Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (8 page)

I took the train.

Yeah, I know. That’s cheating. Again.

But the good doctor was right. I really didn’t have the strength yet, so I jumped on the overnight train for Udaipur, a city by a beautiful lake, some 800 kilometres northwest, and a perfect place to recuperate. And it was the next major city where I could perhaps have another blood test done – just to be sure.

With my bare feet up on the opposite seat, my fellow passenger, Abul (a producer for a biotech company, his business card told me), helped himself to my bicycle handlebar bag, examining the map inside the waterproof plastic sheath while I helped myself to his English newspaper.

‘English, yes, but Hindi, no,’ he had said, smiling. For the first time since arriving, I was with an Indian who didn’t understand Hindi, which comforted me greatly. I felt that we were comrades in arms against the ongoing confusion around us. But then again, understanding Abul’s English was another matter altogether. When I pressed him to tell me more about his profession, I couldn’t understand either the terminology he was using or his taut Tamil twang.

In contrast, sitting opposite me was Asilya, a well-spoken farmer with a sad countenance and droopy moustache. He owned and operated a farm growing soya beans, sugar cane and rice. His father was a lawyer and a farmer, a family tradition by all accounts. He spoke with an indifferent manner, which was a refreshing change from the obsequious attention I was often greeted with.

I asked Asilya whether he used genetically modified crops.

‘No. I have no time for this business. This is the south.’

I was curious, as I had read
Stolen Harvest
by environmentalist and activist Vandana Shiva. She detailed how, in the late 1990s, hundreds of farmers took on a new biocrop offered by multinationals that would supposedly double the farmers’ yields. The catch was that if farmers wanted to replant, they had to buy more seed from the company, breaking a tradition of sharing seeds in the farming collectives. The crops failed, and, unable to repay the debt, over 400 hundred farmers killed themselves by consuming pesticides. This spurred a movement called ‘Monsanto, Quit India’ campaign in 1998. Alas, the suicides have continued and are now more than 25 000.

Asilya’s wife, a quiet woman with a gentle seriousness about her, sat opposite with their shy nine-year-old son. She was particularly affectionate to her husband – something I had not seen in India until now – resting her hand on his thigh in a relaxed, loving fashion, sometimes slapping it to punctuate a thought.

They were absolutely lovely and they temporarily adopted me. They shared their lunch with me –
alu
(spicy potatoes) and homemade chutney. When the train stopped at stations, Asilya would ask if I needed anything (to which I replied that I didn’t) and then disappear and return with sweets to share.

The afternoon brought a dusty heat into our compartment and soon we were all yawning, flopping on each other’s shoulders. I tried to read but the train shook the words off the page and I surrendered to the slow breathing around me.

This equanimity was a far cry from when I first bordered the train, flopping about with my six bags like a Christmas tree. My straps caught on doorknobs and other people’s luggage, and snared small children, taking them further and further into the bowels of the train, screaming all the way.

I had had trouble with the parcel office clerk, a thin man with a tea saucer of baldness at the back of his head, who insisted that my bike would not be delivered to me until the following week.

‘But it needs to come with me now.’

‘Then you should have come here a week ago to book it.’

‘But I didn’t know that I was going by train a week ago.’

He sat back among the piles of paperwork stacked high in boxes. Ragged station hands loaded hessian-wrapped packages onto a barrow. The clerk sipped his
chai
and went back to filling out a lengthy form. Clearly, this needed a different tack.

‘Look. I’ve had malaria. I mean, I
have
malaria. I need to get to a hospital for treatment. Urgently.’

‘Then this is a problem for you,’ he said, not looking up.

‘Right. Er, look, is there any way, any way at all that I can get my bike on the train with me?’

No answer.

‘Well?’

He looked up. ‘Express.’

‘No. I’m not putting it on the Express.’

‘Express —’

‘I said “No Express!” With me!’

‘Express postage. Fill this in.’

‘Oh! Will the bike go with me? I mean, on this train?’

‘Yes. One hundred and seventy rupees. Special charge,’ he chimed.

I filled in the triplicate forms, which he then stamped and sealed with hot wax then attached them to the bike.

I tried not to wonder whether the parcel office clerk would later sell bits and pieces of my bike down at the market, and tried to forget his eagerness for me not to lock the bike up. My fears were allayed when I heard the welcoming sounds of ‘BRRINGG-BRRINGG!’

A crowd of station hands were milling around my bike and playing with the bell. (The fact that it was an Indian bell hadn’t dampened their enthusiasm).

At the town of Indore, a man with a broken wrist and a weasel’s nose boarded. He barked instruction at a younger man who threw his luggage on our bunks. This caused some consternation from the farmer’s wife and some apprehension on my part.

I curled up on a bunk – not my bunk; Weasel-man had taken that – and I eventually was gently rocked to sleep by the clunking tracks.

‘I was lying naked and she was reading. At first I thought it was her shaking the bed making some kind of joke. But the whole building is shaking and I wonder what is happening. She says to me, “Quick! Get up!” I run down the stairs totally naked!’ he laughed. His partner interjected.

‘In the street, cows were running up and down, people were screaming, running into each other. The vibrations started small then bigger and bigger. We kept falling over. When it had stopped we went back upstairs to grab our things and a woman started screaming at us to get out, “Aftershocks! Aftershocks!”’

Hannes and Hayley, a young Swiss (Hannes) and Welsh (Hayley) couple, had been only 120 kilometres from the epicentre of India’s worst earthquakes in years. The city of Bhuj, in the north-western state of Gujarat, took the brunt of the quake, which levelled 90 per cent of the city and killed over 17 000 people. It had happened on 26 January while I was in Khandwa watching the crowds celebrate India’s independence.

Hannes and Hayley looked tired and gaunt and hadn’t slept for the past four days. They had ended up staying out in the open at a schoolyard, where locals had generously given them blankets, food and water. Most of the roads out of Bhuj were closed, but Hannes and Hayley had been lucky enough to get a ride out and were taken over the last remaining bridge out of Bhuj.

‘In the town,’ Hannes said, ‘there is this horrible silence.’

I felt a twinge of guilt here in Udaipur, a town in the north-western state of Rajasthan, as I sat in comfort on the balcony of the Lakeside Hotel and enjoyed the scenic blue splendour of Lake Picola. I had only arrived by train that morning from Khandwa. Rajput porters, in their red turbans and
dhoti
(white ankle-length cloth) jostled past other passengers with my six bags of luggage, their proudly large moustaches leading the way, bangles dangling obediently by their wrists.

It was strange to see the Rajputs portering considering that they were known as the warrior Hindu caste. In the past, they dominated the area for thousands of years until, unable to solve inter-clan disputes and unite, they were eventually defeated by the invading Moghuls in the 12th century.

Udaipur was indeed the best place to recuperate from malaria (well, except that it had more mosquitoes) and I spent most mornings on the rooftop patio sipping pots of tea, munching on banana pancakes and gasbagging the days away with other travellers.

The town was famous not only for having a beautiful Moghul palace, the Jag Niwas, its white ivory domes and arches reflecting in the middle of a lake, but also because it was where the James Bond movie
Octopussy
was filmed. Banners hung from the narrow cobbled streets advertising free viewings of the film in restaurants while the ubiquitous drones of Bob Marley wailed endlessly from cafés and German bakeries.

In the late afternoon, I watched two hawks circle around a minaret, flying on the heavy heat only to be scared off by the call of the
salat
from a bearded
muezzin
. Below me, white-tufted and black-faced langur monkeys hung from the adjoining wall, playing with each other’s tails. My neighbour, a woman in brown
salwa kameez,
picked up a long stick and began tapping the bricks near the monkeys, trying to move them on. The leader bared his teeth at her and then bounced over into a neighbouring yard only to be chased by another woman with another long stick. The troupe of monkeys followed, teasing her as they passed, clanging and bouncing over the tin roofs.

While the
muezzin’s
call was to remind Muslims to pray, at five o’clock most afternoons I too was summoned. But not with such reverence.

‘Hot Pants! … Hot Pants! HEEEEYY!’

Several metres below my balcony and on the flat roof of their house, Manarge and Lanarge, ten-year-old pigtailed twins, sang and danced like James Brown. They clapped their hands, spun around and moved up and down like yo-yos before doing synchronised hip drops.

‘Ah, my prodigies!’

I had taught them these moves and now every day I had to join in which I did with gusto. Their mother, impressed with the attention I had given them for the past week brought me coffee, throwing her sari over her face, laughing.

Raku, a girl of eight in a red dress, climbed up the six-foot wall with a devilish grin on her face. ‘Photo! Photo!’

I took some more shots though I already had umpteen photographs of these kids. I offered lift-ups to the smaller ones, and sometimes two at a time hung off my arms as they swung back and forth like fat little plums. They were delightful.

‘Okay! Enough!’ I dropped the kids. It would be dusk soon but already mosquitoes were hovering over a vast buffet – my bald head. I went inside, put on long trousers and a long-sleeved shirt and fumigated myself with mosquito repellent. Once bitten, twice shy. I set off for the hospital to have another blood test.

‘Just to be sure,’ Sunil’s father, a doctor, had emphasised. ‘You don’t know if they are doing the tests properly in this small town.’

The sky was ablaze with corrugated orange clouds, giving a soft peachy pink hue to the palace and blurring the strong lines of the towering triple-storey
havelis
– ornate houses – some of which were hundreds of years old.

A scythe of colour suddenly streaked across the sky, ricocheting through the valley like mortar fire before crackling to nothing. Fireworks.

It was the wedding season, and every night these pyrotechnic celebrations coloured the desert night. Brass bands played through the streets, the musicians adorned in smart maroon tunics with gold ornate lacing. Male party guests danced wildly at the front of the procession while women followed, clapping in their beautiful, brightly coloured saris.

I followed the procession, clapping with the guests, my happiness unwrapping my smile. Sitting on a flower-covered horse, the groom wore a bright orange turban and a beige suit. He looked nonplussed about the whole event; in fact I dare say he even looked bored.

‘Are you nervous?’ I asked him.

‘No. Why should I be?’

‘Well … getting married. You know. No second thoughts?’

‘No. It is all fine.’

The procession stopped and a wild frenzy of dancing overtook the wedding guests. For the first time since I arrived in India, I saw men and women sharing an activity other than eating: dancing. Before I knew it I was being dragged into the melee and whirled in a circle at high speed. The guest who had ‘invited me to dance’ bobbed up and down and I followed his lead. We spurred each other on, faster and faster, much to the excitement of the crowd. I sensed that we were reaching our critical speed and I lost his grip, catapulting him into a crowd of old women in red saris. Hauled up by the old women, who laughed at his plight, he rejoined the dancing.

The women were incredibly beautiful, one in particular in her blue sari and gold jewellery smiling with the other women. Our eyes met and I smiled. She laughed and shyly hid herself beneath her sari.

The band was paid on a per-song basis. The men danced with ten-rupee notes in their hands, waving a circle over their fellow dancers’ heads, and then, when the music ended, gave the money to the bandleader, Ruzen, who ordered his band to whip up another song.

‘You must come with us to another wedding,’ he told me. ‘You are a good dancer.’

‘I can play the trumpet.’

‘Really?’ He took a trumpet from one of the band members, washed it with mineral water and presented it to me.

‘Play.’

The last time I had played the trumpet was when I was 14, so things were going to be interesting. I put the mouthpiece to my lips. The piece was smaller than what I was used to and, with cracked and sore lips, I found it difficult to get a good note. I tried playing ‘It’s Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ but it came out sounding more like a sacred cow being slaughtered. After a few attempts and more splutters, Ruzen swiped the trumpet from me.

‘Okay, okay.’ He whipped the trumpet back to its owner, who drowned the mouthpiece with water in case perhaps my bad playing was infectious.

I went off to the hospital, got a blood test and returned to the patio of my hotel to find Hannes and Hayley showing off wedding clothes –
their
wedding clothes. This wedding business in Udaipur had rubbed off on them. Hayley sashayed, proudly showing off her embroidered pink sari while Hannes stood awkwardly in his elegant pointed burgundy shoes and grey suit.

‘I asked him to marry me,’ said Hayley proudly. ‘He was like “Okay”. So, I rang my parents and he rang his, and we’re all meeting up in Delhi.’

‘Congratulations!’ I embraced them.

‘How was the malaria result?’ Hayley asked.

‘Negative.’

‘Wonderful! I’m so pleased for you.’ Hayley hugged me back.

And with that news, I left the next day for the blue city of Jodhpur via Ranakpur, known to have one of the most elaborate Jain Temples in the world.