Read Online Never Mind the Bullocks by Vanessa Able - Free Book Online

swooning and shutting itself down with a histrionic twirl of its timer symbol.
    â€˜Bollocks!’
    Soft anxiety now gave way to hard panic. Without the GPS or my phone, how was I supposed to know where I was going? The road signs were in Forrin, and I had absolutely no clue where I had to turn off to get to Nagaon. A strip-lit kiosk emerged by the side of the road ahead of me like a mirage, and I knew the moment had arrived. It was time to face facts, look my demons in the eye and do the hitherto unthinkable:
ask
for directions. I pulled up by the roadside just ahead of the kiosk, opening my door to the Maharashtrian night as a bus whipped within an arm’s length of my ear, its horn shaking every cell down to my very core.
    I approached the kiosk-wallah with caution: the look on his face when he caught sight of me implied I had appeared to him suddenly as a frightening backlit apparition. Not wanting to alarm the man too much, and working on the assumption that if the signs out here couldn’t speak English then neither could he, I decided to keep things simple at the start by pronouncing only my primary intention: ‘Nagaon?’
    The man rocked his head from side to side and repeated ‘Nagaon’ in a way that suggested he wholeheartedly agreed with me. I was stumped.
    â€˜So… Nagaon?’
    Again, he agreed.
    â€˜Okay, but where is it? Which way is Nagaon?’
    The kiosk attendant continued to shake his head.
    Impatience was kicking in and I stared into the darkness ahead of us that lay beyond the reach of the Nano’s humble full beams. I pointed my finger into that darkness. ‘Is Nagaon that way?’
    He closed his eyes now and nodded his head. ‘Aaaah. Nagaon.’
    To double-check, I pointed in the opposite direction, from where I had just come.
    â€˜Is Nagaon that way?’
    To my despair, he repeated the same wobble. ‘Nagaon. Nagaon,’ he affirmed.
    â€˜So let’s get this straight: Nagaon is this way,’ pointing ahead of us along the road, ‘and also that way,’ gesturing at the direction from which I had come. It was like asking directions from Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. I was about to check that Nagaon might not also be up above us on the moon, when the kiosk-wallah’s eyes opened wide in realization.
    â€˜No, no, no, no, no! Nagaon not,’ he said, pointing behind us. Then gesturing ahead with a hearty, full-shouldered swing of his arm, ‘Nagaon!’
    His enthusiasm was convincing and I decided to take his word for it. After one final check – ‘Nagaon?’ – I felt the warm tingle of first success rise in my belly. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be so bad after all: in the middle of this beastly morass, here we were, two people with few common signifiers and only a loose consensus on the notion of internationally agreed positive/negative body language – a sure recipe for communicational disaster, especially given my rather irked state of mind. But a few minutes and several overblown physical gestures later, wehad reached a concord, and were unified in our conviction that I was to continue driving straight on the road, all the way to Nagaon.

3

ROUND THE BEND – Defining Sanity, Osho Style
    PUNE; KM 262
    When people in Europe say that driving somewhere like Paris or Rome is scary, they are usually referring to hairy moments spent trying to make a circle around the Place de la Concorde or being honked at by macho moped drivers for failing to pre-empt a green light. I had always considered the French and Italian capitals stout candidates for European driving at its most volatile, but now I was beginning to wonder just how Roman or Parisian drivers would fare with their cocky Smart cars and Cinquecentos on India’s roads. Here, it felt like everything was on its head: where I would normally relent, in India I had to lurch forward; where I would usually leave a chevron’s distance between me