KOLHAPUR to ARAMBOL; KM 500–694
Jwoke to the sound of trance music pounding loathsomely through the wall, with beats so ferocious they were driving the metal springs under my mattress into a twangy dissonance, vibrating right into the centre of my primary auditory cortex, which also happened at that moment to be the location of my deep irritation nucleus. A vision of strangling my neighbours using their sound system’s wiring took shape through the fog of semi-consciousness as my more rational brain alerted itself to the fact that there was something urgent that needed to be done this morning.
I forced open my crusted eyelids to take a day-lit peek at the quarters I had rented the night before. It was a sparse room with damp patches on the walls, cracked tiles on the floor and a fan with one broken blade that swivelled in a lopsided arc above my head. My bag had been plonked in the far corner of the room, its contents bleeding out and making a trail towards the bathroom along the murky tiles. The room resembled a detention cell, but as images from the previous day’s drive began to file back onto the screen of my psyche, I remembered very clearly that the night before, I would have settled for sleeping on a morgue slab.
Yesterday had not been pretty. Best-laid plans oft do fall by the wayside, and the route from Kolhapur to Goa, a 200 km drive that should have taken just a few hours to cover, was one such disastrous scheme that ended up spanning the entire chuffing day, and had me lost in deepest rural Maharashtra entertaining the not unlikely prospect of a survival situation.
The brunt of the problem lay in the fact that, on setting out from Kolhapur – where I had decided to overnight on my way from Pune to Goa – there hadn’t been anything like a best- or even an ill-laid plan on the table to begin with. The GPS having served me faithfully over the last couple of legs of the journey, I began to think I could put my trust in the technology of satellites to get us to our destination without having to exert any effort on my own part. It followed that the extent of my day’s route preparation consisted of looking at a map of Goa, identifying Arambol as the northern-most popular beach, and entering the closest town, Pernem, into the GPS. I was given an estimated journey time of four-and-a-half hours, which I figured would have me swinging in a hammock by mid-afternoon, the glistening waters of the Arabian Sea providing a soothing background as I sipped coconut water and dined royally off giant pineapple slices.
I guessed the route would be fairly straightforward, assuming we continued down south on the very efficient NH4 that had brought us here from Pune. But, so trusting was I of the GPS’s authoritative tones, so engrossed was I by the vision of my impending picture-perfect afternoon, that I failed to react when I realized we clearly were not headed back towards the highway. My first schoolgirl error was to assume that global positioning satellites knew more about how to get to Goa than I did after a cursory glance at the Lonely Planet map. The second, and even more fatal, mistake was not to verify the route that Delilah (the name I gave the GPS that day in return for her bitter betrayal) had in store for our little road trip. Forty minutes later, after trundling along an unpaved road compounded with the red dust of some very inactive roadworks (okay, it was a Sunday), it finally occurred to me to hit the ‘route overview’ option to see where the hell we were going.
It turned out that Delilah had no well- or ill-laid plans either, at least not for heading for the NH4. She thought it a better idea to take a little back road called the SH115 that would eventually throw us out onto the west-coast highway, the NH17. Delilah justified her decision on the grounds that it was the shortest route (a mere 180 km), and I accordingly presumed she was the expert and could be trusted with the one task that her entire being was programmed to do. After all, once we cleared the roadworks on the outskirts of Kolhapur, the landscape took a turn for the gorgeous. We were in the countryside – real thick, green Indian countryside – and it was stunning. I gave the GPS a conciliatory nod of approval; this wasn’t turning out to be so bad after all.
The road was well paved and suddenly became shrouded by the curving branches of the giant trees that leaned over the tarmac, trying to touch each other halfway and making a lush arc that shaded our passage. A shepherd boy urged a goat to cross the road ahead of me, swinging a scythe over his shoulder as an old woman passed him, a bright yellow skirt rippling around her hips with a brown shawl thrown over her head. A small brick kiln in the shape of a half-built pyramid smouldered by the side of the road as we slowly overtook a man on a bicycle balancing a pile of freshly cut grass about twice his height bundled into a bow-tie shape behind him. The houses became smaller, blending better with the earth as we moved away from the city: simple, rectangular structures with terracotta-tiled rooftops, sometimes obscured by massive mounds of hay, or little outhouses that were entirely covered by dried banana leaves. We whizzed past rice fields shining saturated green and separated from neighbouring cornfields by successions of palm trees, while a couple of kilometres later I was amazed to see echoes of the Mediterranean in fields of neatly planted sunflowers. Every so often the road would open out onto a little stone bridge that spanned a river where a group of women were knee high in the water, bending down and kneading various brightly coloured fabrics before laying them out to dry in long strips on the banks of the river.
Then there were the bullocks. They paced the road in pairs, oblivious to passing trucks and buses and their perfunctory honks. I passed two of them at first, steadfastly pulling a cart with lorry-sized tyres that was carrying sticks of firewood so long they were dragging on the road behind. The driver stood upright on top of all of the wood, towering above the bullocks that he guided with a couple of fraying ropes. The beasts plodded on, their eyes fixed forward and their horns painted bright red with a couple of white horizontal stripes. We passed another pair, and another, all pulling the same kind of cart piled up with the same kind of wood. We kept passing them until it became clear they were part of some sort of procession. I presumed they were all headed for the same spot: a bullock convention, perhaps, or a giant bovine Burning Man.
Several kilometres later I realized the carts were all going to the village of Bidri, where a factory with a tall chimney pumped out smoke that blackened the blue sky. A line of bullock carts several dozen long waited to shed their loads in turn at the doors of the plant.
I had never seen so many bullocks in my life. There were around a hundred, some waiting stoically in the midday sun, while others unwound in the shadows of palm trees across the road. I parked Abhilasha in an open field near the bullocks and went out with my camera to record the sight. The animals seemed imperturbable: they were just standing, sitting, reclining and drifting off into reverie. Some of them stared into an inscrutable distance or picked at bits of grass on the ground, while others folded their legs underneath their tank-like torsos and sank down on top of them. Their drivers lay next to them on the ground or draped over their loads of wood, also drifting off into bored and careless sleep, oblivious to my picking my way between them and snapping away at their dozing forms. As road users, the bullocks’ demeanour was the exact opposite of that of most of the vehicles Abhilasha and I had encountered these past few days. The bullock, cart and driver were the anti-truck: slow, steady, silent and self-assured.
I drove on, steeped in mental rhetoric eulogizing the merits of rural life. It was idyllic: people seemed so laid-back, the cattle were so unflustered. Everywhere I looked was a picture postcard and each tiny village we passed treated the Nano as a visiting hero. Children ran in our wake, waving and screaming ‘Nanonanonanonanonanonano!’ while men often stopped dead in their tracks and watched the car go by, keeping us in view until we were out of sight. Passengers in passing SUVs waved frantically from the back seat, while groups of women pointed in our direction, whispering, then falling into hysterical laughter. I saw the jaw of one teenage kid on a bicycle actually drop in a hammed-up expression of surprise as we overtook him with a honk. I kept him in my rear view for a few seconds more, worried he might complete his slapstick routine by losing control of his bike, veering off the road and ploughing head first into a bush.
The bucolic feel-good vibes came to an abrupt end when, an hour or so out of Kolhapur, I arrived at a fork in the road and made a spur-of-the-moment decision that would quickly change my opinion that remoteness from civilization was a thing to be desired. Having been informed by Delilah some distance back that the road would be straight for the next couple of hours, I had turned her off to save batteries, assuming there would be no major turns before we hit the NH17. Quickly assessing the fork in the road in front of me, I failed to consult Delilah, opting instead to rely on my instincts and turning left; it was a road that looked more enticing, and anyway, the huge lorry ahead of me had gone the same way. But it was this bad error of judgement, I later reflected, that eventually rendered myself and Abhilasha hopelessly lost in a land almost entirely void of English speakers or any helpful road signs. Not to mention hammocks, coconut water or giant pineapple slices.
A few minutes after taking the ill-fated turn, the road started to narrow and a tiny pang of doubt set in. I decided to switch Delilah on anyway, just to ascertain we were still on the right track. I kept driving as she struggled to pick up a signal, but when she eventually did, the little car on the screen that represented us appeared to be driving at a steady rate about one centimetre to the right of the yellow line that was the road we were supposed to be on. I looked to my left where there was nothing but fields and trees, and was stumped at exactly how I was supposed to interpret this information. I eventually figured that since we were holding a steady course in relation to the yellow line, the one-centimetre difference could be put down to the satellite taking a little cosmic knock and registering us a few metres to the right of our actual position. Such a margin of error was permissible, I reasoned, given the distances we were dealing with and the fact we were in the proverbial butthole of nowhere.
It wasn’t until about two hours later, when the road we were on had all but completely given way to a track filled with razor-sharp stones, that I stopped to think that perhaps, just maybe, Delilah might have pulled a fast one. Wary of deflating all four of my tyres in one fell swoop, I powered her up for another consult. By now her signal had completely disappeared and my phone displayed the same dumb vacancy. I cursed them both. It had been about twenty kilometres since I had passed the last village, about twelve since the last turn, and at least three or four since I had seen another human being (an old lady aimlessly squatting by the side of the road). My situation called for drastic measures; I had to know at least if I was still heading in the direction of Goa.
Compounding my problem was the absence of an alternative. My £5.99 map wasn’t even an option and, since I had entirely entrusted the trip to Delilah, I had done nothing in the way of preparing a reference list of en-route towns and villages. This meant that even if a Maharashtrian villager was to materialize, I had absolutely no idea what I would ask him anyway. And even if I did know, I’d be asking in English, a language probably as remote to my villager friend as Serbo-Croat. Not even Beginner’s Hindi could help me now. Despite my toolbox of GPS, iPhone, large map and relatively well-functioning human brain, I had no clue where I was and even less of where I was going. It was not a proud moment.
The rumble of an approaching motorcycle crept up behind me. The driver’s shock at seeing a stranded white girl in a Nano in the thick of Maharashtra was matched by my relief at encountering another person in the middle of nowhere. He pulled up before I even had the chance to hope he wasn’t a crazed killer, and we sized each other up for a few seconds as I tried to decide what would be the best course of action. I chose the long shot first.
‘English?’
Nothing.
‘Okay… uh… Hindi?’
Nope.
It seemed I would have to revert to the international language of mime. How could I illustrate Goa manually? I started to move my hands about in a wave-like motion.
‘The sea!’ I exclaimed, by way of explanation. My audience betrayed no sign of recognition, sympathy or even entertainment. Undeterred, I continued, making the waves a little more exaggerated and sensational. ‘The sea? You know, the sea?’
My reasoning was thus: asking the directions to Goa at this point might be tantamount to asking the way to China. It was simply too far and too general to be a destination to which this passing motorcyclist might be able to point me. And without the relevant data on towns between here and Goa, I decided the easiest thing would be to head towards the sea, where I would invariably join up with the NH17 that would take me south. And although I didn’t know what the Marathi for sea was, I fancied my ‘B’ in GCSE Drama might finally come into its own as I enacted an impression of one of nature’s most magnificent forces to the bemused motorcyclist.
He looked utterly flummoxed, but I couldn’t afford to admit defeat. Maybe I wasn’t putting enough fluidity into my wrists. I tried to inject them with a little more flourish, and I even began to accompany my manual demonstration with the audio effect of breaking waves, which probably sounded more like I was trying to hush the bewildered man. Whether the penny finally dropped, or whether he had just had enough and really needed me to stop the Little Mermaid show, the motorcyclist suddenly interrupted me mid-wave to motion I should just keep going over the rocky road. I was highly sceptical, but he appeared quite sure of himself. I felt certain that no one without an elephant or an SUV with platinum treads, or with half of their wits about them, should even think of attempting to cross the blades of death.
‘Straight on, you say?’ I asked with a grating English cadence, keeping it ridiculous with the utterly pointless question, ‘And then it’s the sea, you say?’
He looked puzzled.
‘The sea, the sea…’ I restarted the hand motion.
‘Yes, yes! Ek kilometre!’ I looked ahead and considered. He seemed to be telling me that the beach was but a kilometre away and that these rocks were my last trial before reaching the gleaming sands of India’s western coast. Or at least, that was what I wished to believe. I badly wanted to trust that despite everything, I was still going in the right direction and it was perfectly feasible for the road to appear and disappear like this from time to time, even if it was supposed to be a state highway.
Satisfied that I’d follow his instructions, the motorcyclist puzzlingly turned his bike around and went back the way he had come. I pushed Abhilasha into first gear, gave her some gas and made our first move over Satan’s own pebbled path. Despite our near-crawling speed, rocks were still flying up at the engine and the undercarriage, and I winced with every little knock and bump. This could not be good for the tyres, the paintwork, the suspension, or the low-lying undercarriage.
Ek kilometre later, I wasn’t too surprised to find myself not staring out into the infinity of the Arabian Sea, but in fact looking at an impasse, as even the stony path had now disappeared and we had been ejected onto the edge of a field bordered by red sandy scrub. It was here I finally surrendered. I was lost beyond redemption. There was only one thing for it: I had to swallow my pride and start back up the road to retrace our steps.
As I winced over the rocks of death, cursing Delilah at every bump and bang, I felt the rose-tinted glasses through which I had been viewing rural India begin to steam up. I knew nothing other than the fact that we were somewhere on the 200 km stretch of land between Kolhapur and Goa. It wasn’t late yet, but the afternoon was certainly ripening in a way that told me I might not make it to my hammock before sunset.
I angrily renamed the SH115 the SH11T. And to top my SH11T pie with a turd cherry, events took a turn for the even more incredible when, just after I had made my way back over the road of doom, I ran into a roadblock manned by a group of children. A long piece of cane was laid across my path at about thigh height, balanced between two rickety wooden forks. Eight or so children milled about, presumably having just been released from school and embarking on an afternoon’s larks conning money out of lost people. In any other situation I might have found the wee tykes endearing and even amusing, but given the grimness of our current situation, it was all my inner Scrooge could do to press on the brakes and not shoot straight through their carefully crafted barrier.
I rolled down the window to a flock of confounded faces. I suppose that in turn, I was also the last person this little group of would-be taxmen was expecting to see that afternoon. So great was the shock at the sight of my face (I did have a quick look in the mirror to check it wasn’t covered in tiny pins) that for a second no one moved. Then one boy in shorts ran to a shack to call over a taller boy in trousers, who immediately pulled up the wooden bar by use of an impressively functional pulley system. I shot them a forgiving wink and hit the gas as they remained speechless in my dust.
About an hour back down the road, I saw a white jeep and a bunch of lads clad in jeans, T-shirts and Wayfarers who had stopped to have a cigarette. Finally, city folk. I couldn’t have felt more affiliation with this group of youths at that moment had they been my own brethren. I pulled up alongside, rolled down the window and took a deep breath.
‘Hello there. You don’t happen to know the way to Goa by any chance?’
I was met with seven blank stares suggesting the boys weren’t quite sharing my overwhelming sense of sibling fellowship.
‘Umm, Goa? Beach? Sea?’ (Hand movements) ‘Goa? Gooooooh-a?’
The light of comprehension burst behind the eyes of one of the lads. Goa! Of course. Yes, he knew, and he knew well. It wasn’t straightforward, but he slowly listed for me the succession of villages I’d need to pass through in order to get back out onto the NH17, the road headed south.
Gargoti, Uttur, Aza-somewhere… I wrote them all phonetically in my notebook, thanked the chap profusely and went on my way. List in hand, I was now sure to stop at every village to yell the names in front of me to random passers-by who then pointed me on to the next stop. I was sure this flimsy method was flawed at best, but I had no choice but to follow the paper trail from one village to the next. As it turned out, the village relay method proved remarkably reliable as well as instructive. I managed to glean several navigational pointers from the experience, including being able to decipher the hand gestures that relayed the necessity of taking a right or left turning in the near to mid-term future, as well as the requisite of asking for directions three times over at each step. Every now and then my chosen oracle either stank of booze or seemed so terror-stricken at the prospect of a me-driven Nano that his instructions were hard to divine. One guy who by the angle of his stance looked as though he’d had about five beers too many thought he’d actually have a go at getting in the car with me after I slowed down at a junction to ask him the way to Uttur. I locked the door in the nick of time and motioned to him in the politest possible way that I was not at this moment taking passengers.
It was after dark when we crossed the border into Goa. Uniformed police stood amid a flood of headlights and clouds of dust to stop every car on its way into the tiny state. When it was my turn, I rolled down the window to find a beaming policeman on the other side.
He wasn’t to know that my mood had hit rock bottom, that I had been frustrated at the wheel for close to nine hours now and was in no mood for pleasantries.
‘Yes, indeed it’s a Nano, officer.’
The policeman sustained his smile, casting a curious eye over my lap to the junk on the passenger seat and the bags in the back.
‘Very good,’ he concluded. ‘Goa?’
‘Yes,’ I replied with faux solemnity, stifling the urge to ask him where the hell else I might be going, crossing the border into Goa at 7 pm.
He waved me on with official cheerfulness and Abhilasha and I finally crossed the threshold of our target state. It was another hour to Arambol, where the roads became thinner and the greenery noticeably lusher. We passed the odd church, some sweaty colonial houses and a couple of barefoot Israelis riding an Enfield at high speed and volume, before finally getting wedged into the tiny lanes of stalls selling tie-dyed fabrics, bongo drums and crystals that constitute Arambol’s hippie gateway.
I settled for the first hotel I found that appeared to have some adjacent parking space down a little side street: a gap the size of a garden path between two stationary Marutis. As I sized up the space against my mental image of Abhilasha’s actual width, a man knocked on my window and identified himself as the owner of one of the parked cars. He was confident, if not eager, to see me take the place next to him, and proceeded to direct me as I tried to squeeze Abhilasha into the munchkin-sized spot.
Within seconds, a small audience had gathered to monitor the manoeuvre from every angle and discuss my chances of completing the park successfully. I fancied someone might even be running a book. After several lurches backwards and forwards, I finished in triumph, sweating from the pressure of surveillance. However, with only about an inch between Abhilasha and the adjacent Marutis, the next challenge I faced was getting out of the car. The Maruti owner realized my predicament and beckoned me to back out again. With the engine off and the handbrake up, I watched from the sidelines as Abhilasha was gently nudged back into place under the combined effort of the bystanders until her bumper was just touching the wall behind her. Exhilarated by a job well done, the Maruti owner stepped forward and shook my hand, then informed me that I had to move from this spot by 8 am as Abhilasha was blocking the route of the daily garbage truck.
Rolling over in bed, I reached for my phone. It was 8:15 am.
‘Shit!’
I jumped up, pulled on yesterday’s discarded clothing from the floor and ran out of the door, expecting to find the Nano hanging from a tow-truck crane. But there she was, just as I had left her the night before. Only this time, one of the Marutis had been replaced by two rickshaws.
‘Nano girl!’ someone called. I turned around to see a group of four guys squatting and laughing from a doorstep behind me. I put on a weird simper to cover my true impression of ‘How the hell did you know this was my car?’ Feeling miserably like I was being laughed at, I nevertheless took advantage of the lads to enquire about the elusive garbage truck. My question was met with smiles.
‘No problem, no problem!’
‘But shouldn’t I move my car?’
There was a round of shakes of the head and waves of the hands and a general consensus that Abhilasha should stay put.
The oldest looking of the bunch, a guy in his late 30s wearing a white shirt with an animal leaping across the left breast stood up and motioned me over to the car. His tone was suddenly very businesslike.
‘Are you selling this car?’ he asked with a concerned frown. I noticed his friends had all risen too and were making their way towards us to listen in on the conversation. I was beginning to wish I had my own entourage for such moments: a gang of girls who would pop out of nowhere and gather around me in the style of a 1990s gangsta rap video, hanging off my shoulders and shooting vaguely irascible looks at whoever it was I was talking to.
‘Well, yes, eventually. But for now I’m driving it. Around India. For 10,000 kilometres.’ There was a round of sage nods from his boy-gang, but my interrogator was persistent.
‘When you are finished, will you come to Goa and sell it to me?’
Hang on, was he trying to cut a deal here? Seriously? He really wanted me to bring the car down to Goa after I had dragged it thousands of kilometres all the way around the country? What did he want it for, spare parts?
‘Will you still want it after 10,000 kilometres? What will you do with it?’ I asked suspiciously.
He brightened. ‘Of course. 10,000 kilometres is like a new car!’
I made a mental note to try to start reselling negotiations when the dial was at 9,900.
‘I have a Maruti Zen,’ the man continued. ‘But I would like to purchase this one-lakh car also.’ Now it was me nodding sagely, though in reality I was bewildered. Was this guy serious? I’d never been approached by anyone wanting to perform an automobile transaction as though he were selling me a postcard. With my spine still tingling from the previous day’s debacle in Maharashtra, I almost began to take his offer seriously. I could just sell the Nano now, cut my losses, take the cash and book a train back to Mumbai, still in one piece. This complete stranger was offering me a way out, an option not to spend the next dozen or so weeks embarrassing myself by bumbling cluelessly around the Indian countryside. Should I just take the money and run?
Swimming in options, I joined Abhilasha’s potential buyer and his boy-gang in turning to admire her radiant yellow sheen. I suddenly remembered the handbrake was still off and made for the passenger door to pull it up. Just as I was doing so, the man popped his head in next to me.
‘Madam, will you permit me a test drive?’
I straightened up. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Will you allow me to test drive this Nano?’
He might as well have asked if he could nip off with my liver for a few minutes. His request was so bold I was momentarily stunned; looking at his earnest features, I found myself flailing in a chasm of cultural relativism. I had been approached by a complete stranger who first wanted to buy my car, and now wanted to take it for a spin: was this a highly elaborate mugging or a friendly moment of village bonding? If I went with my instincts and refused him the car (and now I’d apparently agreed to sell Abhilasha to him, he considered himself as good as the owner), would I be committing an act of gross offence to a citizen of my host country? Was I about to break the last Indian taboo of not practising generosity with one’s car keys? I imagined a similar situation in London that would most likely end in police intervention and decided I wasn’t going to take a chance with my steed.
‘Um, no. Sorry, but no.’
He didn’t seem to take the rejection too much to heart. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card for an export company with large lettering in Courier.
‘This is my card. When you are ready to sell, you call me, okay?’
‘Right you are.’ I took the card and stashed it deep in my pocket next to Abhilasha’s keys. I crossed my fingers as I shook his hand, satisfied I’d made the right decision to hold on to the Nano. Trauma-yoked amnesia had kicked in and yesterday’s cock-up was already fast fading into a rosy pastoral narrative. The journey was young and the spectacular Maharashtran countryside had been but a warm-up, a rural test run to see what we were capable of as a team. From this point forward, we would be a terrifying pair, honed in navigation and linguistic skills, savvy to local customs, nifty with the gearstick, and most certainly not for sale.