National Highway 66

📍Gokarna, Karnataka, India (Issue 185)

When I refuse to take the NH66 I cross rivers by boat.

The NH66 runs from Kanyakumari to Mumbai and though it's the direction I'm headed, until last week I had avoided this grim tarmac demon. But the highway has moved closer to the sea and squeezed me onto her. It's become a travel companion, and we have an on-off relationship. I leave in the morning only for us to bitterly reconnect the same afternoon. She is ghastly and inconsistent, chaotic and slow.

I have, however, been lucky to dine out on the NH66, and along her hard shoulder are two types of restaurants. The first is marked by a sun-bleached sign hoisted in the nineties or maybe even the sixties. The sign hangs limp, in the same way that in the Middle Ages a hanged body served as a warning to strangers to stay away. Outside the restaurant there's a woman with terrible posture throwing cups of filthy water onto the dusty ground, to keep the pollution at bay.

Little good it does! Damn that dust. That putrid dust! It follows the trucks as if haunting them; it churns in the air like smokestacks, swirling in a vortex, whipping the unthinkable grime up from the ground, and throwing it at the restaurant's open interior. A couple of ceiling fans do their best to blow away the worst. The omniscient owner, always cheery and male, never in motion, sits at the wooden desk by the entrance, tallying seventy plus fifteen, for masala dosa and chai, and taking cash. Owing to the air quality, he never ceases to clear his throat to hack up the last quarter hour of congestion. He, too, is forever short of small change and eyes my crisp 500 rupee note (£5) with discomfort: "No change". His drawer is stacked with change! I can see it; he can see that I can see it! It's crushed together un-sorted, a kaleidoscope of coloured notes. Small change, although ubiquitous, is the most treasured thing along the NH66; a twenty rupee note, I sometimes feel, is worth more than five hundred.

Not long ago, the NH66 was a single track, the remnants of which I cross, like uncovering an ancient Roman road in Hampshire. Some houses have been torn in half to make way for the highway, but they remain inhabited, with their bathroom now opening onto the road, their kitchen — gutted — hanging over the curb. Presently, the NH66 is a four-lane highway built by an Indian contractor, though the building of it ceased before it was complete. There is every sign of construction but no sign of the contractor! Concrete towers represent new bridges, though nothing is suspended for the 'bridging'. We weave our way between foundations. The traffic — in which I flow — is often diverted onto the side road, down some steep and mudded ditch, or into the path of oncoming lorries. The sun will boil the oceans before the dotted lines are painted on the rolled tarmac or the street lights are connected to the grid. 

The wicked state of the NH66 means vehicles travel about as fast as me, and for fifty kilometres a bus to Cortalim or to Chauri will overtake my tired legs on an uphill stretch. It’ll then slow down without warning for an unmarked speed bump, or to drop a passenger. When standing on my peddles, I take the speed bump in my stride and pull ahead, accelerating rapidly on any downhill or flat. Soon, I'm met again with another incline; the bus to Chauri drags itself past me, exhaling leaded petrol fumes so dense to be illegal anywhere else on Earth. I’m sure the mesosphere, which hosts the aurora some 200km above us, has a higher oxygen content than the slow lane on the NH66. I breathe through my nose. The lads in the back of the bus wave as they grind past me. With not a little satisfaction, I undertake them the next time we cross a speed bump or roll downhill. My day is essentially this, hour after hour, listening to Songs of Isha, and feeling at peace, at one with the traffic, at one with the dust.

The second type of restaurant is Salvation. It's this that I wait for—a chilled 'Pure Veg' paradise. The building sits on a paved parking lot with good shade for bicycles. It has bathrooms with doors on, sinks with soap and windows to protect the diners from the noise and the smoke and the clouds of pink-grey dust. Hardly perceptible at midday, this dust is inflamed by the morning and the evening sun and creates a golden haze you can taste even hours later. This second type of restaurant has air conditioning in an 'A/C Family Room' which I walk in to steaming to the surprise of the conservative Indian families. Here, I even take the risk and have ice in my watermelon juice — a no-no for the precious Western traveller in India. Having washed my face and hands of dust, I sit protected from the NH66 for half an hour, usually with my back to it in vain disrespect.

Over the inevitable masala dosa and chai, it's in the second of these restaurants that a kind family (now subscribers) treat me to breakfast. They introduce me to Allamaprabhu, a Vachana poet and a mystic saint from the 12th century. Allamaprabhu was from Karnataka, the state we are in. He might have even walked along the NH66! In his time, he promoted the philosophy of a unitary consciousness of Shiva (god) and Self, a non-duel way of thinking of the world, where ‘God’ and ‘I’ are one. Allamaprabhu wrote, 

Without the duality – mind and mere bone,
For him who has merged his own Self with the Lord,
All actions are actions of linga alone.
With mind given rest from its usual toil,
For him who has merged his own Self with the Lord,
All thoughts of attainment his knowledge be spoil.
Himself into Self having joined with great yoke,
For him there's no dual, no unity broke,
O Lord of the Caves!

—  Allamaprabhu, Translated by R Blake Michaelby

I'm once more surprised by what I learn from strangers. Spirituality in India, no matter the congestion, pollution, and general chaos (is this unfair?!), is never more than one chai deep in conversation; it's never more than a dozen kilometres away by road. It's always there; we only have to look, we needn't even ask.