View of Chamba Town 2005
On a hot day in June 1984, I was on my way from Chamba to Delhi in a Himachal Roadways bus. During those days, it took just about 24 hours to reach Delhi. The time, however, could vary, depending on the circumstances en route.
After completing the Chamba-Delhi bus journey, which began one morning and ended the next, your condition could be far worse than that of Neil Armstrong after his path-breaking journey to the moon. You were one up over Armstrong if you had your family too to travel with you, like I had that day.
It was one of the most important days in the history of free India, as I learnt on reaching Delhi 36 hours later. ‘Operation Blue Star’ had happened that day in Amritsar.
I had close encounters with Indian history in the making a couple of times that day. How deeply they affected my personal life is recorded below.
The first encounter took place on the border between Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. A platoon of the Indian army stopped the bus at the border check-post at about 11 in the morning. Armed soldiers stormed into the bus and ordered all the men out, after which a thorough body search took place. Women were ordered to open their purses and display their contents. All baggage items inside the bus were opened and scrutinized. All of us with heavy baggage on the roof had to climb up, open them and pull out everything before stuffing it hurriedly back after a thorough search.
Being a writer of sorts, I was carrying an imported portable typewriter gifted to me by a friend. The soldiers dismantled it so thoroughly that even an expert could not reassemble it later and had to be sold as scrap.
The next ‘search’ took place at a deserted spot somewhere between Jalandhar and Ludhiana. This time we had to get our baggage down on the ground. How I managed to get the heavy family tin trunk down I don’t remember now. All I remember, rather nostalgically, are the clothes in it – my shirts and pants, my wife’s saris and suits, my kids’ baby clothes.
Unable to return the trunk to the roof of the bus unassisted, I abandoned it on the roadside and scrambled into the bus, which would have abandoned
me if I had tarried any further.
I was working as a low-paid schoolmaster at Mayo College Ajmer at that time. It is not difficult to imagine how that event in the Indian history affected my personal economy.
To this day, I am trying to figure out what those soldiers were looking for, especially inside my wife’s purse.
~
Once upon a time in India, there used to be a car that went by the name of Standard Herald. Designed on the lines of some old British model (India has yet to design a car of its own), it used to be a two-door wonder rich Indians patronized, mainly to keep their wives in good humour. A dainty car driven by dainty drivers, its run was usually restricted to beauty salons and rummy clubs in the metros of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.
It became extinct around the time rummy-playing women in India swept rummy cards aside and started elbowing men out of various arenas including politics.
Soon after, M.F.Hussain – pragmatic artist that he is -- gave expression to this phenomenon in a series of paintings depicting one particular woman as the incarnation of the goddess Durga.
Now I had a colleague in Ajmer who was a connoisseur of cars. He spoke of Rolls Royces, Peugeots, Chevrolets and Mercedes’ as if he and his ancestors had done nothing in their lives except pottering around in those cars we had seen only as illustrations in the
Encyclopedia Britannica. He had more knowledge about cars than about history – the subject he taught in the school. Though as poorly rich or richly poor as all schoolmasters are in India, he gave us a complex with his knowledge about cars.
All of us, therefore, turned green with jealously one morning when we saw Mr. Mefirst (not his real name) drive into the school in a gleaming Standard Herald. It was 1985 and we were under the impression all Standard Heralds were dead as dodo. Now where did he find that car? Did he buy it? If so, what with?
Eventually I was the only one to ask him. He not only furnished the answers but also indicated ways and means to procure me one if I so desired.
Standard Herald Car
Now is there any man in India who does not hide in the heart of his hearts the desire for a car? As a matter of fact, desire for a car is generally stronger than desire for a woman in most Indian males. Perhaps that is the reason they demand a car first and then marry a woman.
To cut the story short, I went Mr. Mefirst’s way. I sold my wife’s gold ornaments she had brought along as dowry, paid ten thousand rupees in cash and brought home a Standard Herald coated with the dust and rust of three decades. Its lucky owner pocketed the windfall, scrambled into his new Maruti 800 and drove off to celebrate in a bar.
The next two years of my relationship with my Standard Herald hide a poignant tale of trials and tribulations I underwent to keep it going like a dead woman walking. In the third year of our relationship, I succumbed to my highway lust and tried to drive it from Ajmer to Jaipur. At some place between Kishangarh and Jaipur in the vast sands of Rajasthan, it collapsed for the last time with irrevocable finality.
I had neither mind nor means to get it towed away, so the highway police got it removed and recovered the cost by selling it as scrap.
~
By the end of 1989, militancy in Punjab reached the zenith and I reached Delhi as the principal of a school.
Now a principal needs to possess some status symbol, otherwise nobody including the school peon takes any notice of him.
As a result, I spent the entire amount of provident fund I had collected from Mayo College on buying one – another second-hand car.
Providentially, most children in my school came from the families of scrap dealers, so with the help of a parent, I got myself a Maruti 800 second-hand that was in ‘regular’ running condition. Generally, a Maruti 800 second-hand is in ‘running’ condition only when you buy it. To convert it into ‘regular’ running condition, you have to spend more money.
~
I have a sister-in-law in Delhi who is the living icon of frugality.
However, she is the only one among our relatives who invites us to weekend dinners at her place. As for our other relatives, they expect us to invite them to weekend dinners at our place. I respect her frugality, mainly because I lack it. She owns a flat in Delhi because she is frugal; I don’t own anything because I am not.
It is out of respect for her frugality that I do not mind when on weekend dinners at her place, she takes ‘order’ from you the way waiters do in restaurants. I have to specify the number of chapattis I am likely to consume so that she bakes only as many as people have ordered. As a result, stray dogs do not stand and wait every morning at her door the way they do at mine. Whenever I am invited over to her place for dinner, I always order more chapattis than I can consume; I quietly pocket the surplus so that stray dogs at my door do not go hungry the next morning.
As I was telling you earlier, militancy in Punjab had grown worse by the end of 1989. Any desire on your part to visit Punjab those days was considered symptomatic of a deep psychological malaise with death wish as its main motif.
So when my sister-in-law expressed the desire to visit Punjab one cold morning in the January of 1990, I was filled with apprehensions about her mental health. I pleaded with her to change her mind; I went even to the extent of confessing my guilt of over-ordering chapattis for dinner and surrendering my recent acquisitions in an effort to persuade her to change her mind. She, however, proved so single-minded she did not pay the least attention to the curled up evidence of my treachery in front of her. Moreover, her interest is limited to the number of chapattis you order before dinner; what you do with them after they are served is entirely your business.
Now my sister-in-law is married to a man hailing from a fertile village in Punjab. He is a true son of the soil. He is highly educated, highly intelligent and highly placed in a government job. Still he goes to his village in Punjab every year to take care of his ancestral lands during the sowing season. My sister-in-law goes to the village in the harvesting season only -- to make sure relatives, farm labourers and rodents do not succeed in pilfering anything.
In January of 1990, it is harvest time for oranges in Punjab. My sister-in-law knows it is a bumper crop that year, so militancy or no militancy, she has to go.
My wife is an antithesis to her elder sister and loves rural India for practically the same reasons as made Mr. William Wordsworth fall in love with the Lake District in his native England. Naturally, she finds things such as news on the TV awfully mundane. If you were to ask her what she understands by ‘militancy’, she might say it has something to do with the Indian army.
Eventually the pragmatism of my sister-in-law and the romanticism of my wife combined together into a potent force that January morning and persuaded me to drive them in my Maruti 800 second-hand to a village in the fertile plains of Punjab.
~
Leaving Delhi early in the morning, we by-pass Chandigarh and enter Punjab through a fog so dense it makes me suspicious militants may have something to do with it. I drive as fast as my Maruti 800 second-hand can make it. Firstly, I am scared of the militants; secondly the roads are so straight and the traffic so sparse there is no fear of ramming into anything. My car has never run so freely before, so we make it to the village much before our ETA.
After finishing the harvesting and then the marketing (which takes just about five minutes because the buyers are equipped with AK 47s), we get the car loaded with oranges to be carried to Delhi for personal consumption.
First, we get seated inside the car; then the farm workers empty basket after basket of oranges around us so that by the time we are ready, we are immersed in oranges almost up to our waists.
That is the only way to carry home sufficient quantity of oranges in a Maruti 800, especially when you travel 600 kilometers to get them.
All goes well until we are flagged down at an army check post on Punjab-Haryana border. A soldier demands my car keys to make sure we are not hiding anything lethal in the boot of the car.
When he opens it, some oranges spill out with such force they almost topple him over. When the deluge is over and the soldier is satisfied and unhurt, he shuts the boot, returns the keys and flags us off.
My sister-in-law does not mind at all when I drive off, leaving some oranges behind.
She is a patriot too.
~
Five years later, I’m in Himachal Pradesh again -- this time at the-then-little-known hill station named Dalhousie.
A View of Dalhousie
Since Independence, the reputation of Dalhousie had remained restricted only to the Punjabis of Jalandhar, Amritsar and Ludhiana and to the Malayalis, Gujaratis and Bengalis – the only people in India who have this curious knack for digging out unknown places on the world map and visiting them, if not settling on them.
The pretty hill station of Dalhousie had remained obsolete for two reasons.
Firstly, it had Jammu and Kashmir for a neighbour. Until the time ultras strangled the golden goose of tourism in Kashmir with their own hands, even the Punjabis of Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Amritsar had started preferring Srinagar, Pahalgam and Gulmarg to Dalhousie.
Secondly, it is Dalhousie’s misfortune to be located in Himachal Pradesh. It ought to have been located in Haryana where even buffalo ponds have been converted into thriving tourist complexes.
Shimla makes it a point to monopolize tourism in Himachal Pradesh. Rail, road and air links to Shimla are open throughout the year and tourism amenities are aplenty. On the other hand, a tourist who strays to Dalhousie generally ends up hungry, angry and frustrated (exactly in that order) and resolves never to return again.
Since the onset of militancy in Kashmir and the growth of car industry in India, the Punjabis of Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Amritsar have returned to Dalhousie and its neighbour Khajjiar -- also known as Mini Switzerland -- with a vengeance.
No matter how repetitive it can get to visit Dalhousie-Khajjiar strewn with cow dung and pony shit again and again, the Punjabis from Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Amritsar flock there every weekend in summers, playing loud music on their car stereos. Fun-loving by nature, they normally do not waste time sleeping during holidays and try to make the best of ‘peg’, ‘egg’ and ‘leg’ (exactly in that order) within the short time at their disposal. By Monday morning, they are back to making more money in their respective towns.
No wonder there were no direct buses between Delhi and Dalhousie at that time. With the growth of car industry and easy access to bank loans, the frequency of buses to Dalhousie had reduced to a trickle.
So when my wife and I find ourselves stranded in Dalhousie in the summer of 1994 in the absence of a direct bus to Delhi (somehow we have this weakness for direct buses), our joy knows no bounds when we find out that there is, after all, a travel agency in Dalhousie that books passengers to Delhi in a chartered bus. We book our seats for the next evening by paying full fare in advance.
To our great disappointment, the bus expected from Delhi does not arrive as scheduled. Short of funds to return to the hotel we had checked out of, we spend the next twenty-four hours in a rain shelter on the Thandi Sarak (Cold Road), enjoying day and night views of Chamba valley free of cost.
To our utter relief, the bus from Delhi arrives the next day and by 7 in the evening, we are on our way to Delhi.
Having survived on bread and jam in the past 24 hours, we are famished by the time the bus enters the plains of north Punjab. Sitting on the seats just behind the driver, we take courage to remind him of dinner stop. He assures us dinner stop would be announced shortly.
Now the term ‘shortly’ has different meanings for different people. In the case of our bus driver, his ‘shortly’ does not materialize even after leaving Hoshiarpur, Ropar, Chandigarh and even Ambala behind. All the Bengalis and Gujaratis inside the bus are soundly asleep after consuming
dal-bhujjia they always carry with them as emergency rations. Only my wife and I are awake, still dreaming of
Raaj Mash and
tandoori chapattis at a roadside
dhaba.
It is 2 in the morning and we are approaching Karnal. The morning breeze has turned cool and my wife, a veteran of sorts in keeping fasts, is reconciled to yet another one, albeit a little too long even for her. By now, she too is fast asleep. As a result, I am the only person awake in the bus.
What is bound to happen when everyone in the bus including the driver falls asleep happens quickly. I watch helplessly as a massive sack of dried up fodder loaded on a tractor starts looming larger and larger into the frame of the windscreen like a shot from a C grade Hindi horror movie. In a moment, it explodes into the windscreen. In the next instant, I find myself completely buried under dried up fodder. By the time I come up for air by flailing my arms, the bus has come to a forced halt on the GT Road.
There is no windscreen anymore; the driver, however, is still intact, shaking himself free of dry fodder. Being seated just behind the driver, my wife and I are the only people affected by the incident. All other passengers behind us are quite untouched.
Finding my wife missing, I frantically try to dig her out, displacing heaps of dried fodder the way dogs do with their paws to dig out bones buried beneath the sand.
Now my wife likes her sleep a bit too much, so when I find her and prod her awake, she grunts and then glares at me with disapproval dripping from her sleepy eyes.
It is a cool summer morning but not cool enough to get rid of the dried up fodder from your sweaty person by shaking yourself the way terriers do after coming out of water. Feeling itchy all over, I remove my shirt first and then my vest. I am about to remove my pants next when my wife reminds me of the now wide awake Bengali and Gujarati women sitting behind us and debating loudly how the government of India can be held responsible for all road mishaps in the country.
My wife has been able to remove her
chunni only, so with plenty of dried fodder inside her
salwar-kameez dress, she keeps twitching the rest of her way to Delhi like a mangy dog while I, soothed by plenty of breeze available inside the bus, sleep like a baby.
~
Travelling by your own car in India exposes you to unique experiences you could never have travelling by public transport.
By that, I do not mean the joy of travelling at your own pace. I do not mean the pot-holed roads and the unruly traffic either. What I mean is something quite different as illustrated in the episodes I narrate below.
My first experience while travelling by my own car goes back to the time when Tata Sumo had appeared on the Indian roads as an unchallenged supremo not unlike Mr. Bal Thackeray of Mumbai. No matter what opinion you might have of it today when you can pick and choose from a vast array of Toyotas, Chevrolets, Fords and so on, Tata Sumo had enjoyed the status of a king at that time. No matter the leg space in it had been designed by somebody with a brain the size of a peanut, no matter you felt like a truck driver behind its wheel, no matter it guzzled fuel like an alcoholic returning to the bottle after long abstinence. Still, it was the SUV that gave you the machismo feel all the way.
Unfortunately I could not afford a Tata Sumo and had to remain content with my Maruti 800 second-hand. My vision of India through its windscreen, whether within the city of Delhi or outside it, had remained restricted to the exhaust pipes of buses and trucks that used to give us company for long hours, particularly on the highways before their conversion into four lane expressways in the recent past. You simply could not overtake them, and if you tried to, you did that with a clear mind – now or never.
I remember one truck in particular that changed the course of my life in 1995. Having failed to overtake it all the way from Delhi to Jaipur, to which place I was bound in my Maruti 800 to face an interview for a job, destiny conspired to make me park my car at a level crossing before Jaipur just inches away from the exhaust pipe of that truck. I had honked at it so many times the battery of my car had almost expired in the effort. The truck driver had taken it as personal affront, denying me even an inch of space to pass him by.
It was a pleasant autumn day and the left window of my car kept open to get some fresh air was aligned with the exhaust pipe of the truck the way the mouth of the fuel tank of your car is aligned with the nozzle of the fuel pipe at a petrol pump.
I had just switched the engine off to wait for the oncoming train (which could take any time ranging from five minutes to an hour) when I was taken by surprise by that decisive event that changed the course of my life -- a situation not much different from the one the people in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia must have faced during the Tsunami disaster.
A massive wave of soot and smoke struck me through the passenger side window unawares, transforming me into the darkest shade of the jet-black.
The train came quickly but a bit too late for me -- giving the truck driver the opportunity to 'vent' his ‘venom’ on me and then scoot off -- laughing all the way to Ahmedabad or Bombay, or wherever he was bound for.
Having no means at my disposal to turn those crucial moments between disaster and destiny around, I decided to turn around the car instead and beat a sooty retreat to Delhi and to the job I had wanted to be ridden of.
~
Chandigarh, also known as the City of Roses, is famous for its wide, smooth and straight roads. Even bullocks would be tempted to race on them, given the chance. However, as it is, Chandigarh does not have bullock carts. It has only buffalo carts.
Now buffalo is an animal that is more useful to Indians than the cow. It carries heavier loads and gives plenty more milk than a cow does. Still it is a victim of prejudice like
Dalits used to be at one time. Whereas
Dalits (oppressed lower caste Hindus) found emancipation through the constitution of India, buffaloes didn’t. Mythology considers them descendents of a species of demons goddess Kali enjoys killing during Dussera festival every year.
Chandigarh is the capital of both Haryana and Punjab (the only city in the world as the capital of two States and that too outside both of them!). Both states are rich in buffalos. No wonder then that their capital city has more buffalo carts than roses.
Speaking from a pragmatic point of view, Chandigarh ought to have been named ‘Buffalo City’,
in which case the Americans and Canadians would have accepted the never-ending exodus of Punjabis to their countries with greater respect and offered them more Fullbright scholarships for doing research from Harvard, Princeton, Manitoba or Yale on possible historical links between Chandigarh and their national hero Buffalo Bill.
My next unique experience while travelling by my own car took place in the City of Buffs … oops … Roses. It so happened that in the summer of 1997 when Tata sumo was still ruling the roos… oops … roads, my wife and kids ‘pressurized’ me to take them on a holiday trip to Manali – the latest Queen of Hills. (Shimla -- the old one – is no more attractive like Rekha of the Bollywood fame.)
I should have agreed to take them to Manali only if I had a Tata Sumo, which I hadn’t, thanks to my ill-timed marriage in 1972 when we had only Bajaj Scooters (that were delivered a quarter century after the booking) and Ambassador cars (that nobody cared to demand in dowry even then).
I am prone to wilting under pressure, so I agreed to drive my family all the way from Delhi to Manali in my Maruti 800 second-hand with its tyres as bald as Mr. Sheshan’s pate and its engine still ticking, thanks to the bypass surgeries performed on it by the mechanics of Kashmiri Gate, Khari Baoli and Naraina.
To cut the immensely forgettable story of our outing short, we were on our way back from Manali to Delhi when another unique experience fell my way while travelling by my own car.
We have just passed the City of Roses and are making our way laboriously through its buffalo-cart infested Industrial Area. We are hungry (who wouldn’t be after spending most of the holiday budget on car repairs?) and tired (who wouldn’t be in a car that has no room for legs?) when we are suddenly flagged down by two constables of Chandigarh police standing by the side of the road. I am scared (who isn’t at the sight of police in our country?) even though my papers are in order.
‘You were over-speeding,’ says one of the constables, ignoring the papers I offer.
‘I beg your pardon? Over-speeding in this car and that too through those buffalo carts?’
‘
Oye jada na bol, bau. Keep your trap shut,’ says the other constable. ‘
Bol challan karwana hai ya kucch whore? (Do you want to be booked or choose another option?)’
Now
challan is something nobody in his right senses wants. Taking it means attending courts in the City of Buffs . . . oops . . . Roses for years. I am from Delhi and can’t afford to do that.
Naturally, I go for “
kucch whore” option – parting ways with the last fifty rupees note I had saved to feed my hungry family in a
dhaba by the roadside.
~
As luck would have it, my next unique experience while travelling by my own car happened in Chandigarh again.
Common sense demanded that since I had to go to Chandigarh on official business, I ought to have travelled by public transport. Unfortunately, I lack common sense more than I lack funds.
However, what persuaded me to travel to Chandigarh by my own car was not only the lack of common sense but also my morbid fear of public transport in general and Haryana Roadways in particular.
Haryana Road Transport seems to have some kind of monopoly so far as public transport in north India is concerned.
My phobia of Haryana buses is so intense even the sight of them sends me into jitters. There are two reasons for it. Firstly, Haryana bus drivers drive so fast they make me nervous. They love overtaking vehicles and faster the better – be it Skodas, Mercedes or Pajeros, which only the farmers of Punjab could afford at the time this experience is set in. As for me, I hesitate to overtake even a cyclist.
The second reason why I was scared of Haryana buses was that during those days, the drivers and conductors of Haryana Roadways not only smoked
beedis inside their vehicles but also encouraged the passengers to do so. I have vivid recall of the day I was thrown out of a Haryana bus for raising objection against smoking while travelling from Delhi to Sirsa. Those were the days when late Mr. Sanjay Gandhi was busy bulldozing shanty towns of Delhi out of existence and the word ‘Maruti’ was associated only with Lord Hanuman. The conductor had blown the whistle in the middle of nowhere to stop the bus and eject me.
To return to the next unique experience while travelling by my own car, I am just a kilometer short of Punjab border on my way out of Chandigarh after attending to my official business. I have almost made it when, lo and behold, a Maruti Gypsy of Chandigarh police parked a few meters within its own territory flags me down. It is a Sikh inspector this time, flanked by half a dozen constables holding bamboo
lathis in their hands. By the time I step out with my papers in hand, a constable has already filled relevant information about my car in the
challan book in his hands.
‘
Key gull hai, janab?’ (‘What is the matter, Sir?’) I try to establish racial kinship through pidgin Punjabi I have picked up from the shopkeepers of Karol Bagh.
‘Sorry, Sir,’ the constable apologises in perfect English as he hands me the slip he has detached from his
challan book. ‘The upper half of your headlights is not painted black – a mandatory regulation in Chandigarh.’
I look at the paper. A fine of five hundred rupees!
‘But it is not mandatory in Delhi!’ I make a fervent appeal to the Sub Inspector, ignoring the constable.
The inspector smiles benignly at me.
‘
Eh Chandigarh hai, Dilli nei, janab,’ (‘This is Chandigarh, not Delhi, Sir!’) he informs me in polite Punjabi.
There goes my travelling allowance, I ponder dejectedly, as I pull my slim wallet out of my hip pocket.
