Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  Pete had thrown all of us except Rockstar into a room with Suzie. A big room with three beds, so I got to sleep next to Patrick’s snores all night. Which meant that I got to listen to the noises from Dana and Charole’s bed, around about four in the morning. Highly suspect, those noises.

  In a better world, I could’ve gone on over and joined them and they wouldn’t have raised a fuss. But this isn’t a better world, so I stayed where I was.

  The next day we headed up to the Kashmir Valley and on the way up there, Rockstar and Suzie got into a fight. This is in a little village where we stopped for lunch. All these young East Indian guys wearing white and polyester crowding around us to watch us open our cans. Patrick with his cans of sardines and smoked salmon and crab. I’m still broke as ever, of course, but I asked Patrick if he could spare one of those cans of crab, and he said by all means, Mr. McPherson. I don’t know what Rockstar said to Suzie. Dave says he called her a bloody frigid bitch and she called him a crazy rapist. I was a ways away, eating a fat juicy mandarin orange with Kelly, sharing

  Patrick’s crab with her. But all of a sudden there’s this flurry of activity, the East Indians start pushing and shoving to get a better view of what’s going down.

  “Oh, oh,” said Kelly. “I knew this was too good to last.” She was talking about the day. Hot and sunny, all these birds, every colour of the rainbow, all those East Indian guys with their friendly faces, joking with each other about these Westerners, what they’re wearing, what they’re eating. And then Rockstar and Suzie have to spoil it all.

  I stand up just in time to get a glimpse of Rockstar whipping out a Khyber knife, he grabs Suzie’s hair and I’m sure he’s going to cut her throat but Pete’s suddenly there, grabbing his hand and then they disappear below all those black shiny heads, the knife goes flying in the air, I see it sparkle in the sun before it disappears back in the crowd. Then I hear something that might be the whistle of a whip. There’s a lot of chattering and a lot of confusion for the next few minutes. But then Pete’s getting on the bus, there’s blood on his face and a whip in his hand and he gets behind the wheel, starts ’er up and eases it through the crowd like it’s Moses. I’m certain, for a moment, that he’s going to leave us all behind, but he stops the bus about forty feet from the crowd, slams open the doors. Me and Kelly take that as an open invitation, we scramble, but we’re not the first ones there, Suzie is, and then Patrick, and then us, Charole and Dana taking up the rear. Just before I get on the bus, I look back at the crowd and I see Rockstar getting up to his knees.

  Pete’s bleeding from a bad gash near where I hit him with the squash racket. He doesn’t seem to notice it. He’s too busy squealing out.

  Suzie goes up and sits in the very first seat. Kelly sits at the tables and I do too. Pete puts in the Stones and turns it up loud. “When the Whip Comes Down.”

  I look at Kelly, who’s sitting across from me. She’s getting out her paint tubes. “Down to six,” she says.

  “Down to six,” I say, “and counting.”

  Patrick’s at the other table across the aisle from me. He’s got a pen in his hand and he’s opening up the daybook.

  He catches me looking at him. “It’s just another day on the Great Indian Trek, isn’t it, Mr. McPherson?”

  “That’s all it is,” I say.

  I look out the window. There’s a couple women carrying huge yellow and green bags on their heads. Huge as beanbag chairs. You can’t even see their faces. There’s green forest stretching away towards blue mountains ahead of us. I can see an ox and oxcart crawling along the shoulder of the road. Dana and Charole are whispering to each other, Suzie is walking down the aisle, looking straight at me, she’s got a jubilant look on her face.

  “Pete did it,” she’s saying, “he really did it, did you see what happened?”

  I say no, Suzie, what happened.

  “Pete has this whip in his boot,” she burbled. “He flicked him in the crotch with it. He won’t be able to walk for a week!” I remembered that bullwhip. Hallowe’en party. Pete came dressed as a matador, whip in hand.

  Dave says all Taurus Tours drivers have them. All part of the bull motif.

  “Can you believe it?” crowed Suzie. “We’ve finally seen the last of that bloody nerdball!”

  She let out a little cheerleader shriek not much different from the one she let out back in Venice when Pete told us we had hot showers waiting and then she did a little dance in the aisle like the dance she did in the snow, back at the Iranian chai stop.

  Patrick’s daybook entry

  en route to Kashmir

  Dec. 5, 1978

  Dear Milligram Millie,

  It’s quite the situation we have here on the bus, concerning the daybook. Why yesterday there was an entry from a person we haven’t even seen in three weeks. Now whose allotted task is it? you ask. All one has to do is flip back a page to see that it was Suzie who last made an entry. So that means it must be Dana’s turn, and then Mary, who isn’t here but has an entry anyway, thanks to Kelly’s thoughtfulness. But that means Dana missed her turn, and after Mary it would be Tim, who isn’t present either. So it must be my turn. Though we haven’t heard from Mr. McPherson, and his missives to one Cocaine Katie, for some time, and so, well, the news is so overwhelming that we mustn’t nitpick and point fingers. Somebody must take pen in hand, and dear Millie, you’ve always known me as a stalwart lad, never one to shirk a duty, except on imported crystal. And so I have taken the task upon myself, and the news, dear Millie, is this. You can hear the phrase resounding around the bus. We are down to seven Merry Globesters. (We do count Mr. Cohen, do we not?) We shall all sorely miss the eighth Merry Globester, may he find his way home to New South Wales in one piece. But the question now is, who will be the next to go?

  Be that as it may, we are continuing our trek ever northward, now, up and into the Kashmir Valley, where, it is promised, tranquility awaits upon old colonial houseboats.

  Wish you were here. And I fervently hope that the pharmaceuticals are holding out, most particularly, the electric Kool-Aid.

  Ever your intrepid explorer of frontiers both mental and physical—

  PI

  from Kelly’s diary

  Dec. 6

  Yesterday I did a reading. The Tower card covers me, the 9 of swords crosses me, the 2 of cups crowns me & the 3 of swords is in my past, the 4 of swords ahead. In the lunar lineup, the Chariot, the 7 of cups, the knight of cups, and the queen of cups, the outcome. More swords. But I’m not going to let them bother me. Still, it didn’t take long for the Tower to express itself. That’s what happened to Rob, in a town called Batote. We’ve left him behind, karma in action. Now we’re in a houseboat, the H.B. Jewelbox, & we wouldn’t be here, Pete said, if the Brits weren’t so smart. At the turn of the century, Brits weren’t allowed to own land, according to Kashmir law. So they built their houses on water. Wonderful boats, even though there are a few cracks in the walls. Crack in the toilet seat. Next door is another houseboat where Sultan, our “houseboy” (near 40) lives, along with his kids, Rasheed & Noah, both blue-eyed & beautiful & others we’ve only glimpsed. Haven’t seen his wife but I heard them arguing last night in loud voices. Last night: Kama Sutra night. Today: a day of wonder. White semen between my thighs in the morning & black crows against azure sky in the afternoon. In between, the whole spectrum. The smoked ham, grainy porridge & the solar orbs of poached eggs for breakfast. The waiting shikara, on the water. The cloudless sky & the mt. reflected in that cerulean & cobalt water, & the firepot & the weave of the blankets & Mick’s hand in mine, beneath those blankets. The psychedelic swirls on the clay bowls & coasters we bought from blue-eyed children in an old brown shack on shore. Then the 1st clouds. Paynes-grey clouds, hanging like frescoes in the sky, moving softly to the constant slap of laundry. The island, with its dead or drying gardens, all autumn browns and pastels. It was like an acid trip. We must be at a very high altitude. M. sang “To a Dancer” while we ate our ro
ast beef sandwiches & Sultan stared out at the water, a good distance away from us. A very strange, taciturn man. S. hardly said anything. Still recovering, it likely takes a while. Not much a person can say. On the way back to the mainland, we stopped at a deserted Buddhist mosque & C & I did a ritual dance in its musty, mote-filled shadows to bring F. back to us, while outside M. played stickball with the local kids. On the way back to the Jewelbox a huge flock of jet-black crows hovered & settled above us in stark, bare, sunset branches, all very ominous, about the time M. politely asked Sultan if he’d mind pulling the shikara over to the bank, he needed to relieve a few internal pressures. He shat, upon a mossy green bank, while everyone except me averted their eyes. He stuck his tongue out at me. His eyes danced, the crows cawed. Now we’re back at the Jewelbox. We’re waiting for macaroons.

  Mick

  After that little outburst from Suzie I picked up Lucille and sang “Tom Dooley.” Real slow.

  “Tom Dooley” was the first song I ever learnt to play.

  I can really drag out “You Are My Sunshine” and I sang

  that one too, as we cruised into the Kashmir Valley. I can make that song into a song full of threat. You will regret it all some day, baby, you bet....

  “Only you, Mick,” said Kelly, “could twist that song into something murderous.”

  “Gee, thanks, Kelly,” I said.

  I wasn’t exactly in a good mood, I felt sorry for Rockstar, he had a bum deal in life and I wondered what he was doing. But not for long. I love mountains. I love them when they’re big and blue and snow-capped, and these ones were.

  Pete stopped the bus beside a lake. Lake Dal it was called. Out in the middle of it, or maybe over on the other side of it, it was hard to tell, was a huge houseboat village. Must’ve been five or six hundred houseboats out there on the waters. And waiting for us were two East Indians with long canoes that had canopies on them. These canoes kind of reminded me of my new moccasins. Kind of. They were called shikaras.

  And Pete said, “Here’s the plan. I think we’re all getting a little bit of cabin fever. Personally, I’d just as soon get back on that bus and drive straight through to Kathmandu and be shot of the whole lot of you. But I can’t do that. I’ve got a contract. I don’t want to get fired.” Which was a lie according to Dave. Pete had already decided that he was going to pack in this tour bus job and he was going to go back to Tasmania and get a nice sensible job selling life insurance for his brother-in-law. “So we’re just going to lay low here for three days and get some R & R. I think you all will probably like these houseboats. The only problem is that they only hold six people. And there’s six of you. So you’re all going to have to share a houseboat. I’ll let you guys figure out the sleeping arrangements. I’ll pick you up in three days.”

  He introduced us to our houseboy, that’s what he called him, even though he looked almost forty. His name was Sultan. He looked like an East Indian Lee Van Cleef, minus the moustache. Sultan helps us all get on board, suitcases and all, and then he gets on board and pushes us away from shore with a paddle.

  When we’re maybe a hundred feet from shore, Suzie chirps, “I don’t believe it, three whole days off the bus and no Rob anywhere. I’m going to give Pete a blow-job next time I see him.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Cohen would appreciate that, Ms. Byrnes,” says Patrick. He was looking back at shore, where Pete was driving away in the bus. “But perhaps you may not get that opportunity.”

  Suzie said whaddya mean?

  Patrick pointed towards the shore. “I have a distinct and unsettling feeling that Mr. Cohen is abandoning us.”

  Charole said, “Well, he certainly picked a nice place to do it.”

  Above the lake was this mountain and its reflection reached towards us on the water. The air smelt fresh and thin. Everything was quiet. I think that’s what she was talking about.

  And then we’re entering the houseboat village. Behind us, Pete and the bus disappear down one of Srinagar’s streets. Naturally I called up Dave. But his line was busy.

  We pass a few houseboats that seem empty. There’s a woman slapping her laundry against the side of her boat and there’s the sound of wood being chopped faraway and there’s the sound of some sort of bird call. It’s real pleasant. Beautiful. I think I’ll retire there when my tires wear out.

  Charole had the same thought as me. “I love this,” whispers Charole. “I think I’ll stay here.”

  “Me, too,” says Suzie. Which probably blew Charole’s little dream of paradise to bits.

  I look at Kelly. She’s trailing her hand in the water. She’s got a faraway expression on her face. I look at Dana. She doesn’t look too happy. Probably because Suzie’s little rumour mill had passed on the information that I was going to be sleeping with Kelly that night. Even though I still wasn’t all that sure I would be.

  But this is the tough part about being a sweet, lovable guy like me, even when I’ve got a troublemaker like Dave in my head. Sometimes hearts get broken and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.

  At least in my experience.

  When people wanna go, ya gotta let ’em go. I made a real fool of myself when Peggy dil-Schmidt gave me my walking papers, crying and begging, it’s part of life but I don’t mean to sound insensitive, it’s just that people aren’t kind, people always think of themselves first and if you don’t realize this

  you’ve got a hard road to hoe, like the old man used to say.

  Actually, Dave says Dana was just depressed over the fact that she was doing what all her lesbo friends back in Halifax told her she’d eventually do, get so pissed off at men that she’d turn to women.

  The houseboat was great, except for the cracks and holes in the walls. A couple chesterfields in the front part, the living room, and in the middle of the floor a big black wood stove. Above an old roll-top writing desk, some pictures of Queen Elizabeth and some king, George I, says Dave. There were four or five little kids, there could’ve been more, who kept running back and forth between our houseboat and the houseboat next door. They were Sultan’s kids. Great little kids, actually, except they liked baksheesh. They kept asking me and Patrick if we had any extra socks.

  The oldest one, Rasheed, he was maybe eleven, real cute, or at least Kelly though so, he slept on the houseboat with us, on one of the couches.

  As for where anyone else was going to sleep, a little controversy, thanks to Suzie, but all she did was grumble about having to sleep in the same room as Patrick. She just warned him not to snore, so Kelly must’ve talked to her.

  Rasheed told us, looking first at Dana, then me, if there was anything we wanted, he’d get it for us. Whatever we wanted. It was Patrick who noticed the hookah behind the one old easy chair. He took it out, ornate brass, sparkled in the light from the fire in the stove. How about something to put in this? he said. Rasheed said no problem. Rasheed happened to have a little hunk of hash in his pocket which we could have for a hundred and fifty rupees. Patrick said no problem. Patrick didn’t really look like a pothead, but same’s true of a lot of potheads. When it was everybody’s turn to kneel in front of the hookah, Kelly said no thanks and so I passed too. It’s weird making love when only one of the merry copulators is stoned. Sometimes. And I wasn’t in the mood for taking chances.

  Patrick was surprised but he let it pass.

  “How about you, Ms. Byrnes?” said Patrick after he’d had a toke. “Would you care to indulge? Think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Then you’ll know what you’re blithering about, whenever, in the future, at some intimate little gathering, where it really isn’t appropriate to go into an anti-drug diatribe, you do so nonetheless.”

  “Take the marbles out of your mouth, mate,” said Suzie. Getting down, to everyone’s surprise, on her knees, having a toke.

  I guess what Patrick said must’ve made sense to her.

  That toke clammed Suzie right up which was nice. She went through this old log she found in the roll-top writing desk w
hile Dana and Patrick and Charole took turns toking and I was sorely tempted to join them, and Kelly must’ve known this, or maybe she just wanted to make Dana jealous, score some points, even up the ledger, because beautiful women can be the cruellest, especially in places like shower rooms, at least this is what Peggy dil-Schmidt told me, who was a beautiful woman herself and should know these things.

  She took my hand and said to everyone, “Pardon Mick and me for being rude but I’ve promised him a foot massage.”

  Suzie looked up from what she was reading and said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Patrick said, “Always the true voice of originality.”

  Dana just looked away, thought I saw a scowl. Charole said, “Just don’t rock the boat, that’s all I ask, I’m feeling a little nauseous.”

  But we did rock the boat. It said so in Dana’s daybook entry the next day.

  We rocked it walking down the long drafty hallway to the bedroom in the back. We rocked it getting undressed and getting into the bed. And we rocked it later too, though we tried not to.

  Our bedroom wasn’t exactly the honeymoon suite at the local Sheraton. Unlit wood stove in a comer, two ancient single brass-rail beds, no canopies. But the beds did have hot water bottles under the sheets and Kelly told me to bring mine over, along with a couple quilts, because it was chilly in that room. There was a lot of space to watch stars around the wood stove pipe where it led outside.

  And I’m not going to say too much about that night. I’d like to say it was the second best night of my life but it wasn’t. Those kind of nights usually come a little later in a relationship, it’s been my experience. I get the willies, you see. It takes me a while to relax. Usually around about the tenth night, if the