Never Mind the Bullocks (28 page)

The headline, which jumped out at me from the screen bearing all the marks of a Hitchcock horror sequence, dismally read: ‘Second Nano Catches Fire: Tata Motors'. With a bleak sense of foreboding, I went on to read the harrowing tale of a brand new Nano that had burst into flames a few days ago on its way to being delivered to a dealership near the town of Vadodara in Gujarat. The article only stated that a Tata spokesperson had announced that the company was sure a design flaw was not to blame. I found little comfort in his reassurance and was frustrated by the newspaper's lack of information about how the fire started. A cigarette left to burn on the passenger seat? A stray firework that made its way into the gas tank? I hoped against hope that the explanation was ludicrous and highly unlikely; that of all the things that might have ignited the flames, what it definitely wasn't was a faulty spark plug that would incite a recall of the 30,000 Nanos already on the road all over India. Or, come to think of it, anything connected with driving long distances in temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius.

I went straight to a YouTube broadcast by CNN-IBN that displayed the words ‘Nano: Trial by Fire' across the screen in block letters, accompanied by a dramatic action-sequence
soundtrack and the heart-rending image of Abhilasha's doppelgänger in an advanced stage of immolation. I watched reluctantly as the report showed the charred remains of a grey Nano being loaded onto the back of a truck and covered solemnly with a white shroud. IBN's man on the ground, Varun Kumar, stood boldly facing the camera and recounted in his best Breaking News tones how the fire had started in the rear of the vehicle and worked its way quickly to engulf the whole body. He went on to interview an auto analyst by the name of R.K. Dhawan. Dhawan, sporting a huge moustache and a baseball cap that undermined his senior years by at least two decades, spoke with cloudy authority about the problems of new-fangled fuel-injection systems. Kumar concluded with the staunch observation that Tata might be seeing its dream sales figure reduced to ashes.

The readers' comments that followed the articles and videos gave me pause for thought. Posts such as ‘It's a toaster oven on wheels – a piece of SHIT car!' and ‘It has become devil. It should be banned' suggested that glowing national support for the little car might not be as widespread as I had assumed. The critics were harsh: ‘What u expect for peanuts!' exclaimed an outraged user called Sahilkind, while Jam from Bangalore pulled no punches in saying, ‘Tata Nano is crap. Please suggest your friends and family members not to go for it, if anyone is planning to. Saving li'l money at the cost of lives is not wise. Thank you.'

TheMrRajaG was hardly so polite: ‘This is a bloody fucking car,' he said, before telling the story of his neighbour who had his Nano ‘thrashed' by an autowala and had to have two doors replaced. He rounded off his tale with the deduction that the Nano was a ‘plastic toy car fucking good for kids'.

‘An expensive way to get someone cremated on slum-dog standards' was the insightful response from YouTube
user Telears, while cyclops621 responded to the footage of the burnt-out car by chillingly laying open his own emotion. ‘Hahahahahahahaha…' he wrote, with brazen honesty.

But the haters in turn had their own detractors: ‘Shame on you whoever you are,' wrote parthakaroy, joined in his defence of the car by athjuljmatthew, who claimed, ‘There is nothing wrong with the nano', and Porusable, who added his own endorsement: ‘On the whole, the tatanano is a fantastic performer.' The Nano's supporters went on to point out that many makes of cars had either spontaneously combusted or undergone safety recalls, including Marutis, Toyotas, Lamborghinis and Ferraris. One user even pointed fellow commentators to a site called The Truth About Cars, which reported no fewer than 190,500 cases of cars bursting into flames in the United States in 2009, a figure that put these two Nano incinerations well into perspective.

At the extreme end of the spectrum of opinion were those who went as far as absolving Tata from all responsibility for the blaze by positing conspiracy theories that were very much in line with my own hopes. ‘This is a deliberate adverse publicity by the scared competitors,' wrote parthakaroy, who went on to make the excellent point: ‘In India, have you ever seen the fire tenders rushing in as soon as a car is engulfed in fire? Here you have the fire tenders, newsman, camera absolutely ready before the event happened.'

Still, the conspiracy theories could only comfort me to a certain point. I went on to read that there had been more spontaneous Nano fires the previous year, with at least three reported incidents in Delhi, Lucknow and Ahmedabad. These had been attributed to a faulty switch in the steering column and the public's mind was supposedly put at rest by a quote from a Tata spokesperson, who claimed his company had ‘comprehensively checked all the Nano cars that are on the road'.

I did the math: I wasn't sure exactly when Mr Shah had taken delivery of Abhilasha prior to selling her on to Prasad, but I calculated it must have been in late 2009, which meant my beloved steed was probably of the same generation as the faulty switch brigade, and had not, to the best of my knowledge, been comprehensively checked out by Tata or indeed anyone (barring the Brahmin in Pondicherry, but the less said about that the better). The blazing cars on YouTube might well be acts of subterfuge, but the fact remained that there were now the twin spectres of faultiness and a potential singeing hovering in the air like a defective button on a steering column that was about to plough into my skull.

Eager for a toehold of optimism from which to chase the phantoms away, I navigated back to the IBN clips page and found an interview with Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of
Autocar India
, who according to the headline was about to enlighten us as to What's Going Wrong With The Nano. ‘When cars are reduced to ashes, it's very difficult to find out exactly what the problem is,' he said rather darkly, though he went on to suggest a shoddy fitting in the spot where fuel comes out under pressure, or an electrical wire meltdown, which didn't mean much to me on a practical level. At that moment, the presenter echoed my own desperate petitions by asking Sorabjee, ‘If I was going for a drive in a Nano, what should be the one thing I should look out for?'

‘Well, keep your eye on the rear-view mirror!' the editor cheerfully quipped.

So that was that: one hour's worth of trawling the internet for some source of comfort or useful information, following the revelation that the car I was driving for thousands of kilometres through burning hot terrain had been reclassified from ‘The People's Car' to ‘Incendiary Death Trap', had borne no fruit. I was none the wiser than when I pulled into Bodh Gaya
two days before, except that now I was condemned to carry the burden of knowledge and the millstone of paranoia for the next few weeks, or at least as long as Abhilasha didn't ignite into a big yellow conflagration.

When we finally did get to put very hesitant wheel onto very hot road, the sun was at its highest in the sky and the tarmac was so heated it was emitting a dizzying Will-o'-the-Wisp-like mirage that upped the illusion of oncoming speed bumps by about 300%. At one point I was convinced that a haystack strapped to a cart pulled by a tractor up ahead was a shackled Gruffalo on its way to the government labs. On top of the worry of a Nano inferno, I was also mildly concerned for Abhilasha's diminutive tyres: we had already seen dozens of signs along the highways warning motorists not to go over 70 kmph for fear of a blowout, and I figured that speed plus 40-something degrees plus incredibly small rubbers was a sure-fire formula for an afternoon spent accumulating heat stroke on a Bihar roadside while scratching my head and trying to figure out which end of my toothbrush was most suitable for prising off Abhilasha's rear hubcap.

NAINITAL to McLEOD GANJ; KM 7,491–8,329

Varansi, India's most beautiful, historical, holy city, came and went like a garbled chimera: as the mercury hit 47, I was aware I was hotter than I had ever been in my life. Hotter, in fact, than I thought it was possible to be. On arriving there in the early afternoon in the middle of a power cut, I could do nothing but sit on the terrace of my room overlooking the bonfires of the Scindhia Ghat – one of the city's open crematoriums – and catch the occasional waft of flesh-scented smoke, while meditating on the sensation that even without the help of an open flame, my own organs were also on their way to a good browning.

After a circular exchange with the lad at reception precipitated by my supplication for a room with air conditioning (his argument, resting on the reasonable tenet that an air-conditioned room would be a waste of money given the power cuts they were currently undergoing, stood staunch in the face of my desperate assertion that I was willing to take my chances either way), I spent the night shrouded in wet towels, cursing the intermittently spinning overhead fan until dawn, when I stepped outside to find the temperature had halved and I could once again form a rational thought. That singular notion was to get the hell out of Varanasi and up to the mountains as fast as Abhilasha could possibly go without herself combusting.

Still, before leaving I took the famous dawn trip on the Ganges in a small wooden boat that coincidentally had the TATA logo hand-painted along its side. My captain was a teenage boy overflowing with enthusiasm for his hometown. As we paddled the length of the city, past the hundreds of people gathering at the riverside ghats to perform their morning puja
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ceremonies, the kid pointed out and explained every last detail of the towering skyline that lined the river.

It was my second time in Varanasi (during my first visit, I had memorably spotted two dead bodies – one of a baby – and an expired cow floating past my morning tour boat) and I was in no doubt it was one of the most remarkable places on earth. The morning light and rising mist threw the mediaeval-looking buildings behind into a saturated relief, framing the colours of the bathers and their candles and flowers that floated down the river in a spectacular shifting composition. Everything I looked at was beautiful and exotic and otherworldly, and happily the whole trip passed without so much as a hint of a floating corpse.

I could have stayed there for a month, but by 9 am, the celestial furnace was beginning to fire up and my survival instincts kicked in. I bid Varanasi a reluctant goodbye – it's not you, it's me; the timing's all wrong – and huffily hauled my bags into a cycle rickshaw, returning to the outskirts of the old city where I'd been obliged to leave Abhilasha; even she was too large for the centre's archaic little streets.

From ancient Varanasi, I set out westwards on the NH2, which ran the course of one of the world's oldest highways: the Grand Trunk Road. Like the Silk Road and other bygone trade routes, this was a key element in the movement of citizens, goods, defending armies and invading forces for two thousand years, and now formed part of the Golden Quadrilateral, the high-tech, high-speed highway connecting
India's four largest cities. As I cruised along the barren dual carriageway towards the town of Allahabad, I remembered Rudyard Kipling's eulogies of the road in
Kim
(‘such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world'); it was a sentiment that stuck a chord with me, though on this particular stretch there was little on the NH2 that appeared to correspond to Kipling's accounts.

As the landscape between Varanasi and Allahabad flattened into the Gangetic Plains, I tried to imagine the ‘green-arched, shade-flecked' thoroughfare that, in the nineteenth century at least, would have been lined with up to four rows of trees. Today the sweep of road was more desolate, the heat having parched the land to a degree where dust clouds rose from the surrounding countryside to lift up a grey-brown haze. Kipling's descriptions of people on the Trunk Road, shrouded in orientalist fantasy as they may have been, were still vivid and sometimes even familiar: the ‘long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs'; the ‘women with their babes on their hips, walking behind the men, the older boys prancing on sticks of sugar cane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as they sell for a halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their betters from cheap toy mirrors'; the newly released prisoners, marriage processions, money lenders, soldiers on leave, jugglers with ‘half-trained monkeys'; Akalis, the ‘wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh devotees'; the Ganges water sellers, cotton wagons and Changars, the women in charge of building the railways: ‘a flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed, blue-petticoated clan of earth-carriers, hurrying north on news of a job, and wasting no time by the road'.

Spirited chronicler of the Raj, Kipling was staunchly opposed to Indian independence, believing the British colonizers should dig in despite popular feeling to the contrary, and carry
out their white man's burden, or whatever it was they needed to do. Born in Mumbai and weaned in the local language of his nanny, he was sent back to the UK for his schooling and returned to Bombay at 16, with a pubescent moustache that apparently scandalized his mother. He got a job at the
Civil and Military Gazette
in Lahore and stayed on for as long as he could bear the chronic heat and disease, which was a total of seven years. Despite the brevity of his time in India, he always considered himself fundamentally Indian, and spent his later life in the UK regretting the ‘blasted Henglish drizzle'
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and yearning for the east.

In following the Great Trunk Road, I was also on the heels of the nineteenth-century Brits who were just as lily-livered as I was when temperatures pushed past 40 and ‘the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl'.
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When the hot season swept across the administrative centres in the plains, the likes of Kolkata, Delhi and Lucknow were emptied of their colonial governors, generals and civil servants, who nearly all bolted up to the highlands for some thermal respite and the eyebrow-raising extra-curricular activities that invariably followed a gathering of bored, affluent people many miles from home. Darjeeling, Mussoorie, Dalhousie, Nainital and McLeod Ganj were among the settlements in the foothills of the Himalayas that became Little Britain for the duration of the summer months. In fact, life in the hills soon grew so attractive that Sir John Lawrence, Viceroy of India from 1864–69, resolved to shift the entire colonial administration 1,000 miles from Calcutta to Shimla, a decision that resulted in a highly controversial budget-busting biannual footslog.