Down the Konkan coast
Last week, a friend and I decided to escape the city and visit the Konkan, the coastal strip that stretches all the way from Bombay down to northern Kerala for a few days. One aim was to travel everywhere by the available public transport, so we picked a few small coastal villages and beaches within a few hours of Pune, and gave ourselves over to the red and yellow STs, the State Transport buses.
Well-heeled folks tend to shrink from horror at the STs, and there is undoubtedly much to sneer at - they can individually rattle each bone in your body, and the state of public facilities at the bus stations strains both the imagination and the bladder, particularly for women. The recently instituted, disastrous and utterly short-sighted, car-friendly policy of the Indian government has enabled more and more middle-class people to withdraw from such public spaces into their own cars, leaving them to the ever-surging numbers of poorer folks. Private Volvo buses nowadays compete with the STs, boasting better suspension and seats, if not superior driving skills. Both on popular highways and on small link roads, vans, 4×4s and the ambitiously named ’six-seater’s also eat into the STs’ revenues.
This harmless-looking six-seater is a marvelous python. It swells incredibly several times a day to swallow eight, ten, twelve, even fourteen people at once. It charges just a bit less than the STs, and its flexible metal body and equally flexible passengers allow its driver to pickle them in and make his ends meet. The buses thus find themselves in the unenviable position of having to ply loss-making public routes, with caps on fares further eroding their profits. Having grown up travelling in STs to go visit grandparents and other relatives, we were keen to take them once again on this trip. I don’t want to tell a trite (expat’s) tale about how this mode of travel allows one to see “the real India,” whatever the hell that is. But I have to say it was eye-opening to see how amazingly resilient and good-humoured these public services and their operators are in the face of remarkably trying work conditions, and how deeply and critically embedded they remain in daily life on and off the highways. If you have never ever been in a vehicle without a seat-belt the STs might not be for you, but hey, they also keep wonderful time. Only downside: too much rattling for any knitting.
Okay, enough pontificating. The Konkan is incredibly lush, especially in the monsoon when the whole landscape turns a fluorescent, shameless, almost golden green.
The Konkan is home to the magnicifient haapus or Alfonso mango, but it also has lots of other varieties of mango, jackfruit, arecanut, paddy, coconut palms, and lots and lots of chameleons, kingfishers, egrets, storks, kites and butterflies….
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The region has a rich and diverse history, and is dotted with forts, temples and mosques, many of the religious structures newly refurbished by successive generations of locals who have migrated nationally and internationally for better prospects. The Shiva temple at Harihareshwar, with a rocky and surging seaface, is considered by many to be Dakshin Kashi, or the southern avatar of the holy city of Benares:
Some of the seafaces, like the one at Harihareswhar, are notoriously dangerous, but we were also lucky to find some quiet and unspoilt ones like those at Karde, Murud and Diveaagar, from where you can literally see the oncoming monsoon spells, thick shafts of grey from sky to sea along the horizon, heralding the lifeline of the subcontinent.
We walked for hours in the warm rain and swung across streams from long banyan ropes. By a happy coincidence, I happened to be reading Rathachakra, a famous Marathi novel set in the Konkan whose author, Shripad Narayan Pendse, was from Murdi, one of the very villages we visited. While Rathachakra is grim and often savagely critical of social life and human relationships, the landscape and our cavorting around also brought to mind other, prettier representations of idyllic rural life in this area as well - classic migrant narratives of the paradise left behind. All in all, it was all too real and fictional at the same time.
