The Setting Sun by Bart Moore-Gilbert

Author:Bart Moore-Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The Ghosts of Satara

From Swargate, the ‘Volvo’ grinds its way through ugly, gridlocked suburbs until eventually we reach the new dual carriageway running south to Bangaluru. There’s no hard shoulder, however, and the inner lane’s choked with pedestrians, bicycles, auto-rickshaws, motorbikes and herds of animals. Rural India, vast as it is, seems to be disappearing apace, Pune’s tentacles spreading far along the motorway, small hotels in bare plots, half-finished filling stations, stalls with shining produce which women risk their lives to lean out into the hurtling traffic and wave imploringly. The bus barrels along in the overtaking lane, darting inside when it’s hogged by labouring trucks, some piled high as double-deckers with precarious arrangements of sacks and crates. The countryside becomes increasingly parched and dun as we approach a series of ridges. We climb steepling passes, one after another, where the road shrinks to a single lane of lurching hairpin bends and ill-tempered klaxons.

Four hours later, as we descend the last incline towards Satara, the landscape changes markedly again. The plain in which the city’s situated is a lush patchwork of emerald sugar cane and jade orchards, extending as far as the eye can see. The temperature’s warmer and the air seems softer, too, more like the tropics than Pune. I’m dropped at a busy intersection and hop into an auto-rickshaw, where I’m suddenly overcome by nerves. At last I’ve reached the main theatre of action, the seeming pinnacle – or nadir – of Bill’s Indian career.

First impressions of Satara are positive. Seen from the broad, tree-lined approach road it’s much less ugly and polluted than Pune, and has more the character of a country town. There are even bullocks grazing in the middle of the final roundabout out of which, of all things, a fifteen-foot replica Eiffel Tower soars. Looming over everything, a mile or so beyond, is a fort on a cliff-encircled height. It’s the one on the cover of Modak’s memoir, but now with spindly telecommunications masts jutting out of it. What did Bill feel when he first entered Satara, charged with his onerous brief? Perhaps the same mixture of excitement and apprehension as grips me now.

At last I’m somewhere Bill spent significant time. My sense of connection with him intensifies when I get to my room, at the top of the eight-storey hotel. It’s not as nice as the one in Pune, but has the great advantage of a balcony. I step outside with the bellhop and he points out the police headquarters, way down to the left, half hidden by a dense canopy of trees. Beyond is a collection of miniature yellow buildings, like children’s blocks from this distance, which he tells me is the Rajah’s ‘new’ palace, built in the eighteenth century. North and west, the eroded flanks and flat-topped bluffs of the Sahyadris rise through the dancing haze like buttes in a western. I wonder which of those hills Bill scoured, which ribbon roads below he raced along in his ‘Woodie’.

After lunch I take another auto-rickshaw to the police station, about a mile away.

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