Never Mind the Bullocks (8 page)

The GPS was frustratingly impervious to the road rage outside. Its own version of our sordid highway reality was a little blue arrow calmly pointing forward on a clear yellow line that snaked out into infinity, unencumbered by the deranged
son et lumière
that was the truth of the world beyond my window. I scowled as I noticed there were even a few little stars to complete the idyllic calm of the night-time sky of the parallel Sat Naviverse, to which the GPS responded by flashing the outline of an empty red battery in my direction and death-rattling off into oblivion.

‘Crap!'

I stabbed at the screen with a sweaty finger, performing mini-CPR on the undeserving gadget. It was no good. I glanced at my watch: time of death 8.13 pm. With at least twenty more kilometres to Nagaon, I needed directions. The road signs that appeared between bouts of visibility were all in Hindi or Marathi – two languages of which I had no inkling whatsoever – so they might as well have been hieroglyphs. I reached for my phone and poked clumsily at its tiny interface in an attempt to locate myself on its map app, a procedure that took several minutes to execute in between having to refer back to the road and having my optical nerves barbecued by fellow motorists. The signal was low and the map was irritatingly slow
to load. The dot that was me flashed godforsaken against the bleak existential background of a grey grid, a little blue light lost in nameless space. I shook the phone in vain and started to perform figures of eight with it above the steering wheel, to no effect. I glanced at the little red rectangle in the top corner, which warned me that only 3% of the battery was left, and as the map struggled to download some form of cartographic image from the World Wide Web, the effort became too much for the device; it too performed a hammy death scene, swooning and shutting itself down with a histrionic twirl of its timer symbol.

‘Bollocks!'

Soft anxiety now gave way to hard panic. Without the GPS or my phone, how was I supposed to know where I was going? The road signs were in Forrin, and I had absolutely no clue where I had to turn off to get to Nagaon. A strip-lit kiosk emerged by the side of the road ahead of me like a mirage, and I knew the moment had arrived. It was time to face facts, look my demons in the eye and do the hitherto unthinkable:
ask
for directions. I pulled up by the roadside just ahead of the kiosk, opening my door to the Maharashtrian night as a bus whipped within an arm's length of my ear, its horn shaking every cell down to my very core.

I approached the kiosk-wallah with caution: the look on his face when he caught sight of me implied I had appeared to him suddenly as a frightening backlit apparition. Not wanting to alarm the man too much, and working on the assumption that if the signs out here couldn't speak English then neither could he, I decided to keep things simple at the start by pronouncing only my primary intention: ‘Nagaon?'

The man rocked his head from side to side and repeated ‘Nagaon' in a way that suggested he wholeheartedly agreed with me. I was stumped.

‘So… Nagaon?'

Again, he agreed.

‘Okay, but where is it? Which way is Nagaon?'

The kiosk attendant continued to shake his head.

Impatience was kicking in and I stared into the darkness ahead of us that lay beyond the reach of the Nano's humble full beams. I pointed my finger into that darkness. ‘Is Nagaon that way?'

He closed his eyes now and nodded his head. ‘Aaaah. Nagaon.'

To double-check, I pointed in the opposite direction, from where I had just come.

‘Is Nagaon that way?'

To my despair, he repeated the same wobble. ‘Nagaon. Nagaon,' he affirmed.

‘So let's get this straight: Nagaon is this way,' pointing ahead of us along the road, ‘and also that way,' gesturing at the direction from which I had come. It was like asking directions from Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. I was about to check that Nagaon might not also be up above us on the moon, when the kiosk-wallah's eyes opened wide in realization.

‘No, no, no, no, no! Nagaon not,' he said, pointing behind us. Then gesturing ahead with a hearty, full-shouldered swing of his arm, ‘Nagaon!'

His enthusiasm was convincing and I decided to take his word for it. After one final check – ‘Nagaon?' – I felt the warm tingle of first success rise in my belly. Perhaps it wasn't going to be so bad after all: in the middle of this beastly morass, here we were, two people with few common signifiers and only a loose consensus on the notion of internationally agreed positive/negative body language – a sure recipe for communicational disaster, especially given my rather irked state of mind. But a few minutes and several overblown physical gestures later, we
had reached a concord, and were unified in our conviction that I was to continue driving straight on the road, all the way to Nagaon.

PUNE; KM 262

When people in Europe say that driving somewhere like Paris or Rome is scary, they are usually referring to hairy moments spent trying to make a circle around the Place de la Concorde or being honked at by macho moped drivers for failing to pre-empt a green light. I had always considered the French and Italian capitals stout candidates for European driving at its most volatile, but now I was beginning to wonder just how Roman or Parisian drivers would fare with their cocky Smart cars and Cinquecentos on India's roads. Here, it felt like everything was on its head: where I would normally relent, in India I had to lurch forward; where I would usually leave a chevron's distance between me and the car in front, now I was driving with my nose practically buried in someone else's exhaust pipe. Instead of heeding lights and signs, here I looked to other vehicles for tips on how to proceed.

It wasn't all bad, though: Abhilasha and I had reached Pune by what is generally thought of as the best road in India. The Yashwantrao Chavan Expressway (named after the first chief minister of Maharashtra and former deputy prime minister) is a six-lane motorway with all the trimmings I'd expect of any major artery in the world: toll booths, refreshment stops, fast and slow lanes, a smooth surface, and even a neatly manicured median. The first part of our cruise to Pune passed with little
incident, feeling fairly uneventful after the previous day's assault course to Nagaon. For a brief moment, I almost found myself yearning for a rebound into the rush of chaos and I noticed the adventurer–blogger in me had deflated a little. What if all roads in India were more like this and less like the NH66 down to Alibag? What would I have to write about in my blog if driving around India only involved cruising on tranquil expressways and stopping for the odd sandwich or Styrofoam cup of chai?

No sooner had I had that unsavoury thought than fate saw fit to throw subject matter at me in the form of an obstacle. I had been overtaking a truck in the fast lane, accumulating speed on a temporarily flat stretch of road that marked a break between hills. Notching up the revs, I was parallel to the truck's front mirror when I became vaguely aware of what looked like an object in the fast lane – our lane – up ahead. At first, I didn't believe my eyes, thinking it was a mirage, but when it was still there another split second and twenty metres later, I concluded there was something in the road that Abhilasha and I were hurtling towards at high velocity. Immediate action was required. Swerving was not an option, as the truck I was overtaking was right beside me to my left, so I hit the brakes, hard. In the same moment as the truck passed me, I hauled the wheel to the left and got into the lane behind him, missing the thing ahead of me by inches.

‘Holy mother of god!' I managed to spit out after the initial shock of what had just occurred sank into my rational brain. That had been extremely and most unacceptably close: hitting a large, stationary object at 80 kmph would certainly have ended in tears. And probably blood and mangled yellow metal. But we were alive and well, and as my heart regained a steady beat and the gut gremlins returned to their lair, images of the thing flashed back. I had initially perceived it from a distance as a large, rectangular piece of metal, and had assumed it was
debris, perhaps something that had fallen off the back of a lorry or a garbage truck and missed by the highway maintenance crew. But on getting a better look as I screeched past, tyres burning a rubber stench into the tarmac, I realized it was in fact a sign. And not only was it a sign, it was also a sign that had been very carefully and deliberately placed in the fast lane of an expressway. And, to pop the glacé cherry atop the whipped cream tower of irony, the sign read ‘Go Slow'.

I laughed out loud: I had nearly been killed by a road sign that had been put there in earnest to try to save my life. A few dozen metres down the road, a group of workers were digging up something on the central reservation, and I deduced that the sign had been put there for their benefit, most likely by their own hands. Though the well-meaning nature of their misguided intentions was plain to see, I nevertheless embarked on a ten-minute cathartic monologue, lecturing the men on why using traffic cones to gradually reduce and close off a lane was accepted and expedient practice around the world.

The expressway incident hardened my conviction that my arrival in Pune, Maharashtra's second-largest city lying 150 km east of Mumbai, hadn't come a moment too soon. I had made the decision to swing by there instead of heading straight south to Goa on the advice of a friend back home who suggested I visit the Osho International Meditation Resort. Aside from the draw of its name, which appealed to me on account of the shades of a holiday spot implied by the word ‘resort', I was also curious about the reputation of the ashram's founder, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho. Rajneesh, who shuffled off this mortal coil back in 1990, was more contentious than your average guru, and is popularly painted as something of a spiritual scoundrel, loved by many but also widely criticized. What interested me about Osho and his methods at this
particular point in my personal development was his espousal of the principle of self-inflicted, controlled madness as an antidote to the greater lunacy of the world at large, and his concept that the key to true learning lay in the principle of unlearning our current conditioning.

After my brush with death by solicitude on the Yashwantrao Chavan, and the subsequent hullaballoo of Pune's suburban traffic, it occurred to me that Osho might be just the man to help: in order to survive (and avoid a nervous breakdown), I might need to let go and revise everything I thought I knew about driving.

‘There are those to whom one must advise madness,' wrote French thinker Joseph Joubert in the nineteenth century; at that moment, while coming off the NH4 into the centre of Pune, competing with a bullock cart for a right-turning opportunity, I knew I had to be reconditioned. I was the square peg and India's roads were the round hole: I needed to take some sandpaper to my edges. For that, I decided to try the high road to psycho-spiritual liberation. It was time to hit an ashram where I could happily convene with my inner loon and prep myself for the next three months of driving like a bonkers bat fresh out of the belfry.

As soon as I arrived at the resort, a woman at the reception desk corrected my use of the term ‘ashram' with indignation that might have been excessive had I suggested the place was a whorehouse. This was not an ashram, she said, but a meditation resort. I wasn't really sure of the difference until I picked up the accommodation brochure and learned that rooms there cost about five times more than at the hotel next door. With a swimming pool, tennis courts, a choice of vegetarian restaurants and a vague reputation for a bit of how's your father, this place was putting the Club Med back into meditation. Or was it trying to shoe-horn a bit of meditation into Club Med?

Even before I set foot past the entrance gate, I was interrogated as to my motives for coming to the resort, charged a hefty enrolment fee and subjected to a mandatory HIV test. This was followed by a trip to the boutique to buy compulsory maroon and white robes, without which I would not be permitted to enter the grounds. Once inside, I had to fight the urge to spend the whole day working on my tan by the side of the pool. A subsequent thirty-minute conversation with an inebriated Dane who cornered me with a blow-by-blow account of a gory bomb blast he'd witnessed at a nearby bakery a few days earlier was the motivation I'd been missing to remind me of the psychic deconstruction I was here for.

I consulted the resort timetable: there was a Kundalini session coming up that would involve some free dance (mortified at the prospect, I was nevertheless keen to try, figuring I'd be breaking down my conditioning by the truckload) followed by something mysterious called the ‘Night Meeting'. Both sessions took place in a large auditorium at the heart of a giant black marble pyramid and involved working through a cycle of various forms of Osho-approved techniques: from dancing as if someone had slipped an Ecstasy pill into our veggie burgers, to playing musical statues, lying dead on the floor and running around blindfolded, screaming gibberish at high volume. The latter appealed to me the most on the grounds that it was theoretically a lot like driving, and as hard as it was to do, I decided to give it a really good go.

‘
Grarrrlllllaarrlllll!
' I roared, waving my hands frantically in the air in an attempt to awaken my inner Tasmanian Devil and have him kick up a dust storm through the rose garden of my more English inhibitions. Feeling an utter fool, I paused for a moment to catch my breath and peek through my blindfold. My fellow internees were hopping around like deranged cats, dressed in the same long maroon robes and screaming guttural
nonsense. Reminiscent of a high-security nuthouse, the scene was terrifying to behold, and I was part of it. I replaced my blindfold and decided that in this case, watching the madness was more maddening than participating in it. There was nothing else for it but to jump high in the air and let out another deafening ‘
Ggggrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaalll!
'