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

by Per J Andersson

  Exams at school were an unrelenting torture. PK would sit, staring at the questions, dumbstruck. He could barely answer a thing. Maths and physics were the worst. Had he understood nothing the teachers had been saying?

  I’m untouchable, and stupid, he said to himself, full of self-pity.

  If he did not pass his exams, he had no future. Then he would have to be content to clean toilets for the wealthy, or become a weaver or a brick burner, professions destined for untouchables who, like himself, were unable to make anything of their lives.

  He went down to the river with the intention of surrendering himself to the rapids, to find his final relief, to obtain his own, better, revelation. He plunged forward, to end all suffering. Something else awaited him, surely.

  But just as the water rushed against his skin, he had time for one thought: what would his mother say? Emotions inside him started to fight against the current that pulled him towards darkness.

  He still wanted to live.

  He came to the surface, swam to the shore and climbed out onto the narrow, shingle beach. Yet, an impulse told him he should try again. He jumped in, but his body struggled against the water. He surfaced. One more time, he said to himself. As his body reached the bottom of the river, he grabbed hold of a rock to keep himself underwater. He wanted this ultimate escape.

  There was no turning back now.

  Suddenly the stone dislodged from the riverbed and he rushed to the surface. Soaking wet and defeated, he went back to school, lay on the floor of his dormitory and stared at the ceiling.

  He began processing recent events. He hated his teachers, the Dhobi wallah, the cook and the other students. He hated the way they accepted everyone’s predetermined place in society. And yet, he could not shake the feeling that all these things happened for a reason. Nothing in life was meaningless. Even failure had its purpose. This sense of exclusion had its purpose, the suicide attempt had its purpose, and the stone loosening at just the right moment had its purpose too. In the search for consolation, he brought his thoughts back to the palm leaf and the horoscope. The prophecy. The woman he would marry. He imagined her, drew her in his mind. The image of a light-skinned woman took shape in the darkness before him. She was beautiful and her smile was gentle. He felt the warmth of a body as he closed his eyes, and he was convinced there was a light surrounding him. His mother. He did not know how he knew, but there was no doubting it. She was sitting on the floor beside him, stroking him.

  ‘There now,’ her voice came to him, ‘they are the stupid ones; you’re doing everything right. One day, you will meet the woman from the prophecy, your future wife.’

  The darkness could not get any darker, but it was his mother, her light, that sustained him and stopped him from taking that plunge into the void.

  It feels so nice when you sit beside me. That was the last thing he remembered saying to her that wretched evening, as he drifted off to sleep.

  Military training camps were mandatory for all boys about to start their final year of secondary school. India had fought two wars with Pakistan and one with China. There were battles in humid jungles, hot salty deserts and icy glaciers. Even schoolboys had to be prepared to serve in the next conflict, because everyone knew it was only a matter of time before war broke out again.

  It was time for PK to attend the National Cadet Corps youth camp in Baulpur. Over a thousand young people from all over Orissa gathered in the summer heat to practise drills and learn to shoot. They lived in tents on the banks of the Brahmani River, under mango trees weighed down with ripe fruit that fell around them in the sand. The exercises were monotonous and boring, but PK was fascinated by the uniforms, the caps and medals, and the heavy leather boots. The outfit gave him a feeling of authority.

  One day, he and two other cadets were charged with guarding the tents while the others marched a kilometre along the river to cook dinner. Navy, rain-filled clouds had been hanging low above the trees all afternoon. Wind had now caught up with them. Not long after the others had left, wet hail the size of kernels of corn started swirling in the air.

  The cyclone hit faster and with more force than anyone had anticipated. In less than ten minutes it had levelled the entire campsite. The dense blackness was illuminated by an occasional flash of white-blue light, and PK stumbled into a ditch he and a few others had dug that very day. A sudden gust dropped another cadet beside him. A large branch was torn from one of the mango trees like a toothpick. A smaller branch came flying and hit PK. The pain ripped into him. He looked up and saw blood gathering in pools where he lay, the scarlet liquid soaking into his clothes. Within seconds, he was drenched in it.

  He looked down at his body, but he was not bleeding. That was when he realized: the blood was his friend’s.

  PK woke up several hours later, an irritatingly bright light hanging above him. He was lying on a hard stretcher in the hospital in Dhenkanal. He had broken his leg. His friend had been crushed by the larger branch, and was dead.

  Before he knew it, the time for exam resits arrived. Just when all had felt so utterly hopeless, hope returned. His bad luck had finally run out. His memory began to function again. The blockage was released.

  He passed. Just.

  Some of what he had been taught had gone in. He was not completely useless after all.

  His father saw again his chance to push PK towards the career he had chosen for him. Become an engineer, son. A job with prospects, a bright future for PK and for India, built on rationality and science, not the superstition and prejudice of the priests.

  Bapa told him to apply to a science college. PK did as he was told and was accepted for the following autumn. But he soon tired of the course and instead took to drawing caricatures of the faculty staff during lectures.

  ‘Untouchables have no brains!’ his maths lecturer yelled upon discovering them.

  But being thrown out of class did not cast PK into despair this time. He knew what he wanted and it was a different life to the one his Bapa had envisioned for him. He hated the natural sciences: physics, chemistry and mathematics were his worst subjects. Leave the nation building to someone else.

  The same lecturer approached him the next day and gave him some sound advice.

  ‘Pradyumna Kumar, this isn’t working,’ he said.

  ‘Then what should I do?’

  ‘Apply for art school!’

  He took his teacher’s advice and fled with the grand sum of fifty-five rupees in his pocket. At first he did not know where he was going, but then he remembered the Bhima Bhoi spiritual centre in Khaliapali, a couple of hours’ bus ride from home. PK knew the monks welcomed lost souls like him. He was received warmly, given a straw mat to sleep on and food to eat. These people shared his values, so he took his place on the floor beside the monks, who were naked save for scraps of bark that covered their genitals.

  PK was fascinated by the movement’s founder, Bhima Bhoi. The monks told him that he had been an orphan boy from the neighbourhood and had formed the sect out of frustration with India’s caste hierarchy, class divisions and hypocritical Brahmins. He had quickly gained followers.

  The monks sang their guru’s songs and recited beautiful poems that told of a just society in which people lived together and were not divided into competing factions. PK found solace in hearing his own thoughts sung out loud. Here, he was among equals. The monks felt the same way about the Brahmins as he did.

  And yet, something told him he could not spend the rest of his life in meditation. The life of a monk was not for him; he needed to taste cravings and desires before he could renounce them. He would marry, the prophecy had told him so, and he wanted to see the world out there, beyond Athmallik.

  He continued his journey, and stole onto a train travelling north to West Bengal. The creaking train was carrying him to a new life, and as he sat watching the world pass by the window, he recalled the headmaster who had once described trains as metal snakes. To think that he had pictured passengers astride a
giant serpent as it wound its way along roads paved with metal. He laughed at his own stupidity. There was so much he had not understood.

  His next destination was Kala Bhavana, an art school in the village of Shantiniketan founded by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. He checked in at the school’s hostel. Only one rupee a night for a bed? That much he could afford. But the classes were much less reasonably priced and he was forced to abandon the idea. He could not possibly write to his father for help. Instead, they told him about an art school in Khallikote, back in his home state of Orissa, designed for students from less affluent backgrounds like him.

  With renewed hope, he sneaked back onto a train going south and arrived at the art school, located in an old colonial house with marble floors and a cast iron fence, nestled between towering mountains and the vast Chilika Lake.

  The school was exceedingly popular because it was free. Competition for the thirty-three available places was fierce, and PK was one of hundreds of applicants. The selection process consisted of a series of tests in how well candidates could work with paints, ink and charcoal. The school set up a still life in the yard – one pot, one bunch of grapes and three mangoes – and the hopefuls formed a ring around it.

  PK glanced at the other drawings and felt confident. The next day, the teachers came to announce the results. First came those who had been unsuccessful. Then, the lucky ones, graded and ranked by order of skill.

  PK was placed number one.

  He told no one at the art school in Khallikote that he was untouchable. And no one asked him. The teachers and students came from all over the country and they socialized together, as if neither caste nor class existed. It was a new and powerful sensation. This was a different India, and it reminded him of the itinerant Muslim circus he had briefly joined as a young boy.

  Another life was possible.

  That year in Khallikote was crowned by his greatest achievement so far. The teachers singled him out for his talent and in the spring invited him to apply for a scholarship to continue his studies in New Delhi. He put in an application and waited for the answer, which arrived finally to the accompaniment of the clap and roar of the summer’s monsoon rains. His father, the postmaster, brought the brown, official-looking envelope home and presented it to his wife, who ripped it open, only to hand it back to her husband to read out loud.

  ‘You got the scholarship!’ Kalabati said when PK called home.

  The ground beneath his feet swayed.

  ‘You’re moving to the capital,’ she continued, and began to cry.

  His father congratulated him, having finally given up on the idea of his son becoming an engineer.

  His mother cried and refused to eat for three days before his departure. The move, for her, was a tragedy. And yet her emotions were more complex. She was also proud. Indeed, in front of the neighbourhood women, she was triumphant:

  ‘My son is travelling by bus and train, and then he is going to fly in a silver bird over the jungle and the mountains and further away than any of you could ever imagine.’

  The Transformation

  It was late summer, and a perfume of fermenting fallen fruit and monsoon rain assailed his nostrils. PK was about to leave for New Delhi. He knelt before his mother and lightly brushed her feet. She cried. Holding back his own tears, he stood up, hugged her and jumped onto the cart. He signalled to the driver, and the ox responded by shaking the flies from its eyes. It then began its leisurely walk along the bumpy dirt road, the wagon PK was sitting on creaking behind it. As he made his way to the train station, PK was reminded of his horoscope: he would marry ‘a girl from far, far away, from outside the village, the district, the province, the state and even the country’.

  The next morning the train arrived at Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa, an exuberant city that hit PK with a riot of new sensations. Wide, straight boulevards with traffic police clad in white positioned at the intersections. Rows of Hindustan Ambassador taxis with men dressed in starched cotton clothes sitting in the back seats. Ancient, stately sandstone temples surrounded by manicured gardens. Bazaars where the goods seemed to pour out into the streets. The delicious aroma of cooking food wafting from rows of small eateries. Cows sauntering among tinkling bicycles and roaring motorized rickshaws. And in the evenings, glistening temples, tall glass houses and lights spilling from shopfronts. It was a gleaming spectacle, an unearthly creation. How, then, would New Delhi shimmer?

  He was twenty-two, or twenty-one, or possibly twenty… he did not know exactly. His illiterate mother could not be sure. Birthdays were not celebrated in his family, and there was no such thing as an identity number in the India of those days. The year was 1971: the calendar that hung on the wall at school told him so, as did the front pages of newspapers for sale by the side of the road.

  His childhood had been characterized by the gradual realization of what it meant to be untouchable; the loneliness, the humiliation, which had overwhelmed the pure joy of the early years in his mother’s care. Village life had been cruel. But now he stood on the threshold of a new kind of freedom, an anonymity unavailable to him back home. Everything – the houses, the streets, the city bustle, parks, temples, the vendors shouting in the markets – they were like picture-perfect visions of a dream-world.

  When running to schedule, the Utkal Express between Bhubaneswar and New Delhi took two and a half days, but by the time they rolled into their final stop, they were more than eight hours delayed. What happened? The man on the bunk beneath him shrugged.

  ‘What hasn’t happened?’ he replied. ‘But we should rejoice that we have made it and not worry about the things in the past we cannot change. I mean, what can you do about it anyway?’

  This sounded like good advice. Look forward, to the future. Celebrate the fact that he had made it out of the village, away from the constant bullying, to the capital, where fantasies were realized and ambitions took flight.

  PK slept deeply that night, in his brave new world on the fifth floor of the Orissa Bhavan state guesthouse, the club and guesthouse for Orissans living in the city The next morning, he got up and went to the window in the hallway. But as he stood, rubbing his eyes in the early morning light, he started to feel scared. He had fallen asleep so full of courage and wild ideas, but was awakened by fears leaping around inside his chest; a feeling that, most of all, he wanted to go back to safety, to his bed, to his village in Orissa, and to his family.

  He looked out on New Delhi below: wide roads of dark smooth asphalt, white and beige hunchbacked cars, buses dented from the constant battering of dense traffic, trucks painted rainbow colours, black and yellow motorized rickshaws, swarms of motorcycles and towering buildings of concrete, steel and glass that glittered in the scorching September sun.

  Will I ever feel at home here?

  He started to wonder if he would even dare to go out. Maybe they would not understand him here? He spoke Oriya, his native tongue, and English, which he had learned in school. But the capital spoke mostly Hindi, of which he had gained only a working reading knowledge in secondary school; it most certainly was not a language he was comfortable speaking. Mai Orissa se ho. I am from Orissa. Mai tik ho. I am well. In Hindi, his conversation would be stiff, formal and childish.

  He let his finger trail across the map from the guesthouse to the art school. It was a long way. He had no idea how to navigate the city’s buses. What if he made a mistake? What if he could not find his way back? What if he was robbed or cheated? What if the city people noticed how awkward he was – unsure of himself and badly dressed – and laughed at him?

  For the first week, he walked to and from the school in order to avoid having to figure out which bus to take. But he soon found it exhausting; he would have to catch a bus after all. As he approached the bus stop, fear grasped him. The Delhi Transport Corporation’s dilapidated vehicles trundled by in a steady stream, tilting heavily as cones of black smoke spewed from their exhaust pipes and passengers hung like bun
ches of grapes in the doorways. The bus drivers did not halt their vehicles but slowed as they approached the stop, so that people could jump on and off.

  Somehow he managed to press himself onto one of the buses. After what felt like hours stuck in the depths of the sweaty human mass, he noticed the tall buildings and roundabouts were being replaced by small mud huts, then fields and thickets.

  The bus, he realized, was not going in the direction of the school. He had gone the wrong way.

  He jumped off at the next stop, crossed to the other side of the road and stuck out his thumb for a ride back into town.

  The next day he decided to walk. The more he got to know the wide boulevards, passed the towering high rises and navigated the giant roundabouts, the less scary New Delhi became. What once seemed dangerous and hostile began to feel familiar. He felt relief. This was freedom. Here he was not the untouchable Pan boy, son of Shridhar Mahanandia, Athmallik’s untouchable postmaster, and Kalabati Mahanandia, the dark-skinned tribal woman. No one had even heard of Athmallik, let alone knew where it was. He had no choice over where he had been born or his place in the caste hierarchy. But here, so far, no one had asked about any of that.

  The teachers at the College of Art were modern, if not radical. They were vehemently opposed to the caste system, and just like at the art school in Khallikote, he sat inside the classroom along with the other students. High caste and low were treated the same. PK heard teachers say things like, ‘The caste system is an evil that must be destroyed.’ They said it loud and proud, almost triumphantly, as if they wanted to free their young students from this obsolete and outdated culture. PK even ate with the others: in the same room, at the same table, from the same deep bowls. No one flinched as he approached and no one shunned his presence or touch. It was like living through a revolution. He walked home at night with a bounce in his step. New Delhi, the city, was his future.

  The scholarship from the state of Orissa was supposed to be paid once a month and be enough to cover school fees, art materials, books, rent at the guesthouse and food. But after a few months the money stopped coming. The fifty rupees his father sent every month was only enough to cover his living costs for a few days. Someone at the government grants office was probably siphoning off the money into his own pocket. PK kept returning to the window where he was supposed to receive it and the same answer came back at him again and again: