But how wrong they were.
So far he has not met a single unfriendly person. He has been lulled into a sense that everyone along the hippy trail is curious, positive, generous and kind. Maybe he could live his whole life in motion, he thinks, every day made up of first encounters with interesting people.
In Iran the hospitality continues. He sleeps less and less outside and after leaving the Caspian Sea, he is almost never alone or hungry. He receives water, dried fish, apples, oranges and dates along the way. He sleeps every night in a bed without having to pay a single rial. His ticket to the bountiful Promised Land is the fact that he is Indian.
‘Oh, India,’ they say. ‘A very good country.’
‘You think so?’
Until his recent death, the Indian President was a Muslim by the name of Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed. Iranian newspapers devoted pages to his obituary, the Muslim who reached the top in a Hindu country.
People repeat the same speech he has heard so many times since he crossed the border. So generous of the Hindus to make a Muslim president, they say. PK does not see it in terms of generosity. In truth, it was a way to appease the country’s minorities, a clever gesture that involved no real sacrifice. The office of president was largely meaningless; the Prime Minister was really the one in charge.
But the Iranians are impressed nevertheless. Muslims in PK’s country have the same rights as everyone else, they say. And yes, it is true, on paper at least. An old man tells him about the historian al-Biruni who travelled from Persia to India a thousand years ago. The Hindus told him India was the most perfect country, with the most powerful kings, the finest religion and the most advanced science. To this old man, India shimmered in gold and silver.
Even if that was the case back then, the India of today is no paradise on earth, PK thinks to himself. The capital’s slums reek. But he does not say so. He makes no objection. It is easier that way. He does not want to disappoint his hosts. Such illusions are the basis for an easy friendship.
In contrast, everything about Iran is rich and orderly; the change was noticeable as soon as he crossed the border. The Afghan border guards were dressed in dirty, worn uniforms, their border stations dilapidated. On the Iranian side, everything is new and clean, the people are better dressed and look healthier, the cars are modern, roadside stops are equipped with luxurious sofas and vending machines delivering cold, clean water for free. A border can make all the difference.
He rides west along the Caspian Sea and then south towards Tehran. Another, more southerly, road is actually closer, but the hippy buses usually take this one, and he does not dare deviate. As long as he stays on the hippy trail, he will meet other travellers whom he can draw, and therefore continue to make money. They are also generous with their advice and offer assistance when he gets into trouble.
He needs rest. By now he has taken on the appearance of a wandering holy man, his hair is matted and his body smeared with dirt. He rents a tent at a camping ground outside Mashhad and unpacks everything he has, peels off his filthy clothes and scrubs them with a bar of soap. He shaves, trims his nasal hair, lathers up and lets the hot water wash over him. It has been a long time since he felt this clean.
A small lake occupies the middle of the campsite, alongside the grave of a famous Iranian poet. A mosque sits nestled on an island in the middle of the water, illuminated by coloured lights once dusk falls. In the evenings, people come from the city to enjoy the tranquillity and visit these sites of pilgrimage. They bring food and blankets and picnic until late.
PK understands that this is a golden opportunity. He sets up his easel and gets his sign translated into Persian. Then he sits and waits.
By the first day, a queue has already formed. He draws all evening and the next, earning himself good money. Iranians are rich. PK notices they arrive in big, expensive cars.
He puts no price on his sign. When people ask how much, he answers only, ‘Whatever you think it’s worth.’
Iranians gladly pay five, sometimes even ten times more for a portrait than he is accustomed to, in addition to giving him food, fruit, tea and rose water.
Iran has been so welcoming, but now his thoughts turn to the road ahead, and Europe. He has heard so many warnings that doubt has begun to creep in; he worries that things might not continue as smoothly once he makes it out of Asia and into this new continent.
Tehran – Qazvin
But first comes Tehran, and it’s chaos. Cars are everywhere, jostling for space in the narrow streets with trucks, buses, carts loaded with goods, as well as cyclists trying not to get crushed, their faces wrapped in shawls to avoid swallowing too much dust and grit.
PK adjusts his backside on the saddle and continues pedalling hard, signalling several times with an extra large horn that he has mounted on the handlebar to make himself heard in the traffic. The horn emits a loud, penetrating sound. He notices how the motorcyclists turn their heads to see who, or what, is making the noise. It is his only weapon against the thundering trucks.
Despite the cacophony around him, he is reflecting on the person he has become, who he used to be and the person he might turn into once he arrives in Sweden. He pedals to shut out any other thoughts.
He is a hybrid. Sometimes he thinks all cultures and beliefs coexist inside him.
He is one of India’s oppressed indigenous people, a symbol for the injustices of the caste system, and at the same time a man on his way out into the world. He is a poor village boy and a successful city man. He owns nothing and everything at once. He is knowledgeable about art history, romanticism and the colours of Turner’s English landscapes, and yet he hardly knows where Sweden is. Already, he has had a more eventful life than he ever dreamed possible as a child, yet he still feels inexperienced, believes literally what people tell him and is curious to learn new things. He has attempted suicide three times, almost starved to death, and yet he is a lighthearted and, dare he say it, happy human being. He believes in destiny and tradition, but also in the liberty that comes from rejecting such ideas.
I am a chameleon. I can blend in anywhere. I can be an outcast among outcasts, important among important people.
But he knows his limitations. He has never demanded to be noticed, he does not know how to affect others or his surroundings.
In Tehran, he acquires a white piece of cardboard that he secures via a wooden stick to his luggage carrier. On it, he writes, I am an Indian artist on my way to Sweden. He attaches his portfolio as well, including everything he has done since he left Kabul. Now, he is a rolling advertisement for himself.
As he rides through Tehran, he notices another portrait, this time not by him. Wherever he goes, on lamp posts and the façades of houses, hangs the same picture.
‘Who’s that?’ he asks eventually, pointing to the ubiquitous young man.
‘The son of the King of Kings,’ people tell him. ‘The Prince of Princes.’
The King of Kings? The Prince of Princes?
‘Don’t you know who the Shah is?’ says a fruit seller. ‘The Shah of Iran? That’s his son. One day he will take over,’ says the man, pointing to the portrait.
He likes it. The young man looks friendly. He makes a drawing of the Prince of Princes and fastens it to the placard that has become a sail on the back of his bike.
The drawing attracts attention. A queue develops in one of Tehran’s squares as people watch him work and wait to be drawn themselves.
He cycles out of the Iranian capital, and heads west along Highway 2 towards Tabriz. Someone tells him he has cycled over three thousand kilometres since his start in New Delhi. He never thinks in kilometres. What can a number tell you about a journey? It means such different things depending on your method of transportation, whether on a plane, a bus or a bike. He has been going for almost two months, and he must have at least as long ahead of him. This has more meaning than three thousand kilometres.
The sun is hot without burning his skin and the wind fans him without sl
owing him down. A good day for cycling. The question, as always, is where is he going to sleep tonight? But he is not worried. It is one of the uncertainties he has learned to live with, and even appreciate. He has slept in tents, gazebos and among cattle in their sheds. The standard of his accommodation has varied, but it has always been sufficient for his needs.
Either he collapses, or reaches his goal. Arrive or die trying. Had his mother still been alive, it would have been different. She was the love that could have kept him in India. But now he is leaving all that ridiculousness behind. He presses on, trying to resurrect the feeling Lotta gave him back in India, that life is not meaningless.
But what if she has changed her mind? What if she no longer wants him?
Qazvin – Zanjan – Tabriz
As PK pedals through Iran, news has spread back home in Orissa about his big trip west. He has been sending regular excerpts from his diary to a local newspaper, and they are published unedited. His older brother sends PK the newspaper clippings, and tells everyone he knows about PK’s journey. He has become the talk of the entire state.
He may be the furthest he has ever been from home, but he feels utterly present. From this distance, so many thousands of miles from the Brahmins, his untouchability means nothing. Everybody loves success. The Brahmins can only treat you badly as long as you stay in your home village, working in a simple job, making no money. Then their talk of ritual purity carries weight. But when you make a name for yourself, a career, suddenly your low caste melts into insignificance. The higher castes bow to you. Oh, the falsehood, the hypocrisy!
One of the articles he sends from Iran causes a particular stir. His brother writes to say everyone has been talking about it.
The story arises from the most basic of human activities, and goes like this. One day he squats behind a tuft of high dry grass in the Iranian desert and relieves himself. His bicycle with his placards and portfolio is parked on the hard shoulder and looks like a beached sailboat in the distance. The sun is shining and a slight breeze makes the yellow blades of grass sway. As he sits, his mind wanders to an event that occurred when he was no more than six or maybe seven years old. He had gone to the outskirts of the village to find a place to relieve himself. A tree: that looked good. He climbed it. There was nothing strange about that. People did so in thousands of villages all over India; the countryside was the toilet. PK was smart to do his business from a height: that way he could avoid the smell and the flies.
Suddenly, he heard a roar. A roar that indicated surprise as much as anger. Terrified, PK glanced down. Beneath him he saw an old man, and on his head were the contents of PK’s bowels. And not just any man. He was a Brahmin. PK jumped down and ran. The Brahmin ran after him, but PK was young and quick and the Brahmin was old and slow and dressed in an unwieldy ankle-length piece of cloth. PK escaped.
Never again did he defecate in the trees.
He looks around, out across the Iranian desert. There is no soul in sight, no risk of contaminating any holy men out here. He sits face to face with the long grass. His friends, he thinks.
‘Dear grass,’ he begins after checking no one can hear him.
‘Here you are, struggling in the heat,’ he says to one straw in particular, ‘as many of your friends have succumbed from dehydration in the desert.’
The blade of grass answers with a polite tremble.
‘You once had a big family, but you are almost the only one left… But you are needed. Without you, the desert would be impossible to live in. Here, even the slightest gust of wind grows into a storm and the sand is like a million needles lodging themselves into your face. You and your few remaining friends fight on, and it is thanks to you that the sand doesn’t blow away completely.
‘Where I come from, Athmallik in the state of Orissa in India, we have other kinds of grasses. And they are our happiness. Rice, our main staple, is also a type of grass. Your cousin. Did you know that?’
A snap of wind snatches hold of the blade and it bends, as if bowing to his wise words.
‘I love you, little grass. You are man’s peacemaker and Earth’s protector. Without you, there would be chaos.’
But the blade of grass says nothing.
‘We humans pull you up by your roots. You are our treasure. We use you to build our houses. But we have no right to hurt you like this. Man has his place, as does the wind, the sand and you, blade of grass; you too have yours.’
He pours a few drops of water from his canteen onto the dry grass as a gesture of his appreciation. The earth trembles in gratitude, he imagines.
He mounts his bicycle and is back on the road, but as he rides he decides to record the conversation and send it home to his brother.
And now it has been published in the newspaper. To think people would enjoy it so much! The people of Orissa must have recognized themselves in his words. Surely everyone has turned philosopher while squatting in the bushes, he thinks. Nature has a soul that deserves respect, or else we humans must face the karmic consequences.
He shakes his head and smiles, and travels on faster than usual towards Tabriz, hoping to find a letter waiting for him there.
Tabriz – Marand – Dogubayazit – Erzurum – Ankara – Istanbul
He pedals, hitchhikes, daydreams, and with tired legs arrives into Tabriz on his new Iranian cycle, his third since leaving Delhi.
Tabriz, Prophet Zoroaster’s birthplace. A letter from Lotta is waiting for him. My dearest, she begins. And a letter from Linnea, the Austrian girl who was so badly injured in Afghanistan and whom he took to hospital in Kabul. She has arrived safely back home in Vienna. My dearest, she also begins. Only later does he think that perhaps Linnea had been in love with him. Or maybe not. His friends in India almost always wrote in such florid prose. All sugar sweet affection, it was the Indian way. So he thinks nothing of it when Linnea writes:
Dearest PK
Hope you are fine. PK, my baby, soon you will come to me in Vienna. I believe you should arrive last week. I was waiting for a long time. I hope you come soon. I think about you a lot and when I do that I feel happy. We will have such a wonderful time together. There is so much I want to show you. Now I finish this letter, but I wait patiently for you to arrive.
Ihr treuer Freund.
Linnea.
He jumps back on his bike and continues towards Turkey.
Iran was vast. So is Turkey. The world is vast. He is very tired of all this cycling now. Where is Europe? Will I be in Borås soon?
More often now, he picks up rides with trucks. It is easy to hitchhike in Turkey.
PK never promised anyone he was going to ride all the way. The trip to Europe was never about proving his physical strength or stamina; it was not some challenge of the body. He promised he would arrive by any means, that was all. Had he enough money, he might have bought a plane ticket. He chose to ride a bike because it was the only option available to him. It was all he could afford. He made a virtue out of necessity. The journey was always going to be difficult and laborious.
He sits next to the driver and his friend, dozing as the landscape slowly changes, thoughts of all that has happened in the past year flickering through his mind. Everything about his life is different now, not just the surrounding geography.
Yes, I have changed.
He was awoken from a slumber in a greater sense: meeting Lotta was the alarm that brought everything into focus. Before her, he had trouble distinguishing his own desires from the wishes of others. It was as if he saw no boundary between what he thought of himself and what others thought of him. But she made him aware of the line between his sense of self and his circumstances.
Now, memories from the time before Lotta are already hazy. Had he ever made a decision for himself, taken ownership of his own choices, before he met her? No, he had allowed himself to float, to be led by others. He had been afraid to be seen and heard, and rarely said what he really thought. He listened and imitated. He had been a guest in other people’s
lives. Curious, sure, but ultimately submissive.
He has always tried to please others. Lotta used to tell him he was too naïve, almost like a child. But she also liked that about him. ‘The fact that you do not feel the need to keep asserting yourself is your strength’, she said.
He also takes the occasional bus ride. With his bike on the roof, he settles into his seat at the front. The vehicle jolts into life and starts along the rough, straight road between Van and Ankara.
People spoke good English in Iran, but in Turkey it is impossible to make himself understood. In the absence of words, he draws. Everyone understands the pictures, regardless of their lack of a common tongue. He draws quick caricatures of other passengers. The entire bus bursts into laughter when he reveals the results. The moustached men and scarf-wearing women offer up bread, cheese and fruit. He sits cross-legged, eating sweet apples and plump, bitter olives, and looks out over the plains. They understand each other somehow.
The story is repeated on several buses and in cafés, restaurants and shelters. The Turkish people love to laugh. He receives invitations to their homes, where he draws in return for shelter and something to eat. You are such kind, warm-hearted people, he tells them. They are flattered and ply him with more food.
Once in Istanbul, he gets up early. The minarets are making their supplications as he hurries to the main post office to see if there are any letters waiting for him. One from Lotta with dense rows of her characteristically squiggly handwriting. One from his father. And one from Linnea in Vienna. Hers is thick and has been sent by recorded mail. Out falls a train ticket: the Trans Balkan Express from Istanbul to Vienna.
He walks along the Golden Horn and looks out over the blue water and the covered Galata Bridge with all its shops and restaurants. Istanbul smells like Asia, but somehow feels different. He cannot put his finger on what it is exactly. He walks through the streets towards the Topkapi Palace and breathes in the chilly morning air thick with wood smoke, pine and the taste of the sea. Cigarette smoke wafts out of the teahouses. Steamboat horns blast as he climbs up the hills, and at the top he can still hear the muffled sounds of old 1950s American Chevrolets and Buicks cruising along the streets of Istanbul below. The cars are even older than the ones back home. But the women dress in the latest fashions, unlike in Afghanistan and Iran. Blouses, skirts, jeans, and hair worn down around their shoulders. Nowhere does he see them covered by scarves, niqab or any other form of concealment.
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love Page 19