The Improbable Wallah

I am drinking my coffee on the sitout with a copy of the TOI. The serial killings in Noida have made the headlines again; the death toll now stands at 38 and the villagers are protesting that the local police – or cops, as the TOI prefers to describe them – turned a blind eye because they had been bribed to do so. There are also accusations that the police acted in collusion with the killer and may have been directly involved in selecting victims; organ trading has given way to cannibalism as a motive. The security forces pacify the demonstrators with Lachtis while the lawyers struggle to find witnesses who are not too scared of reprisals to testify at the initial hearing.
“Another fine day in Puri,” a quiet, well-spoken voice says from the veranda steps rising from the garden. It belongs to Brian, a retired head teacher from England; he is modest, worldly wise and charming. We chat for a while in the morning sunshine and Brian tells me he is a volunteer at a mission for disabled children in Puri; it’s something he does for a month or so every year , whether here or up in Kolkata at the hostel for dying, destitute men. He tells me the story of an eight year-old boy that he has been looking after at the mission, and it is immediately burned into my memory with an awful clarity. I walk up CT Road and collect the Yamaha, ride past the rambling old colonial Great Eastern Railway Hotel with its plinthed, narrow gauge steam engine in the garden; over the bridge that crosses a foul smelling stream lined with hovels, along VIP Road and park outside the reservations office on Station Road.
There is one berth remaining on the Howrah-Chennai Superfast Mail – train number 2603, departing Bhubaneswar at 6.38 tomorrow morning – the last of the ten first class, air-conditioned sleepers the train conveys; there is no other accommodation available – every other carriage is full and has a Wait List of hundreds hoping there will be cancellations and a seat, or berth will become available.
I ride the Yamaha along Marine Drive, past the seafront hotels that are the preserve of domestic Indian tourists, and then out onto Beach Road. The souvenir hawkers and chai stalls fall away, the hotels dwindle to nothing; on my left, an empty, golden beach; on my right, scrub and palm trees. Ahead of me, a straight, flat, deserted tarmac road disappears into the horizon. I take the little Yamaha to the limit, keeping the two-stroke engine in the power band and hit 70mph; the windblast snatches at my shirt, cooling me and scorching my skin at the same time. The sky is a dazzling blue, sunlight glitters on the crests of the breakers rolling in from the Bay of Bengal. The road peters out into a sandy track after a couple of miles, so I put the bike on its stand and walk along the beach. I ride back to Marine Drive and park behind Beach Beer Parlor No2: if there is a Parlor No1, I have yet to see it. I order a Royal Challenge beer, and ask the barman if he would keep my daypack in the back room of the shack. I sip my drink under the gazebo set out on the sand in front of the bar, and then walk across the beach and wade out into the sea. The beach slopes into the water and then levels out; after 100 metres I am still only waist deep. I let the early breakers crash over me and the late waves lift me, swimming through them and riding them back towards the shore. I walk back to the Beer Parlor and wash away the briny taste in my mouth with ice-cold Royal Challenge.
Again I see the two year-old boy lying in the pit outside the hovel’s door. His parents are farmers, uneducated, scratching a meager living out of the land; they cannot take the mentally handicapped infant into the fields with them, so they dig a pit outside their shack and leave him there from dawn until they return at dusk. He lies in the same position every day for six years before he is rescued and finds his way to the mission in Puri. But the damage is already done: his leg is withered and twisted from years of being folded beneath him; his head his permanently thrown back and his eyes sealed shut as protection from the sun that beat down on him in his cramped hole outside the hovel.
I put on my trainers, collect my bag, and then ride back along Beach Road and let the sun and the 60 mph wind dry my shorts. But my enthusiastic riding – I spent a lot of my younger years riding fast motorbikes - comes at a cost: the Yamaha’s engine putters to a stop and will not restart. While I was shouldering my bag outside the lock-up this morning, the owner must have turned the petrol tap that I set to main tank to reserve. The tank is bone dry and the beach and road empty. I light a Wills Classic, sit by the road and wait. After 20 minutes a scooter appears in the distance, struggling along the dusty track that leads off into the jungle. I wave it down and a pleasant Indian man gives me a lift to a roadside shack near the Beach Beer Parlor No2; I buy a litre of petrol in an old plastic water bottle – it is bright orange, the colour of Lucozade. As I get onto the pillion, my calf touches the exhaust pipe of the scooter: it blisters instantly, an angry, red swelling.
I ride back to CT Road, drop off the Yamaha and chastise the owner for not running it on the main tank; I pick-up some anti-septic ointment and bandages, and then go back to my room to treat the wound. It is already seeping a thin, yellow pus and has the throbbing heat of infection.
I take a cycle-rickshaw to Grand Road and shop for paper, pens and a small holdall in the Ganj. Halfway there I tell the wallah to pull over. The rickshaw has a double tube steel frame, a thick rear axle and a heavy, wooden bench set above the back wheels; even without the weight of one or two passengers it must be difficult to pedal, and I’ve often seen an exhausted wallah pushing his empty rickshaw up the slightest of gradients.
There really is only one way to find out.
I give the wallah my bag and tell him to get in the back; his jaw drops in disbelief as I explain to him that to understand how hard his job is, I have to try it myself. And the rickshaw really is as heavy and ungainly as it looks. I stand up on the pedals to get us rolling, and fight with the loose handlebars to keep on course, rattling over potholes and getting bogged down in the patches of sand when I stray too far to the edge of the road. It creates quite a spectacle, a Westerner pedaling a rickshaw wallah through the streets of Puri. The Indians we pass are in fits of laughter, calling and waving. People come out of shops and Dhabas to see what is going on. There is clapping and cheering, shouts of encouragement. I thank the wallah and tip him generously for his indulgence. The tired eyes that began our journey to Grand Road are now animated and full of humour, and he shakes my hand warmly as he asks, “Your good name, sir?”
I eat a masala of fresh king prawns at the Ahaa Garden restaurant, sharing the tails between a one-eared half-blind dog and her companion, a small black and white cat.
I walk back to the Ghandra hotel and sit up on the rooftop terrace with a Kingfisher; the wind is howling in from the sea - a cool, refreshing gale. I know two things – no three things - for definite: I will be sleeping on the Howrah-Chennai Mail tomorrow night; somewhere in Kolkata, the volunteers tending to the homeless who would otherwise die on the streets are soaking the men’s dhotis in disinfectant before gently peeling the cloth away from their ulcerated legs; I could spend a lifetime on Indian Railways and never become bored.