Magic Light in Bhavnagar

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Palitana – Not getting there

I have always marvelled at the uncanny ability of rickshaw drivers to spot an outsider and know where they’re going. I wasn’t dressed too differently from a lot of other people at the bus stand; a simple blue t-shirt, jeans and a small backpack. But there he was, in my face, asking no one else but me, if I wished to go to Palitana. He would take me there for only 700 Rs., he said, and put me up in a nice dharamshala close to the big temples. First, I refused politely with a gentle smile saying I would rather take a bus. Then, when he refused to go away, a curt, dismissive “no”. And finally, when he became overtly insistent, a very angry “no” which appeared to shock him with its vehemence.

It also annoyed me immensely that the bus to Palitana was taking such a long time to arrive. If the time-tables at the station were to be believed, there was a bus that went every hour. But I had been waiting for well over an hour and there was no sign of any that went to Palitana. I went over to the “Enquiry Counter” to interrupt the men sitting inside who had been loudly gossiping with idle drivers and conductors in Gujarati. Someone had made a joke that made them all laugh very loudly and my frantic appeals went unheard. Finally when I broke the sound barrier with the loudest “excuse me” I had ever uttered, the laughter died off abruptly and all the faces turned to stare at me with a stupefied gaze.

“What do you want?”, said the man seated behind the square grill at the counter. “When is the bus to Palitana expected to arrive?” I asked. He gave me a piercing stare, like I was a student who had asked the dumbest of questions, then showed me the palm of his hand, closed the shutter of the window and turned back to entertain his colleagues before I could figure out if the five fingers meant “5 minutes”, “wait” or “get out of here”. When I went back to the Palitana stand, the rickshaw driver, seeing that my situation was becoming more hopeless with every passing minute, made another opportunistic move.

“The bus to Palitana will never come”, he said, “and even if it does, you won’t be able to get a seat.”

“I’ll take my chances”, I said, “Please go away. I’m not going in your rickshaw.”

“Okay, 500 Rs. You’ve come as a tourist to see the temples. It’ll be more comfortable for you if you come with me.”

“No”, I said, “Please go away.”

“As you wish”, he said, shrugging his shoulders.

The bus to Palitana tottered in after half an hour and to my utter dismay, he proved to be right. All the seats were taken and the people who had been waiting patiently all this while took up the standing space as well. There was no way I was going to hang out the door for a 2 hour journey.

The rickshaw driver rubbed his palms gleefully and walked towards me for another round of negotiations. This time, I didn’t know what to do. If I was to reach Palitana, he could be my only way out. But before he could reach where I was standing, a man who was sitting in the waiting area and who had perhaps been observing the dejected look on my face when I couldn’t get a seat on the bus, came up to me and said, “You’re going to Palitana?”

I said, “Yes.”

“If you hurry up, there’s a passenger train leaving in an hour”, he said.

So when the rickshaw driver looked at me with a smirk on his face asking if I was finally ready to go to Palitana, I said, “No, but you could take me to the railway station.”

The driver was appalled at this suggestion and tried every trick from the Book of the Touts to dissuade me from taking the train. The trains don’t go every day, he said. They always break down on the way. Too many people take them because they’re too cheap. The coaches are filthy and the train would take far longer to get to Palitana than his rickshaw would. And it won’t take me to those fabulous dharamshalas where I could bed with all the worldly comforts at bargain basement rates.

I’ll take my chances, I said, as I scooted across the bus station to find the first rickshaw I could find that would take me to the Bhavnagar railway station. Since I had the desperate look on my face that screamed “Yes, rob me of all the money I have”, I totally expected to be robbed of all the money I had by a rowdy rickshaw driver charging extortionate rates. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the rickshaw drivers of Bhavnagar were gentle, honest souls who only charge 30 Rs. for a 2 km journey.

The route to the train station passed through parts of the old town I hadn’t seen and as I had another fleeting glimpse of the exquisitely photogenic stone and timber architecture of the buildings in this part of the city, I swore to come back some day and take a better look at them.

The train station was utterly deserted with not a soul in the vicinity. There was nobody behind the ticket window either. I walked down the platform to look for a station master to enquire about the timings of the train to Palitana. But I couldn’t find anybody. If I didn’t know I was wide awake, I could have sworn I had dreamt up a ghostly apparition of a haunted railroad, stranded all alone on a line that went nowhere.

The first human presence I came across was a bearded man, sleeping on a bench at the far end of the platform. I don’t like waking up people who are asleep but I was anxious to know when the train was going to arrive. So I nervously sputtered, “Bhaisaab” a couple of times and when he didn’t respond, shook him up slightly.

Two bleary, heavily reddened eyes stared at me angrily and asked, “What do you want?”

“I’m sorry”, I said, “I was looking for the train…”

“What train? There are no trains”, he said and shooed me away vehemently with his hands before going back to sleep.

I strolled back to the main entrance where I found that a human being had miraculously surfaced behind the ticket counter. “I’m looking for a train to Palitana…”, I began tentatively. “What train?”, he said,  interrupting me curtly, “There are no trains.”

“But I heard there was a train to Palitana going around this hour”, I said.

“That train left long ago. The evening train is cancelled.”

I walked back dejectedly to the bustling market outside the station and hailed a rickshaw. I asked the driver if he would take me to Palitana and he laughed and said, “No, no. I can’t go to Palitana. It’s too far away. I’ll drop you off at the bus stand and you can take a  bus or a rickshaw from there.”

After reaching the bus stand, he pointed to the platform where the buses to Palitana arrived. I didn’t want to take the bus, I said, and asked him if he knew someone who could take me to Palitana for a reasonable rate.

He looked around and yelled, “Raju! Palitana jaoge?” (Raju! Will you go to Palitana?) Raju came running from the distance and when he came closer, I was dismayed to discover that it was the same driver who was chasing me to go with him earlier at the bus stand.

This happenstance gave him the opportunity to rub his hands in glee again. He said, “Toh, sir, chalein? Kaisa laga Bhavnagar railway station?” (So, sir, let’s go. How did you like the Bhavnagar railway station?”

“Bahut khoobsurat” (Very beautiful), I said, “Kitna loge? 500 Rs?” (Will you go for 500 Rs.?)

“Haan, sir, aapke liye toh jaan bhi haazir hain”, (Yes, sir, I could even give my life for you), he said, smirking uncontrollably, sarcasm dripping from every pore.

Bhavnagar – Curious salesmen, Takhteshwar, CCD, Pav Gathiya

“Sir, if you don’t mind, can you tell me what you’re doing in Bhavnagar?”, squeaked a figure sitting on a sofa opposite to the reception desk as soon as I had waltzed into the hotel after walking in the sweltering heat for hours.

“Why? Why do you want to know?”, I asked, without any effort to mask my annoyance.

“Just like that, sir”, he said, with a nervous laugh, “You keep coming and going during the day. I was only wondering if you were also into sales like the other guests here. I can help you make contacts.”

“What? No. I’m not a salesman. And I’m not in Bhavnagar for work.”

“Sir, then what are you doing here? What is your job?”

“I’m sorry but that’s none of your business”, I said and began walking towards my room.

“Do you work for the CBI?”, he asked in a tone that sounded suspiciously suspicious.

“If I did, why would I tell you?”, I said, “No, I’m not working for the CBI.”

“Then why can’t you tell me what you do?”

I sighed and thought it’s better to get this over with than prolong this conversation in a never-ending question loop.

“I’m a photographer. I’m here to shoot the old architecture of Bhavnagar”, I said.

“Oh”, he said, visibly perking up, “So where do you go tomorrow?”

“I might head to Palitana or Velavadar”, I said, “or maybe spend another day here. I don’t know.”

“I’m very happy to meet you,” he said, “It can get very boring talking to salesmen all the time. Yes, Palitana and Velavadar are amazing. But if you’re here one more day, you should also go to Takhteshwar Temple. It’s only 1 kilometer from here and if you climb up, the views are amazing. You can see all the way to the Gulf of Khambat from the top. Don’t miss it. ”

I felt bad about being snappy and rude earlier and I told him that. I took his advice and extended my stay in Bhavnagar for another day.

Takhteshwar Temple was located on a small hillock in a quiet neighbourhood in the city. This part of Bhavnagar was a stark contrast to the bustle of the market streets of the old town, with row houses, clean streets and gardens. I climbed up the short flight of stairs that led to the temple on top of the hill. The landscapes visible from here were certainly panoramic if not spectacular. Over the low rises around the hillock, the industries surrounding the city could be seen in the distance and bits of the Gulf of Cambay shone through the haze.

The temple was built in the late 19^th century AD by Maharaj Takhatsinhji and is a small, yet clean structure with 18 marble pillars and a shikara. It was undoubtedly an important place of worship but the day I went, people were using the temple as a handy place to catch a siesta or to lounge about on a hot afternoon. A group of school children were playing in the area outside and an old caretaker was sitting on the patio under the shade of tree, gazing into the distance. As it always happens, as soon as I took my camera out to take some pictures, all eyes turned towards me momentarily. The siesta people went back to sleep while the children began pestering me to show them my camera and take their pictures.

I ran away from the kids and went up to the old man to talk to him but I don’t know if he had taken a vow of silence or simply found me too weird because as soon as I opened my mouth to break the ice he smiled awkwardly and walked away in a hurry. This was disappointing because I had hoped to spend a few hours at the temple to catch the sunset. But with no one to talk to and nothing particularly interesting to look at, I walked back down to the road in a dreary drudge.

It’s a testament to my lack of imagination that the first thing that popped into my head when I thought of an alternative plan was “coffee”. I google mapped for the nearest Café Coffee Day (when you’re in the interiors of India, you can’t be too choosy) and was gladdened to see that there was one about a couple of kilometres away near Ghogha Circle. Google Maps showed me a short cut that cut through a large ground and so I happily trod in that direction but when I reached the ground, I found that a tented market had blocked the access to the path that the app advised me to take.

It was 2 pm and it was hot. The sale was comprised of mostly textiles and woollens sold by Tibetans and Nepalis. I wondered who would want to buy those in such a hot, arid place. With Google Maps rendered useless, I reverted to more old-fashioned methods to seek my directions and asked a panipuriwala who had opportunistically placed his stall outside the grounds if there was a way through. He had stuffed a mountain of pan inside his mouth and just flailed his hands about. I asked the people inside the tent if they knew and they didn’t. So finally, the budget traveller in me admitted defeat and hailed an auto rickshaw to Ghogha Circle for 30 Rs.

The Café Coffee Day at Ghogha Circle was like a lot of other Café Coffee Days; glass-fronted, monotonous and soulless with expensive coffee. They wanted to charge me extra for making the cappuccino a bit stronger. Since I refused to pay more money for the additional shot, I had to make do with a cup of coffee that tasted like hot milk with more cinnamon than espresso. The AC was a relief though and I tried to make as good a deal of it as I could by lounging about for a couple of hours in the cool air and surfing the internet on my phone until the staff had enough of me sitting around and shoved a menu card in my face to order or get out. I looked around and the place was absolutely empty but I didn’t want to get into a stupid argument and left.

Ghogha Circle was bustling with street food vendors and just looking at all the food was making me hungry. I didn’t want to have Mumbai chaat having come all the way to Bhavnagar, so I googled standing next to a chaat stall to see what unique varieties of cholesterolic street food Bhavnagar had to offer. Some person on quora believed that it was a sacrilege to go to Bhavnagar and not have pav gathiya. So I asked the people around where I could get some pav gathiya. Fingers pointed in all directions because apparently pav gathiya was available everywhere.

Pav Gathiya is essentially deep fried chunks of besan (gram flour) mixed with an assortment of sauces (many of them extremely spicy) and served with pav (bread). I chose the cleanest looking establishment in the circle, a place called Surendranagar Samosa, and confidently ordered a plateful. A part of me wishes I hadn’t because it was so hot that my digestive system spent the next two days growling for help. Eight months on, I think there are parts of it still trying to come to terms with it.

Bhavnagar – Markets, photography, domestic quarrels

My routine in Bhavnagar was set from the very first day. That morning I braved the ad hoc traffic on the Bhidbhanjan Chowk by the Bhidbhanjan Mahadev temple and walked towards the busy markets at Ghogha Gate where I stopped at Govind restaurant for breakfast. Here, puris were whipped out of a large iron cauldron bubbling with hot oil, plates of buttery pavs and greasier bhajis were doled out in quick time and for those who truly had no fear of diabetes or cholesterol, deep fried ghatiyas with an assortment of sweet and spicy pickles were brought forth in plentiful amounts.

After this calorific feast, I went to the grungy chai stall a couple of blocks away where every chai drinker appeared to know everyone else and I had to put up with the collective stare every time I ventured in. But this was a great place to sit (or stand) for a while watching the life on the street. It was Id-ul Milad that day and the street was buzzing with one vibrant, colourful procession after another with trucks and floats decorated in all manner of gaudy colors and kids riding atop adorned with turbans and large groups of men marching on foot waving their flags. Many of the trucks had people distributing sweets and snacks and while this entire parade was being done under heavy security cover, it was a scene that was joyful to behold.

To let my system digest the greasy food and acidic chai, I walked about the old town area whose lanes were endowed with a generous sprinkling of old world architecture, much of it truly gothic in appearance. The first place I went to, winding past the doors of a Jain temple and numerous sweet marts, was the bustling fruit and vegetable market, not to buy fruits and vegetables but because I’d read on the internet that this was a great place to take pictures. It was housed in a dingy, grimy building with decades of grease and dirt texturing the walls. Rows of vendors were labouring in stalls furnished with rusty fans and light bulbs and decorated with pictures of multifarious gods and ancestors who might have worked those very stalls years ago.

Although I’d grown up in India and had seen many of these markets in my life, I was still amazed that, even in this digital age, timeless places like these existed where life went on like it always had. Until i.e. in all that excitement, I whipped out my DSLR camera and made every head in the space turn and brought it decidedly down to the digital age. Some wondered if I was a news reporter, another anxious guy who took the trouble to walk all the way from one end of the hall wished to know if I was with the Muncipal Corporation, three other dudes showed up requesting facebook profile pictures, one young boy was sure I was a foreigner because he had seen a white person taking pictures of the market a few months ago.

I might not be a foreigner but I certainly felt like a tourist and it felt strange to be a tourist in a place that doesn’t see any tourists. Nevertheless, I braved the attention and smiled awkwardly at anyone who met my eye to get to the far end of the hall where an aged man was sweeping the dust off the floors while workers laboured at hauling big baskets of fruits and vegetables from the large jute sacks to the stalls. The dust had the effect of highlighting the light shafts that slanted into the hall through the latticed windows creating a scene that was truly cinematic. It helped that the people who made me the center of attention had decided they had given me enough of that and went back to work making me feel less conscious as I was capturing the scenes of them working in the gorgeous light.

After this photographic tour, I walked back to M.G. Road, the main market street, to look at the old buildings, many of whom had retained their ornamental wooden facades. Inside them, businessmen and tailors worked away and their activities could be glimpsed through quaint windowed galleries. I took out my camera again to snap pictures and people came up to me to ask if I was making a film or doing a survey and when they learnt that I was only interested in the beauty of the architectures, they pointed me in the direction of other old buildings hidden away in the alleys, some lived in and well preserved housing shops and residences behind grand facades, some quite dilapidated and ghostly in appearance but still preserving remnants of the gothic trimmings.

After hours of walking about the alleys of the market, I exhaustedly took refuge in the confines of an old, begrimed chai shop which was housed in a building reminiscent of an art deco structure and whose interiors were furnished with a few wooden tables and stools.  Here, a woman was complaining to her husband about the botched embroideries on a sari she had given to one of the tailors toiling away in the building opposite to us. The husband didn’t know what to say or do about it. He then saw the camera I had kept on the table and asked if I could take a picture of the piece so he could send it to a tailor he trusted in Ahmedabad to see if he could fix it. Before I could respond, another man who was sitting in a corner came up to him and introduced himself as a tailor and said he could give it a shot if he wished.

The woman, having already suffered an inferior work at the hands of a local tailor, said she would only pay him after seeing what he’s done with it. The man refused to work without an advance payment. The husband didn’t mind paying him a little if it got the work going. The woman yelled at her husband for being such a gullible twit and blamed their financial troubles on his general timidity in dealing with other people. The tailor decided he had enough of this domestic quarrel and squirreled away. After his wife had calmed down, as I was finishing my cup of chai, the husband came back to me and asked if I could take a picture of the sari. Before I could say yes, the woman launched into him again and said there was no need for a picture because unless she met this tailor friend of his and clearly explained what needed to be done there was no need to whatsapp him pictures and get his hopes up.

Before the man could drag me back into the conflict, I finished my cup of chai with a mighty gulp and left the scene. It had been an eventful first day in the old town of Bhavnagar.

Bhavnagar – Getting there

The Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation has an app that lets you book seats online. So I downloaded it, filled a sign up form and after a number of app crashes managed to book seat 21, a 4^th row window seat on the 11 am bus going from Vadodara to Bhavnagar. Having travelled in Indian state transport buses for much of my traveling life, it was a comfort to know that I wouldn’t have to fight for a seat or get crushed by a stampede of passengers wanting to get in or travel 5 hours standing all the way.

But as India regularly reminds you, things are never what they seem (or are promised) to be. The platform number that the app said my bus would leave from was non-existent and it took long sweaty run-arounds from the enquiry counter to the various platforms to figure out where I had to wait for the bus I had booked. Finally, I found it in the most old-fashioned way possible, with a conductor yelling “Bhavnagar” so loudly that the entire neighbourhood could hear it.

There were already a hundred people trying to get in and all the seats had been filled. My frantic demands for my booking to be honoured went completely ignored. I walked back to sit down in the waiting area to think a little. Did I really want to go to Bhavnagar? Was it worth all this trouble? Was I too old for this shit?

These existential ruminations were interrupted by the conductor yelling the number “21” in all directions as the driver assumed his position and began to start the engine. I ran as quickly as I could to take my rightful seat which, to my considerable disappointment, wasn’t the promised window seat on the fourth row but the middle seat on the second which was the row right next to the door. Like a lot of things in the modern world, here was a distinct difference between the dreams advertised online and the downers that existed in real life.

I felt sorry for the old man who had to vacate seat no. 21 on my account. But my empathies wouldn’t last long as he promptly took the little bit of room left next to the person sitting on the aisle seat thus squeezing the space available to me even further. To the old man, things couldn’t have worked out better because the easy access to the door gave him the liberty to chew all the paan he had on his hands (which was quite considerable) and spew these contents out of his mouth every time the conductor opened the door to let passengers hitching on the highway into an already jampacked bus. I saw people sitting on the aisle, people sitting on the engine, people sitting on people and one particular person who was sitting on top of my head making the 3 inches of the backrest handle his home.

To compound this misery, the driver, either in a state of depression from an emotionally wrenching heartbreak or in a spectacular display of bad taste, insisted on playing the most cantankerous song in the history of Hindi cinema i.e. “Ishq Mein Nachenge” from Raja Hindustani, a song I had considered myself fortunate to have never heard since I first did back in 1998, on a loop for the entire length of the journey. There were no signs of protest from the other passengers and some thoroughly enjoyed this atrocity and hummed along to it. I felt like my ears were being Clockwork Orange’d to deafness and my brains being reduced to mush.

I couldn’t distract myself by staring at the scenery outside either, my views being blocked from all sides. The people around me killed the time by socialising with each other and I felt like that awkward introvert at a cocktail party who didn’t know anybody or what they were saying. It was only 2 and a half hours later when we reached the town of Dholera that I got anything resembling air and a bit of quiet. The bus stopped here for tea and snacks and we all stood there drinking tea and eating snacks staring at the beauteous sight of a large cement grinder whipping up dust across the road. The landscape here was industrial, scrubby, parched, arid and dry. Dholera was earmarked as one of India’s numerous futuristic smart cities. I guess it takes time build one of those.

Half the bus emptied at Dholera because many of the people who had hopped in were labourers working at the various construction sites in the town. One of these people happened to be the person sitting next to me and I felt happy as a 6 year old child at getting a window seat for the rest of the journey. If the vistas pre-Dholera were anything like post-Dholera, I hadn’t missed out on an awful lot of beautiful scenery. The landscape was both bucolic and industrial, a woman herding her sheep by the side of the road, men fishing on the sandy banks of a lake far in the distance, dry grasslands and scrublands forming the periphery of the Blackbuck Sanctuary, egrets and herons resting on the waterbodies adjacent to the chemical plants where large mounds of salt waited in the sun to be processed.

My hotel in Bhavnagar was a 20 minute walk from the bus stand. The rickshaw drivers offered to take me there for 30 Rs. but the weather was pleasant, my bags were light and I chose to walk  following google maps which showed me a short cut that went through a large park area adorned with strange sculptures of muscular men exercising. The gardens were well-kept and had quaint little bridges running over stagnant pools of water and kids played and frolicked about the grass and the slides. It wasn’t a bad place to begin looking at a new town.

Hotel Comfort Inn, at the edge of a traffic circle and hidden away above a Laxmi Narayan temple was exactly what it promised, a no frills, barebones place where the bathroom was tolerably clean and the plumbing worked. One didn’t expect anything more for 400 Rs. It was a long day and I needed a few cups of tea to nourish myself. So I walked down to a large traffic circle, past the quaint old, colonnaded edifice that housed the Bhavnagar Muncipal Corporation office, to a heavily busy chai stall populated by office goers and college students and spent the rest of the evening watching people while drinking bottomless cups of chai.