Nightcycling

A loud noise at a junction – an accident. There’s little traffic but something’s managed to hit someone. People gather round; a timeless protocol of observation. The injured man sits up, with another leaning down to help. The rest impassive as statues, like warders guarding something, trained not to let any emotion show.

There are enough voyeurs. I peddle on.

Neon lights of shops, piles of gravel spilling on to the road. Darker roads ahead. Streets that run off the main road silent and empty. A speed bump comes out of nowhere and the bike jolts, sliding on the gravel. Bangalore in the early night hours.

Bats pass close, flitting between drooping lianas – jungle sights in a big city.

Infinite heaps of trash – the burial mounds of the 21^st century, and the overpowering smell of unwanted things.

Multi-coloured and 3D, the bulging forms of Hindu gods adorn a temple wall. The giant elephant Ganesha, all inscrutable and weird to me, rises forty feet, towering over the dead-end darkness. She stares at the decrepit houses and says nothing.

Shelley said night makes a weird sound of its own stillness.

The pariah dogs are listless in the middle of empty roads. I look back and they’ve not moved, faced in different directions like confused ghosts. Night has made animals of them, the darkness dividing them instead of uniting, packs of one.

Cows sift through detritus. The same smells as noon but past midnight no incense to hide the worst of it, and no crowds to look at. Hot air buffeting the bike.

Too much empty darkness to relax, but not sinister.

At a bridge a man humping a sack on his back walks slowly towards me. Stopping the bike to greet him he says something I can’t understand, then drifts away, chanting.

A family of five, all women and girls in blue saris, huddle under a giant tree’s canopy as if it was raining. Tiny and barely visible figures swallowed by the big city.

And a late-night chai shop, busy with patrons. Comforting kitchen sounds. Nepali late-night bar staff stumble home, laughing like they’re in the park on a Sunday. It’s 2am.

Then the ring road and the end of Bangalore proper; what lies outside is just more urban sprawl and eventually the city surrenders to an army of villages and cultivated fields, places where you can see the horizon and the stars shine white on black. No horizon here though and only feeble stars in an orange sky.

The huge highway overpass looms black and gigantic, a urine-soaked frontier. The heat has mixed with piss and rubbish and the smell of decaying fruit to make a unique aroma, multi-layered and reaching the nose in waves.

Old buses like shipwrecks, coated in the day’s dust, blocking the light from nearby houses.

Three vagrants sit on the kerb, combing the dirt for cigarette butts and waiting impatiently for dawn.