Rescuing Our Puppies From India
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Video
A YouTube video introduction to ourselves, our story and the puppies, Mana and Nayna.
Overview
Hello, we are Gwen and Boe. This is our fundraiser to help bring our two adopted stray dogs, Mana and Nayna, back from India.
The girls asleep on the rim of their basket whilst hitchhiking through India, March 2023
We adopted Mana and Nayna as infant puppies last year when we visited India hoping to stay there long term. They are two sisters from the same litter that we stumbled across on the banks of a river in the Himalayas, in a town called Manali.
When we decided not to remain in the country we arranged to pay a friend to look after the dogs until we could gather sufficient funds to be able to return to India and take the dogs home.
Sadly, our friend, a lovely man named Prakash, was unable to continue looking after the puppies and they had to be sent to a kennel. They have been there for several months now. As seen from the video their conditions are quite horrible. They must remain separated because of the noise they make when together, and are very rarely allowed out due to one of them previously attacking a chicken.
We had not planned to return to India so soon due to insufficient savings for covering all the costs involved. However, after seeing the video of the girls in their separate cages, we decided to attempt to bring them back largely through outside help, and so we created this fundraiser.
This fundraiser will help cover the costs of everything that needs to happen before the dogs can meet English soil. Below is an infographic outlying the procedures and expenses we have managed to estimate through investigating the process on various websites and forums. It is of course likely that we will encounter numerous other hidden costs.
First we must get to the dogs and pay their final kennel costs. After this we must get them microchipped and inoculated against rabies. Once this is done, a blood test must be taken and sent to the UK. Following this, we must wait 3 months with the dogs in India following the all clear from the blood tests. Then we must create a UK pet health certificate. Finally the dogs must be wormed before we find a suitable way to transport them back to Europe.
Estimations of costs for both dogs
We have already booked our flights to India and will be arriving in Delhi on the 4th of June, 2024.
It has been nearly a year since last we saw Mana and Nayna. As you can probably imagine we are rather excited to see them.
Below you will find a detailed account of us finding the puppies, and the subsequent 3000km journey we made hitchhiking from the far north of India to the far south - and all the beautiful people and wondrous circumstances one brushes up against when they stand by the wayside and stick out a thumb.
Gwen eating sugar cane with local children, Nalvi, Haryana
An enormous thanks to our friend Josh who among so many other things edited the video. And to his partner, April, who fed us on so many late nights, as well as everything else that she does so gracefully to grease the many cogs of their lives and other lives around them. We couldn't have completed this fundraiser nor reached this stage of retrieving the dogs without Josh and April's help anymore than I could have typed these words without fingers and thumbs.
And thank you to all who choose to donate or who have spent a moment to enjoy our story.
Thank you,
Boe and Gwen x
Chapter 1
Cardboard Box
In March of last year, my girlfriend and I travelled to India with the intention of living there. Equipped with little information about the migration process, we believed in ourselves enough to give it a go. Enough, that was, to purchase plane tickets and wave away all belongings save for the rucksacks and rain jackets and other essential things on our backs and the sandals upon our feet.
Picking up our new packs in Bristol, UK, 2023
I have found, generally, that all big risks are met with at least some kind of reward: rarely in the size nor shape you’d expected, but rewarded nonetheless.
Obviously, all dreams are composed in a vacuum, in the sandpit of our thoughts. But where imagination is the derivative fuel of dreams, it’s risk taking that has the power to pull those dreams out through a nostril and into one’s experience.
Naturally, there are oceans of relevant cherry-pickings from many renowned names and faces when it comes to taking risk but, for me, Anais Nin strips it down beautifully to its naked essence (which is fitting because Anais Nin wrote erotica):
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Landing in Delhi with my girlfriend, Gwen, commenced my third visit to India. I’d wanted to get back since 2019, a time I’d spent living with a group of friends in a mud house atop the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu, near a hill station called Kodaikanal. Our trip to India last year was the pursuit of a dream I had carried around with me for three years, and one that Gwen now shared.
Map of South India
Photos from the mud hut near Kodaikanal
Gwen turns to me as we step out of the airport into the New Delhi night air. Her raised brows comment on the heat. I smile widely. The excitement which had remained contained as we’d passed through customs begins to hiss and steam. These were her first steps on the riverbanks of a whole new world.
We made it. She actually came. I am finally back.
We made it.
At this time, Gwen and I have not been together long. In fact we had been together less than six months.
That said, we had long since moved independently with a very similar brood of hopes, which became, and still remains, a key ingredient of our glue. A hope of living in community with others: to lead what many might deem a simple life, centred around nature - with time to be creative, investing our energies into the place where we live.
And back then we thought that hope might be realised in India.
We dreamed of growing food beneath a consistent Eastern sun: conditions that supported the growth of coconuts, oranges, papaya. We spoke about the wet season, about hospitable neighbours, making things with our hands, from bamboo and clay. Prior to that Delhi evening, that moment on the pavement outside of the airport, we’d even discussed at merry length the possibility of finding a stray dog along our way, and inviting them off the streets.
Stray and cow share rubbish pile, Delhi
Group of guys play cards on the floor, Delhi
“We’ve arrived.”
“Wonderful. What are your plans?” responds the mellow voice of Vishnu, a dear friend I’d stayed with last time I was in India who we were soon to meet.
“I am still with my parents,” his voice continues, slipping down through warbled patches of the iffy Wi-Fi of our cheap hotel, “I will be with them for another month in Hyderabad.”
Gwen and I wanted to meet Visnhu first before anyone else. Much had changed in the three years I’d been away, and Vishnu would be the ideal tour guide for all the new places and faces.
But Hyderabad is an intense city, with intense heat, dense arrangements of concrete and, with around 10 million people in the metropolitan area, it is the sixth most populated metropolis in India.
“If you want to meet me at the time I return to Kodai [Kodaikanal], I think it’s probably best you spend the month somewhere else.”
“I think we agree,” I said, looking at Gwen.
“Gokarna maybe?” Vishnu proposes. “Somewhere close to the sea. I’m sure it’s been a long time since you’ve been to a proper beach. Or there’s always the mountains.”
“India’s a big place.”
“This is true.”
Vishnu, Bangalore, 2019
Gwen and I each had a five year tourist visa. Technically speaking, however, it was more like a two-and-a-half year visa given that one is only allowed to spend six months of every twelve in the country.
Again, we had not yet come up with a plan of how we would be able to stay long term, but 6 months felt like a big enough window in which serendipity could show its face.
Should worse come to worst, we’d simply have to spend half a year in Nepal or Vietnam or Sri Lanka, or some other beautiful, fragrant alternative.
Money? Yes we had some, but hardly reems. We’d have to find a way to support ourselves. And in this, too, we found confidence.
The next day, we find ourselves somehow whisked into a government tourist office (the kind of place that wrinkles the nose of my ego and its sense of adventure). We are sat down across the table from a man in a largely unbuttoned white shirt who is bent on carving up India in straight lines for us, shaping out a route of 30 days, tourist site to tourist site.
Once the tourist officer man had finally grasped that it did not perturb us too greatly to miss out on the Taj Mahal - and that we’d much rather entertain ourselves in a quiet corner, tucked away from busy roads and photo junkies - I found an internal flight from Delhi to Goa for that evening.
Goa would provide an excellent landing from which to travel south and pick out a beach, a hut and local haunts to spend the rest of March, lounging and unwinding from the rather hectic few months behind us.
I showed the tourist officer the flights, he looked them up on his system, shrugged his shoulders in consent, and I booked them.
Gwen still in the tourist office, I went out to find some tea, satisfied with the sense of a plan taking shape.
Standing primed to cross a busy section of road, a small man appears at my side and breaks open a conversation. A conversation that, having finally removed myself from the light interrogation of the tourism officer, I wasn’t really eager to embark on. The exact kind of conversation that Indians are wont to pull out of their pocket at any given opportunity - out of the curiosity they’re so wont to have.
I explain to the mN about my friend in Tamil Nadu, how me and Gwen hope to remain there long term… our flight for this evening to Goa… how hot it is in Delhi compared to London…
“Can I see your ticket?” the man asks.
“My ticket? Why?”
“So we can see what terminal you must get to.”
“Sure,” I say, watching the man as I show him the details of the flight on my phone.
“Tonight you said you fly?”
“Yes.”
“But tonight is the evening of a certain Tuesday the 7th.”
“Yes it is.”
“And this flight," he says, lightly tapping the image, "is for the evening of another Tuesday altogether. Tuesday the 21st.”
I snatched back my phone and stared at the screen, muscles blaring with the many volts of panic.
He was right.
Shit.
I returned to the tourist office, accompanied by the man, where the same thick lipped officer, upon recognising my disquiet, looked at me with humour and concern. He won’t last a week, read the striations of his smiling frown.
After twenty minutes of picking at the various options, Gwen and I both settle on going north. To Manali, a small town lain at the foothills of the Himalayas at a height of about 2,000m. There we would spend the two weeks before our erroneously booked Delhi-Goa flight.
It was all an unwanted diversion, an unnecessary expense, and an embarrassment. But given the new shape of our circumstances it made the most sense. Besides, it felt far better to go north before heading south.
So, that evening, we took a bus - and travelled to the mountains.
Chai before the bus journey to Manali
Writing this now, it is rudely evident how much of my recent past and current life was and continues to be defined by booking a flight for a mistaken date.
Universally, I think, any life that is to be human is a life engaging with Existence as little more than a wibbly wobbly line coursing through time and events. And, equally universal, intersecting this “life-line” - like asteroids and freak cracks of lightning - are all the juncture points, random opportunities and chance meetings that alter the course of these lines, changing them forever in a momentary flash.
That morning, at about 5am local time, Manali, we stumbled upon one of these moments of inflection.
We stepped off the bus into the frigid yawn of a bleak morning. There was no sun yet. We put our down jackets on and, taking a taxi closer to our lodge, crossed over the Bhanu bridge (which reverberated slightly as you walked). In the half light, the roar of a river beneath spoke far louder than what could be made out with the eyes. Around us, lurking mountains stood on all sides, the crowns of their summits catching the first cords of day.
Taken from Bhanu Bridge, Manali
We walk for ten or fifteen minutes more as the sun begins to spill into the valley. All the while the path follows the line of the river, and we round a slight bend. Dunes of boulder and pebble rise up towards the track from the level of the water.
We hear scuffling.
Gwen squeaks as a black puppy, slightly larger than the size of my shoe, stumbles at her shins, tail and hind thrashing and swinging so wildly that the rest of little, fluffy body is thrown about like a maraca. Gwen squats to pick up the wriggly mass as another puppy - and another - and another - all spilling over a low mound of rocks to our side - rush in a helpless dodder towards us. The rocks from where they emerge had at some stage been scraped aside to make way for the track - behind which, we now see, was the makeshift den of the litter.
There was no sign of a mother.
The litter
There is a desperation in their jubilation. Or maybe it is the other way round? They welcome us like they’ve been saved, licking and biting and yipping intoxicatedly.
There is some kind of instinctive understanding in the puppies, I felt, that Gwen and I - looming creatures; positively mountainous by comparison - contained the possibility of their salvation. They lunged at us with a feverishness that felt like hope.
Or maybe it was all me, painting them with my own emotions: my excitement, my guilt? I took the black puppy in my arms. It was the only black one. A sheer, rich, undifferentiated black. The rest were beautiful light browns with tinges of white and gold and darkened tufts.
It wriggles wildly in my arms, completely alive.
It is riddled with life.
Wriggly, rich, undifferentiated life.
And I begin to feel the weight of such life in my hands.
I indulge for a minute, dipping into imaginations of taking it away from this place. Taking it with us. I see it growing up and growing old and playing in the grass of southern mountains. For a moment it feels like we are exactly where we were supposed to be. We had spoken about this possibility. We never thought it would happen like this: so soon and so far from where we were headed.
I look at Gwen.
“Puppies!” she says with very wide eyes.
I check to see what sex the black puppy is that I’m holding. It has a square, chunky forehead and it is plenty boisterous. I expect it to be male.
“A boy?” Gwen asks.
“A girl,” I say, as it gnaws at the skin on my fingers.
As it gnaws at the contents of my mind.
The next two days we spent predominantly discussing whether or not to take a puppy. Or two puppies? Twice the amount of work would ensure a company of pups - not a lone whelp stripped from mum and family.
And what about mum? She was still around, we discovered. But whenever we went to see her and her lot she was hardly there - off, we assumed, searching for scraps to fill up her teats. She was a skinny mongrel with a rib cage like a harsh corset.
Would she be grateful? Would it help? Would it hurt?
Leaving Manali with the puppies would mean cancelling our flight from Delhi to Goa and travelling the 3000 km distance with them, most likely by hitchhiking.
Yes, Indian trains and buses are cheap when compared to European prices. But India is a big place.
In fact, India is so big that it is about the same size as the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Poland combined.
Additionally, the faster you want to travel the more money you pay. The same goes for comfort. And, as with most things transportation, it is far cheaper to buy tickets well in advance. This would require in-depth planning - back to back trains or coaches and finding out where to stay in each city, which train to get and from where each bus left - plans which could be derailed by countless unforeseen mishaps.
Then there’s the accommodation and all the other things and hidden costs one inevitably finds themselves paying on such an outing.
On top of that, puppies have very small bladders and equally short bowels - something we’d come to know intimately over the next month or so.
In other words, frequent toilet breaks onboard long distance trains and bus journeys sounded like an arduously sticky affair. Hitchhiking would allow us to pull over whenever the puppies needed to relieve themselves - and to take our time. Not only this, but it would allow us also to sink deeper beneath the skin of the country we hoped to live.
Travelling India is a mission in and of itself. Perhaps you’re even familiar with the cliché that India is where happy couples go to break up.
It is an intense, immense, busy, bolshie, often hot and often wild country. Throw in a few scammers, a bit of disease and a week of Delhi belly and it soon reveals itself as a place where you can easily lose your head.
Hitchhiking also brings with it another set of unique issues: how to navigate around and through cities, where to stand, when to get in, when to politely decline.
Fortunately, neither of us were strangers to hitchhiking. In fact, our first conversations were waiting in a lay-by outside a train station for a lift four months prior as part of a trip Gwen and my sister were making, hitchhiking from the UK to Berlin. The summer before, I had hitchhiked nearly 4,500km from Barcelona to Diyarbakir in Turkey.
What’s more, from the brief experiences I’d had hitchhiking in India, I knew people would pick us up.
It was possible.
We rationalised and discussed and sat brooding mutely in our room. And yet, by a process difficult to articulate, that same inexplicable presence of confidence - the same intangible sense of momentum and daring which had taken us this far - slowly whispered from some back shelf of our minds. The foolhardy prod of the spirit, pulling our ears.
It seemed far too coincidental to chance upon the den as we did; the happy accidents and choices that had led us there; the Manali hostel we’d chosen at random, down that particular path on the other side of the swaying bridge.
Yes, it’s true, there are many stray dogs in India. But it isn’t every day you stumble across such a fine bunch of healthy, infant puppies, waiting for their luck to change.
What really sealed the deal, however, was - come the afternoon of the third day following our arrival, while feeding the puppies - the apparition of a brand new black SUV, slowly bobbing over the track's ruts and rumps toward us.
A young woman gets out and exclaims her own fascination with the litter.
“Are they by themselves?” she asks.
“The mother is around,” Gwen says, “but she’s very skinny and very weak.”
The woman stood pensively for a moment. “What can we do for them?” she asks, “Do you think they will survive?”
“Some of them might. I don’t think she will,” Gwen says, pointing to one of the smallest puppies who she’d grown deeply fond of.
“And if they do, it’ll only be for a life of scavenging,” I say.
“And pregnancy,” Gwen added.
“And the cold...” said the girl.
“So we should take them to a shelter?” she suggested, looking down at the little mottled posse.
Gwen and I shared a quick glance. “Yeah…,” Gwen said, a sober frown on her face. “Maybe.”
The prospect jabbed me in the throat. As far as I know, dog shelters in India are often overcrowded and underfunded.
Quite suddenly it felt as if the puppies were being taken from us, pulled from our arms. Silly, I know.
Yet a future in which we’d leave Manali with them had already begun to feel palpable, real, distinct in my mind's eye. And… right.
Now that image began to crack and fade. A sense of loss grew in its place.
That was the moment we knew.
“We’re going to adopt two of them,” I say.
Gwen smiles. She nods.
“That’s amazing!” says the woman. “How are you going to do that?”
The next morning we have breakfast in the same corrugated roadside shack where we’d had our breakfast every morning since arriving. We’d grown very fond of the lady who made us our morning omelettes, paratha and chai. She did not speak any English, but we communicated easily enough, with smiles and empty plates.
We would choose a puppy each. I’d already decided on the black one. She was the alpha of the litter, it seemed. For her, I liked the name Mana, both for Manali and mana - the Polynesian word that describes a vital power residing in all things.
Gwen had decided on the little runt. She was another girl; smaller, shyer, deeply timid when it came for her to be fed. A light, golden brown coat and darker snout. But she had not been given a name.
As we were leaving the breakfast shack, our packs on our backs, minutes away from taking the puppies, we asked the younger woman who helped the older lady with the cooking what the older lady’s name was.
“Nayna,” the young woman said. “It means Eye in Hindi.”
Gwen and Nayna, with food shack and Bhanu bridge in the background
“Nayna,” I say as we walk over the bridge, “that’s a good name for a puppy.”
“Mana and Nayna. That’s sure to be confusing.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s pretty.”
“Aye, that it is,” Gwen says, her smile musing the idea.
On the other side of the bridge there is a small box shaped building also clad in corrugation selling soft drinks, cheap industrial cigarettes, gutka (flavoured chewing tobacco) and snacks.
“Hello,” I say, poking my head inside. There are two young men sitting on a big bundle of rope inside, smoking. Hello, they respond.
“Do you have a cardboard box?”
Both look a bit flummoxed. One stands and passes me a small box that might have transported matches or gum.
“Big box,” I say, arms out wide in front of me.
Back where the puppies are, we return to find the mother with them. They are all sleeping in the shade of boulders. The puppies are dotted around, waking as we near. The mother raises her head towards us but doesn’t stir.
Neither me nor Gwen say anything. We quietly pick up Mana and her sister, place them in the box and begin walking back towards the bridge and the road. The mother looks at us as we walk away. But the head lowers, resting again on her front legs, perfectly still in the shade.
We walk down the track towards the bridge. Both puppies attempt to remain on their feet in the box. It must be strange to feel the ground move beneath your paws for the first time.
Mana, though confused, appears calm, her profile composed by her usual sense of certainty; her eyes scoping above the rim of the box.
Nayna on the other hand is dribbling profusely, her body lame, emptied out with dissociation. She stares blankly at nothing, drooling on her chest and legs, stumbling to her feet over and over as the box shakes as I walk, totally in shock.
We cross the bridge and reach the road and put our bags down next to the cardboard box.
“Oh Nayna,” Gwen says, stroking the pup with the golden fur and the big hazel eyes.
Chapter 2
Fruit Crate
A minute or so later, the first vehicle to pass pulls across the road and stops a little way ahead of us. We get in. Little is said. There aren't many choices to make up here regarding route and direction. Further into the mountains - or back down south.
The driver has a hacking cough. He and his copilot look back at the puppies and smile.
“They are yours?” asks the young woman beside the driver.
“Yes, they are,” Gwen says, still tending to Nayna with the box on her lap.
Hardly a moment after we begin to drive away, with the bridge quickly falling from view - the pile of rocks that had concealed the puppies now completely indistinguishable amongst the citadel of stone; a grey mosaic with buildings here and there - Nayna pukes on Mana’s head. A viscose, stringy spew like the salivary ooze one might find in the jaws of a dining bear. Shakily she starts trying to clear it up, licking the elastic goo from her sister's head with it still thick around her chops.
She remains dazed and confused for the next half an hour as though having taken a major blow to the head.
Car sick Nayna and sicked-on Mana
With the sick mostly cleared up by Mana, and several napkins we’d taken unused from restaurants, we make a mental note to buy a roll of paper towels and converse quietly amongst ourselves.
“Not the greatest start,” Gwen remarks solemnly, looking down at the soggy dogs and their soggy cardboard dwelling.
We alight in a nearby town before being picked up by another 4x4: white and dusty with a large flatbed. We get in and pass through the town, soon snaking our way along the shelf-like roads that hug the wide, glacial canyons that carve downwards from the mountains - through which we slalomed then, unto the plains of Punjab and Haryana.
There is not much conversation in the vehicle until the moment where the driver turns to us and says:
“City?”
“Delhi,” I say.
We do not really want to go to Delhi. In fact, going to Delhi would be a terrible move. One thing with hitchhiking is that you never wish to embroil yourself in the mess of cities if you are intending to move past them.
But for now, Delhi is in the right direction.
“No Delhi,” the young man replies, “Haripur.”
I look at the maps on our phone with the Indian SIM.
It's the wrong direction, heading further west than we need. I trace back along to see where the driver’s route deviates from our own.
“Bajaura?” I ask.
“Ok,” the driver says, “one moment.”
There are three men in the car, all who appear to be in their mid to late twenties or early thirties. The driver and crew speak hastily as we continue driving.
The driver looks at us in the rear view mirror and addresses us again. It is not English so we don't understand it. He tries again and we shake our heads. He speaks to his friend who types something out on a smartphone phone before showing us the screen. It reads: 14,000
“Rupees,” says the driver, “you pay.” He taps the phone screen. “Bajaura.”
I let out a laugh. Fourteen thousand rupees (about £140) to take us where he is already going?
“No, bro,” I say.
The figure is deleted and retyped over and over, waning till it reaches six thousand.
“No, bro,” I say again, still shaking my head.
For comparison, the bus which had taken Gwen and I from Delhi to Manali (a five hundred kilometre, ten hour ride) cost a little over three thousand rupees for the both of us.
The driver huffs and pulls over to the side of the road. He turns to look at us and wafts his hand, dismissing us back onto the tarmac.
“Not the best start,” I confirm to Gwen once we’re back outside.
She watches the pups as they snoot around the small roadside shrine adjacent to us.
Both pups squat to pee, nominally concealed in the meagre clefts of grassy weeds that cling to life between the edge of the asphalt and the roadside barriers.
I walk to the edge and cast my eyes downward over the barriers far below to where the loud-mouthed, whitewater Himalayan runoff gurgles and throws up spittle as it crashes into the many wrinkles of waylaid boulders. The puppies, by comparison to the epic fluvial landforms about us, are comically small. Their little heads twitter back and forth, bewildered by the stream of trucks and cars that whip up and down the road.
Gwen cleaning the puppies on the side of the road
It isn’t long before we get another lift: a small, white car that zips with precise speed along the road. We move from the wide open valley to a series of long, slithering ravines into which the sun does not reach.
The car weaves around potholes and protrusions in the road like a little white, winged insect navigating droplets of falling rain.
The driver, who looks to be a similar age to me (25), is called Kapil. His English is good and he is heading in our direction.
“Where you are going?” he asks.
“Our final destination is Kodaikanal,” I say but he doesn’t know it. “In Tamil Nadu.”
“Wow!” he says, “very long way to Tamil Nadu! You go like this?” he asks with his thumb upturned in the air.
“Yes!” I say, smiling, already enjoying his company, “hitchhiking.”
“Wow,” he says again. “Wow. It is very long way.”
For context, to fly from Delhi to Madurai (a comparable distance from Manali to Kodaikanal) takes three hours. London to Rome takes about 2h30m.
It was a long way.
“Come to my restaurant,” Kapil says. “My brother’s and my restaurant.”
I look at Gwen, grinning widely.
“We’d love that,” she says, nursing the puppies all the while.
Mana has taken to car travel like a limpet to the underside of a boat. She is snuggly coiled up in the box, silently and placidly content to be spurred and bounced as the car dips in and out of the endless harangue of corners.
Nayna on the other hand took to road travel like a sea cucumber making itself at home in a cardboard box. Her golden fur was ridgid now with a dried sheen of phlegm. The rest of her - her limbs, her eyes, her tail; even her tongue, which sprouted out slightly from the corner of her mouth - was stiff and deeply unimpressed, quite like the features of an animal that was designed to be aquatic. One that had found itself beached and left withering in the sun.
All around where the little dog lay, the box was almost irreversibly sticky with the drying layers of everything that had come out of her mouth.
Yet, for the moment, she had stopped drooling. And she had not been sick in some time.
We park in a town called Mandi and walk to Kapil’s restaurant. As soon as we arrive the owner, Kapil’s brother, appears from a back room to greet us. He lived for a long time in Bangalore and his English is perfect.
“Hello my friends! How’s it going? Kapil told me that you have just adopted some little puppies from further up the river, and now you’re hitchhiking to Tamil Nadu? Have I got that right?” He has an air of ease about him that translates to a certain degree of cool grace.
“That’s right,” Gwen says. “Well, that is the plan. Best laid schemes and all that.”
“Where in Tamil Nadu exactly?” the man smiles intently, his hands clasped together in front of him.
“Kodaikanal,” I say, “in the mount…”
“Oh, yes, I know it! I have been several times. What an incredible place. You know, in Hindu mythology, those hills are literally the garden of the son of Shiva?”
Kapil’s brother, Rohan, asks us what we want to eat and we tell him to surprise us. He returns with pineapple juice and several southern dishes - masala dosa and tomato rice to name a couple.
Afterwards we are refused permission to pay for anything. Just before we leave, Rohan speaks to a member of staff who bows his head and goes out back, promptly returning with a large plastic fruit box and a hessian sack. He then puts the hessian sack inside the plastic box and presents it to us, having already fed the dogs a bowl of milk and having helped us wash them.
“Bit tougher than cardboard,” he says, slapping the hard plastic of the crate. “And it won’t fall apart if they have any more… accidents.”
After food with Kapil and Rohan, Mandi
It was nearing evening. And nighttime, as you can probably imagine, makes hitchhiking a lot harder.
We decide to take a bus in order to keep moving.
Before going to the station, Kapil drives us to a pharmacy. He explains that when his own street dog puppy was very young it was recommended to him that he feed them formula rather than regular cows milk. “Easy for the stomach,” he said, patting his belly.
When returns with the packet he explains how much to give the dogs and how to serve it to them. “Make a thick like… gravy,” he says, “many times a day. It can never be too much. Very young, very hungry.”
He refused to let us pay for that, too.
Back at the station, he helps us locate our bus, gives both me and Gwen big hugs and says goodbye to the puppies.
“Come back,” he tells us. “Always welcome.”
On the bus, Nayna is far more relaxed as the road straightens out. Five minutes into the journey, they are both sleeping on our laps.
The ticket attendant arrives at our row of seats and is plainly surprised by our additional cargo. He was a short, squat man with a proud moustache. His green uniform was filled out so exactly that there were neither creases nor bulges, like a perfectly taut balloon.
He sticks four thick fingers up in the air in front of our faces.
“Four?” I baulk. I point at Gwen and myself. Two, I single with my fingers.
The man counts again, jabbing a thick finger at me and Gwen followed by Mana and Nayna.
Four, he signals again.
“No,” I say.
“Yes.”
“No. No way.”
But the man doesn’t move. Nor is there any impression of movement.
So we buy four tickets to Ambala and start trundling towards it as evening loses its colour. The only lights now are the canals of headlights - and the big, illuminated billboards outside of restaurant hotels declaring PURE-VEG and NONE-VEG - and the spindly bulbs outside of smaller shacks, around which moths congregate in whizzing balls.
It is the most local of local buses that we have boarded, so we move the most slowly. We deviate and squirm between towns and villages like a greedy yet geriatric pinball. We consult the map every half an hour to find out we are only ten minutes closer.
And every time the ticket attendant slips down the narrow gangway, surprisingly dexterous for his plumpness, we exchange glares like broadside cannons. Or deny each other’s existence like playground nemeses.
It is night time now and we have been on the bus far too long - around six hours. Not only do most local buses carry extremely uncomfortable seats, are often extremely crowded and are perpetually deprived of leg room, but there is hardly enough time between most stops to get the puppies off in order for them to empty themselves.
Twenty minutes more and Mana begins to clamber over both Gwen and I in a restless toddle, scaling over our thighs to the window and back, poking her nose outside into the night air, expressing her yearning to be amongst it.
Nayna is asleep, spread eagled on the hessian sack in the crate beneath our seat.
The next time the bus slows to pick up more people I take Mana and lunge towards the rear door. The bus moves off before I get far, throwing me into the elderly occupant of an aisle seat.
Returning to my place, Mana whines quietly on my lap for another few minutes before falling momentarily quiet. She then moves over to Gwen and lies down heavily in the crook of her lap and remains still, exhausted from the day.
Fortunately, the few little cylindrical tubes of poop she has left behind on my shorts are of a dense enough consistency to be picked up in a paper towel and offered through the window to the gods of Indian b-roads.
Taking the opportunity to stretch out, Mana on my chest
Further along we’re able to make a proper stop at a bigger town. Many get on and off, and the ticket attendant and driver change with their replacements.
A young guy with glasses sits down in the row across from us and smiles as he does so.
“Hello,” he says. “What brings you here, if you don’t my asking?”
I explain about the puppies and where we’re headed.
“Also,” I add, “I have a favour to ask you.”
“Please, my friend.”
“Well, do you think you could ask this ticket guy for a refund for us?”
“Why?”
“The other guy before him charged us four seats,” he said, showing him the tickets.
“Four?”
“For the puppies, too.”
“Ah, yeah,” the guy says, tutting, quietly struck by recollection, holding the flimsy bits of ticket paper. “In this state, Haryana, bus drivers must also charge for the transport of any animals. Like your dogs, for example.”
“Oh, man. I thought it was just the ticket guy being an arsehole.”
“Ah, well, if anyone likes pushing the rules, it's probably an arsehole,” he laughs. His young features, barely made out by the secondary light from the street, can still be seen to be arranged by a gentle self-assurance.
In Chandigarh (a city whose distance from Manali takes six hours without impediment - a journey that had taken us all day) we decide to get off the bus and to look for somewhere to sleep. The hazy, quasi-conscious state we’d drifted in and out of whilst on the bus wasn’t cutting it.
It’s about 2AM.
We find some cheap but hot bus stand food served on thin tin foil trays and make up a couple platters of formula milk for the pups on some of the same trays. We add steel dog bowls to the shopping list.
For Gwen and I, eating, resting, bathroom breaks and so on now worked in rotation. The puppies needed a constant eye; ever eager to get out of the crate and explore. The world is new and full of interesting scents to figure out.
Piles of people doze or natter quietly beside the platforms on rigid benches or on the ground. It’s not cold - not by a long stretch. But mosquitoes are in the air. And the love that mosquitoes have for my blood is a real romance.
We hunt around to find somewhere more secluded and find a set of chunky concrete stairs that lead to a first floor. “Wait there,” I say to Gwen, taking to the steps.
“Can I help you?” comes the voice of a security guard. He is sitting alone on a red plastic chair with his legs splayed wide. His skin glistens with nighttime sweats.
“We’re looking for somewhere to sleep for a few hours,” I say.
“There are rooms down there,” he replies, gesturing down a long hallway with doors on either side, “but all full.”
I look around. In the corner of the room, two rows of benches meet at a right angle.
“Can we sleep on these?” I ask.
The man looks at me quietly as he thinks.
“We?” he asks.
“Me, my girlfriend and two puppies.”
“Puppies?”
“Small dogs.”
“Dogs? Do they…” He quietly imitates barking noises.
“No,” I say, smiling at the man. “They are sleeping.”
“If they are very quiet, you can stay there - no problem,” the man says with a grin and a gentle wobble of his head.
I bloody love India, I think as I hop back down the stairs to Gwen.
“Sorted something?” she asks sleepily.
“More or less.”
Barely have I untangled myself from consciousness before I feel a soft hand shake me tepidly at the shoulder.
“Sir,” says a soft voice, “sir…”
I wake to see the security guard stood over me.
“Yes?” I ask, stretching my spine, completely drunk with sleep.
“A man here is asking me if you want to rest in his room.”
I then see the other man standing behind the security guard. He looked harmless enough. In fact, he had a warm, timid smile.
“And the dogs?”
“Yes, and the dogs,” says the security guard. “There is fan, also,” he adds.
By now, the sweatiness and mosquito nibbles and fatigue have all become one thick, oily, homogeneous skin of displeasure.
“Bucket wash?” I ask.
“Yes sir,” says the security man, waggling his head again softly and smiling, “bucket wash.”
I’ve no idea what percentage of India still washes with a bucket and jug compared to showers, but I’m sure it’s a lot. Though showers undeniably possess many additional benefits, one thing that will never to be duplicated by a shower head is that first, brimming jug of lukewarm water cascading heavily over your crown and down your back.
Inside the room, post wash, the two men we are bunking with try to offer us their beds. In the end, with very few words available with which to negotiate, we successfully manage to prevent our hosts from sleeping on the floor and are given a number of their blankets to place between ourselves and the tiles.
We keep the fruit crate and its contents - two very exhausted pups - within arm’s reach.
Through the remainder of the night we must occasionally reach inside the crate to reassure the little bodies they’re not alone.
Chapter 3
Boundaries and Barriers
The next day we thank our impromptu hosts and attempt to hitch to Ambala, 45km away. From Ambala we planned to traverse westward to a new, very straight looking highway that runs all the way south to a point below Delhi and slightly north of Jaipur.
We take an inner city bus for ₹20 each (~20p) towards the outer rim of Chandigarh. But even that far out the highway is a manic mess, with multiple congested lanes of cars squabbling for more open roads. Additionally, rows of hard barriers cordon off the road from pedestrians - and hitchhikers.
Gwen carrying the puppies in Chandigarh
All together it is very difficult to distinguish where to wait for a lift, so we walk until a toll gate where a kind operator offers to ask the passing cars for lifts on our behalf. Someone soon stops and we are taken to Ambala.
In Ambala we seek breakfast and opt for a snackery positioned directly beneath the highway overpass. It serves spicy chickpea daal with flatbreads. The meal costs around 30p each.
As we clean our disposable trays, standing in the dust beneath the overpass, referring to the map, pointing out and contemplating different directions as traffic swirls all around, we notice that directly across from us is a bus station. We walk over to the station and opt for a short ride further south to a town called Shahbad after being told there are no regular buses west.
Onboard, as we navigate through the city's traffic, I cross off ‘riding on the arm of a crane’ from the list of weird ways I’ve seen Indians make their commute.
In Shahbad, we begin trying to explain to someone that we wish to travel west to the highway.
Nothing that way, the man tells us.
He calls over his friend. This really only serves as an open invitation to all the onlookers that had already begun to muster. In a rapid succession of moments, voices and waving arms, Gwen and I are surrounded by twenty or so people. Many are gripped in earnest debate about what to do with us. Others, with sneaky contagious grins, steal furtive glances at our wares, our skin, the puppies and Gwen’s bald head.
It's not long, however, before we crash against the same issue we’d already discovered earlier that day: There is no word in Hindi or Punjabi for hitchhike.
People continue shaking their heads, asking why we want to go to the highway.
Nothing! they say, Nothing that way!
After a number of minutes we’re finally whisked into a rickshaw. The driver does not speak much English. We’re not exactly sure where we’re going but he soon crosses the highway and begins heading in the right direction.
“Price?!” I call over the sound of the whiny engine.
“Two-hundred-fifty only!” the driver says.
So, in relative comfort, Mana bouncing against Gwen’s chest and Nayna in the crate on my lap, we travel down a road that cleaves the fields of a vast plain in two. The road is bordered by an avenue of trees on either side standing like sentinels: a million leafy shields of green holding back the glare. The land either side of the road stretches on all around us for untold miles.
The best thing about the journey, however, is the breeze.
We chug along for about thirteen kilometres till the driver slows and stops and strikes up a conversation with someone in the settlement we have just crossed into, a town called Nalvi.
Another congregation forms, except this time there is no gaggle of giggly teens in the crowds. Rather it is beside a row of fabricating workshops - their metal shutters hoisted open, waxy lighting encapsulating shiny machinery and shelves all full with parts - and the men who work there, greasy handed and covered in multi-layered stains, that come over to inspect us.
It is remarkable (and one of the points I often make to try and pinpoint the major cultural differences betwixt India and the UK) that work in India can, within reason, be paused at a moment's notice to be picked up again later on.
Exhibit A: our arrival in Nalvi.
We were far more interesting, apparently, than whatever it was people were doing before we arrived. Interest and interest alone was reason enough for tools to be switched off, for visors to be lifted, gloves removed, and for chai to be brewed and poured.
It is not culturally relevant for bosses to be breathing down your neck in India, I have found. At least not in the more rural or less “westernised” parts, regions or streets. There’s no tall pyramid of dour line-managers pushing, pinching, squeezing every last drop of productivity from the souls that operate beneath. Five minutes lost does not warrant an official warning. Seeing friends, chatting and laughing during work hours still remain sacred and essential. It is beautiful, and feels far more natural than the stiff, unyielding lines between customer and customer service, boss and bossed-about.
The group of men natter on. It is a rough fifty-fifty split between those wearing a turban and those wearing the piece of fabric worn when a turban is not - a patka. From their headwear it’s clear that all the men present are Sikh.
I try to tell them directly to take us from where we are now, Nalvi, to the highway using both translated text and maps from the phone. But still the men are unable to grasp why we want to go to such a place. No buses went this way. There was no town or temple.
So I give up and wait for the men’s interest to wane; for the rickshaw driver to concede and take us onwards.
All the while a strange feeling grew. A sense that some invisible current was hemming us in, something against which we were fighting to swim that prevented us from reaching the highway.
Not a minute passes before a really rather short man wearing a patka approaches and lightly tugs at my arm.
“Come,” he says, pulling at me and beckoning Gwen. “My wife,” he says, “my wife… English.”
As part of the loose crowd which has now formed, the man presents to us a lady in a sari sitting atop the ridged seat of a motorbike fitted with off road tyres.
“Hello,” she says, dipping her head, “what is your... problem?”
“We are trying to get to this highway,” Gwen says, pointing to the map, “so that we can then hitchhike south.”
“What is this - uh - hitch… hike?”
“Where you stand by a road like this,” Gwen demonstrates, “and get lifts from people.”
“Ah!.. Lift!” the lady says excitedly. “You want to get a lift,” she says, titillated to have understood - the word lift pronounced with the same hard ‘t’ sound as before. So hard it is practically a ‘d’ sound.
“Yes, exactly!” Gwen exclaims.
The woman explains to the ensemble of male workers in a stream of Punjabi. A wave of revelation spreads through the men, their heads waggling long after, like buildings teetering in the aftershock of a seismic episode.
“You must forgive my English,” the lady says, “it is the first time I am ever speaking it. You are understanding me?”
“We understand you perfectly!” Gwen and I confirm.
The lady’s excitement mounts, and it is quite infectious.
“I only watch YouTube videos of English,” she says, “- never speaking it! No - ‘spoken it’ - right?!”
“That’s correct,” Gwen beamed.
“I have never spoken it,” the lady repeated slowly, appearing with great effort to calm herself.
Watching her talk, pulling sentences together behind her eyes, her features morphing from concentration to joy as we confirmed that we’d understood what she’d said, was like watching someone’s first steps. A bit nervous and stumbly - but the happiness she found before us in attaining something which she’d clearly sought after for a long time was visceral and quite emotional. And deeply childlike. She kept grinning and covering her mouth with her hands.
“What is your name?” Gwen asks.
“Call me Nittu!” she says, followed quickly by: “Ah! Please!” She grabs Gwen’s wrist. “Please, please - you must come to my house? You can have lunch and wash. And sleep there, too. If, that is… you are feeling little bit tired?”
Nittu
Nittu's son having a bucket wash
In the end we stayed the night in Nittu’s mud walled house.
Late into the evening, as they were not permitted to sleep inside, Gwen and I had to keep running from the house into the small yard to placate the puppies that we had build a makeshift pen for; and whose shrill, desperate howls were like the shrieks of needy babies crying in their cribs.
At this point, it was only really when they were asleep or pulled blindly on a wild goose chase by their snouts that the puppies let us out of their sight. And even then, whenever they woke, or lifted their head from something they’d been sniffing, panic would ignite their minds until they’d found us again.
With the puppies in Nittu's yard
The next day we spent with Nittu’s neighbour, Meet.
Interestingly, in Sikhism, there are no male or female names. Yet all Sikh males are typically given the last name Singh (meaning lion) and all Sikh females are given last name Kaur (Crown Prince).
In the morning, we went with Meet, his brother Goldie and more friends of all ages in a colourful swarm of mopeds and bikes and stiffly tied turbans to some of Meet’s fields.
“Why do you…” Meet begins, addressing Gwen, “you know…” He makes scissors of his fingers, cutting the air around Gwen’s head. “You know - cut, cut, cut?”
“It definitely isn’t for the attention,” Gwen says. “I honestly think I’d get the same attention if I walked around naked.”
“No, no, no,” said Meet, grinning wildly, wagging a slender finger, “don’t do this.
“Also - more attention I think,” he added, twinkling his head side to side.
It was hot, and the puppies and I bathed in an irrigation well. It was both hilarious and beautiful to watch them take their first swim, eyes dead ahead, their faces drawn with a sort of gormless horror as their legs moved by themselves in a delicate little paddle.
Meet, we soon realised, was the living embodiment of cheek. His face rarely strayed from the usual makeup of: a tight mouth, with a wry grin curling at the fringes of his lips; mischievous eyes, compressed slightly between his brow and sharp cheekbones; and deep smile lines all throughout the parts of his face that were not covered by a beard that knew no bounds.
“Enjoying?” he asks me as I wick some of the water from my hair.
“Enjoying,” I confirm, smiling.
“Full enjoying?” he asks, as was his custom, his grin growing.
“Full enjoying,” I confirm, laughing. Meet drew laughter from your belly like a hummingbird draws nectar.
Meet
We walked along the narrow field margins (slightly elevated walkways no wider than two people standing shoulder to shoulder) to where Meet’s sugar cane was growing. He and Goldie showed us how to strip the husk with your teeth so’s to uncover the fleshy innards. The raw cane exploded in your mouth, releasing an incredibly fresh, sweet liquid.
Gwen with puppies in Meet's fields
In the end we stayed in Nalvi for a week.
During our stay, whenever or wherever we went, we were always propositioned to have tea. Walking down a street caused whole families to come outside and a band of young children to gather behind us, hiding whenever we looked over our shoulders.
Our presence always preceded us. Complete strangers asked things like, “How are the puppies?” “Where is your girlfriend?” “How long you will stay?” “Please, you will come and meet my son?”
We were beseeched to remain still and smile as friends swapped in and out of the frame for endless photos.
For a week we became trophies. Often feeling like we were little more than something to capture, photograph, and brag about.
Even sweet, sweet chai, we found - or sullying photos with the most ridiculous faces we knew - soon became old.
In Nalvi I realised I do not envy famous people.
We stayed in Meet’s house for the better part of our stay.
Even escaping up to the roof on the second floor would only buy us a few minutes of privacy as people would begin gathering on their own rooftops.
Luckily, Meets house was taller than the others in the immediate neighbourhood, and by sitting in the middle of the flat concrete expanse we found several moments of solitude - albeit beneath an extremely voracious sun.
On the roof we’d practise recall with the dogs. It was probably too early to be training the puppies as strictly as we did, seeing that they were probably only about five weeks old. But being on the road meant that their coming back on command or understanding the word No was extremely important.
After a few sessions of practise, the puppies were starting to distinguish the difference in the sound of their names.
Whenever we took them anywhere, however, they remained firmly… well… dogged in their attempts to free themselves from the fruit crate.
It really hit home in Nalvi the breadth of the language that we had to impart to them: Come, Enough, No, Sit, Stay, Shhh, Gently, Don’t worry we’re coming back.
Neither of us had any formal experience with dog training. I had always grown up around dogs, and had picked up things osmotically from my parents.
All in all, the small improvements spoke louder than the girls' incessant monkey business.
We mostly slept in Meet’s master bedroom; the dogs again remaining outside. At night, it was possible to completely seal Gwen and I in the room from the inside. And, save for the absence of the pups, it was utterly glorious. The hiatus from the masses and the exclusion of the mosquitoes felt like an eight hour retreat.
(In Nalvi, I also realised that Punjabi mozzies love me every bit as much as their national and international cousins.)
Practically every morning, being served the same, truly delicious breakfast of aloo paratha (roti dough with a filling of potato, onion and spice), sambar (a water based curry) and spicy mango pickle made by his wife and mother-in-law on an open fire in his workshop, Meet would lean to me and whisper:
“Last night - enjoying?”
“Yeah, bro. No mosquitoes at all last night. Slept like…”
“No,” he’d say, slapping me lightly on the arm with the back of his hand and whispering quieter still, throwing his eyes at Gwen. “Full enjoying?”
Over the course of the week, I played volleyball multiple times with the local boys and younger men. Gwen sat in groups taking refreshment with women and their infant babies, explaining at length about life growing up in the UK.
We got drunk a few times on home brewed liquor distilled from sugarcane, and incidentally discovered that raising a closed fist at someone with your knuckles facing them and your index finger pointing upwards to the sky is a way in which one can subtly proffer an alcoholic drink. (Doing the same but with your pinky raised in lieu of your index fingers lets the other person know you need to use the bathroom.)
Seeing that most young Sikhs remained too pious to partake in such hedonism - and we quickly established a reputation that we were open to such flavours of sin - moving around town therein became an eclectic barrage of very vocal invitations for chai, selfies and volleyball; with older, quieter men - extravagantly dressed with tall, vibrant turbans - attempting to coax us discretely with their upturned fingers, ushering us into their barns and towards their blue plastic drums of moonshine.
On the day of our departure, Gwen is given two different saris from two different households. We are given lunch to take with us. Goldie returns from a trip into town and hands us our final parting gift: a red mesh container box with rounded edges, topped with a black lid that could be clipped shut, and a handle. A proper pet carrier.
The constant battle to keep the puppies inside the fruit crate was over. And, as the lid closed upon their continued efforts of escape, ours sprang open. Moving down the road with Meet, Nittu’s son and husband - at long last towards The Highway - it felt like taking a big, long breath of independence.
As we say goodbye, however - as I pull away from embracing Meet - I see that he is crying.
Irrefutably, there remains a great fondness between us. A resonance stretching across cultures and circumstances. A colliding of worlds. A momentary flash.
“Come again,” he said, wiping his eyes, “always welcome here.”
Gwen and I take our things and walk to the edge of the sweeping on-ramp. Just as Meet pulls away to leave, an SUV stops to pick us up. We get in and turn onto the highway, Meet’s car passing beneath us along a slow curve in the road, taking the way back to Nalvi.
The occupants of each car wave across the gulf as they part.
Branching threads of Life’s big loom.
Chapter 4
Heart Shaped Hotel
For half an hour, the SUV and the two men inside carry us along an eerily straight and almost entirely deserted road.
The two guys then drop us off at a services after 50km, buying us snacks and an energy drink before taking their turning.
It felt immensely good to be moving again.
Another two young men pick us up and we take our first lift in a classic, squat, heavy duty Indian truck. To get in, we discover, one must really heave themselves upwards so as to scale the enormous tyres just below the doors.
The men don’t speak any English but are very smiley. They also permit the dogs to roam free from their new box, whereby they spread supine on the cushioned interior directly in front of the large vent positioned in the centre of the windscreen - which makes it feel slightly as though the truck has nostrils.
Indian trucks usually have only the one seat: the driver’s. The rest of the cab, save for a passenger side footwell, is a “platform” of the same height as the seat of the driver. All of this platform is covered in a layer of firm-ish cushions on which the co-driver can sleep and stretch out. There is always ample space in these cabs for four human sized bodies, plus two sprawled, lightly panting much smaller, dog-shaped bodies.
The rest of the interior is usually decorated in some gaudy, plasticky vinyl printed with pictures of flowers or repeating geometric patterns or embossed metal plate work. The loud designs are framed by the ubiquitous shiny metal bordering that surrounds all windows and panelling. Equally commonplace are wooden idols and glinty symbols of whichever religion the driver and his mate subscribe to; and arrays of dangly threads, beads and braids.
Pictures from inside some Indian trucks
After another 20km we are dropped off on the hard shoulder, our previous ride slowly pulling away again, building up momentum a few metres to our side; the dark smoke and the bouncing mechanical body like an enormous metal beast chuckling. The horn blares as they take their exit.
Within an instant, two more trucks have stopped for us. One halts directly behind us on the hard shoulder, the other adjacent to us in the slow lane - together taking up half the road. We stand between the two, laughing. The drivers laugh also. I look between them and shrug. Gwen makes a decision and moves to the truck beside us on the slow lane, carrying the puppies. We both bow our heads in thanks to the other lorry before heaving ourselves and our bags inside the cab.
This continues for another two lorries until we are about a third of the way to Jaipur - our rough aim for the day, roughly 420km from Nalvi. Two-hundred-and-fifty kilometres of this distance is covered by the highway we are inching along, the NH 152D.
Travel by lorry is fun but very, very slow.
“We need a car,” I say to Gwen between lifts. “A comfy car, with loud speakers and a driver with a little fire under his bum.”
Alas, it is but another truck that stops for us.
Half an hour in, having watched several cars whizz past, we ask to be let down onto the hard shoulder again. There, we selectively “thumb” all vehicles travelling with adequate haste, letting many bumbling lorries float by. A few specs of rain ping off our packs.
The next person who stops is delivered precisely as ordered. They don’t really speak English, and the only interaction is waving at a video call, saying hello to his pixelated family on his phone. But we do start hammering through the miles.
It rains, fatly and unashamedly - the wipers earning their keep, wagging like overly excited tails. Mana and Nayna sleep on the spare seat in the crate in the back, each one’s head resting on the other’s bum.
And in a number of hours, we come to the end of the highway to a city called Narnaul, which is almost directly south-west from Delhi: the furthest south we’d been.
We transition to another highway by walking beneath a series of overpasses and crossing several wide roads. From the appropriate on-ramp we are picked up by a small people carrier that we do not realise until later, when people begin handing money to the driver, is in fact a taxi.
The driver, however, propels the vehicle with such eagerness it is though every minute saved during the journey is a minute that he will get back at the end of his days.
We sit in the boot on two aftershop, rear facing seats with the puppies on our laps. The colours of dusk, and later the shifting beams of headlights, pass through the dusty rear door glass, casting long shadows across our faces - first as golden hues, followed by the saturation of an orange like embers; before deep reds are extinguished to black. All these final pages of the sunset lie in the gloss of the puppies fur and highlight the bones of our features; until, later on, the swimming tributaries of headlights, growing and diminishing around us as cars pass and are passed in turn, imbue their coats with the pale white light of endless shoals of nighttime traffic.
The driver pulls in for fuel. It’s only then that I check the price of our trip. He is going all the way to Jaipur.
“Five hundred each?!” I baulk. “No way!”
“Five hundred!” he repeats, more forcibly this time.
We don't share a language in which to argue so I settle for a disgruntled face.
There is a great long queue in the gas station, and a young man asks for a lift - seeing that we are now one of the vehicles closest to being served. He happens to speak very good English so, naturally, I ask him to fight my battles for me.
By now, having spent a fair time in India, I have a rough grasp upon what is at least massively overpriced.
It’s not uncommon, as a tourist, for prices to change halfway through a journey; or for someone, namely rickshaw drivers, to pull up to another group of rickshaw drivers and have them vehemently testify to the price that your driver has just pulled from their butt.
The easiest, most readily available solution to any such problem that I have found is to try and grab someone passing by to corroborate the price. Generally, most Indians hate foreigners being scammed, and, usually, most passers-by will engage fiercely with whoever it is that is trying to take you for a figurative ride.
For every scam artist in India there are at least five people who’ll happily wade in to fight for your right to a fairly priced seat.
The young man laughs at the proposed price and all but cracks his knuckles as he engages with the driver.
“Two hundred each,” he says after the verbal scrap has simmered, “don’t let him ask for more. Two hundred.”
I thank him a lot and again before he leaves.
It’s often been the case that if the person who had tried to scam me had not tried to scam me (and I’m okay with being a little bit scammed) I would have tipped them. But as we get from the taxi, I pay the taxi driver no more than the four-hundred total. He takes the money grouchily, muttering to himself.
I do not tip because I don’t wish to reinforce his beliefs surrounding tourists, showcasing that we’re so swimming in money that we positively remunerate attempted swindles.
Now in Jaipur we scope out a rickshaw to take us to the hotel we’d booked from the taxi. After a brief negotiation we take a lift the ten kilometres to our accommodation for a hundred rupees.
“I give you good price,” the driver says merrily over his shoulder as we leave the rank, “because I respect you,” he tells us, an emphatic finger in the air, wiggling above his head.
As we drive, our driver points to where we need to reach - barely more than a stones throw away. But due to the layout of the roads it is clear we must drive a long way round to get there.
“Let us down here,” I call over his shoulder.
It is late; hot and noisy.
“Yes sir,” the man responds.
I pull from my wallet a one hundred rupee note with a fifty rupee tip.
“Hundred-fifty,” he says in a flat, impudent way; more a demand really. A complete shift from his prior tone.
I put the fifty back and hand him the hundred.
“One hundred,” I say, “like we agreed.”
The man falls silent. He turns off his engine. “Hundred fifty!” he squawks amidst the thrum of the street.
“Hundred - take it or leave it.”
“Fine!” he says. “You keep it!” He curses me, slashes his hand back and forth angrily in the air and restarts his engine. I remain where I am, the note still in my hand as he drives off without taking payment.
“What the hell?” Gwen says, carrying the puppies and her bag, ready to leave.
Turning to go, we notice the man stop again. He calls after us, now from a little further down the road. “Please, sir! Please, sir!”
I roll my eyes at Gwen. It’s been a long day. The puppies need tending to and we need a shower.
I return to the man. He is crying, a small photo of a family member in his fingers. “My family!” he appeals.
I shake my head in disbelief. I shrug, my hands open in front of me in an empty offering. This is not the first time I’ve been emotionally blackmailed by a tuktuk driver.
He puts the small photo angrily back into his purse and picks up his indecipherable tirade from where he left off, like switching out tools. I look at him blankly. I try to give him the hundred rupee another time but he swats at my hands like a baby resisting the spoon.
Turning about, I see a security guard of a walled hotel complex who is smiling and doubtlessly enjoying the theatre. I walk over to him and explain the situation. He takes the hundred rupee note and walks over to the driver and barks authoritatively in his ear. The man takes the money and drives off, his complaints quickly lost in the swollen sea of sound. I go to thank the guard but he simply waves a gentle hand through the air, dismissing the need.
On the way over to our hotel we stop for an omelette. It comes with chillies served on two nutritionally barren pieces of toast upon a little disposable silver dish, totally cooked to death - all of which is pretty standard.
We let the dogs out of the box one by one. In such a busy place, keeping an eye on a roving puppy whilst keeping an eye on your things and eating a greasy omelette is a full body process.
Mana safety back in the box, Nayna gets out and is walking around. From behind the food stall a street dog nears. We don’t see it at the time but it barks and - rather than doing literally anything else - Nayna bolts away from us, running blind, fast as her pipsqueak limbs will carry her. I shove my plate on top of Gwen’s and leap after her, hissing at the street dog as I run. The stray scatters and stops barking. But in her disarray and terror, Nayna continues peeling off in the wrong direction, now scampering from the big, lumbering bulk very hot on her heels. Me. I call her but it’s only when I get a hand to her scruff that she stops.
Stuck in that weird position of do you punish or do you soothe, I went for the latter and promised myself I’d train them more.
“Wow,” Gwen said as I got back, “that was like… the most perfect metaphor for how fear sends you in the wrong direction.”
She kissed Nayna on the head several times.
“Poor little bean.”
Next morning, we wake up in our room a few minutes before our 9am alarm. It is the first night we have spent in a bed with the dogs. I stretch around, cuddling the two little lumps of fur that are positioned in the rift between Gwen and I. My foot rests in a patch of wetness, then my calf. I jump up, suddenly quite awake, and inspect the bed. I remove the thin covering of our bedsheet blanket to see the splattering of yellow patches. It’s quite as though we’ve been attacked in the night by a paintball gun loaded only with piss-coloured pellets.
After whipping off the sheets, returning our key and dashing out of the reception before an inspection can be made, Gwen makes a good point, that, despite already being reluctant to pee in the red hamper, perhaps a duvet feels much like the softness of grass and thus, to the puppies, is basically one big bathroom.
“There’s also the fact that they’re unable to get off the bed,” I say, carrying the basket in my arms as one carries a bundle of firewood, looking through the slits to see the girls jangling slightly as I walk, curled up around each other, well-adjusted to being in a box by now.
We take a city bus out to the outskirts of Jaipur and are picked up without hesitation by two men sitting in traffic in their truck. Their small white cab is lavishly adorned with red dangly, tassel trim. Miscellaneous bits of rusted metal stick out far beyond the height of the loading bed.
With our bags, puppies and four full grown bodies, the little space in the cab is saturated as a plant confined to a pot in which there remains no soil, only roots; arms and legs contesting for space that didn't exist. Our shins are forced up against the dashboard with our thighs pressed to our chests. The puppies’ box surfs the small bubble of room above our knees in front of our faces, and the two guys are pressed so tightly together they pretty much became just the one guy.
Like this we ride for 50km. And by the time we get out, my leg is so outstandingly dead that I have to slide like gloop from the cab to the floor, where I remain for five to ten minutes ushering the leg back from wherever legs go when they die.
We are then picked up by someone who speaks basically fluent English. He is not going far but, stopping before his turning - a compressed mud track - he invites us to come with him back to his place.
“I am running a permaculture project not far from here,” he tells us. “I live on the land. We’ve planted many trees. I’d be very honoured to show you around. And you are most welcome to stay the night and eat with us, too.”
He looks at us, quietly unassuming.
But we decline. It is only 2pm, and we’ve barely made it out of Jaipur.
“I understand,” said the man. “All I can do then is to wish you all the luck I have to give,” he says, smiling warmly.
The man drives off down the track calling “Keep safe!” as he parts.
I take the puppies and descend from the roadside verge down to a weedy expanse of reddish earth as Gwen stands on watch for lifts. Stray bits of litter and bigger mounds of festering refuse provide excellent opportunity to reinforce to the girls that the word No means exactly what it says on the tin. I follow in their footsteps, waiting for them to put their noses too close to something before instructing them against it. Ignoring the command enough times results in a bop on the nose and being relegated to their crate.
Nayna is the first to go to the toilet and I return her to Gwen beside the road. I continue watching over Mana as I wait for her to do the same, ensuring she doesn’t consume anything dead, decomposing or made of hydrocarbons.
She squats for a poop, looking up at me as I confirm that she is indeed a good girl. She concludes her business with a couple token back scratches of her hind legs. As she walks away, I see that something is still tagging along behind her. I look closer to discover that it is in fact a piece of thread, partially expelled, trailing behind her like a fuse.
Back on the verge with Gwen, I apply hand sanitiser and take over the watch for cars as she feeds the puppies again.
Shortly after, a spacious, sporty hatchback with red trim across its flanks and loud bassy music playing pulls up. The window glides down smoothly to reveal a man on the passenger side with slicked hair and a black and white printed shirt. He lowers his dark sunglasses dramatically over the bridge of his nose.
“Hello?” he asks. There is a slightly seductive and enigmatic lustre about the man.
“Hi,” I say, walking to the window, “we need a lift. We need to go south. Where are you going?” I press upon the words ‘lift’ and ‘south’ with special emphasis.
“South, yes,” says the man. “We drive to Ratlam.”
I consult the map.
“Wow,” I say, “nearly five-hundred kilometres. You go there tonight?”
The man gave a short and decisive affirmative wiggle of his head.
For reference, London to Edinburgh is 650km.
This was one of those rare Dream Lifts.
I’ve had a couple before. Once I got a lift from Girona to Lyon (550km), delivered directly outside my friend's apartment. More incredibly, for the person who took me to my friend’s door, Lyon was not part of their route; nor even France. She picked me up in Girona, took me to Lyon, and then turned around and drove straight back to Girona.
“Can we come with you?” I ask the man.
“Please,” he says, smiling, returning his glasses to their upright position, “our guests.”
We get in, our bags fitting easily in the surprisingly big boot, the puppies’ crate slotting comfortably in the middle seat between Gwen and I. It is deeply cool in the car, and we pull off at titillating speed.
“This is Businessman Ganesh,” the man on the passenger side says, his hand on the driver's arm.
“Businessman Ganesh,” the man confirms in greeting, nodding to us in the mirror. He is also wearing black shades.
“I am Lawyer Ayub Khan,” the man says.
“Lawyer?”
“It is my profession,” he said, handing us a slick, black business card. “Please, call us AK and Ganesh. We are business and lawyer dream team, working all across India. We travel for work now.”
We introduce ourselves to the two men and explain the mission, AK translating for Ganesh. Both of them are amazed, and their cool exteriors quickly diffuse into childlike fascination.
“Manali?!” Ganesh sputtered.
“From Manali?!” AK asks us again.
“Yeah, Manali!”
“Confirm,” says AK, his tone suddenly taking on a narrow, corporate assertiveness.
“Confirmed,” Gwen says, laughing.
“Wow,” marvelled AK in drawn out amusement. “You need beer?”
With a perspiring tin of Kingfisher in hand we zip through the afternoon, unencumbered by weight, heat, hunger, fatigue, tight spaces or bad company.
Time pushes on. AK and Ganesh swap in and out of the driver’s seat. We restock beer and snacks from roadside shops. The Dream Team laughs as we try to give them money. They pull over without hesitation to let the dogs go to the toilet.
We stop for late lunch and they pay for everything.
Since Nayna’s running away in Jaipur the day before, we seize every possible moment to practise the puppies returning to their name calls.
Down in the car park of the restaurant where we’d eaten our late lunch, Gwen and I stand apart, taking it in turns to call each one towards us. It is difficult for Gwen to scold them when they don't come but we agree it is necessary. We practise pressing their bums down until they sit, reinforcing the action with the word.
All the whilst, Ganesh and AK sit lazily above us, watching from the upper level of the restaurant, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.
The Dream Team, AK on the left and Ganesh on the right
“Sit, sit, sit,” AK instructs us, gesturing towards the shiny brown chairs of the hotel foyer. It’s around 11pm and we have arrived in Ratlam. The city is of roughly the same latitude as the south coast of Bangladesh.
“You will stay here with us tonight?” AK asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, “how much are the rooms?”
AK tuts and shakes his head in a short, rapid burst of dismissal.
“I pay,” he says. “You stay?”
Gwen and I both look at each other, disarmed by his generosity.
“Ok, yes, we’ll stay.”
“Confirm.”
“Confirmed.”
We venture up to the room to leave our stuff. Opening the door, we are confronted with a full frontal view of a waist height, heart shaped bed. It is positioned in the middle of the room, like an art installation. Surrounding it is a thick, spongy wall covered in fake, red leather that delineates the full circumference of the heart. The wall raises above the level of the mattress by about a foot, making the bed a heart shaped bowl that one had to climb into.
Surrounding the TV was another red heart cut from fibreboard. On a red painted ceiling, two 3D, overlapping white hearts are suspended with pink LED strips fitted behind them. On the wall is a black and white vinyl sticker of a heart with an arrow struck through it and ‘Love’ written below in cursive. Next to this is a heart shaped mirror.
There is a sofa of the same fake, hot red leather as the surrounding of the bed bearing semblance to a pair of lips.
In the bathroom, on the other hand, stands a pale green bath that is neither the shape of a heart nor connected to the water.
AK comes back after we have washed and tells us there is food soon arriving upstairs. He tells us to leave the puppies so they don’t disturb us while we eat. We slowly eke out of the door, dousing them with reassuring voices and promises of a swift return. The two little things try desperately to squeeze through the door but we manage to keep them inside. We wait to see if they bark.
“Nothing,” I confirm, staring expectantly at the closed door.
“Nothing yet,” Gwen says.
We rush up the stairs to the next storey and to AK and Ganesh’s far more modest room and drink beer and eat papad (popadom) until the food is delivered.
For about twenty minutes we all sit in quietude, munching away. The food is perfect. It is spicy, but not too spicy. A spicy where, towards the end of the meal, the pleasure and pain of the heat has become an indistinguishable, continuous throb in your mouth - but you can still taste the food. And you are only just starting to weep.
We are all breathing through our mouths and wiping our perspiring faces with napkins when there’s a knock at the door. From where we are sitting, we can’t see the young man at the door hurriedly explaining something to Ganesh in Hindi.
Ganesh returns to the room.
“Dogs,” he says, “mad dogs!"
We run down the stairs to our room, passing several people standing in their open doorways rubbing sleep from their eyes. We apologise as we pass them - sorry, sorry, so sorry - and quickly reach the room; the barking high pitched and desperate.
Behind the door, both of the girls are shaking rather violently with panic - and now excitement. They rush into us, frantically licking our faces as we pick them up, their little bodies jerking in our arms.
It is like we have found them all over again.
Behind them, amongst a few small puddles of pee, a wreckage of impressive proportions has been wrought in our absence. Plastic wrappers, paper towels, the hotel menu - everything which tears is torn.
Our heart shaped hotel is comprehensively shredded.
Chapter 5
The Many Faces of Strangers
We spend the next day in Ratlam whilst AK and Ganesh complete their business there. The day after they take us to the beginnings of the highway outside of the city.
“You are ok?” AK asks.
“We’re good,” we answer, “so good.”
“Confirm.”
“Confirmed.”
“Need something? Need anything? Enough money?”
“We’re fine. You’ve given us so much, AK.”
“Confirm.”
“Confirmed,” we say as we both go to hug him. He is very short and we engulf him.
It’s amazing how quickly strangers become friends.
We get our first lift with a guy in a truck. We are in a land of straight roads and right-angled junctions. We have to follow the same road for about a hundred kilometres. At the man’s turning we stop in front of a juice stall and down two glasses of mango juice, thick as cream.
We get another lift in a huge, blacked out SUV with shiny rims. The men inside are loud, all of them wearing blacked out clothes and all of them saying repeatedly we are gangsters, we are gangsters.
We go with them to a place which they seem to be the proprietors of. There are two enormous pitbulls on metal chains that are very friendly, and a series of muscular colts and stallions in straw lined stables, as well as a fully grown male buffalo that snorts at us as deep as a tremor in the earth.
After tea we drive on with the men until their turning, at which point one of the men gets out to open the boot for us.
Candidly, after he has passed our bags to us, he opens a small case and shows us a powerful looking shiny silver handgun.
“Gangsters,” he says, laughing, slapping me on the upper arm as he returns to the car.
“You didn’t think they were actually gangsters, did you?” I ask Gwen as they drive away.
We get a lift with a man in a small lorry followed by two farmers driving a 4x4 that we rode with entirely in silence.
By now the size of the road has dwindled as, rather than following a bigger National Highway into Indore (with a population of about 3,300,000), we avoid the city by cutting across country on a State Highway, where the roads are single-laned and lined with old trees.
After the farmers we were picked up by a young man who spoke to us with lovely English but who could take us no further than 5km.
As he was still waving his goodbyes another car, a beat up, dusty-red sedan, swerves around him. It judders abruptly to a stop and the engine dies. The music - pounding psytrance, loud as bedlam - continues as a man in a billowy white shirt steps up and out of the driver’s side and waves us over. He does not ask any questions.
Once we are all safely stowed, the dogs positioned as far from the music as possible, the driver turns the ignition. The engine stammers but does not resuscitate. Instinctively, the other two passengers, with myself following their lead, get out of the car and give it a push from behind. The sedan starts and we get in with it rolling away from us.
We drive off, the sun already beginning to set. Elongated shadows of trees stretch like spindly arms over the arid land.
It turns out that the guys are not going anywhere in particular but are simply going for a drive. They’re so thrilled by our adventure that they volunteer to drive us to the national highway that would eventually lead to Mumbai, some 40km away.
We drive through golden hour down a road that follows a gully hewn by long gone water; a course that at one time had cut an undulating line gradually downward to the level of the floodplain about 300m below, where we now drive to to meet the highway.
We slip round serpentine bends between tower-like landforms of harder stone, the sun hovering at eye level over the surface of the Earth, creating rivers of shadow in the valley road.
At times, when we resurface from the gulley, we bask in the sun’s faltering voice as it spends its dying moments embracing all things in a soft, solar orange. The light flashes rapidly through the canopies of gangly trees and bare shrubs like the flickering image of a zoetrope.
With the windows open, bathing in the orange light, everything is a pleasant warmth - where the body begins to feel slightly boundless.
The driver of the beat-up sedan
We find the highway busy - the light fading. There is a restaurant and hotel on the other side of the road to us, but we decide to wait until the light has gone completely before settling for the rest stop over the way.
The head beams of the cars and trucks and jeeps and cramped buses capture the dust and bugs swept up by their passage.
Having only made it about 150km that day, we were reluctant to move towards the hotel. Yet both felt the intoxicating magnetism of a hot meal and cool shower.
A few minutes pass before a people carrier pulls up next to us. In the back seat is an older man with his leg suspended, wrapped in bandages. Beside him is a young man who tells us they are going as far as a town called Khalghat. I ask him if it’s a taxi and the young man confirms that it is. For some reason I trust that we won’t be ripped off too badly, and we get in.
I sit in the front and there is space made in the back for Gwen, the bags and the puppies. There is also a middle aged lady towards the rear of the vehicle who keeps to herself.
It’s then that I see that the driver is albino, with a smartly clipped, full white beard. He speaks softly and his English is enough that he’s able to tell me a bit about his life, that he does not need the work but enjoys driving people around and providing the service. He used to be a teacher, he tells me, and he enjoys writing. There is something deeply soothing about his presence.
He makes me think about how we were treated in Nalvi: the fascination there of our heritage, the colour of our skin. How strange it must be to be born of a country in which white skin is still upheld by many as a foreign jewel, a distant luxury. And to be born in a body of a similar complexion, but to which none of those luxuries apply.
We pull up beside a restaurant in Khalghat and gather all our things from the taxi. I ask the driver how much we owe him but he keeps quiet, smiles and wishes us luck before reaching over and closing the door.
We seek a room in the hotel above the restaurant but they are booked out. No one around speaks much English, so we order tea and take a breather. Nothing like sugary milk and spices to wash down the dust.
Soon after a man comes over, laughing, and introduces himself as Sanjay.
“What are you doing here?” he asks with great animation. “You must be lost to end up here. Do you know where you are? Nothing blows into Khalghat except leaves - but the monsoon isn’t for another two months.” We share with him our situation and he immediately gets on his phone and calls up several local hotels.
“Found one,” he tells us, “not the best, but nice and cheap.” By then his friend, Negi, has arrived, and Gwen and I are taken on the backs of their motorbikes to the hotel which sits by the side of the road just outside the town.
We wash and tend to the puppies and go downstairs to have dinner in the restaurant of the hotel.
At ₹500 a night, our room was basic: four walls, one window, a floor, a ceiling, not much else. There was a bed with no sheet and a wash room that didn’t drain properly. One of the light bulbs worked, and the fan spun as enthusiastically as a woman twirling their hair at the desk of a dead-end job.
The food down in the hotel restaurant, however… oooph.
This random through-road rest stop produced some of the best food I have ever eaten in all the many restaurants and snack shops of India that I have dined in. So good, so divine, Gwen and I can hardly help but moan and groan repeatedly, shaking our full faces disbelievingly throughout its course. We have tarka daal, fried okra, cashew curry, rice and roti, with extra hot chutney and raw onion.
It is at this time that we are trying to teach the dogs the meaning of stay. Being next to the hissing, spitting ferment of a kitchen; or a car park, through which doubtless numerous strays pass, and in which a short pony was also tied (for reasons I was never clear about); or simply the insatiable need of a puppy to play and nip and fight - it was eminently difficult for the puppies to remain on the scarf that we had bought them to replace the hessian sack as their mobile bed.
But they were learning nonetheless, and spent longer and longer periods of time on the scarf - and now practically always returned when called.
Before we’d finished eating, Sanjay and Negi come back and stay for an hour or so, drinking tea.
Every trip to India, I always find it astounding how rapidly I become accustomed to an Indian’s daily intake of sugar - namely administered through tea. Especially when travelling like this, where the opportunity is so ever present, what with the innumerable shacks, tea stalls and rest places that line the road like the trees of a grove.
The going rate of a small chai is usually ₹10 to ₹15, with the exception of the occasional extremely lavish ₹20 a cup (about 20p).
Within a matter of days after touching down in India, passing a morning without a morning chai or retiring to my room after dinner without a post dinner tea soon feels like something is audibly missing.
Sanjay
Negi
Negi invites us to come to his place in the morning and that’s what we do. We go swimming in the Narmada River with Negi’s eldest son and his friends. There is a stone pontoon from which to jump from and many lithe bodies to wrestle with in the water. We then visit the Maheshwar Fort, Negi’s sun playing tabla on one of the dogs new pressed-steel bowls as we drive.
Gwen dressed up with bindi at Negi's house with his mother
Maheshwar Fort
We stay one more night in Khalghat and hit the road early the next morning, with Negi coming to say goodbye. Negi did not really speak English, but his smile evinced a purity that is difficult to come by on the high streets of England. His eyes alone said all that needed to be said.
Our first lift that morning is a red MG 4x4 with an engineer called Jazzy. He spoke English better than I do, and the speakers of the MG were as sonorous as the surround sound of a decent cinema.
He dropped us off after 65km outside another hotel restaurant. There, Gwen ate her first ever idli (a South Indian soft, fluffy rice cake, incredible for soaking up the sambar and coconut chutneys that usually accompany it).
Not only is it deliciously fluffy, the idli is also a tangible, edible piece of rice-based confirmation that we’re making progress. There have been no opportunities for idli further north.
By now we have travelled 1,500km - almost exactly halfway.
We were now eating Southern food.
After breakfast (and chai) we get a lift with two lorry drivers. They had watched me stand beneath a very vocal sun with my thumb up for twenty minutes unable to get a lift while they repaired their lorry. Once they’d finished, one of the men came over to me and flicked his head in gesture towards the truck. Come on, before you cook yourself.
We travel in the lorry for a couple of hours. At one point reaching a series of big toll gates, with many other lorries piled up in long, chugging queues, each with their own hand painted designs and slogans. Both me and the co-driver get out. “Only one,” says the warm-faced driver, pointing at Gwen, “new state. Maharashtra.”
From this I piece together that there can only be as many people in the cab as are listed in the manifest. Or perhaps it is about the weight, I think as me and the copilot skip along the tarmac to where we reconvene with our lorry on the other side. Outside of the truck, the heat is consuming. The kind of heat where you can feel its cloaked potential, its lethality. Like strong hands, with ample power to asphyxiate.
A little while later we stop for food before taking two more lifts with two more lorries. We alight and are forced to walk nearly two kilometres to join another highway heading towards a city called Chalisgaon. As we walk, we are quizzed by a group of policemen who are sitting on chairs in the shade, some of whom are smoking cigarettes, all of whom are sporting the classic, groomed, wide moustache that sits atop the upper lip of so many policemen of the subcontinent.
It should be stated, I suppose, that travelling in the majority of the places where me and Gwen wound up was highly out of the ordinary.
By intentionally steering around big cities, we wound up in towns and smaller cities and roadside food places that were so far removed from tourist routes that we became the attractions. What’s more, travelling with two puppies and asking for lifts the entire time naturally made the whole affair all the more curious.
It took a while to explain to the police officers what we were doing and where we were headed. But in the end they had to let us move on. Albeit unusual, we weren’t doing anything wrong.
Now positioned on the correct road headed to Chalisgaon, we win a lift with a man who, turns out, is being chauffeured by his friend. This friend, explains the man, usually earns his living behind the wheel of a bus.
In conjunction with the remarkable agility of the car - coupled with finding myself positioned directly behind the aforementioned bus driver; a bus driver who at long last had been unshackled by any considerations of speed or size - it did not take me long to realise the potency of such a perfect alloy: Mr Speed and Mrs Audacious.
In fact, it took me no longer than the seconds needed for Gwen and I to get in and shut the doors.
As soon as we set off, I turn to Gwen, buckle in hand, quietly insisting she does the same.
Of all my journeys in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal - Kathmandu, Delhi, Colombo - mountainous roads leaning into impossibly deep voids; zipping through the rain saturated streets of Chennai at 200kmph in a pair of shorts on the back of a KTM; being attacked by street dogs in Goa on a scooter; landing in the Himalayas in a Cessna; riding on the top of buses; sitting on the steps of Sri Lankan trains; wherever - this was by far the most scared I have been.
For over an hour I stared into the mouth of traffic as the driver repeatedly yanked us all out into the cavalry of the oncoming lane. He slammed the vehicle in and out of gaps that seemed hardly big enough for him to parallel park. He was an electron, beaming through a fibre optic cable.
I never tense up or flinch when being driven, I swear. I’ve grown to have complete faith in Asian drivers, all of whom can drive better than me with one eye closed, using only their chin and their dominant pinky toe. But that drive… man, that drive. I was as skittish as if being thrown around by terminal convulsions. Wincing, sweating, squeezing Gwen’s hand, I pressed my invisible brake pedal into the carpet so hard that my bum came off the seat.
Having survived the ordeal, we were picked up by a guy called Arun. Given the hour, around 9PM, he kindly phoned ahead to multiple hotels so as to track down the most affordably luxurious hotel room in the city.
Later, in our room, more than done with the day, we ordered a thali to the hotel, where we ate in merry solitude. Thali, literally “plate” is a often served on circular stainless steel dish with a base of rice, often with many different little dishes including daal (pulses), vegetables (both wet and dry), roti and papad; complete with pickle, yoghurt and a sweet dish. We sprawled nakedly on our fresh white bed, lounging high above the street in an air conditioned bubble, 230km closer to our destination than we had been that morning.
The din of the street, a mechanistic jungle, danced on late into the eve, albeit slightly muffled - retained behind the thin glass of our four storey window.
The next morning, we consulted the map with the puppies sandwiched against our skin. By now, they were able to use their crate to get on and off the bed at night to go to the bathroom.
If there was one, we used the shower mat as their toilet zone, which we would then wash thoroughly the next morning and leave hanging to dry with the intent that it would be rewashed again properly. If there was no shower mat or like alternative we’d resort to the dogs’ scarf which would also washed the next day. We often kept the scarf damp in the box anyway in order to keep the dogs slightly cooler.
Now further south than Mumbai, we planned to move towards the coast. The entire trip, the voiceless temptress of the ocean had been treading water far out before us, enticing as the smell of salt in the air.
We set a target that day of reaching Pune, a city known for many things including its designation as a major IT hub as well as its arts and music scene.
About 150km from the coast, Pune lay six hours from Chalisgaon - 315km from our hotel bed.
We take a tuk-tuk to the edge of town after being unable to find a local bus heading that way. The driver asks for two hundred rupees for the trip. It is way too much, but he doesn’t budge and the battle doesn’t feel worth the victory, at least not that early in the day.
Following the tuk-tuk ride, and a breakfast samosa and feeding the dogs, we get a lift with someone heading to work at his factory. There, he kindly offers to find someone going to Pune for us. He is quickly able to sieve through all the vehicles that pass until he finds someone stopping within 50km of Pune.
Mana riding on the dashboard
The journey is fundamentally unexciting. Right until the end where we ask the man with whom we’d travelled if he’d like some money for his troubles. Except for the men who gave us our second lift coming out of Manali, until this point in the two weeks travelling, no one has either asked or accepted anything from us. Even truck drivers with ripped shirts had all graciously declined. In some cases, if not most cases, it felt insulting to ask.
“Thousand,” the man says.
“A thousand?!”
It is not that I’m suggesting it is wrong to pay for a lift when hitchhiking. Generally, the price of admission for a lift when hitchhiking is free. There are of course unspoken expectations of the hitchhiker: be polite, be tidy, make enthused conversation, assist the person giving the lift with directions; and, if possible, to offer money.
Unless prearranged, however, this is more a token gesture, and is better put to use buying refreshment for the driver.
It is never expected that the hitchhiker pays for a given lift as though the lift-giver were providing a service the likes of a bus or taxi. It is one of the last few remaining transactions arbitrated under good-faith and generosity.
“Thousand,” the man insists coldly.
He does not speak much English so there is no grounds for a conversation. It is a steep price. Gwen is a small distance from me with the puppies.
“No,” I say, looking in my wallet. “Six hundred?”
It is still a steep price. If we're going to be here for a long time we need to make our money last.
The man laughs cruelly as he sips the tea we got him; as if I had all the money in the world and I wouldn't buy him a chai. He speaks to the lady running the tea stall and they both glower and snigger derisively. Very abruptly, it seems, both have become like snakes; and me, some kind of target for their fangs.
I hand the man the three ₹200 notes. He snatches them from my hand.
We walk further down the road to remove ourselves from the previous scene and Gwen sticks her thumb up. Small groups of people sitting outside laugh at us from afar. They shoot short, sharp phrases like “No lift here!” “Bus, bus - bus only!”
This is not the first time it has happened. People in India, like most people around the world, love to have an opinion. The only difference being that Indian’s hold less hesitation in voicing theirs.
It is a grim area. A line of beaten down metal shacks bisected by a tired road bordered by ditches. The ditches contain a strangled water course, and bits of litter swirl in the light wind around your feet. The man from before drives past us in his truck, grinning.
Whilst we are still walking, never feeling comfortable enough to stop, a black hatchback pulls up next to us. The window rolls down to reveal a man who, at a glance, seems to be in his mid to late thirties. His face is full and clean shaven. He, too, is grinning.
“What is all this?” he asks, peering at Gwen and I and all that we carry. Afternoon tends towards dusk - and the urge to escape the place is intense. We explain about the puppies, Manali and our friends in Kodaikanal.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” I say, pointing at myself. And then at Gwen, “Nineteen.”
“What do you do?”
“I am a writer,” I sort of lied, “and she is a teacher,” I sort of lied again.
“Are you married?”
“Not yet.”
The man paused. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh. The whole time he smiled as though entirely enjoying himself. But the questions were beginning to unnerve me slightly.
“Passports?”
“Yes, we have passports.”
“Can I see them?”
“Why?”
“I want to know if you are who you say you are,” he said, laughing.
“You’re not very trusting, are you?” I say, half joking, half growing immensely tired of today’s prodding and poking.
“I am. I am also just very nosey.”
“One might say extremely,” I say, beginning to smile, handing our passports over. “Don’t drive off with them.”
“Yes, well, I don’t think I quite have the right skin tone to get away with using these,” he says, looking at our photos, "Mr William Brown." He switches his eyes from the image to my corporeal self standing outside the car. “Funny for an Englishman’s last name to be Brown, isn’t it? More like William Not So Brown. William Slightly Brown, perhaps. Is that your middle name? Slightly?"
"Yes. William Slightly Annoyed Slightly Brown - nice to meet you."
"Pleasure," says the man, laughing again. Now inspecting our clothes and bags through the window.
“Blimey," he says, "William Quite Assuredly Dirty,” he adds.
“Assuredly,” I say dryly.
The man chuckled. “Yes,” he mewed, “good.”
“Ok,” he says, finally passing back the passports after flicking through the pages.
“You’re not going to stamp them?” I ask, my sarcasm muscles warming up after so long speaking in only simple and straightforward sentences.
“I’m out of ink I’m afraid.”
“Damn,” I say, putting the bags in the back with Gwen and the puppies, “I love stamps.”
“What do you like doing then, Miss and Master England?” asks the man, whose name turns out to be Rupesh, as we drive.
“Personally,” I respond, "I enjoy quiet beachside holidays without too much faff.”
“Faff?”
I gesture to my grubby clothes and feet nearly black with dust. “You know, faff. Faffing. Adventure. Twists, turns. Trials. Tribulations.”
Rupesh laughs. “Oh? I could have sworn you were a man who enjoyed a good faff.”
I grin, suddenly speaking in a furtive tone. “You know, I actually do. It brings me great fulfilment. In fact, I love faffing in India most of all.”
“Oh, please feel free,” Rupesh says with a puckish grin.
Without a glimmer of doubt, I realise now that Rupesh is as cheeky as they come; a man in which all the genes of mischief have been switched on. And the conversation - suddenly being able to speak without restricting my vocabulary; able to delve into dry, sarcastic humour - felt like slipping into some kind of verbal oasis.
“And you,” he says, asking of Gwen, “what tickles your whimsy? Aside from exposing that great big pale scalp of yours.”
“I like art,” she says, “and drama. And listening to you two talk nonsense.”
Rupesh and I share a laugh. It is a fraternal laugh.
“You know you’re fluent in a language when you can speak utter rubbish,” Gwen added.
“And please,” she went on, “what do you do, Mr Big Brown Nose?”
“I also involve myself in the theatrical,” Rupesh responds cryptically. “I work for TATA. You know it?”
“The massive Indian conglomerate?” I say. “Heard of it. Even driven in some of their trucks.”
“Kudos to you. And I happen to work there - performing my theatre. I go into big board rooms and act out dramas to well dressed men of self proclaimed importance. You’d love it,” he says to Gwen.
To this day, Gwen and I still disagree whether Rupesh was being figurative or literal about his drama.
We stop for bhelpuri, a type of chaat (street food) with a base of puffed rice and sev (a thin, fried noodle made from gram flour), topped with vegetables such as onions, tomato and potato, chaat masala (a spice mix) and Indian chutney.
We practise with the puppies, getting them to sit out in the car park a few metres from where we drink our tea at the plastic tables of the open-walled diner. There is noticeable improvement. We’re now able to take our attention off of the puppies without them leaving their given spot. They now lie down and (mostly) wait for our signal to begin moving around again.
“Mana,” Gwen calls, “come.” Mana stands up and walks towards us. Following her, Nayna gets up also and begins making her way.
“No, Nayna, stay.” Her little golden bum thumps back down onto the floor of the car park. Mana arrives and is rewarded. Thirty seconds later, Nayna is called over.
Rupesh is impressed.
It still feels strange though, commanding such miniature beings. And their bemused obedience never fails to be exultingly cute.
Rupesh takes us to a bus station in Pune. It is dark now. We say our goodbyes in the thrum of another busy city before he returns to his car and quickly slips back into the horn fare and the quintessential hubbub.
We take a bus out of town, seeking a hotel from which we could easily begin the next day.
The first hotel we try has a no foreigner policy. They recommend another hotel about a kilometre up the road that they insist permits international travellers. When we arrive there, however, having lugged our things up the steep, windy road to the reception, we find it totally booked up.
The young man at reception calls the desk of a sister hotel in the area and tells us that they have rooms available there. The hotel then provides us with a lift in one of their taxis back down the hill to a hotel closer to the city than the first place we had tried.
When we arrive, painfully ready to crash on fresh linen, we are told that we must wait for a short while as they make up our room. So we decide to have dinner in the restaurant.
The restaurant is expensive looking and new: the kind of establishment that Gwen and I always try to avoid. Not solely for the hike in price, but for the soullessness of a place whose aesthetic never sought to establish its own beauty or style, but rather dragged and dropped generic imitations of those things from elsewhere.
It is a restaurant that you could imagine seeing displayed in its entirety within the pages of a hospitality brochure selling sets of prefabricated eating halls. There are plastic plants, several different iterations of ankle lighting, top tier plastic imitations of wood and frosted metal everywhere.
Due to the lack of diners, we are essentially afforded a personal waiter. The young woman, though clearly lovely, has seemingly come to believe that the essence of luxury is to watch over our shoulders the entire duration of our meal. She did all but follow us to the bathroom and preheat the air for our lungs.
We order a beer to help us digest the nigh exhaustive menu. There are Italian, Chinese, American, Indian and South East Asian dishes. There is sea food, salad, grill, pizza, and five different biryanis.
All the while, the constant presence of the smiling waitress creates an awkward undercurrent the entire time. One that needed but the slightest comedic spark to burn as laughter.
After five minutes, a bucket of ice appears to accompany the bottle of beer. But, seeing as the waitress has already poured our drink equally between two glasses, she picks up the empty bottle and stares between it and the brimming bucket of ice. She finally decides to stash the bottle in the ice anyway, positioning it at an alluring angle.
Our plates arrive - and the waitress simply cannot fathom that we wish to serve ourselves. In the end we are left with no choice but to partake in a silly dance, directing her spoon to serve the desired portion size and placement of each of the three dishes we have ordered: gobi manchurian (an Indo-Chinese dish of batter fried cauliflower with a hot, tangy and slightly sweet sauce), mushroom noodles, and a salad topped with an extremely generous helping of nuts.
As we eat, the whole experience remains rather absurd, especially given how dusty and disgusting we are.
Gwen starts laughing to herself.
“What?!” I ask, trying to keep it hushed. "What?!”
“It’s all these nuts on the salad… why are there so - many - nuts?…” Her voice fluctuates from a contained volume to outbursts of intensity, like a dam bulging. “And then I thought… - Gosh, I’m going to cry… - I thought… Well - did you see on the menu?… Did you…” she says, faltering, her laughter already wilting to become the beginnings of bright little tears, “did you see on the menu… the seafood dish?… Did you see it? The dish which said ‘tossed with oysters’…” - more laughter - “do you think… do you think they actually just tossed it with oysters? Like…” - she acted out the tossing the food in front of her with little imaginary molluscs - “tossed it… - with oysters.”
Her laughter elevates to a sort of anaerobic heaving as she loses her grip upon the ability to inhale. Tears fall freely down her cheeks.
All the peculiar tension at the hands of all the mock formality rushes up and out as hysterics.
Finally, as the laughter gradually subsides, Gwen wiping her tears, she leans back in her chair to take a much needed breath. It as at this moment that the terribly sweet waitress leans in over her shoulder, making Gwen jump slightly in her skin, asking her:
“More Gobi Manchurian, sir?”
With both our jaws hurting, having finished our food, we tip the lady as much as we can afford to. We thank her and apologise for being so silly. She asks us for a selfie, which we take to be a good sign.
We then wait outside in the not quite finished entrance of the hotel. There are a few dumpy bags of grit and aggregate and a large pile of greyish sand. We let the puppies loose and feed them.
Mana is by far the more adventurous of the two puppies. And while she busies herself, sniffting through every crevice of the car park, Nayna remains close by, enchanted by the big pile of sand that Gwen and I are sitting on.
She moves her paw intently down through the sand, observing the effect as the grains shift beneath it. She moves one paw back; then another; scratching away a slight trench, gripped by the kind of fixation that only true innocence can behold.
As she works, she resembles very much someone who has stumbled upon a pile of gold, only to find that each time they take from the pile more gold grows to take its place. Her head tilts from side to side in confusion. Her movements gradually quicken until she gets into a rhythm, stopping abruptly on occasion - a full stop - straining her eyes at the hole. She goes back to digging, routinely bouncing upon the sand with her front paws in bewildered excitement.
“Her first dig,” Gwen says proudly, wiping from her eyes yet more laughter-induced tears as Nayna continues to attack the pile like she’s struck oil.
More time passes in attendance of our clean room, and the looming prospect of being clean and horizontal grows ever more tantalising.
A young man comes outside to where we remain on the sand and introduces himself as Hitesh. His strained face is then parted as he goes on to relay the four most devastating words we'd foolishly stopped expecting to hear.
“I’m really sorry guys…”
You could tell instantly it was not a simple sorry for the wait.
“They actually… well… how to say..." he grips his hands tightly together. "There's no more rooms."
It’s then we realise that the fact of the finishing line being so close had been the only artery oxidising our morale. It’s after midnight now and suddenly we’re exhausted. It feels like a number of days since waking in the hotel room above the street in Chalisgaon.
Hitesh looks at us sympathetically.
“Maybe…” he begins. He pauses for a long moment afterwards.
“I like travelling…” he says wistfully.
We pick our heads up.
“I love travelling, actually. You know? Meeting strange people in new places. I love couchsurfing, too,” he says, “you know? The app. Actually, my place is on couchsurfing.”
Then it struck him.
“Wait… I finish work in half an hour! If you can wait, I’ll order a taxi for you to my place and you can stay at mine. What do you think?”
“I think you just saved our butts, Hitesh,” Gwen says sleepily.
Nayna looks up from her digging as Gwen and I exhale a grand sigh of relief. She cocks her head at us with intrigue.
“Bedtime soon,” Gwen tells her.
After Hitesh has finished he rides back to his apartment on his scooter with us in pursuit in a rickshaw. His place is a 10th storey apartment. We bucket shower and sit outside briefly on his balcony chatting and drinking herbal tea from steel cups.
Gwen is sitting against the wall on a cushion sipping her tea delicately. I am lying on the cool hard tiles, gently rolling the muscles in my back. Mana is lying beside Hitesh, with Nayna sitting on his lap fast asleep, dreaming in the folds of a newly familiar smell.
Hitesh on the balcony of his apartment in Pune
Chapter 6
Jungle Juice
The next morning a friend of Hitesh gives us a lift to the same bus station where Rupesh dropped us the day before.
After taking another bus, further out of the city this time, we hitch a lift with a man to the highway. There, we realise that due to roadworks there is no hard shoulder and end up walking beside the road for nearly two kilometres until a suitable place to wait for a lift is found, and where the dogs can also be in shade. Along the way we buy a bunch of bananas, the likes of which are far smaller and sweeter than the usual Cavendish bananas imported to Europe.
Gwen took to the road to flag down a lift whilst I kept watch of the puppies beneath the concrete veranda of a disused building. As an experiment, I give each of them half a banana (their first ever) to see if they like it, which they do. Their small mouths and incredibly sharp teeth, however, struggle with the sticky golden flesh, and they fight with it clumsily and noisily from the corners of their mouths, producing a good amount of saliva.
The temperature is about 37°C (99°F), and it is hot even in the shade.
We soon get a lift with a man driving with his mother, heading to their home outside of a city called Kolhapur, four and a half hours away - 230km directly South.
We get in, extremely grateful for both the air conditioning and, for a short spell, the lack of having to contend with the usual mental commitments of hitchhiking. Such as things like keeping the dogs cool, which was mostly achieved by washing them down with water from the small water butts outside restaurants placed there for washing hands before and after a meal. The only thing never to be alleviated from the daily routine, of course, were the bathroom breaks.
About an hour and a half into our journey, our driver, who asks us to call him Ben, points ahead of us towards an enormous arm of mountains that jut up out of the relative flatness. They encompass the surrounding landscape like the rim of a bowl, standing in the way of the horizon. Small lanes of cars can be made out at varying degrees of the ascent like trails of ants sprawling upwards along narrow branches.
“This is part of the Western Ghats,” Ben explains. “Though technically the mountain range begins in Gujarat, just below Pakistan, there are certain parts of the Ghats which are louder, so to speak. More in your face,” he said, pointing again. “Most of the towns and cities are in the low spots of the range. But, sometimes, we’ve no choice but to… wiggle our way up.”
View from halfway up the ghat
And wiggle we did. An incredible procession of switchback turns and roads that traced from ridge line to ridge line slowly delivered us the two hundred metres upwards to the pass.
“There are several meanings of the word ghat in India,” Ben says. “The first is the set of steps which lead down to a river at sacred sites, such as beside the Ganges. The second is this - what we’re driving on now. A winding road leading into and through the mountains. And the third is a mountain pass, which we’re quickly nearing.”
“So why are the Western and Eastern Ghats called the Ghats?” I ask.
“Well, over time, the word ghat came to be so mixed up with the mountains themselves that it got itself stuck, so to speak. Many of the roads still used today that connect the Ghats to the rest of the country were made during the British Raj. Maybe, seeing how they built so many of the ghat roads, the word got thrown around so much in relation to the mountains that the mountains became synonymous with the ways into them. And, of course, the way to control them.”
As we continued to ascend, it proved somewhat strange, navigating a road that remained to this day an obvious marvel of the human spirit, that was, nonetheless, there only to be driven on at the expense of other men and other men’s spirits.
The engineering and ingenuity evidently poured into such a structure still spoke through the structure itself, to the eyes that beheld it. And yet, it was undeniably one of the many fruits of a reign of dominance and exploitation.
Only in the search of a tighter grip upon these mountains, and heightened trade from them, had the brick been laid and mortar been spun. It was men’s appetite that moved the hands that pushed the pens that signed the plans - nothing more.
And so the swirling road became yet another example of how man’s infinite brilliance is so often an extension of his avarice.
On the other side of the pass we stop for lunch. Ben and his mother pay for everything.
I don’t know what it is when you hitchhike - or embark on some other such adventure - but something about the act seems to speak to people in a way that I do not pretend to understand, and can’t begin to explain.
I do believe there is something of the daring that exists within all of us. And it appears that when people see that this penchant for adventure has not been struck down in you - that it remains alive and well, breathing within you - they are able to see themselves from an angle that usually remains obscured. An angle that, in part, reveals their true face; a piece of our nature.
We drive on after lunch in blissful uneventfulness, and me and Gwen and the puppies fall asleep.
We stop once more for tea before Ben takes us into Kolhapur.
The intersection where he leaves us is a rather loveless arrangement of concrete and metal, with islands of rubbish and squished cans strewn all over like beached fish. Cows and dogs rummage through the black bin liner landforms.
We find a hotel and book a room adequate for our needs and our budget - loveless as the district beyond the walls.
Ben dropping us off in Kolhapur
We take a tuk tuk out of town in the morning.
As we ride we consult the map once more. We are less than 200km from Goa: a five hour journey with the right vehicle.
Almost immediately after disembarking from the rickshaw we are picked up by three guys in a copper coloured SUV, who it turns out are all part of a secret mission. Operating outside of their wives knowledge, we’re told they must reach Goa and return to their homes in Kolhapur by day’s end.
“Why?” we ask, already having been handed a tin of beer each.
“Because our wives-,” says the driver, who turns to his friend and begins slapping him on the arm, “-beating us.”
We laugh. “No, why are you going to Goa?”
“Ah! Because we drink too much,” replies Karan, who speaks the best English and runs a chaat spot in Kolhapur. “And it is the beginning of the season of the Urrak,” he adds.
“What’s that? A drink?”
“Yes! And from this we make… Jungle Juice!” Karan says excitedly.
“Jungle juice!” hail the other two friends.
Urrak, we find out, is an alcoholic drink made from the fermentation of the juice of the cashew apple (the soft fruit which grows above the nut). And it is to an Urrak distillery that Karan and his friends, and now subsequently ourselves, are headed.
We drive for an hour or so, the car pointing south-west towards the Goan state line. We stop for refreshments by the side of an almost dormant road. There is no multi-lane highway here, only a sleepy single road with ever more sand at the margins.
While we have tea, a stray puppy at least a month or two larger than Mana and Nayna, with skinny, knobbly legs approaches the puppies; curious, I imagine, to come across something smaller than itself.
Nayna, forever bashful, hides beneath the legs of Gwen’s chair. Mana, however, approaches the puppy - an animal twice as tall as she - totally unafraid.
The difference in their appearance - not only due to their very mixed breeds, but the state of their appearance - was hard to miss. Mana’s black fur shimmered slightly with a healthy sheen in the sunlight; the street dog's fur was dry and scrubbish like that of a welcome mat. The stray’s ribs and joints stuck out proudly from the gangly frame; Mana, an amalgamation of squish and fluff.
Nevertheless, they sniffed each other over and ran about, Mana frequently crumpling to the ground beneath the older dog’s bigger pounces, presenting her belly, getting dust in the gleam of her coat.
For another two hours we drive.
Karan spins around in his seat: “We are taking different road into Goa today,” he says, “no police this way. Instead we go by an old smugglers road, right through the jungle.”
A moment or so later, he turns off from the tarmac and onto a dirt and gravel track. Large portions have been carved out by erosion.
Immediately, the canopy begins to thicken. Soon the sky is completely covered, and we drive through long tunnels of green. Creeper vines dangle down in front of the road. The 4x4 pushes them away as if moving through a beaded curtain, and all around the shrill hoots and caws from the many hidden voices of tropical creatures can be heard.
The way would be impossible in a normal car… and it takes us a long time. We rarely move faster than 15mph (24kmph) for the majority of the drive. Sometimes we drop down into unseen troughs with a bang - or scrape across mis-assessed high points. Karan always follows up these gnarly sounding surprises with, “Sorry sorry sorry!”
Eventually we pass through from the thick growth into a more open section of the jungle. From here, we’re met with a view that ranges on for miles.
Before us: millions upon millions of trees. An everlasting, indistinguishable mottle of green. The grain of the leaves are marbled with ribbons of teal, jade and olive: an indiscernibly thick carpet blanketing the land.
Save for the road, there are no signs of man’s intrusions.
The undulating mass of green shimmers beneath the midday sun, reflecting light like the scales of a lazing boa of some ancient mythology. The shape of the land, all of it concealed by the thick flesh of the jungle, ripples in gentle waves all the many miles down to the Arabian Sea.
At some point Karan stops the car, crouching down to pick something up from the side of the road. Held between two fingers, he shows Gwen and I the partially squished, red fruit of the cashew tree.
Ripe cashew apple
“People have come up here,” he says, “harvesting this for the urrak.”
“You’re excited to taste it, aren’t you?” I say, smiling at him.
“Yes, I am,” he says, lobbing the fruit into the foliage, “and you - you too,” he adds, pointing at me. “You have seen the jungle - but you have not tasted the jungle.
“Jungle Juice!” he hoots as he gets back into the car.
“Jungle Juice!” we intone in chorus.
Further along we pass people, mostly women, with baskets full of cashew apples on their backs. Further again we come across a truck with its loading bed almost overspilling with the fruit. As we pass the truck you can smell the sweetness in the air.
Eventually we wind up back on tarmac and among other cars. We reach a town and the three men in the car all seek out an ice cream stall. They enthusiastically deliver both Gwen and I multiple servings of a cold, creamy drink made with almonds called badam milk; badam being almonds. It is incredibly sweet and refreshing, and in the tropical heat provides a relief to the body analogous to the soothing reprieve of honey and lemon to a sore throat.
I head to a chicken stall.
We have started feeding the puppies meat: cooked if possible, raw if not.
Due to lack of refrigeration, animals, namely chickens, are often kept alive outside of the stalls which sell their meat, in cages arranged in stacks. The butcher will fetch and kill multiple chickens throughout the day rather than having dead meat delivered.
I approach the man of a chicken stall and ask for five hundred grams. I make myself watch as a bird is manhandled from its cage and its throat is cut. I watch as the man roughly plucks it, guts it and chops it into little pieces.
Before the trip, it had been a long time since I’d been close to the harsh reality of our blood-based existence; of death and all the gunk hidden beneath feathers, fur and skin.
Without averting my eyes, I acknowledge that up until this point the chunks of white flesh being put into a little clear bag for me had moments before lived and breathed; reduced to a meal solely for the benefit of two other creatures I deem worthy of the sacrifice.
The meat is cheap. But it is definitely not free.
After feeding the dogs in the street, we head to the distillery.
There is no signage. It is not a factory - not a “proper” establishment. At least not as westerners might recognise something like a distillery. There is no driveway, no automatic doors, no receptionist, no towering chimneys ejecting steam.
Rather, it is a short drive down another inconspicuous track that we reach a line of thatched shacks. Our senses are besieged by the smell of heat and boiling sweetness. We walk into one of the buildings. It has no walls. Wooden poles have been tied together with winds of thick string to make the structure. The roof covering is woven palm leaves. Inside, a handful of men wearing thin, stretched vests and shabby shorts, awash with sweat, smoke bidis (small hand rolled cigarettes rolled in tobacco leaf), or are working at one of the parts of the production line.
There are big metal presses with cashew fruit carrion pulped into a homogenous mass. Beneath the presses, a sloped concrete basin directs the juice into two big concrete baths set into the floor. Beside these are big steaming cylindrical steel containers sticking out of clay-walled surrounds. Wicked hot fires burn beneath in these clay ovens. An extensive array of tubes and pipes sprout out of the steel cylinders, leading to various different plastic barrels and metal drums filled with liquid.
As soon as our presence is made known, Karan and his friends (seemingly returning customers) are handed a 2.5L plastic container of urrak by one of the men working there. A number of stools are brought out and placed in one corner of the open building as ingredients are removed from the boot of the 4x4.
“How strong is it?” I ask.
“Around 15 to 20 degrees,” Karan says, meaning percent. Him and his friends are all partaking in the preparation of the drinks. They mix the urrak with soda, a good deal of lemon juice, a bit of salt, a sliced chilli and mint.
“Jungle Juice!” Karan calls as he passes Gwen and I our drinks.
“Jungle Juice!”
We cheers, and before anyone really seems to notice it is nighttime and we are all fantastically drunk.
Piddled at the distillery
The taste of the cocktail is, like many of the best things in life, a bit of an acquired taste. It has an almost yeasty, nutty flavour. By the third glass, Gwen and I adore it. We also try feni: a double distillation liquor also brewed from cashew apples. It is around 40%ABV - and apparently I was too wasted to remember how it tasted.
Back in the car, windows open, rushing along roads towards a hotel for us to stay - Karan and friends by now very anxious to get back to their wives, whose calls have been religiously ignored all evening - the drunk of the urrak, unlike that of many other drinks, is not heavy. Rather it has left us all energised, elevated and clear.
The evening air, however, is thick as soup. And the speed at which we drive, plus the euphoric effect of the cocktails - with the cool air pressing against the sweaty panes of our skin - makes it feel a bit like moving rapidly underwater.
The guys drop us off at a hotel before shooting off hastily to return to Kolhapur. We give each of them a big hug, eat some food, and go to sleep with the knowledge we are all that much closer to our goal.
And very, very close to the sea.
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