He bought the bicycle in Amritsar midst midday heat weighing in at forty-seven degrees centigrade, a hundred-sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. Equipped with canvas saddlebags he set off. He carried Pepsi-Cola, he carried chapatti, he carried peanuts. He about fell over after two hours.
Coming to a halt at the side of the road he yanked his bicycle up on its rear stand and sat down on a rump of raised dirt. He wore khaki shorts, a floral-print shirt, sandals, sunglasses, and a cap that advertised the Oakland Raiders. Out on the savanna dim vegetation clung to the earth in blotches at a height of one or two inches. Six women in ocher saris were down on their haunches harvesting the herbage.
He took his sunglasses off and held his head in his hands. He was suffering from something like dizziness, sight blurry, bearings off kilter. Wade Rickey was a long ways from Glorieta, New Mexico, and he began to wonder about the wisdom of his endeavor.
Down the road and set back from the road’s shoulder a couple of crows fought for balance on the limbs of a thin tree. Wade stood up and walked his bike down there and stood in a whisper of shade. He was rangy, posture atilt. He opened a warm bottle of Pepsi.
From the opposite direction he had come he saw someone bicycling, hair flared and getting whipped by a passing truck. A wooden box rode the rear rack of the bike. The man was skinny and dark. He wore shorts and a grey shirt. His legs looked like charred sticks. A smile grew on his grizzled face. He crossed over and glided up and stopped.
“Oh, Baba. I am so happy to see you,” the man said, and renewed his smile, teeth stained, lips chapped, lines of age folding his complexion. Wade brought his bottle of Pepsi up and took a drink.
“Where have you been?” the man said.
Wade motioned with his chin in the direction he had come.
“Let us have mango,” the man said, and brought a leg over the bar of his bicycle and pulled the bicycle up on its rear stand and took a mango from a pile of about a half dozen that were in a reed basket attached to the handlebars of his bike. A pocketknife appeared and the man went down onto his haunches, blade of the knife lifting skin from the mango. Wade squatted down next to the man, the two of them facing the road and the savanna beyond that.
The man handed Wade a slice of mango and Wade put it in his mouth. The fruit’s nectar rolled over Wade’s palate like a blanket, Pepsi smothered. The man slipped a piece of mango into his shriveled mouth. On the man’s drawn cheeks sinewy muscle flexed. When he swallowed his Adam’s apple bobbed.
A crow landed on the ground before Wade and the man. The bird cocked its head and eyed the peelings.
“The bird’s destination is here,” the man said, and reached down and picked up a peel and flung it. The bird skipped over and lifted the peel with its beak and glanced around. There was cawing. The bird labored off the ground with its prize. A second crow came dive-bombing down. The crow with the peel veered.
“Destination,” said the man. “What was the bird’s destination before the mango was cut?”
Crows were cawing and coming from out of the hot sky. The man passed Wade another piece of mango. Wade slid it into his mouth. The man separated a final segment from the fruit’s large pit and then tossed the pit. Two crows went after the pit. The man put the last segment of fruit into his mouth. Crows were landing and hopping about. The man picked up the rest of the peelings and tossed them.
“This bird ought to be mythologized,” the man said.
A mess of crows scrambled and fought in the dirt. Wade looked at the birds and then looked at the man.
“Where’d you learn English?” Wade said.
“School. Sixteen years of school, twenty-five years of family and work, and now this.” The man’s voice was reedy.
“What’s this?”
“The bicycle.”
“The bicycle?”
“Four years on the bicycle.”
“Four years?”
Around the large seed of the mango three birds worked viciously with their beaks, the pit flipping and skittering on the ground.
The man stood up and went to the wooden box on his bike and got a plastic bottle and motioned to Wade. Wade came over and the man dribbled water so that Wade could rinse his hands. The man gave Wade the bottle and Wade dribbled water for the man to rinse his hands. The man capped the bottle and returned it to the box.
“Shall we go?” the man said.
Wade looked at the man, but the man only looked back at Wade. Wade went to his bicycle and pushed it off its stand and brought the bike to the road’s chewed edge. The man pushed his bicycle off its stand and brought his bicycle to that same ragged edge. Wade looked out at the savanna and saw everything as vivid.
“I’m going this way,” Wade said, and gestured.
“That’s fine.”
Wade waited. The man stood.
“But you just came from that way,” Wade said.
“It is movement which I seek and the physical aspect that the bicycle provides. In India this is acceptable because it is religion¾youth, adulthood, spirit. I have provided. My sons run the business now and my wife is happy to have me out of her hair.” The man chuckled.
Wade brought a hand up and lifted his cap from his head and wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm. The six women in the reddish saris were gone. Wade settled his cap back on his head.
“Why did you come to India?” the man said.
In the distance a wispy tree wavered in the heat coming off the pan, top of the tree flattened as if some pressure from above were upon its limbs.
“I was tired of TV.”
The man broke out laughing. Wade looked at him. A tooth was missing on the right side of the man’s mouth.
“Baba,” said the man, “we travel for the same reasons.”
Wade stood, looking at the man. The man stopped laughing. Wade looked out at the savanna in the direction of the tree.
“But I have destination,” Wade said.
“And where might that be?” the man asked.
“Cape Comorin.”
“Cape Comorin? Indeed. Southernmost India where the three seas of India gather.”
“Yes.”
“This is the Punjab. That is Tamil Nadu. It is far.”
“I know it.”
“Why not fly?”
“I want to see India,” Wade said.
The man smiled.
“Is there something in that tree out there?” Wade asked.
The man brought a hand up to shade his eyes.
“Vultures.”
“Vultures?”
“It is a full moon tonight,” the man said. “Let us ride today, and let us ride through the night.”
“Vultures?”
“The moon will rise and we will be under it, the same as we are under the sun. But not the same.”
Wade looked at the man’s leathery face.
“Let us not overlook coincidence,” the man said, “for everything on this earth is its subject. To ignore it is to ignore what surrounds us.”
There was a noise and Wade and the man looked to the right. A truck was barreling down the road, its horn blaring. Both Wade and the man watched as the truck approached and then as it flew by, no let up on the horn until it was past Wade and the man. In the truck’s wake orange dust pestered the vehicle’s tailgate. The truck’s sound fading and then went extinct.
“Coincidence?” said Wade.
An orange haze hovered over the road like miasma.
“Yes,” said the man, “coincidence. For of all the places we could be we meet here.”
Wade glanced to his left saw the pit from the mango abandoned in the dirt and with this he understood that the crows were gone. Even their sound was gone.
“In the morning we shall part,” the man said, “for parting is necessary.”
Wade looked out at the tree. The man brought a hand up and scratched his neck.
“Okay,” Wade said. “Let’s ride.”
They mounted their bikes and began pedaling. After about five minutes Wade’s legs found the man’s rhythm, the two of them side by side.
“Why is parting necessary?” Wade asked.
The man took a pack of beedies from his shirt pocket and put a beedie between his lips and then held the pack out for Wade. Wade took a beedie. The man put the pack back in his pocket and then took a lighter from his pocket and lit his beedie and reached over and lit Wade’s, the two bicycles coming very close together.
“No parting, no loneliness,” the man said. “No loneliness, no journey.”
Wade had never smoked a beedie before. He held it out in front of himself and looked at it.
Forty-five minutes passed, its only incidence the heat upon the land and the barrenness of that land, Wade and the man pedaling as if through a still life. But then there appeared something at the side of the road, but it was too distant to be understood. Yet there was something, and for that Wade’s eyes couldn’t leave it, and after a while the barest of structures appeared, its possibilities changing as Wade and the man approached. No activity, yet there was something, be it invitation, be it hope, be it possibility.
“Let us have chai,” the man announced.
Wade looked over. On the man’s face there was no expression save that of weather and age. It took another ten minutes before they arrived and in their arrival there was nothing to sate Wade’s expectation
They pulled their bikes up onto the heavy steel stands that elevated the rear tire and then they stood in the dirt looking in at an open-air affair of a few benches and a few tables made crudely out of unfinished wood as if that wood had been taken from a construction site where concrete had been poured into wooden forms and where those forms now became furniture in the shade of a thatched awning made of sticks and brier. The floor was dirt but of a different variety than what Wade and the man stood in, for both Wade’s and the man’s sandals were sunk pastel fluff, whereas the ground under that thatched canopy was hard packed.
Wade looked right and then looked left and saw evidence of vehicles, rutted ground from when that ground had been wet. But now there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Sweat drizzled on Wade’s arms and legs, eddies of saline and silt marking his skin.
The man moved toward the shade and from inside that shade there arose a man and a woman from in back of a low partition that was hardly higher than the tables. There was no back wall. There were no walls at all. Wade could look through the entire edifice and see the savanna the same as he could see it in every other direction. And there was nothing about the placement of this structure to give it cause¾no trees, no water, no village, no crossroads. Wade’s companion sat down at a table and Wade joined him.
The woman was not young and neither was the man. The woman took their order and the man boiled it up. The transaction took but a word¾chai. It was Wade’s companion who spoke it. The woman, in a simple brown sari, had come to the table and had stood. When she heard the utterance she turned and nodded to the man in back of the partition. The woman was barefoot and around her left ankle there was a silver bracelet. Her skin was dark and her frame was bony and in one nostril of her nose there was a silver stud dotted with a red gem.
Wade heard pumping and then hissing and assumed it to be a gas ring. The man behind the partition moved in a small way, exaggerated motion absent. Above a white T-shirt his collarbone protruded.
The chai arrived in thick glasses via an aluminum tray. It was set down on the wooden table without preamble. It steamed and it was chalky brown and even while on the table Wade could smell its spices. When Wade brought the chai to his lips its aroma funneled into his sinus. He held the glass by its lip. It was the only way to manage the hotness. He sipped tentatively and that’s how it went¾picking the glass up with his fingertips, sipping, setting the glass down on scarred wood. A wind of any strength would have scatter this enterprise across the savanna like so much debris, yet within its structure there was everything that was needed as if there were no error in its making. Wade could hear his companion sucking chai.
After about five minutes there appeared a vehicle. A pinprick at first, but its sound and image quickly grew. The car pulled off the road and stopped in the dirt in front of the chai stall, dust swirling, engine idling while the front doors opened. The driver was a well-dressed man who was corpulent but nothing compared to the woman who emerged from the passenger side. She was rolls of fat all the way down to her toes. Wade saw this as she came into the shade, her feet in a pair of delicate sandals, rings on her plump toes. She wore a cream-colored sari with gold sewn through its hems. Cosmetics blanketed her face. She was middle-aged and her neck, arms, and fingers were decorated with jewelry. On her forehead there was a red mark. She teetered as she walked.
The man wore a white long-sleeved dress shirt along with dark slacks and shiny black shoes, scent of cologne pungent. They had closed the doors of the car, a black Mercedes, but had left the engine to idle, motor of the air conditioner audible.
The woman of the chai stall was on her way to the table where the man and the woman had put themselves but before she got there the man bellowed, “Two chai!” The woman of the chai shop stopped as if by command. She then turned and nodded to the man behind the partition.
The man and the woman from the Mercedes looked around. Their eyes settled on Wade and his companion. The woman seemed too big for the bench she was on. Wade brought his glass of tea up and took a sip.
It was after their tea arrived and after they had sipped it that the well-dressed man stood up and came to Wade’s table.
“What are your qualifications?” the well-dressed man said, while looking at Wade.
Wade looked up at the man, and after a moment Wade said, “Qualifications?”
“Yes. What are your qualifications?”
“Qualifications for what?”
“Qualifications. What are your qualifications?”
Wade looked across the table at his companion and said, “What’s he talking about?”
“He wants to know what degrees you have.”
“Degrees? You mean college degrees?"
“Yes.”
The well-dressed man then spoke to Wade’s companion, but he didn’t speak in English. He used another language.
“Please, speak in English,” Wade’s companion said.
The well-dressed man seemed to dismiss this, but he spoke in English, but he didn’t speak to Wade’s companion. He spoke to Wade.
“What are your qualifications?”
Wade picked up his glass of chai and took a sip and then set the glass down. The well-dressed man shifted his weight. He had left his glass of tea at the table where the woman sat.
“What are your qualifications?” the man repeated.
“I don’t have any.”
“Sorry?”
Wade looked out at the savanna and then looked across the table at his companion and said, “What the hell does he want?”
Wade’s companion let a mischievous expression play on his face. The well-dressed man brought his arms up and crossed them in front of his chest.
“He wants to place you, so he can understand you,” Wade’s companion said.
Wade sat a moment and then he said, “All he’s got to do is look at me and he can understand me.”
Wade’s companion looked up at the well-dressed man and said, “I believe he has responded to your inquiry.”
The well-dressed man unfolded his arms and shot a glance at Wade’s companion and then looked at Wade. He then turned and marched back across the packed dirt to where the woman sat. The well-dressed man picked up his glass of chai and began drinking. When the glass was empty he set it on the table and said something to the woman. The woman stood up and started for the car. The woman of the chai stall came forward and said something to the well-dressed man which stopped him, for he was on his way to the car as well. The well-dressed man looked at the chai-shop woman. The woman only stood. The well-dressed man reached into his pocket and brought out a coin purse and opened it and extracted some coins and put them on the table. The chai-shop woman looked at the coins. The well-dressed man walked to his car and opened the door and got in.
Wade and Wade’s companion and the chai-shop woman and the chai-shop man watched the Mercedes as it accelerated and threw dirt from its rear tires until those tires found purchase on the road. When the Mercedes was distant the quiet of the locale returned.
The chai-shop woman picked up the coins from where the man had left them on the table. She tucked the currency into her garment where one fold overlapped another. Then she picked up the glasses and stepped to the edge of the shade and flung the dregs out onto the dirt.
Wade’s companion got out his pack of beedies and put a beedie between his lips and offered the pack to Wade. Wade took a beedie and the man lit Wade’s beedie and then lit his own.
*
It began well after they had left the chai shop. What Wade noticed first was a heaviness beyond that produced by the spongy asphalt. He thought it was a tire, a slow leak, but then he saw a car appear from over a crest, the vehicle wavering where the blacktop undulated in heat. Wade looked around. It was hard to detect, but after the idea struck he saw it. They were on their way up but not by much. Their pedaling was labored but not strained, and for the longest time the crest of the slope seemed to be moving backwards as if it were a mirage.
When the wobbling of the road lessened Wade began to believe that they were gaining on the slope, and as they neared the crest of that slope Wade noticed his heart beating with anticipation. This grew until he thought he was going to cry. He was so happy, yet it was invented.
They reached the crest and went over it. The land flattened and upon that pebbled surface thorny scrub punctuated an everlasting distance. Wade looked at it as if it were an aberration, for of all the things he had imagined he hadn’t imagined this.
There were wingbeats. Wade looked up and saw a crow, the bird cocking its head and looking down.
“It is the same, yet it is different. This is the magic of the world,” Wade’s companion said.
Wade looked over. The man was pedaling, no expression on his gnarled face. There was something to Wade’s left. He looked. The crow was banking and falling away. Wade turned but the bird fell from sight quickly, its disappearance a mystery in that vast expanse where no trees grew.
Wade’s view returned to the road, and where that road met a flat horizon there dwelled a swath of vapor, and as Wade pedaled he understood that the sun was approaching that enfeebled mist, sky in that distant district mauve.
They pedaled and after a long while shadows of thorny bush threw queer sketches upon the earth. The air brushing Wade’s face carried moisture where moisture hadn’t been before. Overhead the sky begot colors born in the west, and it was under this sky that they now moved.
The End
Michael Onofrey’s stories have appeared in The Evansville Review, Oyez Review, and The William and Mary Review, as well as in other literary journals and magazines. He lives in Japan, where he teaches English as a Second Language.