Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  I have learned the most important rule of the road: THE BIGGER VEHICLE ALWAYSHAS THE RIGHT-OF-WAY. This puts bicycles at the very bottom of the vehicle caste system. When two trucks converge, and you, the lowly cyclist, happen to be present, you have but one option other than death—head for the ditch! And time and time again, that’s exactly what I did on the road to Agra (and I thought being a bicycle courier in Seattle was exciting).

  —Willie Weir, “Cycling India: Letters from the Road”

  EYE-SPECIAL HOSPITAL

  PLEASE THIS WAY

  Alice in Wonderland? No, this was India—a country which never failed to surprise. We followed a bank in the direction indicated by the sign but could see only a bunch of bangled women chattering in a golden aura of sunlit dust with big brass water-pots on their heads as they walked towards a small cluster of mud huts. We stopped a youth wearing a shabby red shirt with “Mr. India” written on the back.

  “Mr. India,” I said, “do you know the way to eye hospital?”

  “Eleven minutes walk this way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction to that of the sign.

  “Are you certain?” I asked uncertainly, following his gaze. “All I can see that way are giant haystacks.”

  “Yes, eye hospital certainly this way.”

  In India it is not a good idea to ask just one person’s opinion, especially as far as directions are concerned. Not wishing to appear discourteous or unhelpful, they will say the first thing that comes into their head rather than honestly and far more usefully admitting that they do not know. It is best to ask as many people as possible and opt for the majority view. This does not mean that you will then be going in the right direction—it just gives you a slightly better chance of doing so.

  We therefore asked as many people as possible but we still ended up lost and it was simply by a stroke of good luck that, exhausted, we stumbled upon a ramshackle hut to replenish our water and discovered that we had finally reached our goal. The eye hospital consisted of two dusty, dingy rooms and a bald, bespectacled little man with a magnifying glass. He looked like Gandhi but he was in fact the eye specialist. Peter was laid out on a board. A dim, flickering torch was shone into his eye and then the doctor produced a syringed needle.

  Panic-stricken, Peter sat bolt upright and narrowly missed impaling his eye on it.

  “Whoa!” he gasped. “Where are you going with that? I don’t need any needles, all I need is a cotton-bud.”

  “You must remain lying. I must anaesthetize the eye.”

  The thought of an injection near his eye turned Peter rigid with shock. He lay unflinching as the doctor carried out his delicate manoeuvre and successfully removed the offending article. Peter was pronounced healed, given a bottle of drops and told, “Please Mr. Peter, no charge.”

  The Taj Mahal was memorable not only for everything that it is memorable for but also for meeting Aiden, a hairy cyclist from Matlock Bath in Derbyshire, who joined us and amused us with his continual flow of unusual “slug poems” and reactions to his own case of dire dysentery. We threesomed it out into Rajasthan—a combination which only confused people further.

  “Madame!” hailed a tall Rajastani buried beneath a brightly coloured turban. “I conclude you have two husbands.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you conclude wrongly,” I said. “One’s my puncture repairer and the other’s my slug-poet.”

  “Ah yes, of course,” he replied and turned tail with a flick of his elaborate mustache.

  The sun, a blazing ball of fire, set the walls of Jaipur aglow with a deep, flickering, rosy hue as we arrived. It was easy to see why it is renowned as the Pink City but things did not stay rosy for long in the clamorous congestion that followed. Peter, behind me one moment, was gone the next, vanishing into the mêlée. India is like that; it can just swallow you up. Aiden and I spent a fruitless half hour scouring the teeming streets for him but soon gave up. It was a pointless task. We knew we would meet him again somewhere along the way: in a country brimming with nearly nine hundred million people it is amazing how easily and how often you keep bumping into people you either know of or know.

  Midway between Delhi and Agra we pulled into a dusty lot behind a clump of bushes and stopped at a rundown teahouse for refreshments. Our driver clearly knew the place well because he bypassed the main entrance, successfully evading a group of men who squatted together in the heat surrounded by a motley assort ment of animals. It was a woefully listless scene until we got out of the car and one of the men spotted us. Suddenly the place erupted in a frenzy of music, dancing bears, frolicking monkeys, slithering snakes, squawking birds, and wild gyrations by the men who were at once competing with each other and working as a unified team to win our rupees. We escaped into the restaurant and the scene quieted again until a tour bus pulled in and the show began anew, the same frenetic performance. All day it must be like this, long periods of quiet followed by bursts of pandemonium, all an ongoing attempt to eke out a living.

  —James O’Reilly and Larry Habegger, “Fools in Agra”

  Peter was located a hundred miles down the road, eating a bowlful of banana porridge beside the Holy Lake of Pushkar, where ash-covered sadhus with matted hair and loin cloths sat cross-legged in a state of hypnotized spiritualism. The devout wandered with blood-red tika marks on their brows and garlands of marigolds, offering coconuts to the sacred waters where they bathed to wash away years of impurity and to strengthen their good karma in states of rapt reverence.

  Pushkar was a wonderful place to hang up my wheels for a while and relax. It was brimming with trippies but it was one of those rare places where an influx of travellers proved an advantage. After weeks of cycling through small rural villages where no bus-or train-travelling sightseer would feel inclined to alight and where we were constantly at the centre of animated and forever curious crowds who unceasingly pummelled us with questions and inane gibbering chit-chat, it was sheer bliss to be able to walk around Pushkar without being hammered or pursued.

  The crooked streets were lined with makeshift stalls piled high with pyramids of bananas, papayas, coconuts and peanuts, chickpeas and grapes. Next door to a vendor selling second-hand teeth, I bought some exquisite mangoes and gorged myself silly.

  Aiden and I shared a big, airy rooftop room which turned out to be a popular thoroughfare for the local monkeys. These were the sort of thieving, hiss-spitting (possibly rabid) monkeys that you treated with some respect. If they pocketed your bunch of bananas, then you would neither challenge them nor question the act.“Go ahead,” you would say, keeping a wary distance from their devilishly sharp claws, “please help yourself—you’re welcome to anything—the choice is yours.” It was better than risking the high possibility of being attacked and bitten.

  Sitting on the sun-scorched rooftop overlooking the lake one afternoon, Orwell in one hand, banana in the other, I was dreamily peering down at the pigeons strutting on the waterside steps of the ghats, pecking and drinking, when suddenly the soundtrack of Jaws filled my head. Down in the murky depths of the Holy Waters I caught sight of a savage-looking catfish—more a shark than a mere fish—with grotesque, evil eyes and a mouthful of razor-jagged teeth. More of them appeared on the scene—huge, sinister beasts, lurking just beneath the surface, scarcely moving but ever watchful of the winged activity on the ghats. The clottish pigeons were quite unaware of the impending danger from the denizens of the deep and continued to peck at the water’s edge. Then came the moment. A pigeon bent down for a thirst-quenching beakful. In a splashing flash, the monster fish leapt from the water, grabbed the pigeon by its neck, decapitated it, retained the head and dived back down into the holy murk.

  Every morning at dawn I would pocket a book and a mango and walk beneath reddening skies, out past the stalls, the temples, the curled, skeletal forms of sleeping beggars, to climb a massive, rugged outcrop of rock. At its top was a golden fairytale temple, perched high above the shifting sands of the desert. Parrots with wildly colour
ed plumage and crests that jutted like ships’ prows would flit and swoop like circus clowns; and eagle-like birds of prey would glide gracefully past at eye level. Way down below was Pushkar, a distant shimmer of Holy Lake and whitewashed roofs gently stirring into life as the sun crept over the sandy horizon. For a couple of hours I would sit, queen of my castle, enjoying the peace, my mango and my aptly titled book, Far from the Madding Crowd.

  From Pushkar the three of us branched off in different directions. I fancied a while of lone Indian travel and ignored people’s warnings, including Naveen’s back in Delhi: “Don’t travel alone—the village people are uncivilized and dangerous.” Peter and I arranged to meet for tea several weeks later at the Lake Palace in Udaipur. Aiden, with his slug poems and dire dysentery, was running out of time and jumped on a train. Before doing so, however, he handed me a “dog stick.”

  “I think you might need this,” he said, “if the dogs of Pushkar are anything to go by.”

  He was right. It was not the uncivilized people that would terrorize me but the dogs. India was teeming with pariah hounds. Packs of snarling, salivating canines would surge in my wake, hell-bent on sinking their wolflike fangs into a juicy chunk of blurred, revolving calf. There was no way that I was going to play brave, stand my ground, look them in the eye and ward them off with a few lobbed rocks. They bore down on me from all sides, some of them twice my size—huge, frenzied creatures thirsty for blood. In a state of panic I would reach unbelievable speeds in frantic, lung-bursting attempts to outcycle the ferocious beasts. All the while I would whirl and wield my dog stick, every now and then delivering a direct hit which would send one of my tormentors sprawling with a yelp. This was no dog-loving nation and these were rabid beasts.

  I stepped out of my hut, and again met the dog, a red-eyed, long-nosed, brown, fruit salad of genes with battle scars, the perfect nemesis for Little Red Riding Hood. Each moment that I thought I may be getting closer to some under standing of Mahabalipuram as a thumbnail sketch of India, this dog would appear; my accuser, one of a class of canines known in India as “pariah dogs.”

  —Laurie Udesky, ”Mahabalipuram Daze”

  As I cycled across the Great Indian Desert, people, places and food and water supplies thinned to a trickle. I would pass the desiccated carcasses of camels and macabre, grinning skulls—a reminder of what could happen if things went wrong. All the time, high above in the burnt white skies, were the ever watchful and ever hungry eyes of circling vultures.

  My Indian maps were hopelessly inaccurate and gave little help in discerning what might lie ahead. Villages that I had relied on for food or water or accommodation and which looked quite promising on the map turned out to be dismally small or nonexistent. It was no good pointing to the map when seeking directions from a crowd of villagers, either. Most had never travelled further than the neighbouring village, let alone to one fifty miles away. To mention Delhi or Calcutta was like talking of another planet. If I showed them the map a multitude of grappling hands would descend upon it, turning it upside down and back to front in mystification. I gave up trying to extract navigational information from it and wore it on my head as a turban instead, or wrapped myself in it sari-fashion or, when the sea of pressing faces was too overpowering, I used the map to cover my face and disappeared into a glorious but brief respite of crumpled paper where no eyes could meet mine. There I would stand, motionless, among a rabble of hundreds of puzzled people, my features veiled by 1:1,500,000 scale map of India, thinking: is this really happening? I wanted to curl myself up in a dark corner and hide. But the head-shattering din and the treading on my toes made me realize that, yes, it was happening all right. The clamouring crowd would press closer and closer, trying to get a glimpse of this peculiar, map-bedecked alien on a pink bicycle. Then, when I felt they had overstepped their mark and had stood on all my toes, and when a few cheeky types in the front stalls had sneakily tried to peep through the gaps of my mapped disguise, I would suddenly throw it aside and say, “Boo!” It never failed to amuse.

  Water supplies were often highly suspect. One night I turned up at a small temple; I asked for water and was directed to a well. I threw down the bucket, hauled it up, added a purifying tablet that tasted of swimming pools and drank my fill. Refreshed, I went to bed. The next morning I returned to the well and discovered, by the light of day, that a family of fat rats had set up base in its murky depths.

  On the road to Jaisalmer I met Philippe, a Belgian bus-driver riding a heavy, single-speed heap of Indian-made Hero bicycle. Fed up with crowded trains and buses, he had bought his bike brand new for £28 [about $43] up in Rishikesh, a place the Beatles had made famous for staying there during their hippy phase. He would sell it later in Jaisalmer market at only £4 less—not a bad rate of depreciation for a two-month tour covering more than fifteen hundred miles.

  It was a day for meeting cyclists. Down the road I met a white-haired American who had an exquisite brass gear lever. After a collision with a rickshaw in Bombay, he had a new one made up from the shambles of a scrap-metal mechanic’s shop. Its precision work surpassed even the like of Campagnolo—and it cost a mere twenty-five pence. Indians are great improvisers; nothing gets wasted and if they do not have it they will make it.

  Then out of the heat-haze Peter appeared. That evening we stayed in a small dak bungalow (a government-run rest-house) which we found hidden in a compound in Phalodi. Usually these places provided a degree of escape from the inquisitive locals and this one did too—for about half an hour.

  I had a shower in our en suite bathroom—a dark, odorous, cockroach-infested space about five-foot square with a cooking-oil drum full of water and a hole in the floor that acted as both drain and toilet. Then I fell on the bed in a state of sweaty torpor. The whirring ceiling fan had two speeds: slow, which was as beneficial as “off,” and fast, in which it spun in a frenzy with the ferocious noise and speed of helicopter blades gone berserk, stirring up a hot whirlwind of choking dust and threatening to decapitate you every time you stood up. It was better to sweat in silence.

  Then we were discovered. Outside the window a small but determined battalion of twelve-year-olds had sneaked up on us unnoticed and then broke into a giggling torrent of:“Good morning your father name! English is house! What your time!”

  We closed the window, closed the door and suffered in stuffiness.

  The window was pushed open; a face pushed through. “Book yes not?”We slammed it shut. It opened again (there was no catch): more faces, more giggles, more screams. Then the door was discovered; it was banged on and pushed open to cries of impish laughter and a retreat of scuffling feet. We wanted some peace, we wanted some sleep, but we were not going to get any. I sat up and started shelling peas. Peter sat up in exasperation. He wanted to sort them out—the boys, that is, not the peas.

  “Leave them,” I said, adding hopefully but unrealistically,“they might get bored and go away.”

  I should have known better; Indian staying power is remarkable and the squad outside did not go away. They simply became noisier and more excited. Then they took to hurling missiles.

  When Peter exchanged his flip-flops for baseball boots, I knew he was preparing for gang warfare. Then he picked up his bicycle pump. Things were getting serious. He crouched by the door like a tensed tiger ready to pounce before the kill, waiting for an overconfident enemy to open the door. I acted as decoy and continued passively podding peas. Peter called me Bait.

  THWAACK! The door was kicked open and Peter, emitting a deafening war cry, burst out with such terrifying speed that I dropped a pod in fright. All hell was let loose. He charged into a thick cloud of dust after the panic-stricken stampede. Yells and screams of fear reverberated off the compound walls. The gang leader broke away from the pack and Peter was after him in a flash, accelerating hard as he made a lunge and grabbed him—a blubbering, wailing wreck pleading innocence. The rest of the mob scampered up the boundary wall and made it to their safe haven, but they
were still screaming and leaping up and down like a bunch of berserk baboons.

  Peter the Great triumphantly dragged his hysterical, flapping prey into our room. The wide-eyed captive was terrified, certain that he was doomed. Locking him in our cell (the toilet), Peter shouted tauntingly through the door:“Boy toilet like? Yes not stay? Time now quiet! Not please shout!”

  Our victim yowled away, hammering like a mad thing on the door and emitting ear-shattering screams which soon brought the government staff and half the village running. Bursting through the door, they found us both sitting on the bed calmly shelling peas.

  “Evening,” said Peter.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Aaaargh!” screamed a voice from the toilet. We continued our shelling as if nothing was amiss.

  The room became a jam-packed madhouse with everyone shouting and screaming simultaneously. We explained the situation, our wailing captive was rescued and finally the commotion died down. We were left in peace. Bliss.

  Later we ventured out to get some dal and chapatis from a small chai house where the owner asked if it was true that Peter had ill-treated a child. Peter relayed the full story.

  “That boy,” laughed the owner, “is my nephew. Always he is very bad boy indeed.Very spoilt. Much needed to be taught a lesson. Thank you.”

  Alone again, at Bijolia I stayed at a “hotel” which was half teahouse, half mechanic’s shop. My room resembled a scrap yard. There was a bed—grimy-grey with an oil-stained sheet and surrounded by old tins of grease, rusting wheels, lethal scraps of metal, an assortment of shoddy tools and even an old car engine.