Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  On the first day I found a room in the Inspection Bungalow at Pithora. The other room was occupied by a CARE official. He said he was a doctor helping the Government of Maharashtra to set up a nutrition programme, and was himself a sleekly obese advertisement for nutrition.

  'You are from?' he said.

  'You mean now,' I asked, 'or originally?'

  'No, no,' he said, irritably. 'You are from?'

  After that he seemed to lose interest. I went to the back to cook breakfast and found that a crow had broken and eaten one of my eggs. I slept through the afternoon, and left at dusk, making a detour through Bagbhara to get petrol. At Ghorari I stopped at a chai shop for tea and curry.

  'So, how do you like my India?' inquired my neighbour, a retired tax inspector with a wizened face and a patronizing manner. I tried to give some kind of answer to his question, but it was neither expected nor wanted.

  'You will not be able to understand,' he said with smug certainty, 'it will take you too long.

  'In the course of my duties,' he went on, 'I also have been travelling. I have been to Australia. There are minor differences of custom naturally, but otherwise I would say we are the same. Yes, Indians and Australians are the same.'

  It was an astonishing suggestion.

  'You must have been in Australia a long time to have known them so well,' I said, but of course he did not hear me.

  At the pan stall next door I tried to buy cigarettes, but there was nobody to serve me. I lingered a bit and then asked my new-found mentor whether I might leave the money and take a packet. He threw up his hands.

  'Oh, no, good gentleman,' he said. 'This is India.'

  I rode on to Raipur and found cigarettes at a shop outside a hotel. While there I thought I might as well use the lavatory. The cubicle was already occupied by a man aiming a jet of urine into the bowl. He had left the door open and he looked up as I approached.

  T am making water,' he told me solemnly. 'You wish to do so?'

  The whole of India suddenly struck me as wildly funny, and I went on laughing most of the way to Nagpur.

  The following evening at Jabalpur I met another Indian who had been to Australia. I had no idea so many Indians had gone there. He was a prosperous-looking fellow riding a scooter the way a merchant banker might sometimes bicycle to the City. We had a beer together in an Indian honky-tonk behind a Wine Store. He was very nostalgic about Australia, and had just bought a farm, 'just as a hobby to remind me'.

  T am going to train monkeys to shoo off the neighbour's cattle,' he told me. 'Well, why not? If dogs, why not monkeys?'

  My surprise must have shown on my face.

  Eventually I came to Agra by way of Khajurao. The Taj Mahal was entirely worth visiting despite its reputation, and even more worth listening too. The sighs of a million spirits drifted down inside from the echoing dome.

  I watched young Indian couples come in, noisily alive, wanting to make their mark on this sacred cow of architecture. If they could have carved their names into the marble, they would have had the building in shreds very quickly. Instead they flung their voices at the ceiling, young men drunk with power, young women drunk with hope, wanting that

  moment of immortality when the Taj would speak with their voice. But no sooner was the voice launched, than everything that was sharp, personal and assertive in it was lost, and it became a mournful ghost to mingle for ever with the grey legions above.

  I walked around the grounds, talked to some stonemasons and watched their deft work on the big red slabs of stone they were decorating. In the arcade outside, after three and a half years of thinking about it, I bought a pair of sandals that I could actually wear, and walked in them to see the fort.

  But the fort was closed to the public and surrounded by army.

  'A hundred and twenty ministers from foreign countries are visiting,' an officer told me. I walked on letting my annoyance dissolve in the melting pot of the bazaar, among ox carts, horse carts, cabs, hand barrows, cycles and rickshaws. Knowing that I would not be a part of this confusion for much longer, I sat on a box in an open store with a bottle of lemonade and watched the street. The bottle had a pinched neck and a glass marble as a valve, a brilliant device, almost forgotten since my childhood. Indian life flowed past me, a feast of colour and detail, wonderful in the sheer breadth of the spectrum of human circumstance that is paraded there.

  I walked on up the hill in the throng of vehicles and pedestrians. A portion of noise slightly louder than the rest made me turn, and I saw a horse cab coming up the rise.

  The horse was a powerful white beast, full of nervous energy, thrashing in the shafts and tossing its head. The driver, too, was young and flushed with energy and excitement, urging the animal up the hill, a young Muslim in robe and turban, sleeves swept back, rising up and reaching forward with his whip, eyes glowing with pride. The cab was heavily loaded with passengers and sacks of grain, all Muslims in turban and robe.

  The components of the tragedy came together before my eyes. The cab was going too fast, the horse was too wild. I saw three tiny girls, scarcely knee-high, though they were graded one, two, three, a few inches apart, perhaps sisters separated by a year, all identically dressed as miniature mothers in angle-length red dresses, voluminously pleated from the waist with machine embroidered bodices, cheap dresses for they were clearly poor girls and barefooted, but happily clutching each other and chattering madly together as they darted across the road among the legs of the crowd, a few feet from where I had stood and turned. The crowd parted, swiftly, to reveal the horse they had not heard and they fell in a single bundle, as though their dresses were stitched together, one, two, three, and I watched the wheel of the heavy cab rise slowly over their bodies.

  The moment froze. The big wooden-spoked, iron-tyred wheel bore down. Then time flowed on and the wheel slipped back to the ground. Men started forward to rescue the girls. The driver stumbled to the ground and horror overwhelmed him. He clasped his hands and fell to his knees and raised his arms and face to the sky shouting for mercy. His passengers slipped quietly from the cab, pressed a few coins on the driver and discreetly disappeared, no expression visible on their faces.

  Two of the girls, miraculously, were able to stand. The third, the smallest of them, lay in a shopkeeper's arms. Bright blood appeared at her lips. He passed the child to a boy of fifteen or so, and gave him some instruction. The boy just stood and grinned awkwardly as though embarrassed. The man shouted and pushed the boy, and the boy turned reluctantly and walked up the street carrying his unwanted bundle.

  He had not very far to go. I saw him turn in to a doorway marked 'Dipty X-ray Clinic'. A man came out again a few moments later, carrying the girl, and got astride the pillion of a scooter, which another man drove away.

  The incident had an effect on me far beyond the merely shocking. There was also something very familiar about the wheel crushing those small bodies, as though it were an ever-recurring theme of life, an accident that was made to happen, that had already happened countless times over many thousands of years. I even felt as though I had seen it myself often before.

  For a few minutes I thought of finding out where they had gone and following them; of learning everything there was to know about those three girls and their family. Then I sighed at the impossibility of it, and walked on.

  Although the Triumph behaved faultlessly all the way to Delhi, I knew that there was no question of riding much further without a new sprocket. I had long ago written to England about it, and expected to find a new one waiting for me at the Lucas depot. It was a great disappointment to find nothing there.

  For all their charm and helpfulness, the Lucas people could not conjure up a sprocket out of thin air, and as I sat it out, waiting for packages that did not arrive, sitting by telephones that did not ring, I fought a losing battle with my own exhaustion. I had counted heavily on being able to get out of New Delhi and on my way in a few days, before the heat came down, before I lost the momentu
m I had built up.

  The days stretched into weeks, and I became bogged down in delays and absurd misunderstandings. Many good things happened to me

  while I was there, but eventually they were all lost under the crushing weight of frustration. In the muggy heat of a Delhi summer I began to feel India closing in on me, and I fought furiously to escape from its cloying embrace. Indian friends indulged my antics as if they were the tantrums of a spoilt child.

  When the sprocket finally arrived at New Delhi airport, I had been waiting four weeks. Nervously I sweated my way through the hours of rigmarole at customs, where I was already well known. After their own fashion they were kind to me. The sprocket passed into my hands the same day, and I paid neither tax nor bribe nor fee. When I got it, I had only one ambition: to make a bolt for the border, and home.

  My fear of being trapped in India was not entirely fanciful. There was news of great upheavals in Pakistan and with the overthrow of Bhutto's government, martial law was declared. There were curfews and riots, and I feared that the border might be closed at any time. All overland routes to Europe go across Pakistan.

  But I had other deeper fears, though I could not describe them. I was in an advanced state of rootlessness and it was becoming plain to me that these were not just words, but a real condition that threatened to break me down unless I found some stability and peace soon. Meanwhile, just being on the move towards Europe alleviated it.

  The Prophecy Fulfilled

  On 5 May, with 26,300 miles on the clock since LA, I left New Delhi. I shot up the trunk road to Amritsar like an arrow from a bow, and had three narrow escapes with buses before I was able to cool down sufficiently to ride with my usual caution. In retrospect those seemed like the most dangerous miles of the journey.

  The urge to move westward was irresistible. I had to keep going. I had seen and done more than enough.

  The Pakistan border was open. I rode in a normal convoy of cars to Lahore. This great and populous city was entirely devoid of people, a quite remarkable sight. The curfew was almost round the clock, and stringently enforced. Armed soldiers patrolled every street corner. Otherwise the only life I saw was a herd of dairy buffalo making their own way with leisurely condescension down the middle of the broad and empty avenue.

  There was no reason to stay, for I would only have been incarcerated in an expensive hotel, and I set off alone for Rawalpindi. In less than two hours I arrived at the Jhelum River. Outside Lahore the atmosphere was much lighter, and already I was experiencing a relief from India. I had stopped briefly to drink some tea, and was struck immediately by the humour of the people around me. They made jokes that I could laugh at. How long was it since I had heard a joke?

  The Jhelum Bridge is a toll bridge. As I stopped at the booth a voice called to me.

  'Sir. Sir. Please. Come and rest. Have a cup of tea.'

  I saw a man at the roadside looking at me with a cheerful smile. He wore the pale grey pyjama suit of Northern Pakistan, long tunic with tails over trousers that ballooned out and came in sharply at the ankles. His face was weathered and creased with lines of mischief at the eyes and mouth.

  His family had paid for the franchise on the tool bridge. They lived in quarters on the river bank, all male, brother and cousins, and were Pathans from the Kohat region not far from the Khyber Pass.

  Hamid was the eldest of them, and therefore honoured, though he was otherwise the least qualified. He told me that he liked to offer comfort to foreign travellers, and he set about comforting me with a will. He gave me tea, heated water for my bath, laid out my bed and bedding, gave me supper and treated me to a hundred courtesies which, in the context of my journey, were great luxuries. All the while he entertained me with fragments of wit and wisdom garnered from all corners of human life. He quoted Freud and Einstein and Shaw, and spoke himself with such impish eloquence that I could close my eyes and imagine I was with an Irishman. He even said 'Sorr'.

  'Now tell me, Sorr, about the inert gases. I mean what is the use of them. Do they lead us anywhere at all? And where would you say God is in all this?'

  I said I thought God may well have been a nineteenth-century chemist.

  'Yes, Sorr, well maybe now he is a psychologist. That would be my choice if I were capable. It was a great misfortune for me, Sorr, that in my childhood I was hit many times on the head. It has damaged my brain. I am unable to remember the first five years of my life.'

  He produced a copy of The Psychologist for May 1952, a faded tomato-red pamphlet, and wrote his name 'HAMID, ABDUL, Kohati' on the cover, above the words: 'The Way to Get to the Root of your Worries'.

  'Please keep this, Sorr, as a remembrance. I get it every month. I also study homeopathy and natural medicine. Would you not say, Sorr, that modern medicines are very dangerous?'

  He showed me plants and herbs along the river bank, including the castor oil seed which I had not noticed before, and offered to massage my arms and legs before going to bed.

  The beds were set out on the hillside, charpoys and quilts. I had put my mosquito net up, but the enemy was already within. Before I could get to sleep, my waist was a mass of fiery blisters. Hamid was equal to the situation. Instead of wasting time on apologies and mortification, he fetched kerosene to soothe the bites and deter the creatures. He insisted on changing beds because he said he was impervious to bed bugs, and I fetched out my own sleeping bag. He sailed through this contretemps with an aplomb that is the hallmark of ultimate hospitality in my opinion. No fuss, no embarrassment, a minor problem solved and forgotten. He lay under the mosquito net, a fine green nylon mesh made in the USA. Before I went to sleep I heard him ask: 'Where did you get this mosquito net, Sorr?'

  I told him it came from San Francisco, and waited for the next, inevitable question.

  'It is very marvellous,' he whispered, almost to himself. T have never seen the moon in so many colours.'

  The dreaded question, the one I had become so resigned to for so long, never came. He did not ask me what it cost. Happily, I closed my eyes. Goodbye India.

  Every day I climbed higher towards the mountains, leaving the multitudes of India behind me. I had the impression of rising above a great bowl teeming with life, a vast and vaporous swamp of fecundity. Up here in the colder air the crowd thinned and resolved itself into individuals, aloof from each other, cherishing their apartness.

  I had no idea how far I had adjusted myself to the press of people in India and the absence of privacy. Suddenly I felt space opening all around me and I was afraid of exploding into a vacuum, like a diver in decompression. The feeling became even more intense as I rode on through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. In Kabul I felt I had to stop for a few days until I had regained control of myself. I was in a sort of dizzy rapture and afraid it could lead to an accident.

  I hung around the curio shops dickering with samovar salesmen, amazed at their toughness in bargaining. My greatest indulgence was to buy a loaf of real bread, half a pound of cold imported butter, a large lump of cheese and a bottle of Italian wine made in Afghanistan. With these I retired to my hotel room, recently infested with bed bugs now lying dead on their backs all around the floor, and consumed all my purchases in an orgiastic fantasy.

  Only six thousand miles to home.

  The road ran on through a thousand miles of barren and severe waste, Kandahar, Herat, and into Iran. My thoughts turned in on themselves more and more. I was so close to the end now. What had I to show for four years of my life? What was it all about?

  As my mind scratched restlessly back over the journey, my dismay turned to panic. I really didn't seem to know anything anymore.

  I remembered a snatch of conversation from the hotel at Kassala, when I came out of the Atbara desert on the way to Gondar. How strong I was feeling then.

  A chemistry teacher happened to be sharing my dormitory. 'What are you doing this long journey for?' the teacher asked me. 'To find out,' I answered, weary of my usual long-winded explanations.
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br />   'But what is it you wish to find out?' he persisted. 'Why I am doing it.'

  It was a frivolous reply, but I was so free and easy about it then, with most of it still ahead of me.

  Now, running for home across this bleak land, I had to face the same question.

  Did I find out, after all, why I was doing it?

  It seemed to me that there were times during those four years when I did know, and those were the times when The Journey needed no justification.

  Then I needed no better reason for the journey than to be exactly where I was, knowing what I knew. Those were the times when I felt full of natural wisdom, scratching at heaven's very door.

  The days of Jupiter.

  What had become of him since? Where was all that wonderful assurance and enlightenment now? As I moved mechanically through the landscape, undeviating, incurious, hugging my last reserves of energy, I felt bereft and ignorant, cast down to the depths, no more than 'a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.'

  Scuttling towards home. I called it home. I told myself: 'Just another five thousand miles to home. In only three weeks you can be there.'

  I was drawn, as if by a magnet, past glittering mosques, perfumed bazaars, mountain eyries and troglodytic retreats, all the ages and splendours of civilization, hardly willing even to turn my head. In my mind's eye the same picture flashed again and again. A Mediterranean avenue, and myself on the Triumph riding up it, with the sun flicking between the trunks of the plane trees, towards my home. I played it over and over like a clip from an old black and white film, 'My Home-coming'.

  It was an illusion, and I knew it. There was a house there still, of course, that was mine, but it would never again mean to me what it once had. How many times I had renounced it already! Only a year before I was sure I would return to California and Carol. Now I was besotted by a nostalgic memory more than four years old. All the fine freedom I had known since had evaporated. All the brilliant and unrepeatable experience of four years was as lifeless as ashes. I was burned out, and I could think only of getting to my little stone castle and slamming the door.