The Magic of India
The sights, sounds and smells were so exciting and exotic – and the daredevil girl on the bike simply riveting
INDIA had always wanted to visit the land she was named after, the subcontinent where she was conceived on her parents’ hippie trek 23 summers before.
Some said she had the temperament of her namesake – torrid, wild, confusing and unknowable. She’d always wanted to make the comparison for herself.
And now here she was, melting beneath the 32°C sun that gleamed off her brightly patterned headscarf and caused her shirt to stick damply to her back.
The mela – the fair – was in town and everywhere she looked was noise and colour. Lorries decorated like temples with wooden carvings, gold paint, beads and tapestries threw up clouds of orange dust from the rutted road. Elephants, donkey carts and chickens mingled with the traffic and pedestrians.
Wizened men with grey beards squinted from shadowed doorways. Women in richly coloured saris shouted from steaming food stalls. The aroma of chilli, coriander and ginger called for attention even more forcefully. Girls in loose and elegant shalwar walked like princesses among men in the traditional sarong-style lungi and others in Western-style short-sleeved shirts in a rainbow of colours from lemon to lime.
A throaty roar spun India’s head around. A man with a long black beard and flowing robes was dragging a lion on a lead through a doorway. He scooped his hand under the beast’s rump and forced it over the threshold like a reluctant dog.
India felt as if she was drowning in sensory overload. She knew her parents feared for her safety. But if she didn’t come now, then when?
Flies and mosquitoes buzzed past her ears like helicopters. Then something buzzed louder. She jumped aside as a motorbike ploughed through the dust. At the handlebars was a boy with a big white-toothed grin, long hair and a leather waistcoat over his leanly-muscled torso. Riding pillion, a girl in a silky fuchsia tracksuit shouted through a megaphone.
India reeled as if punched in the ear by words she didn’t understand: “Maut ka Kua!”
A young boy, no more than nine, must have seen her confusion. He grinned, pointed and yelled in gleeful English, “Well of Death! Well of Death!”
It loomed ahead of her, amid the circus tents, sideshows and fairground rides – a rough wooden cylinder, maybe 15m tall and the same across. It was encased in rickety scaffolding and topped with a pointed tent like a spire.
India handed her rupees to a man with a monkey on his shoulder and followed the procession up springy wooden steps. Exhausted and faint, she steadied herself on the handrail and felt it wobble in her grip.
THE sun was muted inside the tented section but augmented by hot spotlights. The oven-like air was filled with deafening rap music, the lyrics shouted in Hindi. India found herself on a narrow platform encircling the wooden cylinder. She made her way to a gap amid the spectators and peered over the chest-high rim.
Staring down the vertiginous sides was indeed like peering into a well. Far below, on the rough dirt of the circular base, were parked three small hatchback cars with scuffed paint and no glass in their windows. Three motorbikes were parked at rakish angles.
Surrounded by the vehicles, half a dozen young figures lounged and chatted around a record deck from which the rap music pounded.
India was intrigued to see the girl in the fuchsia tracksuit amid the blackhaired gypsy-like boys. Her gleaming hair falling to her tiny waist, she looked about the same age as India.
Leaning on the splintery ends of the vertical wooden planks that formed the well’s sides, India wondered how the girl’s life differed from her own.
A cheer went up as the rap music was joined by the heart-racing sound of three motorbikes being kicked into spitting, spluttering life. In convoy, three riders began circling the base of the well, with the girl in fuchsia piloting the lead bike.
Tyres rumbled on roughly nailed wood as the bikes mounted a slanted track around the well’s perimeter. Then, held in place by centrifugal force, they began climbing the vertical sides.
Her ears full of roaring engines and her nose full of pungent exhaust smoke,
India felt the vibration of the planks shaking her to her core as the motorcyclists spiralled up the well towards her, racing parallel to the earth.
In the lead, a blur of pink, her gleaming hair streaming out behind her like a horse’s tail, the girl took her hands off the handlebars and stood on the footrests. Grinning widely, she struck an air-punching pose that drew fresh applause from the crowd.
More engines joined the thunder.
No, thought India, surely they can’t . . .
As she watched in disbelief, the three cars began to circle the well and climb the vertical sides. With three cars and three bikes defying gravity on the sides of the well, the whole structure seemed to sway and ripple and warp.
With her breath held and her heart in her mouth, India felt like she was no longer merely watching the surreal spectacle. She felt she’d become a stretching and flexing strand in its fragile web of bizarre physics.
One by one, the cars and bikes descended to the pit of the well until only the girl in fuchsia was left on the sheer wooden wall. While her friends decelerated, she sped up, her screaming tyres barely a foot beneath the rim of the well.
India flinched as the machine flashed by her every few seconds, scalding her face with its heat and burning her nostrils with the tang of its exhaust smoke. But she couldn’t stop watching as the girl swung a silk-clad leg over the tank of her bike. With the bike racing at right angles to the wall and not holding on in any way, she lay on her back across the saddle.
Her dusty feet were bare. Jewelled bracelets flashed on her ankles. Her toenails were painted the same deep red as the bindi on her forehead. With her arms outstretched and her teeth gleaming in a beatific grin, she looked like an angel in flight.
And as India watched, transfixed, she forgot that she was dying.
SIX months later Dr Andy Singh was making his evening rounds of a Johannesburg hospital. As he approached the room where India Clark lay thin and fragile, with her head wrapped in a silk scarf, he sighed heavily.
Like everyone else on the team he’d fallen a little in love with the girl who faced her fate so bravely. It broke his heart to know there was nothing they could do for her now but make her comfortable. He remembered their conversations about the country after which she was named. She’d asked if he’d ever been there. South African born and bred, he’d laughed and told the pale blonde girl that he’d never been further east than his local Indian restaurant.
“You must go,” she’d insisted, then told him all about the mela and the Maut ka Kua.
As he pushed open her door, the young doctor blinked at the sunset burning through the window. It turned the whole room crimson and brought a healthy glow to India’s usually pallid face.
Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. He wondered if she was dreaming, perhaps about her Eastern namesake. He hesitated to disturb her. Then he realised she wasn’t breathing.
INDIA had heard stories about people on their deathbeds telling relatives that they could hear the heavenly choir and see angels coming to meet them.
But it wasn’t singing she heard as her room turned red in the sunset. It was the distant roar of motorbikes.
As she closed her eyes, she felt the world begin to spin around her. But when she opened them, it wasn’t the world that was spinning, it was her.
She was riding pillion on a dirt bike piloted by the Indian girl in the fuchsia tracksuit as they circled the vertical sides of the Maut ka Kua.
The well was filled with sunlight and India saw there was no tented roof above them, just clear blue sky and a blinding white sun.
The angel at the handlebars looked over her shoulder and grinned. Then she twisted the accelerator and the bike sped up. Around and around they circled, spiralling up the sheer wooden walls, then over the rim and upwards into the azure sky, away from the well of death.
Tyres rumbled on roughly nailed wood as the bikes mounted a slanted track around the well’s perimeter