Last India Overland

© Craig Grant, 1989

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 379 Adelaide Street West, Suite Ml, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1S5.

This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead within it is coincidental.

Cover painting by Christine Lynn. Reproduced courtesy of Craig Grant and the artist. Photographed by Don Hall.

Design by Joyce Sotski.

Typeset by Type Systems, Regina Printed and bound in Canada by MC Graphics Inc. Excerpts from
The Last India Overland
were previously published in
Grain
(February 1981) and
The New Quarterly
(Spring 1983), and broadcast on CBC Radio’s “Ambience.” The author thanks Brenda, Christine, Connie, Doug, Jack, Leon, Mack, Sean, Valerie, and the Saskatoon Poets Coterie. He also thanks the City of Regina, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Ontario Arts Council, and his parents, who helped make this endeavour possible.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the City of Regina, the Canada Council and the Department of Communications in the publication of this book.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Grant, Craig, 1955-The last India overland ISBN: 0-919926-95-9

I. Title    

PS8563.R368L3 1989    C813’.54    C89-098077-2

PR9199.3.G736L3 1989

cofeau books

Suite 209, 1945 Scarth Street Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 2H2

Dedicated to all the Merry Globesters, particularly Mary

Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai Whose doorways are alternate Night and Day, How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp Abode his Hour or two, and went his way

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Foreword

On September 27, 1978, I drove my sister, Kelly, and two of her friends, Charole Anchorage and Frank Jenkins, to the airport in Billings, Montana. They were going to India.

At the airport I gave Kelly a going-away present: a diary.

“Just in case,” I said, “you happen to have any interesting adventures.”

At the time, Iran and Afghanistan were merely obscure Asian countries that were seldom mentioned in the news.

It’s been more than ten years since I hugged Kelly goodbye at the Billings airport. I haven’t seen her since. She said she wasn’t going to be gone longer than a year.

Ten years ago today, on February 7, 1979, I received a package in the mail. It contained a letter from Kelly, along with the diary.

Two months later, on April 11, I received another package in the mail. This one contained a massive manuscript (a memoir of sorts, written on the backs of hospital charts), a “daybook” (which will be explained later), a sheaf of itinerary notes for a tour (the exact nature of which will also become clear), and a letter from Charole Anchorage.

At this point, the only item that probably needs more explanation is the memoir:
All in Search of the Ko Samui Mushroom,
by Michael “Mick” McPherson.

Mick’s handwriting, at first, was quite legible. Toward the end of the manuscript, however, it deteriorated rapidly. Some of the final pages were almost impossible to decipher. I have corrected, I hope, all of Mick’s spelling mistakes, of which there weren’t all that many (he had a problem with “embarrassing” and he hyphenated “toothache,” as do a lot of people), and some of his grammar (the more blatant errors). But I have left his tense shifts alone, as well as some of his frequent lapses in coherence, logic and sentence structure, in the interests of keeping his sense of voice intact.

There seemed to be natural breaks in Mick’s narrative. I’ve used the itinerary notes and Kelly’s diary and the daybook as bridges across those breaks.

There were several discrepancies between Pete’s tour notes, Mick’s memoir and Kelly’s diary concerning the spelling of various towns, landmarks, etc. (“Skopje,” for example, can be spelled “Scoplje”.) In all cases, I have used Fodor’s spellings.

February 7, 1989

from Mick’s manuscript

All in Search of the Ko Samui Mushroom

by Michael “Mick” McPherson

The cute little morning nurse said I should’ve brought my hand back with me, they could’ve sewn it back on. I took a look. There was a big white bandage there where my right hand should’ve been. Which kind of sent my mind reeling.

The cute little morning nurse put an arm around my head and held me for a long time and the perfume she was wearing and the fact that my face was pressed against that small perky bosom finally brought me back to my senses. Soon, that’s her name, it’s short for Soontanapurna or something like that, she pointed out to me that I was lucky to be alive. And she’s right.

When I got control of myself, Soon asked me what happened. So I told her. She shook her head and told me I should stay away from bad people. I said to her, “You know, I think I agree with you.” She thought that was funny. I think she likes my subtle sense of humour. She told me to rest and that was easy. She had me doped up pretty good.

When I woke up the next time it was dark and there was just me and the shadows of palm trees through the window, swaying back and forth slowly against the breezes moving in from the Sea of Siam. Behind them was a quarter moon rising and I watched it disappear above my window. Then there was just the brown stars. I watched that starlit sky for a long time.

I was waiting for one to fall. It took a couple hours maybe, but it finally did.

When Soon checked in at five to see how I was doing, I said to her, well, you tell me.

She said I had a touch of malaria and a slight case of acute hepatitis and a case of tetanus that could turn ugly real quick. She said there wasn’t much she could do about the cracked ribs except let them heal, and as for the tooth splinters in my gum, well, I should see a dentist about those on my way through Bangkok or when I get back to Vancouver. Then she gave me some more morphine for the pain and some Metronidazole
¹
for the hepatitis and she left, and left me staring out the window at those six palm trees swaying in the Ko Samui breeze and the first grey colours of dawn beginning to wash up that sky.

It took me four days to get really bored with the view. Which is why I asked Soon to bring me some pens and paper. Back at Miller High, in Regina, Saskatchewan, I had this English teacher who gave me high marks in comp. They were the only high marks I ever got. He said I had a good imagination and I should take a stab at writing fiction some day.

Well, this is as good a day as any. My twenty-fourth birthday. January 6, 1979. Except my imagination isn’t going to have a lot to do with what I’m going to write, it all really happened.

Take for instance the day I was born. Twenty-four years ago today. I’m a Cappie with my moon in Gemini, according to this girl I met not too long ago. She said that Gemini moon means I could be a writer, maybe.

I was born about four in the morning. It was a cold morning. The old man said it was cold enough to freeze the nuts off a Buick axle. Mom said a cold front from Alaska had moved in, it was forty below and the wind was blowing hard.

It might not have been so bad, she said, if your father hadn’t gotten drunk and forgot to plug in the car and if the phone company hadn’t cut off service. It might not have been so bad, she said, if you hadn’t been twins.

My little twin brother didn’t make it. Or at least that’s what everyone thought.

My mother got pregnant again just as quick as she could, because she thought the spirit of the baby she lost was still hanging around, looking for a home. My little sister Jackie was born about eleven months later.

She changed her name after the old man moved out to Vancouver. She met this Moonie on Granville and he talked her into changing her name to Hasheeba. Mom hates it and calls her Jackie though.

I didn’t move out to Vancouver with the family, not right away, because I was sixteen at the time and head over heels in love with a girl named Peggy dil-Schmidt. But about five months after the move she broke my heart. I tried to hang myself with her pantyhose but it was cheap pantyhose and it ripped when I kicked the chair away. So I said hasta la vista to Regina and hopped on a train to Vancouver.

I kind of wish I hadn’t.

Four weeks after I got out there, the Regina Mafia caught up to my old man at The Olde Salvador Deli and blew him away with a double-barrelled shotgun.

Which is what you call your basic bummer.*

from Kelly’s diary

Sept. 29

Mom was cheerful & chatty behind her Valium haze today at the Bistro. She barely touched her salad. Gave me the expected Sally Ann bag complete with clothesline, passport pouch & a year’s supply of tampons. She held up really well until the goodbye hug & then her eyes misted over & a fat frog croaked in my throat. Then I met C. at Penny’s & it was over to Stampede Medical for our last vac. shots. My shoulder’s all black & blue. At the airport, D gave me this diary
²
as a going-away present & even he got misty-eyed. I should go away more often. I gave him the campground & hotel address list & he promised to write. Then he kissed me for the 1st time ever. The lift-off was like the snipping of some cord. There’s no going back to the womb. F has the window seat & he & C. are happily buzzing away, holding hands. I’m homesick already & we’re not even past Minneapolis.

Mick

The next year was your basic heebie-jeebie nightmare. My mother went off the deep end. Took to drinking double martinis for breakfast. Hasheeba disappeared into the mountains into some Moonie commune. I got heavily into drugs, mostly acid. Got really crazy. Don’t drop it at all any more but I still get weird acid flashbacks every once in a while. I still hear strange voices in my head.

Make that singular: a strange voice.

About three years after the old man died, Hasheeba came back from the commune with this guy from Thailand in tow. He used to be a Buddhist, he said, but now he was a Moonie. Kind of a cool guy, actually. His real name was Jim but everyone called him Rice-Eater. He didn’t seem to mind. He did have this thing about mushroom fried rice.