Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (56 page)

From a distance he is no more than a black smudge on the pavement outside the Continental Hotel in Pondicherry. When it becomes apparent that this blob has a human head on it, my inclination is to hurry by, but two small boys prevent me, and reluctantly I am drawn towards it.

The head is about eighteen inches above the pavement, and is not nearly as handsome as the Churchill of Chingleput's, but at least it is a complete head, and it sits on shoulders. One shoulder is better developed than the other, and from it a single strong arm reaches up past the head to grasp a stick. Below the shoulders and under his shirt I can see the outline of an underdeveloped chest, which seems to be resting directly on the pavement. Whatever else is there is concealed by the shirt, but there is no room for anything much. It is utterly improbable that this person could exist at all. It seems to lack room for the most basic organs, just a head, shoulders and lungs hanging like a vine on a stick. But I must stop this callous clinical naming of parts, because he says: 'Good afternoon'.

I crouch down on the pavement, and we have a conversation in English. His English is limited but intelligible, and he speaks gently, with patience. He is forty years old. This alone I find incredible. With his withered arm he brings out some papers from beneath his shirt. Among them is an address book. He has friends everywhere. He corresponds with Europe and America. For some months he lived with some Germans in their rented rooms until their visas expired. There is an exchange of letters also with a wheelchair firm in Calcutta, and a scheme for sponsoring the construction of a special device to wheel him around.

From this almost non-existent being on a pavement in Pondicherry, a field of consciousness reaches out around the globe. As far as I know he is not a great painter or poet or musician, though it would be wonderful if he were, but his accomplishment is much greater than that. Against all the odds, he has refused to disappear.

I'm riding awkwardly through a thicket of experience, still shaky from the flight to Europe. After three years on the move I can't mend my fences so fast. I hover between confidence and a sense of great loss, trying to understand the meaning of what has happened. My first days in Madras should have been the beginning of a final and marvellous chapter in India, full of discovery, significance and spiritual satisfaction. That is how I would have written it, but I have lost the strength to sustain the illusion and reality has tripped me up.

Had I really been on a long flight from reality, trying to give meaning to something that was meaningless? Was it all just an escape that I had been trying to turn into a legend? I was teetering on a knife edge between faith and despair. Was the purpose of that return to Europe just to show me that there was no purpose? I arrived there full of wisdom, but nothing I had seen or done or thought seemed to be relevant. I passed through

pubs, offices, restaurants, supermarkets, stifled by the boredom of it, but with nothing useful to say to anyone. I felt the failure was mine, that if I had properly understood my experience in Africa, America, Asia, I should be able to apply it to people in trouble with the cost of living or career bottlenecks or sheer boredom. Some of them even asked me, thinking I should know, but my answers seemed to offer no solution. My advice always boiled down to the same thing. Don't solve the problem, just give it up.

They always assumed I was advising them to move to some tropical paradise. I saw the disillusion growing in their eyes.

'Well, frankly old boy we'd love to but, with the boys just in school and the property market being what it is . . .'

In Pondicherry I spend a day drinking hot tea and sweating, to get rid of a fever. Then some days at Auroville, a city of the future that exists in the dreams of a scattered band of people, mostly Europeans and Americans, living on a great sandy site near the coast. Where else in the world could there be so much clarity amidst confusion, so much love amidst hostility, so much beauty in squalor, so much faith against all the evidence? The pioneers of Auroville are at war with their governing
ashram
in Pondicherry. Among themselves they hold wildly different views about how the dream of their guiding spirit, Mother Aurobindo, should be carried out. There are some French people living as though on a luxury holiday in St. Tropez, Australians farming like aboriginals in loincloths on a diet of fermented finger millet, a Mexican running a market garden on the lines of a Jesuit Mission in Latin America, others living more or less orthodox lives in other corners of this vast estate. Yet I feel the cohesion in all this diversity, and it is symbolized by a huge, raw, ferro-concrete skeleton, unfinished and hungry for labour, hand-built on the scale of a modern construction project, which one day, God willing, will become a shimmering sixty-foot globe enshrining the aspirations of them all. Meanwhile it is a demanding and practically useless burden without which, I feel, the whole place will fall apart.

I am more at home in the temples now, less encumbered, and at Thanjavur I find the one that sends my spirit soaring. It has a perfect form, as classical as the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and should be called the Drawing Room of India. My self-appointed guide is called Ravi. He is fourteen and very sharp. He claims that being a guide is his hobby, and plays a neat trick on me by not taking anything, and so keeping my suspicions alive all afternoon.

Later a literature student called Gopal catches me, like a fish, in a quiet backwater of Thanjavur where I'm eating a curry. By thrashing the water all around me, he manages to guide me to his home where his friends come, one after another, to see what he has brought.

He is in a fever of excitement about having hooked a writer, and is determined that I must at least be Solzhenitsyn, if not Shakespeare. When the expected fountain of wisdom fails to spurt from my lips, his disappointment is manifest.

'Does it not bother you that you have not made your name?' he asks in a hectoring manner.

'Would you know if I had?' I ask, since he does not yet know my name.

T would certainly know if you were an important journalist or writer, for I am reading always anything I can get my hands on. What about Ireland? Are the British being fair to Irish Catholics? What about the Israeli hi-jack? What about this inflation?'

Sitting on a bare iron bedframe in a cell-like room facing my inquisitor, I find I have not a single useful opinion in my head. I have read none of the books he mentions, know next to nothing about the authors he considers great. It is very dispiriting. He does not seem to want to talk about things, only to name names and list subjects and titles. Eventually I counter attack with a short lecture on empiricism. It is extremely feeble, but his waspishness melts under a single hot breath. Now he wants me for a godfather. I am to introduce his work to publishers in London, offer criticism and enlightenment, foster his career. With great difficulty I manage to disentangle myself without actually telling a lie.

How could I resent such opportunism, though. In this tide of humanity, where an economics degree might just get you a job on a bus, it's not good enough to open the door to opportunity. You must lasso it on the doormat.

On to Teruchchirapalli, Dundigal, Madurai and Rameswaram. The humidity is so great that every time I put my hand in my pocket I pull the lining out with it. The soil is arid, and turns to sand. Goats nibble every struggling blade of grass. Under a clear sky I hear a shower of rain and look behind me, but it is the pattern of goat hooves on asphalt. Strange. Reminds me of the time when I was camped by the roadside in Brazil and thought I heard cartwheels approaching over the travel. I turned to see a bush fire advancing to consume me.

The fever has returned, mild but bothersome, usually in the afternoon. It has the effect of shaking my mind loose from my body, so that the meaning of things is out of focus. I hope it will go away of its own accord.

The ferry to Sri Lanka crosses from Rameswaram to Talimannar. The distance is twenty-five miles. I board it at ten in the morning and get off just after midnight. It may be the world's slowest boat. The same people keep turning up on this trail south, and they are on the ferry. The four

Hari Krishna disciples are on my left, and one of them is dinging his tiny cymbals in my ear. A wild and nervous Australian 'bushie' is here too. I am reading and have my helmet on the chair next to me. I'm reading because I feel sticky and sick, and I am desperately anxious to put my mind somewhere else just now, but the Australian is desperate to talk.

'Are you tired of answering the same questions?' he asked.

'Yes,' I say, firmly, without looking up.

He perches on the bench opposite me, and stares fixedly to sea. I know he's uncomfortable, and so am I. At last I move my helmet and he sits beside me. He's trying not to talk, but he's like a kettle on the boil, and he can't help it.

'Would you like to hear some Communism?' he says.

The sound of cymbals in one ear and Communism in the other is too much. That is probably what started the backache, agitating a muscle at the bottom of my spine that goes berserk once or twice a year, at inconvenient moments. Riding the bike I hardly feel it, but when I get off the bike it hurts like hell.

At 8.30 we touch against a jetty, in the darkness, but unaccountably the boat sails off again. At ten we return, only to sail away again and return on the other side.

For this twenty-five mile ferry ride I have to undergo all the formalities of an ocean crossing: a bill of lading, a handling charge, a port charge, and a six rupee charge to maintain the floating wharf under the wear and tear of my motorcycle. The paper work is voluminous and infuriating at each end, and I am not dealing with it well. I should consider myself fortunate to get away at midnight. The hordes of Indian passengers, I later hear, don't get ashore until 4 a.m.

For ten days I ride around the island, appreciating the calm of it. The pressure is off here; the people don't swarm in the same way. It's like a dropped-out version of India. I have come as a rain maker. For two years they have had drought. The great reservoirs they call 'tanks' are nearly dry. They need water very badly, and on my first day there the monsoon begins. I can find it in my heart to be very glad for them, but it complicates my life, because it keeps me moving when I would rather lie still. I meet many lovely people, see many beautiful things, but all against a backdrop of ache and fever. While the backache improves, the fever gets worse, and as it fluctuates I get two quite separate images of the tropics. In the morning, clear-sighted and with a clean brain, I see everything in bright and rapturous growth. The wet jungle smells fresh and exciting; the jungle birds leave notes of unbearable beauty hanging on the air; the world bursts with new forms and colours, and the people seem wisely content to accept what nature offers and not worry about shortages and bureaucracy and their political future. Later, as the heat accumulates, and
the humidity thickens, as I get tired and the fever comes to dislocate my senses, I see the other side of the tropics. I see squalor and decay, smell the stench of corruption everywhere, feel the blind force of the jungle reaching out to swallow me, and the people seem morose, pathetic, sinking ever deeper into a putrefying slum.

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.