Journeyman drive back from Kolkata to his home in Udaipur

Hanging around with my wife and child in Kolkata plus my two dogs Lily and Dahlia who I had carted from Udaipur to Kolkata without my wife’s knowledge became a little too tedious as I had the travel itch again. My car was really weary from the trudge on bad roads especially after Barhi in Jharkhand where my car skirted potholes as huge as manholes busting the radiator in the process.

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My poor Palio car being a 1.6 litre limited edition had very spares in Kolkata as the house of Fiat are known to produce excellent workhorses but after sales service and maintenance were wanting in Fiat’s workshop in Kolkata’s Behala area. So as I had learned from a road-side mechanic in Jharkhand state’s mining town of Dhanbad that a polyurethene compound pumped from a plastic injector gun which cost only Rs 250 sealed the plastic parts of the radiator and ensured that the radiator would work fine in cooling the car’s engine. Then there was the question of two bust front shock absorbers which cost me a pretty penny to replace, but my car was ready for the road with one extra car tyre and tube tied on top of the car’s carrier like my life depended on that extra tyre.

I had suffered before in Kanpur due the Grand Trunk road or the lack of it on my journey from Udaipur to Kolkata. So it was good bye to crab dishes, prawn in coconut milk curry and tender sweetmeats made of cottage cheese that only Bengal can serve up to an epicure, or can call me a gastronome. Goodbye to languid afternoons reading a book at the Barrista outlet in Park street over a great cup of coffee. Bye to sweaty afternoons poring over old books at the various second hand stalls in College street looking for a great deal.

So it was goodbye one fine morning with a whole lot of curious onlookers at my father-in-law’s Habra residence with one helpful soul who poured a bucket of water into my wind screen wiper-tank which made life a living nightmare later in the evening. I was looking for the fastest way out of Kolkata’s traffic chaos to hit the Orissa trunk road as in my mind’s eye I had sketched an adventurous tour via Puri and climbing up to Sambalpur to hit the Sambalpur Raipur Nagpur Dhulia highway. Then I was to hit the Dhulia road to Gujarat’s Surat through the Dangs and then climb up towards Udaipur via Ankleshwar, Baroda and Ahmedabad.

My wife had planned other diversions like Aurangabad’s Ajanta and Ellora caves while a childhood friend called Sabyasachi Chakrabarty in between film shoots gave instructions on the phone where to stay in Sambalpur and Nagpur’s Tadoba tiger Sanctuary.

This sounded much more fun than the so-called Golden Quadrilateral which had not lived up to prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s promise, or maybe it was still a long way from being finished.

The journey I undertook was from Habra which is on the Jessore road to Bangladesh which till date remains a skinny single lane or should we call it two lanes on which trucks and buses run at pell-mell speeds skirting their way between obstacle courses that vary from cycle-rickshaws, scooters and motorbikes ferrying hapless humans who have a prayer on their lips and their backs hunched anticipating a bone-cruncher any minute. Guess the so called humans were unperturbed and I was just reflecting my own tensions as ramshackle trucks honked me out of the way.

At least that is how I felt not being a believer in the doctrine of fatalism, and sometimes I sped at even crazier speeds to stay ahead of the maniacs, till I just loosened my back muscles and took my foot off the gas pedal and stared at the serene and wonderful scenery of paddy fields, coconut and betel nut groves of strange sounding places like Guma, Bira, Bamangacchi till one came to crashing halt with mile long queues of buses, hand-carts, honking cars and other assorted contraptions on wheels heralding the dreaded traffic of Kolkata’s Barasat.

That also meant that I was no more in the peaceful village environs of West Bengal’s 24 Parganas.

Now was a sweaty crawl with the air conditioning refusing to cool at the slow speeds with the car half the time in first gear, and my flustered family peering out at the folks who could never expect more having voted the Left Front government for three consecutive decades. I just could not understand the fatalism in these wretched masses, except that there must be a Goebbels like Leftist propaganda machine scaring them to believe that voting the Congress led central government would make them suffer a worser fate.

Not that the ruling Congress party was any better and their practices were aptly described by a Penguin publication book I had picked up in a central London bookstore called India Unbound by an economist called Gurcharan Das who had started his career hawking Vicks Vaporub in India’s villages and small towns. He talked about socialists as people who never gave good roads or vehicles to the common man making him/her huddle in slums which were tenements out of a town-planner’s nightmare.

Only a few favored industrialists would make the same bad clothes which were mass produced making everyone looking the same and we Indians have witnessed people dressed either in stripes and checks as the Birla or Wadias’ mills would churn out so-called fashion statements in the 70’s.

Actually prime minister Narasimha Rao brought about a change in the life-style but the Congress party through their their control over media houses had us to believe that it wasRajeev Gandhi and his Doon school friends who showed us Indians a way out of the hackneyed mess of less expectations and soon color television sets, video recorders, dish washers, microwave ovens and long distance telephony became common place. I have this feeling that the Bharatiya Janata Party under the stewardship gave India a proper road system. The Congress Party may go blue in the face claiming that they planned the Golden Quadrilateral, but as I sped away from West Bengal via Kolaghat and Baripada to a BJP ally state of Orissa, I saw how true this was.

The escape from Barasat lead to the township of Madhyamgram where the road as per the Eicher Tractors’ map showed a right turn to reach the town of Uluberia which was the main artery to reach the vein called the Orissa Trunk Road. Smaller lesser crowded delightful places like Kolaghat zipped by as I speeded up thinking I would reach Puri before nightfall. Little did I know of the pitfalls that lay ahead crossing over from West Bengal into Orissa.

As we reached the town of Kharagpur some locals advised to go to towards the Baharogora checkpost. On reaching the checkpost we found a mile long line of trucks triple parked, and a friendly Sardar truck driver advised us to back up down the road and take the old Baripada highway via Gopiballabhpur as this jam would take all night to clear.

I took the short cut and found that this road was a village road that skirted a wildlife sanctuary called Krishnachandrapur Betanoti Forest. Around Gopiballabhpur we crossed a river and then hand signals from locals carried us towards a muddy slip slide of a ochre coloured mud road where a truck was stuck at almost 45 degrees with a the starboard side set of wheels clear off the ground. that scared the living daylights out of us but as there was no hotel or guest-house anywhere near this forested area, and the evening light slowly fading, we went for it.

With a sickening sound of wheels skidding over mud and the car careening wildly like a out-of-control top we finally came to a halt firmly stuck on a rock. The locals were mostly dressed in dhotis and lungis and most of them had long tikkas on their fore-head and the most disconcerting thing was that most had a bow and a quiver of arrows to shoot their game. I hollered for help and about seven of them picked the car up bodily with us out of the car and heaved it to a dry spot on a thin strip of macadam on which we sped away towards Baripada.

By the time we reached Baripada it had started raining and I turned on the wiper, and the wiper water tank pump squeezed out a spray of oil over the windscreen making the whole front opaque. I stepped out and touched the liquid with my fingers and it smelled of phenyl. Then the sickening reality dawned on me that the helpful drunk who lived near my father-in-law’s bungalow in Habra and who I had once given a hundred rupees for his child’s baby food had put in this oily concoction in my water tank. So what I had in my car’s water tank was water mixed with the remnants of his wife’s mopping fluid in the bucket.

I cursed my luck and with my wife and me peering out of the window to spot the road we reached Baripada by seven p.m. where I stopped at a grocery store and bought a bunch of sachets of shampoo and pumped out the rest of the fluid in the tank and then poured in the shampoo with more clean water and sprayed it out repeating the process about four times. Alas when we hit the road towards Puri the sticky remnants still interfered with my vision on this now super highway where cars were zipping by at over hundred kms an hour and poor me was stuck in the right hand side lane along with the bicycles.

Crawling along I reached a town which said Balasore and I remembered it in my geography book as a Dutch trading post on the eastern coastline. Creeping through at minimal speeds we spied a white apparation which said Torrento hotel which we did not bargain for the first time but just checked in. Crawling into clean sheets after a hot water bath was a luxury and for the first time nobody demanded dinner but had a sandwich and just lit out.

Next morning it was breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant and this place was really swank and clean. I walked out and drove the car over to a mechanic who pumped out the tank’s fluid and poured in dish washing soap liquid and I was off to see the coastline only to find that the water had receded four kilometres in low tide creating a swamp.

So it was goodbye Balasore coast and we decided to see the famous Khirachora temple of the Lord Krishna alsoknown as Balgopal and Balasore was a British abberation of Baleshwar which it is now rightly named. Balasore sounded like Captain Saddle Sore had camped here in the 18th century with his cavalry. Khirachora temple did not really impress us as it was more of a new concrete structure with kitschy blue idols which were not really classy temple as Orissa is known for. So off we were towards Puri via a plethora of names zipping by like Khantapara, Soro, Bhadrak, Cuttack till we reached Bhubaneshwar where we drove into a filling station.

While driving out from the petrol pump in Cuttack I smelled petrol fumes everywhere and I ducked under the car and saw a thin stream leaking from the fuel sump. Panic, all systems alert for pending disaster and I asked instructions for the nearest Fiat dealership and soon we reached Bhubaneswar where lay a Fiat workshop where they changed the sump for a whopping seven thousand rupees. I promised myself to never in my life to ever ask a Sardar for directions as getting stuck on the old Baripada road through Gopiballabhpur had damaged my poor car.

Two hours of watching the workers dismantle the fuel tank in the sultry workshop while my family stayed in the air-conditioned waiting room of the workshop made me edgy and I snapped at the fore-man when he applied VAT or value added tax and upped the costs by eleven percent. That was that and we decided not to stay in the costly city of Bhubaneshwar as sixty kilometres away lay a Brighton beach like city called Puri where affordable and better accommodation lay awaiting us. In Puri were few temples with it’s star temple Jagannath Mandir known to the British as Juggernaut and of course the beach and the seafood. We zipped past Pipli a place of applique art I promised to return on our way out just like my wish to see the six hundred temples of Bhubaneshwar.

I drove straight to the sea front promenade and checked into the New Puri hotel. It was a no-nonsense double room with balconies facing the sea-front where the sound of the waves lulled us to sleep after ahearty dinner at the hotel’s restaurant which served up a fixed Bengali Thali meal of crispy fried potatoes known as Aloo Jhuri Bhaja, lentils, a vegetable dish, a fish meal all for Rs 60 per person. We stayed on for three days viewing the mind-blowing temple architecture of Jagannath and Konark which was 36 kms away and a world heritage site. All through my stay I picked up smatterings of the Oriya language which is almost like Bengali till it was time to say adieu to Puri and drive up to the median central tribal backbone of India where once Verrier Elwin lived amongst the Bastar tribals an even married a local girl.

Anybody been to Nagpur ? It is a very nice still human city with the big avenues studded with two to four storied buildings like Bombay of 1965. A hotel in 2005 on Central Avenue opposite Babboo’s Biryani was a delght. But Babboo’s biryani in Paradise hotel is nowhere on the web any more but gosh, folks can ascertain what happened on that hefty man who served such great rice and mutton combination which was the best outside of Lucknow.

I took the old Pune Road as it is called over the Ajanta ranges when you leave Nagpur and cross the scrub filed highlands with Akola and yes Buldana down to Chikli, Dehlgaon Raja, Lonar where we took a stop at a meteriote direct hit causing a crater housing a Maharashtra Tourism hotel over a lake and then all the way back on the trail next day to Aurangabad via Jalna.

Why Nagpur was such a hit with the family as we had been on the trail for quite a long time from Kolkata to Puri and then Sambalpur to take the central median backbone of tribal country through to Raipur, Britain and on to Mahasamund and yes great hotel and Babboo’s food which was finger licking grub.

The land of Llweyn an anthropologist who married to a girl from the Gond tribe or such like. Sorry as I am writing as usual extempore on a small Samsung phone as my laptop has gone for repairs. But not to lose the trail I saw different tribes in Chattisgarh from whom we bought the last of the lost wax bronze Bastar idols so cheap as buying these in Delhi can be so expensive. Maharashtra hits you hard as now I hear of folks with parched lands but in 2005 I saw these lovely happy men wearing white Gandhi caps and their small dwellings where they treat you to a kokum drink and butter milk laced with asafoetida which they will take no money and get offended.

There is still loads of jungle as you leave towards Gonda in Maharashtra and this starts as you leave Chattisgarh. The whole land is full of sal and yes a sight which made me smile yes smile as here was also teak jungles full of birds chipping as my car goes into second gear slowly climbing to clearing near Mahasamund. What a lunch of bajra ki roti and tomato and potatoes with garlic pickle in a small stall got me remembering a German lady commenting that the best grub is away from the professional gastronomic water holes.

A certain person has a wonderful plan to show the wild life and water bodies that exist instead of the usual Pench and Tadoba. And boy. I too am absolutely certain that the road to Yavatmal instead of my road to Dhulea had loads of game parks as just as you leave Nagpur human habitation is scarce as the small bushes go trailing down as the road climbs upwards showing the expanse of scrub land. Wastelands the way I like them which hide marshes and yes the moors have it all I had read about this area.

I realised later that Nagpur was in Madhya Pradesh till Maharashtra whisked her away. All through this ride back from Kolkata was my 2001 Fiat GTX 1600 cc equipped prototype of the Punto which I saw in London and fell in love handling the kerbs and countryside there. All other small cars at that time were 1000 cc or 1200 at the most this one moved easily at 180 km an hour in her heydays and has pulled me through Yamunotri, Gangotri, Spiti, Kashmir Munsiyari, Auli and Sattal so many times since 2002.

This grunty runt never gave up in the middle of my massive putsch through towards Gujarat’s Surat from Dhulea during this Kolkata to Udaipur to rest after nine days of resting at Puri and Sambhalpur and anyway the days spent seeing Ajanta and Ellora was so awesome that I forgot all the troubles my car had taken to reach here.

The first memories of Buldana was the proliferation of alcoholic drinking holes married to the dhabas and the other very striking feature of the roads which were in a sorry state despite Maharashtra being an industrial giant. And heck with Naveen Patnaik’s state’s smooth highways and Gujarat’s buttered highways ( Makkhan hai bhai, Makkhan ) up ahead with roads leading into India’s great highway king Rajasthan.

I may be stupid when I drive focused but the huge boards with cutouts and pictures of Atal Behari Vajpayee with shook into me the message that heck this BP party and it’s allies sure had a decent set of roads. Lol the moment the Congress won a drive through the Golden Quadrilateral revealed all the posters and cutouts taken off the boards dotting the highway