The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love

by Per J Andersson

  Ask how she’s feeling, then talk about the weather. How are you? Beautiful weather we’re having today! he repeats to himself under his breath as the doorbell rings.

  But it is cold outside, so he will have to make a change to his speech: How are you? It’s cold today! Really cold! Something like that.

  Standing eye to eye with his mother-in-law, the moment has arrived.

  ‘How are you?’ he begins, and then, ‘Very old.’

  It’s almost right, but not quite. On top of this, his mother-in-law’s hearing is bad. She says nothing in return. She must be a melancholy soul, PK thinks.

  But later that evening, Lotta is not pleased with his performance. ‘Why did you call my mother old? She was very upset.’

  ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ he tries to explain.

  The meeting with Lotta’s father does not go much better. PK drops onto his knees to touch the old man’s feet. That is how you show respect to your elders in India. But apparently not in Sweden. ‘Where did the little Indian go?’ Lotta’s father says later, when describing the meeting.

  And then there are the cows. During his first summer in Sweden, they go to visit the family summerhouse in the nearby countryside. That’s when PK sees them, out in their pasture. Someone’s forgotten to open the gate, PK thinks. Cows should roam free. So he opens it. Before long, the animals have strolled out and into the road.

  Cars start honking irritably. PK waves cheerfully back. That is how you get the cows to move out of the way in India too! It turns out they’re not so different here after all.

  But the farmer is furious.

  ‘Who let the cows out?’ he demands in a temper.

  ‘That was me,’ PK replies proudly.

  He takes a four-month course in Swedish for immigrants and works hard at fitting into his new home country. He is used to going everywhere barefoot and sometimes forgets to put on his shoes when he goes outside, even though it is winter. Often it takes the feeling of icy slush between his toes to make him realize his mistake.

  A temporary teaching position in the art department of a local high school opens up and PK applies, even though his Swedish is still rudimentary. But art needs no language, everyone understands a picture, he reflects. He receives an invitation to attend an interview at the municipal department of education. He wears shoes and brushes his hair. So civilized, so Swedish. Almost.

  The red light flashes to green and he enters the interview room, still trying to slow his breathing to mask his anxiety. The interviewer is pacing back and forth, his thumbs hooked in his braces. He rocks on his toes, but says nothing. PK’s nerves intensify. He does not understand what the man is doing or what it means.

  Then, suddenly, the interviewer speaks.

  ‘And what have you sysslat with?’

  He has learned the Swedish word for work, arbeta, and even jobba, but he has never heard this word sysslat before. Later he would learn it meant ‘to be occupied’. The Swedish Employment Service’s favourite term; it is not a job, it is an ‘occupation’, you do not work, you are ‘occupied with your career’.

  The first Swedish person PK had ever met was Jan Lindblad, the famous director of wildlife films. He came to PK’s home village in the jungle in 1968 to film the animals of Tikarpada Wildlife Reserve. The teenaged PK served as a runner for the crew and watched in fascination as they dragged their heavy equipment through the undergrowth, rigged up their cameras and connected their devices with long electrical vines.

  Jan Lindblad liked PK and called him Jungle Boy. He was so funny and friendly and he treated the untouchables as if they were just like everyone else.

  PK observed as Jan Lindblad crept through the vegetation, whistling to attract birds. He was very good at it. He produced melodies and mimicked the animals so that PK laughed until his stomach ached.

  That is it! PK realizes in the middle of his interview. The man is asking if PK can whistle. That makes sense! Clearly whistling is a very important skill in Sweden. Teachers whistle to the children to call them in from their break, after all. That is how they do things here in Sweden.

  PK takes a deep yogic breath and begins whistling, producing a strong and full sound. I too can be like Jan Lindblad, I too can be Swedish, PK thinks. This will prove I am qualified to teach art in a local school.

  But the man does not look happy. He freezes, then raises his palm. Later, PK would learn this was a signal meaning ‘stop’. But right now, PK has no idea. In India, a raised palm means ‘Great, keep it up!’ So he continues, louder and with even greater gusto.

  He whistles until his cheeks hurt and then stops. That should be enough.

  The interviewer looks away. Then he looks straight into PK’s eyes and asks ten short questions about his education and background. Nothing more. Then he goes to the door and opens it. PK gathers his papers.

  ‘Thank you, goodbye!’ the man says firmly.

  He sounds almost angry.

  After the interview, PK tortures himself with questions about the man’s behaviour. Why had he been so abrupt? Was he not good enough for the job? Did he whistle the wrong tune?

  Yet a few days later, PK receives a call from the headmaster of Engelbrecht School. Would Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia be willing to take a temporary job as an art teacher and report to work early the next morning?

  People think their love will never last. He will find it too hard to adapt. The darkness, the cold, the growing racism, even the way Swedes socialize, it will all break him sooner or later, they say. ‘Oh God, how can an Indian village boy learn to live in modern Sweden?’ they whisper to each other, shaking their heads. ‘Before long he will realize just how different it is here and go back to the jungle.’

  But PK never longs to return to India. ‘Mentally, I have escaped India entirely,’ he writes in the red and black diary Lotta has given him. He fills it quickly – and then another, and another – with musings about his new life in Sweden. For the first year he spends his evenings on the couch in the apartment on Ulvensgatan and writes down all his disappointments, new experiences, the people who believe in them and those who do not. He writes as the autumn rain splashes against the façade of the apartment building, as the shards of ice glisten in the winter sun and the blackbirds sing through the open window in the first warmth of the following spring. He lets himself absorb it all, and processes his thoughts in these pages. Sweden and the culture shock have made him a more reflective man.

  With every passing day he becomes more Swedish and less Indian. But Lotta is taking an opposite path. She immerses herself in yoga and meditation. She recites mantras as the first rays of morning sun light the sky. PK hates mantras. The monotonous purr reminds him of all that he has escaped: the power of the Brahmins, the alienation and the suicide attempts. But he learns to overcome even those feelings, which still sometimes manifest themselves in physical nausea. He must mute the memories and live with them.

  Other aspects of Indian culture he recalls with more fondness, so long as they have nothing to do with religion. After first arriving, PK painted postcards and posters with Indian motifs, which he sold to friends and colleagues. He had pictures published in several Swedish newspapers. His proudest moment was when the culture section of one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers, Aftonbladet, published a full-length feature about his art and organized an exhibition of his drawings in its newsroom, just as The Kabul Times had done previously. The Aftonbladet article led to more shows in the capital.

  It is difficult to escape his place of origin, however. People keep telling him to teach yoga, despite his protests that he barely knows enough about it to practise himself, let alone teach. And yet, expectations are high. Offers to lead courses become ever more frequent.

  ‘I’ve never even taken a yoga class, all I know was taught to me by my big brother,’ PK tells the residents of Borås.

  ‘So much the better,’ they answer.

  When the local community college advertises the city’s first ever yoga cou
rse taught by a real Indian, places are snapped up fast. Nearly all his students are female.

  PK goes through the movements his brother had shown him. It’s not much, he thinks. But they seem happy, asking him questions about yoga’s deeper philosophical meaning and significance, things Lotta ought to have answered, because he does not really know the answers. And yet, strangely, the women seem satisfied with his confused and partial responses that are neither insightful nor profound, based as they are on fragments he had heard as a young man.

  ‘I smile and teach my yoga classes. At least it’s work and earns me money,’ PK writes in his diary.

  Sometimes his thoughts turn to what would have become of him had he never met Lotta, bought that first bike in New Delhi or started riding west. He daydreams about what life would have been like had he not fallen in love and been charged with the ‘energy of forgiveness’, and had instead remained in his homeland, an India paralysed by caste conflict. I would have become a politician and fought for the rights of the untouchables, he concludes. Politics would have been my only weapon.

  Maybe he would have been elected to Parliament for Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party. Then he would have presumably started taking bribes just like everyone else. Power corrupts. That is the way it is. Very few people can resist and remain clean.

  Maybe politics would have proved insufficient to quell his anger. Thoughts of revenge had been a feature of his childhood and had even lasted into adulthood. Despite the best efforts of his parents to dissuade and calm him, they have been a part of him ever since he can remember: thoughts of horrific acts of revenge. Until he met Lotta, that is.

  ‘You must forgive,’ his mother and father had said.

  It has been a long time since PK last thought of revenge. Now, if the anger ever starts to fizz and burn, he understands that the object of his rage is nothing more than a mirror image of himself.

  PK wants to be Swedish. He ignores the fact that the people around them remain sceptical. The more friends and colleagues doubt his ability to cope in Sweden, the more he fights to fit in. And it is this struggle to embrace all things Swedish that changes everything. It drives him forward. Learning the language is not easy. He understands most of what is said, but often his pronunciation holds him back. Misunderstandings occur because of misplaced emphasis, a wrong consonant or vowel sound. But each mistake only makes him more determined. He is going to succeed! It is going to work out! As long as he does not give up!

  During his first year in Sweden, a teenage student approaches him in the corridor and asks why he has not married an Indian woman instead.

  ‘It would suit you better,’ she declares.

  ‘Love knows no borders,’ PK responds brusquely and goes out into the schoolyard, where Lotta is waiting for him.

  He will overcome these obstacles. He starts teacher training in outdoor education at Mullsjö College outside Jönköping, learns to ski both cross-country and downhill. He takes mountaineering courses in Tarnaby and climbs Sweden’s highest peak. He gets a job as a recreational leader at Elfsborg, the largest sports club in Borås, puts on events at the church and for the local chapter of the Red Cross, learns to like cinnamon buns and to ride the family horse. He gains ever more skills and experiences specific to Swedish culture, hoping that eventually Swedes will start treating him as a person and not as a representative of the place where he happened to be born.

  Lotta and PK continue living in the apartment in Borås, but every summer they move out to the old family farm at Kroksjöås that used to belong to Lotta’s grandparents. There, they grow cauliflowers and potatoes, take walks in the woods and discuss the possibility of eventually moving out to the forest permanently.

  Late in the summer of 1985, Emelie is born. Not any old day. 15 August. The same day, thirty-eight years earlier, that India had gained independence from the British. What a coincidence! ‘Today I feel freer than ever,’ he writes in his diary.

  His father, brothers and the rest of the family back home in Orissa see it as an omen.

  ‘Now your roots are firmly planted in your new country,’ his father writes in a letter, adding that he hopes PK has not forgotten his Indian ancestry completely. ‘I am looking forward to hearing about Emelie’s naming ceremony,’ he writes.

  PK is forced to disguise his aversion to religion. His family in India would be disappointed if he did not organize a Namkarana ceremony, the Hindu equivalent of a Christian baptism. Eleven days after their daughter is born, PK and Lotta perform the ritual according to Hindu tradition. They gather the Swedish part of the family – PK’s family in India could not afford to come – and they shave the thin tufts of Emelie’s hair as PK reads out loud all the auspicious names and honorific titles his father has sent.

  ‘The Swedish side of the family didn’t much appreciate the ritual. They looked at Emelie’s shaven head as if she was a prisoner in a concentration camp,’ he writes in his diary.

  But by the time Emelie’s brother Karl-Siddhartha is born three years later, they are used to these strange Indian rituals.

  After several years of substitute teaching, courses in Swedish for immigrants and further studying, PK sends his transcript from the art school in New Delhi to the Swedish National Board of Education to have it approved. The Swedish authorities accept the qualification and he is now able to take a permanent position as an art teacher at Engelbrecht School.

  At the beginning of every semester, he clears away the chairs and benches and tells the students to sit cross-legged on the floor. He wants them to know that as well as being another adult, a responsible, conscientious and composed authority figure, he is also just a kid like them. He imitates jungle birds and animals, lies down on his back and waves his legs in the air. He does headstands, taken from his morning yoga practice in the living room. The children laugh and understand they need not fear a teacher so willing to make a fool of himself.

  The cobra had protected him from the rain as a baby in the basket in the hut with the broken roof, and it had also ensured his safe arrival in Borås. Now it continues to protect him in his new country. The students at Engelbrecht School like to pour sugar into the headmaster and other teachers’ petrol tanks. But PK is spared. No one touches his white Volvo 242. A rumour circulates among the school’s troublemakers that PK keeps a cobra in the boot.

  ‘Never touch the Indian’s car, you might get bitten!’

  As PK stands in front of his students, his thoughts often return to his own school days, and all the times in primary school when he had been bullied by his classmates and the teacher. The untouchable pariah. Such bullying en masse is not possible in Sweden, which reassures him.

  But it does happen on a smaller scale, even in Borås. When PK sees Swedish students harassing each other he bursts with an uncontrollable anger. One of the school’s known bullies makes the mistake of tormenting one of his victims right before PK’s eyes. PK’s reaction is instinctive. He roars. Swedish turns to English and then to Oriya, the language of his childhood. He is overwhelmed by feelings difficult to explain to the Swedish kids. He connects to a deeper anger, rooted in that classroom in Athmallik, and it explodes right here in his classroom in Sweden.

  ‘Get down on your knees!’ he bellows.

  A string of Oriya follows, incomprehensible to everyone but PK.

  For the first time, the bully obeys and kneels down, as he can feel the meaning of PK’s words, even if he does not understand them. The boy bends his head and keeps his eyes on the floor; he is too scared to move. PK lets his captive stay there for the rest of the lesson, defeated and humiliated.

  Forcing a student to kneel for more than half an hour is not an acceptable punishment in a Swedish school. PK knows that, but that day, he does not care. The memory of his own vulnerability is still raw. The rage that has been sitting just below the surface for so long takes precedence. He feels ashamed about it afterwards. But many years later, he receives a call from the young bully, now a grown man, drunk and crying. H
e is ringing to thank PK. A letter follows repeating the sentiment, claiming that his Indian teacher had ‘taken the devil out of him’. The victim later tells PK that the experience had also been transformative for him.

  ‘No one ever bullied me again after that; you broke a pattern in a way that everyone else was scared to try,’ he said.

  Kroksjöås Farm, thirty-five years after the first time he saw a wood anemone. Såken Lake laps against the shore, fir trees rustle in the wind and the laughter of children rolls over the dark surface of the water from the beach on the other side. He loves the sounds of the Scandinavian forest.

  He sits on a white garden chair, his feet tickled by the high, yellow grass interspersed with poppies and daisies, and reflects on his life in Sweden. Almost a whole lifetime has passed.

  He would not have survived without Lotta.

  Now he has taken early retirement to make time to paint. During all those years as a teacher, he found it next to impossible to create anything in the studio tucked into their small apartment in the centre of Borås and then, after they moved to the forest permanently, in the red barn next to the yellow wooden house. Any spare time he once had disappeared entirely when the school started demanding he write long reports for each student using the school’s new computer system. It was the perfect excuse to withdraw.

  He has already been up for hours, completed his daily yoga practice that, paradoxically, has long been an indispensable part of his morning routine since he was forced to teach it as a newly arrived immigrant. He has had his ginger tea in the conservatory and finally eaten breakfast, a masala omelette on toasted bread. Afternoon is fast approaching in the house by the lake and the children have just woken up.

  They are adults now.

  Emelie has finished her studies in fashion management with a focus on marketing, and is about to head out into the world of work. She has interned in Copenhagen, rummaged in London’s markets, spent a spring in Bombay and has recently been to Orissa to sign contracts with artisans who specialize in weaving ikat scarves.