Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (3 page)

I dodged workmen laying bricks on the road, and was forced onto the pavement and walked with the bike. A woman, sitting with her hand open to passers-by, upon seeing me, grabbed at my shorts. I tried to keep walking but her nails caught in my shorts like blackberry thorns.

‘Ten rupees, sir. Ten rupees …’

I pulled out a bunch of rupee notes and my shorts were instantly released.

Office workers were busily marching off to lunch, and as I dodged swinging limbs and sweaty business shirts, it appeared that I was walking in the wrong direction. My only relief came as I walked through the Oval Maidan, a broad, parched park filled with enthusiastic young cricketers knocking cricket balls across its starkness.

Near Mumbai’s Churchgate Station throngs of passengers swam by. Across the current of faces, Tiffin boxes (silver tins with wire handles) were being stacked and carried on wooden barrows by men in cotton pyjamas and Nehru pillbox hats. These men were
dabbawallahs
(in local dialect, Marathi,
dabba
means ‘Tiffin carrier’;
wallah
means ‘man’), lunch-box couriers of the Mumbai Tiffin-Box Suppliers Association – a vestige of the British Raj. Every day, about 5000
dabbawallahs
deliver approximately 170 000 lunches (prepared by housewives) from suburban households to schools, universities and offices across Mumbai. Apparently,
dabbawallahs
, despite many being illiterate, only make one mistake for every eight million lunches delivered!

I watched two
dabbawallahs
spear through the slowing traffic, bounce the barrow over a gutter and disappear around a building.

I got back on the bike and cut through onto Marine Drive on the west side of Colaba where the Arabian Sea met the bay. On the beach lay clumps of rags flapping in the wind. Some of these rags got up and walked around – people, no, whole communities, perhaps from the rural plains I would soon be cycling on, were living among plastic bags of blue ruin. Behind them, smog chalked across Back Bay, leaving shadows of Colaba’s hotels like a badly printed watercolour.

Parched from the acrid taste of exhaust, I stopped at a restaurant, sat down and ordered a juice. Shortly after, a frumpish woman entered and greeted the waiter with a kiss and a devilish smile, her green-and-white sari swaying around her. I thought this was odd, as I had not seen an Indian woman greet any man in this way in the four days I had been here. And there was a reason for this, I soon discovered: she was a man or, rather, I think had been. She was a
hijra
– a caste of transvestites and eunuchs.

‘Give me some money,’ came a deep, smooth, yet feminine voice. She smiled at me, flirting a little.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Tsk!’ Her face twisted, taking her large smile with it. ‘You give me some rupees.’

‘What for?’

‘Tsk! Give me money!’

‘But what have you done?’

‘
Baksheesh
,’ she said, and her large smile returned with a proffered hand adorned with gold rings and bangles.

‘No.’

‘Tsk! You give me no money!’ This time she hissed like a cat and made a strange claw with her fingers.

‘Oh, dear. Am I cursed now?’ I smiled, but her eyes were like razors and she shooed me away as if I were an overweight moth.

I was lucky I hadn’t been spat on or, worse, flashed at by his/her missing bits.
Hijras
usually earn their living by turning up at weddings, births and other celebrations in the hope that their bad singing, dancing and vulgar habits will be put to a stop by a few handy bribes. If none of that paper note stuff comes their way, eunuchs will curse newborn babies, spit ochre-coloured
paan
juice on newlyweds or sometimes go as far as taking their own clothes off.

Although it’s unclear how many
hijras
there are in India, the figure has been put at anything between 100 000 and 1.2 million – in other words, nobody has the foggiest.
Hijras
are generally either those born with deformed genitalia, hermaphrodites, transsexuals or voluntary castratos, while others have allegedly been kidnapped, drugged and castrated against their will.

Interestingly, because
hijras
have an insider’s knowledge of local neighbourhoods (they always know in advance where a wedding will take place), some credit card companies now employ them as debt collectors. Somehow I can’t see that working particularly well in the East End of London: ‘Ya gonna show me ya
wot
?’

I pushed up Malaba Hill through slivers of light, the sun trying to knife its way through the thick canopy of trees. At a junction, my guidebook got me lost, so I asked directions from a group of old men wearing Nehru hats and playing what looked to be Chinese chequers. They pointed further up the hill just as a kite snapped in front of my face; a gang of schoolchildren giggled and ran away with it.

I rode up through a lush tropical garden and arrived at a nondescript bungalow that I thought was the entry to the Towers of Silence. An old Parsi gentleman with a black silk cap and Lawrence Olivier air was circumspect about letting me go any further.

‘What do you want?’ he asked flatly.

I explained that, while I didn’t want to go into the Towers of Silence, I wondered if perhaps I could see them from afar.

‘Hmm,’ he held a stiff gaze. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Australia.’

‘Hmm. What are you doing with this bicycle?’

‘Cycling.’

‘From Australia! Good God!’ and, before I could interject to say ‘I’ve only done a few kilometres from Colaba’, he was jabbering at his colleagues, who made lots of ‘ooh, aah!’ sounds and crowded around me.

‘Oh, very far! You must be a strong man.’

‘No, I—’

‘Much hardship for you. Yes, sir. You must be such determination.’

He then palmed me off to a young man named Benjamin.

‘He will show you the towers. Follow him.’

‘They’re much smaller than I imagined them to be,’ I said.

‘Yes, they are small.’

I leant over the square model of the towers; clearly such interest in Parsi funeral rites had forced the Parsis to make a proxy. Well, that and the fact that a
Time Life
photographer had recently scaled a building opposite the towers and published colour photographs of a funeral, vultures and all. The Parsi community was understandably outraged.

‘In here,’ Benjamin said, pointing to four wells that surrounded the structure, ‘it flushes the remains. The blood goes down this chamber into the wells and is filtered. The earth cannot be defiled by the dead.’ He shook his finger. ‘Nothing goes into the sacred elements – water, fire, air and earth.’

This isn’t strictly true. There have been complaints from local residents finding the odd dismembered finger in their washing (‘Ere? What’s that finger doin’ in me undies?’), and of other titbits landing on passers-by as the vultures fly past looking for a private place to eat.

At the time of my visit, not all was well in the Towers of Silence. Corpses weren’t being eaten. A type of sickness, Benjamin told me, was causing the vultures to die. It was in fact due to the use of Diclofena, an anti-inflammatory used on cattle. Vultures would eat the carcass, which in turn would cause their renal system to fail. The decimation of vultures was not unique to Mumbai but right across the Indian-subcontinent.

To remedy the lack of available vultures, the Parsi
panchayat
(council) had installed giant solar reflectors to hasten the process of corpse decomposition, as well as an ozone generator to help combat the stench. Some reformists within the Parsi community were opting for burying the dead while an aviary was being built to breed vultures in captivity.

Like the vultures, the Parsi community was also endangered. Only 90 000 Parsis live in India today, and their numbers are continuing to drop due to intermarriage and a historical disadvantage. When the Parsis’ ancestors – known then as Persians – first arrived in India sometime around the tenth century, the Hindu ruler of Gujarat allowed them to stay, on the condition that they were not allowed to convert his subjects to their religion, Zoroastrianism. Even now, the Hindu community regards the Parsis as outsiders.

I thanked Benjamin for his time, got back on my bike and followed the road down the winding hill. It wasn’t long before I was hopelessly lost. I looked to the sinking sun to get my bearings.

I figured that if I headed south I would eventually end up in Colaba’s narrow peninsula and back at my hotel. Dodging an elephant, numerous potholes and
wallahs
pushing a large barrow stacked with bricks, I found myself in a race with two teenagers – one with particularly large glasses and a vibrant red fez – on bicycles. Trying to gain a few lengths on these boys, I swung out of the traffic, overtook a taxi and found myself in a suicidal collision with an oncoming truck. I slammed on my brakes, causing the back wheel to lock me into a terrifying slide that ended when I smashed into the door of a taxi. I expected the driver to erupt from the taxi in a rage but he merely wobbled his head when I apologised.

It was peak hour and the streets were choked with traffic and accompanied by insane, erratic beeping and blaring. I battled through it, coughing and sputtering through the exhaust until the traffic eased and my lungs began to clear.

When I got back to the hotel I hauled the bike over my shoulder, trudged up three flights of stairs, threw the bike against the wall, then went to the toilet and threw up. I then washed my face, flopped on the bed and passed out, overcome with Mumbai’s polluted breath.

I awoke the next morning to the phone ringing. I picked it up.

‘Omelette jam?’

On my past travels I have noticed how residents of each country have a different way of going to the cinema. In Thailand, patrons stand with hands on hearts when the King’s picture is screened, while in Zimbabwe, locals face their country’s flag and sing their national anthem. But in India … people run!

Swarms of people were squashed up against the padlocked steel gate of the Regal Cinema, an Art Deco building crumbling silently in the night. When the gate opened it was on for young and old and I felt the crush of bodies push past. Over ten million people across India go to the cinema in a single day, and at this moment it felt like they had all decided to come to this one. I shrank up against the wall, spilling my soapy tea, while old ladies jostled and elbowed their way as if to reclaim a dowry from a recalcitrant daughter-in-law. I didn’t understand the rush; 50 rupees got me a reserved seat, didn’t it? I soon realised my mistake: the seat numbers had worn off over the years of attentive neglect but no one had bothered to mention this to management, who were happily giving out numbered tickets and dutifully directing patrons to their seats.

Inside, chaos led the way. Families were jumping, running and throwing themselves into chairs, then valiantly fighting off newcomers. One man was barking directions, pointing at vacant seats and waving what appeared to be his immediate family, his extended family and his extended-extended family through to fill the row. Or maybe there were just a lot of people following one guy; it was hard to say.

Up in the stalls, I jumped into the nearest seat and languished in my dilapidated comfort until a curt-bordering-on-rude voice said, ‘This is not your seat.’

I looked up, prepared to sneer at any seat-bumpers, but instead it was the usher.

‘How do you know? There are no seat numbers.’

The usher ignored my protests and led me upstairs – right up the back and next to a gang of jabbering youths.

‘How do you know this is the right seat?’

‘It is on your ticket!’ he said as if I were a blind idiot.

‘But there’s no seat number on the seat!’ I protested but he was gone, moving people who were, to their surprise, in the wrong seat.

A family of five stood in confusion at my row. Another usher came up to me and demanded to see my ticket. He flicked his torch on it.

‘Your seat is not correct.’

‘But –’

‘No, this is the wrong number to the seat.’

‘What?’

‘The ticket is correct but the seat is not. Come with me.’

He deposited me on the far left of the cinema behind a pillar.

‘This is your correct seat.’

‘Are you sure about that? There are no seat numbers here. How can you give me the right seat if there are no numbers? Hmm?’

His body rocked like a wave.

‘It is correct,’ he said and floated away into the darkness, delivering people to their seats with an unnerving self-assuredness.

The trailers began. Screeching, distorted noise hurt my ears as a community film about residents not rubbishing their neighbourhood clunked across the screen. We saw a man about to spit, another about to urinate, girls throwing rubbish on a beach, and a housewife liberally turfing scraps out of her house onto the street. The solution to this terrible depravity was to put the rubbish in a bin, which in India seemed to be like trying to find a vindaloo curry that wasn’t hot.

I was here to see
Raju Chacha
, a typical Bollywood film. As a genre, Bollywood created itself out of other film styles; this genre is known as the ‘
masala
format’ (named after a culinary term for a mix of several flavours in a single dish). Everything is thrown in – musicals, comedy, horror, action, romance, cartoons and even science fiction. All except pornography. In fact, the most you’ll ever see of that kind of business is a wet, gyrating sari or a naked shoulder. You’re lucky if there’s even a kiss. In fact, the leading actors seem to be pulled out of shot by stagehands just as their moist lips are about to daringly meet.

Raju Chacha
’s claim to fame was that it was made with one of the biggest budgets in Bollywood history: 35
crore
, the equivalent of $US7.22 million. Like Hollywood films, however, a bigger budget didn’t necessarily mean a better script. I sat trying to piece together threads of the story amid its tiresome slapstick but am still to this day not entirely sure what I saw.

I vaguely remember something about a rich architect widower and his three brattish kids living in a garish pink-and-gold mansion with a rainbow-gravel circular driveway and Graceland-style guitar steel gate.

The plot was hatched along the lines of ‘evil relatives plan to kill father and take over his millions’. One minute we were watching the father (who had an uncanny resemblance to the TV host Daryl Somers) dance around the house, and then, in the next second he had suddenly morphed into a
Lion King
cartoon.

But what really surprised about this experience was, unlike going to the movies at home, where even the slightest crackle of Maltesers received hails of sharp abuse, in India it was entirely the opposite. The audience yabbered loudly at each other, got up to stretch, went outside, banged doors noisily, sang to themselves or yawned. This was refreshing and if I knew what the hell was going on I would’ve joined in, being a loud person myself.

Afterwards, I hailed a taxi. As it sped through the empty, dark streets, Mumbai seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, as did its poorer inhabitants who slept where they could – on pavements, roundabouts, or on the bonnets of their taxis. Some were still working, like the
wallahs
clearing rubbish onto small carts pulled by donkeys. I felt a twinge of guilt for going back to a comfortable hotel.

‘If only India was like a Bollywood movie’, I thought wistfully. ‘Everyone dancing and singing their way out of poverty.’

The next morning I found myself in the rear of the Naval Office.

‘You are vanting a map? You can try the CD-ROM,’ said the Government Tourist Officer, whose skin was the colour of coal and his mouth too small to accommodate his crowded teeth.

When I went over to do just that, it wasn’t working. When I told him of this he smiled as if he already knew.

‘You can try the brochure.’

‘But I’m after a map of India.’

‘There is a map in it.’

He passed the brochure across the desk and I flicked through it. There were pictures of the usual tourist spots: the Taj Mahal, Jaisalmer Fortress, and hill stations. But one that caught my eye was a title declaring ‘Come and see Wild Asses!’ I immediately thought of bums cavorting and whinnying around a paddock. I laughed so loudly that the Tourist Officer broke from his
chai
, looked at the brochure again, and then stared at me with curious, skewed eyes.

‘What’s so funny?’ I heard an English accent waft up from a leather couch. A young British couple sat with exhausted defeat. I pointed to the brochure and showed them my ‘Wild Ass’.

‘Oh, I see,’ a young man said, unimpressed, and went back to reading his guidebook.

Jesus! What’s wrong with these people? The very core of British comedy is built on bum humour.
Carry On Up the Khyber
, I say.

‘Just arrived?’ I enquired, with a hint of authority in my voice, trying to wash away my apparent faux pas.

‘No. We’re finishing up the trip. We’ve had enough,’ he replied, shaking his sandy locks.

‘Eh?’

‘Culture shock,’ he said. ‘Can’t deal with it, man. It’s all too much. Delhi was  ’orrible. Goa was better. More our scene. Lyin’ on the beach, chillin’. What are you doin’?’

‘Cycling.’

‘Cycling!’ said his girlfriend with a weary look. ‘Mate, you’re mad.’

‘Yes,’ I raised a proud eyebrow. ‘I know.’

‘No, no. You’re
mad
,’ she said seriously. ‘I’m tellin’ ya, it gets to ya. The starin’, the ’assle, being ripped off, same questions every bloody day. We were on a bus most of it. God knows what it would be like on a bike.’

Hassle? Staring? Culture shock? What were they on about? I’d hitchhiked through most of Africa. I’d survived typhoons while motorbiking around Taiwan. I’d nearly been shot at in Uganda. I’d been chased with machetes in the Congo. And I’d even eaten sandwiches on British Rail! I was tough, baby.

But as I was to discover, no matter what a travel legend I thought I was, nothing would ever prepare me for the challenges of mother India.