Elephants and Enfields, Evelyn Calvert [little readers .TXT] 📗

We hit NH17, which is the main north south artery for Goa and beyond and head north. It is a ribbon of hot tarmac that will hug the coastal plains 270 miles north to Mumbai and likewise south over 400 miles right into Cochin and the state of Kerala.
They are, at most times, packed with motorcycles, scooters, ox-carts, bicycles, taxis, auto-rickshaws, coaches and ‘goods-carriers’ - trucks to you and I. There is the constant cacophony of horns used to warn those ahead of an imminent overtaking manoeuvre, something to be done with flair and panache and not a little bravado by the local drivers. No, substitute the words ‘not a little bravado’ with ‘total disregard for the potential ensuing carnage’.
The first-time visitor to Goa, I can guarantee, will be unable to describe the kind of overtaking that he witnesses. Not through a poor grasp of his language but from an unadulterated blind terror and the certain belief that, within seconds, his fragile bag of bones and blood will be intimately familiar with the working of, and forever adhered to, the drivetrain of a nineteen-tonner.
A goods-carrier will be struggling to crest the brow of a steep hill when a bus blindly overtakes at a speed only fractionally greater than that of the truck. You are thinking that if a vehicle comes the other way there’s sure to be a catastrophic accident….. when a car pulls out and overtakes the two of them! They are now three abreast approaching the summit when a bus looms into view, itself being overtaken by a swarm of scooters. Eyes squint shut, collective breaths are held but somehow they all squeeze through ….usually. Crazy.
Such things are far from our thoughts as we glide past the many, apparently half-built apartment blocks, brightly coloured shops and roadside bars. We pass restaurants, hospitals and clinics, coconut palms and, everywhere, huge advertising hoardings inviting the reader to ‘Drink Kingfisher Beer’,’Buy Kingfisher Water’ and ‘Fly Kingfisher Airlines’.
Kingfisher is the brand name for the beer products of the United Breweries Group and the company, founded by a Scotsman incidentally in 1857, learnt all it knows about brewing from the South Indian British Breweries set up to slake the thirst of the British troops stationed here.
Having had first-hand experience of the volume of beer quaffed by squaddies, it doesn’t surprise me to learn that Kingfisher accounts for over 60% of beer sales in India today. I hardly ever drink beer but it has to be said that an ice-cold Kingfisher does slip down rather well in the heat of the day. Today, the boss of Kingfisher is Vijay Mallya, one of the wealthiest men in the world.
In recent years there has been a boom in house building in Goa, mostly to accommodate the demands of infatuated foreigners and many of the hoardings reflect this. Gaudy primary-coloured painted illustrations of the latest gated, gym-equipped developments look more like Lego advertisements than real estate. Come to think of it, why would anyone want a gymnasium on their development complex in a hot country other than to admire themselves in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors or to ogle the woman in front and be envious of the bead of sweat trickling provocatively down her spine towards her buttock cleavage?
You’re not going to be getting a nice stainless, mirrored lift in your apartment block so walking up and down the bloody stairs should provide adequate exercise for most sane occupants.
It’s like it is here in the UK. After an eight or ten hour slog, you overhear someone at work ask their colleague
‘Coming down the gym tonight after work?’,
‘Of course, I need a good work-out’ they reply.
They don’t need a good work-out, they need a damned good slap for being so lazy during the day. I’ve got more cavity than tooth because I’ve barely the energy to squeeze the toothpaste from its tube at the end of the day and they’re going to be rowing the equivalent of Poole to Cherbourg and back or jogging up Annapurna with Lycra fingerless gloves and an i-Pod dangling from their sweaty lug-holes.
I’ve heard it said that a white headphone cable is what connects an i-Pod to a u-Twat. What is the matter with these people? And, whilst we’re on the subject, why do they wear shorts over their Nike jogpants? It’s like putting your socks on over the top of your shoes. Tossers! There, now I’ve alienated half my readership….all eight of you.
The sixty mile-per-hour traverse of a series of rumblers which Raj had either overlooked or felt his Maruti suspension could cope with caused me to stub my cigarette out on my lip.
It’s worth the pain to see the amusement it gives Hannah. I always know how painful my misfortunes will be as they are directly proportional to how many tears roll from her face. Just now, she cried like she’d lost a close relative. Raj joined in the laughter too but wasn’t sure why.
The rumblers are a prelude to the thump, thump, thump of the tyres as we launch out onto the Zuari River Bridge. Fingers crossed here, lumps of this bridge are forever falling into the river and it undergoes constant repairs.
Alongside the road and overlooking the mighty estuary is a tiny shrine and cross built on an altar of white gloss wall tiles and covered with a roof of whitewashed corrugated iron. These shrines are everywhere in India and are as varied in size and shape as the country itself. Some are huge, colourful and intricate, built from local stone and adorned with turrets and fluted roofs. Others are little more than a tiny niche, a foot square, hacked from the red rock in a road cutting. All have in common an absence of neglect. Candles flicker and garlands of flowers encircle and incense pervades at almost any hour on any day regardless of how isolated the spot. They may be dedicated to the Virgin Mary or Jesus or any number of sainted souls, most not indicating to whom.
Despite my longstanding contempt for all forms of religion, I do admire the believers’ tenacity, fortitude and dedication.
I make a mental note to return to this spot and take in the views at length.
The concrete Zuari road bridge, completed in 1983, crosses high above the murky waters and its five spans cover a third of a mile. The Zuari widens to over two and a half miles at its mouth on the Arabian Sea. Running alongside and upstream of us is the rail bridge with its web of ironwork on the central two spans, bearing the Konkan railway which links Madgaon near Margao in South Goa to Mumbai way up north. It is the longest bridge on the railway.
Through the haze can be seen a procession of ore barges stretching up and downriver, Laden and low to the waterline on their way to the sea and apparently larger as they return more buoyant to the interior for another load.
Another set of rumblers and Raj spots them coming this time. They mark the other end of the bridge and, as we trampoline on the back seat, the coconut palms and tiny shops and roadside stalls close in again and we are in the district (or taluka) of Tiswadi.
The literal meaning of Tiswadi is ‘thirty settlements’ and refers to the settlements of an ancient Himalayan community, the Saraswats, who moved here when, about 1000BC, the Saraswati river started drying up. The Saraswats were renowned for their worldly knowledge in such subjects as astronomy, medicine, philosophy and metaphysics and had a flair for passing on this knowledge. Shame we didn’t have a few at my Suffolk grammar school in the sixties!
There are more fields now too, each partitioned with low mud walls into plots of between fifty and two-hundred metres square.
The fertility of the farmed land in Goa is largely poor. It’s proximity to the Arabian Sea makes the immediate coastal land too saline and, further inland, the annual monsoon rains wash much of the nutrient from the soil. Most arable land is given over to rice but, at this time of year, the winter (or rabi ) crops also include maize, horse and black gram, beans, pulses and other vegetables, many fruits and, of course, coconuts.
The palms are everywhere and damned dangerous too. I recall, on a previous visit, Hannah and I standing in a grove near the Siolim ( pronounced Showlim) River further north from here. We were with a Goan friend, Assim, who was there to assess a brake problem on our scooter.
We were admiring the fabulous view out over the river where those fishermen too poor to afford a boat were waist-deep in the shimmering water hand casting small nets for estuary fish when an almighty whoosh and a loud, metallic but melodious clang signalled the arrival of a coconut. The (unripe) sphere had unilaterally decided to pack its little coconut belongings in a knotted, spotty handkerchief and leap the eighty foot from a nearby palm to ricochet off our friends motorbike petrol tank.
About one third full, I’d say, by the tone. Unleaded, I think. Almost as loud but less melodious was the dull thud as, on the rebound, it struck Assim squarely between his startled eyes. We hadn’t immediately realised what it was. The speed and accuracy of the projectile made me think that we were trespassing in Kapil Dev’s garden.
Assim leant back against the trunk of the offending palm clutching his head. Having scoured Siolim for a fresh underwear shop, we made sympathetic noises as a spherical lump grew from Assim’s brow like John Hurt’s chestburster did in ‘Alien’. We vowed there and then not to stand around too long beneath coconut palms in future. Better to stand out in the sun and contract scalp cancer. At the very least you’ll look nice and tanned against the studded cream silk lining of your beechwood coffin and not have to pay the extra to have one with a bulge in the lid to accommodate your cranial protuberance.
Every so often the highway drops low onto causeways over estuary land with full paddies to both left and right where everything seems so much greener and lush. The many roadside trees along these sections of road afford shade and commensurate coolness and we ask Raj to pull over at a tiny shed-sized shop to buy a cold drink.
The shop is painted electric blue and beautifully hand signwritten in yellow and white with the text ’SMART PCO. TATA Indicom. STD, ISD, LOCAL’ and the image of a huge white telephone handset. Virtually anything that doesn’t move (and much of that which does come to think of it ) is exploited as advertising space in Goa. I don’t know if the proprietors get paid by Tata Indicom to have their property painted electric blue or whether they are grateful for the resultant increase in prominence.
I like to imagine that they just lock up one night their dull, block-built store and arrive the following morning to find that a crack squad of paintbrush-wielding commandos with image-intensifiers and a bucket of masonry paint from Patel’s Covert Sign Squad has ‘done the business’. Either way, it is commercialism in its finest and prettiest form and if I thought that BT would do as artistic a job on my