DO GOAN

Fat men are everywhere.

I was thinking about this on Tuesday night and wondering, in a patronising way, how this could be true even in a place like India where there is such enormous competition for such finite resources.I know where the tubbies come from in London where wages are high and food is cheap. They're sired by pints and pork scratchings and a national food hierarchy which makes the least nutritious food the most attractive and available. But India? Whose lunch money had this monolithic man suctioned into the seat beside me been stealing?

I had a lot of time to contemplate this during the 14 bone-rattling hours I spent cannoning around the bus from Mumbai to Goa, the excess weight of my travel companion in the window seat to my right, splashing across the dividing armrest and into my lap.It started out as a pretty exciting adventure. I was the only westerner on a bus carrying a capacity 45 passengers, all of them ready with a smile and a head waggle. A benign looking black dog rounded out the team. Even it was willing to offer a welcoming waggle from its owners lap. I gave it a friendly little ruffle behind the ears as I took my seat, unaware of the patient and calculated malice of which it was capable. Six hours later I would discover just how devious this malignant little creature could be.

The bus contained 45 tightly spaced recliner seats, some incapable of reclining, others incapable of doing anything else. Protocol dictated that, once seated, those passengers in seats which could be reclined were obliged to do so immediately, preferably with a maximum of force. The seats were not to be returned to the upright position until after the journey’s conclusion. A bank of fans between the windows on each side of the bus promised some relief from the stifling heat reflected off the baking tarmac beneath the tyres and the humidity generated by the burbling engine, the late afternoon sun and the kinetic energy of 48 humans and one canine, breathing and sweating together in a metal and glass box. Their promise was not fulfilled. The fans didn't work.

Nor did the reading lights placed over each seat, so I put away my books and stared across the pitching hillock of my fat companion’s stomach and out of the window at the grubby Mumbai streets.The bus swept into the liquid chaos that marks the roads of every major city in the developing world. Traffic swirled and eddied around us as we poured our glutinous way through the never ending rush-hour. Gradually the crumbling colonial grandeur of Colaba and The Fort and the rotting buildings of the failed Raj gave way to more recent, but no less dilapidated structures. These mossy high rise apartment blocks and offices in turn gave way to incrementally less distinguished premises until finally we reached the seemingly limitless fields of shacks and hovels which make up the southern slums of Mumbai, the home of more than a million souls.

Just as we left the last stretch of city behind us the dull strip-lights which ran along the centre of the bus were dimmed and the television screen at the front of the bus flickered into life. The burble of conversation slackened and died and the opening credits of a film appeared. Outside the world was darkness, broken occasionally by the flare of the headlights from an oncoming vehicle or the dull neon of the signs which mark the rest stops, petrol stations and hotels – little more than neon-lit open concrete shells – which loomed sporadically out of the gloom. The ocean of darkness offered nothing of interest so I turned back inwards and focused on the film.

I don’t speak Hindi. I can say “thank you” and “please” and “bill please, thank you” but I was concerned that unless Indian cinema had embraced a strangely limited form of Art House movie making I was going to have some trouble following the plot. I needn’t have worried.

The basic plot was as transparent as any romantic comedy produced in the west and decidedly less fatuous than most. The basic outline was this; clumsy but endearing fat man likes pretty girl. Handsome friend hatches schemes to help clumsy but endearing fat man. They sing a song. Schemes fail as a result of hilariously unpredictable mishaps. They sing a song. Handsome friend falls in love with single mother. Single mother’s ragamuffin son launches well executed schemes to prevent handsome friend from singing songs with mother. Hilarity. Song. Clumsy but endearing fat man finally gets pretty girl. They sing a song. Handsome man wins over single mother’s son and, subsequently, single mother. All get together to sing a song. Credits roll.

My traveling companions offered none of the uncontrolled enthusiasm I’d previously been led to believe Bollywood sparked in the Indian people. I was disappointed, particularly as that morning I had been offered the role of dancing westerner by one of the scouts who routinely work the traveler’s haunts in Colaba, looking for cheap and enthusiastic extras to shimmy for their cameras. ‘I’d have unlocked the fervor in them with the overwhelming passion of my patented Motown shuffle’ I thought as the bus wound its way though the darkness. ‘They’d have been dancing in the aisles’.

The road between Mumbai and Panji is an unlit two-way stretch of pot-holed bitumen. It is the main artery between the state capitals of Maharashtra and Goa and yet it is less substantial than most of the B-roads in England. It carries a phenomenal amount of traffic.

A sizable fleet of busses leaves Mumbai for Panji at around 6pm every night. All of them squeeze out into the rush-hour on MS Road at almost exactly the same time. They race each other from rest-stop to rest-stop, those buses with more powerful engines overtaking the slower moving older vehicles on the upward stretches, the less powerful vehicles, through the obstinacy and reckless courage of their drivers, frequently reclaiming their rank a short time later on the downward slope. Whether the newer vehicles have governors which restrict their speed on the decline or the drivers of the less powerful machines have some unknown motivation for taking greater risks than their rivals I do not know. What I do know is that our whining old tub, which was forced to take even the slightest of inclines in second gear, lost very little ground on far more modern rivals across the entirety of the trip.

The passing ritual in India is rudimentary and universal. A vehicle grinds up behind a slower means of transportation, sounds its horn, swings onto the far side of the road and accelerates. If during this maneuver a vehicle coming in the opposite direction appears the driver of the passing vehicle must sound his horn and gesticulate toward the driver of the vehicle on his left. The driver of the vehicle on the inside is then obliged to either respond with his own horn and series of gesticulations before staring straight ahead with a determined look on his face, or, he grudgingly slows his pace to allow the driver of the passing vehicle ahead of him.

If the driver of the inside vehicle does not honor the driver of the passing vehicle, the driver of the passing vehicle may choose to slow down and resume his place behind the vehicle he was attempting to pass, shaking his head and cursing violently. He will then regroup in order to attempt a renewed passing effort at the next available opportunity. It is more likely however, that when faced with this challenge, he will sound his horn a further time and accelerate harder. At this point oncoming traffic may very well be upon the passing vehicle. If this is the case the driver of the oncoming vehicle is obliged to sound his horn, flash his lights and slow down. In that order. The driver of the overtaking vehicle then has two options; he either swerves hard left, forcing the driver of the vehicle on his inside to concede the passing maneuver by driving him off the road, or he can begrudgingly concede defeat and fall back, gesticulating wildly at the drivers of both the oncoming vehicle and the vehicle he has failed to pass. He will then await the opportunity to execute a fresh passing maneuver at the nearest possible opportunity.

Bus drivers in this country are proud, courageous and obstinate men. They should not be challenged lightly.

After the film finished my fat companion chose to attempt sleep. He closed the windows to stop the wind luffing in his face, spiking the humidity and making a clammy and damp situation even damper and clammier. Soon he began to snore fulsomely. As an added torment he started to fart.

We stopped for petrol. An enormous poster of India’s cricket captain was plastered to the window of the garage garlanded with the words: "MS Dhoni drives on Speed". Surely not something to be widely encouraged, I thought, recalling the manic fervor of earlier downhill runs.

I turned to my iPod and closed my eyes, hoping to insulate at least two of my senses from the unpleasantness that surrounded me. My back was stiff and my legs tight and amid the heat on my skin, the stink in my nose and the discomfort in my coiled muscles, sleep seemed a long way off.

For some reason I could feel an unaccountable dampness on the bare toes of my left foot. I thought about this momentarily before opening my eyes to see my foot awash in a foaming, sticky liquid which had worked its way to me from somewhere at the front of the bus. I followed the course of this unpleasant little stream along the aisle. It stopped about three seats from the front, where a small reservoir of the substance had pooled, before it broke banks and ran freely, driven backwards by the inertia of the bus.

My eyes reach the source just as a heavy droplet of the sticky liquid smacked to the floor, facilitating a further breach of the pool’s banks. I looked up at the source of the droplet and there, staring back at me with those seemingly benign dark eyes was the black dog, its long pink tongue lolling from the side of its mouth. It met my gaze briefly and with a look of whimsical disdain it shifted its weight in its owners lap and dismissing me from sight. Even the animals didn’t want me to sleep.

The songs shuffled for almost two hours before my head began to loll. A lecture by Noam Chompski on linguistics and philosophy began. I thought this curious as I couldn’t remember uploading it onto my iPod but his voice had a pleasingly mellifluous tone which made me feel very relaxed, so I let it run.

I began to doze, stuck somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, occasionally bumped into partial consciousness by the startling screech of a truck's horn as it powered past us up a hill or the sudden jolt of an aborted overtaking maneuver.Then beneath the soft round tone of Professor Chompski’s East Coast English came a loud and persistent sibilance, like the sudden white-noise which used to appear on car stereos whenever you were listening to the radio and went under a bridge. More alarmingly the vehicle began to wobble. My body was thrust forward onto the fully reclined seat in front of me, the top of the chair striking me in the solar plexus. The brakes screeched and I was thrown back into my chair as the vehicle came to a sudden rest.

Passengers stared at each other through sleepy, confused eyes. A stunningly loud horn sounded in my ear as the air was torn from the cabin and a rival bus whined past at alarming speed. Our bus shifted on its suspension, sucked toward the turbulence of the passing vehicle.

The road at this point was narrow and the soft shoulder virtually non-existent and already partially claimed by a sturdy bank of lush and well established trees. The road turned sharply to the right less than sixty metres from where we stood. We were worryingly exposed.

The situation didn’t phase the bus driver or his two companions however, who swiftly maneuvered the vehicle onto even ground. Fortunately the tyre which had blown was on the rear driving axle, which was supported by four tyres in total. Had a front tyre bust the outcome would have been significantly less benign.

My fellow passengers seemed untroubled by these dark thoughts and all had returned to the business of sleep. I listened to the sound of the men changing the tyre for a few minutes and then tried to zone out myself.

My tubby companion woke just long enough to re-open the window to let some air into the stifling humidity of the now stationary bus. The breeze felt nice on my damp face and I was on the verge of nodding off when an almost supernaturally loud screeching tore through my semi-conscious state. I shot up, startled and confused. It was like I’d just been punched in the head by a sonic fist. I looked up to see the tail-lights of a goods truck disappearing into the distance. I’d just about shaken off the incident when it happened again. And seconds it happened a third time. And it kept happening. I don’t know if it was out of solidarity or triumphal gloating, or if it was some kind of safety measure, but the driver of every passing vehicle sounded its horn, which was generally placed at such a height and directed in such a way that its full volume was channeled directly through the open window of our bus and into my right ear hole. And nothing would stop it. It was like the noise was made up of real material. Like hard atoms of sound were forcing their way directly into my head. I did not like it.

I got up to get off the bus. I needed to get away from the fury of those terrible horns but as I rose to leave the driver resumed his seat and the door was pulled shut. We had lost just thirty minutes.

At the next stop I got off the bus and inspected the tread on the tyres. I wished I hadn't. I spent the rest of the journey fatigued but far from sleepy.

And that, is it for now.

Dale Atkinson