by Ted Simon
At Puttalam, a Tamil town on the west coast, this jaundiced view of life hits rock-bottom. As I walk along the shore of the lagoon, everything I see seems fraught with degradation: a puppy hovering round a fish stall, so eaten up by worms that it is no more than a skull on matchsticks; a beach stinking with refuse; some crows scrapping for morsels. One of the crows is obviously feeble, its feathers scraggy. It can't get to the food, and puts its claw pleadingly on the back of another bird, twice. I would never have thought I could break my heart over a crow. The healthy birds fly off, leaving it to stumble along on its own. Then I see, among all the filth, and plastic and shredded tyres, a dog, curled up and licking something. It looks at me with red mournful eyes. I see it is a bitch with distended udders, and between its front paws is the body of a dead puppy lying back on the garbage and oozing blood.
These examples of misery and death depress me profoundly. Everything seems a terrible mess. The buildings are mildewed wrecks, human effort seems futile; the people just a succession of empty-headed bodies wrapped in sheets with shirt-tails flapping, facile smiles signifying nothing if not envy and ingratiation. I notice only the stupidity, the inefficiency. Thinking of the early European planters who were so prone to feverish illness, I am amazed at the misery they must have endured. There are times when I would give almost anything to feel a cold wind blow.
I value these insights but they are undermining me seriously, and I must get rid of the fever. At the rest house I try again with massive doses of hot tea, and sweat enough to believe I might have broken it, but on the way to Mannar it returns to haunt me again. The rest house man at Mannar remembers me and gives me the same room I had on my arrival. I liked it here and I have come early to give myself an extra day before the ferry leaves. There is an old Portuguese fort I want to look at and a bridge where I want to try fishing. I go straight out with my rod, hoping to be left alone, but betel-chewing spectators gather round me. Then I get a bite. It feels big, and it's the first time I've felt that heavy pull on the line. A sting ray. Fantastic. I don't care whether it's edible or not, I just want to look at it. My audience warns me to be careful. One of them shows me how to remove the sting which, to my amazement, is not at the end of the tail at all, but close to the root, like a quill.
Proudly I carry my prize back to the rest house, and the cook says he will fry it for me, but 'as a fish it is not famous.' Returning to the lounge I
see two men come in and my heart sinks. They were on the bridge earlier and annoyed me unreasonably with their questions.
'Your native land, please? Are you a university graduate? How much does this rod cost in your country? And this jacket? And these shoes?' and on and on. Now I have to sit and take tea with them. There is no escape. One is a government clerk, and the other is the Medical Officer of Mannar. They have so little to say, and understand even less of the little I have to offer, that it is just a yawning ritual.
'What are the principal illnesses here?' I ask the M.O.
Malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid . . .
'What are the symptoms of typhoid?'
A fever building up slowly over a number of days, body aches, headache, nausea . . .
When they have finally left I tell myself it can't be typhoid because I don't feel nauseous. An hour later I am sick. The fever is in me again too. Thoroughly alarmed, I tell the rest house manager that I must go to a doctor. The rain is coming down with great force, but there is a car parked outside and the owner says it can take me to the hospital.
A young doctor receives me with great amusement.
'What do you want?' he asked, chuckling. 'Do you want medicine or to be admitted.'
T want to know what's wrong with me,' I say, stiffly, irritated by his attitude. Why can't he stop grinning. 'You've got a fever,' he says.
It's so ridiculous I have to smile too, though I don't want to. 'Why?' I ask.
'The climate,' he says. 'Take a Dispirin and it will go.' 'That's what I've been doing for three weeks.'
He still thinks it's a huge joke, and asks several questions but doesn't listen to the answers. 'Cough,' he says. 'What?' 'Cough.' I cough.
'You see,' he says. 'You've got a cough.' That alone almost cures me.
Back at the rest house, convinced at least that I don't have typhoid, I bring out the antibiotics for the first time to treat myself. Tetracycline might do it. I take the dose, and go fishing again.
That night a tremendous storm blows up, with sounds like cannon firing. There are pools of water on the floors, the garden is a lake, and the varnish on all the furniture is as sticky as toffee. Between nine and midnight I rival the storm by sweating a lake myself. Not just the sheets but the mattress also is soaked right through, and I have to change beds. By morning I know the fever has broken.
I first thought of becoming a god as I was riding north from Madurai. The fever was gone. I felt more than just healthy, I was bursting with life and joy, floating as you do when you have put down a heavy load. Without exhaustion or discomfort to blunt my senses, without the distorting effect of fever, I saw myself to be in a paradise.
First there were the trees. The Neem, the Peepul, the Tamarind, countless others, stood at stately intervals alongside the roads and fields like giant witnesses from another age. By their presence they transform everything, framing the landscape, giving it depth, variety and freshness, making green-glowing caverns under the sun and casting pools of dappled shade where people and animals can feel at peace.
The ox's creamy hide is made to reflect this flickering light. Under a shade tree a pair of pale oxen passed, yoked to their rumbling cart. The oxen tossed their heads, brandishing their high crescent horns painted in red and blue bands and tipped with glittering brass. The slack, velvety hide beneath their throats rippled in the sun, and the image was printed on my memory for life. Only on my memory? So intense was the image, is still, that I could not believe it was meant only for me. I felt it burning into some larger consciousness than my own.
Small groups of women walked the roads carrying vast but apparently weightless burdens of fodder, produce, pottery or household furniture. The breeze swirled the hems of their saris into the classic mould of nymphs and goddesses. Wrapped in those gauzy layers of lime green and rose red, their bodies were so poised and supple that it was sometimes a shock to see close up the deep wrinkles and grey hair of age.
From the road I saw fields of grain and paddy. Women worked in lines, advancing across the mud, stooping and rising easily, brilliantly coloured against the green rice shoots. The men worked almost naked, with just a triangle of cloth between their long powerful thighs, black-skinned and gleaming. A team of oxen harnessed together and guided by one man was churning up a paddy field, flying round at a tremendous rate. Everywhere people moved briskly and with confidence. They and the land were part of each other and had shaped each other. The harmony was so complete that it seemed to promise utter tranquillity. As I rode through it I felt it reaching for me, as if I had only to stop and let myself slide into it, like a pebble into a lake.
I knew those Indians were most unlikely to share my vision. How could they, since they were in it? How could a fish describe water? And when I stopped the bike and stood idle by the roadside, it faded for me too under the remorseless glare of so-called reality. I would have to strip naked, go
hungry, live with the mosquitoes and the parasites in the paddy squelch and shed a large part of what I liked to call my personality. The very part of me that could envisage such a life would prevent me from living it. Did that make it an illusion?
Throughout the journey, as I rode through so many landscapes, passed through so many lives, forming impressions, holding them and developing them, had I just been wallowing in illusions? It seemed very extraordinary to me that, riding through South India, observing this life around me, I could at the same time summon up vivid mental images of Africans working with sisal and sugar cane, of Americans working among corn, cattle, bananas and oil palms, of Thais
and Malays working with rice, sago and pineapples. I could create living pictures of people and places as remote from these Indians as they had once been from me. If my head could only be wired to a coloured print-out terminal, I could have trailed a blizzard of picture postcards from the four corners of the earth.
Just to be carrying the consciousness of so much at the same time seemed to me to be miraculous, as though I were observing the earth from some far-off point, Mount Olympus, perhaps, or a planet. Riding a motorcycle at thirty miles an hour on the road to Dundigal, among people deeply involved in manual skills, so close to the earth and each other and so different from me, I could imagine myself as a mythical being, a god in disguise that might pass their way only once in a lifetime.
Memories of Madras, of ashes and honey, gods and temples, were strong in me. In India it is quite plain that there is more to life than what the senses can perceive. I was thinking about my plan to meet Sai Baba, the holy man, wondering how it could happen.
'There is no cause to bother,' a devotee advised me. 'He will know. Just go there. He knows everything. If he wants to see you it will happen.'
Apparently he had a headquarters at a building called Whitelands, near Bangalore. At certain times of day he appeared before his followers. I would go there, but I would make no other attempt to get in touch with him. I had heard and read about his miracles, but I knew that such things could, in certain circumstances, be 'arranged'. It seemed very important not to go there expecting magic.
If he 'knows' then let him call me out. That will be miracle enough for me.
I smiled at the idea of it happening.
Just imagine that he does know, that he knows I am riding towards him now, still several days away but coming closer all the time, until finally I ride up to this Whitelands place and Sai Baba falls to his knees beside the motorcycle and says: 'My God. You have come at last.'
That was how the notion of being a god came to me originally. As a joke. After all, there were so many gods in India already, in such wild and wonderful guises, why not a god on a motorcycle?
The southern hills were a great surprise, rising to nearly nine thousand feet and demolishing my notion that India south of the Himalayas was a flat hot triangle. I rode up to Kodaikanal, the more southerly hill station where log fires roar in the grates at night as they did in the White Highlands of Kenya, and then over the Cardamon Hills to Cochin to enjoy the splendour of the West coast and the green tidiness of Kerala. Then up again to Ootacamund, which the British nicknamed 'Ooty'.
At the foot of the last big climb to Ooty were groves of Areca palms, quite improbably graceful and slender for their great height. It seemed incredible that they could support the weight of the men who clambered up them to reap the betel crop from below their feathery crowns, swinging from one to another like monkeys. There were monkeys too, silvery grey ones with long furry limbs. Halfway up the hill, I stopped to contemplate them, my head light with thought, recalling all the other times I had watched them in Africa, America, Malaysia and most recently at the rest house in Mannar, where I had played with one for hours.
They seemed so close to enlightenment, as though at any moment they might stumble over it and explode into consciousness. Their curiosity is extreme. They experiment with any unfamiliar object, a coin, a hat, a piece of paper, just as a human baby does, pulling it, rubbing it, sticking it in their ears, hitting it against other things. And nothing comes of it. To be so close, yet never to pierce the veil!
I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it, but always unable to make sense of it.
If I were a god, that is how I would view myself, I thought. At times I felt myself coming very close to that understanding, as though I might rise above myself and see, at last, what it was all about. The feelings that had begun to form in the Sudan, in the Karroo and the Zoë G and at other times seemed to be coming to fruition in India. A latent power of perception was stirring in me.
I was astonished by my confidence with strangers. Often I was able to talk to them immediately, as though we had always known each other. For a long time I had been training myself to want nothing from others; to accept what was offered but to avoid expectation. I was far from proficient, but even the beginnings I had made were richly rewarding. I could feel that people appreciated my presence and even drew some strength from it, and in turn that feeling strengthened me. There were the beginnings of a growth of power and I was determined to pursue it.
The journey continued, as it always had, with this close interweaving of action and reflection. I ate, slept, cursed, smiled, rode, stopped for
petrol, argued, bargained, wrote, and took pictures. I made friends with some Germans, and some English, and some Indians. I learned about mushrooms, potatoes, cabbages, Golden Nematodes, Indian farmers and elephants.
The thread connecting these random events was The Journey. For me it had a separate meaning and existence, it was the warp on which the experiences of each successive day were laid. For three years I had been weaving one single tapestry. I could still recall where I had been and slept and what I had done on every single day of travelling since The Journey began. There was an intensity and a luminosity about my life during those years which sometimes shocked me. I wondered whether it might be beyond my capacity to hold so much experience in conscious awareness at one time, and I was seriously afraid that I would see the fabric of the tapestry begin to rot before I had finished it. I thought I might be guilty of some offence against nature for which I would be made to pay a terrible price. Was it improper for a mere human to attempt to comprehend the world in this way? For that was my intention. The circle I was describing round the earth might be erratic but the fact remained, it was a real circle. The ends would meet and it would enclose the earth. I would have laid my tracks round the surface of this globe and at the end it would belong to me, in a way that it could never belong to anyone else. I trembled a bit at the fates I might be tempting.
People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage, like single-handed yachting, missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world. The danger was death by exposure.
In India I was on the last and most significant leg, and during the long hours of solitary riding my brain shuttled back and forth, delving into the past for new connections and meanings, synthesizing, analyzing, fantasizing, refining and revising my ideas and observations. The pattern on the tapestry still eluded me, though it shimmered somewhere on the edge of recognition. What must I do to see it clearly? Must I, like Icarus, strap on wax wings and fly to the sun? Whatever it was, I felt ready to try, because I had finally to admit that I was in search of immortality.
The vital instrument of change is detachment and travelling alone was an immense advantage. At a time of change the two aspects of a person exist simultaneously; as with a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, you have the image of what you were and the image of what you are about to be, but those who know you well, see you only as you were. They are unwilling to recognize change. By their actions they try to draw you back into your familiar ways.
It would be hopeless to try to become a god among friends and relations, any more than a man can become a hero to his own valet. It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change. They are so obviously designed to compensate for mortality. The old gods never had any tru
ck with them.
Kronos, the King of the ancient Greek gods, began his career by cutting off his father's penis with a sickle and tossing it into the ocean. He went on to swallow his own children to make sure they did not unseat him. Zeus, the son that got away, put his father in chains and had him guarded in exile by monsters. There are endless tales of betrayal, bloody vengeance and fearful dismemberment. Zeus, who became Jupiter in Roman times, adopted deceitful disguises and committed rape as a cuckoo, a swan and a bull, and he reigned over Olympus more by cunning than virtue.
The Indian gods seemed little different in their own behaviour but, reading the Mahabarata, I saw that in Indian mythology they became more closely involved with mankind than did the Greek gods. They allied themselves to various warring factions and offered advice. The best known example was when Lord Krishna became the warrior Arjuna's charioteer, drove him to battle, and encouraged him in words which have become known as the Bhagavad Gita.
Arjuna, of course, was fighting for good against evil, but many good men had found themselves compromised and were on the wrong side. It sickened Arjuna to have to kill his own kith and kin, and he lost heart, thinking that it must be wrong to do so. What Krishna told him was that his primary duty lay in being true to what he was, a warrior, and not to be crippled by sentimental attachments to his family. There is an elemental brutality about this advice which I found as thrilling as it seemed cruel. When I read it, every line struck home, and I relived episodes of the journey vividly, recalling my own fears and confusions.
Heat, cold, pain, pleasure -
these spring from sensual contact, Arjuna.
They begin and they end.
They exist for the time being,
you must learn to put up with them.
