PK was still homeless and Tarique took him in.
‘You can sleep on my floor. I’m sure Father won’t mind.’
The Beg family lived in a Baroque palace of twenty bedrooms and nine bathrooms among the leafy bungalows of south Delhi. Shortly after PK moved into Tarique’s room, the family hosted a lavish wedding party for his sister. The buffet table in the garden groaned under the weight of the delicacies that had been specially prepared. Large sections of India’s political elite were in attendance, and even Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made an appearance. Needless to say, PK was not welcome. As the guests arrived through the main entrance, he lay on the floor in Tarique’s room, which had been locked from the outside. Tarique had promised to return with a smuggled plate of food. PK felt like a mutt, waiting to be fed.
He listened to the murmur of conversation and the jangling of music coming from outside. He heard laughter and smelled the delicious aroma of spices. Finally, late in the evening, Tarique came.
He lived in Tarique’s room for months. Despite the breathtaking discrepancy between their family backgrounds, they had so much in common. But philosophical discussions could only take place after PK had dealt with a more pressing question: ‘Do you have anything to eat?’ When, many years later, PK and Tarique resumed contact again via email, this was Tarique’s prevailing memory of his poor young friend: ‘You were constantly hungry, it was the first thing on your mind.’ Only once the roar in PK’s stomach had been quelled could they deal with the Buddha.
Tarique’s father became increasingly sceptical of his son’s impoverished friend. The judge was polite to PK, greeted him respectfully as befitted a well-mannered former student of Trinity College, Cambridge. He never said directly that PK was not welcome, not to his face anyway. But Tarique was often forced to endure long interviews with his father, in which he begged for mercy on PK’s behalf.
Tarique told PK that his father was trying to convince him to make friends with the children of better-known and wealthy families. The situation became more pressing as each day passed. Eventually, Tarique lied to his father and said PK had moved out. Tarique sneaked plates of food to him from the family dining room. When Tarique’s father came from his side of the palace to talk, PK hid in the wardrobe. He felt so ashamed, standing in the dark and listening to the rumble of the judge’s voice outside.
He kept himself hidden from Tarique’s father and the rest of the family throughout the spring of 1973. Quite how long he stayed, none of them can remember. Perhaps he moved out one day in May, when the mercury was about to rupture the glass thermometers and the asphalt on the Connaught Place roundabout had turned sticky like English toffee. Maybe it took until the summer monsoon pulled in the lead-coloured clouds, swept the streets of the capital clean and cooled the hot air. No one can say for sure. But Tarique never threw him out. He was the best friend a person could hope for.
During those hot spring nights on Tarique’s floor, PK was assailed by terrible nightmares. He usually forgot what they were about as soon as he awoke, but the horror and fear lingered. One night, soaked with sweat, he opened his eyes and saw his mother approaching in the pitch black of Tarique’s room. A faint grey dawn glow clung to her and her sari was wet and pulled tight around her body, as if she had just come back from her morning wash in the river. As usual, her black hair was damp and she carried a clay pot filled with water on her head.
How can Ma be here? In New Delhi?
‘Everything will work out,’ she said sombrely and placed the pot on Tarique’s floor.
‘My journey is over now,’ she continued. ‘Sona Poa, you must take care of your sister. Promise me that. You have only one sister!’
He opened his eyes and was wide awake. There was no one else in the room, apart from Tarique who lay asleep, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths. It was half past three in the morning. But he could still feel his mother’s presence, soothing him, just as she had done all those years ago when he slept in her arms. But then he knew: she was telling him that something was wrong. The more he thought about those final words, the harder his heart thumped in his chest. He could not remain on the floor as if nothing was happening, much less go back to sleep.
He packed his bag, crept out of the house without waking Tarique, and made his way to the railway station. He jumped into the carriage where passengers with unreserved tickets crowded onto wooden benches. Less than an hour after he had awoken from his dream on Tarique’s floor, he was on his way back home.
After three days, four changes and a long bus ride along potholed roads through the forest, he was standing outside his childhood home in Athmallik.
Shridhar came out, surprised to see his son standing before him with crumpled clothes and messy hair, sticky with sweat and dust.
‘How did you know that your mother is sick?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t,’ PK replied. ‘Or… well, I did. I dreamed it.’
‘Kalabati knew you were coming,’ Shridhar said. ‘We didn’t believe her. I tried to persuade her otherwise. But she is stubborn. She kept saying, “I know my son is on his way.” Come, your mother is waiting for you. Our bird is about to fly her cage forever.’
The family gathered around Kalabati’s bed. She was only about fifty, her hair was not yet grey, but a recent stroke had robbed her of her previous sparkle, or at least that was the explanation given by the medical centre in Athmallik.
Kalabati stared at PK. Then she spoke without any unnecessary greetings: ‘You must never drink alcohol, and never make your future wife unhappy.’
Then, just like in his dream, she added: ‘And you must take care of your sister. Promise me. You only have one sister.’
The conversation with her son was to be her last great effort. Her condition worsened rapidly. By that afternoon, as PK gently poured water into her half-open mouth, she could no longer swallow. A gurgling emanated from her throat, followed by exhausted splutters. Laboriously, she turned onto her side. Her eyes could no longer focus and her breathing was slower and lighter. And then, Kalabati died.
That same afternoon, Shridhar sent a message to the village carpenters that he needed a load of wood for the cremation. PK and his father carried her body down to the river, helped by his younger brother Pravat. They placed the stretcher on the sand and squatted by the edge of the bank where the ground fell steeply to meet the water below.
There they waited patiently. The sun went down, the wind stirred and clouds clogged the sky. Rain began to fall and the ground shook as thunder and lightning cut through the darkness, just as it had all the other monsoons that had come before. PK sat with his mother’s body in his lap, afraid that the storm would take her from him. He held tightly to her feet, as if it would stop her from leaving him.
The night was as black as soot, but in the flashes of lightning he caught glimpses of his mother’s pale face and stiff, grey feet. Several of the untouchables gathered to witness the upcoming cremation, only to leave in the belief that evil spirits had taken possession of the riverbed.
But PK was not afraid. He felt sad, but also secure. Peaceful.
At last, the carpenter arrived. But he approached on foot. They had broken down a good distance from the river, and he was unable to deliver the wood. There could be no cremation that night.
‘You can’t sit all night in this storm with your mother’s body in your lap. She’ll begin to rot soon,’ his father said.
PK and his brother had to do something. They climbed down the sandy slope to the edge of the water and there the three of them dug a half-metre hole with their bare hands. They gently placed Kalabati inside it. In the absence of a cremation, they would have to settle for a sand burial, in the hope that the river would take her body into its swirling embrace.
His father and little brother showed no emotion, but PK sobbed. Then, suddenly, he jumped into the grave on top of his mother. ‘Bury me with her!’ All was quiet for a few seconds. The rain whipped against them, but no one said a wo
rd. Silently, Shridhar pulled his son up and onto the sandy bank. Then he began to shovel the sand over his wife’s body.
PK set off for Delhi the next morning. He did not stay to attend the funeral, which was to be held a few days later, as, according to tradition, he would have had to shave his hair. PK did not want to get rid of the long, flowing locks that had taken an age to grow, inspired by the hippies he had met in the Indian Coffee House. Moreover, he had already said his goodbye to his mother on the riverbank.
The invulnerability he had felt as his mother lay in his lap quickly dissipated, replaced by a feeling of emptiness as the train rattled across the Ganges plain on its way back to his life in the city.
Invisible bands had been broken, he would later write in his diary. ‘Sometimes we fly, but we always land back in our mothers’ laps. Now she’s gone I have no ground to stand on. Life is unstable. The ground is collapsing under my feet. I’m falling.’
Term ended, and PK and Tarique decided to take a trip together. They had talked about visiting PK’s father and brothers, and also wanted to make a pilgrimage to the holy sites of Buddhism.
They began with PK’s village. They hitchhiked around Orissa and called in on a dejected Shridhar, who had not yet recovered from his wife’s death, before taking a winding bus up to the slopes of the Himalayas and the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. It was the first time either of them had left Indian soil, the first time they had seen snow-capped peaks or trampled through puddles covered in a thin film of ice.
Everything sparkled; colours were bright and distinct. The sky was so clear and blue, there was none of the dirt-brown haze that hung over New Delhi. One afternoon, as PK sat drawing trees in Kathmandu’s Ratna Park, a man approached. ‘Namaste,’ he said politely, bringing his hands together and bowing his head. ‘Do you draw people?’
PK hesitated. ‘Yes. Sometimes.’
The man’s face was marked by a straight nose and framed by a Nepalese style of hat that looked like a forage cap. His profile was distinctive, and thus not too difficult to capture. The man seemed satisfied with the picture and asked if he might buy it for a few rupees. This aroused the curiosity of a passing man who asked if PK might do a drawing of him too. As the sun disappeared behind the peaks of the Himalayas, a crowd had formed an orderly queue as paying customers waited to have their portraits done.
After four hours of drawing, his right arm ached, but his pockets were bulging with coins and crumpled bills.
The money paid for four days of breakfast and dinner at the cafés of Freak Street. Just being able to pay his own way and not have to rely on Tarique’s generosity was liberating. PK could feel the weight of his poverty being lifted. Things might work out, after all.
Tarique and PK were like two exotic birds among the Western hippies who frequented two of Kathmandu’s most popular cafés, Patan and the Snowman. An untouchable jungle boy and the son of a rich Muslim judge. Neither of them belonged with the adventurous children of Europe’s middle classes. The young hippies shunned the West while PK and Tarique longed for it. For PK’s part, it was not the wealth or their advanced technology he so admired, but the fact that they did not seem to have Brahmins, or a caste system. They probably have poor people in Europe too, he thought, but they can’t be as oppressed as India’s untouchables, surely?
Nevertheless, they did their best to fit in with the Europeans, who spent their evenings disparaging materialism, smoking hashish and eating apple pie. The Westerners must have found them fascinating, natives dressed in jeans, well read and well spoken.
Things were about to change radically for PK. For the first time, he was making money. Their last evening in Kathmandu was going to be his new beginning, the start of a life in which he would never again have to starve.
Back in New Delhi, Tarique told PK he was too scared to have him back in his house, for fear of his father’s wrath. PK did not blame him. He would have done the same. But this meant that once again, he was homeless. Some nights he slept with friends from the art school, other nights he was back on the stone floor of the train station. Despite his optimistic mood only weeks before in the cafés of Nepal, the depression returned with force. He felt doomed to these endless setbacks.
But this time, he had a way out. He was going to become a commercial artist. And he knew the perfect place to set up shop: the fountain in Connaught Place Park in the centre of Delhi.
Guests from the Indian Coffee House often came to watch as PK made his portraits by the fountain. Every afternoon a crowd formed around his newly purchased easel.
But the spectators also began to attract the police.
‘Sir, honourable Police Commander, please, I need to earn my living somehow, right, sir? Do you not agree, sir?’
Most of the police officers turned out to be decent, however, or at least open to bribes. The Chief of Police used to be satisfied with a portrait.
‘Then you don’t have to pay the fine,’ he would say.
The walls of the police station began to fill up with PK’s pencil and charcoal drawings.
When this did not work, he would be taken to the police station. But PK did not complain. He quickly understood the advantage of not demanding instant release. This way, he got a warm cell, was offered food and even got to shower. He would then be free to go the next morning, clean and rested.
He began cooperating with one of the police officers in particular, who came to arrest him only after his peak hours were over for the day. Their agreement: PK got a bunk in a cell, and the officer took fifty per cent of his income. This lasted for some time, until the officer’s colleagues began to be suspicious and PK’s policeman felt obliged to ask him to lie low for a while.
But PK had to make money, so he moved his business out to the area around the airport. Which was where he happened to be working on Republic Day, 26 January 1975.
People had lined the main boulevard from the city centre out to the airport. Vehicles were banned and police formed human chains to prevent the crowds from surging into the road. People moved as one, shoulder to shoulder, facing the direction of the terminal. Some carried placards, others flowers. PK saw men with cameras and notepads. Suddenly a wave went through the crowd, someone was pushed and fell, and shouts rose up, only to be drowned out almost instantaneously by an excited murmur. Who was everyone waiting for?
Two police jeeps appeared, and then two more. The cortége crept towards them, making a show for the audience. The murmur grew louder. PK penetrated the crowd and found a spot with a good view. That was when he caught sight of the woman in the jeep. Her skin shone milky white in the strong, summer sun.
She has come from somewhere far away, he realized.
‘Valentina, you’re our hero!’ someone shouted.
PK was pressed in between a group of tall Sikhs and a class of schoolchildren. The children cheered. PK joined them. As he had no flowers, he began instead to sketch the woman. She had dropped from the sky, landed at the airport, and was now being transported like a queen towards the centre of the city. He pushed past people to get closer. The jeep had stopped. PK reached over and tried to hand the sketch to the woman in the open top car, but a security guard blocked him with his wooden truncheon. The man took the drawing instead, looked at it, and smiled. He passed the picture to the woman. PK saw her examine the portrait, then look up at the guard, who pointed to PK. He met the woman’s gaze. She leaned forward and murmured something to the guard, who turned to PK.
‘Madame wants to speak with you,’ he said.
‘Now?’
‘No, you idiot! How would that work?’
He was given a piece of paper with an address. The Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Shantipath, Chanakyapuri, it said.
‘Tomorrow at noon. Bring your picture and don’t be late,’ the guard added brusquely.
He approached the Soviet Embassy in the tidy diplomatic quarter of Chanakyapuri. Indian government officials and Russian diplomats were standing at the entrance
, surrounded by journalists and photographers. There she was, a little further inside the building, deep in the pit of people and framed photographs of Soviet leaders. A guard shoved him towards her, she took his hand and thanked him in broken English.
‘A beautiful portrait,’ she said, introducing herself, ‘Valentina Tereshkova.’
‘A beautiful face,’ replied PK.
Who was she? They smiled together at the cameras. Tereshkova? He had never heard the name before. There was only time to exchange a few pleasantries. With so many diplomats and journalists in the room, he could not add anything personal, like a question: are you married?
Instead, he was hit with questions from curious journalists as soon as he came out.
‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ they wanted to know.
PK asked the journalists to tell him instead who Valentina Tereshkova was.
‘Oh my God, how ignorant can you be? The world’s first female cosmonaut!’ cried one of the journalists.
PK was delighted. He did not need to know more. Outer space! That was enough for him. He answered their questions, telling them about the village in the jungle and his tribal mother and untouchable father. The reporters scribbled intensively. Indians love a feel-good story and the journalists knew this dark-skinned young man was gold. PK, the poor, low-caste boy from the jungle, had been given the chance to meet the world’s most famous female cosmonaut.
That evening, he sat at the coffee shop on Connaught Place and thought of Valentina Tereshkova. By now he had read the day’s newspapers. Once a textile factory worker, on the morning of 16 June 1963, Valentina had donned her spacesuit and stepped up onto the bus that was to take her out to the launch site, the newspaper said. The rocket had roared and the controls had buzzed. After a two-hour countdown, the engines were fired and they had lift off. Valentina, codenamed Gull, began her journey up into Earth’s orbit. She spun forty-eight times around the planet over two days, twenty-two hours and fifty minutes, before coming down again in a small cone of steel equipped with parachutes, and landing on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan. Back on Earth, she continued as a researcher in aeronautics, and became a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love Page 8
