by Rosie Thomas
Richard Clark made some impatient noise and the man looked up from his task.
'Bureaucracy is the legacy left to us by you British,' he said coldly.
After the form had been filled, the passport holder was waved through into the inner office. Here, under a ceiling fan that wallowed in the humid air, a Mr Important sat behind a desk with a minion on either side of him.
He took my passport and frowned at it, then passed it to one of the clerks. While the senior man asked me some desultory questions about my suitability to enter India, the clerk thumbed through a greasy ledger evidently containing the details of frontier undesirables. Fantastically, the ledger entries were not in alphabetical or date order, or any other logical sequence. For each traveller every ledger entry had to be read through, from the first page to the last.
At the end, finally, the rubber stamp grudgingly descended on the passport.
We were luckier than the six Iranians, who were just behind us. They were marched off into another room for what would clearly be a long interrogation. They bore this treatment, and a version of it at every border we came to except their own, with patience and great good humour.
It was now almost four o'clock. The Indian customs formalities had taken more than four and a half hours to complete.
Behind the bamboo huts was the towering face of a huge river dam, and a few metres down a bank was a crescent of gritty sand that, regarded through half-closed eyes, could almost be called a beach.
True to form, Chris and Howard had refused to queue. They were lying on the sand sunbathing, and Howard was reading a volume of A.J.P. Taylor's essays.
'Going in for a swim?' Chris enquired.
I had only intended to cool my feet, but as soon as he suggested it the idea of a swim became irresistible. I knew that Phil was lurking under the trees, chafing to get straight in the car and drive on, but I pretended not to see him. I stripped off to my underclothes and ran into the water. The current ripping away from the dam was savage, but the water looked clean and the chill of it felt like heaven.
When I waded out again, I saw that an old man, three small boys and a mangy cur had gathered to look at me. Howard peered over the top of his book.
'Hmm. When Melissa went in, she drew a crowd of about forty.'
'Thanks.'
Phil was sitting in the car by now, practically gunning the engine, with the route notes on his lap.
'Ready? There's still 150 km to go.'
'I know. I'm ready.'
We drove over the dam, and had our book stamped at the 'India In' time control. We had an allowance of 2 hours and 50 minutes to cover the distance from here up to Nainital, which I thought was generous.
I hadn't reckoned with India.
The difference from Nepal became apparent within the first few kilometres. The spectators along the roadside didn't smile or wave. They only stared.
The road was busy with crowded buses and farm carts. We overtook pedestrians, doggedly walking between villages under the shade of big black umbrellas, and herds of the thinnest cattle I have ever seen. Every few hundred metres a dead dog lay in a cloud of flies. In the fields beyond, primitive pumping engines lifted and spouted water into irrigation ditches.
In the first town we came to the traffic seemed impenetrable. It was a stew of tuktuks and Tata buses, trucks and cars, and scooters sometimes carrying a whole family, the wife in her sari perched sidesaddle behind her husband and two or three small children wedged before and behind. Even bicycles usually carried two people, sometimes three.
'Use your horn,' we had been advised in the India drivers' briefing. Phil jammed his thumb on the button, adding our extra note to the cacophony of hooting and hissing and screaming brakes. It made no difference whatsoever, and it was hell for him to try to drive safely through this careening wilderness of metal and people and wandering livestock.
Nepal had looked poor, but there had been a grace about it that emanated principally from the people themselves. Grace was the last characteristic that anyone would associate with the road to Nainital, in the towns at least. The roadsides and the shacks that lined them were vistas of pure squalor. Men and women squatted in the dirt amid rotting towers of rubbish, spitting and excreting, sniffed at by starving dogs, watched by impassive children. The noise of traffic was ceaseless, and the heat as thick as a blanket.
We stopped for petrol, 40 litres, and were charged seventy-nine dollars for it. I had also made the mistake of assuming that India would be cheap, or at least that a fuel pump attendant, seeing that that was exactly the value of the currency I had with me, would not immediately declare it owing to him. There was no gauge on the pump, so we had no basis for argument.
We drove on, hungry and dehydrated again. There was never time to stop, never a proper interval for food or rest anywhere on the road. It was getting dark, and the traffic was so bad I was beginning to be concerned about the time.
We came to a place called Haldwani.
'Twinned with Golmud,' David Tremain said later.
The main street was choked with thousands of people, and buses and all the rest of our traffic adversaries. It was fully dark now, but half the vehicles didn't use lights. They drove head-on into the fray, in a blare of horns, playing chicken with every oncoming driver. There was no lane discipline – there were no lanes, even. Traffic in both directions used either side of the road with complete impartiality, overtaking and undertaking and skidding around each other in the fractured darkness. Pedestrians, ancient crones to minute toddlers, adopted the same approach in crossing the street.
Phil's eyes looked as if he had been up all night on a shovel-load of speed, and his knuckles stood out of his oily fists on the wheel like white moons. He swore monotonously and justifiably.
A young man on a scooter shot out of a side turning and swooped in front of us without even a glance over his shoulder. We just missed him, but we had screamed out our fear in unison, and the narrowness of the margin left us shaking.
Then beyond Haldwani the conditions changed with disorientating rapidity. The traffic disappeared, and black night wrapped around us.
'Can't see a fucking thing,' Phil muttered as we forged onwards. 'Is this the right way?'
I had caught a glimpse of Dave and Angela in the Rover back in the chaos of Haldwani, but no other rally cars since then. The empty road and the impenetrable darkness were disconcerting, and I was finding it impossible to pick out the landmarks listed in the route notes and so to monitor the trip distances accurately enough. I peered into the featureless void.
'I think so. I'm looking for a left turn at a hairpin junction. Signpost Nainital.'
It was 12 km from there to the control, and we still had half an hour to go. Tighter than was comfortable, but we should still do it.
'Here it is,' I shouted as a bend and a left turn materialised. Beep.
The road began to climb. Phil swung the wheel harder as the bends grew tighter and the gradient increased. I was hunched forward, counting the kilometres and the minutes.
'Where is everyone?' Phil demanded. I had been asking myself the same question.
The road went on and on, seeming to climb ever more steeply. The minutes were running by too quickly and I knew that there should be some signs of civilisation soon, but there was nothing except the endless dark. We had already done 12 km from the left turn, so we should be there by now. I must have misread the notes, I thought, and taken a wrong turning somewhere back down the road. Which meant that we could be anywhere, nowhere near Nainital. My first major navigational cock-up.
Phil suddenly jammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car. He ran round to the front and then disappeared, but his head bobbed up again a few seconds later. He threw aside a screwed-up black handful of something and leapt back into his seat. Newly bright headlamp beams cut into the dark ahead of us.
'Forgot about the tape,' he grinned. The headlamp glass had been protected from flying stones by a thick cross of black masking
tape. 'No wonder I couldn't see.'
He was driving faster and faster, up and up the terrible bends. At every one my throat tightened in the fear that he wouldn't get us round it. Suddenly, giddily high up above us, I saw a tiny powdering of lights that ought to have been somewhere in the sky but could only belong to the hill station of Nainital.
'There it is!'
A second later we skidded past a bare rock-face. Painted on the rock in dribbly white letters were the words 'Nainital 16 km'.
'Sixteen?' I couldn't believe it, but I knew what I must have done. I had identified the bend in the notes wrongly, and much too early, and accordingly underestimated the distance still to run. Now we had a bare 8 minutes of our allowance left.
'I'm really sorry.'
Phil was kind. 'Don't worry. At least we're on the right road. We'll get there in the end.'
The next bend was a left-hander, steep, doubling back on itself with an adverse camber. As we scrambled around it we saw a small cluster of people standing at the roadside, staring downwards over a gap in the stone wall. They were all locals, but beside them on the wall was a holdall with the Peking to Paris logo on it.
'Accident,' Phil said as he braked to a standstill. The knell that the word sounded was becoming too familiar.
The face of Anthony Jefferis, Nigel Challis' co-driver from the Land Rover, loomed towards us. He had a lump the size of a hen's egg over one eye and he looked dazed.
He called out, 'We're all right. But a major problem. Car's right over the edge. Can you let them know up there?'
It was a drop of 12 metres. Pushing against the clock, they must have taken the corner too fast and gone straight over. They were lucky to be alive. We were the first car to pass, and there was nothing we could do at the scene, so we left them with the promise that help would soon come, and pushed on towards the floating lights.
'We're not supposed to be rallying in the dark. They told us we'd never have to drive like this in the dark,' Phil kept saying.
It was bad planning and no one would ever have chosen to drive this particular road at speed at night, but on the other hand no one could have predicted the scale of the border delays.
The timer on the dash gave its dreaded beep, and I banged the button to silence it. It seemed that the climb and the brutal bends would go on for ever. Our head lights licked over another car slewed at the side of the road, and the white hands of the driver who was flagging us down.
'Please, not another one,' I whispered. It was the Greek Chewy Bel Air, number 58. Theo Voukidis' face appeared in Phil's window.
'Got any fuel?'
They'd run out of petrol, that was all, thank God.
'No, but I'll let them know you're here. There's been an accident further down.'
Theo stood back and waved us on. Phil drove as fast as he dared on up to Nainital.
It was a busy town. We pushed forwards through the traffic and crowds of spectators, peering for the time control under the disorientating street lights. At last we found it, at the edge of a huge car park, and I ran across with the book. There was only one marshal on duty – Paul Brace, RO's driver.
'There's been an accident. Down the hill. The Land Rover.'
He looked concerned, but helpless.
'I can't leave here. There's a mass of cars still to come in. Can you go straight on up to the HQ hotel and let them know?'
He stamped my book. Ten-minute time penalty. There were other cars drawn up in the wide space beyond the control point, with crews who looked either confused or openly angry. Some of the cars were jacked up, there were knots of people muttering together. Evidently Phil and I were not the only ones who had had difficulties with the day.
The cars were to be left where they were, on police orders, Paul told us. The only way to the HQ hotel was by shuttle bus, and we would have to wait for it to return from its last circuit. It took a long time, but the wait must have seemed even longer to the two men stranded downhill beside their crashed car. At last we ran into the HQ lobby and tracked down Sarah Catt. Ever since David Burlinson and his staff had relinquished their administrative responsibilities at Kathmandu, it seemed to become harder and harder to find any of the senior organisers.
'It's all right,' Sarah reassured us. 'We know about it. Help's on the way to them.'
I checked the accommodation list. We were in another hotel – Claridges by name, probably not by nature – even further up the hill. None of the rest of our gang seemed to be billeted there. The system in operation was that, in smaller towns where there was no single hotel big enough to accommodate the entire rally, the organisers, officials, support crews and media teams were allocated rooms in the HQ establishment, which was invariably the best one. Competitors were then assigned rooms elsewhere, in descending degrees of comfort, according to the order in which they had paid for their accommodation package. Phil and I were about midway down the list, which in effect sometimes meant dossing down for the night in Bug City.
We waited for yet another shuttle bus, which eventually took us winding up steep, dark lanes to Claridges. Cold air poured in through the windows, an indication of how high we had climbed from the arid heat of the frontier. It was half-past nine. We were tired, and snappy with each other, and irritated by the slowness of the buses and the time it was taking to get where we could be clean and warm and not thirsty again.
The hotel smelled of damp, and our room featured a murky-looking double bed. Phil gave it a grimace of furious irritation but I was so cold and exhausted I just lay down and pulled the covers over my head.
I heard him moving around the room, discovering another bed on a mezzanine floor. He came and shook my ankle through the covers.
'I'm going to the bar. Are you coming?'
I didn't think I wanted to sit for an hour and talk about what had happened to someone's wheel bearings.
'No.'
'Okay then.'
I had a tepid shower, ordered a curry and some naan bread from room service. I felt gravid with loneliness. I shouldn't have come. I didn't have the necessary moral fibre. Was it only this morning I had been so exultant in the pink daybreak at Kohalpur? How could I have sunk so quickly into defeat and withdrawal?
Then to my surprise Phil came back, bringing two beers and the next-best palliative for my depression: rally gossip. He spooned food from the room-service tray when it arrived, and brought the plate to me in bed. I sat up to eat, greedy for curry and news, and he propped his boots on the sheet and drank beer from the bottle.
'Everyone's pissed off,' he said. 'They all say it was too dangerous, making us drive up here in the pitch dark.'
'We weren't supposed to be doing it in the dark.'
'Well, we did. Because of the border, I know, but they should have reckoned on that. There have been plenty of breakdowns and people losing time.'
'More than us?'
'Much more. We did well.'
Dan and JD had broken a rear shock absorber mounting, and would have to find a welding shop before going any further. Bart and his wife in Kermit, the green Volvo, had broken the top wishbone of one of their front wheels. They had managed somehow to chain the pieces together and limp to a garage for repairs. Jennifer and Francesca had had yet more mechanical problems. The rumour was that a number of cars hadn't even reached Nainital yet, so there would be no order published tonight. There wasn't a start time for the morning either – at least, none had reached the distant outpost of Claridges.
'We'll have to get up early and check it then.'
'I'll do that,' I said. At least I was alert in the mornings.
The view from Claridges, when the sun rose, was of a deep bowl of pine-covered hills with a silver lake set in the centre like a diamond in a ring. The air was cold and resin-scented, and a thin mist lay over the water. The story went that the resort had flourished after some British pukka sahib had had his yacht carried up the hill on the backs of coolies, and had grandly launched it on the lake. It was easy to imagine how N
ainital must have been in the heyday of the Raj, when tight-laced Victorian memsahibs left their husbands to sweat down on the plains and retreated to the cool of the hill station to play cards and take tea. Today it reminded me of an Alpine ski-resort in summer. There were even the cobweb lines of a cable car looping the hillside.
Down at the car park the cars were leaving at one-minute intervals, with a fine and quintessentially Indian send-off. A loudspeaker announcement floridly boomed the details of each car and the names of the crew, and wished them a safe journey. A commemorative plaque of memorable hideousness was presented to each car – the first in what was to become a series of collectible trophies. A band loudly played, competing with the loudspeaker, and dancers jingled and waved and leapt. There was a long, white-clothed trestle table with a tea-urn and pyramids of white cups and saucers, exactly as at an English vicarage fête, and plates of triangular white-bread sandwiches and sponge cakes. Overhead the crystal air shimmered with sunshine against the spruce-green hills.
I took a plate of sandwiches and cake to Phil, who had missed breakfast. The news circulating the car park was that because of the chaos at the border, and the lateness of so many cars into Nainital, yesterday's timings had been 'neutralised'. We had put in one of the best times, and now it wouldn't count.
Phil's bed had been infested, and he was covered with itchy little bedbug bites. Somehow, I had escaped this.
'You should have shared with me,' I teased, remembering the sheikh's turban look but feeling relieved that the double-bed scenario had resolved itself in nothing more penetrating than a few flea-bites.
'Yes, I probably should,' he said darkly. 'How long have we got?'