Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle by Russell McGilton Read Free Book Online

crunching the chain, curious hands having reset the gears. It wasn’t long before their withered frames shimmered and then vanished in the bleaching heat behind me.
    ***
    I arrived at Aurangabad the next day, the largest city I’d seen since leaving Mumbai, and the following morning I went for a ride up to the Bibi-Ka-Maqbara mausoleum, a copy of the famous Taj Mahal. Completed in 1678 it was originally intended to rival the Taj but lack of resources rendered it a pale comparison.
    It had recently been made a World Heritage site and because of this the Indian Tourist Commission now charged tourists entry fees from $US5 or even $US10 to all World Heritage sites, a fact not lost on the ticket seller.
    ‘Indian people five rupees (US 10c), foreigners $5 US dollars,’ he said, enjoying the disparity way too much.
    ‘But I’m Indian,’ I joked. ‘I know I look white but really, my father was a Punjabi. You may have heard of him: “Mr Singh”.’
    ‘You are a white man. Foreigner ,’ he said contemptuously.
    ‘I–I’ve been out of the country for a while.’
    ‘It is $5 US dollars !’ he spat.
    It was a small amount of money but now I didn’t want to give my money to this man.
    ‘I’ll show you, sunshine.’ I cycled to the rear of the mausoleum and thought I’d climb the wall! But as I leaned the bike on a barbed wire fence I heard a hissing sound.
    ‘Cobra?’
    I looked down. Sticking out from the front tyre was a huge thorn. I’d parked the bike right on to a thorn bush. I didn’t have my pump nor my puncture repair kit with me so I jumped on the bike, tore down the hill desperately in search of a bike shop. I found the next best thing: an old, grey stubbled man sitting on a stool in the doorway of another shop surrounded by twisted loops of bicycle tubes. He smiled a toothless grin and adjusted his topi (Muslim cap). He was a puncture repair wallah .
    For five rupees (10c US) the old man took out the tube like a hardened snake handler, buffed it with sandpaper, smeared a huge wad of glue on the hole and then with an equally sized patch, squeezed it together, then whacked the pair with a mallet over the handle of a screwdriver and with such ferocity that I thought he’d cause another puncture.
    As I was to discover, there were thousands of these puncture repair wallahs dotting the roads throughout India. They were ever so helpful and I used them so often that after a while I started to refer to them as the I.R.A., not in that Gerry Adams kind of way (well, they both blew things up), but rather as ‘Indian Roadside Assist’.
    All repaired and pumped up I rode back to the rear of the Bibi-Ka Maqbara and thought I’d get a photo before climbing the wall again. Surrounded by goats and boys squatting their lunch out, I lined up the perfect shot when I clicked the frame over and the film started rewinding! So, I headed down the hill again, got another roll of film, set the bike up for a National Geographic pose when I went over another bloody thorn!
    Defeated and deflated, I wheeled the bike around to the main entrance.
    ‘Ah, you are back?’ said the ticket seller, pleased with himself.
    ‘Yeah, yeah.’ I handed over the money and then under my breath, ‘bloody karma .’

4
AURANGABAD – KHANDWA
Mid-January
    ‘After many years of torture, he finally asked for the curd. He took it and his head exploded.’
    ‘Exploded?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Was the curd … off?’
    ‘It was poisonous! Come.’
    Mesmerised by the story and also the tufts of black hair sprouting from my guide’s ears, I followed as he walked further into the fortress of Daulatabad, a short ride from Aurangabad.
    The lethal-yoghurt victim I had been hearing about was Abdul Hasan Tana Shah, the last Galconda ruler, who was imprisoned for 13 years in the late 17th century by the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb. Abdul Hasan Tana Shah’s headless corpse was dragged behind an elephant to Rauza before being entombed.
    Built in the 12th century by