Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  I thought about going to look for some capsicum but I was too tired. Singing for your life’s hard work. So I went and had a look at the Golden Temple, sitting out in the middle of this huge swimming pool. Eyes get dazzled some by the sun on the water. There’s a few tourists around, some Sikhs in rainbow turbans. I’m tired to the bone so I cack* on one of the benches and have this wild dream about people running around and screaming their heads off and getting shot down by soldiers, or somebody that looked like soldiers, and so I call up Dave and ask him what’s going down and he says nothing much, it’s just Gandhi massacring Sikhs and Sikhs massacring Gandhi, like calves in a veal factory, he says, another little rip in the time fabric from a future Hallowe’en, that’s all, and I say, oh, okay, and I go back to sleep and I dream about a Dow Chemical cloud the shape of a horse and when I wake up next time it’s Patrick’s face shining down from above, like a big old moon, like the Golden Temple, and he’s saying, “Mr. McPherson, well done, what a trooper, good thing I found you, this should almost make us square, this plus the Lake Dal dunking.” I didn’t quite follow, still groggy, but I let him drag me over to this horse and cart and we go clop, clop to some hotel and he tells me just to stay put and he goes to find Suzie, who still has a key to the bus—Dave says she had three copies made when she stole the key from Pete in Istanbul—and I sack out on the back seat and I’m dreaming about a kid I knew back in Regina, in grade one, I watched him pull every one of his own teeth out, then somebody’s shaking me awake, it’s Dana, she saying wake up, Mick, you’ll miss Old Delhi, and that tooth of mine is saying hi, remember me?

  *Go to sleep, I would guess. — D. W.

  367

  Dec. 9th

  We’re in New Delhi, cooling our heels because the New Ranjit Hotel is full of Russians attending a mini-summit. Mick caught up to the bus. Now we’ll never know whether Pete was planning to leave Amristar without him. Pat. bought a Time & Newsweek in the hotel lobby; there’s been some kind of mass suicide in a place called Jonestown, Guyana. Pete just brought us mail. Mom sent a Xmas card with the news that she bought me a miniature TV. A cold October at home, the coldest in years. Tried to phone home but the lines are hopeless, I couldn’t get through. It’s getting to the point where I’ll have to sit by the phone. Money’s almost gone.

  Mick

  I’m glad Dana woke me up though I was surprised it was she who did it, not Kelly. That little walk, thanks to Pete, the sympathy factor, only reason I could come up with. I sat up slow, careful with the ribs. She sat down beside me. First eyes I catch are Kelly’s. Kelly sitting at the table next to Patrick, Patrick shelling peanuts, Kelly with her picture of “Crossing Borders” in front of her, all those reds. They look guilty. Kelly’s eyes, I mean. Why’s Kelly looking guilty? Thought I just thought it or asked it of Dave but I said it out loud. Beats me, said Dana, they went shopping for new glasses for Patrick yesterday, this in a whisper, didn’t get back till late. Actually I saw them at the Golden Temple last night smooching on a park bench.

  Well, this really hurt. I’m walking my dogs off and Kelly’s spooning with Patrick at the Golden Temple. I saved Patrick’s life for Christ’s sake.

  I knew enough not to phone up Dave and ask him if Dana was telling the truth. He’d take her side.

  I decided not to let it bother me. I had enough bothering me with the tooth.

  I phoned up Dave and asked him if there was anywhere in New Delhi where I could buy some chilli capsicum. He said

  he wasn’t sure. He said if I were smart I’d get the tooth pulled and not have to worry about finding chilli capsicum.

  We were driving through Old Delhi. Dirty ramshackle streets full of angst and beggars. Patrick tossing unshelled peanuts out the window, seemed to be millions of people on the streets, the bus moving slow. In a perfect world he would’ve been throwing pizzas but we all know the world ain’t perfect. I’d give my hand for a pizza right now which doesn’t make a lot of sense but Soon would see to it the pizza got to my stomach.

  New Delhi was a different world, wide empty tree-lined boulevards like the West Van suburbs. When we got to the New Ranjit Hotel I went up and asked Pete if he knew any good dentists in New Delhi. He said ask inside. I did. They wanted to know how much money I had. I showed them my thirty-five paltry ragged rupees and they laughed, wrote down an address. I got a sick, clogged-up feeling in my chest, the tooth was making me want to throw up. I went and talked to Kelly but Charole pulled the purse strings and they were almost out of money themselves, they were going to wire home for more money here in New Delhi. “So what’s this between you and Dr. Livingstone?” I asked her. “There’s nothing going on,” she said, “between me and Patrick.” Pete had just brought the mail, passed it out, everyone’s still on the bus, some kind of problem with the rooms, she’s opening up a letter so I leave her alone. It still hurts me, though, Kelly lying to me like that, just thinking about it. She didn’t need to lie. She could’ve been upfront. Yeah, sure, Dave. She had her reasons. Didn’t want to hurt poor Mickers. Early in the relationship. Relationship. She’d gone a whole two years without sex and now there’s two guys in her life, she’s bowled over by it all, and by the leap she made. She can thank me for that leap. I burnt the pictures. Anyway. I go and talk to Dana. “I’ve got a problem,” I said. Explained it.

  She said, “Let me go with you.”

  There’s all these tri-shaws in front of the hotel. We go up to one of them, show him the addresses, get in the back and it’s down to the Black Market area of Old Delhi, takes hours to get there or so it seems and on the way there, the old Sikh driving the tri-shaw turns around once, big white beard, green turban, twinkle in his eye when he looks at me, “You like cocaine, hasheesh, bee-yoo-ti-ful lady?” Dana laughs, says, “Yeah, we love threesomes.”

  I’ve never done cocaine. Up till then. I say, “Maybe the coke but we’d have to sample it. If it’s good, we could maybe buy a kilo or two couldn’t we, sweetheart?” looking at Dana, she catches on. “Or three,” she says. So the guy pulls into an alley, lays out a couple lines on a little pocket mirror, hands us a rolled-up rupee, snort, snort, and it snaps me up quick, a little rush, the day has an extra little clarity despite the grit in the air. It was probably almost pure, samples sometimes are.

  “We’ll have to take a couple kilos of this,” I say to the guy, “but first I have to get a tooth pulled and then we’ll talk business, okay?”

  He says okay, puts the tri-shaw in gear, takes off.

  Outside the dentist’s office, an old shack with a set of choppers in the front window, kids playing marbles, sign in Hindi, he stops. Black market dentist. This’ll be an experience, I say to Dana, glad she’s with me.

  He could be good, you never know, says Dana.

  We ask the guy to wait, he grins, says he’ll wait as long as we like, meter’s still running. On second thought, maybe he could come back later. He flips up the meter. He’s more than happy to wait.

  Pretty obvious from the waiting room I won’t have to wait long. Only guy in it some East Indian hippie passed out on the ratty old couches, stuffing coming out. An old wog shuffles out, he’s wearing thick glasses, looks like he’s got cataracts, great, I say to Dana, a dentist with cataracts. He’s got to keep making a living, she says, I don’t think they have great pension plans in India, and he goes yess, may I help you pleezzz?

  If my tooth hadn’t been hurting so bad I would’ve run for it. But I figured well, it’s not that he’s going to be doing a lot of precision drilling and maybe he’s got good knockout drugs, maybe some laughing gas. Decide to be up front with him. Tell him I’ve got this thing about pain. He nods his head, no pain at all, he promises.

  “Follow me pleezzz,” he says.

  I do. Into a bright room, one hundred and fifty watt light or better in the ceiling. Sits me down in what looks like an old barber chair, swings a trouble light over, tells me to open up wide. I do, real wide, while staring at some pliers on the plate stand beside the chai
r, just a little bit of blood on them, dried blood, blood he missed when he was washing them off. Mean-looking pliers, snub-nosed, made me think of pistols and “77 Sunset Strip,” Kookie Byrnes and his comb and a hairless Larry Olivier asking Dustin Hoffman if he flosses regularly.

  He gives his head a sad shake, not much there, he says, and he loads up a wicked-looking hypodermic that would’ve chilled the heart of Johnny Rotten.

  “Maybe I’ll come back another time,” I say.

  He smiles. He’s got two front teeth missing. First dentist I ever met with missing teeth. The cataracts have a purple tinge. I can smell my sweat, the dust from my midnight stroll, the sick smell of medical vapour.

  “Open wide,” he says.

  I open wide. My toes curl up, my fingers go Joe Cocker spastic. I’m sure my ugly shrivelled up to the size of, well, let’s just say I could feel it shrivelling up. Needle’s in the gum. Pain. Out comes the needle, he shuffles out, leaves me sitting there counting dust motes in the thin ray of sunshine seeping through a high window. There was good stuff in that needle. My left jaw began feeling like a big lump of Silly Putty in almost no time. I start to relax. I won’t feel a thing. It’ll be a distant sensation. No more toothache. Life will be one big bowl of cherries and I’ll tell Kelly I love her, forget about Patrick, we’ll work things out and have great sex and live happily ever after. Then I think about Patrick and that big ugly of his and I wonder if they’ve done it and I feel this jealous rage swelling up inside me like a hot air balloon, and I’m thinking to myself I should’ve just let Patrick, fall back in Dubrovnik, when the dentist comes back, picks up those pliers tells me to open wide gets a hold on the tooth, yank and I’m zonked by this white flash of pain that sets my brain pan on fire. My choked scream comes out sounding more like a gurgle than anything else.

  The old man looks at what he’s got in his pliers. Just a little piece of tooth, bloody, maybe a little wisp of gum hanging from it.

  My tongue tries to find some words around the remains of the tooth. “Fuck, what happened?” I manage to choke out, even though I know what happened.

  Those cataracts go all sympathetic on me. “Tooth broke,” he says.

  Dave rings me up. I think you might want me to take over now, Mick. Dentist hands me a glass of water, some pills, you will have to take these, he says. There’s lightning crashing around the room, thunder, Dana’s voice, saying, Mick?

  Dave says after the pills knocked me out, the dentist brought in his son, who’d been drinking for most of the afternoon but had younger eyes. He used a pair of tweezers to pull the shards from my gum while Dana watched. Dave says he worked for three hours and managed to get most of the shards. My gum bled so much I almost choked to death, according to Dave. Then he stitched up the gum, gave Dana more pills, didn’t charge a single rupee. Outside the driver was long gone. He’d come in, got some money from Dana, left. The son drove me and Dana back to the hotel and him and Patrick carried me up to a room. Dave says I was unconscious for five hours. And then I came to, the pain was creeping back. I went to the bathroom, whizzed and puked and shit, took more pills and just before I sailed back to Conk-out City, Dave called me up and said, think of a country road, in autumn, golden leaves on all the trees and big white clouds in an azure sky... you’re walking on the road until you see a house...it’s a nice

  little house, red cinder bricks____ But what I think of is Kelly.

  Kelly and Patrick, tongues in each other’s mouths, beneath a quarter moon, outside the Golden Temple.... And then I’m gone.

  Patrick’s daybook entry

  en route to Jaipur Dec. 11

  Dear Minolta Minnie,

  I know you’re hungry for more snapshots of my adventures with this most motley of all crews, and so I shall be sending this package post-haste, as soon as I can find a post office where I have some vague guarantee that the stamps won’t be stolen and the enclosed photos won’t be sold to Hindustan Photo. Yesterday our highly esteemed bus driver took us on a tour of the Seven Cities of Delhi. The pictures, in order: 1) Charole, beside a swastika in the Jama Masjid, now convinced that all her high school history teachers lied to her and that Nazism was spawned in the Punjab and raised on curry, not bratwurst. You will note, however, that the swastika is reversed and refers to the wheel of life, not Caucasoid Reichs. 2) Kelly, attempting to link her arms around the Iron Pillar, the Qutab Minar, one of the world’s most perfect towers, in the background. The Pillar, still unrusted despite centuries of weather, is a testament, certainly, to the metallurgical skills of the Moslem horde that put it there, but seldom, I suspect, has it been so graced with perfection of a calibre such as this manifestation. 3) Dana, in the butcher barn, the slabs of carcass stretching to a dim infinity, the Sacred Cow, hung from hooks, so as to feed the insidious carnivorous appetite of the tourist populace. A cheeseburger at the Gaylord on Connaught Place is only sixty rupees. 4) Kelly, with the Imperial Palace of the Shah Jahan in the background. How the times change. There once was a king, Mr. Cohen assured us, within those walls who made it a daily morning practice to drink his own urine. It’s so sad to see the time-honoured rituals pass, so to speak, into oblivion. 5) Suzie, outside the Red Fort, just prior to being treated to the son et lumiere beyond the rust-coloured walls, which was a treat, if you consider out-of-focus slides and a soundtrack that features orgasms and death-cries in its historical treatise to be treats. 6) Mick, after a visit to an old Old Delhi dentist. He was almost comatose, not an unfamiliar state for Mr. McPherson. 7) Mr. Cohen, behind the wheel, weaving the bus expertly between the cows and chickens that have reduced our highway speed to a crawl, at least compared to those wondrous days of travelling hell-bent for Persian carpet across the Turkish plain.

  And there are other pictures as well, of the Chandi Chowk, a street where the merchants smoke long cigarillos and eye tourist wallets with a vulturous interest, not to mention the Pearl Mosque, the Kashmir Gate, the Raj Path, the Diwan-i-Am, the Painted Palace, the Palace of Mirrors, and the Shish Mahal. But those, my dear, will just have to wait. Feel free to anticipate further developments. Shutter me timbers, I do miss you.

  Ever yours, P. Pentax.

  It was like somebody was poking that gum where the tooth used to be with a million pins. Which was interesting, because I was so doped up that I said, well, that’s a new pain sensation, and I stuck my tongue in that hole that felt greasy as a grease gun and I could feel something that felt like pins too. Three pins. Then I went back to sleep. Next time I woke up I screamed and Dave said, sure you don’t want to leave this brutish life behind? I said sure, and I imagine I’m walking down that country road, there’s all these trees with golden leaves and there’s this little red cinder-brick house like you’d expect a witch would live in and sure enough, the porch is made out of gingerbread cookies, with hasheesh baked in, I know because I have a couple bites. I walk through the house. There’s cups of rum and eggnog all over the place. I have a few of those. I figure I better, since this might turn into a malaria nightmare any minute but I make up my mind that no matter what the nightmare was like I was going to ride it because wherever she was going to had to be better than what was waiting for me back in reality, and so when I see this door swing open I walk inside it and it’s the same room I was in before.

  With one thing different. The little Trans Am on the glass and steel coffee table. Turns out to be a phone, and I’m picking up the Fender guitar and saying hey, hi, guy, when the door slams shut behind me. And I just know it’s locked, but I go over and try it anyhow. Sure enough it is. So that’s a little different. But that’s okay. As long as rats and spiders don’t start oozing out of the wall. When the Trans Am rings I pick it up. It’s Dave, of course. He asks me if I still like the digs. I hadn’t ever told him I liked them but I let it pass. Just fine, I say. Good, he says, hangs up, and I start poking around. I find a whole bunch of Chivas Regal Scotch in one cupboard and a mess of frozen pizzas in the freezer compartment of the fridge. I pop one in the microw
ave and pour myself a Scotch and pick up the Fender and I play Willie Nelson’s “Crazy.”

  Dec. 11

  We’re in Jaipur, the pink city, so-called, though it’s more a faded rose. I tried to talk to M. this morning to see how he’s feeling, try to make sense of that last night in Srinagar, now that time & distance have provided perspective, but he brushed me away. Something happened to him in New Delhi, he’s different. But dentists will do that to you. It seems he’s back with D. I can’t really blame him. I should’ve stayed in my hotel room back in Amritsar. Good old hindsight. This afternoon, we rode elephants up to an old fort. Pachyderms, as Patrick called them. Pulchritudinous pachyderms. His language wears on me, except when he calls me a sad but exquisite flower, & even then, some. We made love last night, & it hurt, though he tried to be gentle. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, even a pulchritudinous pachyderm would be envious. From the fort we could see Jaipur & the astrological observatory. Pete wasn’t going to pay it a visit, I don’t think, but C. & I made sure he did. Pat. took a picture of C. beside the Piscean stone jelly roll, me upon the very unbullish Taurean geometrix, the long slide pointing towards the north star behind me. I told Pat. I want a copy. What’s in it for me, he said, only half-joking I think. I just don’t feel very humorous these days, can’t summon up any energy. It’s this whole sex business. So much work, trying to find what I feel is the appropriate attitude. Here, the men and women seem to stay away from each other, during the day at least. I’m starting to think I should just give up, but that depresses me even more. A solitary orgasm is so lonely. Though not quite as lonely as what happened last night. Just talked to a psychic out on the lawns in front of this former Raj’s palace turned hotel. That’s what it’s come down to. Talking to the local psychic, while monkeys chitter in the trees. He advised patience. But he also saw the Firewalk, I gave no hint of it. He said I would have no trouble walking it, I’ve walked it before.