Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  I stop the bike to consider whether I can really hope to penetrate the bazaar. A ring of bodies forms instantly, and begins to thicken. The crowd is crystallizing around me. I have to hold tight for a second, but there is no danger. I was well trained in South America, and the crowd here is just a degree or two more concentrated. I see that it is only partly curiosity that draws them, because much of the time they are not even looking at me. It's more that I might mean an opportunity, a lucky chance. The instinct is to get close to the action, that's all.

  I'm busy making contact, making sure they know I am a human being. I take off my helmet and talk, looking out over the sea of faces with the confidence of a superstar. There are easily a hundred people gathered round me, but they are short and I can look down on them.

  Where is the temple? Can I go through this way? A man in the foreground answers.

  'Yes, you can go. You are coming from? Your native place is?'

  A stream of questions, and as I answer I am trying to cultivate humility, because it would be so easy to think I could play games with these people. I try to remember that from their point of view, as well as being fascinating I might also seem exceptionally foolish.

  I kick the engine over and the crowd opens before me. At a walking pace I ride through to the outer gate of the temple. It is not a good way to arrive. There is no logical place to park a bike, and it looks very vulnerable. I am hot and absurdly overdressed in boots and jeans, and I have to carry the jacket and helmet, because there is nowhere to leave them. On top of that, a camera and a long lens.

  I feel like a target, not a person. And here come the kids.

  'Hello Sir, what is your name? Where you are coming from? You are going? I am collecting coins. You are having coins from your country? I am also collecting stamps. You are having? Give me one rupee.'

  And then the man with the sandals; and the postcards, and the beads, as I walk towards the inner gate. On the right of the gate is a sanctuary like a cave, and in the doorway stands an extraordinary figure of a man with streaks of coloured paint over his forehead and an expression of such solemnity that I want to laugh. He is making weird gestures with his arms, and all I can think is that he looks like a fake, like Charlton Heston acting a crazy Brahmin for Cecil B. de Mille. He is beckoning to me; any second I expect to hear:

  'Hey, sport! Over here! Listen! Your soul's slipping, feller. Don't miss Siva's lingam, sport. Maybe your last chance this lifetime. See the greasy ghee pour down over the supreme prick. Hurry! The Wisdom of the Orient awaits you.'

  The kids are still on my trail, and I have been joined by a young man who simply walks alongside me with an ineffably sweet smile, so sweet and sad that I am sure he has been practising it for years. He asks for nothing, but as the collectors of coins, stamps, ball-pens and rupees launch yet another assault, he says 'Ah, those boys,' again and again.

  Inside the gate the unofficial soliciting slackens off, the Wistful Smiler keeps his distance (what does he want?) and I wander about looking for inspiration. Under an enormous slab of stone supported by hundreds of carved pillars, a small family is cooking in a brass pot over a fire. A bearded man approaches, making semaphore movements with his arms. He stares hotly into the middle of my skull, and then turns away as if he's got the message. I have not got the message. My eyes are grabbing at everything, but I still don't know what I'm doing here. Either this whole gigantic affair is a fraud, or some one will have to come and tell me the truth.

  Looking for the heart of the temple, I find a cash desk with a man sitting behind bars. There's a board up with various prices: 30 paise, 75 paise, 1 rupee 25,2 rupees 50, but the explanation is printed in Tamil. Eventually I discover that this does not apply to me. As a non-Hindu I am a prohibited person; but a young man takes my arm and says 'Come. I will show you.' As I hesitate, he says: T am not a guide. I am a priest.'

  He draws me round a labyrinth of colonnaded passages, rattling away. When I listen closely I realize he is speaking English, but the syllables are colliding and leap-frogging over each other. Then we come to the Mango

  Tree. Partitions have been built to shield it from any casual eye, and I am led inside where a loquacious old gentleman takes over.

  The Mango Tree, he says, is probably three thousand years old and has four branches. Each branch bears a different quality of fruit: bitter and sweet, sour and savoury. He walks me round the tree at a fair trot.

  'And now,' he says grandly, arms outstretched, 'You can offer something to be shared among these friends.'

  The friends, I see, include the Priest and the Wistful Smiler.

  'Ten rupees is the least you can offer.'

  I give two, with bad grace, and hurry off. As I emerge from the temple, the Priest, who has been keeping up with me, says I also collecting coins . . .'

  But the bike is untouched, and though the kids greet me in even greater numbers, I am able to keep my temper with them and even clown a bit, and all I lose is my ball pen. The Wistful Smiler smiles on me again, in the bazaar, and I have learned to do it differently next time. Anyway, the truth is waiting for me next day on the road at Chingleput.

  On the main road at Chingleput is a petrol and diesel station, and on the opposite side of the road, a wooden tea house. Trucks, buses and cars stop here, and it is a busy area. One man has put himself in charge of it. How he has done so, I don't know, but there is no doubt, as I watch him over a cup of milk tea, that he is in command.

  He is a handsome, powerfully-built man in middle age with iron grey hair close cropped on a strong head. His face is particularly striking; it has the intelligence and flair of a statesman or a soldier, lines deeply etched and showing great force and passion, even, I would say, genius.

  Both his legs are cut off halfway along the thigh, and he sits on the stumps on a little wooden trolley, a couple of inches off the ground. He has leather pads on his hands to push himself along. It seems to me that he has all the energy and conviction it takes to run a country or command an army, and he has put it into being a crippled beggar. He skates back and forth across the tarmac with immense skill, shouting his demands, roaring with laughter when he is refused, slapping his stumps with mirth and defying fate with every gesture. There is not a drop of pathos or self-pity in him anywhere. He is a blaze of vitality. When he holds out his hand to me, and I hesitate, he grunts with impatience, laughs, and scoots off to the next arrival. There is no question that it was my loss, not his.

  There is no one in sight who could even begin to challenge his authority, and he is the best example I have ever seen of the power of the human spirit to impose itself over fate. Is it pure coincidence, then, that I should see, the next day, another man who achieved as much and in a quite different way?

  From a distance he is no more than a black smudge on the pavement outside the Continental Hotel in Pondicherry. When it becomes apparent that this blob has a human head on it, my inclination is to hurry by, but two small boys prevent me, and reluctantly I am drawn towards it.

  The head is about eighteen inches above the pavement, and is not nearly as handsome as the Churchill of Chingleput's, but at least it is a complete head, and it sits on shoulders. One shoulder is better developed than the other, and from it a single strong arm reaches up past the head to grasp a stick. Below the shoulders and under his shirt I can see the outline of an underdeveloped chest, which seems to be resting directly on the pavement. Whatever else is there is concealed by the shirt, but there is no room for anything much. It is utterly improbable that this person could exist at all. It seems to lack room for the most basic organs, just a head, shoulders and lungs hanging like a vine on a stick. But I must stop this callous clinical naming of parts, because he says: 'Good afternoon'.

  I crouch down on the pavement, and we have a conversation in English. His English is limited but intelligible, and he speaks gently, with patience. He is forty years old. This alone I find incredible. With his withered arm he brings out some papers from beneath his shirt. A
mong them is an address book. He has friends everywhere. He corresponds with Europe and America. For some months he lived with some Germans in their rented rooms until their visas expired. There is an exchange of letters also with a wheelchair firm in Calcutta, and a scheme for sponsoring the construction of a special device to wheel him around.

  From this almost non-existent being on a pavement in Pondicherry, a field of consciousness reaches out around the globe. As far as I know he is not a great painter or poet or musician, though it would be wonderful if he were, but his accomplishment is much greater than that. Against all the odds, he has refused to disappear.

  I'm riding awkwardly through a thicket of experience, still shaky from the flight to Europe. After three years on the move I can't mend my fences so fast. I hover between confidence and a sense of great loss, trying to understand the meaning of what has happened. My first days in Madras should have been the beginning of a final and marvellous chapter in India, full of discovery, significance and spiritual satisfaction. That is how I would have written it, but I have lost the strength to sustain the illusion and reality has tripped me up.

  Had I really been on a long flight from reality, trying to give meaning to something that was meaningless? Was it all just an escape that I had been trying to turn into a legend? I was teetering on a knife edge between faith and despair. Was the purpose of that return to Europe just to show me that there was no purpose? I arrived there full of wisdom, but nothing I had seen or done or thought seemed to be relevant. I passed through

  pubs, offices, restaurants, supermarkets, stifled by the boredom of it, but with nothing useful to say to anyone. I felt the failure was mine, that if I had properly understood my experience in Africa, America, Asia, I should be able to apply it to people in trouble with the cost of living or career bottlenecks or sheer boredom. Some of them even asked me, thinking I should know, but my answers seemed to offer no solution. My advice always boiled down to the same thing. Don't solve the problem, just give it up.

  They always assumed I was advising them to move to some tropical paradise. I saw the disillusion growing in their eyes.

  'Well, frankly old boy we'd love to but, with the boys just in school and the property market being what it is . . .'

  In Pondicherry I spend a day drinking hot tea and sweating, to get rid of a fever. Then some days at Auroville, a city of the future that exists in the dreams of a scattered band of people, mostly Europeans and Americans, living on a great sandy site near the coast. Where else in the world could there be so much clarity amidst confusion, so much love amidst hostility, so much beauty in squalor, so much faith against all the evidence? The pioneers of Auroville are at war with their governing ashram in Pondicherry. Among themselves they hold wildly different views about how the dream of their guiding spirit, Mother Aurobindo, should be carried out. There are some French people living as though on a luxury holiday in St. Tropez, Australians farming like aboriginals in loincloths on a diet of fermented finger millet, a Mexican running a market garden on the lines of a Jesuit Mission in Latin America, others living more or less orthodox lives in other corners of this vast estate. Yet I feel the cohesion in all this diversity, and it is symbolized by a huge, raw, ferro-concrete skeleton, unfinished and hungry for labour, hand-built on the scale of a modern construction project, which one day, God willing, will become a shimmering sixty-foot globe enshrining the aspirations of them all. Meanwhile it is a demanding and practically useless burden without which, I feel, the whole place will fall apart.

  I am more at home in the temples now, less encumbered, and at Thanjavur I find the one that sends my spirit soaring. It has a perfect form, as classical as the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and should be called the Drawing Room of India. My self-appointed guide is called Ravi. He is fourteen and very sharp. He claims that being a guide is his hobby, and plays a neat trick on me by not taking anything, and so keeping my suspicions alive all afternoon.

  Later a literature student called Gopal catches me, like a fish, in a quiet backwater of Thanjavur where I'm eating a curry. By thrashing the water all around me, he manages to guide me to his home where his friends come, one after another, to see what he has brought.

  He is in a fever of excitement about having hooked a writer, and is determined that I must at least be Solzhenitsyn, if not Shakespeare. When the expected fountain of wisdom fails to spurt from my lips, his disappointment is manifest.

  'Does it not bother you that you have not made your name?' he asks in a hectoring manner.

  'Would you know if I had?' I ask, since he does not yet know my name.

  T would certainly know if you were an important journalist or writer, for I am reading always anything I can get my hands on. What about Ireland? Are the British being fair to Irish Catholics? What about the Israeli hi-jack? What about this inflation?'

  Sitting on a bare iron bedframe in a cell-like room facing my inquisitor, I find I have not a single useful opinion in my head. I have read none of the books he mentions, know next to nothing about the authors he considers great. It is very dispiriting. He does not seem to want to talk about things, only to name names and list subjects and titles. Eventually I counter attack with a short lecture on empiricism. It is extremely feeble, but his waspishness melts under a single hot breath. Now he wants me for a godfather. I am to introduce his work to publishers in London, offer criticism and enlightenment, foster his career. With great difficulty I manage to disentangle myself without actually telling a lie.

  How could I resent such opportunism, though. In this tide of humanity, where an economics degree might just get you a job on a bus, it's not good enough to open the door to opportunity. You must lasso it on the doormat.

  On to Teruchchirapalli, Dundigal, Madurai and Rameswaram. The humidity is so great that every time I put my hand in my pocket I pull the lining out with it. The soil is arid, and turns to sand. Goats nibble every struggling blade of grass. Under a clear sky I hear a shower of rain and look behind me, but it is the pattern of goat hooves on asphalt. Strange. Reminds me of the time when I was camped by the roadside in Brazil and thought I heard cartwheels approaching over the travel. I turned to see a bush fire advancing to consume me.

  The fever has returned, mild but bothersome, usually in the afternoon. It has the effect of shaking my mind loose from my body, so that the meaning of things is out of focus. I hope it will go away of its own accord.

  The ferry to Sri Lanka crosses from Rameswaram to Talimannar. The distance is twenty-five miles. I board it at ten in the morning and get off just after midnight. It may be the world's slowest boat. The same people keep turning up on this trail south, and they are on the ferry. The four

  Hari Krishna disciples are on my left, and one of them is dinging his tiny cymbals in my ear. A wild and nervous Australian 'bushie' is here too. I am reading and have my helmet on the chair next to me. I'm reading because I feel sticky and sick, and I am desperately anxious to put my mind somewhere else just now, but the Australian is desperate to talk.

  'Are you tired of answering the same questions?' he asked.

  'Yes,' I say, firmly, without looking up.

  He perches on the bench opposite me, and stares fixedly to sea. I know he's uncomfortable, and so am I. At last I move my helmet and he sits beside me. He's trying not to talk, but he's like a kettle on the boil, and he can't help it.

  'Would you like to hear some Communism?' he says.

  The sound of cymbals in one ear and Communism in the other is too much. That is probably what started the backache, agitating a muscle at the bottom of my spine that goes berserk once or twice a year, at inconvenient moments. Riding the bike I hardly feel it, but when I get off the bike it hurts like hell.

  At 8.30 we touch against a jetty, in the darkness, but unaccountably the boat sails off again. At ten we return, only to sail away again and return on the other side.

  For this twenty-five mile ferry ride I have to undergo all the formalities of an ocean crossing: a bill of ladin
g, a handling charge, a port charge, and a six rupee charge to maintain the floating wharf under the wear and tear of my motorcycle. The paper work is voluminous and infuriating at each end, and I am not dealing with it well. I should consider myself fortunate to get away at midnight. The hordes of Indian passengers, I later hear, don't get ashore until 4 a.m.

  For ten days I ride around the island, appreciating the calm of it. The pressure is off here; the people don't swarm in the same way. It's like a dropped-out version of India. I have come as a rain maker. For two years they have had drought. The great reservoirs they call 'tanks' are nearly dry. They need water very badly, and on my first day there the monsoon begins. I can find it in my heart to be very glad for them, but it complicates my life, because it keeps me moving when I would rather lie still. I meet many lovely people, see many beautiful things, but all against a backdrop of ache and fever. While the backache improves, the fever gets worse, and as it fluctuates I get two quite separate images of the tropics. In the morning, clear-sighted and with a clean brain, I see everything in bright and rapturous growth. The wet jungle smells fresh and exciting; the jungle birds leave notes of unbearable beauty hanging on the air; the world bursts with new forms and colours, and the people seem wisely content to accept what nature offers and not worry about shortages and bureaucracy and their political future. Later, as the heat accumulates, and the humidity thickens, as I get tired and the fever comes to dislocate my senses, I see the other side of the tropics. I see squalor and decay, smell the stench of corruption everywhere, feel the blind force of the jungle reaching out to swallow me, and the people seem morose, pathetic, sinking ever deeper into a putrefying slum.