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.