PONDICHERRY to CHENNAI; KM 3,041–3,213
Your blessing was very luck,’ the spray-paint technician at Manakular Motors – Pondicherry’s certified Tata garage – assured me, sucking his teeth and running his fingers along Abhilasha’s newly sprayed backside after I’d rattled off to him the previous day’s sequence of events. ‘With no blessing, accident is very bad,’ he stated with certainty. I couldn’t argue with his reasoning, but it did little to lessen my rage over the fact that Abhilasha’s perfect yellow complexion had been tarnished with scratches of karma gone askew, and that putting right the damage was now costing me ten times what I’d paid at the temple.
Still, she was back to fine fettle, sparkling clean and her graze erased, which in turn put me in good spirits as I drove back to rescue Thor, who was passing the morning programming from the terrace of our hotel. We had decided to spend one more day there before heading up to Chennai, where our journey as a couple would come to an end. Though Thor was visibly eager to get back to his ashram and I was growing impatient to head up north, the impending separation lingered like the threat of a distant storm; prone to horrible bouts of amorous wistfulness, I tried not to think too much about what life on the road would be like post-Thor, vaguely reasoning that since things had been just fine before he joined me in Bangalore, they would surely continue to be just fine after he left.
Two weeks of travellers’ intimacy with my redheaded mathematician had pretty much sealed my conviction on what had been an uncanny hunch the first moment I clapped eyes on him: providence was somehow heavily invested in our union. I had always been easily seduced by the veneer of romance, and as such had an awful track record for making myself scarce before the first-date roses had started to wilt. When affairs did develop into relationships and the question of ramping up commitment floated to the surface, my enthusiasm had always turned into emotional paralysis. I concluded I was an awful stickler, exasperated by every tiny flaw and painfully aware that the perfection I thought I was looking for was unlikely to exist beyond the realm of romantic fiction. It was a maddening realization that I dragged away from the last break-up I initiated – which I swore would be my very last – and hung around my neck for the few short months before Thor came to Bangalore and restarted the cogs of affection. In a flash, I went from the conviction that I was destined to stew in a state of perennial dissatisfaction to the sunny thought that there might be hope of salvation after all.
This time is always different; but this time really was. In a rush of ardour, I went a bridge too far by uttering the fateful words: ‘Might you like to drive?’
Thor scanned my face for evidence of a ruse. ‘Really?’
I handed him the keys.
‘Wait a minute. What happened to Little Miss Control Freak? Where’d she go?’
‘I just, you know, thought you might like to give it a go. Just from here to the market. It’s not far.’
‘Well, if you’re sure.’
I wasn’t sure. You can never be sure. You can only jump in the right direction and hope you don’t hit a rock, or a bit of scaffolding. The ten-minute drive from the Swades Guest House over to where Mission Street crossed Nehru Street saw me white-knuckled in the passenger street, straining myself to the point of internal rupture not to play back-seat driver and exclaim on each occasion (about every five seconds) Thor came heart-stoppingly close to knocking over a cyclist or not braking in time to let a cow cross the road. His horn technique was aggressive and his relationship with the gearstick shaky, by the evidence of no fewer than four stalls in the first third of the journey – each of which was accompanied by a torrent of impressive curses.
When it came to parking in one of the streets that surrounded the market, whose edges were already replete with motorbikes, rickshaws and cars, Thor’s quick reverse produced a dull crunch as Abhilasha’s rear bumper ploughed into some scaffolding behind us. He turned to me with a look of sheepish panic.
‘Shit, what was that?’
‘I’d say that was probably you reversing the car into the scaffolding behind us.’
‘Shit! I’m so sorry. Do you think it’s bad?’
‘I daren’t look.’
We got out of the car and went around reluctantly to inspect the rear. It wasn’t so bad. The bumper had taken a minor hit in the form of a scratch on the left side, and apart from now being cocked at a subtly rakish angle, there was little evidence of the collision. That was more than could be said for the wooden panel at the base of the scaffolding the Nano had reversed into. There was a long crack stretching belligerently from one edge of the wood to the other in an accusing grimace that suggested we get the hell out before anyone caught wind of our accidental vandalism.
‘Maybe I’ll take it over to another spot,’ I suggested gently, aware that I was far less irked by Abhilasha’s disfigurement at Thor’s hands than I had been at my own, and yet the rubber blades of passive aggression were nonetheless sharpening against my guts.
‘Yeah, I can’t get used to these stick-shift cars,’ he admitted, a bit defeated.
As I sat back down in the driver’s seat, I felt bad for him and indignantly stroppy at the same time. ‘They’re hideously difficult to manoeuvre,’ I lied. ‘And on top of that, you’re driving on the wrong side of the road here. This is piss easy for me; I was brought up driving on the left. But it must be a complete nightmare for you.’
‘Well, it would be had I managed to go further than ten minutes without writing off the bumper.’
I put my hand on his knee and likely irritated the lifeblood out of him with condescending kindness. ‘It’s alright. You know, you’ll have another opportunity. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
This was also a lie. I had already decided that after that initial display of driving dexterity – or lack thereof – there was no way I’d let Thor near the driver’s seat again. I knew it was one of those points early on in a relationship when little episodes give a sense of the bigger dynamics that lie in wait. The die had been cast: from the moment Abhilasha’s bumper hit the scaffold under Thor’s supervision, the roles had been apportioned – I was the driver, the authority, the wearer of gloves, hat and driving pants. Any future attempt of Thor’s to get behind the wheel would invariably result in a distrusting nervousness on my part that would be so formidable as to completely incapacitate the poor guy, preventing him from being able to drive with any degree of unselfconsciousness and so bringing the situation tragically full circle.
Probably out of loving-kindness and possibly out of fear of further recrimination for his negligent reverse, Thor refrained from addressing the palpable psycho-bitch atmosphere that had expanded to occupy the Nano. I felt the hairy scrub of its backside as I remembered my father manifesting similar behaviour during the road trips of my childhood, when one small motorway skirmish forever banished my mother from sharing the driving on long-distance journeys.
In search of another parking space, we rounded a corner on the edge of the market and came to a standstill on a small road lined with open-fronted shops and zigzagged by deliverymen zipping in every direction hauling boxes, crates and sacks on their shoulders. It was a picture of industry, save for a large lorry standing idle three cars ahead of us that was the opposite of industry and ostensibly the cause of the choke-up. We strained to see from our seats exactly what was going on, but were egged on by the chorus of horns around us to join in and add our parp to the fray.
Minutes later, the game was becoming tiresome. Thor was getting impatient, and without warning he swung open Abhilasha’s door and strode towards the offending lorry. A minute later, he was back in the car.
‘This crap drives me crazy.’
‘What’s going on up there?’
‘There’s like five guys supposed to be unloading that lorry. It’s full of massive sacks of flour or rice or something. But they’re not unloading it, they’re just standing there, shooting the shit, waiting.’
‘What are they waiting for?’
He turned to face me and executed a perfect Indian head wobble. Then he opened and closed the fingers of his hand to imitate the gesture that was the national symbol for five minutes. I giggled.
In my experience so far, ‘pfive minutes’ had usually been employed to excuse a task that would take longer than was acceptable or comfortable for any of the parties involved. It was as much a sign of appeasement as it was any accurate prediction of timing, and I soon came to learn that the actual time it was referring to could represent anything from three minutes to an hour. Five minutes later, we hadn’t moved an inch. I turned the engine off, though I still enjoyed giving a little toot on the horn to coincide with the sporadic eruptions of noise from the cars in front and behind us.
‘See, everyone’s sitting in their cars beeping their horns, but no one’s actually doing anything,’ Thor protested. ‘I swear, if they don’t move their arses in the next sixty seconds, I’m going to get up there and move those sacks for them.’
I was appalled. ‘You wouldn’t. Would you?’
Indeed, another minute and he was out of the car and striding with purpose towards the men around the stationary truck. Through the muted glass of the windscreen, I saw him gesticulating at the guys, who didn’t seem moved to respond. Seemingly frustrated by their lack of reaction, Thor took it on himself to open the door of the truck and climb in. The quick illumination of the vehicle’s rear lights implied the engine had been started. Abruptly, all of the men who had been standing around not moving the sacks jumped in unison and sped over to the driver’s door. One of them, presumably the driver from the look of mortal panic on his face, opened the door and started shouting and gesticulating into the cabin, while I closed my eyes and tried to reconcile myself to the fact that week two of my new romance could well end in a public lynching.
I half expected to see Thor crawl out of the driver’s seat of the truck, wilting from the anger of the gathering crowd, but instead he bounced out, apparently undeterred and grinning from ear to ear, and made his way to the back of the truck. Some more conversation was exchanged, before he jumped into the back, on top of the pile of sacks, and began to haul one up into his arms. It looked spectacularly heavy, but he didn’t flinch, instead completing his gesture by passing the sack down into the arms of one of the men waiting on the road, who in turn passed it to another, who piled it by the side of the road. Two other men jumped up on top of the sacks to join Thor and soon there was a chain of sacks making its way out of the back of the lorry and onto the side of the road. I noticed the beeps of the cars around me had stopped and I wondered if everyone was as beguiled – and a tiny bit excited – by the spectacle as I was.
When Thor returned to the Nano, he was panting, sweating and covered in flour. I wondered to what extent I was to blame for the episode by having previously undermined his road masculinity. I could think of little to say but, ‘Wow. You showed them.’
He patted down his pockets in search of his cigarettes, trying to get his breath back. ‘Yeah. That guy got really pissed when I started up his engine.’
‘I thought they were going to kill you.’
He laughed. ‘Did you?’
‘Well, yeah. They thought you were about to nick their lorry.’ I nearly added, thank god you didn’t try to reverse it.
‘And would you have run out to try and fight for my life?’
‘What, and leave Abhilasha here, alone and vulnerable?’
Thor frowned. ‘I feel bad, though. I think I burst one of their sacks. I was just so angry that I grabbed it wrong and ripped it a bit.’ He slapped his hand down over his T-shirt and a cloud of flour dust rose into the air. ‘I must have lost them quite a bit of flour.’
The truck finally empty, it started to move forward down the street as all the cars that had been stuck behind it restarted their engines and rolled forward. The flour now floating around the Nano settled like a tiny snowfall over the jagged peaks of our previous conversation. Where we had hardened, I began to feel us softening towards one another once more. Perhaps, I thought, our idiosyncrasies could eventually be fine-tuned to a form of good teamwork.
‘What the hell were they waiting for in the end?’
‘Fuck knows.’
The market was putting up too much resistance, so we decided to forgo it in favour of a trip to the sea. We headed north to a beach called Serenity, which had already been invaded by a mob of Euro-hippies dressed in varying styles of tie-dyed sarongs wrapped around their heads and hips. Some bikini-clad girls were dousing themselves in the ocean in a way that might have looked incredibly tempting were it not for the audience of fishermen their antics had gathered to the shoreline. They sat on the edge of their brightly coloured grounded boats, fiddling with nets and shooting side glances at every shrieked ‘Putain!’ coming from the water. I badly wanted to swim, but I wanted to do it unobserved. We met an American woman who lived on the beach called Kasha, who gave us directions to head south for more complete serenity at a place called Paradise Beach.
At Paradise, we found Eden. It was a low promontory of sand separating the Indian Ocean from a quiet inlet that was actually the mouth of the Sangarabarani river. The light of late afternoon had already smoothed the landscape down to deep-baked putty and we arrived just in time to feel the day slowly exhale around us. With not a fisherman in sight, we left our clothes in a heap on the sand and waded into the ocean, which was tepid and foamy.
Thor ran straight for the waves while I remained stationed at knee level, frightened as I always have been of currents and the undertow of big breakers. I’d heard that many people had drowned on this coastline (outside of the 2004 tsunami, which devastated the area) and, given how well my odds were coming through on a daily basis as far as driving was concerned, I didn’t much fancy challenging the fates at sea as well as on land.
So for the second time that day, I sat back and watched Thor from a distance, doing things that I couldn’t. He was lit by the sun that was setting behind us and shining out over the inlet, as he bounced in and out of the waves that intermittently consumed him, then spat him back out. At intervals, he emerged with his eyes red, his nose streaming snot and his hair stuck to his face, spouting a mini-fountain of water from his mouth. A seagull took a break from its business to join me on the water’s edge until its attention was snatched by a dead, inflated blowfish that bobbed slowly by. I felt like Thor, the seagull, the blowfish and I had been here for centuries.
We dried off on the sand. The ocean was behind us, rough and raging, though settling into an evening murmur, while the river ahead of us was smooth as a lake of glass. The world turned pink as the sun eased itself down.
‘Do you forgive me for crashing your car?’ Thor asked.
‘You didn’t crash it. You just rearranged the bumper a tad. It was nothing compared with what I did to it the other day.’
‘Put that way, I suppose it was quite a skilled manoeuvre.’
‘For sure.’ I scuffed about in the sand to lie with my head on his belly, a bony-flesh pillow that tightened to cradle the weight of my skull. ‘Do you forgive me for being horribly aggressive? In the passive sense?’
‘Only if you promise to chill out a bit and stop trying to steer everything past your impossible goals.’
He kissed my head. We had emerged from a tunnel of weirdness and things were better than before we went in. Thor had a way of turning conflict into something constructive, so that instead of bashing one another down with the dead blowfish of recrimination, we were instead tending to one another’s sore spots. It was an answer to a yearning I never knew I’d had.
‘Do you think that if we’re good driving long distances in India in a small car in the blistering heat, that we’ll be as good back in the real world?’ Thor asked.
I had been wondering the same. Back in Europe, or wherever we were destined to see one another again, would I slip back into my old habits of finding fault in every nook and cranny of the relationship? Were we just drunk on India and looking at one another through Kingfisher goggles? And yet, when I thought about it more soberly, there seemed to be nothing discernible in our current togetherness that in any way relied on India, driving, Abhilasha or the outside temperature. Instead, there was an effortless fellowship that seemed to override any anxiety I might have had about what lay ahead. There seemed to be no question about what would follow, since it was quite clear to both of us that we came next.
Although Chennai is undoubtedly loved by many, to me the city formerly known as Madras was a featureless urban sprawl and one long traffic jam, punctuated with transvestite panhandlers at traffic lights and islands of irritable traffic police. It was the only place in India where I was indignantly cajoled into paying an official Rs 100 fine (that means I got a receipt and the cash presumably didn’t go into the officers’ holiday coffers) for running a red light,26 and where I met with the fury of one very angry cop who stopped me for talking on my phone while driving. It was a grave offence that I managed to neutralize through a combination of Jedi mind powers and my increasingly refined Margaret Thatcher impression. I told the cop, in assured, low-pitched tones, that I had in fact been consulting the device for directions and could he possibly tell me how to get to that damn elusive Mount Poonamallee High Road? In a spectacular turnaround of temper, he stopped yelling and quite helpfully pointed me in the direction I knew I had been going all along.
The district of Manapakkam that was home to Thor’s ashram was a suburban neighbourhood defined by a strange and uncomfortable mixture of ramshackle housing and residential comfort, set in the shadow of the growing skyscrapers and cranes that lined its periphery. Middle-class pillbox houses, whose rough cement walls looked like they had been freshly popped out of a rubber mould, stood streets away from a slummy bog whose mountains of noxious debris steamed a stinking slow burn as goats, hogs and dogs spent their days picking through the junk that humans left behind. Nearby were the gates to the ashram, called the Sri Ram Chandra Mission. A security checkpoint waved us onto a palm tree–lined pathway that led to a large covered pavilion that was the centre’s main meditation hall. Chipmunks scampered between the branches of trees as birdsong filled the air and men and women strolled the grounds with looks of happy intention. It was a sunny bell jar of a sanctuary within a world that was developing at breakneck speed, and when the gates closed behind us, they shut off the noise and bedlam outside. I could see why, once Thor had arrived here, he was loath to go anywhere else.
Our digs were situated just around the corner of the ashram’s back gate in the homely outbuilding of a house belonging to a French couple, Marion and Hénoc Marceau. It was an arrangement for which I was very grateful after I spied the communal dorms in the ashram, which would have meant sharing a large concrete floor with hundreds of other devotees and, I feared, the odd rodent.
A friend of Thor’s for almost twenty years, Hénoc had moved to India as a boy with his family, and decided to stay when his parents and brother eventually returned to France. Despite his decades spent in the country and the kerfuffle endured in the name of acquiring Indian nationality, I had the feeling that Hénoc and his wife were, like me, still having trouble nailing Chennai’s redeeming features. Caught in the overlap between an international spiritual centre, an IT park and the developing world, the slightly surreal realm within their four outer walls contained a red-brick house and a smaller cottage with a garden occupied by a cat called Kiri, a pair of Lhasa Apsos, a stray pup called Leia and a domesticated squirrel called Lilu, who had befriended a thus-far nameless gecko. With the exception of outings to the ashram and Marion’s job as a schoolteacher in the city, the pair appeared to prefer bedding down at home, blessed as they were with plenty of greenery, household appliances and a DVD collection primed for a decade of Siberian banishment. Any mention of having to venture beyond the limits of Manapakkam inspired in them both pained expressions of reluctance.
Nevertheless, this didn’t mean they could keep India from their door: their garden attracted an endless stream of visitors, Europeans from the ashram as well as the local neighbours, who appeared quite taken with the floral and faunal abundance of their abode. And the Marceaus were exemplary in their capacity for hospitality, accepting the incursions on their privacy with admirably cheery compliance and greeting everyone who dropped by with a drink and the offer of a seat on the garden swing.
Happily nested on said swing, it was all I could do to drag myself up and plan the next section of my route. I had decided to head north and inland towards Hyderabad, a city of stunning historical architecture that I had visited once before and remembered for its unfathomable draw. Hyderabad was 700 km away, which I figured would require at least one overnight stop along the route. The choices weren’t abundant: an agitated search through the Lonely Planet’s Andhra Pradesh chapter had informed me I was about to enter a large swathe of the country where guidebook-endorsed hotels were few and far between. After some deliberation, I settled on a government hotel in Nellore – a large town on the east coast, north of Chennai.
Whether I was succumbing to a wave of road weariness, or whether my impending departure from Thor was taking its toll, I noticed that my resolve to continue the journey had begun to slide. Since the afternoon at Paradise Beach, there had occurred a shift in my psyche that no longer required me to sit in a car for the next two months, urgently burning rubber and clocking up miles. If I was honest with myself, all I really wanted to do right then was stay in Manapakkam with Thor, the Marceaus and their menagerie. Thor was due to spend another week there before heading back out to Berlin, where we agreed we’d meet when all of this was over. Eager not to cake the situation in too much nostalgic crud, I exercised great willpower in not falling to my knees and begging Thor to take me to Germany with him. Instead, I tried to sound cool and optimistic when he asked me where I’d be staying that night. Oh, in a place called Nellore, I piped.
‘I’ve never heard of Nellore.’
‘Oh really? That’s strange. It’s not far from here and it’s so well known for its, er, mica.’
‘Its what?’
‘Never mind. I’ll be just fine.’
‘Of course you will, little Thunderbolt. Just take it easy.’
Given that Nellore was relatively close, I tried to delay my departure from Chennai as long as possible. It was 4 pm when Abhilasha and I trundled off (not daring to look at Thor waving in my rear-view mirror), which was just the right time to meet the rush-hour traffic coming to a complete standstill. Two hours and enough creative cursing to fill an Eminem lyric book later, we began to move around the northern outskirts of the city.
Crossing the border from Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh, the landscape flattened out and we finally picked up speed. As the massive Pulicat Lake passed unseen somewhere to our right, the sky began to fall through several shades of crimson. It was a picture worth freezing – an open and now relatively unimpeded road, a vast surrounding panorama, a sky slowly sinking into darkness and a few tungsten beacons blinking here and there on the horizon. I felt like the lonesome cowboy, riding off alone into the sunset with a throbbing heart and a fistful of rupees. So I had left my lover behind: what did I care? The road was mine once more. I had over 6,500 km left to drive over India’s feral topography, and the journey started right here. I gave Abhilasha a jolly good cuff around the wheel to celebrate.