Land of Bonkers

We reached Belgaum, our last large town, and already the amount of written English around us was diminishing – advertising hoardings, shop names, signs, began to appear in Kanada, the Karnataka language. A squirly script quite different from Hindi and most challenging for us as neither Alexander nor Guru speak or read a word of it. This was going to be interesting. No more Christians, no more English. We stopped at an ATM for cash and, on the off chance, I put my debit card in, more out of curiosity than any real hope. This was, after all, India. A message came up in English asking me for my pin. I typed it, prompting another message asking how much I would like to withdraw. I typed a one and four zeros, and within seconds it gave be ten thousand rupees, about 130 quid. This is the same card I couldn’t use to pay for petrol in Menton. Together with the lack of dog poo here, I’d say that’s India 2, France Nil.

We hit open country, and the land began to flatten. No factories, no towns, and very few cars, and nothing in the fields to give a clue to which century we were in. Bullock carts trundle up and down the lanes, goats and goatherds scurry across the road, women bash clothes against rocks at stream’s edge, eagles swoop low in the sky, farmers squat at their crops, water is pumped up from the well, lunch is taken out on the ground in the shade of small low mud buildings and brick buildings, dogs graze the verges, pigs dredge the ditches, in a repeating bedspread of fields for ever in every direction, with only us and our van to put into the age post industrial revolution. Let alone electricity. Let alone the internet, Linda Barker and Rupert Murdoch. We drove like this for two hours, by which time – depending on where you started – you would have run out of England, but here we had barely made a dent.

We stopped for lunch at a simple, light and airy restaurant where we ate nan, biriani and a little salad. We’re all a bit scared of fresh fruit and veg as it all contains so much water – watermelon is apparently a real risk for Westerners, and we hadn’t dared to eat fresh tomatoes up ‘til now, but it looked so good and it felt fine – which is important, as the more I think about it, the more I just know that poxy hotel in Benanlim made me sick. Not a single sip of water, or a dodgy prawn, but just the whole mucky thing. So now we crunched on slices of tomato, and ate our dahl and rice and bread. It was beautiful, and came to about 3 quid. I am now in full rude health and brazenly took a shit in the squatting toilet out in the field. The kitchen was a treat. Just good, basic, fresh ingredients, a hotplate, a chopping board, and a round lid in the counter that covered a charcoal oven below a tube. The nans were cooked by sticking the flattened dough to the inside of the tube. I’m sure this oven has a simple name, possibly even a nan oven, and is almost certainly common as old muck, but I’d never seen one before. While the local men ate and watched us, two women and some children were sorting out piles of herbs. I think it was lemon coriander, but the smell and look, but what do I know. Heather made portraits of them on Pop’s old Rolliflex, and then fetched some little packs of crayons for the children from the car. She had brought a bag of little gifts like this with her, and they went down very well.

The restaurant owner joined us in the front seat for a lift to the next town and the bustle of it hit us like a very bustly thing. The road was clogged with tractors decorated with tinsels, garlands of plastic flower, little metal animal shapes, and curly messages; bullock carts with sleek white animals in pairs and painted yellow horns; a man inexplicably holding a euphonium; buses and taxis and motorbikes and cycles and fruit sellers and men with huge bunches of twigs on their head and goats on long pieces of string walking ahead of their bearer like a kite, and children in groups running and laughing and everything honking and beeping and whistling and hollering. It was market day in tow. I thought back to my previous market, dog-sick in Murgao. Here there was none of the filth, none of the squalor, and none of the decay. I had wanted a better map of the area, and the restaurant owner showed me to a stall he hoped might have one. We walked past hundreds of or possibly thousands of people (there are a lot of people in India) and pretty much everyone seemed healthy and clean and composed. The fruit and veg were fresh, there was a lot of smiling, and this was an entirely different kind of bonkers. A happy, clean, light kind of bonkers that I would soon recognised as Hindu bonkers.

We didn’t find a map (not bonkers enough. I could have got a bicycle horn or some tinsel with no trouble at all, but nothing so terrestrial as a topologically accurate cartographic). Still, we had each other and the setting sun to guide us, and India’s not so big. We took a healthy lungful of bonkers Hindu air to guide us safely to Badami, and simply drove for another 3 hours before washing up at the Badami Court Hotel which had one spare room, Hev’s favourite 212, and one spare swimming pool where we soon deposited a good, crusty layer of orange dust at the bottom. It’s odd having driver and a guide, it feels very grand and a bit Empire. ‘Hello, yes I’d like a room for my family please, and some accommodation for my guide and driver. Do you have anything suitable?’ It’s simply not appropriate to stay at this luxury place. It wouldn’t kill my wallet, but these guys are a bit like servants. And anyway while we checked out the air conditioning and the menu in the well-appointed restaurant across from the marble-floored foyer, Alexander and Guru found themselves fine lodgings a mile down the road for which they paid about a sixth of what I was charged. On the way in to Badami, we saw brickworks for miles, blocks of clay drying in the sun and then stacked by the thousand in house-sized piles, but shortly before arriving? the landscape changed. Huge boulders grew out of the ground and filled the horizon, up into the sky like clouds. Wind worn and dramatic and orange, and apparently just the stuff from which the caves at Badami are carved.

Just a little postscript: a few miles before Badami, we stopped on impulse as Hev had noticed something – I can’t remember what, a picture of a horse on a wall, I think – and wanted to photograph it. This was a particularly bonkers village – the bonkers force was especially strong in these people – and within a minute she was entirely surrounded by small children shouting and laughing. Then adults and several domesticated animals. Dex and I joined her and we were mobbed. There were just so excited. Excited that someone was going to take a photo of them all. I mean that wasn’t the original plan, of course, but we were herded down a narrow lane and all the children sat on the steps of the local temple together with several goats. The local schoolmaster spoke a little English and, himself entirely overcome by excitement, beamed and thanked us so much. It’s just possible that these people hadn’t seen Westerners or at least not touched one – everyone wanted to shake our hands or pat our heads – or perhaps it was the photography. This was a blessed-out happy village of the first order. I shall have to look into the Hindu thing in more detail. I’d quite like to know how anyone manages to sustain that level of smiling and excitement. I suspect the diet has a large part to play. At least I have Hindu shits now. Light and fluffy and – in a very good way – a little bit bonkers.