Elephants and Enfields by Evelyn Calvert (most popular novels of all time TXT) 📕

bungalow, I’d invite them round tomorrow.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether it is a wall, a restaurant, a little hut, a bar or a shop. If it has anything remotely resembling a vertical surface, then Vodaphone will get Mr.Patel to paint it Post Office red, Maggi Stock Cubes (remember them?) will insist on canary yellow, Finoglow Lightbulbs, a lovely shade of orange ochre and - you guessed it – Kingfisher Beer, bright red also. It wouldn’t surprise me if many a Goan has come home to find his cat painted orange and black and sponsoring Birla Shakti Cement.
God, I hope Mr.Patel isn’t reading this, I like my cats the colour they are!
I resist the almost hypnotic urge to make a Tata Indicom ISD phone call and ask for a couple of Pepsis. I part with eighteen rupees and am rewarded with a huge infectious grin from the shop owner the size of which is inversely proportional to the number of teeth in his head. Probably the finest and most accurate advert for Pepsi ever. Raj declines the offer of a drink. Probably for the best….don’t want to distract him from the task of dodging goods carriers and cows and shaving a couple more months from our three score years and ten.
Onwards and upwards, literally. As the road widens, the verdant paddies fall behind to give way to red dusty verges. Pretty much every house, shop, wall and tree are coated with this red dust up to about a foot from the ground where the monsoon rains splash and ricochet.
NH17 lazily climbs and winds through the scrubby hillside to Bambolim and it’s landmark holy cross to our right.
The village itself is a gem. A classic Goan village with dogs and kids playing in the road and farmers working the fields with oxen and a lovely, rarely-visited, shell-strewn beach, but it is the ‘Miraculous Cross’ which attracts the attention, so called because of its reputed powers of healing. No-one really knows when and by whom it was erected, but most concede that it was an engineer from Ponda who was building the mud road from Goa’s capital, Panjim, through the once-thick forest which covered this plateau. Banditry was reportedly rife through these hills and may have prompted any doubting travellers into hedging their bets with a swift ‘Hail Mary’ whilst tackling the dense bamboo.
Today it has become a huge shrine with a white modernist concrete façade and an attraction which draws believers from neighbouring states and further afield. Raj’s devotion, like that of many travellers, is of the mobile variety – a hefty hoot on the horn in passing.
On both sides of the road are dusty tracks leading to wire-encased complexes set back amongst the bushes. Their signs are sometimes in Konkani and almost always in English.
’IPHB Mental Hospital’, the huge Goa Medical College and Hospital, ‘Goa Dental College’,’Doctors Quarters’ and, increasingly, Indian Army facilities…’EME Station Workshops’,’Army Transport Training Facility’,’Supply and Stores Section’, each with the guard hut at the gatehouse, a plethora of red and white stripy paint and immaculately uniformed sentry.
It is incredible to me just how drab and depressing an Army camp can be made to be even under cloudless Indian skies. It must take a special kind of architectural skill to take the thoughts of a manic-depressive and sadistic military client with a repressed imagination and turn them into bricks and mortar, whether in India, Germany or Catterick, Yorkshire. I’ll bet that last location sent a shiver up the spine of many an erstwhile squaddie.
I still have etched into my psyche, my initial encounter with an army camp. It was back in 1973. My family were living in a quaint village in Suffolk, and I had just been awarded a distinction in ‘persona non gratia’ by Stowmarket Grammar School as had all the members of the infamous ‘Sixth-form Mafia’ – all three of us.
Gary Miller, Robert Rowell and me, what a team! I must admit that I hadn’t considered our behaviour disruptive. How could we be being disruptive to this bastion of priviledged education when, for a good proportion of our time, we were twenty miles away, in Thetford Forest on a motorbike? I suppose, in retrospect, although three-on-a-motorbike is considered positively uncrowded and everyday here in Goa, the sight of three grammar school pupils in yellow-striped maroon blazers perched atop a Honda 125, smoking St.Moritz menthol (recently stolen from a local shop) and hurtling through the sleepy sunlit rows of pines, was likely to attract the curiosity of the Norfolk Constabulary.
Needless to say, the faeces made contact with the electrical ventilation device and a stark decision had to be made. Find a job in rural Suffolk or join the Army.
I considered long and hard the merits of a career based on separating root vegetables from mud and decided that the earth-father satisfaction of farm work and the tranquillity of the rural idyll would not sufficiently compensate me for having to own a wardrobe comprising wellies spattered in pig shit, John Deere dungarees and a diesel-soaked neckerchief. Nor having to marry an eighteen stone, ruddy-cheeked, steer-wrestling relative.
I have always had a fascination for maps of all descriptions and when I read that the Royal Engineers had the task of mapping and cartography, my mind was made up and I signed on the dotted line with gusto.
Off to the selection centre in Sutton Coldfield, somewhere ‘up North’ for a leisurely weekend to finalise arrangements for reporting later in the year before returning home to spend the summer idling around the village and exploring the intricacies and hopefully intimacies of girls…it was all mapped out or so I thought.
Because there were no immediate vacancies in my chosen trade, I was persuaded to adopt my second choice and join the Royal Tank Regiment until I could be transferred at a later date to the Royal Engineers. I remembered as a child on holiday near Bovington, Dorset, being allowed to clamber into the dark bowels of a Chieftain tank and start it up. The crew were taking a break in a roadside lay-by and somehow my dad persuaded them to let me see inside. I was shown how to start the generator and then the main engine. It was only when watching back the grainy silent 8mm cine film that my dad had taken that I saw the huge billows of white smoke that proved my ‘achievement’.
How exciting would it be to hurtle through the sleepy sunlit rows of pines in one of those?
And so I was enlisted into the Second Royal Tank Regiment at Sutton Coldfield and looked forward to telling my parents all about it later that evening. It was with no little pride that I cheerily accepted my free rail pass but it took a second or two for me to realise that the pass was not made out to Stowmarket station, Suffolk.
I was stuffed onto the first train for Catterick Garrison, Yorkshire, with the news that the next time I would see home and kin was six weeks hence on completion of my basic training.
Now, I had been away from home before but this turn of events differed so much from my expectations of the summer of ’73 that, by the time we reached Grantham, I was already trying to stifle homesickness-induced tears and planning to go AWOL. I reached Darlington station to find an olive-drab three ton taxi waiting to chauffeur me and one other unfortunate soul to Cambrai Barracks.
It was a late, wet afternoon when we booked in at the guardroom and were told where to find our accommodation block. I have, to this day, never felt so forlorn and desolate as I did then.
John, for that was my colleagues name, and I walked across the precision-trimmed grass towards one of the dreary, grey, prison-like two storey blocks. I was just revising my view of 18 stone, ruddy-cheeked women and considering whether or not I would have studied harder at grammar school had I known what the alternative was going to be when the scream rang out for the first time.
‘Get off the fuckin’ grass!’
Of course I was used to hearing (and using) language of such hue but I simply did not believe that an adult would speak to me, a mere child, like that and we gazed across to see who was being so abused.
‘Yes, you, you CUNT, get off the fuckin’ grass…NOW!’
I looked at John. He didn’t strike me as a cunt. I was no expert but felt sure that I wasn’t a cunt either. The rapidly-reddening beret-topped face hanging from a first floor window obviously was an expert in such things because within seconds he was close enough to my face for me to have counted the veins in his bulging eyeballs as he loudly reaffirmed his opinion of our genital status. He either had an overactive thyroid or our army careers were off to a bad start. I suspected the latter.
I later learned to love military life but I still cannot pass an army camp without smiling to myself and basking in the freedom of civilianship.
We leave the military behind us and Goa’s largest village, Santa Cruz, and drop down to the long, straight causeway across the Rio Do Ourem ( river of gold ) estuary, a wide wetland of ponds, streams and rivulets used principally for fish farming and salt-panning. The trees and bushes on the dykes are spiked with the region’s most prolific wader, the little egret, a small white heron-like bird and an expert spear fisherman. These banknote-thin predators will stand motionless for minutes at a time just watching for the slightest movement and then dart their stiletto beaks beneath the ripples to fetch up a shivering silver meal.
At the end of the causeway is the region of Patto, the gateway to Goa’s fascinating capital since 1843, Panaji.
Most people, Goans included, still call the place Panjim or Pangim as it was known by the British and Portugese respectively. The city sits on the inside of a huge sweep of the Mandovi River and its densely packed mix of modern and colonial buildings sparkle through the suns haze. Towering red and white striped radio masts rise from the conurbation like feelers.
There is little accurate record of Panjim prior to the early 1800’s. The land was largely saltmarsh with hardly a house or landmark. The principle occupation of its few residents was the collection of waterways taxes or exise duty from the incoming or outgoing ships. It was offshore of these marshes that the ship of Alfonso de Albuquerque moored prior to the attack which led to the conquest of Goa from the ruler of Bijapur and subsequent Portugese colonization.
There is speculation as to the derivation of the name but in Konkani, ‘Panji’ means great grandmother.
The succession of large roundabouts at Patto are heaving with traffic as it is a hub for travellers to North and South Goa and east to the former capital, Old Goa. Patto also lays claim to an historic monument, Pattobridge or Ponte De Linhares, the remains of one of the longest and oldest bridges in the East.
Building started in 1632 during Portugese colonial rule and ended two years later with a forty span Romanesque bridge over three kilometres long. It runs along the south bank of the Mandovi across the marshes of the Rio Do Ourem from Panjim to the village of Ribandar. Hundreds of local trees were felled and the massive timbers driven into the silts as pilings to support tons of laterite stone blocks. The more modern Indian bridge builders should have taken lessons