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

by Per J Andersson

  On Christmas Day, his birthday, he received a hand-pressed envelope with his name and address written on it in neat block capitals. He opened it with a pounding heart. He removed the colourful card with a drawing of a happy fish jumping out of clumsily drawn waves. Vulgar, his teachers would have said. Commercial. Infantile. But he had never received a birthday card before. He held it up to the sun so that the fish glowed.

  Imagine, we had to travel so far to find a nice friend like you. Happy birthday,

  Lotta.

  The days before her return were sweet torment.

  He caught sight of Leif and his large backpack in the rust-red dusk of New Year’s Eve. PK ran through the crowds gathered around the fountain. Leif was alone and proceeded to tell PK about their trip to Khajuraho and the thousand-year-old temples with their erotic sculptures. Did PK know of a good, cheap hotel?

  ‘Don’t stay in a hotel, stay with me.’

  He gave him the key to his room in Lodi Colony.

  ‘What about Lotta?’ PK ventured.

  ‘She’s renting a room in a palace. We met the family on the train.’

  ‘She’d also be welcome at mine,’ he said listlessly.

  He had no hope that she would exchange a bed in a private room in the plush villa of a wealthy family for his cramped and filthy quarters.

  The next day, as he sat gazing out along the street, a yellow-red dot appeared in the shade of the trees. It began to grow, slowly transforming into the contours of a woman. She was wearing jeans, a yellow T-shirt and a red backpack.

  It felt like a personal triumph. He wanted to shout out in glee: she chose my poverty above their luxury!

  But his greeting was more neutral, more controlled: ‘Welcome, Lotta!’

  Leif slept in PK’s broken charpoy, a wooden bed with a braided rope base. For Lotta, he rolled out a thin bamboo mattress. He slept directly on the cement floor.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m used to sleeping on hard ground,’ he reassured them.

  What bothered him most was that he had no linen to offer. But she looked happy enough as she rolled out her sleeping bag on the bamboo mat under the window.

  He prepared masala omelette, toast and tea on a gas stove on the veranda. Then they took a motor rickshaw to Connaught Place, where they switched to a pat-pattie, a three-wheeled motorcycle overloaded with passengers, and headed for Old Delhi.

  The city, of which he had been so afraid three years earlier, was now a part of him. She has to experience the markets, he said to himself. They are the reason I am the man I am today.

  They wandered around the old town and through a narrow opening, wedged between two small restaurants, into an alley that swelled to form a small courtyard lit by fluorescent lights.

  It smelled of charcoal and fried meat; plumes of steam rose from the outdoor kitchen, and diners sat at tables in the four different rooms around the courtyard. They peered inside one of them: there were floor-to-ceiling tiles and guests eating kebabs and thin, floury bread.

  They walked around the groves and man-made lakes of Delhi Zoo housed in a dilapidated fort, talking and laughing. He felt giddy. And yet, anxiety began to ripple inside him as soon as they sat down on the lawn. He was waiting for tragedy to strike; his luck always ran out at some point. That was his experience of life so far, and it was how it would be now. Happiness was merely the premonition of impending misfortune. He was not created for true happiness. Lotta would travel back to Europe, and he would remain in India. She had come like a flash of lightning and would disappear again just as suddenly.

  He had one semester left at the College of Art, and no money for travel.

  It’s impossible, he thought, our romance has no future, our meeting is doomed to be a short but pleasant memory and nothing more.

  But he did not share these feelings with Lotta.

  They continued on to Paharganj, Delhi’s main market. They pressed tight against each other as they wove between fruit stalls and teashops. He felt at once consumed by her and by the pleasure of that moment. They talked with baker boys who flattened lumps of dough in red-hot tandoori ovens using only their hands. They met the bloodshot eyes of old men and women who lay outside on their charpoys, wrapped in grey sheets. They nearly tripped over a man who had dismantled a gearbox and had laid out the pieces, down to the washers, in a neat pattern on a piece of cardboard in the middle of the road. They picked their way through a herd of goats. They patted the shiny skins of cows, smelled the warm wet fabric of a woman ironing shirts with a steam iron. They laughed at the man who whipped milk with a converted electric drill. And they stood for several minutes watching an old man building a pyramid out of hundreds of chicken eggs under a naked light bulb. ‘If one falls, they all go,’ the egg man said. They laughed.

  They saw dogs sashaying through the crowds, women sewing, silver necklaces being repaired, a girl who swept the street before her door. They breathed in smoke heavy with the smell of burnt leaves and listened as a woman snored. People sang, talked, rolled dough, played cards, and reclined in the shade.

  He felt as if they were part of it all, the people and the streets, the smells and the sky.

  They arrived at the fountain at around six o’clock, and PK started hanging out his paintings. Lotta helped him. He watched as she hooked them onto the cardboard screens. God, let this woman be my future wife, he thought, as he sat down on his stool. He then began working on the queue of people waiting. She sat close to him. He finished four drawings before they decided to pack up and go to the cinema instead.

  Hundreds of people stood outside the Plaza. The queue for the box office snaked out into the street. Sholay had had its premiere six months previously, but it still drew full houses. They stood and looked at the hand-painted posters of Amitabh Bachchan pumping the bad guys full of lead from his machine gun. Once inside, they looked down on the stalls from their seats in the balcony and saw that most of the audience was made up of single men, gazing longingly back at them.

  The movie started and he translated for her. But he paused when Lata Mangeshkar began to sing ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’, leaned back and just listened. Lotta moved closer to him during the film’s more colourful dances, rested her head against his shoulder and put her hand in his. The fear, which he had been keeping at bay since leaving the zoo, returned with force. What did it all mean? Was there a higher power trying to tell him something? Was this how love began? He knew nothing and realized just how inexperienced he really was. He felt twelve years old again.

  What will be will be. He had to overcome his misgivings. We have already started a new togetherness, he said to himself. Our souls are on the same wavelength.

  He leaned forward and kissed her forehead.

  ‘Maheswari Ma, Ma Maheswari’, he whispered. A prayer to the same jungle goddess his mother used to call on in times of need.

  It was winter in Delhi. The night sky was filled with stars but the fog held off until just before dawn. The air was ice-cold as they trudged through the deserted city past the fountain, which looked empty and desolate in the darkness. They walked along the main avenue south, past Raj Path and the triumphal India Gate, towards Lodi Colony. At first he held her hand, but as they were alone, he gathered his courage and put his arm around her. He felt the warmth of her body, but was also assailed by the feeling that he was doing something forbidden, that the streetlights were watching them. For a moment, he thought he had left his own body and was looking down, watching himself walking, side by side, with Lotta.

  It was a long way home. But what of it? They arrived back at two in the morning. Leif was asleep in the rope bed, snoring loudly. They took a blanket and went out onto the veranda. They sat on the cement stairs and wrapped themselves up against the cold. Wild dogs yapped as they ran past. He held her, looked up at the stars, then at her and then up at the stars again. It was so romantic. And yet he was too shy to look straight into her eyes. The sky above was his escape.

  They had been drawn together by a divine
power, a power that had been working on him ever since he was born. He knew Westerners did not think like this. But that was how he had been brought up, that was how life worked. This was their night, their magic, their love, and it had been written in the stars. He kissed her again on the forehead, then on the cheeks. First the eyes, then the mind, and then the heart, love made its way through him. They had always belonged together, and together they would stay, for time in all its infinity.

  He whispered her name. She did not answer. So they remained in silence.

  ‘I love you,’ he ventured. But instantly, he regretted it.

  Why? Why did those words, of all the ones he could have chosen, have to leap out of his mouth? What if she got up and left? What if she laughed? What if she said, ‘I like you, but not like that’?

  Eventually, her answer came. ‘So do I.’ She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

  Then, after another pause:

  ‘I would be the happiest man in the world if you would marry me.’

  She tensed.

  ‘I haven’t given any thought to marriage. Not yet! There’s so much I want to do before then.’

  ‘I don’t mean now,’ he said. ‘I can wait. However long it takes.’

  The conversation petered out. He did not want to push it.

  They sat in silence and listened to Leif’s snoring. Then they went inside. He lay down on the floor and she on his bamboo mattress by the window. He tried to sleep, but ended up staring into the darkness. He tossed and turned, then his body became rigid. He listened. She too was moving, unsettled. He wondered if he should say something. Just then, he felt a light gust of air and heard a faint rustling. A soft hand on his shoulder. Almost silently, she crept in under his blanket and lay down beside him on the cold, cement floor.

  ‘You can’t sleep either?’ she whispered.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I feel scared over there, by the window. Can I lie here with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ he stammered.

  She moved closer. His desire was reawakened and he grew braver. But she tensed.

  ‘I’ll go back to my bed if you can’t control yourself,’ she whispered gently. ‘I didn’t come for that. I want you to hold me, that’s all,’ she added.

  So he held her. Who did he think he was? He was ashamed of himself. This was more than enough.

  PK and Lotta were lying on the bamboo mat on the cement floor. He looked at her. She seemed so at ease when she slept. He remembered her reaction in the night. She had recoiled at the mention of marriage, but he knew no other way to express his feelings. They could not possibly live together if they were not married, and then the romance would wither. Love could not survive without a solemn vow and an official blessing. At least, that was how he felt. But Lotta wanted to wait, she had told him that much on the veranda. It was difficult for him to understand. If she liked him and her father agreed, why wait? In this, it was obvious they came from different cultures.

  But he would keep trying.

  ‘Come with me to Orissa,’ he said as they ate breakfast. She gave him a curious look.

  ‘And meet my father. And my sister and brothers.’

  ‘Sure, why not,’ she replied.

  No counterargument, no questions. But did she really want to come? Had she misunderstood him?

  They moved fast, as if they had to act at once, before she could be conquered by doubt. They pushed his things into her backpack and dressed quickly. He pulled on the same dirty trousers and shirt he had worn the day before. It did not feel right when there was a woman in the room, but what else could he do? He did not have any clean clothes.

  How bad do I really smell? he wondered.

  He turned and looked at Lotta. She was dressed in a newly purchased red sari in a style common to the Varanasi region. That blonde hair and red sari! She was so beautiful.

  They took a rickshaw to Connaught Place to buy a gift for his father and some token presents for his siblings. They ate at a Chinese restaurant, threaded in and out of the shops, gazed at each other, laughed. Life was just like the romances he had watched on the big screen, and now they were building towards their climax. But how long before it all came crashing down? As usual, he kept his doubts to himself.

  They climbed aboard the Janata Express, and before dusk the long train slithered out of the station and eastwards. A cool breeze wafted through the open window as the sun painted the plains a mango yellow. He watched Lotta’s hair flutter in the draught and sometimes whip across her face. He was fascinated by its golden glow in the last light of the day.

  Scenes from PK’s childhood flickered through his mind. Riding his grandfather’s elephant in the jungle at the age of five. His teacher throwing stones at him, shouting that this was his fate. His high-caste friend who was forbidden from playing with him once his parents realized he was untouchable. His thoughts turned to the here and now, as he sat in a train compartment with this beautiful, foreign woman. Characters in the movies were given flashback montages in their dying moments. It was an apt comparison; he was being reincarnated into a better life.

  They ordered dinner, which was served at their seats in cardboard boxes. Vegetables, rice and chapati. They sat cross-legged on the green vinyl bunk and ate in silence. It was dark outside, the faint glow of the carriage lighting cast a gloomy blue over them. The train bounced on the rails, the horn bellowed and they rocked back and forth as if on a boat navigating stormy waters.

  They climbed up into one of the narrow bunks above and lay close to each other. Lotta tried to read her book about Orissan religious festivals, but soon fell asleep. He lay, gazing at her, breathing in the stillness of her sleep, her closed eyelids, her luminous complexion.

  He thought about the conversations they had had over the last few days.

  ‘You’ve made me believe in God,’ she had said to him.

  ‘But I’m poor, I can’t take care of you and give you a secure life,’ he replied.

  ‘You’re not poor to me,’ she countered.

  ‘I’m an artist, that means I will never have money.’

  ‘But I want to share my life with you.’ It seemed that Lotta had decided to follow her heart after all.

  A few hours before dawn, they stepped off the train in Bokaro, the city of steel. This was where PK’s oldest brother worked. They huddled close to each other on the dark platform, wrapped in a soiled woollen blanket, and waited in silence for sunrise. Bundles of material scattered around them seemed to accommodate sleeping people. Maybe they were waiting for the train, or, like PK and Lotta, for relatives who would come to pick them up after dawn. They heard barking dogs roving the streets in packs on the other side of the station, and now and then the solitary trumpet of a bus horn.

  As the sun rose above the horizon, Lotta went into the station, changed into a new, clean sari and covered her hair with a headscarf. From a distance it was impossible to tell that she was a foreigner. PK was sure that his brother would like her traditional style.

  Suddenly, Pramod appeared. PK had not seen him in years. He was now a few kilos heavier, dressed in a Western suit, white shirt and tie. He looked important. He approached with a cautious smile. PK and Lotta knelt before him and greeted him with lowered heads and fingertips to the feet.

  Pramod was a division manager on the Indian Railways and was very proud of his position. He was not unique, but it was still uncommon for an untouchable village boy to do so well. Most managers were still Brahmins or from other high castes, despite Indira Gandhi’s insistence that state companies had to start obeying the anti-discrimination laws. Pramod’s promotion was indirectly Indira’s doing.

  He showed them his office with its attached kitchen and servants, housed in a railway carriage. On the walls hung portraits of Indira Gandhi and the guru Sai Baba, his benefactor, guardian angel and prophet.

  No one believed that PK’s brother was the son of a dark-skinned tribal woman and an untouchable man. He was light-skinned and had,
rather mysteriously, grown paler with the passing years. The young Pramod had often spoken of his desire to be as white-skinned as a wealthy and powerful European. And now it seemed that his wish had come true. PK knew that black hair turned grey then white with age, but he had never heard of skin getting paler too. But so it was. Pramod looked more and more like the Westerners he so admired, and many in the Soviet-sponsored city of steel treated him courteously, having mistaken him for a Russian guest worker.

  PK was worried what his brother would think of Lotta. He did not want to break with local tradition, which decreed that the eldest brother must first approve a marriage, and then the father. He was not sure if it was entirely necessary to follow the custom, but neither did he want to provoke his family unnecessarily. He could not risk being ostracized by them too.

  ‘My oldest and wisest brother,’ PK began that first evening, ‘may I marry Charlotta?’

  Pramod did not answer.

  ‘Charlotta is really the same as Charulata,’ PK clarified in Oriya, then turned to Lotta and whispered in English: ‘He will probably be more sympathetic when he hears that you have such a nice name. Charulata means vine in Oriya.’

  His brother was silent, and then announced that he needed to think. He would meditate for an hour, during which he would consult with Sai Baba and God.

  PK’s brother sat down in the lotus position on the cement floor of the living room, surrounded by photographs of snowy mountain peaks and fair-skinned babies. He closed his eyes and his expression turned grave. PK studied his brother nervously, but he could do nothing but wait.

  After an hour, a smile broke out across his brother’s face. PK knew that it would all be fine.

  They took the Madras Express to Tata, switching to the Utkal Express bound for Cuttack and then a long distance coach up the river and into the forest. The vegetation thickened, the sky cleared and the air became easier to breathe. He was back in the village of his childhood. So much had happened since he had last visited.