Down Memory Road or the Tunnel

It’s “Mother’s Golden Temple Road,” (address given on the Dinesh restaurant sign) or the Auroville Main Road (Google maps), still the main entrance to Auroville for hundreds of vehicles a day carrying Aurovilians swathed in dust-protecting cloth on motorbikes, visitors on carbon belching TVS’s, rickety bicycles, listless walkers pulled over staring blankly at maps – plus lorries, small goods-vans, taxis, school buses, and me, with my memories of it.

The road from Kuilapalayam that feeds into it has changed. Joss’s trees, planted in the 70’s, provide shade and it’s been widened and resurfaced with a few miniscule speed bumps over which young Aurovilians and visitors bounce with abandon in their need for speed. Commercial development has crept out of Lakshmipuram westward along it, offering everything from Greek food to furniture to choice coffee. Thunderous and dangerous, the traffic pours along it, much of it heading for the national highway near Koot Road.

All this on a road that was not much different from Golden Temple Road in the beginning (I think it had some badly potholed surface) when we the stalwart pioneers pushed our ponderous Atlases toward the hole in the ground that was a budding golden temple of the Mother. The effort of that bicycle ride (only a few of us had motorbikes) kept both roads deserted during most of midday except for bullock carts with drivers half asleep in the savage heat.

We made the turn and saw the grove of casuarina trees that marked the centre of Auroville. After Certitude, there was little else except for the bleached beaches of sand on either side that only came alive, if there had been a few drizzles, in September when the low green peanut plants transformed them.

We pushed on in the heat, thinking wistfully of the ride back when the weight of our bikes would glide us easily into a Kuilapalayam that was a small village of mud and keet – no shops except those selling beedis. The then Golden Temple road had no solar kitchen or ring road; it just went straight into the Matrimandir workers camp, itself nothing but an extensive keet hut.

How many times have you ridden it? Cursed it? Gritted your teeth and narrowed your eyes against the fine dust that floats above it? While other roads were being tiled (and untiled) in and around Auroville why, you wondered, does this stretch of hell still look today like it had in the good old days?

The answer: maya. GTR is a temporary illusion that will vanish when the real road, the grand entrance (will there be an arch?) to the city of dawn, appears some time soon. One day, golden-yellow machines will appear somewhere west of Certitude and in a matter of minutes a road will float down from the architectural drawing that constantly hovers above Auroville and be secured with golden spikes. Soon after, the GTR will lie abandoned and desolate. Instantly all of our angst-filled memories will have vanished as well.

So keep this vision in your consciousness as you sneeze your way along it this summer: it does not exist in the real Auroville – it’s just this dusty time tunnel which we have believed for 48 years to be an actual road.