Читать книгу Miles from Nowhere - Barbara Savage - Страница 9

NEW DELHI (AP)—An American woman cyclist was eaten alive yesterday some 200 miles southeast of this Indian capital city by a giant, wild ape.

News of my death would surely make the headlines in all the big newspapers back home in the U. S. of A. Larry, I hoped, would tell the story right, giving it a sensational and tragic ring, conjuring up a horrifying death race between an innocent woman bicycler and an ape with jaws large enough to inhale an entire human being. If he told it right, there I’d be, pedaling through the starving masses of a primitive country filled with cobras, tigers, and bands of cutthroat thieves, when suddenly a wild, semi-erect primate lunges from its treetop sanctuary and chases me down, killing me with the brutal force of its jaws and limbs.

As I watched the ape swing toward me, I prayed that Larry would tell a good story; that he would be kind enough not to tell the truth about the way I was to die.

IN LATE NOVEMBER OF 1979, there were three of us bicycling through India together. Larry and I had met Geoff Thorpe, a blond-haired, blue-eyed New Zealander in his early twenties, at the campground in New Delhi a few days after we arrived in India. Geoff too was headed toward Nepal, and we agreed to travel as a threesome. We were all a bit nervous about bicycling through such a strange and exotic country.

The day we set out from New Delhi I suggested that we take back roads so that we could visit the small Indian villages and farms and avoid the heavy truck traffic on the highways. It took us five days to meander our way to the town of Mainpuri, 183 miles southeast of New Delhi, and everywhere during that time crowds gathered to stare at us. In Mainpuri we drew more crowds than anywhere else, probably because we were farther away from the main highways.

When we rolled into town, it became immediately evident that Mainpuri was not like the other Indian towns we had stayed in. Its streets were so narrow that only one car could pass through at a time; yet there were no cars—only people, bicycles, rickshaws, motor scooters, and a few sacred cows milling about. Tiny wooden kiosks large enough to seat one or two adults lined the alleys. The kiosks were shops that sold everything from food to textiles to jewelry. No one in the shops spoke English, and the people in the town stared at us more in disbelief than curiosity. Eventually, we scouted out the town doctor, who understood our language, and led us to the only boardinghouse in Mainpuri. I waited with Geoff in the dusty, manure-strewn street while Larry went upstairs with the doctor to get a room.

By then, after two weeks in this overflowing country of dark-skinned people with their contrasting ivory teeth and penetrating eyes that continually searched our faces for answers to their silent questions (Who were we? Why were we here? Where were we going? Where had we come from?), Geoff and I expected the crowds. But we did not expect what was to happen next.

Word of our arrival spread instantaneously and mobs of Indians rushed toward us through the narrow alleyways, oblivious of any obstacles in their paths. Given our foreign appearance and our space-age fifteen-speed bicycles and equipment, we probably drew as much attention as would a flying saucer. Geoff and I, crushed and jostled by the force of the bodies around us, held onto our bikes and leaned our backs together in an effort to keep ourselves and bikes upright. The Indians on the outside of the crowd clawed and shoved their way forward in an effort to attain a ringside position, but those nearest us ran a tough defense, frantically protecting their prized positions. Some men attempted to climb up the side of the nearby kiosks for an aerial view, but the shopkeepers poked them with the long bamboo poles normally used for swatting at any sacred cows that tried to steal food from the shops.

Five minutes after the mob had begun to swell, a scream, pleading and helpless, slashed through the frenzy of the crowd like the cry of a drowning child over the pounding surf. Geoff and I glanced about nervously; because of the force of the bodies pressing against us from all sides, we were unable to move any part of our bodies except our heads. I swung my head around and spotted a rickshaw taxi that had been overturned and trampled by the walls of humanity pouring in from the side streets. The two riders, a man and a woman, were caught underneath, but the mob swarmed over the toppled carriage in total disregard of its buried and shrieking occupants. The man who had been pulling the rickshaw behind his bicycle had fallen free. He too ignored the trapped couple and abandoned his work to join in the madness.

While I surveyed the collage of staring faces jiggling around me and listened to the explosions of shouts and squeals echo through the passageways, I heard Geoff say something behind me.

“Ah, B-Barb,” he stammered. “I’ve got to go.”

Both of us were near suffocation and about ready to bolt over the top of our spectators, but Geoff was referring to something else.

“Barb, I can’t hold it any longer,” he whispered.

After picking up dysentery in Iran or Pakistan, Geoff was no longer very polished at controlling himself, and the picture that flashed in my mind of him losing control of his bowels right there in the midst of a few hundred unsuspecting Indian onlookers started me laughing hysterically.

The more I laughed the quieter the crowd became, and the men squeezed in even closer to get a better look at the strange phenomenon before them—a woman laughing. To set eyes on a foreign woman on a bicycle was probably in itself a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the men of Mainpuri, but to hear such a woman laugh seemed to fascinate them even more. It was as if the Indians hadn’t really expected me to be human, to be capable of speech or laughter.

“OK, you two, we’ve got a room!” Larry hollered from one of the windows on the second floor of the boardinghouse. His words brought a quick halt to my giggling and Geoff ’s worries, and the two of us began fighting our way through the sea of human forms between us and the boardinghouse. We pushed aside scores of men dressed in long white tunics and baggy cotton pants who had taken root to the ground. It took a hard shove to break their trances.

Once I’d gotten myself and my bike into the boardinghouse and upstairs, I closed the shutters on the windows in our room to block out the roar of the crowds below. The floors, walls, and the five cots in our room were dirty—filthy by American standards. A rat scurried about the floor, periodically disappearing then reappearing through the gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. After one of its exits I stuffed the gap full of dirty socks. There was a functioning ceiling fan in the room, and we turned it on full force and collapsed on the cots. We wanted to take advantage of the fan, because within a few hours all electricity in the town would be transferred for the night to the countryside, to run the irrigation pumps on the farms. India was experiencing a severe drought this year.

After a few moments I asked Larry where the toilets were. He frowned, rolled his eyes, then pointed upstairs. Two floors up, on the roof, I found the only toilet in the boardinghouse—a bucket. At first I could not bring my feet to approach it, but after arguing with myself for a while I situated my body atop the open-air throne and stared over the surrounding rooftops. The bucket was half full and reeked.

When I first spied the animal, I wanted to believe that it was either stuffed or on a leash. I wanted to refuse to accept what I was seeing while I squatted over the pail, but my mind would not allow that. I was forced to acknowledge the terrible fact that only a few rooftops away from me and my bucket was a live, unfettered, four-foot-tall ape, which at that very moment was swinging over the alleys and leaping along cement roofs straight for me.

So this is how I’m to die, I thought to myself. Ever since the day Larry and I first came up with the idea of bicycling around the world, deep down inside I’d always known I wouldn’t make it. The ape was so close now that I was sure it would grab me before I had time to get off the roof. All I could do was to hope that neither Larry nor Geoff would ever tell the truth of what was about to happen: that I was attacked and killed by an ape while I was relieving myself in a bucket on a rooftop in India.

I opened my mouth to scream but heard myself shout, “Downstairs! Get back downstairs!” My rational thought processes had finally kicked in, and by reflex reaction I was on my feet and outdistancing the ape, no doubt setting India’s all-time record for the fifty-yard dash on the flat and down steps. I sprang into our room and slammed the door behind me.

“You know,” I muttered to Larry and Geoff after I’d calmed my heartbeat, “this is turning out to be one hell of a first-time bicycle trip!”

NOW HAD ALL THIS HAPPENED to me at the very beginning of our trip, I am positive I would have called it quits and headed for home that very evening. But by then, after eighteen months on the road, Larry and I had come to accept, and at times to thrive on, the bizarre and demanding situations of our journey. While I sat on my cot that evening in Mainpuri I thought about how, although the going was often mentally and physically draining, the longer Larry and I bicycled the more we craved challenges to our newfound stamina, strength, and self-reliance. As exhausted and shaken as I felt that evening in India, I was still very glad we had set out on our journey.