the four-cornered world

I’d heard about Max long before I met him. Within the insular little bubble of the tourist town we lived in he was something of an enigma; English but somehow not quite, he seemed to have money but never showed it, didn’t make friends or mix with the crowd but appeared to know everyone all the same, and always, in the background of things, left the impression of having some influence. Physically he lived apart too, for while most of us rented rooms in villagers’ houses as close to the beach as possible, he lived in a large apartment building on the edge of town, as if he were bored by it all, or knew something better.  

There were enough people who didn’t like him. He had a reputation for rudeness and an aversion to shaking hands bordering on the pathological that did nothing to dispel this idea. He had (past tense, because I’m certain it’s gone by now) a habit of not smiling, yet when he did finally smile it was bashful and childlike and changed his face completely. He was (and still is, despite the inevitable weight loss) big and tough looking, and it’s the reason kids living beside railway tracks shout “Bodyguard” at him as he walks by.

I didn’t realise he was half Indian until a year or so after I got to know him. By that point “Beachenders”, as we sometimes called the soap opera our lives descended into, had run its course, at least for me. Some of the crowd who’d built our little scene returned to London and elsewhere never to return, some settled down, more just continued their lives with my presence in them shown to be nothing more than a passing blip. I’d moved away myself, first to Delhi and then Mumbai, to try and make a life, and watched new travellers come and go from afar, with an odd mix of nostalgia, benevolence, weariness and snobbish superiority.  

I stayed in touch with Max though. In fact, of all the relationships built in those days, ours was one of the only ones that didn’t crumble. The earlier revelation about his heritage had cleared up a lot of the initial mystery about him, and explained how he’d lived in Goa so easily, how he happened to run a gym and a furniture shop and other business interests, and how he’d been able to deal with locals as if he was one. But it led to other questions too. Why was he so secretive about everything? Why did he hide his generosity and sensitivity behind a tough man’s disguise? Why did he lead this double life, with almost a sense of shame about his Indian blood?  

As he opened up more and more, details about his past came to light that helped explain some things. He grew up in South London with his single mother, originally from Bangalore, with his German father long gone. Mother and son (along with twin sister and younger brother) lived together with his Indian grandparents above their shop. He suffered full deafness for almost a year when he was ten and partial deafness for the years around that, leaving him to fail his 11+ exams and be placed in a "special school" for the handicapped and delinquent. He was bullied as a result, and shy and quite scrawny. Racism in London was rife at the time, and the pain of this was no doubt compounded by an uncertainty of identity, of never quite being sure where he belonged. You see none of this when you look at him now of course. You only see Max with the body an action star, and it’s this perception he's projected into the world. But he built this body later, when he was in his twenties, and beneath it all, if you know how to look, you can still make out the wounded boy and know that his rudeness is really shyness and that it’s nothing the body can ever completely take away.

Into all of this came the walk, which is the reason I’m writing this now. I’m pleased to say I had something to do with its inception, although I admit I don’t remember the conversation we had at the time. Apparently he was talking about doing something for charity, a walk perhaps, and into this I said flippantly: “Well if you’re going to do a walk why don’t you just walk the whole of India?” Sure, most people would dream of doing it, but not many would follow it through.

Looking back I realise he’d been itching to do something meaningful for a long time, trying to find something bigger than himself, something that would help other people while helping him find his place in the world. He’d tried something on a smaller scale a few years earlier, a garbage collection initiative in South Goa, but that had fallen apart when the shopkeepers wouldn’t put up the necessary (very small) amount of cash they were each required to give to make it workable. 

When he told me about the walk the first thing I thought was “he has the willpower and the determination, but how will he survive the food?” You see he drank coffee in the morning and ate western food all day long. In fact, for as long as I’d known him he’d refused to even touch Indian food. Knowing what I do now it seems another pathology, another rejection of the days above his grandparents’ shop. And so the idea of him eating rice and dal and idli was ludicrous.

But, like I said, I never doubted his determination. And as the idea took shape and became a reality, and the necessary preparations forced him to sit down to poori bhaji and chai in the mornings (alongside the copious amounts of paperwork required for registering a charity), his Indian side began to grow and grow and gradually work its way free.

The walk itself is as simple as it is ambitious: 20,000km through every state of India. At first I believed it was only the walk that mattered: breaking some record or being the first to do it, or doing it because it was there or because he was restless and didn’t want a 9-5 life. I thought the charity bit was a noble addition to the main event, but I was wrong about that. The way he explained it the walk was never about him.  

But it was about him. It was (and is) a way to reconcile a side of his nature with the whole, a side that has been submerged and irreconcilable for so long. He came to Goa (which is forever India-but-not-quite) and he clung to the edges for a while, peering across the border into his motherland, secretly weighing up the odds. Now he’s let go. This isn’t unique of course. Plenty of NRIs, half Indians, OCIs, PIOs and plain old white travellers have come to the motherland to “find themselves”. Each one tends to believe his or her story is unique. Max has never said this; he's never fallen into the trap. But, regardless of the cliché, it’s true. It’s him discovering a part of himself in a place that’s a part of him; it’s there in him wanting to help the needy, sometimes naively, often bravely, but always sincerely. And it’s there in him wanting proudly to belong.

*

So, jump forward almost a year. I’m on the way to see him early in the morning on the day he’s due to start the walk, November 1^st 2011. Panaji, the Goan capital city – in truth a half-beautiful, half-shabby coastal town, depending on where you stand – is very, unseasonably, hot. Inside his hotel room the AC is turned on full but Max is sweating still, dripping with sweat in fact, the perfectly formed beads visible on his forehead waiting to drop. You can almost hear his stomach churning. You can definitely see the rabbit in the headlights of his eyes. He’s packing and repacking his bag, moving things around, picking things up, putting them down again. It’s not that he’s panicking. The fear is there, sure, and the faintly comical sense that he’s only just woken up to what he’s doing, like a boy waking up from a nice dream five minutes before his exam. But really he’s just tired of waiting and all he wants to do now is walk.

We decided to go for a walk around the block then, and that was good for him. We talked about other things, bought some cigarettes and tried to find coffee. When we got back to the room I took a couple of photos. He was supposed to be going to a certain place alongside the Mandovi River very soon where the press and supporters and the charities he was supporting would be waiting to send him off. We joked about skipping it all, just getting the backpack on, going out of the hotel and walking in the opposite direction, down an alleyway, the Hollywood option of joining the highway and becoming a wanderer, spotted twenty years later wearing nothing but a loincloth and a flowing white beard, not knowing his own name. But it wasn’t an option, and the walk was not just his walk anymore.

I think that first day was the hardest. He’d used up so much adrenaline by the time he hit the road that he was exhausted right away, and by the time he reached Margao in the evening he was a wreck. It didn’t help that the walk started close to midday, with the sun beating down on a hot, polluted highway, full of tourist taxis stopping to ask him if he wanted a ride. It was a false start in many ways and it wasn’t until he left Goa – his comfort zone – that it really started to come alive.

I followed his progress all the way through Karnataka and Kerala by text and email and his Facebook page. Then, after he left the southern tip of the country and was heading back up toward Chennai on the east coast in late December, I managed to arrange an email interview with him, sending a bunch of questions that he wrote up and emailed back to me over the next couple of days. Here it is: 

The first thing I wanted to ask is how you’ve adapted in general to life on the road.

I’d say that while my body's rhythm has accelerated due to the daily walks I feel that my heart has slowed down and I’ve become calm in my mind and calmer generally within. Even though the pace and environment is tough externally my thoughts drift in and out of me, they go like gentle waves. I have more of a feeling with things, which settles me; there’s no need to rush, although I do still walk at a fast pace if there’s distance to cover. I’d say that although the sun blazes down and I’m still in a constant sweat, I don't feel it anymore.

How have you dealt with the various injuries, bites, strains and pains that have no doubt come your way? Have you discovered any local remedies or advice?

I’ve been lucky with bites; I've have had no bites other than the odd mosquito. I keep indoors when I can during mosquito time at dusk and if outside I keep away from sitting water. For swollen feet, which I get when I walk over 35km, I place my feet in a bucket of hot and then cold water as advised by many locals. Mustard oil, also advised by a local, helps to soothe my feet after the buckets. 

With injuries, strains and pains I massage the area if I can get to it and stretch the area around it by simple stretching movements. I monitor the area as I go from day to day and decide how best to deal with it. There’s a possible trapped nerves that needs to be endured until I reach Chennai. The list of 'injuries' is as follows: swollen feet, blisters, left eye infection causing mild loss of sight, sore hips / shoulders in general, right thigh (that nerve), bruised toenails (decline walks and railway lines). 

Do you like your days?

I like my days and I don't like my days! I first liked getting up to walk with the sunrise but now, as the days have worn me down, I have trouble getting up at 5am and want to stay in bed. But then, when I do see the sunrise, it sort of wakes me up and I am always glad to be up....  I think that since leaving Kanyakumari the tempo, the effort and the unknown is much greater. Before Kanyak I knew I would get food and drink pretty much whenever I needed it and a bed as I was walking through populated areas. Now, since Kanyak, that's changed. The roads are endless, the sun is ruthless, there is hardly a soul around except those that I take pics of, literally. It is a lonely road and it is really hard to keep motivated. I scream and shout at myself half of the time just to keep it going, to keep to the pace knowing that I have 50km to go before hitting the next place where I might or might not find a bed.

Before Kanyak I was meeting so many people, so many ideas came to life through these people and I loved getting up to see what the day would bring...the opportunities where I could help someone, a family, an orphanage etc. Now it has flipped a little; it is more focused on me getting through each day, almost survival of my will and determination. 

What do you think about?

Thoughts seem to pop up from nowhere. The mission is always there in the background of course. But I think about my mum a lot, about her life in India, about my grandmother’s life in India. It seems more real now; I can taste it rather than just imagine how it might have been. I can see them in reality, doing the things that their stories told. My nan always liked milky, sweet tea, for example, and this is chai, but I didn't put that together until this walk. Also so many families running little shops, chai shops, sweets, soft drinks, I see how it translates to the Indian shopkeepers in the UK. Something that I was ashamed of because of the racism but now I get for what it is, if that makes sense.  

I think of life, of nature, of being as one with all things. I get angry with all the trillions that have gone in the past to alleviate poverty but poverty is still rife.

I get angry knowing that India has the largest deposit of black money than any other country yet it also has such a high percentage of poverty as well.

I drift into silence, into nothingness a lot. I almost cry when I’m in this state of no thought.

Do you miss anything?

I cannot say that I miss much. I miss intimacy - not sex - intimacy in holding hands, in a kiss, in a hug... I miss having a friend to talk to when I am suffering or when I am excited. I miss sharing moments.

When you first enter a new town or village what do you look out for? What's your general routine and how do you go about finding a room? What are some of the rooms you've stayed in like, best and worst?

I can tell when a town is coming up from a few things: the odd rickshaw that becomes a few, the web of electricity cables, then a school, a higher population. A railway station is also a good sign. As I first walk down the main street I look to see down the side streets, how far back they go. Then I check for a bank, banks do not get put there without the need. I then look for a shop to get a chai or anything to start a conversation - they usually speak first, like where are you from etc, then it gets to me walking and looking for a place to sleep. I have had places that are infested with ants and cockroaches, shit on the washroom floor or smeared on the walls! In these I can't sleep and this has an effect on the next couple of days of walking. Other times I will spend more for a decent room if there is one - I need my sleep, I need to feel comfortable to some degree just for my health.

Have you picked up any new habits or rituals? 

If passing next to a banyan tree I will place my right palm on it for a second before moving on. I will always place my right hand on my heart in greeting, a namaste as well… I’ve never liked handshakes anyway. I always pay with my right hand now. Now I drink chai, not coffee. I will always show the human subject of a photo the photo and ask their approval and if it’s ok, or ask before taking the shot. I will pause at the morning puja, let the music of it in; let the meaning flow before continuing to walk as I touch my heart with my right hand. I will always want to touch someone that I have spoken to, like to brush them on the shoulder, in thanks, to feel their energy, to pass it between each of us. I don't always do this though, it’s a feeling.

And any new food or drink?

I haven’t discovered anything new so much as been reacquainted with my mum’s cooking! The samba, the chutney, the poori and so much more that’s normal for everyone. And chai has become a morning ritual. 

After Kanyakumari you’ve left the coastline, something you hadn’t originally planned to do. For so many people the coast gives security, comfort, direction. Now the weather has changed, the people are fewer. Do you feel any nervousness about this?

Yes, I was nervous about leaving the coast. The shoreline was my friend, I knew which way to go and I could pitch my tent on the beach if I needed to in relative safety. Now I’m in open range with not a clue which way to go except north/north east. I feel like I am in a wilderness - the Wild West almost with little ghost towns popping up here and there. However I’m getting used to it, even if still a little apprehensive about what’s out there...