A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

by Suzanne Joinson

  30. Sussex, Present Day

  A prefab building in the Prima Foundation complex

  Badly drawn wings. Aeroplanes. Dragonflies. Butterflies. All hanging from the ceiling. Hot hands. Breath. Outside magpies were rioting, theirs must be the ugliest of all the birdsongs. Tayeb had left earlier with the younger woman and Robert Barker, leaving Frieda alone in the hot headachy room, resonant of distant French lessons. Or, more precisely, her inefficiency at learning French – the shameful sense of being middle-to-lower-middle of the class, befuddled by words in lists and the verbs in lines, none of them adding up to a magical whole in her head – ultimately, the salty-flat memory of failure.

  Then, the door opened and in she came. She had dark hair, like Frieda’s, though with strands of grey webbed through it. Her face had a dreamy look, as if shaped by the contemplation of rivers and swans and duckweed on water. No smile, but she looked at Frieda as if her eyes could drink her up, as if Frieda were made of milk. There was an awkward pause. Should they shake hands, or kiss? Frieda waited for an indication of which, but there was none and so instead she spoke:

  ‘Hello.’

  Still no smile, so Frieda said, ‘You look exactly as I remember you. You don’t seem to have aged at all.’

  Her mother opened a beaded fabric bag whose long handle crossed her body like a safety harness. She pulled out a notebook, the same type that the blonde girl had, red with a black spiral, and wrote on it:

  A diet of seaweed and toast keeps me young. You look beautiful.

  ‘Have you lost your hearing?’ Frieda stretched her jaw to disguise her shock. Her mother shook her head, and wrote:

  So many questions, so much to catch up on. How long are you staying?

  ‘I’m not staying long,’ Frieda said, intending to end with the word ‘Mum’, but didn’t. There are things that she missed that a mother shouldn’t miss, such as the first spots of blood in her daughter’s knickers or a daughter’s return from a school disco with the taste of a broken heart in her mouth, but in the end those things did not matter. What did matter, though, was the thumb-print in her brain that Frieda had been left with, a recurring dream: Frieda standing at the bottom of the hill, her mother walking away without looking back, a huge yellow dice rolling over the hill towards Frieda to crush her.

  ‘I really came to ask you a question,’ Frieda said.

  It was interesting, watching the slight stress-lines gather on her mother’s forehead and the eyes narrow. Frieda could see that she thought she was going to ask her why she left. She was trying to think of an answer, knowing that there was no answer other than that she chose herself over Frieda. After all, not all mothers sacrifice themselves for their children. She might have other explanations, clever ones that would clean up the thumb-prints in her head, but that wasn’t what Frieda was going to ask.

  ‘Do you know who Irene Guy is?’

  Her mother looked surprised, her eyes widening, and then she turned away and coughed, heftily, into her fist. Small bits of phlegm must have landed in her palm, Frieda could tell from the way she cupped her hand and kept it cupped. She needed somewhere to flick them, or wipe them. There she stood with the mucus from her chest in her hand, looking suddenly weary and a little scared. She nodded towards a table and they both sat down, then she took a piece of paper from her notebook, wiped her hand on that and wrote on the next page.

  She’s my mother.

  On the wall was a poster of an Indian man, chubby, surrounded by bright pink lotus flowers and underneath it said, ‘I will Establish Peace in the World’. Frieda remembered him from the kitchen as a child, it was the Margarine.

  ‘You told me your mother was dead. Dead before I was born.’

  Her mother looked down at the floor, her cheekbones stretched out of her face like the corners of chalk.

  ‘Why can’t you speak?’

  She picked up her pen. Serenity resides in silence.

  ‘I thought it resided in fucking your friends’ husbands.’

  The words were out and Frieda was immediately sorry. That wasn’t why she was here, but there was a swish like the sea in her ears, like the long lug-backwards of a retreating tide through the shingle as everything this woman told her all those years before about love and boundaries rushed through her head. Told, when she was too young to be told any of that. Or, at the very least, if Frieda was going to be indoctrinated into the rites of free love then she should not have then been left behind, like a glove.

  Frieda stood up to stop the whirring in her head. She looked around and at the picture of the Indian man. The lotus flowers surrounding the picture frame were browning at the edges and sagged under dust.

  ‘That is Maharaji, I remember him.’ A small smile appeared on her mother’s face.

  ‘You left me for all of this?’ She didn’t move, or say anything. ‘Is it worth it? Has it brought you what you need?’

  Frieda looked up at the ceiling, at the broken wings, thinking of a grandmother in Norwood who owned an owl, their names linked on a database all this time.

  ‘I found this in Irene’s flat.’ She took the photograph out of her pocket and held it out. She watched her mother look at the photograph for a moment; it was impossible to see from her face what she was thinking as she looked at it.

  ‘I wish I had known I had a grandmother. Well. She’s dead now. They sent me a letter about a funeral, but I missed it, I was out of the country. Did they contact you?’

  Her mother shook her head, and glanced directly at Frieda this time. She put her hand to her mouth and looked out of the window. Frieda felt ashamed. She should not have been so abrupt about the death like that.

  Her mother picked up her pen and began to write, then, urgently, her head down very close to the page, her elbow curled around the notebook like a student in an exam. Frieda slid her feet on the carpeted floor, sliding backwards and forwards watching her mother write fast, in her blue ink, scrawling her own calligraphy across the page, until, finally, she passed Frieda the notebook and sat back. She rubbed her eyes and looked away from Frieda, out of the window at an awkward, leaning tree.

  Frieda. Look. I am not going to say sorry for leaving you, because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done – you will never know. And I don’t expect you to forgive me. I am just going to say this: thank you for coming and telling me about Irene. I would not have known about her death otherwise. It means a lot.

  Her mother sat in front of her, like a cat on a wall, composed.

  ‘I wish I’d known,’ Frieda said after reading the words, ‘that there was someone, other than you and Dad alive. I’ve always felt . . . adrift.’

  The silence was vivid.

  ‘I just have so many questions.’ Her mother was looking at the photograph. She tapped it several times with her finger and then picked up her pen.

  I was 19 in that photograph, pregnant with you, quite far gone as you can see. I always told you your grandmother was dead, because in truth, she was to me.

  ‘Why can’t you speak?’ Frieda asked again. It was infuriating, this scribbling. Her mother looked down at the table.

  ‘Why was she dead to you?’ Frieda said.

  Irene, my mum, lived in Hastings – apart from a short stint in London after the war, a stint that resulted in me – there was no father – I mean, I never met him. Irene had been adopted, and her adopted mother died when I was a baby and so it was just me and her, the two of us on our own and I left as soon as I possibly could. Not because I hated it, she was kind, but – it was claustrophobic. Too closed somehow.

  This explains her father’s vague responses to Frieda’s ‘family tree’ project.

  ‘I used to ask Dad about my grandparents, but he never knew. I always thought he was lying. I still don’t understand why you never spoke to her again.’

  Again, the arm curled around the notebook as she wrote.

  I ran away with your dad but when I fell pregnant, I suddenly wanted to tell her. I knocked on the door, show
ed her the bump, told her we were happy and OK. She asked me to come back, said we could look after the baby – you – together and for a moment I was tempted, but she said it was a choice: your father or me.

  ‘You chose him, and then you left him anyway.’

  They looked at each other across the table.

  ‘That was the last time you saw her?’ She nodded.

  It was like I was hypnotised: her standing there, the house full of books and dreams. She talked all the time about learning a language, about travelling. She had maps from all over the world on the walls, inherited mostly from her adopted mother, along with an itch for travel. ‘We’ll go to India! We’ll go to China!’ she used to say when I was little, but somehow – she was stuck in Hastings.

  ‘Your mum – Irene Guy – how did she end up in Norwood, then?’ Frieda asked. ‘If she lived in the house in Hastings?’

  Frieda watched as her mother wrote more, each word appearing fast, a blue stain:

  I heard through a childhood friend that she moved to London. I had no contact with her by then. I just wanted to be away from her. I got sick of the dreams and plans that came to nothing, in the end, everything she said was meaningless. The reality of her life – renting a seaside house alone, never enough money, looking after me – was so far from her daydreams that I hated the delusions, the way she lied to herself.

  A clanging noise came from outside the prefab window, and the sound of someone walking, a crunch of the footfalls.

  ‘So you left and never spoke to her again?’ Frieda’s leg shook a little so she pressed her foot down to stop the vibrations.

  It seemed circular, the sense of repeating mistakes, and the women with the babies and no men. I was terrified that I would get stuck too. That I would end up like her, that any will or plan or dream of mine would be destroyed by these delusions. I ran out of the garden, out of Hastings and when you were old enough I told you that she was dead. I am sorry I lied and that I left. Now, of course, I think of her and you all the time. And I love you, though I know you won’t believe me. I left you not because I didn’t love you but because I had to.

  Frieda pulled at the skin on the back of her hand to give herself a pinching shock. She was about to say – she wanted to say – if that was the case, then why are you hiding here, in this place?

  ‘What shall I do with her things?’

  But her mother was retreating already, she could tell, into caves inside her head and suddenly it was awkward again. Frieda was consumed with a familiar feeling, the sadness of being unwanted; of a child waiting on a bench to be picked up by someone who doesn’t love her. She stood up and the motion of her doing so clicked her mother out of her hypnotic reverie. She put her hand in her beaded bag, pulled out a folded, printed piece of paper and crushed it into Frieda’s palm.

  Frieda squinted and repeated, ‘Her things – her furniture, books. What shall I do with them?’

  Keep them, if you want them.

  ‘Don’t you want any of it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Thank you. I suppose?’

  Her mother took Frieda’s hand, squeezed it too hard, and then let it drop. After that they did not look at each other, and when it became painful to continue the avoidance of meeting eyes, Frieda closed hers, her mind brewing on the facts she had just absorbed. Her mother stood up while Frieda’s eyes were still shut and walked out of the room. Whether she looked back at her, or what exactly the expression in her eyes, Frieda decided not to know. She heard everything acutely, though, the scrape of the chair on the floor, each step, and the hesitation at the door handle. The clunk of the door shutting and the coughing that came from outside, and then nothing.

  Back outside, the sky was oppressive, rolled out in strips of grey. Frieda walked on the green and brown–red leaves and the soft mud. A little way down the path Frieda stopped and leaned against a prefab wall and wanted a cigarette. It took a moment for the swishing noise in her head to diminish. She didn’t know where Tayeb was, near the car she supposed. She unfolded the paper.

  Khechari Mudra

  ‘Kha’ means Akasa and ‘Chari’ means to move. The Yogi moves in the Akasa. The tongue and the mind remain in the Akasa. Hence this is known as Khechari Mudra.

  This Mudra can be performed by a man, only if he has undergone the preliminary exercise under the direct guidance of a Guru, who is practising Khechari Mudra. The preliminary portion of this Mudra is in making the tongue so long that the tip of the tongue might touch the space between the two eyebrows.

  The Guru will cut the lower tendon of the tongue with a bright, clean knife little by little every week. By sprinkling salt and turmeric powder, the cut edges may not join together again. Cutting the lower tendon of the tongue should be done regularly, once a week, for a period of six months. Rub the tongue with fresh butter and draw it out. Take hold of the tongue with the fingers and move it to and fro. Milking the tongue means taking hold of it and drawing it as the milkman does the udder of a cow during milking. By all these means you can lengthen the tongue to reach the forehead. This is the preliminary portion of Khechari Mudra. Once this is done, there is no reason to speak again.

  Then turn the tongue upwards and backwards by sitting in Siddhasana so as to touch the palate and close the posterior nasal openings with the reversed tongue and fix the gaze on the space between the two eye-brows. Now leaving the Ida and Pingala, Prana will move in the Sushumna Nadi. The respiration will stop. The tongue is on the mouth of the well of nectar. This is Khechari Mudra.

  By the practice of this Mudra the Yogi is free from fainting, hunger, thirst and laziness. He is free from diseases, decay, old age and death. This Mudra makes one an Oordhvaretas. As the body of the Yogi is filled with nectar, he will not die even by virulent poison. This Mudra gives Siddhis to Yogins. Khechari is the best of all Mudras.

  A man with a shaved head and a cotton purple shirt was walking towards her. As he approached her she said, ‘Excuse me?’

  He smiled.

  ‘Can I ask your name?’

  He pulled out a red notebook and wrote on it, ‘Tom. And you?’

  ‘Frieda.’

  She held out the handout, and then pointed at his mouth.

  ‘You’ve cut it?’ He nodded, then wrote something: Vow of eternal silence: true nectar.

  Frieda walked towards the hedge remembering the snip snip snip of the nail scissors in the hotel room. What would the Sheikh think of cutting the tongue? The scissors, the fringe, the Sheikh, all of these melded, and instructions came into her mind at once. She wished she could quieten them by finding Tayeb, but all she could see were leaves and the endless grass.

  Breathlessness; Limit Mechanical: When you dread anything you have undertaken as too difficult of accomplishment, just so much more force is required to overcome that idea. If, mounted on your bicycle, you wheel along in a state of apprehension, you induce a high nervous tension that requires a great reserve of power to resist and supply.

  31. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes

  August 15th

  As much as possible we have avoided the villages and mercifully the drumming has faded. I think perhaps I carried the sound with me inside my head for some distance because when I told myself to stop listening the relentless banging vanished. Mah says twenty li more and we will reach Aksu.

  Twenty li – it sounds reasonable but this route takes us alongside the edges of Takla Makan desert at the worst possible time of year to travel. We have hired a carter and small pony for me. The carter is a native Kirghiz, I believe, and very young, sulky-faced. His cart carries my bicycle, which I refuse to leave, and all of my possessions. I paid the carter a small amount now, with a promise to pay the full amount at Kucha.

  The animals – and indeed we – can only bear to travel at night as the daylight stages are simply too hot and so our rhythm is thus: we rise at three in the morning, travel until the sun has fully risen when we find shelter, usually a hovel or a native cav
e-home in the ground. I am astounded to discover that villagers here spend the daylight hours underground for protection from the heat at this time of the year. We eat, sleep through the hottest hours, then begin to walk again in the evening. We keep going until midnight, or later if we have the strength. In the hellish afternoon sleeps I dream terrible dreams: of my sister with great black feathers tied to her arms; of Kashgar on fire; of the mosque in flames; of Millicent, sitting in chains in a prison beneath the Magistrates’ Court; Lizzie, with the bright red ants one sees here crawling in her hair. I thought I would feel lighter as I move away from Millicent, but it is the converse: I am heavier, inside, and almost choked to death by this heat.

  (Few days later) August. I have lost track of the days . . .

  We picked up bread this morning from a baker who was baking in a cave-hovel in the ground, ten small loaves, each heavy with oil which helps to keep them fresher. Clearly the riots have not stopped traders. We have met carts from Aksu or Turfan before dawn, piled high with rugs and carpets, or dried fruits and raw cotton. They stop and talk to Mah and sometimes goods are bought. Yesterday we bought six cucumbers and ate them under a vineyard trellis of dead poplar wood. The stretches between the vendor stalls that set up at dusk and the lonely inns we pass are long and melancholy. I try to understand the exchange of news: talk of riots and trouble and uprisings in Herat, Tashkend, Samarkand, Turfan and Barkul. They point at me, stare at Ai-Lien, Mah says, ‘She comes from England, the other side of Hindustan,’ and they all nod, as if that explains my strangeness.

  August

  Ai-Lien’s bright eyes blink, she sucks her fists. Mah made a stew from some kind of desert rabbit. Like snakes, we sleep in holes. The hovels are usually buried into the bottom of the rolling hills, or dug into the cragged cliff-bases of the moraines. They have a thin walkway and the rest of the floor is taken up by a mud kang. The ceilings are a patchwork of hay and filthy grass; ventilation, if there is any, is simply a number of small holes. There are no windows, and when the door closes it is as close as possible to being buried alive. Mah, the carter, Ai-Lien and I share one room as an economy and each time the door closes over I have the same thoughts: will Mah and his carter kill me? Or worse? So far, though, Mah falls into a deep sleep, aided, I suspect, by a smoke of his opium pipe before coming in, and the two men snore loudly. It is like lying down in a coffin and each time I think I cannot bear it, then exhaustion overcomes me and Ai-Lien too. Surprisingly we sleep soundly in the cool black space and I concede that, as I slowly become accustomed to them, these hovels do provide exactly what is required: relief from the sun and protection from thieves.