Free Indian Takeaway by Hardeep Singh Kohli Page A

I am blissfully unaware of the fact that my decent-looking man is not the owner of a taxi; he is an auto rickshaw driver. For the uninitiated, an auto rickshaw is a scooter around which is attached the paraphernalia of passenger transport. It’s like a small covered couch being pulled along by a 75cc engine. The sides are open adding a certain vibrancy to the journey. They are invariably black with yellow hoods and are best described as rats on wheels.
    I love travelling in auto ricks. You feel much more part of the city, hearing and seeing everything at first hand rather than from the back seat of a cab. Besides which, right now I have littlechoice, since there would appear to be a dearth of cabs around. I agree a price of 500 rupees with the driver. That would seem to be the only thing we agree, since I’m not altogether sure he knows exactly where we are going. It’s not till much later on this 60km journey that I fully understand the implications of what I have agreed to.
    We stop to check the destination with the local English speaker. This is a bizarre three-way conversation between me (who is speaking English), the rickshaw driver (who is speaking Tamil), and the local English speaker (who speaks both). The driver then refuels and checks the air in the tyres. ‘Long journey,’ he says to me and almost smiles. Long journey. I should have realised then …
    If you are unused to travelling by auto rickshaw, then a short journey around a city can be quite hair-raising and a tad bruise-worthy. I am not new to the auto rick experience, yet what I hadn’t fully taken into account was the fact that Mamallapuram is not just 60km away. It’s 60km down a broken, pot-hole-infested, sometimes non-existent road that would seem like an arduous quest even in a luxurious four-wheel drive.
    I am bumped and thumped and thrown around the whining little auto rickshaw for the best part of two long hours. My already tired body soon aches with the unrelenting physical assault of the journey.

    Seven things I saw on my two-hour auto rickshaw journey
    The shell of a white car with no seats or upholstery driven
    by a boy sitting on a yellow plastic bucket.
    A fully grown man going off to work with a Spiderman
    lunchbox.
    A mother with three children on a scooter.
    A bolting cow narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a
    packed minibus.
    About eleven beautifully turned out and uniformed school
    kids in one auto rickshaw.
    Two children dressed as clowns.
    Three sari-clad ladies making themselves wet with a
    sprinkler, as if attempting to realise a Bollywood cliché
    just for me …

    When I eventually get to Mamallapuram I am shattered. I set off from Kovalam nineteen hours ago. I feel defeated. This defeat is compounded by the auto rickshaw driver reneging on the deal we had struck when leaving Chennai. The 500 rupees we had agreed on has now escalated to 700 rupees. I refuse point blank to be blackmailed and after much haggling I pay him 650 rupees. As I walk away from his wronged rebukes I realise that I have saved myself a massive sixty pence. I try to convince myself that it isn’t about the money: who can put a price on principle?
    I check into Greenwoods Beach Resort and fall face first and fully clothed into bed. Which is a mistake because the mattress is the typically hard Indian type: great for your back, not so good for your face. But I sleep.
    Three hours later the afternoon has become evening. I am woken by the sound of an errant child, bemoaning his lot in a language I guess to be Tamil. A day ago I was coddled in the five-star luxury of the Taj, and here I find myself in an altogetherdifferent world. A basic room with a (hard-mattressed) double bed, a dresser, an Igo TV set with an Onida remote control (which doesn’t work), a small bathroom, no toilet paper, no soap. The only wall adornment is a row of four rust-coloured pegs; there used to be five. There is an AC unit, the noisiest AC unit I have ever experienced and of