In his arms

Our first night on a recent roadtrip, we had planned to spend in Khandwa. On the map, it looked like a tough but doable drive from Bombay, on reasonable roads. But as afternoon turned to evening and the sun sank lower, it became clear that we would not make it before dark, and in fact not before driving in darkness for a few hours. So we started hunting for somewhere to stay, suitable for our two-kid situation.

In the messy town of Edalabad, we asked a paanwala if he knew of a place for the night. He pointed behind him, to a strange red and blue structure whose most prominent signage read "Bar and Permit Room". The two kids with me, I walked in.

It might have been the first time the patrons of this establishment had seen a father and two small children approaching the counter, and that might have been why we got several bewildered looks from the numerous tables. Still, the boss-man was unperturbed. "Of course we have rooms," he said, and directed one of his staff to show them to us. This man handed us off to another, telling him to show us their "bilkul A-1 first-class best kamre" (that's verbatim, and my loose translation is "rooms").

He must have been winking.

We took the stairs, the walls a uniform red from years (days? weeks? months?) of forcefully applied paan. The first floor had a large room with several dingy-looking curtained cubicles. I could imagine, though I didn't much feel like explaining to our 5- and 10-year-olds, what went on there. We climbed past them, past more walls painted that delectable red. On the second floor, an aroma greeted us that I can only describe as a charming combo of urine and vomit. There wasn't time to find out where it came from, because the man led us through it and out onto a narrow balcony. Several rooms opened off it, and he showed us one.

Let me just say this much about this room: you look up the word "dingy" in any given dictionary, and it will say this -- "A word that describes the rooms two floors above a particular bar in Edalabad, Maharashtra."

Had I been alone and desperate, I might have just forked over the Rs 300 for this "bilkul A-1 first-class best" room. With my family, no way.

So we drove another 45km in darkness. Spent the night in the VIP room of a charming 100-year-old government rest house in Burhanpur, MP. A few cockroaches and just one towel and no toilet seat -- the VIP treatment that I've had before, apparently -- but otherwise clean and comfortable. Rs 260, and it was even air-conditioned.

***
Incidentally, Edalabad has two claims to fame. (Well, maybe three, if you count the establishment I've just told you about).

One is that our honourable President, Pratibha Patil, used to represent the place in the Maharashtra Assembly.

The second is connected with the fact that its name is actually no longer Edalabad, but Muktainagar. This is after Muktai, sister of the great 13th Century Marathi poet-philosopher-saint Dnyaneshwar. The town apparently has a couple of temples devoted to Muktai.

The story of Muktai's death not far from the town is a sad and moving one. In one version, she and her eldest brother Nivrutti were on a Tapi River pilgrimage, and she became ill and weak. He carried her and kept walking. He did not realize that she had died in his arms.

In Maharashtra, there's a whole political industry built up around reverence for Shivaji. I wonder how much those people know about Nivrutti, Dnyaneshwar, Sopan and Muktai. Perhaps there's no great political capital to be made out of paying attention to their lives. But they remain an intrinsic part of the culture of these parts, and their teachings an inspiration to anyone.

The family way. Or not

Hotel Nilam (Family Restaurant) in Pandharkawda in eastern Maharashtra is the kind of place that sticks colourful plastic flowers on the tables, lurid waterfalls and sunsets on the wall. Also a poster of a smirking couple with, in large letters in one corner, an inexplicable "OPY".

My driver Manish and I walk in one evening for dinner. "Pandharkawda dal fry, the best!" Manish had said, so that's what we plan to order. There's a family at one of the tables, but nobody else. The young waiter comes over and says, apologetically, that we can't sit here. He glances over at the family, turns back to us and offers this stage whisper: "Family room!"

"But there's nobody else here!" I say. "And plenty of empty tables! Don't you want our business?"

"Yes," he says, "but not here. Family room, family room!"

"All right," I say, and point to Manish. "He's my brother, so we're family. Now can we stay?"

Manish butts in, enlightening me on the essence of the situation. "Kya hai, uske liye aurat ki bahut zaroorat hai." ("If we want to pose as a family, we need some women badly.")

Waiter nods vigorously. "But don't worry," he says. "We're cleaning up the VIP room for you."

"But we're not VIPs!" I say. He ignores me and shepherds us out the door, into a large space with several empty tables and chairs. "Can we eat here?" I ask.

"But this is not the VIP room!" he wails in distress.

This is not going anywhere, so we just sit down. The dal fry is superb.

The monkeys, the goats and Nelson Mandela

Some years ago, we and a few other journalists joined the writers Mahasweta Devi, GN Devy and Laxman Gaikwad on a trip through rural Maharashtra.

Mahasweta, winner of the Jnanpith and Magsaysay Awards, turned out to be a feisty lady with a definite twinkle in her eye. Over breakfast on the steps of a rest house near Phaltan in Satara District, we were asking her a few questions. Without warning, she turned away and sniffed: "Are you interviewing me? Where are your notebooks? Why should I answer your questions?"

She sniffed, but she never lost that twinkle.

She told us a tale of how, in her youth, she once contracted to supply 15,000 monkeys for medical experiments in the USA. Collected from the wilds of MP, they were brought to Bombay. Unfortunately, any simian emigratory hopes died right there: the American ship which was to ferry them was not allowed into the harbour. After much wrangling, the beasts were released in the Western Ghats.

Months later, Mahasweta Devi found herself listening to a recounting of the affair from an uncle who didn't know that she had had a part in it. "Only a Bengali could have thought of such a mad scheme," spluttered the uncle. "And do you know, there was even a woman involved!"

So if our trip began with the story about monkeys, it ended, with a certain cosmic symmetry, with goats. Chanda Nimbkar, a friend from university, runs a farm outside Phaltan where she breeds the animals. She hopes to improve the area's goat population in several respects. One: increase their yields of milk. Another: promote twinning, or the tendency to produce more than one offspring at each birth -- for multiple goat kids are a better use of resources than single ones. We could see that for ourselves when we met three such kids, all just a couple of weeks old. One, a single child, was clearly larger than the other two. But the pair, twins, together weighed more than the single one at birth and continue to do so.

Traditionally, it is the women in village families who own and care for goats. So a better breed of goat -- more milk, more kids -- will directly benefit women.

To that end, Chanda had imported several embryos of a South African strain called Boer to cross with desi goats. The embryos have since grown into magnificent specimens, brown and black and white, complete with long flowing beards. Chanda named two of the finest FW de Klerk and Nellie, for Nelson Mandela.

Symmetry, did I say? Mahasweta Devi also told us that when she got her Jnanpith award, it was Mandela himself who handed it to her.

He asked her, she said with another twinkle, if he could keep the cheque.

VIP room

Driving to northern Maharashtra once in a largish group, we spent the night in the Government guest house in Dhule. They gave us two rooms, one the "VIP Kaksha, Poorva": the Eastern VIP Room. That room, they told us, is normally saved for use by Ministers. Ours to use today because there were no Ministers, nor any other breed of VIPs, expected.

The VIP room, I found, had two major differences from the guest house's ordinary rooms. Two major room upgrades that were clearly meant for the benefit of Ministers.

One, some unidentifiable creature was crawling around the Indian-style, and it wasn't human. Not that I would have been happy if it was human. I tried shooing it away, but it ignored my handwaving and crawled on determinedly.

Two, the geyser connected to the mains with a long stretch of bare wire that looped perilously close to the switch. Turning the geyser on was an exercise in trying not to let my hands tremble. I bathed gingerly, contorted to avoid the wire, trying hard to prevent the water I sloshed on myself from also sloshing on the naked strands. Of course, while turning on the water, I also discovered that touching the tap gave me a shock.

Really, when will we ever learn to stop pampering our Ministers?