Last India Overland (46 page)

Me and Dana both laugh.

“We’d also take some opium,” says Dana, “if you’ve got some.”

No problem there. He sells us a few grams. But as for the aspirin, he says, that could be a problem. “What’s it for?” he says.

“This and that,” I say. “Cracked ribs, toothache.”

“Try some chilli capsicum on the toothache,” he says. “These people might have it.”

And then he’s gone. Before I had a chance to ask him how the hell he happened to end up in a God-forsaken town like Kandahar, selling drugs to tourists. I asked Dave but Dave was too lazy to tell me. He said it was a long story.

Those breadmakers did have some chilli capsicum, though. I didn’t really think it’d work. Otherwise why wouldn’t Dave have told me about it. Huh, Dave? Dave says he doesn’t know everything. That’s for sure. He didn’t know about the Delhi dentist or my hand. Dana and me head back to the hotel, end up getting lost on the way. Came across this rock pile full of shit, an old man squatting on one of the rocks like a buzzard. There were all these crazies walking around. They don’t have a lot of insane asylums in Afghanistan. Dana said it reminded her of that scene in
Catch-22
where Yossarian walks down that street in Rome and sees a guy beating his horse and a soldier getting a blow-job in a doorway and another guy getting shot. Good movie. Alan Arkin’s great. He played a great psycho in Wait
Until Dark.
That’s one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. I remember I saw it in a hotel room on TV with Nancy Pickles and we made love for the first time that night. One of the best nights of my life. Anyway. We eventually get back to the hotel and the bus is gone, just us in the room, and I make a water solution of the capsicum and put it in an eyedropper that Dana has and squirt it in the tooth, and I’ll be damned it does work. I let out a little whoop and do a jig around the floor and give Dana a hug that lasts just a little longer than I thought it was going to. Then she looks me in the eye and says, “Let’s have some tea.”

“A pregnant idea,” I say. And it’s out before I realized that I’d put my foot in it.

“Oops, sorry,” I say.

Dana just smiles. She’s easy to get along with.

“That’s okay.”

And so we have our tea. And she catches me up on everything I missed while I was out to lunch, back in Mashhad. That Patrick and Kelly have a little flirtation going, she said, thanks to the fact that Rockstar smashed Patrick’s glasses. And I tell her about what those Afghanis did to me back at the border. I think they were Russians, actually, in Afghan clothing. Dana said the least they could’ve done was be gentle so I could’ve got a cheap thrill out of it. I laughed. I could laugh about it, since my tooth had stopped hurting. Too bad that capsicum didn’t work on cracked ribs, I would’ve busted my gut. And then we told each other our life stories. She’d gone to this convent in high school and went through a lesbian period, she said, right up until she graduated, and then she went wild for two years with men, and that abortion she had in Istanbul wasn’t her first or even her second.

“Us Catholics have hang-ups about birth control, you see,” she says.

“I see,” I say.

“I think the thing to do is just to give up sex,” she says.

I look at her. We’re just kind of lying back on her bed, staring at this spider spinning a web in a broken window. “Yeah, really?” I say.

She laughs. “No, not really. I could never give up sex. I’m crazy about it. I’ve been masturbating since I was six. It’s this idea of forbidden fruit that they instill into us. Makes us want to reach out and take a big bite. Me it does, at least.”

Maybe it was the fact that I’d been out of commission so long. Not even able to beat off. All that jism stored up. Aching all over and I’m horny as a hoot owl. I was just in a great mood, that’s all. My tooth didn’t hurt. I had a whole package of the capsicum stuff. High as a kite with a beautiful woman.

Those chapped lips. She was wearing a loose blue shirt over a dark blue camisole with spaghetti straps, no bra beneath. She looked good enough to get stoned by more Moslem women. I guess it was a chance she was willing to take to look good. I feel good just thinking about the way she looked that day. She’d lost some weight. Her jeans were just a little loose.

“Gee,” I said. “I wonder when everybody’s going to get back.”

Turns out Pete had taken them out to look at some irrigation canals, of all things.

“I wonder too,” she said, and she reached out and took my hand, gave me a smile that turned my heart to cottage cheese. “But I always like it best at night. Especially the first time. So we’ll have to wait.”

I hadn’t even known what I was talking about.

“Besides,” said Dana, “there’s this new moon coming up.”

That brought me up short. “How’d you know about that?” I said.

She laughed. “Come on, Mick. Everybody knows everything about everyone on the bus. You’re not the only person that Kelly talks horoscopes with.”

Yeah, okay, fair enough. Still I was a little surprised. I had thought Kelly only talked to me about certain things.

“What’s happening with Suzie by the way?” I asked, just to change the subject, and Dana said you’re psychic, you should know, and I said, well, last time I checked in with the All Knowing One, Rob was pissed off at Suzie because Patrick found out he only had one testicle and he’s threatened to kill her when we get to Kathmandu.

“Either that or marry her,” said Dana. “He still hasn’t quite made up his mind.”

That was worth another laugh, and another cup of opium tea, and I remember thinking, sitting there watching a fly struggle in that web, that this might be the start of better days.

Patrick’s daybook entry

Ms. Byrnes claims she doesn’t give “one bloody damn” about the daybook any more. We can, she states emphatically, do whatever we bloody well want with it, not excluding using it for toilet paper, which is, at this point in time, a very real possibility.

Be that as it may.

On the forty-eighth day of the Haphazard Indian Trek, I arose from a foul, infested mattress, fresh from malaria nightmares concerning farm animals and polo mallets. Compared to buzkhazi,* rugby seems very much a game for sequestered octogenarians. But I digress. That was yesterday. This is today. Upon rising, I discovered that Mick was caught in the clutches of a strangled rat. When I awoke, he was discom-bobulated, as usual, and had no memory of how the dead rat came to be lying on his chest. Chalk it up as another Merry Globester mystery. Conjecture concerning that, as well as the smell of a certain Globester’s socks, drove me out into the morning streets of Kandahar, where I wandered among barely-glimpsed women in chadris and the men in their tattered khaki (there is something to be said about walking through this world half blind) till potholes prompted me to hail a horse and buggy. However, as hinted already, the streets of Kandahar are less than glorious tributes to the wonders of macadamization, all of which served to unsettle something in the pit of my bowels. I managed, with some bluster and the presentation of several ragged Afghanis, to persuade the Pathan at the reins to take me to a squatter. A literal squatter. A rock pile spattered with fecal matter of all shapes, sizes, textures and fragrance. I am beginning to look back on the Turkish Delights with some fondness, given the perspective of time and distance. However, having relieved myself, I purchased some dusky, worm-riddled apples, for our drive to Kabul, from a merchant missing four fingers (a buzkhazi veteran, no doubt) and then rode back to the hotel, where Pete was putting the bus in gear. As Kandahar’s shanty skyline disappears behind us, I sit and peel my apple, and while I peel my apple, I’m reminded of a letter I received from a friend while we were in Istanbul, lo, these many eons ago. Please don’t tell me about the bad experiences you’re having, she advised me. Because that means you’re not allowing the good things to come through. Tell me, she said,

* Patrick’s one misspelling, that I’ve noticed.
—
D.W.

301

of all the sunsets, the scenery, the friendships, the beautiful and exotic women, and remember that each day will bring to you something that most of your friends will never see.

Yes. She has an excellent point. And I can only pray that none of my friends will ever be forced to relieve themselves in the midst of an outdoor Afghani squatter. Or to watch the horror of a buzkhazi match. Or to wake up with dead rats at their throats. To name but a minimal number of experiential joys that have transpired within the last six hours.

Kelly’s daybook entry

Nov. 28

Kabul. Another Malaria Monday has come & gone, & nightmares still gallop through certain psyches. That’s still no reason not to do what tourists do best, which is see the sights. For some of us, that is. 1 or 2 people were quite conspicuous by their absence on today’s little tour of the Char Chatta Bazaar and the Mausoleum of King Nadir Shah and the animal market and the Kabul Zoo and the Kabul Museum and the Chilstoon, Rishkor and Baber’s Gardens. (Did I leave anything out?) The good news, of course, is that Tim & Mary are safe & sound & somewhere to the west of us, grooving on gigantic Buddhas, & that Kabul has loads of my favourite gem, the lapis lazuli. The bad news is that there’s still no sign of Frank. So we make do instead with Greco-Buddhist sculpture & the world’s oldest skeleton, while we ask ourselves, what are those traffic lights doing in this city? Nobody pays any attention to them. Right now I’m looking out the window & I can see a poor farm family, on ox & cart, caught in the middle of an intersection, horns blaring at them from all directions. I can hear the old gentleman with the white beard and the gunny-sack fashion statement saying, “By Allah, Martha, it’s the last time you get to the city in a camel’s age!” It’s probably their anniversary: they come into town for a decent ashak and bolani
²³
& this is what they get. Life is full of disappointment. But what can you do, except hang in there?

Soon came in this morning, said we’re going to try something new. She meant drugs. She said I should be getting better but I’m not. Not bad drugs. Good drugs. Make the day seem brighter, the room seem smaller, Soon seem prettier. New drugs from Bangkok, she said. Her doctor friend brought them.

Kabul. Next town. Left around noon because Pete didn’t want to face the sun through those cracks in the windshield. Dana got on after me, sat beside me, said Pete’s probably going to throw all of us into the same room again but we could maybe get a room to ourselves. If I was up for it, she said, and smiled. I said sure but I was broke and I’d have to wait until I got my traveller’s cheques replaced if that was okay with her before I could split the bill.

Pete had told me there was an American Express office in Kabul.

Dana told me not to worry about it.

Kelly was sitting next to Patrick. Talking about his planets.

She glanced at us once and then looked away and never looked back.

I said to Dana, “But what if I happen to be a washout?”

She just laughed. “You men worry too much,” she said.

Dana told me all about insurance scams, how life insurance is one big scam, on the way to Kabul, which was a funky little town. City. My kind of city.

When we got there, Pete drove down Chicken St. and he pointed out the best bets for restaurants. He said the cheeseburgers and milkshakes were pretty good in the Faiz Mohammed Hotel and that the Children of God would throw in a hymn with the ketchup if we were lucky. He said all the Led Zeppelin fans aboard would probably like the Sigis because they played Led Zep loud, day in, day out, but he gave his best thumbs up to the. Baggy Bella, an old palace out on the outskirts of town where the chef murdered a few tourists back in the late sixties. Pete joke. He also told us to buy raw material instead of the manufactured whatever because Afghanis weren’t that handy with sewing machines. He told us that we wouldn’t be going up to Bamiyan this trip, to see the Valley of the Buddha, even though it was on our agenda, because he heard there was a lot of fighting going on up there. Then he parked in front of the Park Hotel and went in and posted the room list and sure enough, it was all of us in one room, except for Pete and Rockstar, who had rooms to themselves.

Dave says I forgot all about how Rockstar was almost killed by a guy at a loo-stop along the way to Kabul. Because he took a picture of his wife with his SX-70. I thought that was on the way to Peshawar, but anyway, yeah, Rockstar almost bit the green wiener, and he would’ve if he hadn’t given the guy the picture.

The guy had stuck a pen, a Bic pen, under Rockstar’s throat. Which may have persuaded Rockstar to give it up. I thought Patrick said it was a knife, actually, but Rockstar told me later it was a Bic pen.

Which didn’t really make sense to us, those of us who bothered to think about it, until we got to Dara.

Dave says it was Suzie who gave Rockstar the bright idea to take the picture. That’s news. I was actually taking a dump out behind this caravanserai, as Pete called it, when all this went down. That kind of explains, though, what happened later in Lahore.

But Kabul’s before Lahore.

Dana asked at the desk to see if we could get a room together, she didn’t care what Kelly thought, all’s fair in love and war, I guess, and yeah, they had a room, so she said, “This one’s on me, Mick.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll get tomorrow night if I get my cheques back.”