by Danny Bent
* * *
As I rode south, working elephants started to appear and naughty monkeys plagued the road. It began to really feel like the India I’d seen in the movies. As I cycled along, a news channel pulled alongside and conducted an interview with me from a moving car.
I stopped at a café and the flies descended upon me, dragging themselves away from the cooking pots and utensils. Bird life freely feeds on the bulbous flies. Seeing meat hung from pegs in the midday heat wrapped in flies, I was suddenly vegetarian again.
After washing the pots with brown water, the cook brought over my food with his thumb in my dhal. He removed it and wiped it on his never-been-washed apron. There was nowhere to wash my hands and the soapless spray handwash my mum had insisted on my using had been lost months ago. Dipping my hand into my food to take my first bite, I thought of the hundreds of hands I had shaken since waking that day and the number of people I had seen doing 'number twos' by the side of the road (there’s no toilet paper in India – this is a hands-on approach). I was repulsed for a second but my hunger from a day's cycling got the better of me.
A mouse scuttled from beneath my chair and the obligatory swollen pustulent rat lay in the gutter in the midday heat. It seemed to be moving but that was just the effect of the flies. The cows eat the fly-encrusted rubbish and they themselves are covered with flies.
It’s probably hard for you to believe, I know, but I was sick. What was even harder to believe was that there was no vomiting or diarrhoea. I had 'man 'flu'. Why? When? How? My nose ran, I was coughing, and my throat was so sore.
Recognising me from the paper, my hotel owner gave me a fifty percent reduction. When I showered and dried myself, the towel was black with dirt. The smog and dirt mixing with my sweat from the heat was a terrible concoction to get off my skin.
Needing money, I went round every cash machine in the town. My card was rejected from the first, and the second, and the third. Here we go again. At one of the last ones, I heard it whirring and cheered as if I’d won the jack pot, jumping around the cubical and hammering my fists on the wall. A man ran in with a shot gun to see what the matter was. That soon shut me up. A receipt popped out of the cash drawer. “Unable to process”. Arrrgghhhh!
The roads continued to take their toll on Shirley. Her seat was broken, meaning a sharp shard of metal jabbed into my bottom. I had a sore that ran from cheek to cheek and it was agony at all times. The cycle shacks didn't seem to be able to fix it. Each night I applied ointment but there was little point. The next day I would be on the bike again, and in pain again.
Chapter 36
Ditching Shirley in the hallway, I was shown up to the viewing gallery on top of the hotel. Meanwhile everyone else in Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, was making their way to the top of their own hotel. The sun was just about to set, leaving a magnificent glow over the shining white dome of the Taj.
The hotels vie with each other continuously to get the best view of the Taj. One hotel builds another floor and all those behind it have to do the same to protect their view. I slumped into a chair next to another Brit who was slowly polishing off the hotel's supply of booze, and ordered one of everything on the menu. The Taj looked quite small from where we were, and surprisingly unimpressive.
I wondered to myself whether I’d bother paying the 700R to see it. Locals pay 50R for the same honour. The price seemed to have become a little over-inflated for the foreign tourists. My viewing buddy was equally unimpressed. He was here for the birds. As green parakeets flew over our heads, he named each variety that is present in India. He too was travelling by bicycle, the 'Local Hero' variety, cycling a few miles each day to get to new vantage point to watch more birds.
Despite the fact that the Taj was relatively unimpressive, the view above the city was spectacular. Boys were whistling and whooping on top of buildings to get flocks of pigeons to do an array of acrobatic swoops before returning to their home buildings. Pigeons belonging to different people merged and then parted as the commands flew through the air like radio signals. Troops of monkeys jumped from building to building. Others sat and groomed each other whilst their youngsters fought and grappled on the edge of fifty foot ledges.
I was also joined by Hans and Sophie, a German / Irish couple who were decorated in an array of piercings and tattoos and who had connected their iPod up to speakers, pounding beat box music across the city. An Israeli song came on and a girl ran from her room to be comforted by her homeland music. All three were travelling India and smoking as much of the annual production of passing marijuana plantations as they could. We stayed up all night sharing our experiences and adventures. People still stared in disbelief at the journey I had undertaken but, now that I was in India, they were starting to realise that it was possible, and that I would make it, which was comforting.
When I awoke the next morning to see the sunrise, I glanced up at the viewing gallery from below. There were people up there reading the menus and I fancied some company. As I climbed the stairs, I noticed that these people were very small and quite hairy. The monkeys from the previous night were sitting in the exact same positions the guys and I had occupied, holding the menus in front of them as if they were reading them. One had his menu upside down. He was clearly showing off. A holler came from the kitchen below followed by a crashing of steel pans, and the monkeys scampered off, tearing and throwing the menus around as they left.
At ground level, just outside of the hostel, there was a cow that seemed to be meditating. Twelve hours later it was in the exact same spot. It was no doubt getting in the way of the owner's business but, as cows are sacred in India, it was allowed to stay until it decided to leave.
I sat in the centre of the old town waiting for a chai to be served and was greeted by a holy man who blessed me in Hindi before kissing my hand. He had a bright twinkle in his eye and, when he went to kiss my hand again, he bit down on it, drawing blood. Before I could even begin to decide whether to punch him or run, a monkey jumped from high above onto an electric power pylon. The pylon exploded, sending three prongs of lightning shooting around me. Happy to see the monkey scamper off, I looked around. The holy man had disappeared.
Dressed in beautiful blue uniforms, a group of school children caught my eye and I followed them up the nearby steps near to their school, taking pictures of them and conversing with them in different languages. Sitting a few metres from the stairs, a group of men beckoned me over but I was too busy with the children and monkeys to pay them any attention. The school had a wonderful view of the Taj Mahal. I thought how lucky these children were to have that inspiration in their back yard. On closer inspection, they also had a great view of the men injecting heroin into their crutches and legs. One man noticed my shock and gave me a full frontal of him shooting up.
The heat during the day was becoming intolerable, so I decided to ‘go native’ and buy the local lungi, a sheet that is worn like a skirt in a number of different ways. If David Beckham can do it with a sarong, then Danny Bent can do it with a lungi.
I decided that it would be rude to visit Agra and only see the Taj from afar, so I walked down the street towards the entrance. Pestered by guides trying to make a living at the country's most visited tourist attraction, I strolled forward, avoiding the meditating cow. People tried to entice me into their hotels with calls of marijuana and beer, and I thought it strange that no-one offered me a bed or a good meal.
On my left I had a boy trying to sell me miniature Tajs; on my right were two guides fighting for my trade. When they realised I wasn’t buying, they hurled insults at me. In England I would have been stressed by this attention, the peppering of invites and insults, but not here. I realised how accustomed to the attention I’d become. It just washed off my back, but I understood the reputation Agra had. “The city is horrible - arrive and leave in the same day,” I’d been told more than once a day since arriving in India. Now this attention was my bread and butter. I needed it. Without it, I’d feel like a movie
star going from Hollywood blockbuster to detergent commercials.
After a scrummage at the ticket office, I walked through the majestic gates to the Taj and stopped dead in my tracks. There were long lines of fountains leading to a round dome, surrounded by four pillars. It looked like a long lost friend, so familiar to the eye, as if I had known every detail before I’d even arrived. It was amazing. I stood for minutes just gazing. I looked around and saw the same look in everyone’s eyes. The entrance was huge and opened into a clearing which I’m sure was engineered so that people had a chance to just stop and soak it up.
It is one of the most recognizable structures in the world. It was built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It is widely considered as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and stands as a symbol of eternal love.
Twenty-two thousand workers and one thousand elephants built it between 1631 and 1653, whereupon the emperor gave the order for the workers' hands to be chopped off so no-one could make anything like it again.
Most of the tourists around me were Indians. They told me that “Domestic tourism is very big in India”, speaking with that beautiful Indian twang where every syllable is rounded out, and with the accompanying head wobbling that I tried my hardest to perfect during my stay in India.
These tourists, after tearing their eyes away from their beloved Taj, soon noticed the white man in the lungi. In the same way as I’d gazed at the Taj, they gazed at me, and the cameras started to go off. Groups of people gathered round me wanting to pose with me for pictures, including the gardeners pruning the roses who asked me to hold their tools and immediately trod all over the sacred gardens in their haste to appear by my side. Then a monkey jumped over my head. This was something else.
One minute India is beautiful - A-Ma-Zing, magical, tantalising - the next it's nasty, repulsive, vile and angry but, before you know it, it’s back to being mystical, tender, wonderful and breathtaking again.
* * *
Men on motorbikes thought it was fun to ride into my handle bars and wheels. Buses played with my life like babies with a rag doll. Children threw stones at my head and, if I stopped, they ran for cover. Cheeky things.
Men made dirty homosexual hand gestures at me. They have grown up surrounded by men, starved of female attention. They are forced to marry a woman they don’t even know, who could end up being a bit of a minger or not their type at all and, having totally different interests, they end up despising each other. Is it any wonder they turn to each other for affection and love? And I guess a white, milky bar kid is a new delight.
In fact I noticed an inverse correlation between the number of women in a village and the levels of aggression in the men - more women less aggression, and vice-versa.
In some parts of Pakistan, as I have already observed, the women were not allowed to leave the house. In rural India they are forced to do ALL the work, including mixing cement and working in the fields, while the men sit around chatting and smoking, their only role being to ensure that the women keep up the expected rate of work. By the evening the women are walking back from the fields carrying a huge weight of logs or sticks on their heads. The man walks behind them with an ominous stick. In the end I became so frustrated at their laziness that I would stop and shout to them as I went past “Working hard? Busy as usual?”.
How can this be the case in a country where the first female Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was in power almost twenty years before Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Surely she would have advanced women’s rights.
‘Show me the real India’ I called to the universe.
I’d left the beautiful Taj and the bustling Agra, with its town filled with foreign and Indian tourists, and locals who would sell their own mother to a tourist for the right price. 'Best mother in all of India. I give you good price' – with more head waggling.
The smog seemed to be chasing me and my lungs were hurting. I occasionally coughed up nasty brown sludge.
Red dusty roads cutting between rock formations that wouldn’t look out of place in the Australian outback lay before me. Somehow bright yellow rape seed (my home town, Canewdon’s, finest export) managed to flourish here, leaving a wonderful smell and contrast with the red rocks. The red then turned to bright lush green as agriculture kicked in. Extensive and complex irrigation streams had been cut into the earth to make it possible. Kevin of 'I’ve eaten marijuana and can’t tell if I’m breathing' fame, from Gilgit, wrote to me telling me how he’d camped in one of these fields. At two in the morning his tent was floating in half a foot of water. In true Irish laid back style he went back to enjoying his water bed. We cyclists get tired you know.
The green farmland turned to palm tree jungle, bejewelled with pink and red flowers. The ruined ghost city of Fatehpur peaked out from the undergrowth.
Stopping, I went tiger hunting, intending to shoot them only with my camera. We saw monkeys, all sorts of birds, deer, a leopard kill, and crocodiles, but no tigers. I continued to keep my eyes peeled, except when I was in my tent where, if I had heard a roar, my strategy would have been to hide in my sleeping bag and hope for the best (after kung fu chopping the little blighter and subjecting him to a judo throw, of course. I’m a tough guy. You know that).
As I left Ranthambhore, I passed ladies in luminous dress. Rajasthan is famous for its saris. Carts pulled by camels filled the roads. I saw one that had stopped at a petrol pump. The owner was filling a tank of fuel for his house but at first glance it looked like he was filling the camel up. The home he was taking the fuel to was built of mud bricks and almost certainly had a buffalo roped up outside to provide milk for all the occupants.
A motorcyclist in a clown mask flew past in the opposite direction, carrying his two mates and destroying my last hopes of arriving without incident in Chembakolli.
Never put your camera down, never take your eyes off the road. India is very much alive and not afraid to show it.
Chapter 37
I stopped to buy the Coke and crisps which were what I was eating for breakfast after recent bouts of sickness of the ‘Oh no, how do I get to a phone to call the ambulance without leaving a nasty trail?’ variety, and all business in the village stopped too. Motorbikes pulled over with anything up to four additional passengers, shops emptied, cafés were vacated leaving bills unpaid, and children ran to practise their smatterings of English. These villages don’t see Westerners very often.
You can normally tell how long it has been since a foreigner has been around by the ages of the children who burst into tears at the sight of the ‘white devil’. Normally it is three to six years.
For someone who loves children and often finds their company more appealing than that of adults, I find this experience surprisingly rewarding. I’m the only white man these children have EVER seen. Normally a few massive smiles and a song can prise them away from behind their fathers' legs, but any fast movements on my part send them scuttling off again.
While I chatted with the kids, the gathering got bigger and bigger. By now I couldn’t see anything other than eyes peering at me. If I were to eat lunch, it would remain this way until I picked my bike back up and pushed my way through as politely as possible using my basic Hindi. Having people watch you eat isn't the nicest thing normally, but if they weren’t there I’d have been lonely.
As I passed through a village, a cow in front of me did the deed right ahead of me. A woman whipped out of the nearest hut and scooped it up, making it into what can only be described as a huge chocolate button. It would then be left outside the house, or on the roadside, to dry and be used as fuel for the fire. Villages that looked like something from Hansel and Gretel, chocolate button houses, tended to have particularly keen gatherers of cow dung. They looked good enough to eat.
When I was a child, my dad claimed to have been the discus record holder at his school. He would demonstrate his ability to us by picking up cowpats as we walked in the Peak Dis
trict and he would fire them like bullets as far as we could see. Unlucky bystanders would dive for cover as the stinky disks flew all around them.
A super-attractive girl blew me a kiss. What a highlight. It was my closest encounter with a female in months and it felt GOOD! I was ready to settle down, get married and have kids with her within the year. Shirley, however, was having none of it and forcefully carried me off (albeit kicking and screaming) to my next destination, Bundi, the blue city.
I was glad she had. Bundi is a bustling town drenched in colour, surrounded by an ancient palace in the hills and a putrid lake on the other side.
* * *
I arrived late at night to find markets alive and lit with all sorts of colours. Bundi is a new stop on the tourist map. There weren’t many tourists yet but the locals were keen and had set up several hotels, home stays and restaurants in anticipation of a boom. And a boom there surely would be. It was stunning and sitting on top of a mountain above it was an illuminated fort.
I checked into Mama’s, a home stay owned by the infamous Mama, Mother. I was told to sit myself down with the other travellers who were all waiting for their feeding time, and not to move. One girl tried to go to the toilet but was slammed back into her seat by the small but feisty lady.
When the food came, it didn’t stop. We were all treated to thali. A thali is a selection of different dishes, usually served in small bowls on a round tray. The round tray is generally made of steel with multiple compartments. Our trays were filled to the brim with dhal, rice, vegetables, chapatti, curd (yoghurt), and chutneys and pickles. By the time we’d finished we had no choice but to stay seated. We were wedged into our seats. Groans echoed around the room as expanded bellies gurgled and complained at the strain. A French couple travelling with their children round the world for a year fell asleep on the spot, allowing the children to explore the house.