Invisible Armies

579 Pages·2016·1.58 MB·English

by  Jon Evans

Invisible Armies
Jon Evans
Buy the book via the author's website.
CC BY-NC-ND
Part 1
Karnataka
Chapter
1

The bridge is out. No: it has never been in. Danielle
nudges the gearshift into neutral, splays her legs out on
either side to support the motorcycle, and stares
disbelievingly. The road before her continues smoothly
for some sixty feet, then unravels into a leprous mass of
concrete, from which a tangle of rusted girders reaches
across the Tungabadhra River towards a similar span on
the other side. It fails to arrive by forty feet.
Whoever did not finish this bridge's midsection
neglected to inform the National Geographical Survey of
India, whose map of the state of Karnataka, currently
tucked into Danielle's day pack, claims that the bridge
successfully traverses the dark river below. The next
nearest crossing is fifteen miles away, along gouged
Indian roads that would eat up at least an hour, and it is
already afternoon, and Danielle isn't sure that she can
reach her destination at all from the other bridge. For a
moment she feels defeated.
Which is fine. This is a chore, not a mission. A favour
to a friend, and one she already wishes she had not
accepted. A valid excuse to back out would be a relief,
and how much more valid can you get than this
impassable ruin of an incomplete bridge?
But wait. She sees motion. Something stirs in the
water by the opposite shore, next to the pillars that hold
up its third of a bridge, and then what looks like a large
floating wicker basket shaped like an inverted dome,
maybe ten feet in diameter, emerges from the shadowed
water. It carries two men. One uses a leaf-shaped paddle
to propel the basket-dome – coracle, a distant corner of
her mind informs her – towards the south side of the
river. The other man waves and points somewhere
behind her. His smile flashes white against his dark skin.
Danielle looks over her shoulder and sees a little dirt
trail, about a hundred feet back, that separates from the
road and falls steeply to a muddy landing on the
riverbank.
They cannot seriously be thinking of ferrying her
motorcycle across. It's a small bike, but still a heavy
machine, and their overgrown basket looks like it has all
the structural integrity of a banana leaf. But here is
another coracle, coming behind the first, and this one
moves slowly, because it is loaded with a half-dozen
Indian villagers, several heavy sacks of grain, and a man
sitting on a motorcycle much like hers. This coracle bobs
low in the water but amazingly does not sink.
Danielle reluctantly decides she cannot abandon her
errand just because the river must be crossed by fragile-
seeming ferry instead of bridge. She wheels the bike
around and steers down the dirt path to the riverbank,
controlling brake and throttle gingerly; she has no
helmet, it has been years since she spent much time on a
bike, and low-speed motorcycle maneuvers are always
potentially treacherous. When she gets to the landing, a
flat patch covered by shallow mud, she turns off the
engine and looks towards the approaching coracle ferry.
The paddling has stopped. Both men gape at her with
wonder and bewilderment.
For a moment Danielle doesn't understand. Then she
realizes. They thought she was a man, thanks to her
close-cropped hair, and the truth has struck them dumb.
She is probably the first woman riding a motorcycle by
herself that these men have ever seen, and an exotic
white woman at that. And this is the sticks. Yesterday's
journey, Goa to Hospet to Hampi, was a route that sees
plenty of white women travelling solo, but although
Hampi with its many Western backpackers is only ten
miles away, this broken bridge is definitely off the beaten
track. This is real rural India. A whole different world.
She doesn't feel threatened by their stares, not with the
sun beaming down, and several women visible in the
other coracle, and a handful more now watching her from
the opposite shore, but she does feel distinctly
uncomfortable.
She wonders if this is what being a movie star is like;
everybody wordlessly watching you, knowing that you
belong to an infinitely glamorous and more exciting
world than theirs. She wishes she had brought a male
companion. Not that that wouldn't have created its own
set of problems. But suddenly those problems seem
better than feeling like a target. A target only of attention,
right now, but such attention makes her nervous.
The empty coracle, a woven basket of thumb-thick
branches lined on the outside with plastic wrap, reaches
the shore. The non-paddling man steps out and motions
her to get off the bike. She doesn't want to. She suddenly
wants to turn around, ride straight back to Hampi, email
Keiran and tell him he can find someone else to run his
international errands for him. But Danielle has spent the
last few years of her life systematically forcing herself to
do exactly those things that make her uncomfortable or
frightened. She knows she is mostly the better for it. She
wonders, though, as she stands back and allows the man
to straddle her motorcycle and expertly roll it onto the
coracle, whether one day this constant struggle for self-
improvement will propel her into disaster.
The vessel's interior is wet, but the motorcycle's
weight distorts the flexible hull enough that all the
interior water pools beneath the bike's tires, and Danielle
stays mostly dry. She sits crosslegged on the surprisingly
comfortable wood, avoiding the ferrymen's unflagging
stares, and watches the unearthly landscape around her.
The wide, fast Tungabadhra River, lined by tall
coconut trees, carves a path through jumbled ridges of
colossal reddish boulders that somehow look both
crystalline and water-warped. Roads and villages are
built in the shadow of these boulders, which look like
handfuls of fifty-foot pebbles dropped by the gods,
balancing and leaning on one another in seemingly
unnatural ways, as if child-giants had used them as
playthings, piled stacks and mounds of them, then
abandoned them here when they grew bored. It's hard for
Danielle to shake the notion that this place was meant for
creatures of far greater scale than mere human beings.
And then there are the ruins. Most human constructions
here are ancient, the bones of the Vijayanagar kingdom
that ten centuries ago ruled all of south India. Half-
collapsed stonework; still-intact ziggurats densely carved
with Hindu gods and idols, some of their features worn
away by the centuries, but still enormously imposing;
high ornate walls standing forlornly in tilled fields;
kilometre-long pillared colonnades. Once these were
royal residences, temples, elephant stables, public plazas.
To the west, Danielle can make out the the crumbling
remains of a massive stone bridge that once spanned the
palm-tree-lined river. This thousand-year relic doesn't
seem much more ruined than the rusted iron and cratered
concrete above her.
A few squat concrete boxes have grown around the
northern end of the modern bridge, and clusters of
thatched huts are visible in the distance, between the hills
and ridges. Dots that are men and women can be seen
cultivating small oblong properties, brown fields of grain
and deep green banana plantations. A large whitewashed
temple to some Hindu god is visible at the top of the
highest hill. But the modern buildings, roads and
plantations look wildly out of place.
As they approach the northern bank Danielle winces,
realizing that she forget to agree a price before
embarking. She expects a demand for some outrageous
amount of money, and she is not in a good position to
argue; a woman on her own, on the wrong side of the
river that only these men can help her cross. But the man
asks her for only twenty rupees, less than fifty US cents.
His accent is so thick, and the price so surprising, that he
has to repeat it three times before she is certain she
understood. She wonders why, unlike just about
everyone else in India, these men do not see the central
goal of their interaction with a foreigner to be the
acquisition of as much wealth as possible by any
nonviolent means available. Maybe so few tourists come
here that these men have not learned how to be usurious.
Or maybe they are frightened of foreigners. If Keiran is
right, they have good reason to be frightened.
She wonders what time the ferry stops. Surely she can
get back before nightfall. Even if not, surely she can pay
someone to paddle her back across. And even if that fails,
surely some family will put her up for the night. She has
money, after all, and a white woman's glamour. Even in
the worst case, it will be an adventure. Danielle kicks her
engine into life, shifts into gear, and starts north.