The man who cycled 6,000 miles across the world for love
When a low-caste Indian student and a Swedish noblewoman fell for one another, he crossed continents on a second-hand bicycle to reunite
Six years ago, in Gothenburg, Sweden, the documentary filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel had just given a speech at a Nobel Prize event when he was approached by two young people, who handed him a book. They were siblings, Karl and Emilie von Schedvin. “We love your work,” they said, “and this is our parents’ story. We wondered if you might be interested in exploring it for a film?”
“I was very polite,” says von Einsiedel, “and said I’d have a look. But sadly, my experience is that when people approach you out of the blue saying they have a story that would make a great film, it’s not usually the best story in the world. And when I got home, I put the book away and forgot about it.”
A few months later, the filmmaker – who had won an Oscar for his White Helmets documentary – was going on holiday and took the book with him to read on the plane. “Once I started reading it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, you’re an idiot – this story is unreal.’ And the minute we landed and I had phone reception, I got in touch with them.”
The problem was that by that time, the book – by Swedish author Per J Andersson – had been published in the United States, and the siblings had been inundated by people wanting to make a Hollywood version of the incredible story.
“They’d been courted by a lot of people, and promised the world on a stick, but I said, if you ever want to tell the story in a documentary form, we’d be very honoured.” The siblings invited von Einsiedel to meet their parents. “I fell head over heels in love with them, and we just kept the conversation going and eventually we all decided to work together. Karl and Emilie were producers on the film.”
And it is indeed an incredible story.
In late 1975, Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia, known as PK, was a 26-year-old art student living in Delhi. His grandfather was a tribal chief, and he had grown up in the village of Kandhapada in Odisha. He had a loving family, but he was a Dalit, the bottom of the pile in India’s complicated caste system, and had suffered traumatising discrimination as a child. As an “untouchable”, he was persecuted and had stones thrown at him, but he had been awarded a scholarship to do a master’s in fine art in Delhi and was making a living by drawing portraits of people by the fountain in the city centre. There had even been an article about him in a local newspaper.
It had been ingrained in PK by his family that destiny was everything: an astrologer had told his father that PK’s future wife would come from a faraway land, that she would be musical, that she would be born under the sign of Taurus and “own a jungle”.
PK painted or sketched several people every day, but when a Swedish student showed up, he was immediately drawn to her. Her name was Lotta, she was 20, and she had driven to India with three friends in a VW van. When she came back a second time, he asked her when her birthday was; she was a Taurus, born in May. He asked her whether she was musical – she sang and played the piano. He asked her whether she owned a jungle; she was a bit bemused by this but told him that her grandfather, a Swedish nobleman, owned land and a forest near Gothenburg. In PK’s mind, it was decided. He told her she would be his wife.
Lotta had spent a year in London working as a nurse, and while there, she had been given a calendar with a photo of a vast stone wheel at the 13th-century Konark Sun Temple in Odisha. She loved this picture and pinned it on her wall. Without knowing about her obsession, PK took her to see it, and that is when she too believed in their destiny.
Lotta wrote to her parents to tell them that she had met her life partner, and she and PK travelled to his home village, where she was welcomed by his family and his father performed a marriage ceremony. But Lotta had to return to Sweden to study.
The couple wrote to each other. PK graduated from art college but was desperately missing Lotta. He inquired about a flight and was told that it would cost 40,000 rupees (about 18 times the average annual income in India at the time). Instead, in January 1977, he bought a secondhand ladies’ Raleigh bike for 60 rupees, packed up a sleeping bag, a rudimentary tent and his art materials, and set off for Sweden. He didn’t even have a map.
His remarkable journey is the subject of The Cycle of Love, von Einsiedel’s beautiful documentary. And almost 50 years later, I turn up in Boras, a town near Gothenburg, and make my way to the house in the middle of the forest – or jungle – where PK and Lotta now live.
It is remote: their nearest neighbour is about a mile away. Their house is wooden, surrounded by apple trees. Deer come into the garden, and foxes, and over the years they have seen lynx. Wild boars, Lotta tells me, “do the gardening for us and eat the weeds”.
The foundations of the house have been here since 1776, and it was rebuilt in 1936 by Lotta’s grandfather. The house is light and beautifully furnished, with a mix of antiques and Indian artefacts.
PK and Lotta are warm and welcoming. They speak Swedish to each other and English to me. As he tells me about his marathon journey, Lotta gazes at him fondly and attentively, even though she’s probably heard the story 100 times. PK looks younger than his 77 years, possibly down to his daily yoga. (Von Einsiedel tells me later that when he stayed in the house during filming: “I’d come down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and PK would be standing on his head.”)
The film, released next month, is an artfully edited mixture of interviews with the protagonists and the story recreated by actors, Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale. It has been warmly received at film festivals, and PK and Lotta are delighted with it.
“People came up to us and told us that the film changed their life,” says Lotta. “It’s really touching people’s hearts.”
“It’s medicine for the people,” adds PK. “Medicine that’s needed.”
A significant theme of the story is the caste system, and how PK’s journey helped him come to terms with his childhood and to love himself. It was a crucial factor in why the couple wanted to make the film, says Lotta. “We met – East and West, he was untouchable, I was from nobility. He was ashamed of the caste system, I was ashamed to be part of the nobility – but we are a unifying force. This is a responsibility for us: every day we read what bad shape the world is in, and we see this as our message.”
When PK told Lotta he was going to cycle to her, she urged him not to go alone. But he did. And so the journey began. “My strength was my lack of geographical knowledge,” he says in the film. “I knew the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” He also knew that the journey was long – almost 6,000 miles – but initially he thought he was going to Switzerland; he’d confused the two names. “A Belgian hippie had a map of Europe and I told him I was going to Boras, and he showed me that it was in fact in Sweden, not Switzerland. It was a bit of a blow to realise I had to go even farther than I thought.”
Then there was a visa problem. PK didn’t realise that, at the time, Indians couldn’t get visas to travel through Pakistan, and he was turned back. In Amritsar, near the border, he met an acquaintance from Delhi. Touched by his story, the man bought him an air ticket to Kabul, Afghanistan, so he could avoid Pakistan. PK had never flown before. The bike was brought to Kabul in a van by a German couple he had met.
And that defined the journey: meeting kind people. Those were the days when travel was relatively easy, with less conflict and bureaucracy. People invited him into their homes for food, or gave him money in exchange for a drawing. Everyone was moved by what he was doing.
Cycling away from Kabul, PK came across a car in a ditch and a young Western woman who had been pulled from the wreckage, lying by the side of the road. She was covered in blood and all her teeth had been knocked out. PK flagged down a lorry and lifted her into it, tossed his bike in the back and took her back to Kabul to hospital. She could not speak, but wrote her name on a piece of paper. Her name was Leanna, she was Austrian and worked in a gallery in Vienna. He stayed with her until she was discharged, then took her to her embassy – where they arranged a flight for her – and resumed his journey.
Weeks later, PK arrived at the poste restante in Istanbul to see whether there was a letter from Lotta. “And there was another envelope waiting for me,” he says. Leanna had sent him a train ticket to Vienna.
It had taken PK a long time to reach Istanbul, so by the time he arrived in Vienna, Leanna had left to go to India, but her sister took him to the gallery, “and the owner and his wife bought some of my paintings and gave me a train ticket from Vienna to Gothenburg”. He is still in touch with the family.
On the last leg of his journey, PK ran into further problems. At the German border, guards threatened to arrest him until he showed them his letters from Lotta and an article about him from an Indian magazine which said they were married, and they let him continue on his way.
As the train passed through Sweden, he shared a carriage with a Norwegian woman. “Meeting people was much easier then,” says PK. “Now if you’re sitting on a train everyone is looking at their phones, not talking to each other.” When she saw the guards approaching, she shoved a wad of notes into his pocket, “so when the Scandinavian police saw I had no return ticket and asked me how much money I had, I had something to show them”.
He arrived in Gothenburg on May 23, 133 days after he set off, and phoned Lotta.
“It was a very precious moment,” she remembers. “I drove to pick him up. For a long time there were hardly any words – he was just hugging me and crying.
“My parents gave him a nice welcome. They didn’t speak any English, so I taught them some phrases – my mum made a cake and I taught her how to say, ‘Welcome home’ and ‘Especially for you.’” PK had never seen anything like it. “He was used to eating with his fingers,” says Lotta, “and he took the cake thinking it was all for him and that he’d have to finish it by himself.”
PK recalls meeting Lotta’s father: “He opened the door and I fell at his feet. He was quite surprised. That’s how you greet people in India.”
They had an official Swedish wedding ceremony later that year. PK learnt Swedish and soon got a job teaching art; Lotta was teaching music. They have both taught yoga over the years.
Emilie and Karl join us in the dining room for Swedish fika – in this case, coffee and a delicious apple tart, eaten off beautiful china plates. Emilie was born in 1985 and Karl in 1988.
In those days, Sweden was very white. “People thought we must be adopted,” laughs Karl. “Because in Swedish kindergarten everyone is blond.” They had grown up knowing their parents’ story, and some of their classmates’ parents knew about it too – there had been articles and a documentary on Swedish television.
“People asked us about it, but it seemed normal to us when we were young,” says Emilie. “We thought everyone’s dad had done something like that.”
“Lots of kids had divorced parents,” says Karl. “People would come to see our parents for love advice!”
Emilie studied at the London College of Fashion and then worked in marketing; Karl was a well-known DJ and then became a helicopter pilot, a job he gave up to become a producer on the film. They also went with their parents to screenings of the film at festivals.
“Ethan Hawke wanted a picture with them,” says Emilie, “and Jodie Foster was in Telluride [Colorado] and she loved the film and recommended it to lots of people. She introduced herself to Mum, and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jodie, I’m an actor.’
“This was a big project that has taken such a long time,” she adds. “But it’s been really worth it. One woman tapped me on the shoulder after the screening and just said, ‘You guys gave me hope.’ And then she walked away.”
The family travel to India often, to see the area where PK grew up, but it was a while before Emilie and Karl realised the impact of the caste system. “I studied it in school when I was about 14,” says Emilie, “and we talked about it a bit at home, but I didn’t know much about Dad’s experience until I was 19, and wanted to learn more about my roots. I chose to write about the caste system for a thesis. It was called “In My Father’s Footsteps”, and I went to Odisha and interviewed people from the Dalit communities. Then I interviewed Dad,” she pauses, in tears now, “and that was so emotional. Because it was the first time I saw my dad cry.
“Dad wanted us to experience India, but he wanted us to be Swedish because we live in Sweden and we are protected here,” Emilie says. “The values we were brought up with are something we want to share, because we are so privileged to have that foundation – of seeing people for who they are and not the labels that they carry.”
Back in London, I talk to the film’s director. There were a lot of challenges in making this film, von Einsiedel says, but early on he had an idea to test the basic concept in London. “I took a friend of mine, who is an actor, to Lewisham. He pretended to be an artist who was going to cycle from London to Cape Town for love, and he was trying to raise money for that. The first person he started speaking to was blown away, and she said: ‘I’ll buy you a flight – don’t cycle, I’m 100 per cent going to buy you a flight!’ We told her the truth, of course, but the power of the reaction was so strong that we immediately knew the concept would work.”
They had planned to shoot the journey as it really happened, but because of budget constraints and political challenges, that was not possible, so most of the film was shot in Sweden and India. “India has the entire world in one country: jungles, deserts, mountains,” von Einsiedel says. “There was no script, it was all improvised, and the actors had extraordinary chemistry.”
However, recreating PK’s drawings was a problem. They would set up scenes with real people, but explain that Chirag Lobo was an actor. “So Chirag would do a basic drawing and we had a very good street artist hiding round the corner to do the real one, and then Chirag would nip off and switch drawings. We wanted to get that genuine reaction when people are handed a drawing of themselves, because they are often very moved by it.
“PK really just survived that whole journey by doing those drawings and people inviting him into their homes. And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to make the film – I wanted to tell a happy story, a story of something positive. And the love in this story is extraordinary. It’s the idea that most people in the world are kind, and that’s what PK experienced, and it is my experience as a documentary maker. Most people are wonderful and kind, which is not the story you usually get when you turn on the news at night.”
The Cycle of Love is in British and Irish cinemas from Sep 18
The man who cycled 6,000 miles across the world for love
When a low-caste Indian student and a Swedish noblewoman fell for one another, he crossed continents on a second-hand bicycle to reunite
Six years ago, in Gothenburg, Sweden, the documentary filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel had just given a speech at a Nobel Prize event when he was approached by two young people, who handed him a book. They were siblings, Karl and Emilie von Schedvin. “We love your work,” they said, “and this is our parents’ story. We wondered if you might be interested in exploring it for a film?”
“I was very polite,” says von Einsiedel, “and said I’d have a look. But sadly, my experience is that when people approach you out of the blue saying they have a story that would make a great film, it’s not usually the best story in the world. And when I got home, I put the book away and forgot about it.”
A few months later, the filmmaker – who had won an Oscar for his White Helmets documentary – was going on holiday and took the book with him to read on the plane. “Once I started reading it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, you’re an idiot – this story is unreal.’ And the minute we landed and I had phone reception, I got in touch with them.”
The problem was that by that time, the book – by Swedish author Per J Andersson – had been published in the United States, and the siblings had been inundated by people wanting to make a Hollywood version of the incredible story.
“They’d been courted by a lot of people, and promised the world on a stick, but I said, if you ever want to tell the story in a documentary form, we’d be very honoured.” The siblings invited von Einsiedel to meet their parents. “I fell head over heels in love with them, and we just kept the conversation going and eventually we all decided to work together. Karl and Emilie were producers on the film.”
And it is indeed an incredible story.
In late 1975, Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia, known as PK, was a 26-year-old art student living in Delhi. His grandfather was a tribal chief, and he had grown up in the village of Kandhapada in Odisha. He had a loving family, but he was a Dalit, the bottom of the pile in India’s complicated caste system, and had suffered traumatising discrimination as a child. As an “untouchable”, he was persecuted and had stones thrown at him, but he had been awarded a scholarship to do a master’s in fine art in Delhi and was making a living by drawing portraits of people by the fountain in the city centre. There had even been an article about him in a local newspaper.
It had been ingrained in PK by his family that destiny was everything: an astrologer had told his father that PK’s future wife would come from a faraway land, that she would be musical, that she would be born under the sign of Taurus and “own a jungle”.
PK painted or sketched several people every day, but when a Swedish student showed up, he was immediately drawn to her. Her name was Lotta, she was 20, and she had driven to India with three friends in a VW van. When she came back a second time, he asked her when her birthday was; she was a Taurus, born in May. He asked her whether she was musical – she sang and played the piano. He asked her whether she owned a jungle; she was a bit bemused by this but told him that her grandfather, a Swedish nobleman, owned land and a forest near Gothenburg. In PK’s mind, it was decided. He told her she would be his wife.
Lotta had spent a year in London working as a nurse, and while there, she had been given a calendar with a photo of a vast stone wheel at the 13th-century Konark Sun Temple in Odisha. She loved this picture and pinned it on her wall. Without knowing about her obsession, PK took her to see it, and that is when she too believed in their destiny.
Lotta wrote to her parents to tell them that she had met her life partner, and she and PK travelled to his home village, where she was welcomed by his family and his father performed a marriage ceremony. But Lotta had to return to Sweden to study.
The couple wrote to each other. PK graduated from art college but was desperately missing Lotta. He inquired about a flight and was told that it would cost 40,000 rupees (about 18 times the average annual income in India at the time). Instead, in January 1977, he bought a secondhand ladies’ Raleigh bike for 60 rupees, packed up a sleeping bag, a rudimentary tent and his art materials, and set off for Sweden. He didn’t even have a map.
His remarkable journey is the subject of The Cycle of Love, von Einsiedel’s beautiful documentary. And almost 50 years later, I turn up in Boras, a town near Gothenburg, and make my way to the house in the middle of the forest – or jungle – where PK and Lotta now live.
It is remote: their nearest neighbour is about a mile away. Their house is wooden, surrounded by apple trees. Deer come into the garden, and foxes, and over the years they have seen lynx. Wild boars, Lotta tells me, “do the gardening for us and eat the weeds”.
The foundations of the house have been here since 1776, and it was rebuilt in 1936 by Lotta’s grandfather. The house is light and beautifully furnished, with a mix of antiques and Indian artefacts.
PK and Lotta are warm and welcoming. They speak Swedish to each other and English to me. As he tells me about his marathon journey, Lotta gazes at him fondly and attentively, even though she’s probably heard the story 100 times. PK looks younger than his 77 years, possibly down to his daily yoga. (Von Einsiedel tells me later that when he stayed in the house during filming: “I’d come down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and PK would be standing on his head.”)
The film, released next month, is an artfully edited mixture of interviews with the protagonists and the story recreated by actors, Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale. It has been warmly received at film festivals, and PK and Lotta are delighted with it.
“People came up to us and told us that the film changed their life,” says Lotta. “It’s really touching people’s hearts.”
“It’s medicine for the people,” adds PK. “Medicine that’s needed.”
A significant theme of the story is the caste system, and how PK’s journey helped him come to terms with his childhood and to love himself. It was a crucial factor in why the couple wanted to make the film, says Lotta. “We met – East and West, he was untouchable, I was from nobility. He was ashamed of the caste system, I was ashamed to be part of the nobility – but we are a unifying force. This is a responsibility for us: every day we read what bad shape the world is in, and we see this as our message.”
When PK told Lotta he was going to cycle to her, she urged him not to go alone. But he did. And so the journey began. “My strength was my lack of geographical knowledge,” he says in the film. “I knew the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” He also knew that the journey was long – almost 6,000 miles – but initially he thought he was going to Switzerland; he’d confused the two names. “A Belgian hippie had a map of Europe and I told him I was going to Boras, and he showed me that it was in fact in Sweden, not Switzerland. It was a bit of a blow to realise I had to go even farther than I thought.”
Then there was a visa problem. PK didn’t realise that, at the time, Indians couldn’t get visas to travel through Pakistan, and he was turned back. In Amritsar, near the border, he met an acquaintance from Delhi. Touched by his story, the man bought him an air ticket to Kabul, Afghanistan, so he could avoid Pakistan. PK had never flown before. The bike was brought to Kabul in a van by a German couple he had met.
And that defined the journey: meeting kind people. Those were the days when travel was relatively easy, with less conflict and bureaucracy. People invited him into their homes for food, or gave him money in exchange for a drawing. Everyone was moved by what he was doing.
Cycling away from Kabul, PK came across a car in a ditch and a young Western woman who had been pulled from the wreckage, lying by the side of the road. She was covered in blood and all her teeth had been knocked out. PK flagged down a lorry and lifted her into it, tossed his bike in the back and took her back to Kabul to hospital. She could not speak, but wrote her name on a piece of paper. Her name was Leanna, she was Austrian and worked in a gallery in Vienna. He stayed with her until she was discharged, then took her to her embassy – where they arranged a flight for her – and resumed his journey.
Weeks later, PK arrived at the poste restante in Istanbul to see whether there was a letter from Lotta. “And there was another envelope waiting for me,” he says. Leanna had sent him a train ticket to Vienna.
It had taken PK a long time to reach Istanbul, so by the time he arrived in Vienna, Leanna had left to go to India, but her sister took him to the gallery, “and the owner and his wife bought some of my paintings and gave me a train ticket from Vienna to Gothenburg”. He is still in touch with the family.
On the last leg of his journey, PK ran into further problems. At the German border, guards threatened to arrest him until he showed them his letters from Lotta and an article about him from an Indian magazine which said they were married, and they let him continue on his way.
As the train passed through Sweden, he shared a carriage with a Norwegian woman. “Meeting people was much easier then,” says PK. “Now if you’re sitting on a train everyone is looking at their phones, not talking to each other.” When she saw the guards approaching, she shoved a wad of notes into his pocket, “so when the Scandinavian police saw I had no return ticket and asked me how much money I had, I had something to show them”.
He arrived in Gothenburg on May 23, 133 days after he set off, and phoned Lotta.
“It was a very precious moment,” she remembers. “I drove to pick him up. For a long time there were hardly any words – he was just hugging me and crying.
“My parents gave him a nice welcome. They didn’t speak any English, so I taught them some phrases – my mum made a cake and I taught her how to say, ‘Welcome home’ and ‘Especially for you.’” PK had never seen anything like it. “He was used to eating with his fingers,” says Lotta, “and he took the cake thinking it was all for him and that he’d have to finish it by himself.”
PK recalls meeting Lotta’s father: “He opened the door and I fell at his feet. He was quite surprised. That’s how you greet people in India.”
They had an official Swedish wedding ceremony later that year. PK learnt Swedish and soon got a job teaching art; Lotta was teaching music. They have both taught yoga over the years.
Emilie and Karl join us in the dining room for Swedish fika – in this case, coffee and a delicious apple tart, eaten off beautiful china plates. Emilie was born in 1985 and Karl in 1988.
In those days, Sweden was very white. “People thought we must be adopted,” laughs Karl. “Because in Swedish kindergarten everyone is blond.” They had grown up knowing their parents’ story, and some of their classmates’ parents knew about it too – there had been articles and a documentary on Swedish television.
“People asked us about it, but it seemed normal to us when we were young,” says Emilie. “We thought everyone’s dad had done something like that.”
“Lots of kids had divorced parents,” says Karl. “People would come to see our parents for love advice!”
Emilie studied at the London College of Fashion and then worked in marketing; Karl was a well-known DJ and then became a helicopter pilot, a job he gave up to become a producer on the film. They also went with their parents to screenings of the film at festivals.
“Ethan Hawke wanted a picture with them,” says Emilie, “and Jodie Foster was in Telluride [Colorado] and she loved the film and recommended it to lots of people. She introduced herself to Mum, and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jodie, I’m an actor.’
“This was a big project that has taken such a long time,” she adds. “But it’s been really worth it. One woman tapped me on the shoulder after the screening and just said, ‘You guys gave me hope.’ And then she walked away.”
The family travel to India often, to see the area where PK grew up, but it was a while before Emilie and Karl realised the impact of the caste system. “I studied it in school when I was about 14,” says Emilie, “and we talked about it a bit at home, but I didn’t know much about Dad’s experience until I was 19, and wanted to learn more about my roots. I chose to write about the caste system for a thesis. It was called “In My Father’s Footsteps”, and I went to Odisha and interviewed people from the Dalit communities. Then I interviewed Dad,” she pauses, in tears now, “and that was so emotional. Because it was the first time I saw my dad cry.
“Dad wanted us to experience India, but he wanted us to be Swedish because we live in Sweden and we are protected here,” Emilie says. “The values we were brought up with are something we want to share, because we are so privileged to have that foundation – of seeing people for who they are and not the labels that they carry.”
Back in London, I talk to the film’s director. There were a lot of challenges in making this film, von Einsiedel says, but early on he had an idea to test the basic concept in London. “I took a friend of mine, who is an actor, to Lewisham. He pretended to be an artist who was going to cycle from London to Cape Town for love, and he was trying to raise money for that. The first person he started speaking to was blown away, and she said: ‘I’ll buy you a flight – don’t cycle, I’m 100 per cent going to buy you a flight!’ We told her the truth, of course, but the power of the reaction was so strong that we immediately knew the concept would work.”
They had planned to shoot the journey as it really happened, but because of budget constraints and political challenges, that was not possible, so most of the film was shot in Sweden and India. “India has the entire world in one country: jungles, deserts, mountains,” von Einsiedel says. “There was no script, it was all improvised, and the actors had extraordinary chemistry.”
However, recreating PK’s drawings was a problem. They would set up scenes with real people, but explain that Chirag Lobo was an actor. “So Chirag would do a basic drawing and we had a very good street artist hiding round the corner to do the real one, and then Chirag would nip off and switch drawings. We wanted to get that genuine reaction when people are handed a drawing of themselves, because they are often very moved by it.
“PK really just survived that whole journey by doing those drawings and people inviting him into their homes. And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to make the film – I wanted to tell a happy story, a story of something positive. And the love in this story is extraordinary. It’s the idea that most people in the world are kind, and that’s what PK experienced, and it is my experience as a documentary maker. Most people are wonderful and kind, which is not the story you usually get when you turn on the news at night.”
The Cycle of Love is in British and Irish cinemas from Sep 18
