Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (22 page)

While I was having lunch at a
dhaba
halfway towards Amritsar, a grey-haired man in white pyjamas sat down next to me.

‘Christian?’

‘No.’

‘I am from the Pentecostal Church. You must pray to him. Pray to God.’

‘I don’t believe in God.’

His hand snapped up as if stopping traffic. ‘Pray! To the Lord! He will save you!’ He shook his finger in my face. ‘Come!’ he said and grabbed my sleeve. I grabbed it back.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t believe in God.’

‘No God?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m Buddhist,’ I lied. He stared blankly at me for a moment.

‘No God? No God!’ He shook his head, turned on his heel and disappeared into the sun.

Though saying I was Buddhist wasn’t exactly a lie. Since leaving the Vipassana course I had made a pact with myself that I would try, at least, to have a more Buddhist outlook.

I decided I had to accept things the way they were in the world, that I had the power to change the way I felt about things and not manifest my own pain. This would only create more
samskaras
that I would eventually have to work through again. I promised myself that I would react no more but observe the feelings ’til they left.

So far, I’d kept that promise. I hadn’t lost it since leaving the Vipassana course. I’d remained equanimous when I’d been overcharged at my hotel or surrounded by locals as I changed my tyre – one nicking off with my multi-tool, or when my rear panniers tore off earlier that morning from all the books I was carrying (books are cheap in India).

The most testing experience was when I waited over a week for my new tent to arrive at the post office. Every time I went in to collect it, the clerk told me it hadn’t arrived. Eventually, I insisted on looking for it myself and found it under the very desk the clerk was leaning on!

‘Just as well you have come to collect it,’ he scolded me. ‘That parcel has been sitting there two weeks and we were about to send it back.’

Equanimous, equanimous –
I wanted to slap him–
remain equanimous, equanimous.

On the plains of the Punjab, it was still in the thick grip of monsoonal fever, a whopping affront to my senses after a giddying descent from the cooler Himalayas. The mountains sank into fields of green crops, and Sikh farmers, their orange turbans like helmets, sailed through them on shiny new tractors.

It was strange not to be cycling with Bec, and unconsciously I found myself looking over my shoulder, waiting for her, looking to see if she would magically bundle around the next corner. I would think about her every day.

When I arrived in Amritsar later that day it was like many other Indian cities I had encountered: a cacophonous mess of traffic. That was until I pushed the bike up a ramp into the Golden Temple. Of the many
gurdwaras
(Sikh temples) around India and the world, this one, known as the Harmandir, was the spiritual centre of Sikhism.

The Harmandir is a three-storey structure inside the temple, rising above a man-made tank. At night, the Harmandir shimmers its
gold-leafed
exterior over the still water and marbled floors. It was built to house the Adi Granth (the ‘original book’ of scripture), which, in the late evenings, is taken out, passed hand to hand and read aloud.

Sikhism was founded by the Guru Nanak some 500 years ago, drawing on elements of Islam and Hinduism. Nanak was against idol or blind worship and emphasised that all paths lead to God. Today there are over 20 million Sikhs worldwide and Sikhism is ranked as the world’s fifth-largest religion.

What struck me immediately about Sikhism was its sense of egalitarianism. Anybody could stay in the
gurdwaras
regardless of religion, sex or caste for a maximum of three nights; the accommodation was free, and food was provided twice daily in the
langar
(communal kitchen), also free of charge. Prayers were not set at any given time and could be performed at home. What a contrast this was to that pushy Pentecostal devotee!

A tall, smiling Sikh carrying a spear led me down a corridor and into a large room. On beds rammed together, various nationalities were sprawled under overhead fans while lines of washing danced above them. Korean girls and boys laughed into the fruit they were eating, Germans curled in corners with Stephen King novels, and – ah, the British section – pale bodies snored with their mouths open.

I saw a mountain bike slumped up against the wall. I got speaking to its owner –
Pedro, a diver from the Canary Islands.

Pedro had cycled from Morocco and through Europe to India in less than six months. Like me, he had had his share of adversity. First he got hit with malaria in Iran, then dysentery in Pakistan.

‘Ah, I was in the hospital – so hot! So hot! And the power would go. No fan – oi! I so hot, so hot! I have the fever, headache, and dysentery. The doctor tells me I have malaria.’

He loved Iran but wasn’t impressed with the East.

‘A Frenchman cycling had only one arm. They laughing at him. Try pushing him off his bike. Terrible!’

Among the mess and the heavy heat I spotted a man wearing a turban and a familiar face under it – Philippe, an engineering student from Germany whom I had met during our time at Vipassana. He was a lively character, throwing himself into the culture wherever he was. Now that we were in Amritsar, the Sikh capital, he was sporting white pyjamas, a turban with a Sikh emblem in the middle of it, and a small dagger around his waist. He made a prayer gesture.

‘
Namaste
!’

‘
Namaste
, Philippe.’

‘You get here in two days! So fast, man!’ he said in his characteristically pepped-up voice. But no sooner were we chatting away when he turned and jumped on his bed and began meditating, such were his impulses.

Back in McLeodganj, these impulses had him running every five minutes to stuff his face with strudel or banana cake, and when he had downed that he would run off to the next German bakery, screaming ‘Ah, I must have some more CAAAAAKE!’

With no cakes to be found in Amritsar, it wasn’t before long he developed a new love: ice cream.

‘Ah, Russell! You must come to zis ice-cream shop! Zey have REAL ice-cream!’ And he would grab me by the arm, knocking children out the way and causing rickshaws to veer into each other as he led me across the street to a dubiously named ice-cream parlour, ‘Mr Softy’.

I spent the day trying to have my rear panniers fixed. The hooks had torn out of the back and I had had to bungee them together. After trying various sheet-metal places, I had no luck until I met Hardey Singh in an Internet café. Hardey was 21 going on 40. I jumped on his scooter and we zoomed around the side streets, zapping from one hardware store to the next to get the required parts.

Hardey was a devout Sikh and spent most of his time at the Golden Temple. He was also involved in bringing over American Sikh kids on an exchange program, to show them the history of their religion.

‘The turban is to protect the head from the sun energy,’ he told me. ‘The beard, to collect moon energy. The bangle around my wrist is to remind me why I use my sword, and the small dagger around my waist is to protect the weak.’

He told me these items were worn by members of the
Khalsa
(Sikh warriors) and are known as the five Ks:
keshas
(uncut hair),
kangha
(a comb),
kirpan
(a sword),
kara
(a steel bracelet) and
kaccha
(a pair of shorts). The
Khalsas
were created in the late 17th century to defend the Sikh faith against the dogmatic and ruthless Moghul ruler Aurangzeb, who reimposed a non-Muslim tax and ordered Sikh temples to be destroyed.

As a testament to such persecution by the Moghuls, the Sikh museum housed depictions of torture and slaughter of Sikh martyrs: men sawn in half, women forced to wear garlands of their massacred babies, and martyrs with their eyes hanging out. Children next to me danced and laughed around these horrible images. Bullet holes still cracked the wall, a stark reminder of Indira Ghandi’s ill-fated attempt to quash the militant Sikh leader Bindranwale by blowing up the Golden Temple. (This attack was to spell her own end, when two of her Sikh bodyguards machine-gunned her to death.)

‘We are never to be without a dagger to be ready to fight,’ Hardey said. It was true: that night I watched a Sikh man clutch his dagger between his teeth as he hung on to a thick chain to submerge himself in the Golden Temple pond, while another swam near him, a glint of steel winking from the folds of his turban.

I had dinner that night with Philippe, Pedro, Yuki and three Korean women with the most un-Korean names I had ever heard: Cindy, Maria and Stacey.

‘I like zis restaurant,’ said Philippe as he waved a hand at the grimy walls, the yellow filth, the unwashed tables, the oily food bubbling on coal stoves and the rank smell of leaking gas. The waiter in a stained white shirt came over and slopped more food into our bowls.

‘Our last night in India before Pakistan. And here we are in a real Indian restaurant!’ Philippe smiled, full of love and joy for it all.

‘Yes,
very
Indian!’ I said, and then remembered myself. ‘And this is why we came here.’ We got up and paid. ‘Not coming for a drink, Philippe?’

‘No, I don’t drink,’ he said darkly, then put his index finger to his head like a pistol. ‘Drinking is poison for your mind.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I don’t like. Bad for your spirit, your karma.’

‘What about ice-cream?’

‘No! Definitely not ze ice-cream.’

His self-righteousness floundered a week later when I caught him on a rooftop in Lahore, Pakistan, stoned off his head on
charas
, crowing inanely at the moon.

He wiped the sweat off his brow.

‘It’s so hot! Man, I’m sweating all ze time.’

‘Take the turban off.’

‘Hey! I like my turban. Zey love me. Zey think I’m Sikh.’

In Pakistan they didn’t really go for his new look. In fact, he nearly didn’t get into the country because of it.

‘Maybe,’ I said to him later in Pakistan, ‘it’s because you look like something they’ve been fighting against for the past 500 years, eh, Philippe!’

‘Ah, maybe you are right!’

And the next day this proud Sikh would unravel his turban and don the
salwa kameez
– pyjamas and a
topi
– Muslim cap – in one hot, hurried breath as he stepped over into Pakistan. 

A large red rooster strutted across the Grand Trunk Road, puffed its chest, slammed its foot down several times, did several high kicks, stopped, then waved its crest aggressively as if to say, ‘I AM THE FUNKIEST ROOSTER!’

This incensed a tall, black rooster opposite and it immediately tried to outdo the red rooster: it stomped the ground harder, kicked its legs higher, then crowed furiously, ‘NO, NO!
I
AM THE FUNKIEST ROOSTER!’

A phalanx of blustering red and black roosters followed,
goose-stepping
and barking causing the crowd to cheer and jeer respective chooks.

I wasn’t at an illegal cockfight but it might as well been.

You see, I was at the Wagah Border observing the lowering of the flags ceremony between India and Pakistan where the Border Security Forces of India (wearing large red crested hats) and the Pakistan Rangers (wearing large black crested hats) performed this marching spectacle every day and have done so since 1959.

It had the atmosphere of a football match, my neighbours exploding into hails of abuse at the Indian side. When I shouted out ‘CARN THE BLUES!’ they cheered, slapping my back as if I too had joined in on the abuse.

However, unlike a football match there were deep chasms of hatred on both sides, a fault line that ruptured all the way back to the 1947 partition where nearly a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs butchered each other in a scramble for land. Since then, India and Pakistan have been involved in four wars with each other, border skirmishes and stand-offs, not to mention the ongoing conflict over Jammu-Kashmir. So no wonder I thought there was going to be an
all-out
riot
xxi
(or war for that matter).

At the very end of the ceremony, after all this chest puffing and shouting, the Pakistani and Indian soldiers shook hands with each other then lowered their respective flags exactly the same time.

‘Why at the same time?’ I asked my neighbour, a large man with a grey peppered beard and
topi
.

‘It would show great disrespect! And big problems for the Indians!’ He grinned broadly as if he wanted it to happen.

The soldiers slammed the border gates shut with a loud bang and it was all over. Soon the crowds got back in their Jeeps, buses and autorickshaws and went home whereas I cycled the few kilometres to a small town and slept the night in a road side hotel where not one of the lights worked. On the upside, the plumbing was totally electrified, a discovery that was ‘shocking’.
Oh, stop it, you!

In the morning I faced the vast open plains before me. The road stretched right out into the distance like a cord of liquorice.

Pakistan. Land of the Pure.

I looked behind me. Though I’d had mixed feelings about leaving India, I was glad to have left her now; so much so, that at the Indian border, the immigration official had stamped my passport, uttering, ‘You are looking very happy.’

‘Yes, I am. Very,
very
happy!’

‘
Acha!
You much enjoying India,’ he smiled.

‘Baha!
Well
…’

He fixed me with a stare as I collected my passport. ‘Be careful in Pakistan!’

Little did I know I’d be back in India within three weeks whether I liked it or not.

But now I was in a new country and with that, the thought of a new beginning. I reminded myself of my vows to be a calmer person, a person full of patience, more empathetic, understanding, a – OW! WHAT THE FUCK!

WHOP! PING! CLANG!

The bike suddenly clanged with metallic staccatos and I felt sharp stabs to my right cheek and shoulder.

I looked up to see two teenage boys sitting on a large muffin of hay with a pile of stones in their hands while a sad-looking donkey pulled them along in a wooden cart. I tore around them like a hornet, hurling abuse, shaking my fist, Buddhist vows lost an instant. The boys just shrugged at my mad protestations and threw more stones, one bouncing off my helmet.

I had no idea why they did this.

An hour or two later I coasted into the outskirts of Lahore and slipped off The Grand Trunk road and onto the Canal Road, named thus because a tree-lined canal ran alongside it. I then swung onto to The Mall, a broad boulevard that drew a long bow to the
Champs Elysees
and perhaps why Lahore has been ambitiously known (amongst other names) as ‘The Paris of the Punjab’. And all this time I thought Lahore was French for ‘Ladies of the Night’.
Ah, my friend! You want la whore
?

Toyota Hiace vans careened in and out of lanes, beeping, pulling over, ticket men hanging out the door, smacking the roof, yelling destinations, then suddenly alighting as a large truck thundered towards them.

To say that Pakistani trucks were much more colourful than the orange TATA trucks of India would be an understatement. They were glitzy, garish and tarted up as if they were going to be the star float at a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Every inch of the vehicle was detailed in array of colours, patterns, pictures, ornaments, carvings, portraits of loved ones and murals, while words in English hugged the mudguards – ‘GOD TAKE CARE OF ME’. Jewellery that looked like it had been stolen from belly dancers dripped along the outside of the undercarriage in long chains. Headlights were heavily massacred while above the cabin, a huge Julian Clary
xxii
-like collar jutted forward, enmeshed in metal lattice. Seeing a convoy of theses painted beauties often made me feel like jumping off my bike and starting to dance.

Past the Regale Chowk (roundabout) I arrived outside a white
run-down
looking four-storey building, The Regale Internet Inn. I’d chosen this hotel as other backpackers had said in Amritsar it was the only place in Lahore where the staff didn’t rob you!

Though calling it a hotel was stretching it a bit. It was actually the house of an ex-journalist, Malik, and bodies of weary souls from around the world decamped in what was the living room on mattresses piled on the floor: two chain smoking German brothers, David and Paul; Gavin from Yorkshire; two Danes – Skippy and Orsa; and a Korean, Kar. It wasn’t the cleanest of places and I headed upstairs to get some fresh air. As I ducked under a laundry line of underwear, T-shirts and towels on the rooftop I heard, ‘Ah, Russell! You make good time again!’

It was Philippe,
chillum
in hand and now in a light blue
salwa kameez.
‘Ah, you are strong, Russell!’

‘What’s this?’ I smiled, pointing at the pipe.

‘This? Oh, this is
charas
. You want?’

‘Sure,’ I took a drag and immediately felt a slight buzz from the hashish. ‘But isn’t this “poison for your mind?”’

‘No! It is good for the mind! Very
shanti, shanti.
’

‘I don’t think that’s Urdu.

‘Huh?’

‘Urdu. The language here.’

‘No, no!’ he laughed, ‘I ’eard you!’

Over the next few days Philippe and I perused the streets of Lahore: relieving ourselves from the heat in the marbled The Badshahi Mosque; eating at the night markets, gorging ourselves on meat, something which wasn’t all too available in India; and embarrassingly, spending an inordinate amount of time at the new Western style shopping centre, something we both got too excited about.

‘Chocolate, Russell, they have chocolate from
Germany
!’

There was certainly a different feel to Pakistan. It seemed more relaxed, laid back than India and speaking to Pakistanis, they seemed less bothered about their neighbours. Unfortunately, the streets were dominated by the presence of men.

On one particular day, Malik, after getting us (the men at least) kitted-out in
salwa kameezes
(which were refreshingly light and oddly cooler than wearing T-shirts and shorts) led us through the narrow busy streets of Lahore to one of the most famous and oldest Muslim shrines in Pakistan, the Data Darbar or ‘Shrine of the Giver’. Built by the Sultan Zakiruddin Ibrahim at the end of the 11th century, the marbled tomb holds the remains of Sufi saint Daata Ganj Bakhsh (also known as Syed Ali Hajwairi), a Persian scholar who is believed to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. According to legend, a peasant woman gave Daata Ganj Bakhsh a jar of milk and when she returned home, her cow gave an endless supply. Thus today, countless people – business people, teachers, beggars – come to kiss the mausoleum for good luck, including numerous Pakistani leaders such as President General Musharraf.

‘Basement,’ Malik ordered and we followed him down some marbled steps. In the middle of a large hall and sitting on a green platform in rows were the
humnawa
– eight musicians (all men) – playing
tablas
(hand-drum),
dholak
(two-headed hand-drum), the lead singer pumping a
harmonium
(an accordion) with his feet while singing out his soul. I found it mesmerising and like others around me, clapped my hands and chanted. Soon, a bizarre coterie of men in robes launched themselves out of the crowd and began dancing, spinning and the strangest thing of all, violent head shaking as if they were trying to shake out really bad thoughts.

‘It is called
Qawwali
Music,’ said Malik. ‘These Sufis, they are trying to reach god with the dancing and the singing.’

And by all accounts, lots of hash.

Sufism is the spiritual side of Islam commonly known as Islamic mysticism. Because they worship saints, not to mention having a good time (dancing and singing), it has not made them popular with fundamentalist groups like the Taliban.
xxiii

One of the Sufis, a man that looked like Colonel Gaddafi, entered the fray doing Russian kicks while two older men circled him: one sporting a cape and ribboned George Clinton-style coloured dreadlocks; the other, who I will call Cat Weasel (green shirt, pants and thick locks of hair and beard), shook his head back and forth so fast that he reminded me of an oscillating electric tooth brush.

Of course, he couldn’t keep this up and he tripped and fell into Gaddafi who was none too pleased at having his leg kicking interrupted and fists came out, each one swinging madly like drunks. George Clinton and his Funkenstein crew separated them like boys in a kindergarten. Gaddafi soon went back to his dancing while Cat Weasel had to be consoled with hugs from George Clinton and his consorts before he would raise to the same fervour as before.

Having not danced enough, later that night, Malik piled myself and other travellers into a Subaru for more Sufi dancing at the Baba Shah Jamal shrine, a few kilometres away from Data Darbar.

Malik led the way in a gait that was hard to catch, groups of men following, falling over and elbowing each other out of the way, desperate as they were to catch a glimpse of us. Down a street of vendors selling sweets we followed the sounds of beating drums and soon arrived at a muddy field where our followers stopped to retrieve their sandals caught in the sticky mud.

Around a fire, a man dressed in a blood-red shirt and black jeans, hair flopping over his eyes and sticking to his forehead, seemed to lead the drummers. He’d stared at them, lost in a deep trance, and then, with a twist of his hand, sent the beat in a different direction. Sweat dripped off his face as he shook his head back and forth like a mop on a pendulum. Other dancers joined him, including Philippe, who jumped up and down like bouncing top.

I left the group and wandered the crowded streets alone before coming to a performance stage. Women dressed in saris danced with hints of repressed sexual energy while a skinny man with no shirt and tight jeans pranced around them and bizarrely, grabbed his crotch as if he were Michael Jackson. One of the women pushed him off stage and then the girls vanished into the doorway of a cylindrical structure.

At the top of it, people were looking down on to something. I followed others up the stairs and looked down to see the women in the middle of the cylinder, dancing slowly as two motorbikes and a Subaru hatch drove faster and faster until the centrifugal force had them vertical to the floor.

The driver in the car took his hands off the wheel. The audience cheered. When the motorcyclists let go of the handle bars the audience instinctively stood back and relieved an ‘OOOH!’ sigh.

I rejoined our group who were still with the drummers and there I found Philippe shaking up and down like Jim Morrison, stoned off his face, laughing and jumping, and surrounded by Pakistani men. He passed me a joint and I too was soon bopping up and down trying to catch the beat. Other dancers around us shook their heads; some were so violent with their shaking I thought their very faces would come clean off.

Then, to confirm my imagination, a man with wild tribal-looking hair shook his head like the others but when he stopped his face was horribly disfigured. In fact, half of it was missing, presumably hacked off. Open raw holes in his face where his nose should be stared back at me. I couldn’t steal my eyes from him and later that night at the Regale Inn as I slept heavily after too much
charas
, I couldn’t shake the faceless man from my mind, and woke up with him in my nightmares, hot pools of sweat collecting in the dints of my collarbone, filling like questions of what he must’ve had done or didn’t do to receive such a brutal disfigurement.