Never Mind the Bullocks (12 page)

Time passed and faintly instigated augury threw us together via social media, where our interests were reignited. In the weeks that followed, friendly messaging quickly turned into effusive e-flirting and it soon became apparent that Thor, who wrote programs for a living as a data scientist, also had an stake in India. While mine was more of the socioeconomic/motoring variety, his was purely spiritual: he'd been visiting the country annually for the last 17 years, going to an ashram in Chennai that advanced a form of Raja Yoga called Sahaj Marg and was the domicile of his guru, Shri Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari (‘But you can call him Chari,' he wrote, to my relief). Quite coincidentally, it turned out that Thor was planning a trip over there fairly soon, so raising the possibility of us actually meeting up one day.

We skitted around the subject without either of us betraying too much enthusiasm for the plan, before I upgraded the situation to code red by dropping this devastating phrase into an email: ‘Why not come and travel with me for a while? Go on, it'll be fun.'

I sent the message with some degree of misgiving. Although I was always quick to advise the heartbroken that resaddling on the dating horse was the best and most efficient way to get one over on post-break-up negativity, it also felt a bit too soon to be bringing another bloke into my life. To boot, inviting another human on board the good ship
Abhilasha
was the opposite of what I was supposed to be doing at that point, namely driving, blogging and generally concentrating on some self-restoration by way of navigating the Indian subcontinent. But I hadn't the willpower to refrain; inappropriate, inconvenient, it was all far too enjoyable. So I counter-reasoned that our fling would be quick, fleeting and efficient in the single-minded goal of having a bit of no-strings-attached fun.

Thor's reply was thankfully laced with equal compunction, and the sum of our two vacillations resulted in an agreeably rough-shod plan that had him coming to India at some point in the not too distant future: he'd travel out to meet me, we'd drive around together for a while and we'd ‘see what happens', which I hoped was code for we'd go our separate ways. It was a high-stakes first date, and one that gave me significant wobbles in the light of the prospective future intimacy and all the complications that would naturally follow the simple act of getting my oats.

My nerves took a further blow a few days later when Thor suddenly upped the stakes in our dalliance by actually booking his tickets and setting a schedule: he was flying into Mumbai and then taking the train down to Bangalore, where we would meet in two days' time.

Now that the potential encounter had morphed into a definite plan, I slipped into my familiar routine of rattling with the thrill of fantasy while cultivating the dread of impending reality. Doubt reared its grisly head and began to twist my thoughts into shapes of misgiving. I barely knew the guy. What if he was moody and difficult? What if he talked incessantly or never said a word? What if I realized we had absolutely nothing in common? With the realistic scenarios duly processed, I began to ponder other, more outlandish possibilities: since we had next to no mutual friends, who, if it ever came down to it, could even vouch for him? He might be deranged, psychotic, a twisted marauder of women in cars, a cannibal hungering after the flesh of a Nano-packed female. I mean, why else would he be so keen on coming out to meet me, if not to cut me into small pieces and bury me in the far-flung scrub? He couldn't possibly
like
me that much, not after a few brief conversations at a wedding and a series of, frankly, coquettish emails. There was still time, I thought, to tell him I had to bypass Bangalore, or I had far too much luggage and couldn't take on any passengers. Or that Abhilasha was allergic to men.

These anxieties began to take hold to the backdrop of the spaghetti-western starkness of Andhra Pradesh, an environment that was doing everything to nurture the ballooning notion that the further I got from Mumbai, the further down the barbed rabbit hole I was spinning. The thorny, arid landscape, giddying in its emptiness, inspired a flailing agoraphobia in me, as I took existential respite in the sceptical humanity of the listless villages at junctions, one of which must have considered itself so forsaken by the world as to have erected an unearthly, King Kong–sized statue of the monkey god Hanuman to keep vigil over the souls of its inhabitants.

The jitters had started in Hampi, a place I remembered from my student days as a quiet, laid-back travellers' sanctum replete
with baggy-trousered tattooed hippie types who spent their days reading
Shantaram
in cafés and hanging themselves out to bronze over the breathtakingly large boulders scattered by the banks of the river that ran through the small town's Jurassic terrain. I had got there from Goa via the NH4a, a road that at one point receded into a dirt track so unnavigable I had to take a long, triangular diversion that shaved several thousand dendrites off my nervous system. I approached Hampi at the witching hour, expecting the effects of the long drive to be instantly soothed by a laid-back trance soundtrack infused with the scent of burning incense and weed, but was instead subject to a sequence of official procedures enforced by the town's constabulary that suggested I had entered a militarized zone. I met a set of resolutely closed gates and a guard who was reluctant to let me in before I convinced him I was indeed on the guest list by bandying about permutations of the word ‘permit'.

When I finally arrived at the hotel Shanthi, where I had stayed years before during my first and second trips to the town, I was ordered to go to the local police station by the manager of my hotel. He had motioned at a sign above his head while I was filling out the guest register: ‘Foreigners visiting Hampi should compulsory register their name in district police office of Bellary'.

‘Seriously?'

The manager nodded gravely.

‘The office is at the end of the bazaar, left side. You should go there tomorrow morning, immediately,' he said, leaning forward to intone conspiratorially, ‘It is better, to avoid trouble.'

Trouble? I had always thought of Hampi as a small, unassuming tourist spot of moderate archaeological interest, but it was turning out to be more like the O.K. Corral at Tombstone, if the ongoing security measures were anything to go by. The main – and really,
only
– street of Hampi reminded me of what the
frontier towns of the new America must have looked like in the early days of the settlers, minus the cool wooden buildings and a saloon. One long, straight road bordered by food stalls, shops and cheap hotels that led to – something that probably wasn't a feature of the wild west – a temple with a massive ornamental tower, a
gopuram
, and a resident elephant.

At the police station, I was obliged by the duty officer to sit and read a laminated list of fourteen commandments hanging from the wall that spelled out what might be in store for me in this dusty halfway town. Some of the rules, like ‘Do not wander alone at any time with valuable things and cash', were common sense, but there were others that were a tad more unsettling. Rule number eight warned, ‘No eatables or beverages given by unknown persons should be consumed'. I thought of all the times I had been offered food by strangers in India, whether on a train, bus or boat, or waiting in line for something or other when the odd puri or bhaji would suddenly be produced and offered forth amid an uncrumpling of newspaper and a shimmer of plastic bags. Could it be that the ostensibly well-meaning donors of these comestible gifts were in fact malevolent criminals looking to knock me out with a racehorse dose of Rohypnol and have their wicked way with my luggage?

I heard a cowbell ring somewhere in the distance as a breeze blew a few leaves over the threshold of the police station. I half expected to see a pile of tumbleweed blow down the main street. I read on: ‘Strolling around the Hampi ruins after sunset is not safe. Hence return to your room before sunset.' Blimey, a curfew. No watching the sun go down by the banks of the river for me, then. The next rule that caught my eye upped the stakes somewhat: ‘Do not go to interior places lonely. There is possibility of getting attacked by robbers, thieves and rapists.'

Jesus. Was this for real? The officer behind the desk, satisfied I had absorbed the information before me (I hammered the
point home by taking a photo of the document, assuring him gravely that it was for revision purposes), handed me a large book in an advanced stage of decomposition and asked that I fill out my name and the information decreed by the various columns. My nationality, birthday, father's name and mother's name were all required, and, not being in a particular hurry, I filled them out with flair, curving my sticky-uppy and hangy-downy letters and putting little spirals above my
i
s.

On my way out, chuckling inwardly at the prospect of how life would look if I really were the lovechild of Dolly Parton and Cliff Richard, the policeman called me back. I turned apprehensively, suddenly terrified that this small-town pen pusher might actually be better acquainted with the celebrities of my childhood than I had given him credit for. But instead, he pointed solemnly at another poster I had missed on the way out. It was a series of mugshots of three mustachioed faces that I presumed were the local Crips and Bloods. The pictures were so fuzzy, you wouldn't be able to pick the men out in a line-up were they standing right in front of you. If you squinted your eyes a bit, one of them actually looked like the policeman himself. I thought to tell him so. He was not amused, nor did he seem flattered by the comparison. I left swiftly, stepping out with a touch of trepidation into the lawless Hampi morning.

I tried to shrug off the officer's warnings and spent the following hours suspiciously regarding the other travellers loitering by the riverside. The day passed rather uneventfully and with the exception of a hungry mobbing by a group of monkeys and a subsequent goodwill drubbing by a gang of schoolgirls that left me bereft of a banana and all the pens I was carrying, I managed to escape the town unscathed. But the psychological damage had been done: the officer's words had taken root in the caverns of my paranoia, and started to creep out with their sharp, spindly fingers as I drove out along the deserted NH67.

In contrast to so many other highways I had taken, on the road from Hampi to Gooty I went for ten or fifteen minutes at a time without seeing another vehicle. The fuzzy faces of the bandits I had poked fun at in the police station were now appearing in my mind's eye, squinting out from behind a tree or scowling at me from a rocky outcrop. I had read several stories of highway robberies in the Indian press in the last year, usually reports of gangs who had been captured along with bags of cash and a veritable arsenal of weapons, sometimes even blindsiding their victims by dressing up as women. And since it was only the mobs who had been nicked who were making the headlines, I shuddered at just how many operatives must still be out there, roaming free and lying in wait for unsuspecting small yellow cars.

The
Times of India
wrote chillingly of one particular gang who had been operating in Gujarat and focusing their game mainly on trucks: ‘Their modus operandi was brutal and effective: Any truck going through a deserted stretch of highway would be overtaken with a vehicle and forced to stop. The driver and his assistant would be beaten and left bound and gagged by side of the highway while the truck and its goods would be stolen.'
¹⁹

Keen not to be left bound and gagged by the roadside while some tranny highway(wo)man made off with Abhilasha and most of my worldly possessions, I positioned my travel-sized can of hairspray at grabbing distance on the passenger seat and worked on perfecting my John Wayne scowl. I pitied the vigilante who faced such a terrifying combo.

At Gooty, we turned south to join the NH7, which forms the gist of the country's north–south corridor, a 2,369 km-long spine from Varanasi to Kanyakumari. By all relative standards a well-heeled road still in the process of being built, the highway bore all the hallmarks of a reconstruction project in full swing,
but perhaps on a public holiday: a bunch of abandoned diggers were parked at various junctions along the way and the only workers to be seen were drinking chai by the roadside. Despite the ostensible mooch speed of construction, most of the highway was already a fully functional dual carriageway, with the odd exception of several miles of tarmac here and there where one half was closed off (by use of a haphazard arrangement of rocks, traffic cones, police tape and hand-painted signs) and the road was reduced to a lane in each direction.

This frequent changing of sides clearly confused some drivers, or perhaps just encouraged reprobate opportunists. Careering in the fast lane on a completed stretch of the highway, I was – quite obnoxiously – blaring music by way of a set of battery-powered speakers with the windows down and flooring Abhilasha's revs for all she was worth. At one point we reached the shaky zenith of 95 kmph, the fastest land speed recorded by our team to date, when I saw what looked like a truck approaching from a distance, head on, in my lane.

A quick glance at the traffic moving to my right told me I hadn't gormlessly missed another diversion. To all intents and purposes it was highway business as usual, and yet there most definitely was a truck coming at us, in the fast lane, from the wrong direction. The road was mercifully devoid of many cars, so I swerved quite easily to the left and let the truck pass with an exasperated bleat of Abhilasha's horn. Our protest was met with a nonchalant expression from the driver who indignantly flashed his lights at us, as if our presence in our rightful lane had somehow inconvenienced him.

My disbelief sustained and continued to mount well after his passing. How, just how, was that possible? You can't do that. You can
not
do that. It's so plainly, utterly, painfully, blatantly, patently, flagrantly wrong to drive in the fast lane of a highway
in the wrong direction
. Where to start with the wrongness of
it all? I felt my Osho conditioning begin to seep out of the window, and in this particular case I wasn't sad to see it go. After all, there was madness, which was sort of fun, and then there was consummate lunacy, which I simply couldn't condone.