Have you ever driven your Porsche into a battery of fire from the Russian Katyusha rocket launchers, called colloquially “Stalins Organ”, as did the terrified Wehrmacht and Hitler’s tank regiments in that cars progenitors? Or more prosaically into a bank of fire hoses? If yes don’t bother to read on.
The sky over the slack banyan trees was like a dirty ragged old sack, the road was dry and the contrasting fresh vivid green paddy fields had a calm mirror finish between the rice blades: all looked well as we motored up the pre-war quality road north along the Coramandel coast.
A few drops appeared on the screen freshening the air a little we thought and then the drops multiplied hitting the screen like soft pellets of a heavy viscous liquid previously not experienced but with all the force of mercury.
Then like a wall collapsing on the bonnet it hit us rolling up onto the screen foaming white: the much talked of hurricane had arrived: panic stations:wipers at full, headlamps on high, rear fog on, hazards flashing (the last two thankfully put in place to placate a pedantic German motoring stricture to allow us road insurance in that rigorous country): I even blew the horn in my shock though it’s octaves were lost in the lashings of aerial roots now whipping the sky immediately above! A low gear selected and then deadly calm until another brutal wave shook our feeble transport, and another and another: what was coming at us we did not dare to think but I did expect a heavy Tata lorry grossly overloaded and driven by a devil tempting the storm or, maybe worse, perhaps a clinically insane bus driver thinking himself a formula one race driver, in any case certainly unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy as I now was : either of which might hit us head on in the confusion of this storm. No time now to think about the huge craters, veritable ponds now: nor yet the steep bank dropping down each side of the narrow unmarked and twisting road to the rice-fields either side.
Meanwhile a thousand Pygmy warriors feet were drumming on our canvas roof with a deafening and distracting effect helping to produce a certain degree of delirium.
The storm passed for now but repeated its violence at least a dozen times again: this was our first real monsoon driving.
Then as we relaxed back into our seats after sitting on the very edge, our nerves as tight as crossbow strings, and with only 15 miles to the Windflower hotel a giant wall of water fairly fell on us just outside Cuddalore: this surely was to have been the “coup de grace” but we took the full frontal body slam with some equanimity now: our bow-wave sent a wretched motorcyclist spinning and toppling: but self survival is all and we motored on. How far is that damned hotel, surely we’ve suffered enough?
But Cuddalore was another sadistitic torment with a narrow twisting flooded main road, lunch time be-saried and flip-flop shod jaywalkers, huge buses, those other formula-one racers making up time, coming pell-mell, and, those”pests of the road”, kamikaze motorcyclists: I now remembered our bow-wave with some glee!
Do I really prefer this life to the “old folks home” on Alderton Hill? Do I want my blood curdled with the foul mud, lorry diesel, monsoon rain and assorted other “road-kill” gently decomposing?: my muscles & vital organs frying on a lorries white-hot exhaust manifold? Worse, my more resilient remains, soon to add to those exotic stenches of the Indian by-ways: to become a semi-permanent feature now as the farmers have poisoned all the vultures, once India’s most common bird, which would and did put any cleansing authority dept to shame.
Exhilarating though? As Winston Churchill said after his cavalry charge on Omdurman, there is nothing so exciting as being shot at, with no result”
Especially so, as that dreaded collision never materialised: my blood, my bones & my organs live on intact to eschew that comfortable and perpetual oblivion called “retirement” on Alderton Hill!