Never Mind the Bullocks (31 page)

Reason dictated that by this point the truck that was blocking the opposite lane might slam on its brakes and settle for sliding in behind Abhilasha as the oncoming bus passed. But the driver clearly had no such plans and instead headed for the tiny space between me and the big gassy truck. I silently petitioned my maker, god, Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, not to let it all end here; but then there was another, more stubborn part of me that thought, like hell am I letting the truck get in ahead of me just because it won't slow down. So instead of slowing down to create some space for the truck to pull in ahead of me, I kept my foot firmly on the accelerator, moving uphill with a determination mixed with the terror of annihilation and the vindictiveness of a moment of road rage.

What I didn't anticipate was what happened next: the bus that was trundling down the hill suddenly slowed down and pulled over so that the overtaking truck could pass. Headlights were still being flashed with great urgency and all horns were crying out in unison, but I realized this was in essence an act of extreme politeness and consideration, and it was taking place before my very eyes. As the truck that nearly ground me into the rocks to my left carried on puffing up the hill, I reflected on the implications
of what had just happened. It was road courtesy of an ilk I had not witnessed until now, and if this behaviour was anything to go by, it went a long way to explaining the ostensible kamikaze overtaking tactics practised by all who flung themselves fanatically into the blind curves of these narrow mountain roads. If people coming in the opposite direction were on constant vigil as to the possibility of turning a corner and finding another vehicle in their lane, they would slow and swerve to accommodate. After all, the vehicles going uphill at this point were hardly breaking 30 kmph. How dangerous could it be?

My confidence began to mount as I toyed with the accelerator pedal and teased myself into giving it a squeeze. Abhilasha roared internally, but only moved forward marginally, due to the angle of the slope and the size of her engine, which was a few strokes short of Formula One. Still, if lardy-bum trucks could do it, so could we.

I began to indicate, probably much to the delight of the bright blue three-wheeler pickup piled high with tomatoes that was sniffing at Abhilasha's exhaust pipe. There was a curve up ahead, but wasn't there always? I pulled the Nano's nose out to the right, pushed her into second gear and floored the accelerator for all she was worth, mimicking the trucks' frantically urgent musical horns with my own psychotic bugle of beeps. Her little engine began to gather speed and soon we were neck to neck with the back tyre of Farty Pants. The giant tyre at that moment looked about twice our size.

‘Come on, come on, come on!' I urged Abhilasha, leaning forward in my seat as though shifting my weight by a few centimetres would make any difference at all to her acceleration. We were now parallel with the front cab and we were still making good speed. It was all over in about fifteen seconds. We were ahead of Guff Breath and behind the truck in front, which by now had accumulated at least two more vehicles at its bow. One down, three – or possibly four – to go.

Reeling from the success of my first mindless overtake around a blind bend, I went straight into the next one. Soon we were at the head of the queue and free to continue on an open road. I punched the air. ‘Yesssss!'

The Russian roulette quality of this highly dangerous manoeuvre had raised my serotonin levels past quietly confident to acutely cocky, and I was now taking Abhilasha around the snaky roads as fast as she could go. We whizzed past buses, zoomed away from gas tankers, even left the odd well-meaning SUV in our dust.

Something in me had changed: I was no longer the cautious, law-abiding driver who had first driven in India two months ago. To add to my tally of new driving vices, I was now also executing suicidal mountainside passes, blasting my horn as though my life depended on it (which, when I come to think of it, it often did) and completely disregarding the cautionary signs and signals that had been erected for my benefit. I felt like I had been possessed by a devil, a demon of the road that had just named me queen. Uttarakhand Public Works Department be damned – I was married to danger and had no foreseeable plans for divorce. After two months on the road, I was becoming a bona fide Indian driver.

NEW DELHI; KM 8,975

You moron!' I screamed at Delilah, who seemed quite chuffed with her decision to direct me down a very crowded passage heaving with people shopping from shoulder-to-shoulder tungsten-lit booths that sold bits of ribbon and elaborate wedding hats. This was a pedestrians-only street, a fact that was clearly evident from the withering scowls and tuts Abhilasha and I were receiving. Oblivious to my pain, Delilah instructed me to hold course for another 200 metres.

‘This isn't even a street, it's a frigging shopping mall!' I yelled, pulling her plug.

Thrusting the Nano into reverse, I looked behind us to see that the crowd had already closed in our rear. Through the front windscreen, it was the same view. We were trapped. All I could see were people: hands, arms, wrists and palms as they pressed against the sides of the car to get around us. I heard the word ‘Nano' repeated over and over again, in slightly more irritated tones than I'd been used to so far. A man in a white tunic riding a bicycle that was stacked beyond its credible capacity with hand-stitched sacks knocked angrily on Abhilasha's roof. He made a gesture with the hand that wasn't holding up his faltering load that gave me no information whatsoever other than the fact that he and the gathering mob were growing highly peeved.

I shot him back my best effort at an equally peeved ‘Well, what do you want me to do, mate?' before a kindly shop owner jumped down from the podium of his store and decided to try to take charge of the situation. He carved out a space big enough for himself to stand in front of the Nano, and beckoned me to move forward. I winced. How on earth could I shift even an inch? There were two old ladies bent over the front bumper, leaning against the bonnet under the weight of the crowd of people behind them. But the shopkeeper was insistent: I had to try to move forward or there was a strong chance we'd be there until morning. I revved the engine ever so slightly and let up my foot from the clutch as gently as I could. We started to roll. I was terrified as to what the two old ladies would do, but they seemed to take the new situation very much in their stride, rolling themselves around as the car advanced. The flow of people ahead split into two side streams as we literally ploughed through them; I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. We seemed to be moving at about the same rate as the crowd that was stuck behind us, some of whom were actually holding on to the Nano to give them a more stable advantage against the oncoming tide of pedestrians.

The heart of Old Delhi was not, as I was fast discovering, primed for motor vehicles. That came as a bit of a surprise, given that the rest of the city had so far triumphed on my own personal scoreboard of Indian urban traffic infrastructure. I had made the journey from the mountains in the north via Amritsar, the Sikh holy city just a stone's throw from the Pakistani border, in a matter of days. Back down in the plains, the heat was once again on full blast, and I was eager to get to the capital where I knew a host of cooling mod cons would be waiting for me.

Thanks in part to a recent drive by the Commonwealth Games Committee to make it presentable to visiting dignitaries,
Delhi had become home to some of the best roads and highways in the country. Central Delhi had had a head start with the spacious avenues that lay between the monumental government buildings and bungalows constructed by Edward Lutyens in the early years of the twentieth century. The city was already a place of sidewalks, flyovers, roundabouts and pedestrian crossings when the Commonwealth Games Committee moved in with its budget of Rs 80 crore (£8 million), which went a long way in polishing the city's arteries into the state of a better-oiled machine. I even spotted a few signs put up by an NGO campaigning for noise reduction that pleaded with drivers to refrain from using their horns. The latter strategy, though admirable, had little effect, but the former elements came together to create a symphony of road usage that was – after almost three months of bumping over potholes, dodging goats and zigzagging between pedestrians who had nowhere else to walk but the slow lane of the highway – pure manna from the gods in driving heaven.

My two days of hiding in Delhi started as I rolled through the guarded gates of a neighbourhood called Sundar Nagar. I was staying with a friend called Paul de Bendern, who was working as the bureau chief of the regional Reuters. I basically had the house to myself, since Paul was off doing Reuters-type stuff all day and his photographer wife Lynsey was dodging bullets somewhere dangerous for the
New York Times
. While Lynsey was doing the work of a real journalist, embedded on assignment, I was embedded in their apartment, basking under the cool breeze of their many air-conditioning units, using their wi-fi and downright abusing their Nespresso machine. Aside from catching glimpses of Paul pounding the treadmill and eating boiled eggs in the morning, I saw little of him until after work, when he managed to extricate me from the house and, like a perfect host, deliver me straight to the five-star Aman
Hotel, courtesy of his Mahindra Scorpio and Rakesh, his personal chauffeur. There we drank cocktails and ate tapas with foreign hacks, before moving on to gin and tonics on the lawn at the Foreign Correspondents' Club.

It was a louche and lazy couple of days with little output and much navel-gazing. The only vaguely constructive thing I managed to attain was a transaction via the internet that ensured my passage home, one week from then. It was a tight deadline, but the apathy had to be shaken off, or I knew I could stay like this in Delhi for ever.

The afternoon before we were due to leave, I decided to take Abhilasha for a spin around Delhi's historic neighbourhood. I was hoping we would catch at least a glimpse of the iconic Red Fort and Jama Masjid, on a jaunt designed to scrape off some of my own residual guilt for having done absolutely nothing even vaguely interrogative in the last 48 hours. From Sundar Nagar we breezed along the avenues of Lutyens' Delhi: past the Imperial Hotel, the monumental India Gate, the labyrinthine Connaught Place. I kept on due north, to around New Delhi train station, where the old city mingled with the new. Here, the roads started to narrow and the traffic began to crowd in on itself. I kept going in the direction of Old Delhi Railway Station, spurred on by Delilah who seemed determined to get us there via only the most densely crowded streets possible. It was goodbye Lutyens' Delhi, hello again traffic anarchy.

However much the Commonwealth Games Committee had spent sprucing up Delhi's roads, it appeared that its plans had not quite reached the limits of the Old City. Perhaps it hoped that as long as officials and athletes kept south of Connaught Place, they'd go home with the impression that India's traffic myth was merely malicious propaganda spread by competing-venue cities. Turning into Chandni Chowk, the one-time stylish main street of the Mughal Empire, we were met with an operetta
of engines, horns and human bellows set against a collage of shop signs, adverts and lights, all woven together by the tangled mess of overhead electricity lines. I was in no doubt that the usual Indian road rules were back in play.

Afternoon was turning to evening as the rush-hour traffic chugged along, interspersed at every available opportunity by people wading their way through the slow-moving stream, carefully balanced sacks bobbing above the car roofs, women lugging shopping bags or holding their children aloft out of the way of the unpredictable wheels. Pumping the clutch while crawling forward, I figured our drive-by sightseeing plans might need to go on hold. Delilah, however, seemed to have a different idea, and like the wazzock I am, I followed her traffic-dodging directions down a small alley that after a few metres thinned to about a foot from the tip of each of my wing mirrors.

After grappling to get some kind of sheepish hold on the crowd-plough technique, I continued driving Abhilasha through the market for what felt like a lifetime. We wormed our way along the entire 200 m stretch of very crowded road until finally, just when the end and a much larger intersecting street was in sight, I got a sharp rap on my windscreen from a stick-wielding policeman. I reluctantly wound down my window, and for a moment considered handing over Delilah as a goodwill bribe in a gesture that would also conveniently rid me once and for all of her pestilent poppycock suggestions. The policeman frowned when he saw my face. I'm not sure whom he had been expecting, but they certainly didn't match my description. His hesitation was my hot iron.

‘Officer?' I squeaked, mouse-like and vulnerable.

‘This road,' he boomed, quickly coming to his senses and pointing at where I had just come from, ‘is cars not permitted!'

I looked behind me at the heaving crowd with exaggerated surprise.

‘Oh really?' I blurted, trying to sound casual. ‘I must have missed the sign.'

He was a big bloke with a moustache you could fit on a large broom and a pockmarked face that looked like he'd been in the firing line of a squadron of peashooters. He didn't come across as one for my usual mind tricks, so I tried another tack.

‘I'm so very sorry,' I pleaded. ‘I'm very, very lost. And my GPS is not working.' It was a brief sob story, bereft of drama or much cause for compassion, but ingrained with the vital element of the transferral of blame onto an inanimate object that made it almost impossible for the cop to get any angrier with me. He crumpled his forehead and wearily waved me on, eying me dubiously until I was out of sight.

Back on the roomy highways of South Delhi, we returned to speed, bombing past the signs to Defence Colony, which I imagined as a neighbourhood fortified with cannons and nuclear warheads and marksmen stationed around the encircling ramparts. But we didn't get that far: just past the Jangpura metro station, Abhilasha started to shiver, then shake, then enormously shudder with a force that was more than mere fallout from her snowplough experience in the old city. Struggling to keep the wheel straight, I pulled onto a slip road and cut her engine, fearing the worst. The source of the problem was not hard to detect: her left rear tyre was deflated and spread flat under the weight of the car.