“This is our culture,” explained Dheeru. “You are now part of our family.”
He reached out and grabbed hold of my hand, and I felt it. I was a part of his family, just as he had quickly become a part of mine, joining Willy and Tony and Anna and Mehmet in the growing group of brothers and sisters who had become the heart of this journey. In many ways, I was a boy raised in the wild. I didn’t understand the ways of those around me, and I always felt like I didn’t belong in the concrete jungle of money and business deals and exceedingly good manners. Maybe a part of me belonged in India, long before I ever had the chance to meet her. I wobbled my head back at Dheeru, not even realizing I had already picked up the habit.
I continued on, preparing them for what I hoped would be the gift to change their lives: “You told me that sometimes you don’t have enough money to feed your family and that sometimes your children go hungry for days. And you told me you were a hero in Indian culture because you had the rickshaw. Well . . . I want to buy you a new rickshaw.”
I want to buy you a new rickshaw? I never thought I would utter those words. And I never thought they would mean so much when I did.
Evidently, Dheeru never expected to hear them. He was totally stunned. He couldn’t quite believe this was happening.
“Is it possible?” he whispered.
“Absolutely,” I replied, a wide smile now breaking across my face. “I am going to buy you your own rickshaw.”
“If it’s very possible, I’m very, very happy for you to,” Dheeru stuttered, his excitement making his English even more broken. “Because I work like this. I want this change for my family and change of my living status, you know. So everybody’s looking for this dream, and if it is possible, I am so happy.”
“It is very possible,” I reiterated.
After a long pause he replied, “How can I thank you? I don’t know how I’m going to thank you. I am very happy, very happy. I am . . . I don’t know.”
And then that smile returned. I would have given Dheeru everything I owned for that smile. It was one of joy; it was one of love; and it was, despite their poverty and struggles, one of utter contentment.
Once I was able to convince him that he was not dreaming and that he really would be receiving his very own rickshaw, we sat down for breakfast with his wife and sons.
As we ate, Dheeru started realizing what the rickshaw would mean. “It will change everything,” he explained. He looked at his sons, “Life, education. I can give a good education for a long time for my children. I can extend to go to a nice house, good education, and good place for life.”
Dheeru and his family deserved a good place to live. They deserved good lives. I left the slum that morning and walked back to where I had parked Kindness One the day before. I thought of my own family back at home—Lina and Winston. We had so much—a wonderful house, the knowledge that we would never go hungry—and yet I often failed to appreciate the most important part of our life: We had love.
I revved up Kindness One and heard a little cough in her start. I hoped it wasn’t anything. I couldn’t imagine trying to fix the motorbike along the crazy roads of India, but I knew it was like the old man in the ashram said: “Let it be.”
Chapter Eight
“If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.”
—Edgar W. Howe
I have a confession to make, admittedly it is over twenty years late, but as they say, better late than never: I hated school. Almost every minute I was forced to sit at that desk, listening to teachers, was pure, unadulterated hell. And I had the grades to prove it. At one point, I scored 18% on a chemistry exam. And the fact that I got 18% of the questions correct was a near miracle. No, unfortunately, memorizing facts and being tested on them was just two rungs up from Chinese water torture. I didn’t realize it until much later, but the reason for that was that facts and figures and chemistry didn’t speak to me. Other people’s stories did.
Although my schooling wasn’t much of a success, I found another way of learning. It was by fantasizing about walking on the moon that I became interested in astronomy. It was by wondering where the hell Antarctica was that I pulled out my first map. It was by dreaming that I would ride a motorcycle across the world that one day . . . Well, you know the rest.
And yet without the education I received, I don’t know that I would have ever been open to those lessons. It was because I understood the context of the countries that I was visiting, that I was also better able to understand their people . . . and ultimately myself. I walked through India with my English accent, keenly aware of the role my country had played in the history of this modern nation. I quickly saw how my Queen’s English and my white skin affected the dynamics between me and the people I met. I could feel the weight of history as though it were riding next to me in Kindness One’s sidecar. But I knew that in dropping the mask, the mask of my accent, and that of the horrendous baggage of our mutual past, that in some way, the dynamic might be shifted yet again.
No school could teach the lessons of India. It seemed that all the crises of the world—poverty, inequality, spirituality, and a glut of technology—were playing out on the broken rubble of its streets. And perhaps this was no more true than in Delhi, where the modern world sat right on top of the ancient one, the old roots of Hinduism and Islam rising through the billboard ads for cell phones and Coca-Cola.
As I had anticipated, it was difficult to find people to give me things they did not have. I spent nearly an entire day sitting at a gas station waiting for someone to give me gas. Apparently (like the sport of cricket), waiting was a national pastime in India, and I was becoming quite accomplished in it. But what I received in place of gas or water or even food were the stories of a nation. People were always willing to stop and talk, despite the language barriers and my awkward explanation of how I, a white man in India, had no money.
Finally, I met someone who was able to help, offering me a tank of gas and my first meal of the day before I got on the road again, off to the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal was famously built by the Shah Jahan in the 1600s in honor of his wife, who died in childbirth. It is a testament to their love, and the loss that only such a love can bring. It took twenty years and over twenty thousand workers to build it. It is rumored that when it was done, the Shah had the main architect killed so that no copy of it could be completed elsewhere. And when you stand before it, you can’t help but understand, just a little bit, why.
Two young Dutch girls had taken pity on me and paid for my entrance to the site. While walking the marble halls, I looked around, and it seemed like the entire site was filled with couples holding hands. Suddenly I felt terribly alone, as though I had no one else to talk to, and never would again. I had no one to share this with. I remembered Lina’s face on my computer, and suddenly Los Angeles seemed a long, long way away. Antarctica felt closer. But that’s probably because it was!
I left the Taj with a heavy heart, which may or may not have been the cause of the following incident. Now when I took my driving test in London, which I passed on the sixth attempt, one of the things I was taught was to stay on the road. I swear, I was never told by any driving instructor, ever, that I should drive off the road and into a wall. But what can I say? I’m a rule breaker. And apparently, a wall breaker, because only half a mile away from the Shah’s testament to the eternity of love, I rode my motorbike right into a wall. A hard wall. A freshly painted hard wall. The only one in India I believe.
Once I shook off the shock of the collision—where did that wall come from, anyway?—I realized a few things: one, that I wasn’t hurt; two, that no one else was involved; three, that the wall had taken a big chunk out of my precious yellow bike; and four, that Kindness One wouldn’t start.
When I looked underneath the engine, I saw that there was a dreaded leak. I had not
only failed my chemistry test and my driving exam, but I was also clearly failing the course on motorbike management that I had inadvertently signed up for in taking this trip.
For those of you who haven’t been to India, I am about to share one of its many secrets: When anything goes wrong in India, people arrive. Lots of people. They mingle. They watch. They chatter among themselves. They often try and help. When an Englishman on a yellow motorbike drives into a freshly painted wall, the whole town comes out. Including, as I found out, the local karate master.
I am not joking. I mean at the moment, I wondered whether I was seeing things, but that’s an upside of having a camera crew with you. They can help you identify the difference between crazy shit that actually happened and good old-fashioned hallucinations, and the karate master was no hallucination.
After introducing himself in broken English, which was much better than my Hindi, I asked him, “What color belt do you have?”
“Black belt,” he replied dryly as he walked around my bike. I had managed to stop the leak, but Kindness One was going to need a lot more help than that.
“Can you teach me some karate?” I asked, thinking this would lighten the mood a bit, and maybe convince the karate teacher to help a fellow out.
“Done. And change to uniform.”
I know, I know. This moment can’t be real. There is no way a karate master stopped to look at my bike and brought along with him a freshly cleaned karate costume in my size. Well, that first part is all true. The size part—not so much. The jacket fit tightly over my T-shirt, and the pants barely fit around my trousers, but it was good enough for the karate master and certainly for the quickly growing audience around us.
Our first interactions were quite gentle, but then the karate master stood back and smiled.
“I will hug you,” he stated for all to hear. I was ready to be embraced, thinking our lesson was over. I should have paid more attention to my karate instructor when I was young. Never expect a hug.
Instead, what I got was a jarring kick to the face. As though riding my bike into a wall hadn’t been bad enough, I had also just ridden my face into this stranger’s foot. He started to circle me, showing off some Bollywood moves for the audience as they laughed and cheered him on. What had I gotten myself into? I was about to get my arse kicked less than a mile away from the international epicenter of love. I guess in India “I will hug you” actually means “I will kick you in the face until you beg for mercy.”
So that’s what I did. On my knees. And then I tried to run away. Finally, I found a translator from the crowd who told the master that I didn’t actually know karate. Finally, he understood. I was looking for a teacher. He thought he had found a sparring partner.
After I spent the better part of ten minutes prostrate on the ground, the karate teacher finally offered me a hand of friendship. Rajat had not only stopped trying to beat me up, but also asked if I needed a place to stay for the night. It seemed I had earned his kindness through my lack of karate skills. I was just grateful I didn’t have to go through that every time I asked someone for help.
We walked Kindness One back to his small two-room house in a shanty town not far from the Taj. There, I was able to keep an eye on the leaking situation. Rajat told me to calm down and that in the morning he would send me to one of his friends who would fix the leak. Of course, this was coming from a man who had kicked me in the face only hours before. As I lay down on the mat Rajat had offered me, I thought again of Lina. I don’t know why I find relationships to be so much harder when I’m in them. From here, in India, Lina and our home sounded like the best place on earth. And yet, I had learned over the years that, once I settled back home, I always felt the need to go again. I wondered whether it was like being in school. I liked the idea of it, but the reality always made me feel like the walls were closing in on me.
When I woke up in the morning, Agra looked different in the dawn’s light—kinder, gentler. Rajat sent me to a local mechanic who patched up the leak for free. I started up Kindness One and was ready again to hit the open roads of India.
Or shall I say the broken roads of India? How do I put this tactfully? How about this? The Indian roads are a complete death trap. Hell waits for you at every corner. Cars drive right at you. Cows pop out of nowhere. Children play in the middle of the road. There are no rules. Precious little asphalt. No trustworthy stoplights or speed limits. There is nothing but absolute, astonishing fear. If you ever have the chance to drive in India. Don’t. Just. Don’t. You have been warned.
I had decided to ride to Lucknow, which is a big town in the center of India, and from the sound of it, a great place to get some luck, now. My bike, however, had other plans. While on the road to fortune, Kindness One started spluttering and then stopped in the middle of a highway. The truck drivers weren’t happy. The cows weren’t happy. Kindness One wasn’t happy. And I won’t even tell you how I was feeling. But it had been during moments like this that I had often witnessed people at their kindest. They could smell the desperation or see the exhaustion or know, because they had been there many times themselves, when someone just needed some help
The sun was fading, and things were looking bad, but I was in luck now without even having made it to the aforementioned city yet. Although I had stopped in the middle of the street, I had also stopped right next to a roadside pancake seller. He and his nine children, ranging in age from four to sixteen, helped push my bike to the corner and let me stay the night with them. If you think that sleeping on a straw mattress under the stars is a good night’s sleep, well it is. It was a perfect night of sleep. In the morning, the family even patched up my bike and gave me gas. As I was quickly learning, there was probably no better place in the world for a bike to break down than in India. Because nearly everyone rode them, and unlike you-know-who, they all knew how to fix them. Incredible India indeed!
I arrived in Lucknow only to find that, once again, a white man with a British accent was cause for curiosity but not generosity. And again, I understood. Even I was embarrassed for the chap. I did my best not to get run over by the Lucknow traffic as I made my way to an outdoor teashop. It was one of many that lined the streets of India. Old men selling chai to a short but steady line. I began to talk with a man while he waited for his tea, hoping he might buy me one, too.
“Is it normally this hot in India?” I asked, getting used to striking up conversations with strangers.
“Yes. Now it’s cool. You can say it’s cool.”
“It’s cool?” I responded. “Cool is 60 degrees. Not 110!”
“I’d even say it’s cold,” the man said laughing. Ajay was in his early twenties and looked as though he might work for a tech company or ride a motorbike of his own. He replied in near-perfect English, “It’s much more hot in the summers.”
“I think I’ve lost about fifteen kilos of body weight already . . .”
“That means you were huge!” he laughed again, and I knew that I was making a friend. I explained to him my journey and also my hunger, hoping that he wouldn’t dismiss me as so many had already done that day.
Ajay countered with my favorite reply, “You’re looking for a place to stay the night?”
This man was good.
“Yes, I am,” I replied, trying not to appear too desperate. Finally, my luck was looking up.
“So, I don’t have a place to stay for you,” Ajay began. “But I’m going to the bus station on the way to my village. If you like, I can take you there, and you can stay there.”
“How far away is your village?” I asked.
“From Lucknow, it’s a hundred kilometers. I can take you there, and you can see new things, and they will show you kindness. If you want to come with me, I will take you on a safe journey, and I can buy you a bus ticket to it.”
I explained that I had my motorbike and offered to give him a ride if he could take care of t
he gas. He gladly agreed, and added lunch into the deal as well.
A good friend once told me, “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” I had applied those words to my career, to my relationships, to my life choices, but I had begun to realize that nowhere did they apply more than in India. The miracles were there, hidden beneath the thick smog, the piles of trash alongside the road, the hurried and desperate pace of its people. You just had to be willing to wait, and sometimes you had to wait a really long time (like, a really, really long time), but somewhere in that mess of smells and people and color, miracles occurred.
As Ajay and I drove into the village, I realized my new friend had evidently called in advance, telling his friends and family of my impending arrival. The whole village had come out to welcome me. All of them. Even the cows.
I felt like a Bollywood star coming back to his hometown for a visit. During our short drive there, a whole show had been put together in my honor. There were singers. And dancers. And cows. And children, lots and lots of children.
Everyone in the village seemed to own a cell phone, and they were all taking photos and videos of our entrance. It appeared that the digital revolution had reached the backwaters of India, but white men on yellow motorbikes had not.
Music seemed to fill the air. I wasn’t even sure where it was coming from, but as the children and the people from the village danced around me, I felt myself join in. Almost instantly, it was as though we were one moving body, and not separate people. We danced past the small mud huts of the village, moving across the dirt road. I felt myself laughing so hard, I had forgotten about the days of travel, the exhaustion, the fear. I forgot about everything but the present moment, dancing with strangers who without a word had become my friends. For a while, Ajay joined along with us, bouncing up and down next to me, sharing in my laughter, but in the mayhem of people and dancers and cell phones and cows, I lost sight of him.
The Kindness Diaries: One Man's Quest to Ignite Goodwill and Transform Lives Around the World Page 12
