He used to dream of the inspector’s return. The inspector would sit diagonally behind the teacher, watching eagle-eyed over the class. Nothing escaped his gaze and he saw to it that everyone treated PK fairly. PK sat in the middle of the classroom, surrounded by the other students. He raised his hand, answered all the questions correctly and was praised repeatedly.
But such sweet sensations evaporated when he opened his eyes. He lay still, the warmth lingering in his body for just a moment longer than the dream. The pressure in his chest returned as soon as he was up and sitting out on the veranda greeting the sun, and he would replay the post-inspection ritual in his mind. It went like this: immediately after the inspector had mounted his bike and pedalled away, PK’s Brahmin teacher and caste classmates would form a procession and proceed down to the reservoir to cleanse themselves with soap and water. They washed carefully and slowly, scrubbing every last trace of the stench of his presence from their skin.
The first time it happened, he went home and cried desperately.
‘They were dirty,’ his mother soothed. ‘They needed a wash. You did them a favour, making them go for a swim. They stank!’
She would keep repeating these words until he stopped crying. Although he knew she was lying, the words were soft and warm and wrapped themselves around him like a blanket. At least someone in the world accepted him.
This charade was not performed for the inspector alone. In his third year of school, they received a visit from a British colonial official who had remained in Orissa after Independence. He and his wife stepped stiffly into the classroom, he in a dark suit, she in a floral dress. Their faces were as white and smooth as yogurt. The Brahmin girls in the class placed flower garlands around their necks. To mark the occasion, PK was once again allowed to sit with the others inside the classroom, as if the daily humiliation was nothing but a figment of his young imagination. The children stood up together and sang for their visitors, a loving family reunited.
As the British couple were leaving the classroom, the woman approached PK and patted him on the cheek. She looked him straight in the eyes and smiled.
‘I can touch you, because I am also untouchable,’ she said as she removed the garland of flowers around her neck and placed it on PK.
The sense of acceptance was intoxicating. This time he knew it was temporary, but he did not allow its transience to settle; no, he swatted it away like a mosquito, desperate to let the moment last a little longer.
When the British were in earshot, caste did not exist. Maybe life was better for us when they were in charge? His grandfather thought so.
He glanced at the white woman and remembered the astrologer’s prediction: she will come from far, far away, from another country even. Was he destined to marry a woman in a floral dress and a face as white as yogurt?
Lotta’s longing for the East only grew. The Beatles are off to India to meditate, the Swedish newspapers announced. She read about how George Harrison had travelled to India, met with spiritual masters, learned to play the sitar and performed an Indian song in a Hindu temple in London. She also read an interview with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles, who said that the Fab Four had cosmic potential. India was everywhere, impossible to escape.
Lotta often thought about her grandfather, who died when she was only two. It had been his dream to travel, his greatest wish to take off for countries far, far away. He had been a weaver by trade and made friends with a travelling textile dealer from Bombay. He read books by Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, and talked constantly about having his own adventures in the Orient.
Lotta often took out the yellowed copy of the magazine Idun where he had circled an advert for cruises to India. Grandfather had never realized his dream. Instead, he brought the world home to him. One day he found an old incense burner at the local junkyard, which turned out to be from Persia. No one knew how it had ended up on a rubbish heap in Borås, but what did that matter? Lotta’s grandfather treasured it. It was his adventure.
When he died, responsibility for looking after the censer fell to Lotta. Many years later she ended up hanging it in a niche in her home in the clearing in the woods. I’m not going to settle for a censer, Lotta said to herself, I’m going to do what Grandfather never managed.
The family home was a small, three-room apartment. They were often short of money and lived frugally. Her parents ran a fabric shop they had inherited but never really wanted, and when business dwindled, eventually they were forced to shut down. Lotta’s father began working on managing the family forest, while her mother took a job as a nurse at her brother’s dental practice.
It wasn’t obvious from their modest lifestyle, but Lotta’s family was descended from a knight. They were nobles, the von Schedvins. But what to others was a name to be proud of, to the teenaged Lotta felt like a weight around her neck. It was no fun to bear such a fancy name. Lotta wanted to be like everyone else. And yet she also felt guilty for begrudging her privileged background.
The family drove an old, rusty car that often broke down. But Lotta and her sisters wanted a horse. So the family sat down to discuss it: which was the more important investment, a horse or a car? It could not be both, it was either or. Lotta’s mother held the deciding vote.
‘It’s more important the girls have a hobby,’ she said, ‘than we have a new car.’
She turned to Lotta and her sisters.
‘You must learn to take responsibility for something other than yourselves.’
Lotta once saw a film at the cinema about a boy who rode around India’s dense jungles on an elephant. I will have a friend like that, she thought. And before long she was writing to pen pals in Nairobi, Japan, Austria and San Francisco.
One day, a bracelet made from elephant hair arrived from Nairobi. She wore it to school the next day with pride.
India’s first Prime Minister was Jawaharlal Nehru who was sworn in on 15 August 1947, the day India gained independence from the British Empire. He believed in modernity, industry, urbanization and the railways. In a speech laying out his vision for India, he talked about how the new must replace the deadwood of the past. It inspired many of PK’s fellow countrymen. Indeed, his father was one of Nehru’s greatest admirers, as was his school’s new headmaster.
On the first day at his new job, the headmaster gathered the students in the playground to tell them about all the machines and other modern things he had seen in the city. First he described the telephone, then something so strange and magical, PK remembers it to this day.
‘The locomotive,’ the headmaster said with a sense of drama, ‘is very long. It looks a bit like a giant snake that reaches from where I am standing here all the way over there.’ He pointed to a grassy slope a few hundred metres away. ‘It also moves like a snake, zigzagging through the countryside. I travelled on one for three days and two nights to get here. There was over a hundred of us sitting on it.’
PK listened carefully and imagined the train as a long, man-made snake slithering through the sand, with the people sitting astride it, as if they were riding a horse or an elephant.
‘Any questions?’ the headmaster said finally.
PK raised his hand.
‘Can it jump up like a cobra?’
He recalled not only the cobra that had protected him as a baby, but also the one that had bitten him when he was a mere five years old. He had been so furious that he grabbed the snake, bit through its scaly skin and let it bleed until it hung lifeless in his hands. He pictured an animal many times larger than that one, shiny and powerful.
The headmaster snorted and sniffed theatrically.
‘It’s too heavy to jump; it’s made entirely from metal,’ he said.
Yes, it must be terribly heavy, PK realized. It couldn’t possibly jump off the ground. But he had one more question.
‘Will it come to the village?’
Now the headmaster lost his patience.
‘No, it most ce
rtainly will not. It travels only on metal. Roads made of metal. And we don’t have those here.’
Amazing! Roads of solid metal! Imagine how much you’d need to build a whole road! More than in all of Grandpa’s arrowheads, and he had more than anyone else in the village. Perhaps if I took all of them and melted them down, it might be enough… to make a metre? Not more. And Headmaster said he travelled for three days and two nights!
He tried to imagine such a thing, but the scale of it only made him dizzy and he had to shake his head to rid himself of the feeling.
After five years, he moved on to boarding school and, just like his father and brothers, returned to his mother only one day a week.
He walked along the corridors of his new school and looked up at the ceiling. They were decorated with strange objects he had never seen before: round glass globes that hung from thin strings. A puzzling sight. Oil lamps? They were so bright! They must guzzle oil, he thought. He examined them from all angles, looking for the reservoir.
‘How do the townspeople refill their lamps?’ he asked his father on his first Sunday home.
Shridhar replied that he need not trouble himself with such questions, and that he would learn how everything worked in time.
‘But get used to it! The Prime Minister has promised us that we will have those kind of lamps in our village soon,’ he added.
From the very first day at his new school, his untouchability was apparent to everyone and his new teachers and classmates treated him accordingly. Indeed, now he carried in his pocket a folded caste certificate issued by the local authorities. This gave him access to the quotas reserved for ‘Scheduled Castes’, ‘Scheduled Tribes’ and ‘Other Backward Castes’, which included untouchables and tribal people like him:
Caste Certificate. Case Record No 44
of 1975. Certified that Sri Pradyumna
Kumar Mahanandia, son of Sri Sreedhar
Mahanandia of village Kandhapada P S
Athmallik in the district of Dehnkanal belongs
to schedule caste. His subcaste is Pan.
There it was, black and white proof that he was untouchable, a pariah, a second-class citizen. The certificate afforded him cheaper train tickets and would one day give him easier entry to university, that much was true. But mostly he regarded it as a stamp of his humiliation. He was nothing but a poor wretch who needed special treatment just to survive.
One of his new teachers also happened to be director of a shelter for Dalits (untouchables), which made him qualified to tell the young PK exactly what was expected of him and how he should behave. He was not to enter the kitchen or the dining room if anyone else was present, and, instead, should sit on the floor in the hallway and wait there for his food. The cook would come out to serve him last, and separately.
The cook came out with his pans and poured a portion of rice, dal and vegetable curry from such a height that his ladle did not touch PK’s bowl. Some days, PK was given only rice as the other food had run out. When he complained the cook only sighed, as if he was as powerless as PK in the situation.
‘It’s karma from your past life. You must understand and respect that,’ was his only answer.
This was not the first time he had been given this explanation, invariably from Brahmins or people who had been brainwashed by them. It’s not their fault, he would say to himself, they have been indoctrinated, taught to treat untouchables like lepers. But still he felt the rage swell inside him.
The school employed a Dhobi wallah, a man who washed clothes for the boarders. Except PK’s. When he realized this, PK’s fury turned into a deafening scream, but he was too scared to let it out. Instead, he slipped down to the riverbank, and just as he had done as a little boy with the priests at the temple, shot at the Dhobi wallah’s water pots with his slingshot. Yet again, he was caught.
That week, a letter arrived for PK’s father from the Dhobi wallah: ‘Your son must understand and respect our rules and traditions. How would it look if he did as he pleased all of a sudden?’
Shridhar replied that he knew all about these traditions and so, no doubt, did his son. ‘But,’ he wrote back, ‘these rules are unjust and shameful for a country that wants to be modern and compete with the successful nations of the West.’
Had the laundry man heard Prime Minister Nehru’s speeches? Did he not know that the politicians in New Delhi dreamed of an India free from caste hierarchies? Had he not read Nehru’s most wise pronouncement that people are creatures of free will, and are not controlled by ancient customs? Life is like a game of cards, Nehru once said, the cards you are dealt are predetermined, but life is all about your skill in the game. That is your free will.
The following week, the Dhobi wallah approached PK as he sat alone eating his meal in the corridor. ‘Get your clothes for me tonight,’ he whispered, ‘but be sure no one sees you. I’ll wash them and you’ll get them back tomorrow night when the others are asleep.’
A half-victory, at least.
Indian society was full of contradictions, PK was more than aware of that. A good example was how the caste system had affected his paternal grandfather. Grandpa was a respected man when it came to secular activities. Yet it was unthinkable to the Brahmins to receive food or a glass of water that he might have touched. He was refused entry to the temple until the day he died.
The Pan had worked as weavers for hundreds of years, but his grandfather broke with tradition and took an office job in Athmallik. While the Brahmins treated him like elephant dung, the British respected him. They would do anything to annoy the Brahmins. They appointed him chatia, chief of the village, and tasked him with arbitrating local conflicts, as well as reporting all births and deaths and crimes committed to the colonial authorities. There was no police station or national registration office in the village, it all fell to Grandpa. The role was also punitive. If anyone violated the law it was Grandpa who beat the offender with his wooden stick, as per British orders. But most of all, this position made him an official representative of the British Empire, because the imperialists did not trust the Brahmins.
‘Brahmins have so many taboos when it comes to food, as well as strange social rules, so you never know if you are insulting them. Only they seem to understand the rules,’ one of the British in Athmallik was reported to have said.
The British knew that the scepticism was mutual. Orthodox Brahmins despised the colonialists and called them Beefeaters. It was meant as an insult.
Grandpa used to tell PK how much he liked the British.
‘They keep their promises; they are good people. Unlike the Brahmins, they shake hands with us. They don’t mind touching us,’ he said. ‘Stay away from Brahmins,’ he continued in his gravest tone. ‘If you don’t keep your distance, it will be your undoing.’
During his teenage years, PK found sanctuary and companionship in a most unexpected place: the travelling circus. They arrived one day without warning, pitched their tents, parked their elephants and built their itinerant amusement park nearby. The first evening, a queue formed for the Ferris wheel and the carousel, powered by men on reconstructed bikes. The rusty attractions squeaked, blinked and whined. It was a ramshackle affair perhaps, but PK was nevertheless impressed by the spinning, rattling machines. Yet it was the circus tent that fascinated him the most, without really knowing why. He wandered among the caravans, patting the horses and elephants and introducing himself to the jugglers and lion tamers.
PK was careful to let them know he was untouchable. Out of consideration. Then they could choose to keep their distance or shoo him away. That way he would not contaminate them.
‘We don’t care about stuff like that!’ said one of the lion tamers.
‘We’re Muslims, we understand you. They treat us as if we’re untouchable too,’ said a juggler.
No one had ever told him that India’s Muslims were treated as badly as the untouchables. Technically, Muslims did not belong to the caste system. But in fact, they too had once been lo
w-caste Hindus who had escaped their untouchability by converting to Islam. Not that it had helped. They were excluded and humiliated just the same.
The caste system is an incurable epidemic, PK concluded.
He went to the circus after school every day. Finally, he had found a place where he was treated with common respect. The circus people were friendly, open and curious. They answered his questions and listened to his stories. It was an unfamiliar feeling. After a few days, they offered him a job. Why not? He did not care if his school work suffered. That was his way. He did not think before he acted, and good offers were so rare that he never said no.
He was flattered. For the first time in his life, he felt accepted.
For two weeks, he carried hay to the animals and ladders to the tents. He also painted their posters.
‘Become our clown and join us on tour!’ the circus director said to him one day.
Sure, why not? It was the beginning of the summer holidays anyway. He was given a long striped coat and a red plastic nose. He learned some tricks and sketches, and realized that it was not so hard. Best of all, the audiences laughed. The attention was easily earned and at first it was intoxicating.
The circus performers liked him. But after a few weeks, when the director asked if he wanted to join them on a longer tour of several states in eastern India, he hesitated. Something was not quite right. He had started to feel that playing the clown was the ultimate confirmation of his exclusion. What was a clown if not a failure who tried to cover up the fact by making himself a fool? He was among like-minded people, he had a job, he was even earning money, but somehow the laughter of the caste Hindus in the audience sounded scornful to him. No, he did not want to be the clown.
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love Page 5
