Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (60 page)

I could not get a grasp of Calcutta. It seemed to elude me. Only afterwards did I wonder whether perhaps I had been misled by its reputation into expecting something else. I visited that kindest of institutions, the Home for the Destitute and Dying set up by Mother Theresa, but far from finding it shocking, I thought it was a good deal more pleasant and better ordered than an average Indian railway platform. I dragged myself out across the awful Howrah bridge into various poor areas, but saw nothing that was conspicuously worse than what I was already accustomed to.

I was not overcome by grisly sights or intolerable smells. Nobody fell dead at my feet. When I came to read
Freedom at Midnight
and other dramatic Western accounts of Indian life, with their constant emphasis on reek and stench and teeming masses, death, disease and subhuman squalor, I was outraged by the careless assumption that only the Western nose and eye can judge what is fit for humans.

Several times on my way through India I had asked to be taken to the worst slum, expecting the worst. Each time, as I entered among the colony of makeshift shacks I could see only individual families doing what they could with what they had, and I became absorbed in the detail of their lives. It was a shock to recall that, thirty years before, I had visited families in London in a North Kensington slum area whose circumstances had certainly been much worse, for they had to cope in addition with cold winters and living in underground basements.

But at the time, in Calcutta, my spirits being somewhat deflated, I assumed my own judgement was at fault in not appreciating the epic quality of Calcutta's miseries, and I decided to get out.

The route I had planned took me back one more time to the Bay of Bengal at Puri and at Konarak. Powerful winds were blowing in from the bay, and a thin veil of sand particles hovered over the long beaches to give the light an unearthly feeling. Through this eerie brightness, I gazed at abandoned summer villas half buried in dunes, turreted and crenellated, pastel-coloured Indian Gothic remains, seemingly untouched for decades and in terminal decay, except that being in India it would not have surprised me to see the family resume occupancy at any time.

I fought brief battles with enormous waves, gazed at mildly erotic carvings and slept a lot, gathering strength for the last curl in my spiral course through India. I was deeply conscious of the fact that from here on I would be heading directly towards Europe, but first I had to cross to Nagpur, at the geographical centre of India. These fifteen hundred miles from Puri to Delhi worried me. Already on my way from Calcutta I had felt the heat in the air, greater than I had imagined possible for April. In the heart of India, on the Deccan plain, it would be hotter still, much hotter.

Shortly after I set out the chain broke, a unique event in my experience. It was nothing like the disaster I had always anticipated. No damage was done. Anyway, it had broken on the joining link which was easily replaced, but it drew my attention again to the state of the rear sprocket:

All the teeth were badly blunted, worn down, as it were, almost to the gums, and some were broken off altogether. Now I had something to worry about. Sprocketlessness, like scurvy, sounds funny, but it advanced stages can prove fatal. As I repaired the chain I recalled the two accidents I had been promised and added them to my anxieties. Soon after, the heat became unbearable. It struck me as though from a blast furnace, and for the first time I found that the faster I rode, the hotter I got.

I took refuge in a roadside tea house, and ate portions of curried peas and spinach and dal from chipped enamel plates, scooping it up with puri and chapati. It was after four in the afternoon before the heat wavered and dipped. I had never travelled by night before. It had seemed pointless and dangerous, but now I realized that there was no other way, and I started with very real misgivings.

The unfamiliarity was frightening at first. I had never liked to put faith in road surfaces, and here it was unavoidable. One could not hope to pick up every pot hole in such poor light. There were many big trucks moving at night, and they were as unpredictable at night as by day. In addition the roads were all under reconstruction. For hundreds of miles they were regularly interrupted by culvert constructions to channel flood water, and temporary diversions dived off into the sand and stone of the surrounding countryside. It seemed to me that all this, combined with an almost bald front tyre and a worn chain on a toothless sprocket, must conspire to produce an accident somewhere.

Perhaps the clairvoyant saved me. I was damned if I was going to
fulfil
his prophecy so quickly. As the hours passed I grew more adept at recognizing hazards, and began to feel more confident. I was surprised to find I had covered more than three hundred miles in the first leg, and the night journey developed into a relaxed and interesting experience.

Life in the towns and villages continued far into the night, and I came out of the dark flat scrubland into brilliant city streets or bustling village corners.

On the first day I found a room in the Inspection Bungalow at Pithora. The other room was occupied by a CARE official. He said he was a doctor helping the Government of Maharashtra to set up a nutrition programme, and was himself a sleekly obese advertisement for nutrition.

'You are from?' he said.

'You mean now,' I asked, 'or originally?'

'No, no,' he said, irritably. 'You are
from?'

After that he seemed to lose interest. I went to the back to cook breakfast and found that a crow had broken and eaten one of my eggs. I slept through the afternoon, and left at dusk, making a detour through Bagbhara to get petrol. At Ghorari I stopped at a
chai
shop for tea and curry.

'So, how do you like my India?' inquired my neighbour, a retired tax inspector with a wizened face and a patronizing manner. I tried to give some kind of answer to his question, but it was neither expected nor wanted.

'You will not be able to understand,' he said with smug certainty, 'it will take you too long.

'In the course of my duties,' he went on, 'I also have been travelling. I have been to Australia. There are minor differences of custom naturally, but otherwise I would say we are the same. Yes, Indians and Australians are the same.'

It was an astonishing suggestion.

'You must have been in Australia a long time to have known them so well,' I said, but of course he did not hear me.

At the
pan
stall next door I tried to buy cigarettes, but there was nobody to serve me. I lingered a bit and then asked my new-found mentor whether I might leave the money and take a packet. He threw up his hands.

'Oh, no, good gentleman,' he said. 'This is India.'

I rode on to Raipur and found cigarettes at a shop outside a hotel. While there I thought I might as well use the lavatory. The cubicle was already occupied by a man aiming a jet of urine into the bowl. He had left the door open and he looked up as I approached.

T am making water,' he told me solemnly. 'You wish to do so?'

The whole of India suddenly struck me as wildly funny, and I went on laughing most of the way to Nagpur.

The following evening at Jabalpur I met another Indian who had been to Australia. I had no idea so many Indians had gone there. He was a prosperous-looking fellow riding a scooter the way a merchant banker might sometimes bicycle to the City. We had a beer together in an Indian honky-tonk behind a Wine Store. He was very nostalgic about Australia, and had just bought a farm, 'just as a hobby to remind me'.

T am going to train monkeys to shoo off the neighbour's cattle,' he told me. 'Well, why not? If dogs, why not monkeys?'

My surprise must have shown on my face.

Eventually I came to Agra by way of Khajurao. The Taj Mahal was entirely worth visiting despite its reputation, and even more worth listening too. The sighs of a million spirits drifted down inside from the echoing dome.

I watched young Indian couples come in, noisily alive, wanting to make their mark on this sacred cow of architecture. If they could have carved their names into the marble, they would have had the building in shreds very quickly. Instead they flung their voices at the ceiling, young men drunk with power, young women drunk with hope, wanting that

moment of immortality when the Taj would speak with
their
voice. But no sooner was the voice launched, than everything that was sharp, personal and assertive in it was lost, and it became a mournful ghost to mingle for ever with the grey legions above.

I walked around the grounds, talked to some stonemasons and watched their deft work on the big red slabs of stone they were decorating. In the arcade outside, after three and a half years of thinking about it, I bought a pair of sandals that I could actually wear, and walked in them to see the fort.

But the fort was closed to the public and surrounded by army.

'A hundred and twenty ministers from foreign countries are visiting,' an officer told me. I walked on letting my annoyance dissolve in the melting pot of the bazaar, among ox carts, horse carts, cabs, hand barrows, cycles and rickshaws. Knowing that I would not be a part of this confusion for much longer, I sat on a box in an open store with a bottle of lemonade and watched the street. The bottle had a pinched neck and a glass marble as a valve, a brilliant device, almost forgotten since my childhood. Indian life flowed past me, a feast of colour and detail, wonderful in the sheer breadth of the spectrum of human circumstance that is paraded there.

I walked on up the hill in the throng of vehicles and pedestrians. A portion of noise slightly louder than the rest made me turn, and I saw a horse cab coming up the rise.

The horse was a powerful white beast, full of nervous energy, thrashing in the shafts and tossing its head. The driver, too, was young and flushed with energy and excitement, urging the animal up the hill, a young Muslim in robe and turban, sleeves swept back, rising up and reaching forward with his whip, eyes glowing with pride. The cab was heavily loaded with passengers and sacks of grain, all Muslims in turban and robe.

The components of the tragedy came together before my eyes. The cab was going too fast, the horse was too wild. I saw three tiny girls, scarcely knee-high, though they were graded one, two, three, a few inches apart, perhaps sisters separated by a year, all identically dressed as miniature mothers in angle-length red dresses, voluminously pleated from the waist with machine embroidered bodices, cheap dresses for they were clearly poor girls and barefooted, but happily clutching each other and chattering madly together as they darted across the road among the legs of the crowd, a few feet from where I had stood and turned. The crowd parted, swiftly, to reveal the horse they had not heard and they fell in a single bundle, as though their dresses were stitched together, one, two, three, and I watched the wheel of the heavy cab rise slowly over their bodies.

The moment froze. The big wooden-spoked, iron-tyred wheel bore down. Then time flowed on and the wheel slipped back to the ground. Men started forward to rescue the girls. The driver stumbled to the ground and horror overwhelmed him. He clasped his hands and fell to his knees and raised his arms and face to the sky shouting for mercy. His passengers slipped quietly from the cab, pressed a few coins on the driver and discreetly disappeared, no expression visible on their faces.

Two of the girls, miraculously, were able to stand. The third, the smallest of them, lay in a shopkeeper's arms. Bright blood appeared at her lips. He passed the child to a boy of fifteen or so, and gave him some instruction. The boy just stood and grinned awkwardly as though embarrassed. The man shouted and pushed the boy, and the boy turned reluctantly and walked up the street carrying his unwanted bundle.

He had not very far to go. I saw him turn in to a doorway marked 'Dipty X-ray Clinic'. A man came out again a few moments later, carrying the girl, and got astride the pillion of a scooter, which another man drove away.

The incident had an effect on me far beyond the merely shocking. There was also something very familiar about the wheel crushing those small bodies, as though it were an ever-recurring theme of life, an accident that was
made
to happen, that had
already
happened countless times over many thousands of years. I even felt as though I had seen it myself often before.

For a few minutes I thought of finding out where they had gone and following them; of learning everything there was to know about those three girls and their family. Then I sighed at the impossibility of it, and walked on.

Although the Triumph behaved faultlessly all the way to Delhi, I knew that there was no question of riding much further without a new sprocket. I had long ago written to England about it, and expected to find a new one waiting for me at the Lucas depot. It was a great disappointment to find nothing there.

For all their charm and helpfulness, the Lucas people could not
conjure
up a sprocket out of thin air, and as I sat it out, waiting for packages that did not arrive, sitting by telephones that did not ring, I fought a losing battle with my own exhaustion. I had counted heavily on being able to get out of New Delhi and on my way in a few days, before the heat came down, before I lost the momentum I had built up.

The days stretched into weeks, and I became bogged down in delays and absurd misunderstandings. Many good things happened to me

while I was there, but eventually they were all lost under the crushing weight of frustration. In the muggy heat of a Delhi summer I began to feel India closing in on me, and I fought furiously to escape from its cloying embrace. Indian friends indulged my antics as if they were the tantrums of a spoilt child.

When the sprocket finally
arrived
at New Delhi airport, I had been waiting four weeks. Nervously I sweated my way through the hours of rigmarole at customs, where I was already well known. After their own fashion they were kind to me. The sprocket passed into my hands the same day, and I paid neither tax nor bribe nor fee. When I got it, I had only one ambition: to make a bolt for the border, and home.

My fear of being trapped in India was not entirely fanciful. There was news of great upheavals in Pakistan and with the overthrow of Bhutto's government, martial law was declared. There were curfews and riots, and I feared that the border might be closed at any time. All overland routes to Europe go across Pakistan.