I lay on another bench and slept some more. It was hot. When I woke up a series of buses arrived and departed, with a few passengers, a gaggle of school girls stared at me, the sugar cane machine went round and round with it's jingling bells but I never saw anyone drink the juice. Crows cawed. The sun set.
At last my bus arrived. The driver got down and dissappeared.
Jaitapur
The road to Jaitapur deteriorated. There were whole stretches without tarmac, bumpy earth. Dust billowed up as we drove and everything that overtook us enveloped us in a huge cloud of dust. As we progressed, the bus gradually emptied. The bus stopped. Smiling, the conductor told me to get out. Jaitapur. It was completely dark. Jaitaupur? I asked. The waved their hands in a general direction, also dark, and so I walked. I came to a house with a light on. No one spoke English. I gestured sleep. A girl cme out and told me kuchni - nothing. They took me a little further on to a rickshaw, who took me up the coast to a bar. They seemed reluctant to give me a room, but they did. Just that. A room with a bed. The toilet was outside, down two flights of stairs, in the dark.
Next day I tried to wash my hair with soap and a bucket of water, because I had forgotten to bring shampoo. The soap seemed to act like glue. In the bar they shook my hand, attempted conversation and told me when the next bus was going to Rajapur. The night before a couple of businessmen told me that Ritwik's telephone number was not local to there. There was no public telephone in this place and no one wanted to let me use their mobile. Anyway it seems that I had come all this way to meet someone who doesn't live here and nobody in this place spoke English. They barely spoke Hindi. So I decided to beat a retreat.
It turns out that the bar was a drinking den, where men come to drink whiskey, from seven o'clock in the morning. Rows of bottles of Indian whiskey on glass shelves. That might explain their reluctance to let me stay the night before.
I made the mistake of catching a bus to Rajapur, thinking that I could get a train from there. But the train station was 26km from the bus station and there was no transport to get there. The birds nest was still scattered all over the floor of the bus station. The jingling sugar cane juice machine was still turning. The crows still cawed. I got on the next bus to Ratnagiri (I could have got a bus direct to Ratnagiri from where I was.) The Ratnagiri bus went back to Rajapur town, got stuck in a traffic jam, then came back to Rajapur bus station. Then on to Ratnagiri, grinding up and down the wooded hills for three and a half hours.
In Ratnagiri I got on a local train to Goa , in the ladies carriage again, until it emptied. Then I went into the general carriage, where two delightful Saddhus invited me to sit with them. They wore orange robes and orange turbans, and had long locks and long, soft, white beards. They perused my map with the aid of a pair of broken glasses and a torch and advised me to go all the way to Madgoan, the last stop, not to try to get across country to a beach in the night because I wouldn't find any buses. They gave me a beautiful wool shawl to wrap round my shoulders to keep me warm. When we arrived they wanted to give it to me as a present, but I refused. How could I take something from a pair of wandering Saddhus. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs and relied on the generosity of the public to survive.
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