Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (59 page)

'You have one recourse,' he said, harshly. 'To give me something for food. I haven't eaten all day.' Something in what I had experienced that evening made it impossible for me to give anything. His last shouted appeal 'For humanity's sake' and my desperate, dismal response, 'You'll have to sort yourselves out' stayed with me like twin echoes through the night.

It was important to me to give only when I felt like it. I tried never to let a sense of guilt or conscience drive me to it, for then I would never know whether I wanted to or not. Happily there were some occasions when I did want to give, though not very many.

I was a beggar myself, of course, in the sense that I made myself very obviously available to hospitality, and it was generously offered. The prize, I suppose, must have been the two nights I spent in the palace of the Maharajah of Baroda. My friends in Madras had known the Maharajah (or strictly speaking, the ex-Maharajah, since the title was officially extinct) and suggested I mention his name. I arrived full of curiosity, not knowing what to expect, and was directed first to the wrong palace which was full of soldiers. However, they sent me in the right direction, and I came to an apparently endless and towering railing alongside a road, and at last a gate.

It seemed odd that the gate should be opened and unguarded, but I went in, down a potholed drive among trees and bushes until the palace came in sight. It was quite an overwhelming sight, not simply because it was enormous and seemed to fill my entire field of vision when I came upon it, but because of the breathtaking detail that filled every part of the facade. There were so many wings, even the wings had wings, that for a good while I could see no way to get at it. Only later did I realize that I was looking at the back of the palace and that the
really
impressive facade was round the other side.

As I rode and walked up and down the gravel, puzzled by the silence and the apparent absence of a doorway, two figures appeared on one of a hundred balconies overlooking the drive. They looked ragged and disreputable, and in every way inappropriate to all the magnificence around them. In fact I thought at first I had caught two housebreakers at work. They were probably having similar thoughts about me. One of them shouted down: 'What do you want?' They obviously were keen to keep their distance.

I
want to see the Maharajah,' I shouted back. It felt quite ridiculous. They looked like a couple of villains. I was a black and greasy biker after the long ride from Bombay. I should have been at the back of a slum tenement shouting 'Tell Bert the cops are on to him.'

'Not here,' the man replied. 'His Highness not here.'

I went on at the top of my voice in great detail about my connections and ambitions, knowing that he did not understand me but trying to entice him down. Eventually it worked. My authentic English accent must have done the trick.

I saw there was nothing villainous about him at all. He was the Indian

version of a faithful old retainer, and he managed to explain that the estate was now managed from an office across the road, not far away. He gave me a glass of water, and a note scribbled in Gujarati. I went off to find the office, and met the Maharajah's brother and a young engineer called Ash win Mehta. We talked pleasantly for a while, and I learned that the Maharajah, who was also an M.P., was in New Dehli, and that the palace was hardly used these days.

Ashwin said there was much to be seen in Baroda and that he would show me around, and the Maharajah's brother said I should stay at the palace meanwhile if I liked. I had no difficulty accepting. In due course I went back to wash and change, and went through the front entrance into a hall big enough to contain most houses. There was no door, for it was never needed. It was never cold, and privacy began a long way away at the boundaries of the immense estate.

There were several bearers in white cotton livery with bare feet and stylish cockades in their hats, although it was a skeleton crew compared with what must once have manned this monster. They padded ahead with my peculiar bits of luggage while I clumped after them in dirty boots under the disapproving stares of various ancestors. I had two rooms, equally large. One was the bedroom, the other the bathroom. They over-
J
looked one of several beautiful courtyards trapped within the fabric of the building, crammed with palms and fountains.

My bed was a four poster inside a little room of its own made of gauzy mosquito netting. A bearer slept on the floor outside my bedroom door at night. It would be pointless and unnecessary to pretend that I was enjoying the same luxury that the princes once offered to guests at the height of their power. To have tried to recreate or maintain that today would be absurd and impossible. What I saw there in that short stay, the profusion of marble, bronze and mosaic, the infinite corridors, the echoing halls, the huge audience room with chairs for five hundred people, and the Executioner's sword hanging over them all, was enough. My imagination could supply the rest.

I sat there on my second night, amidst all this magnificence, penning a letter on the Maharajah's stationery and thinking that it was just as well that I had also slept in a prison. It helped me to feel that I deserved it.

By the time I came out of Assam into West Bengal in February 1977, my memories of India alone were beginning to overwhelm me. A Royal Bengal Tiger stalking the long grass at sunset. A religious procession winding down a mountainside. A wild tribal dance. Men in loin cloths hunting with bows and arrows. Tibetan traders walking the trails from Mustang. A wildcat oil rig driving down into the rock on the Burmese border. The sublime music of one of India's greatest musicians playing only five feet away from me in a private celebration. A night lost in a rhododendron forest at eleven thousand feet. The astonishing open-cast coal mine at Margherita. The period opulence of the tea estates. An all-night theatrical production by a touring company of Indian players in a tent. On and on they went, and with them the daily pressure of India and the crowd that gathered round me every time I stopped. Gradually I got used to considering my life as public property.

'Excuse me Sir? Your native place is? London proper, is it? May I intrude? I. J. Krishnan, currently completing BSc at BHU. And your good name Sir? You are married? I see, you are bachelor? Your age is please? Why are you not married? Where is your family? What are your qualifications? How are you able to leave your family for so long? Your journey must be costing a lot of money. Are you in government service? Then how please are you paying for all this?'

When it got to the marriage question I was often tempted to plead impotence or homosexuality, but the joke would certainly have failed. I let the waves wash over me. Pointless to waste effort in trying to beat them back. But gradually they wore me down anyway.

The road from Assam meets the Ganges and divides in two. One fork continues downstream to Calcutta. The other runs upstream towards Benares. The logical route to take was upstream towards the splendid heart of India, but I resisted it. I was tired and felt threatened by all that exposure. There were European friends passing through Calcutta and I craved their company, wishing to escape from India for a while.

So I followed my craving to Calcutta and somewhere along the way Fate seized me and sent me off on the other road towards Benares. Not until the late afternoon did I realize my mistake. Gracelessly at first, I
surrende
re
d
to India and the multitude. As I advanced into Bihar, one of the poorest and most populous states in the Indian union, the multitude thickened and the weaves grew stronger, but Fate was still working its magic too.

How else should I have been led to a hotel in Patna whose owner was a glider pilot and who insisted on taking me up with him? For breathless minutes I found my escape from India by whirling above it in the company of those big brown birds. And why else should I find myself now having my future told to me at a Rajput wedding?

'You are Jupiter,' he said.

Of all the gods in the pantheon, Jupiter is the one I fancy most. A lovely name, Jupiter, like cream and honey in the mouth. And a sense of great distance and closeness at the same time.

He was a rain maker, and I have made more than my share of rain. Then he was famous for his thunder, which is appropriate too for a god on a motorcycle, and (if it's fair to mix him up a bit with Zeus) I like the idea of

appearing in all those disguises. I have been changing my shape quite often as well.

All in all, I would quite like to be Jupiter, if it is not too late . . .

'You are Jupiter,' he said, 'but for seven years you have been having conflict with Mars.' Of course. It was just a misunderstanding. He was talking about the planet.

'This troubling influence will go on for two more years.' His grip on my hand remained firm and convincing, and I did not resist. I wanted it to be important.

'During these two years you will have two accidents. They will not be major accidents, but they will not be minor either.'

Really, I thought, that's stretching my credulity a bit. I hardly need a fortune teller to predict accidents, with ten thousand miles still to ride. But he did say two. Not major? Not minor?

'After this period, when you are no longer influenced by Mars, all will be well. You will have great success and happiness.'

I absorbed the message. Two years of strife and accident, and then prosperity and happiness ever after.

'You owe everything to your mother,' he said. Did I tell Raj I was the only son of a divorced mother? I must have told someone.

'You have a weak hold on the affections of women. She is the only one who will give you whole-hearted support.'

I gazed hard then at this grave, composed man in the brown business suit sitting next to me in the front sea of his car outside a wedding tent, trying to penetrate his meaning. It sounded wrong, absolutely wrong, like the reverse side of a familiar coin. Yet there was something very right hidden in it somewhere. I was impressed by him, I felt he was really trying, and after all it was nothing to him. None of them would ever see me again. He was just a businessman about to leave for his office in Patna.

There were more pleasant remarks about my strength and determination. We exchanged solemn compliments and he drove off.

Ten miles beyond Gaya is Boddhgaya, the place where Buddha preached his first sermon under a tree. A tree stands on the spot now, though not, I think, the same tree. Above and around the tree, a great temple
and
stupa
has been built. Somewhere nearby, every Buddhist nation is also represented by a temple, and refuge for pilgrims. The refuges are austere and cheap to live in. They offer shelter and tranquillity, and in the dry hot spring of Bihar, that is all one needs. The first of these refuges on the road from Gaya is the Burmese Vihar,
and it had been recommended to me. Two monks made me welcome and I took the bike in through the big wrought iron gate. The original building on my right faced a square garden of rather straggly shrubs and vegetables, and along each side, between the garden and the high walls that enclosed the Vihar, ran two rows of small brick cubicles. It was very popular, and the place was full of people from every continent, but a remarkable atmosphere of good-natured calm pervaded all of it.

I had one of the cubicles to myself, which gave me room to put down my things and cook for myself, and a wide plank to sleep on. It was all I needed. In the area round the house was a table under a big shade tree, and I sat there and wrote an article for the approaching elections in India. A Thai monk was offering courses in Yoga and Meditation, and I took those too. There was time for everything, and time to spare. Those were the last perfectly peaceful days I spent on the journey and far the most promising of all.

I arrived in Calcutta slightly weakened by food poisoning, and went to ground in Sudder Street, at the Salvation Army hostel, where so many poor travellers stay. My health was easily restored, but I had to acknowledge that my energy was not replenishing itself anymore. The feeling, like the climate, was reminiscent of Panama, two years earlier and thirty thousand miles back, but I had to recognize that this time the lethargy was more deeply established.

There was no easy remedy, so I tried self-indulgence. In a corner of Sudder Street facing the hostel stood, and no doubt will stand for ever, a two-star bastion of the Raj, the Fairlawn Hotel. By my standards it was far too expensive. Even if I had thought it worth the price to stay there and confirm that the Empire was past its prime, I did not actually have the money.

However, I could afford to sit in the garden and drink a lemon soda. I breached the big wooden gates and sat at an iron table under a spray of blossom, alone in the grounds and soothingly remote from the city's business.

It took the bearer a long time to find me among all the trees and trellises, though I had seen eyes peering in my direction from the reception desk for some while. Was I perhaps unsuitably dressed for the Fairlawn, I wondered. After all, I had shaved, and the pattern of my shirt was still recognizable through the grime. And I might be down on my luck but, dammit, I was still an Englishman.

'Bring me a lemon juice and a bottle of soda,' I said, almost adding 'and make it snappy!'

The bearer returned with my order (what else could he do?) and opened the bottle on the table. I waited for the cheerful sparkle, the gay effervescence that would zestfully challenge Calcutta's soggy noon.

Nothing happened. One bubble struggled wearily up through the liquid and lodged itself in the meniscus, lacking the will to burst.

It was an unimportant matter, and I would have left it, except that it gave me an opportunity for conversation and I was curious. I had already noticed an elaborately coiffed head of hair bobbing about briskly in the reception area. I knew the hotel belonged to an old Indian Army man, and I thought this must be the
memsahib
herself. I thought she might be amused by my story and I sauntered over with the bottle dangling from my fingertips.

She was dressed and made up in a manner that left no doubt about how she saw her usefulness in this world. Here, I told myself, is a woman who likes to maintain standards, and I resolved to help her. I mentioned the paucity of bubbles in my soda water, and she flew into a rage.

I was amazed. My remark had been as light and debonair as I could manage it, as if to say 'What's in a bubble? After all, we're British.'

Her rage was all the more violent for being fearfully controlled.

'There has never been any sickness here from water,' she cried. Never once in living memory, not since the Mutiny, not since John Company first set foot on this sub-continent, not once ever had anybody challenged the water at the Fairlawn. 'And you are not even staying with us!'

Useless to explain that the purity of the water was not in question; that I was merely reporting a minor matter of bubble trouble. She shook and went livid and puce by turns. I began to suspect other roots to her distress. Perhaps she had detected a working class inflection in one of my vowels. She gathered herself up, finally, to administer the blow that would send me reeling off the premises.

'All our water, I'll have you know, comes directly from The Saturday Club.' I was rendered speechless, since I had never heard of it. It was the
coup de grace,
but she could not leave well alone.

'And if that is not good enough,' she went on, 'you can speak to my husband.'

'Ah,' I said. 'That's a good idea. Where is The Colonel?' 'Upstairs,' she said grimly. I got one foot on the first step, but her staff surrounded me.

'No, Sir. Please. No. This way Sir, please come,' and with a fresh bottle of soda they enticed me back to my table.

I tried on another day to drink a beer in the garden, knowing that others had succeeded, but the bearer informed me frigidly that it was a dry day at the bar. I dared not approach the desk again. A dog with eyes like cartwheels I can face, but an irate
memsahib,
never.