Journey to Elysee

By TRK

Introduction

I was weaned on the stories from the travels of Marco Polo’s : a travelogue by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo, describing the travels of the latter through central Asia, Persia, China, in the 13th century. This classic describes his journey along the silk road and remained for me the ultimate, a paradigm, the journey of my dreams .

My other inspiration came from reading about Hsüan Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim who left China for India in the year 627 A.C., stealthily, as it was then against the law to travel abroad. He survived the rigors of crossing vast deserts and mountains and, narrowly escaping death, he passed through the central Asiatic regions of Turfan, Karashahr, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bactria. He kept a journal of his unique experiences and observations during this 19-year journey, which later became known as the Hsi-yü Chi. Then there were more contemporary travel writers, Victorian adventurers who went as far afield as South America and Africa, crossing the magical Saharan, Nubian and mid Eastern deserts. I was young and there was much to do and much to see and I wanted to live dangerously.

And so, I left Delhi on foot with a friend, bound for Paris.

It seems that travelogues as a genre are a favorite and much esteemed form of literature with illustrious past and contemporary practitioners. One is under the pressure of a historical and literary imperative to render a fine account of one’s own journey. This is a difficult task since I kept no journals and rely entirely on what I remember after some 40 years.

If there was one thing that we discovered during our 40 days on the road, it was that total strangers could be unbelievably kind and hospitable, whereas people you considered to be your friends and well wishers could turn hard hearted, unkind and inhospitable.

 

I. The Journey Begins

As a junior reporter on my first job in the sumptuous wilderness of New Delhi I was sent to interview a young man called Irshad Panjatan by my Chief Reporter Om Narayan, a smart if laid back Uttar Pradesh character. For those of you who do not know, Irshad Panjatan was a uniquely gifted mime artiste in the mould of Marcel Marceaux. He had hitchhiked all the way from New Delhi to London via Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy and France and Germany. Irshad earned money by performing his unique art of mime in local schools and colleges. He had an easy time traversing half the globe both ways, getting written about and interviewed by local newspapers along the way and had a bulging Press cuttings folder to prove it. His audience realised that mime broke through the boundaries of language and indeed needed no language to communicate. He seemed to be in good health, none the worse for the months he had spent on the road with a rucksack on his back. He even offered to write to his brother in Anakara (in Turkey) – an economist seconded by the UN to the Turkish Government, offering us an interim shelter and care.

Here was my dream ticket to Paris and London! I had no special skills that would earn me my keep. I was 21, reckless in spirit and burned with ambition to be a great writer supping with the likes of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Andre Gide Andre Malraux and James Baldwin on the left bank of the Seine. Who knows, I might even end up marrying Francoise Sagan who shot to international fame with her slim 100 page novels: Bonjour Tristessse (Good Morning Sadness) and Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile). Just repeating the names of these novels sent shivers up my spine. I used to boast that I knew every street of Paris like a lit up map of this great metropolis in my head. No one could stop me now. I had to lay my plans so carefully that even my parents would not hear of my departure until I was safely ensconced in a garret in the Vth Arrondissement, overlooking Notre Dame.



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For a while it seemed fate had its own interventionist strategies. I was struck down with Jaundice which turned my eyes bright canary yellow, and sent my body temperature in to high Fahrenheit numbers. I was in bed for a month, eating saltless, spiceless bland bowls of gruel. I brain fevered at night with scenes of my planned Odyssey. As soon as I could stand, I was back planning my solo departure for Europe. A kind friend, cartoonist O.V.Vijayan insisted I move in with him in to his Defence Colony bungalow under his watchful eye and rest and recuperate. Another well connected friend Najmul Hasan, an elegant cultured Aligarh scholar turned journalist offered to help me get my visas since he knew the Consuls in respective embassies and it would be a doddle if he were to take me along.

Years after my hitch hiking adventure I let everyone believe that I carried my clothes and accessories in a glamorous rucksack. In fact, I bought myself the largest suitcase I could find in one of the pavement shops in Connaught Circus, cast in a black plasticised cardboard-like material to help me take a cargo of all my favourite books (The Serpent & the Rope by Raja Rao; Lawrence Durrel trilogy; Collected short stories of Nabokov; Faulkner, William Styron, Norman Mailer oeuvres; Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, the list goes on). I also planned on taking a thousand pages of my own yet unpublished writings and my correspondence with several well known writers and friends. I had little by way of tinned food, attractive items like Gillette blades which would have been eminently exchangeable for cash on the way.)

Fate intervened again in the shape of Subhash Chopra, then a reporter for Indian Express, later an eminent journalist. I had just attended a Press Conference for some new venture and was waiting for my bus in the dark to take me back to the Fleet street of New Delhi and found Subhash waiting for the same bus as our respective newspapers were in adjacent buildings. When I mentioned to Subhash that I was packed and ready to leave for Europe by road with just three UK pounds’ worth of Forex cash, a trunk full of books and a crazy dream in my head, Subhash was virtually trembling. He made a request that I delay my departure by a couple of weeks so that he could get his parents’ permission and blessings to accompany me and cancel his pre-planned easy route by boat to Genoa or Marseilles and a train journey to London. Prudently he even had a UK work permit and visa. I was not averse to having a companion and did not realise then that without Subhash, I would not have survived the journey, as my skinny arms were too frail to carry a massive case all the way to Europe with no money and all the hazards.

I still remember the crisp spring day at New Delhi train station when some 50 friends and well wisher acquaintances turned up to send us off on the first leg of our journey. I still feel tears pricking my eyes as I remember the faces: Atul Cowshish a Statesman reporter, who shared the room with me when I was bed ridden with jaundice, Anil Saari, the poet and cine theorist, O.V.Vijayan, Krishnan Dubey, Hindi journalist, Cecil Victor, fellow reporter and a multitude of Subhash’s friends. I believe there was even a note from Nirad Chaudhuri wishing me well (I had got to know him), but I never saw it. Some one had kindly paid for two train tickets from Delhi to Wagah border with Pakistan, from where we assumed we would commence relying on the good will of passing lorries and cars to take us deeper and deeper in to our journey and nearer to our destination. We were just not prepared for what was in store for us at the India–Pakistan border, at Wagah.


Part II: Facing No man's Land-End of the Journey?




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