Never Mind the Bullocks

by Vanessa Able

  The most common application was during the overtake: I learned that in India, it’s only courteous, just before passing someone – any vehicle, not just a truck – to give them a quick honk of warning. If someone is crossing lanes in front of you on a highway, a triple beep is most useful in giving them a better sense of their room to manoeuvre, while a well-timed, well-mannered parp is usually enough to gain access from an obstructive vehicle at a traffic light. Abhilasha’s humble horn also turned out to be an excellent shepherding tool when faced with herds of sheep, goats, cows and bullocks strolling over highways, or making their way down country lanes, as I discovered that even India’s ungulates were savvy to the parley of the road.

  There were many different types of horns, from drum-shattering sirens and vuvuzela-inspired rackets to novelty musical beepers and those squeezy rubber parpy things championed by The Great Gatsby. On the highways at least, a good horn really sorted the wheat from the chaff as far as mobility was concerned. The drivers of trucks and buses, for example, displayed a penchant for ear-piercing musical numbers that were loud and fearsome enough to make the earth tremble. One of those coming from behind with an alarming intensity of Doppler shift was extremely efficient at making me move, as I learned quickly that the sound would be emanating from a large and unusually speedy lorry on a suicide mission. Such vehicles were wont to drive remarkably long distances with the horn in a state of constant depression, a tactic I can’t say I didn’t admire just a tad.

  I often thought the Nano’s horn was not quite as powerful as it could have been. Later on in the trip, it even started to give off little quivers and shakes like a soprano in a bad state of training and after three chain-smoked packs of Lucky Strikes. I began to think that other drivers who couldn’t see the source of its wee hoot thought they were dealing with a two-wheeler, as that was often the amount of space they allotted for passing. Or sometimes they didn’t move at all, a flagrant defiance of my newly discovered road lexicon that invariably brought out in me what came to be known as The Spirit of Braveheart.

  The Braveheart Tactic involved emulating at least the attitude (if not the terrifying volume) of a cross between a fearless, warmongering William Wallace leading his armies into battle, and the king-of-the-road stratagem employed by the previously mentioned monster trucks who drove with their horns on perma-blare. If the vehicle ahead of us gave me so much as a few centimetres to work with, I would go postal with the blasts, shooting them out in rapid fire so the vehicle in question could know exactly what kind of psycho they were dealing with. As I passed in bloodthirsty mode, I kept the horn going all the way till the end of the overtake. If Abhilasha had a face, it would have been red by this point.

  All of this was hugely satisfying, and once I began to enjoy myself, the horn was all mine and trigger happiness set in. Old lady crossing the street ahead: ‘BEEEEEEEEPPPPPP!’ Dog sauntering happily in the fast lane of the highway: ‘BEEEEEEEPPPP!’ Cow about to lay itself at perpendicular angles to the oncoming Nano: ‘BBBBBEEEEEPPPPPPP bloody BEEEEEPPPPPPPP!!!’

  Horn please? Okay, and then some.

  6

  MISTER THOR – Girl Meets Boy

  BANGALORE; KM 1,562

  The machinations of gastro-intestinal upheaval in India are rarely worth going into. To me, puzzling over the causes of near-perpetual Delhi belly is about as useful an activity as debating the existence of beings in the metaphysical realm: whether they’re there or not, shit will invariably keep on happening. So in the same way, no matter which school of thought I subscribed to – be it the eat-anything-you-can-get-your-hands-on creed or the treat-all-food-with-high-suspicion doctrine – I always eventually ended up with an incendiary sphincter. For every several portions of street food I’d apprehensively eaten – uttering a silent prayer as I nervously ingested lunch from a dubious banana-leaf bowl – it seemed I was just as likely to be sent running to the loo after dining at an air-conditioned restaurant with tablecloths, proper menus and waiters with name badges. My best guess was the pithy excuse that I had a sensitive stomach and needed to be fed tasteless, starchy comfort food (read toast and eggs) at every available opportunity to balance out the spicy, oily fare that sustained me the rest of the time.

  It was a dietary supplication that staff at the Ashley Inn, a family-run pension in Bangalore, were happy to accommodate on my first morning. Come day two, however, after an evening at a downtown restaurant gorging on what might have been the best spiced and barbequed chicken I had ever tasted, I was a no-show, locked in my loo, my belly carping and contracting at various intervals, while I flipped mournfully through a copy of India Today to distract myself from thinking just how inappropriate a situation this was to usher a new romance into my life.

  My timing was horrible. Thor was due to reach the Ashley Inn in a few hours, possibly hoping to find me reclining seductively on the bed in my Ann Summers’ finest and a black feather boa, while the reality of our first encounter here in India was more likely to involve outings for loo roll and Immodium, me trying to disguise my intestinal noises with well-timed coughs. I brooded as I studied the foot of the bathroom door with fresh intensity. This was not quite how I imagined us igniting the flames of passion.

  The demons of uncertainty tainted with pre-date nerves slithered into the toilet bowl from out of the sewer and began to whisper again in my ear; perhaps the universe was trying to tell me that kindling a new interest was a terrible idea. Here I was, on the journey of a lifetime, in my own uninterrupted heaven of selfish existence. The last thing I needed was another person and the inevitable necessity of compromise to encroach on that hard-won and highly enjoyable space, as well as to distract me from the work at hand.

  And anyway, where was he going to sleep? Here? In the heady rush of pseudo-tentative emails exchanged about how he’d accompany me from Bangalore all the way through to Chennai (via Kanyakumari in the south and back up again; it was a roundabout route, but, both of us drunk with sexually charged romantic anticipation, we’d agreed it’d be fun), we had neglected to touch on the embarrassing practicalities of the instant intimacy that would be thrust on us, sharing a small car and numerous hotel rooms together over the coming fortnight.

  Just as I was thinking about getting in the shower, the phone rang. I waddled into the bedroom with my pants still around my ankles.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, madam, I am calling to inform you that your husband has arrived.’

  ‘My husband?’

  ‘Yes, madam, your husband,’ the woman said. ‘Mister Thor. He is on his way up to your room now.’

  ‘But, I’m not…’

  There was a knock at the door. I slammed down the phone, froze by the unmade bed and pulled my pants up to their rightful position. Seconds passed as the room spun around me and I scoured the back rooms of my creative imagination for a way of fishing this situation out of the gutter.

  Another knock.

  ‘Um, hello?’ I squeaked, despite my best attempt to deepen my voice to Dietrich-like standards of sexiness.

  ‘Hi, it’s Thor,’ came his voice, which I had to admit, despite all events conspiring to the contrary, turned some deep-set part of me to jelly.

  ‘Oh! Er, hello! You’re here,’ I grunted from the other side of the closed door.

  ‘Yes. My train got in early, would you believe? Or I screwed up the timetables. In any case, can I come in?’

  ‘Oh, of course. Of course!’ I exclaimed with a forced cheeriness that must have had him already regretting not taking the train straight to Chennai. ‘Just bear with me for a couple of minutes, will you?’

  I ran into the bathroom to try to make myself presentable in under thirty seconds, then back into the bedroom where I rummaged through a mound of dirty T-shirts and some crumpled salwar kameez I’d bought the previous day in FabIndia20 as an act of concession to local fashion, comfort and climatic necessity. As far as I was concerned, the optimal thing to wear at that moment would have been a large paper bag to c
over my body from head to foot. Instead, I settled on a conceptually similar billowy dress that concealed as much of me as possible. I blitzed the air around me with deodorant and tidied my hair into a bun. Then I took it down again; too matronly.

  Thor was in all probability reconsidering his options by the time I came round to opening the door. When I finally did, I washed over with a goosefleshy species of fairy dust at the sight of the figure who was looking no more glamorous or date-worthy than myself, clad in a coffee-stained white T-shirt and road-worn drawstring linen trousers, and clutching a green holdall about the size of my cosmetics bag that oozed the miasma of overnight train journey. He was a picture, I conceded almost jealously. How was it that a guy could look like he’d just had a fight with a tipsy tea urn after not bathing for a week and still be a candidate for a GQ fashion shoot? Unlike me, who probably looked mildly traumatized, Thor was grinning, clearly oblivious to either of our appearances, or the pit of infirmity that lay beyond the door. I exhaled.

  ‘Hi. I believe you’re my husband?’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he smiled. ‘Just keeping up appearances, you know. We don’t want to cause any scandals, do we?’

  ‘Certainly not, Mister Thor. What would the neighbours think?’

  He stepped into the room, dropped his bag and threw himself onto the bed, to my horror right on top of an overlooked bra and some discarded pants.

  ‘God, I feel terrible,’ he moaned, squeezing the bridge of his nose. ‘Sinuses. This fucking country always screws with my sinuses. Have you got any toilet paper? I need to blow my nose.’

  So our first date in India did indeed consist of a loo roll mission. Not that I couldn’t have asked the guesthouse for more, but frankly I thought three top-ups in 24 hours would have been borderline cringeworthy. We made it about 100 metres to the nearest kiosk before the effort became too much: my malady had drained all the energy from my limbs and I was obliged to take Thor, who was intensively perusing the vendor’s cigarette selection, under the arm for support. I confessed I might need to spend the day in bed, a proposal to which he initially reacted with some excitement until I explained that it was, sadly, necessary convalescence due to a malfunctioning gut.

  What followed was an afternoon and evening a world away from the ignominious hell I’d dreamed up prior to Thor’s arrival. After he saw me tucked up in bed with enough water and mango juice to quench a foreign legion, he went out to the nearby Coffee Day to answer my feeble, bed-ridden request for a cheese sandwich. The afternoon passed as we lay in bed and held hands and talked and studied each other’s faces with the rapturous curiosity of rediscovering something long forgotten. We were both in an invalid state, me intermittently dashing to the loo, Thor blowing his nose every twenty minutes and executing a bizarre procedure in the bathroom that involved siphoning half a litre of salt water up his nostrils, through his nasal passage and back down his throat and out of his mouth. It looked and sounded like some sort of unpleasant, choking form of brain irrigation, but it seemed to help him breathe easier. In the same way that he insisted my belly bedlam made me no less desirable in his eyes, for me he was still god of thunder-like, bent over the sink, hacking and rasping as he emptied the contents of his nasal passages. The issue of where he was going to sleep didn’t even arise, as he got into bed next to me in his coffee-stained T-shirt and drawstring linens and we spent the evening watching The Hurt Locker on my laptop. I fell asleep before the film finished and was vaguely aware of the room turning dark at the click of a light switch before a warm arm curled around my waist and I drifted off, feeling thoroughly cared for.

  By the following morning I had made a good enough recovery to be able to ingest half a pack of Good Day almond biscuits while watching doe-eyed from the bed as Thor sat with his freckled back to me, jabbing at the keys of his laptop on a table in the corner next to a pile of tissues. He had an easy presence, one that left the air light and open, even if we had just spent close to 24 hours locked in a room together. All of my previous misgivings had dissipated in the mellow intimacy that already hung between us. He seemed in no way disconcerted or thwarted by our sequestration, and in some ways was quite pleased by it.

  Thor was in the fortunate and rare position of having a non-artistic job with a bohemian’s schedule. As a mathematician, he worked as a consultant to clients from the US to France, Germany and Italy. As such, he only ever needed to be at dashing distance from an internet connection, and could maintain flexible work hours as well as locations. The downside of this, as I slowly began to uncover and relate to myself as a lifelong freelancer, is that there is never really a defined point where the effort starts and ends. He was in a constant state of guilt over not doing enough work, and was consequently wary of any activity that wasn’t maths related.

  That was why he welcomed our convalescence: it gave him the opportunity to sit at his laptop, graft equations and write thoroughly illegible programming code for hours without having to succumb to the nagging necessity of sightseeing or other non-mathematical pursuits. And as the act of tourism was frequently my own bread and butter, we were brought to a minor impasse that morning when, after checking my emails for the first time in two days, I read an invitation for paid professional sightseeing. It was a commission for a travel piece on Bangalore from the Mexican newspaper Reforma, to which I was a sporadic contributor. It would mean staying in the city for a few days and having a reason to explore its more travel-newsworthy side. I figured this was an excellent opportunity to amp up my appeal in Thor’s eyes through the veneer of plausible professionalism (or at least, marginally more plausible, if driving a car around India could even be considered a job). I accepted the task.

  Bangalore, or Bengaluru – its pre-colonial name that was reinstated in 2007 and subsequently ignored by just about everyone I spoke to, I assume because of the phonetic hassle and the fact that it actually means something like ‘City of Boiled Beans’ – is famously the hotbed of India’s info-tech revolution. One of the fastest-growing cities in the country, it was also at the time of my arrival home to the greatest number of rupee millionaires, which basically translates as people with expendable income. As such, it was the perfect place to go in search of that grail of India’s upward mobility that had eluded me since I left Mumbai (mostly because I had been putting the majority of my energy and focus into the act of driving, with the residue occupied with minor activities like eating, blogging and finding places to sleep). Bangalore was a city ripe to accommodate the dozens of foreign multinational companies that had opened offices there, as well as newbies on the start-up circuit. I saw stories in the press about PIOs21 who had returned from their comfortable lives in the US in order to profit from the boom, as well as fully fledged foreigners who were coming in a tentative trickle to milk the burgeoning economy. Bangalore’s reputation in the international press, combined with the assertions in various bits of travel literature that it was India’s greenest city due to its large number of parks, primed me for a sort of hightech Shangri-La.

  So I was a bit disappointed when, on entering the metropolitan area and dodging my first traffic cop, I found that Bangalore looked quite similar to the rest of the country, at least on the surface. There was the same traffic, the same chaos, the same smoky pollution hanging in the air and the same sense that life was in leisurely overdrive, if there was such a thing. Between entering the city from the north via Bellary Road and reaching the Ashley Inn, it was imposing government buildings like Karnataka’s High Court and its state legislation HQ, the Vidhana Soudha – not, as I expected, Google, Microsoft or IBM megaplexes – that dominated the architectural landscape. It turned out that most of the big company headquarters and IT parks were located in the city’s suburbs, while the centre was undergoing a very involved facelift. From Mahatma Gandhi Road, I could see cranes and construction in every direction. The road itself was a giant building site, where a half-finished overpass was throwing the street below into shadow and covering everything within sprinklin
g distance in a film of concrete dust.

  Not far from there, finishing touches were being put to a luxury shopping centre called UB City that was the kind of place only heiresses and rap stars could possibly want to shop. Thor and I made it past the mustachioed guard at the front door to enter a world of Ab-Fab brands the likes of Vuitton, Zegna and Versace. We went up to the roof of the complex for some air and discovered a piazza that had been engineered to resemble – according to the brochure – ‘an easy, street side ambience’ of a high-end international food court. From there we could see, framed by a set of fountains in the foreground, an uncanny trompe l’oeil city skyline that was attempting to create the effect of being in the midst of a clutch of flashy skyscrapers; think movie-set rendition of downtown Philadelphia. Drawn in by the smell of baking bread and a waft of garlic, Thor and I did a round of the restaurant menus, me dizzy with the glamour of it all and salivating at the prospect of European-style food; Thor, a bit disgruntled for having been wrenched away from programming, rolling his eyes at the European-style prices.

  ‘I could feed myself for a week on this money,’ he sighed, to my disappointment. But he was right: it was a world away from the wholesome and inexpensive Indian food I’d come to know, and the prices were, relatively speaking, extortionate. But hypnotized by the veneer of cool, I pressed for more.