by Vanessa Able
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.
13
ROAD RAGE – Fear and Loathing in the Red-Hot Corridor
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 in
cident 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 culturall
y 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.
