Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle Read online

  I struggled to load the bike. Everything felt heavy. I wheeled the bike out, got on and coasted on a rough, patchy road through the town, my shoulder aching.

  I hoped to get to Khandwa, some 75 kilometres away, though I wasn’t sure I was even going to get as far as the next kilometre, as every push on the peddle drained me as I climbed a small hill. A TATA truck revved behind me, easily making it, the driver tooting cheerily but I could not muster an acknowledgement. Three boys, aged about eight, herded goats down the road and decided that this was a good moment to yell and make stupid faces at me. I swore which only seemed to encourage them.

  Exhausted, I found a shady patch under a eucalyptus tree and climbed off the bike. Looking up at the gum leaves, I felt like I hadn’t left Australia at all. From under the backpack I pulled out the blue tarpaulin, unfolded it and stretched out for a quick nap.

  Peace at last. It was a quiet road. And no wonder, with a road like that.

  I felt myself caught in that mousetrap of sleep and consciousness, half-dreaming, half-floating, when a motorbike zoomed past. I heard it turn around and stop. It idled.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I groaned and pushed my head under my sarong, trying to disappear. The engine coughed to a gasp, the kickstand slammed down. Footsteps in the dust – crunch, crunch, crunch – got louder then stopped. Silence.

  What were they doing?

  I recalled a story of a bikini-clad woman sleeping on a beach in Goa who woke to find four men masturbating over her. I wasn’t wearing a bikini, but … surely they weren’t … these shorts weren’t that exciting … I mean … what could they be …?

  I peeked up from the sarong. It was worse than I’d thought.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ asked a smiling face bright as the sun. ‘Which country?’

  5

  KHANDWA

  January

  Eventually, I flopped into Khandwa.

  I found a room at The Motil, a hotel so narrow that you had to squint just to see it. I crossed a narrow plank over road works to get to the foyer and hauled my bike up narrow stairs, continually bumping my head on the low ceiling. As the porter opened the door, a flurry of mosquitoes whizzed around the room while a heady smell of stale urine rose out of the squat toilet in the adjacent bathroom. It was so horrible I just had to have it and soon I was asleep.

  However, I was woken shortly after by the sound of pigs fighting somewhere below me while boys played cricket up against the wall – THUDUNK! THUDUNK! A train tooted and thundered as if it was right next door. That’s because it was. I had the good fortune of choosing a hotel right next to the Khandwa Train Station.

  Somehow, I went back to sleep but then was woken up through the night by the train announcements that blared through my window, trailing off departure times and arrivals to every unpronounceable town in sub-tropical Asia. Diesel trains thrummed through my ears, letting off baritone shots from their horns.

  My body ached deep in my hipbones. My face was on fire. I fought to untangle myself from the mosquito net, which I kept getting caught up in like a fruit bat.

  I got out of bed and popped two aspirin. Soon I was asleep but the fever burned through as soon as the aspirin wore off. Every two hours I downed more. Lying there in the dark, stale room, sweating and itching, I wondered if I had malaria. And if I did, was it the dreaded cerebral malaria, the one that would travel through my blood stream, attack my brain cells, put me in a coma and then force me to wake up dead in the morning?

  Perhaps that hijra in Mumbai had cursed me after all.

  ***

  In the morning I went in search of a doctor and found a small clinic behind the arse of a cow that was happily chewing on the curtains. A nurse raced out and beat it with a broom until it lounged away swishing its tail shamelessly. Ah, ’dem cows!

  ‘Doctor?’ I asked.

  I half-expected her to say, ‘No, it’s a cow,’ but thankfully she pointed me to a very serious-looking middle-aged woman with a bindi (red dot) in the middle of her forehead and a shawl draped around her as she sat at her reception–desk-cum-examination-area.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked flatly.

  ‘I think I have malaria.’

  ‘Sit.’

  I did.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ she ordered, then shone a torch down my throat.

  ‘You have an infected throat.’

  ‘Yes, it’s sore.’

  ‘We shall do blood sample. Go,’ she said, waving me off to a small man with a thin moustache. She went back to her paperwork as I followed him into a room where nurses were standing over a woman in a purple sari lying on a table.

  ‘No!’ the doctor yelled at me. ‘There is someone there.’

  ‘But you just said to go —’

  ‘Sit. You must be waiting.’

  So I sat and stared at the floor. It was a small, quiet hospital and there only seemed to be me in it. When signalled to go in, I presented my arm. Three nurses took turns at tapping it until a bluish vessel reared up obediently. They popped the vein and bent the needle ridiculously, ignoring my worried face. One shouted out and an older nurse came in. She yanked hard on the syringe and filled it with my red insides, reminding me of the mosquitoes that had sucked my blood out in the first place.

  I returned to the doctor’s desk and sat down.

  ‘Go now. Be back here at three p.m. sharp.’

  When I did return, a happy, 50-something man (moustache, receding hair, round paunch) was sitting in her chair.

  ‘I am the husband of Dr Chawla,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘Dr Chawla.’

  ‘Ah, the same.’

  ‘Not the same. Different,’ he frowned at me. ‘She is my wife.’

  He put on his glasses and showed me the blood-test result. A Latin term was badly typed across a thin piece of paper.

  ‘Plasmodium falciparum. It is a strain of malaria. There are four types: Plasmodium vivax, ovale, malariae and the one you have – falciparum – the killer malaria!’ he said, smiling. His wife’s indifference was matched only by his joy at my illness.

  ‘Right,’ I said, trying to digest all of this as I replayed being bitten on the ankle in the hotel in Mumbai, the bites through the night in Aurangabad, the bites on my neck in … somewhere.

  ‘Injection! Injection is best for you! Inside!’ In the same manner as his wife, he waved me away to a cubicle.

  They laid me out on the table in the foyer of the hospital, flung a blanket over me, and popped a saline-solution drip into my surrendered forearm. The drip hung there draining itself like a bloated tick while, outside, the noxious sounds of traffic horns tore past.

  I began to think of other times I had been ill in foreign lands. The worst of it had been in Egypt, in the back of a taxi on the way to the temple of Abu Simbel, hot as hell in the middle of the Aswan desert. I had stabbing pains in my stomach and had been vomiting and crapping all day. A 40-something Israeli woman had an enlightened solution.

  ‘Russell, to take your mind off the pain, what you need to do is to masturbate!’

  At the time, I almost considered it, but I did wonder how well that would have gone down while middle-aged Americans in big shorts posed in front of the giant statues of Ramses II while I shat, vomited and jerked myself blue into a furious cloud of dust by their ankles … ‘George! What’s he doing? Do you think I should give him baksheesh to make him stop? It’s getting all over my Nikes!’

  As if to muffle such thoughts, a nurse came over and put another blanket over me. I didn’t realise I had been shivering. The nurse smiled, patted my arm, then disappeared upstairs, her purple sari waving behind her. Wishing for the soft hand of Bec to palm my forehead and tell me everything was going to be alright. I had dozed off to sleep when I heard: ‘Ah, you are awake!’

  It was Dr Chawla.

  What does he call it when your eyes are opened?

  He handed me a prescription and told me to go to the Pharmacy Market.

  In Khandwa (and like most towns in India), good
s and services were demarcated: textiles occupied one street – furls of blue, white, red and chequered patterns sailed on the footpaths – while metal goods – hooks, chains, cases, hardware products, nails and tools – were up the top end near the chowk (intersection). Behind the chowk and near the town square was the vegetable market, and nearby, the milk shops bubbled and frothed sweetened milk in huge woks as patrons munched on sweets, chatting, laughing and wiping away their milk moustaches.

  The Pharmacy Market was in the next street, occupying most of it with small shops only big enough for one man. Packets of drugs were lined up, sitting in the sun. I’d heard some were most likely copies of the authentic product or, worse, contained not the drugs at all but turmeric. One company had apparently had so much trouble with their products being copied that they had to change their packaging three times in a year.

  ‘Hello. Where are you from?’ called an English accent. I snapped around to see a thin Indian man with glasses smiling from inside his tiny pharmacy. He wobbled his head and I thought instantly of a praying mantis.

  His name was Sunil and his father had immigrated back to India from England, hence his clear Manchester accent. He was the oldest of his siblings and was therefore responsible for looking after his parents. His father was a doctor and Khandwa was his hometown.

  ‘Here is a very dusty place, very dirty,’ said Sunil from inside his shop.

  ‘Oh, but I find it positively cosmopolitan,’ I said. It was busier than most of the small towns I had been to in India in my brief two weeks of travel.

  ‘Sure, it may be a city, but you know there’s nothing to do here. People are concerned about working and making money. They don’t want to talk about other things like the rest of the world.’ He stopped and looked at me. ‘You look tired. You should get some sleep now. Come back later when you are rested. I like meeting people like you. Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Motil.’

  ‘Near the railway station? Ah, it’s not very nice there. There is a better place I know. Very clean rooms. The Rinjit Hotel. The food there is very clean.’

  ‘But I’ve been eating at the food stalls all through India.’

  ‘You shouldn’t! The food is poor quality, and then there are the flies!’

  Later that night, I met Sunil at the Rinjit for dinner, the kitchen now firmly open and serving piping hot meals. As the night progressed, while we ate outside in the restaurant garden amid burning oil lanterns, Sunil’s accent glided out of his smooth English to its natural Indian staccato.

  ‘Eighty per cent of the people of India,’ he said, chewing on a chapatti, ‘and I’m sure you’ve seen them, are terribly poor. The common man here, if he is lucky, will have five rupees in his pocket. Not even enough to buy soap!’

  Sunil was right. India still has the world’s largest number of people living in poverty in a single country. Of its nearly one billion inhabitants, an estimated 350–400 million live below the poverty line.

  ‘Do you think,’ I began, ‘that using the soap will get rid of the germs after … you know, after you’ve been to the toilet?’

  ‘Sure. Most of them.’

  ‘You think it’s hygienic?’

  ‘Very hygienic!’ He raised his hand up as if asserting a high truth.

  ‘Then why does everyone eat with their right hand?’

  He looked dumbfounded for a moment then shot back with, ‘It is the custom!’

  ***

  The news of my malaria travelled fast.

  Sitting at an Internet café, where the owner had blessed every computer before letting me sit down, friends and family were understandably concerned. My sister, a nurse, consulted a doctor and said that I should be okay once I had taken the drugs, as the strain I had caught only stayed in the blood, unlike others that resided in vital organs such as the liver even when treated.

  Alan suggested that I come home, in case ‘you end up six feet under’, while Bec begged me to return. But it was my mother’s response that beggared belief: ‘I hear you’ve got a touch of malaria,’ she wrote in her email. ‘Anyway, bought a new couch last week and —’

  A touch of malaria? A touch of … what the –!! What did she think I had? ‘A tickle of bubonic plague? A sniffle of AIDS? Got a bit of a rash from that nasty Ebola business, luv?’ Muuuuuuum!

  After a week of lying in bed at the Rinjit Hotel reading and watching Bugs Bunny in Hindi (which gave my feverish deliriums a nice kick) I was back at the Doctors Chawla to collect the last of my antibiotics and Chloroquine. The aches and fevers had gone and I was feeling almost normal.

  The doctor, to my surprise, was not so concerned about my health but about something much more pressing.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said coyly, looking around the room, then, smiling (or was that leering?), ‘I hear the sex in your country is … free.’

  ‘Free?’

  ‘Yes. Free.’

  I looked around the clinic. His wife wasn’t around.

  ‘Well … you’ve got to buy them a drink at least,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, drink. Hmm.’

  His wife walked in and sat down at the desk. He shifted in his chair and put his glasses on.

  ‘Tell me,’ his said, quickly changing the subject then scrutinising my bald pate, ‘where did your hair go?’

  I blinked at the remark.

  ‘South America.’

  ‘South America? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m bald, Doctor. Pure bald.’

  ‘Yes, I see. You can be having the hair transplant,’ he smiled, evidently finding the thought of having hair plugs butchered into my scalp a pleasing one.

  ‘No, I don’t want to have that,’ I said. ‘Besides, they don’t really work. My father had one and he ended up getting a toupée. A wig,’ I added for clarity.

  ‘A wig? This is ridiculous. Why would you want to worry about such things?’

  ‘I’m not sure …’ I stared at him, noting that he had tried every possible manoeuvre with his remaining hair to cover his balding pate – from the back, the sides, a little from the front – it looked like a coffee scroll and he was telling me not to worry about baldness?!

  ‘Anyway,’ he said sitting up, fiddling with his glasses and affecting a professional air, ‘you should not cycle with this malaria, Mr Russell.’

  ‘But I’m feeling fine.’

  ‘No. You must not cycle. You must rest.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Another ten days at least.’

  ‘Really? I’m feeling quite chipper. I had a ride today and felt great.’

  ‘No! Not advisable. Here, take this course of tablets.’

  He dumped a pile of boxes on the desk and fixed a hard stare over his glasses.

  ‘Finish them all. And no cycling!’

  But when I went to bed that I night I lay there thinking, ‘Ha ha, Doctor! I’ll show you! I’ll show you what hardy creatures we Australians are and get back on that bike! Ha ha! You’ll see! YOU’LL SEEEEEEE!’

  6

  KHANDWA – UDAIPUR

  January

  I took the train.

  Yeah, I know. That’s cheating. Again.

  But the good doctor was right. I really didn’t have the strength yet, so I jumped on the overnight train for Udaipur, a city by a beautiful lake, some 800 kilometres northwest, and a perfect place to recuperate. And it was the next major city where I could perhaps have another blood test done – just to be sure.

  With my bare feet up on the opposite seat, my fellow passenger, Abul (a producer for a biotech company, his business card told me), helped himself to my bicycle handlebar bag, examining the map inside the waterproof plastic sheath while I helped myself to his English newspaper.

  ‘English, yes, but Hindi, no,’ he had said, smiling. For the first time since arriving, I was with an Indian who didn’t understand Hindi, which comforted me greatly. I felt that we were comrades in arms against the ongoing confusion around us. But then again, understanding Abul’s
English was another matter altogether. When I pressed him to tell me more about his profession, I couldn’t understand either the terminology he was using or his taut Tamil twang.

  In contrast, sitting opposite me was Asilya, a well-spoken farmer with a sad countenance and droopy moustache. He owned and operated a farm growing soya beans, sugar cane and rice. His father was a lawyer and a farmer, a family tradition by all accounts. He spoke with an indifferent manner, which was a refreshing change from the obsequious attention I was often greeted with.

  I asked Asilya whether he used genetically modified crops.

  ‘No. I have no time for this business. This is the south.’

  I was curious, as I had read Stolen Harvest by environmentalist and activist Vandana Shiva. She detailed how, in the late 1990s, hundreds of farmers took on a new biocrop offered by multinationals that would supposedly double the farmers’ yields. The catch was that if farmers wanted to replant, they had to buy more seed from the company, breaking a tradition of sharing seeds in the farming collectives. The crops failed, and, unable to repay the debt, over 400 hundred farmers killed themselves by consuming pesticides. This spurred a movement called ‘Monsanto, Quit India’ campaign in 1998. Alas, the suicides have continued and are now more than 25 000.

  Asilya’s wife, a quiet woman with a gentle seriousness about her, sat opposite with their shy nine-year-old son. She was particularly affectionate to her husband – something I had not seen in India until now – resting her hand on his thigh in a relaxed, loving fashion, sometimes slapping it to punctuate a thought.

  They were absolutely lovely and they temporarily adopted me. They shared their lunch with me – alu (spicy potatoes) and homemade chutney. When the train stopped at stations, Asilya would ask if I needed anything (to which I replied that I didn’t) and then disappear and return with sweets to share.

  The afternoon brought a dusty heat into our compartment and soon we were all yawning, flopping on each other’s shoulders. I tried to read but the train shook the words off the page and I surrendered to the slow breathing around me.