FOOTLOOSE IN THE HEART OF INDIA

“Do you want to dance like crazy around a bonfire or do you want to indulge in some real backpackin’?” asked Rocker. How could I, a wannabe Ian Wright, say no to this one? What followed was a sensational trip, one that would make veteran backpackers go green with jealousy. We even bested African Overlanders on one count - sheer randomness.

The journeymen: Rocker (career in HR…anyone?), Ed Scissorhands (Nero cometh!), Arn (the Bong beefcake) and I (Rasta tresses galore!)

Day 1: We managed to buy four tickets to Jabalpur. Armchair travelers would argue that managing to buy tickets should not ideally merit a line in a travel log. Well, that was the only time that we managed to do something right on this trip. Intent on making this trip on half-a-shoestring, we set out on foot towards the bus stand. The bus was scheduled to leave at 10:30 pm. We reached the station at 10:45 pm. A half-hour wait and a few phone calls later, we realized that we had missed the bus. So, we caught another bus to the depot at Old Nagpur, where the bus was to make its final stop before making its move towards Jabalpur. Luckily, we managed to board the bus. One self-proclaimed Good Samaritan ensured that we would get no sleep in the bus. The bus stopped at Seoni at around 2 am. We got down from the bus, had platefuls of poha, smoked a few cigarettes and relieved ourselves of the bile-in-the-bladder. A couple of hours later, we found ourselves in Jabalpur. The chill in the air was enough to send you packing to a dingy street side stall to have tea. Which is exactly what we did? Ed managed to strike up a conversation with a rickshaw puller, as only he can. “The rickshaw puller would help us get a hotel room for 300/- rupees”, said Ed. We jumped at the opportunity. The emaciated rickshaw puller pulled us to a garish looking Hotel Pankaj Palace, bang in the middle of Wright Town in Jabalpur.
The paan chewing person at the reception looked like a villain straight out of a B-grade Hindi movie. We shed all our inhibitions and took a room for a meager 300 rupees for four people. The stain-filled pillows and the graffitied walls were revolting. But we had an attached bathroom. “You cannot expect everything for 75 rupees a night, can you?” I said. All three nodded in affirmation. Rocker and Arn readily slung themselves on the armor-hard bed to gain some sleep. Ed, the couch potato, switched on the TV and swayed to the tunes of India’s latest music sensation (some nasal crooner by the name Himesh) while I sat smoking cigarettes on the slashed-at sofa seat. At 8:00 am, we all made the customary visit to the toilet and dressed up for the visit to the marble cliffs of Bhedaghat.
Bhedaghat is situated at a distance of 23 km from Jabalpur. Its discovery is credited to one Captain J. Forsyth, who waxed eloquent about the strange marble rock formations in his memoirs. Strangely enough, this one-time dacoit-infested badland received recognition after a song from the film on the life of the ultimate dacoit - ASOKA was shot here, on a boat on the Narmada.
The auto-ride from Jabalpur to Bhedaghat was bumpy. However, we managed to get there in one-piece (a considerable achievement considering the fate of a girl in a Maruti some way ahead of us; she threw up a trail of puke all along the 23 km ride). We trekked our way up to a cliff and clicked a few photographs of the boats that glided past us. “Why don’t we conquer all of the peaks here?” said Ed. His suggestions were always weird. And depending on their timing, they could sometimes even be wayward, awkward or downright baseless. Somehow we all agreed to this one suggestion and pursued his dream. We tiptoed our way across peaks that could be graded as ranging from easy to ‘what the hell?’ We clung to rock faces that plunged into the river at right angles and even captured some of those moments for posterity. The most adventurous photograph was that of four topless males perched gingerly on top of a treacherous peak. The camera was set on self timer and kept on top of a nearby cliff. The famed Bandar-kudni proved to be elusive, but all the other cliffs lay prostrate at our feet after three hours of rock climbing.
However, we could not possibly spend the entire day on pure adrenaline. The poha and rabri that we had had for breakfast had found their final resting place in the remote corners of our sinews .Our stomachs were rumbling by now. We had rice, dal and some subzi for lunch at a dhaba and moved on.
Next stop was Dhuandhar-the violent waterfall (India’s answer to the Niagara). We trekked all the way to the fall and spent an hour in its cool water. By now, Ed’s mind was not on the trek. And that was because some corny girl, in cornier pink jeans was casting playful glances at him (he claimed this, but could not substantiate it with enough evidence). At 5:30 pm, we made our way back to Jabalpur. This, after we all got some marble memorabilia for ourselves from an MP government marble workshop. Rocker did not get anything for himself. Instead, he bought a crude house made from leftovers, from a poor girl (a la Charles Bronson from The Magnificent Seven).On our way back we alighted at the base of a hillock situated a few kilometers away from our hotel. We had to see the Madan Mahal, the palace of the erstwhile Gond rulers of the region. The trek up to the palace took us almost an hour. The palace was humble in comparison to some its contemporaries in North India. Ed, true to his manner, threw out a stream of expletives at the rulers for making a none-too-impressive palace on top of an imposing hillock. We even visited the Katanga Colony- where yours truly had spent a year of his early life. Our struggle to get an auto rickshaw to the colony almost landed me and Rocker in a fight with some local ruffians. We got back to our hotel at around 9 pm.
Back at our hotel, we wondered about how we could make the most out of this journey. Ed and Arn, the two conservatives in our ranks, were totally exhausted. They wanted to go back to Nagpur. Rocker and I wanted to extend the road trip. We shuttled from travel agency to travel agency trying to find out a cheap way of going to Khajuraho-India’s capital of erotica. While Ed and Arn fell asleep on their hotel beds, we smoked away whole packets of cigarettes. The stimuli, we thought would help us come up with a feasible idea. And I did come up with one. What an idea it was! We decided to go to Umaria and from there to Bandhavgarh, India’s densest tiger habitat. I bet all four of us would remember what followed, for the rest of our lives. We quickly had some Tandoori Chicken and biryani at a filthy roadside eatery (our idea of a New Year’s Eve meal) and set out towards Jabalpur station
So there we were, four twenty-somethings, happy at the thought of spending their New Year’s night in a stuffy general compartment of a passenger train, shuttling between a none-too-happening Jabalpur and a sleepy little hamlet, Umaria. We boarded the Shaktipunj Express at 11:45 pm. The people, for once, weren’t packed like a tin of sardines. Ed and Arn even found two bunkers to lie on. At midnight, we wished each other a ‘Happy new year’. Soon after, an RPF personnel rebuked Rocker and me for having boarded the wrong train. He said that the train wasn’t going to Umaria at all. This, after we had traveled for almost 2 hours on board the Shaktipunj. He even threatened to slap us with a hefty fine. Our fellow passengers advised us to get off at the next station. “Seems as though we are in a big soup”, said Rocker. “Whatever the destination, we always will have something new in store for us”, said I. Rocker broke into a grin, the kind that tells you that he was game for anything. We did not however consider one thing. “What will be the reaction of those two?” I said. “We’ll tell them”, said Rocker. We surely did tell them. And in great style too. We shook them out of their slumber and asked them to get off. The train chugged into the station. A rusty signboard indicated that the name of the place was Khanna Banjari. I pushed them out onto the platform. “We’ve got bad news for you both”, I said. “We are not in Umaria. In fact, we don’t even know where we are and how far we are from Bandhavgarh”, I said. Their faces went pale. Rocker went up to the station master and enquired how far Bandhavgarh was from Khanna Banjari. The station master was standing on the verandah of a ramshackle tile-roofed house. “It’s just 31 km from here”, he said. His reply set the adrenaline running in our limbs again.
We, however, had to spend the night at the station. Now, if Umaria (and I hadn’t seen it till then) was a sleepy hamlet, Khanna Banjari was absolutely Timbuktuesque in proportion. It just had a single platform and a lone station master’s office. There was no one else at the station bar four lost young souls and a station master. To add to our already overflowing cup of woes, it had just two benches on the platform. Each was just wide enough to ensure that one and only one person could sleep on it. But, we were four. No mathematician could have solved this skewed equation. Rocker rolled out his sleeping bag and slept on one of the benches. I lay down on the other bench. It wasn’t easy though. The bench was cold as a slab of steel and I had to coax Ed and Arn to stay awake. “We will sleep in turns”, I said. Amidst raging concerns of getting pneumonia the following morning, Ed and Arn found enough strength to have an argument about the best way to fold the blanket so as to cover me sufficiently with it. As I lay on the cold bench, they almost went on indefinitely. However, sanity soon prevailed and Ed got the station master’s permission to sleep on his verandah. We laid out newspaper sheets and a blanket on the floor and covered ourselves with the quilt. Rocker joined us soon. And then we all dozed off. That night we slept, and we slept so well that I still, sometimes, crave for such sleep.

Day 2: We woke up at around 6 in the morning, to the sound of mooing cows. A drove of cattle was grazing in a nearby field. In fact, the station was unlike any other that I can claim to have seen in my lifetime. We could see nothing but agricultural land for miles ahead. A group of farmers were squatting around a roadside tea stall, in the distance. We joined them and had tea and some S-shaped cookies- ones that required razor sharp teeth to break into. “Now I know the secret to the dentures of the village folk”, I thought to myself. It was not their healthy lifestyle, nor the pollution-free atmosphere of the village. It was these biscuits. Where in the city could you get such exercise for your teeth? Having finished our breakfast, we asked the boy at the tea stall for directions to Bandhavgarh. He advised us to trek 3 km to the nearest town and then take a bus to Tiger Country. Rocker managed to borrow a few beedis from the farmers. We huffed and ‘puffed’ our way to the quaint, little town of Barhi. It consisted of two lines of shops on either side of the road, a truck depot and a Sulabh Shauchalaya-one Bindeswar Pathak’s gift to a nation which still believes in defecating in the open. We went inside by turns and completed our morning rituals. We were all geared up now to go to Bandhavgarh.
The bus looked more like a horse-drawn buggy from some Spaghetti Western. We wriggled into our respective seats. A man in a colorful kurta was casting happy glances Rocker’s way. His neatly combed curls, polished nails and a teaser that he was humming suggested that he wasn’t just happy, that he was gay to boot. Rocker was starting to get conscious by all the attention that he was drawing. Luckily for Rocker, the man got down halfway through the journey. The 31 km ride took us one and a half hours to complete. And why wouldn’t it? We were virtually traveling over a roadless terrain that was part agricultural land and part jungle track. The bus dropped us at a diversion in the forest. Bandhavgarh, we were told, was still 4 km away. A truck driver allowed us a hitch to the Park gate for the nominal charge of having his photograph taken with his deputy.
Disappointment greeted us at the gate of the Tiger Sanctuary. A placard told us that a safari for six people would cost 1200 rupees. We were four; our notes and the few clanking coins in our pockets amounted to 950 rupees and the nearest ATM was at a distance of 37 km at Umaria. A recipe for disaster, surely! But two gentlemen from Katni came to our rescue. They were two and had come on bikes from Katni to see the famed tigers of Bandhavgarh. We decided to rent a vehicle together for the safari and split the expenses. They even offered to give us jobs after we finished engineering. Rocker had a lucrative internship lined up in Delhi and the remaining three of us already had jobs. So we politely refused.
In a dhaba in the town, we had roti and dal for lunch. Rocker, who decided to catch up on sleep while we were having lunch, had six samosas because we only had enough money left for that.
The safari was scheduled for the afternoon. We entered the Park in anticipation. The groups of people that had just returned had seen a tigress and her cubs preying on a hapless cheetal. We weren’t so lucky. We had to contend with a few cheetals, a fox, a jackal, some monkeys and a crazed wild elephant. The inexorably burgeoning undergrowth made game-spotting a difficult job. The ruins of ancient temples inside the Park were amazing pieces of architecture. Long abandoned, they now had bats dangling from the ribs in the ceiling, but little else. “Who, in their right minds, would have had the guts to build temples and palaces in the wilderness?” we wondered. We however managed to hear the roar of a tiger. It was gearing up to launch an attack on some poor animal, our guide and some screeching monkeys told us. This coupled with the message on a hoarding at the exit saying that it didn’t matter if we hadn’t seen the tiger, for the tiger had certainly seen us proved to be consolation enough. We walked to the town from the Park gate.
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Head /Expenses
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Cigarettes/ 21
Safari /800
6 rotis /12
1 dal /25
6 samosas /12
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Total /870
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Table: Spending done at Bandhavgarh

950 we had. Out of which 870, we had spent. Now we just had 80 rupees to make the journey to Umaria. And surprise, surprise! The tickets to Umaria cost us exactly 80 rupees. Good be to our Guardian Angel (I’m sure we had one all to ourselves during the trip)! At 9 pm, we reached Umaria. We now needed to go back to Nagpur. But even that would be a struggle. We now realized that we would have to take two trains and a bus to get to Nagpur.
We got off the bus at Umaria bus stand and took an auto rickshaw to the railway station. We had to stop the auto rickshaw at the first ATM that we managed to spot, to refuel our wallets. At Umaria station, we bore witness to a bloody family feud. A group of travelers were fighting amongst each other. One of them had a large stone in his hand and he was threatening to strike his adversary’s head with it. In the heat of the moment, he struck his son’s head with it. All hell broke loose at the station. The railway police chased down the offender and bashed him up. “Khanna Banjari was so much better. Why don’t they make it (and not Umaria) the official drop-off point for Bandhavgarh?” we thought as we stood there as silent observers. Meanwhile, we had some fruit cake at the Umaria station.
Amidst talks of boarding a goods train to Jabalpur, we boarded a passenger train to Katni. The journey took almost three hours and we could barely stand in the stuffy general compartment.
At Katni, we decided to splurge a bit. We ate full meals at a joint outside the railway station (our first full meals in a day). I wanted to take a look at the famous nautch-girls of Katni. I even took Rocker, Ed and Arn to a flower shop to buy garlands to be worn on the wrist. But my adolescent desire was put down by Arn with high-handed authority. “What if we aren’t virgins anymore in the morning?” he said. “As if we are proud to be virgins at age twenty two”, said Ed. Our initial enthusiasm doused by dissension in the ranks, we decided against going to the nautch-girls. We loitered around the streets of Katni for an hour and then caught another passenger train to Jabalpur. This time, Ed was lucky enough (though lucky is not a word that you would often associate with him) to get a bunker to sleep on and Arn found himself a seat. Rocker and I had to contend with the wet corridor between the toilets. This journey took us another two and a half hours. In Jabalpur, we got off the train and darted across to the bus depot to catch the earliest bus to Nagpur. It was 4:30 am and the man at the travel agency told us that the first bus to Nagpur would start off the blocks at six in the morning. I, almost immediately fell asleep, on the counter of the travel desk. The others slept on the other horizontal surfaces that they could find in the office.

Day 3: At six, we took our seats in the bus to Nagpur. And at 1:30 pm, we reached Nagpur. This journey from Jabalpur to Nagpur was boring as a dud. We almost slept through the length of the journey. On one particular occasion, I was awakened by the wet sensation of my own saliva on my shirt. We all were that tired. In fact, we all were drooling.

I now work in an IT firm in Mumbai. And the only journeys that I now make are from home to office and back. But the memories of this trip still linger on. The thought of four youths fighting for their share of the blanket on a station master’s verandah at Khanna Banjari, the micro-finance lessons that we learnt at Bandhavgarh and the sudden fit of must experienced in Katni will live on. The 3-day trip was a no-show in comparison to the 2-3 months that Overlanders spend on the road. But even their journeys are planned meticulously. Even they have an itinerary. And we? Well, we had none. It is that feeling of suddenly boarding a bus and then thinking “so, what next?” to yourself that appeals to me the most. And I bet that all four of us involved in this one-of –a-kind experience will never forget that high that the sheer spontaneity of the trip gave us. We may well forget that the Hanging Gardens were in Babylon, but will we forget that cows moo in the morning in Khanna Banjari? Well, that, we never will.