weâre made ofâ) we finally edged past the behemoth and had nothing but a dark, open road ahead of us.
The NH66, my route from Navi Mumbai down to Maharashtraâs seaside Nagaon, stretched ahead of us into the darkness. But the Nanoâs headlights, not a jot on the stadium-strength peepers of its peers, were not doing the best job lighting the way, and while I was fumbling with the switches to try to activate the full beams, I became aware that the dividing tracks of the road were shifting to the left underneath me. For some idiotically naive reason, I put this down to the road having widened to two lanes in either direction and congratulated myself for having passed through the eye of the storm and the worst part of the road unscathed. Now weâd be cruising all the way to the ocean.
This assumption turned out to be a very bad error of judgement. I rounded a bend only to be immersed in an explosion of light coupled with an outraged honk somewhere right in front of me. I instinctively swerved to the left and missed the oncoming vehicle by inches. It transpired that my two-lane fantasy was just that; in the end the road was only one lane in each direction, and I had been driving, quite evidently, in the
wrong
one. Within hours of my first auto outing in India, I had come close to being trouser-pressed by lumbering lorries, had my eyeballs fried, and then nearly annihilated myself by way of sheer stupidity, almost dragging the Mother Ship down with me into the jaws of hell. Was this what the next 10,000 km would look like?
The following hour passed in a blur while I maintained the concentration of a tightrope walker. The calm that had been broken by my earlier veering-off into the wrong lane turned out to be something of an oddity. The traffic was back in full monsoon-level flow on both sides, headlights blazing, horns blaring. I assumed a stiff, white-knuckled position behind the wheel, my nose almost touching the windscreen, my eyes squinting into the approaching glare. I hardly dared blink: one wrong move and Iâd be tinned meat in a little yellow can.
The GPS was frustratingly impervious to the road rage outside. Its own version of our sordid highway reality was a little blue arrow calmly pointing forward on a clear yellow line that snaked out into infinity, unencumbered by the deranged
son et lumière
that was the truth of the world beyond my window. I scowled as I noticed there were even a few little stars to complete the idyllic calm of the night-time sky of the parallel Sat Naviverse, to which the GPS responded by flashing the outline of an empty red battery in my direction and death-rattling off into oblivion.
âCrap!â
I stabbed at the screen with a sweaty finger, performing mini-CPR on the undeserving gadget. It was no good. I glanced at my watch: time of death 8.13 pm. With at least twenty more kilometres to Nagaon, I needed directions. The road signs that appeared between bouts of visibility were all in Hindi or Marathi â two languages of which I had no inkling whatsoever â so they might as well have been hieroglyphs. I reached for my phone and poked clumsily at its tiny interface in an attempt to locate myself on its map app, a procedure that took several minutes to execute in between having to refer back to the road and having my optical nerves barbecued by fellow motorists. The signal was low and the map was irritatingly slowto load. The dot that was me flashed godforsaken against the bleak existential background of a grey grid, a little blue light lost in nameless space. I shook the phone in vain and started to perform figures of eight with it above the steering wheel, to no effect. I glanced at the little red rectangle in the top corner, which warned me that only 3% of the battery was left, and as the map struggled to download some form of cartographic image from the World Wide Web, the effort became too much for the device; it too performed a hammy death scene,
The NH66, my route from Navi Mumbai down to Maharashtraâs seaside Nagaon, stretched ahead of us into the darkness. But the Nanoâs headlights, not a jot on the stadium-strength peepers of its peers, were not doing the best job lighting the way, and while I was fumbling with the switches to try to activate the full beams, I became aware that the dividing tracks of the road were shifting to the left underneath me. For some idiotically naive reason, I put this down to the road having widened to two lanes in either direction and congratulated myself for having passed through the eye of the storm and the worst part of the road unscathed. Now weâd be cruising all the way to the ocean.
This assumption turned out to be a very bad error of judgement. I rounded a bend only to be immersed in an explosion of light coupled with an outraged honk somewhere right in front of me. I instinctively swerved to the left and missed the oncoming vehicle by inches. It transpired that my two-lane fantasy was just that; in the end the road was only one lane in each direction, and I had been driving, quite evidently, in the
wrong
one. Within hours of my first auto outing in India, I had come close to being trouser-pressed by lumbering lorries, had my eyeballs fried, and then nearly annihilated myself by way of sheer stupidity, almost dragging the Mother Ship down with me into the jaws of hell. Was this what the next 10,000 km would look like?
The following hour passed in a blur while I maintained the concentration of a tightrope walker. The calm that had been broken by my earlier veering-off into the wrong lane turned out to be something of an oddity. The traffic was back in full monsoon-level flow on both sides, headlights blazing, horns blaring. I assumed a stiff, white-knuckled position behind the wheel, my nose almost touching the windscreen, my eyes squinting into the approaching glare. I hardly dared blink: one wrong move and Iâd be tinned meat in a little yellow can.
The GPS was frustratingly impervious to the road rage outside. Its own version of our sordid highway reality was a little blue arrow calmly pointing forward on a clear yellow line that snaked out into infinity, unencumbered by the deranged
son et lumière
that was the truth of the world beyond my window. I scowled as I noticed there were even a few little stars to complete the idyllic calm of the night-time sky of the parallel Sat Naviverse, to which the GPS responded by flashing the outline of an empty red battery in my direction and death-rattling off into oblivion.
âCrap!â
I stabbed at the screen with a sweaty finger, performing mini-CPR on the undeserving gadget. It was no good. I glanced at my watch: time of death 8.13 pm. With at least twenty more kilometres to Nagaon, I needed directions. The road signs that appeared between bouts of visibility were all in Hindi or Marathi â two languages of which I had no inkling whatsoever â so they might as well have been hieroglyphs. I reached for my phone and poked clumsily at its tiny interface in an attempt to locate myself on its map app, a procedure that took several minutes to execute in between having to refer back to the road and having my optical nerves barbecued by fellow motorists. The signal was low and the map was irritatingly slowto load. The dot that was me flashed godforsaken against the bleak existential background of a grey grid, a little blue light lost in nameless space. I shook the phone in vain and started to perform figures of eight with it above the steering wheel, to no effect. I glanced at the little red rectangle in the top corner, which warned me that only 3% of the battery was left, and as the map struggled to download some form of cartographic image from the World Wide Web, the effort became too much for the device; it too performed a hammy death scene,
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