The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love

by Per J Andersson

  The priests performed ceremonies to appease the goddesses before the villagers went out to collect seeds for the next year’s crops. But one man did not wait for the ritual to be completed, and before long, he was struck down with aches and a raging fever. The muscles in his legs atrophied, until they became as thin as twigs. He never recovered. For the rest of his life he was forced to drag himself around on crutches. That was what happened if you defied the goddesses.

  An old tree grew at the eastern end of the village, where bats and nocturnal birds lived. And witches, said PK’s grandmother. Every night, a conference of birds could be heard chatting in the tree, only to be drowned out by the shrill squawks of the crows, the most fervent talkers of all. But PK thought that these noises were actually the desperate cries of people who had been cursed by the witches and damned to spend this life in bird form.

  A large wooden cart was usually parked on the outskirts of the village. During the summer festivities it was used to parade the black, white and yellow gods: Jagannath, Lord of the Universe, his brother Balarama and sister Subhadra. They were gods of the forest people, ones his mother’s family had worshipped since ancient times even though the Hindus had made them their own. Jagannath became a revelation of Vishnu, while the Buddhists saw him as an incarnation of the Buddha.

  In autumn, festival season came again. This was when Durga, Shiva’s wife, was honoured. The priests sacrificed goats on a hill outside the village, staining the soil dark with their blood. The Brahmins said that blood gave Durga power to fight the demons that threatened the divine order.

  The Hindus have so many gods, PK used to think. He never understood how they all fitted together. But he felt their presence and ignored the contradictions. As an adult, he realized that his mother and father were not allowed to participate fully in the festivals. They could join the processions, but were forbidden to touch the statues or the wooden cart in which the gods travelled. They could pray, but not next to the upper castes or in the temple. They were permitted to perform the rituals, but preferably in the background so that the Brahmins did not see them. If the priests had been free to decide, they would have made the untouchables stay at home, away from everything that was pure and holy.

  A great deal of Indian entertainment focused on relationships between mothers and daughters-in-law, the core conflict at the heart of the Indian family and thus the subject of many soap operas and Bollywood films. This was perhaps only natural when multiple generations lived together under one roof. Men may be the masters of the mountainside, but women reign over the hearth. To this day, mothers-in-law maintain a firm grip over the domestic realm, while daughters-in-law bring habits inherited from their own mothers. How should the chapatis be rolled, the dal boiled, the corn harvested and the children raised?

  PK was three years old and too young to notice what was going on in his own family, but his older brothers later told him about the time their mother fell out with Grandma.

  Kalabati had given birth to her fourth child three months earlier, a girl named Pramodini. But her mother-in-law was on the attack.

  ‘That beloved wife of yours is a witch,’ she told Shridhar.

  And then she turned to Kalabati. ‘You can’t stay here. You bring trouble on us all.’

  Kalabati’s eyes darkened, but she did not reply. What good would it do to protest? It was understood by all that Grandma made the decisions. The house belonged to her and her husband. PK’s mother was the outsider who had moved in. The only person in a position to defend her was Shridhar, but he said nothing. He swallowed the anger, vexation and shame. He showed no emotion, no displeasure at his mother’s behaviour.

  Silence descended on the home. That Monday, Shridhar left for the city without comment and Kalabati went about her chores. But after a week had passed and Shridhar was about to return for the weekend, Kalabati turned to her mother-in-law. Without letting even one tear run down her cheeks, she announced that she would be moving back to her parents.

  ‘With the two youngest.’

  Grandma put her foot down. ‘Take the girl, she’s just a baby, but the boy stays with me.’

  Kalabati accepted without a word.

  PK stood on the veranda with his arms crossed and his cheeks wet with crying as his mother took her possessions in one arm, his little sister in the other, and, weighed down by a heavy frown, walked out of the house and down the path. She turned several times to look at him; he waved and she waved back. To this day, he can still see her disappearing behind the sugar cane and feel how his world suddenly became quiet and empty.

  His mother and little sister were gone. As his Bapa Shridhar lived six days a week in the city, PK was alone with his grandmother and grandfather.

  He cried for days, weeks, maybe even months. Tears showered his cheeks as the monsoon clouds expelled sheets of rain that turned the dirt roads scarlet and made the straw ceilings smell of damp and mould. Everything was a wet haze of loss. Once he had cried out all his tears, he fell silent. He stopped talking, laughing, even smiling. He spent days with the same pinched face. He refused to let a word pass his lips. Most of his waking time was spent sitting by himself in a corner, staring into space. He refused food, but soon he did not have the strength to fight when Grandma forced him to eat. The rice and lentils had no flavour any more. Food was just texture in his mouth.

  Then, one Sunday, a man came riding up on a bicycle. He had a message from Kalabati’s family; she had been taken ill. She no longer did her chores, the messenger said. She just sat and cried. Shridhar received the news and, without letting anyone know what he was thinking, walked quietly out into the back garden, fetched his mother, who was digging in the soil, and led her off to the cornfield.

  ‘We can’t go on like this!’ he cried, finally releasing months of imprisoned anger.

  His mother made no reply.

  ‘You are driving my wife insane!’ he continued.

  Still she said nothing.

  What could she say? She was too proud to admit that she had made a mistake. And deep down, she probably thought she was in the right. She was a stubborn woman. Unyielding. She represented reason and logic in the face of a world gone mad.

  When PK’s Bapa returned the following Saturday, he sat PK down and told him that he had purchased a piece of land near the post office in the town of Athmallik.

  ‘We are going to move there, to our new house,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Us. Just us.’

  ‘We’re going to live there by ourselves?’ PK asked. He had never heard of anyone who did not live with their grandparents.

  ‘Yes, it will be our house. Just ours,’ Shridhar confirmed.

  The rain polished the sugar cane and churned the red soil into mud, so that cows and people squelched and bicycle wheels scored deep combat-zone furrows in the muck. Black clouds gathered above and the landscape was enveloped in semi-darkness, cheating the villagers of precious daylight hours.

  Bapa lifted PK up onto the cart, which was tied behind two glossy oxen. It had a roof of plaited bamboo, and a couple of burnt clay pots filled with milk from Grandma and Grandpa’s cow had been loaded onto the back. The driver belted the animals with his whip and the wheels started to roll, settling into a leisurely rhythmic creak as they made their way through the village.

  Bapa walked behind with Grandma and Grandpa, talking, while PK sat close to his mother, who had placed his little sister in her lap. He could not hear what his father was saying, but he hoped that he was explaining why they could not stay, that they were moving to make his mother happy again.

  After a few short minutes, the cart stopped by the spirit tree outside the temple on the outskirts of the village. PK looked back and saw his father kneeling down before Grandma, his forehead lowered to the ground. He was touching her feet with his fingertips.

  It started to rain again, the plump drops saturating Grandma’s grey hair and yellow sari. But no tears ran down her cheeks. The ox cart continued
to roll along the narrow earthen road between the fields. PK looked around again as the temple and the cornfields receded and then disappeared completely in the lingering fog.

  Grandma dissolved away with the rest of the village, a quivering yellow dot in the grey, before becoming one with the monsoon and the nightfall.

  He laid his head on his mother’s lap. She covered his naked body with a piece of thin, soft cotton.

  The cart rocked along the road, winding through woods, past flooded rice fields and across narrow wooden bridges that hovered above hurried streams and rivers. The rain clouds blocked out any residual light from the stars or the moon. PK looked out into the darkness and saw nothing. But his ears were attuned to the creaking of the wheels and to the familiar sounds of the forest: croaking frogs, singing grasshoppers and screaming foxes. He felt the warmth of his mother’s soft thighs and was calmed by the rhythm of her breathing.

  He awoke as his mother stroked his forehead to announce their arrival. Paralysed by fatigue, PK was helped down from the cart. He stared into the darkness, but there was nothing to see. Where was their new house?

  Father lit an oil lamp and their new home emerged from the shadows. Long grass tickled his legs.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

  ‘Liptinga Sahi,’ replied his mother. ‘Close to Athmallik, near where your father works and your brothers go to school.’

  Father disappeared to get some food from the kitchens of the private school. He soon returned with metal lunch-boxes filled to the brim. They sat on the floor of their new home and ate their first meal in their new village, far, far away from Grandma and Grandpa. Life had suddenly taken on a new colour, thought PK, as he watched the insects fly into the white glow of the gas lamp. Even the dal had been made with different spices, he noted in amazement. Taste had returned. The cloud of grief that had hung over the family began to fade into the past.

  Nobody would ever be able to separate him from his mother again.

  The new house sat alone, separate from the others. But PK frequently heard the sound of children shouting and laughing.

  ‘They are our people,’ his mother said, patting him on the head.

  ‘Our people?’

  ‘They belong to the same caste as us.’

  It was the first time he had heard the word, even if he had experienced its vicious sting back in the old village. He understood, however, that it meant the children would not mind playing with him. That they belonged together.

  ‘Caste?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, they are Pan, just like your father.’

  ‘What about you, Ma?’ asked PK.

  ‘I’m Kondh. Khutia Kondh.’

  He was learning so much in this new place.

  A path cut through the cornfields, passed their house and the others further beyond, and on towards a crumbling, yellow concrete building with a small hatch window secured by thick metal bars. It was along this trail that the long stream of village men stumbled to get their hooch. They shouted to the man inside and out came large bottles of beer and smaller bottles of spirits wrapped in brown paper bags. They turned up in the early morning until the sun disappeared for the night, singing and wailing, the whites of their eyes shot through with blood. This was PK’s first encounter with alcohol. He had never seen a drunk before.

  Another narrow road went from the house down to a large reservoir. He liked following the paths and exploring where they led. Every day he ventured just a little bit further than the last. But he was always careful to avoid the hooch shop because the men, stinking of spirits, shouted after him, grabbed him and slurred so badly he could not understand what they were saying.

  At his grandparents’ house they had bathed in the river. In Liptinga Sahi they washed in the reservoir, which was covered in lotus flowers and teaming with fish. Many of the villagers took their morning bath here, along with birds and bears looking for breakfast. His mother would dig damp clay from the wooded embankment close to the water’s edge and take it home in a basket. She used the mud to wash her hair and clean the plates, pots and pans.

  ‘Gravel and clay mixed together work better than soap and water,’ Kalabati said. She made a virtue out of buying as little as possible from the shop, so that she could save their money for more important things.

  By the time the first monsoon clouds had passed overhead and the autumn sun was high in the sky, PK had begun to feel at home. It almost felt as if they had never lived anywhere else. He adapted quickly; indeed, he always had.

  If you don’t adapt, you drown, he came to realize many years later.

  One day, his mother took him on a walk to the two largest trees on the outskirts of the village. They were home to eagles and vultures. Under the trees men worked skinning dead cows, preparing the hides to sell to the shoemaker to make into shoes and bags.

  ‘They,’ she said, pointing to the men, ‘are our people.’

  ‘Do we know them?’ he asked.

  ‘No, they belong to the same caste as us.’

  But that was not entirely true. The men who took care of the animal carcasses came from a group of families that belonged to the Ghasiara caste. They lived in the forest, beyond the cornfields. But they were also untouchables, which was what his mother meant. The Ghasis lived in terrible conditions. The Brahmins considered them even dirtier than the Pan because not only did they work with dead animals, but they handled the carcasses of cows. God forbid. Even their shadows were dirty. The merest sight of them was considered a bad omen.

  But as darkness fell, the Ghasi women were no longer untouchable, that much Kalabati knew. At night-time the men from the surrounding villages came, men who were ritually clean and distinguished, to buy sex from the women. Even Brahmins, who spat on them during the hours of daylight, were drawn to their tents at night.

  Kalabati did not tell her son about this. She wanted to protect him from the cruel reality of life for the untouchables for as long as possible.

  PK stood in the cornfield and watched the Ghasi men drag a dead cow towards the village spirit tree. Their second monsoon in the new house was upon them. He watched as they laid the heavy body out on the ground and began separating the skin from the flesh and the flesh from the bones. Flies swarmed around the mounds of meat and vultures circled ever lower. Finally, the birds shot down from the sky like arrows. But rather than tear into their dinner, they waited, like stone statues, patience winning out over greed. It looked to PK as if the vultures had been possessed by the gods, or at least, they did not act like predators. He could not understand why they were not eating. He looked up. Two more birds were flying above. Then, suddenly, they too swept down with such force that their wings whipped the air into cyclones.

  PK dreamed of being able to do the same. He took off down the sloping path that meandered towards their house, howling like a vulture, his arms stretched out like wings.

  ‘Ma, if I sat on the back of one of those vultures, would I be able to fly too?’ he asked when they were home.

  But instantly, his dreams of flying were dispelled.

  ‘Be careful of vultures!’ his mother replied quickly. ‘They will peck your eyes out and turn you blind!’

  ‘Why did they wait before eating?’

  ‘Vultures,’ she said, ‘are just like people. They have kings and queens, sons and daughters and live in families too. When a cow dies the vultures tell their king and queen where the body is located. They daren’t eat before the king and queen. That’s why they wait so patiently like that.’

  Then she continued: ‘The king and queen are the most beautiful of all the vultures. Look closely next time: their feathers shimmer like gold in the sun.’

  She put her hand on his forehead.

  ‘Their world is not so different from ours.’

  PK’s maternal grandmother lived alone in a small village a few kilometres further into the jungle. Her house was even humbler, with walls made of bamboo and mud and a thatched roof that often collapsed during the monsoo
n rains. The garden had been overtaken by tall maize plants, which attracted wild animals when the corn was ripe. Regulars included the bear, with his long, black coat, and the fox. When Grandma tired of seeing her precious maize crop being taken, she built a scarecrow out of straw and placed it high up in a clump of bamboo. She hung a brass bell that tinkled in the breeze from one of its arms. This kept most of the animals away. But not all of them.

  PK and his little sister Pramodini were visiting their grandma one evening when a family of hathi came to visit. The children were already asleep when the walls around them began to shake. Two adult elephants and their baby were trampling the vegetation and chewing on the bright yellow corncobs. But Grandma was not scared. She went out on the veranda with a bundle of dry grass, set it alight and started waving the flames at them. Unfortunately, the elephants were not scared either. The papa elephant snorted, scuffed the ground with his hind foot and charged straight at Grandma. She threw the torch and ran back to the hut, slamming the wooden door behind her and locking it.

  The elephant threw his weight against the fragile building, cracking the mud and bamboo walls. Grandma woke the grandchildren, told PK to get out of the way and, with little Pramodini on her hip, began banging at the opposite wall with her one free fist, managing to beat a hole in it large enough to escape through. She nudged PK outside and they ran through the thorny undergrowth and cacti. PK remembers feeling nothing as the thorns ripped through his skin. Blood gushed down his legs, but he was numb. Was he awake, or still asleep and dreaming?

  Finally they stopped, exhausted. PK had no idea how far they had run. Their escape was quick but it felt infinitely long. Soaked in blood and sweat, they collapsed against a tree trunk and waited for the sun to rise. The night air was filled with the buzz and chirp of mosquitoes, grasshoppers and crickets.