Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  This equanimity was a far cry from when I first bordered the train, flopping about with my six bags like a Christmas tree. My straps caught on doorknobs and other people’s luggage, and snared small children, taking them further and further into the bowels of the train, screaming all the way.

  I had had trouble with the parcel office clerk, a thin man with a tea saucer of baldness at the back of his head, who insisted that my bike would not be delivered to me until the following week.

  ‘But it needs to come with me now.’

  ‘Then you should have come here a week ago to book it.’

  ‘But I didn’t know that I was going by train a week ago.’

  He sat back among the piles of paperwork stacked high in boxes. Ragged station hands loaded hessian-wrapped packages onto a barrow. The clerk sipped his chai and went back to filling out a lengthy form. Clearly, this needed a different tack.

  ‘Look. I’ve had malaria. I mean, I have malaria. I need to get to a hospital for treatment. Urgently.’

  ‘Then this is a problem for you,’ he said, not looking up.

  ‘Right. Er, look, is there any way, any way at all that I can get my bike on the train with me?’

  No answer.

  ‘Well?’

  He looked up. ‘Express.’

  ‘No. I’m not putting it on the Express.’

  ‘Express —’

  ‘I said “No Express!” With me!’

  ‘Express postage. Fill this in.’

  ‘Oh! Will the bike go with me? I mean, on this train?’

  ‘Yes. One hundred and seventy rupees. Special charge,’ he chimed.

  I filled in the triplicate forms, which he then stamped and sealed with hot wax then attached them to the bike.

  I tried not to wonder whether the parcel office clerk would later sell bits and pieces of my bike down at the market, and tried to forget his eagerness for me not to lock the bike up. My fears were allayed when I heard the welcoming sounds of ‘BRRINGG-BRRINGG!’

  A crowd of station hands were milling around my bike and playing with the bell. (The fact that it was an Indian bell hadn’t dampened their enthusiasm).

  At the town of Indore, a man with a broken wrist and a weasel’s nose boarded. He barked instruction at a younger man who threw his luggage on our bunks. This caused some consternation from the farmer’s wife and some apprehension on my part.

  I curled up on a bunk – not my bunk; Weasel-man had taken that – and I eventually was gently rocked to sleep by the clunking tracks.

  7

  UDAIPUR

  Early February

  ‘I was lying naked and she was reading. At first I thought it was her shaking the bed making some kind of joke. But the whole building is shaking and I wonder what is happening. She says to me, “Quick! Get up!” I run down the stairs totally naked!’ he laughed. His partner interjected.

  ‘In the street, cows were running up and down, people were screaming, running into each other. The vibrations started small then bigger and bigger. We kept falling over. When it had stopped we went back upstairs to grab our things and a woman started screaming at us to get out, “Aftershocks! Aftershocks!”’

  Hannes and Hayley, a young Swiss (Hannes) and Welsh (Hayley) couple, had been only 120 kilometres from the epicentre of India’s worst earthquakes in years. The city of Bhuj, in the north-western state of Gujarat, took the brunt of the quake, which levelled 90 per cent of the city and killed over 17 000 people. It had happened on 26 January while I was in Khandwa watching the crowds celebrate India’s independence.

  Hannes and Hayley looked tired and gaunt and hadn’t slept for the past four days. They had ended up staying out in the open at a schoolyard, where locals had generously given them blankets, food and water. Most of the roads out of Bhuj were closed, but Hannes and Hayley had been lucky enough to get a ride out and were taken over the last remaining bridge out of Bhuj.

  ‘In the town,’ Hannes said, ‘there is this horrible silence.’

  I felt a twinge of guilt here in Udaipur, a town in the north-western state of Rajasthan, as I sat in comfort on the balcony of the Lakeside Hotel and enjoyed the scenic blue splendour of Lake Picola. I had only arrived by train that morning from Khandwa. Rajput porters, in their red turbans and dhoti (white ankle-length cloth) jostled past other passengers with my six bags of luggage, their proudly large moustaches leading the way, bangles dangling obediently by their wrists.

  It was strange to see the Rajputs portering considering that they were known as the warrior Hindu caste. In the past, they dominated the area for thousands of years until, unable to solve inter-clan disputes and unite, they were eventually defeated by the invading Moghuls in the 12th century.

  Udaipur was indeed the best place to recuperate from malaria (well, except that it had more mosquitoes) and I spent most mornings on the rooftop patio sipping pots of tea, munching on banana pancakes and gasbagging the days away with other travellers.

  The town was famous not only for having a beautiful Moghul palace, the Jag Niwas, its white ivory domes and arches reflecting in the middle of a lake, but also because it was where the James Bond movie Octopussy was filmed. Banners hung from the narrow cobbled streets advertising free viewings of the film in restaurants while the ubiquitous drones of Bob Marley wailed endlessly from cafés and German bakeries.

  In the late afternoon, I watched two hawks circle around a minaret, flying on the heavy heat only to be scared off by the call of the salat from a bearded muezzin. Below me, white-tufted and black-faced langur monkeys hung from the adjoining wall, playing with each other’s tails. My neighbour, a woman in brown salwa kameez, picked up a long stick and began tapping the bricks near the monkeys, trying to move them on. The leader bared his teeth at her and then bounced over into a neighbouring yard only to be chased by another woman with another long stick. The troupe of monkeys followed, teasing her as they passed, clanging and bouncing over the tin roofs.

  While the muezzin’s call was to remind Muslims to pray, at five o’clock most afternoons I too was summoned. But not with such reverence.

  ‘Hot Pants! … Hot Pants! HEEEEYY!’

  Several metres below my balcony and on the flat roof of their house, Manarge and Lanarge, ten-year-old pigtailed twins, sang and danced like James Brown. They clapped their hands, spun around and moved up and down like yo-yos before doing synchronised hip drops.

  ‘Ah, my prodigies!’

  I had taught them these moves and now every day I had to join in which I did with gusto. Their mother, impressed with the attention I had given them for the past week brought me coffee, throwing her sari over her face, laughing.

  Raku, a girl of eight in a red dress, climbed up the six-foot wall with a devilish grin on her face. ‘Photo! Photo!’

  I took some more shots though I already had umpteen photographs of these kids. I offered lift-ups to the smaller ones, and sometimes two at a time hung off my arms as they swung back and forth like fat little plums. They were delightful.

  ‘Okay! Enough!’ I dropped the kids. It would be dusk soon but already mosquitoes were hovering over a vast buffet – my bald head. I went inside, put on long trousers and a long-sleeved shirt and fumigated myself with mosquito repellent. Once bitten, twice shy. I set off for the hospital to have another blood test.

  ‘Just to be sure,’ Sunil’s father, a doctor, had emphasised. ‘You don’t know if they are doing the tests properly in this small town.’

  The sky was ablaze with corrugated orange clouds, giving a soft peachy pink hue to the palace and blurring the strong lines of the towering triple-storey havelis – ornate houses – some of which were hundreds of years old.

  A scythe of colour suddenly streaked across the sky, ricocheting through the valley like mortar fire before crackling to nothing. Fireworks.

  It was the wedding season, and every night these pyrotechnic celebrations coloured the desert night. Brass bands played through the streets, the musicians adorned in smart maroon tuni
cs with gold ornate lacing. Male party guests danced wildly at the front of the procession while women followed, clapping in their beautiful, brightly coloured saris.

  I followed the procession, clapping with the guests, my happiness unwrapping my smile. Sitting on a flower-covered horse, the groom wore a bright orange turban and a beige suit. He looked nonplussed about the whole event; in fact I dare say he even looked bored.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. Why should I be?’

  ‘Well … getting married. You know. No second thoughts?’

  ‘No. It is all fine.’

  The procession stopped and a wild frenzy of dancing overtook the wedding guests. For the first time since I arrived in India, I saw men and women sharing an activity other than eating: dancing. Before I knew it I was being dragged into the melee and whirled in a circle at high speed. The guest who had ‘invited me to dance’ bobbed up and down and I followed his lead. We spurred each other on, faster and faster, much to the excitement of the crowd. I sensed that we were reaching our critical speed and I lost his grip, catapulting him into a crowd of old women in red saris. Hauled up by the old women, who laughed at his plight, he rejoined the dancing.

  The women were incredibly beautiful, one in particular in her blue sari and gold jewellery smiling with the other women. Our eyes met and I smiled. She laughed and shyly hid herself beneath her sari.

  The band was paid on a per-song basis. The men danced with ten-rupee notes in their hands, waving a circle over their fellow dancers’ heads, and then, when the music ended, gave the money to the bandleader, Ruzen, who ordered his band to whip up another song.

  ‘You must come with us to another wedding,’ he told me. ‘You are a good dancer.’

  ‘I can play the trumpet.’

  ‘Really?’ He took a trumpet from one of the band members, washed it with mineral water and presented it to me.

  ‘Play.’

  The last time I had played the trumpet was when I was 14, so things were going to be interesting. I put the mouthpiece to my lips. The piece was smaller than what I was used to and, with cracked and sore lips, I found it difficult to get a good note. I tried playing ‘It’s Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ but it came out sounding more like a sacred cow being slaughtered. After a few attempts and more splutters, Ruzen swiped the trumpet from me.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ He whipped the trumpet back to its owner, who drowned the mouthpiece with water in case perhaps my bad playing was infectious.

  I went off to the hospital, got a blood test and returned to the patio of my hotel to find Hannes and Hayley showing off wedding clothes – their wedding clothes. This wedding business in Udaipur had rubbed off on them. Hayley sashayed, proudly showing off her embroidered pink sari while Hannes stood awkwardly in his elegant pointed burgundy shoes and grey suit.

  ‘I asked him to marry me,’ said Hayley proudly. ‘He was like “Okay”. So, I rang my parents and he rang his, and we’re all meeting up in Delhi.’

  ‘Congratulations!’ I embraced them.

  ‘How was the malaria result?’ Hayley asked.

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Wonderful! I’m so pleased for you.’ Hayley hugged me back.

  And with that news, I left the next day for the blue city of Jodhpur via Ranakpur, known to have one of the most elaborate Jain Temples in the world.

  8

  UDAIPUR – JODHPUR

  February

  There I was climbing the Aravalli Range, the trees thin and stark like upright skeletons, when the desert came alive with dark figures appearing from nowhere as if emerging from the dry earth itself. As they neared I saw that they were children, some of them teenagers and all seemingly stuck together with filth. They chased me as I rode.

  ‘Namaste! Namaste!’

  Eventually I was stopped by a group that blocked me by walking in front, one of them yanking at my pack-rack, jerking me to a sudden, violent stop.

  ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN! ONE PEN!’ they demanded.

  ‘Sorry, no pen. All gone,’ which was true. In Udaipur, I had given them all to Lanarge and Manarge, who were probably now doing James Brown dance spins and twirls on the patio – ‘HEEEYYY!’

  ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN! ONE PEN!’ They tugged at my arms, my pack, my shorts, and my handlebars. I tried to move off but they gripped tight to the pack-rack.

  ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN!’

  I looked around. Dust rose in swirls over shale and broken rocks.

  ‘What exactly are you going to write on?’

  ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN! ONE PEN!”

  I managed to prise their little fingers from the bike, slip on the gears, and break from the pack, hearing their voices eventually turn into soft squeaks. But this was not the end, oh, no. Up ahead, more children had gathered and, like a dark storm cloud, descended the slope screaming ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN! ONE PEN!’

  I picked up speed again, my bad knee burning at the sudden pedal work. Thankfully, a downward stretch hastened my escape and again I was free. But, as I slowed to climb the next hill …

  ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN! ONE PEN!”

  ‘Oh, hell!’ I sped up again, my lungs burning, my knee a hot knot of pain and threatening to pop off my thighbone. Over the hill and … silence. Well, almost. Ahead, I saw dark shapes bumping around. They were too small to be children. As I neared, a huge dark shape glided over me and landed in the middle of a water buffalo carcass. It suddenly flew off, squawking, having been chased by the low growl and snaps of three rabid-looking dogs.

  Vultures.

  I stopped the bike. Across the road there were over 200 of them, hawing and squabbling. They may have been graceful in flight but on the ground they hopped and bounced around like Edward G. Robinsonxi in a gangster movie. ‘Hey, you guys lay off! This cow is mine, seeeee! Yaaah! Miiiiiiiiine!’

  The dogs were busily ripping the carcass to pieces, finishing off the tiny bits of red meat, blood smearing and matting their snouts. I was more afraid of the dogs than the vultures, and was reminded of the last time I saw a dog so hellish, in Madhya Pradesh. I had passed a water buffalo by the side of the road and presumed it was asleep until I saw a mangy dog ripping the buffalo’s rear end out, pieces of flesh the colour of red wine dripping into the dust. The dog flashed its teeth at me, making every hair on my neck stand up and my legs pedal faster.

  I left the vultures and the dogs to their carrion meal, and, upon entering a small dusty town, I too was ready to eat. I sat and had gobi mutter (cauliflower and peas) and a dodgy-looking samosa sinking in an island of oil. A taxi missing a wheel was slumped by the side of the road. The passenger, a large fat man with a nose like a red mushroom, got out and sat at my table.

  ‘Tyre. Is broken. I vait for fixing,’ he said in a thick German accent and then looked at my bike as if he wanted to swap places. He yelled at the driver, ‘TAXI FUCKING!’ The driver smiled and continued to smoke his small cigarette.

  I left him there, tut-tutting at his swearing, riding the high moral ground not knowing that very shortly I would be in a far worse situation. A few kilometres down the road I felt my lunch taking hold and the awful immediacy that goes with it. I pulled the bike under a shady spot, careful to avoid thistle thorns that have caused many a puncture. I got the loo paper ready, looked around, hoisted my pants down and let gravity do the talking.

  Just when I was halfway through this number I heard the unmentionable – ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN! ONE PEN!’ – and snapped around to see what seemed to be the entire population of Indian children smiling and staring at my groaning, spluttering arsehole.

  Dear reader. I wish I was more understanding about the curiosity of these poor children. But I wasn’t. Not with my pants down. I swore, I raged, I hurled unmentionable profanities.

  And you know, it didn’t have any effect whatsoever! It encouraged them! They moved in a circle around me, some holding their noses, others laughing.

  ‘HAVE YOU NO SHAME!’ I screamed at them, trying vainly to shoo
them away with the scraggy piece of loo paper.

  ‘ONE PEN! ONE PEN! ONE PEN!’

  ‘ARRRGHH!’

  Perhaps because of the rage in my voice, the burning mad stare in my eyes and not to mention the diarrhoea that had sparked up in volcanic velocity since, the kids’ expressions blanked into a panic and they ran in the direction from which they came.

  ‘What the hell would they want a pen for?’ I chewed on these words like the gravel I was now riding over. ‘They’re most likely illiterate anyway.’

  Thankfully, I’d calmed down by the time I’d got to Ranakpur which consisted of nothing more than a chai stall … oh, and a 15th century marble Jain temple standing out like a monstrous three-storey wedding cake.

  It was late in the afternoon and Jain monks were quietly walking the sandy grounds of the temple in their white robes, some brushing away debris in front of them as they walked while some had small rectangular masks over their noses and mouths to avoid breathing in insects. They were following the path of ahimsa (non-violence) to the extreme and thus avoiding harm to jivas or souls that not only lived in all creatures large and small but also in the four elements – water, air, fire and earth. It is a religion that is older than Buddhism and similarly these ascetic monks have relinquished possessions, attachments, wrong thoughts and most difficult of all, family.

  This temple was devoted to the first of the 24 tirthankaras (enlightened beings), Adinath, and, as I walked through some of the 29 ornate rooms, I found friezes depicting his life, including, to my surprise, erotic carvings. Well, if large-breasted figures and a devotee with a large penis is erotic as such. It must be hard being a monk around this temple!

  It was magnificent and, because there were no tourists, sublime. However, before I knew it, the temple was closing up and although I could’ve stayed with the monks in their quarters (on a mat, actually) I chickened out and instead had a wonderful quiet rest at the Hotel Shipli (well, except for the geyser in my bathroom that blew up in the middle of the night like a wet grenade).