Never Mind the Bullocks

by Vanessa Able

  It wasn’t all bad, though: Abhilasha and I had reached Pune by what is generally thought of as the best road in India. The Yashwantrao Chavan Expressway (named after the first chief minister of Maharashtra and former deputy prime minister) is a six-lane motorway with all the trimmings I’d expect of any major artery in the world: toll booths, refreshment stops, fast and slow lanes, a smooth surface, and even a neatly manicured median. The first part of our cruise to Pune passed with little incident, feeling fairly uneventful after the previous day’s assault course to Nagaon. For a brief moment, I almost found myself yearning for a rebound into the rush of chaos and I noticed the adventurer–blogger in me had deflated a little. What if all roads in India were more like this and less like the NH66 down to Alibag? What would I have to write about in my blog if driving around India only involved cruising on tranquil expressways and stopping for the odd sandwich or Styrofoam cup of chai?

  No sooner had I had that unsavoury thought than fate saw fit to throw subject matter at me in the form of an obstacle. I had been overtaking a truck in the fast lane, accumulating speed on a temporarily flat stretch of road that marked a break between hills. Notching up the revs, I was parallel to the truck’s front mirror when I became vaguely aware of what looked like an object in the fast lane – our lane – up ahead. At first, I didn’t believe my eyes, thinking it was a mirage, but when it was still there another split second and twenty metres later, I concluded there was something in the road that Abhilasha and I were hurtling towards at high velocity. Immediate action was required. Swerving was not an option, as the truck I was overtaking was right beside me to my left, so I hit the brakes, hard. In the same moment as the truck passed me, I hauled the wheel to the left and got into the lane behind him, missing the thing ahead of me by inches.

  ‘Holy mother of god!’ I managed to spit out after the initial shock of what had just occurred sank into my rational brain. That had been extremely and most unacceptably close: hitting a large, stationary object at 80 kmph would certainly have ended in tears. And probably blood and mangled yellow metal. But we were alive and well, and as my heart regained a steady beat and the gut gremlins returned to their lair, images of the thing flashed back. I had initially perceived it from a distance as a large, rectangular piece of metal, and had assumed it was debris, perhaps something that had fallen off the back of a lorry or a garbage truck and missed by the highway maintenance crew. But on getting a better look as I screeched past, tyres burning a rubber stench into the tarmac, I realized it was in fact a sign. And not only was it a sign, it was also a sign that had been very carefully and deliberately placed in the fast lane of an expressway. And, to pop the glacé cherry atop the whipped cream tower of irony, the sign read ‘Go Slow’.

  I laughed out loud: I had nearly been killed by a road sign that had been put there in earnest to try to save my life. A few dozen metres down the road, a group of workers were digging up something on the central reservation, and I deduced that the sign had been put there for their benefit, most likely by their own hands. Though the well-meaning nature of their misguided intentions was plain to see, I nevertheless embarked on a ten-minute cathartic monologue, lecturing the men on why using traffic cones to gradually reduce and close off a lane was accepted and expedient practice around the world.

  The expressway incident hardened my conviction that my arrival in Pune, Maharashtra’s second-largest city lying 150 km east of Mumbai, hadn’t come a moment too soon. I had made the decision to swing by there instead of heading straight south to Goa on the advice of a friend back home who suggested I visit the Osho International Meditation Resort. Aside from the draw of its name, which appealed to me on account of the shades of a holiday spot implied by the word ‘resort’, I was also curious about the reputation of the ashram’s founder, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho. Rajneesh, who shuffled off this mortal coil back in 1990, was more contentious than your average guru, and is popularly painted as something of a spiritual scoundrel, loved by many but also widely criticized. What interested me about Osho and his methods at this particular point in my personal development was his espousal of the principle of self-inflicted, controlled madness as an antidote to the greater lunacy of the world at large, and his concept that the key to true learning lay in the principle of unlearning our current conditioning.

  After my brush with death by solicitude on the Yashwantrao Chavan, and the subsequent hullaballoo of Pune’s suburban traffic, it occurred to me that Osho might be just the man to help: in order to survive (and avoid a nervous breakdown), I might need to let go and revise everything I thought I knew about driving.

  ‘There are those to whom one must advise madness,’ wrote French thinker Joseph Joubert in the nineteenth century; at that moment, while coming off the NH4 into the centre of Pune, competing with a bullock cart for a right-turning opportunity, I knew I had to be reconditioned. I was the square peg and India’s roads were the round hole: I needed to take some sandpaper to my edges. For that, I decided to try the high road to psycho-spiritual liberation. It was time to hit an ashram where I could happily convene with my inner loon and prep myself for the next three months of driving like a bonkers bat fresh out of the belfry.

  As soon as I arrived at the resort, a woman at the reception desk corrected my use of the term ‘ashram’ with indignation that might have been excessive had I suggested the place was a whorehouse. This was not an ashram, she said, but a meditation resort. I wasn’t really sure of the difference until I picked up the accommodation brochure and learned that rooms there cost about five times more than at the hotel next door. With a swimming pool, tennis courts, a choice of vegetarian restaurants and a vague reputation for a bit of how’s your father, this place was putting the Club Med back into meditation. Or was it trying to shoe-horn a bit of meditation into Club Med?

  Even before I set foot past the entrance gate, I was interrogated as to my motives for coming to the resort, charged a hefty enrolment fee and subjected to a mandatory HIV test. This was followed by a trip to the boutique to buy compulsory maroon and white robes, without which I would not be permitted to enter the grounds. Once inside, I had to fight the urge to spend the whole day working on my tan by the side of the pool. A subsequent thirty-minute conversation with an inebriated Dane who cornered me with a blow-by-blow account of a gory bomb blast he’d witnessed at a nearby bakery a few days earlier was the motivation I’d been missing to remind me of the psychic deconstruction I was here for.

  I consulted the resort timetable: there was a Kundalini session coming up that would involve some free dance (mortified at the prospect, I was nevertheless keen to try, figuring I’d be breaking down my conditioning by the truckload) followed by something mysterious called the ‘Night Meeting’. Both sessions took place in a large auditorium at the heart of a giant black marble pyramid and involved working through a cycle of various forms of Osho-approved techniques: from dancing as if someone had slipped an Ecstasy pill into our veggie burgers, to playing musical statues, lying dead on the floor and running around blindfolded, screaming gibberish at high volume. The latter appealed to me the most on the grounds that it was theoretically a lot like driving, and as hard as it was to do, I decided to give it a really good go.

  ‘Grarrrlllllaarrlllll!’ I roared, waving my hands frantically in the air in an attempt to awaken my inner Tasmanian Devil and have him kick up a dust storm through the rose garden of my more English inhibitions. Feeling an utter fool, I paused for a moment to catch my breath and peek through my blindfold. My fellow internees were hopping around like deranged cats, dressed in the same long maroon robes and screaming guttural nonsense. Reminiscent of a high-security nuthouse, the scene was terrifying to behold, and I was part of it. I replaced my blindfold and decided that in this case, watching the madness was more maddening than participating in it. There was nothing else for it but to jump high in the air and let out another deafening ‘Ggggrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaalll!’

  When the evening dancing started, the audi
torium transformed. About 200 or so people, all clad in regulation white evening robes, started boogying around the hall to the repetitive strain of what sounded like a cheerful Cossack ditty mixed with a 1970s cop-show theme. The room began to resemble a cross between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a Goa trance party. Gathered there were people of all ages and nationalities, and every single one appeared to be thoroughly absorbed in his or her personal dance, eyes closed and arms swinging. Their sheer number was a blessing. I could lose myself in this sea of groovers, and after a few minutes I started to feel like I was at a nightclub. I closed my eyes and let my body do what it would in time to the jaunty melodies emanating from the band. Every so often there would be a sudden break in the music and the revellers would stop mid-routine, shout ‘Osho!’ at the top of their lungs, and then continue their dance. Not really sure why we were doing it, I nonetheless joined in, feeling my embarrassment dissipate with every minute.

  Eventually, we were able to invoke him. Sweaty and danced out, when the music stopped, everybody in the hall plopped down on the floor and the man himself made an appearance, projected from beyond the grave onto a giant video screen at the front of the auditorium. Wearing a blue gown with Dynasty-style shoulder pads and his trademark beanie, Osho spoke slowly and precisely to the camera from somewhere in what I guess must have been the mid-1980s.

  His talk impressed me. He appeared to have a focused air and a wicked sense of humour. He told a really long joke about Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, and I laughed out loud, as did everyone else. But when I stopped laughing, they continued. A couple of minutes passed and they were still laughing, some of them rolling around on their backs, thumping the floor in breathless mirth. Five minutes turned to ten and finally the giggles died down and transformed into something even more disturbing: gobbledegook. Hundreds of voices jabbered in unison; the sounds they made were incomprehensible, noises rising from the subconscious, but somehow they came together in a deranged harmony. It was a bit like the gibberish session, but more controlled, and with the blindfolds off.

  Feeling like a daunted private among an army of demented chimps, I let my underlying fool flow out through my mouth and gave voice to all manner of nonsense. I babbled, gabbled, yabbered and yammered until I was almost drooling down my white dress. Osho thought it was necessary to walk through the fires of insanity to decompress the tensions of social living, to liberate one’s soul from the frameset of rules, and I was beginning to see his point.

  When I left the resort two days later, I returned to the Indian roads with a fresh outlook. I knew I had to adjust my attitude: just like in the auditorium, there was no sense in standing apart from the madness, as that only made everything seem more demented. The only way to deal with it was by gagging my inner traffic cop and entering into the fray, horns a-blazing, brakes a-braking, engine a-revving – or, at least, that was the plan.

  RULE OF THE ROAD #2

  Pukka Protocol

  When two Indians meet as strangers, I read in an essay by Indian author Pavan K. Varma, the encounter is often a duel to ascertain the aukaat of the other.

  Emerging wet-handed from a gas station toilet cubicle where I’d walked in on a mortified attendant taking a shower, I found Abhilasha stationed in a bumper-to-bumper standoff with a Maruti Zen. The Zen’s owner, a prim-looking, mustachioed gent with henna-tinted hair and a shirt that looked as though it had spent the night pressed between two giant spring-fresh anvils, was pacing cautiously around the car, taking in her every detail. As I approached him, he shifted his gaze over to me and treated my crumpled cotton salwar kameez with the same level of critical scrutiny. Mr Fiery Redhead was apparently departing from the usual tradition of gushing sycophantic Nano-philia, possibly on account of his decision to splash out an extra couple of grand on The Other Compact Car, and was pulling no punches in checking us out. The duel had clearly begun.

  ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he greeted me, his shoulders back, his lips tight.

  ‘Hello there,’ I responded, feeling my own eyes cast a damning glare in the direction of the Maruti, which was firing belligerent daggers into Abhilasha’s headlights.

  ‘What is your good name?’ he enquired stiffly, as though it pained him to betray any hint of civility in my direction.

  I told him and volleyed the question back at him.

  He responded with a cascade of syllables that contained in them somewhere ‘indra’, ‘giri’, ‘dhar’ and ‘doctor’, among a torrent of other sounds that oozed authority.

  Something was definitely going on here, I thought. We were walking circles around each other like two dogs going for the scrotum sniff. What did the doctor want from me?

  ‘Did you buy this car in Mumbai?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much did you pay?’

  ‘Two lakh four.’

  His eyes widened and I saw a brief glint of victory flash through his retina. ‘But this is the one-lakh car.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I sighed, ‘but this one is the top model. It has air conditioning and, um, electric windows.’ I was still at pains myself to figure out quite how these features doubled the vehicle’s price.

  ‘What is your fuel efficiency?’

  ‘About 19 kilometres to the litre.’

  ‘Oh, very good.’

  The doctor fell silent. I felt obliged to continue the conversation. ‘So are you, uh, planning on buying one?’

  The doc shook his head. ‘Oh no, I would never buy this car.’

  Hang on. What was going on here? Was I in the company of a hater?

  ‘If you have one or two lakhs to spend on a car, then you can buy a second-hand Maruti Zen, or Tata Indica. It is much more reliable than a Nano.’

  I rose up like an owner scorned. ‘But I’ve driven all the way from Mumbai in this car and I’ve had no problems whatsoever.’

  ‘Maybe you have had no problems yet,’ the man said, giving Abhilasha’s back tyre a light kick with his polished chestnut-brown loafer, ‘but maybe the next few thousand kilometres will not be so lucky for you.’

  It was a point against which I couldn’t really argue, irritated as I was at the fact his foot had just made contact with Abhilasha’s wheel, a gesture that was as good as an all-out declaration of war.

  ‘I am employed with the civil service,’ the man said, thumbing his chest and moving his hand over to the right to finger the gold pen sticking out from his shirt pocket from behind a folded handkerchief. ‘It is not appropriate for me to drive this Nano. It is seen as a poor man’s car.’

  His road aukaat firmly established, my red-headed friend returned to the superior fold of his Maruti and left me standing, shamed and bewildered, in his dust.

  ‘The mentality of a stratified society is very much in evidence in everyday life,’ wrote Varma.16 I presumed he was writing about India’s hierarchical caste system, which had been around for millennia and was still very much in force. I went on to read that the phenomenon of aukaat, which roughly translates as ‘status’, adds another dimension to Indian society’s complex layering. As I watched the doctor pull out of the petrol station, I wondered whether his attitude was representative of the upwardly mobile middle class as a whole. Who wants to be seen driving the cheapest car on the market if you’re trying to show yourself as being on the up? The Nano had proved popular with the kids of the established upper-middle class who loved its quirky design and were buying it as an addition to the existing family fleet of Beemers and Audis. But for families just entering the world of purchasing power, was it really an attractive idea to spend their precious savings on a car with unwarranted long-term prospects? And all practical considerations aside, there was also the bottom line so eloquently expressed by my civil servant friend: Who wants to be seen driving a poor man’s car? I certainly didn’t mind, but I was from another world.

  As we pulled back onto the highway, a triad of menacing black SUVs whizzed past us in a dust cloud that left me giddy from the Doppler effect
. Abhilasha shimmied slightly to the left in their wake. I sighed: two aukaat-fuelled drubbings in the space of five minutes. The Nano might be one of India’s new industrial darlings, but when it came to the pecking order of the road, she had to take her place among the hierarchy that was dictated by one simple rule: size.

  If a person has to be asked what their aukaat is, the question is already an insult. Varma’s cautionary pointer might be perplexing if applied to social situations by a foreigner and an outsider like myself, but when I looked at his principle through the prism of highway etiquette, it was a no-brainer. On the roads it was clear who was boss: bulk and velocity ruled. If the oncoming vehicle was bigger than me, I relented; if it was smaller, I cut it up. It was that easy.

  At the top of the highway power pyramid were the lumbering lorries, the articulated kind that measured about ten times the length of the Nano and moved at a majestic snail’s pace, scattering all terrified objects from their path with their formidable horns that could probably be heard from space.

  On the next rung down were the smaller trucks, coaches and buses. They did have a slight speed advantage over the giant lorries in that they were often driven by boy racers who handled their bulky, aging torsos as though they were featherweight Ferraris with spruced-up horns designed to present a more intimidating impression. Trucks and buses were followed by SUVs and cars, which contained many of their own subcategories, but it goes without saying that the humble low-cost Nano pretty much bookended the spectrum with the likes of a Porsche Cayenne Turbo at the other extreme (the one-lakh car versus the one-crore17 car). Within that hundredfold price difference lay all the other Tatas, Toyotas, Mahindras and Marutis.