Never Mind the Bullocks (10 page)

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.