Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (61 page)

But I had other deeper fears, though I could not describe them. I was in an advanced state of rootlessness and it was becoming plain to me that these were not just words, but a real condition that threatened to break me down unless I found some stability and peace soon. Meanwhile, just being on the move towards Europe alleviated it.

On 5 May, with 26,300 miles on the clock since LA, I left New Delhi. I shot up the trunk road to Amritsar like an arrow from a bow, and had three narrow escapes with buses before I was able to cool down sufficiently to ride with my usual caution. In retrospect those seemed like the most dangerous miles of the journey.

The urge to move westward was irresistible. I had to keep going. I had seen and done more than enough.

The Pakistan border was open. I rode in a normal convoy of cars to Lahore. This great and populous city was entirely devoid of people, a quite remarkable sight. The curfew was almost round the clock, and stringently enforced. Armed soldiers patrolled every street corner. Otherwise the only life I saw was a herd of dairy buffalo making their own way with leisurely condescension down the middle of the broad and empty avenue.

There was no reason to stay, for I would only have been incarcerated in an expensive hotel, and I set off alone for Rawalpindi. In less than two hours I arrived at the Jhelum River. Outside Lahore the atmosphere was much lighter, and already I was experiencing a relief from India. I had stopped briefly to drink some tea, and was struck immediately by the humour of the people around me. They made jokes that I could laugh at. How long was it since I had heard a joke?

The Jhelum Bridge is a toll bridge. As I stopped at the booth a voice called to me.

'Sir. Sir. Please. Come and rest. Have a cup of tea.'

I saw a man at the roadside looking at me with a cheerful smile. He wore the pale grey pyjama suit of Northern Pakistan, long tunic with tails over trousers that ballooned out and came in sharply at the ankles. His face
w
^a
s
weathered and creased with lines of mischief at the eyes and mouth.

His family had paid for the franchise on the tool bridge. They lived in quarters on the river bank, all male, brother and cousins, and were Pathans from the Kohat region not far from the Khyber Pass.

Hamid was the eldest of them, and therefore honoured, though he was otherwise the least qualified. He told me that he liked to offer comfort to foreign travellers, and he set about comforting me with a will. He gave me tea, heated water for my bath, laid out my bed and bedding, gave me supper and treated me to a hundred courtesies which, in the context of my journey, were great luxuries. All the while he entertained me with fragments of wit and wisdom garnered from all corners of human life. He quoted Freud and Einstein and Shaw, and spoke himself with such impish eloquence that I could close my eyes and imagine I was with an Irishman. He even said 'Sorr'.

'Now tell me, Sorr, about the inert gases. I mean what is the use of them. Do they lead us anywhere at all? And where would you say God is in all this?'

I said I thought God may well have been a nineteenth-century chemist.

'Yes, Sorr, well maybe now he is a psychologist. That would be my choice if I were capable. It was a great misfortune for me, Sorr, that in my childhood I was hit many times on the head. It has damaged my brain. I am unable to remember the first five years of my life.'

He produced a copy of
The Psychologist
for May 1952, a faded tomato-red pamphlet, and wrote his name '
hamid, abdul
, Kohati' on the cover, above the words: 'The Way to Get to the Root of your Worries'.

'Please keep this, Sorr, as a remembrance. I get it every month. I also study homeopathy and natural medicine. Would you not say, Sorr, that modern medicines are very dangerous?'

He showed me plants and herbs along the river bank, including the castor oil seed which I had not noticed before, and offered to massage my arms and legs before going to bed.

The beds were set out on the hillside, charpoys and quilts. I had put my mosquito net up, but the enemy was already within. Before I could get to sleep, my waist was a mass of fiery blisters. Hamid was equal to the situation. Instead of wasting time on apologies and mortification, he fetched kerosene to soothe the bites and deter the creatures. He insisted on changing beds because he said he was impervious to bed bugs, and I fetched out my own sleeping bag. He sailed through this contretemps with an aplomb that is the hallmark of ultimate hospitality in my opinion. No fuss, no embarrassment, a minor problem solved and forgotten. He lay under the mosquito net, a fine green nylon mesh made in the USA. Before I went to sleep I heard him ask: 'Where did you get this mosquito net, Sorr?'

I told him it came from San Francisco, and waited for the next, inevitable question.

'It is very marvellous,' he whispered, almost to himself. T have never seen the moon in so many colours.'

The dreaded question, the one I had become so resigned to for so long, never came. He did not ask me what it cost. Happily, I closed my eyes. Goodbye India.

Every day I climbed higher towards the mountains, leaving the multitudes of India behind me. I had the impression of rising above a great bowl teeming with life, a vast and vaporous swamp of fecundity. Up here in the colder air the crowd thinned and resolved itself into individuals, aloof from each other, cherishing their apartness.

I had no idea how far I had adjusted myself to the press of people in India and the
absence of
privacy. Suddenly I felt space opening all around me and I was afraid of exploding into a vacuum, like a diver in decompression. The feeling became even more intense as I rode on through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. In Kabul I felt I had to stop for a few days until I had regained control of myself. I was in a sort of dizzy rapture and afraid it could lead to an accident.

I hung around the curio shops dickering with samovar salesmen, amazed at their toughness in bargaining. My greatest indulgence was to buy a loaf of real bread, half a pound of cold imported butter, a large lump of cheese and a bottle of Italian wine made in Afghanistan. With these I retired to my hotel room, recently infested with bed bugs now lying dead on their backs all around the floor, and consumed all my purchases in an orgiastic fantasy.

Only six thousand miles to home.

The road ran on through a thousand miles of barren and severe waste, Kandahar, Herat, and into Iran. My thoughts turned in on themselves more and more. I was so close to the end now. What had I to show for four years of my life? What was it all about?

As my mind scratched restlessly back over the journey, my dismay turned to panic. I really didn't seem to know anything anymore.

I remembered a snatch of conversation from the hotel at Kassala, when I came out of the Atbara desert on the way to Gondar. How strong I was feeling then.

A chemistry teacher happened to be sharing my dormitory. 'What are you doing this long journey for?' the teacher asked me. 'To find out,' I answered, weary of my usual long-winded explanations.

'But what is it you wish to find out?' he persisted. 'Why I am doing it.'

It was a frivolous reply, but I was so free and easy about it then, with most of it still ahead of me.

Now, running for home across this bleak land, I had to face the same question.

Did I find out, after all, why I was doing it?

It seemed to me that there were times during those four years when I did know, and those were the times when The Journey needed no justification.

Then I needed no better reason for the journey than to be exactly where I was, knowing what I knew. Those were the times when I felt full of natural wisdom, scratching at heaven's very door.

The days of Jupiter.

What had become of him since? Where was all that wonderful assurance and enlightenment now? As I moved mechanically through the landscape, undeviating, incurious, hugging my last reserves of energy, I felt bereft and ignorant, cast down to the depths, no more than 'a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.'

Scuttling towards home. I called it home. I told myself: 'Just another five thousand miles to home. In only three weeks you can be there.'

I was drawn, as if by a magnet, past glittering mosques, perfumed bazaars, mountain eyries and troglodytic retreats, all the ages and splendours of civilization, hardly willing even to turn my head. In my mind's eye the same picture flashed again and again. A Mediterranean avenue, and myself on the Triumph riding up it, with the sun flicking between the trunks of the plane trees, towards my home. I played it over and over like a clip from an old black and white film, 'My Home-coming'.

It was an illusion, and I knew it. There was a house there still, of course, that was mine, but it would never again mean to me what it once had. How many times I had renounced it already! Only a year before I was sure I would return to California and Carol. Now I was besotted by a nostalgic memory more than four years old. All the fine freedom I had known since had evaporated. All the brilliant and unrepeatable experience of four years was as lifeless as ashes. I was burned out, and I could think only of getting to my little stone castle and slamming the door.

Rage could still kindle a fire of sorts, as I accused myself of stupidity, betrayal, waste, weakness, every failing under the sun.

How could I have let it go? How could I have let it shrivel away like this? The whole thing was preposterous and frightening. I must have something to say after four years and sixty thousand miles, after all I had seen and done in forty countries.

'Excuse me, Mr. Simon, but can you tell me please what message you will be carrying back to your country when you return?'

I did not have a message, I seemed to have lost it on the way.

'But surely, Mr. Simon, you have learned something. What about death, for example?'

Yes. True. I did learn something after all.

It was at the end of my two weeks at Boddhgaya that I packed a small bag, hired a rickshaw to Gaya and took a train to Benares. I stayed there only one full day and towards the end of that day I shared a small boat with a New Zealander and floated on the Ganges, as everyone does, down to the
ghats
where the bodies are burned.

As we approached the
ghats,
going upstream, an unburned corpse drifted slowly past us. I did not, at first, recognize it for what it was. It lay back in the water as though in a very deep, soft armchair, with only the knees, toes, arms and head above water. A crow was perched on its forehead, pecking.

Nobody in normal times could be indifferent to the sight of a dead human body. I certainly was not, and to see it being ripped into by a bird was even more shocking. Yet the shock lasted hardly a second. I had been preparing for this sight a long time, and Benares itself gave my conditioning a last powerful shove.

What was there to be shocked by? Nothing could suggest greater peace or purity than the Ganges. To watch that broad expanse of shining water, so massive and unruffled in the evening light, is like watching life itself slide past. No Indian could wish a better fate on the poor clay of his body than that it should float away on this river. Was I going to be shocked then by considerations of hygiene? Hardly, knowing what is pumped regularly, if invisibly, into the world's rivers.

Was it the bird then? But why should a bird be harder to contemplate than a worm? So it must have been that I simply didn't like being reminded of death.

In time, that body floating down the river was transformed for me into an image of great beauty and simplicity. It allowed me to think more calmly about the prospect of death. Unless I could do that, I thought, how could I possibly hope to appreciate without fear the pleasures of being alive.

'Thank you, Mr. Simon, but what about God? It is reported that at one time you imagined yourself to be God. Do you not consider that to be rather blasphemous?'

No. I do think it is possible to be God for brief moments. I am certainly not God now.

'But surely, in your country, most people believe there is only one God?'

I think God is the composite creation of large numbers of people being good for a moment - the way football fans keep a steady glow going in a stadium because there is always someone lighting a match. If people stopped being good altogether, God would vanish.

'This is all rather airy-fairy, isn't it. Don't you have anything more specific to tell people?'

I could tell them to refuse to be afraid, and to try always to do what is right. It comes with practice. We are gifted a compass in our hearts which will guide us to all success in life. ,

'Mr. Simon, after your many experiences people will certainly want something more concrete and pertinent to the world we live in. What can you suggest?'

They can always leave a tip for the starving millions on their way out.

The eastern border of Turkey was the halfway mark. Only three and a half thousand miles to go. So far it had been easy. The worst I had had to face had been an oil leak in Afghanistan and some filthy weather by the Caspian Sea. I had steered my way safely between all the wrecked tankers and trucks littering the side of the highway and, so far, had successfully outwitted the fate prophesied for me.

The entrance to Turkey was a yellow stucco gateway, built presumably for horse-drawn traffic. In this wasteland between Turkey and Iran, it stood as a romantic relic of the Ottoman Empire, comprehensively stuck in an age of bound ledgers entered by hand with scratchy nibs. Waiting to go past was a mile-long queue of forty-ton TIR trucks, parked two abreast in the hot sun. The drivers, mostly Hungarians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Englishmen and Scandinavians, were out sunning themselves in singlets and shorts, and playing interminable games of cards. They expected to be there for two days or more, but private traffic passed through quite quickly and easily.