The Covered Trucks

We left Vapi the next morning, March 3. We started out towards Nasik, back into Maharashtra. Nasik was a four hour ride through rugged low lying bald hills, taking the full blast of the March sun’s fury blazing away. There was no shade except at evasive distances, and the trees, all shrivelled and malnourished with stems pretending to be trunks, were all like hair on an Albino’s arms.

We got through to Nasik, and after a beer and lunch moved on to Dhule. A full 164 kilometres away. Dhule itself has a history of communal riots. But it was Malegaon that bothered me. Malegaon logs almost one riot a year, even when the rest of the country is attending to its usual business. Not all of them are severe, but communal ignition in Malegaon is generally ahead of the key. When the communal tensions erupted in Gujarat, that Malegaon would pick up its threads was almost a foregone conclusion.

If we needed any confirmation, a lone sugar cane juice-cum-Pepsi -cum tea stall next to a make-shift construction site structure along the highway had the answer. The podgy man who ran the stall was no village rookie, and looked sceptical about us. He asked where we were going and what we were doing. I told him I was a journalist. He suddenly warmed up, to a lukewarm. The reason was that he expected only this tribe to be travelling at such a time.

“Any reports of riots from Malegaon?” I asked.

“It will be there. But not on the main road. Better not stay there. To enter Malegaon you have to turn left from the highway. Just keep going along, and there will be no problem. The military is already in Malegaon, but riots will happen.”

After tea we left. Rohan started to catch the mildly tensing air, and my anxiety to find out if Malegaon was in the thick of things. He asked me what the problem was. I explained as quietly as possible that the town we were about to pass through was famous for riots.

“Don’t worry dekh lega. Only, you have confidence in me. And sit right.”

That admonition was not without reason. I have never before ridden pillion on a bike for so many kilometers. That apart, those who have given me a lift on their bikes for even half a kilometer will testify to my colossal distrust in the rider; cutting across caste, creed and religion, just as anachronistic Irani restaurants in Bombay scream their secular credentials.

We started off in the direction of Malegaon. On either side were dug up fields. But almost tracing the edges of the highway was one contiguous trench. Over the mounds of the freshly unfastened earth, we saw snaking across the length of the trench colourful cables.

Thick. In bright red, yellow, orange, green. Wherever the trench was yet to be dug, we saw these coils in neatly wound circles. These were the symptoms of India’s spectacular catch-up act with the twenty first century : Information Technology. These were cables laid to connect all of India with all of India. On the outskirts of villages, and along the highway the drab landscapes of drying shrubs and brown-yellow earth, the dug up soil and the colourful cables looked like some inspired baby running its crayons wantonly across the topography.

After two hours of riding, the sun too was tiring. And Rohan fell quiet. The traffic was not too thick. But there were occasional trucks with Gujarat number plates. They rarely carried material. They were full of people. People I kept trying to fix. Were they Muslim families running away from Ahmedabad? There seemed to be all units of the family. The overweight women, the kindly aged white haired men. But they were not immediately visible to the eye, unless you pried into the backs of the trucks covered in tarpaulin. What the eye saw was a bunch of youngsters, all men. They usually formed the crest of the trucks. They faced the wind. Some had shirts unbuttoned half way. Others had tied kerchiefs across their foreheads. Yet others had small towels worn like the kafiyeh. They all fluttered like mini sails. If there was any emotion, any sign of trauma, or even plain physical fatigue, I could not see it. They all looked like one netted shield of human faces facing the strong wind. No link had a human face, because the wind was blurring their faces as if they were wet paint posters flattened by wind before they could congeal into real faces.

Where were the women? I wondered. Were the women sheltered in the backs of the trucks covered by tarpaulin? Were they trading stories of trauma? Or loss? Or were they too, carried by the journey, talking of the dry landscape? Or maybe, they were worried when they’d stop to get food next? Was there a new mother, silenced by the fear of the
elderly and the more knowing, suffering the mortification of having to silence a child in need of milk?

The light dimmed. The emaciated trees, not too sparse even earlier, were suddenly acquiring their strength in numbers. Their lengthening shadows started to bunch and regroup, and soon got the upper hand now that the sun was no more visible in the sky.

“Three kilometers to Malegaon,”

Rohan spoke, almost startling me with a new voice. I had not even noticed him opening the visor of his helmet, slowing down, moving his face closer to mine.

We rode into Malegaon. Hardly anybody on the road. Only one more of those cars crossed. The kind of cars that were stuffed with people in white. They had knitted caps. They had long beards. And usually, right in the front, next to the driver, would be a man in the same attire, but older than the rest, with shaved off moustache, grim faced, of indeterminate age, anywhere between 40 and 70, that contrasted with the determined look of the face that seemed to have been set in quick drying plaster.

We had seen three similar vehicles earlier, in the last two hours, heading in the opposite direction, meaning riding out of Malegaon and towards Nasik.

As we approached what should be about a kilometre away from Malegaon, we saw a man with a long stick stretched across his shoulders. The man was just coming into view. He was solitary. Probably carrying something on each end of that stick; the traditional way of water carriers across the country.

Suddenly, Rohan bent low, almost hugging the fuel tank of the bike, and swerved first to the right and then violently to the left. I almost lost balance at his stunt. I had forewarned him, that I was going to ride pillion with him across the route only on the condition that he avoid whatever manoeuvre I might consider a stunt. And then had proceeded to give him my long and severely orthodox list of things I considered show boating. This one was high up on that list. Now, I kept quiet, since I knew he would tell me whatever it was that he had done that for.

We reached the junction. It was unreally real. Just a small mouth of another big town opening into the edge of the highway. There was a broken down, overly abused public urinal. There was a huge tree. There were a few groups of two to three persons scattered across the approximately 300 square meters of ground where Malegaon met the inter-state highway.

Rohan lost all fear of the riots and Malegaon. The reassuringly mundane scene brought him so suddenly back to reality that he smoothly guided the bike to a stop. He took off his helmet, and announced.

“I want to pee.”

As Rohan headed towards the broken down panchayat public urinal, I stood leaning on the the bike. An old woman, probably eighty, was next to the bike. When Rohan walked away, the old woman asked me to take her across the highway. She had a stick in her hand, and her glasses looked more like crushed prisms precariously balanced on a small expanse of very deep creases. Her nose hardly a ledge to hold the glass.

I held her hand, let a truck roar by, and took her across the road. She muttered her blessings, and as I was leaving her hand, I heard a shout behind me. Rohan was heading towards the bike, and another man was shouting at him. Not angrily, but with the boisterous amusement of villages. Rohan turned around, discovered that he was the object of their screams, and went to enquire. He had a chat with the group of men that I could not hear. All I saw when he reached the bike was that he was blushing a deep red, red enough to beat his dark complexion.

We started the bike, and set off.

“What happened?” I finally asked, since he was still trying to get the colour back into his face.
“I used the ladies loo,” said my sheepish mate, “I did not see the board.”

We moved into Dhule about nine in the night. The highway was getting crowded as we approached the town. The trucks coming out of town had their bright lights glaring in synchronized animosity at our puny bike, and other smaller vehicles that had joined us on the highway behind and ahead of us.

“Bastard,” Rohan cursed at the truck coming in from the other side. Despite his furious signalling, the truck did not bother to allow him through. We almost got off the road.
“Let’s get into the first hotel here,” he said. He was not really sharing an idea, for the bike was already by now gliding into the entrance of the hotel. We checked in, got to the room and took a shower. We had been riding non stop but for a one hour lunch, for nine hours.

I decided that we better not eat in the hotel but see what we could of this town. My old friend Lalit Marathe was from this town. Dhule was his Vapi. He grew up here, more or less like I grew up in Vapi. We had both landed as small town bumpkins at the same college in Bombay.

Today, we were established city slickers, but we shared humble roots. Lalit and I are not the friends we were. But the town that was the stuff of hostel room angst for several shared years sent mild emotional tremors through me. Would I meet somebody who might have known Lalit? Or his editor father? Perhaps, I thought, the chances of meeting somebody who knew his uncle were brighter. Lalit’s uncle ran a club, a euphemism for a gambling den. That is the kind of notoriety that is easily connected to in small towns, I thought.

Well, Rohan and I had underestimated our strengths. Once out of the hotel, we were smack in the middle of the highway. And our freshly showered bodies were caught in the burst of the gaseous mix of vehicle fumes, dust and that inescapeable smell of diesel, petrol, urine. We turned right, and saw a dhaba, an unpretentious eating place for truckers. It had those coir beds, charpoys. And there was even a raucous bunch of six people downing cheap whiskey. Exploring Dhule will have to wait for some other, more leisurely visit.

Rohan said he wanted to call his wife. I moved in with him to the ubiquitous yellow and black STD booth at the dhaba. As Rohan moved into the cubicle to make his call, I tried to chat up the owner.

“Has there been any problem in Dhule?”
“No.”
The man was as interested in me as any businessman would be interested in a passing, captive customer. Which, was of course, very little. Our conversation died at birth. Rohan came out of the phone booth, and promptly put life back into the conversation challenged man at the counter.

“Kithi jhala, bhau.” he asked in Marathi. The man read out the amount

“Where are you coming from?” asked the booth owner. He also owned the dhaba.
“We are riding in from Bombay,” Rohan said, in his friendly open way.
“From Bombay, out on a tour,” he asked, a readymade admiration flickering on his indecisively raised brow.
“Yes. We are going to Orissa. And then down the western coastline,” I told him, uninvited. But I had to pipe in before he forgot that I am part of the duo.
He then asked us when we had set out? Which bike?

“Oh Bullet. Yes it is the king of bikes.” Rohan took over.

I asked him what his name was.

“Marathe”

“Hah, I knew one Marathe here, long ago. Vijay Marathe. Do you know him?” Vijay Marathe was my college friend Lalit’s father.

“There are many Marathes here,” the man refused to be interested in me.

I did not remember Lalit’s uncle’s name. So I said, there was another Marathe who ran a club. Still no memory.

Rohan changed tack. He knew that the man was not interested in anything I said.

“There were lots of trucks with Gujarat number plates carrying families. Where are they going?”

“They are moving in here. There are lots of Muslims here also. It is sad.”

Yeah, I clucked.

“We are also Saaheb’s men,” Rohan said, immediately opening up the dhaba owner’s defences. Rohan did it because he knew I wanted to talk and ask him about the Muslim families and the trucks.

“But what they did was also unforgivable. How can we tolerate it? This was bound to happen. But poor people die. Bechara, they have nothing to do with it. They have small businesses which are burnt down. How will they feed their families? There is no education among them.” The them of course, were the Muslims.

I was wondering why the man was so casually inaccessible to me, while he opened up so easily to Rohan. There was the fact that Rohan was a Maharashtrian, and spoke the language. But Dhule, like many small towns of Maharshtra closer to the border of Hindi speaking Madhya Pradesh, used Hindi as a regular language as much as Vapi did. In both places, one could easily live without knowing the local language.

What was even more surprising was that he managed to be cold to me and warm to Rohan simultaneously, sitting right across, within one 2-feet distance from both my face and Rohan’s. It was in a way a strange antipathy that he handed out to me, right there from where he was perfectly at ease, and welcoming Rohan. Had it to do with Rohan aligning himself with Saaheb, the Shiv Sena leader. I was not sure. He just seemed to have sensed, who amongst us he wanted to be sweet to, and who not.

And yet, despite his allegiance with Rohan, he had attempted a weak balancing act when he blamed the Muslims for the Godhra incident. He had then deftly changed tack to the road level view that he would have gained running a highway dhaba. That poor Muslim families running small businesses would be the worst affected.

However, by the end of my thoughts, I was sure he was not being clever. That was the maximum humanism he could muster, and he was not faking it. He could relate to those families that lose their livelihood, sympathise with them. However, once he had to choose one party over the other, Hindus and Muslims, his choice was unambiguous. I almost envied his lack of ambiguity. That was something I have been under pressure to resolve inside me. The ambiguity.

We left Dhule early next morning. Streaking through more arid landscape we ducked into Amravati by early next night. We checked into a hotel, but decided to eat elsewhere. Where we decided to eat, finally turned out to be a hotel where some college students were holding a get together. Turned out it was a freshers party thrown by the Uttar Pradesh Students Association. In the middle of Maharashtra, an Uttar Pradesh Students Union was amazing.

The late eighties spurt in private engineering colleges across Maharashtra had led to this phenomenon. Students from across the nation landed up in the weirdest of places. I have seen North East Indian students from Nagaland and Mizoram, and Manipur in God forsaken Tavanur in Kerala. I have seen Bihari and Kashmiri students in Manipal and Loni. It follows naturally that one day, they reached the critical mass to form state based associations.

We moved into the hotel lawns to eat at about seven in the evening. By eight, the few girls in that gathering had already made themselves scarce. By the time we were leaving, there were only three boys, stone drunk, discussing things that seemed like girl problems. But from the snatches that floated across to our seat, about twenty feet away, was an eerie throwback to the feudalism of the state of their origin.

Four or so many years of meeting so many students from so many states in a foreign state had not removed that latent prejudice. What I overheard was.

“Chamar hai saala.” He is a lower caste bastard. I never hear that in Bombay.

In many ways, the economically strident states were attracting some of the brighter, or richer, boys and girls to these states for education. Engineering, medicine and the latest craze which was MBA. After they leave their native towns and cities of Northern Indian, they run smack into a world that was pooh poohed back home. The world where girls were equal to boys, and often very aggressive, wore what they pleased, and mingled with boys. Eventually, the urbanity of these more modern states rubbed off on these boys and girls. Some married their classmates from other states. Some stayed back for work.

There were also cases of some landing up in jail. One of my brother’s classmates at his B school in Pune, a hot blooded Jat from Uttar Pradesh, was cooling his heels in Yerwada jail for knifing a fellow student over a minor brawl. The student he knifed died, and his rich farmer father’s considerable political influence could do nought to save his son from the law in faraway Pune.

But somehow, many of these colleges in less known small towns have become nodes of modernity. Youngsters are coming face to face with people of the same age from other states. Those who speak different languages, follow different customs, look different, and yet all agreed in their estimation of a valuable technical education.

We bump over a five-kilometer road that resembled the back of an overly agitated dinosaur with all its scales up. We are entering Nagpur, the next afternoon. The first board after the hell stretch says “Welcome to India’s second greenest city,” then there is another board, “Inconvenience is regretted.”

Eventually we slip further towards the city. And yet another board declares;
“Welcome to Orange city.”

With so many epithets, Nagpur is best announced as the sum total of the boards on the outskirts. A funnily ambiguous city, if ever there
was one. It is not much of a city. It is also not Maharashtrian. It is
still wondering whether to be “India’s first Orange city”, or
whether “second greenest city” sounds better on its
curriculum vitae.
And yet, Nagpur is historically significant. The founding father of India’s secular constitution Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar converted to Buddhism here, after his tireless fight for the depressed classes or dalits, Hinduism’s untouchables. Ambedkar left a scorching brand on Hinduism’s collective academic soul when he said “I was born a Hindu, but I will not die one.” He died a Budhhist.

Interestingly, Nagpur’s other claim to national consciousness is
as the head quarters of militant Hinduism, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh. While I was growing up, I thought of the RSS as a venerable
institution, justifiably sidelined. It is here that I meet my old
friend and a journalist Pranav Priyadarshi. Pranav, was a liberal by
temperament, and a socialist by alliance, like George Orwell.
Pranav grew up in Patna, Bihar. There he started going to RSS schools
and still remembers the militant and clearly rousing rhetoric of Hindu
revivalism. He has grown to despise the RSS, but still cannot get rid
of some of those propaganda songs from his memory.

We decide to stay in Nagpur for two days. I call up Bhanu Rajagopalan,
a general do gooder of Nagpur. Son of a renowned acoustic engineer,
Bhanu runs an advertising and marketing company. He, from time to
time, tries to fire up the somnolent life of Nagpur’s citizens
with dashes of art and social service.

Then there was another friend, also a journalist. Pankaj Maniktala.
Pankaj is the Business Editor of Nagpur’s old paper The Hitawada. Rohan, Pranav and I meet up with Bhanu and Pankaj, and drive to the outskirts of the city. Bhanu knows everybody who is anybody in Nagpur. And soon enough we were discussing some of those worthies over strong rum.

I am conscious. I do not want to play reporter. I guard against bringing up the issue of the communal riots that was playing on my mind. Bhanu and Pankaj start talking. And soon we get into another subject. Bhanu is a friend of India’s living humanitarian, Baba Amte. Amte’s colony for leprosy patients has grown by leaps and bounds. His children have followed him into a career in social service.

Bhanu had been there only the night before. He talks of his experience.
Pankaj, whom we dragged from a groggy out-of-turn sleep is clued on.
So is Pranav. Bhanu tells you marvellous tales. For example, Prakash
Amte, Baba Amte’s son, has a virtual zoo on his estate. He has
fed tiger cubs; unknown and not necessarily harmless animals, are
time and again brought to his estate by the tribals of the area.
Prakash keeps all of them, and they grow up, without him or the rest
of the estate people realizing that they are in fact dangerous man eating animals.

But Prakash’s biggest problem is snake bites. So he has trained the tribals to catch snakes instead of killing them. He prepares some kind of
anti-venom from these captive snakes, which are released after the venom has been extracted. Interestingly, Bhanu says, he stores the samples in a 40 year old fridge.

Pankaj jumps in, saying Prakash Amte’s place is indeed a great
place to visit.

“Those guys are doing a great job. The entire family, three
generations of them, are in this neck of wilderness doing social
service,” says Bhanu.

“Yes. And they serve very simple food. He even eats food served
by the lepers with their mauled hands,” says Pankaj as much to
pull Bhanu’s leg as to underline where his empathy stops.

“So what yaar? They are also human,” says a not at all
squeamish Bhanu.

“That’s all fine, but why do you want to eat food served
by those hands? I stop there.”

I change the subject. Not because there was any unpleasantness or possibility of that arising. We talk of the big city-small city
divide. We talk of unethical practices in journalism. We talk about
mediocrity in the profession. We talk through the night almost, but
throughout not a single mention of the communal riots in neighbouring
Gujarat. It was not intentional. Nor was it a symptom of
insensitivity. It was just another aspect of life. One cannot grieve
all the time for all the people. I was relieved. The issue I had in
mind had been left untouched that night.

I rolled the irony on my tongue. Throughout what had been on my mind, was not even touched upon in the city that is home to the perpetrators of the mayhem in Gujarat, the RSS. And the ones with whom I was that night were genuine seculars.