BODH GAYA; KM 6,352
Whatever you do,’ Reuben Abraham had told me as I drove out of the ISB campus several weeks earlier, ‘don’t try anything cute in Naxalite country.’
Eager to get going, I pretended to know what he was talking about, laughed and gave him and his wife Petra a chipper wave before rolling up the window and setting off. But as Hyderabad receded into the distance, his warning began to resound uncomfortably inside the Nano. Hang on, what was Naxalite country? I had never heard of it and had no recollection of seeing it on the maps. And what did he mean by cute, exactly?
Two days later, on 6 April, all my questions were answered in the news reports. Seventy-four members of the Central Reserve Police Force had been massacred in an ambush carried out by Naxals, who I learned were fearsome revolutionary Maoists who terrorized a large swathe of India through violent operations like this one. The attack had taken place in the forests of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, near the border with Orissa and Andhra Pradesh (about 300 km from our route), and followed another incident two days earlier that saw eleven soldiers killed in Orissa when a landmine blew up a van.
The massacre in Dantewada had been the group’s most deadly to date. As I reread the sequence of events on several news sites, the gut gremlins – largely absent since I banished them through the evocation of Swami Vivekananda’s thunderbolt mind back in Kanyakumari – made a dramatic comeback. I read on with trepidation about the group’s continuing campaign of violence, which had allegedly claimed the lives of 6,000 people in the past twenty years. According to an Indian intelligence estimate in 2006, there were around 70,000 active Naxals in the country, 20,000 of whom were armed. Most of their attacks were aimed at police and government forces, but civilians, and especially local tribespeople, were frequently caught in the crossfire. The areas they mostly operated in – Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and Jharkhand – were considered ‘severely affected’ by Naxalite activity.
I got hold of a map of these areas and compared it with my own route. There was an alarming amount of overlap. Hyderabad itself appeared to be at the centre of an area called the Red Corridor, a rash of Naxalite-impacted territories that dropped down like a sash around India from West Bengal all the way to Kerala. So I had already been in the thick of these badlands that stretched in the other direction all the way up to Orissa and Calcutta and closed around my next destination, the sacred Buddhist town of Bodh Gaya.
From what little I knew of Bihar and Jharkhand, it made sense that they might be ripe territory for Maoist activity. Among the poorest states in India, a large majority of their population lives rurally, while the size of their middle class is negligible. Bihar has the lowest GDP per capita in India and virtually no industry, relying on its migrant workers to send money home from the big cities for a great deal of its income. The state also has a reputation for lawlessness, with a large number of criminal activities – most notoriously, kidnappings and extortion – that stick to the wall in a way that just wouldn’t wash in other parts of the country. Even the guidebook was a bit iffy on the subject of Bihar and Jharkhand, grouping them into one chapter and glossing over them with the general attitude that despite the presence of some nice Buddhist sites, more discerning travellers might want to think of taking themselves off to another neck of the Indian woods.
As I crossed the border from West Bengal into Jharkhand, it immediately became apparent that something was quite different here. The most obvious sign was a massive drop in the number of private cars on the road, an indication, I guessed, of the prevailing economic situation. However, the highway that cut through the state, the NH2 – the eastern arm of the country’s Golden Quadrilateral network – drove a smooth line through a landscape that, despite all the doom I had managed to monger, turned out to be beautifully and breathtakingly rugged. Making good time through sublime scenery, and not a Naxal in sight, gumption levels inside the Nano were high. That is, until we approached the frontier with Bihar.
There was the usual long line of trucks waiting at the state border. I had read that truck drivers spend an average of two to seven hours waiting at such borders, and even up to 24 hours, a chronic delay that the World Bank estimates costs India $420 million annually.32 Still, inert boredom for the attendant truckies had the upside of providing a fun driving game for me: due to the often unruly nature of the lines, getting through to the front was like trying to figure out a maze, ducking through the spaces between stationary trucks in a bid not to hit a dead end. In the past, I had left such situations to the experts, latching on to the first SUV I saw negotiating the lines with any degree of dexterity and tailing it right to the bitter end. But on the border between Jharkhand and Bihar, there was no such opportunity. Abhilasha was the only private car I had seen in at least an hour, and when we met the giant lorry park, I had no choice but to go it alone.
I began to weave tentatively through the maze of colossal trucks, trying to gain as much ground as possible along the edges of the road. The line went on for at least two or three kilometres. The drivers were milling about their vehicles, some of them smoking, some knocking back shots of chai, some of them taking a nap in the shade underneath their trucks. Heads turned as we passed by, making me painfully aware of our exterior bright yellowness, interior single white femaleness and general excellent candidacy for high-profile kidnapping, should there be any off-duty Naxals among the fray. There was none of the friendly waves or salutes to the Nano to which I had become accustomed, just eyes that followed us in what felt like irritated suspicion.
At one point, two trucks parked shoulder to shoulder and, allowing for no passage, blocked the way ahead of me. After about a minute studying their posteriors while a small crowd of guys began to gather around us, I decided that staying still was not an entirely comfortable option. Trying not to meet the eyes of the lorry drivers for whom I was now a one-woman spectacle of bad reversing, I concentrated on getting Abhilasha out of our little Venus Fly Trap cul-de-sac and back onto the road.
I had never felt intimidated on account of my gender or the fact that I was alone – never, that was, until now. Perhaps it was all the stories and hype about the Naxalites, maybe it was the neurosis of entering an infamously anarchic part of the country, but among the horde of lorry drivers at the border between Bihar and Jharkhand that day, I definitely felt like a plump yellow pigeon among a crowd of hungry cats.
Half an hour later, after some very focused manoeuvres and a hardened commitment to not stopping under any circumstances, I managed to extricate Abhilasha from the scrum. We were out, over the border and back on the road as the sun began to drop and the hues of the jagged hills took on a deeper shade of terracotta, the spindly shrubs lining the hillsides appearing softer and increasingly fuzz-like. As if in a dream, I passed a group of Muslim men performing their evening prayers in perfect synchronicity in five rows of four on the central reservation of the highway. It was a beautiful sight of coordinated devotion in a most outlandish location that clocked the paranoia pixies out for the day. I chided myself for my foolishness and aptitude for gobbling up media alarmism as though it were the gospel truth. Bodh Gaya was only another 250 km away and if there was one thing I needed, it was a good grounding stint in Buddha’s own seat of enlightenment under the most famous tree in India.
But it seemed that the ugly head of my neurosis had reared up for the long haul and couldn’t be appeased, even by the presence of scores of well-meaning, shiny happy Buddhists to whom Bodh Gaya was a centre of pilgrimage and a temporary home. The heat wasn’t helping: it was mid-April and the air outside was scorching. I can’t say I wasn’t told. When I set out in the relatively balmy month of February, vaguely planning a route that would take me in a circle around the country in three months and so through the northern plains around the time of the dreaded hot season, people with whom I discussed my itinerary pleaded with me to avoid the north in April. My cocksure dismissal of their advice doubtless rendered me demented in their eyes.
I don’t know which part of ‘temperatures in the north of India during April and May are usually between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius’ I didn’t quite process; it had seemed an abstraction, an intimation of warmness, but nothing that I assumed couldn’t be easily negotiated with a bottle of ice-cold water and a blast of Abhilasha’s AC. Besides, I had foolishly reasoned, the more hardship and adventure we faced as a team, the more character-building the experience would be and the more stories we’d have to tell.
If I had known that those stories would involve tedious tales of lying under a fan in a hotel room covered with a wet towel and groaning sporadically as I tried to muster the will to do anything, I might have rethought my route timings. Sweat-drenched clothing and heat-induced lethargy do not glamorous tales of the road make. And such was my first, and only, morning in Bodh Gaya. I lay on the bed in my room at the Kirti, a hotel wrapped in Tibetan flags, watching the clock drag out the minutes past lunchtime. Just outside, within a few hundred metres of where I lay ostensibly dying, was one of the most culturally and spiritually significant sites in the world: the Mahabodhi Temple, which contained in its grounds the Peepul tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. I had spent the morning chastising myself for being so close to a slice of living history and not having the gall to undergo the roasting necessary to see it. But after five hours of self-castigation, I decided I’d learned my lesson and that it was now or never as far as the Buddha was concerned. If he could sit under that tree without moving for 49 days, then I could surely get off the bed and go and check it out for an afternoon.
When I did go outside, the main street of Bodh Gaya was deserted. A couple of mad dogs limped by and began to follow me, howling in boiled derangement as they watched me make my way to the gates, where there was very little activity. The cluster of shops selling wooden statues of the Buddha and the many-armed Avalokiteshvara pulled their doors ajar resignedly in the taciturn sleepiness of the peak of the day’s heat. At the Mahabodhi entrance, I found a guide who was willing to take me round. We wove our way through the gardens that surround the tall, monolithic structure of the main temple, among little pockets of cheerful Tibetan, Vietnamese and Bhutanese monks who were alternately meditating, taking photographs, rummaging through their satchels, or just sitting in the shade of the trees, chewing the fat. My guide, whose name I failed to retain despite his repeating it four or five times, gave an account (often way too thorough, given the effect of the temperature on my blood pressure and general patience levels) of the garden’s artefacts, all of which were, according to him, either exactly 300, 1,000 or 2,300 years old. In his version of events, they were put there by Emperor Ashoka, or destroyed by the Mughals, or both; there appeared to be no real third alternative.
The tour over, I drank the entire contents of the bottle of water from my bag and sat down in the shade to make like a Bhutanese monk and contemplate the sprawling peepul tree that stood within a walled garden on the south side of the temple.
At dusk, when the temperature had dropped enough to allow the non-essential functions of my brain to kick back in, I was approached by a smiling middle-aged monk in yellow robes. We had no language in common and so proceeded to communicate mostly by way of hand gestures and the mutual exchange of detritus at the bottom of both our bags. He showed me his passport, which told me that his name was Le Van Chung and that he was Vietnamese. He then curiously insisted that I take a photo of his passport picture page; a strange request, which for some reason I felt might be insulting to refuse. I went ahead and snapped his document, before he quite rightly asked if he could return the favour.
Once again, the grizzly paw of suspicion took a swipe in my direction. Exchanging images of each other’s passports was an unprecedentedly bizarre activity. My more rational intellect told me to relax, that the man was clearly a mendicant: his head was shaved, he was clad in holy cloth and his arms were dripping with prayer beads. This was most probably his way of getting to know people and gleaning the information that his language skills prevented him from doing: small-talk basics like name and country data. There was nothing peculiar about that, was there? But then the gremlins crawled out from their lair and whispered in my other ear – he could be an identity thief, a human trafficker, an undercover agent, a con artist, a (gasp!) Naxal… After all, the guise of the benevolent monk would be perfect for reeling in unsuspecting single females already batty from the heat. I kept my eye on him even after he left to meditate by the temple entrance, and didn’t let him out of my sight until I decided to head back to the Kirti.
Back in bed, lungs heaving and sweat drying off under the force of the huge overhead fan, I began to come to my senses. The chances that Le Van was a mastermind criminal or local Marxist rabble-rouser were very small indeed. Occam’s razor dictated that he was basically just a nice old chap with a quirky way of making friends.
That decided, I realized a problem remained: the issue here was not the über-friendly Le Van, nor was it the Naxals. The problem, as it revealed itself to me in a moment of lucidity, was the joint prongs on the pitchfork of my own predicament: namely, prolonged periods of time spent with nothing but my own paranoid ranting for company within, and all-encompassing mind-bending heat without. And on the back of that rather calming and incisive thought, Occam’s razor also added that it was high time I got the hell out of the plains, before I started to have a meltdown of nerves.
I turned to Google Maps and checked out our options. We needed to get north as fast as possible, to the foothills of the Himalayas where temperatures were in the blissful 20s. I decided we would head for the state of Uttarkhand, which contained the closest highlands in the direction in which we were moving. I set my sights on the town of Nainital, a small holiday resort at the start of the foothills that, according to Lonely Planet, was an attractive and upbeat place built by homesick Brits who wanted to be reminded of the Lake District. That suited me just fine, but a few moments of measurement brought with them the grim tidings that this pseudo-Cumbrian mountain paradise was still 1,000 km away, which realistically meant at least another three days on the road. Between the Buddha tree and Nainital, we’d have to overnight in Varanasi (although, remembering how much I had loved the city the first time I visited, I was tempted to stay on) and again in Lucknow before finally escaping the oven that was the northern plains.
As I settled down to sleep, I tried to think what the Buddha might do in the same situation. He would probably use his infinite wisdom to accept the trials of the heat and see through the illusion of the pains of extreme high temperatures and lethargy, I thought, resolving to take my future cues more from the stoic Buddha and less from Scooby Doo in the face of 50 degrees Celsius. But then I remembered what Buddha, a native of this area, actually did: come the summertime, Shakyamuni would gather up his disciples, find a suitable spot of serenity and batten down the hatches for the next three months, thus starting the tradition of the annual summer Buddhist retreat.33 Now that was smart. And so I drifted uncomfortably off to sleep in the grim knowledge that Buddha himself wouldn’t attempt the journey we were about to embark on the next day: a 250 km drive to Varanasi over tarmac roads hot enough to make a thousand-egg masala omelette.
My hopeful plans for leaving before daybreak were scuppered by a slumber so log-like that not even the irritating sound of a phone alarm sustained over 45 minutes managed to scratch the bark of my deep REM.
After finally being frog-marched into consciousness by a protracted banging at the door from a shy youth who had been obliged by some higher power to ascertain that I was checking out that day, my departure was then further delayed by an email I received from Thor with the alarming header: ‘Check this out and please don’t explode and die!’ Inside was a link to an article in the Hindustan Times that almost made me want to leave Abhilasha in the Kirti parking lot and take the first plane out to wherever, with nothing but a Dear John scribbled on a Post-it and stuck to her windscreen by way of explanation.
The headline, which jumped out at me from the screen bearing all the marks of a Hitchcock horror sequence, dismally read: ‘Second Nano Catches Fire: Tata Motors’. With a bleak sense of foreboding, I went on to read the harrowing tale of a brand new Nano that had burst into flames a few days ago on its way to being delivered to a dealership near the town of Vadodara in Gujarat. The article only stated that a Tata spokesperson had announced that the company was sure a design flaw was not to blame. I found little comfort in his reassurance and was frustrated by the newspaper’s lack of information about how the fire started. A cigarette left to burn on the passenger seat? A stray firework that made its way into the gas tank? I hoped against hope that the explanation was ludicrous and highly unlikely; that of all the things that might have ignited the flames, what it definitely wasn’t was a faulty spark plug that would incite a recall of the 30,000 Nanos already on the road all over India. Or, come to think of it, anything connected with driving long distances in temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius.
I went straight to a YouTube broadcast by CNN-IBN that displayed the words ‘Nano: Trial by Fire’ across the screen in block letters, accompanied by a dramatic action-sequence soundtrack and the heart-rending image of Abhilasha’s doppelgänger in an advanced stage of immolation. I watched reluctantly as the report showed the charred remains of a grey Nano being loaded onto the back of a truck and covered solemnly with a white shroud. IBN’s man on the ground, Varun Kumar, stood boldly facing the camera and recounted in his best Breaking News tones how the fire had started in the rear of the vehicle and worked its way quickly to engulf the whole body. He went on to interview an auto analyst by the name of R.K. Dhawan. Dhawan, sporting a huge moustache and a baseball cap that undermined his senior years by at least two decades, spoke with cloudy authority about the problems of new-fangled fuel-injection systems. Kumar concluded with the staunch observation that Tata might be seeing its dream sales figure reduced to ashes.
The readers’ comments that followed the articles and videos gave me pause for thought. Posts such as ‘It’s a toaster oven on wheels – a piece of SHIT car!’ and ‘It has become devil. It should be banned’ suggested that glowing national support for the little car might not be as widespread as I had assumed. The critics were harsh: ‘What u expect for peanuts!’ exclaimed an outraged user called Sahilkind, while Jam from Bangalore pulled no punches in saying, ‘Tata Nano is crap. Please suggest your friends and family members not to go for it, if anyone is planning to. Saving li’l money at the cost of lives is not wise. Thank you.’
TheMrRajaG was hardly so polite: ‘This is a bloody fucking car,’ he said, before telling the story of his neighbour who had his Nano ‘thrashed’ by an autowala and had to have two doors replaced. He rounded off his tale with the deduction that the Nano was a ‘plastic toy car fucking good for kids’.
‘An expensive way to get someone cremated on slum-dog standards’ was the insightful response from YouTube user Telears, while cyclops621 responded to the footage of the burnt-out car by chillingly laying open his own emotion. ‘Hahahahahahahaha…’ he wrote, with brazen honesty.
But the haters in turn had their own detractors: ‘Shame on you whoever you are,’ wrote parthakaroy, joined in his defence of the car by athjuljmatthew, who claimed, ‘There is nothing wrong with the nano’, and Porusable, who added his own endorsement: ‘On the whole, the tatanano is a fantastic performer.’ The Nano’s supporters went on to point out that many makes of cars had either spontaneously combusted or undergone safety recalls, including Marutis, Toyotas, Lamborghinis and Ferraris. One user even pointed fellow commentators to a site called The Truth About Cars, which reported no fewer than 190,500 cases of cars bursting into flames in the United States in 2009, a figure that put these two Nano incinerations well into perspective.
At the extreme end of the spectrum of opinion were those who went as far as absolving Tata from all responsibility for the blaze by positing conspiracy theories that were very much in line with my own hopes. ‘This is a deliberate adverse publicity by the scared competitors,’ wrote parthakaroy, who went on to make the excellent point: ‘In India, have you ever seen the fire tenders rushing in as soon as a car is engulfed in fire? Here you have the fire tenders, newsman, camera absolutely ready before the event happened.’
Still, the conspiracy theories could only comfort me to a certain point. I went on to read that there had been more spontaneous Nano fires the previous year, with at least three reported incidents in Delhi, Lucknow and Ahmedabad. These had been attributed to a faulty switch in the steering column and the public’s mind was supposedly put at rest by a quote from a Tata spokesperson, who claimed his company had ‘comprehensively checked all the Nano cars that are on the road’.
I did the math: I wasn’t sure exactly when Mr Shah had taken delivery of Abhilasha prior to selling her on to Prasad, but I calculated it must have been in late 2009, which meant my beloved steed was probably of the same generation as the faulty switch brigade, and had not, to the best of my knowledge, been comprehensively checked out by Tata or indeed anyone (barring the Brahmin in Pondicherry, but the less said about that the better). The blazing cars on YouTube might well be acts of subterfuge, but the fact remained that there were now the twin spectres of faultiness and a potential singeing hovering in the air like a defective button on a steering column that was about to plough into my skull.
Eager for a toehold of optimism from which to chase the phantoms away, I navigated back to the IBN clips page and found an interview with Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of Autocar India, who according to the headline was about to enlighten us as to What’s Going Wrong With The Nano. ‘When cars are reduced to ashes, it’s very difficult to find out exactly what the problem is,’ he said rather darkly, though he went on to suggest a shoddy fitting in the spot where fuel comes out under pressure, or an electrical wire meltdown, which didn’t mean much to me on a practical level. At that moment, the presenter echoed my own desperate petitions by asking Sorabjee, ‘If I was going for a drive in a Nano, what should be the one thing I should look out for?’
‘Well, keep your eye on the rear-view mirror!’ the editor cheerfully quipped.
So that was that: one hour’s worth of trawling the internet for some source of comfort or useful information, following the revelation that the car I was driving for thousands of kilometres through burning hot terrain had been reclassified from ‘The People’s Car’ to ‘Incendiary Death Trap’, had borne no fruit. I was none the wiser than when I pulled into Bodh Gaya two days before, except that now I was condemned to carry the burden of knowledge and the millstone of paranoia for the next few weeks, or at least as long as Abhilasha didn’t ignite into a big yellow conflagration.
When we finally did get to put very hesitant wheel onto very hot road, the sun was at its highest in the sky and the tarmac was so heated it was emitting a dizzying Will-o’-the-Wisp-like mirage that upped the illusion of oncoming speed bumps by about 300%. At one point I was convinced that a haystack strapped to a cart pulled by a tractor up ahead was a shackled Gruffalo on its way to the government labs. On top of the worry of a Nano inferno, I was also mildly concerned for Abhilasha’s diminutive tyres: we had already seen dozens of signs along the highways warning motorists not to go over 70 kmph for fear of a blowout, and I figured that speed plus 40-something degrees plus incredibly small rubbers was a sure-fire formula for an afternoon spent accumulating heat stroke on a Bihar roadside while scratching my head and trying to figure out which end of my toothbrush was most suitable for prising off Abhilasha’s rear hubcap.