| Fastest Man Around the World - Excerpt
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My bike was parked in the hotel lockup.
The engine was still cooling when my head hit the pillow. I
dreamed I was standing by the bike somewhere in an Indian desert.
It was in Maharastra and it reminded me of a time before, when
I had been overwhelmed by the endlessness of the Sahara and
the heat of the Thar that stilled time. Heat has the trick of
making clocks stand still for travellers. During the day the
sharpness of the horizon was diluted by the shimmering air and
the will to voyage was diminished by the coolness of the shadows.
Everywhere was brown. Brown mountains and brown trees, brown
people with sandy-coloured dogs and a brownness in the baked
air.
"I have bicycled around
the world twice. I have motor-biked around the world twice.
Tell me, mind, does not passing the same places twice give me
the validity I search for?"
"Probably not," answered my mind, "because the
reason for doing it again is that you were not aware of the
experience the first time."
"How many times do I have to be a journeyman around this
planet before I can believe that I am solid and exist; before
I know where I am going and why? One day I will be old and have
to stay at home and then it will be too late."
"Just once. If you go round and round a hundred times and
experience only time and distance, then it will be as if you
never
went at all. The journeying will have been wasted. But if you
are fully aware of the journey the cycle of unknowing can be
broken. If you sleep through your experiences then how can you
learn through your suffering not to have to suffer again? Not
to know is not to suffer and not to suffer is not to learn.
This is the basis of all religions. It is a law of life. It
is something you have to understand before you can start any
journey."
But maybe these thoughts were
not from a dream. Perhaps they had come from a conversation
on the terrace of a cafe overlooking some icon of the world
that I had barely given a second glance. I sat up in my bed
and looked wearily around at the nicotine-stained wallpaper
which, on the ceiling, was the colour of sick. I remembered
riding the bike in the night across Orissa to get here, twisting
and turning through the forests and the bandits, and before
that to Nagpur, and before that from Bombay, and all since two
dawns ago.
I lay down again to sleep and lurid pictures flashed into my
mind, a bedlam of the old and insane and beggars and people
with the pox. Then with his round spectacles and grey Oxford
moustache an old man called Mr. Fares strode across the inside
of my head. I remember him. He owned the Golden Hotel in Talaat
Herb Street off Tahrir Square. I was in Cairo. It was 1983.
I was walking through the market in Bab al Luk past the Falafel
restaurant and up his shabby stairs.
"It's all very well to go around the world," he told
me, "but you don't in fact need to go except to realise
that this is so." He was 80 years old and he made me see
the uselessness of my task. For the next 16 years I was to struggle
to make sense out of something that in his terms was quite senseless.
"It is all here, here," he said, remonstrating with
his spindly old man's arms. "It is here in front of you,
before your nose. That is life, eh?" |
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