Never Mind the Bullocks (36 page)

Thor and I returned to India to get married. The date of our wedding was almost two years to the day since I had bought Abhilasha and conceived of the madcap notion of driving 10,000 km around the country. Prior to meeting Thor, I had never seriously entertained the prospect of marriage, and so my reaction in the face of his proposal (I cried solidly for two hours between bouts of trying to convince him I was shedding tears of joy) came as something of a shock to us both. It was an unequivocal yes, made all the more emotive by the speed at which our circumstances had turned around. Two years might be a long courtship by some standards, but in my own contemporary world of long engagements and perennial relationships that segued into parenthood long before vows were even verbalized, it was a shotgun wedding.

We had decided our union would best be sealed in Chennai, at Thor's ashram, under the authority and with the blessing of Mr Rajagopalachari. We emerged early one January morning to join no fewer than ten other couples who were all tying the knot the same day, and together we sat at the front of a large
auditorium filled with the friends and families of the other newlyweds, who numbered in their merry thousands. One by one, the couples were called up onto the stage, where they were festooned with heavy garlands of flowers and given large boxes of sweets to hand out to the exuberant crowd. Our number came up last and Thor got up and strode towards the stage, while I waddled behind him, tripping over the hem of my inexpertly arranged sari and jingling from my hennaed wrists and ankles like the village cow. Our vows were said for us at lightning speed and Chariji held our hands together while we exchanged rings to seal the deal.

After the ceremony we were set upon by hordes of well- wishers – mostly complete strangers – as we basked in grinning post-nuptial delirium, sweating under the weight of the pounds of roses hung around our necks and taking pictures with people we'd never met before whose families had adopted us in a brief moment of wedlock rapture. The Marceaus held a party for us that night in their garden, complete with disco lights and a Franco-Indian soundtrack that was everything I would never have imagined, but had me dancing in my sari till I thought I'd collapse.

The next day, we rode off in Abhilasha. Hénoc had bought her from us before we left Pondicherry and now gave us back the keys for a honeymoon burn. A faint rattle from her undercarriage provided the traditional newlywed tins-and-cans ditty as we waved off the Marceaus and their mini-zoo and set out on Highway 55 towards the sea and the beautiful East Coast Road.

Abhilasha's AC had been fixed and she was in fair fettle, given the number of miles she now had to her name. Her shiny yellow surface was clean, but only I knew that behind her wheels and compounded into her nooks and crannies were the remnants of thousands of miles of road: the black fumes from the hallucinogenic lorries, the particles of dirt we threw up every
time we flew over a speed bump or dipped into a pothole, the smut of the evening bonfires or the dust that hovered in the air above the scorching earth. It was the same sooty blanket that hung over the shoulders of all the itinerants we had passed: the rickies and truckies, the bus drivers and motorcyclists, the suited professionals driving their clientele in black cars with tinted windows, the cart pushers, the boy racers, the cyclists and the walkers; the guys at the pumps and the roadworks crews, the diggers, dumpers and layers; the farmers, the cattle herders, the quick sly dogs, the impervious camels and heavy-footed elephants, the shepherd boys with their armies of goats and the women hiking home at dusk with cloth-bound stacks of firewood balancing on their heads; the yelling kids, the chorus of hellos, the traffic light hawkers and the people sleeping, eating and praying by the sides of motorways; the crowded towns and the placid villages, the cities under construction and the locked-up gates of the bubble communities; the vast ocean beaches and the starry skies, the wide-open fields and the flat and arid landscapes, the mountains that were monumental and lush and the rivers that ran rugged brown, foamy and fertile, or just plain dry. Everything and everyone was flecked with the identical road dirt, and the splattered forms of dead insects and bird poo that now covered Abhilasha and undeniably me and my husband too, and the great big, lumbering bullocks.

Some bonds are hard to break, others are locked in a pattern of eternal return. In the autumn of 2013, I regained official custody of Abhilasha from Hénoc Marceau, who was having trouble selling her following his decision to move back to France. At around the same time I was by chance due to return to India for a month-long publicity tour; it seemed to me that the stars were aligning and that this was a sign from the cosmos that Abhilasha and I were due an encore.

We were reunited at 6 am in a parking lot in Andheri West, a suburb of Mumbai just a few miles from the airport. Thor and I had just landed there a couple of hours earlier, and were still drowsy from the flight. Hénoc's friend who had been looking after Abhilasha had broken his leg in a car accident a few days earlier. He'd had Abhilasha's keys in his pocket at the time and now they were bent out of shape.

But they still worked. As the Nano rattled into life, I was assailed by a sense of amazement at the 10,000 kilometres I'd attempted in this little car that, after the bulked-out 1993 Audi Cabriolet I'd been driving in Rome for the past two years, felt more like a mobile jerrycan. Abhilasha's Frisbee-sized wheel was very heavy to steer, her gearstick seemed stiff and her brakes were incredibly sensitive.

We spent several nostalgic days together driving around Mumbai and, as soon as I got used to the traffic again, we were back on our old form, weaving in and out of jams, honking for all we were worth and rather ignominiously running out of petrol in the full flow of evening rush hour by the Flora Fountain.

My departure loomed and still I couldn't bring myself to think about selling Abhilasha again. I toyed with other options: the most appealing was to palm her off on one of my friends or acquaintances in the city who'd take temporary custody of her, but (understandably?) none was biting. A man I met at the British Council offered to raffle her off at his office Christmas party, but that plan also eventually fell through. Up to the evening before my departure I was in a sustained state of denial about where I could leave Abhilasha (the airport car park seemed as good a last resort as any), when the day was saved by a photographer friend of a friend who happened to have a spare parking space at his apartment in Bandra, Mumbai's hipster neighborhood of the north.

I dropped the Nano off at her new home just hours before my flight and was pleased to see that this particular part of Mumbai, right next to the sea and with the quiet air of a fishing village, was possibly one of the nicest parts of the city I had seen to date. Sea air corrosion notwithstanding, Abhilasha was in a beautiful spot and in good hands.

She now spends her days bombing around Mumbai on photography assignments. I draw comfort from the knowledge that she's being put to good use, that she's there for me should the need ever arise, and that our partnership is sealed until the day I'm made an offer I can't refuse.

1.
Back in 1994, this was an easily forgeable folded pink slip with a glued-on passport picture, stuffed into a plastic sheath. My only form of portable ID for many years, it got me duly laughed out of pubs and clubs the world over, and flatly denied entry into some of the more pedantic drinking venues in the US.

2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/asia/08ihtroads.html?pagewanted=all

3.
This was the figure in 2009. The number of road deaths in 2011 jumped to over 140,000.
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-08/india/32123122_1_road-accidents-road-fatalities-road-deaths

4.
WHO Global Status Report on Road Safety
, 2009.

5.
http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/Tata-Nano

6.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/01/09/how-green-is-a-mini.html

7.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/worlds-cheapest-car-boon-or-bane/

8.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ratan-tata-will-be-a-hero-if-he-made-a-bus-like-nano/56973-11.html

9.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sunita-narainisright-right/353011/

10.
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-20/mumbai/31373302_1_lifeline-poles-accidents

11.
Indian National Crime Records Bureau.

12.
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, 2011.

13.
World Bank.

14.
I later discovered that five vehicles per kilometre of road is a national average made from wildly disparate statistics. In fact, the number of vehicles per kilometre of road in
Mumbai stands at 674.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Mumbai/Mumbai-has-674-vehicles-for-every-km-of-road/Article1-829604.aspx

15.
My Mumbais and Bombays were in a perpetual muddle; and not just here, but in every city that had recently changed its name in India. What I realized was that within the cities, opinion was split as to which name to use, and so a mixture of both appeared to be the norm. Hence, Bangalore can be Bengaluru, Madras can be Chennai and Calcutta can be Kolkata, depending on your (or my) mood and/or political inclination.

16.
Pavan K. Varma,
Being Indian
, Penguin India, 2005.

17.
One crore = a hundred lakhs or 10,000,000.

18.
Though not cows. I was beginning to understand that cows were a whole different story, exempted from the directives on account of their divine standing.

19.
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-14/ahmedabad/28122955_1_inter-state-gang-gang-of-highway-robbers-gang-members

20.
A popular clothing and fabric chain.

21.
Persons of Indian Origin.

22.
I'm not counting the rather outlandish and clearly erroneous results for Dadra and Nagar Haveli, a Union Territory squished between Maharashtra and Gujarat whose death rate is 100% based on a reported 45 accidents in all 45 of the state's registered cars that resulted in 45 fatalities, or the Lakshadweep Islands' 200% based on a single accident in 2009 that killed two people.

23.
It could also mean quite simply that Malayalis are more diligent in reporting minor accidents to the police.

24.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-11/india-to-pay-for-highways-for-first-time-in-14-years-freight

25.
http://washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-MBQ2AW0D9L3501-03KFPD9FO6DULNCQ08IA3IP0CI
.

26.
In my defence, the light was a superfluous item placed in an inconspicuous (I could almost say hidden) spot along a one-way, intersection-less road that had no discernible reason to require traffic to stop at that particular point. I sensed a crafty fundraising drive on the part of Chennai's traffic department.

27.
He is now India's Prime Minister.

28.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/55427.stm

29.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080111/jsp/nation/story_8769282.jsp

30.
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-05-09/inside-the-tata-nano-factorybusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice

31.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Engineering-the-Nano/articleshow/2693758.cms
?

32.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/lingerie-delayed-as-517-billion-india-jam-idles-trucks-freight.html

33.
I later found out that by ‘summer', historians in fact meant the time of year we in the West traditionally refer to as summer – that is, from June to September – and not the actual hottest time of the year on the subcontinent, which would be April and May. This means that Buddha and his buddies were escaping the incessant rains of the monsoon (for the sake of not harming any wee beasties during the course of their travels) and not the ferocious summer heat; so Buddha was infinitely more hardcore than me, as we all initially suspected.