Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  One of these old guys could speak a little bit of English and he wanted to know about Rice-Eater so I told him that he was going to make the cover of Rolling Stone any month now. Ace plays a mean bass. And these guys were good hosts. Or at least I thought so. They brought out a bowl of this white stuff and gave me a rolled up baht. I had a few snorts. And whatever it was, I thought it was coke, made my gum feel lots better. Made that tooth shrapnel in my gum feel like marshmallow fluff. Made my cracked ribs feel like soft goose feathers.

  How I got that shrapnel in my gum and those cracked ribs is something I’ll get to in detail later.

  Then everyone disappeared for a conference outside. I had a few more snorts. Maybe quite a few. One of the old guys seemed upset when they walked back inside and saw me down on my knees like a good little acolyte. All of a sudden they wanted to see the colour of my money. So I took out my wallet. And I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when I saw it was empty. And that the moneybelt was empty too.

  I really shouldn’t have laughed though. That was a mistake. Because there’s nothing funny about an empty wallet, especially to a few bloodthirsty dope dealers. Bloodthirsty dope dealers don’t have much in the way of a sense of a humour, that’s one thing I’ve learned in life.

  The next few minutes were kind of confused. I tried to explain what had happened but I was too high to make much sense, I guess, because all of a sudden I’m knocked to the ground and there’s this machete flashing through the air. Next thing I know my right hand is lying in the dirt, looking kind of silly, and there’s blood spurting all over the place. It was like a bad malaria nightmare. I thought I’d wake up from it. But I didn’t. Instead I blacked out, and when I opened my eyes, there’s sunlight in my eyes, morning sunlight, and there’s a nurse taking a thermometer out of my mouth. She’s cute as the dickens. She was smiling at me and wishing me a happy new year.

  Afterword

  On September 3, 1979, I got a postcard from Charole. On the front of the postcard was San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The message was simple: could I please pick her up at the Billings Airport at 2:37 on the 7th.

  It was great to see her standing there waiting for her luggage by the carousel.

  While we waited for her luggage, we traded the usual pleasantries and then I asked her about Kelly and the Firewalk.

  Charole said, “She actually walked it.”

  “She did?” I said.

  “She did,” she said.

  I grabbed her backpack and suitcase and we walked out towards my ’76 Chevette. The ’Vette, I called it.

  We walked in silence for a moment or two.

  “And now where is she?” I asked.

  “She went back to Nagarkot. She met some guy there named Shamkar. The day before I left, this was in Bangkok, they went to see a doctor. Kelly’s pregnant.”

  I took this in stride.

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  I asked what this Shamkar was like, after the luggage was stowed in the hatchback and I was behind the wheel.

  “He’s okay,” said Charole. “A little lost in the stars maybe.”

  I asked what the Firewalk was like.

  Charole didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Well, it was scary at first. Actually I expected a pit of flaming fire but it was only a shallow pit of coals about seven by four feet. The coals were white hot, but Shamkar, he was there too, he’d done it before, he told her that all she had to do was think of the coals as ice cubes and keep her attention focussed on the sky just slightly above her normal line of vision and don’t walk slow, don’t walk fast, just walk normal, and she’d be fine. And he was right.” There was a slight pause. Then she looked at me, as I opened the car door for her. “It looked easy,” she said, “so I tried it too.”

  “Really?”

  She smiled. “Holding Kelly’s hand, of course.”

  Then she said, “Can we go somewhere and eat? I’m dying for a pizza.”

  I’ve since seen Charole do the Firewalk in person, by herself, at a psychic fair that came through Billings in the fall of 1986.

  She made it look very simple.

  Charole told me Shamkar and Kelly were married in the spring of 1979. According to a recent letter from Kelly, they now have two children, Michael and Francine.

  Charole is now married to a rancher from Livingstone and working in the Bank of America in Great Falls.

  She says she still thinks about Frank a lot, and wishes that things had turned out differently, that she’d handled things differently.

  As for me, I’m married too.

  When I finally got the book typed up, I took it up to Vancouver to show Hasheeba.

  This was in 1982.

  Her feeling was that she’d prefer not to see the book published until after her mother, who was quite ill at the time, died. She feared she might find the book, and read it, and be hurt by it. As it was, Hasheeba had told her that Mick was still alive and living happily with some girl on an island called Ko Samui. An island that doesn’t have a phone and post office.

  Hasheeba felt that it wasn’t a complete lie. She thinks there’s a very good chance that Mick is still alive. She told me Mick was always making up lies when he was young, and playing tricks on her by playing dead.

  “Charole didn’t see his body, did she?”

  I said, “No, apparently not. Just his ashes.”

  “He doesn’t want to pay his taxes, that’s all,” she said. “He likes that island and he likes that nurse. If I was him I’d stay there too.”

  I know I liked Vancouver and I definitely liked Hasheeba. She’s quirky and has a wonderful sense of humour. She likes to live out on the edge of things.

  A little like Mick.

  I ended up living in Vancouver for a year, until my visa expired. About the same time that Hasheeba’s mother died.

  Hasheeba came down and lived with me in Billings for six months, but she didn’t care much for Montana.

  The day before she was going to leave, I asked her to marry

  me. She said yes. Then she asked me if I’d mind moving back to her old hometown. Regina, Saskatchewan. She said she went to a psychic once and he told her an earthquake was going to devastate the whole west coast in 1991.

  Mick’s prediction that Moslem terrorists would one day bomb nuclear installations on the San Andreas Fault also may have influenced her decision not to return to the west coast.

  I told her I’d be happy to follow her wherever she wanted to go.

  “Even Ko Samui?” she said.

  “Even Ko Samui,” I said.

  Ko Samui isn’t that far from Nepal. I would kind of like to see Kelly again.

  So here we are, in Regina, Saskatchewan. A few hundred miles north of my old friends, my old haunts. It’s not the prettiest city in the world, but the air is fresh and it is sitting on solid tectonic plates.

  Craig Grant

  Craig Grant entered this particular incarnation a few minutes south of the forty-ninth parallel, near one hundred and seven degrees west longitude in south-western Saskatchewan. He was first published in Archie comics at the age of six. Since then Craig has published poetry and fiction in several journals, Grain, The New Quarterly, Western People, CVII and Canadian Fiction Magazine. Several of his poems have also been aired on CBC Radio’s Ambience and others have been published in the anthologies New Poems From Saskatchewan (1979) and Blue Streak in a Dry Year (1980). Excerpts from The Last India Overland have appeared in Grain (1981) and The New Quarterly (1983). Craig has been the recipient of two Saskatchewan Writers Guild Awards for poetry (1982 and 1986) and one for short fiction (1987). He has been awarded writing grants from the City of Regina, The Ontario Arts Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

  Craig read On The Road by Jack Kerouac while attending the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. That book, more than any other, was likely responsible for Craig finding himself, five months after graduating with a B.A. in English in 1978, on the last tour
bus to go through Iran, before that country closed its borders to western traffic.

  1

  I phoned up the local public health nurse and she informed me that this particular drug is hard on the liver and would have made Mick’s condition worse. According to the same public health nurse there is no treatment for hepatitis. — D.W.

  When I first read this, I had some doubts about whether or not Mick was calling his powers of imagination into play. But I’ve since had the opportunity to meet his sister, Hasheeba, concerning the publishing of this manuscript, and she verified these details.

  The gunmen were never apprehended. — D. W.

  2

  The diary was approximately five by seven inches with a stitched leather cover that had two humanoid grasshoppers on it, male and female, riding a bicycle. The pages inside were blue, one for each day. A mistake. I should Ve got one without the constriction of dates. — D.W.

  3

  Certain things Mick says, obviously, need to be taken with a grain of salt.

  — D.W.

  4

  This was written in Kelly’s most minuscule scrawl. It took a good fifteen minutes to decipher it. — D. W.

  Half lager, half lemonade: a shandy. — D.W.

  This is from Peter Cohen’s travel binder, courtesy of Taurus Tours. It is not my intention to use every one of his notes, which were written, presumably, by a higher-up in the organization. I’ll just use the notes when I need a bridge from one section to the next, or if I found a note particularly interesting (as was often the case, once the trip got into Asia). I did try phoning Taurus Tours to find out who wrote the notes, and to give credit where credit is due. But I had no luck. The India Overland was its main tour package and thanks to events in Iran and Afghanistan, and because the number of tourists that had booked onto their 1978 trips was less than expected, that package was no longer feasible following the fall of 1978. So the company folded. This according to someone I contacted at Sunrise Tours, in London.—D.W.

  5

  1 later discovered from Kelly that Suzie was lying here. Suzie later confessed to Kelly, in Lahore, that she wasn’t actually one of the sex surrogates; rather she was a nursing aide, responsible for changing the sheets and such things.

  — D.W.

  6

  There were detailed directions to campgrounds and tourist attractions, etc., on most of Pete’s tour notes, but I have included only this page as an example, probably because I tried to imagine what Pete would’ve done, if say, he’d lost this page and had to ask for directions.

  7

  Whoever wrote these notes obviously didn't take his history very seriously.

  — D.W.

  8

  Loosely, “Look, there’s a bird in flight. ” (Usually uttered when someone is contemplating the theft of someone else’s dinner.) — D.W.

  9

  This business with Dave struck me, at first, as being a delusion of Mick’s mind. Though I did phone up a psychic on a Great Falls radio phone-in show, just to get his opinion on whether or not the souls of dead twins can enter the minds of surviving twins, if the transfer happened in the womb. He said, yes, definitely. He knows personally of six such cases, and then he went on to the next caller. — D. W.

  Patrick evidently chose not to finish this daybook entry, perhaps because of what happened next. My suspicion is that it came to symbolize something for him. Like how short, brutish and incomplete life can be. — D.W.

  Mick said Kelly had this conversation in Zadar. Since Kelly was writing her version immediately alter the fact as opposed to two or three months later, it is likely more accurate. This, of course, would apply to all discrepancies, of which there are a few. — D. W.

  10

  Such a language lesson came with each country. I’ve chosen to include only the Greek language lesson. I’ve always liked the language, the way it sounds.

  First of all, yes, I am a writer. A published writer, now. I have a seven hundred page novel in a drawer about life on a Montana ranch in the late 1990s. It’s kind of a postmodern, magic realism effort. And, to answer Kelly’s question, yes, that was an old story with a new title. It used to be called, “When the Calf Gets Butchered.”

  11

  An effort was made to disguise the handwriting. But, as Mick explains later, it was Patrick’s. According to Dave at least. — D.W.

  12

  Kelly used to write a lot of poetry in high school. She has perhaps a hundred poems stashed away in a closet. — D. W.

  There was at least one page missing here, and at least one page missing in the Istanbul section, all of which will be explained later. — D.W.

  13

  1 have done some research, recently, into drug use. A recent special on PBS, called, simply, The Brain, examined the way that drugs affect the brain, creating delusions as they stimulate what is called the brain’s dopamine circuit and the nucleus accumbens. These are the same centres that are activated by sexual pleasure and food. Man and animal alike are creatures of habit, and anything that is stimulated wishes to be stimulated again, a fact which finds its measure in the brain’s most primitive centres, where (it is speculated by today’s new age mystics) our past lives are held in storage by whatever it is that forms the foundation of our memory system. This place, I suppose, is where Dave makes his home, if we allow for the supposition that Mick is sane. — D. VV.

  This is the other point at which there was a page, or pages, missing. When Mick’s narrative picks up again, the group is at the Galata Tower. — D. W.

  14

  Due to the extra days the group spent in Istanbul, the itinerary is now out of sync. — D. W.

  15

  A book came out in 1988 called Holidays in Hell by P.J. O’Rourke. — D.W.

  16

  This postcard, with a picture of the Goreme Valley at sunset in the front, showed up in our mother’s mailbox in early December, two days after she died of a heart attack. It was the second piece of mail to her from Kelly in over a month. Kelly told me later she had been sending postcards and aerogrammes. They just weren’t getting through. — D.W.

  The reader shall see what this graffiti is by the end of the book.

  17

  In what might be Rob’s scrawl.

  18

  Mick’s, of course. — D.W.

  And Suzie’s.

  19

  When I received this postcard, no telegram from Kelly had arrived. A major mistake I made was disobeying Kelly’s request. I showed the postcard to our mother. — D. W.

  This doesn’t exactly jibe with Mick’s description of their menu selection. Given the fact that fesejan (a chicken or duck dish, served in a sauce of walnuts and pomegranate), shirin polo (sweet rice served with chicken breasts, sliced almonds and orange peel) and ab-gusht (a spicy stew of meat and vegetables) are all Iranian national dishes, I’m more inclined to go with Patrick’s version. Dave, apparently, did not feel it was a sufficiently important detail to set Mick straight on it. Understandably. — D. W.

  20

  It struck me, as Kelly neared the end of her diary, that she was less inclined to scratch out a date and continue on with the previous date. She tried to keep the entry to each date down to the given page, and this sometimes resulted in her squeezing her scrawl down to a minuscule hen scratch, which was very hard to decipher. — D. W.

  21

  Kelly’s telegram, which arrived 4 days after the Urgiip postcard, and one day after our mother died, held only one word: “SAFE. ” — D.W.

  22

  There are four states of consciousness. Beta is the normal waking rhythm of the brain, which is measured with a frequency of thirteen to thirty cycles per second and which can be increased by anxiety or pronounced mental activity. The alpha rhythm, which occurs during sleep or relaxation, is the most prominent rhythm, and vibrates between eight and thirteen cycles per second. Pheta is in the four- to seven-cycle range and is associated with the dream state and access to creative i
nsight, subconscious information and breakthrough insights. Delta is very slow, from one to four cycles a second or less, and occurs during deep sleep, or, it has been suggested, at the onset of psychic phenomena and the higher levels of consciousness. — D.W.

  23

  Fried leek and “Afghan ravioli” respectively. — D.W.

  302

  24

  This postcard did not arrive until April 19, 1979, several weeks after Kelly’s parcel from Bangkok arrived, The aerogramme never did arrive. I had by that time phoned Michael Herring, a state senator, and he made some inquiries with the American embassies in Tehran, Kabul, and Lahore, as well as the American consulate in New Delhi, but there wasn ’t any information concerning a Frank Jenkins anywhere. Concerning the American Embassy in Tehran, he said, “They were going nuts there trying to find their own people, they said there wasn’t much chance of finding a missing tourist.” On the front of Kelly’s postcard: a picture of an Afghani buzkashim horseman crossing a goal line with a headless goat on his pommel, a picture taken at Nawroz (Afghan New Year) in a place called Kunduz. — D. W.

  25

  According to Fodor’s, his dying words were “Kashmii—only Kashmir!" — D.W.

  This line was heavily crossed out, perhaps because Suzie thought about it, and decided she didn’t want to answer a lot of questions about it, or face possible further retribution from Rob. I’m not even absolutely certain that’s what the phrase said. But I’m fairly certain. — D.W.