Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  See you in the morning, she said, her eyes still looking at me as she slowly closed the door.

  Suzie’s daybook entry

  Dec. 3

  What day is it today? It’s bloody Sunday? I hate these bloody Moslem countries where everything’s open on Sunday and nothing’s open on Friday, it screws everything up. It gets me all confused and worried and anxious. Just like I hate nerdball men who think don’t means donut and they decide they’re feeling hungry. They think can’t is cunt and won’t is I want you, I need you, let’s find a haystack. There’s nerdball men like that all over the place, you can’t get away from them. I hate them. Just like I hate these free days. I’d rather keep this bloody bus full of wank-off artists on the road and get this trip over with. I just want to be sitting at a table filling my fat face with mom’s Christmas pudding. But instead Pete wants us to go play squash. I hate nerdball men who always want us women to do what they want us to do. I’m not going to go play squash so somebody else can put down here who won what if they think it’s so important. I’ll talk about Dara instead. When Pete told us we were going to Dara, Patrick said what the fuck’s Dara? Took the words out of my mouth, mate. I’ve been there and I still don’t know what it was. There were lots of guns and lots of drugs and it looked like a couple guys had been in a mule accident somewhere in the hills. When I get back home I’m going to tell my mom I was on a bus full of drug addicts and one-bollock rapists.* I’m sure that’ll make her real happy.

  Next day. Dave? Right. Squash. Pete drops us off at some squash courts. He’s got time so he has a game, game with me, and he hits a wild one, I have to lunge for it, needs a backhand and I hit him in the nose with my racket. Pete got pissed off. He thought I did it on purpose. It was just an accident. Then he takes off to get the radiator fixed. I went and found a phone. Dave told me I should try to get that tooth fixed. What happens, he said, if I run out of chilli capsicum? So I tried phoning up a few dentists but the Lahore Lug-nuts had beat the Aussie Axle-rods in a soccer or rugby game the night before and the city decided to take a holiday. At least the dentists did. Don’t know how Pete managed to fix the radiator. Probably by greasing a few palms. Downtown after squash, the only thing open was a drug store. Literally. It sold drugs. So everyone got stoned. Except Rockstar and Suzie, who took off somewhere by themselves, weird, I thought, Suzie going off with Rockstar, not a brain in her head, she was asking for trouble. The rest of us, zonk city. Well. Half-zonk city. I didn’t take much of the opium Patrick bought, didn’t feel like having Dave take over and fuck up my life some more. Didn’t even get a buzz. Kelly did though. She clammed up tight, didn’t say a word for two hours, while Patrick and Charole and Dana got into a heavy discussion about Milk Duds, fur balls and whether or not it was the Year of the Horse or Year of the Snake and after that it was back to the hotel, where Pete was waiting to take us on a tour of Lahore, which I skipped.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Dec. 3

  Μ & I had a date last night. Kind of date I never would’ve dreamed of in high school. Saw a movie that milked the old beauty & the beast cliche of every nuance, & then afterwards, among potted palms and some of Lahore’s effluvial affluence (Pat.’s phrase), we talked about things that mattered. There’s hope. But they say there’s always hope. This morning before breakfast, Pete came to our room & gave S. & me some opium. If we ever happen to have a chance, he said, stick some of this in R.’s clothes. Pete really isn’t the most intelligent guy in the world, but I kept my mouth shut, & S. seemed to think it was a great idea. Pete then dropped all of us off, R. included, at some squash courts & played 1 game & then took off to get the radiator fixed. First D. beat me, then C. beat me. Mick finally let me win a game. Then we decided to get tri-shaws, my kind of vehicle, the wind in my hair, always a hair’s breadth away from a traffic disaster, down to the mall. S took a tri-shaw with Rob, acting very very friendly, giving herself up to the cause. She claims he raped her in Peshawar. The reason for the opium plant. She still isn’t back. As for the rest of us, we sniffed out a gov’t agency like a liquor vendor. Except it sells drugs—opium, hash. Skin felt like papyrus. I could feel all my organs working, the blood pulsing through the arteries. Everything slowly slowing down, beginning to rot like the dead & dying flowers. Pat., high, chattered away, I wanted to sew his mouth shut. But it was weak stuff, the high’s long gone, & S. has just walked in. R caught her in the act of trying to slide the opium into a jeans pocket. He took it wrong, thought it was a present. He didn’t get mad, she said, he just ate the opium, even offered to share it with her. Pete then returned with the bus, the radiator’s fixed, took us on a tour of the city. Guide & everything. Right now we’re at the tomb of the Emperor Jahangir. I can feel the ghosts. Concrete death, sitting like a Buddha, staring. We’ve seen another fort, blood soaked into its walls, walls bleeding, the Budshahi Mosque, Wazir Khan’s Mosque, other tombs belonging to Anarkali & Noor Jahan. All these tombs, all these reminders of death, everywhere we go. Starting to get depressing. I’m looking back with fondness to that night in Istanbul when F. & I watched the Lady of the Veils. She was lively at least. Just had supper at the Nemat Kadah. Delicious chicken mussallam & nans, all washed down with more opium tea. Rob, stoned, was on his best behaviour, talking to me about how difficult it is to photocopy colours without letting them bleed. He used to work in a print shop. When he talks to me, he has kind brown eyes. But still intense, & nervous. Something creeping behind the pupils.

  INDIA Lahore—Jammu

  Day 52

  Departure: 8:00 a.m.; 279 km. Arrival depends on border but you can count on a long day.

  Route: Wagah—Batala—Kathua—Samba—Jammu.

  Hotel: Jammu Motel; tel.: 5104.

  Points: 1. If you have a long wait at the border, you might want to keep the restless folk entertained with a short history of India, to wit: five shillings was all it took to get the colony bandwagon rolling. That was the increase in price of a pound of pepper by Dutch traders, who controlled the spice trade at the time. Twenty-four London traders put up 72,000 pounds capital and voila! The English East Indian Trading Company was born. Their first vessel was the Hector, captained by one William Hawkins. He arrived at the small port of Surat, north of Bombay, in 1600. He had tea in Agra with the fourth of the Great Moghuls and soon thereafter two ships a month were bringing sugar, raw silks, muslin, spice and other things nice into Britain. They would return laden with British goods. As trade increased, though, the Company’s officers were inevitably drawn into local squabbles, and thus began the process by which England conquered India. In 1757, General Robert Clive put the boots to a troublesome nawab in the Bengalese rice paddies and opened the gates of Northern India to London merchants and regiments of His Majesty’s soldiers. In the following century, British Rule extended over much of India. In 1858, one year after the Indian Mutiny, a Royal Decree wrote finis to the East India Company and the destiny of 300 million Indians lay in the small and delicate hands of Queen Victoria, who was, at the time, 39 years old. Her authority was sustained by 200,000 native Indian troops and 60,000 British soldiers, most of whom perceived India as a place of challenge and adventure, and excellent polo and cricket grounds. These were the days of gentleman officers wearing plumed shakos. These were the days of sumptuous imperial balls and tiger hunts in Assam and the occasional battle with cantankerous Pathan tribesmen. It was all very much a lark, for a while.

  2. If you’ve still got time on your hands, and you likely

  will, you can tell them that India is the birth place of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism. Hindi is the language spoken but almost everyone understands English. The country is 1,261,000 miles square. The food is good, in most places. If you want, you can give them a run-down of some of the dishes they should sample: khorma (meat cooked in dry curd); nargasi kofte (meat balls with eggs inside); keema (minced meat with peas); nan (unleavened oval-shaped bread). Make sure to tell them not to eat with their left hands. In Indian, the right han
d is for eating, the left hand for other things, all unmentionable. Local beers and spirits are available, subject to regional prohibition laws, and they’re normally expensive. The nimbo pani (fresh lime water with sugar) is tasty.

  Mick

  Soon just walked in. And takes my temperature, and I can tell she’s all upset, she says I’m going to have to leave the hospital pretty soon unless my money arrives real quick, they laid this on me once before and so I told them if they’d lend me enough money to send a telegram then I could wire for some money, but they don’t have a telegraph office on Ko Samui, but they’ve got a telephone and so I tried phoning home a couple times but I couldn’t get through. I don’t think the Ko Samui telephone system is exactly up to snuff. So I wrote a letter to Hasheeba, telling her that I needed some cash. I kind of hinted at the situation I was in.*

  I mentioned I was lying back beneath some palm tree while the sun set on the waves and there was a cute little morning nurse taking care of my every whim but that I was sort of maybe dying.

  Fine. I’m going to be dead in three or four days and the only thing that Dave’s worried about is getting this fucking book finished. That’s what he says to me. I won’t last long outside the hospital so I better get the book done. Jammu, he says.

  Okay, Dave. Jammu to you too.

  Long day, that day we drove to Jammu. Mainly because we were stopped for about six hours at the Indian border while the Indians shuffled papers back and forth. I remember there was this kid who kept bugging me to let him give my sneakers a shine. He just wanted baksheesh. I had to swat him a couple times to get him to take off and a little while later I heard something go plop and I looked down and there was this pile of wet manure on my left sneaker and that kid’s standing there looking at me. Want shine now, he says. I took off my sneaker and threw it at him but the little bugger caught it and took off with it and I tried to chase him but there was no way I could catch him. Like I maybe said before, I wasn’t born to be a jock.

  Kelly figured it was all karma boomeranging back at me. That was the sneaker that killed the cat in Peshawar. But I thought I was doing the cat a favour. Who knows, she says. She was sitting across the aisle from me and she was in a quiet mood, working on a painting. Lots of reds. Mosque in the middle. I asked her what she was going to call it. She said she wasn’t sure. Either “Mosque in Mist” or “Peshawar Morning” or “Crossing Borders,” which did I like best. I wasn’t in the mood to think too hard on this. “Crossing Borders”, I said.

  I tried to talk to her about movies again but she just looked at me and said, we don’t have to talk, Mick. Silence can be its own conversation. Well, that was fine for her. But the way I was raised you’re supposed to talk to a woman once you’ve picked the corpus delicti clean. Go the whole route, son, the old man used to say, the champagne and moonlight and roses, and if you’re lucky, half the time it’ll be worth it. So I decided to go up and talk to Dana for a while since we hadn’t had a chat since Kabul but she was still pissed off at me, she just kind of said yes and no to anything I said and she wouldn’t look at me, and the old man always said that if you’re ever in a situation where you’re in high gear and getting nowhere then you’ve got to cut your losses, put everything in reverse, head back to the garage.

  Not that I blame Dana particularly. But I thought she was an easy-come, easy-go kind of lady.

  I headed back to Lucille and finger-picked blues until the customs agents got on the bus and hauled Rockstar away.

  He didn’t put up a fight, which surprised me.

  What also didn’t surprise me was when the customs agents got on the bus again about half an hour later, and went through the tent cage with a fine-toothed comb.

  They didn’t find anything.

  When Rockstar got on the bus he sat in the front seat until Suzie got on.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” he says to her.

  Then he stands up, lifts up his Voidoid T-shirt, sticks out that white whale gut of his, which was smaller and slacker than the last time I’d seen it, and he paraded it down the aisle. Wickering, snickering, sneering. Crawls into the tent cage and lets out a barking cackle that would freeze the blood in the veins of a rabid hyena.

  I finger-pick my way into an Elton John song I kind of like, “Levon,” from Madman Across the Water. Pete gets on the bus and we head for Jammu. Rockstar comes and sits beside me. That fucking Pete, he says, is a bloody bastard, Muckle, he tried to stab me in the back. People will do that to you, Rockstar, I say, and I tune up Lucille and sing my favourite Van Morrison song, “Brown-Eyed Girl,” and after that I sang “Son, Don’t Go Near the Indians.” Here we were, in India at last, me minus a sneaker and Rockstar still with us when everyone was hoping we’d be down to six little Indians, seven counting Pete.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Dec. 4

  We’re in India, sitting at the border, doing what we always do best at borders: killing time. Pete just gave us his usual history spiel, reading in a monotone from his binder, none of us paying attention. Mostly about Indira Gandhi being back in power & getting friendly with the Russians. Mick lost his sneaker, but found my title. C says the end is in sight, but she’s talking about how she might go back to Iran if F. doesn’t show up by the time we get to Kathmandu. I asked her how she thought she’d be able to find him in the middle of the revolution, which is getting worse, according to the news

  reports. She said she’d worry about that bridge when she came to it. The Pakistani Polka’s behind us. Now it’s the Hindu Two-Step. And Pete’s little ruse didn’t work. Rob got a body search but he was clean. In a manner of speaking.

  from the daybook

  pagoda

  weight

  when first we met he told me about the devas the spirit the trinity of life that invests all we see, be it candles or mountains, and then he told me he thought that the world was perched precariously on top of a himalayan mountain peak, and i asked him why, and he said because once, a long time ago, he had talked to the gravity deva and the deva had let him hold the world for a moment upon his shoulders i

  asked

  him

  how

  was

  it

  he

  said

  it

  was

  heavy

  Mary showed me this poem when we were in Kavalla, before the deluge. It’s just a copy and she told me I could keep it. Now that we’re in India, and Mary doesn’t seem to be, it struck me that it should become part of the daybook. I’m going to take a chance and dedicate it to Tim, who Mary wrote it for, shortly after they met, at the Maharishi’s university in Fairfield, Iowa.26

  INDIA

  J ammu—Srinagar

  Day 53

  Departure: 8:00 a.m. (it’s a long and winding road).

  Hotel: The Houseboat Village (don’t let them stick you with the H.B. Jewelbox—I stayed there one night and I’m sure the damn thing is haunted.)

  Points: 1. One point only and it’s spelled Kashmir Valley. The Moghul Emperor, Jahangir, called it “A Paradise on Earth,” when he was deep in his cups. Kashmir was never part of the Raj (the British sold it, rather than going to the trouble of administering it) but the Brits reserved the right to make it their summer capital, and thus stamped forever on this remote Himalayan state a British atmosphere. Hope you like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Kashmir is snowed in from December to March, but the first flowers of spring always correspond with the first crop of tourists, most of whom make a beeline for the houseboats the Brits built about a hundred years ago, mainly because only Kashmiri citizens were allowed to own land—but there was no law about foreigners building houses on water. Inside they look like the inside of a Victorian club in Pall Mall, in the 1880s. There’s usually two or three bedrooms, a bathroom with a hot water tank, a flush toilet (don’t even think where it goes). The servants are happy to cook you anything British, treacle tart included, but they’ll think you’re crazy if you ask for curry.
“The British in the good old days, sahib,” they’ll say, “never ate foreign foods.” They’re still very pro-British. And they’re still very good traders. Because the tourist season is limited, they usually pull out all the stops to extract as much money as possible from each visitor. They sail up to the houseboats in shikaras awash with tourist treasure—jewellery, wood carvings, precious stones, carpets, sheepskin coats and antiques, some of the latter still dirty, after being dug up from a field where they’ve been undergoing an aging process, as they call it. And, of course, they’ve got good “ganja” for sale as well. As any tourist with anything other than a brush cut soon finds out. If there’s a market, a Kashmiri will exploit it. A shikara can easily be hired to sail upon the beautiful tranquil lakes, with destinations like the restful gardens of the Moghul emperors, the fabled Nishat and Shalimar Bagh (Garden of Love). For a price, or if he likes you, the boatman will sing you a folk song of the mountain people, while you lie back on the cushions, close your eyes and dream. There’s an old Brit saying: whatever you left behind won’t find you, in the Vale of Kashmir.

  Mick

  Nothing much happened in Jammu. We stayed in a motel, the Jammu Motel, which was a slab of grey concrete with a neon sign for a hairpiece. But it had a TV, of all things, in the lobby, so I sat most of the night watching that. India had Booze days and No-Booze days and this was a Booze day, as well as Malaria Monday, I remember, because Kelly gave me some more malaria tablets. This was when she went shopping with me and I bought some nifty brown moccasins and so I was able to drink rum and limcas, limcas are kind of a grapefruit drink they have up there, while I watched old reruns of “ Star Trek ” and ‘ ‘ I Love Lucy. ” It was great. The ‘ ‘ Star Trek” was “The Trouble with Tribbles” episode, one of my favourites.