Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  I look at her.

  She looks mad. “It was just a simple request,” she said.

  “All you had to do was listen to it.”

  She was talking about the business with the eyes.

  “I really burnt those pictures, Kelly,” I said. “Shots by the fireplace, close-ups, I burnt them all. Threw them in the fire.”

  But all she wants to know is why I opened my eyes.

  I say, “Sorry. I was somewhere else.”

  She turns around. “And you can sleep somewhere else too,” she says and she throws a quilt onto the other bed, gets into her own.

  I take a deep breath or two.

  And decide it might be better to hash all this out in the morning.

  I get into the bed, my own bed. Feel the water bottle at my feet, cold. Close my eyes. My brain does wheelies until someone knocks on my eyelids I open them. Not Rasheed. Patrick. Saying change of plans, Pete dropped by, he said he saw Rockstar in town, bus leaves in five. I look over at Kelly’s bed. She’s gone. So like a zombie I crack myself out of my egg get dressed grab my stuff. And I want to go next door tell Sultan’s wife to pack up and leave. But I don’t. I’m late. I’m the last guy to walk the plank down to the shikara and it’s this thing that I have about heights. And the plank did have more of that early morning frost on it, made it slippery. Yeah, you got it. Slipped and lost my balance. Splash. Right into the cold shitty waters of beautiful Lake Dal.

  Dana thought it was hilarious. Her face laughing when my head broke the surface, through the water. Kelly’s hand reaching towards me but I missed it by inches.

  It was Patrick and Sultan who hauled me out.

  That was a chilly ride, across that early morning water to the bus.

  It wasn’t until I was on the bus that the Lake Dal chill made my tooth hurt and I reached for the chilli capsicum in my shirt pocket.

  That Afghani Bic rifle was still there. But the capsicum was gone.

  Dec. 7

  Don’t know what to say about last night. Ate something I shouldn’t have, I guess. The sound of the water bird whistling woke me up with its echo. Knew I couldn’t go back to sleep so I went out to the living room. Rasheed was lighting the fire in the stove. I asked him if he’d mind posing for a picture & he was happy to, for a pair of nylons. I was half-finished with it when Pete came knocking with his news we were leaving

  2 days early. He claimed he saw R. walking around the lake looking for the bus, which was hidden somewhere, I suppose. I guess it was the truth. We saw R. as we left town, shortly after M. took an awkward plunge, looking like the Scarecrow looking for Oz. Have to borrow a picture from Pat. of R. At the right time, he’s not talking to me right now. Playing the jealous suitor. I’m not in a sympathetic mood. According to S. Pete’s not completely sober when he gets behind the wheel, she can smell it on him. Good for her, I can hear it. We’re not getting nearly as many history lessons as we used to. We’re on the outskirts of Jammu. The sky is orange & full of ritual.

  Mick

  Dave says I didn’t mention I was wearing a sweater that the guy in the shikara had sold me. One of them fisherman’s knit jobs, lots of white wool which likes to soak up water. Anyway Dave says this is an important detail, which is a bad sign. I’m starting to lose it, he says. My green and yellow life force has been seeping away, and there ain’t much left of it. My aura, he says, is grey around the fringes and it’s creeping in. So I’m caught between a rock and a hard place, he says. Between the anvil and the hammer, as the frogs put it. The devil and the deep blue Sea of Ko Samui. I got to speed things up. But I can’t forget important details. Okay, Dave, you tell me. What’s the most important details of that day we drove back to Jammu? Okay, one. We drove past Rockstar on the side of the road about a mile or two south of Srinagar. He was standing there waiting for us, with his thumb out. Rockstar wasn’t stupid. He knew from the itinerary we were heading back to Jammu, or at least we had to, if we were going to Kathmandu. Second important detail: I made the mistake of asking Pete, when we were stopped at our lunchbreak in Batote, same place where we left Rockstar, if he was afraid of Rockstar. I think Pete took it as a personal slight. Still he answered my question. He said, “I’m afraid of all psychos, mate. Which means I’m afraid of you.”

  I said, “No, no, Pete, you got it wrong. I’m a psychic, not a psycho.”

  He popped the top off another Heineken, his third of the morning, Dave was counting. He gave me a sour look, said, “Oh, is that it?” then took a long hard swallow, almost drained the can dry.

  Dave says Pete had been drinking on the drive up to Kashmir too. He had beer in his thermos. And I thought that was tea.

  Dave says it’s too bad the central character of this thing is me and not Pete. Pete had quite the trip himself. Well, fuck you, Dave. But then again, says Dave, everyone did, and they’re free to tell their own story if they want to.

  When we got to Jammu, Pete threw us all into the same room and disappeared downtown. Dave says there was a nice little bar in Jammu called The Scarlet Slipper. Me, I went downtown too. My tooth felt like it was full of battery acid and little tiny razors, all of it moving around at blender speed. I went looking for some chilli capsicum. But by the time we got to Jammu all the stores were closed, and the darkness that fell on me that night at the foot of the Himalayas, on my way back to the Jammu Motel in my still-soggy moccasins, was a chilly darkness. It chilled me to my still-wet bones.

  When I got back to the Jammu Motel, I tried to get myself a rum and limca from the bar but it was closed, it was a No-Booze day in the Punjab or whatever province it was.

  So I sat down in front of that TV. “Coronation Street” and the BBC news. News was all about Jim Jones and some sort of mass suicide in a town called Jonestown.

  Dave told me that I should maybe not mention this to Kelly, it would only depress her and she depresses easily. This is maybe the first time I ever heard Dave tell me something on Kelly’s behalf. Looking back on it now, I can tell he was starting to like her. Who can blame him? Kelly was one neat lady. I love her. I only wish I’d told her so.

  Dave says I forgot a few things. Real nonchalantly. A few things still. Think. He thinks this is a game. Okay. I’ll think. Write, he says. Write while you think, time is short. Okay. Dec. 7, he says, yeah, right, at the breakfast table, slurping back a quick coffee before we got on board the shikara. Patrick making a toast, to Pearl Harbour. Kelly’s face, something going on between her and Patrick, he’d started digging at her in little, subtle ways. Dave says well done. Okay. Dana, her and Charole, something there, can’t quite get it. Oh, yeah, Dana saying to Charole when we got on the shikara, headed for shore, “Back to Pete.” Charole giving her a wild look. A mean look. An I-don’t-know-you kind of look. Just before I walked the plank so fucking much reality the way Dana and Charole looked, sitting in that shikara, on the way to what Sultan called the Garden of Pleasure, for a picnic. A real picture. Patrick took the picture. Probably be a good cover, sell lots of copies. But Dave says the publisher would have to get their permission so no dice.

  INDIA Jammu—Amritsar

  Day 58

  Departure: 9:00 a.m. (Yeah, you got it, you can sleep in, it’s an easy drive across the Punjab plain today).

  Hotel: You’ll have to check around for a new one, the one we usually use was burned down by Sikh extremists last year. Points: 1. Amritsar, the centre of Sikhism, is a municipal city in the Punjab, sixteen miles from Wagah, an outpost on the India-Pakistan border. The Sikhs want to form an independent Sikh state in the Punjab and lately they’ve been resorting to terrorist tactics to achieve their aim. Avoid Sikhs whenever you can, they can be a nasty lot.

  2. The Golden Temple is their number one temple. No, it’s not all gold, it’s just gilding on the temple. The “pool of nectar” was excavated by the fourth guru of the Sikh religion, Ram Das. (The Sikhs are waiting for the twelfth guru to show up, to lead them in battle for their “promised land”—they’re not an original lo
t, either. They believe he’ll show up shortly before Armageddon.) The fifth guru, Arjun Dev, built the temple, and during the reign of Ranjit Singh (1780-1839) the upper part of the temple was covered with a copper dome and decorated with gold foil.

  3. Two furlongs from the Golden Temple is the famous Jallian-wala Bagh, the park where Br. government troops, in 1919, fired upon participants in a political meeting. The park was declared a national monument after India achieved her independence.

  4. More about Sikhs: they’ll tell you that the basic tenet of their religion is peace and equality. They’ll tell you that their basic principles involve discarding rituals and leading an honest, truthful life. They’ll tell you they spend most of their time meditating on the attributes of the one god and they always share whatever they can spare with the needy. They’ll tell you it was the Guru Gobind Singh who established the order of Khalsa, i.e., men willing to die for their religion and men who were given the five symbols of identity: unshorn hair and beard, a comb, a steel wrist guard, a sword, knee-length trousers. They’ll tell you it was necessary to develop a military tradition in order to survive. They’ll tell you the turbans and beards were designed to make the Sikhs aware that they were different, as if that’s a problem. They’ll tell you all kinds of stuff, but really, don’t you have anything better to do than talk to a Sikh?

  Mick

  Next day on the bus, the toothache was worse. I went and asked Dana if she happened to have any aspirin left. She gave me a sweet little smile, eyes dancing like June bugs on a hot August night. Gee, sorry, Mick, I don’t, she said, I took the last one last night.

  Patrick heard this. “Sounds hmm, sounds fishy, did you have a haddock?”

  Dana laughed. I didn’t.

  Pain got so bad I went and picked up Lucille. Tried to find a note that might lessen the ache. Even started kicking the tent cage to try and find a backbeat. Maybe I shouldn’t have kicked the tent cage as hard as I did. Pete stopped the bus, came back and said, mind if I have a word with you outside, mate. Real friendly like. I said no problem, Pete. I get outside and he puts a hand on my shoulder, says, just stand there for a minute, mate, there’s something I want to show you. He gets back on the bus, slams the door shut, takes off.

  What he wanted to show me was the backside of the bus heading southeast.

  Well, I sat down, right next to this pile of something that looked like one of the stacks of cheddar cheese pancakes that I used to serve to people in some pancake house that probably should remain nameless, back when I was just a first-year at Simon Fraser. And I looked at that pile of ox or camel dung and I took a long, hard look at my life, and my life, basically, is one of those lives that’s always come out best when looked at as quickly as possible. And then I thought about heading back to the Jammu bus station, wherever that was. But I looked back towards the northeast and I could see this little figure on the horizon. I figured it might be Rockstar so I nixed that idea. And I considered the fact that all I had was the clothes on my back, a few hundred rupees I’d won off Patrick in a poker game and Lucille for company.

  And I thought about making like a blue old cowgirl and sticking out my thumb come Sissy Hankshaw. Either that or walk. Sissy won, thumbs up, but that figure down the road was getting closer and I called up Dave and he said, yeah, it was Rockstar. Rockstar in a real bad mood. Dave said he’d already killed somebody that day, just to get some apples to eat and he’d almost killed somebody else when he was trying to steal a truck. It smacked of something similar to that stack of cheddar cheese dung on the highway but I couldn’t take the chance that it wasn’t bullshit. And so I beat it down the road, even though I knew it was going to be an experience. It was. I just don’t know how to describe it. Dave says it’s simple. You did a lot of walking and then this ox and cart showed up from a side road and you caught a ride on that for a while and then it turned off into a side road, you hopped off and walked some more. Yeah, I walked until dusk and then I stopped in a roadside chai stop for supper and a woman with a face covered with scars approached me and asked me, in stilted English, if I might be interested in a little fun.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Dec. 8

  The bus was rolling & music was in the air, A1 Stewart’s Year of the Cat. I don’t think M. likes that tape. He did his best to drown it out with a wild performance at the back of the bus. I thought he was throwing, hopefully, a jealous fit, he was singing Lennon, “Jealous Guy,” punk-style. I was sitting with P & S, S saying that she feels sorry for R., she thinks she fucked up, just like she fucked up with a guy who was till fucked up when she was a sexual surrogate, which got her fired, when Pete stopped the bus & talked to M. outside then left him behind. Pete said we’ll wait for him in Amritsar, M. needs the fresh air & exercise. Which, Pat. said, is perhaps quite true. So here we are in Amritsar. The moon is growing, & Venus is conjunct my Uranus. Pat. just dropped by. He thinks “Crossing Borders” is a masterpiece. Asked if I’d like to see the Golden Temple by moonlight.

  I was in the mood for almost anything but Dave persuaded me to keep on walking because this woman, yeah, he said, she was interested in what I had in my pants but only if it was green and paper and spendable. Though rupees, actually, were beige and brown. And I walked through the night bombarded by sounds that kicked my imagination into high gear. But there were no Bengal tigers no pythons no black widow spiders, set to spring on me, or so says Dave, there was just me and my solid conviction that I’d be dead by dawn.

  I just wish there hadn’t been so God-damn many dogs in all those small towns, every one of them thinking I’m a bitch in heat, thanks to whatever smell Lake Dal left on me. I just wish I’d been wearing a jacket so it wouldn’t have been so cold. I wish my Camels hadn’t got soaked in Lake Dal.

  Well at least a herd of wild Indian elephants didn’t trample me into cow dung, even though that’s probably sacred stuff in India.

  I walked till I got tired and had to sit down. Flashed some rupees at a bus driver but he kept on trucking. Across the road, these skinny white cows were chewing their cuds and giving me divine bovine stares. I stared right back at them.

  Made me think of something the old man once said. He said, son, there comes a time for everyone when their backs are against the wall. Difference between winners and losers is winners know it and do something about it and losers don’t.

  I did a lot of thinking, sitting there on that road in the middle of India. My favourite thought concerned staking Pete out on an anthill and getting out the honey jar. My most practical thought concerned putting one foot in front of the other.

  So I walked. Walked till I was tired and then I lay down beneath a mango tree and I had this dream about the old man. He still had his head. He looked down at me and shook that head. Bald as a billiard ball. Felt insecure about it, knew that. Know for sure he’s disappointed in me. Same thing happened last night, that’s why I remember it. I woke up last night and there’s the old man, looking down at me with his usual sad look in his eyes. Old man had Dachshund eyes especially when he was blitzed or the old lady was on the warpath or it was their anniversary and he was bringing her roses, a rose for each year of their marriage. But he was really there. I pinched myself, no dream, Mickers had a visitor at last. When I tried to talk to him, though, he just kind of faded away. Just like he did in that dream when I woke up out there in the middle of that Hindu nowhere. Though it wasn’t a Hindu nowhere, says Dave. It was a Sikh nowhere. Both times I felt like crying. Last night I did cry. Truth to tell. Time for truth, says Dave. No more exaggeration, no more lies. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe I do. I have lied a little in this book. But just a little. Just a tad. Not about anything important. Not really. That felt good afterwards, actually. Crying. So I did it again this morning and Soon got all upset. She don’t like teartracks. When I think about how I could be in the Himalayas right now with Kelly it makes me want to cry some more. But Dave tells me this ain’t the time for a lot of self-pity and he gives me a
flash of an Indian sunset. Yeah, it was sunset when I woke up. Too late for the buses, I found out, at the first town I came to. So I walked all night. Surrounded by sounds and smells. Crickets and Bengal tigers. Spice and cowshit. Dogs barking and dogging my heels when I walked through the towns. Babies crying in the still night air. I kept waiting for a black widow spider to drop on my head. God I was cold. Cold as a Sikh whore’s heart. Then this truck rattles up behind. I stick out my thumb, truck stops. Behind the wheel there’s this woman with a huge red dot on her forehead. She asks me where I’m going, I tell her Amritsar, she says jump in, that’s where she’s going too. She gestures at Lucille with a thumb stump, though, once she whangs the truck into gear, and tells me I’m going to have to sing for my ride unless I want to get my throat slit from here to Thursday and I ain’t even sure what day of the week it is but I get her point when she takes out this long Khyber knife, smiles a toothless grin, sunlight bouncing off one tooth, one blade, dazzles my eyes, and glad to, I say, not even fazed, just thinking about how I have to get to a dentist, and I sing her my whole repertoire, including Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita,” which she liked best, all the way to Amritsar, and when we got there she asks me in a real sweet voice, I think she fell in love with me, or my voice at least, not the first time it’s happened, where I want to get dropped off. Where the tourists go, I told her. So she drops me off at the Golden Temple and it wasn’t until she took off that Dave told me I’d just had a ride with the Punjab Outlaw Queen and that the government had a warrant out for her arrest and she’d have sixteen notches in that Khyber knife of hers if she’d been the sentimental sort that went in for notches.