(First chapter of my book: “Walking Across the Eastern Seaboard” with Mani)
“Take the first step in faith you don’t have to see the whole staircase just take the first step” – Martin Luther King Jr. 1929-1968
BEGINNINGS
WE NEVER HEARD THE STARTING GUN. From several hundred yards in front of us came a great cheer and the crowd of twelve thousand runners began to uncoil. We could sense the sudden release of tension up ahead, but, being positioned near the back of the pack, we could see only the other runners immediately around us, each poised to begin as soon as the space ahead opened up. Several minutes went by before we could take a single step. Already the runners at the front would have run half a mile. But then, Mani and I weren’t here to win the Boston Marathon, or even to compete. We were unofficial entrants, having arrived barely two days before, too late to register. That suited us fine. No point in wearing ourselves out. For us, this was just the beginning. When the other runners completed the mandatory twenty-six miles and 365 yards, we would be the only ones not to stop. To reach our own finish-line–Key West, Florida–we had more than 2,500 miles and ten months to go.
Already it was hot, and my new sweatshirt was feeling itchy and uncomfortable. I’d bought it just that morning with a precious $12 of the last $288 Mani and I had to our names. A newscaster on TV the night before had predicted snow (I later learned I’d been watching the ski report for the mountains of New Hampshire, not the Boston weather report) and when I went out that morning for a 20-minute wake-up jog through the Boston suburbs I could feel the chill right through my bones. It never gets that cold where I live in central India; the record all-time low in Hyderabad, my home town, is barely 20 degrees Celsius–about 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Actually, it was just in the 40’s F. when I went jogging that morning, but to me it seemed near-freezing. Figuring the rest of the day would bring more of the same, not to mention the snow the newscaster had predicted, I convinced Mani, our frugal treasurer, to part with $24–$12 each–and we bought the two warm, hooded sweatshirts that, we hoped, would get us safely through the frigid conditions we expected during the race.
And now here we were just a few hours later, with the Marathon barely begun, and already the temperature had risen into the 70’s and within a couple of hours would be pushing 90. Even as the crowd of runners uncoiled and we took our first hesitant steps, those lush and lovely gray sweatshirts with the drawstring hoods and the white flannel lining were getting heavier and heavier and beginning to feel like grubby old sheepskins against our sweating torsos. Since we knew absolutely nobody who could hold them for us in all that vast crowd of spectators, it soon became clear we would have to throw them away or else be hopelessly weighed down, half poached in our own juices.
But at least we were beginning to move. The problem was, for the first few minutes it was like thrashing around in a tossing sea of knees and elbows. Almost immediately someone stepped on my foot, right on the instep, and I nearly dropped to one knee and would have stopped right there except I was afraid I might be trampled. For a moment I grabbed onto Mani’s shoulder and he was so surprised we both nearly fell down. I was supposed to be the experienced runner; Mani had never even run in a race before. For months I had been training him. Yet here I was, not a hundred steps into the Marathon, holding on to him for dear life. We hobbled along, the two of us, like a couple of tottering drunks, holding each other up. If I wasn’t in such pain, I would have burst out laughing.
I remember thinking: Some beginning!
All the while, the cheers and screams of the crowd drowned out my groans. We could barely hear some people nearby shouting:
“Hey, you can make it!”
“Don’t give up!”
“Keep going, you guys!”
I was amazed. They were actually encouraging us! If this were India, we’d have been the butt of a dozen jokes and insults. Most people in India think running for the sake of running is totally crazy. When I used to go out jogging in Hyderabad, I’d get comments like:
“Hey, you’re going the wrong way! The insane asylum’s that way!”
or–
“Look at the guy streaking!”
or–
“Catch the thief! He’s getting away!”
Stray dogs would chase me down the street. I used to keep a pocketful of small stones for that purpose, and became an excellent marksman until one day I accidentally killed a squirrel and felt so bad I never carried the stones again. No fancy runner’s shoes for me in those days. Bare feet were my all-purpose footgear, thorns and broken glass and rusty nails, as well as scorpions and snakes, my constant enemies.
And yet I loved what they call the “runner’s high,” the physical elation of moving effortlessly through space like some transcendent spirit, my breath and the wind indistinguishable, the rhythm of my body caught up in the rhythm of the Universe. Early every morning for years, silently intoning the sacred and infinite word “Om!” as I ran, I dissolved myself in speed and distance, finding in pure and unattached running my own way to the spiritual center of my being–that focus of the soul, where self meets Self–spoken of by Lord Krishna in the holy Bhagavad Gita, or “Song of God.”
But right now the center of my being was the pain in my right foot and my spiritual support was Mani’s left shoulder. I knew if I stopped here, at the very beginning, it could cast a shadow across our whole journey. Pulling away, I managed to lurch along on my own, focusing on the pain, trying to isolate it, to surround it with a cocoon of consciousness. I ran right into it and then right through it. Ever so gradually the throbbing began to subside. Thankfully, nothing seemed to be broken. After a few minutes I was able to put enough weight on my right foot to regain a regular, if gimpy, running rhythm. I never stopped. My breathing evened out. At one point I wrestled the by now sopping-wet sweatshirt over my shoulders and gave it a fling into the crowd of spectators lining the curb. I vaguely saw a woman reach out and grab it and heard her shout “Thank you! Thank you!” as if it were some kind of heavenly raiment.
Almost instantly I felt a thousand pounds lighter. I began picking up speed, passing a few of the slower runners. The Lord Krishna would be laughing at me. It was He, I knew, who had stepped on my foot to test me, to compel me to remember Him. He was the pain, and He was the strength to overcome the pain. He was the breath in my heaving lungs, and He was the rhythm in my pistoning legs. He was running, not I.
Maybe twenty minutes had passed maybe a century. I glanced around to see if Mani was doing all right, but he was nowhere to be seen. Had he dropped behind, or gone on ahead during my troubles? I knew he had painful blisters on both heels from his new running shoes. He might have stopped, or fallen down, or even quit. Krishna could be testing him, too. Still, I felt responsible for him. After all, this was my idea, not his.
My father, may he read this in good health, once told me when I was a child: “Chandrapal, your mind is as full of ideas as a banyan tree is full of monkeys!”
One of my crazy ideas, back in 1983, had been to run with a group of student friends from the Himalayas on the Pakistan border to the southern tip of India–about 7,500 kilometers or 4,000 plus miles. That took us three months, with two of us running and two of us cycling ahead each day with our gear. Mrs. Indira Gandhi herself even joined us for a few steps when we passed through New Delhi. She approved of our project because it promoted strenuous exercise and outdoorsmanship–neither of which, unfortunately, have gained the kind of popularity in India that they have in the States. Even though the Himalayas are in our own backyard, we have for the most part left the challenge of climbing them to foreigners. People in India will wait at a bus stop for hours rather than walk or run a few miles. Children grow up in glass cages with ten thousand bars–ten thousand commandments telling them what not to do. Don’t take risks. Don’t upset your parents. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Don’t, don’t, don’t. This may keep them out of trouble, but it stifles initiative. My parents taught me otherwise. Though they never really understood my passion for running, they still encouraged me to pursue it. They told me to go out and seize life–not be seized by it. “Only when you face death do you know the meaning of life,” my Dad said. Whatever project or crazy idea I came up with, he would weigh the pros and cons with me, and then let me decide. Only that way, he said, could I learn to ‘discriminate.’ He and my mother looked on with a certain bemused tolerance when, with a group of friends–at the suggestion of my Hatha yoga teacher–I launched an adventure club in Hyderabad, affiliated with the National Adventure Foundation, a private organization that promotes adventure and outdoor activities for India’s youth. We called our chapter the Andhra Pradesh Sky Rockers Adventure Club. Its chief function was, originally, to promote hang gliding in India (another of my crazy ideas) but, since hang gliders turned out to cost more than one man’s expected wages for a lifetime, we kept the name (which I still like) but changed the focus to a much cheaper and more practical kind of adventure: running. (Already I was learning to ‘discriminate’!) That led to the run through India and, ultimately, to this journey through America.
Mani, as I’ve said, was no runner. He’d been the recording secretary of the Sky Rockers, and did most of his exercise on the flashy red motorbike his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday. When we made the run through India, he didn’t go. He weighed nearly 200 pounds back then and he wasn’t in condition. Then, when I started dreaming out loud about running through America, Mani decided the time had come to break out of his glass cage. He sold the motorbike, explained to his worried parents and grandparents that there was no dissuading him, and put himself in training. He became my shadow whenever I went out jogging or cycling. Within a year he’d sweated himself down to a lean, taut, hard-muscled 145 pounds. He looked–and acted–like a completely new human being. Though he lacked my speed, he developed impressive endurance, and, even more important, he brought to our project a ready smile and a buoyant optimism that would shine through many a dark moment. As it turned out, he would be the only other Sky Rocker to come to America with me, and I couldn’t have had a better companion.
Originally, we’d planned that he would follow along behind me on a bicycle, carrying our gear while I did the running. But he came to dislike the idea. “I’ll run, too!” he insisted. Finally, I agreed, though it meant we’d have to find some other way to shuttle our gear. We couldn’t run 30-40 miles a day with 70-pound knapsacks on our backs.
Then, shortly after we arrived in America, what had begun as an adventure became a cause. I’ll never forget that night in early December 1984. We were watching TV while staying at my cousin Gadwal’s apartment outside Washington, D.C. A familiar image came on the screen: the city of Bhopal in central India, about 1,500 kilometers north of Hyderabad….Then, to our growing horror, came the unbelievable news of the poison-gas leak at the Union Carbide plant. Listening with numbed disbelief, seeing more than 2,000 lives no different than our own erased by that invisible cloud, we found ourselves weeping uncontrollably. We felt not only the pain of India; we felt the pain of America. We decided that very night that we would dedicate our run to raising money for the victims of Bhopal.
That’s why we now wore the words “Running for Bhopal” on our t-shirts: those words had become our slogan, our identity. An Indian-American cultural organization had agreed to sponsor us and handle all financial contributions we would raise for Bhopal. Mani and I would simply run and ask people along the way to contribute what they could. Their checks would be sent directly to the sponsor; we would never touch the money. The sponsor, in turn, agreed to pay the insurance for our run and also to arrange our itinerary so that somebody would always be there to shuttle our knapsacks to some prearranged point up ahead. It seemed like the perfect arrangement.
The only money we would accept personally would be what people along the way gave us specifically for the run itself. We’d have preferred to avoid even that, but, by Indian law, we were allowed to take a maximum of only $500 each out of the country, and, by U.S. law, we couldn’t work for a living. Hence, of necessity, we would have to rely on the generosity of others to survive. That suited us just fine. None less than Mahatma Gandhi himself had done the same, accepting the kindness of strangers while taking his famous Padayatras, or Freedom Walks, through the length and breadth of India to preach the gospel of independence to the masses. Our task was much easier. No preaching would be necessary. Mani and I had only to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. The Lord Krishna–and friends we met along the way–would take care of our meager material needs.
I was running freely now, still worried about Mani’s whereabouts, but realizing there was nothing I could do until I saw him at the end of the race. The pain in my foot still ached at the back of my consciousness but no longer hampered my stride. For the first time I could enjoy the exhilarating sensation of being swept along in this great annual human migration called the Boston Marathon. I started passing other runners, not really to compete but just to feel a breeze against my face and body.
I came up along a skinny redheaded fellow who gave me an irritated sidelong glance and started speeding up at my approach. Instinctively, I speeded up with him, and this in turn spurred him on even more. There were thousands of runners ahead of us and thousands more behind, yet here we were having a two-man race of our own in the middle of it all! And then I just pulled back and let him go. I didn’t want to give in to that old feeling, that compulsive lust to win at all costs. For years I wallowed in it, not realizing that the real victory is in detachment. I entered every race in Hyderabad and drove myself to the limit, becoming a consistent winner. Defeat, or even second place, was unthinkable to me. I had to win. I remember the time I convinced my good friend G.Y. to enter the 8-kilometer Coca Cola race in Hyderabad. We were running one-two, far ahead of the pack, when I tripped on a stone and fell, gashing my knee. G.Y. slowed down to help me to the finish-line. Then–just as we approached it–I lunged forward to come in just ahead of him. That broke his heart, made him quit running forever, and destroyed our friendship. I was so remorseful at my own dirty trick that I gave up all formal competition after that.
Now I even felt relief as that redheaded fellow pulled ahead of me. Let him go. I wished him well. I was here for another purpose. In India we have a phrase for running: ‘Eating the wind.’ That’s what I was doing now, eating the wind. It was suddenly delicious. And just as my throat started parching out, some blessed soul thrust into my hand a dripping wedge of orange. This I put gratefully between my lips and sucked on meditatively as I ran. The juice seemed almost wickedly sweet, even intoxicating. The wind, the orange, and I–we ran along together. It was pure sensation. Unconsciously, involuntarily, the sacred syllable “Om” arose within me, becoming one with the noise of the crowd. I felt at ease for the first time since my arrival in America months before. These people were my friends. I had nothing to fear. We were welcome here. Our “Run for Bhopal” was going to be a success! My anxieties flowed out of me. All of Boston, all of America, all of India was running with us.
And I loved this American crowd. They emanated energy, a wild yet good-natured enthusiasm that was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I’ve been in great crowds–the crushing mob at the Bombay Railway Terminal, the mad hordes at the annual Hyderabad Industrial Fair, the wailing thousands of sweating half-naked pilgrims at the Juggernaut Festival pulling the huge sacred chariot with velvet ropes while women and children whip them on with satin ribbons (sometimes careless zealots get crushed beneath the wheels as they cry “Jai Jagganatha Prabhu Ki Jai–Victory to Lord Jagganatha!”). But this American crowd–it was casual, relaxed, smiling, and laughing. Everyone had laid claim to their own space, their own little territory along our route: on a tree limb, on a car-top, sitting along the curb in lawn chairs, standing on plastic ice-coolers…. And all of them, hundreds of thousands of people, were somehow, instantaneously, our personal friends, rooting for us and cheering us on as if we were running this race specifically for them. And in a way we were.
I guess I must have had a smile on my face as I ran. I wanted to shout out, “Hello, America! Thank you, America!”
I kept running. An hour, two hours passed under my feet. The crowd became a blur. I myself became a blur. The running lost its pleasure and became tedious. I had a sense of growing gradually heavier and slower, the way I sometimes do in dreams when I’m running away from some indefinable fear. Mani was still nowhere to be seen, and that nagged at me. Could he be hurt? Should I stop and ask the officials about him? Would he think I’d abandoned him? By now the winners would already have passed the finish line. I still had an hour or more to go. Just finish, I told myself. Just finish!
NEAR THE FOOT of what they call Heartbreak Hill–at about Mile 21–I rounded a curve where volunteers were passing out paper cups of water to the runners. By now I’d been running for about three hours and I could feel some strange palpitations in my chest. I was vaguely dizzy, feeling nauseous, and had the sensation of running in slow motion. My breathing was hoarse and hollow, like a wheezing bellows in my chest. The smile I’d worn a couple of hours before was long gone. Now every molecule in my body was screaming out for me to stop. Just a few yards ahead they were passing out the little paper cups of ice-water. The runners were grabbing one cup to drink and another just to splash back in their faces or over their heads. Thousands of crumpled cups littered the street pavement at this point and there were puddles everywhere. I remember reaching out my left hand to take a cup from one of the volunteers….when suddenly all of Boston, America, and the world slipped out from under me.
I guess I must have skidded eight or ten feet, riding the whole way on my left buttock and repeatedly banging my left elbow. A crowd started to gather around me where I slid to a stop but I somehow picked myself up almost instantly and stumbled on, too embarrassed to stop. “I’m OK! I’m OK!” I shouted out, letting my momentum carry me on. My left side felt like it was on fire. I’d scraped half the skin off my buttock and ground it into that Boston street pavement. And my elbow felt like it might be broken. Half-crouching in pain, with the battered elbow crimped up against my ribs and my right hand reaching around to hold the cloth of my running shorts away from my raw and bleeding buttock, I dragged myself along. I must have looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, a pitiful creature, half doubled over. I only wished no one could see me. But the crowd was everywhere and once again they were cheering!
“Right on!”
“You’re going to make it, baby!”
Now out of that blur of spectators emerged the figure of a pretty black-haired girl, an apparition in white shorts and a skimpy blue halter. She came up alongside me as I hobbled along.
“Hi! she said, “You OK? You need anything?”
I shook my head. “Everything’s fine,” I lied.
Somehow–I don’t know how she managed it because we never stopped moving–she slipped a cool-skinned arm lightly around my overheated shoulders and, as I turned my head towards her in surprise, kissed me full on the mouth. No kiss was ever sweeter or more loving. I drank it in like some magical nectar.
For a few more steps she ran along.
“See you at the Pru!” she said, and then, in a breeze of flowery perfume, she was gone. The Pru–she was talking about the Prudential Tower, where the Marathon finished in downtown Boston.
She would meet me there!
I LURCHED ON, alone with my pain and feverish fantasies. I could still feel her kiss on my lips, a lingering perfume that somehow gave me strength to continue. My mind swam away from reality, transporting me back to another girl and another kiss….Just two years before it had been, while I was riding on a small double-decked gondola-like pleasure boat on Lake Dal in Kashmir (it was the day before we began our run through India)….we were gliding along and I was standing meditatively at the lower rail, peering down into the mirrory waters of the lake. As if in some vision I saw her…or rather, I saw her reflection…a lovely girl on the deck just above me, looking like some celestial nymph. My eyes met hers in the reflection….I could see her lean over the rail, shyly waving a white-gloved hand, blowing me a little kiss from smiling lips….I twisted around and looked up. And then, what made me do it? I clambered up on the rail with the agility of Hanuman, the monkey warrior in the Ramayana, and pulled myself up to her (I could see she was startled and I could smell a tantalizing nutmeg aroma on her breath)….Then–my precarious hold snapping like an overstretched rubber band–my hand slipped, the world gave way, and I was abruptly immersed in the chill Himalayan waters below. Overboard! Me! The ultimate embarrassment! What a fool! What a monkey! I could hear shouts and laughter. I managed to swim back to the boat. Hands reached down to fetch me back up on the board, dripping and humiliated. I was wrapped in towels and rubbed warm. I could have crawled in a hole. And the girl….where was she? Gone. Hiding somewhere on the upper deck, no doubt! I was too mortified to seek her out, and huddled alone and shivering on a bench until the boat docked. I never saw her again.
And would it be the same this time? Would I ever see this Boston girl again? Would she be the one for whom I would build my Taj Mahal? I limped over the crest of Heartbreak Hill…so aptly named! The rest of the run would be downhill. From here on gravity was on my side.
I pulled myself on, one of only a scattering of runners now. The crowd was breaking up, no longer interested in the remaining stragglers. They were all headed down to the Pru to cheer the winners. Unnoticed, uncheered, I finally reached the finish line. A crowd of people was clapping, but it didn’t seem to be for me. Someone put a silvery ’space blanket’ around me–given to all the runners to conserve body heat (by now it was late afternoon and getting cooler again and I remember wishing almost feverishly that I hadn’t thrown away my $12 sweatshirt because I was shivering and my teeth were chattering). I stumbled over to a group of paramedics and was led down into an underground parking garage where some cots had been set up. I laid down and went into a faint, delirious now. My arms and legs were twitching uncontrollably. My lungs felt like some huge balloons in my chest, about to explode. My eyes were on fire. And I was hallucinating….the Kashmir girl with the white gloves….the Boston girl with the blue halter….they were reaching out to me, but our hands couldn’t quite touch….I could smell nutmeg and a flowery perfume….and the terrible ammonia smell of the smelling salts!
I opened my eyes, barely aware of where I was. Every pain in my body was screaming out with a tongue of its own. “You OK?” a man’s voice asked. I nodded, looking around at the crowd that had gathered around me. Someone had put a plastic cup of raspberry yogurt in my hand, also a can of Coke. I put them down, feeling nauseous. My surroundings came into focus. I sat up. Was she there? My eyes searched their faces hopefully for her bright smile. I gazed at the people milling about in the garage. I squinted through the dim light, seeking her out. No, she wasn’t there. Gone! Jilted again! I didn’t even know her name to ask for her. I fell back on the pillow and for fifteen or twenty minutes lay there. I tried, or dreamed that I tried, to resuscitate myself by injecting prana–the vital breath–back into my body. I remembered a quote my Yoga master had taught me from the ancient texts: “Mind is the master of the senses, and prana–breath–is the master of the mind.” To achieve such mastery one practices pranayama–breathe control. I closed my right nostril with my thumb and visualized inhaling the holy prana to three counts of the holy syllable “Om.” I then retained the breath-energy pervading my body; I exhaled to the count of three more “Om’s.” Three times I repeated the process, not daring to do more since I was the merest novice at such things; I had heard of Yoga students dying or going crazy practicing higher forms of pranayama without an experienced guru. I only wanted to restore some sense of inner stability with the ancient technique, not achieve nirvana here in the middle of the Prudential garage! Gradually, without even trying, my breath came more easily, more regularly. My senses started to refocus.
And then I remembered Mani! Had anyone seen him? They shook their heads. I could see they had no idea who I was talking about. I got up and found a telephone. I dialed the number of the Indian family where we had been staying. It was Mani’s voice on the phone! God, how happy I was to hear him! Had he finished the race? Yes! Apparently he had come in just after me. Both of his badly blistered heels were bleeding, but he’d made it–finished the first long-distance race he had ever entered! There was triumph in his voice. “And how did you do, Chandu? He asked.
I paused, not knowing what to say. How to explain it all? I remembered a recent popular phrase I’d heard, one of those wonderful American expressions:
“Piece of cake!” I said.
Copyright © 2007 – 2008 Chandrapal Kaman
