Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road.

Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road Calcutta to Khyber Anthony Weller Marlowe & Company, $22.95, 383 pp.

The Grand Trunk Road presents a daunting prospect to the cow which wants to cross to the other side; the man who dreams of traveling from one end to the other is an exceptional being indeed. It would be difficult to find a more intimidating thoroughfare. To begin with there is its size: 1,525 miles from the Khyber Pass, at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to the city of Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal--from landlocked mountains to the open sea. There is its history, which on the subcontinent is as much about beliefs as it is about rulers. "Four great religions," Anthony Weller points out "--Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism--were born and grew up along the route," which begins in one of man's most ancient crossroads, runs across land traveled by Alexander the Great, passes near the Golden Temple in Amritsar, cuts through the heart of the capital of Delhi, gives a view of the Taj Majal in Agra, gets outshone by the Ganges in Benares, before entering the infamous city of Calcutta. Chronologically, it traverses thirty-five centuries, during which it has given passage to everyone from Buddha to Kipling: ...

Ho! get away, you bullock-man,

you've 'eard the bugle blowed,

There's a regiment a-comin' down

the Grand Trunk Road:

... to the refugees of partition.

And, not to be overlooked, there is its danger. Once famous for professional assassins or "thugs"--one of the many Hindi words incorporated into English--the road is now more feared as a dueling ground for rampaging trucks. Rare is the drive along the Grand Trunk Road that doesn't come across at least one accident. The route has also, through its roadside prostitutes, contributed to the spread of AIOS in India, but the already high-risk nature of their work makes the drivers fairly oblivious to the threat. What is a microscopic virus in the face of an oncoming truck?

It was with all this in mind, of course, that Weller set out on the Grand Trunk Road. He had just finished a novel, and was not heavily booked in Boston (he is a guitarist as well as a writer), and his earlier encounters with India had left him unsatisfied. "Often," he writes wisely, "the places that stay with us most, that possess our imaginations, are the ones we have failed to understand."

The Grand Trunk appeared as a road toward understanding, for it connected not only India with Pakistan but the past with the present. Here he could see "subsistence farmers living like their ancestors did three thousand years ago, while an hour's drive up the Grand Trunk Road the well-off in cities are leaving their computers.... Along the Grand Trunk Road I often had the impression that all the distinct ages of man were crowding the wayside and flourishing in its dust, sheltered by shade trees."

Weller began his journey in Calcutta, specifically choosing to go against the traditional eastward flow of merchants and invaders, and before setting off provides good historical background on the road: its origins under Aryan settlers, its paving by the British, its name referring not to the quality of luggage carried along it but to the fact that it connected all the various branch roads.

Because of restrictions against foreigners driving in India (partly as a device for keeping Indians employed), Weller hired a series of drivers. They add little to the journey in terms of color or conversation, but they do an admirable job of steering clear of trucks.

And Weller's impressive learning makes him less in need of local guides. In Parasnath, he gives insight into the Jains, who believe "in escape through enlightenment--essentially, the perfectibility of man," and are very good with numbers. At Bodh Gaya he writes a brief and lucid discourse on the division in Buddhism between those who regard Buddha as a deity and those who see him as a teacher. Much farther along, in the Punjab, he compares the first Sikh guru, Nanak, to Martin Luther King, Jr., in his efforts "to declare a path to God as ultimately available to any man and free from religious cant."

Weller has a wonderful ability--important in a travel writer--to come upon the odd bit of trivia. One wonders how many other travelers on this road would have found Lawrence Durrell's birthplace (in Jullundur) or discovered the hotel in Lahore where Claude Levi-Strauss stayed while researching Tristes Tropiques. He tells us, in a strange connectiveness, of the fight that the young journalist Kipling nearly had with a young civil servant named O'Dwyer, the same man who would give the order to fire at the massacre in Jallianwala Bagh on April 13,1919, and who, twenty years later in London, would be assassinated by one of the survivors. The Pathans of Peshawar, we learn, have gained world domination in the sport of squash, and thousands of Sikhs are members of the Lions Club because the name Singh--which all male Sikhs bear--means "lion." Of all the groups encountered on this journey, the Pathans and the Sikhs come most vividly to life.

Weller finds Pakistan less squalid and disorganized but also less sensuous than India. In Peshawar he encounters his first real drama--applying for permission to travel through the Khyber Pass--and while awaiting a response he eats dinner with an informative French journalist, visits the arms--manufacturing town of Darra, and then, finally, has a cordial and ultimately successful meeting with the deputy secretary of Home and Tribal Affairs. After all the miles of museums and temples, something is actually happening to our hero, and we realize that if this book lacks anything it is human experiences like these. The ride up through the pass, with the obligatory bodyguard, is almost an anticlimax. Though the writing, as throughout the book, carries the moment: "I stood there looking out over the last stretch, the way out of the Khyber and the subcontinent, where so many men had walked or ridden to their doom, and asked myself what all these miles of the [Grand Trunk] added up to .... All along I'd tried to see how these people were living with their profound pasts, pasts they were largely unaware of except for an inherited residue of blind emotion and mutual distrust and habitual gestures--so little wisdom passed on, after all those centuries of civilization.... There was no natural drift toward better things: that was the age-old lesson of the subcontinent. The times of wisdom, the fruitful centuries, were only bumps in the road."

Thomas Swick is travel editor of the Fort Lauderdale Sentinel.