Never Mind the Bullocks (2 page)

‘Anyway, it's about to be my Jesus Year,' I reminded my mother.

‘Your what?'

‘My Jesus Year. Thirty-three. It's when you make things happen in your life. When you make decisions and change things.'

‘Why not make it the year you decide to finally enter a legitimate workforce?'

I opted not to comment.

‘Besides, Jesus
died
when he was thirty-three. That's so morbid.'

Mum was right, as she often is, in her assertion that I'd been to India a lot. And that a proper paying job would be something of enormous benefit. This was true: but since I'd started thinking about the Nano, a thought process that coincided with other ideas of immediate escape from the rock of my birth that was now holding me emotional prisoner, I had become possessed by the idea of returning to India. A decade earlier, it had been the land of opportunity for me: a paradise for the youthful, adventurous and relatively broke. It was an anarchic, volatile, often squalid place where my conceited young soul could play out the illusion of influence with as little as a few quid in my back pocket. A world of easy drugs and full moon parties set against a blurred and (for me then) only fleetingly interesting background of social hardship, where for the western traveller hippie type virtually anything could be made possible for the right price, and that figure was a fraction of what it was back at home.

Would those things really still hold any appeal? I knew I was definitely a few years over that level of decadence, but the urge to explore India was still in my veins. My savings account contained several times more than it ever had during my student days when the vacation coffers were only scantly furnished with the proceeds from a job pulping oranges at a doomed juice bar on Charing Cross Road. Now I had the kind of money that could buy me three months in India. I could, I reasoned, purchase myself one of these cheap cars and take it all the way
around the country on the drive of a lifetime. What better way, I mused, to take on newly single life and embark on another, more daring chapter?

While I was indulging in these fantasies, hype around the Nano was ballooning globally, as the international media caught on to what the car actually meant in a country with a booming economy and a ballooning new middle class.
USA Today
echoed the popular opinion that the car ‘may yield a transportation revolution', while
Time
magazine pegged it as ‘one of the most important cars ever designed'. ‘Indian streets may never be the same again,' declared the BBC, and
Newsweek
asserted that the Nano was ‘changing the rules of the road for the auto industry and society itself'. But it was the
Financial Times
' claim that the Nano encapsulated ‘the dream of millions of Indians groping for a shot at urban prosperity' that really caught my imagination. This was my chance to partake in what was destined to be legend.

I was sold. All that remained was to figure out how to get my hands on one.

‘Hello! Mr Shah?' I yelled into my computer. ‘
I'd – like – to – buy – your – Nano!
'

‘Something something
Nano
?' Mr Shah shouted back.

‘Yes, your Nano! I want to buy it!
How much for your Nano
, Mr Shah? Your – Nano – that – is – for – sale?'

Silence, followed by a low churning noise.

It turned out that trying to buy the most wanted car in India off a bloke in Mumbai from an island in the English Channel was not as easy as I had anticipated. Spurred on by an internet ad I had come across earlier, I had dialled Mr Shah with the aim of coming to some agreement about the sale of his car,
and in the hope that he might take credit cards. But I soon discovered that such high-stakes negotiations were not suited to debilitated internet telephony. All I could hear from my laptop speaker was a series of crackles and the voice of a man-bot who sounded like he was trying to physically project his voice 9,000 km into my ear.

‘Mr Shah? How much is it, the car?'

‘Something something
two-lakh four
.'

I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Sorry, could you repeat that, please?'

There was no response and I couldn't tell if he'd heard me. I gave my laptop a caustic shake as though jiggling it might help clear the crud that was blocking the line or the satellite beam somewhere between me and Mumbai. But with Mr Shah's voice still only coming through in barely fathomable fits and starts, my patience expired and I finally hung up to rethink my strategy.

When Tata launched the Nano at the Delhi Auto Expo back in 2008, it was not yet ready to go on the market. Due to a controversy surrounding the acquisition of land for its proposed factory in West Bengal, production of the car had been delayed. To keep buyers interested, Tata nonetheless opened the brand up for business and began to take orders. There was a deluge towards dealership offices, as forms were hastily filled out and hefty deposits paid. Around 200,000 orders were placed before Tata decided it would be best to close the lines, as the number was higher than it could realistically produce in the coming months. It eventually accepted half of the orders, which it chose through a lottery, and pledged that the cars would all be delivered by October 2010. In a time of global recession, 2010
was still looking bright for India's economy, which had been on the rise ever since the liberalization of the country's financial system in 1991. The advent of the Nano was just another symptom of the boost in trade and industry that was providing hundreds of thousands of people with their first taste of material might, and, for now at least, it seemed they all wanted to buy the same car.

So in January 2010, nine months before the delivery deadline, it transpired that simply snapping up a Nano was an impossible task. Dealerships were only distributing the car to people on Tata's waiting list, and it was predicted that new buyers might have to hold out for a whole year before getting their hands on one.

As far as I was concerned, this wouldn't do. I had made up my mind to leave Jersey and circumvent India in the World's Cheapest Car, and every day I spent getting narky with my mum, or huffing when my dad asked me to close the garage door, was another day of lessening self-worth. In order to bag a Nano, I realized I would need an accomplice in India; a person on the ground, a local, a savant, someone who could pull strings and get me what I damn well wanted. I needed an Indian genie of sorts, so I called on the only person I knew who could fulfil that role, who also happened to be the only person I knew in India at the time. My saviour was Akhil Gupta, a friend of my American cousin who I had met some years ago at a birthday party in Vermont. All I really knew about Akhil was that he lived in Mumbai and was the chairman of a private equity firm called Blackstone India. Our link was tenuous to say the least, so it was with some hesitation that I sent him an email one day out of the blue asking if he could help me buy a car.

Gentleman and inveterate yes-man that he is, he didn't flinch and responded immediately in the affirmative, as though I'd asked him to pop round the corner for a pint of milk. A
few days later, however, he came back to me with grim tidings. After some extensive research, he confirmed that it was not possible to buy a Nano at a dealership anywhere in India.

The project looked on the verge of being shelved, and Akhil was showing signs of relief. He tactfully put some more sensible recommendations on the table: a Toyota Innova, he suggested, would be a far more suitable vehicle in which to tour India, and for £350 a month I could hire the car and the driver. Clearly concerned for my safety, Akhil outlined the following reasons in neat bullet points as to why I should definitely not attempt to cross India in a Nano:

• Nano is not meant for highway driving.

• If the car breaks down, you are in trouble, as there is no AAA, and may not have service stations which have Nano parts.

• Single beautiful girl like you travelling alone will be worrisome.

I wasn't worried about hiring the driver that Akhil suggested. I'd been at the wheel since before I was legal, the only daughter of parents desperate to desist from their roles as my personal chauffeurs, and in particular a father bent on passing down his driving skills to the son he never had. Many a Sunday afternoon in my mid-teens was spent stalling my dad's car around various parking lots. ‘Be one with the machine,' he would intone with uncharacteristic Yoda-ness that made me suspect he had been preparing for this moment for many years: ‘Feel the rise of the car when you take your foot off the clutch. It's not a car you are driving; it's a machine you're fusing with.'

And fuse I did. Within days of my seventeenth birthday I had passed my driving test (of which I can only recall performing an Olympic-grade three-point turn in yet another car
park) and was the proud owner of a Parish of Grouville driver's licence.
¹
It didn't take me long to catch the road bug: at eighteen, I devoured Kerouac's
On the Road
like every other teenage Beatnik wannabe. It was the stimulus that inspired my first solo road trip at the age of nineteen: an ambitious, though somewhat less degenerate, voyage that spanned the length and breadth of New Zealand in a Vauxhall Viva purchased for $300 from a Japanese woman in Auckland. In the years that followed, I rented a Yugo and drove through the villages of Serbia, a Tofaş Şahin over the eastern plains of Turkey, a Chevy through the American deserts to the Pacific coast, and a pimped-out Jeep Grand Cherokee in the abysmal traffic of Mexico City. I once even co-drove a behemoth eight-bed caravan through France, Italy and over to Greece, redefining the laws of Newtonian physics round Kefalonian hairpin bends. In short, I was no weteared neophyte: my driver's CV was extensive and for the most part spotless (barring the one-time orchestration of a three-car pile-up on Ladbroke Grove in London, of which I shall not speak here).

But Akhil was not the only person with consternation for my wellbeing. Soon his assistant Prasad, who was charged with the execution of my request, also began trying to coax me into curbing my plans. He extolled the virtues of India's other much-loved indigenous vehicle, the Maruti, reiterating that in his opinion, the brand had a much more reliable national support network than Tata.

Undeterred and feigning staunch oblivion to the butterflies this lack of confidence in the Nano was inspiring in me, I went back online and decided to consult Google. I searched for ‘second-hand Tata Nano for sale, India' and within seconds was returned a search result informing me that a certain Mr Shah of Mumbai was selling his newly delivered yellow Nano LX with only 300 km on the clock.

My phone call with Mr Shah having miserably failed, I entreated Prasad to contact him to try to seal the deal. Prasad came back to me within hours with the happy news that the car was still for sale at the price of two-lakh four or Rs 240,000. That was exactly double what I had expected to pay. It turned out the reason was that there were three models of Nano and not just one: the cheapest model was indeed Rs 100,000, or one lakh, but the more expensive version, the one that listed air conditioning and electric windows among other perks, was a damn sight more. And Mr Shah, being in possession of the latter model, was reselling it, of course, at a premium. At double the price of the cheapest car in the world, it was no longer a bargain, but by that point I was so entrenched in the idea of a road trip that it seemed I had no choice: the cheapie version was nowhere to be seen in my subsequent trawl through Indian used-car classifieds. Needs must when the devil drives, and in the knowledge that this could be my only shot at bagging a Nano, I called Prasad and gave him the go-ahead.

The speed at which things moved after that was a little daunting. Within a couple of days, I received an email from Prasad that bore the triumphant words ‘Nano bought' in the subject line. Accompanying the email was a trio of shakily framed, steamed-up photos of the car taken from his cell phone at varying angles. I sat down to reassess what was to be my trusty steed for a one-woman road trip around India.