In the meantime we kicked around a few suggestions as to what we’d do if Mungo had to go home. We decided that if it was only bruising and he could get away with a few days’ rest, we’d wait for him. If it was a torn cartilage we’d fly him home either to rest or have some kind of treatment. His brother-in-law had said a tear could be sorted very quickly with keyhole surgery and Mungo was convinced he could be up and around in as little as a few days. Personally I wasn’t sure about that, but then I’m not a surgeon.
Russ and I talked about how we were going to get to Varanasi. We’d been on the phone to the office already and Robin, another member of the team, was flying out to meet us. There was a potential problem getting him a visa so quickly but Lucy was on to the embassy trying to pull out all the stops.
I wanted to spend a decent amount of time at Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges, where people bathe in the water to cleanse themselves of their past, present and future wrongdoings. Considered one of the most spiritual places on earth, it’s a sacred city of Hinduism, and believers say it’s where the physical world meets the spiritual.
Meanwhile we were doing our own bit of praying for Mungo. He was looking more and more disconsolate.
Russ suggested a bath chair: ‘We could push you to Nepal,’ he said. ‘Or chuck you in a rickshaw.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Mungo said.
An hour later we had the magic envelope and got a taxi back to Dr Kapoor’s office.
‘
Should I stay or should I go
?’ I was singing the old Clash song as we climbed the steps to the clinic, where the guard with the shotgun looked on impassively. ‘
Should I stay or should I go now?
’ I was waving the envelope. ‘
Should I stay or should I go
?’
Mungo wasn’t impressed.
‘Two words,’ Russ stated. ‘Bruise or tear. Bruise he stays, tear he goes.’
For all the jokes the uncertainty was getting to us. Back in the office Dr Kapoor sat down, the only sound the hum of the air-conditioning. He took a moment, Russ seated opposite him, me at the door and Mungo perched on the examining table looking worried.
Dr Kapoor perused the document: ‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘There does seem to be a minor tear.’
‘Tear?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
Mungo was almost in tears.
‘You can’t do anything about that here?’ Russ asked the doctor. ‘You can’t fix that?’
He shook his head. ‘Three weeks’ rest would do it. Anything else - surgery, for example - would be up to the doctors back in Britain.’ He looked sympathetically at Mungo. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to tell you that, you’re on such a lovely mission. But I’d rather see you walking properly in Sydney.’
‘A partial tear,’ I repeated.
He nodded.
It was bad news, the worst. Russ was looking at Mungo. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The best thing to do is get Mungo home rather than jolly you along, mate.’
‘We can meet up with you again in Hanoi,’ I said. ‘You can’t walk, Mungo, and in Nepal that’s pretty much all we’ll be doing.’ I was doing my best to let him down gently. ‘We have to fly into China now anyway so you won’t miss as much and . . .’
‘What do you think?’ Russ asked him.
Mungo was silent, the emotion etched in his face. ‘There are two things,’ he stuttered. ‘I want it to heal properly otherwise it’ll be an ongoing problem. The other issue is . . .’ Suddenly he broke down, chin on his chest. ‘I can bury my grandfather.’
It was all too much: he’d been keeping a lid on his emotions about his grandfather and now this.
Russ was on his feet. ‘Oh, Mungo, man.’ He threw an arm round Mungo’s neck and Mungo held on to him. ‘In that case you have to go back. When is the funeral?’
Mungo grabbed a breath. ‘A week on Friday.’
‘Then you can come back,’ I said. ‘Go to the funeral and get better. Then you can come out again.’
Tears were rolling down Mungo’s face. ‘I wanted to,’ he said, ‘since I found out, of course I did, but . . .’
‘Do that,’ Russ told him. ‘That’s the right thing to do anyway.’
‘It makes sense,’ I said. ‘Go back, get better and then you can fly out and join up with us again later. Fate has brought us to this point, Mungo. I’m a great believer in that. Everything happens for a reason.’
‘He’s right,’ Russ added. ‘This injury means you can go to the funeral: it’s a silver lining to that grey cloud. Go back and get fixed. We’ll make ends meet and hook up with you again later in the trip.’
The doctor bandaged Mungo’s knee and fitted his leg with a brace. Then we headed back to the hotel to regroup. ‘See what your brother-in-law says,’ I told him, ‘then come back if you want to.’
‘Want to?’ Mungo had recovered a little now and looked long and hard at me. ‘You’ll have to cancel every flight to wherever you are to stop me. I hate doing this to you, guys, leaving you in the lurch like this.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ I said, patting his arm. ‘You’re a shit cameraman anyway.’
14
The Longest Day
We booked Mungo on to a business class flight back to London so he’d have some room to stretch his leg. He planned to see his brother-in-law as soon as he got home and he’d keep us posted.
We hadn’t realised how much Mungo had been affected by his grandfather’s death. We’d been sympathetic but he’s not a demonstrably emotional guy and I don’t think he really knew himself until that moment in the doctor’s surgery. Russ and I would have happily camped up for a couple of days so he could go back for the funeral, but he probably felt he would be letting the team down. We told him that no matter what the prognosis was regarding his knee, he must not come back until after his granddad’s funeral. As I said, I’m a great believer in fate - this was his opportunity to say goodbye and he had to take it.
Mungo’s flight wasn’t until two the next morning, and it was hard leaving him behind in Agra. I know how that feels - it’s no fun when you’re injured and the expedition is going on without you. We moved on to a small town about 170 miles further on and I finally fell into bed around eleven p.m. Four hours later I was awake again, just before the alarm went off. We were heading out to a truck stop where Rina reckoned we ought to be able to hitch a ride. We had a boat booked to get us across the Ganges from Ramnagar at four this afternoon and I really wanted to make it.
Truck drivers are hard to track down in advance - I’d thought there was one waiting for us, but had misunderstood the situation. Instead we were just going to rock up and see what we could get - they tended to set off early in the morning, so this was the best time to catch someone.
The truck stop - a cluster of buildings by the road - was a little way out of town. A bunch of men were sitting on tables watching some old B movie on TV while others slept on makeshift beds lined up along the wall outside. It was still pitch-black, but there had been a huge storm last night and even now the odd bolt of lightning lit up the sky. Inside the cafe flies were buzzing round the drivers, the food, the urns of tea. No one seemed very communicative. Standing on the sandy ground pitted with dark puddles I started to think that a lift wasn’t going to be very likely.
However, after a few negative responses, a young guy called Raj, wearing a vest and baseball cap, slapped away the flies and told us he could take us to a town close to Ramnagar. We could get a bus the rest of the way.
He pointed out his Tata truck, a big beast with a massive cab, and said we’d leave at four forty-five. When the time came the guy he shared the driving with was still asleep on one of the beds outside. Raj prodded him but he just rolled over. When Raj called his name he rolled over again. Taking a glass of water Raj tossed it over him and the poor guy sat up spluttering. This was Lallan, Raj’s partner. Raj told him it was time to get going.
They covered very long distances, driving all over India, and took it in turns at the wheel. Today they were transporting vegetables, and there was a third guy called Kamar riding along with them. Kamar’s dad owned the truck.
It was just what we’d been hoping for - ancient, flat-fronted, with the windscreen split in two sections with a partition between them. The cab was double sized with a bench seat in the back and a place between the driver and passenger where I would be able to squat with my back to the windscreen. We all piled in and Raj got the engine started. The steering wheel was worn from years of use and it had the old-style gear change on the column. After idling for a few minutes to get the engine warm we left the TV, the flies and the half-dozen sleeping drivers and headed off between the parked trucks.
It was strange and exhilarating taking off like that in the dead of night. The last few days had been pretty emotional but this was fun - it was exactly why we were here. I sat between Raj and Kamar with Russ and Rina in the back, Lallan on the far side, eyes closed, slumped against the window. I was tired but excited, riding along the clear roads in the dark, heading for the Ganges in an old vegetable truck. We’d watched so many of these trucks barrelling along on our side of the road, the drivers indifferent to the oncoming traffic, and now it was our turn to experience it first-hand.
The truck was personalised just as Asadollah’s had been in Iran, a home away from home for the crew. Raj told me he made about £100 a month, which appeared to be a decent wage here: I’d spoken to cleaners in Agra who only made about £10. Raj had been driving for eight years or so and made enough money to buy a house with his family. His story echoed many others we’d heard here. India isn’t a poor country, it’s just that the money isn’t evenly distributed. If you could get yourself a half-decent job in the city you could maybe pull enough money together to get a nice home and a pretty decent life.
The sun came up revealing a flat, dry landscape, with skinny trees and battered-looking buildings. The road was a narrow ribbon of tarmac in an otherwise sandy world; I wondered what it would look like when the rains came.
A little further on we stopped for tea, passing between lines of parked trucks before pulling off on to a patch of baked ground. These stops were spread out across the country, and drivers would stop, eat and sleep here, hooking up with old friends and generally shooting the breeze. Next door the cafe owner was making spicy naan bread in cast-iron frying pans and served us milky tea. I watched a couple of his helpers fetch water from a large metal tank; they used the water for the tea and for washing the pots and pans. I thought it might be the cover to some kind of well, but taking a wander over I found it was in fact just a tank, with a large catfish swimming in the bottom. As Russ said to me later, there isn’t a minute in any day when there isn’t something to see in this country.
With the sunrise came the traffic, and the cacophony of horns. India truly is an amazing and vibrant country; there was so much going on I spent most of my time staring in wonder. It felt very safe, too - the people were universally friendly and despite travelling so far and so wide, we had never once felt even vaguely threatened.
By nine-thirty it was forty degrees and we were roasting. We decided to ride on top of the load for a while and get some fresh air. It was quiet up on the roof, away from the engine. The breeze was a relief - it was very hot here, as hot as it had been in Sudan.
‘Nice to get the wind in your face,’ Russ said. ‘It’s a fantastic place, isn’t it? And have you noticed that everywhere you look there are kids playing cricket?’ He pointed to an open patch of waste ground where a bunch of barefoot young lads in rags were bashing a ball around. ‘Anywhere else it would be football, but in India it’s cricket. I was thinking only last night how you can really see the influence Britain has had on some of the places we’ve been through: good and bad.’
I noticed that I had been putting on weight: we’d eaten fantastic food throughout our journey and in the last few days I’d really porked out. And moving from one form of transport to another meant that I wasn’t getting much exercise. I decided to eat less and do more exercise from now on, starting right then with some push-ups on top of Raj’s cab.
Raj let us off at a crossroads on the edge of a small town where he told us we could get the bus to Ramnagar. We had all our bags and Mungo’s camera pack and we were due to meet the boat at four p.m. I’d missed both the sunset and sunrise at the Taj Mahal and I did not want to arrive in Varanasi in darkness.
It was almost two p.m. now and having been up since three I was pretty tired. The truck had been great, just what we wanted, and we were on time. Now, however, things started to go wrong. Looking around for a means of getting to the bus station we couldn’t find anything. We were too far out of town and the only vehicles passing were motorbikes or carts drawn by bullocks. I was hot, sweating and frustrated, worrying that we’d never get the boat in time. At last a couple of tuk-tuks came by and we flagged them down. They took us into town and the traffic just backed up. It was bedlam again - narrow streets packed with people, carts, bikes, tuk-tuks and local buses weighted down with passengers. And all the time the incessant honking of horns.
I watched the buses lumbering along at a snail’s pace, stopping every two minutes. ‘We’ll never make it to the boat in a bus,’ I said. ‘It’s forty miles and they’re too slow. What about a jeep?’ I gestured as one clattered past. ‘You can rent those. If this guy drops us at the bus station we can grab one. There are bound to be some hanging around.’
There weren’t. The tuk-tuk dropped us inside a gated courtyard of baked earth surrounded by old, broken-down buildings. We got out, unloaded our gear and I stood there with my hands on my hips, the sweat pouring off me. There was not a single bus in sight and no jeeps, nothing but a couple of ancient tuk-tuks and the odd rickshaw. I was beginning to feel a bit stressed.
‘Well,’ Russ said. ‘I’ve never seen a bus station with no buses in it before.’