Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle Page 8

  ***

  I struggled with the idea of seeing the temple again the next morning but it opened at ten o’clock – too late for beating the heat of the day. Regrettably, I left.

  By lunch time the next day I realised I wasn’t free of something – Pen People. Arriving in Jodhpur I saw that tourists were being jumped, grabbed and followed by gangs of children demanding you-know-what. Strangely, this made me smile.

  I was told later that the kids were not demanding pens for literacy reasons but because they wanted to resell them, and that ‘One pen’ was another way of asking for money.

  ‘Manarge and Lanarge! You’ve sold me up river!’

  I had originally been lured to Jodhpur by the incredible photographs by travel photographer Steve McCurry in his glorious photologue called Monsoon. Jodhpur was known as the ‘blue city’, named because, well, it was blue. Well, the old city at least. The walls had been painted blue not for aesthetic reasons but to combat termites and other pests. McCurry had captured the vibrancy of the town by framing proud Rajputs in their red turbans standing in front of the blue walls. However, some years had passed, and as I stood in the Mehrangarh Fort that towered over the city, the iridescent blue had now faded to a soft mauve.

  The fortress was the fourth-largest in India and had been built on a high rocky outcrop with thick imposing walls. One intriguing story in its construction was that the founder, the Rajput ruler of Mandore, Rao Jodha, buried a man called Rajiya Bhambi alive in the foundations to ensure its good luck, though not for ol’ Ray. ‘Guys, somehow I don’t know think this in the Occupational Health and Safety Guide – glop, glop, glop.’

  That night, I enjoyed an exquisite Rajasthani dish of chakki-ka-sagh (dumplings in gravy) on the terrace of the Haveli Guest House while the Mehrangarh Fort faded into the background like an enormous black backdrop.

  I might have stayed longer in Jodhpur if not for the hordes of touts and tourists pawing off each other, a mutual exchange of gain and disdain. I was starting to gather that I was least happy in touristic areas; local people I met usually had an ulterior motive. This was felt particularly when it came to auto-rickshaw drivers who harangued tourists mercilessly. ‘No,’ seemed to mean, ‘Yes, ask me again if I need a lift.’

  However, one night, the tables turned – I actually got to drive a rickshaw! A rickshaw driver, the big smiling Mr King, drove up as I walked and showed me his half completed rickshaw. It was like in the tram in the film Malcolm. The front shield was there, welds still fresh, no license plate, while the motor, chassis and crankshaft were exposed and quite naked.

  ‘India’s first! You come.’ He sat me down on the seat on top of the engine and started it with some rope wrapped around the flywheel.

  I grabbed the handlebars and let the clutch out. We lurched into traffic.

  ‘Shlow … shlow.’ He forced me to ease back on the throttle. We bounced and zipped through the dimly lit narrow streets. I saw two large tourists, one with ‘MONTANA’ emblazoned across his shirt.

  ‘YOU! YOU!’ I hissed, makes kissing noises at them like I’d seen so many rickshaw drivers do. ‘Rickshaw? Rickshaw? Good price! Good price!’

  ‘No, thank —’

  The American turned around and burst out laughing when he saw me. Later, King dropped me back at the hotel and just when I thought this had all been just a bit of fun he turned around and said, ‘Now, how much you want to pay for the ride?’

  Just before I left Jodhpur the following morning, I went to the bank. Now, I’d been warned about how inefficient banks were in India. As I was to discover, it wasn’t that, exactly. After waiting in line then getting a special token from the teller then told to go upstairs and wait, I was finally, after an hour, led into a small office. Files lay this way and that, numerous piles stacked and falling over in lazy lumps. The bank manager, a man with a grey moustache, the ends white as if they’d been dipped in flour, looked at my traveller’s cheque, my passport, then suddenly put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘It is tea break!’ he remonstrated as if I should’ve known and pointed to the clock on the wall. ‘Ten o’clock.’

  Shortly thereafter, in came the chai-wallah with glasses of chai. The manager said something and a piping hot chai was placed in my hands.

  ‘Dunubud (Thank you).’

  We chatted and at exactly quarter past ten the manager animated back into life and processed my cheque. Now, why can’t all banks be like this? Cup of tea, biscuit, bit of chat and a laugh. Oh, we have lost so much in the West!

  ***

  I took the back roads on the way to Jaisalmer, known as the Golden Fortress with its sandstone walls and intricate carved havelis. It was of particular interest to me as I’d had to prepare a catalogue for it for our college project and it would be wonderful seeing the real thing at last.

  It was a hard ride. The roads disappeared into sand drifts and I found myself pushing the bike for hours through the sand and the interminably hot sun.

  And so, after eight hours of cycling, I found myself in the tiny town of Shergarh with not one tourist in sight.

  Sand swam in the streets, and children played in it and within seconds, I was surrounded by the entire town. Elders, teenagers and small children covered in dirt, all smiling, all very curious about the bike and me.

  ‘Oh, gear cycle! Gear cycle!’

  A young man sashayed through the crowd and introduced himself.

  ‘I am Rikesh,’ he said, his English impeccable. ‘You are the first foreigner here in a long while. Come, I will take you to the best hotel in Shergarh.’

  And it was the best hotel in Shergarh … because it was the only hotel in Shergarh! Well, calling it a hotel was a bit generous. It was a storeroom-cum-dorm above the restaurant. I was to share the room with an old Rajput who wore an enormous yellow turban, dhoti (wrap around pants) and sported a pointy moustache that belonged more on someone called ‘Brigadier Reginald Dwyer’.

  A proud Rajput with fierce eyes owned the restaurant. He sat at a cooking slate on his haunches like a vulture, rolling wads of chapattis in his big bony hands. With his woollen cap and sweater he looked more suited to the sea, at the helm of a fishing boat in a typhoon, than in the dry, calm sands of Shergarh.

  ‘Take your seat,’ he ordered, pointing his cooking knife at me.

  As I ate, a crowd of adolescent boys giggled and stared at me while holding each other’s legs, hands and waists like couples on a date. Later, I chased kids up and down the dunes and gave piggyback rides and pretended to be an albatross, much to their heady delight.

  Rikesh told me that no foreigner had ever stayed in Shergarh. ‘And so everyone here thinks that you are like a movie star!’

  He was a medical student and all of 18 but had the maturity of someone much older.

  ‘Come. I will take you to my brother’s shop.’

  His brother’s shop was a stall, which sold chewing tobacco and a locally made mouth freshener. He told his brother to prepare a mouth freshener for me, getting bits of what looked like crystal, yellow powder, and different types of herbs, and placing these onto a banana leaf. Rikesh told me to empty it onto my mouth. I did. It was sweet, fragrant and slightly bitter and left my head buzzing.

  ‘Spit.’ I did, watching the brown red goo hit the dust.

  As the moon turned the desert into rude round shapes, music blared out from a small shack: ‘WHOAH! WE’RE GOING TO IBIZA! WHOAH! BACK TO THE ISLAND!’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I regarded the Rajasthani Bullet Beer I was now drinking with some mistrust. But there it was. British pop music in one of India’s most backwater towns, where asking for a bottle of Coke got you a confused enema grimace from shopkeepers.

  I was dragged up by Rikesh and the boys and urged to dance. Thankfully, the track soon finished but not until it rapped into some hardcore techno tunes that sounded like IKEA furniture fucking. Eventually, I tried to ‘rave it’ which to
me meant shaking your hand around as if you had snot on the back of it. The lads cheered me on.

  I bought a tape – not because I liked it – but as a way of blocking out the din of dogs fighting so I could sleep.

  ***

  In the early hours of the morning, I awoke with a start at the sight of a face trying to push itself through my mosquito net like the stalker from the film Halloween. The face pulled back. It belonged to a young man. He jumped on the end of my bed, swinging his legs back and forth like a child and speaking Marwari (I presumed), the local dialect. When I didn’t respond he leapt up and started playing with my bike up against the wall in the room, ringing the bell.

  ‘BRRINGG-BRRINGG! BRRINGG-BRRINGG!’

  Duli, the town’s vet who lived in the next room, called out to him. He jumped up and left. Duli came in.

  ‘I told him to go,’ Duli said.

  ‘Thank you. It’s an Indian thing isn’t it? No idea of privacy.’

  ‘Indian thing! Hah! I don’t like it either!’ he erupted. ‘I do not like it when they walk into my room without announcement. These are very illiterate people. You must tell them to go!’

  And, as if on cue, the old Rajput with yellow turban barged in, sat on my bed and stared at me.

  ‘Go!’ I pointed to the door. He frowned at me quizzically then babbled at Duli.

  ‘He says you owe the owner two hundred rupees,’ Duli said.

  ‘Two hundred?’ It seemed a trifle much, especially I paid that much for a nice, big room at the Haveli Guest House in Jodhpur.

  ‘Fifty per night, fifty per day, twenty-five for each meal. So, now you give him two hundred.’

  Not wanting to cause offence, I handed it over.

  At breakfast I was invited to meet with Mr Prakash, the principal of the local school. He was a squat, rolling man in his early 50s and was in the habit of leaning against the back of his chair. He immediately unburdened himself of his worries to me: the four-year drought, bores having to be dug deeper and deeper every year and the bleak future of the town without water. But then, when I told him of my journey and my malarial fevers he uttered the most curious of suggestions.

  ‘Drinking your urine is very beneficial for your health.’

  I blinked. ‘You’re drinking your own urine?’ I dipped my stale biscuit in my tea, hoping he had given me tea.

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled. I tried to get a glimpse of signs of uric contamination on his teeth.

  ‘You’re taking the piss!’ I teased, but he didn’t get me.

  ‘Yes. I am taking the piss since 1996 and I feel much better for it. I am stronger, much vigour, and I have not been sick once since the treatment.’

  ‘What does yours taste like?’

  ‘Depends on what I eat. Sometimes if I have too much tea it is a little bitter and –’

  ‘Okay, okay, okay!’ I waved him to stop. He ruffled through his drawer and flapped out a rough copy of a book called The Golden Fountain by Coen Van Der Kroon. My first thought was, ‘Those fucking Dutch!’

  ‘It is all in here. Go on. Read it.’

  Urine, Van Der Kroon claimed, could cure anything: herpes, athlete’s foot, skin problems, sunburn, indigestion, diarrhoea, even cancer and AIDS. But what really got my attention was that urine could cure baldness.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Dr Prakash smiled. ‘You put urine on the scalp and the hair should grow.’

  ‘That would require spectacular aim, Mr Prakash.’

  ‘No, no. You have to use old urine.’

  ‘Old urine?’ I had images of trying to milk geriatric men. Or worse, bowing before them in public urinals. ‘All I’m asking is for you to …’

  ‘The urine has to be four days old and left out in the sun, then applied to the affected area,’ he said, making a rubbing motion on his scalp.

  ‘Yeah … but the smell.’

  ‘Sure, but if you want the benefit, then this is a small price.’

  When I gave a look that suggested that the author had been drinking too much of the stuff, Mr Prakash lit up.

  ‘Anyway, you should use it to treat your malaria. There is this woman who was close to death. She has the leukaemia. She tries everything but nothing works. But then she is given the urine treatment – no food, just urine – and she is cured.’

  ‘What is she doing now?’

  ‘Oh …’ he sighed. ‘She is dead. Hit by a bus.’

  Mr Prakash took me outside to watch the school assembly. The students marched ankle-deep in the sand of their quadrangle, then sat in rows and prayed to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge, who was depicted above them in a picture in which she played a long-necked string instrument called a veena. I watched a male lyrebird fly down from a wall behind the students and peck at morsels of food left in the sand.

  What struck me the most about the assembly was not the pressed blue shirts that were so remarkably neat and clean in such a dusty landscape, but that there were only 25 girls among the hundred or so boys and they sat in segregated lots. When I asked the principal about the disparity he said, ‘Families do not think that girls need education. They will only get married or work on the farms.’

  I spent two nights in Shergarh and on the morning that I was leaving I had tea with Rikesh at his house. His parents, in their 60s, sat in the shadows like old furniture.

  ‘When will you come back?’ asked Rikesh.

  ‘I’m not sure. Thank you for everything,’ I said. We hugged and I wheeled the bike through sand until the bitumen resurfaced like a buried elephant’s back.

  I turned over my shoulder to see Rikesh still there, shrinking in the distance. He had been a good friend for the past two days, showing me around the town and introducing me to his friends. He had a gentle kindness, a quiet humility I immediately felt when I first met him. I hoped to see him one day again.

  The quietness of the desert reminded me that I was now alone again. My only company was the knocking gait of my chain, the slow sound of my breath drawing in and the odd shift of tools in my luggage.

  Faced with no one to talk to, I talked to myself and sang. For some reason, old television commercials crept up from my childhood vault.

  Up, up and away with TAA, the friendly way to FLLLYYYY!

  Not long after this, I found another part of my body singing, as I squatted, pants hoisted down, stomach grumbling its own sonata over a small cactus. The sudden eruption seemed to settle things down … for a while, until again I found myself stirring up an aria over a culvert. I felt decidedly ill.

  In my haste, I had punctured the front tyre on a thorny branch. I searched around in my front pannier for my tools when The Golden Fountain flopped out.

  Now, I hadn’t been overly impressed by the principal’s suggestion of drinking my own piss, but something in The Golden Fountain made sense. It said that urine, being a natural antiseptic, would kill germs in the digestive tract. Hmm. And I needed to pee.

  I took my drink bottle from its cage on the bike, drank the rest of the water and looked around. No one. Furtively, I whizzed away and felt the warm urine crawl up the bottle. I looked inside; it was the colour of a beer including bubbles floating around the top. No wonder they call beer ‘piss’ where I come from.

  I held it to my mouth.

  I can’t be serious!

  But I was. I closed my eyes and, with a sigh and a gulp, took in the hot ‘Golden Nectar’ … then spat it straight out!

  ‘Corr!’

  But I was determined to give it a go. I knocked it back once more and grimaced again. I washed my mouth out with a fresh bottle of water.

  Within minutes my stomach settled. I stretched out on my tarp and relaxed. I heard a Jeep approaching in the distance. And in my stomach I felt something else approaching.

  My insides lurched and I puked a jet of yellow vomit across the bike just as the Jeep sailed by. I looked up. A ‘Friends of Gujarat Earthquake’ banner waved across the Jeep, which had now stopped.

  ‘Are you okay, my friend?’ A thick Germ
an voice reached out.

  Why do people ask you if you’re okay when clearly you’re not? You could have your head hanging off by a scraggily vein and they’d still go, ‘You alright?’

  ‘I’m fine. WHHHARRRPPP!’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. WHHAARR-RRGGAHH!’

  ‘You eat somezing bad?’

  ‘Well, “eat” isn’t exactly the verb here … I’ll …’ I really couldn’t tell him what I had done. ‘Really.’

  He tapped his driver on the shoulder and they were gone. I watched the scarf of dust head towards Shergarh, and imagined the principal smiling and laughing to himself. Who indeed had been taking the piss?

  ***

  After fixing the puncture, I got back on the bike, the bitter taste of vomit grinding on my molars. I felt awful. I was sneezing and felt like I was getting a cold. I hoped it wasn’t malaria again.

  I passed scabby bush, sand and towns with the usual foray of men hanging off each other in dhaba shacks, watching the day vanish in dust swirls.

  I could see adversity spreading itself over the bitumen up ahead – sheets of sand drifts. I sped up, thinking I could skim over them on to the next island of black tar, but I quickly found myself bogged in a sand trap. I got off and pushed.

  A bus passed then stopped. The driver motioned me to get on and through hand movements indicated that the road was like this for some time. But I was made of stronger stuff, I told myself. I smiled back and waved him on, shaking his head at this mad bloody foreigner.

  What have I done?

  I went back to pushing the bike through the sand. Four hours later, the sun blistering down, I was still at it – riding for a while then dismounting to push the bike. I was exhausted. And I was running out of water.

  Eventually, the road cleared up and I made it to Phalsund, the only major town between Shergarh and Shiv. But I was worse for wear. I had a blinding headache that felt like it was cracking my skull in two.