Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (11 page)

I took the bus.

I know, I know.

And as punishment, getting to Pushkar was hellish. It wasn’t just the overnight bus ride through Pokaran – contaminated, no doubt, by radioactive killer dust, me trying not to breathe when the bus stopped there – but having to cycle over a sizeable mountain at three in the morning when the bus terminated at Ajmer – 15 kilometres short of Pushkar.

My headlamp barely shone the way as I pedalled on a flat road before beginning an ascent with dogs upon me, barking and biting at my bags. Two shot up ahead then veered me into the hard shoulder. I swerved just in time, avoiding a deep pothole but colliding with the leader’s tail, causing it to give a startled yelp. I made off into the night, the rear pannier nipped at by a determined straggler. I could taste an exhausted rawness in my throat and sweat trickling off my helmet.

But my troubles weren’t over: four more dog attacks followed before I reached Pushkar. During one, when I was surrounded by the sound of barks somewhere in the darkness, I picked up some rocks and began throwing them wildly around, sparking off the bitumen. Just when I had scared the dogs away, I went to get back on the bike and lost my balance and went over, falling hard on the road. It was the dogs’ perfect moment to surround me and bark inches away from my face.

As if the journey to Pushkar were not bad enough, the fever turned up, hitching a ride from Jaisalmer with a bounty on my health, no doubt. When I went in search of a doctor, a Brahmin priest was suddenly by my side thrusting a flower into my hand. He didn’t look like a priest of any sort – well, not in that Catholic kind of way. He wore normal clothes, and the only thing that gave him any sense of spiritual legitimacy was a sandalwood marking daubed in the middle of his forehead.

‘Come down to the water and make
puja
. Many good things for you.’

I don’t believe in a god, but I had tried everything else to get rid of this fever – medication, Ayurvedic herbs, my own urine – so why not a prayer? If divine intervention was going to … well, intervene, then I was willing to be the most religious zealot you had ever set eyes on.

The priest led me down to the steps towards Pushkar Lake, past an archway filled with langur monkeys lazing in the sun like clothes hung out to dry. The lake was so small that it should have been called Pushkar Pond and once so infested with crocodiles that Brahmin priests had been known to knock a few on the head with a stick while they went through the morning rituals. Under British rule, the army had had the crocodiles moved rather than shot, to respect local sensibilities.

‘Many good things for you, sir,’ the priest said, then smiled like one of the evicted crocodiles, ‘if you give donation for
puja
.’

Ah, there was always a cost for one’s faith.

‘How much?’

‘Two thousand rupees only.’

I scoffed.

‘Many good things for you, more like it,’ I said and moved to go, but he grabbed my arm, firmly.

‘How much you want to give?’

‘I am not Brahmin. I am just looking.’

‘Does not matter. We are same, same. Eyes, legs, arms, mouth. We are same under God.’

‘That’s an interesting theological point, but I’m going now.’

He grabbed me again.

‘One thousand rupees!’

‘No!’

‘But this is great blessing for you. Good karma.’ He cut me off, moving up the steps towards my hiking shoes, which I had been urged to take off and was now quite worried about.

‘Okay, how much you want to pay?’

‘Let’s see … nothing.’

‘Nothing is no good for Brahmin. Many people give to me for blessing.’

‘That’s because they don’t know about charlatan Brahmin priests.’

I ducked passed him, then managed to get to my boots and started lacing them up.

‘You are not good man. You come here and disgrace my sacred water.’

I looked at the sacred water – a stagnant pool of grubbiness.

‘Okay, 500 only,’ he said.

I got up and started walking up the stairs.

‘Okay, okay, 250!’ He grabbed the back of my shirt and this time I snapped his hand away, hard.

‘Leave me alone!’

This enraged him.

‘You,
chelo
! (go!) You … you … European!’

I escaped up the broad marble stairs. Strangely, the altercation with the Brahmin priest made me feel better.

Unable to find a doctor, I browsed through a bookshop looking for anything on malaria but instead nearly bought a Hindi phrasebook. I ‘nearly’ did because I was unsure how useful it would be to ask, ‘Will I need to wear a wool jacket tomorrow?’ or ‘Have you cleaned your musket?’ or ‘Order your sepoy to dig me a mine’.

But the fever flushed through me again and I headed to an Internet café. When I opened my email account, I received a shock – there were over 30 messages. I opened one from my sister:

What was going on? Why so many emails? Finally, I found out:

Alan! Goddamn it! What was he doing scaring everyone? All I said was that the fevers had returned (in retrospect, this was actually cause for alarm though I didn’t see it at the time).

I spent half the day sending off emails to everyone that I was fine. Bec, of course, went nuts, so I called her and promised that I would go to New Delhi immediately.

Thus, I found myself on the Shabti Express to New Delhi to see a ‘real doctor’, a doctor recommended by my travel insurance company and who would cost me two hundred times the going rate for a blood test that would reveal nothing. Dr Singh reassured me that I did not have malaria, and that if I did then I really didn’t.

Yes, I was confused too.

‘Then, why do I keep getting the fevers?’ I asked Dr Singh.

He sat back in his leather chair, hands behind his turban, and lorded his 30 years of Western medical advice: ‘I don’t know.’

I liked Delhi, or, rather, Central New Delhi, as soon as I arrived. Unlike the old city of Delhi, which was a sprawling crowded mess of gridlocked traffic, Central New Delhi had wide and well-sealed roads, large green gardens, tree-lined boulevards and cafés.

This made it easy to cycle around, which was a relief from the chaos of other Indian towns (though it must be said New Delhi’s roundabouts often had me swinging into unplanned orbits).

I was on my way to the centre of town near the granddaddy of all roundabouts, Connaught Place, when something hard and wet hit me in the ear. Stunned, I spun around to see that children had thrown a water bomb at me from their apartment balcony.

I got off my bike, furious. A Sikh auto-rickshaw driver stopped.

‘Do not worry. This is not serious.’

‘Not serious! I nearly fell off my bike!’

‘They are only playing. They are only excited because
Holi
is coming.’

‘Who?’

‘Holi. A celebration.’

Holi
. Of course. The Water Festival (also known as the Festival of Colour). Every March, Holi is celebrated during a full moon or Dol Purnima to bring good harvests and ward off evil spirits. Water and brightly coloured
gulal
(powder) are thrown at passers-by by intoxicated participants (or kids, for that matter). I had seen pictures in travel books of smiling Indian men (the women didn’t seem to get involved) covered in red powder and practically assaulting each other with dye and water.

As I cycled off looking over my shoulder, I had to admit that the kid that had got me was a pretty good shot.

I took a private room at the Ringo Guest House. Well, a closet with a fan that nearly took out the walls to complete a revolution. It was a narrow hotel, the stairs giving me no leeway as I bumped and squeezed my loaded bike past guests.

To my surprise I saw another mountain bike locked up against a post on the patio. I eventually met the owner, who was urged on by a 50-something, big-bottomed Yorkshire woman with fangs.

‘Go on, luv! ’Ere’s your chance. Ask ‘im.’

A shy-looking bespectacled man with a pigtail greeted me.

‘Hello. My name is Uros.’

Uros was a 25-year-old Slovenian engineering student who had just arrived in Delhi. He had, he admitted nervously, never done anything like this before and had no idea where to go. He was thinking about going south, but I warned him off it, as it was getting hotter by the day. I spread my map of India out over the table. His eyes swirled over the runnel of red lines and brain-like contours. A worried dint appeared between his eyebrows.

‘Best to head north, out of the heat,’ I said then added, ‘I’m heading to Nepal if you want to come along.’

He brightened immediately. ‘It is okay? I am not very fast.’

Just as I was pointing to a suggested cycle route on the map, a purple splog exploded across south India. Another hit the breast of an Australian woman, Sharon.

‘Owwww!’ she clutched her chest.

We jumped up from our chairs to see an Indian boy from an apartment roof above us waving and laughing before throwing another dyed-water bomb.

‘Right!’ I declared to everyone at the table. ‘It’s war!’

With my posse in tow, which included me, Uros, and a young British lad, Ian, we set off to exact revenge. We clambered up the apartment, whisking from one hallway to the next until we reached the top. Half a dozen or so Indian men and boys were filling up buckets, making water bombs filled with dye, throwing them at each other, laughing, one holding another down while another poured the hose over him then smeared green paint over his face.

‘Let’s get ’em!’ I cried, and we set about wrenching the buckets and hoses from the locals, throwing ourselves into the water fight, laughing and sliding over each other on the wet tiles.

Our victims gave it back as good as they got, and before too long we had joined sides, making water bombs and flinging them at the Ringo Guest House.

‘Bombs away!’ Ian shouted as we heard the water balloon popping onto the patio. Sharon got up from her hiding place and showered us with abuse.

We cheered her back. ‘YOU LOVE IT!’

Anyone walking below was of course fair game, copping a bucket of cold water from seven storeys up. Downstairs, neighbours were throwing more dye and water, and when we finally dared to go there, we were set upon, held down and had purple, green, red and blue smeared over our clothes and faces.

‘Happy Holi!’ they cheered, and a rotund man grabbed me in a bear hug. ‘Be happy, my friend. Here in India you are my guest. It is my duty to look after you,’ and then squeezed my spleen into mush.

He dragged me by the wrist into his house and shovelled spoonfuls of chickpeas into my mouth, and then with the same spoon into Ian’s and Uros’s. Our host then plied us with more drink and then in a flourish we were led into another house and given plates of food:
dahl
, chutney, poppadums and rice.

After a few chillum pipes and several glasses of scotch, we absconded back to the hotel as wet and very stoned multi-coloured bandits.

‘I’m not impressed with you lot,’ Sharon glared at us in her fresh clean clothes.

‘It’s okay. You’ll never see us again,’ smirked Ian. ‘And that is the joy of travel.’

Early the next morning, feeling somewhat seedy, we took turns guarding our bikes outside the hotel while the others went back upstairs to retrieve the gear then pack for our 1200 kilometre trip to Kathmandu.

‘You have many things,’ Uros said, observing my six bags strewn along the wall. Uros had only two panniers, a handlebar bag, a tent and a sleeping bag. I had to remind myself that he had only come for the summer.

He poked at my rear rack. ‘Aluminium. It will break,’ he said with glee. ‘Mine is steel. Very strong, and I can get it welded here.’

‘Yes, but mine is
lighter
!’

‘Yes, but mine is
stronger!
’

‘Yes, but you’re a much
big-ger
dork!’

He laughed. We downed some curd and
chai
at a café then got on our bikes.

‘Remember, this is my first time, so I don’t know how far I can go today,’ Uros said. I don’t know why he was so nervous. After all, he had cycled through 20 kilometres of horrendous traffic from the airport.

I placed the New Delhi map in the clear plastic on my handlebar bag and sorted out my bearings. We had to head due east towards the next major town, Moradabad, but would probably only go as far as Harpur, some 70 kilometres away. After that, and after a few more days of cycling, we hoped to enter Nepal at its most far west border, the town of Mahendranagar, before continuing along the Mahendra Highway and into the Terai – a region known for its once rich
sal
forest but also, I groaned, malaria.

‘You are more experienced. So you go first.’

‘Yes, yes I am!’ I said with slightly more arrogance than was necessary. ‘This is the way, Belvedere!’

An hour later, I had both of us totally lost.

We were still in New Delhi, having been swung in the wrong direction by those damned roundabouts. Through a number of wrong streets, building sites and the back of the Mogul Red Fort, I eventually got us over a bridge and onto a double laned road, Highway 24. We coughed and wheezed through the soupy haze, the first I had seen since arriving in Dehli. Apart from this particularly polluted day, New Delhi’s air had improved dramatically since a Supreme Court order decried that all auto-rickshaws, taxis and buses be converted to gas or CNG as it was known here.
xii

As the highway narrowed to one lane, trucks and buses came towards us in the opposite direction, running us off into the dirt as they passed approaching traffic.

Uros shook his fist at them as they missed him by inches. I laughed, seeing now what I must have looked like all these months.

The built-up, drab estates of Delhi fell behind us as the urban greyness gave over to green rice paddies and wheat fields. We passed small villages, their houses made from straw and mud, children playing in the dirt with sticks, women pumping water into large silver pots and carrying them on their heads as they walked past ten-foot high dome structures under palm trees: cow pats, meticulously stacked and shaped, and used as fuel for cooking.

‘Maybe it is from one very big cow,’ Uros mused. He didn’t say much, and I don’t know whether it was because he had only a moderate grasp of English, was out of breath, or just wasn’t talkative.

On a vast, flat field,
wallahs
laid out huge white sheets in the sun as a rusty goods train, as long as the horizon, grumbled through the heat.

By mid-morning we had outdone ourselves, having reached Harpur in a few hours. We stopped for lunch at a
dhaba
shack plastered with blue Pepsi signs. Under one, a reassuring tag line read: NO ADDED FRUIT, ADDED FLAVOUR. Inspired by the liberal use of chemicals and none of that dreaded natural fruit stuff, Uros ordered a bottle.

‘No Pepsi,’ the waiter replied. We returned a befuddled stare. The restaurant was walled with so much Pepsi signage that there was no space for anything else. Their reaction was like us going into McDonald’s and asking them for a Whopper.

Instead, we ordered brown curried eggs and
chai
. When we had rested for half an hour we got on our bikes only to discover that Uros had a flat rear tyre.

‘Ah! My first day and I get puncture!’

He was mortified that his first day was not perfect.

‘Ah! You need the I.R.A.!’

I explained my invented acronym as he rolled his bike over to a puncture repairer – but it was lost on him. In this short time, a crowd of 20 men stood around – close, poking at the gears, at our bags and at us.

‘What are they staring at?’ Uros scowled.

‘They are thinking,’ I put on an Indian accent, ‘you are the movie star!’

This too was also lost on him. But not on the puncture
wallah
who could not hide his annoyance.

‘These are crazy people!’

We continued out of the stench of Hapur, a horrible industrial place, to enjoy a growing rarity in India, a forest, before it became a soft green memory as it disappeared from our gaze, dissolving into chemical factories, sugar cane mills and brick kilns.

Brick kilns were a disturbing sight, and not just for the thick, dirty plumes of smoke bellowing out of them. We watched ten-year-old boys in ragged shirts and shorts haul bricks onto trucks.

Child labour in India, despite efforts to end it, flourishes. According to a Human Rights report (‘
The Small Hands of Slavery – bonded child labour in India’
), of the 250 million children working in hazardous conditions around the world, almost half work in India – the highest number in the world. Though moves are afoot to end such work practices, local as well as international companies continue to exploit children for profit. So much for corporate responsibility, the bastards.

By the time we reached the small town of Garh Mukteshwar it was only one p.m. and we had topped 110 kilometres. It felt like nothing.

I told Uros I was going to find a doctor.

‘You are not so good?’

‘I’m fine. It’s just that they usually speak English, and that way we can find out where a hotel is.’

I found a doctor under a Red Cross sign in a crowded clinic. He told me that there were no hotels in this town and advised us to go back onto the highway. We did, and found ourselves trapped in a gridlock of bicycles, motorbikes, trucks and cars at a railway crossing. A train slinked past, taking forever it seemed, and I started to feel claustrophobic in the fumes and the heat while the metal clank of train wheels passed over the gaps in the track. Traffic crowded so heavily on both sides that when the gates opened no one could pass. Everyone pushed, shoved, beeped and yelled until the chaos eventually subsided.

On our way to the highway we caught sight of a hotel, and not just an ordinary hotel but the Happy Tourist Hotel. It boasted a sign that read ‘service with a smile’. I went inside and saw the manager who looked at me glumly, no smile in sight.

‘A room. Double. How much?’’

‘Two hundred and seventy-five.’

‘Can I look?’

We went off silently, still no smiles forthcoming. He showed me a modest, dull room. I agreed to take it. Uros, happy as a puppy, wheeled his bike in. I followed, unclipping pannier straps. Uros fell onto the bed.

‘Ah! At last.’

The manager came back into the room, no knock at all, and announced, ‘This room, three hundred and seventy-five.’

‘You said “Two hundred and seventy-five”.’

‘No, no. I take you to other room.’

I followed him into another room, which was smaller and duller than the first. I hazarded that he was playing for extra cash.

‘No. I don’t want this room. You say “two seventy-five” not “three seventy-five.’

‘No. This room, three seventy-five.’

‘We’ll go, then.’

‘Okay, you go.’

He left. I looked at Uros. He was spread out like a bed quilt, eyes beginning to close.