Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  The smell of omelette took me from these thoughts and sat me down to breakfast, where I noticed that something was missing. Everything was there – the omelette, tea and toast …

  ‘Jam?’ I asked the porter, but he simply wobbled his head again and left.

  What was with the head-wobble? Was it a ‘yes’, a ‘no’, ‘I don’t know?’ or ‘I’ll just keep you guessing’? It reminded me of those toy dogs you used to see in the back of old Chrysler Valiants, heads jiggling happily.

  I bit into my omelette when a distinct sweetness hit my palate. ‘Oooh! They’ve mixed the jam in!’

  With my jam-curried omelette hanging off my fork, I unfurled my Nelles map of India and China.

  When I first decided to do this trip back in Melbourne, my plan was to start from Mumbai/Bombay, straight through to Nepal then into Tibet, China and eventually Beijing. However, the Chinese government were (and still are) a bit sensitive about independent foreign travellers, let alone cyclists, going through this border crossing (mmm … could it be the wholesale destruction of the Tibetan people and their culture that they don’t want us to see?), thus they were barred from passing. It was only on organised tour groups that this was possible.

  So, my plan changed to China via Pakistan.

  But this changed again when four months before I was about to leave, I fell in love.

  A gorgeous blue-eyed blonde, Rebecca, a recently qualified acupuncturist and eight years my junior had caught me hook line and sinker. She too was going travelling, and as it was her first time, adamant about doing it on her own.

  ‘Besides,’ she had said, flicking through travel guides at the bookstore. ‘Europe’s more my thing. Not India.’

  ‘But just imagine Bec, there we are in an Indian palace, making love in the steamy monsoonal heat, while the rain trickled and danced outside and a cool breeze refreshed our hot naked bodies … mmm?’

  ‘Ooh! Now, there’s a thought!’

  Of course, this wasn’t the only reason Bec eventually agreed. She wasn’t that kinda girl. Bec was going because she wanted to meet the people, learn about the history, to understand the cultural milieu and the colonial context in sub-continental India … actually, no, I think she was just going for the sex! Hell, it would be enough for me. ‘You wanna shag over a Indonesian volcano … surrrreee!’

  ‘Just say anywhere on my itinerary, Bec, and we can meet up there for a month and then you can do your own thing.’

  She looked at the map and pointed to an obscure splog.

  ‘Kathmandu!? But that’s not on the way,’ I protested.

  ‘Yes, it is darling!’

  And because women are always right, I made a ‘slight’ 3000-kilometre detour via Rajasthan (to beat the approaching summer).

  This was my final plan:

  Yes, I know. It makes Winston Churchill’s hiccupvi look like an epileptic seizure. But would you believe it got far worse?

  ***

  After breakfast, I set to work on assembling the bike, most of that time spent straightening or ‘truing’, as it’s called, the front wheel (‘Thanks Qantas!’).

  Dervla, before her big trip, christened her bike ‘Roz’. Not to be outdone, I called mine ‘bike’.

  Once ready, I hauled ‘bike’ over my shoulder, walked downstairs and, with a stiff breath, threw myself into the maelstrom of traffic for my debut ride into Mumbai.

  Of course, the first thing you notice about cycling in Mumbai is the traffic. In Melbourne, cyclists go on the far left of the road and cars go on the right. In India, well, it’s pretty much the same except the cows go on the far left and cars on the right.

  The reason cows in India have such free rein of the roads, footpaths and in some cases (as I have seen) banks, is because of that well-known fact that they are considered – in India’s largest religion, Hinduism – to be sacred. In its religious texts cows are represented with their famous deities: Lord Rama, The Protector, received a dowry of a thousand cows; a bull was used to transport Lord Shiva, The Destroyer; while the Lord Krishna, The Supreme Being, was a humble cowherd. There are even temples built in honour of them.

  Cows are so loved in India, Mahatma Gandhi went so far as to declare, ‘Mother cow is in many ways better than the mother who gave us birth’. Somehow, I don’t think mothers around the world would be impressed with Gandhi’s comparison, i.e. being upstaged by some dozy, garbage-eating ruminant with hairy teats.

  Anyway, it is no wonder that it is illegal to eat or harm cows in most states of India.

  Now the problem with all this … this overt bovine respect, is that the cows, people, the cows … know this! And let me tell you something – they are the rudest and most arrogant cows (apart from the ones in public office) that I have ever met in my entire life!

  They just lurch out in front of you like a second-hand couch falling off a truck without so much as a cursory look. So many times I’ve had to slam on the brakes to narrowly miss their voluminous rumps or have been ‘nosed’ off the pavement for being in their way. I’ve even seen gangs of them plonking down in the middle of traffic like some grazing roundabout. I tried to exact some kind of revenge by going to McDonalds but to my dismay they only sold mutton burgers.

  Despite the cows, cycling in Mumbai wasn’t as dangerous as I had thought, even if there didn’t seem to be enough space for anything other than taxis, crammed buses and the occasional gnat. Traffic moved a lot slower due to there being so much of it and drivers showed no sign of agitation as they beeped madly at seemingly everything around them.

  It was, however, pollution that caused me the greatest of ills. Most drivers adulterated the fuel of their cars, auto-rickshaws, motorbikes or trucks with kerosene, as kerosene is much cheaper than petrol. Try as I might to block out the foul mess with a folded handkerchief over my face, this only served to scare American Express staff when I went to cash a traveller’s cheque.

  I thought I’d go and see the Parsi Towers of Silence situated on Malaba Hill, a lush enclave of Mumbai some 5 kilometres away. For over 2500 years Parsis have been disposing of their dead in dokhmas (towers). In these towers, corpses are laid out naked and arranged according to age and sex, and are later … devoured by vultures.

  As I cycled into the thicket of street life along Colaba Causeway, my nose was assaulted by a confluence of smells: the heavy stench from open drains, the odour of stale urine, the relieving aroma of pakoras (fried vegetables) from street vendors, and for contrast, the overpowering perfume from joss sticks placed like guards on the corner of erected tables selling bluish pictures of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman.

  I dodged workmen laying bricks on the road, and was forced onto the pavement and walked with the bike. A woman, sitting with her hand open to passers-by, upon seeing me, grabbed at my shorts. I tried to keep walking but her nails caught in my shorts like blackberry thorns.

  ‘Ten rupees, sir. Ten rupees …’

  I pulled out a bunch of rupee notes and my shorts were instantly released.

  Office workers were busily marching off to lunch, and as I dodged swinging limbs and sweaty business shirts, it appeared that I was walking in the wrong direction. My only relief came as I walked through the Oval Maidan, a broad, parched park filled with enthusiastic young cricketers knocking cricket balls across its starkness.

  Near Mumbai’s Churchgate Station throngs of passengers swam by. Across the current of faces, Tiffin boxes (silver tins with wire handles) were being stacked and carried on wooden barrows by men in cotton pyjamas and Nehru pillbox hats. These men were dabbawallahs (in local dialect, Marathi, dabba means ‘Tiffin carrier’; wallah means ‘man’), lunch-box couriers of the Mumbai Tiffin-Box Suppliers Association – a vestige of the British Raj. Every day, about 5000 dabbawallahs deliver approximately 170 000 lunches (prepared by housewives) from suburban households to schools, universities and offices across Mumbai. Apparently, dabbawallahs, despite many being illiterate, only make one mistake for every eight million lunches delivered!
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  I watched two dabbawallahs spear through the slowing traffic, bounce the barrow over a gutter and disappear around a building.

  I got back on the bike and cut through onto Marine Drive on the west side of Colaba where the Arabian Sea met the bay. On the beach lay clumps of rags flapping in the wind. Some of these rags got up and walked around – people, no, whole communities, perhaps from the rural plains I would soon be cycling on, were living among plastic bags of blue ruin. Behind them, smog chalked across Back Bay, leaving shadows of Colaba’s hotels like a badly printed watercolour.

  Parched from the acrid taste of exhaust, I stopped at a restaurant, sat down and ordered a juice. Shortly after, a frumpish woman entered and greeted the waiter with a kiss and a devilish smile, her green-and-white sari swaying around her. I thought this was odd, as I had not seen an Indian woman greet any man in this way in the four days I had been here. And there was a reason for this, I soon discovered: she was a man or, rather, I think had been. She was a hijra – a caste of transvestites and eunuchs.

  ‘Give me some money,’ came a deep, smooth, yet feminine voice. She smiled at me, flirting a little.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Tsk!’ Her face twisted, taking her large smile with it. ‘You give me some rupees.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Tsk! Give me money!’

  ‘But what have you done?’

  ‘Baksheesh,’ she said, and her large smile returned with a proffered hand adorned with gold rings and bangles.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tsk! You give me no money!’ This time she hissed like a cat and made a strange claw with her fingers.

  ‘Oh, dear. Am I cursed now?’ I smiled, but her eyes were like razors and she shooed me away as if I were an overweight moth.

  I was lucky I hadn’t been spat on or, worse, flashed at by his/her missing bits. Hijras usually earn their living by turning up at weddings, births and other celebrations in the hope that their bad singing, dancing and vulgar habits will be put to a stop by a few handy bribes. If none of that paper note stuff comes their way, eunuchs will curse newborn babies, spit ochre-coloured paan juice on newlyweds or sometimes go as far as taking their own clothes off.

  Although it’s unclear how many hijras there are in India, the figure has been put at anything between 100 000 and 1.2 million – in other words, nobody has the foggiest. Hijras are generally either those born with deformed genitalia, hermaphrodites, transsexuals or voluntary castratos, while others have allegedly been kidnapped, drugged and castrated against their will.

  Interestingly, because hijras have an insider’s knowledge of local neighbourhoods (they always know in advance where a wedding will take place), some credit card companies now employ them as debt collectors. Somehow I can’t see that working particularly well in the East End of London: ‘Ya gonna show me ya wot?’

  I pushed up Malaba Hill through slivers of light, the sun trying to knife its way through the thick canopy of trees. At a junction, my guidebook got me lost, so I asked directions from a group of old men wearing Nehru hats and playing what looked to be Chinese chequers. They pointed further up the hill just as a kite snapped in front of my face; a gang of schoolchildren giggled and ran away with it.

  I rode up through a lush tropical garden and arrived at a nondescript bungalow that I thought was the entry to the Towers of Silence. An old Parsi gentleman with a black silk cap and Lawrence Olivier air was circumspect about letting me go any further.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked flatly.

  I explained that, while I didn’t want to go into the Towers of Silence, I wondered if perhaps I could see them from afar.

  ‘Hmm,’ he held a stiff gaze. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Hmm. What are you doing with this bicycle?’

  ‘Cycling.’

  ‘From Australia! Good God!’ and, before I could interject to say ‘I’ve only done a few kilometres from Colaba’, he was jabbering at his colleagues, who made lots of ‘ooh, aah!’ sounds and crowded around me.

  ‘Oh, very far! You must be a strong man.’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Much hardship for you. Yes, sir. You must be such determination.’

  He then palmed me off to a young man named Benjamin.

  ‘He will show you the towers. Follow him.’

  ‘They’re much smaller than I imagined them to be,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, they are small.’

  I leant over the square model of the towers; clearly such interest in Parsi funeral rites had forced the Parsis to make a proxy. Well, that and the fact that a Time Life photographer had recently scaled a building opposite the towers and published colour photographs of a funeral, vultures and all. The Parsi community was understandably outraged.

  ‘In here,’ Benjamin said, pointing to four wells that surrounded the structure, ‘it flushes the remains. The blood goes down this chamber into the wells and is filtered. The earth cannot be defiled by the dead.’ He shook his finger. ‘Nothing goes into the sacred elements – water, fire, air and earth.’

  This isn’t strictly true. There have been complaints from local residents finding the odd dismembered finger in their washing (‘Ere? What’s that finger doin’ in me undies?’), and of other titbits landing on passers-by as the vultures fly past looking for a private place to eat.

  At the time of my visit, not all was well in the Towers of Silence. Corpses weren’t being eaten. A type of sickness, Benjamin told me, was causing the vultures to die. It was in fact due to the use of Diclofena, an anti-inflammatory used on cattle. Vultures would eat the carcass, which in turn would cause their renal system to fail. The decimation of vultures was not unique to Mumbai but right across the Indian-subcontinent.

  To remedy the lack of available vultures, the Parsi panchayat (council) had installed giant solar reflectors to hasten the process of corpse decomposition, as well as an ozone generator to help combat the stench. Some reformists within the Parsi community were opting for burying the dead while an aviary was being built to breed vultures in captivity.

  Like the vultures, the Parsi community was also endangered. Only 90 000 Parsis live in India today, and their numbers are continuing to drop due to intermarriage and a historical disadvantage. When the Parsis’ ancestors – known then as Persians – first arrived in India sometime around the tenth century, the Hindu ruler of Gujarat allowed them to stay, on the condition that they were not allowed to convert his subjects to their religion, Zoroastrianism. Even now, the Hindu community regards the Parsis as outsiders.

  I thanked Benjamin for his time, got back on my bike and followed the road down the winding hill. It wasn’t long before I was hopelessly lost. I looked to the sinking sun to get my bearings.

  I figured that if I headed south I would eventually end up in Colaba’s narrow peninsula and back at my hotel. Dodging an elephant, numerous potholes and wallahs pushing a large barrow stacked with bricks, I found myself in a race with two teenagers – one with particularly large glasses and a vibrant red fez – on bicycles. Trying to gain a few lengths on these boys, I swung out of the traffic, overtook a taxi and found myself in a suicidal collision with an oncoming truck. I slammed on my brakes, causing the back wheel to lock me into a terrifying slide that ended when I smashed into the door of a taxi. I expected the driver to erupt from the taxi in a rage but he merely wobbled his head when I apologised.

  It was peak hour and the streets were choked with traffic and accompanied by insane, erratic beeping and blaring. I battled through it, coughing and sputtering through the exhaust until the traffic eased and my lungs began to clear.

  When I got back to the hotel I hauled the bike over my shoulder, trudged up three flights of stairs, threw the bike against the wall, then went to the toilet and threw up. I then washed my face, flopped on the bed and passed out, overcome with Mumbai’s polluted breath.

  I awoke the next morning to the phone ringing. I picked it up.

&nb
sp; ‘Omelette jam?’

  2

  BOMBAY/MUMBAI

  January

  On my past travels I have noticed how residents of each country have a different way of going to the cinema. In Thailand, patrons stand with hands on hearts when the King’s picture is screened, while in Zimbabwe, locals face their country’s flag and sing their national anthem. But in India … people run!

  Swarms of people were squashed up against the padlocked steel gate of the Regal Cinema, an Art Deco building crumbling silently in the night. When the gate opened it was on for young and old and I felt the crush of bodies push past. Over ten million people across India go to the cinema in a single day, and at this moment it felt like they had all decided to come to this one. I shrank up against the wall, spilling my soapy tea, while old ladies jostled and elbowed their way as if to reclaim a dowry from a recalcitrant daughter-in-law. I didn’t understand the rush; 50 rupees got me a reserved seat, didn’t it? I soon realised my mistake: the seat numbers had worn off over the years of attentive neglect but no one had bothered to mention this to management, who were happily giving out numbered tickets and dutifully directing patrons to their seats.

  Inside, chaos led the way. Families were jumping, running and throwing themselves into chairs, then valiantly fighting off newcomers. One man was barking directions, pointing at vacant seats and waving what appeared to be his immediate family, his extended family and his extended-extended family through to fill the row. Or maybe there were just a lot of people following one guy; it was hard to say.

  Up in the stalls, I jumped into the nearest seat and languished in my dilapidated comfort until a curt-bordering-on-rude voice said, ‘This is not your seat.’