Never Mind the Bullocks (6 page)

Russell had already made no secret of the fact he disapproved of my quest. ‘I think you're mad,' he said in his customary deadpan tone. ‘Why would you want to drive around India in that ridiculous car?' He followed up his admonitions with gloomy forecasts like ‘It'll take you a month to leave Mumbai' and, more bluntly, ‘You'll probably die, you know that, right?'

In all the years I've known Russell, a second-generation Indian and dyed-in-the-wool Londoner, he's shown very little enthusiasm for exploring his ancestral lands beyond the vacations at his family villa in Nagaon, and has admitted to never having so much as touched the wheel of a car in India for fear of an instant meltdown.

‘Don't worry about the road name,' he advised me over the phone as I sat in thick traffic on Mumbai's Eastern Expressway, headed towards the six-lane Vashi Bridge crossing Thane Creek, the massive inland harbour that defines the eastern edge of
Greater Mumbai. ‘Just get to Nagaon. I'll meet you somewhere on the road.'

I knew from the start that navigation would be an issue. Before leaving London, I had procured a £5.99 map of India that I packed in with my other indispensable navigational aids: an outdated edition of
Lonely Planet India
and a copy of a book called
Beginner's Hindi
. I casually figured that in any eventuality this triumvirate of travel tools couldn't help me with, the gods would surely intervene. I had opened up the map for the first time at Akhil's place, my second attempt to do so after I had wrestled with and loudly ripped the display copy in London when trying to sneak a not-so-subtle peek at its scale. And what I slowly began to realize as I studied the great triangular outline of the Indian subcontinent on my hands and knees was that this document might serve me better as emergency loo roll than as any useful implement for planning a road trip. Flapping under the sheer size of the map in a corner of Stanfords, I'd been convinced it was big enough to show every junction, pothole and chai stall from Kashmir to Kerala. But straining my eyes to see the little dot that was Mumbai and the thick, snaky road that emanated to its right and headed a whole centimetre over to Pune, I became aware that this was simply not going to fly.

Maps, schmaps; if I was driving a vehicle of the new millennium, I needed the navigational technology to match. I needed a GPS. The next day, I called Akhil's assistant Prasad for guidance on the best place to buy one. He answered (and I'm sure he was stifling a laugh here) that there was no such thing in India. The country was so vast and the roads so numerous and often, well, unofficial, that there would be no possible way to catalogue them successfully. ‘Most roads don't even have names,' he informed me cheerily. ‘Don't waste your time with this.'

I might well have taken Prasad's word for it, but I was bent on doing as much damage limitation as possible. The few hours I had spent holding my breath as I drove around the city with Puran had shown me just how much of my attention would need to go to the basic act of driving; I suspected there was no way I could concede even an ounce of concentration to unfolding and squinting at maps while at the wheel. This hunch, coupled with the overarching concern that I might not even be able to find my way out of Mumbai, let alone all the way around India and back again, convinced me to disregard Prasad's advice completely and head to a Croma electronics store – India's answer to Best Buy – in a search for nothing short of a miracle.

And indeed, the marvel showed itself in the form of a Mio Moov 200 Satellite Navigation unit. I was overcome.

‘Really? And it, umm, works?' I asked Sunil, the smiling, badge-wearing shop assistant who was holding the blessed item up before my disbelieving eyes.

‘Yes, ma'am. Perfectly. I will demonstrate.' He jabbed his finger at the screen. Within a minute he had me going 1,200 km to the Taj Mahal and arriving by the following evening. I was sold. Sunil packed the gadget back into the box and waved a cable at me.

‘In-car charging,' he beamed with pride.

Half an hour later, from the darkness of the subterranean car park of Mumbai's Phoenix Mills shopping centre, I let out the long, despairing cry of consumer dreams cruelly dashed against the rocks of impracticality. The Nano had no charging outlet: no cigarette lighter, nowhere to plug in the damn GPS. Again, I refused to accept defeat and began to tug at two circular plastic discs down by the gear stick, which, due to their size and positioning, looked like prime candidates for a slyly concealed charging port. However,
the discs failed to budge and I lost a portion of a fingernail in the process.

Injured digit hanging limply in mouth, I consoled myself with the wall-plug power charger that also came with the GPS. With languid optimism I mused that the Mio Moov would have at least three or maybe even four hours of life at full charge. With diligent use of battery power and assiduous advance route planning, we'd make it around the country with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine. What could possibly go wrong?

‘Roger, Russ. Nagaon. I'll just feed that into the GPS.'

I reached over to the Mio Moov – which I had suctioned onto a small triangular section of window to my right – and punched in N-A-G-A-O-N. The Moov mulled over a little egg timer for several seconds before triumphantly presenting me with a result: Nagaon was 2,800 km away with an estimated journey time of 40 hours.

Huh? No, not Nagaon, Assam, you fool, I need Nagaon, Maharashtra. I tried again, with no joy. It seemed the only Nagaon in India the Moov wished to sanction was up in the hills somewhere near Bhutan. So I tried the next largest town, Alibag, and was relieved that it came up with the correct distance and a projected arrival time of 8 pm.

Surely not. Six blimming hours to cover just over 100 km? Impossible. That would mean an average speed of around 17 kmph. There had to be a mistake. I jabbed at the settings options on the Moov; clearly it had been preprogrammed for Sunday afternoon strolling speed and not highway driving. But there was nothing I could do to correct the estimate, and looking at my watch I got the sinking feeling that there might be an element of truth to the Moov's preposterous assertion: it had
already been an hour and a half since I had left Akhil's place to embark on the Great Journey Around India and we'd barely clocked up 20 km. Not quite the cork-popping, flag-waving parade I had envisioned; the scene that surrounded us on the northbound NH3 more closely resembled a biblical exodus ground to a standstill.

We were crammed into a tiny gap between a gleaming white space-age Ashok Leyland coach with tinted windows and an Acer truck loaded with cement bags. As I grumpily prodded the Moov's screen for a way out of this unholy jam – a secret road leading from Mumbai, perhaps, that no one else knew – I noticed that Abhilasha and I had become a source of breathless mirth for a group of schoolchildren literally overflowing from the back of a Tempo shoehorned into a crack in the traffic ahead of me. The kids, pre-teen and dressed in baby-blue uniforms – the boys lanky with home-cut crops, the girls with white-ribboned pigtails – were gesturing eagerly at the Nano and shouting out its duosyllabic name again and again till I thought they might go hoarse. Smiles were shot out through the windscreen at me as they waved their hands with glee and brought them to up to their foreheads. ‘Hello madam! Madam! Madam! Hello madam! Nano, madam, Nano! Na-no, na-no-na-no-na-no! Hello madam! Nano!' And then squeals – deep-throated howls – of laughter.

Feeling like a chimp at London Zoo, I awkwardly raised my right hand in a salutary gesture. I smiled, flattered by the children's attention and pleased finally to be garnering some enthusiasm, albeit inadvertently. But as the spectacle continued and I realized we weren't going anywhere fast, I began to melt in the limelight. My jaw was starting to hurt from my ‘hello children' perma-grin and I began wondering exactly how long the kids could maintain so much enthusiasm for a small yellow car. I went back to fiddling with the GPS, this time with a far
sterner expression on my face that I intended to resemble exaggerated concentration. But the children failed to interpret my facial ‘do not disturb' sign and continued to shake and quiver in the direction of the Nano. We were rock stars, celebrities, VIPs stuck in a traffic jam on the road to nowhere.

A horn parped from behind and a motorbike appeared in my side mirror, squeezing itself through the space between the Nano and the Ashok Leyland. Ten tiny fingers and then a larger pair of hands walked their way across Abhilasha's back window, steadying the bike that was already wobbling under its hefty load. From what I could see, the vehicle was being steered by a five-year-old girl with braided pigtails. She was gripping the handlebars from between the legs of her father, who was deeply involved in some kind of transaction via his cell phone. Behind him sat a woman, presumably his wife, who was holding to her chest a baby, recognizable as such only by the appearance of a set of minute toes that peeked from under a blanket. The woman was wearing a pink and yellow sari that flapped around her and beat against the number-plate, while the tail end of the fabric danced teeth-clenchingly close to the spokes of the back wheel. She was sitting sidesaddle with a look of nonchalance more appropriate to the resigned boredom of a doctor's waiting room than to moving among large vehicles along a main road with nothing to hold on to. The hands that should have been clutching her husband or a pillion bar were instead occupied with clinging onto her newborn child with the kind of relaxed composure I could only replicate embedded in an armchair, sleepily thumbing a remote control. They were like a campaign family for suicidal bike riding. As they wobbled past Abhilasha, they took a swift right in front of the Ashok Leyland and scooted off into the distance, joining the flow of two-wheelers hurtling past the disgruntled vehicles that were ground to a halt on the NH3.

As I watched the motorcycle disappear, I moved Abhilasha forward another few centimetres and began to wonder whether manning up and getting my hands on an Enfield would have been a better idea after all. How much time was I destined to lose sitting in congestion like this over the next few months? Still, after a quick chew over some simple statistics, I figured it was worth the wait: more people die on motorbikes than on any other form of transport in India, including all car, bicycle and rickshaw deaths combined.
¹¹
It was a damn dangerous form of transport made all the more menacing by the acrobatics of those intent on using it as their family vehicle.

According to legend, it was this very image of an overloaded motorbike making its way through a city jam that sowed the seed of the Nano in the mind of Ratan Tata, who originally conceived of the car one day back in 2001 while idling through Bangalore traffic. His revelation was that motorbike accidents could be considerably reduced if the vehicles were not used for gravity-defying configurations of humans, children, animals, furniture, farm produce and building materials. However, the financial gap between an affordable motorbike and the cheapest available car was huge, and it occurred to Tata that there was a niche in the market for something in between: a cheap car that was only a bit more expensive than a motorbike, but that could safely accommodate whole families without the danger of losing a child to a sharp bend in the road, or of Mum being garrotted by her sari. This was the story that would be quoted again and again in accounts of the Nano's legendary rise, that of a socially responsible answer to a straightforward and very urgent need.

It's a heart-warming tale, and from all the accounts I had read of Tata's various philanthropic projects, I had no doubt the fellow had people's best interests at heart. However, being
a rather astute businessman, there was no way he wouldn't have snuck at least a little peek at the figures before committing to a project that finally required an investment of Rs 1,800 crore ($320 million).

As in most Asian countries, motorbikes have a huge market share in India: something like three-quarters of all vehicles on the road are a motorized two-wheeler (which would also of course explain the hideously inflated death rate). Cars, on the other hand, account for only about 13% of India's vehicles.
¹²
What with the country's fast-expanding economy hitching up standards of living and providing hundreds of thousands of families who had previously lived hand to mouth with disposable income, the future looked bright for the car market, especially if those cars were priced just a smidgen higher than a good motorbike. In order to start making profits on the huge investment in the Nano, economists predicted that Tata would need to sell about one million cars. And if he was aiming to nick some of his customers from the two-wheeler segment, he'd need about 10% of them to reach his targets. It was a gamble, but it appeared to be a pretty good one. With the economy up in India, and with more and more people emerging with the financial resources to realize their aspirations, one of the first places I imagined they'd go would be straight to the car dealership.