Hey all,
Hope things are going great for all of you. They certainly are for me. Well, on the 26th of this month I was scheduled to appear in a show as the guitarist for Shilpa Rao. As it so happened, the show was to be in Darbhanga, this most legendary of places. This place has provided me with great stories and greater friends and I was very keen to finally get there and see what the madness was all about for myself. The rest of the band and I were driving up to Darbhanga, which is a fair distance away from Jamshedpur. Somebody told me the Nepal border isn't far off from there. My dad reminded me of the time he and my brother had to undergo a 36 (yes 36) hour bus journey to get there for answering an engineering entrance exam. But that was 10 years ago, the roads have improved and we had a very competent driver.
Well, we started late night and made excellent progress, got to Ranchi in 1.5 hours (against a normal time of 3 hours). My own health was little bit of a downer as I am not used to long distances inside a closed car, obviously couldn't keep open windows for it was fiercely cold. That aside, all went well and we were well into Bihar till the next morning.
Then the legendary madness began. Before you think of this as some great expose`, please be forewarned. I am just using saucy lines, the stories aren't that crazy. We were some distance off of Samastipur when we encountered this massive traffic jam. Time brought curiosity and we found out that earlier in the morning a truck ran over a hapless motorist killing him instantly and now the villagers have blockaded the road in an effort to get compensation for the victim's family from the state government. One man in a car ahead of us suggested paying Rs.1500 to the villagers so they'd clear the road. I'm not sure whether that sum was the gentleman's value of human life but the comment was in poor taste, at the very least. We were already running a bit late and decided to step out of queue, reverse and head back the way we came from. The villagers, who had by now decided to walk down the queue of vehicles, asking them to pay up to be let through, spotted us and started running after us. Of course they couldn't catch us, this car got to Ranchi in 1.5 hours. What ensued was driving through a village dirt-track through fields, cattle-sheds and so on for around 45 minutes till we got back on any kind of tarred road again. After a fair amount of asking about, we finally landed on familiar territory and went right through to Darbhanga, and then asked our way into the hotel. The hotel was actually situated in the premises of an old fort, and the accommodations and service too was from another time, but that is just an observation. I stayed there for less than 10 hours, I really didn't care much about the standard of accommodation, although the bathroom could have used a shower.
More fun after the gig, we packed our instruments in, our driver safely napping away in the hotel room (he was the one driving through the entire night after all), and as we are to leave the venue, one of the tires gets punctured. Nobody apart from me had any clue what to do and I was rusty at best. There I was, in the Darbhanga night, 12 midnight actually, lying down beneath the car trying to get everything in position. A lot of hard work and a couple of mistakes later, finally it was all done. Took a long time though. Got back to the hotel to realize they stop dinner after 10 or something. Thankfully somebody from Shilpa's entourage had ordered a lot of food as back-up and we didn't go hungry. Anyway, at around 2 in the night, after 11 odd hours in Darbhanga, we got back in the car. Went off to sleep, knew that they stopped somewhere to try and repair the puncture in the tire. Anyway, was awoken at 7:30 in the morning to be told that..... the tire was punctured, the same one!! Ha ha, what fun! And it turned out, on the previous occasion, the tire wasn't punctured, the air just went out. Go figure! Anyway, there I was in the middle of the highway on my back again. Thankfully, the driver was a great help, and we got through this quickly. And he had blazed through the night because we covered a huge distance in a very short amount of time!! For that I was grateful. From there on it was pretty much routine, albeit a little delayed as the guys were intent on making random stops! Nevertheless, an action packed 36 hours. Yes, by this time, my dad was getting to Darbhanga. He he.
Oh and btw, played a kick-ass show in the midst of all of that!
Cheers!
Surjo
_/\_
