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

gifts.
    ‘Hello, sir. Look, special trinket,’ one of them said, showing me a small gold carving. ‘Key ring,’ he said. A closer look revealed a man thrusting into a woman from behind.
    ‘Cute,’ I said. ‘But will it unlock my bike?’
    I swung my leg over the bike and got as far as the small farming town of Phulumbria, where trucks laid siege to a large paddock of cut sugar cane, their trays overflowing like stuffed scarecrows. I found the only hotel in town, which was run by a man with a cyst the size of a golf ball under his chin. Later, in the restaurant, he served me spicy dahl in the dim flickering light of a solitary kerosene lamp.
    ‘Yes …’ He leered, his cyst waggling back and forth like a hypnotic metronome, his eyes never leaving me while I ate. ‘ Yeees .’
    ***
    The ride out of Phulumbria was flat at first, but then as I neared the Ajanta Caves it became quite hilly and I was forced to slog up a long, arduous slope, sweating and groaning in India’s springtime heat, which was already uncomfortable by nine a.m. I could only wonder what it would be like when summer finally arrived in April, just over two months from now.
    More emptiness greeted me when I reached the top. I coursed down the hill, the rush of warm air cooling me, to the entrance of the Ajanta Caves. Built in the same period as the caves of Nasik, the Ajanta Caves were said to be the most detailed Buddhist caves in the world.
    At the cave’s entrance, Indian tourists flocked around souvenir shops, drink sellers and samosa stalls. I decided to leave my bike somewhere and pay someone to look after it, but no one wanted a bar of it, not even the bag handler with a big stick and attitude to match. A sign read ‘UNLOCKED BAGS WILL NOT BE CHECK IN’, and, as my panniers were unlockable, he wouldn’t take them.
    ‘Where am I supposed to put them, then?’
    His explanation was a hefty wave of his stick, so I was left with one option: stay the night at the Ajanta Hotel.
    I took a single room and slept for two hours, avoiding the afternoon heat. Upon venturing out, I came across a large man. He was deeply lined, grey-moustached, with a yellow turban around his head and a large stomach protruding from his camel safari suit. When I asked to take his photograph his grey moustache shot out either side like antennae.
    ‘Forty rupees!’ he demanded.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘People from all over the world – Holland, Denmark, Germany – come to see me and they pay,’ he said, hand to the side, in a half wave.
    I politely declined and instead took photos of grey haired and black-faced langur monkeys, hanging lazily from the trees above. Named after the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman, they are sacred in India and thus left alone. This fact, however, was lost on a group of rowdy children who took pleasure at throwing stones at them. The monkeys barked to life and took off, leaping on to the rocks, their grey tails propelling them.
    Though the afternoon sun had peaked, the rock face of the caves radiated an intense heat, and I took cover in the coolness of a deep cave. This was just one of the 28 caves that had been carved out by hand as a permanent place of worship for the monks, supposedly to protect them from the heavy monsoons.
    This particular cave housed various murals. Flaking away from centuries of neglect and recent attempts to restore it, one mural showed sailors being seduced by Sirens who later devoured them; on another mural, limbs and heads were being cooked in pots. This wasn’t exactly the sought of thing I expected to see in a Buddhist monastery, and I half-wondered whether these horrid images were perhaps intended to scare off unwelcome guests (notably school children, who were now testing the reverberations of the cave with high-pitched squeals). Apparently these murals told the story of Buddha’s past lives to illustrate certain virtues (I would have thought that eating each other was an obvious no-no, but perhaps some wayward monk had