in my wake to make up for the tarmac erosion for which I would inevitably be responsible.

But the fact remained that I was the owner of a (nearly) new Tata Nano and only days away from embarking on a three-month drive around India. And all I needed was just a hint of encouragement.

Now it was finally time to make a dent in the 10,000 km journey, I suddenly found my safe, burrowed, Queen of Sheba–like existence in Akhil's apartment very appealing. It had been more than a week since I had arrived, and I hadn't lifted a finger in the direction of self-sufficiency. There was Mohan who cooked,
and his younger brother who cleaned, washed my clothes and returned them to me ironed and interleaved with pages from a month-old copy of the
Times of India
. There was Puran who still called every day to see if I needed his services, clearly sceptical of my assertions that I was now self-driven.

And then there was the marvellous Akhil, who made intermittent appearances between meetings and business trips, only materializing for an early breakfast or late at night. I had awoken groggy and jetlagged on my second morning in Mumbai to an enthusiastic rapping on my bedroom door. I opened it to find my beaming friend dressed in British Airways pyjamas, suggesting I accompany him for a series of yoga stretches and pranayamic breathing exercises on his terrace. A platter of eggs and toast was then laid out before me, while Akhil munched away on a bowl of chilled sprouts, insisting that his was the breakfast of champions. The same evening he returned with a bottle of red wine, a local product he had just discovered and maintained was excellent. We had a glass to the amplified notes of a Mozart piano concerto that he blasted at top volume to demonstrate the power of his new surround-sound system that ran through the whole apartment, terrace and all. Mohan then brought each of us a cup of Horlicks, and Akhil retired to his desk for more work.

When he wasn't there, I padded around the marble floors of his apartment, inspecting his book collection under Mohan's watchful eye. There was no doubting it: I was ensconced in the lap of luxury, living in an India that belonged to only a tiny minority, and the longer I stayed, the harder it would be for me to get out and see the rest. Large city apartments inhabited by upper- and middle-class citizens with a significant disposable income were the domain of only about 6% of the country's population. Akhil's place was a world away from the standard of living endured by the majority of India's people
who continue to subsist below the poverty line, something I figured would become clear as soon as I worked up the bottle to leave and see what lay beyond the sugar-coated gates of Breach Candy.

This cloistered time was conducive to reflection. If I stuck around for too long during the day, the empty flat would start to amplify my own feelings of solitude and disorientation at having come so far in such a short time. Under the steady gaze of a collection of Chopra novels, my thoughts began to stray from matters of the road to matters more interior. A bombshell attack of nostalgia for my previous stable couple-life in Mexico City would assail me from time to time and I would go out onto Akhil's terrace to contemplate the muggy Mumbai skyline and try to exhale the weight that hung between my ribs. The bewildering space that remains after the departure of a partner is a gap that's hopelessly difficult to fill. The only thing to do was dig in and wait for the other parts of my life to expand and dissolve the hole by means of slow erosion; in the meantime, I would bury my emotions under the avalanche of this all-consuming mission.

Looking south from Akhil's terrace, I could see a recession of skyscrapers lining the coast. They disappeared into the miasmic cloud of mist or pollution that's on perma-hover around the city, masking the horizon, so I couldn't quite see the point where the sky and the earth came together. And whatever that obscured point in the distance, be it road trip heaven or hell, that was my target. It was time to leave.

Waiting for me in the car park was Naresh's evil corporate death machine. I was still grappling to navigate the sea of moral iffiness and doubt my meeting with him had set me off on, and the only way to do that, I concluded, was to pretend his challenge to my integrity had never happened. I called on my trusty inner broom to sweep away the dust of bad feeling under
my carpet of denial as I shoehorned my bags into Abhilasha's backseat and set out for India in the little yellow anti-hero that was about to carry this clueless wench across the length and breadth of an infinite country.

Or, to be more precise, no sanctioned written rules. Despite all my best efforts, I could find no such thing as an official Indian Highway Code. Initially, I began to fret: after my first few days of highly focused driving, I felt the need for relief in the form of some guidance, a document of commonly accepted rules and practice by which to measure transgression and misdeed.

I came from a place of one-way systems and yellow grids; of no-parking areas, dedicated bus and cycle lanes, and a terrifically courteous roundabout system particular to the island of Jersey called ‘Filter in Turn'. But I was not in Jersey any more. Its unhurried, polite civility was a world away from the mobocracy of India's roads; this was a country where it seemed every man, woman and Nano had to fight for survival or risk annihilation.

I was convinced that a set of instructions had to exist somewhere, a tome that ordained correct lane driving, overtaking rules, guidelines for the interaction of animal and machine, of two-, three-, four- and eight-wheeled vehicles. Surely someone had to have sat down and created a manifesto by which all of India's incredibly diverse road beings could live together in harmony. If there was no right, how could there be any wrong, and vice versa? World order as I knew it began to crumble as I contemplated the grim eventuality that, if it couldn't be found on Google, it was possible that India might not have a national highway code. If it didn't, what then?

Pulling myself together, I went to the search engine with my request: ‘Indian Driving Rules'. The results that came from more unofficial sources were mildly encouraging: the first couple sprouted from a site called indiadrivingschools.com, whose homemade list of pointers for the road was propelled by the notion that drivers ‘should primarily focus on ways to control aggressiveness'.
Of the 27 commandments that followed, a surprising number were concerned with anger management: ‘Avoid creating a situation that may provoke another motorist' instructed rule number two, while rule four ordained against ‘inappropriate facial and hand gestures'. It was a bit like reading a driving manual from Edwardian England, more concerned with manners and etiquette than actual skills. I half expected to see some pointers as to what action to take in the event of a fault with the hand crank, or a rip in the overhead canopy. Even more uncannily antiquated was the complete disregard for women's lib demonstrated in rule 22, which was concerned with pedestrians and emphasized the need for special regard to be given to ‘senior citizens, handicapped and ladies'.

The Delhi Traffic Police's initial approach was similar, in that its primary goal appeared to be keeping drivers calm behind the wheel. ‘Maintain your cool, even in adverse situations,' the site read, adding rather compassionately, ‘you may be burdened with unending number of problems at the home or office, but keep them aside before you venture on to the roads'.

The following section dealt with genuine road rules and featured a couple of fuzzy directives that in my opinion wouldn't stand up in court in the event of a collision between, say, a Nano and a lorry thundering towards it in the wrong lane. The first rule was concerned with the implementation of left-hand driving. One vestige of the Raj had been to employ British driving principles in India, so the British standard, left, also became the Indian rule of thumb. Thumb was the operative term, in particular according to the Delhi Traffic Police, which was all thumbs in its description of exactly where drivers should try to place their vehicles: ‘How far from the left side of the road you should drive depends upon the road condition and the type of traffic on it. But, as a driver you must drive sufficiently to the left.' I reflected that from a legal point of view at least, ‘sufficiently to the left' was painfully
insufficient to cover the spectrum of eventualities. One man's sufficiently left might be another's way too far to the right, and the road was surely no backdrop for the volatility of such subjectivities to play themselves out against.

Another rule endorsed by the DTP was lane driving. ‘Every road has lanes, whether marked or not,' the web page stated. So if lanes are there, you drive between them. Easy peasy. But what if they're not? Drive sufficiently to the left? Call your local council works department and inform them of a substandard road? Choose another route? All sensible suggestions, but in fact the Delhi Traffic Police had an even more ingenious plan where absent lanes were concerned: ‘When they are not marked, divide the road mentally into appropriate lanes.'

Divide the road mentally… I lingered on this one. So what the Delhi Traffic Police was asking of the capital's drivers was that in the absence of sanctioned road signs and signals, they insert the necessary guidelines by use of their imagination. It was a fascinating principle and one sure to shave a few rupees from the annual road maintenance budget. Indeed, why stop at lane markings? Think of all the money that could be saved by the simple act of imagining traffic lights at busy junctions. Drivers could save minutes upon minutes by imagining a red signal to be green and so zipping straight through. Or what about fantasizing the speed limit? Dreaming up warnings for slippery surfaces or impending dangerous curves in random places where they may or may not occur? It was a near-perfect plan for smoothly running roads, the only danger being that in the unlikely event of two drivers contradicting one another, overlap might occur. But, with more than 10 million vehicles on the road in the city, realistically, what would be the chances of that happening?

MUMBAI to NAGAON; KM 0–118

What do you mean you don't have an address? How do you receive post?' I asked Russell Korgaonkar, my old school friend from London whom I was going to visit along with his wife Alexia at his family home in the village of Nagaon, about 150 km south of Mumbai. It was to be a gentle immersion into rural India, a buffer to help ease the transition of my delicate frame from the high life of staying with Akhil to what was inevitably in store over the next 10,000 km.