Saturday, 14 January 2012 20:17
Written by Richard Brown
When I got back into the car, I was suddenly transported to a different time and place as long dormant memories of market days I spent with my grandfather in the small Lincolnshire town of Spilsby in the early 1970s flooded through my brain. How I would yearn for him to speed up as he crawled along the narrow winding country lanes in his trusty old pick-up truck so that I could run to the newsagents to pick up the latest edition of my favorite comic, Roy of the Rovers. And how bored I would get as I stood around waiting for my grandfather to finish chewing the cud with his old cronies, having read and reread my comic so many times that I couldn’t almost memorize the stories.
I didn’t have much patience then and I don’t think I have that much more forty years later. Neither did the young guys whizzing past our car on their motorbikes with their girlfriends hugging them closely from behind, their fashionable modern clothes and flashy mobile phones harbingers of the changes that are set to sweep rural India as it is dragged almost unwittingly into the modern world.
The motorbikes mysteriously disappeared as the road twisted its way up into the hills. The previously fertile fields had now turned into scrubland, and the tall graceful palm trees I had seen earlier had been replaced by much smaller, less verdant species. Up ahead of us a tall sheer crag with a small temple perched on its summit came into sight.
This, I knew from my notes, was the Narasimha Temple. It wouldn’t take us long to get to Melkote now.
