Never Mind the Bullocks (9 page)

When the evening dancing started, the auditorium transformed. About 200 or so people, all clad in regulation white evening robes, started boogying around the hall to the repetitive strain of what sounded like a cheerful Cossack ditty mixed with a 1970s cop-show theme. The room began to resemble a cross between
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
and a Goa trance party. Gathered there were people of all ages and nationalities, and every single one appeared to be thoroughly absorbed in his or her personal dance, eyes closed and arms swinging. Their sheer number was a blessing. I could lose myself in this sea of groovers, and after a few minutes I started to feel like I was at a nightclub. I closed my eyes and let my body do what it would in time to the jaunty melodies emanating from the band. Every so often there would be a sudden break in the music and the revellers would stop mid-routine, shout ‘
Osho!
' at the top of their lungs, and then continue their dance. Not really sure why we were doing it, I nonetheless joined in, feeling my embarrassment dissipate with every minute.

Eventually, we were able to invoke him. Sweaty and danced out, when the music stopped, everybody in the hall plopped down on the floor and the man himself made an appearance, projected from beyond the grave onto a giant video screen at the front of the auditorium. Wearing a blue gown with Dynasty-style shoulder pads and his trademark beanie, Osho spoke slowly and precisely to the camera from somewhere in what I guess must have been the mid-1980s.

His talk impressed me. He appeared to have a focused air and a wicked sense of humour. He told a really long joke about Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, and I laughed out loud, as did everyone else. But when I stopped laughing, they continued. A couple of minutes passed and they were still laughing, some of them rolling around on their backs, thumping the floor in breathless mirth. Five minutes turned to ten and finally the giggles died down and transformed into something even more disturbing: gobbledegook. Hundreds of voices jabbered in unison; the sounds they made were incomprehensible, noises rising from the subconscious, but somehow they came together in a deranged harmony. It was a bit like the gibberish session, but more controlled, and with the blindfolds off.

Feeling like a daunted private among an army of demented chimps, I let my underlying fool flow out through my mouth and gave voice to all manner of nonsense. I babbled, gabbled, yabbered and yammered until I was almost drooling down my white dress. Osho thought it was necessary to walk through the fires of insanity to decompress the tensions of social living, to liberate one's soul from the frameset of rules, and I was beginning to see his point.

When I left the resort two days later, I returned to the Indian roads with a fresh outlook. I knew I had to adjust my attitude: just like in the auditorium, there was no sense in standing apart from the madness, as that only made everything seem more demented. The only way to deal with it was by gagging my inner traffic cop and entering into the fray, horns a-blazing, brakes a-braking, engine a-revving – or, at least, that was the plan.

When two Indians meet as strangers, I read in an essay by Indian author Pavan K. Varma, the encounter is often a duel to ascertain the
aukaat
of the other.

Emerging wet-handed from a gas station toilet cubicle where I'd walked in on a mortified attendant taking a shower, I found Abhilasha stationed in a bumper-to-bumper standoff with a Maruti Zen. The Zen's owner, a prim-looking, mustachioed gent with henna-tinted hair and a shirt that looked as though it had spent the night pressed between two giant spring-fresh anvils, was pacing cautiously around the car, taking in her every detail. As I approached him, he shifted his gaze over to me and treated my crumpled cotton salwar kameez with the same level of critical scrutiny. Mr Fiery Redhead was apparently departing from the usual tradition of gushing sycophantic Nano-philia, possibly on account of his decision to splash out an extra couple of grand on The Other Compact Car, and was pulling no punches in checking us out. The duel had clearly begun.

‘Good morning, ma'am,' he greeted me, his shoulders back, his lips tight.

‘Hello there,' I responded, feeling my own eyes cast a damning glare in the direction of the Maruti, which was firing belligerent daggers into Abhilasha's headlights.

‘What is your good name?' he enquired stiffly, as though it pained him to betray any hint of civility in my direction.

I told him and volleyed the question back at him.

He responded with a cascade of syllables that contained in them somewhere ‘indra', ‘giri', ‘dhar' and ‘doctor', among a torrent of other sounds that oozed authority.

Something was definitely going on here, I thought. We were walking circles around each other like two dogs going for the scrotum sniff. What did the doctor want from me?

‘Did you buy this car in Mumbai?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘How much did you pay?'

‘Two lakh four.'

His eyes widened and I saw a brief glint of victory flash through his retina. ‘But this is the one-lakh car.'

‘Yes, it is,' I sighed, ‘but this one is the top model. It has air conditioning and, um, electric windows.' I was still at pains myself to figure out quite how these features doubled the vehicle's price.

‘What is your fuel efficiency?'

‘About 19 kilometres to the litre.'

‘Oh, very good.'

The doctor fell silent. I felt obliged to continue the conversation. ‘So are you, uh, planning on buying one?'

The doc shook his head. ‘Oh no, I would never buy this car.'

Hang on. What was going on here? Was I in the company of a hater?

‘If you have one or two lakhs to spend on a car, then you can buy a second-hand Maruti Zen, or Tata Indica. It is much more reliable than a Nano.'

I rose up like an owner scorned. ‘But I've driven all the way from Mumbai in this car and I've had no problems whatsoever.'

‘Maybe you have had no problems
yet
,' the man said, giving Abhilasha's back tyre a light kick with his polished chestnut-brown loafer, ‘but maybe the next few thousand kilometres will not be so lucky for you.'

It was a point against which I couldn't really argue, irritated as I was at the fact his foot had just made contact with Abhilasha's wheel, a gesture that was as good as an all-out declaration of war.

‘I am employed with the civil service,' the man said, thumbing his chest and moving his hand over to the right to finger the gold pen sticking out from his shirt pocket from behind a folded
handkerchief. ‘It is not appropriate for me to drive this Nano. It is seen as a poor man's car.'

His road
aukaat
firmly established, my red-headed friend returned to the superior fold of his Maruti and left me standing, shamed and bewildered, in his dust.

‘The mentality of a stratified society is very much in evidence in everyday life,' wrote Varma.
¹⁶
I presumed he was writing about India's hierarchical caste system, which had been around for millennia and was still very much in force. I went on to read that the phenomenon of
aukaat
, which roughly translates as ‘status', adds another dimension to Indian society's complex layering. As I watched the doctor pull out of the petrol station, I wondered whether his attitude was representative of the upwardly mobile middle class as a whole. Who wants to be seen driving the cheapest car on the market if you're trying to show yourself as being on the up? The Nano had proved popular with the kids of the established upper-middle class who loved its quirky design and were buying it as an addition to the existing family fleet of Beemers and Audis. But for families just entering the world of purchasing power, was it really an attractive idea to spend their precious savings on a car with unwarranted long-term prospects? And all practical considerations aside, there was also the bottom line so eloquently expressed by my civil servant friend: Who wants to be seen driving a poor man's car? I certainly didn't mind, but I was from another world.

As we pulled back onto the highway, a triad of menacing black SUVs whizzed past us in a dust cloud that left me giddy from the Doppler effect. Abhilasha shimmied slightly to the left in their wake. I sighed: two
aukaat
-fuelled drubbings in the space of five minutes. The Nano might be one of India's new industrial darlings, but when it came to the pecking order of the road, she had to take her place among the hierarchy that was dictated by one simple rule: size.

If a person has to be asked what their
aukaat
is, the question is already an insult. Varma's cautionary pointer might be perplexing if applied to social situations by a foreigner and an outsider like myself, but when I looked at his principle through the prism of highway etiquette, it was a no-brainer. On the roads it was clear who was boss: bulk and velocity ruled. If the oncoming vehicle was bigger than me, I relented; if it was smaller, I cut it up. It was that easy.

At the top of the highway power pyramid were the lumbering lorries, the articulated kind that measured about ten times the length of the Nano and moved at a majestic snail's pace, scattering all terrified objects from their path with their formidable horns that could probably be heard from space.

On the next rung down were the smaller trucks, coaches and buses. They did have a slight speed advantage over the giant lorries in that they were often driven by boy racers who handled their bulky, aging torsos as though they were featherweight Ferraris with spruced-up horns designed to present a more intimidating impression. Trucks and buses were followed by SUVs and cars, which contained many of their own subcategories, but it goes without saying that the humble low-cost Nano pretty much bookended the spectrum with the likes of a Porsche Cayenne Turbo at the other extreme (the one-lakh car versus the one-crore
¹⁷
car). Within that hundredfold price difference lay all the other Tatas, Toyotas, Mahindras and Marutis.

The next category mostly comprised a more domesticated class of machinery. The horse- and bullock-drawn carts, charming and bucolic in appearance, were straightforward farmyard transport modes that were delightfully quaint and environmentally friendly, their only downside being their speed of bullock-miles per hour. Other members of this category included
jugaads
, vehicles reconstructed from the debris and spare parts harvested from the long since deceased. A motor from here, a gear box from there, some
tractor wheels found near railway tracks and the disused wooden carriage that's been rotting in the back field since the last horse died two years ago: put them all together and you have a weird hybrid tractor–cart thing that was invariably piled up with hay or people or both, and set to putter along the countryside roads in the early mornings or at dusk, taxiing its load from farms to villages and back again.

Next up were the auto-rickshaws and Tempos, three-wheelers often loaded with people that could hold anything up to an entire class of schoolchildren. In cities, rickshaws ruled the roost with their plucky moves and swift turns, but on the highways they were humbled by the sheer fact of their slowness, holding themselves rather sheepishly to the left as they let traffic hurl past them. Down another notch were the two-wheelers, a term encompassing everything from a moped to a high-speed Honda, although it usually meant a 125 cc motorbike ridden by a minimum of three to four adults with the added option of children, livestock and industrial hardware balanced at various points for optimum weight distribution. They were closely followed by bicycles, which were capable of performing similar functions but at much lower speeds. And then there were those who travelled on foot: goats, dogs, hogs and, finally, people.
¹⁸
At the bottom of the pyramid of power, pedestrians were molested the most: cars hurtled by them within inches of their elbows and honked at them angrily at road crossings where they'd let a cow pass with reverential awe.

But just as caste barriers were beginning to crumble in India with the advent of a new, modernizing wave of social structure, so too were road users trumping one another and undermining the rules of road
aukaat
by use of all manner of resources. Take cleanliness as an example: in a country rife with dust, fumes and the humidity to mix them into sticky pollution, cleanliness is very much next to godliness. Despite this, a pristine sunshine yellow coat was not something I was always able to arrange for
Abhilasha: many were the mornings I drove her out into the world looking like the Swamp Thing after a particularly bitchy mud fight.

Power in numbers was another trick for manipulating the traffic to one's will, and no road user displayed this ploy as well as humble livestock. A single sheep or goat by the side of the road was potential roadkill, but in herds they were formidable traffic stoppers who didn't differentiate between high-speed highways and back-country roads.

Speed and sprightliness were another option for blindsiding other road users into giving way. If you could outrun or even dodge the bastard, it didn't really matter how big he was. And this was the principle that I, by all rights a foreigner and an outcast, used from inside my yellow Indian avatar. When I was on form and Abhilasha in good fettle, the two of us were able to leave many a red-faced Maruti Zen or Tata Indica sprawling in our slipstream.

It seemed to me that social mobility was possible, at least as far as the roads were concerned. If I swerved, dodged and blared my horn enough in the face of my so-called superiors – leaving them in the sorry knowledge that maybe they weren't the kings of the highway after all – then there was a small orifice in the fortress of
aukaat
through which the proles and their one-lakh cars could just about squeeze.