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

by Per J Andersson

  Karl-Siddhartha, otherwise known as Kid Sid, has been touring Sweden and the rest of Europe as a DJ since he was a teenager. He even won the DMC World DJ Championships at the age of sixteen. He has used the money he has earned to study for a helicopter licence. His dream is to work as a professional helicopter pilot in India, and perhaps fly politicians and businessmen from inaccessible parts of Orissa.

  Both children feel a strong attraction to their father’s home country.

  Their first contact with India was through their cousin Ranjita, who came on a visit to Borås from Athmallik before Emelie and Karl-Siddhartha started school. Emelie thought that their Indian cousin was very strange. Even though she was in her teens, she did not know how to use cutlery. That alone was enough to mark her out as odd to the little Swedes.

  The following year PK and Lotta took the children to India for the first time. PK was worried about how it would all go. During his lessons in Swedish for immigrants, he had been taught that children should wear helmets when riding a bicycle. He embraced the Swedish love of safety as if it were written in stone. No more the Indian ‘whatever’ mentality, from now on it was Swedish helmets, always. Even though they had no plans to ride bikes in India, they packed helmets into their luggage. India is so dangerous, he realized.

  Emelie wore a blue styrofoam helmet virtually the whole trip, in small towns as well as large cities, while playing with her cousins in the fields and on dirt paths. The villagers in Athmallik had never seen anything like it.

  ‘Hello, little girl,’ they said, laughing and tapping their ringers on her head. The five-year-old Emelie was furious.

  ‘You never know what could happen,’ PK countered when she begged to take it off. It was sweaty and itched.

  It is summer and PK is sitting out in the garden by the outhouse they have built for guests, swatting away a stubborn fly. He is trying to formulate his ideas as if explaining them to a Swede who knows nothing about India. Imagine, he will say, that the nobility and clergy occupy all the important positions in society and that you, who belong to neither group, are ostracized wherever you go. Imagine that the people are at first cheerful and open, but quickly frown and turn away as soon as you tell them your name. Imagine that all of Sweden’s priests are born to this position, and they stand in front of the churches and yell at you to go away and worship elsewhere. That they will even bend down, gather handfuls of gravel and throw it at you so that you will run, before slamming the door and locking it. And then consider, he continues to his imaginary Swedish friend, these experiences are repeated every day, year after year, even though the law says you have the same rights as everyone else and that it is illegal for you to face such discrimination.

  Then he recalls a book he read about in both the Indian and Swedish newspapers that tells the story of an oppressed and exploited low-caste girl called Phoolan Devi who ends up in a criminal gang, becomes a bandit queen and takes bloody revenge on her former tormentors. She was put in prison, but later released and became a Member of Parliament and celebrity all over India, the world even, all because of the book and film made about her life. And yet, in the end, she was murdered by the relatives of her former bullies: revenge by the ones she took revenge upon.

  That’s what happens if you give an eye for an eye. Continued hatred is the only outcome of a blood feud. Reprisals prolong suffering. No, revenge is good for no one, PK thinks, breathing in the scent of freshly mown grass.

  A gust of wind gently rattles a nearby birch. He looks out over the lake and the ripples shimmering across the water’s surface.

  PK cannot understand why the government of India does not outlaw the caste system once and for all, relegate it to the history books. Sure, discrimination based on caste is technically illegal. And there are reservations and quotas so that low castes are given a little helping hand. But it is an outright ban that is required. In England, the Church condemned slavery and serfdom as early as 1102, and in Sweden slavery was declared illegal in 1335 by King Magnus Erikson. India’s untouchables are not enslaved, but just as serfs in medieval Europe were not allowed into the church, there are still Hindu priests that deny untouchables entry to their temples to this very day. Untouchables are still commonly thought to defile all that is pure and holy.

  PK feels the anger swell inside him when he thinks of the injustice. His grandfather, who lived under British colonial rule and attended the Victoria Vernacular School, at least had the dignity of being treated the same as his high-caste schoolmates. But PK, who grew up in the newly liberated and independent India, was forced to sit out on the veranda, to be separated from his classmates and endure the fiercest and subtlest forms of discrimination.

  ‘It was a concerted campaign of oppression, that’s what it was,’ he mumbles to himself and begins along the path by the lake and up through the pines.

  The sun is shining for once over the rain-saturated hamlet. He walks through the drowsy forest, around the mounds of rock and earth wrapped in soft, damp moss. It is as if someone has placed a giant green marzipan blanket over everything, making a traditional Swedish prinsesstårta, princess cake, out of nature.

  The tall fir trees form a roof over his head. He leaps from stone to stone across a gurgling stream. He emerges on the other side and into a clearing where the dew glistens like silver in the tall grass. A long, slippery footbridge crosses the marshy meadow, and then the trees fold away. There it is, the lake, today smooth and shiny. Dead trunks lie on the sandy beach as if abandoned in a giant game of Mikado. The water is dark brown, almost like Coca-Cola.

  ‘What nice weather we’ve been having,’ PK says as he meets a neighbour on the gravel road that leads back to the cottage.

  He thinks about the contradictory feelings that are stirred up inside him every time he returns to his village in India. A few years previously, state politicians in Orissa ordered a helicopter to collect PK, Lotta and their two children and fly them from the state capital to the village where the locals had gathered in what was billed as an official visit. They were to worship PK’s resurrection, the successful untouchable boy. To say it had been overwhelming would be an understatement. The Brahmin girls whose fathers had once thrown stones at him kneeled down and touched his feet, before decorating him with garlands of marigolds. But while the Brahmins may now admire him, he was still careful not to challenge their power overtly. Otherwise it could have caused trouble after his return to Sweden.

  His older brother Pramod, the one who was a successful railway manager in Bokaro, hired several untouchables to work for him in accordance with the government’s edict. And yet, one day, he was found lifeless on the floor of his bungalow. The servant looked down at his face, which had mysteriously grown whiter with each passing year. At the corner of his mouth, a blue foam bubble popped.

  ‘Death by natural causes,’ the police said. But his family and friends doubted it.

  He had challenged the Brahmins too forcefully, was their conclusion. A law-abiding civil servant who followed the new anti-discrimination laws was still too much for the higher castes. They poisoned him. And the perpetrators, whoever they were, went free.

  PK goes down to the shore and skims a flat stone over the smooth surface of the lake. He can physically feel the grief and nausea that come over him every time he smells incense, or hears Hindu temple music, or even prayers or other ritual texts being read aloud in Sanskrit. But in these situations he has a weapon. These feelings are nothing more than passing clouds; before long the wind will blow them on again.

  He draws the air into his lungs. It smells of fresh water and reeds. And he listens to the distant splashes and children’s laughter from the beach on the other side. The forest makes him calm. The thick tree trunks, pine needles, moss, the heather and stubby blueberry bushes. Our kingdom, for Lotta and me, he thinks.

  Autumn arrives and the rain clouds sweep through Borås. PK puts on his rubber boots and goes out into the woods where the rain is streaming down from the towering branches
above, causing the moss to swell and glisten. He knows how precarious his memories are. When he thinks of his life in India and the bicycle trip that brought him to Sweden it feels as if it happened to another PK. These days he prefers to stay at home, painting in his studio in the barn, taking walks in the forest, going out with his chainsaw to do some gardening and then returning to their little cottage to look out over the lake.

  PK recalls a speech he made only a couple of years ago to Lotta’s relatives, the members of the von Schedvin family. The talk took place in the symbolic heart of the Swedish nobility, Riddarhuset in Stockholm. He was dressed in a dark blue collarless suit and a sand-coloured Indian raw-silk shirt. His moustache was dyed and his hair combed flat.

  He had given talks about his life many times before, for study groups and in schools, for civil servants, local associations and pensioner clubs, but here, at the so-called House of the Nobility, he was more nervous than usual. The pompous surroundings, the paintings, the crests and all the fine hand-painted china, it made him feel small and insignificant. But he gathered his courage, stepped up to the microphone and began to talk about his childhood, about the jungle and the elephants, the snakes and the temples, and of course the caste system. He wanted to take this opportunity to make a comparison between the Indian caste system and the Swedish class structure. Priests, warriors, merchants and workers, said the Indians. Nobles, clergy, burghers and peasants, said the Swedes.

  Then he told them about the prophecy, his falling in love with Lotta and the bicycle trip to Sweden. Fate, love, his journey.

  ‘I have no power over the direction of my life, and neither do you, dear audience. Look at me! Everything turned out as the prophecy predicted and not how my father, teachers or anyone else planned.’

  Yet PK is sure that man has free will, and that destiny is only a framework. The prophets can only predict the contours of a human life. His mother, Kalabati, phrased it in hopeful terms: ‘No one is doomed to be untouchable forever and nobody of the highest caste can expect to decide for eternity who can or cannot enter the temples or perform the sacred rituals.’

  He went on to explain that laws already existed that made discrimination illegal and quotas were in place to help low castes get an education and jobs, but that India still needed to go further if it wanted to be rid of the caste system.

  ‘A ban! That’s my vision.’

  More speeches followed. The Utkal University of Culture in Bhubaneswar called and wanted to grant him an honorary doctorate. He could not resist. He was flattered, and proud.

  When he was little, they kicked him into the dirt; now they’re brushing him down and dressing him with garlands – PK found this amusing. For an untouchable to be granted a doctorate had to mean the world was making some kind of progress, despite all the wars and continued misery.

  Once again, he dresses in his dark blue suit, takes a deep breath and steps out onto the stage. The lights are hot, beads of sweat gather on his forehead, and hundreds of pairs of eyes stare back at him. He is given flowers, and an orange cape with a gold fringe is draped over his shoulders. The speech made in his honour is pompous and over-the-top, in good Indian tradition.

  ‘I have not always been so happy in my life as I am now. When I was a young student, I tried many times to end my own life. Every day I struggled to find food to eat and I was always hungry,’ PK says when it is his turn.

  ‘Everything starts with the family we grow up in. If the family isn’t working, society cannot work.’ He continues with one of his grandfather’s sayings: with righteousness in your heart, your home will be harmonious, with harmony at home comes order in society, and with order in society comes peace on earth.

  And he would not have got this far – to the yellow house in the woods of Sweden – if it had not been for the inspiring example set by the people of Orissa, he adds out of politeness.

  ‘Do not thank me, say thank you to yourselves,’ he says, repeating the words of the late Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme.

  One frostbitten December morning, Lotta, Emelie, Karl-Siddhartha and I board a plane in Gothenburg. We are going to the former kingdom of Athmallik. We fly over Denmark’s powder-white fields and Vienna’s oxidized copper roofs. We cross over Iran’s arid plains and Afghanistan’s rocky mountains, where thirty years previously I struggled on my bike in the opposite direction. We pass high above the sun-scorched Ganges plains, where a train once carried me away from the village along gleaming rails, over jungles dark and curly like broccoli, before making a turn at the Bay of Bengal, the Black Pagoda and the temple of the sun god with the magic wheel. Finally, we land in the fields where I grew up.

  We rent a car and drive along bumpy roads past the market towns of Dhenkanal and Angul, before turning off the main road down an even narrower track edged by increasingly dense jungle. All the way back to my childhood.

  We enter the village to the sound of an orchestra. Eight men walk in front of our four-wheel-drive Chevrolet, which crawls rather than drives for fear of crushing the musicians. I received the same welcome the last time I came to visit, with exactly the same melody, played by the same drums, clarinet, tuba. Villagers line the main street, waving at us as we pass.

  We live in the house between the mountains and the river. The house that we built so that we have a place to return to now that both my father and mother are dead and my childhood home is long gone. From here I can coordinate my charitable work: water wells, the school and the activity centre that holds workshops for the women.

  I want to help those who have not been as fortunate as myself, even if my work is only a drop in the ocean. There is so much to do. A crowd gathers every morning outside our door, they have come for advice.

  We go down to the Mahanadi River, where women wash clothes by the beach, buffaloes and cows wade in the knee-high currents and crocodiles bask on the protruding sandbanks. A procession of men, women and children from the village follows behind us. My personal bodyguard, dressed in a black military-style beret and camouflage, sits beside me, sent and paid for by the state government.

  Among the procession is the village bard, a Brahmin who raises his stick to the heavens and shouts his tribute to God, ‘Hari Bol!’ He laughs, his teeth rattling and red from years of chewing betel nut.

  I have two bodyguards then, a Brahmin and a soldier. The best protection a man could hope for.

  The Brahmin tells me he has performed this ritual, the laughter and the ‘Hari Bol!’, every day since 1962 and has not been sick once. God rewards the devout. But Karl-Siddhartha quickly tires of the monotonous chanting and teaches the old man instead to shout out ‘Hey you!’ in Gothenburg-heavy Swedish.

  Halfway to the river, the Brahmin invites us into his home. There, in the darkness, he has erected an altar, as in most Hindu homes. But instead of the usual images of Shiva or Vishnu, he has placed a picture of… Lotta and me.

  We stand and watch as the Brahmin falls to his knees, raising his hands to worship the photograph.

  I look at Lotta, who shakes her head and smiles. We can hardly believe our eyes.

  Postscript

  The Indian Caste System

  As PK says, the caste system in India is not that hard to understand on the surface. It’s when you start to delve more deeply into its divisions and subdivisions that it seems as chaotic and bewildering as a busy Indian street market.

  The word caste is derived from the Portuguese casta, meaning ‘race, breed or ancestry’, and originally from the Latin casto, meaning ‘pure or chaste’. There is no precise translation in Indian languages, but varna and jati are the two most proximate terms. These two concepts represent different levels of social identity within the caste system.

  According to Brahminical books like the Rigveda, varna in Sanskrit means ‘colour, type, or order’, inferring the colour of one’s skin. Historically there were four main varna existing in a rigid hierarchy. At the top were the Brahmins (teachers, intellectuals, priests), then the Kshatriya (wa
rriors and rulers), followed by the Vaishya (traders, merchants, artisans) and finally the Shudra (labourers, servants).

  Some groups of people were banished from the varna system and were referred to as ‘untouchables’, now known as Dalits. They are socially excluded to this day.

  Jati refers to birth and is typically associated with a job or occupation. The jati belong to one of the four varna, and it’s at this point that PK’s Western friends throw their hands in the air and change the conversation, because there are thousands of jati. These complex social groups defy clear definition.

  The Rigveda verses that PK mentions are a collection of ancient Indian Sanskrit hymns dedicated to Rigvedic deities, one of whom is Purusha, the ‘cosmic being’. He inhabits everything universally conscious and unconscious and is depicted as a being with a thousand heads, eyes and legs.

  The untouchable or Dalit caste to which PK belongs was traditionally involved in occupations that were regarded as impure, such as leatherwork, butchering or removal of animal carcasses, or disposal of rubbish and human waste. They were generally outcasts, banned from everyday social life, physically separated from the rest of the community and forbidden to enter temples or schools. As PK describes, untouchables are social pariahs from the moment of birth, outlawed, vagrant and undesirable, categorized as unpersons by dint of an accident of fate.

  Although the Indian caste system has ancient origins, the British Raj exacerbated the problems by making caste organization legally binding, thereby enabling a divide and rule means of government. Between 1860 and 1920, the British segregated Indians by caste, giving the top administrative jobs to the upper castes. However, protests during the 1920s forced the colonial administration to begin a policy of positive discrimination by offering a percentage of government jobs to the lower castes.