Simon - Jupiters Travels

When the reserve tank ran dry too, and the engine choked and died, I guessed I was ten or fifteen miles from Gaya. The thought was disagreeable. It might mean spending the night there, and somewhere I had read that Gaya was the dirtiest town in India.

I let the bike roll off the asphalt onto the grass under a shade tree. The trunk of the tree was stout and twisted with prominent roots and a grey scaly bark. Drooping clusters of small dry leaves gave a medium shade. It was a common tree in India though I still could not remember its name.

I tucked my gloves into my helmet and stood by the bike looking up and down the country road and across the field of green wheat wondering who was going to help me this time, and what it would lead to. I did not doubt that help would come, and with it most probably some unexpected twist in my fortunes. It had taken years to achieve that measure of confidence and calm, and as I waited I allowed myself some pleasure in knowing it.

My thoughts brushed over the years and miles of the journey, tracing the fear as it had waxed and waned along the way, trying to hold it all together and reassure myself that there really had been a beginning. Without a beginning how could there be an end? At times, and more frequently now, I could feel the tiredness invading my bones, bleaching my retina and raising a mist on the horizon of my mind. Soon it would have to end. There were many men walking along the road. Most of them wore loose cotton clothing, once white but stained right through by the reddish brown soil of Bihar. It caught the sun softly, and the people passed by under the trees like pale shadows taking up no space.

Few motor vehicles were on the road. Some men were riding bicycles, and a few drove ox carts or rode in pony cabs. There were some buzzing auto-rickshaws too, which are three-wheeled scooters with cabs for passengers. They were unlikely to have spare petrol. In the state of Bihar you could get three or four meals for the price of a litre of petrol.

A taxi came towards me full of people pressing forward. The driver was bent over the wheel with his dark face thrust against the windscreen and all the expression squeezed out of him. The wheels flew up and down on the bumps, and the taxi slithered and juddered across the waves of tar as though trying to escape, drawn to its destination only by the concerted prayers of the people inside it.

By this time several men had stopped to observe me and then reluctantly walked on, but now one came who spoke a little English. His colour and features indicated that he was a Brahmin, though his knotted cord, if he had one, was covered by his shawl and shirt. He told me straight away that he was very poor. I replied by telling him that I had no petrol.

Village is there, he said. Not far.

He stopped another man coming along slowly on a bicycle with a shopping bag slung from the handlebars, and spoke to him in Hindi.

He says they will be having petrol. It is two miles. Not far.

I thanked him and waited. I felt sure there would be no petrol at the next village but could not say so. There were more words spoken in Hindi.

This man will go on his bicycle. How much petrol you are wishing?

It did not seem to me that the man had volunteered but he appeared to accept the Brahmins authority without question.

Thats wonderful, I said. will need a litre, and started to fish in my pockets.

No, no, good sir. Afterwards you can pay. Now he will go.

The Brahmins prophecy was instantly fulfilled. The man turned his bicycle and went. The Brahmin then mentioned again, as a matter of purely academic interest, that he was poor, this time adding that I was rich. I felt that he was striving towards some kind of dialogue which would result, without his even having to wish it, in my turning my fortune over to him and continuing on foot. This might well have happened in ancient Indian legend, but I was not the warrior he took me for, and he was not sage enough for me, though he had a sly air about him.

So I withdrew politely from the conversation and sat at the foot of the tree to write and take pleasure in the afternoon. It was February. The light was still cool and golden, and there was peace here too, a kind of detachment that I found only rarely in public places in India. It seemed a perfect time to put down on paper what had been accumulating in my mind since the day, four days back, when I made my great mistake.

In the three years of my journey I had never made an error like it. I had planned to ride to Calcutta from Darjeeling, a long ride for one day on Indian roads, but the highway is better than most. It parallels the border of Bangladesh and, for part of the way, runs in company with the Ganges. What I had actually done on meeting the Ganges had been to take the highway that runs upstream to Patna and Benares. But had I done it? There was no recollection of choice. I had followed the holy river, secure in the knowledge that it was flowing on my right-hand side, unaware that I had crossed it in a confusion of streams and bridges and was on the west side and not the east. When I had noticed my mistake I had already travelled 150 miles in the opposite direction to Calcutta, a sufficient distance to change my life.