Never Mind the Bullocks (27 page)

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.
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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.
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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.