The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  Ancient legends tell of how the nuts grew on trees beneath the sea. Societies along India’s western coastline pounded them up to make medicines, elixirs and potent aphrodisiacs. A cult even developed, dedicated to worshiping the coconut. When General Gordon visited Praslin in 1881, he declared that the island was the Garden of Eden, and the mystical coco-de-mer its forbidden fruit.

  * * * *

  Late the next morning, after an uncomfortable night spent aboard the stationary bus, the driver turned up with an assortment of inner tubes, for which he had traded his assistant’s coral necklace. The auxiliary, who was petulant at having his prized possession swapped for a heap of lousy inner tubes, set about with a jack and tire levers.

  Less than two hours later, the machine was heaving into Kottagudem. Defying the sceptics – for whom I was the spokesman – it negotiated the remaining miles without another stop.

  After a wash beneath a standpipe in the market area, I tramped over to the railway station. By a great stroke of luck, a slow train bound for Vijayawada, the last sizable city en route to Tirupati, was about to depart.

  Once I had got comfortable in my second-class seat, I again pondered what had happened to Bhalu. If he had been there on the train, he would already be scamming a small fortune from what he considered to be fresh blood. Maybe I had been too abrupt in dashing off without him. But his behavior had really begun to deteriorate. One-night stands with Siamese twins … what would be next?

  At Khammam, the largest of the many stops we made, a portly figure entered the carriage and took the seat opposite mine. The baldness and VIP gray attaché case gave him away as a member of the Secret Army. I was about to suggest that he rush out and buy a Director’s Brand hairpiece when he clicked open his VIP.

  Pretending to be jolted forward as the locomotive took a sudden bend, I attempted to peek over the top of his case. No good; too slow.

  Could I work out his business by observing the signs? His open-toed sandals were constructed from good-quality leather; his shirt was indigo silk; a top-of-the-range Indian-made watch was strapped to his wrist; and the deep scar on his left cheek seemed to have been attended to by a skilful surgeon. He was, quite obviously, an important salesman.

  Unable to bear my overt investigation any longer, the man pulled a large, shiny oval object from his case and handed it to me.

  “Egg?” he said. “Would you like an Easter egg?”

  “Thank you very much,” I replied. “That’s the last thing I’d expect to see on a train in Andhra Pradesh. Are you sure you can spare it?”

  The salesman removed his glasses to rub his eyes.

  “Oh, yes, of course I can,” he retorted, “I’ve got thousands of them.”

  Why were the Secret Army of Indian executives breaking into chocolate Easter eggs? One thing was for certain: their motives had nothing to do with Easter. I examined the egg. Its wrapper advertised a cache of jelly babies inside. I also observed that the egg, from Safeway Supermarkets, was eight months past the sell-by date.

  “Excuse me for prying,” I said, “but are you a member of the Christian Church?”

  The salesman clutched his case to his chest, as if I had insulted him gravely.

  “Certainly not!” he quipped, “I’m a Hindu.”

  “Then why the interest in Easter eggs?”

  I had to get to the bottom of it all.

  “Vedding-eggs!” he said, squirming back in his seat. “They’re vedding-eggs!”

  “Vedic eggs?”

  “No, no, vedding-eggs … matrimony.”

  Clearly, I had missed a key snippet of information. What do chocolate Easter eggs from Safeway have to do with Indian weddings? I asked the executive. He was warming to my interest in his product.

  “The bride’s family gives one to each guest who comes to the marriage. It’s a symbol … a bountiful future.”

  “Was this your own idea, by any chance?”

  The salesman beamed with the smile of a man who had come up with a great invention.

  “Yes, all my idea,” he said.

  “But where do you get the Easter eggs from?”

  “My cousin in Blackburn buys up all out-of-date eggs after Easter and ships them over to me. I supply them to veddings across southern India.”

  This was a project on a par with Pykrete and Tirupati toupees. Transmutation of a symbol from one religion to another. An anthropologist would kill for a whiff of this. But the concept of the wedding egg was far more than an anthropological curiosity. It was an example of Indian genius at the highest level. Easter eggs are made by the million in countries across Europe and the Americas. The day after Easter they’re virtually worthless. So, enter the calculating mind of the Indian Secret Army executive.

  * * * *

  One of eastern India’s most ancient cities, Vijayawada nestles on the north bank of the mighty Krishna River. Not far from the coast, set on a great floodplain, and bathed in history: one might expect the city to be a key tourist destination. Having installed myself at an open air tea house near the city center, I dug out my Cadogan guide to south India. What lavish praise had its writers afforded Vijayawada? Opening it at the appropriate page, I began to read: “ … Vijayawada is a classic textbook example of an Indian hell-hole and should be avoided …” Below the write-up was a line-drawing of a supine traveler, his hand wearily stroking his brow.

  Pressing the book to my face, I glanced to the left and then to the right, without moving my head. The place had not seemed as bad as all that. Granted, it was rather stifling, and most of the tourists appeared to have been frightened away, but this was no hell-hole. Then it struck me. Of course, instead of being a classic textbook example of a hell-hole, this was a classic textbook example of a travel-guide writer’s infatuation. As the author of a guide myself, I knew well the routine of slandering one’s favorite spots. How else can an overworked, underpaid travel writer ensure that the riffraff will stay away? I’ll stay here a couple of days, I mused. If it’s as bad as the guide insists, it must be terrific.

  Leaning back on my chair, I ordered another idli and a second glass of tea. Then I withdrew my notepad and dashed off a report to Feroze; he would surely be interested in the wedding-egg business. Even if he was out of Calcutta, I was certain that he would eventually arrange for my letters to be sent on. As I scrawled the details down, a gargantuan Westerner approached the restaurant. He was fifty-something, as tall as an oak, with sagging jowls and a face that bore the scars of tropical illness. Even before he sidled over to my table, I knew he was an Australian. My supposition involved little guesswork. This was a man, who must have tramped across the Outback, fought crocodiles barehanded, and feasted on mealy grubs beneath the stars. His hat gave it all away. It was wide-brimmed and made of tightly woven straw. And corks dangled from its outer edge on strings.

  “G’day,” said the man, obviously intrigued that another foreigner had ignored the guide-book warnings to turn back.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Don’t get many strangers in these parts,” he said, removing his hat. “Had a couple a Kiwis last month, they decorated my hat with the corks. Keeps the flies away pretty well …”

  “I “m not surprised there are so few tourists: the guide books are virtually pleading with visitors to bypass Vijayawada.”

  As I asked the Australian what had brought him to such an outlying locality, I noticed an odd scar, a sort of pock, about an inch above his brow. The advanced state of his baldness drew my eyes to the mark. Although healed, it was as if the wound had originally been quite deep: far more than a superficial break of the skin.

  “I’m researching earth eaters,” he said, answering my question.

  “Earth eaters? What do they do?”

  Even before the words had left my mouth, I was blushing at the stupidity of my question.

  “Earth eaters …” replied the man with an ominous inflection, “eat earth.”

  “Golly …” I said, hoping to claw myself back
to the realms of credibility.

  The Australian had more to say:

  “Unusual cravings, they’re my line,” he said, introducing himself as Fisher. Like everything in the Antipodes, his name had been abbreviated, to “Fish”.

  “Earth eating sounds more like a sign of derangement than a craving,” I said.

  My attitude to the unusual appetite had not pleased the Australian.

  “Geophagy, earth craving is rare in Asia,” he said coldly. “I’ve discovered a local pregnant woman who eats more than half a pound of earth a day.”

  “Maybe she’s starving,” I said.

  Fish, who had taken on a pseudo-scientific air, was not impressed with my hypothesis. Pulling out a pair of bifocals, he twirled them around his index finger. I imagined he had condescended to speak to me only as no one else in Vijayawada was in the least bit interested in earth eaters.

  “So, why do people eat earth?” I probed, hoping to conclude the conversation. “It can’t taste that good, or everyone would be gorging themselves on it.”

  Fish sucked on the arm of his spectacles.

  “More people eat it than you think.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, straining forward to pass on what he knew. “In Ghana, five thousand tons of clay are mined each year … not to be made into pots, or to build houses, but to be eaten. It’s sieved and mixed with water to form a kind of dough.”

  “Yes, but all kinds of amazing things are going on in Africa …”

  “Well, what about Mississippi?”

  “What about it?”

  “There’s a well-known earth-eating tradition there. People near the river say their soil tastes like sherbet. And what about the slaves in the New World? Everyone knows that when they were brought to the Americas, they ate earth out of fear. They got addicted to it.”

  “Are there any similarities between the earth eaten in Ghana, Mississippi and Vijayawada?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” he replied.

  From the furtive way Fish rubbed his palms together, I sensed he knew more than he was giving away.

  “Earth eating,” he continued after a few minutes of silence, “is probably the most primitive side of our brain somehow kicking in. What if one could activate this area of the mind in everyone? Think what it could mean for marketing!”

  “Fish, I don’t want to denigrate earth eaters,” I said, “but I really don’t think the business community’s going to get too worked up about them.”

  The Australian called the waiter and asked for a cup of milky tea.

  “You don’t understand,” he sniffed. “The implications are tremendous. Find out how these ancient, primeval brain patterns work – why some individuals are ruled by their cravings – and you can control the way people think … then you can determine what they buy.”

  “But who’d want food that tasted like earth?”

  “Forget earth-flavored anything,” said Fish. “That doesn’t even come into it. The earth eaters are just the key!”

  Had Fish been dressed in a Sevile Row suit, sitting in a swish Los Angeles office, I might have been reeling in awe at the ramifications of primeval appetite. The fact that he was lying low in Vijayawada, discussing his plans with random foreigners, made me suspicious. Perhaps he was himself an undercover earth eater. For a moment I wished Bhalu was still around. He would have cut straight through to Fish’s real intentions.

  As far as I was concerned, anyone investigating unusual cravings on the banks of the River Krishna had to be a little eccentric, irrespective of their motives. The more the Australian and I conversed, the more convinced I became that a maniac was sitting before me.

  The majority of Westerners one meets in India are on a quest. They’re searching for truth, for enlightenment, for themselves, or, like Fish, are hunting for the bizarre. Unlike the West, India – a country dedicated to assisting those on a journey – comforts them, nurturing their peculiarities.

  Fish and I discussed all kinds of subjects, and spoke of distant places, until late into the afternoon. He came across as a man of considerable acumen, but whose brilliance was marred by disturbing undertones. He claimed to speak six languages, including Tagalog; to have written extensively on the Japanese board-game Go; and to play the marimba. Impressive stuff. I didn’t doubt any of his accomplishments. But Fish ought to have stopped with the marimba.

  Fired by the Master’s order to observe at all costs, I bombarded the Australian with questions. He, goaded by my insatiable curiosity, lifted the veil on his deep and peculiar past.

  Before dispatching me on my journey of observation, Feroze had instilled in me an important rule of thumb. Never, he said, disclose too much at the first meeting; rather, extract information from your interlocutor. At the time, I had wondered what exactly the magician had meant. But my lengthy conversation with the headstrong Australian was a good example of how not to behave.

  Having deliberated on the flavor of Ghanaian soil, the merits of the marimba, and the winning strategies of Go, Fish shifted the conversation into the Twilight Zone of his youth.

  I asked whether he had been to the subcontinent before.

  “I certainly have,” he said languidly. “It was in the early seventies. Went to Goa, to Kashmir and West Bengal … you can’t beat this country. Or we couldn’t then.”

  “Why not? What was so special about India?”

  Fish made fists with his hands and banged them together.

  “Because,” he called out, “we were on a quest …”

  “A quest for what?”

  “For a third eye. You see, in the seventies, India was Disneyland … it was the Disneyland of the soul.”

  The waiter circled our table like a shark. We had not ordered anything for a long time, and the management was ready for us to leave. With the Antipodean just opening up, I had to stall. So, pulling out a hundred rupee note, I rustled it in my hand like a dry leaf.

  Speaking at full speed, Fish revealed a deeper obsession … trephination.

  His tale began with an interest in the work of the Dutch physician Dr Bart Huges. While at a party in 1962, Huges had seen a man stand on his head. The act had given him a flash of inspiration. Surely, he thought, the more blood you have in your brain, the higher your consciousness? So Huges experimented by standing on his head, and by pinching the veins draining blood from his neck. The results were encouraging. But Huges yearned for a more permanent increase in consciousness. He longed to return to the consciousness of infancy. For this, he thought, the skull would have to be unsealed, like a child’s. He realized a third eye could be created by excising a small disc of bone from the head … using an electric masonry drill.

  Huges was carted away to an asylum when he went public with his ideas. But an Englishman called Mellen took up the gauntlet. He bored a hole into his skull, using a high-speed electric drill. It was uneven, so he drilled another. His friend, a woman called Amanda Fielding, began noticing improvements in Mellen’s character. So persuaded was she by the development that she drilled a hole in her own skull. Amanda Fielding grew so thrilled with the operation that she saw it as her duty to campaign for trephination for everyone with only two eyes. She stood as an independent candidate in the 1979 and 1983 parliamentary elections. Her central manifesto pledge was to get head-drilling free for all on the National Health.

  “So, where did you get yours done?”

  Fish probed the inner reaches of his mouth with his index finger. He suddenly seemed contemplative. But then, one would expect anyone who had applied a high-speed masonry drill to their skull to take the subject seriously. Three or four minutes passed. He said nothing. Perhaps my question had brought back painful memories. Fish was staring into space.

  “Sydney in 1976,” he whispered, without changing his focus. “We were high as kites and looking for stimulation … the permanent kind.”

  “Golly,” I said, gulping.

  “A group of us ha
d heard of Huges and Mellen, and thought we’d have a go ourselves. You see, we had all been to India in search of the third eye, but had left with nothing but diarrhea.”

  “What did it feel like when the drill went in? Did you reach higher consciousness? Do you recommend boring out a third eye? How does it feel now?”

  Fish drew a hand across his chin, and paused as my rapid volley of questions struck him.

  “There’s only one answer I can give,” he responded gently.

  “Yes … yes, please tell me.”

  “If you’re so interested,” he replied defensively, “drill a hole in your own skull …”

  EIGHTEEN

  The Yogi’s Last Breath

  The ravens in the rafters of Vijayawada’s railway station were very large indeed. Passengers and red-shirted luggage bearers hurried about, all laden with packages wrapped in greasy newspaper. The coal-black birds peered down, secure in the knowledge that they were untouchable. A herd of boot-boys weaved through the crowds, rapping their brushes together like the keys of a glockenspiel to attract customers. A madman hopped about on one foot, swearing. Fifteen clocks all advertised a different time. A bewigged Secret Army executive spat paan against a wall and coughed. Hawkers jostled from one platform to the next, selling padlocks and toilet chains, rubber gloves and rolling-pins. Just another morning in the railway Black Hole.

  Muttering something about making a long-distance telephone call, Fish had left me to find a room for the night. I had risen at dawn and made for the railway station. After an hour of waiting, the ticket officer had sold me a seat on the 0810 service direct to Tirupati. The second-class carriages were full, which meant I would have to travel south in third-class.

  Twenty minutes before the train arrived, I observed a crowd gathering at one end of the platform. Always enthusiastic to see another performance, I went over and made my way to the front of the throng. But this was not a new trick. It was one that I knew well. For it was being performed by none other than Bhalu.

  “Ah, “ he said loudly, “I was wondering when you’d turn up!”

  “I thought you had run off with the twin sisters.”