We were two young reporters who resigned their jobs on two New Delhi newspapers and decided to hitch-hike to London – but not the usual rough style all the way to Britain. Rathnakar Kini from The Patriot and myself from The Indian Express chose to be fairly respectable travellers up to Tehran (when we ran out of all our cash). We didn’t hitch-hike through Pakistan either. In 1964 we simply could not. It was out of the question for two Indians who were also journalists from the neighbouring “friendly” country. The very visa conditions ruled out any such possibility. We were to travel specifically by bus from the Indian border to Lahore and by rail from Lahore to Quetta and out to Zahidan in Iran – all in one week. We did it in six days.
We left New Delhi like two mad dogs in the mid-day sun of a burning May day and arrived the next day at the India-Pakistan border post of Wagah by an excellent steam train of the Indian Railways. Crossing the border under the scorching sun and lugging our respectable but clumsy baggage (a suitcase and a shoulder bag each) we sweated our mile-long walk to the first Pakistani bus stop. Lahore, the city of my birth and a thousand memories, was only 18 miles away.
Once on the bus we passed along plentiful farms and bustling small town markets. A burqa-clad (veiled) woman with nail-polished young figures clambered on to our bus at one stop and then another – an unveiled fresh face this time – hopped into our single decker. Soon the bus rolled parallel to some factory walls bearing a series of sprawling signs and slogans in big bold painted letters in English some of which read:
FIRST DESERVE, THEN DEMAND
WORK IS A MORAL NECESSITY
THINK SLOW, ACT QUICK
Unable to read English, most Pakistanis blessedly ignored it.
A few minutes later we reached Lahore railway station terminus. Unlike the greasy Old Delhi railway station of the Indian capital, Lahore station was a neat place. The traffic policeman at the road junction was dressed in spotless whites and carried a well-polished helmet on his head. Efficiency seemed writ large on the face of the city where people seemed to fear not only God but also authority.
Only the coffee house on the Mall remained unreformed. Its lower middle class customers (and some middle class addicts too) were openly critical of the working of their world and could be heard to demand a good deal more than what they were told they deserved. They talked about military rule and nepotism among the top brass and at least one of them was overheard to be praising India’s Mahatma Gandhi, anathema to most Pakistanis – thanks to the fanatical and often martial fingures on the keyboards of Pakistan’s press and book printing industry. Places like the Mall coffee house were shunned by the middle class and the upper crust who preferred Gymkhana clubs and other rendezvous where they drank whatever they pleased to the health of those in power. Unlike in General Zia-ul-Haq’s days, liquor flowed freely under General Ayub Khan’s Presidency.
After a couple of days’ stay in Lahore we took the train to Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s south-western border province of Baluchistan which has remained in a state of perpetual rebellion since the British days long before the birth of Pakistan. We covered the 800-mile distance between the two provincial capitals in just 24 hours despite a number of stops on the way. Faster trains were being planned for the future and new tracks, we were told, were being laid.
Paradoxically, perhaps the slowest train in the world was also in Pakistan. It was the weekly train from Quetta to Zahidan in Iran doing about 450 miles in a little over 50 hours. It passed through the deserts of Baluchistan where the railway tracks quite often get buried under the moving sands.
The tracks may be weak; but the people are sturdy. They jump on and off the trains at will. When a Pakistani co-traveller once asked a stripling teenager about his ticket because the ticket inspector was approaching, the little spark snapped back: “Hum azad hain (we are a free people)”. And he jumped off the running train, disappearing into the desert.
We reached Zahidan, our first halt in Iran, a little after midnight. The train stopped in the middle of a sandy expanse where taxis seemed to park right beside the train windows. It looked like a railway station without a platform, but we knew later that plans were ready for a complete transformation of the scene.
Our first impression of Zahidan as some railyard wilderness was soon corrected when our cab moved along the well illuminated and tree-lined avenues like Khiaban-i-Pahlavi (then named after the old Shah’s dynasty – most probably after some other name now.
The school examination season was on. Books in hand the students paced up and down the well-lit street roundabouts or sat under the neon lights. Young Iran seemed to be awake in search of education.
Strolling out into the main shopping area during the day we caught sight of yard-long naans (leavened eastern bread) — naan bakeries are spread throughout the country and the practice of baking bread at home – at least in the towns – seemed to be non-existent. It was a refreshing change from the Indian and Pakistani practice of condemning women to the time wasting practice of making endless chapattis on tavas (hot iron plates) or baking rotis with hand dives into the burning tandoors (clay ovens). And quite unlike that Anglo-Saxon invention of sliced bread, the naans tasted simply delicious.
About two days of endless bus travel, partly paid for by some of our wayside hosts, brought us to Tehran where we found free-of-charge sleeping floor space for five nights at the local Sikh temple or gurdwara known there as Masjid-i-Hind (the Indian mosque) which was also host to a New Zealander, a German and two English men besides another two Indians like us.
Our fellow guests included Christians, Muslims and Hindus (you don’t have to be a Sikh to be able to enjoy the gurdwara’s hospitality).
A visit to the Department of English at Tehran University next day proved our salvation from impending financial disaster. We had nearly finished all our cash before reaching Tehran — two-thirds of our journey still lay ahead! Once at the university, we introduced ourselves to a final year student of English, a Mr. Arma, who, though himself in a hurry, passed us on to two fellow students – Parvez Nikfarjam and Mohammad Babajanzadeh, the unspoilt man from the East.
We talked about our travels, our writings, about English literature, about India and about Iran till the lunch hour when they offered to take us to their university dining hall. The first lunch was followed by an endless operation hospitality over the next four days. They almost overfed us with continuous lunches, dinners, drives to Shamira and other spots, and rounds of coffee, beeakerfuls of tea and ice creams. Many a time Babajanzadeh threatened displeasure if we didn’t agree to yet another round of his favoured delicacies.
Financial despondence gave way to confidence and big city bewilderness to beauty and affinity. Tehran at once started looking beauteous where old and new, East and West appeared to meet.
Here was old world leisure with people sipping tea and smoking winding silvery hookahs (hubble bubble pipes) in restaurants. India’s betel chewing, lazy Lucknow seemed to have lost its prime of place in the leisure hierarchy of the Eastern world.
Here were statues of Shaikh Saadi, Omar Khayyam and Ferdaus – all standing on the important cross-roads of this Eastern city gone West. The all-you-want Ferdausi super store had escalators to take you up its various sections while the Plasco market tried to cast its own 19-storey spell on those who had the money to spend.
The temper of the place was Eastern, the material modes European. In those pre-Khoemeni days most town women wore no veil (chador) — some were out in their long eastern trousers and some in skirts. Was it East or West? Was this the heaven of which poet Ferdaus had once said:
“Gar bar rooh-e-zamin ast
Hamin ast. Hamin ast. Hamin ast.”
or in translation
“If ever it (heaven) is on this earth,
It’s here. It’s here. It’s here.”
However, our journalistic suspicions wouldn’t rest. We started to find out about the so-called White Revolution launched by the Emperor Reza Shah II, since deposed for his Western ways and later to die in exile. As a first step big estates were being broken up and, we were told, nobody was to be allowed to hold more than 500 hectares of land or own complete villages. Ultimately even these holdings were to face a break-up, releasing land for the tillers. But having watched the failure of Gandhian Bhoodan (gift of land) and other reforms in India we remained sceptics. The big farmers and estate owners, in their turn were being given shares in the nascent industry as compensation for the loss of their lands. When I asked whether this process was not a mere substitution of rural landlordism with the more powerful urban proprietorship, two prominent members of the Majlis (national parliament) simply brushed aside the question with an evasive smile.
One major issue on which the official attitude displayed conspicuous reticence was the historical role of the former anti-Western, anti-Royalist and leftist Premier Mossadiq, still the unforgotten here of vast sections of intelligentsia, who launched Iran on the road to nationalisation of her oil resources.
But the most encouraging of the sights to be seen was in the villages where the Shah’s new Literacy Corps (made up of school and university graduates) was engaged in teaching adults and children in the use of the three Rs and rural aids. Despite bureaucratic gaps, the beginnings were earnest and people eager to learn. It was this grassroot revolution which seemed to be at the root of the unrest of the late 1970s. Education always leads to collision with authority, however benevolent its intentions.
After full five days in Tehran we had a farewell lunch given by our student hosts who in yet another bout of generosity bought us tickets up to Tabriz, the western provincial capital. The train moved on as we looked backwards with fond memories.
Our next halt was Tabriz and our hosts once again were local students. We had only to spot one of them in the city’s student quarter, and lunches, dinners, rounds of tea and introductions to new friends followed. Language was no barrier. A bit of English; a few words of Persian and Bharat Natyam (Indian signs and gestures) were quite adequate for most occasions.
A couple of days later, we stood on the Turkish side of Iran’s border watching the snow-capped Arsar mountains less than five crow miles towards the old Soviet border.
With about three Turkish liras (less than an old English shilling or an Indian rupee) in our pockets the pair of us stood on the Turkish hilltop surveying all the miles left behind and many more to come. A few more hours’ journey after selling one of my shirts and a pair of sun glasses brought us to a little Turkish town called Agri where with the help of a police officer we managed to get into a truck bound for Erzurum. Sun down, our new vehicle started with an odd load of two horses and two journalists at the back, and the driver and his mate at the front.
The machine moved on through the high mountain roads under thick, dark clouds relieved occasionally by either natural lightning or the radar lights on hilltops signifying America’s “vigil for democracy” or Turkey’s “sell-out to American dollars” as the opponent camp would put it.
Another day, another donor. We were soon in Erzincan where we stumbled into a certain Kemal Poutre who entertained us to a delicious, hot meal and promised us a night’s free rest at his hotel besides arranging a lift to Ankara the next morning. But our luck ran out. Kemal’s boss turned up at the hotel and we soon realised that he was being generous at the expense of his hotel proprietor. In fact, Kemal was mortally afraid even to talk to us after his chief’s arrival.
We reached Ankara, the capital city of seven hills, on a cloudy, dripping morning with less than the price of a couple of cups of tea between the two of us. But we had never given up hope of striking some ever new source of human goodwill. And strike we did.
We spent our last few coins on phoning Abid Hussain, an Indian community development expert ( later India’s Ambasador to the USA) whose services had been loaned to Turkey via the United Nations and whose address we had picked up from his younger brother at India Coffee House in New Delhi. We had never met him in our life. With great trepidation, we phoned Mr. Hussain.
He straight away welcomed us. We raced through Kennedy Cadessi to Kedar Sokagi where we found Mrs. Abid Hussain beckoning to us a welcome from her balcony as if we were some long lost friends. For full five days the Hussains treated us to unforgettable hospitality that combined the best traditions of Hyderabad in South India with those of Lucknow in the North.
But like all good things it had to end and we were soon on way to Istanbul.
It was about 1 a.m. on the 25th day of our travels that we entered Europe by ferry across the Bosphorus. Landing in the “European” part of Istanbul, we lodged for three nights at what was known as the American hostel, the hub of European hitch-hikers’ area.
We had our first small glimpse of Europe in the hostel baths where a number of young men were washing their naked bodies while women cleaners scrubbed some of the empty cubicles without even batting an eyelid at the sight of the male nudes.
Istanbul the city of the Golden Horn, the Blue Mosque, St. Sophia’s Church and other landmarks was as impressive as it was fabled to be despite its modern municipal administrators or their bosses who perpetually blamed cash shortages for the old city’s unkempt look. A strange meeting place of the West and the East, Istanbul looked overwhelmed by the tourists who neither loved the place nor were loved by those who belonged to the place.
And like the tourist flotsom and jetsom we too had our transient contact with Istanbul on way to other pastures.
Dogged by our eternal shortage of funds we sped towards the Greek border. Crossing Turkey at Edirne, we passed through a new hamlet bearing a hoary old name — Nea Orestia — a modernist reminder of the great days of ancient Greek drama! Whether the village had any greater link with the past than its half name (Orestia) was highly doubtful.
Back on the road we found ourselves surprised when a police patrol car stopped by us — not so much to ask for our passports but to offer us a ride in response to our thumb signs! It was a short ride but we soon hopped into an inter-continental lorry and were glad to be racing along the coast to Alexandropolis, beauteous Cavala with its cobbled central square, and on to Thessaloniki. Food, drink, climate — all were ideal. But our finances were too precarious to let us have any taste of Greece. We could only promise ourselves to return to these places in better times.
Onward to the Yugoslav border. We thought ourselves lucky to have hitched a ride with another inter-continental lorry driver who promised to take us up to Skopje. But he changed his mind half-way on seeing two girl hitch-hikers. He simply ordered us to take the back seats and vacate the front seats next to him for the girls. Soon he made it clear to us that he would be dropping us two males at the next major town, taking with him only the two pretty ones for the rest of the journey. But the lecher lost his prize when, almost out of the blue, his boss turned up and changed his route probably diverting the lorry consignment to some other customer. The driver dropped all four of us. Crest fallen he took the lonely road while we walked away with the girls -- at least for a few minutes. They were rich enough to pay their fares and soon took a train to Beograd (Belgrade). We soldiered on with hitching ever more rides.
A couple of days and a few hundred kilometers later we found ourselves standing at a dusty spot on the road to Beograd looking hungrily at the ripe cherries in an orchard across the highway. There appeared a young farmer dragging his bike like a donkey; he saw us, waved a cheer at us and conquered us. He asked us where we came from. We replied: “India, Nehru, India” and, to jog his free association of words or stream of consciousness, we added: “Nehru, Tito, Nasser.” It clicked. We had conquered the language barrier. He understood we had come from a non-aligned country that, like his own, sought a world full of peace, undominated by big powers something that trinity of those names appeared to symbolise.
Peasants may be unlettered but they are canny in their judgment of humanity. For the next three hours the farmer became our host entertaining us to a lunch of omlette, cheese, beautiful bread and a bottle of some most potent stuff. It was a knockout! Literally, for one of us at least. My mate Kini was legless.
Shortly afterwards we re-posted ourselves on the road to Beograd and sure enough a single ride in a Swiss engineer’s car brought us right to the centre of the national capital well before the day was out. The evening proved desultory. We neither had enough money nor wanted a proper meal — the farmer’s hospitality was still fresh in our system. The air was warm and we roamed the streets and the parks, finally coming to the central railway station waiting rooms for the night’s shelter. But that was not to be! A railway policeman arrived and served quit orders on every one without a ticket for some next train. We joined the unlucky band and came out of the station. But all was not lost. The railway station’s pavement chairs offered a welcome rest to the drop-out brigade. There was no state police chasing us or any other person.
The next day dawned and after a lot of idle wandering we chanced our luck with a visit to the Indian Embassy where we were offered by the Press Counsellor a hot cup of tea and a bath – both very welcome! The Counsellor, Mr. Mahajan, also gave us the telephone number of the only Indian journalist then working in the Yugoslav capital. It was a most lucky strike for a whole week’s hospitality and stay in Beograd where we also met two equally generous young painters from India. The city itself held a charm of its own – a hearty people visibly exuding relaxation and joy that blew through the city, its Kale Maigden park and the banks of the Sava river.
A week was soon over and it was time to say farewell to Beograd and our Indian friends who bought us tickets up to Trieste. The train rolled on and before long we were the guests of a Yugoslav engineer who feted us with brimful glasses of beautiful, bubbling beer – making it another unforgettable evening of humour (he spoke very good English) and hospitality. The Yugoslavs (in Marshal Tito’s days) were certainly not living by bread alone!
The train trundled on till we stopped in Trieste where our rail tickets expired. Once on the coast road, its heavenly scenery banished all thoughts of our financial precariousness and by the evening of the same day we were in Venice watching other people enjoying gondola rides and meals in St. Mark’s Square.
We also watched the pigeons in the square. Venice quickly joined other places on our list to be visited in better circumstances!
Onward soldiers, we hitched rides as fast as we could and within two days we had raced on to Milan, Turin, and crossing the Alps and lot of French territory, to Grenobles, Lyons and Paris itself.
After a disastrous meeting between my mate Kini and his patron uncle (from his native Indian town who had been working as a correspondent of a major Indian newspaper in Paris for some years we decided to look up a painter friend (acquaintance, in fact) whose address we carried with us.
Standing a short distance from the Notre Dame cathedral by the Seine we asked a bystander for guidance towards Rue de Austerlitz where our painter friend once lived. The Frenchman knew English and seemed to be posted there by providence to help us. He beckoned us to follow him down to a car park, took out his car and drove us to Rue de Austerlitz where he went to the hotel (pension) reception to find if our painter friend was there. No, our painter friend was not there. He hadn’t been there for a long time and had left no forwarding address.
The Frenchman came out of the hotel and asked us where we planned to spend the night. “Under one of Seine’s bridges”, I replied. “Oh, no. That can’t be”, he said as he stood and scratched his head for a moment. He speedily swung back to the hotel, asking us to wait a while. He returned and told us he had paid for a room for us for the night and hastily pushed some money into my pocket for dinner and morning’s coffee. “Welcome to France”, he said and simply disappeared!
Next morning, through the Indian Embassy we traced our painter friend who introduced us to another two friends who between themselves took to feeding us and entertaining us as if we were really some old mates!
After four days, I had to put Paris on my list of places to be visited in more prosperous times. I took the road to Calais and exactly on the 46th day of my travels from New Delhi I reached England after a midnight boat crossing from Calais to Dover.
And there begins another story. That was my first passage to England. Later it was back to India (though not by hitch-hiking because of security reasons) and then to England again. Since those days it continues to be back forth -- an abiding affair between my two worlds.
