The delightful With Cyclists Around the World is the story of how six young Parsi men, members of the Bombay Weightlifting Club, set off on their bicycles in October 1923. When Jal Bapasola, Rustom Bhumgara and Adi Hakim, the three who completed the journey, returned to Bombay in March 1928, they had cycled 71,000km around the world. They weren’t the first; Thomas Stevens did it over 1884-86. Nor was theirs the most unbelievable, an honour that can only belong to Annie Kopchovsky, who at age 25, became the first woman to cycle around the world, a journey undertaken over 1894-95 to settle a bet between two wealthy Bostonians.
But they were the first Indians, and that makes for a thoroughly unusual and entertaining travel book. Consider their first taste of Europe: The dirty, poverty-stricken southern Italy of the time clearly did not impress our tourists. “We do not think a laundry business could succeed in this part of the world,” and later; “There is a proverb, ‘see Naples and die’. We have seen Naples and do not understand what the proverb means.” To anyone who’s had to bear First-Worlders slagging off the subcontinent (the rants on craigslist.com have to be seen to be believed) these delicious barbs are priceless. And our adventurers certainly aren’t mere whiners. When there is beauty, as in the sheer magic wrought in Florence by legendary architects and designers such as Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, no praise is high enough.
Later, in Austria and Belgium, they are sensitive enough to see the soliciting by women as the sad fallout of a brutal world war. Equally, they aren’t so buttoned up that they can’t enjoy an evening of erotic Parisian cabaret. This attitude is one of the pleasures of the book, because we are being treated to the authentic voices of the sort of Indian men generally not encountered in literature. These cyclists are confident, curious and, above all, tough — although they are the sort of nice young men you might bring home to meet your folks, they are quite definitely no effete apologists from some battered subaltern state. More than one potentially sticky situation is alleviated because the perpetrators realise our boys have the stomach for a scrap; they also often raise funds for their ongoing travels with boxing bouts and “exhibitions of strength”, such as smashing boulders on their chests.
It’s interesting, too, to see the ritual humiliation of entry to the United States isn’t new. In their words: “The Immigration Laws of the US are enforced with strictness and a jealousy that is almost unprecedented.” It’s as if to say that the US is the world’s worst dog-in-the-manger, and a thoroughly racist one at that, as they point out. And yet they are at pains to describe what an absolutely wonderful manger the country is. Even that description pales before the account of their travel through Japan, Korea, China and South-east Asia, in lands that have since been changed almost beyond recognition by war, politics and astonishing economic growth. It’s a look into the past that’s in its own way just as revealing as the sad contrast with the West Asia that they traversed. It was brutally tough for our cyclists, but today only a madman with a death wish might care to retrace this part of their journey.
Sloppy editing, though, mars the book. Several longueurs merely make it a product of its time, but perhaps not at the cost of details such as which of the six original cyclists went where (a separate account by a great-nephew of one rider is more explicit). Scores of typographical errors, haphazard captioning (individuals in photos aren’t identified left to right, and Navroz Baug has somehow travelled from Lalbaug in Parel to Dadar, for instance) and the simply mystifying elision of everything between Bombay and Honolulu on the world map showing their route are just unfortunate. Bombay’s intrepid cyclists deserved better, but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the book.