Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  I loathed myself.

  Now, as a travel writer you’re not supposed say that you don’t like the country you’re in, but right at this moment I wasn’t liking India one bit, and when I told Rebecca that night she said, ‘Then why stay here and complain? Let’s take a bus!’

  ‘Because I’m writing a book! I can’t call it “Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle” if I took buses, trains or planes all the time. It’d be called “Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle … sort of”.’

  ‘But it’s not even called Bombay!’

  ‘I’m working on that!’

  ‘But it’s just distance for distance’s sake. It’s not even fun.’

  ‘Look. Let’s try one more day. Things could get better.’

  ‘Get better! Hah! I’m hot, I can’t sleep, every day some dickhead grabbing me on the tits … how could anything get better?’

  ***

  But things did get better and what happened next reminded of how wonderful India and Indian people can be.

  Rudauli was a small splot on my map in the middle of Uttar Pradesh. When streams of people surrounded us, a plump man in a tracksuit stepped forward and urged them to go.

  ‘I am Dr Pushkar,’ he announced and shook my hand. ‘Please, come and have dinner with me tonight. But first I will arrange for you to sleep.’

  He showed us to a government bungalow, used by officials ever so rarely that nothing at all worked. But it was clean, large and kept in a reasonable state of repair by two caretakers who appeared to be continually stoned on charas.

  That night we sat outside Dr Pushkar’s house with his wife, a gynaecologist, and their family, sitting in the boiling, soupy heat, going through the pleasantries. Suddenly, there was a large flash of light that split across the sky and released an almighty explosion.

  ‘Ah, the power has arrived!’ Dr Pushkar smiled cheerfully, wobbling his head while servants, nonplussed by the crackling light, flapped square fans to cool us. ‘It is the transformer. He is melting.’

  Within minutes, the power came on. Wooden fans were dropped in our favour for electric ones and everyone at last relaxed and sat down. The family seated us at the table and only ate once we were well and truly stuffed.

  ‘This is the Indian custom,’ Dr Pushkar smiled. ‘It is our duty to look after our guests like a god. We must accept you like a storm – we do not expect it but we welcome it.’

  He had a wonderful relationship with his children – two daughters and a son. Often I would find him laughing and playing with them in the morning while he tried to shave, chasing and tickling them around the house, or up at four a.m. to take his son and his friends for a jog, even though it was already quite hot at that hour.

  Bec and I felt happy just being near him, and our annoyances of the past few days melted away.

  Some days later, Dr Pushkar took us to a local wedding. Under a huge tent, relatives and friends gathered to see the bridal couple, who were perched on a stage several feet away from each other. The groom was accepting red envelopes, relatives touching him on the feet as a sign of respect while his bride, in a bright red dress and adorned with gold nose-rings, sat quietly, eyes downcast.

  ‘She doesn’t look very happy,’ I said to Dr Pushkar, who looked dashing in his camel safari suit.

  ‘No! She is very happy!’ he asserted.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Ah, you see, if she is smiling, then everyone will be thinking that they have already made the marriage!’ He flashed me a big smile and a wink.

  Perhaps the bride was unhappy with something else; perhaps a dowry that was sending her parents bankrupt. It is still the tradition in India (even though it was prohibited in 1961) for the bride’s parents to provide a dowry of money or gifts, or education for the bridegroom. Not just on the wedding night but for the duration of the marriage.

  I saw something big, shiny and metallic under Dr Pushkar’s jacket.

  ‘What’s that?’ I pointed. He lifted his jacket back.

  ‘It is my gun,’ he said innocently.

  ‘But … you’re a doctor! You’re supposed to protect life!’

  ‘Yes, I know. But, if someone wants to take my life, then I will take his!’ he said, laughing. Banditry was apparently rife around these parts, and Dr Pushkar was a target when driving around in his Jeep with his family.

  Right about the time we had planned to leave, Bec became ill with what Dr Pushkar called ‘heat diarrhoea’.

  ‘Ah, you should have come to me sooner,’ Dr Pushkar scolded me. I suddenly felt the weight of being a man in this country; by their standards, it seemed, I was responsible for Bec in every way. ‘And you should have boiled the water then put in the electrolyte.’

  ‘But it’s bottled.’

  ‘Still. Maybe problems. Some bad people are changing the water.’

  All night, Bec was filled with antibiotics and electrolytes through an IV drip. We huddled under the overhead fan, trying to find relief in the moving hot air until it sadly stopped moving when the power cut out.

  The next day I too got diarrhoea and because of this we took the ‘slow train’ (was there any other kind in India?) to Lucknow, the next town, just over 130 kilometres away. Halfway there, rattling in the heat with our bikes, a thought struck me.

  ‘Bec, have you seen my money belt?’

  Four hours later, I was back on the train to Rudauli. I was sure I had left my money belt under the mattress of the bed in the government bungalow.

  I sat panicking, wondering if all my money, my passport, my credit cards, everything, was gone. Three-and–a-half hours and 120 kilometres later, I was back at Rudauli. I leapt off the train and ran, making a beeline for the bungalow.

  I motioned to the caretakers to get the key. When they cracked open the padlock, I burst in and made straight for the bed. I looked under the mattress. Nothing.

  ‘Aagghhh!’

  ‘Sir.’ I heard a child’s voice and turned around; Dr Pushkar’s son was standing in the doorway. ‘Your money belt. My father has it.’

  I yelped with joy, hugged the little guy and repeated over and over, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I could not run fast enough to catch you from the train.’

  ‘Ah, you are having much happiness to you,’ said Dr Pushkar, smiling a broad grin as he sat cross-legged on a table. He was wearing a singlet and shorts and was shaving by a mirror. ‘We are very good friends, isn’t it? I get a call from your wife about your money belt and I run to the guesthouse with no shoes because I am worried that a thief might take it.’

  He slapped me gently on the knee.

  ‘We were surely brothers in our past lives. God has blessed us. Sit. Have some tea and food.’

  Tears welled up in my eyes ’til I could no longer see India at all.

  16

  LUCKNOW – RISHIKESH

  Early June

  If India had been giving us the shits, it was Harold Weinerman that was going to give us the colonoscopy.

  ‘I am known as the man that makes the cocks grow!’ the old American hippy said proudly, his lined face tightening like a tree knot. What was left of his hair stuck out from the side of his head like question marks.

  ‘Grow?’ I asked.

  ‘“Crow!” Each rooster was in a cage, and, as I passed, they crowed. I have this magic that moves through my heart chakra,’ he pointed to his spleen, ‘and through the petals of my cranium. I hear birds sing,’ he grabbed his lower abdomen and his eyes bulged, ‘here!’

  Bec had met Harold at a bank in Lucknow. He had kindly invited us to stay at his house, and, going by what he told me of his Afro–Cuban jazz collection and his 30 years chasing the hippy trail in India, I was looking forward to hearing his stories. And, because he was a hippy, I thought he would have kaftans full of dope; not that I’m a prodigious smoker of the precious weed but I was beginning to wonder why so many Westerners smoked the stuff here and I came to the conclusion that it was to anaesthetise themsel
ves from every reality that India had to offer.

  Alas, Harold, to my horror, did not have any. ‘Aspirin? Do you at least have fucking aspirin, Harold?!’ What he did have a lot of was conversation, and that was neither pleasurable nor, thankfully, addictive.

  Harold could talk for hours without a break and had ideas so disconnected it was like trying to listen to a scratched CD that had been frisbeed through a bead rack.

  The only good thing about our experience with Harold was that he had taken us to the Hanuman temple where we spent three hours with other worshippers chanting ourselves into a delirious trance.

  ‘Sai Baba abused his magical powers!’ Harold went on, chasing another incoming tangent. ‘You know, they say the reason he looks so young is because he jerks off little boys and drinks their sperm. Anyway, he used it against me.’

  ‘What? The sperm?’

  ‘No! His magic!’ He rose up. ‘I’d arrive in towns and people would just act weird towards me.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I said, edging away from him.

  ‘Yeah! He was jealous that I was more enlightened than he was, that I could tune people, take them 20 miles above the earth with my magical powers —’

  ‘Harold,’ I cut in, ‘how many times have you dropped acid?’

  ‘What? Er. Oh …’ He looked to the ceiling, eyes swirling about in his skull. ‘About 500. At least.’

  ‘Couldn’t you suppose, and, hey, this could just be a long shot, but couldn’t your self-possessed powers and enlightened “beingness” be, say, the effects of all the drugs? Hmmmm?’

  He became flustered. ‘Well, one might think that. Sure. Just be quiet and let me explain.’ He then began a longwinded rant about being able to hear bells in his liver and then of all things, his ex-wife ‘losing’ her orgasms like loose change that had fallen down the seat of a taxi.

  We leapt up in the middle of it and said that we suddenly had to take a bus to Rishikesh.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I feel Mother India calling us from the Ganges, Harold, a … a spiritual awakening that has struck us since talking to you. Your enlightening wisdom has shown us the way.’

  ‘Really? Well. You know, I was trying to tune you—’

  ‘No, don’t get up, Harold. Thank you, thank you for everything!’

  We rode away from his house as fast as we could and jumped on the overnight bus to Rishikesh. But that turned out to be trading one form of madness for another.

  India is hell, I tell you. Hell!

  Both fighting diarrhoea, speeding off our heads on too much Imodium, heads banging on the steel seat rungs in front of us as we tried to sleep, while the bus overtook into the pathway of countless trucks, we also had to fight the conductor of the bus who wanted to charge us the same price as the tickets for our bikes (420 rupees). The most I had ever paid was 30 rupees for my bike and this really felt like we were being shaken down because we were white.

  I yelled at them. Bec urged me to calm down. ‘I’m not paying full price for bikes that I put on the roof myself!’ I asserted. ‘Screw them, the thieving bastards!’

  But this purgatory didn’t end when we got off the bus in Haridwar, some ten kilometres short of Rishikesh.

  As I got the second bike off the roof, I felt myself being lifted then pushed up against the side of the bus. It was the conductor and the driver who, after making puja (prayers) by the peaceful River Ganges, were both now incarnated with Kali – Goddess of Destruction.

  ‘He says you must give him 420 rupees for the bicycles,’ said a smiling moustached old man who I recognised as one of the passengers. Indians, it occurred to me, always smiled when bad shit was going down.

  ‘We’re not paying 420 rupees. This is robbery.’

  ‘Yes,’ the old man agreed, smiling again, goddammit. ‘Robbery. But if you don’t … they are going to beat you!’

  ‘Ah! Well, why didn’t they say this before!’ I started searching for my wallet. It must be said, I’ve got a bark but I’ve got absolutely no bite.

  Bec was ever so supportive.

  ‘Don’t pay them,’ she ordered, and then disappeared.

  They moved closer. I smiled.

  ‘I’m a guest in your country. It is your duty to be good to us,’ I cheesed, half winding them up and half sucking up. ‘Right, guys?’

  The driver punched the bus panel near my head and made cutting noises towards the bikes, which I had unwittingly left at the rear of the bus. He climbed up onto the driver’s seat and started the engine. The conductor pulled at my shirt and screamed incomprehensibly.

  ‘Peace! Calm down,’ I said, putting my hands up. ‘Shanti, shanti. (Peace, peace.)’

  ‘Don’t talk to them, Russ!’ Bec shouted as she reappeared. ‘Don’t pay them!’

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t. Absolutely not.’

  Two minutes later …

  ‘Why did you give them the money?’ Bec’s voice was sharp, accusing.

  ‘They were going to fuck up the bikes.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have fucked them up.’

  ‘Oh, you’re so sure, aren’t you!’

  ‘And you were sure you weren’t going to pay them.’

  ‘Bec,’ I raised my voice. ‘I was too tired, too sick to fight them, okay? And really, is it worth getting our bikes mashed for twenty bucks?’

  ‘You could have just said no.’

  ‘Let’s not argue about this now. We’re both tired.’ But stupidly, I continued. ‘You so fucking know, you’re so cocksure.’

  ‘They just wouldn’t have.’

  ‘What do YOU KNOW?!’ I erupted. ‘You weren’t there with two guys threatening to beat your head in, trying to get money out of you.’

  ‘Russ,’ she said calmly. ‘Why don’t you ride up ahead?’

  ‘YOU GO AHEAD! PACK YOUR BIKE AND LET’S GO!’

  Bec stared back at this rabid-dog man, this mad beast, and put her hands up, facing me with firm resolve. ‘I don’t want to be around you right now.’

  Then all that heaviness that had been getting heavier every day since I met Bec in Kathmandu came tumbling out: ‘AND I WISH YOU’D NEVER COME WITH ME!’

  17

  RISHIKESH

  June

  ‘Get ready for eyeballs’, said our Sikh Yogi master, his eyes first wide and centred, then darting from left to right, down and up. He wore shorts and a singlet and had removed his turban to reveal a small bundle of hair under what looked to be a jam preservatives cloth.

  Twenty or so other Westerners were sweating it out under fans that wobbled menacingly from cords high up on the ceiling. A small bat darted around the temple before skitting off into the night.

  We were staying at the Ved Niketan Ashram in Rishikesh, at the foothills of the Himalayas. The ashram was founded by a 96-year-old Swami who, if you believe the literature in the reception area, ‘can be still seen to this day labouring with workers building the new ghats (stairs to a river)’, though all I had seen him do so far was sit in a small chair in the office and stare at the wall.

  The ashram wasn’t exactly a welcoming place. It was high-walled and wired, and various statues of deities were locked in steel doghouses to keep the prying hands of rhesus monkeys from making off with the fruity offerings.

  In fact, the only difference I could see between the ashram and Stalag 13 was the fresh coat of gaudy yellow paint adorning the high wire fences; I could almost hear the Hogan’s Heroes brass number playing as we walked up the stone path. And, if this wasn’t enough to let us know that we were entering some form of imprisonment, signs around the place were hardly shy about the fact:

  INMATES WILL RETURN TO THE ASHRAM NO LATER THAN 10 P.M.

  NO PLAYING OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, SINGING, TALKING AFTER 4 P.M.

  NO NAKED BATHING NEAR THE ASHRAM.

  NO PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION OR REVEALING DRESS ALLOWED.

  NO TAKING OF DRUGS OR ALCOHOL PERMITTED.

  PEOPLE FOUND SMILING WILL BE SHOT. DONATIONS WELCOME.
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br />   Well, not really the last one, but it felt like it.

  It was here in Rishikesh, in this town of hippies, sadhus, spiritual healers, yoga retreats, meditation ashrams, and once-Beatles hang out, that I thought Bec and I could at last find the peace that had been eluding us in India.

  But after our horrid bus fight, and despite my profuse apologies, peace was the last thing on Bec’s mind and she shut me out for days, not saying a word. Thus, like the broken spokes on Bec’s rear wheel that always seemed to snap when we argued, we were breaking apart, the tension between us too much and our relationship buckled.

  Then one evening, she surprised me with this revelation: ‘You care more about writing this book than me.’

  ‘What?’ I did a double-take. ‘Are you jealous?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  I wouldn’t be surprised if she was. I gave my journal an inordinate amount of time: I had long conversations with it in restaurants while Bec stared out of the window with boredom; I fed it anecdotes while Bec waited impatiently up ahead; in the middle of the night, Bec would catch me poring over it, pages indecently asunder. It was like I was having an affair right in front of her with this … this A4 mistress.

  ‘Anyway, I’m toying with the idea of only going with you as far as the Pakistani border,’ she said finally.

  ‘I see.’ I thought for a moment. ‘In light of things, that may not be a bad idea.’

  She began to cry and I hugged her, feeling her tears on my face. I softened.

  ‘It’s just that not once have you said, “Bec, don’t leave me, I love you”.’

  She had a point. We had only been cycling together for six weeks and I was already growing restless; more restless with each passing day, taking walks by myself, trying desperately to find my own space. To be alone.

  ‘Let’s work it out, Bec. Okay? Come on,’ I said soothingly.

  We made up and, later, headed for a restaurant.

  Even at dusk it was still humid in Rishikesh. Sadhus sat by the walls of ashrams, walking sticks propped by them like rifles, eating alms out of tin pots. A middle-aged sadhu with brilliant chocolate-coloured skin shiny with sweat passed us while combing his hair, handsome in the dying light.