Never Mind the Bullocks (26 page)

I waved down a nearby motorcyclist wearing an enormous padded white leather jacket. Having furnished me with excellent directions to Chakratirtha Road, the man proceeded to cross the hospitable local–psychopathic stalker divide by tailing Abhilasha and sticking to us like Velcro for the next few kilometres. Whenever the road afforded him the opportunity, the motorcyclist sped up to come level with my face and actually rapped on the window for my attention. The first couple of times I thought he might be trying to alert me to the fact that a flock of man-eating seagulls had nested on the car's roof, or that one of her tyres could do with a puff of air, but his intentions were far more amicable.

‘Where are you from?' he screamed with urgency against the wind, which was carrying his voice back down the road at 30 kmph.

Perplexed at the high-speed small talk, I mouthed back through the glass, ‘Uh, England.'

Spurred on by my participation in the curious dialogue, and not even fractionally letting up on his speed, the motorcyclist continued his line of questioning in earnest.

‘What is your good name?'

Before I had the chance to answer, a rickshaw van piled up with wooden crates that was coming in the opposite direction forced my friend to swerve and slow down to take his place behind me and let the vehicle pass. Within less than a minute, his knuckles were at the window again.

‘Which hotel are you staying at?' he asked with an interrogator's seriousness that consigned him once and for all to the nutters' wing of my estimations. I declined to answer and instead scowled at him from the driver's seat, baring my teeth. His was a friendliness that gave me goosebumps and I had no intention of encouraging his attentions further. Several thumps of the window later and even a disrespectful slap of Abhilasha's
posterior, my eager escort went on his way, ostensibly bored by my indifference and definitely terrified by my well-honed vitriolic growl.

We finally pulled up on Chakratirtha Road, home to the main run of small hotels in Puri, to be treated to a sight somewhere between the scene of a recent natural disaster, a horror movie set and a building site. The trinity was a painful one, spiked with the thorns of my own broken dreams of a night at a beach paradise. The surrounding streets were lined with boxy concrete buildings, all of which bore an eerie air of emptiness. A thick cloud of dust rose from the unpaved ground under Abhilasha's wheels as we drove around the grid of streets lined with scattered building debris and hog-wild weeds. I found my hotel, the so-called Maharaja's Palace, only to see that it was walled in and shut up and looked as appealing a venue for a night's dreamy sea-watching as the deck of a sinking ship. In fact, where
was
the sea? According to the map, it was only three blocks away, so I tried steering Abhilasha in the right direction. Maybe after a lungful of fresh Bay of Bengal air and a paddle in its waters, I might have a renewed, more positive perspective on this town that, to all current intents and purposes, seemed a bit of a dump.

But every time I thought we were close to seeing the sea, the street would be blocked off by a wall of rubble or a pile of sandbags, to the point where getting to it seemed so difficult, I finally gave up the ghost. It was hardly St Tropez, and no sooner had I had that thought than a French-looking lad with an expression that suggested he was dealing with a very bad smell passed by. We made momentary eye contact and looked away immediately as though any kind of camaraderie in this place would amount to lesser chances of saving oneself. We appeared to be embroiled in a game of escape and survival, and
as far as that went, the four wheels under my posterior were my advantage.

That day, in Puri, all the pains of driving a car in India paid off in one happy reimbursement: unlike the suffering backpackers who arrived by long and agonizing bus or train journeys, I was mobile and free as a bird. With only 75 km back to Bhubaneswar and the simple pleasures of the Ginger Hotel (once again coloured sunny and appealing in my fickle memory banks), I was under no obligation to stay in this two-bit excuse for a resort.

‘This place has bad juju, Abs,' I obliged myself to say out loud, in case there were any doubt cast over my awesome coolness. ‘Let's get the hell out.' As we sped out of town, I allowed Puri one last concession: that it was off season, which was probably the reason for its construction sites, sandbags and uncanny lack of people. Or was it just my increasing boredom with all things developed or developing and the homogenous sludge they exuded?

I decided to take one last detour: nearby was Konark, the famous Temple of the Sun, ostensibly Orissa's most fascinating archaeological site and largest tourist draw. Given that Puri went under the guidebook designation ‘undiscovered', I figured mass consensus might work in my favour for once in this rapidly disintegrating day of adventure and sightseeing.

I pulled Abhilasha into a space at the end of a row of cars just outside a gated entrance to a long bazaar that led up to the temple. Our arrival immediately attracted the attention of a group of loitering youths, one of whom stepped forward and – much to my surprise – took the liberty of opening the driver's door after I had barely cut the engine. What I first took to
be a charming gesture of chivalry turned out to be a means of giving the Nano's interior a thorough and quite unsolicited inspection. I nudged the impudent adolescent out of the way and, hauling myself out of the seat, made an exaggerated show of locking all the doors and giving Abhilasha a proprietary pat on the roof before walking away. Was it me, or were the young men of Orissa more roguish than their counterparts in the rest of the country?

At the bazaar entrance, I was set upon by a throng of guides, from which I settled for a man called Suryamani, the only person who claimed to guarantee the Nano's safety in addition to showing me the sights, and who tried to appease me regarding the fact that Abhilasha had now become a leaning post for the young guys who had propped themselves up against her with an air of entitlement that made me plain uncomfortable.

‘Don't worry,' Suryamani said with a dismissive, boys-will-be-boys laugh, ‘they don't want to take the car, only to touch it and look. Is very new and exciting, you know.'

Yeah, I knew, but my inner maternal jackal was roused at seeing such flippant manhandling of her bodywork.

Suryamani turned out to be tour-guide gold. After fifteen years on the job at the Sun Temple, he had the spiel down to a fine art. The building was a truly impressive and magnificently preserved temple that dated back to the thirteenth century and was dedicated to Surya, the sun god (a nominal coincidence that appeared to tickle Suryamani pink). The temple was aligned along perfect coordinates for solstice and equinox wow factors and the structure was a chariot, with twelve pairs of stone wheels adorning the outside and seven bucking horses pulling it from the front, towards the sunrise.

We started with an introductory stroll around the pillared remains of a dance hall, where Suryamani pointed out
various animal carvings in the stone. ‘This is sheep – S-H-E-E-P; and this one is bull – B-U-L-L; over there is cow – C-O-W' and so on.

With Farmyard Spelling 101 in the bag, Suryamani, who had appeared distracted for the last five minutes as though something was on his mind, finally cut to the chase. ‘Madam, can I talk about the
Kama Sutra
?' he asked in a conspiratorial whisper, to which I cautiously answered in the affirmative. If I hadn't, our tour would have stopped right there, because almost the entire perimeter of the main temple building was covered with sexually explicit carvings of a highly imaginative variety.

‘This,' said Suryamani, adopting a very business-like tone while pointing at a twelve-inch man in a compromising position with two members of the fairer sex, ‘is bigamy. B-I-G-A-M-Y. Two women and one man.'

‘Gosh,' I said, not knowing how else to react.

‘Yes!' Suryamani exclaimed triumphantly. ‘They are having intercourse together.'

I nodded sagely and we moved on.

‘Three women together,' he continued, gesturing at the relevant carving. ‘One woman giving one man oral sex. O-R-A-L S-E-X.'

I went closer and squinted. ‘Good lord!'

We kept walking and the sculptures became increasingly X-rated. At one point, Suryamani threw a furtive glance over his shoulder. ‘This,' he said in a hushed voice, ‘is doggy style. And these are two elephants doing doggy style. Look!'

I looked and can confirm that indeed they were.

We turned a corner and something in Suryamani's excited demeanour told me we had reached his favourite part. ‘Look you!' he signalled at the figure of a woman riding an unidentified animal. ‘One woman with dog. D-O-G!'

I thought it only polite to match Suryamani's enthusiasm with incredulity, but as I widened my eyes in overacted shock, I realized I was genuinely stunned. What from the onset had seemed like an 800-year-old temple constructed by the very regal-sounding King Narasimhadeva the First, head of the Eastern Ganga Dynasty, was actually an array of chiselled hardcore pornography, from girl-on-girl scenarios to threesomes and even a bit of bestiality, put on by some ancient-day Hugh Hefner. If the artistic evidence of this temple was anything to go by, it was a wonder empires were built at all, given all the hanky-panky with which thirteenth-century Indians ostensibly passed their time. Or perhaps it was all fantasy: the men who were drafted to work on the temple were, Suryamani told me, often separated from their womenfolk for months at a time. So is it any wonder their imaginations might have started to run wild?

Whatever the reason, I had to admit that in principle at least, thirteenth-century Indian cheesecake gave the likes of
Playboy
a run for its money, though it would be a damn sight harder to stash discreetly under the bed. Still, I figured it had done the trick – invigorated and my enthusiasm restored, I went back in the direction of Bhubaneswar, my mind buzzing with enough P-O-R-N-O-G-R-A-P-H-I-C I-M-A-G-E-R-Y to keep me alert and amused as far as Calcutta.

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.