Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  “This is all going to get worse,” said Kelly, “with Zia in power. ”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  She looked at me. “You’re the psychic. You tell me.” Alright, fine. So I called up Dave. This is when he told me all about Zia.

  Few moments later, I said, “Yeah, you’re right. For the next ten years or so. Then somebody’s going to sabotage Zia’s plane and he’s going to go down in flames.”

  Kelly said, “You could be rich, Mick. Ever think about getting into the psychic racket? Open-line phone shows, consultations in dark hotel rooms?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Too much like work. But what you’re saying is, with your looks and my brains, we could be rich and famous, right?”

  She laughed, said, “Yeah, we’d be a wonderful team.”

  I said, “How about when we get back to civilization, we give it a shot. I’ve always wanted to live in Montana.”

  She said, “I’ve always wanted to live on the west coast. Say Seattle or Portland. Why don’t we compromise?” “Sounds okay to me,” I said.

  Since we seemed to be on the same wavelength at last, and since it was getting dark and the zombies with knives in their belts were starting to come out of the woodwork, we decided to head back to the Park Hotel, and when we were making love, about half an hour later, I was looking down at Kelly in that late afternoon twilight and I was thinking about how much she looked like a teenager, I was falling a little more in love with her, but then she opened her eyes and saw me looking at her.

  Her face suddenly clamped down like a steel trap. “Please don’t look at me when we make love.”

  I said, “Mind if I ask why? I like to look at you.”

  She said, “It brings back bad memories.”

  I told her I didn’t follow.

  She said, “Think about it, Mick. You’re the psychic.” She pushed me away and so I pulled out, rolled onto my back, and we lay there on our backs, not touching, staring at the ceiling, fade to black.

  I called up Dave. Asked him to give me the low-down on this. He said it’s just one of Kelly’s minor obsessions that’s all, she won’t let it go. That photographer prof, the married man, took some pictures of her, nude pictures, refused to give them back. Has them at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. He always stared at her when they made love with these big spooky laughing eyes. Kelly thinks he takes the pictures out every once in a while, masturbates. Does he? I ask him. Beats me, says Dave. I don’t know everything.

  I said to Kelly, “He doesn’t look at those pictures any more. He’s got them at the bottom of a box of old photography magazines. He doesn’t even know where they are any more.” Kelly was quiet for a long time.

  Finally she said, “You could be really rich, Mick. You could help people.”

  You know, she’s probably right. If I ever get back to Kitsilano, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to help people. Me and Dave. And maybe get really rich.

  But mainly help people. Yeah. Me and Dave and maybe Soon, if I can talk her into coming back with us.

  I haven’t been able to talk to her lately, though, she seems miles away. Light years away.

  PAKISTAN Peshawar—Lahore

  Day 50

  Departure: 7:30 a.m.

  Route: Nowshera—Attock Bridge—Rawalpindi—Gujranwala. Hotel: International, on the Mall, Manager: Qahar Khan.

  Points: 1. The Attock Bridge spans the famous meeting point of the Indus and Kabul Rivers. The bridge was built by the British in 1881, and since it’s the only crossing, it’s military property and hordes of secret service will descend upon the bus if anyone takes a picture of it. This is the place where Alexander crossed during his Indian campaign. The cute little obelisk was built to commemorate the death of General Mackerson (1857), who helped build the Khyber Pass. That large fort was built during the Moghul dynasty and it’s still used today as a military base.

  2. Rawalpindi is a city of approx. 3/4 million. It grew up as a trading centre on the Grand Trunk Road, and came of age, briefly, as the interim capital of Pakistan after the partitioning of India. The nearby city of Islamabad is now the capital.

  3. Food for thought, on the way into town: the Koh-I-Noori, otherwise known as the “Sea of Light” is set in the British Queen Mother’s crown. It was used for her coronation with King George VI in 1937. It is now housed in the Tower of London. Some people date it back some 5,000 years. The Moghuls used to own it, but then Nadir Shah stole it, and the story goes that when he first saw it, he cried, Koh-i-Norri! The British got hold of it after the annexation of the Punjab in 1940. But now Pakistan wants it back. Which is why, some say, they’re developing the bomb.

  4. Hindu tradition traces the origin of Lahore to Loh or Lava, son of Rama, hero of The Ramayana. It was founded near the beginning of the second century and has known many a conqueror: Ghazni, the Moghuls, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Ranjit Singh, the Sikhs and the British. Things not to miss: the Mosque of Wazir Khan, the Tomb of Jahangir and the Shalimar Gardens. There’s a good squash court near the hotel, and there are good buys around for silver and gold.

  5. The Tomb of Jahangir is the mausoleum of a Moghul emperor who was the son of Akbar and the father of Shah Jahan. It was completed in 1637. One motif which features regularly in the intricate designs and geometric patterns which adorn its walls and minarets is a wine flagon. The architect chose a fitting epitaph—Jahangir’s passion for alcohol rivals that of a tour bus driver four days from the end of the trip. Remember: drinking and driving can get you into big trouble. Jahangir died on his way to his beloved Kashmir. As he lay dying, he was asked if he wanted anything. He replied, “Bury me in Kashmir.”25 But the scoundrels didn’t listen to him. They took him to Lahore instead.

  6. The Shalimar Gardens were built by the Shah Jahan in 1642 as a private playground for the royal family. They liked to frolic in fountains and flowing water. They liked to rest in the shade of cool pavilions, where the problems of empire were far, far away. And then Shah Jahan died, and he rested for a while at the main entrance of the present gardens, before his corpse was removed to an obscure little crypt in Agra, India, called the Taj Mahal.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Dec. 2

  Feels strange to be driving on the left-hand side of the highway. Last night felt strange too. 1st time in a long time. They should have thankyou notes for such occasions. I want to do something to commemorate the event but nothing has come to mind yet. The dawn this morning, through the Peshawar haze, was amazing, the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. Even the stone had a nice ebb & flow, except for 1 small snafu, nothing serious, just a lack of communication on my part, not Mick’s. Sex & death, the old 8th house influence. Mercury just crossed the cusp & I can feel it in the Zeitgeist, challenging. This business of people dying, the senses stopped. I’ve been using the broken heart excuse for too long to hide from life, this whole business of shutting down the emotions. Trip’s been good, way better than shock therapy. I’m seeing colours I’ve never seen, & all these people we see who we can’t understand, including those we share a language with, they’ve all got their own indigenous mental landscapes, & landscapes can be changed, ploughed under, ploughed over, reforested. It’s time I crossed into a new territory, if I’m not willing to change the old territory. There’s just a little trick involved, likely, like the switch that Mick flipped last night.

  Mick

  Dave says I haven’t mentioned the way Patrick was sulking around, mooning over the fact that Kelly led him on for a while and then cut him off short and how pissed off at me Dana was, and the way that Suzie was becoming somewhat catatonic because no one would sit near her on the bus except Rockstar. Because no one wanted to have anything to do with her, except Rockstar. And Dave says that while my mouth was giving Kelly her first orgasm since May 7, 1976—she hadn’t told me that—Rockstar, all gonzo on drugs, he’d grabbed some hash and eaten it when nobody was looking, back at Dara, according to Dave, was in the room that Suzie ha
d to herself—no one wanted to sleep in the same room as her either—and he was showing her the Bic .22. And he had the thing loaded and pointed at her when he asked her why she told Patrick he only had one testicle. This was the last thing Suzie needed. She had the Pakistani Polka worse than anybody. She freaked, according to Dave, started screaming, and Rockstar knocked her to the bed, covered her mouth, she started kicking, so he stuck that pen near her eye, pushed the pocket clip into a cocked position. Suzie got the message, quit struggling. And then Rockstar raped her.

  Next day, on the way to Lahore, Rockstar sat behind me, making little snuffling noises and whispering things like, I’m gonna kill ya, Muck-hole, gonna kill ya now, here comes the bullet, say hi to Charlie, won’t ya, when you get down to hell.

  I laughed at most of it, hilarious stuff, but that only kind of egged Rockstar on, he started coming up with weirder things, like what he was going to do to my sister after he pissed on my grave, and that wasn’t so funny, so I told him to can it but he wouldn’t so I picked up Lucille who’d been feeling a little ignored and I banged out some rocking blues, John Lee Hooker style, and tried to use Rockstar’s gibbering for percussion and back beat. But it didn’t work too well.

  What finally got him to stop was Suzie yelling for a loo-stop and maybe Pete didn’t hear her or he didn’t want to hear her but he didn’t stop, just kept driving, and finally Suzie got up off her seat, went down the aisle undoing her pants, pushing them down, panties, everything, so finally Pete put on the brakes, which spilled her down into the stairwell. When Pete finally got the bus stopped, we could hear her crying. Pete didn’t open up the doors, he just sat there gawking down at her. The rest of us went up to gawk as well. One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, Suzie crumpled up at the bottom of the stairwell, sobbing to herself, letting everything go.

  Kelly went and got a towel, three towels, from her bag, Charole got down beside and her and held her up, told Pete to open the doors, Pete did, and it took maybe ten or fifteen minutes for the two of them to get Suzie cleaned up, and Dave says when they were doing it, Suzie quit crying long enough to tell them Rockstar raped her the night before.

  So that wasn’t a great day, that drive to Lahore, and I forgot all about the fact that Lahore was where I could find a decent dentist since the chilli capsicum was working so well.

  Kind of funny thing happened, too, on the way to Lahore. Me and Kelly got to talking about our favourite movies. Hers was North by North-west. Mine was Bonnie and Clyde. And we were saying to each other, gee, wouldn’t it be great to see a movie again. Just to see those larger-than-life images up on the screen and smell popcorn in the air and feel that sticky floor underfoot. And on the main drag into Lahore, there it was, red and bright and white, a fucking movie marquee. With English words on it even. Mighty Himalayan Man.

  “We have to go see this movie,” I said to Kelly.

  She looked at me and tried hard to smile. She had Suzie on her mind. “It’s a date,” she said.

  Patrick heard this though. He looked back at us. “Is this a private excursion,” he said, “or can anyone come along?”

  Which is when Dana looked back too, with a mean look in her eye. “Yeah, can anyone come along?” she said, more

  to me than to Kelly.

  I looked at Kelly. She said, in a half-hearted tone of voice, “The more the merrier.”

  As we pull up in front of the International Hotel, Patrick asks us what the name of the movie is, and so we tell him. He says well, it’s certainly not the most auspicious of titles, but in the end I suppose it is quite acceptable, anything for a diversion, and so once we all got settled into our rooms and Kelly and Charole have a talk with Pete, they get a room with Suzie, this in the swankiest hotel on the trip, swankier than that hotel in Mashhad, we all head out into the streets, all of us except Pete and Rockstar, and Patrick flags down a couple tri-shaws, these little motorized scooters, open-air, sat three in the back if you squeezed in tight, and we went to see Mighty Himalayan Man.

  Weird theatre. Women had their own line-ups. These garish posters, all walls, pirates and apes and women in veils and dark-eyed men with swords and housewives smiling too broadly. But there is a popcorn maker. Got a box. Then into the dark. Only a few other Pakistanis. Watching the tragic tale of a misunderstood beast and the frail and lovely woman he falls in love with, while being chased and tormented by the males of her species. Kind of a King Kong rip-off without Fay Wray. A Tibetan movie in dubbed English with Urdu subtitles, not that the dialogue was all that important anyway. Dave says what Kelly was wishing was that I’d maybe held her hand, she was longing for contact with flesh, like the abominable snowman up on the screen, but me, I was caught up in seeing how much of King Kong the Tibetan moviemakers would actually rip-off, it was great to see something larger than life again. There weren’t many skyscrapers to be found in Himalayan jungle. What would they come up with for a big finale? Which is why, when everyone else had seen more than enough of the film, I said I wanted to stay and so Kelly stayed too and afterwards, over Spanish coffees in the cocktail lounge of the Lahore Hilton, Kelly said, well, I liked some of the photography, when they managed to keep the camera still, and several moments later, when the subject of the movie had been exhausted (it needed a big finale, I said), I asked Kelly what she and Charole talked to Pete about, and so she told me what Suzie told them, and Pete said well, he’s got to get the radiator fixed first thing in the morning so it’ll have to wait, but what’ll likely happen is that he’ll tip off the cops at the Indian border and they’ll find a little something on Rockstar that’ll happen to be illegal and that’ll be the last we see of Rockstar, just like that.

  I just shook my head and laughed.

  “So what does the Great McPherson perceive in his crystal ball, concerning this endeavour?” she said.

  Dave rang me up and said it wasn’t going to happen.

  “It ain’t going to happen,” I said.

  Kelly said, “Well, we’ll see.”

  Then there’s a long silence before she says, “Mick, let’s talk about sex.”

  Something kicked into debonair gear and I’m the epitome of suave and masculine sophistication. I say sure, glad to, because I can see what it is Kelly wants, I can feel the ache inside her of wanting to be setded down with someone in front of the boob tube, little dinners out every once in a while, heavy discussions about what movie to see next, and sex maybe three times a week, sometimes in the afternoon, and kids, after a while, but not too soon. I’d gone that route, kind of, with the infamous Peggy dil-Schmidt, and that little romance led straight to a chair and a knotted nylon, and that’s the way things were headed with Nancy Pickles, except I took a little detour straight to this hospital bed.

  She said, “I am curious to know what it’s like, before I die, to have really good sex with someone I love. I mean on a consistent basis. Have you ever had that?” She gazes at me, a frank, pure Kelly gaze.

  I said, “I don’t think so. Came close a couple times. Like last night. But for something like that, like, I think it probably takes a while.”

  “True,” she said, “but everyone has to start somewhere.

  And this whole business with Suzie____” She let the thought

  trail away.

  I said, “We can’t let the real world kill the old sense of romance, can we?”

  “That’s it, exactly,” she said. “Every once in a while I feel like throwing in the towel, admitting defeat, let it all get sucked away down the drain, but there’s this voice in my head that tells me to hang in there, a soul mate might be around the next corner, and so I do.” She took a sip of her Spanish coffee, licked at the sugar on the rim, looked back at me, said, “I have my doubts about you, Mick, but you don’t judge me, and I can relate to your self-destructive tendencies, I’ve got them myself. So when we get to those houseboats in the Kashmir Valley, why don’t we pretend we’re soul mates, that we’ve been married for years, that the trust between us is like a s
olid iron kettle full of hot mulled wine?”

  I laughed. She smiled.

  “Just for the hell of it,” she said.

  I take out my chilli capsicum, give my tooth a squirt. Rub my ribs. They were aching some, right above my heart.

  I finally say, “Yeah, let’s give it a shot. Just for the hell of it.”

  There was a brief silence while Kelly looked into her coffee. Then she said, “I suppose we should talk about birth control.” I said, “Maybe we should’ve talked about that last night.” She said, “What’s romance without a little risk?”

  I said, “Okay, let’s talk about birth control.”

  She said, “If it’s alright with you, I’d just as soon not use any.”

  I said, “Why not?”

  She said, “Because I’ve got this romantic notion. We have to give the Fates a chance, every once in a while, without modern plastic technology intervening.”

  “I get your drift,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about strings,” she said. “If there does happen to be one strong swimmer, it’s my responsibility.” “Whatever you say,” I said.

  “I should tell you though, I’m at the peak of my cycle, and Venus is close to my Jupiter in my Fifth House of children.” She gave me an impish smile.

  “Thanks for the info,” I said.

  After that there was a little lull in the conversation so I switched it back to movies, to the first ones we’d seen.

  First one Kelly ever saw was a Disney flick, The Incredible Journey. The first one I ever saw was a Tarzan movie, don’t remember its name but it had this scary scene in it where this bad guy walked into a pit of quicksand and slowly started sinking. He went down screaming. Last thing we see is his hand then his fingers then nothing.

  Then Kelly and I walked back to the hotel, holding hands, and outside her room she went up on her tiptoes and kissed me goodnight on the mouth.