Never Mind the Bullocks Read Free

seconds was returned a search result informing me that a certain Mr Shah of Mumbai was selling his newly delivered yellow Nano LX with only 300 km on the clock.
    My phone call with Mr Shah having miserably failed, I entreated Prasad to contact him to try to seal the deal. Prasad came back to me within hours with the happy news that the car was still for sale at the price of two-lakh four or Rs 240,000. That was exactly double what I had expected to pay. It turned out the reason was that there were three models of Nano and not just one: the cheapest model was indeed Rs 100,000, or one lakh, but the more expensive version, the one that listed air conditioning and electric windows among other perks, was a damn sight more. And Mr Shah, being in possession of the latter model, was reselling it, of course, at a premium. At double the price of the cheapest car in the world, it was no longer a bargain, but by that point I was so entrenched in the idea of a road trip that it seemed I had no choice: the cheapie version was nowhere to be seen in my subsequent trawl through Indian used-car classifieds. Needs must when the devil drives, and in the knowledge that this could be my only shot at bagging a Nano, I called Prasad and gave him the go-ahead.
    The speed at which things moved after that was a little daunting. Within a couple of days, I received an email from Prasad that bore the triumphant words ‘Nano bought’ in the subject line. Accompanying the email was a trio of shakily framed, steamed-up photos of the car taken from his cell phone at varying angles. I sat down to reassess what was to be my trusty steed for a one-woman road trip around India.
    The plan now had to be hiked up from a flight of fancy to something that was definitely going to happen. As such, I branded it: I started a blog called The Nano Diaries and set a distance challenge of 10,000 km, which was what India’s circumference roughly measured. I made a tentative map of the ensuing journey: a hand-drawn circle around the country that started and ended in Mumbai and took in all the major cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Calcutta and Delhi, as well aspassing through the Nilgiris hills of the south, right down to Kanyakumari at the southernmost tip, before heading back up the east coast all the way to West Bengal. From there I’d head over to the northern plains, to the cradle of Buddhism in Bihar and India’s most holy city, Varanasi, before going north into the foothills of the Himalayas. My trajectory in that direction ended at the Kashmiri border where the mountains looked a little too Nano-unfriendly. Instead, I would work my way back down through Delhi and Gujarat to finish up again in Mumbai.
    It was only at that moment – having set up the blog and committed to 10,000 km in the Nano – that I went back to Prasad’s photos and was struck by just how unroadworthy the car looked: it had no discernible front bonnet or boot, and it was painted a ridiculous, attention-drawing bright yellow. It did not in any way resemble the fantasy compact, all-terrain vehicle I had created on the drawing board of my mind that was somewhere between a Smart Car and a Suzuki Vitara. With four doors, and an undercarriage about eight inches off the ground, this was neither a particularly compact car, nor did it look fit for the miles of off-roading I suspected lay ahead. I began to think that the Toyota Innova might not have been such a bad idea after all.
    My mum peered at the triptych of yellow cars on my computer screen. ‘Gosh, it’s tiny!’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you sure that’s not a Smart? And where’s the engine?’
    Determined not to ignite her incendiary maternal scrub, I tried to sound like I knew what I was talking about and parroted off the specs I had lifted from the Nano website minutes earlier. It might seem small, I began to explain with an air of technical authority, but in fact this particular model boasted a