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 cover 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 sprinkling 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.
‘Let’s just go take a look in there,’ I suggested, eyeing up a huge glass-fronted structure with what looked like a giant Buddha’s head surveying its hiply lit interior. The place was called Shiro, and the concept was a pan-Asian restaurant-stroke-terrace-stroke-club, heavily influenced by the Buddha Bar. We walked in to find the manager and staff engaged in a photo session, clustered around a framed certificate of a food award from the Times of India. Eastern ambient music filled the cooled air and stragglers from the late-lunch crowd tweaked morsels of food into their mouths with chopsticks, large shopping bags leaning casually against the table legs.
I looked down at my feet cased in plastic flip-flops: they had acquired a semi-permanent layer of dirt from the sum of all the streets they had passed through since Mumbai, and the once-glossy nail varnish on my toenails had chipped back like a peeling inner-city wall. The bottoms of my trousers were caked in a mysterious mud of whose origin I had no idea, but whose presence I had grown used to as an inevitability of circulating in India; in the discerning light of Shiro, what I’d thought a couple of days ago to be groovy local attire looked more like lame FabIndia dowd. We had fallen down the rabbit hole, which was to say we had crossed the line between the world outside – the cacophony of life that jostled through the day to the soundtrack of jackhammers, caterwauls, car horns and human voices – into the sterilized world of designer labels and meze plates that was the domain of a tiny minority.
I found myself staring at a woman with impeccably tressed hair and a trouser suit that was pressed to match. How did she keep so clean? I looked to Thor, who appeared to be experiencing the same level of disorientation. His annual visits to the ashram in Chennai were pretty much the extent of his experience in the country. He had never felt the urge – or he simply hadn’t had the time – to travel around, and had certainly never come across places like UB City. For Thor, India was where street vendors provided thimbles of chai and fresh coconut for only a few pennies, and where one ate rice and dal daily at the ashram canteen. Everything else was excess. The idea that I was on the verge of ordering a cocktail that would cost him several days’ living budget was visibly vexing him. I took pity.
‘Subway?’
‘Oh yes, yes. Let’s get a sandwich. Thank god.’
Indeed, Subway was a welcome sanctuary of mass consumerism (albeit still quite high end by relative standards) in the bizarre realm of exclusivity we had discovered. From the discomfort of the fast-food seating there, we gained space for reflection, trying to find a speck of meaning where really there wasn’t any. UB City didn’t reveal anything too interesting beyond the fact that there was obviously a significant number of people with the cash to blow on keeping Salvatore Ferragamo and his haute-couture colleagues in business. For sure, the number of super-rich in India has gone up in tune with the economy in general since the early 1990s, but they still only count for about 1% of the population. Leagues more interesting is the new economic bubble towards whom the Nano was ostensibly aimed – the emerging middle class. They were the new generation of consumers carving out their own niches in the gaping territory between UB City and the slums, and it was their backs on which the hopes of the new Indian dream were pinned.
That night, we followed up our Subway subs with veg fried rice in the company of an IBM software engineer called Arunsai, whom Thor had met on the train. Thor showed me the piece of paper with his phone number, shaky from the seismographic effects of the railroad, and I insisted we call him straight away – I was eager to hear at first hand about the life of an IT worker here at Ground Zero. After the disorienting extremes of UB City, I wanted to discover more about the people in the middle.
Arunsai suggested we meet in a Chinese restaurant somewhere on the outskirts of town, an air-conditioned family joint with little embellishment other than the odd hint of Chineseness in the form of a lucky cat or a goldfish. Arunsai ordered chicken fried rice and launched straight into bemoaning the fact he might soon need to forgo his meat-eating ways. He was about to be engaged, he explained, to a girl from Chennai, and she was a vegetarian. Her family were intractable on the issue that she was to remain so, and that she would never have to cook meat for her husband. Arunsai looked downcast.
‘I don’t know how I can never eat meat again,’ he sighed, before remembering something else that made him reach for his phone with a sly grin. ‘You want to see her picture?’ He pulled up a muggy, pixelated image of a young, plumpish girl dressed in a sari and adorned with all manner of golden trinkets, hanging from any part of her head that would support it.
‘Our engagement is next month and the wedding is in May,’ he beamed. ‘You must come.’
I had yet to get used to the Indian tradition of inviting any random stranger to a wedding, and was thrown a bit off kilter by his good-natured proposal.
‘She seems nice. What’s she like?’
‘I don’t know; we haven’t really spoken yet. But I think she will be a good wife.’ He forgot to add, if only she could whip me up a weekly roast lamb, though it was written all over his face.
Arunsai had come to Bangalore from his home in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu in 2005 to claim his own stake in the IT gold rush. At first, it had been hard to find his feet: after many weeks of applying for jobs and sifting through rejections, he was offered an internship at Compuserve, though he had to pay the company for the privilege. He subsisted on the meagre Rs 5,000 (£60) his father was able to send him each month. Clearly a savvy worker, Arunsai managed to scale up the chain in a snakes-and-ladders motion that saw him transferring to Pune for a while to work for IBM, before being duped into travelling to the US in search of work that never materialized.
‘I dreamed of America and a Honda Civic,’ he confided with a self-deprecating grin. ‘Everyone in India does.’ But that dream didn’t come true and after a few months of fruitless job hunting, he returned home.
After dinner, Arunsai insisted we go to visit his home. It was about a five-minute drive from the restaurant, in a brand new apartment building with its own parking garage where, having driven ahead of us on his motorbike, he showed us proudly to his very own parking spot. His flat was sizeable, with three bedrooms, two balconies and a security system, but not a scrap of furniture. His bed was a mat on the tiled floor and his kitchen was a single gas cylinder with a pot perched on top. He was clearly a man in need of a woman, and living in anticipation of his impending wedding and the gifts that would follow and furnish his house. In the meantime, as far as he was concerned, he’d done the right thing by his future wife by finding them their first family home, and that was all that mattered.
Driving back to the city centre that evening, I became aware again of Abhilasha’s errant steering, which I was sure had grown worse since I’d first noticed it on the way to Bangalore a few days earlier. It called for immediate action; she had to go to a mechanic. A quick Google search informed me that a nearby Tata garage by the name of Prerana Motors was at my service, and I called them to make an outpatient appointment for Abhilasha the next day. That night Thor had the opportunity to see me at my obsessive-compulsive worst as I went online to ensure I was as informed as I could be prior to handing her over to any potentially unscrupulous mechanics.
My online research had done little to shed light on her disorder, which I learned was referred to in the trade as a ‘steering pull’. Ploughing through a cascade of search results, I was forced to battle with an impenetrable mechanic’s lexicon of the various causes of a crooked steering wheel. An authoritative-looking website called aa1car.com (‘Automotive Diagnostic and Repair Help for Cars and Trucks’, if you’re interested) listed no fewer than 31 possibilities for why Abhilasha was out of joint, from binding in the upper strut mounts to an uneven parallelogram steering linkage. The page continued with dense passages written in small fonts that showed no consideration for the notion that there might be anyone other than a doctor of auto-mechanics reading the text.
‘Too much cross-camber can make a vehicle pull or lead towards the side that has the most (positive) camber or away from the side that has the least (negative) camber; the underlying cause may be a bent strut or mislocated strut tower, a bent spindle, collapsed control arm bushing, weak or broken spring, or a shifted cross member or engine cradle.’
This was not going to be a straightforward deal, not now that spindles, strut towers and arm bushings were involved. I needed to go to the best garage in town in a bid to stem the tide of the what-ifs that had started flooding the flittery membranes of my subconscious. What if we had to wait for spare parts? And what if those spare parts could only be sourced from a mine in the deepest Himalayas? And what if they could only travel here on the backs of lame mules? In my pessimistic mind’s eye, the future didn’t look too bright.
Still, lady luck hadn’t entirely jumped ship: we were after all in Bangalore, home to some of the best cerebral matter the subcontinent had to offer. What better place than this city full of geeks and engineers to search for a cure to Abhilasha’s condition?
The photographs on Prerana Motors’ website spoke of an impressively large workshop filled with state-of-the-art machinery, lots of colourful balloons and a very shiny floor. It was an image that bore little resemblance to its real, rather more makeshift appearance. The actual entrance was a sign painted onto the brick wall of an enclosure off a dusty back road. As Thor and I stood looking confused in the parking lot, we were approached by a man in a pressed white shirt whose eyes lit up at the sight of Abhilasha.
He walked straight to Thor. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘Yes, actually you can,’ I cut in. Irritatingly enough, my hard-learned engineer lingo jumped out of the window before you could say mislocated strut. ‘It seems that the steering wheel is a bit, erm, wonky.’
‘The problem is your Nano has a wonky wheel?’ the man asked with genuine concern, still looking directly at Thor. I nodded. He gave the tyres a sage once-over before adjusting his glasses and straightening back up to face Thor. ‘Please, give me the key and I will take it for a test drive.’
Thor turned to me and I hesitated. The man insisted with an almost impatient gesture of his hand.
‘Please, wait in the visitors’ room, backside,’ he said, pointing towards the building behind the wall. Against my better judgement and every screaming maternal instinct, I gave the man my keys. He and Abhilasha disappeared in a white cloud out onto the Old Madras Road.
Thor sensed my concern. ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. Come on, let’s go check out the visitors’ room backside.’
The visitors’ room was a hot and poky little space with nothing in the way of shiny floors or balloons. Instead there were a few plastic chairs, a copy of the previous day’s Deccan Herald, another paper in the local Kannada script (which looked like an alphabet constructed during a particularly creative night spent with a couple of joints and a baroque love-heart stencil) and a water cooler proffering about an inch of liquid and two suspiciously recycled-looking plastic cups. We waited for half an hour with no news and began to wonder whether our white-shirted friend hadn’t already reached Madras by way of its namesake road. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went outside. There was Abhilasha, surrounded by a formidable pit-stop crew who were washing and polishing her bodywork with urgency, commanded by the man in the white shirt standing in their midst and conducting the service symphony in a hoedown of waved gestures.
I approached him apprehensively with the air of someone meeting a surgeon who’d just performed a triple bypass on their next of kin. So, was everything all right?
‘Yes, yes, everything is done,’ he beamed.
‘You, uh, fixed the steering?’ I asked, incredulous that there appeared to be no need for any inpatient treatment, nor for new binding for the upper strut mounts to be ordered from up north.
The steering, I was assured, was fixed, and he had personally checked over the whole car himself. Oil and water had been topped up and now Abhilasha was getting a good clean on the inside and out.
It was all too easy…
‘Well, I’ll just go over and pay while you finish off here then,’ I said, stepping towards the garage office, mentally totting up the price of the list of jobs he had reeled off, but white-shirted man stopped me in my tracks.
‘No, madam, please, no money!’
‘No money?’ What was this, a TV show set-up?
‘No, free service, madam.’
‘What? Why?’ Surely this was a ruse. I didn’t really believe him until he handed me Abhilasha’s keys ten minutes later, my little yellow companion gleaming like the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The man didn’t stick around for a palm of baksheesh or even a mild show of gratitude; he simply turned on his heel and marched back towards the garage.
‘Thank you,’ I called out after him, a bit choked. He looked around, surprised, so I tried to think of a good follow-up.
The man smiled and continued walking. I sat down in the newly vacuumed driver’s seat to find the steering wheel perfectly aligned and the floor covered with large pieces of brown paper that wished us ‘Happy Motoring’.