Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  We were supposed to undertake all of this with the austerity of a monk and thus were segregated according to sex (‘I like it standing up’, ‘This line on the left, please’), not allowed to talk, do any form of illicit drugs, harm any living thing, steal, tell lies or indulge in any sexual misconduct. (I had a problem with the last one. I mean, could you at least, ahem, have sexual misconduct with yourself? After all, ten days is a looooong time!)

  Though a compulsive talker, I took to the no-talking rule like a duck to water. It opened up a world of possibilities: you could slam doors in people’s faces, push in line, trip them over, steal their meditation cushions, set their kaftans on fire … and they couldn’t say one little thing about it! They were powerless! (Though, I did begin to have a growing sense of dread as I seemed to be attracting a large number of glares.)

  But, back to the Dharma Hall. I adjusted my cushions once again. After an hour, an old man got up on stage, sat cross-legged and turned off the tape.

  ‘You must be here on time or I will have to ask you to leave,’ he said, addressing us all. ‘And absolutely no talking. You must not break the Noble Silence. We are here to meditate.’

  He was our teacher and he meant what he said. He had already thrown out a Frenchman who had turned up late. I was not surprised to learn that he had been a colonel in the Indian army for 40 years, during most of which he had been stationed in Ladakh fighting the Chinese. He of course went by the name ‘Colonel’.

  Despite Colonel’s stern warnings, and much to my annoyance, Indian participants were overlooked as they regularly whispered to each other, handkerchiefs drawn to the side, sending messages like errant spies. On one occasion when I went to see the Colonel after a meditation (we could talk as long as if it was directed at the teacher), I passed two of the talkers as they left. The Colonel sighed once they were finally out the room, ‘Oh, I just cannot get these Indians to shut up!’

  Sometimes I felt as if I were living in a paradox. While the monsoonal rains bucketed down, signs sprang up around the bathrooms:

  DUE TO A WATER SHORTAGE THERE WILL BE NO SHOWERS TODAY

  I could see my fellow meditators looking up at the dark sky, rain splashing in their eyes, looking at the signs then mouthing, ‘I don’t fucking believe this!’

  But I did eventually settle down. Despite the fire in my knees, my sitting bones numbing to mush, and my back creaking like a splintered door, I remained, to quote Goenka, ‘equanimous’. The key was to not react to the pain with revulsion, so as to not create more samskaras (mental reactions), but to examine it objectively while keeping in mind that everything is impermanent.

  This helped me become acutely aware of what was going on with my bad shoulder. It vibrated violently, sometimes in spasms, and I thought about what Antony had said, and wondered whether this heat, this throbbing that was now pumping out of my shoulder, was the anger I felt over my father’s death. I was angry that he died when he did (he was only 64), and perhaps I was still carrying this anger around with me, taking it out on India, taking it out on Bec (though it must be said my relationships had all been disasters, one so bad that the girlfriend in question had tried to run me over with her car! Which was odd because I was in the kitchen at the time!).

  It had been a hard four months together: the heat, the crowds, the traffic, the sheer human maelstrom that overwhelmed Bec and me. I had found India the most difficult of all the places I had travelled. It hadn’t helped being in a relationship that was failing. Or, rather, had failed.

  This was all apparent to me when Bec left that day in tears; I was worried and concerned about her, now alone on a bus to Delhi, and though I felt sadness, I also felt relief.

  I had fallen out of love with Bec and I wasn’t sure when it had happened. Perhaps it had evaporated on the hot Deccan plains, in the rocking madness of a crowded bus, or in the leer of mobs of men, or perhaps it was swept away by the Ganges while we fought near it. Wherever it had gone, I couldn’t see it returning, and I struggled for days as I walked through the wet pine trees on my meditation breaks, trying to console myself with the practical reasons for parting with her, things we had talked about and agreed on.

  We were incompatible … she was too young … she needed to travel on her own … we had nothing in common.

  We had planned to meet up yet again, this time in Taiwan, and then perhaps travel again together. I knew now I couldn’t carry on this lie. I had to tell her, as much as I dreaded it. But tell her when?

  I unwittingly would choose the worst day possible.

  Anicca, anicca. Everything changes.

  22

  DHARAMSALA – AMRITSAR

  July–September

  While I was having lunch at a dhaba halfway towards Amritsar, a grey-haired man in white pyjamas sat down next to me.

  ‘Christian?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am from the Pentecostal Church. You must pray to him. Pray to God.’

  ‘I don’t believe in God.’

  His hand snapped up as if stopping traffic. ‘Pray! To the Lord! He will save you!’ He shook his finger in my face. ‘Come!’ he said and grabbed my sleeve. I grabbed it back.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘No God?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m Buddhist,’ I lied. He stared blankly at me for a moment.

  ‘No God? No God!’ He shook his head, turned on his heel and disappeared into the sun.

  Though saying I was Buddhist wasn’t exactly a lie. Since leaving the Vipassana course I had made a pact with myself that I would try, at least, to have a more Buddhist outlook.

  I decided I had to accept things the way they were in the world, that I had the power to change the way I felt about things and not manifest my own pain. This would only create more samskaras that I would eventually have to work through again. I promised myself that I would react no more but observe the feelings ’til they left.

  So far, I’d kept that promise. I hadn’t lost it since leaving the Vipassana course. I’d remained equanimous when I’d been overcharged at my hotel or surrounded by locals as I changed my tyre – one nicking off with my multi-tool, or when my rear panniers tore off earlier that morning from all the books I was carrying (books are cheap in India).

  The most testing experience was when I waited over a week for my new tent to arrive at the post office. Every time I went in to collect it, the clerk told me it hadn’t arrived. Eventually, I insisted on looking for it myself and found it under the very desk the clerk was leaning on!

  ‘Just as well you have come to collect it,’ he scolded me. ‘That parcel has been sitting there two weeks and we were about to send it back.’

  Equanimous, equanimous – I wanted to slap him– remain equanimous, equanimous.

  On the plains of the Punjab, it was still in the thick grip of monsoonal fever, a whopping affront to my senses after a giddying descent from the cooler Himalayas. The mountains sank into fields of green crops, and Sikh farmers, their orange turbans like helmets, sailed through them on shiny new tractors.

  It was strange not to be cycling with Bec, and unconsciously I found myself looking over my shoulder, waiting for her, looking to see if she would magically bundle around the next corner. I would think about her every day.

  When I arrived in Amritsar later that day it was like many other Indian cities I had encountered: a cacophonous mess of traffic. That was until I pushed the bike up a ramp into the Golden Temple. Of the many gurdwaras (Sikh temples) around India and the world, this one, known as the Harmandir, was the spiritual centre of Sikhism.

  The Harmandir is a three-storey structure inside the temple, rising above a man-made tank. At night, the Harmandir shimmers its gold-leafed exterior over the still water and marbled floors. It was built to house the Adi Granth (the ‘original book’ of scripture), which, in the late evenings, is taken out, passed hand to hand and read aloud.

  Sikhism was founded by the
Guru Nanak some 500 years ago, drawing on elements of Islam and Hinduism. Nanak was against idol or blind worship and emphasised that all paths lead to God. Today there are over 20 million Sikhs worldwide and Sikhism is ranked as the world’s fifth-largest religion.

  What struck me immediately about Sikhism was its sense of egalitarianism. Anybody could stay in the gurdwaras regardless of religion, sex or caste for a maximum of three nights; the accommodation was free, and food was provided twice daily in the langar (communal kitchen), also free of charge. Prayers were not set at any given time and could be performed at home. What a contrast this was to that pushy Pentecostal devotee!

  A tall, smiling Sikh carrying a spear led me down a corridor and into a large room. On beds rammed together, various nationalities were sprawled under overhead fans while lines of washing danced above them. Korean girls and boys laughed into the fruit they were eating, Germans curled in corners with Stephen King novels, and – ah, the British section – pale bodies snored with their mouths open.

  I saw a mountain bike slumped up against the wall. I got speaking to its owner –

  Pedro, a diver from the Canary Islands.

  Pedro had cycled from Morocco and through Europe to India in less than six months. Like me, he had had his share of adversity. First he got hit with malaria in Iran, then dysentery in Pakistan.

  ‘Ah, I was in the hospital – so hot! So hot! And the power would go. No fan – oi! I so hot, so hot! I have the fever, headache, and dysentery. The doctor tells me I have malaria.’

  He loved Iran but wasn’t impressed with the East.

  ‘A Frenchman cycling had only one arm. They laughing at him. Try pushing him off his bike. Terrible!’

  Among the mess and the heavy heat I spotted a man wearing a turban and a familiar face under it – Philippe, an engineering student from Germany whom I had met during our time at Vipassana. He was a lively character, throwing himself into the culture wherever he was. Now that we were in Amritsar, the Sikh capital, he was sporting white pyjamas, a turban with a Sikh emblem in the middle of it, and a small dagger around his waist. He made a prayer gesture.

  ‘Namaste!’

  ‘Namaste, Philippe.’

  ‘You get here in two days! So fast, man!’ he said in his characteristically pepped-up voice. But no sooner were we chatting away when he turned and jumped on his bed and began meditating, such were his impulses.

  Back in McLeodganj, these impulses had him running every five minutes to stuff his face with strudel or banana cake, and when he had downed that he would run off to the next German bakery, screaming ‘Ah, I must have some more CAAAAAKE!’

  With no cakes to be found in Amritsar, it wasn’t before long he developed a new love: ice cream.

  ‘Ah, Russell! You must come to zis ice-cream shop! Zey have REAL ice-cream!’ And he would grab me by the arm, knocking children out the way and causing rickshaws to veer into each other as he led me across the street to a dubiously named ice-cream parlour, ‘Mr Softy’.

  I spent the day trying to have my rear panniers fixed. The hooks had torn out of the back and I had had to bungee them together. After trying various sheet-metal places, I had no luck until I met Hardey Singh in an Internet café. Hardey was 21 going on 40. I jumped on his scooter and we zoomed around the side streets, zapping from one hardware store to the next to get the required parts.

  Hardey was a devout Sikh and spent most of his time at the Golden Temple. He was also involved in bringing over American Sikh kids on an exchange program, to show them the history of their religion.

  ‘The turban is to protect the head from the sun energy,’ he told me. ‘The beard, to collect moon energy. The bangle around my wrist is to remind me why I use my sword, and the small dagger around my waist is to protect the weak.’

  He told me these items were worn by members of the Khalsa (Sikh warriors) and are known as the five Ks: keshas (uncut hair), kangha (a comb), kirpan (a sword), kara (a steel bracelet) and kaccha (a pair of shorts). The Khalsas were created in the late 17th century to defend the Sikh faith against the dogmatic and ruthless Moghul ruler Aurangzeb, who reimposed a non-Muslim tax and ordered Sikh temples to be destroyed.

  As a testament to such persecution by the Moghuls, the Sikh museum housed depictions of torture and slaughter of Sikh martyrs: men sawn in half, women forced to wear garlands of their massacred babies, and martyrs with their eyes hanging out. Children next to me danced and laughed around these horrible images. Bullet holes still cracked the wall, a stark reminder of Indira Ghandi’s ill-fated attempt to quash the militant Sikh leader Bindranwale by blowing up the Golden Temple. (This attack was to spell her own end, when two of her Sikh bodyguards machine-gunned her to death.)

  ‘We are never to be without a dagger to be ready to fight,’ Hardey said. It was true: that night I watched a Sikh man clutch his dagger between his teeth as he hung on to a thick chain to submerge himself in the Golden Temple pond, while another swam near him, a glint of steel winking from the folds of his turban.

  I had dinner that night with Philippe, Pedro, Yuki and three Korean women with the most un-Korean names I had ever heard: Cindy, Maria and Stacey.

  ‘I like zis restaurant,’ said Philippe as he waved a hand at the grimy walls, the yellow filth, the unwashed tables, the oily food bubbling on coal stoves and the rank smell of leaking gas. The waiter in a stained white shirt came over and slopped more food into our bowls.

  ‘Our last night in India before Pakistan. And here we are in a real Indian restaurant!’ Philippe smiled, full of love and joy for it all.

  ‘Yes, very Indian!’ I said, and then remembered myself. ‘And this is why we came here.’ We got up and paid. ‘Not coming for a drink, Philippe?’

  ‘No, I don’t drink,’ he said darkly, then put his index finger to his head like a pistol. ‘Drinking is poison for your mind.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t like. Bad for your spirit, your karma.’

  ‘What about ice-cream?’

  ‘No! Definitely not ze ice-cream.’

  His self-righteousness floundered a week later when I caught him on a rooftop in Lahore, Pakistan, stoned off his head on charas, crowing inanely at the moon.

  He wiped the sweat off his brow.

  ‘It’s so hot! Man, I’m sweating all ze time.’

  ‘Take the turban off.’

  ‘Hey! I like my turban. Zey love me. Zey think I’m Sikh.’

  In Pakistan they didn’t really go for his new look. In fact, he nearly didn’t get into the country because of it.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said to him later in Pakistan, ‘it’s because you look like something they’ve been fighting against for the past 500 years, eh, Philippe!’

  ‘Ah, maybe you are right!’

  And the next day this proud Sikh would unravel his turban and don the salwa kameez – pyjamas and a topi – Muslim cap – in one hot, hurried breath as he stepped over into Pakistan.

  23

  AMRITSAR – ISLAMABAD

  September

  A large red rooster strutted across the Grand Trunk Road, puffed its chest, slammed its foot down several times, did several high kicks, stopped, then waved its crest aggressively as if to say, ‘I AM THE FUNKIEST ROOSTER!’

  This incensed a tall, black rooster opposite and it immediately tried to outdo the red rooster: it stomped the ground harder, kicked its legs higher, then crowed furiously, ‘NO, NO! I AM THE FUNKIEST ROOSTER!’

  A phalanx of blustering red and black roosters followed, goose-stepping and barking causing the crowd to cheer and jeer respective chooks.

  I wasn’t at an illegal cockfight but it might as well been.

  You see, I was at the Wagah Border observing the lowering of the flags ceremony between India and Pakistan where the Border Security Forces of India (wearing large red crested hats) and the Pakistan Rangers (wearing large black crested hats) performed this marching spectacle every day and have done so since 1959.

  It had the atmos
phere of a football match, my neighbours exploding into hails of abuse at the Indian side. When I shouted out ‘CARN THE BLUES!’ they cheered, slapping my back as if I too had joined in on the abuse.

  However, unlike a football match there were deep chasms of hatred on both sides, a fault line that ruptured all the way back to the 1947 partition where nearly a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs butchered each other in a scramble for land. Since then, India and Pakistan have been involved in four wars with each other, border skirmishes and stand-offs, not to mention the ongoing conflict over Jammu-Kashmir. So no wonder I thought there was going to be an all-out riotxxi (or war for that matter).

  At the very end of the ceremony, after all this chest puffing and shouting, the Pakistani and Indian soldiers shook hands with each other then lowered their respective flags exactly the same time.

  ‘Why at the same time?’ I asked my neighbour, a large man with a grey peppered beard and topi.

  ‘It would show great disrespect! And big problems for the Indians!’ He grinned broadly as if he wanted it to happen.

  The soldiers slammed the border gates shut with a loud bang and it was all over. Soon the crowds got back in their Jeeps, buses and autorickshaws and went home whereas I cycled the few kilometres to a small town and slept the night in a road side hotel where not one of the lights worked. On the upside, the plumbing was totally electrified, a discovery that was ‘shocking’. Oh, stop it, you!

  In the morning I faced the vast open plains before me. The road stretched right out into the distance like a cord of liquorice.

  Pakistan. Land of the Pure.

  I looked behind me. Though I’d had mixed feelings about leaving India, I was glad to have left her now; so much so, that at the Indian border, the immigration official had stamped my passport, uttering, ‘You are looking very happy.’

  ‘Yes, I am. Very, very happy!’