NEW DELHI; KM 8,975
You moron!’ I screamed at Delilah, who seemed quite chuffed with her decision to direct me down a very crowded passage heaving with people shopping from shoulder-to-shoulder tungsten-lit booths that sold bits of ribbon and elaborate wedding hats. This was a pedestrians-only street, a fact that was clearly evident from the withering scowls and tuts Abhilasha and I were receiving. Oblivious to my pain, Delilah instructed me to hold course for another 200 metres.
‘This isn’t even a street, it’s a frigging shopping mall!’ I yelled, pulling her plug.
Thrusting the Nano into reverse, I looked behind us to see that the crowd had already closed in our rear. Through the front windscreen, it was the same view. We were trapped. All I could see were people: hands, arms, wrists and palms as they pressed against the sides of the car to get around us. I heard the word ‘Nano’ repeated over and over again, in slightly more irritated tones than I’d been used to so far. A man in a white tunic riding a bicycle that was stacked beyond its credible capacity with hand-stitched sacks knocked angrily on Abhilasha’s roof. He made a gesture with the hand that wasn’t holding up his faltering load that gave me no information whatsoever other than the fact that he and the gathering mob were growing highly peeved.
I shot him back my best effort at an equally peeved ‘Well, what do you want me to do, mate?’ before a kindly shop owner jumped down from the podium of his store and decided to try to take charge of the situation. He carved out a space big enough for himself to stand in front of the Nano, and beckoned me to move forward. I winced. How on earth could I shift even an inch? There were two old ladies bent over the front bumper, leaning against the bonnet under the weight of the crowd of people behind them. But the shopkeeper was insistent: I had to try to move forward or there was a strong chance we’d be there until morning. I revved the engine ever so slightly and let up my foot from the clutch as gently as I could. We started to roll. I was terrified as to what the two old ladies would do, but they seemed to take the new situation very much in their stride, rolling themselves around as the car advanced. The flow of people ahead split into two side streams as we literally ploughed through them; I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. We seemed to be moving at about the same rate as the crowd that was stuck behind us, some of whom were actually holding on to the Nano to give them a more stable advantage against the oncoming tide of pedestrians.
The heart of Old Delhi was not, as I was fast discovering, primed for motor vehicles. That came as a bit of a surprise, given that the rest of the city had so far triumphed on my own personal scoreboard of Indian urban traffic infrastructure. I had made the journey from the mountains in the north via Amritsar, the Sikh holy city just a stone’s throw from the Pakistani border, in a matter of days. Back down in the plains, the heat was once again on full blast, and I was eager to get to the capital where I knew a host of cooling mod cons would be waiting for me.
Thanks in part to a recent drive by the Commonwealth Games Committee to make it presentable to visiting dignitaries, Delhi had become home to some of the best roads and highways in the country. Central Delhi had had a head start with the spacious avenues that lay between the monumental government buildings and bungalows constructed by Edward Lutyens in the early years of the twentieth century. The city was already a place of sidewalks, flyovers, roundabouts and pedestrian crossings when the Commonwealth Games Committee moved in with its budget of Rs 80 crore (£8 million), which went a long way in polishing the city’s arteries into the state of a better-oiled machine. I even spotted a few signs put up by an NGO campaigning for noise reduction that pleaded with drivers to refrain from using their horns. The latter strategy, though admirable, had little effect, but the former elements came together to create a symphony of road usage that was – after almost three months of bumping over potholes, dodging goats and zigzagging between pedestrians who had nowhere else to walk but the slow lane of the highway – pure manna from the gods in driving heaven.
My two days of hiding in Delhi started as I rolled through the guarded gates of a neighbourhood called Sundar Nagar. I was staying with a friend called Paul de Bendern, who was working as the bureau chief of the regional Reuters. I basically had the house to myself, since Paul was off doing Reuters-type stuff all day and his photographer wife Lynsey was dodging bullets somewhere dangerous for the New York Times. While Lynsey was doing the work of a real journalist, embedded on assignment, I was embedded in their apartment, basking under the cool breeze of their many air-conditioning units, using their wi-fi and downright abusing their Nespresso machine. Aside from catching glimpses of Paul pounding the treadmill and eating boiled eggs in the morning, I saw little of him until after work, when he managed to extricate me from the house and, like a perfect host, deliver me straight to the five-star Aman Hotel, courtesy of his Mahindra Scorpio and Rakesh, his personal chauffeur. There we drank cocktails and ate tapas with foreign hacks, before moving on to gin and tonics on the lawn at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
It was a louche and lazy couple of days with little output and much navel-gazing. The only vaguely constructive thing I managed to attain was a transaction via the internet that ensured my passage home, one week from then. It was a tight deadline, but the apathy had to be shaken off, or I knew I could stay like this in Delhi for ever.
The afternoon before we were due to leave, I decided to take Abhilasha for a spin around Delhi’s historic neighbourhood. I was hoping we would catch at least a glimpse of the iconic Red Fort and Jama Masjid, on a jaunt designed to scrape off some of my own residual guilt for having done absolutely nothing even vaguely interrogative in the last 48 hours. From Sundar Nagar we breezed along the avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi: past the Imperial Hotel, the monumental India Gate, the labyrinthine Connaught Place. I kept on due north, to around New Delhi train station, where the old city mingled with the new. Here, the roads started to narrow and the traffic began to crowd in on itself. I kept going in the direction of Old Delhi Railway Station, spurred on by Delilah who seemed determined to get us there via only the most densely crowded streets possible. It was goodbye Lutyens’ Delhi, hello again traffic anarchy.
However much the Commonwealth Games Committee had spent sprucing up Delhi’s roads, it appeared that its plans had not quite reached the limits of the Old City. Perhaps it hoped that as long as officials and athletes kept south of Connaught Place, they’d go home with the impression that India’s traffic myth was merely malicious propaganda spread by competing-venue cities. Turning into Chandni Chowk, the one-time stylish main street of the Mughal Empire, we were met with an operetta of engines, horns and human bellows set against a collage of shop signs, adverts and lights, all woven together by the tangled mess of overhead electricity lines. I was in no doubt that the usual Indian road rules were back in play.
Afternoon was turning to evening as the rush-hour traffic chugged along, interspersed at every available opportunity by people wading their way through the slow-moving stream, carefully balanced sacks bobbing above the car roofs, women lugging shopping bags or holding their children aloft out of the way of the unpredictable wheels. Pumping the clutch while crawling forward, I figured our drive-by sightseeing plans might need to go on hold. Delilah, however, seemed to have a different idea, and like the wazzock I am, I followed her traffic-dodging directions down a small alley that after a few metres thinned to about a foot from the tip of each of my wing mirrors.
After grappling to get some kind of sheepish hold on the crowd-plough technique, I continued driving Abhilasha through the market for what felt like a lifetime. We wormed our way along the entire 200 m stretch of very crowded road until finally, just when the end and a much larger intersecting street was in sight, I got a sharp rap on my windscreen from a stick-wielding policeman. I reluctantly wound down my window, and for a moment considered handing over Delilah as a goodwill bribe in a gesture that would also conveniently rid me once and for all of her pestilent poppycock suggestions. The policeman frowned when he saw my face. I’m not sure whom he had been expecting, but they certainly didn’t match my description. His hesitation was my hot iron.
‘Officer?’ I squeaked, mouse-like and vulnerable.
‘This road,’ he boomed, quickly coming to his senses and pointing at where I had just come from, ‘is cars not permitted!’
I looked behind me at the heaving crowd with exaggerated surprise.
‘Oh really?’ I blurted, trying to sound casual. ‘I must have missed the sign.’
He was a big bloke with a moustache you could fit on a large broom and a pockmarked face that looked like he’d been in the firing line of a squadron of peashooters. He didn’t come across as one for my usual mind tricks, so I tried another tack.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m very, very lost. And my GPS is not working.’ It was a brief sob story, bereft of drama or much cause for compassion, but ingrained with the vital element of the transferral of blame onto an inanimate object that made it almost impossible for the cop to get any angrier with me. He crumpled his forehead and wearily waved me on, eying me dubiously until I was out of sight.
Back on the roomy highways of South Delhi, we returned to speed, bombing past the signs to Defence Colony, which I imagined as a neighbourhood fortified with cannons and nuclear warheads and marksmen stationed around the encircling ramparts. But we didn’t get that far: just past the Jangpura metro station, Abhilasha started to shiver, then shake, then enormously shudder with a force that was more than mere fallout from her snowplough experience in the old city. Struggling to keep the wheel straight, I pulled onto a slip road and cut her engine, fearing the worst. The source of the problem was not hard to detect: her left rear tyre was deflated and spread flat under the weight of the car.
Flummoxed, I knelt down to inspect the damaged element. The source of the puncture was a mystery: I couldn’t see any lacerations in the rubber that would account for the sudden loss of air. I reflected that maybe one of the shoppers I’d nearly pulped in the Old City might have thought a quick slash of a knife appropriate retribution for the abomination we’d committed. And I wouldn’t blame them. Or maybe it was simply the sheer exhaustion of nearly 10,000 km of road and Abhilasha pleading for a little R&R and attention (I was yet to take her for her third service, which was due given our lofty mileage). Whatever the reason for the blowout, the fact of the matter was that I was sat by the side of a busy slip road in the dark of the Delhi night, a lone woman in trouble intermittently floodlit for the world to see. Having only once single-handedly changed a tyre many years ago in the murky backwaters of my driving past, I figured this was not the moment to get back into practice; first back to Sundar Nagar, then this one-woman pit-stop team would kick into action.
With a nagging doubt that perhaps driving for fifteen minutes on a flat tyre might not be the wisest idea either, I set off slowly, trying to hold the steering wheel steady. I felt the Nano wobble and convulse, wincing through the pain of her deflated shank as the sporadic thwack of the edge of the hubcap hitting the tarmac sent my shoulders up around my ears with each new strike. I imagined sparks spewing out from our left rear end as we kept sheepishly to the extreme slow lane usually reserved for cyclists and handcarts. My fellow drivers were also concerned: one rickshaw-wallah slowed down beside us and motioned urgently for me to stop while making furious gestures with his spare hand that I feared indicated some kind of firework display emanating from Abhilasha’s posterior. I smiled diffidently and replied by raising my thumbs in a manner that would have confirmed his original suspicion that I was an irremediably clueless halfwit with a penchant for Nano-sadism.
We made it to Sundar Nagar, but not without having reshaped the hubcap into something resembling a battered gong. I cursed physics and damned its immutable laws as I searched under the passenger seat for the large plastic wallet I had never opened but had always suspected contained materials for the remedy of flat tyres. Sure enough, out dropped a contraption resembling a giant iron grasshopper and a metal wrench. Supplementing distant experience with online assistance from a website called artofmanliness.com, I got to work jacking up the rear of the Nano, surprised at just how simple and ungruelling a task it was. The next step, according to the site, was to remove the lug nuts, which I deduced must be the massive screws that were sticking out through the hubcap. From then on it was plain sailing; the new tyre was retrieved from the tiny space under the front bonnet and fitted, and the bolts replaced.
There was one thing that concerned me, however, and that was a diagram on artofmanliness.com illustrating the order in which these lug nuts should be refitted and tightened: the drawing assumed at least four, if not five bolts in the wheel. Abhilasha’s diminutive three wasn’t even brought into consideration for the complicated pentagram formations that were apparently essential for a safely attached wheel. I just pushed on the wrench until I thought I’d break it and resolved to take Abhilasha to a tyre shop in the morning for a second opinion, and to check I hadn’t put it on back to front.
The next day, through a relayed chain of directions that started at the petrol station just outside Sundar Nagar and ended back in Jangpura Extension close to where the blowout had originally occurred, I finally got to a tyre shop that was more accurately a kind of a street-side walk-in closet for all things black and treaded. There was hooped rubber everywhere, hanging from the ceiling, from hooks on the walls, piled up in wobbly columns and arranged into various combinations to make the required office furniture. Sitting on one of the tyre-loungers were a couple of barefoot lads in jeans and perfectly pressed blue shirts. Alarmed at my arrival, they jerked to attention. I pointed them in the direction of my handiwork on the rear wheel.
One of them knelt down and ran a judicious finger around the distended hubcap, grimacing. I shrugged with heavily feigned indifference and, by way of distraction, led them both around to the front bonnet, from which I produced the mangled former back tyre. The lads took it from me and one of them, all the time holding the object at arm’s length as though it were blighted with the plague, began to shake it and watched with disapprobation as a pile of rubber shavings floated down around his feet. He looked up at me, trying to put a polite lid on his clear disbelief at my crackbrained behaviour. Had I driven far with the flat tyre? Um, no, I lied. Well maybe for a few hundred metres; a kilometre possibly. Two, tops. Glancing down at the pile of rubber bits that now almost came up to his ankles, I know I didn’t have a case. I was no expert, but I figured this was the debris from the estimated six-and-a-half kilometres I’d driven on the expired tube. The dented hubcap was just one more piece of hard evidence piled against me.
A heated discussion ensued in Hindi between the two mechanics that threw out the odd recognizable word like ‘Nano’, ‘tyre’ and ‘tube’ and involved a lot of earnest head-shaking. The mechanics told me that under no circumstances could I continue to keep driving on the spare tyre. It was actually not big enough to be used as a rear wheel, being the size of the smaller, front tyres. So we would need to fix the old tyre and replace it in its original spot.
Would that be possible? I asked.
He looked down at the tyre and gyrated his head. It was a yes–no tie-breaker.
Pulled in by the irresistible magnetism of a yellow Nano, a few passers-by also stopped to get a look-in at the action, and within minutes we were Jangpura Extension’s number one attraction. A friendly grey-bearded Sikh gent pulled me to one side and whispered with concerned exigency, ‘I think you must have driven at least four or five kilometres with this flat tyre,’ he said.
‘Um, actually… yes, I did,’ I confessed, suddenly mortified at what this might imply to the gent: that I was lazy, stupid or plain frivolous. I had no excuse to hide behind. I was speaking the truth, and as I did, I watched the consequences of my indolence play out before me: one of the lads was resolutely beating a mallet into the dents of the damaged hubcap while the other was refitting the tyre he thought he’d repaired, but it was refusing to inflate. He removed it again and banged it about a bit more, but to no effect.
The proceedings were being monitored by an older guy in a long-sleeved shirt – I presumed he was the manager – who had rocked up and perched himself on top of a rubber column, from where he took over the chair of the debate that was still raging over what to do about the tyres. The frequency of the word ‘tube’ suddenly increased and within minutes one of the lads appeared with a brand new long black inner tube.
‘Really?’ I exclaimed. ‘But shouldn’t tubeless tyres not have tubes? Isn’t that the point?’ Nobody understood what I was saying anyway. Barely had I voiced my protests than the inner tube was fitted and inflated, and the boy was bouncing Abhilasha’s back wheel up and down the tyre-shop courtyard.
The Sikh gent returned to my side. ‘I can see that you are religious,’ he said to me in another whisper.
Why on earth would he think that? He pointed at Abhilasha and the now slightly faded stickers of Shiva and Lakshmi I had pasted to the rear windscreen somewhere back in Karnataka.
‘Oh yes, those!’ I exclaimed, deeply embarrassed at the levity with which I had attached them.
‘Belief in God is very important,’ he intoned gravely. ‘It will keep you safe on the road.’
I nodded and mumbled something about covering all my bases. I had no intention of shaming myself further after the driving-five-kilometres-with-a-flat scandal, and I wasn’t sure now was the right moment to engage in a debate about the advantages of religious faith over pragmatic caution while driving. Luckily, attention on the shop floor soon turned from the triumph of the inner tube to what seemed like a far more pressing matter around the area of Abhilasha’s front wheels. It was a chance discovery that further vindicated my Sikh friend’s belief in divine intervention, and my own in the power of a good mechanic. What I had failed to notice, and what might have proved a bit troublesome had it not been uncovered at that particular moment, was that both of the tyres were worn completely bald down their left-hand sides, the rubber so eroded that a network of tiny fine wires was showing through from the undertread.
The garage manager shook his head. This was not good. I mirrored him, executing what felt like my first perfect Indian head wobble, my neck joints having significantly loosened over the last few weeks. I tried to ascertain from him why they were bald down one side only, but the answer was not forthcoming. I put it down to Abhilasha’s chronic steering misalignment and made a mental note to point it out to the garage where I took her for her next service.
Whatever the reason, the fact was that new tyres were clearly in order. Whether or not the right ones were in stock was a cloudy issue, but eventually two new wheels were produced and within a couple of hours we were back on the road with one tubed back tyre and two spanking new ones up front, only a couple of thousand rupees lighter of pocket. It might have been more, but the price of the service had been rigorously negotiated by the Sikh gent, as some kind of reward for my apparent spiritual diligence, and as a token of our devotional camaraderie.