"None Is A Stranger"
Calcutta, India
February 23, 1985
Dear Folks,
The slow waters of the river cast back the sun's last light like some old dirty mirror. This was, I pondered sadly, perhaps the final time our meandering paths would ever cross. For behind me were the entire width of the Indian subcontinent and the 1,500 miles of the Grand Trunk Road.
I was done, or nearly so. Calcutta, the "Royal Route's" eastern-most anchor, was but a few hundred meters away at the end of the bridge on which I'd paused. It was so hard to believe I'd actually done it, actually made all those supposedly "deadly" and "diseased" miles between the Afghanistan border and Calcutta on foot and alone.
Gripping the bridge railing and standing tall, I looked back toward the land to which I'd just given so much of my time and emotions. A river breeze tousled my hair and tickled the stubble on my cheeks. I laughed aloud, causing a rainbow of parrots to stretch out over the river. How utterly absurd to think that all I have seen, learned and felt these past months could ever be put into ordinary words! There was nothing in any dictionary that could have described my time here.
I watched in awe as the sun settled onto the lance of a poor farmer's rake and burst into the heraldic rays of a magic wand. Was not all I'd seen the greatest magic possible? Surely every second was a miracle.
A rumble to my right caused me to turn. There, with its smokestack horns flaring and its dark labyrinth snarling, lay the "Black Hole" . . . Calcutta! With a never-ending poverty stirring restlessly inside its hulk, it looked to be the most evil of urban pain. But it didn't scare me in the least. If I am sure of anything, it is that fear is an unnecessary part of life. Oh, to be sure, there were dangers inside that beast, but I also knew from my journeys that they would quickly flee in the face of boldness.
My walking has shown me that fear need be a reality only to those who don't care to see past man's false worlds and experience the universe as it really is. So much of what we have been told in ignorance is taken for granted, when all we need do is look for ourselves to see that what we had feared is really absurd. Why, I wondered sadly, do so many end their pilgrimage in life with empty eyes, when all those years they had been surrounded with so much wonderment?
India had shared much with me, and not all of it was beautiful, particularly the widespread bribe-taking, police brutality and horrible public education and high illiteracy. Yet, I also knew that even those had been invaluable to me, if I realized that those things were not to feared, but to be viewed as a challenge.
An infant democracy of only 38 years, India's philosophy for its nearly one-billion people is taken from Mahatma Gandhi, a simple villager who became a dominant figure in their war for independence from the British. As our Martin Luther King did later, Gandhi stressed non-violence and peaceful co-existence. Because of my being from the nuclear superpower America, I found myself continually having to answer for the current nuclear race madness between the United States and the Soviet Union. India, the leader of the Third World (or the "third superpower," as they like to say) forced me into being a sort of "backroad diplomat" more times than I cared for.
All across this world, even in some of the most isolated spots, I have found the vision of a dead planet, charred by nuclear war, to be on most people's minds. Their sense of fatalism and their staunch conviction that nuclear destruction from the arsenals of America and Russia is a certainty is enough to shake the confidence of even the most naive optimist. In India that sense of doom was the strongest yet.
Unfortunately, I had no answers for their worried faces. I have no clear idea why the superpowers keep building so many nuclear weapons. I could, however, share the words of a village sage I shared tea with one night: "My child," he said slowly, staring into a campfire, "if you want peace, look not at others' faults, but to your own. You and I and the rest must learn to understand that none is a stranger. The world belongs to all. When we seek only for goodness and the beauty God has placed in every single man and woman, then will evil lose its hold. Then we will know peace."
Of all the treasures India gave me, surely that sage's words were some of the most priceless. They were nothing new, of course, for those same words have been said in a million other ways by countless men of peace. Yet, the truth in those words still rings out as crisply as ever.
Now, if only more would have the boldness to live those words.
Taking one last look at an Indian sunset, then at a garland swirling down the Ganges, I shouldered my heavy pack ... and continued my journey.
Steven