7,000 miles on two wheels in pursuit of love
As Valentine’s Day approaches and thoughts turn to a romantic gesture, here’s one that makes all others look puny. Pradyumna Kumar, known as PK, was an indian street artist working in a square in new Delhi when, just after 7pm on the evening of December 17, 1975, a blonde swedish backpacker called lotta gave him 10 rupees to draw her.
He was so captivated by her loveliness that his hands wouldn’t stop shaking, so he offered to show her around the city.
they were both aged about 20. lotta, whose family were landed gentry, had been oddly obsessed with asia since girlhood.
PK’s parents had been told by the local snake charmer, when he was still a baby, that he would marry a girl from far, far away and that her family would own land. the relationship seemed predestined. soon, they fell hopelessly, sweetly, chastely in love.
lotta had to return to her home town, near Gothenburg. she promised to come back quickly, but her mother wouldn’t let her, insisting that she complete her course as a music student.
so PK took a decision, refusing to be intimidated by the geographical divide, even though he was so hazy about europe he thought swedes came from switzerland.
the title of this charming book rather gives away what happened next. Desperate to be reunited with lotta, but with no chance of raising the air fare or mustering enough for a car, PK embarked on an epic bicycle journey through Pakistan, afghanistan, iran and turkey.
in istanbul, he sold his bike and continued by train to sweden, where he lives to this day. after nearly 40 years, PK and lotta are still happily married with two grown-up children. that monumental journey changed his life. and yet it was far from the most daunting challenge he had ever faced.
PK grew up in eastern india, in a remote village on the edge of the rainforest said to have inspired Rudyard Kipling’s Just so stories.
But he was born into a family of so-called Untouchables, those blighted indians considered social pariahs under the country’s hidebound caste system. He went to a local school, but was forbidden from mixing with the other pupils, so he had to follow lessons from the veranda. at mealtimes, the cook was careful not to let his ladle so much as brush PK’s bowl.
PK’s talent for drawing won him an art scholarship to new Delhi. But the money covered only his education. Pretty soon, penniless and scarred emotionally by his Untouchable status, he decided to end it all. He lay down by a railway track determined
to throw himself in front of a train, and might have done, had India’s train drivers not been on strike.
After that tragi-comic moment, things took a dramatic turn for the better. PK sketched Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet Union’s first female cosmonaut, who was being paraded through the New Delhi streets in an open-top car. He hadn’t a clue who she was, but when he thrust his drawing into the car, she asked to meet him.
That unlikely encounter soon yielded others, leading all the way to a commissioned portrait of the prime minister, Mrs Gandhi.
PK had achieved celebrity as an artist, but he was still an Untouchable, compelled to scrape a living on the street. Then came the whirlwind romance with Lotta and the impulsive decision to fulfil the snake charmer’s prophecy and head west — on a woman’s bike costing 60 rupees (half the price of a man’s bike).
It was a journey repeatedly facilitated by the kindness of strangers, but also fraught with danger and pitfalls.
At the frontier with Pakistan, the police aggressively turned him back, but melted when he drew flattering portraits of them.
Again and again, PK was nothing if not resourceful. In Kabul, he befriended an Australian woman who slept with an embassy official to get him a visa.
At the West German border, curtly informed that he would be deported, he tearfully and winningly appealed to their sense of romance.
In Copenhagen, he almost had second thoughts himself when he saw a young couple French kissing — in India, someone would have yelled at them and pulled them apart.
But on he went, finally arriving in Gothenburg on May 28, 1977. He and Lotta were married in 1979, two years to the day after the completion of his 7,000-mile journey across continents, lasting almost five months — all in the name of love.