Overland to India 50 Years ago: Part 4 (an ending)

 We came upon Srinagar in the Himalayas, through a winding mid-November ride from the Punjab to Kashmir stretching up towards the snow, yet another world. When would war come? Would Kashmir be the focal point? Anxiety about travelling onwards and worry about what war would mean to us had dragged our spirits down since leaving Amritsar. There were some on the bus who wanted to get to Delhi as soon as possible and push on to destinations beyond India. 

 

However, Srinagar was on the itinerary and that was where we found ourselves. We left the vehicle with our luggage and peered into the autumn night air and the enveloping scent of woodsmoke. We passed by pale, soft lights, and a distant tide of murmuring voices as we approached the Dal Lake to take up residence in one of the houseboats moored upon the banks. It was a night where time had no meaning, where the distance between humanity, water and the cold breeze disappeared and merged into an ecstatic strange dream. Even now the smell of woodsmoke in the dark of night when I am out in the cold returns me to that place and that time.

 

Please burn my body on a pile of wood and throw my ashes into water. 

 

The lake revealed itself in the morning with autumn trees mirrored in stillness; sellers of fruit, vegetables, and stuff for tourists, slid by like ghosts on the glassy water on their shallow, narrow boats, and their voices echoing beyond the trees up to the vast snow-capped mountains beyond. On the houseboat we were shown the visitors’ book signed by George Harrison just five years before, when he stayed by the Lake to learn from the guru of the sitar, Ravi Shankar. I was also delighted to see, lying enticingly on an uncluttered table, the spectacular album cover of the Incredible String Band’s ‘The 5000 Sprits or the Layers of the Onion’. 

 

We rode on scrawny, tough mules up into the snow lapped mountains. Later we took a slow rowed boat journey along the lake fringed with golden brown leaved trees; all sound absorbed and subsumed into the surroundings. No engines, no drills, no aeroplanes, no cars, nothing but people, birds, the wind, the cold – another time, another life. It is so easy to vaunt the progress of man, and to dismiss as sentimental rubbish and nostalgic musings of a romantic the questioning of modernity – our brave new world. 

It is indeed impossible to recreate the past, for the past is a dead land full of misconstruction. However, to deny the past and its play in the present is to enter a fool’s paradise shorn of complexity and housed in mirrors of distortion. Can you see what is? Are your perceptions real? Are you aware of how your actions of today create the path to tomorrow? How can you be so sure?

 

As the rumbles of war took us from this place so close to the Pakistan border and essential focus point for conflict resulting from that archetypal bureaucratic blunder by the British in partitioning India, we moved to the blackouts of Delhi. Occasionally, a siren would wail as preparations for the experience of attacks by warplanes and bombers was becoming more of a reality. There were anti-aircraft guns surrounded by sandbags and operated by helmeted men in camouflage uniforms placed strategically around the city.

 

 

How is it that I, like so many people in the past and the future, fell in love with India? Was it that naïve, romantic streak trying to escape cruel reality? It couldn’t be for there is more daily evidence of ‘cruel reality’ as you travel round India than in many other places in the world. It is there in front of you; on the streets; in the villages; in the fields; not much is hidden, but when this ‘reality’ is revealed, there can be horrors that shock to the core.

 

Delhi is where we parted company; at the YMCA in the centre of the city where taxi drivers sidled up to us to offer a variety of services one of which was a ride in the car. An early morning city of tennis players on the nearby courts and the sad, silent ragged creatures that stirred from their nocturnal homes on the street. We had been together for almost three months, finding a closeness, a travelling community. But then, once we had stopped, the communal ceased and individual purpose took over. 

 

Accident of birth is all that is needed in this stiff framework of inequality. To be male instead of female; to be white  instead of black, brown, or yellow; to have a home; to have food; to have a good chance of survival. We were the lucky ones, the privilege afforded by where and to whom we were born. We knew that in this there was held a responsibility. 

 

We had arrived in a country so totally different from the one we had left. But, because we had come overland and had experienced gradual culture and environmental change, we had been able to assimilate this transformation and connect with both land and humanity. To travel like this is the very antithesis to air-travel – to be picked up in one country and dumped in another. It takes a while to catch up with yourself. 

 

My only connection with my family was through letters. The company running the trip set up designated Post Restante places, which were post offices that held any post for us to pick up on the way. Generally, we were able to get post about every two weeks. My mother had written weekly to my brothers and me when we were at boarding school. She kept this up so that there was always a letter for me to collect – I wrote home more sporadically. We never communicated by phone.

 

As a parent, I have been incredibly grateful for the ability to communicate with my children as they have travelled to many places, and lived for a lengthy time in other parts of the world. However, when the communication ceases for a time, anxiety can so easily surface. When I made this trip to India it was really a case of there being ‘no news is good news’.

 

Our ancestors walked, went by horseback, camel, oxcart, open to the elements, in discomfort, slow, but in deep connection with their surroundings. Even travelling by bus, we had to stop frequently; we had to interact with the people we met on the way; the roads were often poorly maintained, narrow and winding; mostly we travelled slowly. 

 

Maybe the wheel will turn, and we will have to travel slowly again.

Overland to India 50 Years Ago: Part 3

 The southern coastline of Turkey held beaches, warm seas, and ancient ruins, so the fact that we had stay a little longer and then go to Iran via Syria was no trouble. Entrance to Iran was closed for a time whilst the Shah of Persia celebrated the 2500th year of the Foundation of the Imperial State of Iran with the dignitaries and Heads of State being invited to attend from around the world. The borders were, however, closed to lesser mortals, particularly travellers like us with very little money.

 We drove through Syria via Aleppo and swum in the River Euphrates. The biblical deserts were still peopled by shepherds tending their skinny flocks, and the occasional tented nomadic community could be seen from the road. In Baghdad we camped under date palms just outside the city. When wandering about the city I happened to glance into a steel bucket and saw sheep heads, their eyes staring back in mild accusation at my presence. Tehran led to Isfahan with its magnificent mosques and extraordinary artistry and colour. 

 

We slept beside the bus under the stars in the open land ready to cross the border the next day. I lay feeling the cold of the desert air, so far from anything I had known. We entered Herat, and the magic began shifting again, sliding across the border at dusk the next day into Afghanistan and the low, dark houses looking as if they had grown out of the rocky sandy land. Wood-smoke curled round the roofs and the soft light of kerosene lamps blurred the edges of rooms and entrances to houses. The city was rooted in the past, ghosts of ancient traders paraded their goods by camel, horse, and donkey. Incomprehensible whispers emanated from gatherings of merchants, past and present, soon to be drowned out by the thundering of trucks – but not quite yet. Modernity was slowly creeping on its belly towards this place, and with it would come great shudders of terrible violence.

 

After six weeks on the road, an imperceptible transition in my mind and character was taking place; even as I was having to deposit the contents of my stomach behind some low wall outside a tiny restaurant. The local purchase of a stinking, but lovely Afghan coat and cheap leather boots furnished me with the look, the outward show of a naturalised western traveller ready to travel further East in the turning year.

 

In these lands poets had travelled through mountains and deserts, ruthless warlords had rained down a blood-soaked hell with metal honed to part body from soul, and wild horses were tamed by women, children, and their menfolk. It was these lands that the British Empire, for which this boy was educated, had sought to conquer, and impose their civilisation on this wiry, wild, and striking dark race. It was only a quarter of a century since global war had subsided, however, and the oil-rich nations had now become dominant in a fatal game of who would own that finite liquid gold. Thin, brittle humans were no match for monstrously greedy demand for resources and the fat few that could broker any deal and suck up all the money. 

 

I think maybe it was here in Afghanistan that I reconnected with the child that had been hidden so long beneath the accumulation of knowledge, the words of admonishment, of how to be, and the terrible, terrible fear of doing something wrong. 

 

A man, thin and dark, with a dirty white cloth wrapped around his head and with a long white straggling beard made to throw a punch at me whilst I was walking down a street in Kabul. I flinched, he laughed, I laughed. He shook my hand. 

 

Is it likely that being young in the 1960s there was an inevitable exposure to a tide of questioning? Had my materially privileged upbringing created a kind of soft barrier to the harsh realities of life so that I could indulge in romantic dreaming? Nevertheless, I think there did emerge a glimmer of connecting to something other, something unnamed, before crass consumption took over, smothering so much with superficial aspirations that shone out in the display of possessions.

 

Then on the road again, but we had to wait as one of the young drivers who had driven us so far disappeared in Kabul with the stash of whisky that he brought from England. He left behind him traces of his Scottish accent, images of his bushy beard and the tears of a young female fellow traveller. Another driver was flown out so the journey could continue.

 

Up and over the Khyber Pass we went, round perilously sharp bends, glimpsing the broken lorries down below, skeletal after crashing down the mountainside, all placing ourselves in the hands of providence. The vast rush of adrenalin that comes with a roller-coaster ride was never my cup of tea, but there were views that destroyed all rationality and a confluence of space and time. I was happily sitting in the front of the bus.

 

Onwards to Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Lahore, where vast colonial houses nestled by the narrow streets, and prayers were called in a regular undulating expanse across the city. Shops were openings that drifted back into buildings and acquired a tempting glow after dusk. Streets and roads crowded with all living creatures and humanity jostled with both the past and the future.

 

We crossed the border leaving this young country, barely twenty-five years old since the British drew the line through the vast sub-continent that was India. There were tangible signs of a rumoured war. Under the warm December sky, against the backdrop of the people going about their everyday business, soldiers were on the move by the truckload. Tanks crept along the narrow highway; jeeps mounted with machine guns weaved between them – they meant business. 

We passed through the Punjab over the border to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. On a road that had been awash with blood not so many years before, the machines of violence were driving over the spectres of women, children and men. It has been said that the savagery brought about by Partition was without comparison in the history of Asia in its ferocity and long-term effect. 

 

To view, as travellers, this expression of human existence against the background of unfolding wonder is to be brought up sharply by the extraordinary stupidity we constantly display in our ideas and conclusions. Peaceful coexistence appears to be an anathema to humanity and is consigned to the overflowing bin named ideals.

 

Once over the border into India and travelling again, we silently watched with further feelings of foreboding what was unfolding on the roads bordered by lush fields of wheat, more tanks, more lorries carrying more men, more guns, more death. 

 

Then on to Amritsar where the Golden Temple shone with the devotion of over two hundred years. We gazed at the huge carp swimming gracefully in the waters of the enormous, deep tanks that separated the walkways, their movements augmented by the intonation of the readings from the sacred books. Women in their bright saris, men with magnificent beards and colourful turbans, all walked with humility, the light of the sacred shining in their faces, tall, straight backed with fiercely independent gaze. 

 

When the possibility of understanding the narrowness of a background that comes with being brought up in any limited social environment, a perception may come as a sliver of light in the darkness or a steady glow of dawning colour. Words do not suffice, neither are they necessary; what is learnt is not consigned to memory but remains alive in the consciousness of the individual.

 

We were a group of travellers passing through lands together with different perceptions of shared experiences. 

 

Now, half a century later, I do not see them individually, but sense them as extensions of that person I was then – similarly I am part of them. Their names I cannot remember, some faces drift into view in hazy relief. The couples, the young women, and men – the backdrop to a dream. The spectre of my being is floating entwined with theirs as memories locked into the past. Looking back there is magic in remembering and no regret in forgetting. 

 

Overland to India 50 Years ago: Part 2

 Worried about spending too much money, I barely ate for the first few days, aware of the time and space that lay before me. With a significant lack of exposure to the practical details of life, this excursion into the unknown was challenging to this nineteen-year-old, not long out of the cocoon of boarding school, well versed in words, but little else. Various stages of the journey opened diverse doors, revelations of possibilities. There were thirty individuals aged from nineteen, that was me, to an American couple in their sixties. This couple pulled out of the trip in the early stages, unsure of the level of comfort and the actuality of arriving safely at the destination.

 

The first stop was the Munich Beer Festival, not the beginning of a series of spiritual experiences which would deepen my understanding and enable me to go beyond the material world one might expect. Groups of people, mostly, but not exclusively young, from various parts of the world, fuelled with the flow of amber frothing liquid, created a sense of camaraderie that I had not experienced before. It was not long before I began shedding the skin of uneasy and debilitating self-consciousness, quietly becoming friends with everybody. 

 

‘All Pommies are bastards! All Pommies are bastards!’

 

The mellifluous tones of young long-haired drunken Australian men filled the bus returning us to the campsite on the edge of the city.

 

‘Are you a Pom?’

 

 Where this was leading was painfully obvious. What might happen afterwards was a matter of hoping for the best.

 

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re a bastard!’ 

 

Howls of uncontrolled laughter followed.

 

‘Are you a bastard?’ 

 

The Australian’s bearded face loomed towards me.

 

‘Actually, I am not.’ 

 

Oh God, I sounded like someone from the 1950s announcing on the BBC .

 

‘Yes, you are, you’re a Pommy bastard. Because all Pommies are bastards!’ 

 

The two of them proceeded to embrace me and pat me heavily on the back.

 

‘And you are a real Pommy bastard! You’re our mate… mate!’

 

More laughter, more chat. More alcohol fuelled friendship.

 

But alcohol assists in building a window of deception and leaves both physical and mental wounds that over time do not always heal effectively, lubricating false friendships and destroying lives.

 

On our return to the campsite it became clear that one of the bus drivers had disappeared. So, on this mild September night several of us wandered back into the city to look for him – we had no idea where we were going, or how to get back to the campsite. However, it was one of those occasions when all the right things happened – he was found, we returned, and all woke up feeling unsure of ourselves in bright sunlight the following morning

 

Soon we passed through Yugoslavia, a country that now only exists in echoes a shadows of brief unity; and we were becoming conscious of fewer vehicles, more animal traffic and different modes of dress. I realised that I was changing with the journey, a mind being opened by what I saw, although not fully realising the significance of what this meant in terms of the lives of the people we were seeing.

 

We swam off the glorious coast of Greece, camping on the beaches. We walked round the ancient wonders of Athens and then moving on to Turkey. What an assault on my seriously under-developed senses.

 

Istanbul heralded the advent of the East, although already my outlook had moved in synchronisation with the bus towards a slower, more rural aspect of life; peasant farming was still prevalent in most of Europe. In Istanbul I stood outside shops selling the most wonderful cakes and puddings, fully aware my money would not allow such luxuries. 

 

I listened to conversations of the many travellers who gathered in the cafes and outside the shops; tales of drug use, prisons, illness and danger. All the while I breathed the heady air of unwashed bodies, stale cigarette smoke and marijuana, caught in the romance of abandoned youth, dowdy beards, long straggly hair, and the warmth of smiling young women. I was entering another world. Magic was taking place, the magic of infinite possibilities, a magic that was never really to leave me.

A young couple from Wales, who must have been in their early twenties, regaled us with their own tales of sex, drugs, jails, illness encountered through hitchhiking around Europe. She was short with long unkempt, brown hair and a lively, friendly face. He stood taller and they had their arms around each other as they talked; his smiling face framed by darker hair of about the same length as hers, stained teeth shone through strands of wispy beard. Both were clad in dirty denim dungarees with what appeared to be very little underneath. They smiled as they talked of the friends they had met, who had been arrested by the Turkish police, who had been searched for drugs and then beaten up. 

 

They told stories of young Americans they had heard of who had been found with drugs on them and had been thrown into prison and left to rot with no food, sharing cells with murderers and dangerous criminals, only a bucket for a toilet. For some reason Americans were not well-liked in Turkey at that time. What we thought were the exaggerations of these natural story tellers at the time was clearly true.

 

 

 I was used to being with people but was discovering that the tendency to keep my distance from others was still very strong in me. Shyness? Self-protection? To share such a journey in the close proximity of others was both a joy and a challenge. Most of my fellow travellers were under the age of forty. There were young couples from the UK and Australia. Individuals travelling to the Far East and beyond. There were nurses, teachers, students and those who were taking time out from all types of work. We shared laughter, worries, silence and the marvels of the lands we were passing through.

 

An Australian couple from Wollongong took me under their wing. She was small with long dark hair hanging below her waist. He was taller and blond. They both exuded a vitality and openness that entranced me. With them, Steve, a young man from the UK just a few years older than me, and another young couple from the UK became the people I was most friendly with. We were all from different backgrounds, heading towards diverse destinations; and thoroughly enjoying the ride.

 

There were also several girls, one or two travelling alone and others with friends. Despite spending a year in London, I was still very uncertain in the company of young ladies. Nine years in boys only boarding schools and a short lifetime at home with five brothers had firmly placed me in a very male world. I liked the girls I was travelling with, but such close proximity to them made me nervous. 

So much to learn.

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

Overland to India 50 years ago: Part 1

 I am sitting on a bench on the edge of Clapham Common on a cloudy September day in 1971waiting for a bus to India.

 

It was a time when many young people took the overland trail from West to East - to find themselves. The perceived spirituality of India had been being exported wholesale to the West since the early 1960’s.  Some years before I had seen footage on the BBC News of the Beatles with their exotically robed, long-haired, bearded, guru, filmed at the colourful ashram on the edge of the milky blue holy Ganges against the backdrop of the mystic Himalayan mountains. A story of fairy-tale qualities. 

 

I harbour no doubts of being heavily influenced. Influenced by the assimilation of the sounds of the music of the East that had emerged in the 1960s, and words that had been culled from ancient Hindu texts. The jangling sitar of the Incredible String Band heralding that ‘all the world is just a play …’ in their song, “Maya’ echoes and intertwines with the classical ragas of Ravi Shankar, the master of the sitar. Influenced by the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who, though constantly reiterating that he was not a guru, seemed to hold the door open to another world – a world that had its origins in India. I had come across his work when attending a meeting at the London Buddhist Centre earlier that year. Through friends I had also read several poems written by Rabindranath Tagore, half-remembered for their simplicity of observation, anchored in nature, and moving effortlessly from the particular to the universal. Through both their work I had been touched by the expression of harmony with nature through which lense the world of humanity could be seen and understood. 

 

‘Why are you dropping out of this degree course? Have you thought about leaving it open? Why not come back next year.’

 

The college lecturer was interested and encouraging – he did not ask why I was going to India.

The length of my hair and beard was not conducive to good family relations. 

'India? Why India? You look like a hippie and now you are going to become one. You’ll never come back.'

However, that Christmas I received from my parents a very small book entitled ‘The Little Book of Indian Wisdom’. This contained short quotations from the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita. 

 

‘So, are you looking for enlightenment? Are you going to find yourself?’

 

A friend asked with not a little hint of irony.

 

I had read the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and had been drawn to a small volume – ‘Zen Flesh, Zen Bones’ a collection of Zen stories published by Paul Reps in 1957. I had also read the Tao Te Ching. This journey was to be, without doubt, a spiritual quest, but I was not seeking enlightenment. Maybe I was looking to regain a sense of spirit, a feeling that seemed to have existed most strongly in me before I was sent to school.

 

Indeed, the journey, though born through a haze of romanticism, was fuelled by a perceived need to continue to educate myself, to find out how others live, to see great mountains, wide rivers, all kinds of birds and animals – to explore. 

 

What was surprising to me, sitting there on the edge of Clapham Common, was that I did not feel afraid; for fear had continued to be my constant, hidden companion, emerging from the depths of the past, threatening to paralyse all activity. As it was, I would not be alone, for there were two buses each expecting to carry thirty passengers of various ages. For this was not the brave pioneering step of a free-spirited individual; it was a packaged tour run by a professional company, one of the less expensive ones operating at the time - £84 London to Delhi and £84 back.

 

I was aware and immensely respectful of the courage of those young people who took to the road with their determination to be free, their sense of adventure, and their relaxed approach to all that the previous generation held as taboo. They would hitchhike, take an old van, or pile into trucks and travel in basic discomfort. But I did not feel that this was part of me; caution, hesitancy and reticence existed where there could so easily have been that carefree attitude I so admired.

 

I enter the bus with wide- eyed excitement. This is the step into the unknown I’ve been craving. At last, I can shake off the demands of others as to what I should be and who I should be. I know I’m not alone, but I sense my exploration is beginning from a sense of isolation or separation that had formed an integral part of my schooling. I am looking into the possibility of something that might reveal the connection with the universal that creates a depth of perception that goes beyond the daily routine. It is this quest that takes me to India.

 

 

From London to Delhi Overland: Fifty Years Ago

 Introduction.

 

In early September 1971 aged nineteen, two years after leaving boarding school, I took a bus for a ten week journey overland to India. A great-aunt had left me and my brothers £500 each, and I was excited to have this extraordinary opportunity to learn about the world first hand.

 

We are approaching the ending of our second year dominated by the COVID virus which is severely restricting travel. The people of Afghanistan are being subjected to further devastation and pain. Political, economic, and social disturbance are on the increase throughout the globe. Floods and fires signal climate breakdown. Fear causes people to retreat into isolation and aggression towards those who are different, in the hope that clinging on to the prejudices of the past will lead to a more secure future. Information flies instantly around the world with no reference to the true or the false.

 

Consequently, I have decided to create a series of blogs that will follow my journey from London to Delhi as a reflective experience to understand this personal journey as a human being. I write to understand the world around me, to explore what life is, and to come to terms with ageing. I feel that I am writing within the context of the totality of human consciousness, not as a single, separate being.

 

My intention is to produce a series of four blogs outlining the journey that will be relatively brief and accessible. The first one will appear this weekend.

 

Who will read them? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter.