The days dragged by. An inexplicable emptiness came upon him. The excitement of being in a different and strange land was replaced by boredom and restlessness. He began to think obsessively about death. The idea of walking the streets anymore became repulsive. For days he spoke to no one but Ali, who left early in the mornings and returned late at night. In the gloom of the room John felt like a prisoner alone in a cell. The folly of his past filled his thoughts. Nightmares full of death visions began to plague him.
One morning, while bathing his face in cold water, John looked at his reflection in the mirror and saw a stranger staring back. He knew that sometime soon he would have to move on again.
Review for Chapter 6
I. Comprehension Questions
1. Why did Hamid and Abdul invite John to go to Iran and Afghanistan?
2. Where did Hamid show John that he really was an experienced driver?
3. What kind of family was Ali from?
4. What did Ali's friends ask John to do for them?
5. What made John remember his earlier days in military prison?
II. Mark the following statements as true (T) or false (F).
( ) 1. Hamid and Abdul did not like Paris.
( ) 2. In the beginning of the journey, John was impressed by Hamid's driving.
( ) 3. In Istanbul, John was given a visa for entering Iran.
( ) 4. The road from Istanbul to Izmit was very crowded with many vehicles.
( ) 5. Hamid and John had no problems passing through the eastern mountains of Turkey.
( ) 6. John started working as a teacher.
( ) 7. John talked a lot about his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War and his subsequent prison experiences.
( ) 8. John thought he could live for a long time in Iran.
III. Discussion/Essay Questions
1. John had many new things to become accustomed to in Iran. Have you ever moved to a new place and started a new life? If so, what things were difficult to get used to? What things were easy?
2. Iran is an Islamic country. If you are not from an Islamic country, what things do you imagine are different from your country? What things do you think are similar? List five of each and compare with your classmates.
Chapter 7
A few days later John went to the Afghan consulate and got a 30-day visa. He called Hamid to thank him for all his help and his family's kindness, then said goodbye to Ali. The next morning he boarded a bus to Herat, anxious to see what further adventures awaited him.
He crossed the Iranian-Afghan border and proceeded to Herat, a city of low, brown adobe huts clustered tightly together and enclosed by mud walls and towers. The first thing he noticed when crossing into Afghanistan was the conspicuous absence of Western influence. It was like stepping into the pages of the Old Testament. Time had changed nothing. The people of Herat in the narrow bazaar streets had a distinct peace and dignity. They moved about their work as if it did not matter, as if it could be done either the next day or the day after. The coppersmiths, the cobblers, the saddlemakers, all the various shopkeepers worked as they had for centuries. There were some shopkeepers who, in the intense heat of the afternoon, dozed in their stalls.
The Afghans were a virile people. The attitude of the crowds in the bazaar was of a mild disdain. John saw few beggars. The men were proud of bearing, savage and distinguished in appearance, and they met every man's eyes on the level with a straightforward glance. Their faces carried an expression that showed no fear. Their bodies were strong and supple. The few women seen in public were shrouded in full-length chadors with embroidered masks.
John spent two days in Herat and left the following morning on a bus. The sunrise cast varied tints from golden brown to violet on the low, distant mountains. The bus entered the open desert. John was the lone foreigner on a bus loaded with Afghan men. A sea of bobbing turbans atop dark, proud faces filled the bus. Across the glaring distance there was nothing but an empty stretch of desert.
They came to Kandahar, Afghanistan's leading commercial center. The people had a freer air about them than those in the villages the bus had passed. The city had much less the atmosphere of a remote fortress than Herat. They stopped for tea in a cafe that was full of smoke, full of men, full of rich, masculine smells.
The bus continued toward Kabul, stopping three times during the day for the Afghans to roll out their prayer carpets and, facing Mecca, pray. At Ghazni they witnessed a sunset that bathed the eastern mountains in a fiery red and deep violet. It lasted but a few minutes before the night grew dark and solemn.
Two hours later they arrived in Kabul, the capital city. Two of the Afghan passengers helped John get a taxi to Abdul's motel. Abdul was surprised and pleased to see John. He introduced John to his partner and brothers, then showed John to a room. He brought some tea and the two visited for an hour.
The city of Kabul was located in a large, fertile plain surrounded by high hills rising into the Hindu Kush mountains. The whole of the city seemed a mass of mud huts, although the newer part of the city bore signs of modernization: apartment buildings, a hospital, and a university. There were many wide streets lined on either side with poplar and mulberry trees. There were also many gloomy, narrow lanes that even in daylight were so dark one had to walk slowly and take care not to fall into a ditch.
John spent most of his time relaxing, reading, and walking the streets around the central bazaar area. In most places the streets were full of primitive wooden structures on which were laid mats of hemp. There were rows and rows of stalls on which the traders squatted cross-legged. Those who could not afford to buy a stall sat on the street corners and sold their goods. It was always crowded. In the midst of all the activity passed donkeys laden with wood, brick, and straw. Camel caravans passed slowly. Riders on horses pushed their way through in a domineering manner.
Abdul's motel was a run-down place with a kitchen and about 20 rooms filled with tattered carpets and beds of rope called charpoy. The people who frequented the motel were a strange sort. They were mostly of the younger, vagabonding set, Europeans who had come east to the lure of cheap living and an easy access to drugs. They were reminiscent of the drifting bohemians John had met on his journey through Europe four years earlier. Those people had instilled in him an excitement with their talk of literature, philosophy, and revolution. The people he now found himself surrounded by, although much the same in appearance, were a more decadent type. They had faded into a vegetable existence. They talked only of drugs. They smoked hashish all day, stared into space, and made friends only for a meal or a bus ticket.
Abdul was busy much of the time, but he managed to get a few days off and invited John to spend some time with his family in the desert outside Ghazni. When they arrived by jeep, they saw sheep and goats grazing in the plain while a few powerful mastiffs kept watch over the village. The men were plowing the sparse fields and threshing corn. The women sat in front of the tent-like huts knitting and playing with the children.
Abdul introduced John to his mother and father. John and Abdul spent four restful days in the village before returning to Kabul. John was treated like royalty. Great meals of rice, lamb, bread, tea, and fruit were served. One of the lambs had been butchered upon their arrival. In the evenings they sat around a fire, shared a nargile of hashish, watched the stars, and listened to the somber sigh of the earth.
The time came for John to continue east. His 30-day visa would soon expire. He and Abdul embraced with a genuine fondness, knowing they would never see each other again, but glad to have been able to share a portion of their lives together.
*****
John took a bus into Pakistan as far as Rawalpindi, where he bought a train ticket. The ride through the dusty Indus Valley was long, hot, and uncomfortable. There were many stops where soldiers either boarded or got off the train.
He spent the night in a cheap motel in Rawalpindi and the next day took a crowded train to Lahore
. In the brilliant sunshine the train swept past rice fields and stagnant pools full of white lotuses and standing herons, past people slapping pie-shaped, cow-dung patties onto the sides of mud huts to dry, past men with bullocks and submerged plows preparing rice fields for planting. In the different train stations were fruit venders and their carts and janitors in white uniforms sweeping the platforms with palm fronds. Each town had its shantytown by the railroad tracks, smaller towns of grass huts, cardboard shelters, pup tents, hovels of paper and twigs and cloth. Everyone in these shantytowns was in motion.
The train arrived in Lahore. Processions of rickshaws, pony carts, hawkers, and veiled women filled the narrow lanes. The larger streets were congested with swarms of jostling people. Recently there had been an uprising against the Bhutto regime for allegedly rigging the elections. There was now a curfew with the military patrolling the streets at night. Late that night, as he went to sleep in another cheap motel room, John heard muffled sounds of gunfire coming from the streets.
He crossed the border into India the next day. There was a long wait at the border as the customs officials took their time examining every passenger's baggage. The train arrived in Amritsar in the early evening. There was no train to Delhi until the next morning. John slept that night on a bench in the station waiting room.
The next day John arrived at the station in the old section of Delhi. A seething swarm of people surrounded the passengers as they got off the train. Everywhere skinny, brown rickshaw drivers and hawkers of cheap goods were clamoring for attention. John allowed himself to be swooped up by one driver, who took John's duffle bag, hooked it on his bicycle rickshaw, and pedaled John to a section in a bazaar area where John could find a cheap room.
They rode past entire communities living on the streets. Women in tattered rags with cracked feet and rings in their noses stood cooking pots of vegetables over smoky fires. Children ran here and there. The narrow, winding streets and wide bazaars were littered with debris and thick with intimate odors. Cripples walked the streets alongside half-naked natives. Thousands of people with rickets, leprosy, skin diseases, and bloated bellies lined the filthy streets. Vehicles of many types competed for limited space.
John found a room in an old, ramshackle motel. A single window overlooked a narrow street in the bazaar. The heat in the room was suffocating. It was impossible to sleep soundly.
For the next week John walked the streets. Everywhere he saw poverty, hunger, disease, violence, and nightmare misery. He walked through the refuge quarter of the city. He went there every day to stare at the chained-off society, as if it were a perverse circus side show. He was lured by its air of unreality. The people lived in houses built of tin and boxes, hideous things, hotbeds of epidemic.
The strange thing was how the older people had grown reconciled and seemed almost glad of their misery. They were scattered all about in every pose of contorted collapse, like in a picture of a massacre. There were people with catalepsy, with tuberculosis, with syphilis, with worms of all sorts, with eye diseases, with many saddening things. Some lay prostrate about the chained-off streets, their faces gaunt and colorless. When they closed their eyes, they looked as if they were dead.
John was struck by the extraordinary stoicism with which these people bore their sufferings. He felt humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement, abasement, and a despair that would not go away. As he returned each night from these visits to the purgatorial streets, he inevitably stopped at the same stall in the bazaar. Exhausted from destroyed emotions and the heat, he bought fruit or liquid refreshment. The shopkeeper was an old, wrinkled man who had seen many generations of suffering and still held his head high, composed like a Buddha. The man's impassive repose was like a display of great dignity.
John was overwhelmed by the abstracted silence of this man. One night, in a moment of excruciating self-pity, John seized the old man's hand and wrung it with all the force of his gratitude. The shopkeeper simply smiled and passed his hand gently over John's head.
Dysentery overtook John. He lay for days in a sweating fever on the charpoy, the sole piece of furniture in his room. He became like the prostrate death-forms of the streets. He was so weak he could not lift his body and lay in the sticky warmth of his involuntary excretions. He prayed for death, for deliverance from the agony of existence. At times he was barely conscious of voices murmuring around him and of someone pouring water over his head. Finally, the fever broke. In his weakened condition it was all he could do to drag himself into the streets to the shopkeeper's stall. The old man gave John tea, fruit, and yogurt in silence. John's strength gradually returned.
Review for Chapter 7
I. Comprehension Questions
1. What did John notice in Herat that was different from Mashad?
2. How many foreigners were on the bus from Herat to Kabul?
3. In what way were the foreigners John saw in Kabul different from those he had met in Europe four years before?
4. Where did John stay in Delhi?
5. Who became John's friend in Delhi?
II. Put the following events in the correct order.
___a. John heard gunshots while staying in a motel.
___b. John visited the bazaar area in Kabul.
___c. John bought something to eat or drink several times at the same bazaar stall.
___d. The bus to Kabul stopped in the desert so the passengers could pray.
___e. John became very sick.
___f. John walked the streets staring at cripples and diseased people.
___g. John and Abdul went into the desert to see Abdul's family.
___h. John slept at a train station.
III. Discussion/Essay Questions
1. Afghanistan is a land that few people can now enter. What kind of life do you think Afghans lead? What kind of people are they? What kind of difficulties do you think they have in the desert and mountains? What kind of natural beauties do you think exist there?
2. John was shocked and dismayed by what he saw and experienced in Delhi. Are you easily shocked? What are some of the things that have shocked or surprised you in your life?
Chapter 8
John had about $300 remaining. He bought a bus ticket to Calcutta, where he hoped to find work aboard a freighter headed to the U.S. He left Delhi early in the morning. The journey lasted two full days. One vista shifted into another, a dizzying displacement of hill and air, of haze and all the shades of green and brown. All along the road were animals and people. Bandy-legged men in the bus spit betel juice from their red lips through the windows, as if in derisive comment on the abject condition of life.
Calcutta was a mass of tenements, hovels, temples, mosques, shrines, warehouses, shops, and factories. It was worse than Delhi. The smoke of tens of thousands of cow-dung fires used by the inhabitants of the streets for cooking hung over the city. Everywhere in the overflowing streets lay the squalor of diseased life and morbid death. John saw one man leap in front of a train pulling into a station. After the train passed, the man, his legs amputated at the waist and bleeding profusely, lay on his back with his hands extended upward. His shrieks were wild and sounded like a madman's laughter. He finally collapsed, blood flowing fast from his mouth, his eyes open and staring at the sky.
John passed through a leper colony that was on the other side of a railway bridge. Not far away was a vast garbage dump. Some of the lepers lay on beds inside mud huts with their limbs bandaged. One boy sat against an outside wall, his arms and legs smeared with a blue ointment. Next to him was another child whose finger stumps were raw and bleeding. There was a woman using the grey stump of her hand like a wooden spoon to stir a pot of steaming liquid. A few nuns from Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity, the Nirmal Hriday, came that day bringing bandages, food, and cats to keep at bay the garbage dump rats that sometimes crossed over to the colony to chew on leprous limbs.
John followed the nuns back to the Nirmal Hriday. A small
but clean building was crammed with rows and rows of stretcher beds with dying patients. The patients lay very still, blinking and sometimes reaching for food. The nuns moved continuously down the rows of beds, dishing out food to those able to eat, shaving the heads of those with lice, dressing the sores of the rancid ones, and cleaning up the ones who soiled themselves involuntarily.
There was one man with a gangrenous leg wrapped in rags who was taken outside because of his terrible stench to have his leg rinsed. The water caused the blood to flow over the green flesh. Bits of bone and muscle dropped off the leg. A crow flew down and picked up a piece of bone that had fallen from the leg. John vomited and left.
He walked along the Hooghly River. It was silted badly from the ashes of cremated bodies. Garbage lined the streets. More than once John saw, resting in the piles of garbage, a dead baby whose skin was parched and cracked. He bought a bottle of wine from a black market dealer, got drunk, and passed out on the streets.
He awoke the next morning with a pounding headache. The morning heat was already piercing and insufferable. He bought fruit and bottled water from a street vender and watched the wretched masses. A new desolation crept over his soul, a wild, aching loneliness. He felt weak and hollow within.
He found a park with some trees that provided shade to sit under. He stared incomprehensibly at the sky. What had he learned from this journey? What had he gained? A deeper awareness of the suffering of mankind? He knew only that his own personal suffering was nothing compared to the swarms of creatures he had seen in Delhi and Calcutta. He could no longer feel even pity. There was no room for pity, not where all required it.
The Many Roads to Japan Page 5