Hot Tea Across India by Rishad Saam Mehta

Author:Rishad Saam Mehta [Mehta, Rishad Saam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Asia, India & South Asia, Essays & Travelogues
ISBN: 9789381626108
Google: xHgUpyOIxiMC
Publisher: Westland
Published: 2011-04-15T04:16:58+00:00

Down the Barrel of a Gun

I

started my ride back from Pahalgam to Jammu, where I planned to load my bike into the Jammu-Tavi Express to Mumbai and then fly from Jammu to Delhi and then Mumbai.

My ride started off normally enough. There was plenty of traffic that consisted of private cars, trucks, buses and a large number of military vehicles, especially the handsome, rugged olive green Stallion trucks that the Indian army uses. At times I was told by the alert soldiers sitting in the rear of the truck not to overtake and keep in the middle of the convoy of trucks. But this was only till the Jawahar Tunnel. After that the going was quite relaxed. At times I would pass road barriers that were open and wave out to the jawans standing guard and they would cheerily wave back and flag me on.

Everyone in Srinagar who knew I was going to ride to Jammu had one common suggestion: stop at Peeda near Ramban and have the rajma-rice there. So I did, although I’m not a big rajma-rice fan. The amount of ghee that was loaded in that dish could have lit up a nineteenth-century palace for a week, but it really was delicious.

After my meal, I kicked the bike to life and swung a leg over the saddle for the last 150 kilometres of my ride. Forty minutes into it, I saw a J&K police van parked across the road with about five policemen standing with their rifles cocked and ready. The inspector leading them was a lad of about twenty-six, whose uniform seemed to be spray painted on him— it fit so snugly over his bulging muscles. But all that was not of consequence to me; what was causing me mild consternation was that he was brandishing his magazine-fed pistol about as he directed his men to get into ambush position. Mild consternation turned into positive panic when I found the nozzle of the gun pointing towards me, and for the second time in five days, I saw a finger curl around a trigger. I was ordered off my Bullet as I rode up to them and roughly hauled towards the inspector.

‘Why haven’t you been stopping at barriers when you were signalled to do so?’ the inspector demanded. I explained that no one had signalled me to stop; in fact, I pointed out, I’d waved to the sentries at all the barriers and they had cheerily flagged me on.

That seemed to anger him even more; he wouldn’t take his finger off the trigger, and honestly that wasn’t doing a lot of good to my bladder. He called a few of the barrier check-points on his wireless and after some animated conversation came back to me with his fair face even redder with rage.

‘Where are your two other companions?’ he shouted. When I told him that I’d been riding solo since Leh, he grabbed the lapels of my jacket and through clenched teeth muttered, ‘You better start telling the truth or I am going to have you taken to the police station where it will be beaten out of you.

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