Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (57 page)

That night a tremendous storm blows up, with sounds like cannon firing. There are pools of water on the floors, the garden is a lake, and the varnish on all the furniture is as sticky as toffee. Between nine and midnight I rival the storm by sweating a lake myself. Not just the sheets
but the mattress also is soaked right through, and I have to change beds. By morning I know the fever has broken.

I first thought of becoming a god as I was riding north from Madurai. The fever was gone. I felt more than just healthy, I was bursting with life and joy, floating as you do when you have put down a heavy load. Without exhaustion or discomfort to blunt my senses, without the distorting effect of fever, I saw myself to be in a paradise.

First there were the trees. The Neem, the Peepul, the Tamarind, countless others, stood at stately intervals alongside the roads and fields like giant witnesses from another age. By their presence they transform everything, framing the landscape, giving it depth, variety and freshness, making green-glowing caverns under the sun and casting pools of dappled shade where people and animals can feel at peace.

The ox's creamy hide is made to reflect this flickering light. Under a shade tree a pair of pale oxen passed, yoked to their rumbling cart. The oxen tossed their heads, brandishing their high crescent horns painted in red and blue bands and tipped with glittering brass. The slack, velvety hide beneath their throats rippled in the sun, and the image was printed on my memory for life. Only on
my
memory? So intense was the image, is still, that I could not believe it was meant only for me. I felt it burning into some larger consciousness than my own.

Small groups of women walked the roads carrying vast but apparently weightless burdens of fodder, produce, pottery or household furniture. The breeze swirled the hems of their saris into the classic mould of nymphs and goddesses. Wrapped in those gauzy layers of lime green and rose red, their bodies were so poised and supple that it was sometimes a shock to see close up the deep wrinkles and grey hair of age.

From the road I saw fields of grain and paddy. Women worked in lines, advancing across the mud, stooping and rising easily, brilliantly coloured against the green rice shoots. The men worked almost naked, with just a triangle of cloth between their long powerful thighs, black-skinned and gleaming. A team of oxen harnessed together and guided by one man was churning up a paddy field, flying round at a tremendous rate. Everywhere people moved briskly and with confidence. They and the land were part of each other and had shaped each other. The harmony was so complete that it seemed to promise utter tranquillity. As I rode through it I felt it reaching for me, as if I had only to stop and let myself slide into it, like a pebble into a lake.

I knew those Indians were most unlikely to share my vision. How could they, since they were in it? How could a fish describe water? And when I stopped the bike and stood idle by the roadside, it faded for me too under the remorseless glare of so-called reality. I would have to strip naked, go

hungry, live with the mosquitoes and the parasites in the paddy squelch and shed a large part of what I liked to call my personality. The very part of me that could envisage such a life would prevent me from living it. Did that make it an illusion?

Throughout the journey, as I rode through so many landscapes, passed through so many lives, forming impressions, holding them and developing them, had I just been wallowing in illusions? It seemed very extraordinary to me that, riding through South India, observing this life around me, I could at the same time summon up vivid mental images of Africans working with sisal and sugar cane, of Americans working among corn, cattle, bananas and oil palms, of Thais and Malays working with rice, sago and pineapples. I could create living pictures of people and places as remote from these Indians as they had once been from me. If my head could only be wired to a coloured print-out terminal, I could have trailed a blizzard of picture postcards from the four corners of the earth.

Just to be carrying the consciousness of so much at the same time seemed to me to be miraculous, as though I were observing the earth from some far-off point, Mount Olympus, perhaps, or a planet. Riding a motorcycle at thirty miles an hour on the road to Dundigal, among people deeply involved in manual skills, so close to the earth and each other and so different from me, I could imagine myself as a mythical being, a god in disguise that might pass their way only once in a lifetime.

Memories of Madras, of ashes and honey, gods and temples, were strong in me. In India it is quite plain that there is more to life than what the senses can perceive. I was thinking about my plan to meet Sai Baba, the holy man, wondering how it could happen.

'There is no cause to bother,' a devotee advised me. 'He will know. Just go there. He knows everything. If he wants to see you it will happen.'

Apparently he had a headquarters at a building called Whitelands, near Bangalore. At certain times of day he appeared before his followers. I would go there, but I would make no other attempt to get in touch with him. I had heard and read about his miracles, but I knew that such things could, in certain circumstances, be 'arranged'. It seemed very important not to go there expecting magic.

If he 'knows' then let him call me out. That will be miracle enough for me.

I smiled at the idea of it happening.

Just imagine that he does know, that he knows I am riding towards him now, still several days away but coming closer all the time, until finally I ride up to this Whitelands place and Sai Baba falls to his knees beside the motorcycle and says: 'My God. You have come at last.'

That was how the notion of being a god came to me originally. As a joke. After all, there were so many gods in India already, in such wild and wonderful guises, why not a god on a motorcycle?

The southern hills were a great surprise, rising to nearly nine thousand feet and demolishing my notion that India south of the Himalayas was a flat hot triangle. I rode up to Kodaikanal, the more southerly hill station where log fires roar in the grates at night as they did in the White Highlands of Kenya, and then over the Cardamon Hills to Cochin to enjoy the splendour of the West coast and the green tidiness of Kerala. Then up again to Ootacamund, which the British nicknamed 'Ooty'.

At the foot of the last big climb to Ooty were groves of Areca palms, quite improbably graceful and slender for their great height. It seemed incredible that they could support the weight of the men who clambered up them to reap the betel crop from below their feathery crowns, swinging from one to another like monkeys. There were monkeys too, silvery grey ones with long furry limbs. Halfway up the hill, I stopped to contemplate them, my head light with thought, recalling all the other times I had watched them in Africa, America, Malaysia and most recently at the rest house in Mannar, where I had played with one for hours.

They seemed so close to enlightenment, as though at any moment they might stumble over it and explode into consciousness. Their curiosity is extreme. They experiment with any unfamiliar object, a coin, a hat, a piece of paper, just as a human baby does, pulling it, rubbing it, sticking it in their ears, hitting it against other things. And nothing comes of it. To be so close, yet never to pierce the veil!

I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it, but always unable to make sense of it.

If I were a god, that is how I would view myself, I thought. At times I felt myself coming very close to that understanding, as though I might rise above myself and see, at last, what it was all about. The feelings that had begun to form in the Sudan, in the Karroo and the
Zoë
G
and at other times seemed to be coming to fruition in India. A latent power of perception was stirring in me.

I was astonished by my confidence with strangers. Often I was able to talk to them immediately, as though we had always known each other. For a long time I had been training myself to want nothing from others; to accept what was offered but to avoid expectation. I was far from proficient, but even the beginnings I had made were richly rewarding. I could feel that people appreciated my presence and even drew some strength from it, and in turn that feeling strengthened me. There were the beginnings of a growth of power and I was determined to pursue it.

The journey continued, as it always had, with this close interweaving of action and reflection. I ate, slept, cursed, smiled, rode, stopped for

petrol, argued, bargained, wrote, and took pictures. I made friends with some Germans, and some English, and some Indians. I learned about mushrooms, potatoes, cabbages, Golden Nematodes, Indian farmers and elephants.

The thread connecting these random events was The Journey. For me it had a separate meaning and existence, it was the warp on which the experiences of each successive day were laid. For three years I had been weaving one single tapestry. I could still recall where I had been and slept and what I had done on every single day of travelling since The Journey began. There was an intensity and a luminosity about my life during those years which sometimes shocked me. I wondered whether it might be beyond my capacity to hold so much experience in conscious awareness at one time, and I was seriously afraid that I would see the fabric of the tapestry begin to rot before I had finished it. I thought I might be guilty of some offence against nature for which I would be made to pay a terrible price. Was it improper for a mere human to attempt to comprehend the world in this way? For that was my intention. The circle I was describing round the earth might be erratic but the fact remained, it was a real circle. The ends would meet and it would enclose the earth. I would have laid my tracks round the surface of this globe and at the end it would belong to me, in a way that it could never belong to anyone else. I trembled a bit at the fates I might be tempting.

People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage, like single-handed yachting, missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world. The danger was death by exposure.

In India I was on the last and most significant leg, and during the long hours of solitary riding my brain shuttled back and forth, delving into the past for new connections and meanings, synthesizing, analyzing, fantasizing, refining and revising my ideas and observations. The pattern on the tapestry still eluded me, though it shimmered somewhere on the edge of recognition. What must I do to see it clearly? Must I, like Icarus, strap on wax wings and fly to the sun? Whatever it was, I felt ready to try, because I had finally to admit that I was in search of immortality.

The vital instrument of change is detachment and travelling alone was an immense advantage. At a time of change the two aspects of a person exist simultaneously; as with a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, you have the image of what you were and the image of what you are about to be, but those who know you well, see you only as you were. They are unwilling to recognize change. By their actions they try to draw you back into your familiar ways.

It would be hopeless to try to become a god among friends and relations, any more than a man can become a hero to his own valet. It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change. They are so obviously designed to compensate for mortality. The old gods never had any truck with them.

Kronos, the King of the ancient Greek gods, began his career by cutting off his father's penis with a sickle and tossing it into the ocean. He went on to swallow his own children to make sure they did not unseat him. Zeus, the son that got away, put his father in chains and had him guarded in exile by monsters. There are endless tales of betrayal, bloody vengeance and fearful dismemberment. Zeus, who became Jupiter in Roman times, adopted deceitful disguises and committed rape as a cuckoo, a swan and a bull, and he reigned over Olympus more by cunning than virtue.

The Indian gods seemed little different in their own behaviour but, reading the
Mahabarata,
I saw that in Indian mythology they became more closely involved with mankind than did the Greek gods. They allied themselves to various warring factions and offered advice. The best known example was when Lord Krishna became the warrior Arjuna's charioteer, drove him to battle, and encouraged him in words which have become known as the
Bhagavad Gita.

Arjuna, of course, was fighting for good against evil, but many good men had found themselves compromised and were on the wrong side. It sickened Arjuna to have to kill his own kith and kin, and he lost heart, thinking that it must be wrong to do so. What Krishna told him was that his primary duty lay in being true to what he was, a warrior, and not to be crippled by sentimental attachments to his family. There is an elemental brutality about this advice which I found as thrilling as it seemed cruel. When I read it, every line struck home, and I relived episodes of the journey vividly, recalling my own fears and confusions.

Heat, cold, pain, pleasure -

these spring from sensual contact, Arjuna.

They begin and they end.

They exist for the time being,

you must learn to put up with them.

The man whom these cannot distract,

the man who is steady in pain and pleasure,

is the man who achieves serenity.

The untrue never is,

the True never isn't.

The knowers of Truth know this.

And the Self that pervades all things is imperishable.

Nothing corrupts this imperishable self.

Lucky are soldiers who strive in a just war; for them it is an easy entrance into heaven.

Equate pain and pleasure, profit and loss, victory and defeat. And fight.

There is no blame this way.

There is no waste of half done work in this,

no inconsistent results.

An iota of this removes a world of fear.

In this there is only single-minded consistency;

while the efforts of confused people

are many branching and full of contradiction.

Your duty is to work, not to reap the fruits of work . . .

Wanting things breeds attachment,

from attachment springs covetousness,

and covetousness breeds anger.