When driving through built up areas in major Indian cities, pay attention to what’s above, as well as around you. Among the things to especially look out for are high voltage power cables hanging at roof-rack height across narrow side streets. Failing to do so will almost certainly result in disaster.
After somehow managing to successfully transport the rickshaw, both support cars and a crew of thirteen across the Narmada River yesterday evening, on a river ferry slightly larger than a jumbo box of matches, we were sure that today’s drive from Bhopal to Sagar would be a breeze.
But as I watched the power cable snag on the rickshaw’s roof-rack, all I could think of was a street awash with a sea of sparks igniting The Shaw's 5-litre reserve petrol can, which is prone to leaking.
Put simply, the entire roof-rack and luggage were ripped completely away from the roof of the rickshaw, and with such force that Shelley found a rusting piece of roof rack coming to rest just inches from her head. The bare metal had slashed a four-inch hole in the soft top.
For a split second, our journey to Nepal was hanging in the balance. But in India, no solution is much more than a few streets away and one hour later and 120 rupees worse off, we left a welding workshop and hit the road with a functional roof-rack, which vaguely resembled the old one, but with a touch more character.
We set out east across the wetlands of Madhya Pradesh. Along the way, we stopped off at Sanchi, one of India’s oldest Buddhist sites. After lunch, our biggest off-road challenge to date as National Highway NH86 turned from smooth open road to farm track. It took five hours, a tyre change and a knee-deep ford crossing to limp the final 60km in the dark, into Sagar.
But our series of mishaps and inconveniences today pale into insignificance when you look straight into the eyes of people your own age, who have lost parents, children and entire families in a disaster, which was beyond their control.
Earlier in the day, we’d used what little time we had before leaving Bhopal to pay our respects at the memorial, which has been erected in the community that lives outside the walls of the Union Carbide plant just north of Hadidia Road.
The city is still trying to recover from the disastrous chemical leak, which killed more than 28,000 people that fateful December night back in 1984. Even today, the name Bhopal resonates with tragedy.
We passed the halfway point today. Mixed reactions abound as we consider travelling the same distance again. It’s certainly reason to be proud – we’ve taken a two-stroke, 150cc three-wheeler 1,400km and halfway across the world’s ninth largest country in a week.
But seeing every inch of the road from Goa at ground level has had an inevitable effect.
I watched a video my wife had posted on Facebook this morning, of my one-year-old old son walking for the first time. When I return home to him, I’ll do my best not to forget the images of babies here, with only their mothers’ arms to lie in, of children stepping over stiff dead dogs on their way to school, of rows of men using those same roads as a toilet and entire villages buried by waste because the local governments are probably so corrupt, the money intended for refuse disposal lines pockets that need it much less.
And in Bhopal, a city that should have learned more than most, that high voltage power cable has probably been hanging at roof-rack height across that street for a year. If we hadn’t pulled it down, it might have remained unrepaired until it eventually caused damage to someone a lot less fortunate, in so many more serious ways.
Incredible India? Most definitely. But so often for the most tragic reasons.
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