At once it was clear that his father had no objections to the match.
‘You should marry whoever makes you happy,’ he said. ‘And she fits with your horoscope,’ he added.
His father began singing hymns in Sanskrit as if he were a Brahmin. The village priests would surely have been most disturbed by such a display, but Shridhar did not care.
‘Why should the Brahmins have the sole right to perform sacred ceremonies?’ he used to counter when his colleagues thought he was in danger of provoking the high castes.
PK and Lotta watched. Behind him on the wall hung a portrait of PK’s mother. PK felt his Ma’s gaze, as though she had returned from the dead, curious to see what he had made of his life.
Then his father brought together their hands, nodded and spoke.
‘Pradyumna Kumar,’ he said, looking at his son, ‘make sure you never give her reason to cry.’
‘I promise, as long as she’s with me,’ he replied.
‘If tears run down her cheeks, never let them reach the ground,’ his father continued. ‘You should always be on hand to comfort your wife.’
Then he presented Lotta with a new sari. It was done. They were husband and wife. They would have to register the marriage formally at the local court, but they could do that later. For now, it did not matter.
With backpacks on their heads, they weaved through the mass of villagers who had come out to see PK and his white-skinned wife dressed in Indian clothes. They had never seen anything like it. They stared unabashedly, but no one dared approach her and say hello. PK’s success in Delhi commanded their respect and admiration. He was no longer a pariah.
Rumour spread quickly that the boy from the village who had drawn a cosmonaut, a prime minister and a president had returned. In Bhubaneswar, the secretary-general of the art school invited them to lunch. He praised PK and pulled out their chairs so they might sit down. It was a display completely alien to PK. After lunch, the secretary-general instructed his chauffeur to drive them wherever they wanted to go in town and sent a messenger boy to buy their train tickets. Lotta was presented with a silver hair clasp as if she were a queen. King Pradyumna Kumar and Queen Lotta. It was as if the whole world had transformed into their servants.
They took the bus to Puri and strolled along the wide sandy beach past other lovers, and then on to the Sun Temple in Konark with its carvings of erotic scenes from the Kama Sutra.
Before they reached the Black Pagoda, as the old-time sailors called the temple, PK told Lotta to stop. He cupped his hands and placed them over her eyes.
‘Now, for something beautiful.’
He took his hands away.
‘Look, up there!’
The temple with the stone wheel. The very same stone wheel in the picture she used to have pinned to her wall in London. She had stared at that picture and longed for India. And now, here she was, standing before the real thing. She started to cry.
They had only met a few weeks before, but here, in front of the temple designed as a chariot for the sun god Surya, their lips touched for the first time.
PK’s ecstasy was once again blunted by doubt. It was all so surreal, so detached from reality.
How is it possible for an untouchable jungle boy like me to walk beside the woman I love?
The doubt swelled, occupying everything. He stumbled over the simplest phrases. He fumbled while performing the most basic manoeuvres, such as a caress of Lotta’s cheek or avoiding piles of rubbish in the street.
On the bus back to Bhubaneswar he imagined throwing his old life away, the career in New Delhi, for a possible future with Lotta in Europe. He toyed with the idea and it scared him, precisely because it felt so perfectly feasible. Why had he left behind the beauty of his home in Orissa and gone to the capital? This was where his family was, and everything that felt familiar. The jungle was so bounteous, so rich, dense, mysterious and exciting. Mango trees and coconut palms shrouded in morning mist belonged to a landscape that made him question the ingrained notion that it was worth sacrificing everything for the new and the capricious.
As soon as they arrived back at his rented room in New Delhi a week later, his neighbour Didi came to tell him that a well-dressed woman and her daughter had been to visit several times in his absence. Puni and her mother, it transpired. Where was PK? they kept asking. In the end, Didi turned the question on them; why were they looking for him?
Puni’s mother told Didi the story:
There was nothing wrong with Puni’s fiancé, the engineering student. He was a nice boy. But the boy’s father had asked for fifty thousand rupees in dowry. It was an unthinkably large sum, a dowry fit for a film star. Puni’s father had been desperate for his daughter to wed the boy from the high-caste family, but eventually he too had to accept that they could not afford it. So Puni’s mother had come to see if PK might take her daughter after all.
What an idiotic family! Why would he want anything to do with them, after her father had so humiliated him?
I’m a forgiving person, but there are limits, he thought.
To Didi and his friends, he said that he was already married to the woman from Sweden. This was not strictly true of course. His father had performed the ceremony so that they were united in the eyes of the gods, but they were not technically wed according to the law. But then again, who was going to check something like that?
They spent their nights lying beside each other on the concrete floor of PK’s rented room, looking up at the cracked cement ceiling, while Lotta related stories about Swedish history and her ancestors.
‘The King of Sweden at that time was called Adolf Frederick and the Queen Louisa Ulrika, and just like India, Sweden had four castes. The King’s power had been limited and the country was ruled instead by four parliaments, one for each caste group,’ Lotta explained. ‘We called them the nobles, the clergy, the burghers and the peasants. Two parties contended for power, and they had the strangest names, the Hats and the Caps!’
‘How strange. Imagine that happening in India!’ whispered PK. ‘People would laugh themselves to death.’
‘Let me finish,’ Lotta said.
‘The King and Queen were furious that the nobles who controlled the Hat Party were attempting to seize power and limit that of the royal family. They even insisted upon raising the heir to the throne, Prince Gustav. This way, the Prince would grow up to be a fair and just king.
‘The Queen refused. How could humans alter the will of God? It was madness. She called her advisers and told them about her plan to stop the Hats. They would enact a military coup and reinstate the King, as God ordained.
‘One summer evening,’ Lotta continued, ‘in 1756…’
Just as Robert Clive was struggling to gain dominance over India – what a coincidence, thought PK.
‘Have I told you about Robert Clive?’ he interrupted. ‘I must tell you his story.’
‘Later!
‘One summer evening, in 1756, chaos broke out in Stockholm. But the details of the Queen’s plan had not yet been fully worked out. The agents of the coup did not have the necessary money, and the timing was wrong. But one of the Queen’s closest men decided he would start the coup anyway. He collected together his friends and told them to set the plan in motion. Then he ran up the palace staircase to inform the Queen.
‘Word of the plan reached the King and Queen’s bodyguard and a junior officer of only twenty-two by the name of Daniel Schedvin.
‘Had he obeyed the order, my family’s history would have turned out very differently. Then we wouldn’t have owned any forest,’ said Lotta.
‘You own forest?’
‘Not me personally, but my family does.’
She continued. ‘The King and Queen’s men gathered their troops and marched on the Hat Party headquarters to arrest them. Daniel, however, went to his lord and told him what was going on, and then warned the leader of the noblemen.
‘Sweden’s warrior caste.’
‘We ca
ll them Kshatriya in India.’
‘The nobility mobilized their opposition and quickly stopped the Queen’s attempted coup. The King and Queen were criticized in a sermon given by the high priest. Several others involved were executed. And my ancestor, Daniel, was rewarded with a large sum of money, which he used to buy forest and land. The nobility also forced the King to knight him. To be knighted, that means to change caste and advance upwards,’ Lotta explained to an increasingly puzzled PK.
‘Daniel became the owner of a large section of the Swedish forest and his family bore a coat of arms decorated in blue and gold, with two crossed swords, a green wreath with ribbons, and a motto in silver: Ob cives servatus.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s Latin, but I’ve forgotten what it means, unfortunately,’ she replied.
The family shield was hung in the Stockholm headquarters of his new caste, and in a church in the area where he bought the land.
‘That’s why my family still owns forest,’ said Lotta.
‘So you’re from a high and noble caste?’
‘Yes, that’s why my last name is von Schedvin. But I’m not proud of it. It doesn’t make me better than anyone else.’
‘Lotta, you belong to a high caste while I get less respect than the dirt on the soles of your feet.’
He remembered how Puni’s father had shouted at him to leave their house and thought of all the doomed Indian love affairs that ended in honour killings because of similar mismatches.
How was their love affair going to end? he thought as he kissed her on the forehead.
‘Yes, but those are just outdated prejudices,’ Lotta said. ‘That stuff doesn’t mean anything to me.’
‘You own forest. It’s my destiny. If all that stuff hadn’t happened all those years ago, the prophecy wouldn’t have come true.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
‘Lotta, you know, everything happens for a reason.’
Lotta took the train to Amritsar, where her friends were waiting with the VW bus. They would go back the way they had come, over the Hindu Kush mountain range, through Iran’s deserts and the peaks high above the Black Sea. She recalled the trip they had made only a few months earlier. She remembered how, in the Alps, a guardian angel had prevented the bus from becoming a burning pile of metal at the bottom of a ravine. In Turkey, they wormed their way along endless mountain roads, and the world had never been more beautiful. They almost turned the van to scrap once more in the traffic chaos of Tehran. Hours passed on the roads of Afghanistan without seeing a single person, only empty diners with dusty Coca-Cola signs and no drinks to sell.
Three weeks after their departure from Sweden, they had passed over the border between Pakistan and India. After a detour to the Taj Mahal, they arrived in Delhi late at night, where they collided with a wall and demolished the bumper. It was pitch black and the streets were emptier than usual because of the state of emergency, but they did not know this. They had not phoned home once, but now they contacted the Swedish Embassy and asked the receptionist to call their parents and tell them that they had arrived, having crashed only once, one hundred metres from their final destination. The embassy in New Delhi called through to Borås, but neglected to mention that they had not been injured in the accident.
The trip home to Europe did not worry her, she was now experienced and cleansed. She could have found her way back without a map. The trip went quickly and with no major mishaps, apart from an incident when the van skidded on a patch of ice on a mountain road beyond Trabzon. They spun full circle and slid to a halt right at the edge of the precipice. But their guardian angel had not abandoned them, and they stepped out of the vehicle, unharmed but in shock.
Everything happens for a reason. And Lotta’s destiny was to arrive safely back in Sweden.
It was spring 1976, and at home in Borås, she told her parents that she was in love. PK was the man she wanted to marry, and she would return to India that autumn.
But this time, her mother stopped her.
‘PK hasn’t finished art school and you haven’t got yourself a proper education yet,’ came her sober reply. ‘Stay here and study. Keep in touch, write letters, get to know each other from a distance.’
It was not what Lotta wanted to hear, but as the memories of India began to fade, as the smells left her clothes, she began to think that her mother might be right. A conflict raged inside her. If she returned now she would surely remain in India, and never come back. But wherever she ended up, she needed a foundation on which to build her life and career.
PK promised he would come to Sweden as soon as he could. But weeks, then months, passed. Their agreed date for a reunion, August, came and went, and PK never appeared. A letter arrived in September from New Delhi. He would come, but he still did not know when exactly, as he was not sure how to get there.
Lotta was reconsidering if she would go back to India after all. She had started work in a kindergarten. The pay was low and she could not save for a ticket. She certainly did not want to borrow money from her parents.
Later, Lotta realized how scared her mother had been that she would not make a career. Women should no longer be only mothers and housewives, her mother said. She had missed out on the opportunity to educate herself, but she would not see her daughters make the same mistake.
New dreams began to take shape. Lotta had learned to play the piano as a child. She applied for a job as a substitute teacher at the municipal music school, as well as for a place at the University College of Music Education in Stockholm.
She got both.
India would have to wait.
PK returned to his previous routine, attending lessons at the art school, painting in the school’s studio and drawing portraits by the fountain. But Indian society had changed. New Delhi was paralysed by the new and harsh laws of the emergency: press censorship, slum sanitation, sterilization campaigns, as well as bans on demonstrations and political gatherings.
Bulldozers tore through slums along the city’s boulevards and police dispersed crowds. The usually obedient and politically tolerant capital was now boiling over in open rebellion and police repression.
And yet, PK never felt that Indira Gandhi was going too far. If we want to get rid of the corruption and the injustice, then India needed to take a hard line, he concluded. You cannot ask the Brahmins nicely to stop discriminating against untouchables and for employers to start giving them jobs. You cannot expect people to give up their privilege voluntarily, inherited or otherwise, in some false hope that they will act without a stick to encourage them. Politics was the antidote to self-interest, he had learned that from bitter experience.
It had now been over a year since Mr Haksar, Indira’s principal secretary, had promised to organize a place for PK to live. Then, in the spring of 1976, Haksar got in touch again.
‘It’s all done,’ he said. ‘You’re free to move in.’
‘Where?’
‘South Avenue.’
South Avenue! The road where India’s Members of Parliament lived. The exclusive preserve of the country’s elite.
‘I’m going to live there?’
‘Yes,’ said Haksar. ‘One of the apartments at No. 78 is yours.’
PK packed his belongings, barely filling one bag. He kept his easel and canvases at the fountain and walked all the way to his new home in South Avenue.
The apartment consisted of a large lavishly furnished living room, a separate bedroom, a balcony overlooking the garden, a kitchen, a dining room and two bathrooms. When hunger struck, all he had to do was pick up the phone and food would be delivered straight to his door. When his clothes were dirty, he left them for the Dhobi wallah who came every day to collect them.
One year ago, he had been sleeping under bridges and warming himself by bonfires of rubbish. Now he lived in a bungalow on the same street as the Prime Minister and was never short of money. He must have exhausted his reserve of bad karma; all the fighting and the
struggle had filled his well full of better luck to draw on.
For PK, life during the emergency was one of success and increased self-worth. Indira Gandhi was a mother figure for the untouchables, for all of India’s oppressed. And sometimes, a mother could be harsh and reprimanding.
She was their benefactor. What would India’s untouchables have been without her? Where would he have been without her benevolence? Most certainly, in the gutter.
But PK was still hurting from missing Lotta, and he told anyone who would listen about his loss. The intensity of his feelings so moved people that Lotta received a steady stream of letters from PK, as well as messages from backpackers he met at the Indian Coffee House.
It was as if everyone making the round trip to Asia knew about their story.
Kate from Edinburgh wrote:
I just got back from India. I met your friend PK while I was out there. He’s a nice, honest guy and he misses you a lot. He was always talking about you, saying he hopes you haven’t forgotten him. Not that I want to get involved, of course, but maybe you should write to him and let him know how you are.
And then a letter from Maria from Bohus-Björkö:
I just got back from Pakistan on Sunday the 6th… I was also in Delhi in January. A friend from Lahore and I took a short trip to India. Another friend told us to look PK up and we did. We met several times and had a great time. PK gave us a book to give to you… PK is well, but he misses you a lot.
Beatrice from Pontoise, who thought he was called Pieket, said:
I arrived home three days ago from Delhi. My husband and I met Pieket there and he helped us a lot. Pieket told me about you and we saw the beautiful photo of you two together. Pieket asked me to write a letter to you as soon as I got home to Paris, and it makes me happy even if my English is poor. I hope you will understand anyway what I write. Pieket have not heard from you in two months, and he is worried about it. He hopes that nothing happened to you and we hope it too.
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love Page 14