The last few hours of driving on autopilot back to Mumbai demonstrated that a certain Indian road prowess had cemented itself into my subconscious. Although driving with my eyes shut, jedi-style, was still not quite an option, I realized that steering Abhilasha through this confusion of vehicles actually required little in the way of will and effort and much more in the way of opening myself up to the innate rhythms of the road. Becoming one with the car, as my father had once said, meant more than merely driving it as fast as possible. It meant finding my own number within the great traffic marathon.
By the end of the journey, my overall cruising speed was something in the region of 35–40 kmph. At the beginning of the trip, this sluggish rate would have inspired in me the wrath of a woman scorned by her Sat Nav. Had I been driving blindfold? Or had I gone in reverse the whole way? Did we just make the journey with four flat tyres, or had I switched the engine off, cut a hole in the floor and walked us there, Flintstones style? It seemed that no matter how focused I was on the road, I could never pick up our average velocity above crawling speed. And no matter how hard I tried to chill out and enjoy the scenery, I couldn’t stop that fact from irritating the living daylights out of me. I had spent several weeks in a state of sustained denial, stuck on a learning curve that would have scuppered all of Pavlov’s theories of repeated conditioning in intelligent animals.
The animals themselves were a large part of the menace. One of the most common causes of delay was the sudden appearance on a country road or highway of a mob of sheep, goats, cows or bullocks, with the odd elephant or camel thrown in, depending on the region. They would surge around Abhilasha in an orchestrated pincer movement that quickly engulfed us and forced us to a standstill. The animals may have been low down on the pecking order but in some ways they wielded more power than any other road user.
This was especially the case for the cow and her gelded husband the bullock. As the weeks wore on, I came to believe that the sacred bovines were probably the most intelligent road users of all, imbued as they were with confidence, stability and ethereal traffic-stopping powers of which Abhilasha could only dream. After three months of battling against the tide of Indian traffic, of swimming upstream in my attempts to figure out the rules and carve out for myself some kind of knowledge base that would give me an advantage over other drivers and get me to my destination in half the time, I began to grasp that instead of looking to the rickshaws and truck drivers for tips on how to stay on top in the road race, I should have been looking down the line to the oldest and most experienced travellers around. The bullocks, I finally fathomed, were the guardians of the unwritten rules of the country’s roads: they had been lumbering along them for millennia, aeons prior to the rumble of the first motor engine. The noisy new machines of the twenty-first century are a blip on the bullocks’ epic timeline, one they tolerate with enduring dignity.
The castrated workers of the bovine world, bullocks are variously employed as farm hands – pulling heavy ploughs to till the fields – or as a form of transport, hauling people or carts piled with hay between fields and villages and marketplaces. Late in the afternoon, on their way home from work, they spread out along the route, kicking up dust with their cloven hooves and heading forward in a single-minded drove, mob-handed, horns painted and sauntering from their skinny shoulders and haunch bones, their tails swinging like pendulums, indiscriminately slugging passing objects with a flick of their snaky appendages.
They were invariably unhurried; whether in the thick of urban chaos or on a small country road holding up a mile of traffic, they were amblers, less concerned with their speed than with the concentrated, easy plod of putting one foot in front of the other. Their calm bearing and phlegmatic eyes blinked away the flies and put to question any concept of speed or hurry. They were the true champions of the road because only they really knew how to travel.
It occurred to me that for the past three months, as though employed by the Graces to protect me from myself, the bullocks had been slowing me down. Every time I’d run into them, I was induced to stop and take a breath. Why was I always hurrying? What did an extra hour on the road matter, when there was so much ground to cross and such a wealth of watering holes along the way? When there were centuries – behind us and up ahead – and hundreds of roads to explore and leave our hoof prints on, where was the necessity to keep running today?
Make like a bullock, the bullocks said, and enjoy the ride.