On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  True enough though, cricket is the National sport of the Antipodes and though we may win occasionally, it can never last very long, because every kid in every back yard of Melbourne – and indeed all the other cities and towns – has a cricket bat in his hand and stumps in the lawn. In Engand I never see kids playing cricket, except on the beach. Only football. It’s only because we’ve got fifty million people to help make up a team, and even then we find we’re asking the South Africans to lend a hand in defeating the Aussies.

  The cricket came and went. In our last few weeks of our long stay in Australia Annette and I took a trip up the Murray River from Adelaide on a paddle boat. The bird life alone was fantastic. I spent all day, every day on the deck photographing spoonbills, darters, pelicans, eagles, hawks and scores of others. Annette read and painted, occasionally lifting her head when I gave an excited yell and pointed at some creature doing something natural. There’s nothing for the soul like it, just drifting slowly along a great river, watching the wilderness slide by on either side. The wildlife is not wary of a great lump of wood out on the water, even if it is carrying a bundle of humans. Animals and birds seem to know when we are safely contained and no threat to them. If they are grazers, after one lazy look they carry on grazing. If they are killers, they do not even bother with the look: they pounce, they stoop, they strike, they eat their prey right in front of your wincing face.

  ~

  In the early part of the new millennium Annette was recruited by one of our Hong Kong friends to teach as a volunteer at a school in Bihar, Northern India, near the border of Bangladesh. Bihar is perhaps the poorest state in India. An eye doctor who came to Britain early in his career founded the school in his old village, where he had grown up as an untouchable. His name was Mahto – I use the past tense for Dr Mahto recently died of old age – and somehow he was educated despite his low status. When he became relatively rich, by Indian standards, he wanted to give something back. English is a national language in India but many of the rural people speak it so poorly they have difficulty in being understood by Europeans. If they want to get a job in telecommunications, which many of them do, they have to iron out their accents and learn to speak English a great deal more slowly.

  Once a year Annette has paid for her own air fare and internal fares to get to the school, where she and her friend Roz, attempt to help the children with their pronunciation of English. They stay a month living at the school in basic conditions. I remember a friend, who knew the extreme temperatures of the climate, saying to Annette:

  ‘Do you have air conditioning?’

  ‘Air conditioning?’ Annette replied. ‘We don’t have windows.’

  The whole school, including visitors, live on buffalo milk and bean curds. At night there are watchmen patrolling, it being a dangerous area for bandits, who blow whistles to communicate. Naturally those whistles wake anyone who is not used to the sound. Annette finds the visits rewarding but exhausting, taking handfuls of sleeping tablets with her. She has not long done her final visit, having developed deep vein thrombosis and having entered her late sixties. The time has come to retire from her retirement work abroad.

  Here’s a short story of resourcefulness in the young.

  One of her thirteen-year-old pupils at the school, paid for his own school fees by passing on the knowledge he gained in the classroom. He gathered local children even poorer than himself in the shade of a tamarisk tree after daily lessons. There he charged them one rupee to teach them what he had learned in class that day. In this way he gained an education and helped to raise that of the other village children. We, who have so much more in the West, need to adjust our values.

  ~

  Before Annette was to start her visits to the school in Bihar we decided to investigate India together. It was Fe Evans, Chris’s lovely and adventurous young wife, who whetted our palates for a taste of this vast exotic country. Fe had talked to us about her backpacking years in India and Nepal and it sounded great. Also I was preparing to write two novels set in North India, which meant that I could get tax relief for research, probably the only bonus a writer gets.

  ‘You’ve done Malaysia to death,’ Fe had said, a couple of times. ‘Try India – you won’t regret it.’

  And we haven’t.

  Our first visit was to the old perennial, the golden triangle. We went out of season and during a SARS epidemic thus ensuring that we were the only two tourists in the whole subcontinent. This was a good thing because the locals drive the wrong way down motorways, weave around potholes and end up on the wrong side of the road, triple-overtake on blind corners and force each other into ditches. Add to that elephants wandering down dual carriageways, slow camel carts crossing high-speed junctions and the odd pack of dogs careering through the traffic chaos and we might well have never returned to England.

  We spent much time assisting people getting their cars out of ditches and gawping at horrific accidents. The temperatures were around fifty degrees Celsius. Mighty, mighty hot. One day, out in the Rajastan wastelands (they had been suffering a several-years drought) the air conditioning in the Fiat Panda exploded, scaring the hell out of us and our driver, Subish. In order to have some air in the car he dropped the front windscreen and we drove into a cloud of unbreathable dust and grit all the way across the plains to Jaipur. Even when the air was clean the wind came from a bank of hair driers on at full blast. When we got to the outskirts we learned our hotel had been closed for two years.

  In the late 1900s the Indian government had told its rajahs and maharajas that the state would no longer assist with the funding of aristocrats’ estates, so we were staying at palaces and hunting lodges that had by necessity been turned into hotels. A traditional tour tailor-made to our requirements. These places were stunningly beautiful of course, with all the magnificent architecture one associates with an eastern palace. And in each place we stayed we were the only guests, which had the staff hovering and swooping on our every need. At the hunting lodges we found waiters wanted to take us out and show us the bird life of the region and name the trees for us, which of course was just superb.

  I gathered a huge amount of information for my book, Rogue Officer, set during the Indian Mutiny, also called the Sepoy Rebellion or the First War of Independence, depending on your nationality. In the lodges too there were photographs of the British Raj – Indian princes and British colonels – each with one foot on a dead tiger. We abhor such killing now of course, but this was of its time and as such, fascinating to see the arrogant expressions and the display of pomp and riches.

  At Jaipur we went to the Indian Tourist Agency to remonstrate with them over a closed hotel.

  ‘You must show you are very angry with them,’ said Subish. ‘You must hit the table with your fist and demand the best compensation.’

  That’s probably what Subish would have done, but westerners with inhibitions were probably going to say, ‘Excuse me, sir, but the hotel you sent us to does not exist. Can you help us?’

  In fact, we were called into the Head Manager’s office and did not even have to open our mouths. They put us in the best hotel in Jaipur, another grand palace, and added a bonus of a visit to Ranthambhore Game Park. I put on my fiercest expression on leaving the office, so that Subish could see we had been obdurate. I nodded to him grimly.

  ‘Best hotel in Jaipur,’ I said.

  Subish nodded back, firmly, obviously pleased that he was not driving a pair of wimps around the Rajastan plains.

  Ranthambhore is one of the best places in India to see a tiger and we were delighted to be going there. However, we were warned that seeing one of these regal beasts was still very chancey. Bill Clinton had just left the region after two weeks at Ranthambhore and had not even glimpsed one of these shadowy creatures. We were to have a single afternoon.

  Back out on the plains again, on our way to the game park, we had to pass through a remote village. As we drove down the main dirt track which led through the shacks we were a
ware of something happening. There were raging mobs of people, wailing and screaming hysterically. A group of men came storming up to our Panda, which Subish had brought to a halt, and one of them immediately cracked our windscreen with a rock. Subish quickly slammed the vehicle into reverse and shot backwards all the way to the edge of the village. Things seemed a little calmer there, though there was still a bad atmosphere.

  Subish called a man over and asked him what was wrong. He told us a lorry driver had just ploughed into a crowd in the market killing four people, including a child. The whole village was grief-stricken and on the rampage. In the east a hysteria builds up in such situations and the people attack anything and anyone who is not of their community, whether innocent or guilty of the crime that has taken place. Subish knew he couldn’t drive through the village now, so he took a route over the ploughed fields and ditches. We found others, vehicles that had been behind us on the road, following us across the landscape. Fortunately the Panda had a high chassis and though it got a battering we made it to the other side of the troubled village and on to Ranthambhore, thanks to the cool thinking of our excellent driver.

  We stayed at yet another hunting lodge. Here there was another British couple, the only other guests, who had braved SARS and the out-of-season heat, only to fall sick of enteritis. (We always go vegie in India, since a great percentage of the population are also vegetarians and the food choices are wide and excellent.) A jeep came to pick up Annette and me, to take us into the game park. In the front was a driver and sitting next to him, a guide. However, in the back was another very distinguished looking gentleman. The guide explained.

  ‘This is M.D. Parashar (sic),’ he told us, ‘the famous painter of tigers. Mr Parashar painted the logo for the Esso petrol company.’

  We shook hands with Mr Parashar.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said the artist, ‘but I’d like to come out with you. I have a free afternoon and I want to take some photos. Afterwards I would be glad if you would join me in taking some tea at my studios, not far from here.’

  We were quite happy with such exulted company. The guide whispered to us a little later that we were very lucky having Mr Parashar with us, because he was allowed into areas of the park that tourists like us were not normally permitted to enter. In fact the artist was a very amiable and knowledgeable man, who gave us a running commentary on all that we saw, from sambar deer to ruined lodges. We could not have had better company. And indeed, he knew where to find the tigers and led us first to a big male, who it had to be said stayed in the shade under a thorn bush and made himself very difficult to see, but then in the early evening to a beautiful female who walked right in front of us, clawed the trunk of a tree while we watched, then strolled away into the forest.

  Unfortunately my camera (the old-fashioned film kind) was not working properly and we got only one poor shot of her, but still we have that precious photo now in our album. Afterwards we did indeed visit Mr Parashar’s studios where he showed us his latest paintings of tigers, both by himself and by his students, all of which were far too expensive for Mr and Mrs Kilworth of Tattingstone, Suffolk.

  So ended our first taste of India. We saw the Taj Mahal, the Pink Palace, the Red Fort, and all the other buildings of course and like many others before and after us could not fail to be impressed. We’ve since returned twice more, but those latterly times to Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Kerala is our favourite state in the more green and pleasant south, it having a wonderful bird sanctuary, Thattekkad, with hundreds of species of birds, from the Sri Lankan Frogmouth to the Pied Kingfisher. As usual we wanted a homestay at the bird sanctuary for our accommodation, which is a bit like a bed-and-breakfast except one eats with the family as well as sharing their home with them. Annette called a man named Gireesh and he confirmed that he had a room free.

  ‘I’ll meet you in the town,’ he told us, ‘outside the courtrooms at midday.’

  We had one of those hairy rides coming down through the mountains of the Western Ghats, narrowly avoiding death on every corner and were duly in the right place at the right time. Just when we were getting twitchy a man in barrister’s robes came leaping down the courtroom steps and opened our car door. It was our host.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, breathlessly, ‘still in the middle of a case – but my mum’s coming to fetch you. See you later.’

  He then ran back up inside the courtooms.

  Mum arrived five minutes later in another car.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘jump in.’

  She took us to a delightful two-storey house painted purple, nestling in the jungle of Thettekkad wildlife park and bird sanctuary. There were four generations: a three-year-old girl, Gireesh and his wife, mum and grandmother. All the adults spoke good English except grandmother, who spoke none at all, but insisted on hugging us every time she saw us in place of a verbal greeting. She was lovely and during the course of the week got out her photo album to show us pictures of her husband who had passed away just a few years earlier.

  Gireesh’s father had also passed away, so he was surrounded by women. The whole household were keen bird watchers and guides, and mum took us out that evening to a lake where we saw three kinds of kingfisher. We enjoyed every moment of our stay with the family, having come from a homestay in a Karnataka wildlife park, where there was only one occupant of the house. However, it has to be said that particular host was the most wonderful chef and grew everything he cooked in his own garden, including the coffee beans.

  We obviously met and joined occasionally with other travellers while we journeyed around south India. This included a group of four Australians. I developed a sort of friendly word-battle with Gwenda, one of the Aussies, in the way that Pommies and Aussies do.

  At one point I dropped my guard and said to her, ‘You know, this is a great group. Often you get one person who spoils it for the rest, but we seem to have been lucky.’

  Gwenda looked me straight in the eyes and replied, ‘So no one’s told you yet?’

  Kerala is a Christian state, which also has local Communist councils. You see the red flag with the hammer and sickle flying from the towers and spires of churches and cathedrals. Very quirky and very Indian. One of my favourite advertisement boards stated that ‘Chadda Boiler Valves Are Serving God’s Country!’ But my all-time favourite company was the ‘Infant Jesus Radiator Works’. Such boards help to bring a smile to the face of the most weary tourist.

  The kids in Kerala, as elsewhere in India, are endlessly, tirelessly playing cricket. Any spare piece of wasteland will find several matches going on, with a tatty ball and piece of boxwood for a bat. They will play from dusk until dawn and be there the next day. One homestay in Fort Cochi was opposite a ‘parade ground’, a flattened grassless area of packed earth which the police and army used to practise marching up and down. When the military weren’t there, the kids used this ‘maidan’ for their cricket pitches. We returned to this same homestay the second time we visited Cochin and this time I took with me two dozen cricket balls: twelve match balls and twelve practice balls. The utter pleasure on the faces of the children when I handed then round was priceless.

  There is no easy way to travel around India. Using a car is highly dangerous. Travelling on a springless, crowded bus for hours is uncomfortable. The best way to travel is by rail. The trains, if a little grubby and insecty, are excellent. Food and tea vendors walk through the carriages, calling in soft voices, ‘Chai. Chai.’ ‘Curry. Curry.’

  However, the railways do not serve every corner of India. If you want to go to a remote game park, you need at some point to go on the road, which means a car or bus. It has to be said though, the end is always worth the means.

  ~

  In 2006, some Boy Entrants from my military school days in the 1950s arranged a reunion of the 29th Telegraphists. Eddie Owen and Bob Nottage worked hard to get us all together at a hotel in the Midlands. I recall there were only about twenty of us, out of a possible ninety. It�
��s quite strange walking into a room to find a bunch of old men you last saw 50 years previously. Some you recognise – those whose features remain fairly intact – some you have no idea who they are. My old Scottish pal Tam Keay was there, John Chidlow, Rod Williams, Bob Nottage, Alan Cake, Dorset, Ed, and others. We had a great dinner, with good speakers, and told many old stories. We all went home with warm memories stoked into fires again. Sadly, a short time afterwards Alan Cake had climbed onto the roof of his house to adjust the aerial to his ham radio – and fell, killing himself. A communicator to the last, Alan was the brightest of us and one of the most genial men you could meet.

  It was in 2006 too, that myself and many of my classmates received the Pingat Jasa Medal, awarded to us by the Malaysian King and his Government for the Malaysian Campaign. Those of us who served in Malaysia and Singapore between 1957 and 1966 were awarded the medal which the British Government immediately told us we could not accept, even though the Aussie and Kiwi governments had accepted theirs. Lobbying ensued in parliament and eventually we were told we could accept the medal but not wear it. What? I’m not likely at my age to have an occasion to wear a gong and being a Quaker now I probably wouldn’t have done so anyway, but being told I can’t by those twits in Whitehall makes a massive difference. If ever I have to join a military parade again, or attend a formal dinner, that bloody medal will be on my chest alongside my GSM for the South Arabian Campaign.

  ~

  In the same year my young adult novel Attica was published by Little Brown. It’s a story about an attic that expands to become a continent across which three young adults trek and meet various adventures. The children are accompanied by a three-legged cat called Nelson, who in real life was our Hong Kong friends Cath and Richard Beacher’s moggy. Nelson was a Tabby Persian, one of those tangle-haired scruffy-looking cats whose fur seems to be unravelling. He was a real character, Nelson. Unfortunately he died during the writing of the novel thus ensuring the book was dedicated to him.