The leg breaker of MadrasHow not to travel by bus

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

I leave Hyderabad by bus. It is after dark.

As we finally clear the traffic-choked streets of the city, I get a taste of something I have been starved of ever since my arrival: oxygen. Reclining my seat, I try to sleep. It proves difficult. The man in front of me is having trouble adjusting his seat, jerking it back and forth so vigorously I begin to get the idea he is trying to break my legs. Music blares from speakers close by me, a trashy pop song, with obvious melodies and tawdry lyrics: "E-store vest (hai!), Ind-ya is dee best (hai! hai!)". It is quite catchy though. I tap my toe to the beat and gaze ahead, trying not to be too appalled by the tactics - or are they antics? - of the driver, who seems to be playing games with the traffic, swinging out casually from behind the cover of trucks and aiming the bus at oncoming headlights, that get bigger, and bigger, almost filling the windscreen, before he jerks at the steering wheel and gets us back in lane. But I grow accustomed to it after a time, find it quite exhilarating. I even have enough faith in the driver to close my eyes and try for sleep again.

I can't get there. My muscles and joints still haven't forgotten the pain of previous travels. I try to enjoy the night, fragrant with earthy aromas. The velvety sky, punctured by stars, is rent to the east by a three-quarter moon, a sallow orange in the heat. I grow thirsty as the moon climbs and lightens to a lemon yellow, pales to a milky white. The rivers we cross have dried to almost nothing, mere islands of water in meandering streams of sand, turned to small drops and trails of quicksilver in the moonlight.

The man in front of me rouses, groans uncomfortably, and goes into his leg-breaking routine again. We have been stopping along the way at small satellite towns around Hyderabad, but it now becomes obvious we have as many people aboard as we are going to get and have a clear run to Madras. With the seat beside me empty, I lie across it and shut my eyes, slipping into a state which is close enough to sleep to be restful.

We stop at a chai stall at the crack of dawn the next day. The air is crisp and cool, the chai is strong and sweet. I shiver at the sight of a man in nothing but a small loincloth, shimmying up a palm tree and cutting down green coconuts.

"You are going to Tirumala?"

The man who had been sitting in front of me - the leg breaker, owner of a photographic store in Madras, he informs me - is surprised to learn that I am heading straight for Madras and not breaking my journey at Tirumala. He hadn't asked me what my profession is, which is unusual - it is a standard gambit - and something of a disappointment: I want to tell him I am a manufacturer artificial legs. But I doubt he would get the joke.

"It is much big," he tells me, "Tirumala. Many pilgrims going there. Many thousand, all the time going there."

He gives me statistics. The figures are staggering. I guess he is boasting, fabricating numbers - Indians have a habit of telling you that this or that thing is the biggest or best in the world - but in fact, he is being modest. The town of Tirumala is the largest centre of pilgrimage, not only in India, but the world, drawing more devotees than either Jerusalem or Mecca or Rome. The presiding deity of the temple is Sri Venkateswar, an incarnation of Vishnu, and at any given time there are well in excess of 100,000 people there, seeking darshan, an audience with the god.

"Any wish," my informant tells me, "he will be granting. From everywhere, people are coming to Tirumala. All are having wishes. All wishes are being granted."

We don't actually go to Tirumala - it is high up in the wooded Venkata Hills - though we go through Tirupati, the nearest town and a base for most of the pilgrims who visit the nearby Venkateswara Temple. It is a small town, seedy though invitingly energetic. No one gets down there. It is our last halt, although we are still hours from our destination, Madras, the leg breaker's home. We jolt along winding, humpy roads, that thread through grey hills and the by-now inevitable palm groves and paddyfields. Butterflies skip in the sunny air. Black drongos rest on telephone lines, their big forked tales hanging below the wires. Cacti like prickly rhododendrons sprout from bare patches of ground.