Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  And I open up my eyes, and sure enough, there’s Rockstar, grinning down at me. At least I think he’s grinning down at me. All I see is a silhouette. But knowing Rockstar, he was grinning down at me. And his hands were sticking something in my mouth. It was hash. A lot of it. This’ll make you feel better, Muck-hole, he whispers. A nice body stone always makes you feel better. He actually cradles my head in one stinky armpit while he holds one of Pete’s Heinekens up to my mouth, and the Heineken tastes good, even if it is warm, and so I choke and gurgle and swallow and chew and choke and swallow some more, and then Rockstar’s gone, and you know, Rockstar did me kind of a favour there, or at least I thought so, for a while.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 23

  Don’t think M. enjoyed his visit behind closed doors. We’re in Herat, in some hotel right out of a western or a Wyeth painting. P isn’t here & neither are T & M. Pete says we’ll be here until everyone shows up or he finds a radiator & new windshield or until hell freezes over, whichever comes last. He’s not in the best of moods & that might be connected to the fact C. & I are sharing a room. C says it’s nothing to do with Pete, she’s just worried about Frank. She thinks she’s somehow responsible for the fact he’s not here. We are a few days behind schedule, but the sleepy-eyed bandit behind the worn wooden bar said he hasn’t seen anyone to match any description. I feel lost at sea. I think everyone feels lost at sea, especially Mick. Last time I asked, he said he felt like he was 10 floors above molten lava, hanging onto a bare electric wire with wet fingers. Interesting. That’s the way I feel. There is something about this landscape, though. The jutting rocks, & the yellow fading to blue desert. Can’t or won’t ever be able to capture it unless it lingers, & I think it will, in my mind; it’s almost lunar. R’s turned nasty, he’s calling S Mabel. S says anything & R.’s in earshot, he says, Mabel, you’d wank off a dead dog if there was a shilling in his wanker. That was a first but it grows tired 9th time around. R.’s biggest problem (well, not his biggest problem): no imagination.

  Room 13, Hotel Mowafaq, Herat, 24/11/78

  Dear Vicki Kolomyka,

  Yeah, Vicki, just thought I’d write you and let you know that the troops down here got your Xmas care packages of vodka and they’ve even shown their appreciation by breaking into them early. Late at night near the town square you can see them in their jeeps, taking furtive sips of something that looks like ice water. You got it. It’s basic R & R down here in Herat. The Revolution’s purring along quite nicely. Even the Herat Herald which has a new editor, by the way, (that sweet Vlad Chomski) says so (over and over again). The only Tabasco in the Vaseline is this tour bus full of Westerners that blew into town a couple of nights ago. They’re upsetting the local folk with their sickly Western pallors and their shabby denim jeans that lack even the most subtle black market conviction. Though some of the merchants, I must confess, have been reported to offer a grimace of a grin when they see them walking their way. It’s the corruption of the Western dollar. It’s such an insidious thing. We’ll all be really happy when they leave and the status quo can return to normal and we can get on with the business of yanking this poor benighted country into the twentieth century. So we can get on with the business of doing the southern folk the ample favour of putting in seaside resorts, each one complete with its own navy. Only thing is, the tourists don’t show any sign of leaving. I sent Sergeant Sergei out on an undercover assignment and he came back with the news that they’re simply waiting for some of their recalcitrant companions who are finding the Islamic charms of Iran difficult to leave behind. And so it seems we’re stuck with them for a while, though Sergeant Sergei has suggested that we sick the opium dealers on them and catch them in the act of committing perfidious deeds and throw them in jail, or maybe just make sure they quietly disappear into that mysterious Siberian limbo that we Russians have made famous worldwide. But that, of course, is a touch extreme. We’ll give them twenty-four more hours. And then they’ll feel the jaw of our authority. In the meantime, could you maybe smuggle down some of that black-market Kahlua. I have a feeling that if I introduce these good Islamic people to a decent Black Russian, they’ll forget this nonsense about alcohol abstinence and I can clean up.

  Cheers,

  Veronica Smirnoff

  Mick

  Body stones. Kidney stones, boulders. I’m dreaming about mushrooms, mushrooms sprouting out of my body, glands, flanges, fringes, I’m a forest of these things, nice rich soil, but when I breathe, the mushrooms get bigger. Nuclear. Clouds. In the one cloud there’s this guy who looks like Travis Bickle. Big yellow teeth, a sinner’s grin. But he has Charole’s voice. Gotta change, she says, those things. Body’s all mushroom, all soft, blooming in shit, so why not and out comes a pair of scissors, click, click, coming down from somewhere, thunder, Thor, it’s me screaming as the bandages around my chest pull out the little bit of chest hair I’ve got. Charole’s real face finally comes into focus, and she’s saying sorry, and then her face blurs, and she says, oh, you’re crying, and her fingers touch my face and even that hurts. Aches, which is a malaria nightmare first. Room suddenly becomes clear, dust motes dancing in sunlight, Charole’s voice in shadow. Where are we? I say. Herat, says Charole’s voice. First thing I think of is Jenkins. Where’s Jenkins? I say. Not here, Charole says. Where’s Tim and Teach? I don’t hear her answer. The room dissolves to dust motes. There’s music somewhere. Ribs like an accordion. Pinch and squeeze. Black out. Dream. Someone’s making a mushroom soup out of my body. When they slice open my eyelids all I see is Dana’s face, peering down. Where am I? I ask her. Herat, she says. Then it’s back to the mushroom soup. Soup on a fire, bubbling, red-hot blaze below.

  Nov. 25

  F & T & M. still haven’t shown, & Pete can’t find a radiator that fits. We may have to move on, he says, & everyone will just have to catch up when they can. This morning a shopping trip. D bought 6 pairs of rainbow-coloured socks with toe pockets & Pat. bought 6 grams of opium from an apple merchant who charmed his snake for us with his flute, for 15 Afghanis. At the back of his shack was a cave where he served us “high tea” free, once he found out C & I were Americans. 1st place we’ve been where it’s o.k. to be American. He told us about all the Russians in town, 100 at least. Then he bartered with Pat. for 1/2 an hr over a fur blanket until he finally capitulated, because, he said, Pat. had such good taste in friends. On the way back to the hotel, C & D complained about Pete. Not the most sensitive of guys in the sack, it seems. When your cup runneth over.... Stopped at the telegraph office & spent nearly $80 Am. on a telegram home.21 M made it to the can on his own for the 1st time in days but the trip exhausted him. Last night with a flashlight, we gave him a shadow puppet show. Our room has roaches. Too high to care. That high tea was not just high tea. Or, rather, it was definitely high tea. Through the window I can see the park. Lots of stark bare autumn trees, like a scene from Wild Strawberries. Beneath one of them, a Russ, soldier in a jeep, watching me watch him. I wave & smile, he looks away.

  AFGANISTAN Herat—Kandahar

  Day 44

  Departure: 8:00 a.m. (728 km).

  Hotel: Mowafaq

  Points: 1. Kandahar is the second largest city in Afghanistan (a pop. of 125,000). Alex the Great stopped off here for a little R & R on his way to India, and it was the scene of massive slaughter between Persia’s Safavid Empire and India’s Moghuls back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today it’s the most important trade city in the country. Your happy little troupe will find goods from Britain, Iran, Russia and the Hindustan in Kandahar’s bazaars. The city was founded in the eighteenth century by Ahmad Shah Durrani, the country’s first king. It’s a square city, surrounded by a wall that’s 30 ft. high and 15 ft. across. It’s also surrounded by one of the largest fruit-growing areas in Afghanistan. That desert to the south is the Registan. On the way into town, point out the irrigation canals that draw water from the Arghan-dab near Baba-wali. These canals form a considerable impedime
nt to the movement of troops.

  2. The Shahidanu Chawk is the martyr’s square downtown, between the old and new parts of the city. In its centre, a monument to fallen soldiers.

  3. The Khero Sharif is located next to the Mausoleum of Ahmad Shah Durrani. It’s the country’s most sacred shrine, containing, as it does, the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed. Acquired from the Amir of Bokhara in 1765 as part of a treaty, you’ll have to have some special pull to see it, it’s not shown that often.

  4. Kandahar would be a good place to take in a game of buzkashi. Played during the winter you might be able to take in the first games of the season. It’s the country’s national sport, and basically the game consists of two groups of possibly insane horsemen who fight over the headless body of a goat or calf. The horses have been trained to bite each other and the riders. The players aren’t supposed to attack each other but they usually do. You can always tell what guys on the street play buzkashi. They’re the guys with the mangled arm or the missing eye. It’s considered a quiet game if no one was killed during it, and it’s quite normal to have enthusiastic players riding into the stands, trampling spectators.

  Mick

  Don’t know what day it was I was finally able to move without having to bite off my tongue to keep from screaming. The day after the shadow show. Kelly and Patrick and Dana, using their hands to throw shadows of ducks and chickens and donkeys on my wall, just to keep poor Mickers entertained. The last day we were in Herat, that was the day. Remember sitting on the step, old hotel step, near sunset, watching Afghanis on big black bikes pedal past. Horses and buggies. This Russkie in a jeep, looking me over. Me wondering what happened to all my traveller’s cheques. They’d disappeared. I was broke, tooth hurt more than ever. But I didn’t have the dose any more, it was completely dried up, that was the one good thing. That tooth, though. Tooth hurt so bad that I found this rusty old nail on the step, lying there, saying hi, handsome. Picked it up, did some poking around just the natural thing to do. Stuck that nail into the very bottom of that hole pressed hard and my scalp lifted off and after it had settled back around my ears and the tears flowed away from my eyes, I said Dave, you take it, and he settled behind the wheel, easy transition. He told me to think of a house on a country road, autumn colours, and to count my steps, backwards from a hundred. About the time I get to the door, I’m at seventy-six, and when I open the door, everything turns to black and white and I find myself in this room that has beanbags on the floor and a little fridge and a stereo system and a Les Paul electric guitar and a TV set. I turn on the TV set and there’s a shadow coming towards me. The camera. Whatever. I settle back on a beanbag. It’s a shapely shadow breasts hips legs. Puffy chapped lips. Chapped lips make you want to suck on the lower one specially. Dana. She sits down beside Dave, he clears his throat, he’s like me, frog in his throat. Women make him nervous, women he loves. Dana asks him how he feels. Like one of the living dead, he tells her, she laughs, they talk about Night of the Living Dead, Dana saw it sixty-three times when she was an usherette, that scene near the end, gas tank, zombies clawing at the window, their putrid flesh falling off in pieces. Talk about Jenkins and what he might be up to. Talk about her fingers. Dave asks her what happened to them, and she says she froze them when she was six that time when she got locked outside in a blizzard when her parents were celebrating their anniversary, remember? Dave says, oh, yeah, right. Dana says, What would you have said if I’d said they were a birth defect? Dave says, I would’ve said, oh, so you weren’t born with a perfect body. Dana smiles Oh, you’ve just made my day, she says, say it again. Dave hesitates for a minute. I would’ve said, he says, oh, so you weren’t born with a perfect body. Dana laughs, puts a hand on his shoulder, her face strange, filling the TV screen, the two or three lights of Herat behind her. Me in this room, watching her on TV. Thinking this is a malaria dream that’s going to turn nightmare any second. Where are the zombies? But nothing happens. Dana talks about a snake charmer she saw downtown that morning, about the line-ups in the telegram office and then she says she thought it was time to get some sleep and she says goodnight, touches Dave again on the shoulder, and then she’s gone, disappearing into the dark hotel lobby.

  Dave went to our room, Patrick was there, reading something. Feeling better, Mr. McPherson? he says. Dave says yeah, and then asks if he could borrow some money. Patrick says certainly, no hesitation, shells out a hundred Afghanis. Soon after that, Dave closes his eyes, and Patrick’s snoring comes rasping over the TV speakers. I change channels. Find Charole getting undressed, Kelly in bed behind her, Suzie saying, from somewhere I can’t see, “Rob says he’s going to wait until we’re in Kathmandu before he kills me because he might get kicked off the bus if he does it before.”

  “That shows that he’s capable of thinking things through to a logical conclusion at least,” says Kelly. They disappear from sight. Suddenly I’m looking at a breast, and Dana’s weird fingertips pulling at a hair on the edge of her nipple. A little curly hair. A couple tries and finally she gets it. I’m somehow in Dana’s head. So that’s where Dave went when the phone was busy. Then Charole’s walking to the door, naked except for her blue panties, pulled up high on her hips, kind of a French look, I guess. Then darkness. “Another day gone,” says Kelly’s voice from the speaker. “And another day coming,” says Dana’s voice. Then nothing. I switch channels. I get “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Elly Mae pushing Jethro into the pool. Another channel. The news in some foreign language, people getting shot in Esfahan. Another channel, static, another has a test pattern, I finally turn it off, pick up that Les Paul, play all night, and when I turn on the TV again, I don’t know after how long, the room didn’t have a clock, we’re on the bus, and I’m looking at miles of desert. Strange mystical mountain out in the middle of nowhere, shimmering in the air like that piano chord from “A Day in the Life.” Camel caravans, more women in chadris, lots of hooked noses. This incredible blue sky, like Saskatchewan sky, the vault of heaven that can’t ever be busted open, not by sinners like me. I should’ve got religion. Should’ve been a Moonie. Hasheeba kicked drugs. Should’ve listened to her. I flip through the channels, get an episode of “The Honeymooners,” I watch that, I’d missed TV on the trip. When I switch back, Dylan’s singing “Senor” on the way into Kandahar. Love that song. I think Dylan must’ve wrote it when he was making Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid with Peckinpah. Has that same Mexican feel. Maybe Peckinpah cut it from the movie. I picked up the Les Paul and played along until Pete pulled up in front of the hotel we had in Kandahar. Lousy hotel from the look of it. Broken windows and desperadoes staring at us from the chai shop as we all file past. Smoking opium pipes and staring at us while we walk through to the room that Pete gives us, that was Kandahar, and it’s just like back in (jrgup when the lights go out about an hour after sunset, and I think that’s the only reason that Pete pays us a visit, we’re all in one room, something about rapists, town’s full of rapists, and zip your bags up tight, Afghanis don’t believe in fumigation. Also him and Charole they’re on the outs, I picked up on that, because she wasn’t staying in Pete’s room that night either. Pete had a hard time hanging onto women and I sensed some tension in the room when he showed up, mainly coming from Charole and Dana. Some coming from Suzie, Rockstar nowhere. Pete with a flashlight. Patrick looking hilarious in Kelly’s glasses, Kelly looking like a hoot owl. Rockstar sank his heel into Patrick’s glasses, did I mention that? Kelly rented hers to him, an Afghani an hour, whatever that is, not much. Dana was in good spirits, though. No more belly spasms. Her idea to have another little shadow show with the flashlight, since the conversation wasn’t moving along too crisp. Suzie came up with a chicken head that said bloody old rooster over and over. Bloody old rooster is so hard up, has to use his beak to speak and leak, I think that’s what she said. Dana’s cow head complaining about how there wasn’t any moon to jump over, nobody’s moon at all while Kelly’s horse head went into some weird mumbo jumbo about a heart missin
g a sweet Pegasus but it was Patrick’s cat’s head that got my attention. It was saying I’ll get you I’ll get you I’ll get you a diamond ring if only you will sing but Dave can’t sing worth a damn, but Patrick did lend him that money, so there’s this knock on the door, I open it up, and there’s a swimming pool there, I dive in, and when I surface, I can feel my ribs hurting, my tooth hurting, and Kelly’s handing me Lucille. Come on, troubadour, she says with a smile. But only if you’re feeling up to it. And so I took the hint and took Lucille and sang Loudon Wainwright’s “Dead Skunk.” Afterwards Patrick offers me some tea for my services, tells me it was opium tea, I knock lots back, because I’m feeling weird and thirsty. Things turn strange, pain goes away and I feel real tired. Not as tired as now though.

  And when the flashlight’s gone and only a candle is flickering, Kelly talking to Patrick in low tones about his palms, heartline and lifeline, I sack out on one of those cots, mean cot, springs and teeth, and I close my eyes and when I open them there’s a rat sitting on my chest, pink eyes full of flame and I can’t speak can’t move too stoned and so I close my eyes and husde on down to the wharf where I phone up Dave and say hey Dave didn’t you used to be a cat in a past life and he says yeah and so I say well I got just the life for you right now, it was the least I could do. And when I got off that wharf I took a dive in the ocean and found this big black boat with a big white pillow in it and I curled up inside its feathers and went to sleep.*