Never Mind the Bullocks by Vanessa Able Page A

taking a punt at my posterior.
    The bright side of being wedged at right angles between two metal giants was that the one on my right was temporarily shielding me from the stream of traffic coming from the opposite direction. The procession, which I presumed had been forced off the road due to the presence of a large lorry in their own lane, had been burning headlight-shaped troughs into my retina in a carpet-bomb succession of nuclear explosions for the last hour. I wasn’t sure if they all had their high beams on, or if it was the quality of the air, the dust, the humidity, or smoke from evening fires that diffused, reflected and even magnified the photons, but each time a set of lights came into my field of vision, it annihilated everything else around it, including the vehicle in front. This would force me to negotiate my way along the road, according to the principle of keeping the bastard bright beams always on my right and the truck in front in a state of cloudy near-visibility.
    Jesus, this is not a joke, I thought, as I sat up straight, gripped the wheel and put every inch of my being and focus into keeping the car on an even keel and out of the way. Although the Nano’s speedometer was reading a meagre 30 kmph, I actually felt more like I was negotiating a Formula One circuit with Vaseline in my eyes, against a cast of raving truck drivers who were all jumped up on some rather mettle-enhancing crack.
    There was no choice but to keep up, although even this was soon an insufficient strategy. The truck in front of me began to bear sharply to the right, pushing into the truck next to it and forcing that further back into the oncoming lane. The manoeuvre was accompanied from all sides with a doleful roar of horns, including from the line of traffic in the opposite direction that was once again propelled off the road by the obstinate truck hogging their own god-given thoroughfare.
    â€˜What could he possibly be…’ I started to mutter incredulously, before it became clear that what I was witnessing, and indeed was in the vortex of, was a daredevil double overtake: the truck in front that was already being so painfully passed by another was executing an overhaul of its own. Through the grey cloud of the accelerating vehicle’s exhaust fumes, the hind legs of some large black animal came into view to my left, then another pair, and then another, all of which were soon accompanied by torsos, tails and lolling heads. They were bullocks – bulls without balls – and, as I was set to find out, as common a form of transport in India as the village tractor.
    Within a few seconds, the bunch of bullocks had turned into a veritable herd, plodding contentedly at the command of a tiny man with a dirty-white turban who walked in their midst holding aloft a cane as though he were a tourist guide herding a sightseeing flock. I felt the thwack of a couple of shit-caked tails hitting the Nano’s bodywork as we crawled past the indifferent beasts in a respectful and silent cortege. The last bullock behind us, the horns restarted, as did the efforts of the big fat lorry to get ahead of his counterpart. It was harrowing to watch, but he ultimately made it in front, with a left-ways wiggle that elicited a surprise whoop of relief from me.
    Within minutes that particular party was over and traffic on the road thinned out. Then it was just me and the huge truck I’d been trailing for over an hour now; I’d been overtaken by every member of the impatient mob that had been straining behind me, leaving in their wake an eerily quiet instant of respite. Deciding the moment was ripe to try a little overtaking of my own, I shifted down into third gear and hit the gas. We were still on a bit of an incline and the Nano didn’t pick up speed with quite as much gusto as I hoped, but after somegentle encouragement and motivation tricks (‘Come on girl, you know you can do it. Let’s show fatty here what