Never Mind the Bullocks (30 page)

Wandering the famous Mall, imagining the high-society shopping extravaganza here that pre-dated the candyfloss stalls and other trappings of tourism that came with Shimla's current top-notch holiday-spot status, was a strange experience of juxtaposing worlds. On the outside, Shimla looked uncannily like England. The lemon-yellow Christchurch Cathedral in the main square just across from the Tudorbethan – that's a real architectural term, by the way – Municipal Corporation building posed patiently for photographs, with the disgruntled air of an edifice wondering why the hell it wasn't in Penrith. A cuppa at the brilliantly old-school Indian Coffee Workers' Co-op Society was followed by a desire for an early dinner spurred on by the sight of a Domino's Pizza further up the mall. I resisted the stodgy-looking Peppy Paneer Cheese Burst Crust in favour of dining at a neon blue–lit restaurant that proffered southern-fried chicken and margaritas. Hardly the apex of cool, but here in the place that resembled home, I wanted the comfort food to match. The oily, sugary reality of the culinary experience, however, was a different matter, and within hours I was making hurried tracks to the toilet in my room at the Spars.

I dubbed those hours of intestinal upheaval the Night of Gandhi's Revenge; I imagined the ghost of the nation's father looking down on me with consternation from his place at Summer Hill as I munched on greasy chicken washed down with bogus Mexican hooch in the midst of a living memorial to
the frivolities of his beloved country's colonial occupiers. The resulting emergency evacuation of the contents of my bowels came as little surprise, given the circumstances.

However, I was adamant that a sleepless night spent with bum to porcelain – well, plastic actually; this wasn't the Oberoi – would not impede our progress. We still had several thousand kilometres to go to get back to Mumbai and just under three weeks in which to do it. There was no time to be spent moping around feeling sorry for myself and the chicken that had so rapidly passed through me. Coupled with a head cold and an impending sense of all-over muscle ache, I knew the eight-hour drive through the mountains from Shimla to my next stop, McLeod Ganj, was going to be riddled with loo stops and bellyaches.

And so it went: after a few kilometres, a deep bubbling growl in the abdominal region had me screeching to a halt at the nearest petrol station, heading for the outhouse and holding my nose. One particular stop at an Indian Oil outpost a couple of hours beyond Shimla necessitated having to shout down an irate monkey – an actual Rhesus monkey – who had occupied the station's only cubicle and was drinking from the toilet bowl. It was a sad scene, bereft of the poise and glamour of a Merchant Ivory production.

I arrived in McLeod Ganj after eight or so hours spent negotiating mountain bends and trying to keep myself sensible by singing loudly and occasionally talking to an imaginary primate whom I briefly hallucinated in the passenger seat on a particularly sharp bend somewhere near Palampur.

As far as first impressions went, I felt more at home in this town almost entirely populated by Tibetans in exile than at
Christchurch Cathedral in rainy Shimla, built by my people to remind them of home. This was probably because of the fact that the Tibetans are joined in their mountain abode by a transitory population of foreigners who come to be near the Big Guy, the Dalai Lama himself, his temple and all the smaller seminaries his presence there has sparked. As I pulled up the hill and onto McLeod Ganj's main street, it became immediately clear that the town was a priority stop for the modern hippie: foreigners not shaven of head and clad in saffron were long of hair, scant of shoe and bedraggled of clothing. It appeared that the Little Britain of Shimla appealed more to Punjabi tourists, while contemporary travelling Brits – along with their European, Antipodean and Israeli counterparts – much preferred the coloured flags and prayer wheels of Little Tibet. Where there are Western travellers, there are ethnic handicrafts, coffee shops, wi-fi cafés, bookshops and even sushi restaurants. It was a strange kind of homecoming; a sudden immersion into a community specifically designed to cater to my latte-drinking, internet-using, book-reading ways.

For the first time after two-and-a-half months of driving around India, I could hear England English spoken with northern, southern, West Country and east London accents. The words ‘Darren, will ye get us twenty of them Gold Flake from 't shop?' wafted through Abhilasha's window spoken in deep Lancastrian tones that never made me want more a slice of Hovis bread and a cup of Bovril.

Tired, sick and all driven out, I felt like the little town was welcoming us with open arms; or rather, the Tibetan woman at one of the hotels up the hill was. She actually did spread out her arms – in horror – when, using my last ounce of energy, I unceremoniously dropped my bag and all its contents at the threshold of her property before almost losing consciousness outside
the front door. She gathered my belongings with matronly zeal and showed me to a bare-bones room that was immaculately clean with a view over the lush valley below.

‘Eat charcoal!' Thor messaged me as I collapsed on the bed and thumbed news of my condition through to him.

‘Argh, don't, I want to puke.'

‘No, seriously, eat charcoal. It's the miracle drug.'

‘What would you know? You never get sick.'

One of the few things that irritated me about Thor was his steely constitution. Being of a mildly competitive nature, I'd got annoyed at his capacity to maintain digestive equilibrium when I was often shuffling off to a loo. To boot, he was a vegetarian, which probably gave him an upper hand in protecting him from the threat of meat gone wrong.

‘Trust me.'

‘You mean actual charcoal, like the stuff you find in fireplaces?'

‘Like the stuff you draw with.'

‘Barf!'

‘Yeah, but you take a tablet, you don't have to munch on a lump of coal.'

‘And what does it do?'

‘It absorbs all the bad stuff in your guts and turns your poo black.'

‘Okay, well, there might be some in the fireplace down in reception. Shall I go and look?'

Thor, caring and well intentioned, was saved from further sarcasm by a knock at the door. It was the Tibetan woman from downstairs, who appeared like an angel in my doorway with a cup of hot ginger, lemon and honey, and a bowl of Tibetan noodle soup.

‘Adopted Tibetan Mum saves the day,' I texted. ‘No need to go foraging for ashes after all.'

‘Good news,' Thor replied. ‘Now lie back and dream of England.'

‘Or Lhasa.'

‘Whichever suits.'

‘If you are married to speed divorce it' read the sign jabbed into the side of the road on a curve where, had the directive by the Public Works Department of Uttarakhand not been blocking my view, I would have seen a sweeping panorama of staggered hills rising from the seemingly bottomless valley below. I had been exercising my horn in the wake of a lardy-arsed coach for the past fifteen minutes, waiting for a long and straight enough stretch to afford me the visibility to pass as well as the runway to build up enough speed, but no such strip was forthcoming. Welcome to the start of the Himalayas, land of surprisingly well-paved (and, I had to admit, so far at least well-behaved) roads. Nevertheless, just like the rural highways on the plains, I was already feeling the familiar rise of frustration with the speed at which things generally moved.

The Uttarakhand PWD had obviously anticipated my impatience and was doing everything in its power, as far as erecting encouraging and creative road signs was concerned, to get me to chill out and slow down. Around the next bend flashed the words ‘We like you but not your speed', cleverly playing on my personal insecurities as well as jabbing at my guilt glands for the numerous attempts I'd half-started at a perilous overtake of the coach ahead. ‘Whisky is risky' declared another sign with undeniable poetic flair, after the defiant coach had pulled up to deposit its load of Korean passengers at a roadside
dhaba
.

As steep slopes gaped hungrily to the side and the road, only intermittently dotted with railings or concrete bollards, curved round at angles that sometimes felt like we were pulling a full 360, it became clear that traffic authorities in the north of India had additional reason to encourage safe driving along the mountain routes. Either that, or they had a lot more time – and possibly
mind-altering drugs – on their hands, if evidence procured on a later web search was anything to go by. It seemed the most creative road-sign wordsmiths lived up in Kashmir, and displayed their work along the hazardous roads of Ladakh, especially the notorious Manali to Leh route, considered one of the most deadly in the world. A blogger called Ajay Jain had compiled a book and site on the subject called
Peep Peep Don't Sleep
(a title derived from a real sign), in which he catalogued a mass of inspired driving decrees from the Himalayan highways. My favourites had to be ‘Fast won't last', ‘No race no rally, enjoy the beauty of the valley', ‘Road is hilly, don't drive silly' and the virtuosic ‘Safety on the road is safe tea at home'. Genius.

It seemed the PWD had no qualms whatsoever in issuing quite graphic warnings to hammer the point of cautious driving home. ‘Your family waits for you not for news of your accident' read another, more maudlin post, while ‘Drive like hell and you will be there' held little hope of salvation for fast drivers. I thought whoever came up with ‘Better Mr Late than Late Mr' displayed fine lyrical promise, while ‘Darling, do not nag me, as I am driving. Instead turn your head and enjoy the nature charming' was worthy of Larkin.

I had been a little nervous about hitting the Himalayas. I imagined the madness and diversity of traffic on the sub-Himalayan highways transposed onto narrow rocky mountain passes; a frightful prospect. But it seemed, at least from Shimla going north, that the roads here were in much better nick, as were the vehicles travelling on them, which in any case were far fewer in number. But as with everything, when one headache dissipated, another reared up: while the roads were no longer congested, now they were all over the shop. They would often skirt the very edge of a rock face, as chasms yawned just centimetres from Abhilasha's tyres without a barrier to separate me from certain death by plummeting into the unknown darkness, and twist
and turn with the scary turbulence of a cobra with an acute itch. At the heart of the problem were the hulking buses and trucks, for which the narrow roads, steep inclines and sharp turns were a pestilent wasp in their cloddish ointment. Once I got stuck behind a large vehicle, like the Korean tourist coach, I would be obliged to hover at its rear like the flies that hover around a horse's tail and wait there until an opportune moment for overtaking, which was usually not before the vehicle pulled over for a break.

No sooner had I got past the Koreans than I quickly caught up with a Tata lorry, whose backside was painted orange, yellow and red and emblazoned with the words ‘Super-Star'. It was emitting thick clouds of grey smoke that infiltrated Abhilasha's interior to the point where I didn't know whether it was better to roll down the windows and at least mix the inevitable added rush of fumes with some fresh air, or maintain the drip-feed exhaust pipe in a Ziploc effect that was currently playing itself out. I nestled in at its rear, sighed and resigned myself to painful sloth and early-onset emphysema.

A few minutes later, I was jolted out of a creeping somnolence and mounting nausea by the ear-splitting horn of a truck that was attempting to pass me and the two lorries in front with phenomenal spunk, given that we were all struggling against a fairly steep incline while approaching a blind bend. I flinched as the truck slugged doggedly past, all the while keeping its horn pressed and flashing its headlights with the frenzy of a strobe light on speed. The whole manoeuvre took about half a minute during which I barely drew breath, expecting that a car might come bombing down the hill from the opposite direction at any second and end up battered into the truck's front grill. Call it luck, fate or good karma, the truck made out like a bandit and finished at the head of the queue, puttering off into the distance.

Looking in my rear-view mirror, I could see a line of cars gathering impatiently behind me, which also started to overtake one
by one, while I pulled over as far as I could to let them pass. It was not my proudest moment, and I concluded in a rush of outraged self-righteousness that there was no time like the present to master the art of the perilous uphill, blind-corner overtake. I had to adapt to my environment and become the cool and nifty mountain driver; it was time to channel Bond.

As another truck passed me to my right at a speed that barely warranted an overtake, I caught a glimpse of a bus heading towards us from the oncoming lane. I could hear it bleat out its warning via a tremendous horn, a protest to which the truck to my right responded not by yielding, but by giving an indignant parp of its own instrument.