Never Mind the Bullocks by Vanessa Able

that so few cars could cause this much congestion? The answer was not forthcoming, but I had 10,000 km to try to figure it out.

    Landfall finally came in the form of a McDonald’s whose golden arches appeared between the towers of Navi Mumbai, Bombay’s 15 high-rise residential suburb. Three hours into thejourney and we hadn’t even crossed the city limits – it beggared belief. I needed an incentive, a reason to continue pushing through the morass. Caffeine, processed protein, carbohydrates – anything would do. I nosed the Nano’s flat-packed beak into the parking lot and went inside to find that this unremarkable roadside fast-food chain was in fact
the
place for the swinging youth of Navi Mumbai. It was mobbed with hipsters, kids in drainpipe jeans and gelled hair, who sat sipping coke floats and giving me the occasional ‘you’re not from around here’ side glance during lulls in their conversations.
    I shuffled towards the counter with the furtive sheepishness of the new girl at school and ordered a cappuccino, which I half expected to be bullied off me by a gang of Big Mac–wielding hipsters. I could almost feel the conversation restart as the door closed behind me, and with a sigh that felt like I’d just had a brush with a hiding, I took out my phone to call Russell.
    â€˜You’re where?’
    â€˜The Maccy-Dees in Navi Mumbai. You must know it. It’s where all the cool kids hang.’
    â€˜What the hell are you doing still in Mumbai? It’s quarter to six.’
    Russell was nervous, and for good reason. Daylight was fading and I had another 80 km to go to Nagaon. Driving at night appeared to be something that all Indians, or at least the ones I had spoken to – like Russell, Akhil, Prasad, Puran, Naresh and even Sunil the Sat Nav whizz in Croma – feared like the Bogeyman. Once the outlandish and idiotic idea that I was taking the Nano past the limits of Navi Mumbai was absorbed into the individual psyches of my advisers, all that usually remained was to utter grimly, ‘Be careful.’ And then, ‘But whatever you do, just don’t drive at night.’
    Their words resounded through my guts and stirred a family of gremlins that resided deep inside. When I daredto ask why, I was fed a litany of disaster scenarios and horror stories that ranged from the sheer paralysis of not being able to see a thing on an ill-lit, unmarked road, blinded by the full beams of oncoming traffic, to the apparent notoriety of long-distance truck drivers who aided their road concentration not through the traditional methods of stimulants like coffee, tea or the indigenous rocket fuel, Thums Up, but rather through the ingestion of copious alcohol. Not much fancying the prospect of a Mahindra lorry–Bagpiper whisky combo, I decided that this advice was best heeded and that all journeys would and must be completed by sunset. All, except of course this first one.

    â€˜Holy – effing – shit.’
    I was straining up a steep incline, my foot flooring the accelerator, causing Abhilasha to bleat indignantly. I was wedged between an unknown bushy darkness to my left on the edge of the road, a doddery truck up front, and another truck to my right that was attempting to overtake us by accelerating its lard-arse up the hill, heralding its laboured ascent with its thunderous horn. I was inches, seconds, decibels away from death by unpleasant squishing.
    I scoured my driving databanks for possible bailout options, but there was nothing I had ever experienced to provide a solution to this truck sandwich: the only alternatives that seemed feasible were slamming on the brakes, or swerving left into the bushes where I could take respite and possibly cry. But a quick glance in my rear-view mirror assured me quickly that neither plan was going to work: the incandescent yellow glare told of an angry corpus of vehicles on my tail, salivating at the prospect of