Ten White Knuckles on a Passage to India

Ten White Knuckles on a Passage to India

by Simon Rowe

 

The sub-continental bus equation goes like this: for every two hours of road travelled allow 30 minutes for breakdowns, meal stops, smoke stops, pee stops and no-reason-at-all stops. This formula took effect the moment I pulled out of Kathmandu.

The Bus—a barge on bald Firestones and filled to the gunnels with world travellers whose idea of a shower was a stick of cheap roll-on—came to a grinding halt in the mist on the outskirts of the Nepalese capital. Most stayed on board and tried to sleep, some went looking for a fence to nervously relieve themselves on. I went to find a hot chai vendor. A half hour passed. Much banging and commotion came from the undercarriage as the driver and his entourage took turns at delivering lethal blows to the axle with a mallet.

Then, like an old Howitzer, the engine burst the dirty night with a roar. Fellow tea drinkers—there were many now—smashed their clay cups against the wall and clambered aboard. The Bus creaked and groaned, shuddering over every pot-holed mile like a junk cart; through dark mountain passes, round hair-pin bends, each Devil’s elbow announced with a blast from her air horn. Down in ravines lay sand-swept wrecks and rusty skeletons of less fortunate machines.

Sometime around midnight the driver halted. He lifted his large buttocks from the flattened sheep’s skin seat and edged down the aisle asking for torches. Why? The headlights had blown, he said. He needed lumens, “Lots of lumens!” For the past two hours he had been driving without any headlights. Two Kiwi girls cornered him; they demanded he wait till daylight before delivering us to India. He clicked his tongue, shook his head, then nodded it—okay, okay, he’d wait till the moon was full before resuming.

The world travellers slept, or pretended to sleep; it was their only escape from the visual horrors that flew at us: the crazed Terai taxi drivers, the freight trucks captained by mad Sikhs, the farting Enfield motorcycles with faceless riders, and the ghosts of countless others. They say courage flows on adrenalin and warm blood to carry it. I glimpsed the gorge far below, the moonlight on its mighty waters, snowmelt from the great Himalaya, and I shivered.

Time and again we stopped at tin-shed roadhouses reeking of cooking fat and nervous sweat. On sunrise, we pulled into our last one and a woman emerged from her hut to stoke a small charcoal fire. Within minutes she had produced a tray of hot tea. Drivers, travellers, beggars, dogs and dead men thawed their veins on her steaming cardamom chai. An hour passed. The sky grew light, crenellated in pink cloud and softened by the first rays. The driver gunned the engine—we were already three hours behind schedule. The lush, humid plains of northern India beckoned.

Across the Terai, smoke rose in wisps from farm hamlets. Skinny boys thrashed water buffalo straining with carts of melons and pomegranates and the barefoot stream of humanity grew denser as we closed in on the subcontinent. Thousands of people streamed in the same direction. An ocean refuses no river. India welcomed us.

Amidst dust and flies we gathered our bags and headed for the Sunauli border post. The fat passport controller sat at a wooden desk outside. Flies were target practice for his spit-balls. With one hand he offered me a ripe mandarin. With the other he held a stamp.  Like a blacksmith forging a horseshoe, he brought it down onto the last remaining blank page of my passport with god-almighty WUMPH. “Welcome to India!” he grinned.