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

by Per J Andersson

  He thinks about her warning. He should be travelling with someone. The route from India to Europe is no game, especially not for the solo traveller. She’s right. But he does not have anyone to do the journey with, that is the problem. He has only his sleeping bag and his bike for companionship. But he is sure it will work out. He has his easel, a smile and an ability to make friends even among his worst critics.

  And yet, he wants the trip to be tough. It should not come too easy. The road to Lotta must be paved with adversity. Only then will it feel authentic. Aches from the saddle, exhaustion every time he puts his bicycle down in the afternoon, relief to fill his belly with food and lay his body in a hammock, to stretch his legs, dispel negative thoughts and fight to keep the doubt and homesickness at bay.

  It is too expensive to fly, but more than that, it would be too easy. That is how the rich travel, but not him. He is a drifter, a vagabond. So far, he has overcome all the obstacles put in his way. Sword in hand, Alexander the Great had made his way along the same route, admittedly in the opposite direction. But PK is travelling with a pencil. His battering ram.

  ‘I understand that you have met many helpful people along the way. You are able to reach people with your paper and pencil. When I think about that, I’m not so worried,’ writes Lotta.

  PK decides to keep focused on the end goal. Soon, we will be reunited.

  Kandahar – Delaram

  Afghanistan feels both modern and ancient at the same time. The roads are neat and straight, something he has never seen in India before. Even the Grand Trunk Road is just rubble compared to this, he thinks. But Afghanistan is a strange place. He sees almost only men out on the streets, and the women who do venture out are hidden underneath a thick layer of material.

  As is his way, he quickly makes new friends. It comes naturally to him; he does not need to think about it. He jokes with the people he meets. It always breaks the ice; a laugh bridges language and cultural differences. And then he draws them. He works fast, first just a sketch, which he shows them. It never fails. Even policemen and soldiers break out in smiles when they see his drawings.

  He is invited home by one of the head doctors at Kandahar hospital. He has seen PK’s portraits on the streets of the city and wants him to draw one of his four wives.

  ‘Of course!’ PK responds, and cycles there the following day with a stick of charcoal, a bundle of pencils and a pad of paper in a bag dangling from the handlebars.

  The doctor’s house is palatial. He must be immensely rich, PK thinks as the butler opens the door. He is let in and shown around by the doctor himself, who is at pains to explain that the furniture has been imported from Paris and no luxury is too much for him and his wives.

  PK walks into a circular room crowned by an immense semi-circular sofa. This is where the doctor’s first, second and third wives are sitting. Their faces are uncovered, a rare sight in Afghanistan. Perhaps they only need to wear burqas when going outside, PK reflects. He greets them in turn, putting his hands together and bowing: ‘Namaste.’

  The three wives return the greeting with curious looks and mumbled hellos.

  Then, a figure enters. A walking tent, but somewhere deep inside the burqa there is, PK assumes, a person. The doctor points to the fabric and he understands: this is his fourth wife, and PK will be drawing her.

  PK is left alone in a side room, facing her. He is petrified, unable to bring himself to draw a piece of cloth. But then she starts talking. He is flabbergasted. The voice speaks perfect English with a clear American accent. If he closes his eyes he would have assumed she was an American tourist.

  She removes the burqa. He is even more surprised. She is wearing a tight T-shirt, jeans and high-heeled shoes. A thick layer of make-up has been painted on her face and the sweet smell of perfume hangs like a cloud around her. But she cannot be older than fifteen. She is beautiful, very beautiful even, in complete contrast to the dull, heavy fabric of her covering. But her age saddens him. He thinks of her husband, the head doctor. Sixty-four, wrinkled, bald and with a fat belly. The poor girl! What a miserable future!

  His sorrow then turns to anger. These outdated traditions, polygamy and arranged marriages, they have to be stopped. Love cannot be planned and controlled. Love must be free. In the future, the people of Afghanistan and India must be able to choose for themselves who they will marry.

  He tells himself that he is the happiest Indian in the world. Unlike the girl sitting opposite him, he took his chance and broke with tradition. But then the uncertainty of it all comes back to him. His separation from Lotta, the unbearable longing, the journey. Is he really happy? At least the doctor’s young wife knows her lot. What is he heading towards? Will he ever reach the remote town of Borås and be reunited with Lotta? And will he ever see his father and siblings again?

  He is free, he is unburdened. But he is also driven to pedal every day until he almost collapses with exhaustion. In fact, he is also one of the loneliest Indians in the world. The anxiety is physical, a constant tingling sensation just below his lower left rib. The more he thinks about how vulnerable he really is, the more it eats at his sense of freedom and his hopes for future happiness. Maybe Lotta was right. This journey is far too dangerous to undertake alone.

  The girl’s husband keeps popping his head in, asking when he will be done. He should really start now. But he cannot, his mind is spinning and he feels paralysed. Instead, he asks the beautiful fourth wife:

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Yes, I’m happy,’ she answers quickly.

  ‘But your husband, do you really love him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In your heart?’

  ‘I really love him.’

  ‘But do you think he loves you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he has three other wives.’

  ‘He loves me most.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I get whatever I want. I just have to point. If I want a new perfume from Paris, he makes a call and then a week later it arrives in the mail.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be better to marry a boy your own age?’

  ‘I don’t trust men my age, they say all kinds of pretty things, tell you they love you, but they never keep their promises.’

  She sounds brainwashed, he thinks, but he does not say this.

  ‘He only sleeps with me, not the other three,’ she says.

  PK turns to the work at hand. And yet he keeps thinking about her life choices. Maybe she sees something he cannot. He thinks of a story his mother used to tell him as a boy about six blind men and their encounter with an elephant. The first man approaches the elephant and grabs hold of one of the animal’s legs. ‘Ah, the elephant is a tree, this is the trunk,’ he says.

  The next blind man goes round the back and takes hold of the tail. ‘You fool, the elephant is a kind of rope.’

  The third blind man stretches out his hands and feels the trunk. ‘You’re both wrong. The elephant is a type of snake.’

  The fourth man reaches for the tusks. ‘What nonsense. The elephant is a kind of spear.’

  The fifth man grabs the elephant’s ear. ‘No, no, the elephant is a type of fan for when the weather gets hot.’

  Finally, the last blind man approaches the belly. ‘You are all wrong. The elephant is a wall.’

  The six blind men turn to the elephant keeper.

  ‘Which of us is right?’ they ask.

  ‘You are all right, and you are all wrong,’ says the elephant keeper.

  We’re both blind, the doctor’s wife and I, PK reflects. We only see and understand what is right in front of us.

  The next morning, he starts out west again. He has the address of the rich man’s friend, also a doctor, who lives in Delaram, halfway to Herat.

  This friend receives him warmly at the city border, invites him to his home and offers him tea. As they sit drinking, the doctor reaches under his bed.

  ‘Do you want a look?’ asks the do
ctor, still a bachelor, and passes PK a bundle of American Playboy magazines.

  PK flips through them and gives them back. No wonder Afghan men have to resort to these kinds of magazines when all the women in their country are hidden from view. The bare breasts are like the pieces of an elephant’s body, he thinks. Surely the young doctor would be more satisfied with a real woman?

  He can feel the tiredness come, the nagging headache, the aching in his thigh muscles. He sips his tea and stares outside. But instead of Afghanistan, he sees his village by the river at the edge of the forest. The images still live in his memory.

  The next day, he cycles on under a tall sky, a chill caressing his cheeks, his mind empty of thoughts.

  Delaram – Herat – Islam Qala

  After Delaram, the East–West A1 turns north towards Herat. This is the route everyone takes, and therefore the route PK takes. There is no real alternative. It is the main road for hippies and locals alike.

  PK rides from dawn to dusk with just an hour’s break for lunch. The same light grey concrete slabs with the irritating joins between them. The bike jumps with each seam. Not something the Russians thought about when they built the road, clearly. What was wrong with asphalt?

  He does not worry too much about where he will sleep. Something always turns up. But of the hundreds of addresses in his notebook, none of them can be found along this road. The majority are in Europe. Yet, the people of rural Afghanistan are extremely hospitable, he is discovering. They invite him in for tea and food, and often offer him a bed to sleep in. Of course they can provide shelter for the night. He is welcomed without reservation. He does not even have to draw in exchange for something to eat.

  He keeps pedalling, his eyes fixed on the horizon. He is overtaken by trucks loaded with hay, mattresses and goats heading west, and once or twice a day he meets an imaginatively painted bus full of Europeans heading east. He knows that most of them will be sitting in the cafés of Chicken Street within a week, and then outside the Indian Coffee House a few weeks after that, sharing tips and experiences from the road.

  The budget hostel in Herat is one of the dirtiest he has ever stayed in. He lies in a bed with a base made of braided rope but with no mattress. His sleep is fitful and broken by nightmares. Horrible nightmares. Beggars approach him in groups, ten, twenty, thirty of them. Hands outstretched. He looks down at their calloused palms, raises his eyes and sees they have no heads. An army of headless beggars, closing in on him. Their demands are a hoarse whisper, but he can hear their threats clearly nonetheless.

  The next morning, he wakes to the sun shining through a small opening above his head. He is sweaty and dirty; he has not washed in days. His body is sticky. His mouth is dry. The floor is gravelly and the painted concrete floor is flaking. Rudolf was murdered in this bed, has been rather ominously scrawled on the wall beside him. Who was Rudolf, how was he murdered, and by whom? His dreams are echoes of the images of famine and suffering he used to paint when he lived under the bridges of New Delhi.

  The day is beginning, and he heads out onto the streets of Herat to make some money. He wants to add to the thick wad of notes stuffed into the cloth bag that hangs around his neck and in the hidden pockets sewn into his trousers. Then he will eat his fill and continue on west. Only once his pockets and stomach are satisfied will he think of Lotta.

  But less than one hundred metres from the hotel, a car stops in front of him and a man jumps out from the passenger seat. He introduces himself and explains that he is an adviser to the district governor.

  ‘Get in the car, please,’ he says.

  ‘Okay,’ PK says.

  ‘The governor has a PhD in political science, he is a very important and intelligent man,’ explains the adviser in the back seat of the car as it zooms through Herat’s narrow streets.

  ‘We have noticed that you are offering your services as an artist. The governor wants a portrait.’

  The governor lives in a grand house protected by fences and guards at the front entrance. PK greets the governor, who is waiting for them. He examines PK, squints. PK knows what this means. They sit down in the courtyard and PK works quickly. Before long his concentrated pencil marks have conjured away the squint. The governor is delighted.

  ‘The best portrait I have ever seen,’ he exclaims, and then asks if there is anything he can do for the Indian artist.

  PK tells him his Afghan visa expired two weeks ago and that he will have problems when he reaches the border with Iran.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ the governor replies confidently.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I will take care of it.’

  Indeed, when PK shows the border police at Islam Qala his passport and the expired visa inside, they merely smile and wave him on.

  Islam Qala – Taybad – Farhadgerd – Mashhad – Bojnurd – Azadshahr – Sari – Amol – Tehran

  In Iran, he suffers setbacks. He sleeps for two nights by the side of the road, with nothing more than fruit in his belly. He has money in the cloth bag around his neck – that is not the problem – but he is too far from civilization to buy anything. From the border, he hitchhikes with a truck, but is dropped again after an hour. He continues to cycle, but he has ridden more days in a row than he really has the energy for, and his legs and bottom are so sore he can barely sit down in the saddle. He feels his ribs and knows he has lost weight. When he looks at his reflection, he sees a hippy staring back at him.

  He decides to rest in a white beach pavilion in the small resort town of Sari, on the Caspian Sea. They sell ice cream here during the day, he thinks. Now it is night, the beach is deserted. He rolls out a sleeping bag, settles himself gently on the floor, careful not to hurt his backside. His stomach aches from hunger. He falls into an exhausted state halfway between wakefulness and sleep. The beach is so light, the sea so calm, the sky so blue. It is a beautiful place to drift away.

  Every time he has sunk this far, been this close to rock bottom, something has happened to pull him back up again. As the sun rises over the pavilion the next morning, he rouses gently from his torpor. He would happily never open his eyes again. That is his first thought. He wants to remain on the edge a while longer, then plunge into the dreamless sleep of eternal darkness.

  Just then, he hears laughter. He is woken properly and opens his eyes. He is surrounded by ten girls lifting their veils and smiling at him. Such pleasant expressions on their sweet Persian faces, he thinks. They look as if they want to eat him. He sits up and reflexively reaches for his sketchbook to show them his drawings. It’s the best way to communicate. It usually works.

  But one of them speaks English.

  ‘I’m an artist,’ PK says.

  They are not figments of his famished imagination. The girl tells him they are students from Tehran who have come to spend the day by the beach. They have brought a picnic. He flips through the sketchbook and tells them about his journey from India. They laugh and ply him with food. Bread, yogurt, dates and olives. Such a sweet feeling as they line his stomach.

  He has ridden all the way from India, via Afghanistan’s snow-topped mountains and through the Shah’s Promised Land, on his way to Europe and the woman he loves. A murmur runs through his audience.

  ‘How wonderful!’ exclaims the English-speaking girl.

  They give him food to pack in his backpack.

  If there is one thing he has learned about life, it is that sometimes it pays to come close to the abyss.

  After Sari, he feels lighter on his bike again. The villages arrive faster, he meets more people and is often invited into people’s homes for food and shelter. Some Iranians are disparaging about the shoddy bike he bought in Afghanistan, so he buys a new one in a market he passes on the way.

  Refreshed, excited, carrying a full bottle of water and with a newly oiled bike chain, he continues along Highway 79 towards Tehran, where he hopes a letter from Lotta will be waiting.

  The spring sun warms his thighs during the afternoon while th
e evening chills his cheeks after dusk. He stops at teahouses, drinks and draws the other guests, and is thus invited home. He has not stayed one night in a hotel since Herat in Afghanistan.

  Before he goes to sleep he thinks of Lotta. He is still confident she will welcome him with open arms. It has not occurred to him yet that she might have changed her mind or met another man. He is so convinced of the steadfastness of their love that doubt does not have a chance.

  There was nothing keeping him in India now his mother was gone. Sure, he still had his father and brothers and sister in Orissa, and all his friends from art school and the Congress Party in Delhi, but he has only ever really loved his mother. And now Lotta. He cannot travel to Kalabati. Lotta, however, is waiting for him just beyond the horizon.

  His mind obsesses over one thought for hours as he rides: he must be reunited with Lotta. It is either that or die. And this idea wipes away all fear. Whatever will be will be, it’s best if I don’t overthink it, he philosophizes as he pedals past villages and towns with names like Qaemshahr, Shirgah and Pol-e-Sefid.

  He is being driven by emotion not rational thought, he knows that. He is listening to his heart, his gut. A bicycle trip this long is foolish. The dangers are many, the risk of major setbacks constant. Perhaps the plan is downright impossible. But it is only by refusing to think logically that he can continue on.

  And yet so far no one he has met has told him the trip to Sweden is foolish. In fact, when PK tells people he is riding to Scandinavia, they react as if it is perfectly normal. The route is full of romantics like him. Tireless travellers. Cultural refugees. Seekers. Besides all the hippies, he also meets migrants; poor Asians on the way to wealthy Europe. With these companions, he shares the feeling that anything is possible.

  Back in India, he was met with a different reaction. His friends warned him not to undertake the journey. It’s impossible, they said. Bicycles are for poor people. Bicycles are dangerous. Bicycles are slow. You can’t. You’ll never make it. You’re going to die.