Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (7 page)

The bike shook and my teeth rattled as I slowed from a smooth 30 kilometres per hour to a bumpy ten. It frustrated the hell out of me and forced me to dodge pothole after pothole. I threw the bike into the rough, hard shoulder but this proved to be no better, with
fist-sized
boulders waiting to catch my wheels, jarring my shoulders horribly.

I soldiered on until about an hour later I felt something mushy under the back wheel, like I had substituted the tyre for a sponge cloth. I looked behind. The tyre was almost completely flat.

Conveniently, the tyre blew when I was under a huge tree that shaded a
chai
stall but inconveniently, no puncture repair
wallah
was about.

Setting to work, I threw off the panniers and bags. A crowd gathered; some played with my tools as I reached for them, while others fetched me water and helped me pull the bike apart. A truck stopped and the driver got out, squatted beside me, and from what I could gather from his excited finger and thumb gesticulations, was telling me to put my bike on his truck and go to a whore house.

‘Yes,’ I raised an eyebrow, ‘but that’s not the kind of hole I want to fill right now!’

I took out the tube, stuck on a patch, and stuffed it back in.

A man with slightly greying hair and stained and broken teeth came over.

‘I am Asif.’

‘As if what?’ I joked. But he didn’t get me.

‘I am the mayor of this town.’

I looked around at the dusty shacks. ‘Town? What town?’

He wobbled his head.

‘Here, I pump you.’

‘Excuse me?’

He grabbed the bicycle pump and began thrusting the handle back and forth.

‘You must have many wives.’

‘Why’s that?’ I asked. He leered and continued pumping.

‘I have four wives. Ten children.’

I didn’t understand what he was saying. He pumped the tyre harder, making noises and grinning.

‘You been talking to that truck driver?’

‘Many wives! Strong man. You. How many wives?’

‘I’m not even married!’

‘No. You must have many!’ he said and began pumping so vigorously that I had to stop him in case he burst the tube.

He gave me a cup of
chai
and I lay down on some rubber straps criss-crossed over a bed frame. These beds are a common feature in rural India, and I often found truck drivers and their jockeys on these beds, limbs asunder, unconscious once the speedy effects of chewing betel nut had failed to keep them awake.

Lying there, I realised I couldn’t feel the upper left side of my back nor the fingers on my left hand. I tried to stretch the wretched pain out when my left shoulder shrieked. My tendonitis, an ailment that had been dogging me for two years, was back and it would never leave me alone for the entire trip.

Now this is something that nobody really ever tells you about cycle touring; pain.

They’ll mention everything else – the sights, the beautiful days, the heroic climbs, the traffic, a great café, but they never tell you about how their body ached, how they stopped countless times to adjust the handlebars to take the weight off their bottom, the numbness in the hands, the stiff thighs. No wonder Lance Armstrong has a team of chiropractors on
Le Tour de France.
Asif did give me a shoulder rub – but somehow it just wasn’t the same.

But there was another thing that wore me down more than the rocky roads in India: the constant attention.

Stop to check the map, adjust the brakes or sit down at a
chai
stall and you’re soon mobbed. At the beginning of the trip, this level of curiosity was refreshing, but now, almost two weeks on, I felt like I was an infectious disease that was constantly being swamped by white cells.

With the crowds came the inevitable questions, the
same
questions and almost in the
same
exact order and often when I had to repair the bike:

‘Hello, sir. Which country?’

‘Australia.’

‘Oh, Australia! Cricket! Shane Warne. Ricky Ponting!’

‘What are you doing in India?’

‘Cycling.’

‘What is your good name?’

‘Russell.’

‘Hello, sir. Which country?’

‘Australia.’

‘Oh, Australia! Cricket! Shane Warne! Ricky Ponting!’

‘What are you doing in India?’

‘
Cycling
.’

‘What is your good name?’

‘Russell.’

‘Hello, sir. Which country?’

‘Australia.’

‘Ah! Cricket! Shane Warne! Ricky Ponting!’

‘What is your good name?’

‘Russell.’

‘What are you doing in India?’

‘
Cycling
!’

‘Hello, sir. Which country?’

‘AUSTRALIA!’

‘Ah! Cricket! Shane Warne! What are you doing in India?’

‘CYCLING!
’

It was like someone saying ‘Have you left the iron on? Have you left the iron on?’

Cycling away offered no escape and I was often almost killed with kindness: motorists, excited upon seeing me, would drive alongside and unwittingly force me into the hard shoulder of dust, turds or other vehicles while cheerily inviting me for lunch or tea.

Now, I appreciate the fact that seeing me, a Westerner on an expensive bike in their country, was a novelty and indeed a gift in these rural parts. And I appreciate that my Hindi and their English was limited. And I understand that these were poor people. I get all that. I really do. But the constant attention and the same questions were like the relentless commercials on Australian television – you never quite got used to it
x
.

I hate to say it but those ‘naïve Brits’ back in Mumbai were right. It was getting to me.

However, all this would soon be the least of my concerns.

I said goodbye to Asif, thanked him for his help and the
chai
, and got back, somewhat reluctantly, on the bike.

I struggled through the late afternoon heat and got as far as Burhanpur, another dusty, derelict town like many I had seen so far in India. They were all starting to look the same: a blur of chaotic traffic, noise, tobacco booths, staring crowds and street stalls selling fruit,
chai
and sweets.

I swung the bike past some gates to a swanky hotel called the Monsoon Palace. It was the cleanest hotel I had been in for some time – the sheets looked as if they had been changed at least once that month. The hotel was so glitzy, in fact, that management nearly didn’t let me put my bike in the room with me. Now, there was a first.

I had a shower, washing away the day’s dust and grime, then took a swig from a chilled bottle of beer, stretched out on the king-size bed. I felt a warm flush over my face, something I had noticed in the evenings of late. ‘No! It can’t be! I’m too young for menopause … wait a second, that’s a lady thing …’

In the morning, I felt like someone had made off with all my remaining energy during the night. My hips ached and my eyes were so sore that I was sure someone had been using them as bulls-eyes on a dartboard.

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?’

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), goods 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
!’