What struck me is this — there was no announcement on a PA system, no officials busily informing passengers what to do. Everything worked on word-of-mouth, each passenger telling the others, the news traveling from one end of the train to the other like a wave. I scrambled out of the bunk, followed the long file of groggy, excited passengers onto a rattle-trap bus. The journey was fun. The roads were beautiful and intermittent rain pearled the gigantic windshield. There was music on my iPod. There was Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions when I bored of the landscape, which was seldom. There were excitable boys playing Dumb Charades with wild gesticulations. The woman next to me peeled bananas and chatted about her home in Margao, her IT-professional son in Bangalore, and her husband who refuses to go anywhere anymore. The TC accidentally dropped his clipboard on me and just missed goring one eye. For the rest of the trip, he gave me sheepish grins which I returned with the ‘I’m such a good person that I forgive you’ look. Such drama! If the journey had lasted much longer, it would have become a love affair.

***

The string of buses stopped for brunch (dosa and sheera) at a wayside place just before Karwar. One of the passengers — a woman traveling alone — went to the loo and her bus left without her. She had not told anyone where she was going or that they should wait. She had not registered her presence in some manner — and it’s easy to be invisible when you’re alone. Anyway, she did the sensible thing of getting onto our bus. She seemed poor and elderly though she might have been middle-aged with the prematurely haggard look that hardship brings. She was frantic about her things left behind on the other bus. For the next four hours or so, she begged the TC to find out, cried intermittently, even struck her chest in worry and fear. I wonder what her bag contained. What possessions, what valuables, what earthly things. All her money for the journey? Jewels she had carried to some wedding? All the clothes she owns?

Our TC called a few of the others but he clearly did not know all the numbers. Finally he told her she would have to travel to Vasco where all the buses would terminate, and then hunt for her bag. She asked if the buses would be traveling back to Margao where she wanted to get off. He said no. She looked stricken, realizing she would have to spend the extra money to get back on her own. For her, it was not a good journey.

***

I got off at Margao, took a cab to my hotel and got there at 4 pm, only two hours later than anticipated. The next two days were spent in sinful indolence and soul-baring talk (I was meeting my closest friend after years). Goa itself was beautiful — wetly green and fecund, bleak and stormy all at the same time. Palolem beach had one and a half shacks open and a straggle of kids playing football.

In one of the shacks, the deadpan manager turned out to be a lech, full of roving eyes and roving questions. I was short with him. My friend astutely pointed out that our food would now be laced with spit. We retreated to the other shack where the waiters were more discrete. We drank cocktails and ate king fish. All the beach dogs were inside to shelter from the rain. They nestled near our legs or sat at the edges of the shack like sentries, or dosed in small pits they had dug for themselves. The plastic sheets covering the shack flapped in the wind. The sand between our toes was dark and gritty. We talked about college and life, the last ten years and now. We watched the sea roil and seethe.

I took a flight back to Bangalore because all trains on the southwestern route had been canceled. More landslides. So I didn’t have time to finish the second book I had taken along, Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Oh, but instead, I used the extra time to lounge around the hotel. I saw a huge chess board with its horses dripping rain water. And I drank beer in a pool while it was pouring, my tiny spot covered by a gazebo while all along the rest of it, sharp needles of water rose upwards like steam. I’m not complaining.

We get lost a lot. On our way up to Thadiyendamol and back, we try shortcuts, jump the wrong walls, run up deeply mossed steps to the other side of the mountain. There is a feeling of constantly traveling sideways. Then there are the women. At a dead-end in the forest, a bland white house and in the verandah, a woman who fixes us with her mad eyes as if she knows our deepest secrets. Later, after a crossing of streams, a tribal woman who smiles in relief as if she likes unexpected guests, gives us water from her groundwater tap. I am struck by our differences, all of us, women standing on the same small bit of mountain.

About E, what stays with me are not the specifics so much as a ‘mood’, the air she carries about her — of adventure bordering on foolhardiness, and the kind of innocence that Indian girls must lose pretty quickly. E is not wary, furtive, careful, or cold around men she passes on the streets. She smiles, says hello. They look bemused, shy or amused depending on their age and general proclivities. When I am with her during these exchanges,  I look away, am often caught between grimace and smile. You see, I’m not used to such warmth with strange men. I’m more the ‘look through – look down – look sternly ahead’ kinda girl. This difference in our behaviour makes me think of the places we grew up in, the ways in which we grew up.

I wonder what it would be like to walk down a road and not see men as  potential trouble. To not shuffle or scuttle or sidle by.

***

After I got back, I rather instinctively googled  ‘russia women’ to find out more about gender constructs in modern-day Russia.  I say ‘instinctively’ because if I had stopped to think, I would have remembered the stereotype and expected the gadzillion dating and marriage sites I was hit with. Of course, I quickly modified my search with ‘gender relations’, ‘freedom of mobility’.  But I discovered little because the sea of dating sites and other stereotypes swamped everything else.

There were more putrid examples like this, but also reasonably innocent-sounding ones. This blogger talks about this phenomenon in some detail:

According to Google, all Russian women strive for one thing: a marriage with a foreigner. The first link that came up stated “All Russian Women Want to Escape from Russia” –  with an only intention of finding a foreign partner, of course….The ‘Russian woman’ as been turned into a brand by the internet.  I am surprised no one has registered the Russian Woman trademark yet. (Or has someone?)

Clearly, we have no other desires but to popularize ourselves with handsome foreign strangers who will whip out their cyber guides, make us borsch, and will then whisk us away from our homeland. Do women in other cultures have a better digital reputation?

So using the same, rather loose attitude-mapping tool, I googled ‘India women’. The top link was something about ‘100 beautiful Indian women’ but most of the other links on the first page dealt with women’s problems in one form or another — an article on the Mangalore bar attacks, a UN report on women’s status, a dated, bleak census report on women’s health. And I wondered if all of us are just traveling sideays after all, in our own corners of the world.

I pull the curtain aside to trees outlined against the dark like giant ghosts.  The iPod beats a tune. I feel clear, unfogged. This is unusual — I am not a morning person. Forests at night can be suffocating in their density, a jumble of shadows. But the plantations of Coorg are different. Orderly in their beauty. Immensely cheerful. I catch some of this, even at this hour, like this.

A little later, I stand shivering at Virajpet bus station, cursing the cab driver who has not turned up. It is the darkest hour of night and the town looks scary as sleeping towns tend to. Nearby, a parked auto rickshaw with three men inside talking in low murmurs. A truck glows lurid yellow under a street lamp. There may be people inside but I’m not sure.  I try to look as inconspicuous as possible, given the fact that my jacket is fire-engine red. I  distract myself by thinking of how I will relate this little adventure once I’m home and safe.

When my cabbie arrives — Raja who has a bad cold and no handkerchief — I am relieved, as if I have met someone I love after many years. I collapse into the seat and forgive him. Because he has clearly dressed in a hurry. Because I am tired and need to pee. And because I love Coorg and am full of the joy of that.

The road from Virajpet to Kakkabe, higher up at the foothills of the Thadiyendamol peak, takes 45 minutes at this time. The road is smooth and Raja is friendly without being familiar. He asks me where I am from. Bangalore, I say. ‘No, native place?’ I hesitate. ‘Calcutta?’ I offer. ‘He seems satisfied, as if I have confirmed something. He has lived his whole life in Virajpet. I try to imagine the boundaries of his life.

We reach the home-stay an hour later and I tumble into my bed for a nap after watching dawn break over the hills. I wake up after two hours and step out of my room to this.

***

Blog posts on the trip may seem a bit disjointed. This is because I was in Coorg and Kabini to do some resort reviews and can’t say much without impinging on my stories.

The view from the seafront restaurant at hotel ‘The Promenade’

A Pondicherry cop waddling smartly across the street

Sunlight filtering through the Big Banyan near the Matri Mandir at Auroville

…and another view of the Big Banyan

A bohemian restaurant and art studio called Le Space in the French part of town

A cycle rickshaw parked outside the restaurant as its driver steps into a bar

Magnum-sized bottles at the bar at Hotel de Pondicherry

One the way back, we stopped at Taj Fisherman’s Cove for lunch

…where the restaurant overlooked blue sea and a solitary crow on the beach