From Jester To King XLVIII

The old salt road/the Karakoram Highway running all the way from Timbuktu (Timor) to Moscow and right on through to London. Which fact I proudly pointed out to the young man sitting behind me as soon as I came to realise. It was something in the road signs, something jogging my memory, something I’d read in the guide books a long time ago. The jalopy wasn’t impressive, all our things stuffed in the back, but it was certainly a thrill to think that the road we were on stretched all the way back to the homeland. Young Babu needed to be dropped off at the road market so we had to move off the front seat to let him pass out. The vehicle was in the vein of the ubiquitous moto-remorque/moto-taxi/tuktuk the ones you find thronging the subcontinent, and to take it all the way on this three thousand mile odyssey was a truly great endeavour. But Lalu my guide reassured me we had everything we needed. Plus he had a young wife with kids and had to make regular stop-offs on the way either to sell the merchandise he already had or buy more to sell later on. He was friendly and reassuring, and I felt safe with him. And he knew where my stuff was under the melee because whenever I expressed concern, he upended everything and pulled out my sleeping bag with in the blink of an eye. But when we stopped to let out Young Babu I was disappointed because I just wanted to be on the open road and see it deliver its promise, that is see the scenery transform from the chaos of India to the sedate wilderness of the steppe.

We stopped in the casino in Salonika for the poker and there lo and behold was my old friend Gyros. Who was not so much as boasting about the recent conquest of his vivacious black girlfriend, who was (she was) swanning around up and down the stairs via the stage all primped up and preen, but moreso expressing his joy at have gotten her in the first place, whereupon I couldn’t help but point out to him that this woman was your typical arm-candy type, a vacant plot, the type of girl who’s in it for the appearance rather than the substance, I knew the type, in fact I might have even known the girl myself. And so he got all defensive telling me I was wrong, doubting my capacity to know anything better than he did and it became a tacit battle of who knows more about life and the world around us although I felt secure in my assessment and knew I wasn’t trying to get one over, my motive being to set him straight on something he hadn’t seen or paid attention to. But what an overexcited child and I’d never seen him so enthused. The tournament was huge and we had to do a redraw on the scoresheet making sure every single one of the players had been set out correctly. And then I caught sight of Big Jonny Jones, and the mere sight of him causes ripples and when he stood on the intro pod he seemed to have grown at least another foot in height since I’d last seen him, I hardly came up to his navel, and he seemed to be in his usual good spirits teeming with arrogance and the ready knowledge that he was the man to beat, and everyone was gathering around him giving him the attention he was craving and I looked at the whole thing with more than a measure of irritation, how the people always get sucked in, how you can’t really do anything to stop them, hype being hype, just don’t let it get to you.