Never Mind the Bullocks (25 page)

The twin joys of shelter and company were a godsend, no matter how gag inducing and itchy. I recriminated myself for my shambolic performance that evening and promised it wouldn't happen again: behind the cocky Thunderbolt exterior lay a girl who was just as vulnerable and assailable as the next, should the misfortune of predatory intentions befall her. These fates were not to be messed with.

BHUBANESWAR to KONARK; KM 5,217–5,389

The NH5 that ran the length of India's east coast was a swift highway, unencumbered by too many delays or diversions. It was primed for carefree cruising and only occasionally punctuated by the odd fleet of lorries, herd of goats or roadwork diversions that bottlenecked all the highway traffic through a single tiny village. Thor called me on the road and found an unusually calm and composed Thunderbolt on the line.

‘You're not supposed to be talking while you're driving.'

‘Uh-huh. I'm willing to risk the fine. Besides, I'm on a straight-shot road right now.'

‘Wow, really?'

‘Yeah, it's like the highway of our dreams. I'm holding a steady 85 and I haven't seen an animal in like twenty minutes.'

‘You sure you didn't cross over to China by mistake?'

‘Yep. I'm pretty sure the trucks in China aren't this colourful.'

‘You missing your passenger?'

‘Eh, maybe. I could do with some company. In fact, I've got a confession to make.'

‘What's that?'

‘I'm a bit bored.'

‘Bored? How is that possible?'

‘It's the road's fault.'

‘It's always the road's fault. A bad driver always blames…'

‘Nothing's
happening
.'

‘I thought you wanted stuff to
stop
happening. Like highways ending abruptly and elephants attacking the car. Like potholes and diversions and…'

‘Yeah, but not like this. I keep falling asleep.'

‘Asleep? I can't begin to imagine anyone getting sleepy behind the wheel in that traffic.'

‘Blame the Golden Quadrilateral.'

Thor was back in Berlin, but continued to call me every couple of days. He phoned during times he knew I was on the road for long stretches and needed some company, and we talked like he was back in the passenger seat.

‘Fuck me, you should see the size of the balls of this horse I'm tracking. They're like coconuts, I swear.'

‘Take a photo, take a photo.'

‘I can't, they won't fit in the lens.'

‘Aw, I wish I was there.'

My spirits were high: the roads were good and we were moving fast, which was just the combo I needed after a stock-take in the town of Vijayawada, which had been my stop after Nagarjuna Sagar. There I had spread out the long-neglected Stanford's map on my king-sized bed at the budget-busting Quality Inn (my only choice since I discovered too late that wedding season had descended on Vijayawada and spare rooms in the city were very hard to come by) and scrutinized our current position with a pencil and a calculator app. We were just under halfway up the east coast from Kanyakumari to Kolkata, which was a bit disheartening since I had marked Kolkata as our next major destination. It had been two and a half weeks since Vivekananda's ashram, which – not taking into account the Hyderabad diversion – was around 1,250 km and nine days behind us. Kolkata was the same distance ahead, and
the prospect of taking a further week and a half to get there was about as appealing as another night feeding microscopic buddies my epidermis at a lakeside hotel. With a little over five weeks remaining to reach our 10,000 km target, I realized we needed to get our groove on.

A peek at my bank balance sealed my conviction. Another nine days to reach Kolkata was not an option; the clock was ticking and the coffers were draining. I had already completed six weeks and only covered 4,000 km, a pace that was not going to suffice unless I wanted to be greeted back in London by a bankruptcy suit. And the Playboy Mansion nights at the likes of the Quality Inn were only aggravating the situation. I needed to step up and reach Kolkata within three days, which meant travelling at three times the current pace. I felt my chicken biryani dinner do an uncomfortable turn somewhere in my duodenum at the prospect of the impending hours at the wheel.

But if there was a bright side, it was that the NHAI had our back; on its online project map, the NH5 was coloured in glorious, victorious, fait accompli red. According to the key, this meant it had already been lovingly fondled by the restorative fingers of the roadwork team, which potentially meant an uninterrupted stretch of two-lane highway with an average speed of at least 70 kmph all the way up to Kolkata. At that rate, 400 km a day would be a cakewalk.

And they were; but this particular piece of cake was laced with something eminently soporific. Between slugs of energy drinks and hyperventilation exercises designed to shake away the looming sleepiness and send blood back to my brain, I reflected on this easy road I had spent the last seven weeks wishing for. It was smooth, it was fast and it seemed relatively safe. My close encounters had been fewer and further between and not quite as butt-clenchingly terrifying as those before. Here, as Thor rightly pointed out, was the infrastructure I'd
been harping on about, the progress the multitudes were calling for; well oiled and effective, it was nonetheless as dull as monsoon ditchwater, and as sleep inducing as a tank of chloroform.

The erratic pendulum of my desires set itself back in the opposite direction and began to hanker after something more colourful, more exciting than mere efficient plod. After a night spent among the easy-wash linoleum floors, sparse pine-veneer furniture and the kind of bathroom you might expect to find in a space-age mental asylum at the Tata-branded Ginger Hotel in Bhubaneswar, my impulse had upgraded to a yearning, and by morning, my resolve to keep pounding relentlessly on to Kolkata had dissipated in favour of a burn around rural Orissa. The final straw might have been waking up to the austere Swedish-prison interior of my room, or it could have been the glyco-synthetic qualities of the Coffee Day Iced Eskimo and chocolate doughnut I'd gorged on for breakfast, or even the uncanny smell of ginger that lingered through the hotel's corridors, but the prospect of another day watching chevrons disappear under my dashboard at a steady speed, unimpeded by livestock or holes in the road, could not be tolerated. Abhilasha and I needed to return to rural roads, get back to nature.

Consulting the guidebook, I came across a strong recommendation for the beach resort of Puri, only 75 km away, which apparently attracted two types of visitors: the ‘spiritual' and those after ‘worldly pleasures'. Having a penchant for a bit of each, I thought this would be just the place to break the monotony of modern progress: a small coastal settlement and a favourite with hippies in the 1970s. I imagined a less-developed Goa from which full English breakfasts and even the likes of Café Coffee Day would be mercifully absent, and where an evening could be spent contemplating the gently cascading tide from the terrace of a converted Maharaja's palace. Screw
the time limit, the devil take the budget – I was not a driving machine, and Abhilasha was not just a means of slogging from one business hotel to the next in order to chug coffeeccinos and battle with uncooperative wireless networks.

The Orissan countryside was an eyeful. Lush feral fields bordered by palm trees and criss-crossed by pathways and bicycle tracks the colour of the terracotta earth were plentiful grazing grounds for cattle, who lowed serenely between mouthfuls of grass alongside their companions, the white storks, who looked on quizzically. Sporadic temple ruins punctuated the landscape, their pyramidal shapes echoed by the outlines of the loosely stacked bales of hay, scenes worthy of a subcontinental Constable painting. Grass huts that looked like they were about to melt into the ground were surrounded by swamplands blanketed by a profusion of untamed lilac flowers.

I watched as a line of women in bright saris waded through the rice fields, while a gang of teenagers whizzed past, howling from a trio of overloaded bikes. A man holding a large black umbrella squatted in the corner of a field; another hacked away at the ground for all he was worth with what resembled a highly ineffective wooden machete. Across the road from him, a driver in a pressed beige uniform pulled a rag over the headlights of a parked Ambassador with the leisurely air of someone passing an abundance of excess time. The cattle mooed behind him, snazzy new Hyundais and Suzukis occasionally whizzed by in front: three ages of Indian transport condensed into a single snapshot.

Aside from invoking a pang of guilt that Abhilasha and I had never shared such an intimate moment of personal hygiene (the only washes she had ever received had been
at the hands of the odd-job boys and parking attendants at the hotels where we'd stayed), the image also ignited in me a curious nostalgia. It was a given that the luscious bucolic terrain that surrounded us was a world in decline as agriculture and village life dwindled in India. But I was also aware that the Ambassador – the graceful, old-fashioned Ambi, as people affectionately called it, with its curvilinear bodywork and the enduring robustness of a reliable old mare – was also on the edge of obsolescence.

I had loved the car since I'd seen it in Delhi the first time I came to India, but I was perplexed about its origins, mistakenly believing for a long time that it was a remnant of the Raj, left in India by departing Brits in the 1940s. I was very wrong: it turned out the Ambassador was an Indian car, first put out by Hindustan Motors a decade after independence. Its blueprint was taken directly from an English jalopy, the Morris Oxford, devised by Sir Alec Issigonis, the Greek-British car designer who was better known for drafting the Mini. I was amazed to discover that India's Ambassadors were still in production in a form quite similar to the original 1957 model. But all this was set to change: that very month, the government passed a new set of emission standards that spelled the beginning of the end for antiquated cars not running on greener engines. Within a year, sales of the car for use as taxis in India's cities would be phased out altogether.

For decades the Ambassador had been one of the only two cars available in the country, along with the Fiat 1100D Padmini, made by India's other car manufacturer, Premier. The Padmini ceased production in 2001, but is still famous for being Mumbai's yellow-and-black taxi of choice. The Ambassador and the Padmini basically ruled the roads until the early 1980s, when the cogs of economic liberalization
began to turn and other car manufacturers arrived on the scene, including Maruti Suzuki, which produced India's own Tin Lizzie prior to the Nano, the Maruti 800 (now rebranded the Alto).

Tata Motors put out its first passenger vehicle in 1991, the same year Ratan Tata was appointed chairman of the group. Its foray into the world of private cars came at the perfect time: India's economy was starting to expand and individual purchasing power was on the verge of rising. Since then, India has seen the influx of international car brands the likes of Hyundai, General Motors, Ford and Honda, so it makes sense that relics like the Ambassador have already been pushed to the back burner, and will soon be shoved out of the market altogether. There's little room for old uncles in this rapidly changing family picture in which a younger generation of cute, cheap, fuel-efficient little yellow cars have become the new point of focus. For now, at least.

My escape from the ho-hum turned out to be a bit more tum-te-tum, as it dawned on me just how ambivalent I was towards homogenized progress on the one hand and barmy bits of rural life on the other. Drawing closer to Puri, I began to deck out my fantasies with increasingly elaborate images of sandy white beaches and golden sunsets, a vision that, in retrospect, was only doomed to disappointment. The slippery slope to disenchantment began on the outskirts of town when Delilah was scuppered in her attempts to get us to the centre by a number of road closures and diversions. Disoriented at a forlorn train junction somewhere that seemed miles from my vision of a Bay of Bengal
Baywatch
, I decided to wind down the window and let the world – and its road directions – in.