TRACELESS PATH

When Thomas and I landed back in Trivandrum in the state of Kerala on a Sunday in the middle of April 1989 it was just gone two in the afternoon. The flight from Colombo should have taken just 45 minutes but as it happened we were in the air for well over an hour, due to the plane having to circle on landing and I had to admit I didn't enjoy the circling. When it happens it always make me think one of the wheels of the plane has fallen off or the pilots have simply stiffed out and no one knows what the fuck they're supposed to do. On this occasion however, it all turned out cool and we touched down safe and sound, back in India once again. Back in Mother India, land of the Om Vibration! Back in Trivandrum, the place from which we'd flown out of to Sri Lanka six weeks previously. Sri Lanka, the Emerald Isle, a steamy place full of snakes and guns. Marco Polo had once written it was the most beautiful island in the world. Well that might have been the case, but when me and Thomas were there it was also one of the most dangerous. Sometimes we really had the willies put up us, what with the Tamil Tigers blowing the shit out of people in the north and the Sinhalese JVP doing the same thing in the south. For most of our time we were right in the middle, caught in the crossfire so to speak, a couple of pale skins continually running for cover.

Now it was back to the grind of making our way through the vastness of India, where it was necessary at times to keep well out of the sun. To play it cool and quietly sip a king coconut beneath a shady tree, watching the singsong street life inexorably shift along. As we walked from the plane on the runway to the terminal building it didn't take us long to realise the weather was hotter than when we had left, really quite toasty. It was now the middle of April and it was getting close to the peak of Indian summertime, so I guess it was not too surprising that we were soon both sweating our bollocks off. The time of year had come when those multi-layered gods and goddesses rolled over on their clouds and flicked a few switches for the sun to belt down hard on the seething masses below, giving no quarter. About halfway down the runway, past the buzzing engines of the planes on the scorching tarmac and soldiers standing guard against fuck knows what, the heat haze began. It hung above the scrub lands where beggar families lived and made everything look plain and harsh, beaten up and rusty; where you wouldn't want to spend more time in than what was absolutely necessary. Those Indian scrub lands, badlands in a heat haze symphony with the pungent smell of shit hanging over them, a scene replicated countless thousands of times throughout the whole of the country.

When I had flown to Sri Lanka from Trivandrum we had been delayed for over three hours in the departure lounge. A packed lounge with broken fans, non-existent drinking water and hundreds of mosquitoes. It had been my first experience of a provincial Indian airport on a bad day. The plane we were supposed to fly in hadn't even left Colombo when we had arrived at the airport, only nobody had thought of telling us that until much, much later. Coming back, I didn't want a repeat performance of hanging around, endlessly staring out at the bleakness of it all, struggling in my mind to push the time away and escape from the present. It was lucky for me then that Thomas was in quick thinking mode because he simply walked to the front of the queue of people waiting to go through customs and immigration, and naturally enough, I followed him. He had reasoned that since we were the only white boys around, the officials were bound to want to deal with us quickly and get us out the way. And I have to say his reasoning was spot on! In no time at all we were through and on the other side with our passports stamped in all the right places, the gateway to India opened to us once again.

All we had to do now was get through the baggage area and pick up our rucksacks. Baggage areas in Indian airports made me nervous because of my experience in Delhi when I had first arrived in Asia and was on my way to Kathmandu, when my rucksack had been left behind at Gatwick and I subsequently ended up with nothing. My backpack was delivered five days later via Pakistan, looking like it had been dropped from out of the sky, which it probably had. At the time though, I felt that I was just lucky to get something, anything, out of it. The funny thing was that I remember in Delhi having a strong intuition that my airline had lost my pack, or not quite because they just hadn’t loaded it in the first place, and as it turned out I was absolutely right. On this occasion however, Lady Luck was shining down on me because my precious rucksack soon appeared on a rickety old baggage belt bearing the possessions of all the flight passengers. Ancient cases, beat up cardboard boxes, smelly rucksacks, you name it, the whole fucking lot. With feelings of joy and relief I picked up my pack and slung it over my shoulder. Now I was up for it, ready to rock, to take a trip into Trivandrum and see what was there.

When we got outside the terminal building we were greeted by the usual crowd of hawkers, beggars, auto rick and taxi drivers all of them hungry for business; a wall of dark Keralan faces, line cracked and well used to the sun. Scientology would never take off with these guys, they would piss all over any well suited fuckhead who tried to push any new kind of deal on them. They knew the score, simple as that. Life was rough but also beautiful, life was tough and with obligations to meet. Thomas and I also knew very well that these guys had the potential to cause us pain and hassle, and sure enough it was not long before they began to fulfil that potential. All that we wanted was to get from the airport into the centre of Trivandrum which was about 5 km away, so we therefore needed to hire an auto rick, but being a pair of cost conscious bums we really didn't want to get ripped off and just wanted to pay the going rate. It was going to be difficult though, we could see that. The locals obviously saw a couple of white boys as prime targets for some impressive over charging and we were soon being quoted some really silly prices. It took patience on our side and the worst thing about it was to see how quickly we found ourselves in a situation where we could easily blow our tops. Again!

We eventually found someone willing to take us into town for 5 rupees which seemed like a good deal to the both of us. A fare which even a local lad wouldn't have minded paying, so we were pretty pleased with ourselves when we clambered aboard. Our well worn and dusty appearance from weeks of travelling was obviously beginning to have an effect, we really hadn't had to wait too long before the drivers were convinced that we didn't have the bread they thought we had. And it felt great to be noisily clattering our way through the back streets of Trivandrum, kicking up dust and bouncing past multiple colours of humanity blazin' in the sun. I sat back and let it all wash over me, contemplating the fact that we were once again in India, which in terms of dreams, imagination and wonder, had to be one of the most powerful countries in the world. No question!

Guess it came as no real surprise to us that when we got to the centre of town and began to offload our stuff by the side of the Mahatma Gandhi High Road, our driver kicked up over the price he was getting. He came out with the old story that he had misunderstood us back at the airport and that there was no way he could accept the 5 rupee note which was now being offered him. No way at all. No, no, no! He wanted more, much more, 25 rupees minimum. I have to say that I wouldn't have minded paying a little over the odds because being a rickshaw driver was hardly the best job in the world, but in this instance the driver looked a sly bastard and no doubt had played this trick before. It was not for the first time that I then fully appreciated Thomas and his Teutonic sense of humour, because he handed the driver a 5 rupee note and told him to keep the change. Sometimes there was nothing like being with a German when they were cracking a joke at somebody else's expense, they just seemed to hit the spot! Without bothering to prolong matters, we picked up our bags, gave the driver hard looks to show we knew the score, and left him standing there in the dust having a right old fucking moan at us.

We were both pretty hungry and the first thing on the agenda was to find a place to eat. The plan for the rest of the day was first to fill our stomachs, then hit the central bus station and get a bus to Quilon which was about 60 km up the road heading north. When we got to Quilon we would find a place to stay for the night. We thought it was better doing things that way, hit the ground running rather than fuck around in Trivandrum for 12 hours before moving on. The next day we would do a backwater trip from Quilon to Allepey. Now along with its beaches and first class weed, one of the things Kerala was famous for was its backwaters and the boat trips you could take on them. The writers in the obligatory travel books we had stashed in our back packs were always waxing lyrical over the backwaters, in fact every other Western asshole who you met on the road would always say that if you go to Kerala, be sure to take a backwater trip. Once we had done one we would then be able to do the same thing ourselves, to casually drop into future conversations, "Yeah, yeah, you've gotta do a backwater trip man, really fucking wicked!" You know, the usual old shit. Anyway, after the backwaters the next stage was to get from Allepey to Cochin, Kerala's number one city, and a place we were both looking forward to checking out, even though it might have been difficult to say why exactly. For some reason Cochin had stuck in our minds after a stoned night smoking ourselves stupid on some very strong grass down in the town of Galle in Sri Lanka, where at a certain point we had talked about what we would do when we got back to India.

As we walked up and down the Mahatma Gandhi High Road checking it out, it seemed like the place to eat was the Azad Restaurant which had a queue of people outside it. We were happy to wait, we used the time to think about what we would order and both of us decided to go for an egg byriani. I have to say we were looking forward to some decent Indian food again, which on the whole was second to none, in South India especially. This had not been the case in Sri Lanka where we often had to eat rough in order to fill ourselves up, too much fish and meat, which was no good for us because we were supposed to be veggies, and also too many fucking chillies. The food in South India was a different cup of tea altogether and some of the spice combinations in the dishes sublime beyond words, well, certainly my words. Even though it was a Sunday and most of the offices and shops in the centre of Trivandrum were shut, the Azad Restaurant was still full of people and the place was buzzing. It was dominated by men, with very few women about. The blokes were all dressed in their Sunday best, spotless shirts and lungis and it had to be said that when me and Thomas finally took our seats we got a few disapproving stares because of our rather shabby appearance. Our clothes looked full of dust, we probably didn't smell too great either, and both of us were unshaven.

All we could do was sit there and wait to be fed, dressed in our falling apart t- shirts and stringy cotton trousers, but it didn't matter to us, in our hunger we were oblivious to appearances. The food was wonderful when it came, fantastic spices and loads of it. We were soon absorbed in the process of scooping up mounds of byriani rice with our hands and throwing it all into our mouths. Clumsy for sure, but there was no getting away from the fact that we thought eating this way was really great. There was a much closer relationship to be had with the food, no knife and fork shit in the Azad, it was hands or nothing, end of fucking story! When we were done, we walked to the back of the restaurant and washed our hands at the taps and basins; so clean, direct and simple. Then we sat down again and had a couple of cups of strong coffee. In South India the coffee was good, there were plantations everywhere, a legacy of the British and Dutch no doubt, and it was always fresh. We both soon felt well fortified and ready to face the challenges which would inevitably be presented to us by the time we got to the central bus station in down town Trivandrum, in order to catch a ride to Quilon.

Back on the Mahatma Gandhi High Road it was mid afternoon, the hottest part of the day, where after the large amount of food we'd eaten, and with the weight of our rucksacks on our backs, it wasn't long before we began to sweat. So much so that on the way to the bus station we both had to take a break and each buy a king coconut from a street stall. We stood back under the shadows of a tree, each of us slowly drinking down the fresh coconut water, quietly watching the royal academy of Indian street life perform its crazy dance in front of us. There was a never ending procession of cars, auto ricks, bullock carts and people, with lorries and buses honking their way through the middle of it all, swaggering and bullying everything else to the side of the road. Just looking at it all made me feel tired. It was overwhelming! We had flown back from Sri Lanka into all of this, we had eaten a huge meal at the Azad and now we were standing there by the roadside with sweat dripping down our backs. When Thomas insisted on getting another king coconut it almost threw me into a black mood. All I wanted to do was get out of there, to keep pressing on and get to the bus station. But that was how Thomas was, when he said "Hey wait, I take another!" he meant it and there was no use in arguing. It was just the way things went, when situations in India demanded you to be as together as possible it was often the case that you then came closest to falling apart. It was no big deal anyway, just another fucking coconut. I guess it just all came down to the way he said "Hey wait, I take another!" which hacked me off, something possibly a bit too German about it, nevertheless I stood there and kept my cool as Thomas went and slowly downed another king.

When we got to the bus station, after Thomas had performed his double king coconut act, I took off my rucksack and wearily slumped down on the floor. I was simply too fucked to do anything else. A combination of the heat, the travel and the large meal I’d recently eaten had all caught up with me, and now that we were in the middle of a crowded bus station, I was useless. Impeccable timing it had to be said. It was going to have to be up to Thomas to sort out getting the tickets, and to be fair to him it was these kind of situations which brought out the best in him. With no word of complaint he would just get on with things and do what had to be done. It had been like that in Sri Lanka where often the most testing times encountered were at the bus and railway stations, with the urge to scream in anger and frustration at the masses pressing in on us, along with a non-existent sense of order, being pretty damn strong. In contrast to Thomas I often just sat there, a crumpled heap on the ground, supposedly looking after the rucksacks, but more to the point just looking for a chance to do sweet fuck all. From my position on the floor of the central bus station in Trivandrum I could see a lot of people crowding round the ticket office with there being no sign or shape of an orderly queue whatsoever. It didn't look good! Thomas had disappeared, probably he was right in the middle of it, but it seemed unlikely he would have a successful mission.

Then from out of nowhere a little man with a badly deformed pair of legs appeared, not bad enough for him not to be able to walk, but bad enough to ensure he needed a pair of walking sticks which he had to use to get around on. He had a calm and pleasant looking face which, considering his circumstances, made me realise how far I had to go in achieving just a basic attitude of appreciation towards my life. The man told me in reasonably good English that the best way for us to get a ticket for Quilon was to buy tickets for the express bus which went all the way to Cochin. In order to do this we would need to get a seat reservation ticket. This was the Kerala State Bus Company's way of combating bus overcrowding; to get on the bus you had to have a seat reservation ticket, simple as that. It was an eminently sensible idea! There was nothing worse than witnessing and participating in the degrading scenes which so easily occurred when a whole crowd of people desperately fought each other to get on a bus at an Indian bus station, which would then only move when it was so ridiculously overcrowded that mass fatalities on the road involving them were quite common. The little man came into the equation because he said he would be able to get us the reservation tickets for a small fee. Looking over at the madness of the ticket office I knew it was a good idea, a very good idea indeed. By this stage Thomas had come back empty handed, which came as no surprise, and he gave me a look which made it plain he thought we should accept the offer.

"What do you think Phil?"
"Yeah sure, why not."

I could only agree to the proposition. It was bound to save us a load of trouble and it would help things for the Keralan who, it was obvious, had to spend his days at the bus station performing such duties in order to earn his crust. It was a nice touch when he also refused to accept any money off us in advance, simply disappearing into the crowds which surrounded the ticket reservation office to sort things out. We wished him the best of luck.

Thomas joined me on the floor from where we lazily surveyed the station life, which was made all the more intense by music being played at high volume through speakers which had been built into the roof. Our heads were soon being washed in highly distorted local Keralan tunes and the big hits of Hindi pop. None of this seemed to affect any of the people however, and there were many who were just sprawled out on the floor looking as if they were enjoying a perfect sleep. Motionless families amongst islands of luggage. On top of the music there was also the constant roar of the buses going through their manoeuvres on the station forecourt. Buses brightly painted in the red, yellow and green colours of the Kerala State Bus Corporation, barely visible through the clouds of dust they were kicking up, their drivers oblivious to anything which might get in their way. When they were done they would either swing into one of the bays ready to pick up passengers, or zoom off into Trivandrum, stars of the royal academy of Indian street life. Heavy duty stuff to have to watch in the afternoon heat and by the time the Keralan returned I had more than had enough of it. It really did impress me how well the little man looked considering the bad condition of his legs and the fact that he had to spend so much of his life hanging around such a noisy crowded bus station. We were having difficulty staying there for barely 45 minutes, or at least I was. He handed us our reservation tickets and in exchange for these we each gave him a couple of rupees. Money well spent!

The man then directed us to one of the bays where a bus had just rolled in and told us that it was the express service to Cochin. It was a most welcome sight and I have to say I was one of the first to clamber aboard, pushing a few people out of the way in the process, not really caring how many of them I knocked about with my rucksack. Fuck any kind of civilised behaviour, even with the reservation system I still couldn't help thinking it was still a case of every man for himself. Things took a turn for the better when we got on the bus. The seats were soft and comfortable and ours also happened to be right at the front. This made things exciting, because we’d heard that bus drivers in Kerala had a reputation for reckless driving which was hard to beat even by Indian standards, in fact they were supposed to be the most dangerous throughout the whole of the sub-continent. Thomas didn't look too happy about it, but fast and dangerous was fine by me, when out on the roads in India I always felt the gods were on my side for some peculiar reason, and that I would never end up splattered across the tarmac, ridiculous really, but there we go. The driver's seat diagonally opposite us looked more like a throne. It was elevated and set well apart from the rest of the passenger seats, of such construction that anyone would be sure to get a buzz of power and invincibility once they sat themselves on it. There was no way anyone would have driven safe and slow once they had got themselves settled, and when our man finally got behind the wheel he looked like he wasn't going to disappoint. Sure enough he wasted no time at all in spinning the bus around, surging out of the station and onto the dusty streets of Trivandrum. After all the waiting around the sudden rush of speed was a real thrill and a wave of happiness broke over me, we were on the move again, and I had to admit that a voice inside me was urging our driver to go as fast as possible.

Throughout the whole of the ride to Quilon he used his bus to bully off the road any smaller vehicles that lay in its path, forever blasting on his horn, which was the only form of warning he gave that he was coming. Everything without exception got out of the way, and quick. If he was steaming up behind a slow moving lorry he would simply swing the bus out and overtake it, regardless of what might be coming in the opposite direction. It was the responsibility of the oncoming traffic to make way for him, despite the fact he was over on their side of the road. Superb tactics I have to say, thoroughly fucking demented in every possible way, and if it looked like there was going to be a crash his solution was to increase rather decrease his speed. All the way through the journey he simply stared straight ahead out of the driver's window, completely absorbed in his own performance. Sitting there right at the front, I found it all immensely enjoyable, it must have been the frustrated Hell's Angel in me I guess, the gypsy biker I would never get to be. It made the blood red colours of a spectacular Kerala sunset look all the more fantastic, and the magic, the real magic of being in India, which I had first had a blast of a few months ago up in the holy city of Varanasi, now came back to me. It felt like it was adventure time all over again, not that Sri Lanka hadn't been an adventure, but the difference was that India had the Om vibration whilst Sri Lanka by contrast didn't, simply didn't have the Om, and although only a short distance away, it might as well have been on the other side of the world.

All the positive energy from the bus ride was soon put to the test when we approached Quilon. No one had told us beforehand, but there was evidently a major festival going on and the streets were absolutely packed with people, seriously fucking packed. There was lots of red about and since Kerala was a Marxist state we guessed it was must have been some kind of political rally or celebration leaning somewhat to the left of the political spectrum. The knock on effect for us soon became clear in that it was going to be impossible for our bus to get to the centre of town and we were soon completely stuck. The tiredness which had disappeared during the high powered bus ride now came back to me in a big crushing wave. I suddenly noticed how unbearably hot it was in the bus and like an outraged good citizen I wondered how the fuck that neither the driver or the ticket inspector had realised something on such a huge scale was going on in a place they were going to and which was only 50 km up the road. The stupid pair of assholes must have had a clue, surely, but no, it looked like they hadn't. Eventually the driver took a turn down a side street and it wasn't long before we were going through the back of beyond, well and truly up the posterior of Quilon. In fact it looked like we had landed ourselves in the rough end of town because we were soon going down a street with huts along its sides which were made of little more than mud and bamboo. It also seemed to be a great surprise to the locals as well, to suddenly see a bus come roaring down the dust tracks, everyone moving quick to get out of the way.

When we finally did get back on a main road it soon became clear our driver wanted to dump those passengers who only wanted to go to Quilon, so that he could continue on his way to Cochin and bypass the centre of town. It turned out the only people who were due to get off at Quilon were me and Thomas. In no time at all, at the invitation of the conductor, we were off loading ourselves from the bus, stepping down and onto the streets into an unknown part of town, and before we knew it, the bus had sped off into the distance leaving us standing there feeling somewhat abandoned. As a parting gesture the inspector had pointed to a bus across the road and told us to get on that. Shit! Now it felt like we had our work cut out all of a sudden. A dark mood descended upon me. One minute we had been shooting through the countryside of Kerala with a grandstand view of things sitting at the front of the bus, and the next we found ourselves back on the streets again, still a bit of a way from our destination. That was what it was like in India, simple as that, dangerous to take too much for granted, it would only lead to pain, pretty much like the pain I was now experiencing. The bus which we were pointed to looked like a pretty clapped out bundle of local old tin which was on its last legs and it was ominously stationary. It was also absolutely packed, even so it looked like the driver was waiting to see if a few more suckers could be crammed on board, which I guess was where me and Thomas came into the picture. We had a real struggle pushing ourselves up the steps at the back of it. When this had been accomplished I was soon engaged in a pretty desperate attempt to pull my rucksack down the aisle. We were surrounded by strange faces who were obviously very surprised to see us and it felt like they all seemed to be having a laugh at our expense. Instant paranoia was soon setting in on me, I could feel it plain as day, so much so that my anger and frustration at finding ourselves in such an unexpected situation soon boiled over. It expressed itself by way of me having a go at Thomas.

"Come on man, for fuck's sake get down the aisle. I can hardly fucking move here!"

It was an unwarranted outburst because Thomas had no room to move himself, and the look of surprise and disappointment on his face instantly filled me with shame. However he could at least see I was suffering from an all too familiar kind of stress which could so easily descend upon me in India right out of the blue, and so he let it go. It was just as well, because I was so wound up that if he had snapped back at me I would possibly have given him a slap, and I quickly felt very despondent over how I could be affected so much by such an unexpected but minor event. It was hardly life or death after all! At most it would mean we would be half an hour or so late in arriving at the centre of town. That was all, nothing more to it than that, no one was going to come down out of the hills and take us away to be eaten. It was just that at the time it seemed such a big, big deal. The people on the bus must have wondered what was going on when they saw those furrows of anger creased upon my face. Travelling in a place like India brought out hidden tensions and brought them out quickly, the speed with which I lost my cool left me bewildered and worried over what I might do the next time something unexpected came along. It was so easy to think all was under control when in fact it was not, no, not by a long chalk. Fortunately, by the time we finally got off the bus in the centre of Quilon, after we had been given a guided tour of its far flung suburbs, and where I had been plunged into embarrassed introspection over my outburst at Thomas, I was sufficiently recovered in body, speech and mind to fully participate in the task of finding a place for us to stay for the night.

Guess it was just as well that I was okay again because it turned out to be a real hassle finding somewhere in Quilon which would have us. Everywhere was full because of the festival going on. There was an extraordinary amount of people who were in town and soon it became clear that rooms were at a premium. Now it was the turn of Thomas to throw a bad mood, a bit of a wobbly. He was soon ranting away at the extortionate hotel prices, cursing the fact we hadn't just gone straight to Cochin and scrapped the idea of going on a stupid fucking backwater trip. Thomas had got used to the situation we had enjoyed in Sri Lanka, where everything was at rock bottom prices because of all the troubles and where tourists were thin on the ground, so that even a pair of smelly backpacker bums like us had some kind of power over the places we rolled up in. This was most definitely not the case now that we were back in India where as far as the hotels were concerned if we didn't wish to pay the rate quoted we could simply fuck off. Thomas was going to have to realise that things had changed or else he was going to suffer! Nevertheless there was no doubt that the prices in Quilon because of the festival were silly to the point of being well out of order. First class shit holes were suddenly asking the earth for the privilege of staying in a disgusting room for the night, it was a real hack off no doubt about that, but we just had to keep our heads or else we'd end up with nothing.

Eventually we reached the area of Quilon which lay down by the boat jetties, where there were some rock bottom dives of the kind which India could so effortlessly produce when it needed to. They were the type of places which made you want to top yourself if you had to stay in them for more than one night, but by this stage of the day we were both dog tired and Thomas was getting extremely irritable. By way of contrast my mood had cleared up, and I guess it was really quite strange the number of times that one of us would be in some kind of turmoil, in the pits of mental suffering, whilst the other was okay and be able to keep it all together, only for things to change a short time later and for our roles to be completely reversed. The town of Negombo in Sri Lanka where we had woken up that morning before our flight back across to India, now seemed quite far away in time. The journey from Negombo to the airport in Colombo; the flight back to India on Indian Airlines; the trip into Trivandrum; our egg byriani at the Azad; the bus ride to Quilon before being unceremoniously dumped on the outskirts of town; they all added up. Tiredness was setting in, making itself at home, turning us weak at the knees, and the jetty area was also a pretty damn chaotic place. As well as being the terminus for all the backwater boats it was also the location of the central bus station, which was where we should have been dropped off earlier on by our express bus from Trivandrum. Pretty much like all Indian bus stations there were buses coming in from every direction and doing so in a way which was loud, nasty and dangerous. Nothing new in that it had to be said, but at that particular point in the day it would have been nice to have been able to do without it. But no, those Earth pollutin’ Indian bus drivers just didn't have any idea of when to let up and so kept piling on the pressure, hittin’ us hard.

There was no problem getting a room in one of the hotels by the jetty however, which I guess wasn't too surprising because they were as rough and ready as they come, some of them looking like they were shacks about to fall apart. We booked ourselves into the Station Hotel where they had a double room available, and after going through the ritual of signing the books and writing down our passport numbers, we were in. Soon enough we’d both had cold showers and were lying naked on our beds, recovering from the rigours of the day. It was so good just to lie there and stare up at the ceiling fan slowly pushing the hot air around. Whizz! Whizz! Whizz! Once again in my mind I went over our flight, the auto rick ride into Trivandrum, our egg byriani at the Azad, the walk to the central bus station in Trivandrum, the man with the crooked legs, our express ride into the sunset with our nutty driver, our abrupt dismissal on the outskirts of Quilon, my mini freak out which led to me having a go at Thomas, and finally our quest for a room to stay in for the night which then saw Thomas loose his cool. Those were the day's images which floated through my mind as we lay there in the early evening heat of the Station Hotel.

After a while I talked to Thomas about my outburst on the bus, and he told me I would just find it a lot easier if I learnt to go with the flow with regard to whatever situation I found myself in, rather than try to fight against it, only to end building up a load of tension inside myself. He was right of course, India was one of the worst places in the world to find yourself wishing things to be any different from what they were. It was imperative just to accept things as we found them, because the environment was simply too powerful to ever notice any petty concerns over what we might have thought right or wrong, nice or horrible, or other stuff like that. If we didn't understand this, we would soon find ourselves living a life of hell where everything appeared to conspire against us. Guess it was good for me to talk to Thomas. All in all I knew I was a bad traveller, freaking out instead of playing it cool. I needed the therapy of talking things through with him, even if I usually got to talk it through only after I had blown my top. And Thomas was a good listener, I guess he enjoyed the chance to take the therapist's chair, but what the fuck, I needed the therapy!

The next morning I woke up early. Sleep had been fitful, what with the heat and the non-stop activities of the central bus station close by. It happened to be my 27th birthday and on the table next to me sat a beautiful Buddha statue which hadn't been there the night before. It took me a while to figure it all out, then I realised it must have been a gift from Thomas. I was delighted and yet I was puzzled over how he had known it was my birthday, before I concluded that I must have told him at some point when I was stoned off my head in Sri Lanka. Stoned off my head because of the particularly strong weed which one could buy and smoke there! It was a great Buddha statue and when he woke, Thomas told me he had picked it up in the town of Kandy which lay slap bang in the middle of the Emerald Isle. Indeed by studying the casting I saw that it was a very much a Southern Buddha, one which was used to the jungles, the heat, and to lots of sitting meditation whilst living in a hut of bamboo. If it hadn't been for The Buddha then me and Thomas would never have got together in the way we had on the Kopan meditation course which we had taken way back north up in Kathmandu. Something which seemed a long time ago now, quite far away. We had now been travelling together for nearly two months. The time we had spent in Sri Lanka had been roughly divided between staying at a mediation centre called Nilambe, which was in the middle of the island, a few miles out from the hill city of Kandy, and then travelling along the west coast where we found places to hang around in for a few days and smoke the local weed. Being with Thomas had so far worked out well, ten times more enjoyable than just being on my own, I was sure of that, maybe not quite as enjoyable as being with Susan, but all that I’d shared with her was now history. The times when I had been on my own in India had been far more difficult to handle than when I was with someone, and if it wasn’t for Thomas I would probably have not even made it across to Sri Lanka in the first place, but now that we were back in India our plans were somewhat hazy.

All our focus in the previous weeks and months had just been on each of us getting down to the south of India, Kovalam beach to be exact, in order to go to Sri Lanka where we'd stayed for the best part of a couple of months. That had all been successfully accomplished and there were a number of options now open to us. Whatever it was we chose to do, it would have to involve getting back up to the north again at some point because our return flights home were both booked from Delhi a few more months down the line. Thomas talked vaguely about going back across to Calcutta and doing work at Mother Theresa's and I'd thought vaguely about checking out Goa before ending my trip in the hill station town of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh where I could get into some serious meditation. But that was about it, neither of us really had a definite clue what it was we wanted to do and I guess we were happy to take each day as it came, hoping that maybe the sights of Kerala would give us an answer. The main thing on the horizon as we lay about our room that morning in the Station Hotel was our imminent backwater trip and our hopeful arrival that evening in Cochin, Kerala's number one city.

When we made our way downstairs to the hotel restaurant Thomas, being a generous bastard, insisted on buying me a birthday breakfast. We celebrated the astounding fact that I had reached my 27th year by way of each of us having a large plate of putthu, which was a spicy coconut roll sprinkled with sugar and a breakfast speciality of Kerala. This was followed by iddlys and sambhar which were basically rice cakes with a thin gravy sauce, and quite simply one of the best dishes in the whole of South India. For thousands of miles around at that very moment, people would be sitting at home or in their local food house tucking in to iddlys and sambhar for breakfast, swilled down with hot fresh coffee. We did the same and then topped it off with a bottle of cold soda water each. It was the perfect birthday breakfast and we both felt we had stood ourselves in good stead for the day to come and the long backwater trip which lay ahead of us. We got down to the jetty by 9.30 and were quite taken aback by the number of other travellers there. For some reason we thought we were going to be the only Westerners in town, which more often than not had been the case whilst we were travelling through Sri Lanka. It was therefore a bit of a surprise to see that we were now most definitely back on the tourist trail, and Thomas soon had a foul look on his face. There we were, a bunch of Westerners standing around, all of us soon feeling slightly impatient because the Indians were taking so long in getting things together.

"My oh my, look at these bunch of assholes!" Thomas kept muttering to me as he cast his eye upon our fellow travellers.

I didn't take it so bad as him, but nevertheless it was a definite bummer. By the time the boat took off there were nine of us altogether - two plain German girls who Thomas was very abrupt with, almost to the point of being downright rude, a pair of Americans who were continually playing with their cameras and who in both our opinions deserved to be shot through the head, an English couple who read the papers and chain smoked throughout the whole fucking trip, an Australian who wore hiking boots whilst everyone else had flip flops and last but not least, there was me and Thomas. Let us just say that it was a relief when the Keralans finally hauled their arses into gear and got the boat moving.

The trip turned out to be pretty slow going. It soon became apparent that the locals only used the kind of backwater boats that we were on if there was no other choice of transport, otherwise if they wanted to get to a place like Cochin they would go by bus, which was far quicker and a lot more comfortable. But of course as Westerners we had not thought about that, we just assumed we were going to be having the time of our lives by taking a slow boat down the backwaters of Kerala. The place we were heading towards was a town called Alleppey and the journey time was something like 8 to 10 hours, quite a slog in other words. All there was for us to do once on board was sit on the hard wooden benches and stare out at the river, trying to ignore the deafening drone of the engine motor which was far too fucking loud to enable people to hold anything like a normal conversation. It was also far too hot to sit on the roof deck because the morning sun was blistering, so it was a question of sitting there like a bunch of dummies staring out at the green bushes and vaguely wondering why there were so few Indians on the boat with us.

The banks of the river were full of palm trees and strange dense bushes but after 40 minutes or so the sight of them lost its appeal. There was other interesting stuff like rows of huge Chinese fishing nets and locals cutting across our bows in dugout canoes on their way to who knows where. But the whole thing seemed a lot more of an effort than I had ever imagined and I was soon blankly staring at the backs of the English couple in front of us, having fallen in to some kind of dull stupor. Thomas didn't even bother to try to stay awake and was crashed out on a bench opposite, in what looked like an extremely awkward position, the sight of all the Westerners had simply wiped him out. The morning wore on with the boat making many stops along the river, picking up and dropping off the locals at very frequent intervals. Stop start, stop fucking start, it really made me wish we had just caught the bus! By the time we pulled up for lunch at a bunch of backwater huts in the middle of nowhere, I had made my way through our considerable supply of fresh nuts and bananas which we had bought in Quilon, but nevertheless I was still starving.

Lunch at least was some kind of compensation because we both ate extremely good vegetable thalis served on freshly washed banana leaves. Again it was hands only which suited us just fine. There was the food hand and the arse hand, simple as that, and if you didn't like it you could buy yourself a spoon. During the course of the afternoon things on the boat improved a bit. The food had given us a shot of energy and when our journey resumed the sun was also a lot less fierce, which meant that we were able to go and sit on the roof. This led to a totally different view of the backwaters because we were now able to gaze over the tops of the riverside banks and see the flat grass lands which stretched off into the distance behind them. Lands which were criss-crossed with dusty pathways and where in the clearings lay the modest huts of the backwater fishing people. It all looked quite strange and I sat there finding it difficult to imagine ever spending a night with one of the families who lived in them, like it was all just a bit too foreign for me to relate to, although it was probably just my imagination making it more alien than it actually was. People were people after all, nothing too weird about that.

The changing scene and our suddenly expanded view of things allowed me and Thomas to both open up a bit and for the first time in a while we talked about what the plan was supposed to be now that we were back in India. Basically it was a question of whether we were going to continue travelling together or go our separate ways. Thomas suggested that we went up the west coast until Bombay. The only place he really wanted to visit before getting to Bombay was Cochin, and he talked about getting a train from Bombay, hauling himself across to the other side of the country and spending some time in Calcutta. He thought it would be a powerful learning experience to end his trip by working at Mother Theresa's in the hot season when conditions would probably be so fucking hard as to be almost unbearable. He hoped it would impress upon him the misery of human suffering, appreciate his own life a bit more, which would be all the more meaningful since he would then fly back to the perfection of Stuttgart in southern Germany, where his beautiful girlfriend Heike would be waiting for him to step off the plane. In comparison to Thomas my plans were quite a lot less ambitious. All I really wanted to do was to get up to Dharamsala at some point, a town in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Dharamsala was no ordinary town however, because it was the home of the Dalai Lama, exiled spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet. It was one of the main places in India for Tibetan Buddhism, and since the whole point of me coming out to the East had been to do a Tibetan Buddhist meditation course at Kopan monastery in Nepal, it kind of made sense for me to end my trip with a stay in Dharamsala and hopefully take in some teachings by the Dalai Lama. Not only that, if possible I would also stay at the Tushita Retreat Centre, a place in the same Tibetan Buddhist tradition as Kopan and which would therefore be the logical end point to my trip. In fact I had originally planned to get there by the end of March but it was now already the middle of April, so it looked like I now wasn't going to arrive before the beginning of May. Things had changed because we stayed on an extra few weeks in Sri Lanka, mainly because we were having such a good time getting smashed on the west coast, smoking up all the local weed and having lots of incredible conversations. It was simply taking longer to get back up to the north than I had anticipated, like being at the bottom of a hill with weights tied to my legs, knowing I had to climb back to the top but still not making it.

As we sat there on the roof of the boat whilst it chugged its way through the backwaters, we both agreed that in the short term we should stick together. This was fine by me because I didn't really want to split from Thomas until it seemed like the obvious thing to do, and at the moment it didn't. There had been a few tense, sweaty moments for us in Sri Lanka, but overall it had been a good experience travelling with him and I felt that by observing the way he handled things, I had learnt a lot about how to conduct myself in new and strange situations. I trusted him and always had from the moment I had first seen his head popping out from the top of his sleeping bag when I had walked into that room in Kopan nearly six months ago. Out of the two of us I was the one more likely to freak out if things didn't go according to plan, I knew that, so I was still happy to further delay my arrival in Dharamsala if it meant having a few more adventures with him. If I was on my own I knew I probably wouldn't get up to that much at all and merely play things safe, probably because I didn’t know any other way to play them. The more we sat and talked, the more I was encouraged by the prospect of sticking together with Thomas for a while longer, and in my enthusiasm for maintaining our partnership I suggested, right out of the blue, that we should travel on up the west coast until we got to Goa. Fuck knows where the idea came from but once the cat was out of the bag it was difficult to stop it from taking on a life of its own. If we went to Goa, I said to Thomas, we would be able to sit around on the beaches, relax for hours on end and even take a bit of acid, get into some LSD as an orange sun dipped into the sea far to the west. Fucking fantastic! The more I talked to him about it, the more my excitement grew and it wasn't long before I was trying to sell the idea with quite a degree of force.

"Come on man! Chances are you'll have a deeper and more meaningful experience doing that rather than going all the way up to Calcutta and slogging your guts out in Mother Theresa's."

It unsettled me how much I tried to dissuade Thomas from doing something which, if he did get to do it, was no doubt to be applauded. After all, no one would criticise him for putting in some hours at Mother Theresa's to help the poor and needy. And dissuade him for what exactly? Just so we could go to Goa, drop some acid together and then hang around in all those beachside places where every fucked up and dropped out Westerner finally hauled their smelly arses into if they hadn't already blown their money. In fact the more I hammered on, the more I thought about how it would be better to just drop the whole fucking thing right there and then. But it was already too late for that because Thomas was now enthusiastically talking about us going to Goa and doing some trips, both psychedelic and physical, whilst spending our days and nights on its never ending beaches.

"Hey Phil, you know it's a really great idea! After Sri Lanka with the grass, mushrooms and brown sugar, I think it would be good for me to go to Goa and do some acid. You are right! Going to Mother Theresa's might mean nothing, it may only be some kind of fucked up empty gesture. Yeah, it's a great idea! We should go to Goa and after Goa we can head to Bombay. Then I'll go to Rajasthan and try some opium there whilst you can go on straight to Dharamsala."

The German in Thomas, which of course was a pretty big part, was beginning to come to the fore, because he now began to make plans for the both of us. Yet as I sat there listening to him and nodding my head, a part of me already wanted to change my mind and was wondering how the hell I ever came up with the idea in the first place. Suddenly it felt like the last thing I wanted to do was go to Goa. I wished I had kept my big mouth shut and never fucking mentioned it! Getting my head blasted with acid and hanging out with a heap of derelict Western spacers who thought they were far away from home when in fact they weren’t at all, was not my idea of fun. But it was too late now. My suggestion had caught fire, got Thomas sling hooked on the idea, and it would have been a bit too much for me now to turn round and tell him to forget it. Guess it was a good example of the mental turmoil which I could so easily create for myself. Countless times in the past I had begun spouting off about an idea only to soon want to bottle out of it when I realised it wasn't what I wanted to do at all. I hadn't yet learnt the art of keeping my mouth shut until I had properly thought things through; in other words I was still jumping the gun. As far was Thomas was concerned however, we were now going to Goa after we had been to Cochin, and as he sat there with a big smile on his face and renewed enthusiasm for our journey, I was already thinking of how I was going to later have to sow some seeds of doubt in his mind in order to change our plans. For the moment it was just another mess I had got myself into, and it left me feeling like a first class prat as I stared out over the never ending backwaters.

When the riverboat finally pulled alongside the jetty in Alleppy, it was the end of our backwater odyssey. I wasn't that sorry I have to say. Apart from a couple of hours up on the roof in the afternoon when all was rosy until I’d spouted off about Goa, I would have much preferred to have taken a bus ride with one of those famous Kerala psycho-drivers behind the wheel. Vroom fuckin' vroom, all the way to Cochin from Quilon in a couple of hours flat. Once we were off the boat we went straight to the central bus stand to see about the chances of getting a bus to Cochin, but not before stopping off for some good quality street food on the way. It was early evening, the streets stalls were all beginning to open up, and the smells coming from some of them were simply irresistible. Our thalis on banana leaves eaten in the middle of the backwaters suddenly seemed like a long time ago, so a tasty spicy snack was definitely now in order. When we got to the bus stand we were in luck and able to get the last two seats on an express bus which was just about to leave the station.

As we clambered aboard we were surprised to see that the English couple from the riverboat had beaten us to it, they must have taken an auto rickshaw from the jetty and we ended up sitting right behind them, just like we had on the boat. Earlier in the day Thomas had spoken to them and as a result of that conversation he now held them in utter contempt. They had made the mistake of telling him they’d been in India for three weeks and in that time they hadn’t spent more than two days in any one place. Now they had a week left before flying back to England and they hoped by that time they would have covered the whole country. It was the kind of information which brought out the worst in Thomas, who was convinced it would be impossible for them to get an authentic experience of what the real India was like in such a short space of time. He said they would go back to England with good knowledge of how to work out the timetables of the Indian railways and buses, but fuck all else. I guess he felt that after having now been in India for over six months, he had a right to make those kind of comments, and I was hardly any less to blame because I just sat there and sneered in agreement with him.

"Yeah, stupid pair of assholes. What the fuck do they know about the real India man? Tell me that!"

I really enjoyed the 60 minute bus ride from Alleppy to Cochin. It was one of those journeys where thoughts about the wonder and mystery of everything in life on planet Earth flowed right through me, as if all my senses had opened up and were receiving messages from the wider universe. We were riding through the early night deep down in South India and it was magical, riding through a land so far away from home and so full of promise. Once again our driver didn't disappoint and he treated us to a first rate lunatic performance of dangerous driving, keeping his foot on the gas to ensure the bus rattled along at a rocking pace, with a take no prisoners attitude belching out of every cloud of dirty filthy exhaust smoke. Excellent stuff! We were also able to enjoy our trip sitting down in comfort due to the well thought out ticketing system which was obviously in operation throughout the whole of Kerala and which guaranteed our seats, just like when he had travelled up from Trivandrum to Quilon. It prevented the insane overcrowding which could otherwise so easily occur and which did occur on the buses in virtually every other state in India we had been to, Sri Lanka too, thus making reasonable human behaviour very difficult at times to abide by.

In the bus there was a relaxed atmosphere with passengers talking freely, Indians shouting down the aisle and all of them in good humour. It was something that would never happen back in England, relative strangers speaking to each other with such warmth. Outside the colours got darker and darker as day turned into night and we sped through the small towns and villages of Kerala on the shadow road to Cochin. It was nice for me just to sit back and close my eyes, to quietly get excited about our evening arrival in another strange city. Always was an amazing feeling to see those places rising up and disappearing along the way; constantly, endlessly. Filling my head with wonderful thoughts, leaving my heart full of feelings which were a kind of love for life. Cochin! How would it compare to what I held it to be in my imagination? I could have stayed on that bus for hours, just sitting there and taking in the wonder. It was therefore a bit of a nasty surprise to discover that our arrival in Cochin would soon turn out to be just as heated and unpleasant as our arrival in Quilon had been the day before.

Cochin was spread out over the islands of Vypeen, Bolgatty, Wellington and Fort Cochin, then finally on the mainland it existed in the form of Ernakulum. When we arrived it was late and what we wanted to do was get off at Fort Cochin, which according to Thomas's travel book was the oldest and most interesting part of the city. However our entrance was a really fucking confusing one and we ended up instead at the central bus station in mainland Ernakulum, not on any of the islands at all, having completely missed whatever stop would have been needed to take us over to Fort Cochin. Since neither of us could face the prospect of attempting to negotiate the city's ferry system after our journey up from Quilon we had little choice but to spend the night in Ernakulum. We stood there at the bus station, which as it happened was a pretty crazy place full of people looking strange and vaguely threatening, whilst trying our best to get ourselves together, to work out where we were in relation to all the cheap hotels. This meant digging around in my rucksack and getting out my copy of Lonely Planet to see what it had to say about accommodation in Ernakulum. There were a couple of places right by the station but they looked real slime room jobs and we both felt we that we needed to do better than that. The previous night had been spent at the Station Hotel in Quilon and now we needed something a bit quieter, away from all the remorseless noise which never fucking stopped if you were anywhere near a bus station. All the recommended hotels seemed to be in the area of the main ferry jetty down by the bay, a good few blocks away from where we were. Too far to walk to since we were new in town and it was already well into the evening.

Everything was strange to us and all of a sudden I felt tired, really fucking tired. Time was getting on. We would have to take a ride in an auto rickshaw to get to the jetty area and look for a place there, so we both put on our hardened to India faces and set about finding a driver who would take us there for a fair price. After a heavy bout of haggling the best we could do was find a driver who would drop us there for 6 rupees. There was no doubt that it was over the odds but we had little choice in the matter, we needed to get moving, so we bundled ourselves and our rucksacks into the back of the auto rick and set off. We were soon rattling through yet another new set of Indian streets, alleys and markets all seen at odd angles whilst craning our necks out of the open sides of the auto-rick and bathing our faces in the warm night air. Everything was closing down for the night and there were a large number of deep, dark spaces which I wouldn't have particularly wanted to walk into. Friend or foe? There was no way of telling.

When we got down to the main jetty things were still quite busy, with the kind of late evening scenes you saw at just about any Indian public transport terminus throughout the whole of the country. There was the usual line of late night food stalls and fruit juice stands running along the sidewalk around which people were crowded. Candles and weak electricity were illuminating everything, with incense smoke curling up and disappearing into the night air, probably to keep the mosquitoes away. Food was being cooked with various forms of business conducted, some of it probably dodgy. All the customers were Indians, definitely no Westerners, and that at least made Thomas happy. Maybe we were going to be strangers in town again, with none of our own kind around for many miles. As soon as we off loaded ourselves from the auto rickshaw, pulling our rucksacks out of the back, we were approached by a couple of shady looking characters.

"Hello, yes. Hash, opium, brown. Change money?"

They had unpleasant smiles on their faces and there was absolutely no doubt that if we did any business with them it would result in a rip off. It hit me with some force that the last thing I wanted to do was to listen to the shit they were about to spew in our direction. Instantly I reminded myself of what it said in my copy of Lonely Planet about some parts of Cochin; that it was a large seaport with a lot of rough sailors passing through and no doubt underneath its exotic belly there was a lot of seed. This was especially so in Ernakulum, where the street life was described in the book as sometimes even being dangerous. A grim feeling came over me as I slung my rucksack over my shoulder and gave the two guys a good long stare. I was tired, I was hot and now I was going to get shit from a pair of dope hustlers. We had been on the backwaters all fucking day and all I wanted was to find a place for a good night's sleep, preferably somewhere clean. In other words I was beginning to lose my patience! We turned our backs on them and walked off in the direction of some bright lights up the road, which we hoped were the lights of nice hotels. The two guys followed us and kept on with their hassling. It wasn't long before I snapped.

"No, no! We don't we don't want anything, ok?"

They picked up on my vibe and backed away. At times I could get quite ferocious and even though I had hardly ever been involved in a scrap in my life I knew there were a lot of situations which could put me in a fighting mood. Oh yes, sometimes I knew it wouldn't take much for me to pull the trigger! Despite a relatively clean track record I guess a part of me was just naturally aggressive, and when things were bad, my temper could flare up over the slightest things. Although the hustlers were gone we soon ran into further problems when we discovered that the best value hotel in town, and which we were walking around trying to find, had now closed down. This was a real bummer because the only other place close by was way too expensive and out of our limited spending range. It caught us by surprise and suddenly we were out of ideas. We simply hadn't expected to run into this kind of situation over such a simple thing as trying to find a place to stay for the night. By this point we had been walking around for quite a while and feelings of real tiredness had now caught up with us. We simply stood there in a lane beside an empty building which had once been the hotel, not knowing what it was we should do next. India had caught us out yet again. Feeling hot, sticky and exhausted I indulged in another outburst at Thomas, all because I was full of anger and frustration over the situation and looking to take it out on someone.

"Fucking hell! What a stupid fucking place this is, no hotels or any fucking thing! Just what the fuck is it we're supposed to do? And man, what the fuck are you looking at?"

It was just as well that Thomas was able to stay level headed because for a couple of minutes I really lost it. Put it down to the heat I guess, but I was seething with rage and only came to my senses when I passed, with hardly a second glance, a beggar on the pavement who had no legs. I had been so caught up in my own self pity that I hadn't even noticed him and was completely insensitive to such a pitiful sight; a fellow human being in that kind of situation. It suddenly brought home to me how genuinely inconsequential my perceived troubles really were. I now felt thoroughly ashamed of myself for letting my own petty concerns dominate my mental landscape to such a large degree. The beggar had a begging bowl in front of him and that was all, nothing else. His eyes were cast downward and obviously he was hardly going to be out on the streets at that time of night unless he had no other choice. He was hungry and needed money for food, that was why he was there. It was that fucking simple. Whatever problems I thought I had, I realised after seeing the poor guy on the pavement that things could be a whole lot worse and if I didn't shape up and pull my shit together, they probably would be.

We had to walk back down to the jetty area again and this time we decided to go in the opposite direction. Across the bay we could see the lights shining out from the islands which made up the rest of Cochin, with Fort Cochin no doubt being one of them. It was getting pretty damn late and by Indian standards the streets were now empty. For the moment however, we were well and truly stuck in Ernakulum, and after being in town for barely over an hour various scenes were already becoming wearily familiar, especially the desperate looking dope peddlers still hanging round the chai stalls, and who quite naturally I didn't want anything to do with, even though they kept staring at me. We eventually came to a part of town called Broadway and from out of one of the back streets we caught sight of a blue neon sign which was lit up with the words Hotel Blue Diamond. It was a sight which filled us both with hope and joy, so it was with feelings of great relief that we struck a route towards it. No time to lose! Indian hotels often shut up shop by 11 at night and by this point it was getting pretty damn close to that time. When we got to the street of the Hotel Blue Diamond we saw that there was another place, the Modern Guest House, over on the other side of the road, this one brightly lit up in neon yellow. All of a sudden we felt spoilt for choice, both of us bathed in the neon wondering what the fuck we should do.

The Modern Guest House looked cheaper than the Blue Diamond so we naturally went to check it out first. The guy in the reception quoted us a price of 71 rupees a night for a double room which on our budget was a bit fucking expensive, so we decided to check out the Hotel Blue Diamond just in case it was cheaper. Things were worse there however as far as costs were concerned, with a double at the Diamond weighing in at a hefty 121 rupees a night which for me and Thomas was nearly 2 whole days spending money. In other words, it was out of the fucking question, so we went back to the Modern Guest House and booked ourselves in. We had no choice by this stage. There didn't seem to be anything else close by and besides we were both now absolutely fucked from all our wandering around, even though it was definitely a bit of an up market joint for the likes of us. When we checked in, going through the formalities of signing in the visitors’ book, showing our passports and all the other shit, we saw the reception was full of smart looking Indian businessmen sitting on comfortable sofas and watching a Bollywood movie on the TV. As we stood there signing our autographs on various pieces of paper, they gave us the eye and I got the distinct impression they thought we looked little more than a couple of lousy stinking Western bums. This probably wasn't too far from the truth either, because we were both in the same clothes we had worn for days. Our appearance must have been pretty damn unimpressive to an Indian wheeler dealer on the way up in life, with his head full of business dreams, male family succession and fuck all else.

When the formalities had been completed - name, passport / visa number, where we had come from, where we were going to, date and time of arrival - we were taken to our room which was a couple of floors up and at the back of the building. It was far smarter than anything else we had stayed in since being on the road together, its soft beds and relatively expensive furnishings were a bit of shock after the barren but functional places we had grown used to. It all might have all been a bit fancy for us but on this occasion, after another troubled arrival in another strange Indian city, the security of its relatively plush surroundings was most welcome. All we wanted to do was rest up and drink a long cold soda each. It was not long before we were both freshly showered and lying there naked on our beds, both of us glad that we could now recover from the rigours of the day. Waiting at the jetty in Quilon earlier that morning suddenly seemed a long time ago, but that was ok, it was just the name of the game for the trip we were on. It was always the case after a day of travelling through the heat of India that time stretched, with beginnings punched back into the past, often far further than they actually were.

As I lay there going over my latest performance during our recent arrival in Cochin, I knew that once again I had been in a situation where I had simply allowed unpredicted events overwhelm me and I’d behaved badly as a consequence. This time it had all stemmed from the fact that we hadn't been able to immediately find a place to stay when we'd got off the bus in Ernakulum. There were no suitable hotels on hand and sure enough, after a little bit of hassle, I had blown my top! Suckered again, always prey to negative emotions it seemed, just when things demanded something different. I knew I would have to watch it. It just wasn't good enough to be always freaking out in those kind of situations. India threw them up by the bucket load and although I wasn't yet getting to the point of being completely out of control, the way things were shaping up it was something that might very well happen. If I carried on like this I realised I would eventually begin to strike out at people, and that would probably mean Thomas; either that or I would just have a fit one day and begin to bang my head senseless on the pavement before they came to take me away. Thinking about it as I lay there on the bed made me feel sweaty all over again. Things were only going to improve when I became more capable of just accepting things as they were instead of throwing a tantrum. But it seemed that it was difficult, much more difficult, to put into action when the time came along to give it a try.

When we woke in the morning after a reasonable night's sleep, we both had a shower and then lay on our beds to plan out what to do that day. We had no real idea how long we were going to stay in Cochin before supposedly heading on up the coast to Goa, all we knew for sure was that we both wanted to check out Fort Cochin and then if that seemed interesting we would hang round there for a couple of days, but no longer than that. We decided to take a ferry over to Fort Cochin that morning, but that was only to be after we went to have breakfast at the Bharat Coffee House which was reckoned by my Lonely Planet to be a good place to eat. Top quality and cheap, words which were music to our ears. We were both pretty damn starving after not having eaten much the night before due to all the trouble we’d had over finding a place to crash for the night, so some good food was definitely now in order. When we hit the streets the weather was already hot and sunny, but it was still cool enough to be pleasant rather than uncomfortable as we made our way down Broadway towards the Bharat. Everything now appeared to be harmless and already strangely familiar, yet the night before the surroundings had all seemed so very different. We had almost been on the verge of panic, both of us convinced that it just would have been too catastrophic for words if we’d ended up sleeping on the pavement or in a local park for the night. Yet now it was obvious that even if we hadn't found a hotel it would hardly have been the end of the world. We would have survived, no doubt about that, although at the time it had been enough to fill us up with worry and all kinds of other intolerable stress.

The Bharat Coffee House turned out to be a big old place on Broadway, full of Indian men and with an atmosphere which made it seem more like a private club than a public coffee house. Everything was decked out in wood and there were lots of dark, dusty shadows in which to hide. Hundreds of waiters milled about, all of them dressed in white and they soon treated us with looks to show they were distinctly unimpressed by our appearance. They were looks of contempt, and over the years they’d probably had plenty of chances to perfect them on anyone who might have happened not to have come up to their standards. The waiter who finally came to serve us looked like he had drawn the short straw, so it was easy to guess where we fitted into the Bharat customer hierarchical system. Compensation for the seemingly insulting manner in which we were treated did at least come in the form of the food, because the Bharat served up a decent breakfast of iddlys, sambhar, putthu and strong fresh coffee. Kerala cuisine at its best, no fucking doubt about that, and we sat there stuffing ourselves stupid. Nevertheless we were both relieved to get out of there, it was just a bit too Indian in the worst possible way. The Bharat was a place where rules were rules, and as far as it was concerned they were obviously the kind of rules which were going to last forever, even if they were all just a bit too fucking stupid to be true.

"What a bunch of wankers!" I said to Thomas when we hit the street.
"Yeah, they were real assholes!"

We were offended, just because we looked like a pair of punk-ass bums was no reason in our minds for them to be so rude to us. Bread was bread and we should have been respected for our spending power at least, but no, that snobby bunch of jack asses in the Bharat had well and truly given us an Indian style cold shoulder which had taken the form of ignoring us for as long as possible. After we got out of the Bharat the temperature on the streets of Ernakulum was beginning to rise and in turn things were getting stickier and stickier as we walked along Broadway. By the time we got to the ferry jetty the weather had well and truly heated up and it was a relief to get on the boat which took us out into the waters of the bay where the fresh air seemed all the more sweeter. From the ferry we got a good view of the islands which made up the city - Vypeen, Bolgatty, Wellington and Fort Cochin. Looking back towards Ernakulum we saw that it was far more extensive than we had thought, with plenty of skyscrapers and no end of modern buildings standing on the horizon. The kind of place where deals were made which would have an effect on an area greater than just the city and its immediate hinterland; from Ernakulum power would reach out far into the fields and hills of Kerala, that was for sure.

The bay itself was dominated by the port of Cochin which was spread out over a vast area. Large bulk carriers lay alongside the wharves, loading and unloading their cargoes, whilst the cranes and warehouses made the docks seem like another city within a city. Sea trade was obviously an activity which had been going on for hundreds of years in Cochin and it was the Portuguese who had founded the port a few centuries ago. It now dealt in all the heavy duty stuff which was either imported or exported by the state of Kerala, and from a deserted island in the middle of the bay stretched a long jetty, at the end of which an oil tanker lay at berth. It looked huge and frightening as our small ferry passed in front of it. Cochin was also an important naval base, so all in all, as far hardware went there was some pretty impressive kit around. It was a bit of a shock after some of the backwoods places we had found ourselves in over the last few weeks, where modern times had seemed quite far away, it was a shock to now be back in the middle of all this machinery of defence and commerce. Thomas excitedly pointed out a couple of dolphins in the bay, both of them rising up and out of the water in slippery curves as they swam along. Somehow the sight of them made me feel sad, like I was watching creatures who had little say in the world but who possibly had a lot of wisdom, whilst along the shores of the islands we passed rows and rows of exotic looking Chinese fishing nets which according to my Lonely Planet were one of the things Cochin was famous for. They stood upright and jet black against the horizon, suspended above the waters like death machines waiting to swallow up thousands of poor little fishes from the waters below. I wondered what kind of crazy clever bastard had thought up those kind of things in the first place, and came to the conclusion it was probably someone who lived not too far from the Yellow or the Yangtze.

Just as we approached the island of Fort Cochin we passed a half sunken ship lying on its side in the waters of the bay which looked like it had been there for years. Its lower portholes were pointing up towards the sky, appearing lifeless and stupid. Fuck knows why the city authorities hadn't bothered to scoop it out of the water and get it scrapped. No doubt there was a complicated insurance issue lurking somewhere in the shadows. It was funny seeing the wreck in the water. Funny because when we'd stayed in the town of Galle on the south coast of Sri Lanka, we had often walked along its sea wall and stared out over the harbour where a ship lay grounded on the rocks, a forgotten casualty of an accident along some distant trading route. It hadn't quite been forgotten actually, because the locals in Galle had informed us that a salvage crew was on its way from Taiwan to get it sorted. The strange thing was that Fort Cochin reminded us of Galle in its layout and buildings, both had similar histories in that they were founded and first built by the Portuguese before being taken over by the Dutch and then finally the British. All the architectural influences were there to see. And now, on top of all that, they each had an abandoned ship in their waters.

When we got off the ferry we were both ready to explore the island after our ferry trip across the bay. One of the things which me and Thomas had in common was a genuine feeling of excitement when we arrived in strange new places, a keen anticipation, as if we were about to find the answers to all our dreams. Now that we were on the island we decided just to walk around for a while and see where we ended up. The only place we wanted to get to at some point was the Church of St Francis, which according to my Lonely Planet was where the Portuguese navigator and explorer Vasco de Gama was buried. In my imagination I pictured that the church would be all decked out in white with strange spires and twists like a piece of glorious architecture from a past age of conquerors. God knows why! It was the kind of stuff that I walked around with in my head all day, even when I knew it was only bound to lead to disappointment. Tough shit on me I guess, for having such a fanciful imagination. It wasn't long before we hit the back streets of the island away from the jetty and were walking through some typically Indian scenes. Various kinds of smells emanated from everywhere, sweet smells of cooking and incense burning, then a foul stench from the trash and shit of people with various kinds of animals all living so closely together. The one noticeable thing was that despite the humbleness of some of the surroundings there didn't seem to be that many miserable people around, because even though we were complete strangers, everyone had a smile for us. This was in stark contrast to countless thousands of places back home where miserable fuckers could so easily parade themselves before you as if they were on 24 hour display.

We walked deeper into the island of Fort Cochin, eventually losing our direction and becoming more and more tired. The heat kept conversation between us to a minimum, all our energy was put into walking down the streets without it becoming too physically uncomfortable. It was very easy to get exhausted and I knew from past experience how necessary it was for us to stagger into the shade of the nearest chai shop and gulp down a bottle of cold soda when things got too much. Maybe we were walking too fast or had just forgotten our sun hats, I just don't know, but eventually we came to a square with some large trees, beneath which in their shade, stood a number of food and drink stalls. It was time to take a rest, especially as it was fast approaching midday, when the physical need for refreshment became quite pronounced. We went over to one of the drinks stands and downed a couple of sodas each, sodas mixed with lemon and honey, absolutely exquisite it had to be said. When the old woman who served us had done the mix we knocked them back in one go. Glug, glug, gluggy! Straight down into our stomachs.

Once our thirst was quenched all we could do was order a second bottle each to drink at leisure, whilst watching life in the square pass on by. At one end was a low lying promenade with a bit of shingle beach and the open sea beyond it. When we had finished at the drinks stall we headed off in its direction hoping to find a nice place to rest by the waters. As we walked past the other stalls, all of which were selling various forms of food and drink, a well built Indian man stepped out from one of them and gave me a card. He told us in good English that if we wanted a decent meal whilst we were on the island we could buy some fresh fish and take it to his stall where he would cook it for us. He said there was an excellent fish seller at the other end of the square, so when we got hungry we could bear his idea in mind. Once the information had been imparted to us he returned to his stall and we were both amazed at the lack of hassle involved. There had been no hard sell tactics or anything of that nature, just the option to do something later if we so chose. Thomas even had a smile on his face.

"Wow ! A nice guy, you think?"
"Yeah right. Quite a good idea too. Get some food and let him cook it."
"Mmmm. Maybe later we go there!"
"Yeah, yeah. Why not man, why not?"

Before I flicked the card in my pocket I took a quick look at it. There was a fair bit written on it and as we made our way towards the waters I was only able to take in the first three lines.

Remember me you will be happy.
Angel Gebereel.
Snack Bar.

Weird, I thought. Very fucking weird.

We got to the water and found a place to sit. There were quite a few people around and it must have been a favourite lunch time spot to go to for people who lived on the island. Young couples sat not far away from us, the women wearing jewellery and colourful saris, the men in shirts and trousers; people who looked like they were leading good lives. Me and Thomas must have seemed as appealing to them as a pair of dog turds, both of us sitting there in our trail beaten clothes and with faces sporting three day stubbles. As I sat and looked out to sea, a ship appeared from out of the haze on the horizon, obviously bound for the port in the bay. It must have been empty because it sat up high in the water and looked pretty huge, a gloomy old vessel with a couple of rusted cranes on its deck and a tattered Indian flag flying from its stern. It moved quickly through the waters and it had soon sailed past us into the narrow channel which divided the sea and the bay of Cochin. There were sailors on the upper decks staring out towards the shore. Somehow it was a ghost-like vision and I wondered how the conditions must have been on board for the crew, with things possibly being at the rough end of the twentieth century line by way of those vessels plying the waters of the Arabian Sea.

Then, just as we had begun to feel sufficiently recovered from our recent exertions a man approached us. He was a rough, dark looking Indian and soon made no bones about his business.

"Grass?"

He had a deep voice which betrayed years of smoking and as he said the word he raised his eyebrows in hopeful expectation. It was therefore with a tinge of sadness that I had to disappoint him.

"No, no. It's ok thanks. We've got plenty."

This was actually a lie. Since getting back to India from Sri Lanka we hadn't really thought about stocking up on weed again, and far less got round to doing anything about it. Things had got a little crazy on the Emerald Isle where, once we had finished our period of meditation at Nilambe, we went straight into a phase of excessive dope smoking, and in the case of Thomas other things as well, like mushrooms and brown sugar. The problem with the guy in front of us was that he really didn't look like someone who was going to be able to cut us a very good deal. In fact it was decidedly likely he would provide us with the complete opposite, a very bad one. Nevertheless I was able to get him to play the good citizen by asking him to give us directions to the Church of St Francis, and from what he said it turned out that we were not too far away at all. We therefore got up and struck a path in its direction leaving the Indian standing there without any business and probably feeling a bit pissed off with us, but there you go, those were the breaks.

The street we walked down led immediately into one of the quieter parts of the island where the houses were large and obviously belonged to locals who were prosperous, either that or they had been owned by the same families for generations. They sat there in the heat of the early afternoon, giving the place an atmosphere of a hundred thousand lazy Sundays. We soon spotted the church pointing up from behind them, but just as we were about to turn into the street it was on, we were approached by a youth on a push bike. When he got close enough he simply held out a bag in front of us.

"Grass! 100 rupees."

The directness of his delivery stopped us in our tracks. It was something which could only be admired as he stood there dangling a big bag of temptation right before our eyes. I looked over at Thomas who was obviously thinking the same thing as I was.

"Oh well, I suppose we might as well at least take a look at it."

It was with a heavy sigh that I took the bag off the youth and opened it up to have a closer inspection.

"Mmmm. Think it smells ok, what do you think?"

I handed the bag over to Thomas. This was done more out of courtesy than anything else because when it came to buying stuff like weed and mushrooms I was the expert, which meant that whatever I said Thomas would invariably agree with me. Naturally this made me feel pretty good, despite the fact I was not really an expert at all when it got down to the nitty gritty.

"Well, Phil, let's buy it!"
"Yeah…right, right!"

I was caught up for a moment in a nasty little bout of indecision. The problem with weed was that it was often difficult to tell just how good it might be until some of it had been smoked. The last thing I wanted to do was roll up a joint to test it out there and then in the bright early afternoon sun of Fort Cochin, although that was definitely the safest option in terms of ensuring we had made a good investment. Otherwise there was a real chance of ending up with a bag of shit! In the end I just decided to go for it, and for what seemed to be two good reasons. First we were bound to want to have something to smoke at some stage, and secondly doing it like this involved a minimum amount of hassle, since all we had to do was put our hands in our pockets and hand over the necessary cash. No running around and waiting outside a building until a dodgy dealer finally reappeared from the shadows or any stuff like that. I made the boy an offer.

"I'll give you 80 rupees for it."

The youth immediately agreed and I suppose if I had been a bit sharper I would have realised that something was up. If anyone was selling quality stuff they would want to hold out for as long as possible to get the best price. But this was over and done before it had even got started. Maybe my brain was getting squashed by the heat of the sun, but whatever it was, greed overtook my common sense. It was a big bag which felt satisfyingly heavy so I just went ahead and did the deal. The youth didn't hang around once he got his 80 rupees and soon disappeared quickly pedaling his push bike, leaving me and Thomas standing there in the hazy silence, just a few yards away from the church. I knelt down and stuffed the bag of weed into the small backpack which I was carrying, then flicked a look at Thomas.

"Oh well, looks like we've got something to smoke tonight!"
“Yeah, great Phil. Really, really great!”

From the outside, the Church of St Francis was not the beautiful building which I had somehow imagined it to be, but once we were inside there was no denying that it did have a special kind of atmosphere, one of spirits long gone but somehow still present. We walked down the middle aisle until we got to a section on the life of Vasco de Gama, which was at the front of the right hand row of pews. There we read the history of this famous Portuguese navigator, and above the words was a small postcard size portrait of the man himself. He had a brooding pair of eyes which looked like those of someone whose talent had taken him to strange new worlds where no one from his land had ever gone before, but they were strange worlds in which he was destined to die. The eyes unsettled me, they were so very, very dark and they might have seen many brutalities, and it could be the case that Cochin has probably never recovered from the day Vasco de Gama discovered it.

We sat down in the front pew to rest for a while, the church was extremely quiet, and apart from a lone attendant sitting behind a desk at the entrance and who looked bored out of his skull, we were the only people there. It wasn't long before I pulled out the bag of weed and gave it a good inspection. However I didn't feel too comfortable looking at it inside a church and soon my uneasiness got the better of me so I put it away again, stashing it at the bottom of my pack. Fears of eternal damnation raining down on me and all that; yes, I guess you could say at times that I was full of superstition. When I sat up straight my eyes met those of Vasco de Gama head on; dark and penetrating I doubted very much if he would have had much tolerance for dope smokers on any of his expeditions, and would probably have made them walk the plank whilst in the middle of the deep, dark sea. Funnily enough, the more I looked at them, the more those eyes soothed me. Darkness and history were blended together in a mysterious combination to take me far away from the heat and sweat of Fort Cochin, back through the centuries of time for a little bit of day dreaming, something which I was rather good at.

We were both getting pretty hungry and once we were finished with the Church of St. Francis I pulled out my Lonely Planet to see what it said about eating places on the island. In this case it recommended the Elite Hotel which was just a couple of streets away. When we got there we discovered it not only had a restaurant but rooms as well, and since it looked kind of cool we decided to see if there were any vacancies. The young man behind the counter was wearing Western clothes and he was reading an Asterix book, something which made me smile.

"Wow! Asterix!"
"Yeah, now for the third time."

His English was very good, in fact he spoke with a lazy kind of drawl which required no effort at all. When we enquired about the room situation he told us he had two which were empty. One upstairs for 25 rupees a night and one around the back on the ground floor for 40. We checked them both out and decided to take the one upstairs. It was bare and dusty, with just a couple of beds, a table and a chair, but it also had a balcony with a view onto the street below, and we both thought it would be nice to sit out there in the evening and smoke a couple of joints from our recently acquired bag of grass. After booking the room we sat down in the restaurant to order some food where I noticed Thomas had a big smile on his face.

"So this is what we do Phil. We go back to Ernakulum, rest a couple of hours at the hotel and then come back here with our stuff in the evening."

He looked pretty damn pleased with himself for saying that and I guess it wasn't such a bad idea at all, so I could only agree with him.

"Yeah, right. It's 24 hour check out at the Modern so we've got plenty of time."

Our immediate plans sorted, we then turned our attention to food. The restaurant served traditional Indian dishes as well as Western stuff like toast, butter, jam and pancakes. We both went for a thali, which was the main meal most people in South India had every day of their lives, usually for lunch. Served on a large round steel plate it consisted of a big pile of rice along with a number of pickles and curries, all vegetarian, and in addition to all that there were also a number of spices and gravy sauces. There was little doubt in our minds that a thali was one of the most satisfying meals man had yet come up with; there was always a good quantity, we ate it with our bare hands and it was wholly vegetarian. Thomas followed his thali with a couple of Berliners, a German doughnut which he was pretty astounded to find available on Fort Cochin. Probably was the case that the people who ran the Elite had got the idea from someone who must have come from that part of the world and that was why there was a whole pile of them stacked on a tray by the window. All freshly baked. Even more surprising was that when the typically hard beaten Indian waiter served them to Thomas he got their pronunciation just right.

"Bearlinerz!"

After the meal we made our way slowly back to the other side of the island to the ferry jetty. It was extremely hot and as we walked down the dusty back streets I made for any bit of shadow I could find, getting more and more paranoid I was about to be struck down with sunstroke. I had a vision of suddenly, without any warning, falling over and turning very, very cold with my belly full of thali. Thomas would be bent over me nervously asking if I was OK, already knowing in his heart of hearts that I was a goner. Somehow I kept myself together and arrived back at the jetty in one piece, where we discovered we would have to wait 45 minutes until the next ferry to Ernakulum. Luckily there was a chai shop close by in which we were able to escape from the sun, drinking sodas as the sweat ran upon our brows and down from out of our armpits. There wasn't much to say to each other and we were both happy to sit there in silence, deep in the shadows of our new found refuge, watching the locals wander in and out. They came and drank cups of chai, bought cigarettes or beedies, and had brief exchanges with the fat cross eyed man who sat behind the counter before they stepped back into the sun. All very relaxed and informal movements performed by people used to moving slow instead of fast, which was just how it was supposed to be if you lived in the lands of the heat.

When it was time for us to catch the ferry I bought a few packs of beedies which were the cheapest and most unhealthy things to smoke in India, even worse than Four Cut, a budget brand cigarette on a par with Player’s No. 10 or Sovereign. However once their low quality tobacco had been removed, beedie skins made excellent material to roll joints with, something we would soon be wanting to do now that we had got our hands on a big bag of weed. We went and stood upon the jetty in order to watch the ferry slowly make its way towards us, just about about recognising its red, yellow and green colours from across the bay, the colours which all forms of public transport in Kerala were painted in. They were nice colours, more thought had gone into their decoration than some of the stuff you got back home, that was for sure. Attention to detail is what you might call it. Somehow, and I don't quite know how, I got drawn into a conversation with a smartly dressed Indian who was standing next to me on the jetty. He was short and well built and he must have been in his mid to late-thirties. With a pair of deep dark eyes which appeared like they had some kind of black liner round them, he looked like he was deeply into Hindusim. He fired out questions at me at such a speed that I found it difficult keeping up with him. It was the usual stuff - how long had I been in India, what did I think of such a great country, where else did I intend to go, was I travelling with anyone, at which point I felt like pointing over to Thomas and saying "Yeah, I'm travelling with that smelly bastard over there!" and last but not least, whether or not I was married.

Now one might have thought that he was an nosy little fucker in every way, but in actual fact he was just a typical example of what most Indians were like when they felt the need to poke their noses right into your business. All I could do was stand there and stutter out some quick replies whilst suffering the same feelings of irritation which I always had when being interrogated by inquisitive natives. It was an irritation which always left me wanting to tell them to fuck off, however I knew it was an attitude I would have to change, unless I wanted to end up being seriously rude to people. It was just their manner, their custom, whatever you want to call it. The ferry was still some way off, out there in the bay somewhere doing fuck knows what, so I shot a few questions back to the man in return, looking upon it as an opportunity to at least try to be a bit more friendly and open. No point in being a miserable screwed up Westerner the whole of my life! He told me he was from Bangalore, main city in the state of Karnataka and which was about 400 km up the road from Cochin. According to him, as far as cities went in India, Bangalore was second only to Bombay in terms of educational and industrial development. He worked in Cochin for a pesticides company and their main offices were on Fort Cochin island where he was their sales co-ordinator for the whole of South India, an area which took in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. It kind of depressed me to think what kind of chemicals they used on the land. There was a good chance I was talking to someone who was contributing towards really screwing up the environment, but then again how did I know that? It didn't occur to me to tell him all of this, he hardly looked an evil bastard and he no doubt genuinely thought that he was doing the best thing with his life. It was just a bit sad to think that the consequences of all his enthusiasm might be tragic both for him and the whole fucking world. But such was the fate of the Bangalore Man, and me, now that I come to think about it.

When I got back to the Modern Guest House in downtown Ernakulum I took a shower and flopped down on one of the comfortable chairs in our room. I needed a rest. Thomas had split on the way back to buy some batteries for the Walkman. It was my Walkman but over the weeks it had become common property and I was happy about that because on some occasions we both really needed to let our minds drift away and listen to a bit of music, just to escape from the strangeness of the places we were visiting and also possibly from each other. In Sri Lanka it had been an essential part of our equipment, where it had been so nice to have a puff of the local weed then sit right back and listen to either Burning Spear, The Twinkle Brothers, Jah Shaka or even a bit of Bob Marley. Yes, down there on the Emerald Isle it had been Jah Rastafari all the way! It didn't take me long to pull out the bag of weed which we had scored over on Fort Cochin in order to take another look at it. I knew that the only way of really finding out its quality was going to be by sparking some of it up. I took out one of my beedies, slit its skin and emptied out all the tobacco, then I stuffed it full of weed, ending up with a beefy little number which I soon lit before I sat back and drew the smoke deep down into my lungs. There seemed to be a bit of a perfumed to taste to it, which no doubt betrayed some kind of impurity, or a certain lack of freshness, but nevertheless by the time Thomas had returned from his shopping trip, the joint was finished and I was pretty stoned. Doubtless the haze in the room and the fact that I was sitting there with a big smile on my face gave the game away as it didn't take long for him to figure what out had happened.

"Hey Phil, you smoked some, yes?"
"Er, yeah, yeah…I have!"
"Is it good stuff?"
"Yeah man, it's kind of ok. Strong, definitely. Anyway, try some. I'll spark up another number."

What with the heat and the rush which the weed gave me, talking was actually quite a bit of an effort. As I rolled up a spliff for Thomas I realised that I was a bit shaky. I had to play it cool however, because I didn't really want to get caught up in a bout of stoned paranoia, bad buzzing about my health or any shit like that. So I cast my fears aside and when I tossed the joint over to Thomas it felt like I was fully back in control.

"Here, catch!"
"Thanks. Hey, it looks great."
"Yeah, I think those beedies were a good purchase. Their skins roll quite easily."
"Yeah, it's great. Hey look, I bought some music when I was out. What do you think?"

Lying there on his bed Thomas held up a tape of Diesel and Dust by Midnight Oil. It had a really cool cover. A shot of a dust shack in the Outback of Oz against a deep blue sky. I had seen it in the shops before and it was an album I had been meaning to listen to for a quite some time.

"Yeah, looks good. They're an Aussie band I think, had a single called Beds are Burning.”
"Well, I think I try it!"

With that Thomas lit up the joint I had rolled him, put the Walkman over his ears and closed his eyes. It allowed me to return to the strange landscapes of my own stoned thinking as I sat there in my chair, looking out of the window where the trees stood out the back of the hotel in the many shades of green. South India, what an incredible place it was!

Our room was at the rear of the Modern and it happened to be reasonably quiet. The afternoon outside was bathed in a deep yellow light, the sun was shining but there were some heavy brooding clouds around, as if a storm might be on the way. The rusty coloured tiles of the back buildings had a warmth to them which made me think about places of retreat. I thought about how nice it would have been just to have stayed where I was in my chair for a few days, smoking our bag of weed and taking a break from all the challenges which travelling through India so effortlessly delivered up to us. Yeah man, go on a big fucking chill out vacation and just let myself go! No doubt it was the smoke making me think like that. I knew from years of past experience that when I was high it became quite easy to hang around places for hours, days, or even weeks, hanging around just thinking stoned thoughts whilst my body felt like it had been put to sleep. The father of a friend of mine had once said that if you are going to smoke dope you might as well do nothing, and I have to say in that regard he was absolutely right. The major drawback of smoking weed was that it often left me too timid to step into the big wide world, preferring instead to hang around my room where I could sit and smoke until everything was gone.

As I sat there toking on my beefy spliff I began to regret the fact we would soon have to check out of the Modern Guest House and drag ourselves back over to Fort Cochin to book ourselves into the Elite. Now that I was stoned, moving anywhere seemed so pointless! What were we going to find on the island that we didn't already have? Well, a cheaper room I guess. Then after Fort Cochin it was supposed to be Goa, then somewhere else and so wagon would keep on rolling, place after place, searching for what? It seemed we never gave ourselves the chance to really think or deeply penetrate the situation which we already found ourselves in and just be satisfied with that. Always moving on, down the dust tracks, looking for something, looking for whatever it was we thought we didn’t already have. Strange as though it might have seemed, all this thinking about staying made me feel a little bit restless so I decided I would go and check out a bit of Ernakulum before we headed back across the bay to Fort Cochin.

"Hey Thomas, I'm going for a walk, ok?"

He was lying horizontal on the bed and was already red-eyed from the weed. He looked up at me with an expression of stoned confusion, something which I had seen so many times before, and he slowly took the cans off his ears.

"What you say?"
"I said I'm going for a walk."
"Ok, but Phil, don't be long. Soon we have to check out of this place."
"No, no. Don't worry man, I won't be long."

Outside I struck a route away from the direction of Broadway and towards what looked like a quieter part of town. I was still pretty stoned and as I walked along at a leisurely pace the richness and variety of Indian street life simply blew me away. Bright yellow auto ricks, horse drawn carts and psychedelic painted lorries were some of the more notable forms of transport to be found on the roads, whilst crowds of people cycled, walked, or simply sat around on the pavements. The brightly coloured signs of the shops and buildings, all on top of one another and jutting out at odd angles, made it appear as if the people of Ernakulum were happier than most with how they lived their lives. In my stoned haze there seemed to be an air of celebration about it which freed the place from that heavy intensity often so pervasive throughout most Indian cities. An intensity which at times had been strong enough to make me panic and wish to just get the hell out of wherever it was I happened to be in, whilst filled with paranoid thoughts that it was way too big to ever really escape from. By way of contrast, Ernakulum wasn't like all that, in fact one could almost imagine living there and having a contented life, probably all preposterous bollocks of course, but on that particular day as I walked along that was how it felt when seen through the haze of my stoned imaginings.

By the time I got to the end of the street which the Modern Guest House was on, I found myself in a small square which had a number of roads running off it. Around it were some bookshops and after a couple of minutes stoned deliberation I went inside one of them which had a small display of English language titles in its window. I hadn't managed to get my hands on something decent to read since The Magus which I had bought way back in Varanasi when I was with Susan. It felt like I was about due for another good one, but in India it was tricky, so easy to con yourself into buying complete shit, whilst under the illusion it would counteract those inevitable bouts of boredom which came along when on the road. The shop had a pretty meagre selection however, and I soon got into one of those crazy stoned situations where I felt I couldn't just walk out of the place without at least buying something. Maybe it was because the old man behind the counter had such a sad expression on his face which made me immediately feel sorry for him, yet for all I knew he’d probably honed his act down to perfection. After a long period of just staring at the shelves I ended up with a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens which cost me 22 rupees.

God knows why I got it because I really just couldn't imagine ever ploughing my way through it all whilst down in the depths of South India. The funny thing about the book was that it had a photograph of Dickens inside the cover which bore a remarkable resemblance to Vasco de Gama, that mean looking navigator of the oceans now lying in the Church of St Francis on Fort Cochin. There was the same dark brooding intensity to his eyes, staring deep into me. On the shop counter lay a street map of Cochin which I picked up and gave the once over, but I didn't think I would need it because we were only going to be in town for another day or so at the most. Beneath the map was a guide to the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, two Muslim cities in the south of the country and in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Something struck me about their names, they sounded so exotic and foreign, so removed from everything that I knew and had so far been to in India. They were only names of course, but I was stoned and when I was stoned it was easy to think in pictures. Hyderabad and Secunderabad, somehow I felt that it would pretty damn interesting to go and visit those places if I ever got the chance.

When I got back to the Modern Guest House I mentioned to Thomas that maybe we would be better off staying where we were rather than going through the hassle of carting all our stuff over to Fort Cochin, but all I got from him was a lecture on the importance of giving up on attachments. He said they held us back from stepping into new situations and on top of that he reminded me that we had signed the visitors book at the Elite, so the owner would only be offended if we didn't now turn up. Somehow I didn't think the owner would really have minded that much, but I think I got the point, which was that Thomas was fired up to go back to Fort Cochin and so that was that! When he set his mind on something he was like a fucking great Germanic steam roller impossible to stop, so I was left with little choice but to get my stuff together and follow him down to the ferry jetty. I could have done with another smoke for the ferry ride if truth be told, but with Thomas now taking control of the situation there was little chance of that; he wanted to get out of Ernakulum before I threw any more potential obstacles in his way. Outside the brooding clouds which had been gathering all afternoon now delivered on their threat of rain and we got completely fucking soaked on our way to the jetty. It was a splish-splash cacophony out there on the streets as, with our rucksacks strapped to our backs, we tried to avoid the crowds of people moving in every which way direction. We got there right at the time of the early evening rush hour and consequently the ferry was packed. I just stood there in the middle of it all still pretty stoned, with my rucksack stuck to my soaking wet back whilst staring out into the darkness enveloping the bay, the bay of Cochin.

On arrival our room at the Elite looked just as drab and dusty as it had earlier in the day. It was illuminated by a single bare light bulb which hung down from the ceiling. After we had dumped our rucksacks we both headed downstairs for something to eat, I guess it was the after effects of the smoking which had given us such ravenous appetites and I for one could have eaten a horse as long as it was made of vegetables. The scene in the restaurant took us a little bit by surprise however because it was full of Westerners, which in one swift hit dispelled our notions of being a pair of lone travellers making our way through strange and off the beaten track kind of places on the west coast of India. We really should have realised that something was up when we’d seen all those Berliners earlier in the day, after all they were hardly there for the locals. Now we felt that we were just part of the crowd, an ever changing mob making their way down the line, and that we were doing nothing special. Everything was already worked out, all seats taken. Shit, what a bummer! The knowledge hit us hard, especially Thomas who expressed his disappointment in his usual way as soon as we sat down at a table.

"Oh man, oh man, what a miserable bunch of assholes!"

He lapsed into a cynical and angry mood which lasted throughout the meal. But he was right, the other pale skins were the most miserable bunch of fuckers you could have ever wished to have come across. Nevertheless Thomas really did have a problem accepting their presence. They took away from him the magic of thinking we were in a place where nobody from our part of the world had ever been before. Evidently that just simply was not the case and obviously never had been. We were part of a cast of thousands, doing what we were supposed to do, little more than that. It was funny, because in situations when things looked threatening, even dangerous, Thomas was fine at remaining open and keeping his cool, but when it came to handling the duller, slightly more boring scenes we encountered he could easily lose his patience and get wound up. As Thomas often told me, one of the main causes of grief for people was their inability to accept things as they were, yet here he was blowing things big time by indulging in a massive sulk! All pictures of him being some great adventurer from a little known town in South Germany who was out in the tropics were crumbling to dust and he didn't fucking like it. I can't say that I really felt the same way, sure I liked the adventure side of things, but only up to a point I guess, so a few familiar looking faces was ok by me. No big deal! All the same it had to be said that the scene in the restaurant of the Elite was pretty desperate. Westerners sitting there quietly sipping their coffees or milkshakes and doing their best not to look completely fucking lost. Dipping into whatever ruffled paperback books they happened to be reading, giving off the vibe that the slightest altercation would push them over the edge.

It was a relief to get back to our room and shut the door on them after we had eaten. We didn't waste much time before opening up the shutters to the balcony and getting out our big bag of weed. Thomas tried to calm himself down by way of lying on his bed and sticking on the Walkman to give his Midnight Oil tape another spin, whilst I sat at the table and set about rolling a couple of joints. As I slowly got the stuff together I couldn't help listening in on a conversation which was taking place in the hallway, the walls were pretty thin so hearing things clear as a bell was really no problem. An American woman was talking to a couple of Indians who must have worked in the hotel. She was evidently travelling on her own and by their tone it sounded like the Indians were suspicious of having a single woman staying there. They seemed to be continually asking her when she was leaving and where she was travelling to next. She was obviously hardened to handling inquisitive Indians who could all too easily make you feel like punching them in the face just to shut them up, so she calmly dealt with their intrusive questions. It made me wonder how I would cope if I was a woman travelling on my own and staying a night at a place like the Elite with only a couple of nosy pricks like those guys to talk to. Not very well I concluded, not very well at all! I always felt I needed company and although I sometimes slagged him off to myself something rotten, there was no doubt in my mind that Thomas was my best buddy in the whole wide world at that precise moment in time.

For me the interesting thing about listening to the woman was when she began to talk about where she was going after Cochin. She told the Indians in the hallway that she would go to Mysore and then on to Bangalore in the state of Karnataka. I don't know what it was, but the way she talked about those places immediately made me want to visit them as well. They sounded different, exotic, and a whole lot better than our current plan, which still hadn't evolved into much more than hanging around Cochin for a couple of days before hauling ourselves up to Goa. In fact listening to her talk made me feel that our plan was altogether too dull and predictable in comparison with what she would be doing. Mysore and Bangalore! Just like Hyderabad and Secunderabad they were intriguing names, enticing even, and who knows what we might find if we went there? The rest of the conversation in the hallway drifted away from me after that because I became lost in thoughts about changing our travel plans once again. So after I tossed a joint over to Thomas, who was deep within the lands of Midnight Oil, I took out my Lonely Planet to see what it had to say about Mysore and Bangalore.

It was actually the first time since coming to India that I heard the city of Mysore mentioned and as I read the write up in the book I wanted to go there more and more. It was otherwise known as the Sandalwood City because it produced incense, it had been a Mecca for travellers for centuries, and it sounded incredible. I got more excited after I looked at the map and realised that if we went to Mysore and Bangalore it would then be possible for us to travel up through Karnataka and then visit those twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad. After a couple of tokes on my joint I was soon filled with travel fever all over again because my thoughts ran wild, and it didn't take long for me to get it all nailed down in my mind as to what it was we should do. Of course, everything suddenly made perfect sense! After Cochin we should go to Mysore and then across to Bangalore, after that up to Hyderabad and Secunderabad. Fuck, what a dynamite plan! It was ten times better than just pissing our time away in Goa with all those other losers who thought they were gonna find the meaning of life only to end up wasted on the beach for a couple of months. We could even then go on to Calcutta where Thomas could work in Mother Theresa's like a good citizen before he went back to Deutschland and once again be with Heike, whilst I could hit those hills of Himachal Pradesh. It all seemed like a wicked idea to me. No more monkey business! We would go straight up through the heart of India, taking the bull by the horns. In my stoned haze I was flush with new visions as I pictured sunset landscapes in strange and unknown cities further on up the road. I felt very happy and I realised without any doubt that it was definitely what me and Thomas should do if we wanted to stay travelling together for a little while longer.

It took a lot of effort to hold myself back from spilling the beans to him there and then. But I wanted what was to be a major proposition to sound good and for it to make perfect fucking sense. Otherwise there was a danger he might just pass up on the idea and insist that we go to Goa, like we had agreed just a couple of days ago. The day before in fact! It would be better if I laid things out to him the next morning and safer as well, just in case I had another one of my notorious bouts of second thoughts. When I had finished thinking all that through to myself and put my Lonely Planet away, I rolled up a couple more joints and took them out onto the balcony where we both sat down and took in what we hoped would be the cool night air. It had stopped raining but the atmosphere still hadn't really cleared and everything felt warm, close and somewhat sticky. Fizzing in the heat, we sat there and smoked our joints. As we stared out over the street below we heard the unmistakable sound of Eric Clapton coming from out of an open window a few doors along. In my stoned haze his guitar sounded just great as the notes warbled, span and finally floated off up into the night. Whatever song it was he must have been well into heroin when he recorded it because it was outta fucking sight. No wonder people used to call him God!

Just as I was beginning to relax however, I felt another bout of stoned paranoia coming on. I became convinced my heart was beating too fast and I was soon engulfed in one of those oh so familiar bad health buzzes which can quickly come upon me when stoned. For some reason I became ultra sensitive to a perceived heaviness in my chest and because of that my heart was forced to beat faster in order to cope with the extra weight. It felt that by smoking the weed I wasn't doing a particularly nice thing to my body, and if I was brutally honest with myself I knew I would have to say it was not something to recommend to others. It simply felt too crude to be a bona fide spiritual activity and the negative physical side effects for me made the whole thing dubious, decidedly dodgy, whilst the mental ones were pretty obvious. Sooner or later I knew that I would have to stop once and for all, but I also knew that after nine years of continuous smoking, giving up the weed was not going to be that easy. There had been many times in the past when I had promised myself enough was enough, only for it not to be by a very long way. But then just before it looked like I was going to be lost for a couple of hours in those half assed recriminations which can so easily afflict me when stoned, a Land Rover pulled up on the other side of the road.

A couple of men got out and opened up the doors of a building on which was a sign which simply stated Cold Storage Centre. The men began to unload from the back of the vehicle baskets full of live chickens and soon there were lots of them stacked up on the road. From our balcony we could see into the building where there was a row of freezers. Oh dear, it didn't look good for the chickens, it had to be said! When all the baskets were unloaded the men opened them up and began to carry the chickens inside, holding them upside down by their legs. There was no doubt that the chickens sounded decidedly worried and I have to say it looked like they had pretty good reason to be. Thomas and I were more than a little freaked out by it. Some of the chickens desperately tried to wriggle out of the grasp of the men, but they failed miserably, there was simply no chance of escape. The effects of the smoking left us sensitive to their plight, like they were our own brothers and sisters down there, although there was no mistaking the fact that we were going to do fuck all about it apart from talk to each other about how horrible it was. The best we could do was console ourselves over the fact that we were both vegetarian.

Neither of us had a particularly pleasant sleep that night, I guess there might have been some kind of negative energy emanating from across the road and what was going on inside. It was also extremely warm inside our room and things were not helped by the fact that there were thousands of tiny black mosquitoes which apparently were a speciality on the island of Fort Cochin. Since no mosquito nets were provided in our budget accommodation we got bitten to fuck, and as if that wasn't enough my bad health buzz came back to haunt me with ever greater intensity in the depths of the sweaty dark. On top of all that a French couple were having a really bad argument in the room next door. A really fucking bad one! The woman was sobbing and crying and whatever the man said to her only seemed to make things worse, producing yet more howls of pain and anguish from her. Fucking great, that was all I needed! So I lay there in the dark, full of a horrid discomfort, my ticker going boom fucking boom whilst the couple next door were at each other hammer and tongs well into the early hours.

When I woke up the following morning I felt pretty damn crappy, my chest was heavy, my head was thick and it felt like all the energy had been sucked out of me. One thing for sure was that we were definitely not going to spend another night at the Elite. It might have had a good restaurant and an Asterix reading manager on reception but our room was a complete and total dog, a right old fucking flea pit, and I was grateful to have at least survived the night there. There was no sign of Thomas, so after waiting around in our room for a while I made my way down to the restaurant. The same collection of dreary looking travellers from the night before were already there and tucking into their toast and jam, sloshing it down with fresh coffee. They all seemed to be looking intently at their travel books, no doubt studying their next move, poor lonely fuckers, but really, was I any different to them? Somehow I doubted it. Thomas wasn’t in the restaurant either and I began to wonder where the fuck he had gone. I sat down and ordered a plate of chickpeas and putthu, quietly feeling proud of myself over going for something authentic instead of being like all the other bozos and putting up with some cheap imitation Western shit. However I very nearly got badly caught out when a chickpea got stuck in the back of my throat and the chilli sauce which it was covered in made its way down to my lungs by an unexpected route. A brief but violent coughing fit ensued and my face must have looked a dark shade of purple by the time I was finished. It was all a little bit embarrassing to say the least.

Thomas still hadn't showed up, even by the time I had eventually finished my breakfast, and now I began to really wonder what the fuck had happened to him. But then, when I got back to the room, he was lying there on his bed.

"What happened to you man?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well I woke up and you weren't around so I went down and had something to eat expecting to see you there, but no."
"Ah man! All I did was go for a shit and come back here. I wasn't hungry."

He looked pretty damn relaxed considering it was so early in the morning and I soon became suspicious.

"Well, I tell you man, I had a crap night's sleep so I really don't want to stay around this shithole for another day. Especially after what happened to those chickens across the road."
"Ok Phil, but what do you want to do?"
"I don't know. Maybe we should go back to Ernakulum and spend another night there. I feel so shit that I don't want to leave town today, but I don't want to stay here in this place either."
"Ok that's fine. We go back to Ernakulum today and then maybe tomorrow we travel up to Goa."
"Yeah right, fine."

The Goa bit didn't appeal to me at all after the brainwave I'd had the previous evening whilst listening in on that woman's conversation, but I played along with it for now, because it didn't feel like it was the right time to tell Thomas about my wizard of a plan for us to go to Mysore and Bangalore instead. He looked across at me, still with a smile on his face.

"So now that is decided I am going to lie here for a while and listen to Midnight Oil on the Walkman. You know Phil, when you were downstairs I had a little smoke."
"What, of the weed?"
"Yeah, just a small joint. This Midnight Oil tape is really great!"

My suspicions were confirmed. The closer I looked at Thomas the more I realised his red eyes were a giveaway, along with the slightly stupid expression on his face. It may have been a bit early in the day but I could only admire his dedication. There was no way I was in any condition to start smoking just yet, in fact I was wondering if the weed we'd got was duff, not up to scratch, because my head felt like it weighed a ton and that was not the usual effect I had the day after a night of smoking. I'd read somewhere once that bad weed affected the head and the sinuses, leaving them stuffed and fuzzy, which was pretty much exactly how they now felt. Maybe it was just me being paranoid however, as there really didn't seem to be too much wrong with Thomas. In fact it was obvious that he was going for it as he lay there on his bed with his eyes closed and the headphones on whilst he lost himself once more in the lands of Midnight Oil. I sat at the table and flicked through my little notebook in which I wrote things down, usually just one line images which sometimes developed into poems, and when I was stoned I could amuse myself for hours playing with words and their sounds. The only thing I'd managed to write from the previous evening was harping sweet batteries of sorrow. God knows what it meant, but to me it sounded nice in a fucked up kind of way, almost erotic - she lay there in the open field, harping sweet batteries of sorrow. Or he even.

When Thomas emerged from his latest Midnight Oil session I went ahead and hammered out the Mysore - Bangalore plan to him. No messing around just straight for the jugular. I had to make it sound decisive, and as I talked it out loud for the first time with him I began to feel excited at the prospect of us taking off on such a route through the centre of India. Initially Thomas appeared shocked over the change in my thinking, that our Goa plan was now toast, but I could see that he was beginning to warm to the idea the more I went on about it to him. We soon had a map out on the bed looking to see where exactly all the places were. It all went very smoothly, the way I pitched it to Thomas made it sound like it was a challenge which neither of us could afford to miss. Going to Goa was just too easy, too damn easy by half. By way of contrast, the prospect of travelling up through the middle of India together was something he would find difficult to resist. And of course I made sure to tell him that he would be back in Calcutta at Mother Theresa's by the end of it, which of course was something he had wanted to do all along. Within ten minutes of announcing it, I had won him over, which I have to say was a bit of a triumph. He did look rather puzzled however, when he asked me the obvious question.

"Hey Phil, where did you get such a great idea ?"
"Oh you know man, these things just come to me sometimes."

I enjoyed his look of admiration too much to tell him I had stolen it from listening in on what was being said by a lonely sounding woman getting hassled out in the hallway the night before by a couple of nosy pricks. It might have put him off, it would have shot down in flames the intrepid hero picture I now had of myself and I wasn't about to do that. Instead we sat there and had a laugh about how we might look at the end of such a trip, with both of us agreeing that it would indeed be a one hell of thing if we actually managed to pull it off.

Our arrival back in Ernakulum later that morning was a lot smoother than when we had first hit the place after our bus ride from Alleppy a couple of nights ago. No more bad buzzes in that department, no more blowing of tops! On the ferry going back across the bay we studied our travel books for accommodation tips and both of us agreed on heading for the Basato Lodge. It was a place which was close to the ferry jetty and which, for some reason, we had completely missed the first evening we were in town. It lay on a quiet side street between the ferry jetty and Broadway, and our books said that it was a good value place to stay. We were sold, the Basato it was! When we arrived the man behind the reception was a very straight looking Indian, bald headed and with a big pair of glasses. He told us that we were in luck because he had a double room with an attached bathroom available for 32 rupees a night. We checked it out and decided to take it. It was a good one, done out in pretty much the same way as the one at the Elite had been - two beds, two tables and a couple of chairs - but it was tons nicer. The furniture was better quality stuff and it was also a hell of a lot cleaner and very quiet, being located at the back of the hotel. The room overlooked some gardens with green trees swaying in the breeze and there were a couple of dusty old red brick buildings, all of which was quite evocative in washed out Indian kind of way.

Once we were inside the room and had shut the door, it felt like the rest of the hotel was far, far away, as if the room was a place of retreat. Great, it was just what I needed! The rest of the morning after our move to the Basato Lodge was spent just generally sitting around. I still felt a certain heaviness from our smoking session the night before, whilst Thomas was now feeling rough from the after effects of his early morning spliff. I rummaged through my rucksack and took out the Buddha statue he had given me for my birthday back in Quilon. After some deliberation I put it on a shelf above one of the desks and stood back to see how it looked.

"Hey Phil, you know where I would put it?"

Thomas was about to fuck things up for me, I could sense it. I felt slightly irritated because I was pretty confident I had a good eye for things without needing his guidance.

"No, where?"
"Here, look. I'll show you."

With that he picked up the Buddha and put it on the top frame of the desk mirror.

"There! The Buddha is supposed to be the mirror of ourselves."
"Yeah, right."

It was difficult to tell whether he was joking or not. It was also difficult for me to remove it, because after all, it was Thomas who had given it to me in the first place. All the same I wished I could have picked it up and put it back where I wanted it, which was on the shelf, but doing so would have seemed just a bit too petty and childish so I let it drop, leaving it sitting there on the frame top.

By early afternoon we felt together enough to go out and find somewhere to eat. We stepped outside, saw there was a restaurant at the end of the street and because neither of us were feeling super-fit, we decided to settle for that. It was called the Broadway Coffee House, although technically it wasn't actually on Broadway at all, but on some other street round the back. Not that it mattered, I mean how the hell could it? We went inside and were immediately impressed. It looked really great, spotlessly clean with dark wooden chairs and marble top tables all set out in neat rows. There was a spaciousness and silence to the scene which was very rare, in many places of a similar nature in India things would have been pretty much heaving. We sat down and studied the menu which was chalked up on a board next to a huge glass cabinet which displayed perfect arrangements of Indian sweets and various bowls of savoury snacks. The Broadway Coffee House felt special, and everything on the menu also looked very cheap. When the waiter came up to us we ordered masala dosas, onion utthapams, boiled bananas and fresh coffees. It seemed like all of a sudden we had woken up and realised that we were hungry, so a big meal was definitely needed in order for us to get our strength back. The place was pretty much deserted apart from a table close by where there sat a young Indian man sporting a very impressive set of dreadlocks who was in deep conversation with an older man who had a very intense look about him. When the young Indian noticed me and Thomas looking his way, he gave us a big smile and lit up a Camel cigarette, giving the appearance of being a pretty cool dude who knew the score, whatever the score was.

Our food was delicious and by the time we finished we both thought we had stumbled across one of the best value eating places in the whole of India. In fact we probably had because it was a blindingly obvious ten out of ten; no pretension, no monkey business, just honest to goodness high quality Indian food at an affordable price. It was good enough to make me want to stay a little while longer in Ernakulum, and just as we had finished the young Indian with the dreadlocks came over and had a word with us.

"Hi, you just arrived in Cochin no?"

His voice was smooth and clear and I did my best to sound cool and chilled when I replied to him.

"No, no, man. We arrived in town a couple of days ago."
"Ah I see, I see. You like the city no? Very interesting city. And to Fort Cochin have you been?"
"Yeah, yeah we have. In fact we've just come from there."
"Ah! But I didn't see you no ? You see I live in Fort Cochin, in an ashram there. A very nice place! Very nice ashram. You should visit no?"
"Yeah, we'll definitely try. We didn't know there were any ashrams over there."
"Ah yes, there is the Om Ashram where I live. Very nice ashram! There you will meet some very nice people. We, er, try, how you say? We try to live an alternative life to most people in society."
"Wow, yeah. Sounds really interesting."
"Here, look. I give the address. If you visit please come later when people are sure to be there to talk with you. My name, by the way, is Vino, as in wine."

Both Thomas and I were excited by the information which this Vino had given us. Needless to say India was really famous for its ashrams and to know there was one on Fort Cochin intrigued us both a great deal. We had simply no idea that there was one. When Vino and his friend had left the restaurant Thomas picked up the piece of paper with the address on and soon there was a sparkle in his eyes.

"Wow! The Om Ashram. Sounds great Phil! I think we should definitely try to visit this place."
"Yeah right man, it could be really wild."

Vino and his flowing dreadlocks had certainly made a big impression on both of us. After the Broadway Coffee House we returned to the Basato where we just hung around our room for a couple of hours. Both of us still felt tired from our weed smoking session the night before and most of our energy was now taken up with digesting the rather large amounts of food we had just eaten. I sat on a chair and dipped into Great Expectations whilst Thomas just lay on his bed and went to sleep. He was good at that, and I envied him for it, the fact that he could always relax whenever he wanted to. If I attempted to do the same as him I knew it wouldn't work, I just was not one of those people who could go to sleep in the middle of the day, being too wired to ever give myself the chance to rest. If I lay on the bed it never failed to bug me, as if I thought resting was some kind of sin, that moral virtue lay in constantly moving around and being awake, regardless of whether I was tired or not, or even in a foul fucking mood. Thomas however, was able to lie down for hours and then carry on as if nothing had ever happened. He didn't worry about it at all, the lucky bastard!

By the middle of the afternoon I had given up on Dickens. I berated myself for wasting my precious rupees on such an incongruous fucking book. It was simply impossible to get a picture in my mind of a Kent village in the middle of winter from over 100 years ago. It might have been easier to do if I was holed up in a cabin somewhere with a big log fire burning but I wasn't. Instead I was in the middle of the colourful life and heat of South India, and the more I attempted to get into Great Expectations the weirder I felt, until it got to the point where I knew it was absolutely futile, so I put it down and soon enough my mind drifted off to other things. Suddenly I had the idea of going to get some of my films developed. I had a load of them in my rucksack, which had shots of all the places I had so far been to in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka. It was a cool idea and it didn't take long for me to persuade myself that I could afford to splash out and have some done. Maybe I was now at a stage in the trip where I needed something like that to cheer me up. I knew we would be in town for at least another day so I picked out a couple of films from the pile I had and decided to go for it. All I had to do was find a film developers. Thomas was lying there on his bed, he said he felt too tired to move and all he wanted to do was sleep, so I left him to it.

When I hit the streets again I went on up past the Broadway Coffee House and in the direction of the central bus station. I had a feeling the centre of town lay over there and so that would be the place for me to get my films developed. I soon passed the bookshop where I had ill advisedly purchased Great Expectations the day before and soon I was on a street with many more bookshops, more bookshops than in any other place I had seen since being in India. It was a bit of a shock and since I now saw shops with many hundreds of English titles on display in their windows, I felt even worse about blowing all those precious rupees on my Dickens. Shit, what a bummer! If only I had walked on a bit further the other day I would have surely come up with something a whole lot better. Discontent was what I felt, but making wrong decisions was what could happen when I was stoned; obstacles on the path and making bad decisions, or so it seemed. Now I saw that I could have a got myself a William S. Burroughs book or something by one of the other Beats, which would probably have been much more appropriate to where my head was at and the place I was in, for good or bad, happy or sad.

Finally I got to a main street which looked as if it ran right through the centre of town and here things were a hell of a lot busier than Broadway, busier than the jetty area even. Loads of buses and lorries roared down the road, all of them seemingly trying to get to wherever they were going as quickly as possible, with as much risk to as many people as they could manage. Crazy, crazy fuckers! One day I imagined it would be a blood bath. Black filth was belching out in huge great billows at every opportunity and the smell of rank diesel hung heavy in the air; modern day pollution Indian style, there really was nothing quite like it! The lorries were all decked out in their psychedelic colours with the pictures and names of Shiva and Jesus on prominent display, but really, they made too much fucking noise to look attractive in this situation. The name of the game as far as the drivers were concerned was just to put their foot on the gas and never take it off again. They were a reckless bunch of bastards and they obviously didn't give a damn if anyone got in their way. The pavements were also a lot more crowded, filled with beggars, hawkers and pedestrians in a disorderly and ragged jumble spilling itself everywhere.

This area of Ernakulum reminded me of Calcutta for some reason and it really took me by surprise, where everything seemed much more intense and harder than places which were just a few streets away, back in the direction of Broadway and the Basato Lodge. I stayed pretty cool for once as I made my way through the middle of it all, and I soon began to follow the signs which advertised Aruns, a local photo developers. It turned out to be a long walk! On the way I managed to draw attention to myself after I gave some change to some beggars. I was followed for a while by a bunch of kids, no doubt hoping I was going to give them something as well, but there was no chance of that and after I threw them a couple of sharp warning glances they soon backed off. That was what it sometimes felt like on the streets in busy Indian cities, survival of the fittest, show no mercy and keep on walking. I wasn't deliberately trying to be a tight fisted bastard, it was just that I had to decide what was appropriate and what was not when it came to dealing out whatever spare change I had.

Aruns turned out to be in a big old building just off a junction on the main road. It felt like a lonely place, everything around it was racing in every direction kicking up the dust, making it seem like some kind of a barren urban wasteland. When I got to the counter inside the shop I decided to hand in two films to be developed and not three as I had originally planned. This was just in case they fucked them up and I ended up with nothing. I knew I shouldn't have been so mistrustful of their ability as film developers, but that was just the way I was. There was no getting away from the fact that I was attached to my films and I would have been heartbroken if they had all got lost. But I guess that I really needn't have worried, Aruns seemed a nice old business where having one's films developed was still treated as something of an event. They also appeared to be pretty pleased that someone such as myself had just dropped in to give them a bit of custom and when they called me Mr Bradley as they handed me my receipt slip I really felt quite important. What I usually felt was that I was little more than a lousy stinking punk ass bum who was travelling through India on his bare bones, with a crazy German fucker as a companion thrown in for good measure. They told me my photos would be ready to be picked up the following afternoon and with a big smile on my face I told them that would be fine, just fine, whilst hoping I was giving them the impression that I was the kind of guy who expected them to deliver some quality service.

When I got outside of Aruns I decided to take a different route back to the Basato Lodge, through some of the back streets and away from the main road, where the relentless noise and constant motion had been pretty damn intense. I bought a bag of oranges from a street fruit hawker and then struck a path away from the main road in the direction of the bay. It was a long road that I found myself on and as I walked along I ate a couple of the oranges, enjoying the freedom of just being able to throw the peel into the gutter without having to worry about someone coming along and accusing me of messing the place up. India was great like that, you could just let it all hang out, and no one would give a fuck. Eventually I made it down to the bay, where it was just a simple question of turning in the direction of the ferry jetty to carry on walking, and even if I say so myself, my sense of where I had to go was pretty much spot on. Still it was a long way back to the Basato and I thought about getting a bus since it would only have been a couple of rupees at most, but in the end I just stayed on my feet. Maybe I was being stubborn, or maybe it was because I was now used to walking for miles and miles with no pressing need to get to wherever I was going, as if the whole day lay stretched out in front of me.

As I walked along the bay road I passed an old building with a lot of people outside it and then I realised that it was a hospital. It was typical of those kind of places found throughout India, always loads of people around, doing what I don't know, but whatever it was I guess there had to be a reason. As I made my way through the crowds on the pavement, a young Indian came up and greeted me. He had a hard looking face but a friendly smile and I found myself slowing down, which was something I didn't usually do in those situations, preferring to walk on, because any kind of casual contact was often bad news, or at the very least just plain irritating. Maybe on this occasion I slowed down because I was tired, or maybe I really didn't mind having the chance to talk to someone.

"Where you go?"
"Oh, er, Broadway. The Basato Lodge, over there."
"Ah come, I take you."

He pointed to a motorbike which was parked on the street. His offer took me completely by surprise, and being a bit of a suspicious bastard I couldn't believe I was going to get a ride without any strings attached. I could imagine getting a lift from him to the Basato Lodge and then being begged for a big bit of petrol money. Yeah, stuff like that was soon floating round my head. Not very wholesome I know, but realistically such a scene would have been par for the course. I could see how it might end badly, with me throwing a 5 rupee note at him in disgust before storming off back up to my room. Pretty low down thoughts it had to be said, but my nature was such to allow those things as possibilities enter my mind. Alternatively I might get on the back of his bike and be whizzed off to some secluded spot and get beaten up, badly beaten and robbed of all I had, which wasn't much admittedly, but nevertheless it could be nasty. Considering all those things I decided it was best to play it safe.

"Er, no, no. I'm ok thanks. I can walk, I'm enjoying it."

This wasn’t strictly true but my hands were held in a gesture of retreat and as I did so the young Indian actually looked quite upset, like I'd mortally offended him or something.

"No, no! I take you. A free ride. No money. Come!"

It now seemed to be difficult to refuse his offer without me coming out of it looking like a total cunt. What a tricky situation! He did look genuine enough after all, although there was something a bit scary about his face, like he could be a real hard case if things demanded it. What was I supposed to do? It was only a kilometre or two down the road and hardly any big deal. Besides, I thought to myself, it would be a laugh to take a ride through all the blazing traffic whilst on the back of a motor bike without any helmet on, being driven by a local lad. It would be cool! Getting to know the natives, so to speak, in a proper way.

"Ok then. Just to the Basato Lodge yeah?"
"Sure, sure. Of course. Come, we go."

As we walked to the bike he asked me my name, and when I told him it was Philip he let out a big laugh.

"My name also ! My name also!"
"Yeah. You're called Philip as well?"
"Yes, yes. My name is Phillip."
"Fuck!"

I was astonished. What a strange fucking coincidence! We smiled at each other, the fact we shared the same name seemed in my mind at least to draw us a bit closer together. It would have been amazingly cynical of him to have made it up on the spot just to lull me into a false sense of security, so I had to accept that what he said was true. All the same there couldn't have been many Indians called Phillip although I guessed that on the west coast there might have been a few, due to the influence of the Portuguese in years gone by, and possibly the Dutch, especially in Cochin. Phillip revved the engine of his bike and pulled out straight into the traffic, where soon enough we were in the fast lane racing through the warm air of Kerala on the road beside the bay. It felt pretty fucking fantastic and I immediately wondered what kind of sucker walks along broken pavements for hours and hours to get to his place of destination when all along he could have been on a cool pair of wheels. It was years since I had last been on a bike and it was exhilarating as we sped past the lorries, buses, cars and auto rickshaws, all of whom were also going for it in their own various ways in order to get from A to B as fast as possible. We arrived at the Basato Lodge in no time at all and as Phillip pulled the bike up in the dust I sat for awhile on the seat in order to recover. What a buzz! Phillip was the first to get off and when I followed suit he asked me a question.

"You smoke grass?"

Shit, I thought. Here we go, start of the hassle.

"Er, yeah, yeah. I do. But I'm ok thanks. I've got plenty."
"You have? Where you buy?"
"Over on Fort Cochin."
"How much you pay?"
"How much? Ooh shit, let me think. Maybe 2 kilos."
"No, how much you pay?"
"Oh, pay! Right I see, 80 rupees."
"Mmmmm. You see, Fort Cochin no good. Not good place to buy grass from. Maybe what you buy no good yes? You have, we smoke?"
"Er, all the weed is in my room."

Phillip looked at me for a while and although I had promised myself not to hold myself in his debt I again felt that I couldn't disappoint him. Besides, he appeared to be genuinely concerned. It seemed that the least I could do was show him the weed we had, after all if he did know a bit about it, he might be able to give an honest opinion over its quality. After our smoking session from the night before it was certainly something I wanted to get cleared up, because I was by no means convinced that the stuff we'd bought wasn't just simply a pile of shit. I therefore decided to take Phillip up to the room to let him check it out.

We went into the Basato, where the Indian behind the reception counter gave a pretty dark look when he saw Phillip behind me, and I instantly felt that I had gone down in his estimation. After all, a traveller bringing one of the locals back to their room after such a short time staying there had to signify that something was up. Still, what the fuck, I wanted to get this weed situation sorted. Besides, I guess that me and Thomas were hardly the first dope smokers to have ended up in the Basato, and it was highly unlikely we were going to be the last either. We both climbed up the stairs and I remembered that when I left Thomas to go on my walk he had been sprawled out naked on his bed, with his prick and balls flopped to one side of his inner thighs. I hoped he still wasn't like that now! It was a few hours since I had left, but with Thomas I knew I couldn't take anything for granted. Luckily when I opened the door, although he was still on his bed in a horizontal position, he at least had his trousers on. He was lying there reading his copy of a biography of Carl Jung and he gave a look of surprise when he saw Phillip walk in behind me, therefore I didn't waste much time in putting him in the picture.

"Hi Thomas, look, I'm just going to show this guy the weed we got. He thinks it might be bad stuff and to be honest, so do I."

Thomas just lay there with a look of total surprise. I handed the bag of weed to Phillip who stuck his nose inside and gave it a good sniff. Then he took a couple of leaves and examined them more closely before he shook his head.

"No, no. This no good. You smoke this and you get bad head."

I knew it, I fucking knew it! My worst fears about the weed were now confirmed. I didn't really doubt that Phillip had made the right diagnosis, even though I also knew that somewhere down the line there would no doubt be something in it for him.

"You should not smoke this. Very bad. Makes water here."

He tapped his head. Fuck, it looked like we had indeed ended up with a real bag of shit.

"What, you mean it affects the brain?"
"Yes, brain, yes, yes. Makes you crazy."
"Shit!"

I turned to Thomas to see what his thoughts on the situation were.

"Well, what do you think? I'm sure this guy is right. When I woke up this morning I felt completely fucked and I never usually feel like that after a night smoking weed."
"Sure, sure. Ok, ok. Hey Phil, I think we shouldn't smoke it anymore!"

Mention anything about bad brains to a German and they were soon on the back foot. Phillip handed the bag back to me.

"Come, we go on my bike and buy some good grass. Very good grass! The best in Cochin."

For a moment my suspicions returned. So this was what it was all about. He was bullshitting us just so that he could get to sell us some dope! But no, my intuition told me the weed we'd bought from that lad on his push bike outside the Church of St. Francis definitely wasn't right, too damn good to be true. Nevertheless I didn't want to give Phillip the impression that we were going to be so easily persuaded to go along with him.

"Hey, hey. I don't know. That bag of weed cost 80 rupees and there's a lot of it. Even if it isn't 100% pure I'm sure we can still smoke it."
"No, no. You smoke this then your head very bad!"

I flashed a look at Thomas.

"What do you reckon?"
"Well man, if he says the stuff is shit, then we have to buy something else."

That was what I needed, some clear headed German logic, and of course it made perfect fucking sense.

"Yeah, right. Of course. We need some more weed!"

I turned to Phillip.

"How much is it?"
"Two packets 50 rupees."
"And one?"
"One packet 25"

Well, there obviously wasn't any discount for larger orders.

"Ok look. We buy one packet."

I thought that if we were going to get ripped off again it might as well be for only 25 rupees instead of 50. Otherwise we would soon be blowing our already modest budget to pieces, but 25 rupees was really fuck all, so I knew we could manage that. I put the bag of bad weed on the table and looked over at Thomas who had hardly moved since I had come back in the room with Phillip.

"Ok, I'm going to go and score some grass with this guy."
"Sure, sure. I wait here."

Just as we were about to make a move Phillip asked me for a bit of weed from the bag he’d just dismissed so he could roll a joint for us on our way to the dealers. It seemed a decidedly strange request after he had given such a damning analysis as to its quality. But what the hell! He probably only wanted a blast so he could get a bit of extra zip on the throttle of his motor bike. And so what if it did make your head go bad? We all had bad heads anyway, so I gave him enough of the weed to roll a couple of big ones. In my mind it had become significantly devalued after his analysis, even more so when he said, "No, no. Just enough for one." That reassured me, if Phillip was lying about it he would have gone for the two no question, even might have asked to take the whole bloody bag away with him but no, he wasn’t after much, so my confidence was restored. As we walked out through the Basato I felt excited at the prospect of taking another ride on the back of his motor bike, going on a trip to another part of town to score another bag of weed, and hopefully this time a better one.

When we hit the streets again Phillip got a joint together with remarkable speed and lit it up just as he revved the engine of his bike, kicking up a cloud of dust in front of the Basato. He passed the joint to me as I jumped on the back and after we each had taken a couple of good, hard tokes we sped off down the road towards the bay. The effect of the smoke soon washed over me, and although it may not have been top quality stuff and possibly also brain damaging, reality was once again nicely cushioned. We were soon in the fast lane of the bay road and overtaking a bewildering assortment of vehicles, all of them seemingly going as fast as they could to get to their destinations. We rode for quite a while until we came to another ferry jetty where we went round a large roundabout and headed off into a quieter, more residential part of town. It was an area of Ernakulum which would have been off any of the tourist maps and if I hadn't been with Phillip it would have been highly unlikely I would have ever got to see it. No doubt about that!

New horizons, unknown frontiers, that was what I needed, and all on the back of a motor bike driven by one of the local boys of Cochin. People gave me some odds looks from the pavements and roadside shacks, looks that made me feel cool and alive as we sped past them on our way to score what I hoped would be some top quality weed. We were in the back lanes where there were a lot less people and a lot more trees, a nice middle class part of town. Going down those lanes for the first time they seemed to be pieces of a wonderful maze, where the houses and apartments looked spacious and comfortable in the late afternoon sun. It was a reassuring environment to be in and I didn't feel threatened at all, with no paranoid thoughts of being suddenly pulled off the bike and horrifically murdered whilst indifferent crowds looked on. Phillip eventually stopped in front of a row of garages beneath some apartments, where he then took the 25 rupees off me and told me to wait by the bike. He disappeared through a door to the side of one of the garages and I was suddenly on my own.

There were the sounds of work being done on the road in the distance, and there was a warm breeze lazily blowing through the trees, but that was about all. Beautiful India, I thought to myself, how could I ever stop loving it? I was brought back to reality somewhat by the appearance of a toothless old Keralan from out of one of the garages who gave me a big smile whilst he put his fingers to his lips in a gesture of having a smoke and nodded his head. I nodded back and returned his smile, feeling slightly embarrassed. But there was no point in trying to hide the fact as to why I was there, he obviously knew what was going on and by his manner it was clear that people like me had been there before. No big deal about that, dope scenes were dope scenes the whole world over. Phillip soon re-emerged and pulled out a package for me. It was tightly wrapped and he ripped it open at one end and stuck it under his nose.

"See? Very good smell, very good smell."

He gave it to me and there was no doubt at all that its aroma was whole lot better than the other stuff; very fresh, very pure and most importantly, potentially very, very strong. Top quality weed without a shadow of a doubt. The delicious smell hung there on the tips of my nostrils as I flipped the packet into my shirt pocket.

"Great! Thank you."

Phillip smiled back at me.

"Come, we go and smoke some."

He revved up his bike again and when it was ready to go I jumped on the back of it, before we sped off down those back lanes in the same direction from which we had come. On the way Phillip pulled up by the roundabout jetty and said that it was a good place to stop and have a smoke. I must admit that now the business had been done, I would have much preferred it if he’d just taken me straight back to the Basato Lodge where I could have sat down and rolled a joint for me and Thomas. However I felt I couldn't disappoint him, couldn’t deprive him of a smoke of the some of the weed he'd just scored for me. I would just have to be patient. When we got off the bike I was somewhat surprised to see Vino with a group of Indians hanging around a chai stall. I smiled and gave him a wave. He looked surprised to see me as well, after our brief meeting in the Broadway Coffee House earlier that afternoon, but he recovered soon enough and waved back at me with a big smile on his face. Vino could only have been impressed, I thought, to see me on the back of a motor bike with one of the local lads, one of the boys of Cochin! It must have shown him I didn't fuck around when I travelled and that I got straight down to business. Only staying on the safe turf of the tourist patches and never hunting for something a little bit different was evidently not my scene, oh no, not at all. Perhaps it would mean I would get the red carpet treatment when I visited his ashram over on Fort Cochin, however Phillip had a strange look on his face after he saw me wave at Vino.

"You know that man?"
"Who? Vino?"
"Yes, yes. You know him?"

When I told him I had only spoken to him for the first time in my life a couple of hours ago, he stood there with a frown on his face.

"He no good."
"What?"
"He no good!"

I was surprised. It was the last thing I expected Phillip to say. Vino, with his flowing dreadlocks and Camel cigarettes, really did look the model of cool decency in a strangely Indian kind of way and hardly a threat at all.

"Well what do you mean?"
"He just no good. Stay away from him."

The look on his face was deadly serious and there was no doubt that as far as Phillip was concerned Vino was bad news. Whatever confusion I felt about that was soon swept away by an acute bout of self consciousness because I suddenly found myself surrounded by a lot of people, most of whom were staring straight back at me. This was the Smokers Corner of Ernakulum which Phillip had taken me to, there was no doubt about that, but the thing about it was that it was in the great wide open and clearly for the locals only. This meant among those deep, dark, life hardened Kerala faces I stood out a mile, shining like a pale and more than slightly worried white beacon. I meekly followed Phillip as we made our way to a small stall where we bought a couple of cigarettes. He lit them both up at the same time and then gave one to me. I drew the tobacco smoke deep down into my lungs and I have to say it immediately calmed me down. Nothing like a fag in those situations to get your mind back on the straight and narrow! I pulled myself together and decided that I would be able to see the situation through, even though I had come close to shaking Phillip by the shoulders and demanding that he get me the hell out of there. But now it was cool, everything was cool as I took another drag on my cigarette, there was no point whatsoever in freaking out, no point at all. OK, I looked a little different from the other guys, but so what?

We walked over to the sea wall where a bunch of Keralan youths were sat, and I continued to take some really big drags on my fag as we crossed a chicken shit piece of scrub land to get there. I just hoped I blended in well enough with the scenery so as not to draw the attention of any curious Ernakulum cops who might have been floating by, or for that matter, any other upstanding citizens who happened to be around. By the time we had sat ourselves on the wall it was pretty clear that everyone was smoking weed and the expressions on their faces made it clear that my secret was safe with them. They were stone heads Cochin city style, every last one of them red eyed and wasted. Phillip asked me for the weed and when I handed it over he quickly unravelled the tightly packed tube in order to fully inspect the contents. He picked out a couple of plant heads.

"Gold. Kerala gold. When this colour, very strong!"

A couple of the local lads also took a look and expressed their approval. So unless it was all a massive pre-arranged con trick, there was now no doubt in my mind that the weed we'd scored was going to be pretty good. I felt puffed up with pride because it looked like I had managed to score some of the best stuff around which even the locals would have bought, although whether they would have paid 25 rupees for it was another matter. Still there was no getting away from the fact that the best of the local stuff in India meant it was close to being the best weed available anywhere in the world, so I could quite justifiably see it as one of the high points of my dope buying career so far, and naturally it felt great to be doing everything at such a grass roots level as well, excuse the pun. There I was, deep down in South India, really mixing it with the local boys, those boys of Cochin, on the back of a motorbike and kicking up dust wherever we went, rolling up joints on the sea wall at the edge of a dirty old bay. Great stuff! I was in love with it all, despite the fact that barely a couple of minutes ago I had been more than a little bit scared, feeling well over my head at finding myself in such an unknown situation. But now I was the cool guy again and it felt like I had played it absolutely by the book, with no major freak outs on the way to shake me to the core.

Phillip quickly rolled a couple of joints before carefully folding the package up again and handing it back to me. We smoked them with the boys and after just a couple of tokes I could feel my head buzzing, really fucking buzzing; the weed was the business without a doubt. Everything seemed to fall into place because when the joint was finished Phillip said that he had to make a move back to the hospital, where we had first met, something which suited me just fine, so we got back on the bike for him to drop me at the Basato. The return ride seemed to go very fast and when we arrived Phillip said we would try to meet up again the next day before he then sped off down Broadway. We didn't arrange a time or place and really I thought that we were quits, everything was even. He had scored for us, but no doubt taken a cut, as well as getting some free smokes for himself. It really would be best if things were left at that. Although we had got on fine there was a hardness to his features which somewhat freaked me out and I didn't want things to get any more complicated by way too much further involvement. He was friendly for sure, but maybe a part of him was also a bit desperate. In my stoned confusion I really couldn't put my finger on it, like was he really called Phillip?

Back in the room I took out both lots of weed to compare them. Simply by looking I could see there was no doubt regarding the quality of Phillip's gear so I gave Thomas the good news.

"Yeah, this new stuff is definitely better man. Looks so much fresher in comparison."
"Yeah? You think?"
"Definitely! It's really fucking excellent."
"Well, maybe we should smoke some then?"
"Right, right, yeah. I think we should. Maybe we should just get rid of this other stuff. There's no point in putting any more shit into our systems."
"Ok, Phil. That's fine with me. Do whatever you want. Just roll me a joint from the new weed!"

It didn't take me long to get a couple of good looking spliffs together, beefy little numbers, and it felt great to be dipping into our new pile of finest local ganja; we were in a paradise for stone heads on the coast of Kerala and it appeared that we had struck gold. When the joints were done I tossed over one over to Thomas.

"There you go man."

I lit up mine and drew the smoke deep down into my lungs. Then I picked up the bag of old weed and threw it out the fucking window.

"There, it's gone!"

We both cracked up. It wasn't every day you got to throw a bag of weed away just because it wasn't quite up to scratch. What a luxury ! However when I looked out the window I saw that the bag of the bad stuff had only landed on some tiles directly below our room. I had expected it to have reached the shrubs and to have been out of sight for ever. Now it looked quite conspicuous. Shit! Maybe the owner of the hotel would see it, immediately put two and two together and point the finger at us. Next thing the cops would be around sniffing for money from us in order for them not to take the whole thing a stage further. What a fucking hassle that would be! Why couldn't I have thrown the weed just that little bit further? Where was my strength? But I quickly regained my composure, after all there was nothing to be done about it now. It would just have to stay where it was and maybe it would serve as some kind of reminder that I didn't always get things right, something which of course was a considerable understatement.

I sat back at the table and told Tomas all about scoring the weed and my ride on the bike through the streets of Ernakulum. As I talked about it and got more stoned, I realised I really didn't know what to make of Phillip. Maybe it was significant that I had met him outside a hospital, a place usually associated with healing, but then again hospitals were associated with casualties as well. Maybe there was some karma there too. After all with our bag of duff weed, he'd turned us away from something which might have done us some real harm. So, I really didn't know. He may have helped us, but he had also made his way into our little money pots without too much effort and he might come back looking for more. This was the kind of stuff which went on in my mind; the positive and negative, the light and the dark, what was right, what was wrong, the blah ze, blah ze, blah ze. It did my head in trying to reach a conclusion and all I really knew for sure was that I was obviously drawn from time to time to some fairly shady characters. In fact as I looked back through my life I saw there was a long line of them, probably first beginning with Sandy Miller, who I had known when I was seven and living in Silloth on the Solway Firth. Sandy was a lad who was a little unpredictable, my best friend one day and then a stranger to me the next, which meant there was always a certain edge to our games of play. Yes, the new weed was most certainly a lot stronger than that other stuff, punching me into the far away fields of memory lane - Sandy Miller? Where the fuck had he come from? - and after I'd finished telling Thomas about the thrill of scoring it, we both slipped off the deep end into our own worlds of stoned visions, sitting there and lying around our room at the back of the Basato Lodge in downtown Ernakulum.

Thomas lay back on his bed and I sat at the table with my notebook open. I guess I was trying to put into words the images which were flowing freely through my mind, but the problem was that the images were really quite obscure. I wrote them down with the idea of turning them into some kind of poem which I hoped would adequately describe my experiences so far in Cochin and Ernakulum. Guess I wanted it to be almost like a song in which certain words were repeated for an echo effect; it was going to be a psychedelic dope rap, kissed by the South Indian sun! But it was also going to be difficult to come up with something which would make sense to anyone but me, in order to stop it from being little more than nonsense, and the challenge in my present condition was simply to write anything which wouldn’t be an undecipherable pile of crap. The weed gave me inspiration, there was no doubt about that, unfortunately it also made it easy for things to get rather jumbled up and out of focus, the result of which were long periods spent just staring blankly at the page. The longer I worked at it, the harder it became, but at least it was pretty damn absorbing, so much so that I only stopped once a massive storm started up outside and diverted my attention. I knew that if I was to transform my poetic visions into reality, hardly any of the words I had so far come up with would be used in the final version, not in their current form at least, otherwise it wouldn't stand a chance of being understandable, but then again maybe it would!

Outside the rain was really pelting down, making it worth my while to get up and take a look out of the window. It was a torrential downpour and it might have been one of those pre-monsoon blasters shooting a warning from the heavens to people of what was to come. The raindrops were big and hitting everything with such force that when I looked out of the window I saw that they were beginning to move the bag of weed on the tiles below. I watched it get bashed about for a while, hoping it would reach the gutter where it would then be washed away. Only a few more drops were needed to give it a final push, but typically enough, it just didn't happen. There was so much weed still in the bag that it was too fucking heavy to shift. It was as exasperating as playing those arcade games where you shove in all your coins hoping that a big pile of silver will fall off the edge and into your lap, yet hardly ever does. Sitting by the table I looked over at Thomas who was lying on his bed with the Walkman on, he was really getting into that Midnight Oil tape, it had to be said. His head was rocking and his eyes were closed, he was clearly off on a good one, rocking to the beat of the desert, to the Outback heat of Oz wrapped up in a strange Nocturnal Petrolvision. The storm made the room a whole lot darker and by the time it finished it was early evening. The effect of the weed made it seem as if we’d been there for hours but it hadn't really been that long, even so there were deep shadows and the silence of the Basato made the place feel hidden and secret. It was homely in a weird kind of way, and with the weed I'd scored it felt like it was going to be a difficult place to get away from. We might be holed up in the Basato Lodge for weeks and weeks!

As it happened, we didn't manage to get out of the Basato until mid-evening. The room and its enveloping atmosphere had conspired to keep us in there for what seemed like forever and ever, but somehow we eventually managed to escape. It was like emerging from a different world when we walked down the dark stretch of corridor which separated our room from the rest of the hotel. Hunger led us straight back to the Broadway Coffee House for dinner, which in less than a day had firmly established itself as an all time favourite Indian eating place for us. Once inside the restaurant we talked very little and devoted ourselves instead to eating our way through plates of delicious South Indian food, with no words necessary. When we finished our meal we took a leisurely walk down Broadway to once more take in the sights and sounds of Ernakulum. After the storm there was a hell of a lot of water around and at times the pavements were like obstacle courses, full of puddles and rutted up pieces of concrete which were all too easy to either step into or trip over and fall flat on your fucking face. It wasn't helped by the locals who pushed, shoved and generally did what had to be done to get you out of their way. Survival of the fittest, triumph of the tough, that was name of the game on Broadway where confusion reigned, all amplified by the buzz of generators powering the shops because the storm had knocked out the electric supply in that part of town. It had really fucked things up but it didn't seem to matter much. Stalls and shops which didn't have their own generators were lit up with hundreds of candles instead, so that business could carry on as usual. Everyone seemed to think it was a bit of a laugh, with shopkeepers peering out of the shadows with big smiles on their faces, as if the first big downpour of the season was a cause of celebration. Quite impressive really!

By the time we were on Broadway it was raining again and we found that we had little option but to take refuge in the Bharat Coffee House, the place where we both felt we had been ignored the day before because of our somewhat weather beaten appearance. If anything we now encountered an even more traumatic experience, possibly because we were both still a bit stoned and therefore more sensitive to the environment we found ourselves in. There was no doubt this time that our shabby looking clothes didn't go down at all well with the waiters. The Bharat obviously fancied itself as a place for the smartly dressed of Ernakulum, which meant that scum like me and Thomas were just not fucking welcome. We still had our dirty shirts on from the day before and now they looked even worse since they had just got a fresh soaking from the storm. As we sat there waiting to order a couple of coffees whilst being completely ignored, I found it difficult not to let it get to me. A surge of anger ran up through my spine and burst out of my mouth.

"Come on you miserable bastards, get over here and serve us so we can have some fucking coffee!"

Thomas tried to smile but I really felt pissed off and it was as much as I could do to stop from shouting at them. We didn't deserve it, just didn't deserve to be treated like shit. I was so consumed with bad feelings that I hated the guts of every one of those Bharat waiters, walking around in their white uniforms with their noses stuck up in the air. My thoughts were dark, very dark indeed. I imagined how nice it would have been to have pulled a shooter out and blown a couple of them away.

"Boom fucking boom. End of story and easy on the sugar!"

It was funny how such situations appeared from seemingly out of nowhere and caught me unawares, showed quite plainly what mental suffering was all about and how it was clearly connected to not getting what you desired. In this particular instance it was simply the desire to get noticed. We were both attempting to use our travelling experiences in India as lessons in patience, but this was really a low point and I was failing miserably because I just wanted to kick their fucking teeth in. As time passed however, I sat there and reflected on the situation, and I saw how insulted the people in the Bharat might have been by us. All the other customers were well dressed and they obviously treated it with respect; no doubt they regarded the Bharat as a place to go in town where it was at least worth making the effort to turn up clean and tidy. Then out of the blue a pair of punk ass bums like me and Thomas walk in and try to lord it over them whilst looking like complete fucking wrecks. I was just about to tell all this to Thomas but it was difficult to get through to him, because he was also now caught up in the anger of the situation.

"Well fuck it!” he said, “we came here to drink coffee. Not to look good. These assholes, they are too much man, really too much!"

So that was our second experience of getting the cold shoulder at the Bharat. We eventually got our precious coffees of course, but once again we fell well short of gaining much in the way of wisdom.

When we stepped outside we split to go on separate walks before heading back to our room in the Basato Lodge. Once again it had stopped raining but there were still plenty of big puddles around so I had to walk carefully. I paused at an electrical shop which looked like it had a good selection of music tapes and in the window there was a display devoted to Like A Prayer, the new Madonna album. It looked just like anywhere in the West! I took a look inside but couldn't see anything good enough to buy, with it being one of those semi stoned situations where I wanted to get something to show that I meant business, but just couldn't see anything to fit the bill. If only there had been a Pink Floyd tape or even something by Led Zeppelin then things might have been different. But no, they all frustratingly just missed the mark, unless that is I fancied a bit of Nazareth, who for some reason seemed to be very big in India. Hair Of The Dog anyone?

The room was empty when I returned and after taking a piss I sat down at the table and looked at myself in the mirror. The only light was from a single candle on the table which threw out dark shadows making the reflection of my face look haunted; a face which was quickly getting older, no doubt the price to be paid for the life I was leading. The lines on my forehead seemed to be deeper and there were quite a few new ones which had appeared as well, probably in the last few weeks, striking off at odd angles from my brow. It left me in little doubt that behind the mask was a mind which still had many problems left to solve. I sat there and looked at my Buddha statue. At least someone had got it right, but it was hard to cut through all the crap and the thought of meditating my way to peace seemed at that moment in time to be more than a little daunting, like climbing up an incredibly steep hill. All I could do in the light of this knowledge, or lack of it, was pull out the weed I'd scored and roll another number. Thomas said that Germans called stone heads kaputniks, and I guess that I felt I was getting pretty close to being one of those; a kaputnik, a casualty. A person responsible for self-inflicted brain damage who deserved no pardon, who just walked around like a crash landed spaceman sowing the seeds of his own doom. It was all a long way from the clear headed diligence I had applied when taking the meditation course just a few months ago up in Nepal, that was for sure.

By the time Thomas got back to the room I had finished the joint and I have to say it had given me quite a buzz, though not wholly a good one. Thomas had a big smile on his face however, and all I could do was blankly stare at him when he handed me a small package.

"There. Try that."
"What is it?"

I slowly unwrapped it and inside there was a stuffed green leaf, triangle shaped and wet. Interest and recognition lifted me out of my stoned stupor.

"Oh wow, paan! Shit man, where did you get it? Where did you get the paan man?"
"What do you mean man? These fucking paan sellers are all over the place. I was lucky that some guy showed me how you use them. Really Phil, they're great!"

It was then that I noticed Thomas was talking funny and there was a big bulge in one of his cheeks.

"Look. You put the whole leaf in your mouth and then you suck. Your mouth gets filled with all the different paan juices and spices. It's fantastic, so refreshing. Just remember to spit the juice out. Don't swallow it or else the guy said it will fuck up your stomach."
"Right, right. Yeah, yeah I see!"

Soon enough I had stuffed the leaf into my mouth and was sucking hard on it. Funny thing was that ever since Varanasi, a place where they seemed to be highly popular with the locals, I had wanted to know what you were supposed to do with them. There had been paan stalls wherever I went in India and I had always found it fascinating just to stand around and stare as the paan sellers took their leaves and made them into compact little packets full of various exotic Indian spices and things like beetle nut to give you an extra bit of zip, a bit more pace to get you through the heat of the day. There were also rumoured to be paans around which contained opium if you knew the right places to go to buy them. Guess those paans were meant to slow you down in pretty much the same way that a bhang lassi did, just like when I had drunk one in Varanasi and then spent over three hours staring at the River Ganges feeling completely wasted. Paans were generally seen as being a form of refreshment which were chewed by millions of Indians every day and Thomas enlightened me further by saying that paans came in sweet and sour varieties. The sweet ones could easily and quickly eat your teeth, turn your mouth rotten in no time at all, which helped to explain why there were so many toothless Indian men around. The paans which Thomas had got were sweet but they just tasted exquisite and it was easy to see why people got addicted to them. We both sat there for a while, contentedly spitting the paan juice into a bathroom bucket, both of us feeling happy we had solved another of India's mysteries. Take the paan leaf, put it in your mouth, suck, spit; that was pretty much all there was to it!

The evening wore on, pushing itself into night, and by the light of the candle I rolled a couple more joints for us. Thomas was lying on his bed again, his back against the wall and propped up by a couple of pillows. He was now a lot more awake than he had been earlier in the day and he began to talk about the Jung book which he had been reading. He said it was about the experiences of Jung's childhood and how Carl Gustav believed that so many of our fears and conditionings had their roots in our early years. Thomas lit up the joint which I tossed over to him and then began to describe his own childhood, how he felt there was a definite connection between what he was then and what he is like now. It was a bit of an obvious conclusion to draw I suppose, but I wasn't going to spoil his fun by pointing that out to him. He told me that when his mother was pregnant she had wanted him to be a girl since there was already an elder bother; German nuclear symmetry and all that. I guess as a result of this Thomas believed his mother had over-emphasised the feminine parts of himself as he grew up and as a consequence he believed he had developed a bisexual nature. He said he didn't mind it in the least, in fact some of his most satisfying sexual experiences had been with men; far from resenting the way she had brought him up, he loved his mother for it. One of the best things about his girlfriend Heike for example, a dark haired Swabian beauty who came from Stuttgart, was that when they fucked she stuck her finger up his arse. He said he loved that, with a happy side effect for both of them being that it made his dick bigger. In fact, as Thomas lay there on his bed smoking hard on his joint of Kerala's finest, he said that he had never felt so much love for his mother as he did just then, and indeed it was true that in the half light of our room his blue eyes did have a wistful, faraway look about them.

Thomas said he felt that it was being in India which was opening him up to say such things. Everything was so much more visible, nothing was hidden and he loved the place for that, although I wasn’t sure how true that was when it came to things like expressing one’s sexual orientation but no matter, in the main reality was shown for what it was and there was no shame about it. In the West, he said, everything was clean and hidden but if you found the place where the shit was and opened it up, the smell was ten times fucking worse. He was right about that, it was hard to imagine some of the barbarous acts which have littered Western history, dark things such as the Inquisition and the Nazis, ever happening in India. I admired Thomas for the way he described his feelings, he spoke with a real tenderness for his life and there was no bullshit. He was just doing his best to see things the way they were, then explain them to himself and others. In comparison to him I was much more reserved and somewhat reluctant to try to articulate my inner feelings, in fact if truth be told, I wouldn't have known where to start.

The lights of the hotel finally came back on and as our conversation faded away I returned to my notebook. I found it hard to get into any kind of rhythm and for the most part I just stared down blankly at the page, going over and over the words I had already written, sitting there stoned out of my mind. My brain felt like it had been dulled to the point of finding it impossible to come up with anything fresh. Bombed out is what I guess you might have called it! Instead of writing I returned to bad buzzing about my health and some rather uncomfortable physical sensations I seemed to be having. It suddenly felt like my heart was beating incredibly fast inside my chest and I was worried that I was going to keel over and have a fucking massive heart attack. That was the weed for you, a real devil when it came to taking one on walks into the vale of deep paranoia. The heaviness in my chest made me go on another guilt trip because of all the dope smoking I was doing. “Doin' dope! Doin' dope! Why?” At any moment I thought my head would be thrown back, my body would stiffen and I would suffer an appalling bloody brain haemorrhage which would kill me on the spot. Or if that didn't happen my heart would simply give up the ghost and explode into a million pieces, our room sprayed with splattered rib cage and flesh, making an awful fucking mess. Shit, the new weed sure was strong, there was no doubt about that!

My health buzz was bad enough for me to get up out of my chair and stand in the middle of the room to take a few deep breaths. I needed to get a hold of myself before things went from bad to worse. As I stood there beneath the recently resurrected dim light of the room I visualised thousands upon thousands of tiny white blood cells in my chest, which would only mean one thing: cancer. I'd smoked so much weed that now I’d given myself a fatal disease which was spreading through my body like underworld poison. It was disconcerting enough for me to give Thomas a shake and raise him from his bed, from the latest encounter he was having with Midnight Oil on the Walkman.

"Oh my god man, come over here, come over here!"
"What is the matter?"
"Look, just fucking come over here and I'll show you."

Reluctantly, it had to be said, Thomas got off his bed and stood in front of me beneath the light.

"Well Phil, what is the problem?"
"These man. These!"

I was pointing to my chest.

"What?"
"These man! Look I think it means I've got cancer. In fact I'm pretty fucking sure of it."

He gave me a hard look and let out a deep sigh of despair.

"Man oh man you are really too much! If you had cancer you would feel unbearable pain and you wouldn't be able to move."

Shit! Yeah, maybe. Thomas was right of course. If I had cancer that pronounced, I would feel intense pain, would be in absolute agony instead of prancing about on another stoned freak out.

"Yeah, right, right! I guess that's true. But fuck man, I really thought something was there!"
"No man, I don't think so. You just have a strange imagination from smoking too much of this really strong weed."

That was it exactly. He’d hit the nail on the head, I simply had a strange imagination and I was smoking too much weed! Getting too full of weird thoughts which could trip me off to fuck knows where, lost within dark and shadow filled landscapes stoking the fires of paranoia. It was crash out time, I needed to hit the sack, yes it would probably be good to get my head down and give my mind a rest.

The following morning we both woke up late and after lying around on our beds for a while we finally got it together to go to the Broadway Coffee House for breakfast. It was our usual fare of iddlys, sambhar and coffee. A fucking excellent start to the day and after we had polished it all off it was back to our room in the Basato where we both felt it was time to relax for a while and recover from the rigours of the night before. In fact it was time to try to recover from the rigours of the last few days, where all we had seemed to do was run around in the heat and end up smoking lots of grass. Judging on past performances however, what were the chances that this new day would really be any different? It already looked like we would be spending at least another night at the Basato Lodge. The prospect of finding out how to get to Mysore already seemed like it was a bit too fucking much. It would have meant trips to the central bus station and the railway station in order to check out the most appropriate means of transport, battling through all the crowds in the heat, before coming back to pack up our rucksacks for an early departure the next day. Too much work by half! All of that was a tall enough order even when in peak physical condition and it was most definitely something which seemed a bit too challenging in our current states of disrepair.

After our conversation with Vino we both felt like going back over to Fort Cochin to check out the Om Ashram, something which held out the possibility of offering us a strange, inexplicable and wholly unique experience of the kind you would only ever find in India. If the Om wasn't intriguing enough, there was Angel Geeberel on his food stand in the square. It turned out there was something very odd written on the back of the card he had given me and what it said was :

A Public Challenge

Foundation to world peace will be laid on the day any person in any part of the world answers this question within six months - Name any respected or venerated person who has not been falsely accused by society?

Can you win respect or world peace.

What the fuck did that mean? So our plan for the day would be to go over to Fort Cochin at some point, although it wasn't likely we would get to do it much before the afternoon, when hopefully we would have got some of our energy back. For the moment I tried to get into my Dickens again and go over the notes I had written the night before, whilst Thomas lay back on his bed and put on the Walkman with Midnight Oil once again his choice of listening material. He was beginning to get well and truly into Deisel and Dust that was for sure, playing the tape non-stop, continually telling me how fucking brilliant it was and that I should try to get into it as well.

By midday we were out on the streets again. We needed to have a stretch of our legs and Thomas also wanted to find the man who had sold him those juicy paans from the day before. He said the paan man had been on one of the pavements off Broadway, but now it looked like he wasn't around. It wasn't too surprising because it might simply have been too early in the day for him, we were in India after all, where there were often no set times for when stalls and shops opened and closed, or at least that was how it seemed to me. Sometimes they just rose up out of the dust then disappeared again, things being so fluid with no readily apparent pattern to them. We ended up in an older part of town where there was a cluster of fish, fruit and vegetable markets; hundreds of stalls and shacks tightly packed together, whilst all around lay the rich and colourful produce of the seas and lands of India. Nevertheless there was an awful fucking stench coming from somewhere and at one point it was as much as me and Thomas could do to walk along without gagging. We made our way through the narrow and cramped passageways of the markets where it seemed like the people were a different breed to the more affluent traders up the road on Broadway; here they were darker, earthier and quite a bit more intense. But we got a friendly vibe from them and I felt sad about the overwhelming barriers of communication which lay between us. It would have been nice to have had a talk, but as things stood they strangers to us and we were strangers to them.

We eventually had lunch in a back street restaurant which served up huge vegetarian thalis which consisted of mountains of rice and as much in the way of vegetables as we could eat. The waiters simply came round with steel buckets and sloshed the tasty slop on our plates at only the merest suggestion of when we might have wanted more. It was excellent, the way all good eating places should be, letting people plough on until they were absolutely stuffed, and all for next to nothing in terms of cost. After the meal we found another paan seller who made us up sweet paans for a couple of rupees each. When they were ready we put them straight into our mouths, hungry for the hit which their juices gave from the nuts, spices and other strange perfumes stuffed inside them. The paans numbed our cheeks, sent revitalising waves through our systems and once again it was easy to see why so many Indians were chewing paans every single day of their lives. We were able to breeze back to the Basato, making our way through the crowded streets with puffed up cheeks because of the paans inside our mouths, feeling we were cool dudes, well and truly in touch with the local scene.

We continued our recovery process back in our room by way of simply sitting and lying around, gently preparing ourselves for the trip back over to Fort Cochin. After some time I remembered that I had to go and collect my photos from Aruns. I left Thomas sprawled on his bed, semi-naked with the Walkman wrapped round his ears and once again listening to Midnight Oil. My walk to Aruns in the mid afternoon heat was long and tiring. Instead of struggling through the fumes and dust I really should have splashed out on a ride in an auto rickshaw. Unfortunately I was sometimes so tight fisted that I was prepared to walk for miles in various degrees of discomfort just to save a few rupees. Weird how our minds work! I suppose I figured that all the walking was good for my health, despite the overwhelmingly heavy traffic. It all seemed to be worth it when I picked up my snaps however, because their quality was quite simply excellent. As I stood on the pavement outside Aruns flicking through them, a wave of memories came flooding back to me, of people and places from earlier in my trip. Experiences were vividly re-awakened, yet at the same time they already seemed so far away, like they were from another life. Memories of being with Susan up in Varanasi, being so happy that it was hard for me to think about her without an incredible sized lump forming in the back of my throat. Then there were pictures of travelling through Sri Lanka with Thomas, up in the dangerous hill country full of tigers with guns and then down onto the weed ridden coast. My journey so far had given me many colourful encounters which I would never forget, and it wasn't over yet, but those times now were gone and I knew there was nothing sadder than living off past glories.

Back at the Basato I showed all the photos to Thomas, and as I did so I had to roll a couple of joints for us because the shots I had taken made me happy yet sad at the same time, whilst the weed soon got me stoned. The long walk to Aruns and back, the effects of the first smoke of the day, the re-awakening of a non-stop train of thoughts about my trip so far, especially the time I had spent with Susan, made me decidedly unenthusiastic about heading back over to Fort Cochin. Time was pushing on however, and after his long session of lying around doing sweet fuck all apart from listen to Midnight Oil, Thomas was now ready for a bit of action. As far as I was concerned I soon got caught up in a paralysing bout of stoned indecision. Should I go with Thomas over to Fort Cochin or should I stay in Ernakulum? Stick or twist? Simple as that, although it most certainly didn't seem so at the time! Thomas finally suggested we each did whatever we wanted to do and that it was no big deal if I came over with him or not. We could either meet up in Fort Cochin or back in our room later on, it was that fucking simple, and due to the state I was in, it seemed the best plan to me. It gave me some breathing space and the chance to get my head together, and it saved Thomas the hassle of having to wait around for me and possibly getting wound up in the process. Not long after that, Thomas split the scene to head for the island and I was left alone in the room, completely lost in thoughts and memories of places and people from earlier in my trip, specifically thoughts and memories of Susan. It now seemed such a long time ago that I had said goodbye to her in Calcutta. Where was she now? Probably out of India and back in the United States. Looking at all the photographs of her in North India made me feel lonely, very lonely indeed, and I would have given a good couple of hundred rupees, thousands even, to have had the chance to have been with her right there and then. She had been my love since the day we had first got it together in deepest darkest Kathmandu after the Kopan meditation course in Nepal, and now she was my lost love, it really did seem that way. Sometimes life could feel like it was the saddest fucking dream!

By the time I got it together to go out it was almost dark. I went to buy some film for my camera because I was hungry to get clicking again after seeing the positive results from Aruns. I found a shop which sold film but then had another bout of stoned indecision when I couldn't decide on getting a roll of Kodak for 90 rupees or a roll of Konica for 50. I had been using Kodak throughout my trip and so far I had no complaints, but now it felt like I was now getting to that stage of the journey where I would have to tighten my purse strings a bit. This meant that a roll of film which was 40 rupees cheaper had to be taken into serious consideration, inferior quality or not. So what was it gonna to be, Kodak or Konica? More than once I had already experienced paranoid visions of running out of money completely and never being able to get back, stranded in a hell hole somewhere, washing dishes for the next 20 years, so it was a tough choice to make. My instinct told me to go for Kodak, but common sense said Konica, and eventually after what seemed like a very long time, I went for the cheaper one. Naturally, as soon as I had bought the Konica it felt like I had made the wrong decision. It just didn't feel right getting a film which wasn't in one of those bright little yellow and red Kodak boxes, but it was tough shit, the Konica would just have to do!

Storm clouds were brewing on the horizon but somehow the rain didn't materialise. I looked up and saw some breaks in the clouds, through which a darkening sky of blue appeared. It felt that now the time was right for me to go and visit the Om Ashram over on Fort Cochin, so I struck a route towards the bay and the ferry jetty. I was excited again, something which always seemed to precede some kind of new adventure. It was a feeling which left me light and powerful, like I could still cut it as a Harrison Ford type figure setting out to meet the spooks or whatever was hiding in the shadows of the deep unknown. All complete and utter bullshit of course, but there we go, that was just how my mind sometimes worked, especially after smoking some ganja. When I got closer to the jetty I was surprised to see none other than Phillip walking towards me from the other direction. He was looking straight at me and he had a big smile on his face, like he was just about to meet a long lost friend. As the distance closed between us I felt vaguely depressed. A part of me wanted to tell him that I was grateful to him for having scored the weed the day before, but now if it was all the same to him, could he please just piss off and leave me alone? I had paranoid thoughts that he might actually have been hanging around there for hours, just waiting for the chance to deliberately bump into me. But maybe that was just the weed talking, fucking up my mind, and since weed was the main thing between us, he would no doubt be on the sniff for a bit of new business. Oh shit, what a bummer! My new found feelings of excitement were quickly swiped away and as we drew up close I put a weary smile on my face before greeting him.

"Hi Phillip."
"Hi. Where have you been?"

It seemed like Phillip had a puzzled look on his face but I really didn't know why.

"Today where were you? I wait at your hotel for two hours but still you no come."

I was astonished to hear this because we had made no arrangement at all to meet after we had scored the weed together, or at least that was how I remembered it.

"Shit. I had no idea you were coming round."
"Yes, yes. I wait long time for you."
"Well, I didn't know you would be around man."
"Yes, yes. I wait long time!"

It all seemed a bit hard to swallow. If he had been hanging round the Basato for such a long time I'm sure I would have seen him, either when I went out to go across to Aruns to collect my snaps or when me and Thomas went to the Broadway Coffee House to eat lunch. Phillip was lying, simple as that! He was trying to lead me up Bullshit Alley and I didn't like it, so I couldn't really bring myself to offering him much in the way of sympathy.

"Well, like I said. If I'd known you were going to be around…"

We looked at each other, it felt like there was a funny vibe going on, with too stoned much confusion for me to see things clearly.

"You smoke today?"
"Er… yeah, yeah. I've had a little. It's good stuff you got for us. Thank you."
"Ah yes. Good grass no?"
"Yeah, really good."
"You want more? Today some very good grass. Better grass today. Come, we go and buy."
"No, no. It's ok, it's ok. I'm fine. We've still got plenty. We've only just bought some, remember?"

I held my hands up in a gesture of retreat but it was clear that Phillip was hungry for business.

"Maybe tomorrow yes?"
"Yeah, yeah. Maybe tomorrow."
"Yes, tomorrow I get grass. Very good quality!"

As I stood there I actually gave it some thought and realised that it probably would be a good idea to score a bit more before we moved on. There was no doubt that Phillip was able to get his hands on top quality stuff, and although we had only scored our nice little pile the day before, there was no mistaking the fact that good quality weed didn't hang around forever, it got smoked. If I bought a couple more tolas off Phillip that would be fine, in fact it would set us up nicely for the next few days to come. We would be well stocked up and then when we left Cochin we would have enough weed to save us any trips into the seedier parts of either Mysore or Bangalore, the next places we were due to go to. Well, at least that was the hope! So I relaxed a little and became a bit friendlier with Phillip, there was no point in off loading him just yet, he could still be of use to us, and of course in retrospect, what he said about waiting around the hotel for me might have been true. We could have just missed each other through sheer bad luck!

"Yeah, look. Tomorrow I definitely buy some ok?"

I said it in a way which left no doubt there was still some more business for him to come. So that it was good for him and good for me.

"Fine, ok, ok. We smoke now? You have some smoke?"

As it happened I did have a bit because I'd thought it might be cool to smoke some over at the Om Ashram, to impress the residents so to speak.

"Yeah, yeah. I have a little."
"Good, good. I know a very nice place to smoke. Close to here. Come, we go."

I dithered for a while. Did I really want to go for a smoke with Phillip? In my stoned haze it seemed such an imponderable question that it might have taken me to the edges of infinity before I decided what to do, quite simply it felt as if I was paralysed. Time was moving on however, and if I wanted to get over to Fort Cochin I would have to move reasonably quickly, but I didn't want to tell Phillip where I was going just in case he dragged himself along with me. A split second insight therefore told me the easiest option was just to go with his suggestion and have a smoke.

I soon found myself walking past the ferry jetty and into a little park by the side of the bay. Despite the fact it was now dark there were still a lot of people around, mainly couples and families out for some evening relaxation by the flower beds. We made our across the grass and sat on a wall, with the waters of the bay lapping against the shore directly behind us. It didn't take long for me to realise Phillip had taken me to another Smokers Corner within the environs of the city of Cochin. Again it I felt like I was somewhat exposed and again I needed to smoke a cigarette to calm my nerves, the nicotine hits soon doing the job quite nicely. There was a bunch of Indian youths, all of whom Phillip seemed to know, and the immediate vicinity smelt very strongly of weed. I was the only white skin amongst them and once again it felt like I stood out a mile, naturally enough making me feel more than a little bit paranoid. As I passed the weed to Phillip to roll up a joint, I sensed there were a few quizzical stares coming my way from other people in the park. Oh shit, I thought, why was it that I did such things?

This time I felt that my situation was not helped by the fact that I was wearing a loud and eye-catching t-shirt, one I had bought in Sri Lanka and which had a wild elephant sewn onto the back, ripping up a palm tree from the ground with its trunk. Another reason why I didn't like being there in the little park was that the water in the bay behind us absolutely stank. It felt like it was a real health risk to hang around the area for any more than five minutes, but the locals didn't seem to be bothered about it though, it had to be said, a number of them were sitting on the grass nearby as if they were in the most beautiful place in the world. We sat there smoking and, as the effect of the weed once more rolled over me like a wave which had begun its journey far out in the ocean, I took less and less interest in the conversation and began retreating once again into a world of my own stoned thoughts. I knew that it was important for me to take responsibility for the situations in which I found myself. Yes, yes, I knew that. It was what the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan had taught in all those books by Carlos Castaneda, taking responsibility for one’s actions, but all the same I couldn't help wondering just what the hell was I doing there. Smoking weed with a bunch of lads I had never seen before in the whole of my life and getting mildly freaked out in the process, I mean it hardly seemed like I was giving myself a good time did it? Suddenly I felt like a lonely stranger, just a kaputnik with other kaputniks who I didn't know how to talk to, had nothing to say to, didn’t know even a single word of their own language, and it made me feel sad, very sad.

Nonetheless the joints just kept coming and it wasn't long before I was seriously blasted, well on my way to once again being completely fucking wrecked. Fort Cochin seemed to be a long way off, although in actual fact I could quite clearly see its lights shining from across the bay and Thomas was over there somewhere, doing fuck knows what. I began to doubt whether I would make it over, but there was no point in kicking up over the situation in which I found myself, after all I was the only one to blame for it. I was still there on the Ernakulum side of the bay purely and simply because I liked to smoke weed and these were the people in Cochin who also liked to smoke weed, nothing more to it than that. The only thing to do was try to learn from the situation, try to understand it and not to panic. It might have been the case that I truly didn't want to be there and yet I was, so I had to face that question squarely. Head on, no hiding, no pretending I had just fallen from out of the fucking sky and was somehow in that park by accident. Eventually I managed to pull myself out of my stoned ruminations for a brief moment, to tell Phillip that I had to split and that I would see him tomorrow. However getting rid of Phillip wasn't that easy and he walked back with me to the ferry jetty. In the present circumstances I didn't intend to go over to Fort Cochin, the only thing I was good for after all the joints in the park, was to head back to our room in the Basato. Nevertheless I was aware that I had to arrange meeting up with Phillip the following morning in order to score some more weed.

"Look tomorrow I definitely have to go to Fort Cochin to visit the Om Ashram, so I don't know what will be the best time for us to meet."

Phillip didn't really see that there was any problem, pretty much just as I expected.

"Fort Cochin? Ok that is fine. We go and buy grass in Fort Cochin tomorrow. I know a place. Very good grass there!"

I realised there was no point in arguing, once Phillip got his claws out it was going to be hard to get him to put them back in again. Put simply, I was stoned and powerless.

"Ok, look. Tomorrow we go and buy some grass in Fort Cochin and then I go to the Om Ashram."
"Yes, yes. No problem. Tomorrow very good grass!"

We arranged to meet the following morning at the ferry jetty at 10. Just as he was about to leave Phillip asked me another question.

"You have Bob Marley tape yes?"
"Bob Marley?"
"Yes, yes. You like Bob Marley?"
"Yeah, he's good. I have a tape of his with me, sure."
"I can borrow ? You bring tomorrow?"

I guess I should have seen it coming. Bob Marley was huge in South India and Sri Lanka. It would have been tight fisted of me to have refused Phillip but at the same time I felt uncomfortable. More pressure! But what the fuck was wrong with me? It was only a tape which I'd bought in Colombo for about 60 Sri Lankan rupees. Fuck all in other words. It was one of those cheap compilation tapes of a famous artist which had at most two recognisable songs on it, with rest being made up of complete and utter shit, which in Bob’s case meant bad reggae on a bad day.

"Yeah, ok. I'll bring it along tomorrow."
"Ah yes. Thank you! And I bring tape for you. Very good, you will like. Kerala music."
"Sure, sure. That would be great. I'll look forward to it."

I was getting tired now and really wanted to split but Phillip wasn't finished yet. He had a strange smile on his face.

"You have knife?"
"A knife?"

I began to get nervous. All of a sudden his hardened face looked a lot harder than it had before.

"Yes, yes. Red knife."
"Red?"
"Yes, small red knife."

Then it dawned on me what he was getting at. A Swiss army knife. Of course! Nuthin' too scary about that.

"Oh, you mean a Swiss knife?"
"Yes, yes. Swiss knife. You have?"

That was better, at least it wasn't anything worse. A full blown murder blade or any shit like that. But his appetite was insatiable, and through Phillip’s eyes I could see that I was obviously just a piece of white trash whom he considered fair game, a punk with a rucksack who really knew sweet fuck all about his home town, the mighty city of Cochin by the Arabian Sea.

"No, no. I don't have one. No knife!"

I was telling the truth as well. I had given my Swiss army knife to Susan in Calcutta and that was the last I had seen of it. I hoped to fuck she still had it though, and that every time she used it she thought of me.

"Ok, just the tape then and we meet tomorrow yes?"
"Yeah, tomorrow at ten."

Phillip then disappeared into the jetty crowds and I was left on my own standing there on the sidewalk. It was a relief but I was pissed off with him and pissed off with myself. There was no doubt that he was after anything he could get off me, but I guess it would have been insane for me to really expect things to have been any different. It was my own stupid fucking fault for getting mixed up with him in the first place and for then perpetuating such a farcical relationship. But the reason why it had continued was simply down to the fact that he could get his hands on top quality weed, and I was prepared to put up with all the other shit because of it. I was just crazy for the local ganja!

Back at the Basato again and in our room, I realised I was still pretty fucking blasted. Making my way over to Fort Cochin and the Om Ashram that night were most definitely out of the question; they were only across the bay but suddenly it seemed like an awful big bay. I just sat there for a while, still feeling bad about getting involved with someone like Phillip. It must have said a lot about the kind of guy I was, but I guess that the problem was I really didn't know what kind of guy I was, like someone who continually surprised himself in a not particularly pleasant way. It seemed like I drifted into situations, spurred on by some kind of crazy desire which I couldn't control, then more often than not freaked out when things began to get rocky. My somewhat negative feelings towards myself were soon compounded when I fucked up putting the new roll of film into my camera. It should have been a relatively simple operation and I was simply at a loss over what to do when I got the old film stuck and I was unable to move it. A wave of panic washed over me.

"Oh shit!” I said to myself, “what's wrong with this bloody fucking camera?"

All of a sudden it felt like I was totally useless when it came to things which required just a little patience and dexterity; badly fucking useless, a total wash out. A kaputnik, a complete and utter fuck up! Soon I broke into a most unpleasant sweat. My heart was racing and my temples pulsed as I descended further into feelings of helpless recrimination and frustration. Stoned and confused I was stuck solid in an ugly inner landscape and so it was a huge relief when the film suddenly began to rewind again.

"That's right bastard. Don't fuck! Don't fuck! Okay?"

Things didn't end happily however, because I suffered further grief in trying to load my recently purchased Konica film onto the spool. Guess I should known better, that it simply wasn't the time to be doing things even remotely technical, but I was blind to the consequences. I tried to wind the new film on but it got completely jammed and in a fit of fury I ripped it out and slung it across the room into the bin. Good shot, but what a fucking disaster! Now I felt terrible, totally fucking shit, full of shame and remorse over the fact I wasn't even able to perform a simple operation like putting a new film into my camera without badly fucking it up. I was stunned by my outburst of violence, especially because weed smoking was supposed to bring peace of mind, and so I just sat there staring blankly into space, depressed beyond words. Quite simply, I thought I was better than that, but no, things had got tricky and instead of being able to take a step back and wait a little while, I had exploded into a senseless rage.

When I did finally manage to shake myself out of my stupor the only thing I could think of doing was rolling another joint. There was bad stuff in me, I knew that, but what the fuck? Now it was time to get stoned again, so I pulled hard on the joint, soon enough beginning to see things in a new light and feel a bit better. The smoke allowed me to interpret the whole thing as a sign for me to simply stop taking photographs, it had clearly been a message sent from the gods! I had enough film in my rucksack already shot and now it was time to lay down the attachment I had to photos and move onto other things. No more clicking like a dumb tourist who had fuck all else to do. Yes, it was time to give the camera a rest. It would save a lot of fucking around in the heat as well, worrying about whether some shot of an ancient monument would look good or not. Now I could just quietly put my camera at the bottom of my rucksack and forget all about it. Loads of time would be saved! Time which would otherwise have been spent bending over in the dust, trying to get the angle right on some holy temple, or risking life and limb by way of standing in the middle of a busy city trying to capture a slap dash street scene full of people and traffic. Smoking the joint did the trick, dispelled all recent bad feelings suffered over the camera, enabling a series of swift and effective thought manoeuvres to be performed which soon made everything appear fine again.

The electricity in the room was off and I sat there by the table with a single candle burning, staring at the reflection of my face in the mirror. There was something in the way the shadows hung over my cheeks which made it appear quite frightening. Haunted. Fuelled by the weed and the silence of our room which appeared to be disconnected from the rest of the Basato, things seemed to be pretty damn intense. My face kept changing into weirder and weirder shapes until it seemed to disappear altogether. I sat there and saw nothing but a void where my face should have been; void, space, whatever you want to call it. Once I recovered from the shock, I figured out the thing which allowed it to happen was letting my eyes go unfocused until they felt fully relaxed. My perception then became completely different and in this particular instance it led to the disappearance of my face. In my stoned haze I became quite absorbed in it, sitting in front of the mirror in the room and making my face seemingly disappear at will. Years ago I'd had a similar experience when I was on my own in my Granny Jane's flat in South Wales.

On that occasion I had got myself completely blasted after smoking some particularly strong Moroccan hash and then looked at myself in the mirror, where instead of my face disappearing I got to the point where I couldn't recognise who I was. A strange, foreign pair of eyes had stared back at me; those of a young savage lost in the lands of finest desert hash from the hills of North Africa. I witnessed my face change from the picture I knew and was wholly familiar with, into something completely different. It got broken down stage by stage until it was no more than a mass of tiny particles, whirling and spinning around at extraordinarily high speed, and it hadn’t been an unpleasant experience at all, in fact it felt like I was getting a glimpse into what things were really like, albeit by a risky manoeuvre. The experience I was now having at the Basato was roughly comparable, although not as strong, but all the same it left me convinced that beneath it all there was something wild and out of control going on. Below the day to day reality of life there was a raging storm in our psyche which we would never fully understand, and possibly never want to.

By the time I managed to reassemble all the constituent parts of my face it was well into the evening and there was still no sign of Thomas. The later it got, the more obvious it became that he had indeed made it over to Fort Cochin and visited the Om Ashram. I began to wonder what had happened to him over there, in fact I even felt a little worried. Maybe he had stumbled into a really weird set up and had got himself brutally murdered. Bad karma, it was possible. Shit, then it would be down to me to inform the local cops and also maybe arrange with the German authorities in India to get his body flown back home. What a hell of a hassle that would be! I pictured having to go down to the police station in the middle of the night to tell them of my fears.

"That's right officer, my friend said he was going to Fort Cochin and he would be no more than a couple of hours, but that was a long, long time ago!"

It was just fantasy I know. That crazy bastard could more than look after himself and the likelihood was that he was having a pretty damn exciting time of it over on the island, something which would make all my face disappearing antics seem like a boring old pile of shit. I consoled myself by rolling another joint, and then another one. I tried to use the rush from the smoking as inspiration for my poem about Ernakulum which was getting more problematic every time I stared down at the page of paper in my notebook, attempting to decipher just exactly what it was I had written. The more involved I got, the more complicated it became, so much so that I was no longer sure what my intention was when I’d started out on it all that time ago. It now seemed like my face hadn't disappeared at all, it had merely got stuck up my own arsehole and all my messing around over a crazy pile of words suddenly pissed me off! They just lay there in a heap on the paper and I was damned if I knew what it was I was supposed to do with them. Well, I guess I just wasn't a fucking poet, simple as that.

This was the situation I found myself in when Thomas finally made it through the door at just gone midnight. He must have caught the last ferry back across the bay and from the look on his face it was plain he had been up to something. His skin was glowing and he obviously had a story to tell. He paced up and down the room for a while, eyes bulging and with an excited smile on his face.

"Oh man, oh man. This evening you would not believe!"
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, really Phil, it was incredible!"

Oh shit, the bastard has only gone and had a much better time than me! I tried to sound interested and to not feel jealous over the fact that he had left me and then had ended up having a really great time on his own. But it was already too late. I sat there wondering why the fuck it was that all the special experiences seemed to happen to Thomas, how by contrast I had ended up on the wrong side of the bay with a character like Phillip for company, smoking next to open broken sewers in the wrong part of Cochin. Thomas began his account in a way which sounded like he was apologising for having had such a great time without me and, needless to say, it was more than a little irritating. Nevertheless it turned out that his story was pretty damn entertaining and the more he went on, the more drawn in I became. Thomas told me that when he left the Basato Lodge he had hung around Ernakulum for a while, still trying to find the paan seller from the night before, but just like when we had searched earlier that afternoon, he had failed to locate him. He continued to wander around the streets until he eventually found himself on the bay road heading towards the ferry jetty. When he got there he felt like taking a ride across to Fort Cochin and checking out the Om Ashram, just like I thought he would. He remembered our meeting with Vino the day before in the Broadway Coffee House and how we said to him that we would definitely try to make it over there. Now he realised it would be a bit fucking rude if neither of us showed to check his place out, making it sound as if Vino was specially waiting there for us to turn up, something which I highly doubted.

When he got over to Fort Cochin, Thomas decided first of all to pay a visit to Angel Geeberel, the man with the stall in the square who had given us the card with his bizarre public challenge stated on the back of it. When he met up with Angel Geeberel and started talking with him, he was given a full explanation as to what it really meant. The Angel Geeberel told Thomas that he’d had a vision in which he had seen that the world would end in approximately 35 years from now, and since we were in 1989 that would mean around 2025. The reason would be a nuclear war and this would come about because of a conflict between Christians and Muslims. Not only that, but in the final days before it happened the Christians would produce a second Christ, but it would be too late, no one would listen to him and that would be the end of life on Earth as we knew it. According to Angel Geeberel however, all was not lost because a Christ could only appear on Earth when the ground had been prepared for his coming and the beings whose job it was to do that were angels. Yes, angels had to come and clear the way for the messiah! By setting his public challenge, Angel Geeberel was asking the angels who were already on Earth to come forward now and declare themselves. If this happened then people might become more aware of what was going on and thus the spiritual consciousness of the world would be raised accordingly. Maybe raised high enough for the new messiah to appear on Earth before the time predicted in Angel Geeberel's vision, and therefore said messiah would have a better chance of persuading everyone to put down their weapons and to save the world from some serious nuclear conflict in the name of God, Allah or whatever you wanted to call him or it.

When he had finished Thomas just stood there and stared at me intently.

"An amazing story you think?"
"Yeah, yeah. It's heavy shit man. Heavy shit!"
"And you know, he totally believes it, this guy. He really thinks these angels will come and no way do I think he is crazy!"
"No? Well, fuck! What a thing to carry around in your head!"
"Yeah, yeah. It's heavy shit man. Heavy shit."

Thomas continued to talk and I got a couple of joints together. More weed was definitely required so that we could reflect on the news which he had just returned with. In fact it was just as well I rolled some beefy spliffs as there was much more still to come about his evening on the island. He said that when he asked Angel Geeberel for directions to the Om Ashram after listening to his challenge, the Angel frowned and shook his head, telling him that he didn't think it was a good place at all and that if he wanted to go there he would have to be careful. Angel Geeberel told him the man who ran it said bad things about the Bible, very bad things indeed, and when Thomas asked the Angel what he meant exactly, he could get no more words out of him. Such was the force of the Angel’s conviction, he wondered for a while whether he should go to the Om Ashram or leave it at that and head back to the Basato Lodge. Play it safe in other words, like I would probably have done. However Thomas then realised the whole point of him going over to Fort Cochin was to go the Om, so he might as well pay it a visit. He pushed aside his fears and followed the route to the Om reluctantly given to him by the Angel Geeberel. On the way he met a drunk who wanted him to share a drink of toddy with him, toddy being quite a lethal local spirit made from coconuts. Indian newspapers would often have small news items under the headline - Man falls down a well and drowns after drinking toddy - and other stuff of that nature. Normally Thomas would not have accepted a drink from a stranger, but since he felt he was now on a potentially dark and dangerous mission, he took a good swig from the bottle before giving the man a pat on the back and 5 rupees.

When he got to the Om Ashram it didn't seem to be a place which supported a lively community of people, despite what Vino had told us in the Broadway Coffee House. Standing on its own and on a quiet back street, the ashram was a rundown old building which had long since seen better days. It appeared to be completely deserted, but since its front door was open Thomas had just walked right up and stepped inside without even bothering to knock. He found himself in a large room with no one in it apart from the man who had been chatting with Vino in the Broadway Coffee House. Everything was filthy, including the man, who sat there in the middle of the room on an old deckchair. He asked Thomas to sit down and after a while it became apparent to Thomas what the man was teaching. Put simply the man believed the Bible was written by Lucifer and consequently he and all the people who were part of the Om Ashram worshipped the Fallen One. The way Thomas told it to me, it sounded quite shocking.

"Fuck man! Didn't you just get the hell out of there or what?"
"Ah, no! I wasn't scared of some old man just because he said he was into Lucifer and anyway what he had to say was really quite interesting."

Thomas continued with his story, saying that it wasn't long before the man got out a copy of the Bible and began to show him various passages which, as far as he was concerned, proved beyond any doubt that the Bible was the work of Lucifer. Although he found it a little embarrassing to sit there and listen to the man try so hard to persuade him that such a thing was true, Thomas said that he wasn't frightened in any way whatsoever and he even found the man's arguments quite appealing.

"Hey Phil! Imagine if what he said was true. All the beliefs which people have held onto and been conditioned by through the ages would be completely turned upside down. Suddenly people would see that all along they had been worshipping a book which had been written by Lucifer. Quite incredible don't you think?"
"Yeah, right. Too fucking much man, too fucking much!"

Thomas had lit up the joint which I had tossed over to him and was taking a few good hits from it. I think he needed it, so just to keep him company I did exactly the same with mine. I had to admit that the old man might well have been on to something pretty mind blowing. It all seemed too simple to be true, but if you looked at things one way it made perfect fucking sense. If I thought about it I realised that it really wouldn't be too farfetched to believe that the Bible had been written by Lucifer. After all, over the years and through the centuries, there had been so many wars and so much blood spilt in the name of the holy book that maybe it really wasn't very difficult to imagine that it hadn't been written for the good of mankind at all. No, far from it. Countless numbers of people had held it in their hands and then screamed at others to believe in it or go straight to hell. Then more often than not those who had chosen to pass up on the offer were killed on the spot, or far worse if you happened to be a non-believer at the time of the Inquisition and in almost the whole of the Middle Ages. Knights, conquistadors, priests, popes, kings and queens; they had all committed terrible acts whilst under the spell of religious fever. And of course if the Angel Geeberel's vision was anything to go by, then we would soon be involved in another barrel load of trouble because of it and this time with a bunch of Muslims thrown into the mix as well. So, why not Lucifer? Why couldn't Lucifer have written the good old black book after all?

"Shit man! Too much, too fucking much!"
"Yeah I know, crazy isn't it?"

Thomas lay there on his bed with his eyes wide open and a big grin on his face like he had just discovered something really explosive. If it was all true then of course the Bible would quite simply turn out to be pure evil and so Lucifer would be entitled to feel pretty proud of the work he had done. It was difficult not to trip off into lands of intensely stoned speculation in the face of it, but just as I managed to shake myself out of any possible apocalyptic visions I found Thomas lying there with an even bigger grin on his face.

"Yes, yes Phil! And what about the Pope? You know what he would be? The devil's representative on earth! Head of the Church of Satan! Oh man, oh man!"

By this stage it now all appeared to be so logical that it was difficult not to agree with him.

"Yeah, yeah. Of course. I always wondered why they were into red, all those poppy Popes. That stuff about the holy blood must have been just a load of old bollocks, red instead is the colour of the fires of hell!"

Nevertheless I did hope that Thomas was not going to get caught up in all this Om Ashram stuff, and go on and on and on about it. OK it was good for a laugh but it was not something to be taken seriously, surely not? Even if it did turn out to be true what difference would it really make? What was going to happen was going to happen, simple as that. In the end we all copped it anyway, our minds still pretty much as dumb as when we first appeared on the scene. However I knew from past experience that Thomas had the capacity to lose himself in some pretty wild theories and speculations, especially if he was smoking weed, just like what we were now doing. For the time being though, it was best just to let him get on with it. When we had been travelling through the hills of Sri Lanka, and smoking heavily into the bargain, Thomas had somehow convinced himself we had both known each other in a previous life. It would not have been too bad if he had left it at that but no, according to Thomas we had both been Aztec Indians and that he had ripped my heart out when performing a child sacrifice; pretty gory stuff it had to be said and not something I was that comfortable with. He had gone on about this for a couple of days and by the end of it, in the tropical heat, it had all got a bit too much, somewhat disconcerting, and I had almost begun to go around thinking just what the hell was I doing travelling around with him? And then, when I thought he had got it all off his chest when we had finally hit the west coast of the Emerald Isle, he convinced himself that he had been an SS guard in a concentration camp during World War II, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews. Totally stoned he would goosestep whilst seig heiling naked around our room of the guest house we were staying in and I'd seriously had my work cut out trying to persuade him that it probably wasn’t true.

Now it looked like it could all be starting up again because Thomas went on and on about the Om, Lucifer and the armies of Satan. I tried to get him to change the subject but he was way too into it, too damn locked into his own spooky speculations to give it a rest. At last, when I came around out of another stoned haze, I managed to ask him:

"So did anything else happen there or what?"
"Ah yes. Wait, I tell you!"

Thomas said that he sat and listened to the old man go on about Lucifer and the Bible for quite a long while, but after the initial shock of his theory wore off, he did get quite boring. All he could do was quote some old passages he had found in the Bible to support his claim and considering the Bible was a pretty big book he didn't really have that many of them. But then just as Thomas was getting ready to leave the Om Ashram four fresh faced young men appeared on the scene. He was relieved there were some more people around, but wary at the same time because he realised that if it was going to turn into a five against one situation he wouldn't have stood had a fucking chance. Two of these youths were sons of the man in the chair and the oldest lad went by the name of Titus. Thomas then broke off his narrative whilst looking directly at me.

"And you know what Phil? He was the most beautiful boy I have ever seen!"
"Yeah?"
"Yeah really! He was a really beautiful boy. Oh man it was so difficult for me not to just look at him all of the time!"

Thomas of course wasn't averse to trying it on with the boys once in a while, and now it seemed like he had struck gold with Titus. He said that he had to restrain himself and avert his eyes by looking at the other boys instead, questioning them about what they thought of Lucifer and all this Bible business. It worried him when they just repeated almost exactly what the old man had said to him before, like they had been pretty well brain washed, no doubt looking upon the old man as their guru. If that was the case they had drawn a short straw considering how many countless thousands of other gurus there were the length and breadth of India, where the chances of finding at least a half-way decent holy man or woman must have been considerably higher than in most other places. Instead they had ended up with a guy in a ramshackle house on Fort Cochin who believed in Lucifer, the Fallen One. Thomas was relieved the boys didn't turn out to be as into the whole deal as the old man however, and that after running through the Lucifer spiel they were happy to talk with Thomas about other things. The conversation then became more general and the atmosphere lighter, Thomas telling me that he began to fantasise about meeting up with Titus in private, where no doubt if he thought he could get away with it, he would try to give the Indian boy a blow job or vice versa. He soon began to get paranoid over having such thoughts however, and wondered if the man or the other boys might have known what was going through his mind. Thomas started to convince himself that maybe they all knew he would fall for Titus, and had deliberately introduced them to each other in order to lure him deeper and deeper into the world of the Om. So deep into its blackness would he go, that he would never be able to get out again. But then he told himself such thoughts were plain crazy! How could they have ever known he had even planned to visit the ashram that evening? And also how could they have known that he swung both ways? They couldn't have, full stop. His mind was running away with itself, creating too many crazy fucked up fantasies and he needed to reel it back in.

As I sat and listened to him, I began to think what it would have been like if I had been there and I could safely guess that I would probably have been in a state of advanced paranoia. Thomas realised the young Keralans were simply just a friendly bunch of carefree lads, and the more he talked with them the more absurd he knew it was for him to think they secretly wanted to convert him in order to go and spread the dark word back in the West. They just wanted to talk to him because he was a traveller in their midst who came from a different culture, and they were naturally curious, wanting to make comparisons between the kind of life Thomas led and theirs. When it was time for him to leave, Thomas was rewarded with an invitation from Titus to go for a swim with him the next day. Titus told Thomas that if he so wished, he could join both him and his younger brother for a dip in the waters off the island of Fort Cochin.

"So you see Phil? Tomorrow I go swimming and then maybe I stay there and fuck the boy!"

Once his story was over, Thomas sat back on his bed looking very proud of himself and I felt duty bound to salute him. The crazy German fucker had done it again!

"Yeah, well. Go for it man, go for it! Sounds incredible."

It seemed like he had indeed got himself involved in a big adventure which now held out the possibility of him having fun on the seashore with a fresh faced young Indian lad. It was difficult for me not to be impressed, because in comparison I had really come up with sweet fuck all, apart from a few shady dealings with a guy who might have been called Phillip, although admittedly it had led to the scoring of some pretty dynamite weed. But against that, there was no doubt Thomas had stepped into some new adventures and challenging situations, diving right into them instead of just running back to the Basato like I had done. He had allowed whatever was meant to happen to simply happen. As a result he had created for himself a pretty interesting experience, one which would certainly be worth his while getting up for the following morning, and one which I was sure that I would never be able to emulate in any way whatsoever.

Still, there was no point in giving myself a hard time over my lack of appetite for adventure, and I realised I was probably painting an unreasonably harsh picture of myself in my mind. Some things in life just couldn't be changed and the wheel of fate was one of them. It had been my destiny that day to run into a character like Phillip and not to make it onto the island of the Om with Thomas. I told myself that one could only influence events up to a point and after that things were simply the way they were. There wasn't much else that could be done. All the same when I laid down on my bed to crash out for the night I couldn't help feeling a little bit useless for just staying back at the Basato, and a coward for freaking out over what in actual fact had been rather mundane situations. When I was by the sea wall with a bunch of local lads and smoking myself stupid, I had been too damn timid to just take the bull by the horns and get away from there without the whole situation getting on top of me.

When I woke up the following morning I really felt like blowing my appointment with Phillip. Did I really want to see him again? It was pretty clear to me by now that I didn't like the guy but I guess that was not really the point. The rigmarole which would no doubt be involved in going with him to score some weed all seemed to be a bit too much. It would have suited me just fine if Thomas and I had picked up our rucksacks and made arrangements to travel on up the road to Mysore that very day, I'd had enough of Cochin and all I wanted to do now was get out of there. Weed, weed and yet more weed; complicated attempts to write poems which in actual fact were just a load of shit; suspicious characters down by the jetty; that was what I had found and now I realised it was all getting a bit too much. There was no way however that Thomas was going to miss his meeting with Titus, and besides it was useless for me to want to suddenly try to run away from a situation I'd helped to create. It would only come back to haunt me later on, in a different shape and different form no doubt, but with the same feelings of paranoia, fear and frustration. The potential for further pain and suffering would remain, that was guaranteed! So I knew that I had to face my responsibility and get down to the jetty by ten as arranged, to go through the motions with Phillip in order to get my hands on a bit more of Kerala's finest marijuana.

Over our morning breakfast of iddlys, sambhar, boiled bananas and hot sweet coffee in the Broadway Coffee House, Thomas told me he would be meeting Titus over in Fort Cochin in the early afternoon. He wanted to go on his own, which left me feeling somewhat jealous and left out, no fucking good to anyone. I had planned to go over to the Om Ashram after I had scored the weed with Phillip, but now I had to think of something else to do because Thomas made it quite clear he didn't want me around in case I screwed things up for him. So the only thing we agreed to do was loosely arrange to meet back at the Basato Lodge later that evening. This meant that for most of the day I was going to be on my own, or with Phillip, a guy I barely trusted, where no doubt I would be full of paranoia over whatever situations I might happen to find myself in. It was therefore with a rather heavy heart that I made my way down to the ferry jetty, and I found it hard not to feel pissed off with everything. There I was on my own in a strange city on the west coast of India and the only thing on my agenda was to meet a guy I didn't really like, in fact felt somewhat afraid of, just to get him to score some weed for me and hope to fuck he didn't rip me off in the process. In comparison to Thomas, with the hope and enthusiasm which he looked forward to his meeting with Titus, I felt dirty and sad. I couldn't help thinking about how much fun Thomas was going to have and how I was just going to have a day of worrying over things which ultimately were of no consequence. But then I caught myself and remembered how useless it was to indulge; that was the hand I had been dealt and it was a bit late in the day to try to change things. Just crack on like a good soldier. It would be better if I tried to remain open and let things roll with Phillip until they reached their natural conclusion, even if the conclusion was inevitably not going to be a good one.

I reached the jetty bang on ten but Phillip was nowhere to be seen. Great, I thought, maybe he wouldn't turn up and I'd be let off the hook. I wouldn't have minded at all just heading back to the Basato and smoking up the rest of the weed in peace. Then, when it was finished, I would simply forget about buying any ever again, but as soon as I thought that I became more than a little horrified at the prospect of running dry! So I stayed at the jetty and waited. I hung round the ticket office area, oblivious to the frequent offers of hash and brown from desperate looking peddlers who hung around there all hours of the day, where rip offs were guaranteed from people who lived their lives in the shadows of the port of Cochin. After a while I went over to a quiet spot by the bay wall, accepted my fate and just waited. I felt mildly paranoid that someone might come up to me and ask just what the fuck it was that I was doing, but no one paid me any attention whatsoever. I might just as well have been a ghost, a poor lost white soul who could have sat there for the next 10 years. People were either busy running after business or just hanging round the rickshaw stands talking to each other in the hot morning sun, drinking cups of chai and smoking beedies. The whole scene was really quite absorbing as I stood there and looked upon it from the outer edges, through the eyes of an often lonely wanderer who had a little bit of a ganja problem. When after a few minutes I got a tap on the shoulder, I swung round in surprise and found myself face to face with Phillip. It took an effort for me to sound cool and unflustered because I simply hadn't seen him coming.

"Oh hi…I was, er, beginning to think that you weren't going to show up."
"No, no. I wait here for you!"
"Where ? You've been waiting here?"
"Yes, yes. Here I wait."

It scarcely seemed believable. After all I had been hanging around the jetty for a good half an hour with both my eyes wide open and hadn't caught the merest sniff of the bastard. Now he creeps up behind me and says he's been there all along!

"Look, look Phillip. You can't have been waiting. I would have seen you. Definitely I would have seen you."
"No! No! Here I been waiting. Where were you?"

It was no good. Despite all my attempts to persuade him that I had been there he wouldn't have any of it. All the same I could tell he was lying and a part of me wondered why the fuck I just didn't walk away from him there and then. It depressed me to think that he chose to lie over such a trivial matter rather than simply admit that he was late. What was he trying to do? Change my reality? Maybe it had something to do with Keralan pride or some other such localised bullshit which I would never understand in a million years, but whatever it was I'm afraid it plunged back me into bleak thoughts about him. Black thoughts indeed, which made me feel like saying:

"Hell’s bells, you're a liar Phillip! A goddamned dirty liar, now don't fuck with me, not ever!"

Horrible stuff I know, but the thing was I just hated it when people weren't straight with me, really fucking hated it. Nevertheless I kept control of myself and I guess poor old Phillip would have had to have been a fucking genius to realise what my innermost ramblings were at that precise moment in time. After our initially awkward meeting up, we both stood there by the jetty talking to each other whilst trying to decide on what it was we were going to do. The arrangement had been for us to go to Fort Cochin and then on to the Om Ashram, but now I wasn't so sure if that was such a good idea because it might have meant bumping into Thomas and fucking things up for him. It seemed like the best thing to do was go back to the place where we'd been the other day and score some more weed from there, round the back streets of Ernakulum in other words. If nothing else, I was pretty confident that top quality weed would again be guaranteed, because the stuff from the other day was absolute dynamite, enough to make anyone's head pop. Also if things got sticky with Phillip, I could make a quick break for it and head back to the Basato, just in case he adopted an overly hassling mode, which actually was entirely possible.

It therefore wasn't long before we were both in an auto rickshaw and heading back to the part of town where we'd scored the weed the other day. Fuck knows what had happened to Phillip's motorbike, maybe it hadn't belonged to him in the first place. He spent the whole of the journey talking with the auto rickshaw driver and not for the first time I sat there amazed over how everyone in India seemed to know each other, how easy it was for them to strike up friendly conversations on what seemed like very intimate terms, conversations with total strangers which seemed so warm and natural. Things were different back home that was for sure, and in comparison to India, they were a million times more rigid and boring. Whilst Phillip and the driver talked to each other I sat back and stared out at the Ernakulum street scenes as we passed on by. They now looked more familiar than a couple of days before, when everything was strange and wonderful, when I was riding along on the back of Phillip's bike and relishing a new sense of freedom. In fact it was a little disconcerting to see how easy it was for my mind to make things normal and somewhat boring as we made our way back along the same route to the weed dealer's place. Maybe it was the company, maybe it was because I wasn't stoned, or maybe it was because I was having to put up with yet another bumpy ride in an auto rickshaw, but whatever it was, what was once so strange and exotic only a short time ago, now appeared dull and familiar.

When we got to the dealer’s house I gave Phillip 50 rupees and told him to get two more tubes of the same weed he had scored for us the other day because that would do very nicely thank you very much. He soon disappeared through the door, and left me standing there in the warm morning breeze beside the waiting auto rickshaw. I walked around and smoked a beedi with the driver, who for some reason had a big smile on his face.

"You smoke grass yes?"
"Yeah, yeah. I do."

There was no point in pretending I was there for anything else, I mean it was pretty fucking obvious.

"Ah yes, Kerala very good place to buy grass!"
"Yeah, I know."
"Best in India."
"Right, right. Yeah."

I really couldn’t disagree with him. At that moment it seemed like the weed was worth going through all the psychological pain I gave myself by way of hanging around characters like Phillip. The end product justified the means, suddenly I could see that quite clearly, and I felt better because of it. For purity and downright effectiveness there was no question that the weed from the other day had been more than able to pack quite a considerable punch. If I ever made it up to the mountains it would be interesting to see how some top rated hashish compared with it, that was for fucking sure! It wasn't long before Phillip reappeared and tossed a couple of tubes across to me. Suddenly I could have given him a hug, he had delivered the goods, done the business, and now it was time to get stoned, with no more fucking around.

"You look. I think very good. The best!"

I tore open the end of one of the tightly packed tubes and gave it a good sniff.

"Wow! Yeah, yeah. That's great, smells really great."
"Kerala gold. Come, we smoke some."

There was no doubt this stuff was going to be just as good as the last batch, merely smelling it almost made me high, and in terms of supply it was double bubble, we now had more than enough to keep us going long after we’d left Cochin. We both climbed back into the auto rickshaw and again went down to the area of wasteland by the bay where Phillip and his friends hung around, in other words we were back on Smokers Corner. It wasn't as busy as the other day and this time I didn't indulge in any major freak outs, in fact as we made our way to the wall by the bay I felt like a local boy on his home turf, unprepared to take shit from anyone. Soon we got a couple of joints together and although it was pretty early in the day, the testing of new weed was something which had to be done, end of story. We sat there on the sea wall smoking our joints and for some reason I asked Phillip what he knew about the Om Ashram over on Fort Cochin. My question resulted in a troubled look pass across his face.

"Why you want to go there? It no good place."

When I asked him why he thought it was so bad he told me that the people who lived there believed that Lucifer had written the Bible. I was surprised how uncomfortable the subject made him feel. Kerala had a large Christian population and I could only assume there were a great many locals who both read and respected the holy book, and regularly got down on their knees to pray, although I doubted very much if Phillip was one of them. In their eyes there was probably little doubt that the Om was a place which was thoroughly and despicably evil, to be avoided at all costs. It saddened me that I could not share Phillip's outrage, to me it was all a bit of a laugh, albeit from a safe distance, and it felt like I had taken a long journey from the days of Sunday school when Jesus was the Son of God no question. I hoped that I hadn't gone in the wrong direction, but the honest truth was that I didn't really give a shit if the Bible had been written by Lucifer or not, because I thought the whole thing was a load of rubbish anyway. Just some historical book which a lot of people had fought a lot of wars over, spilling tons of blood in the process, thinking that they were right and had found the answer to everything, using it to justify all the horrible things they had done to others.

After listening to Thomas and his description from the night before, I would have been absolutely flabbergasted if the inhabitants of the Om Ashram had ever kidnapped and killed anyone, then buried the remains deep underground. They were just a bunch of guys with some strange notions, but they weren't into upside down pentacles, altars decked out in black with chicken heads hanging from the walls or anything like that. It felt good that the whole thing didn't scare me, maybe more so since Phillip was obviously disturbed by the Om Ashram and what he thought went on there. It made me feel like I had one up on him, that it empowered me in some strange way. As I sat there on the wall by the bay getting stoned, I found it difficult to resist the temptation to wind him up, to tell him that I was a believer in the Fallen One myself, and that whenever I could, I also liked to pay my respects to the Lord of Darkness. It would have been a bit much however, a bit too handsomely black for my own good and the language barrier might have also made it difficult for me to convince Phillip that I was only joking. So I changed the subject and asked him what he thought of Angel Geeberel, and at the mention of the Angel's name, Phillip's face visibly brightened.

"He's good man! Best man in Fort Cochin. Very holy man!"

It struck me as kind of funny that over on Fort Cochin there was the Angel on one side of the island and the Om Ashram on the other. Being so close and obviously holding such different views they would surely have known about each other’s activities, and in some way there must have been a sense of competition between them. Riding high on the hit given by the new batch of weed I was smoking, I indulged in some stoned visions of going over to the island one night in the middle of a huge thunderstorm. There I would witness lightning striking trees down dead and crosses falling from out of the sky as the Angel and the old man from the Om fought it out with each other against a bloody backdrop horizon stretching far out over the Arabian Sea. Both of them would be shrieking and wailing like dancers of the apocalypse, each convinced their vision of the world and its potential end was the right one. The truth was probably that each of them fed off the presence of the other, they needed each other, pushing themselves on like a crazy pair of preachers full of revelations, all of which ultimately added up to probably little more than jack squat.

Our joints were finished. The new weed was just as good as the last batch there was no doubt about that, and by now I was well and truly buzzing. Boy oh boy, stoned again; when was it ever going to end, and did I ever want it to? Mind and body both felt like they had been punched inwards and turned inside out. When Phillip suggested that we took a trip over to Fort Cochin to see some of his friends I could only nod my head in vague agreement. Viewed from the state I was in, as far as I could tell, it seemed like a good idea. If things didn't work out I could always hang round and check out the Om Ashram, see where Thomas had gone swimming with Titus, spy on him from behind the bushes, ha ha, hee hee. We walked back over the waste ground to the auto rickshaw which was waiting for us, its driver breaking into a smile when I rather clumsily climbed into the back.

"Good grass, yes?"
"Yeah, yeah. Great grass!"
"Kerala finest!"

Walking the short distance to the auto rick after the smoke really sent my head spinning. The weed was strong for sure, but on top of that there was the fact that it was another hot and sunny day in downtown Ernakulum where the temperature must have been a minimum 36 degrees. When such things were all combined they made the task of maintaining a level headed perception of things quite a formidable challenge, if not downright impossible. It meant that in the auto rickshaw I spent the ride to the jetty taking a few deep breaths and generally trying to keep my head together. There was the ferry ride to come and then a walk through the heat of Fort Cochin, so it really would have been bad form if I fell down hard on the deck, thoroughly dead from a massive and catastrophic heart attack. Guess I was back down paranoid alley again, berating myself over why the fuck I had deemed it necessary to have a smoke so early in the day; oh yes, that’s right, the new weed had required testing!

At the main jetty we found out we would have to wait another 20 minutes for the next ferry over to Fort Cochin, and for some reason Phillip thought it would be better if we first went to the island of Vypeen, then got a smaller boat from there. That seemed ok with me. In my stoned confusion I figured that he knew his way around far better than I did, and at that moment I was game for new adventures, even though I was hardly in a condition to set the pace. I bought our tickets and then we looked for a place to sit down. After that first smoke of the day I wasn't in a standing mood and needed to put my feet up. As I looked over the rows of seats in the waiting area my eyes fell upon the man from Bangalore who I had met a few days previously over at the jetty on Fort Cochin. He was staring straight back at me with those intense black lined eyes of his and I was left with little choice but to go over and have a chat with him. It was going to be difficult, there was no doubt about that, because I was feeling pretty smashed. When I got up close I saw that he was just as smartly dressed as before and that he was holding hands with a very pretty youth who was sitting next to him. They made an attractive couple and I guess I couldn't help standing there with visions flashing through my mind of them both naked on a bed in some hotel room on Fort Cochin with a case full of pesticide contracts on the table beside them. Immediately I cast them out of my mind. A lot of Indian men were physically affectionate with each other in public, and for them to hold hands was nothing more than a sign of good friendship. There was simply no excuse at all for me to think that they might have been anything other than close friends. After all, not everyone was like Thomas! My oh my, there I was crawling around inside my head again and finding filth like that, it was all really rather shameful, yet so very, very easy at the same time.

It wasn't long before the Bangalore Man began to interrogate me in pretty much the same way as when we had been waiting at the jetty on Fort Cochin the day before, or maybe the day before that. I remembered during our first meeting that it had been hard enough for me to give the Bangalore Man the normal tourist rap of what it was I had done and what the places were I hoped to visit. Now that I was standing in front of him with a character like Phillip beside me and two tight packed tubes of killer weed in my shirt pocket, I found it almost impossible. The Bangalore Man began to reel off a whole list of sights which he thought I would have got round to visiting since our last talk, but as I stood there shaking my head and answering in the negative to all his questions he looked more and more bemused, obviously wondering to himself just what the fuck it was I had done with my time in Cochin. Well of course for the most part the answer was pretty simple, I had hung around the Basato Lodge stoned out of my fucking box whilst at times getting more than a little paranoid in the process. But somehow I didn't have the heart to tell him that. Naturally I should have been brave enough to cut the crap, to come out clean and tell him I was a hopeless stone head and possible kaputnik, that furthermore I had been hanging round in all the wrong parts of Ernakulum with people like Phillip.

Maybe I wouldn't have been able to bear the sight of his deep, dark intense eyes shining out at me whilst betraying a confused look of profound disappointment. Really I knew the best policy would have just to have been honest with him, that it was somehow deceitful hiding behind a smokescreen, especially one with a particular kind of scent to it, but that was how it was with me at times, sorry to say, simple as that. After all I didn't know what the reaction from him might have been if I had just played it straight and told him I was stoned, seriously stoned, and intended to get even more stoned by the end of the day. The Bangalore Man might have been a secret smoker himself of course, and then who knows? I could have gone off with him and his boy where we would have had a whale of a time back in his hotel room spliffing up, but somehow I didn’t think so. As it was, when he left to catch his ferry he looked more than a little perplexed, wondering no doubt what I was still doing in Ernakulum, and why I hadn't gone on to the next place up the road, down the road, or wherever the fuck it was supposed to be. It was probably the case that in his book, people just stayed in new places for a few days before moving on after seeing all the sights to see. But of course he was wrong in this instance, and just inches from his face I had the weed to prove it.

The ferry which took us across the water to Vypeen was a clapped out vessel with a particularly loud engine. It was so bad that it was impossible for anyone to hear themselves speak, like being on the backwaters all over again, so consequently everyone sat out the ride in silence. Actually it was quite interesting to see a group of Indians in public who were quiet for a change, because normally it was as if all hell had broken lose with everyone speaking at a million miles an hour. However people genuinely didn't seem to like the roar of the engine, which was a monster to say the least, and they just sat there staring out across the bay, appearing to my sad, stoned fucked up mind to be distinctly unhappy over the fact they only had their own thoughts for company. It was pretty much the same for me of course, but then I was used to it, and as I blankly stared across the waters at a couple of bulk carriers slowly making their way into port, I felt the first wave of a comedown from my early smoking session, and as a consequence felt tired and unfocused. Naturally it made me want to have another smoke to recapture the initial high, because it was the logical thing to do when one was getting addicted to weed. It was a pure and simple wanting feeling, that somehow the situation in which I found myself wasn't good enough, that things needed improving big time and I had just the things needed to improve it. Deep down I knew it was a feeling which would have to be shaken, shed and pulverised if I was ever to be a fully functioning human being. Underneath it all I was a young man with great aspirations who truly looked forward to the day when there would be no reliance on outside agents such as drugs for happiness. That was why the Buddha statue back in the room at the Basato Lodge really did mean something to me when my head was straight. It was just that at this particular period in time my head wasn't really straight very often.

By the time we got to Vypeen and had walked to another jetty in the morning heat for the short ferry ride across to Fort Cochin, I felt I was in a bit of a daze. The introspection whilst on the boat had only depressed me instead of firing me up with a new desire to see things straight and feel more alive. As we waited for the next boat Phillip ran into someone he obviously knew pretty well and I just stood around unable to understand a single word spoken as they began a long conversation in their native tongue of Malayalam. It made me feel kind of stupid and filled me full of thoughts of just what the fuck it was I was supposed to be doing there. His friend kept looking over in my direction and giving me a good stare which made me feel kind of uncomfortable, like I was merely playing the part of the dumb foreigner who the local boys were taking for a ride, which in actual fact was probably a pretty accurate assessment of what was actually happening. The boat which took us from Vypeen to Fort Cochin was tiny and naturally it didn't leave until it was crammed full of people. That was the thing about India, just when you thought it was impossible for any more punters to get on board there would be an almighty rush of what seemed like a thousand of them. Suddenly I found myself standing next to Phillip on the edge of the deck with absolutely nothing to stop us from falling into the sea, no railing, no strung across rope, nothing. I immediately felt stoned again and I had to stare down at my feet, imagine I was as solid as a rock in order to stop myself from keeling over, and it really took a lot of concentration for me just to loosen up and trust in gravity. All the while on the short ride across the water, a thought was lodged in my brain telling me that it would only have taken a well placed shove from someone and I would have been overboard and in the water. Not even a well placed shove, just a nudge from a clumsy Keralan would have been enough, or from a Keralan like Phillip.

Needless to say I was relieved to step on dry land again when we got to Fort Cochin, where I followed Phillip in the blazing sun as he led me to the square where Angel Geeberel's stall was located. Once there we walked over to a group of youths who were sitting around an empty fountain. Phillip introduced me to them and for a while I was the centre of attention as I played the part of being the cool traveller from lands afar, come to deliver the good times in the form of two tightly packed tubes of top quality weed. I handed some to Phillip so that he could roll a couple of joints. It seemed like the lads were used to strangers butting in on their scene, because soon enough they pretty much ignored me and began to speak to each other in Malayalam. I was left standing there with no one to talk to and once again I had soon slipped into my own private world of stoned thoughts which were now completely dominated by trying to work out just what the hell had become of me. Not surprisingly I didn't come up with too many answers, none at all in fact. It was a problem which I had thought about time and time again over the years, usually in the condition in which I now found myself, and it always ended in a total blank. I was relieved to be pulled out of my bleak and pointless inner speculations by one of Phillip's fountain friends who passed across a well fired joint for me to draw the smoke deep down into my lungs.

Smoking the joint allowed me back into the group, and as it happened a couple of the boys could speak a bit of English, so we had a chat whilst we sat around and got stuck into the weed. Underneath the bluster it was plain to see they were hardly the happiest bunch of people in the world, even though they lived their lives in the sun and had access to some of the finest quality grass in India. From what I could gather it seemed that none of them worked and for the most part they just hung round Fort Cochin all day, smoking weed and doing whatever they could to get by when stranger tourists like myself came along. After a while the effect of the smoke brought silence down upon the group and as I looked around I saw that the lads appeared to have troubled looks on their faces. They were staring off into the distance, maybe wondering what they were doing with their lives, before turning their heads to check on the others and to make sure they hadn't missed anything. It seemed like dope smokers were the same the whole world over, or maybe I was just getting it wrong and they were really having the time of their lives, but somehow I doubted it. Suddenly it felt like it was all too much, this smoking of the weed, all in the crazy search for a good time. What the fuck was I doing there? A wave of panic surged through me and I knew I had to quit the scene as quickly as possible, because another paranoid freak out was possibly on the way. The mental pressure caused by this feeling of panic immediately coursed through my body and down to my bowels, leaving me with an irresistible urge to have a crap. Suddenly I knew I had to have shit and have one quick, so I started looking for excuses in order to take my leave and find somewhere to go.

Due to the confusion of the stoned haze I found myself in, it felt too damn embarrassing to ask the boys where the nearest toilets were, especially if they told me to head for the beach, so for a couple of painful minutes I hung round feeling like I was in hell with seemingly no way out and my bowels seriously twitching. Eventually I just got up and told them I was making a move, and from where I was I figured that I would be able to get across to the Elite Hotel, home of Asterix Man and those Berliners, in about 5 minutes. That would give me just about enough time to make it there in one piece. Without fucking around any longer I made my way out of the square and struck off in the direction of the Elite, firmly focused upon reaching my destination. It was tough walking through the hot and hazy midday streets of Fort Cochin whilst bursting for a crap, but there was no other option available to me. After a little while I realised that Phillip was walking behind me, shadowing me possibly, but I really couldn't really have cared less because it was literally shit or bust, the only thing on my mind was that hole in the ground in the shack behind the restaurant. When I eventually got to the Elite I ran out to the row of shit houses, crouched down and let the explosions begin, not emerging from the rusty stinking cubicle for a good 10 minutes.

When I came out I felt much better, back in control of things and so I was able to join Phillip who was sitting in the restaurant drinking a coffee and eating a fresh Berliner. It wasn't long before I was having a thali for my lunch, lovingly scooping up handfuls of rice, vegetables and pickles before shovelling it into my mouth, all recent bodily inconveniences quickly forgotten. Over the meal Phillip told me he had to go back to Vypeen to see someone and that he would meet me later in the afternoon back in Ernakulum, telling me he would have his bike by then and that we could maybe go for a ride somewhere. That suited me just fine, in fact it sounded rather good. If he actually did bring his wheels it would make it worthwhile meeting up with him again. If not, then I really wasn't that fucking interested. In the meantime I could head back to the Basato Lodge and rest for a couple of hours, which would no doubt translate itself into smoking more of our weed in the privacy of our room whilst staring into space. There was no getting away from it, that was just the way it was. I knocked the idea of going to the Om Ashram on the head, the early smokes and then hanging around in the heat had exhausted me, all I wanted to do now was lie in the shade somewhere with a minimum amount of hassle; in other words the big adventurer was more than quite possibly going to be having another early night.

We stepped out of the Elite into the bright light of the early afternoon sun, and Phillip walked with me through the streets to the jetty. I remembered I had bought the Bob Marley tape I had promised him so I gave it to him there and then. He broke into a big smile and seemed to be genuinely touched.

"Ah thank you! Thank you! Later I give you a tape of music, very good music Kerala music!"

Sure you will, sure you will, was what I thought to myself. I simply didn't believe him, but nevertheless I was pleased by his reaction. It reassured me. Often in my past I had given things to people who had scared me a little bit, all in the hope they wouldn't turn on me when things got rough, a form of protection payment in other words, the chicken’s way you might call it. Yet it had always seemed like money well spent and in my current state of hazy stoned confusion this occasion seemed to be no exception. We then parted on good terms as Phillip jumped on his boat to Vypeen, leaving me with a distant hope of an early evening bike ride through the outer edges of the city of Cochin.

Back at the Basato I hung round our room for a couple of hours, where the first thing I did was give the two new tubes of weed a good inspection. I sat there with a big grin on my face as I smelt and savoured some of the finest quality shit I had ever bought in my life. After that I had to have a lie down, I was dog tired from all the walking around in the heat - talking to strangers, scoring weed at the far end of town, staring into the deep waters of the bay, taking an almighty dump at the Elite, going through no end of mental trial and tribulation - had all conspired to take it out of me. What I needed now was a bit of peace! I lay on my bed and thought how my life at times seemed like it was turning out to be a rather odd affair. How could I have ever known as a little schoolboy that I would be doing stuff like this, and that if I had known, would I have ever bothered growing up? Instead of being back home in the West actively pursuing a career, here I was in my mid-twenties deep down in South India having the kind of experiences that would be difficult to describe to my parents in any great detail before they lapsed into an uncomfortable and profoundly dismayed state of silence, possibly at times unable to hold back their disgust. Scrapes with the low life, cheap thrills, rip offs and plenty of mixed up confusion, that was what my life had now turned out to be, interspersed I guess with one or two moments of inspiration. However there was always the hope of redemption in the form of finally getting to head up to the hills, embracing the path of Buddhism and meditation in a big enough way to cut through all the crap, but at that precise moment in time I was still pretty far away from those hills.

Naturally I wondered how Thomas was getting on, no doubt he would be full of it when he got back and I hoped that he had got to do whatever it was he had wanted to do with Titus. As long as the boy was happy! I had to admit I really took my hat off to that crazy German bastard, he was a born explorer, even if the places he chose to explore were dubious at times and in some respects downright disturbing. But at least he had his visions and the energy to pursue them. The early afternoon soon passed by as I lay around thinking my thoughts and generally lying around whilst trying to understand the meaning of this life I was living. That was no easy task and for the most part I just lay there in my own silence, composing a symphony which would never be heard or understood by anyone, and I guess that was fine by me. By the time I had to leave the Basato in order to go and meet Phillip by the jetty I had lost all enthusiasm to see him, to no doubt relive all those tired old scenarios in my mind of whether or not he was going to rip me off or beat me up. I was happy chilling out on my own in the Basato, but I felt I had to keep the appointment just in case he turned up with his wheels, because a ride around the outer edges of Cochin on a motorbike would have been a buzz, no doubt about that. My energy reserves were rather low however, and even though I had resisted the temptation to have a smoke after lunch, my head was still rather hazy and heavy from the morning session over on Fort Cochin. A part of me just wanted to take it easy, have a few joints in the Basato and work some more on my poem, which was still at the stage of going nowhere, but it must have been fear of the potential bad karma of blowing out Phillip which made me stick to our arrangement. Back on the streets I soon regretted it because when I reached the bay road I was stopped by a crazy looking Indian youth wearing rolled up jeans, baseball boots and a bright yellow sweatshirt.

"Hello my friend! Now, I can tell that you smoke marijuana yes? Of course! Yes, yes, I can tell. Isn't that right?"

He had a broad smile on his face and was quite pushy as he took my arm and drew me closer towards him.

"Come my friend. We can go and smoke a joint of grass and then drink some toddy yes ? I know a very nice place for us!"

I was quite taken aback by his boldness, his lack of inhibition over stepping directly into my space and the fact that he had immediately known I was a weed smoker. Was it that fucking obvious? I held my hands up in a gesture of retreat.

"No, no. It's ok man. It's ok. I'm fine."

Up close he looked just a little bit too dangerous, his face was marked with little scars and his eyes seemed wildly displaced.

"Paul! You can call me Paul."
"Well no, it's ok then Paul."
"Oh come on, it'd be great!"
"No, no. Look. I don't drink toddy and anyway I have to go and meet someone."

I actually felt a bit sorry for him. Underneath his smiles and cockiness, he looked a pretty desperate dude.

"Ok my friend, we don't have to smoke together and we don't have to drink toddy now, but tell me, how would you like to go to Goa? Look, just the two of us. We can go to Goa! I have a very good Suzuki motorbike, very fast machine! Only two days to get to Goa from Cochin. It'd be great!"

He was serious, and I couldn't help laughing at his nerve. It seemed like he really thought I would agree to go there and then, and maybe he had met people in the past who had done exactly that.

"Goa? Ah, no! Look man, thanks, but I'm already travelling with someone, so forget it!"
"No, no. We must! You can meet your friend later. Bombay maybe. Come on, it'd be great!"

Somehow I didn't think so. I could just imagine taking off with Paul, his Suzuki kicking up dust on the road heading north out of Cochin, and then losing everything I had on my first night. I would wake up with nothing in the middle of nowhere, just a few palm leaves blowing in the breeze above my fucked up head. Clothes, rucksack, money all shot to pieces with Paul already another 50 miles up the road, out of fucking sight. He was simply bad news to anyone who had enough sense to look into his eyes and see what was in them. If anyone got ripped off by a guy like Paul they deserved it.

"Look man, forget it, ok ? Now, please, I've got to go."

I hated being so abrupt but if I hadn't been then Paul would have just gone on and on. I left him standing there on the pavement shouting after me, trying one last time to sell his Goa proposition.

"It'd be great! It'd be great!"

His voice was ringing in my ears even though the streets were crowded. Too bad! I guess Paul was from an Indian family with money, hence his clothes and wheels, but he had fallen in with bad company somewhere along the line and now it looked like he peddled his wares, whatever they were, along the west coast of India, from the smokers' dens in Kerala up to the psychedelic junk yards of Goa, spiritual home to countless Westerner kaputniks all washed up on their backs in beach shacks.

By the time I got to the jetty Phillip was nowhere in sight, although I have to say it didn't really surprise me. I walked over to the rickshaw stands and stood in the shadows where I waited for him. It took me quite a while to explain to the drivers that I didn't want a ride and then even longer to shake off the hawkers. They just never gave up! But eventually they did and I was then left in peace to watch the never ending procession of Indian street life roll on by. The place was busy, at that particular time of the day clothes sellers were everywhere, proudly displaying their wares in the form of imitation t-shirts and training shoes for people to buy. By now I was getting rather familiar with the jetty area, which I suppose was a bit worrying since it was hardly the Taj Mahal. The bad quality dope pushers were recognisable faces to me and they had stopped trying to hassle me a long time ago. After waiting for at least 20 minutes there was still no sign of Phillip, so I walked across the jetty area to sit in a restaurant which served a great cold coffee. It was a weird little place. All the waiters wore white uniforms with little hats which looked a cross between a conch shell and a turban. It had to be said they looked pretty fucking stupid but then again who was I to judge? After all there might have been some profound cultural reason for their design which I knew nothing about. When I had drunk a couple of cold coffees I returned to my spot but there was still no sign of Phillip. It was now close to 40 minutes since I had first arrived so I had little option but to split the scene and head back to the Basato. He had blown me out and my early evening bike ride was up in smoke, something which was not what you might have called too surprising.

Back at the Basato it was hard to settle down. A part of me had wanted to meet up with Phillip, to get on his wheels and go for a ride because I felt like doing something more than just hanging round the room all evening. Smoking a joint didn't do the trick, nor did working on my poem, my crazy goddamn poem which wasn’t going anywhere, so I soon found myself walking back down to the jetty in a haze from the weed, just to see if Phillip had turned up yet. Guess I was looking for some company. Halfway along the bay road however, I spotted the unmistakable sight of Paul's yellow sweatshirt coming towards me so I immediately turned around and walked in the other direction. Fuck that! Fresh from smoking a joint, there was no way I could handle any more of his hassle and besides if he saw me again, he would probably think I was seeking him out in order to take him up on his proposition to head on up to Goa. I took it as a sign that a bike ride with Phillip simply wasn't meant to be, I’d tried my best to make it happen but uncontrollable circumstances had taken over. Fate was obviously pushing me to some other place and the best thing to do was just go with the flow, even if the flow was little more than a trickle.

It was now late afternoon and the clouds were building up for what would probably be another storm. That was fine by me, I'd had enough of the dusty haze, and at that precise moment in time I could have quite easily have allowed myself to be transported back to a rainy English seaside town for me to tuck into chicken, chips and peas in a forgotten café where the cooking was great. Anything to take me far away from all this Indian craziness! In fact as I wondered along trying to figure out what the fuck to do, I thought that maybe it was as good a time as any to check out the times of buses to Mysore. As far as I was concerned Ernakulum was dragging me down, all I was doing was smoking more and more weed with a head full of dumb thoughts, whilst Thomas was getting up to god knows what over on Fort Cochin. If we were serious about making it all the way up through India and then to Calcutta there would have to be a lot of straightening out to do. We would have to pull ourselves together at some point and I hoped that Mysore would be the first stage of the clean up period of our little trip, with just a few occasional smokes and a healthy slab of conventional sight-seeing thrown in to get us back on the straight and narrow. No more chasing boys on Fort Cochin, and no dodgy drug dealers to hang around with whilst hopelessly waiting in vain for a spin on their wheels, and last but not least no more prolonged bouts of hopelessly stoned introspection.

The central bus station was quite some distance from the Basato but nevertheless I decided to walk there as I didn't have any other appointments. After all, my diary was hardly full to the point of bursting. The exercise would do me good and probably would have done if it hadn't been for the fact it was rush hour time and the town centre was enjoying an extra heavy dose of Indian style pollution. All kinds of noxious fumes were being belched out by the traffic and one could safely assume that lead free petrol was definitely not on the menu at any of the local petrol stations. Tata lorries, Ashok Leyland buses, Ambassador cars and countless thousands of auto ricks were all doing their best to filth up the atmosphere and it had to be said they were making a pretty good job of it. Thankfully when I got to the bus station I found an information booth without too much hassle, and for once there weren't hundreds of people hanging around doing their best to make things difficult, something which was more than a little surprising. I was able to ascertain from the man in the booth that there were three buses daily to Mysore, all of them of the Inter-State Deluxe variety with two leaving in the morning and one at night. A ticket to Mysore was 68 rupees and was to be paid for on the bus after a reservation had been made at least 12 hours beforehand, which I have to say sounded pretty cool and was all I needed to know. It meant the earliest we would be able to get out of Cochin would be the following night. That was fine by me and I decided I would put the case for our departure most forcefully to Thomas when I saw him later in the evening back at the Basato. It was just going to be too bad if he had gone and fallen in love with Titus, because as far as I was concerned it was time for us to make our move and get the hell out of town. Thomas was going to have to start to pull his weight and remember that essentially he was travelling on the road with me, not simply on a leisurely cock sucking tour of South India with barrel loads of weed scored by yours truly thrown in for good measure. After getting the times and the booking procedure straightened in my head I was determined we should leave as soon as possible. Surely my destiny was not to end burnt out and busted in dusty Ernakulum, brain awash with weed from the boys of Cochin?

As I walked back to the Basato Lodge signs of an impending storm looked pretty damn unmistakable. There were some mighty big clouds around and the warm breeze was beginning to give all the signboards on the shops a damn good rattle. All I could do was keep my head down and walk on as fast as possible, however it wasn't long before the skies opened and I had to run for cover. There was no use in trying to carry on and dodge the raindrops because storms in India were just not like that. All you could do was get the hell out of the way and let the elements get on with it, wildly smashing things around whilst the streets emptied of people. From the shelter of a shop front I looked out on what was soon a miraculously cleared pavement, all the people had simply melted away. On the main road lorries and buses were storming through the spray and creating fizzy mists, whilst the auto ricks continued with their dangerous form of vehicular acrobatics by weaving around the larger vehicles which were tanking along at high speed. It was easy to imagine fatalities in any road crashes there might happen to be, that very few people would be reported as having escaped with just minor cuts and bruises. No fucking way! More often than not it would have just been splat across the middle of the road, end of story, dead as a fucking doornail and not a particularly pretty sight to boot.

The storm soon made the buildings of Ernakulum look like they were just about to fall apart. Suddenly the place was more like a bunch of tin huts in the sun and I could see how the foundations upon which Ernakulum was built were a lot more shaky than those of the cities back in the West. Maybe the concrete used was much thicker back home and that it only got to be laid after a fair degree of planning had taken place. In Ernakulum it was as if the natural elements gave everything such an almighty pounding every once in a while that it was difficult to maintain an image of healthy permanence, so consequently things appeared to be rather precarious. Nevertheless the looks on the faces of people didn't indicate they had any fear or sense of hopelessness because of the situation, instead they seemed to think it was all a bit of a laugh, that it made life a little less boring and something of an adventure instead. In Britain I could imagine a big storm happening and then everyone kicking up shit if any damage was caused, people on the rampage looking for someone to blame, screaming for some kind of compensation. That just wasn't the way things were in Ernakulum and in a spiritual sense the place felt a whole lot better and healthier because of it. After twenty minutes or so the storm was still going strong but I decided to break from cover and try to find an auto rickshaw. I was lucky, one had just pulled up on the pavement close by and as the Indian couple warily stepped out trying to avoid the puddles, I jumped right in and told the driver to take me to the Basato Lodge. Once it began to move I realised I might just as well have walked fully exposed to the elements because the wind and rain blew into where I was sitting in the back and completely fucking soaked me. All I could do was sit there cursing fate like a wet skinned sucker, hacked off over the unnecessary expenditure of 4 rupees for the ride.

Everything was in deep shadow when I walked back into the Basato Lodge. The electricity was out again because of the storm and in the reception a couple of candles provided the only source of light. It got darker and darker as I climbed the stairs, in fact the little stretch of corridor before our room was pitch black and for a crazy split second I had a vision of Phillip jumping out of the shadows from behind me and knifing me in the back.

"There you go fucker, you can keep your Bob Marley tape, its only got two decent tracks on it!"

This was followed by a yet more horrid picture of opening the door to our room and finding Thomas lying on his bed stone dead because of a horrific satanic curse delivered courtesy of the old man at the Om Ashram. His blond hair limp, his blue eyes open and his body motionless as a trickle of blood escaped from the corner of his mouth. I could well have done without such images I can tell you! Too much smoking was bringing them on, that was for sure, too much wild imagination invading my mind, fantasy taking over and becoming my reality. At this rate anything would soon be possible and none of it good. When I finally opened the door after fumbling for my keys for ages and ages in the dark, I found to my relief the room was empty, no dead Thomas lying on his bed, and so I slumped down in the chair by the desk to pull myself together, alone in the deep shadows as the storm continued to rage outside.

By now it was early evening and there was still no sign of Thomas. After getting back from the storm I was absolutely shattered and I had to lie down on my bed to recover for a while. When I felt a bit better I sat up and wondered how he was getting on with Titus over on the island. For a while I was pissed off at the prospect of another evening on my own at the Basato, but not for long, I had the best weed in the world for company and now I had Midnight Oil to listen to as well. This was because I had also been really getting into the tape which Thomas had bought when we first arrived in town. It was difficult to make out whether Midnight Oil were on the side of good or evil, but one thing was for sure and that was their tunes were pretty damn fantastic. Put down that weapon, or we'll all be gone. I must know something to know it’s all wrong. Words of peace sung with a snarl against a backdrop of big guitars, circular drums and bone dry bass all created in the wide open spaces of Outback Oz. Great stuff! So I was happy just to hang out in the silence of our shadowy room at the back of the Basato, my mind slipping gently into a half haze of dreams and memories; so much travelling, so much smoking, so much walking round in the heat and dust. But things felt positive all of a sudden, so much so that I slowly pulled myself together and sat at the table to roll another joint.

Lighting it up I turned once again to the poem I was trying to write and soon realised how totally confused it still was, how the words and phrases I was trying to use just danced around in front of my eyes without making any sense whatsoever. It was all becoming a bit of a car crash situation if truth be told.

The sing song boys of Ernakulum,
Living their sing song street life
Of red, gold and green
Beneath the broken sewer stars

At the time it seemed to make sense carrying on with it because there was so much meaning behind the words, or at least it appeared that way to me. What it really required was a few hours or even minutes sober analysis, but in my present condition that was the last thing which was going to happen, and if I ended up going insane in Cochin, then this damn bloody poem could be cited as one of the causes. After some time I sat back and laughed about it in a pathetic kind of way, then realised I had to leave it alone. In my stoned haze I turned my thoughts instead to the idea of writing a book about my experiences in India and I was soon fantasising about coming up with something so profound and at the same time so entertaining that it would change the lives of millions of people forever. In the process it would also make millions of pounds so that I would never ever have to work again, and from my position in the Basato it all seemed pretty damned feasible; all I had to do was come up with a couple of hundred thousand words in full exotic colour along with a bit of a crazy story. Simple really!

It was difficult not to get carried away, so to bring myself down to earth I began to note a few of the things which had happened to me since arriving in India. Soon however I was lost in thoughts about the time Thomas and I had been travelling through the hill country of Sri Lanka, ridin’ high in the middle of the island which was barely a few weeks ago in fact, although it already seemed like it was from another century. We had travelled south from the city of Kandy and rolled up in a place called Haputale where we were forced to stay an extra couple of days because of an enforced curfew imposed by anti-government Sinhalese rebels who were active in the area. We’d arrived there after having made a pilgrimage to a mountain called Adams Peak, which had involved an all night climb to the top to watch the sunrise at dawn and admire the shadow of the peak when cast upon the thick mists below. Pretty impressive it was too. In Haputale we stayed in the Bawa Guest House which was run by a Muslim family who also ran New Bawa Tailors in the centre of town, the old one having been burnt down after having been targeted in some troubles a few years ago. Trouble seemed to be a pretty common thing in that part of the world, villagers getting butchered being run of the mill local paper kind of stuff. As a consequence the Muslims in Haputale stuck together and so next door to the Bawa Guest House lived the owner's brother who was a dealer in precious stones under the name Bawa Gems. This man had a couple of mines up in the hills and from there he got all kinds of gems such as sapphires, emeralds and rubies. These he would polish and cut before taking them down to Colombo in order to sell to the big city jewellers.

One night he showed us his collection and offered to sell us some at a discounted price, cheaper than anywhere else on the island, or so he said. He told us we would then be able to take them back to the West and sell them at a big profit, therefore making a nice little bit of business out of the whole thing with a minimum amount of hassle. Thomas wasn't interested at all, but for some reason I found the idea really quite appealing and I spent the whole of that evening and the following day agonising over whether I should take the guy up on his offer. I was full of ideas about making a financial killing, setting myself up as a stones dealer and using this guy in Haputale as my secret source. I would wear smart suits, reflective sunglasses and all the rest of it, travel back and forth between the UK and Sri Lanka leading a mysterious life but always having lots of money. Enough to get any woman I wanted, maybe more than one, shower them with stones like some kind of magic man. Crazy fucking stuff! What stopped me from going ahead was the undoubted contempt Thomas would have held me in if I had bought a batch. He saw right through it and knew the guy had us pegged as just being a couple of sucker tourists whom he could try to trap. Sometimes I was stupid like that and unable to see obvious, blinded by greed to the point where it made me little more than a silly dumb asshole.

In our room at the Basato I sat there recollecting many such incidents from the trip so far, the good, the bad the ugly, so to speak. I jotted down every major thing which had happened to me and Thomas from when we started travelling together after Kovalam, right up to our arrival in Fort Cochin. It was very pleasurable losing myself in those memories, rolling joint after joint it felt like I had at last found my vocation and time flew by, so much so that when Thomas came through the door at 11.30 I was surprised to see how late it was. Now that he was back I soon became curious as to how his day had gone.

"Hey man, you're back. How was it?"

Thomas initially paced up and down the room just like he had done the night before, only maybe now he wasn't quite as excited. Nevertheless he made a pretty good show of giving the impression he was about to impart some major revelations. Big hero coming back to the campfire after another wild adventure into the great unknown and all that.

"Ha! Well, it was good. An interesting day. I will tell you Phil. But first of all, do you think you can roll us a joint from this?"

He handed me something wrapped in silver foil which turned out to be a small lump of hashish.

"Wow! Black. Smells good. Yeah, yeah. Where did you get it from man?"

The hashish smelt great as I held it under my nose and gave it a good sniff. A nice bit of black hash to complement the weed we were smoking was going to be just perfect so I was truly surprised and delighted. I had been led to believe that South India was weed country through and through, that it would be difficult getting any of the solid stuff in the form of hashish. Got to admit I was also impressed with Thomas because he had managed to score for once. Usually I was chief of that department so now all of a sudden it felt like Christmas. He told me he bought it off a guy in Fort Cochin for 40 rupees.

"40! Fuck man, that's a lot!"

By Indian standards it definitely was, considering its size. But what the hell! At least Thomas had tried and it felt pretty fucking great to know that we now had some hash on the menu as well as weed. It couldn't have been much more than a couple of grams and further up north the going rate was 80 rupees for 10 grams, but of course at that precise moment in time further up north was a long way off so there was no point in complaining about inflated prices. It was still three times cheaper than what it would have been back in the UK, and on top of that there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever as regards to its quality. I soon got a little number together, with our newly acquired hash sprinkled over a big bed of weed along with tobacco from a beedi. When it was done I tossed it over to Thomas to spark it up, and after he had taken a couple of good pulls, he handed it back to me and began to his story.

Thomas said that when he got over to the island he went straight to the beach where he met Titus as arranged. The boy was already in the water with some of his friends so Thomas joined them, where not so far away big ships and tankers were making their way through the narrow channel into the bay of Cochin. It therefore wasn't much of a surprise to him when he found the waters were quite polluted, nevertheless he said that it was fun swimming around with Titus and his friends. It was very innocent and they were soon joined by some other Indian lads who were all very excited over the fact that someone like Thomas was swimming in the sea with them. In the midst of all the splashing and general horsing around, Titus said that one day he hoped to become a Brahmin priest. Of course this information came as a bit of a letdown for Thomas, who immediately realised no potential Brahmin priest was going to allow his dick to be sucked by a blonde haired German who saw himself as a part time gay. Soon he felt ashamed that he had ever entertained such notions when it was now so obvious that it had all been in his head. Titus saw himself destined for higher things, he wanted to be one of those temple boys who kept the incense burning whilst sprinkling water and flowers over the faithful masses. Thomas told me that he now realised how powerful his own mind had been in projecting his fantasies onto Titus. All along the reality of the situation had been completely different to what he had been thinking, or rather to what he had been hoping, and he told me it left him with no choice but to drop his dirty dreams and settle for just being good friends with the boy instead.

They stayed in the water for ages and even when Thomas finally got out after a couple of hours, all of the local lads all continued to swim. Thomas realised he hadn't brought a towel along with him and since the boys didn't have any either, he had to sit there and shiver on the beach until he slowly got dry. It was easy for me to picture Thomas over there on Fort Cochin, sitting almost butt naked on a shingle beach and seeing the whole thing as part of an adventure, which I suppose it was. In a way I admired him for it, I really fucking did, he had his dreams and he went for them. He was able to cope with inconveniences like sitting on a beach and shivering his ass off because he saw it as part of a bigger picture and therefore he never let irritations like that get to him in any kind of negative way. Certainly not to the point where they would be strong enough to stop him from doing what he wanted to do. And I thought that was great, he possessed an overview which allowed him to put things into context instead of complaining about them, which unfortunately is probably what I would have done. If it had been me and I had done something like forget my towel, I'm sure I would have sat there miserably cursing my situation and wondering just what the fuck it was I was doing there. That was the way my mind worked, I was often unprepared for any form of discomfort and when it came along it had the power to throw me into misery, rage and confusion. At the end of the day that might have been the difference between me and Thomas. Whilst he was prepared to go in pursuit of his goal and accept whatever came his way, I preferred to play it safe and take a back seat, which was why I ended up for hours on my own in the Basato, smoking myself stupid with weed and filling my head full of strange ideas whilst trying but completely and utterly failing to write a poem about the place I was in.

When the boys finally got out of the water there was a massive storm, no doubt the same storm which I had got caught up in on the other side of the bay, and Thomas said that he got soaked all over again. As a consequence he said that he now had the shivers, they had been with him all evening and as yet he’d been unable to shake them off. It was true, because when I looked over at him through the smoke haze of the weed, I suddenly realised that he appeared to have a stinking cold.

"Yeah man, looks like you're coming down with something."
"That's right. I tell you, since then I've been fucking shivering all day!"

Shit, I thought, I hoped it wasn't contagious. The last thing I wanted was to go down with the sniffles from that bastard. I was about to tell him about my plan about making a move to Mysore, that maybe the next day we should do it, but something held me back. It might have been that it would come out sounding too pushy and only put Thomas off, so I stayed patient and let him carry on with his story.

"Oh yes Phil, I forgot to mention. When I was sitting on the beach before that big fucking storm I met this really nice guy called Nelson."

According to Thomas, Nelson was a young Keralan with a good knowledge of modern India and how things were developing, that it was now becoming more like the West and that how, inevitably, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. I could well imagine Thomas finding Nelson an interesting guy to talk to. From past experience I knew that there was nothing Thomas liked better than to sit down for hours and put to right all the wrongs of society. His enthusiasm made me feel guilty at times, because he really did have the capacity to go on and on about social issues and perceived injustices, whilst after a certain point I simply switched off. This meant by way of comparison, I saw myself as a somewhat uncaring son of a bitch who'd never really applied himself to seriously thinking about the wider problems society faced. Looking after Number One was more my motto, trying to save the world was something I didn’t really have much time for, so when Thomas told me he had arranged to meet Nelson the next morning I felt a wave of irritation come over me because he was leaving me out of his plans again. Not only that, he was now putting my idea of getting out of Cochin and heading on up to Mysore into serious jeopardy. Fuck it, he really was a selfish tosser at times! I felt frozen out, I was being ignored. Yet again Thomas was getting wrapped up in his own plans, which did nothing to help my feelings of inadequacy over not being able to hit it off with the locals in the same way as him. I suddenly felt out of my depth, like I was in a strong current getting pushed further and further away from the shore.

"So what are you going to do? Try and fuck Nelson as well?"

Thomas picked up on my sarcasm and gave me a look of surprise. But he had a smile on his face and, keeping his cool, began to taunt me.

"No, no. Why? Would it make any difference to you?"
"Yeah, ha ha. Very funny man, very fucking funny. I just think we should be getting it together to leave now, that's all. We've been here nearly a week and the more we stay here the more I end up smoking weed."
"Ah come on ! You only want to leave because you're bored, and because you’re doing nothing but smoking! When things get bad you just want to run away."
"Oh bullshit man. Bullshit! Things aren't bad. It's just that we've been smoking ourselves stupid and now I think we should go to Mysore like we planned, then we can rest there for a few days."
"No man, no man. You've been smoking yourself stupid, whilst I've been having a really interesting time."
"Hey look Thomas, I don't want to fucking argue, but the fact is we're supposed to be travelling through India together, not spending our whole fucking time down here in Cochin getting mixed up with pretty boys and devil worshippers!"

It felt bad to argue with him but it had all come out before I had a chance to stop. I had to assert myself one way or the other or else I would just end up being dominated by the bastard.

"Ok ok, look Phil this is what we do. We stay one more day and then the next day we head for Mysore for sure!"

Thomas had a look of resignation on his face but I was relieved that he had at least compromised.

"Yeah, yeah, OK. Cool! One more day, then we definitely go."
"Sure, of course. Then we go."

His face was the picture of reassurance so I shut up and we were both quiet for a while. The effect of the weed had prevented things from getting too heated, but there was no doubt we had done some straight talking. I thought about what Thomas had said. Maybe he was right! Maybe I was just running away from things and blaming it all on outside circumstances. Thinking it was the fault of Cochin and that I wasn't to blame in any way whatsoever for the negative feelings I might be having was just pure fantasy. Similarly, thinking Cochin was inherently evil, that it would lead anyone who visited it into bad ways, was also of course patently absurd. I knew in my heart of hearts that the only way to sort my problems was to look within, to see what was reflected out, yet that was often easier said than done. But what the fuck! I had got to the point of having to think of my mental and physical health and nothing else, otherwise I might not survive, so the best thing I could come up with was just to get the hell out of town. Yeah, if the worst came to the worst, Thomas could always hang on for an extra couple of days with Nelson and catch up with me further down the line. So I cooled down a bit, things were arranging themselves in my mind and there was no point being an argumentative asshole.

"Hey Thomas, you want to tell me what else happened?"

Thomas emerged from stoned reflections which must have pretty nice because he now had a peaceful look on his face.

"Yeah sure, Phil. Why not? Let's get another couple of joints together as well. It's good black isn't it?"

It sure was! The black hash bought a new and deeper dimension to our smoking experience, thoughts were more solid and the colours richer, those imaginary avenues I stepped down upon all the more beguiling, making it all so damned easy to go off tripping into self created worlds of half baked nonsense.

When the storm had come along, Thomas said he had to leave Nelson and go with Titus back to the Om Ashram where it had taken him ages to get dry again. He was in the same room as when he had visited the place the night before and spoken with the old man. It was still just as filthy and the old man was again sat in his deckchair with a copy of the Bible on the table next to him. Thomas said he had taken some of the weed along with him, so he got it out and rolled up a joint. He and the old man then had a smoke. It didn't seem to make the old man any the wiser and he was soon spouting off about Lucifer again, whilst Thomas just wanted to sit there and quietly get stoned. In fact Thomas soon did begin to feel stoned and along with it came the paranoia that the old man wanted to fuck him in the same way that Thomas had wanted to fuck Titus. Karmic payback is what I guess you might call it. He imagined ending up in bed with the old man, whose head was full of fantasies about the Fallen One, the exact opposite of what it would have been if he had managed to score with his son Titus. The way Thomas told it to me even made me shiver. What the hell was he getting up to over there at the Om?

"Yeah man, fuck. It's probably done you no good at all having all that shit in your head when you're in a place like the Om."
"Hey, what do you mean? Nothing happened!"
"Doesn't matter man, sometimes it's what you are thinking that counts. There could be spirits in that place which picked up on your state of mind and now they may come back to haunt you."
"Ah, come on! You can't be serious!"

Although he was smiling, I did detect a brief look of worry flash across his face and so decided to exploit it. He was stoned on the hash and weed, therefore susceptible to a little bit of paranoia, and I was in the mood for getting some kind of revenge on him.

"Man, I'm deadly serious. With all that shit in your head who knows if you weren't being dabbled with underneath by some mysterious forces? You know, unseen spirit manoeuvres and all that. It only takes a couple of well performed rituals quietly being done in the next room and then they've nailed you. Absolutely fucked you so to speak, gone right inside and up your own smelly asshole. Maybe you don't even know it yourself, but you could be one of them now. Yeah man, they might have really spooked you up and you don't even know it yet!"

It felt great to sit there and see Thomas plunged into doubt and worry, something which Germans could perform so exceedingly well. Certainly the hash was amplifying all his uncertainties, making him more unsure and vulnerable by the second.

"You are joking yes?"
"Man I'm not. Really, I'm not fucking joking. You could be in deep shit. Better sleep with the light on tonight!"
"My god. Maybe they've possessed me and I don't even know yet!"
"Yeah man, maybe. Why not?"
"Ah, no! No!"
"Well, I reckon so man."

By now he was pacing up and down the room, his exclamations and worried gestures providing me with some satisfying entertainment. It was too much for me though, I hated to see people suffering, even Thomas. Besides, it worried me that it might all come back and break my shoulders with double the power, so I decided to loosen the screw.

"Hey look man, don't worry. I'm joking. Really I'm just fucking joking. All I wanted to do was see you shit yourself."
"Oh man, really, really! You should not do that!"
"Yeah well, sometimes you deserve it."

There was genuine fear and concern in his voice, and I actually felt sorry for him, almost to the point of wanting to apologise.

"Look, shit man I'm sorry! It was a joke, just a stupid fucking joke! You're fine, honest you're fine. So forget it."

I realised the last thing I wanted was for Thomas to get carried away on a spirit possession trip, because I would never hear the last of it if he did.

"Ok ok, but Phil, don't say those things again. I really believed them!"
"No I won't, I promise. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just strong hash we’re smoking, making us think things which aren’t really there. So tell me, what else happened?"

After shooting me a wary look, Thomas continued on with his story. He said that as he sat there smoking with the old man and Titus, they were joined by a group of men in their twenties, who were more like Vino from the Broadway Coffee House. They were smartly dressed and looked pretty much together, not just people who ended up at the Om Ashram because they had nothing else better to do. Thomas was surprised to see them in a place like the Om, and just like he had with Nelson earlier in the day, Thomas had an interesting conversation with them about the effects of the West on India and how things were now changing. They told him that whilst Indians were now getting into things like televisions, videos, fridges and computers, they were customising them so that what you got at the end of the day was essentially an Indian version of those products and not just some cheap import which they hadn't made themselves. Made in India was the name of the game and they said the spirit of India would never be changed, and that when it came to religion Hinduism was the only one of any real significance. For them Hinduism was the only religion in tune with how things actually were and in comparison, something like Christianity was primitive.

In relation to that they said the only reason why they came to the Om Ashram was because they believed that the Bible could indeed have been written by someone who was evil, and that it had been the cause of countless wars. Whilst Christians time and time again had failed to live in peace, Hindus just accepted things as they were and as a consequence they were far happier. As for how you lived your life, they told Thomas that in India if you were a rich man you behaved like a rich man, and if you were a beggar you behaved like a beggar. That was the reality and there was no point in trying to hide from it or to change it, that it was a waste of time going around saying that things should be better. Things were how they were, simple as that, and as a consequence everyone in India was a lot happier on some kind of basic level than people were in the West. The argument they made certainly seemed to impress Thomas and it was difficult for me not to end up thinking they might have had a point.

"I tell you man. India is much more sophisticated than I ever thought possible. You must be a really stupid asshole if you dismiss India as just a place where people shit in the open air!"
"Yeah, right. It's a spiritual country man, a deeply spiritual country."

It was getting late and although I could have argued a bit with him, like pointing out that Hinduism also upheld a rigid caste system which meant life was a pretty raw deal for a good few hundred million people, I was too tired and too full to the brim with the effects from all our smoking to bother. Oblivion was the only thing on my mind and Thomas told me that nothing else really happened to him that night anyway. All he had done after that conversation with the young Hindu men was score the hash on his way back to the ferry jetty on Fort Cochin. When he finished his account Thomas lay back on his bed with the Walkman on, once again drifting off into the sonic landscapes of Midnight Oil, and what magnificent landscapes they were! I was now addicted to Diesel and Dust just as much as he was, and I realised I would have to stay awake until Thomas had finished in order to have another listen to it myself. By this stage Thomas looked completely shot and his body shivered occasionally, so I forgave him for not bothering to ask how my day had gone, because I guess that as far adventures in Cochin were concerned, Thomas was the star of the show. If I had started rambling on about what I had done, it would only have been a sad and sorry anti-climax. Since the next day was going to be our last full day in Cochin, I realised that I should try to make it over to the Om Ashram just to see what all the fuss was about. If I was ever going to write about Cochin it would look pretty fucking stupid if I didn't get to see what was turning out to be its main attraction. Maybe I should also check out the Angel Geeberel and his supposed public challenge as well, after all Thomas might have got his facts wrong, that it wasn't like what he said it was at all.

The next morning we once again had breakfast in the Broadway Coffee House and I have to say we were both in a pretty rough condition. Thomas was still shivering from the day before, his eyes were bloodshot and his face was pale. As for me I had smoked so much weed over the last few days that it felt like it was now growing on my chest. The effect of the hash had also made its presence felt and over my plate of iddlys I entertained unhappy visions of ending up dead by the time I was 30. Dead through drug abuse, a stupid fucking kaputnik who had it all going for him but had blown it away, seriously blown it! The thoughts were real enough to bring me out in a sweat and exclaim out loud to Thomas.

"Ooh fuck! Fucking hell!"

Thomas looked up bleary eyed from his plate of iddlys.

"Hey Phil, what is it?"
"Ah nothing man, nothing. Just having a bad fucking buzz that's all. Starting to think I was going to die. Shit! Look, I think I'll give the smoking a miss today."
"Yeah, maybe that's a good idea."

Was it fuck! The prospect of having a day without weed at that precise moment in time was not something to seriously contemplate, no matter how many times I said to myself that it was a sensible thing to do. I just had to get used to that little voice inside me which always appeared in the midst of a heavy bout of smoking and said: "Enough is enough, time to get your head together and your lungs clean." Yes, yes I would just have to ignore that little voice every time it came along, keep the sergeant major within at bay. Besides, there didn't seem much point in stopping now if it really was going to be our last full day in town. No, far better to save the abstinence until we got to Mysore, a little further on up the road. By the time we had each downed our second coffee some kind of rough plan had emerged for the day. Thomas would first go over to Fort Cochin to meet Nelson and then around noon I would go over and join them at Angel Geeberel's, where if we felt like it, we would get Angel Geeberel to cook us a meal. Some fresh smoky Kerala fish might go down well. After that Thomas would take me to the Om Ashram where I could at last see for myself whether what was going on was just bullshit or genuine evil. Naturally I was hoping it would be the spookier one of the two so long as it didn’t involve too much in the way of danger, especially if Thomas was with me. The arrangements suited me fine, I was glad to figure in Thomas's plans again, another day of smoking on my own with the just the possibility of a chance encounter with Phillip to keep me company might well have sent me over the edge. I could now see that when it came to adventures in foreign places I was useless as a leader but not so bad as a right hand man, and I hoped that one day Thomas would appreciate it.

After we were done at the Broadway Coffee House Thomas went straight over to Fort Cochin for his morning meeting with Nelson and I returned to the Basato for a couple of hours rest and relaxation, determined not to have a smoke. The room must have had a spirit which kept calling me back because I had spent so much time there over the last few days, there was no denying it. I sat by the desk, lit some incense and enjoyed the morning silence, our room really was tucked away at the back of the hotel and it felt like a hideaway, cut off from everything else. It was great to sit there and blend in with the shadows, deep down in a strange place in South India. I gazed upon the Buddha statue sitting still and in perfect balance. How far away was I from that state of being? It was something I hadn't really paid much attention to over the last few days, what with all my weed smoking and explorations of my own paranoia, but I hoped that one day I would be like The Buddha and make it to the top, instead of where I was at that precise moment in time, which wasn’t anywhere near.

I spent the morning hanging around listening to Midnight Oil on the Walkman again, writing up some notes and reading a bit of Dickens before realising once and for all that the book had been a thoroughly bad buy. When you are up to your eyes in weed down in South India, the last thing you want to do is try to transport your mind back to misty nineteenth century Britain, Kent to be exact, and the house of Miss Caversham. I shouldn't have even bothered trying, all these classical writers which everyone says you should read, sometimes it was just a bit too fucking much! The hours passed and it felt like there was a distinct lack of mindfulness about what I was doing, like I was just idling the hours away until it was time for me to go back over to Fort Cochin and meet Thomas. I couldn't dredge up anything to help me with my poem on Ernakulum either, despite prolonged bouts of staring blankly at the page in front of me. And I didn't want to smoke. Got to admit I hated it when things got like that, as if the present moment somehow wasn't good enough, that I wanted more than the things I already had. Yet if someone had asked me what it was I wanted, I wouldn't have been able to really answer them anyway. Things only settled down a bit when I rolled a few joints for our day's supply of smoking, a supply which comprised of two cocktails of half-weed half-hash, and two pure weed ones. It was easier doing them in advance rather than taking all the gear with me, and besides it always looked pretty damn cool when I flipped out a readymade joint and sparked it up in front of people. Fuck the no smoking resolution, I had to be realistic, there was no way it was going to happen whilst we remained in Cochin, end of story! In fact when the joints were done I was tempted to smoke one there and then, but I remembered my lungs and how worried I had been over them at breakfast, with pictures in my mind of stuff growing all over my chest. A short break being straight for another hour or so would therefore be no bad thing before I got the show on the road again when I got over to Fort Cochin to hook up with Thomas and Nelson.

When I walked through the reception of the Basato and out on the street the first person I saw was Crazy Paul who zoomed past me at high speed on a motorbike. He gave me a big smile and shouted "Hi!" That fucker needed to be sent on a long journey to Timbuktu, the hard way, or something else equally impossible. I was glad when he carried on, not even bothering to stop. The funny thing was that I had just been thinking about him, whether I would see him again as I walked down the stairs of the Basato, then two seconds later there he was! I hoped it wasn't going to be another one of those days, however it soon looked like it was, because no sooner had I got to the bay road than I saw Phillip walking towards me from the opposite direction. He was looking straight at me and he had a big smile on his face. I wasn't that happy to see him, he had blown our appointment the day before and made me wait for the best part of an hour for a bike ride that never was, so I didn't see any reason to suddenly start jumping for joy. As he approached me I could sense that beneath his smile lay a hunger for business, he probably knew that he wouldn't have many more chances to screw the thin white sucker he saw slowly walking towards him. He came up to me and took my hand, like he had just met up with his long lost friend.

"Hi, Hi. How are you?"
"Hi Phillip."

My reply was somewhat cool and his face soon creased into a frown.

"Why yesterday you no come to the jetty?"
"Ah come on, Phillip! I was waiting there until 3.30, for fifty minutes. Then I went away and came back again but still you didn't show up."
"No, no I was there! I was waiting at the jetty but still you no come."

I was impressed at how he found the energy to lie so forcefully, but it really was a bit much, him expecting me to swallow it yet again so I let him know where he stood in no uncertain terms.

"Look man, I was waiting for nearly an hour, so don't give me any bullshit about trying to tell me I wasn't there."

He dropped it after that, no doubt sensing that to pursue things any further wouldn't get him very far. Instead he told me that he had been visiting his sister in hospital which immediately seemed a bit of a low stunt to pull, until I remembered that when we had first met it had indeed been outside a hospital, so there may have been a slight chance he was telling the truth. Nevertheless my feelings immediately cooled again when he began hassling me to see if I wanted to buy any more weed.

"You want smoke no? Today I got very good grass, very good grass today! Better than before!"

I was really sick of it by now, sick of Phillip going on, sick with myself for having played a big part in making this kind of situation continue to happen.

"No, no. Look. I don't want any more ok? I have plenty. Two packets from yesterday remember?"
"Ah yes but today very good!"
"Look man, I've got to get somewhere, so I'll see you around ok?"

That was it. I brushed past Phillip and continued on my way to the jetty. Fuck him, I'd had enough of all his lies and hassling. What a mess to have got myself into! All the time that I had spent agonising with myself over whether or not I should be more open with him had simply been a waste of energy. In the end our relationship mounted up to little more than a fraught and seedy business arrangement, with the supplier trying to push on to the customer more than what was required. It had been a total waste of time giving myself the illusion that somehow I had been working towards building up a genuine friendly relationship with one of the local boys of Cochin. In comparison to the exploits of Thomas I felt embarrassed with myself that this was the best I could do, it was a sad pathetic little affair based on the supply and consumption of weed and nothing else. Nevertheless it seemed like I wasn't going to be able to run away and forget it so easily because Phillip soon caught up and walked beside me, despite the fact that I did my best not to acknowledge his presence in any way whatsoever and spoke no words to him.

When I got to the ticket booth at the jetty I was told the next ferry to Fort Cochin wouldn't be for another half an hour so I had no choice but to sit down and wait. Phillip decided to hang around as well. It looked like he had nothing else better to do.

"Look, we go to Vypeen then take a small boat to Fort Cochin, much quicker."

His offer didn't tempt me, I wasn't going to follow him anywhere.

"No, no, it's ok. I'm going to wait and go direct to Fort Cochin. You go ahead, go ahead."

A ferry to Vypeen was just about to leave from the jetty.

"Come, come. Much quicker to Vypeen. Then Fort Cochin."
"It's ok, it's ok. I'll wait."
"Come, we take. Quick!"
"Hey look, Phillip. I'm not going to go anywhere with you alright?"

I had shot him a threatening look which did the trick because he could plainly see that it was going to be no use trying to persuade me to go with him, so he jumped up and ran to catch his ferry, leaping onto the deck just as it pulled away from the jetty, which I have to say looked pretty impressive. Nevertheless I sat there and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

"Thank fuck for that, thank fuck for that!"

When I arrived in Fort Cochin I had a sweaty walk through the midday heat to get to Angel Geeberel's where I met up with Thomas. Nelson was with him and he turned out to be a tall Keralan who was dressed from head to toe in clean white clothes and had a graceful friendly smile. His appearance was in stark contrast to me and Thomas, both of us looking more like a pair of tramps. I was glad to see them, I was tired of spending hours either on my own or in public places with people I tried to befriend but who only turned out to be song boy strangers after my money. In the bright light and heat of the middle of the day, Thomas looked as if he was half dead; his face was white, his eyes were bloodshot and his body let out an occasional shiver. Clearly his antics from the last few days were catching up with him. He said that since meeting up with Nelson earlier in the morning all he had done was talk with him and sit under a tree. We walked away from Angel Geeberel's to a nearby soda stand. Thomas told me that he didn't think it was a good idea to later have a meal there like we had originally planned. The thought of going off to buy some fish and then coming back for the Angel Geeberel to cook it seemed like too much hassle for him. I was surprised and disappointed, finding it hard to believe that Thomas of all people would come up with such a tame excuse for not doing what we had already decided. There had to be another reason.

"Oh come on man, you've got be kidding. I wanted to ask Angel Geeberel about his public challenge so come on, we should do it!"
"OK, ok, look Phil, I tell why we don't go."

Taking a big swig from his soda bottle, Thomas drew me in close. He told me that after talking with Nelson for the last couple of hours he had found out that Angel Geeberel was not all that he was cracked up to be. He was certainly no angel and he probably didn't even believe in God. According to Nelson, the Angel’s public challenge was simply a way of trying to draw in a few more punters to visit his food and drinks stand. After all, Thomas said, we were in India and sometimes any means were used in order to get more bread out of people. His brutal assessment of the Angel's activities left me in no doubt as to where things stood. It was a pity, such a fucking pity, I had really believed that the Angel was on a mission to round up all the angels on earth and save us all from a nuclear Armageddon, but no, it was not to be.

"Honestly Phil, it's all bullshit. All our friend wants to do is to get the chance to cook some stinking piece of fish and then charge us a fistful of rupees for it. In fact before Nelson came along I had a glass of chai from the Angel’s stall and when I gave him 50 paise he looked at me and said, "No, my chai costs one rupee !" So you see Phil, he's a rip off bastard!"
"Yeah, yeah, right. One rupee for a glass of chai, that's fucking outrageous!"

We had been living off street food and shack snacks for too long now not to notice extortionate prices when we saw them and one rupee for a glass of chai was simply not on. Thomas found it hard to conceal his contempt, although I think it was disappointment more than anything else. He really had been hoping to come across something extraordinary over on Fort Cochin and in the Angel Geeberel I guess he thought he had been pretty close to finding it. But in the end the Angel was not going to turn out to be a unique holy man living in the backwaters of South India. No, instead he was just another businessman on the look out to get money out of people in order to earn his daily crust. I suppose that what the Angel was doing was not too bad in the great scheme of things, it was just a strange way of attracting people to his stand so he could cook them some fish. All that talk about the end of the world with Christians and Muslims going for the big one had been a ruse, as if believers from those two enlightened religions would ever contemplate such a thing! Thomas however had taken it badly, and in his eyes it was obvious the Angel was never going to regain his former position as some kind of mystic man in touch with forces he could pull down from out of the apocalyptic skies. We had a couple of sodas each and then decided to go to the Elite for lunch, their thalis, Berliners and coffee were pretty hard to beat and we were both getting hungry. On the way to the restaurant Nelson left us, he told us had to meet someone and as he walked up an alley and out of sight Thomas looked at him in admiration.

"He was a really nice guy, a really nice guy!"

Again I felt a pang of embarrassment when I thought of Phillip and the lousy relationship I had ended up having with him over the weed. Shit, I thought to myself, why was it I felt such a goddamn loser ? Whilst we were eating our meal Thomas told me that he didn't think that he had the energy to make it over to the Om Ashram. It didn't surprise me, he looked absolutely fucked. He said that the previous day had really taken it out of him and all that he wanted to do was go back to the Basato for a couple of hours and rest up. If he felt better in the evening he would come back over to the island. He then gave me directions to the Om which I have to say put me in a bit of predicament because if I wanted to visit that afternoon I would have to go there on my own, and a part of me didn't think that would be such a good idea. A worried voice in my head told me that if I went there without Thomas the chances were I would walk right into some kind of bloody awful sacrifice and end up in the shit. That would be just my fucking luck, to pay a call on them just at the time when the really bad guys had come to town, for them to cart me off to some underground cavern and leave me to rot like a dog. Paranoid thoughts for sure, but then again, I was paranoid! Nevertheless a voice kept nagging at me, saying that if I ever hoped to write a full account of Fort Cochin, the least I would have to do was visit the Om Ashram. It was a tough decision but in the end I decided to bottle it. Fuck it, no point in taking any risks.

"Hey man, you know what? I think I'll give it a miss. I'm not feeling too clever myself."

Thomas was too fucked to really notice one way or the other and didn't say much in reply. After our meal at the Elite we slowly made our way through the streets in the early afternoon heat to the jetty where we each drank a couple of sodas. I smoked a beedi whilst we waited for the ferry to take us back across the bay, into the mid afternoon haze of downtown Ernakulum, with the cheap tobacco from the beedi giving me a slightly nasty buzz. By the time we got back to our room I was absolutely desperate for a blast of weed and the very first thing I did was spark up one of the four joints which I had rolled earlier that morning. I pulled on it greedily to get the hit which my body was craving and when it came it felt fabulous, a hash and weed cocktail of some of the finest dope on offer anywhere in the world. As the hit from the smoke rushed through me I was unable to make sense of anything for a while, I was just happy reeling in the blissful confusion it brought to my mind, enjoying more crazy visions of our life in South India. After a few good tokes I tossed the joint over to Thomas who was lying on his bed, resting up and reading a copy of the Indian Express. In a stoned haze I sat on the chair by the desk playing with the box of the Midnight Oil tape in an absent minded way and listening to Thomas read out bits of news from the paper. As the minutes went by the tape box began to take up more and more of my attention and then I suddenly had a strange thought; what if Midnight Oil were into the devil?

The effect of the smoke plunged me into a series of intriguing speculations. After all, if what the man at the Om said about the Bible was true, and that it was possible for the devil to have a representative on earth in the form of a Pope, then it was just as possible for the devil to have representatives on earth in the form of a rock group from Australia. Those who thought it might have been AC/DC were barking up the wrong tree and on top of that there was no doubting the fact Midnight Oil were pretty damn black, the name itself couldn't get much darker. Midnight and Oil, put the two together and you wouldn’t be able see a fucking thing! Then there was the music to consider as well, the sonic landscapes which they inhabited, from which all manner of sounds came flying out to grab you by the scruff of the neck and shake you by the shoulders. Good sounds no doubt about that, but maybe a bit too good. On one of the tracks Thomas was convinced the singer was whispering his name, "Thomas, Thomas", so much so that it was keeping him awake at night thinking about it. Therefore it was quite possible that Midnight Oil were disciples of the Fallen One and as the world began to disintegrate it was entirely natural there would be a group like them around to sing about it. Stoned thoughts indeed, yes it was really good shit we were smoking! I hadn't really appreciated the night before just how strong the hash was, but now in the full light of day it was revealing its true colours and its indisputable power was being fully confirmed.

"Ooh la, la. This dope really is strong. It's amazing!"

As he spoke those words Thomas was lying horizontal on his bed and he looked more red eyed and wasted than ever, whilst it was as much as I could do to put the tape box down and voice my agreement.

"Yeah man, it is. It really fucking is. I'm wrecked!"

The afternoon wore on. Thomas soon drifted into sleep and I just sat around our room trying to make sense of the crazy fucking poem I was still trying to compose, along with writing up some notes for my intended bestseller about our trip through India. As I sat there I mulled over again and again, whether or not it would be a good idea to go over to the Om. Did I really want to go to a run down place and listen to some old guy go on about Lucifer whilst he sat there on a deck chair? A sensible voice within me told me just to forget the whole fucking thing and that if I wanted some exercise I could take a walk through the weird and wonderful streets of Ernakulum and fire off some shots with my camera. The bottom line was that I probably was a little bit scared about going to the Om, just in case I got into something really heavy and didn't make it back for the bus to Mysore the following evening, and more than anything else I wanted to catch that bus in order to get the hell out of Cochin.

When Thomas woke up he said that he felt refreshed and rested, saying that maybe going over to the Om that evening would be a good idea, which somewhat unsettled me because I had now reconciled myself to giving the whole thing a miss. I had successfully overcome all those thoughts I'd had over being a truly inadequate adventurer by reasoning that there was not much to check out about it anyway. The last thing I now wanted was Thomas to start up with his Lucifer this and Lucifer that again.

"Fuck man, it's like you can't go without you're daily dose of Satan!"
"Oh come on, it's nothing."
"No, seriously I'm telling you man, maybe the old man at the Om has got some kind of hold on you and you just don't know it. He keeps you coming back for more and more, then one day you'll go inside and won't come out again. What if people like us have been there before and they're still stuck inside, only we just don't know it?"
"Ah Phil! You are really not serious."
"I'm not joking! You never know what is in the back rooms of those kind of places."
"Ok, ok. Maybe you are right. Maybe it's too much to go back again and we should stay here tonight."
"Well yeah man, that's what I think we should do!"

I had come to the conclusion that I didn't really want to fuck around with a bunch of devil boys, and it would be too bad if I got dragged down into something I couldn't handle because of Thomas and his insistence over revisiting the Om. I felt pleased with myself for finally putting the whole thing to bed and Thomas soon fell into a half slumber again, lying flat on his back and still looking pretty pale whilst his body let out an occasional shiver.

Late in the afternoon, just as the colours of the day were softening, I went for a walk hoping to take some shots with my new roll of film. Thomas had opted to stay in our room, he was heavily stoned from the joints we'd smoked that afternoon and was happy to just lie there and allow his body to recover from the rigours of the day before. I was hoping that all the weed I’d smoked would give me some inspiration because I usually found taking photos a bit of a hit and miss affair. Sometimes I got things right but other times I got things horribly wrong. It all seemed to be a question of energy. At times the camera could feel so light that all I had to do was point and shoot, other times it felt so heavy that whatever I took turned out rotten. There was no logic to it, other than the fact I might well have simply been a crap photographer. Things were going to be difficult that afternoon however, because in my stoned haze I hadn't really paid much attention to time, so when I hit the streets I soon realised it was pretty much right in the middle of the rush hour.

Walking down the sidewalks of Ernakulum there was always something which I needed to shuffle around so as to avoid stumbling over; shoe repairers, barbers, beggars with little more than a tin cup at their feet, all of them made the pavements either their home or place of work. This meant that being on the streets when stoned on weed was a hazardous operation and at rush hour time this was doubly so, even triply. It felt like being on the front line, where the full colourful spectrum of Indian street traffic was ready and waiting to do you a nasty turn if you put the slightest foot wrong. Auto rickshaws were particularly dangerous when they weaved their way in and out of the traffic and performed their sometimes pathetic acrobatics as they tried to avoid getting stuck behind some of the larger vehicles on the road. It was definitely true that you never knew which direction the next auto rickshaw would be coming from, not until it would appear as if from out of nowhere and miss you by a matter of inches as you took a quick step backwards. Under such circumstances it was difficult not to wish painful deaths on all auto rickshaw drivers, even if the job they did must have been more than a little hellish.

On top of all that I got well and truly pestered by a guy who came up beside me and asked if I wanted to go for a drink with him. He was short, very well built, wearing a smart set of clothes and he was accompanied by another man in more or less the same kind of outfit. They looked like they were fresh out of college and I had visions of going for a drink with them and getting involved in some kind of prolonged conversation about the current political scene in India and what I thought of it. As if I fucking knew; what they needed was Thomas! It was the last thing I wanted to do, so I politely told the guy that I wasn't really into it, that I was happy enough just walking along, doing my own thing, and minding my own fucking business. Unfortunately he wouldn't take no for an answer, he just kept on and on, asking me to go for a drink with him and his friend.

"Come, please! We go for just one drink."
"No, no. Look, it's ok. I just…well, look, it's alright y'know?"

Sometimes it was difficult to sound convincing when smashed on weed, and I had an awful feeling I was coming across as an unfriendly bastard but I'm afraid that was just the way it was.

"Please, you must come with me. Be my friend!"
"No, no. Really, I can't. I've just got to, you know, go and do a few things. I don't have much time."
"No, you must come. Be my friend, be my friend!"

It really was very difficult for me to know what to say to him. He looked a harmless enough guy that was for sure, but the fact that I was stoned meant I really just wanted to be on my own and take in the wonder of everything being paraded before me, with the exception of him possibly, oh and the auto ricks, better not forget those damn bloody auto ricks. Nevertheless this particular encounter did get to the point of being quite embarrassing because the guy just wouldn't take no for an answer and the longer it went on the more insistent he became. I tried my best to let him down easy, but in the end I turned my back to him and left him standing there with a look of intense hurt and rejection on his face.

“Be my friend. Please! Be my friend.”

That was India for you, sometimes it was too much, way too fucking much to handle!

This brief encounter didn't put me in the right mood to take any photographs. For me they were best shot when I felt anonymous, as if I had blended into the scenery, become nothing, but now it felt as if I stood out like a sore fucking thumb. And what was worse I was wracked with guilt over those two guys, which was more than a little ridiculous. What I needed was to feel as unselfconscious as possible but the guy and his friend had unnerved me and on top of the weed I’d smoked it made me feel as if everyone on the streets was looking intently at what I was doing. The attraction which I felt being drawn towards me soon left me feeling totally incapable of taking a picture of anything. I had to put my camera in my pocket because I felt it might lead to another meeting with another stranger which again would end messily. After a while I realised I was walking down a street I didn't want to be on and although it would have been easy and quite logical to turn around and go in the direction I needed to go in, I was so stoned and paranoid that all I could do was keep on walking whilst staring straight in front of me. It even got to the point where I was convinced that if I had turned around someone would have shouted out in perfect English :

"Look that fucker's stoned! Get him! No one walks the streets of Ernakulum smashed out of their box without getting arrested!"

It was when I was walking down the street which I didn't want to be on that I suddenly realised I had forgotten my key to the room back in the Basato. I had no idea what it was which made me think I didn't have it, but of course when I found it was indeed the case, I went straight into panic mode, serious fucking panic mode. Immediately I had a vision forcing my way into an empty room, Thomas having decided to get up and go over to the Om after all. That would then leave me with no choice but to follow him over to the island and get sucked into some crazy hellhole from which I would never escape. It would all happen just like that. Fuck! How could I have been so stupid? In my stoned haze it was so obvious that this was going to be my fate. I abruptly turned around and headed back to the Basato with all thoughts of acting the fascinated culturally inquisitive tourist banished from my mind, if in fact they had ever existed. My head was filled instead with visions of walking down that dark stretch of corridor before our room in the Basato and finding the door locked tight. Soon enough I was jogging down the streets, desperate to get back as quickly as possible. It just seemed so fucking obvious that Thomas would convince himself that in my absence it was cool to go back over to the Om and listen to the old man once again go on about the Fallen One, getting more and more drawn in to his darkness. When I got back to the Basato Lodge I ran up the stairs and through the corridor, then almost shouldered the door to the room. It flung open to reveal Thomas lying on his bed with his eyes closed and the Walkman on, no surprises there now that I come to think about it. The sound of my entrance was loud enough to cut through the possibly dubious yet thoroughly entrancing sonic landscapes of Midnight Oil because he sat up with a start, possibly thinking the place was being raided by the cops.

"Fuck man! You wouldn't believe the bad buzz I've just had!"
"Well fuck, Phil. Don't shock me like that! What if I had been wanking?"
"Yeah, sorry man, sorry. I know it's a bit over the top, but I forgot my fucking key!"

I slumped down on my bed and stared up at the ceiling, thick relief pumping through my temples. After the disturbance Thomas gradually made himself comfortable again and was soon back wandering through those Petrolvision lands of Midnight Oil. My experience at the hands of the man who wanted a drink with me, my paranoia over taking photos with what felt like everyone staring at me and then my panic over the key had all left me feeling completely exhausted. What kind of mind was it I had anyway? Did anybody else suffer quite so much and in quite the same way over things which ultimately were of no consequence? I really fucking doubted it! The whole episode made me more paranoid than ever about somehow not making it out of Cochin, like we were doomed to spend the rest of our lives in Ernakulum, eventually ending up on the streets and dressed in rags, blowing around in the dust, hopeless kaputniks hooked on weed, just a pair of beggars from the West who had never made it back. Those were the kind of visions which floated through my mind. We still hadn't even got it together to make our reservations for the express bus to Mysore the following evening, there was something about the place which was so incapacitating that hours and hours went by with next to nothing being accomplished.

The final effect from the afternoon smoke made me think about Thomas and the Om Ashram again. Maybe there really was some heavy shit going on there and that they were up to something which would suck me in as well. Maybe it was already too late for Thomas and he just didn't know it. Fuck, we both just didn't know it! On top of all that there were the bad physical buzzes I kept having from all the weed smoking. Just having to run back through the streets and up the stairs of the Basato to be reunited with my key had left me feeling sick and dizzy. I was getting in worse and worse physical shape. My chest was tighter than ever and the thought of our trek through the heart of India which we had only just recently planned and hardly even begun, made me feel all the more uncomfortable. I lay there on my bed and vowed yet again not to smoke the following day, I would just have a last session in the evening, a good one, and then that would be it! I prayed that I would have the strength to lay off the weed and give my mind and body the chance to recover.

It was vitally important to have a rest from it or else by the time we got to the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad I would be completely and utterly fucked. There was no doubt about it, we had to get ourselves together. We had to be on that bus to Mysore the following evening or there would be hell to pay, and probably in more ways than one. All this stoned thinking left me feeling so hot and uncomfortable that I had to go and get a soda. Outside I stood there by the soda stand opposite the Basato Lodge, vacantly staring at the early evening street life of downtown Ernakulum, wondering just why the fuck things could turn out to be so complicated and dangerous. Eventually I went back up to the room and brought out Thomas so we could go for an evening meal in the Broadway Coffee House. Once there we devoured masala dosas, boiled bananas, fresh curds and sweet coffee. It was absolutely great, the best food in the whole wide world, no doubt about that. All we did was sit there in silence and eat, nothing needed to be said and even all those crazy thoughts in my head calmed down for a little while as I filled my stomach.

We took a leisurely walk down Broadway after our meal and ended up in a shop looking at the music tapes on offer. Somewhat belatedly Thomas was now seriously worried he was overdosing on Midnight Oil, so he wanted to get a new collection of tunes to listen to. Diesel and Dust was so fucking addictive that he felt that it was beginning to possess him and I could fully see his point; even the music tapes were spirits in this town! He was eyeing up a copy Led Zeppelin IV, an album I had been well into a few years previously when I had been dropping a lot of acid, me along with countless thousands of others no doubt, millions even. It reminded me of my trip to the Isle of Skye, with Stairway to Heaven reverberating in my mind after I had almost fell off a cliff whilst walking on a coast path beneath the Cullins. That had been a close one, I can tell you! Thomas finally pressed the button on the Led Zeppelin tape and stumped up 30 rupees for it. A sound investment in my opinion, which he would probably only fully appreciate by the time he got to listen to the really rather incredible Misty Mountain Hop at the beginning of side two.

Back at the Basato when I rolled up and lit our first joint of the evening, I suddenly had another bout of paranoia over Phillip. It didn't take me long to convince myself that he might follow me up the road to Mysore, where one night he would take me by surprise and slit my throat. It was all getting a bit ridiculous! I had never been to Mysore in my life but already in my mind I was turning it into a place to be scared of, a city of shadows and danger, with people like Phillip waiting to pounce upon me from out of the dark. There I was, walking down unknown streets and suddenly bumping into Phillip who gives me his long lost friend look before slowly drawing out a knife, a really fucking sharp one, and sticking it in my guts. It was the weed, I concluded, simply the weed! It delivered me a sucker punch each and every time with its full-on visuals whenever I had a smoke of it, which was actually quite often. Great shit of course, but definitely dodgy for people like myself who were more than easily prone to one or two prolonged bouts of bad buzzing due to having an overactive imagination.

When the first effects of the joint eased off I was able to regain some kind of balance by contemplating the complete and utter uselessness of worrying over possible future events which in all probability would never come true. It would be far better if I just directed my attention to the present, just became aware of what was happening there and then with Thomas. As I stared across the room at him whilst he lay there on his bed, he looked like he had been going through a similar kind of mental experience. He lifted his head up and stared at me, his blue eyes now bloodshot and glazed. I think we both realised in that instant that we had been caught in our own worlds of stoned thoughts, projected fantasies, and all the other stuff which trails in their wake, and how useless they were with all the paranoid twists and turns they inevitably entailed. Entertaining for sure, but ultimately completely fucking useless. We crashed out at a reasonable time that night, both of us heavily stoned from all the smoking but with our minds now firmly set on getting ourselves together for the following day and our night ride to Mysore.

In the middle of the night something really strange happened. The Walkman which was lying on my bed fell off and crashed to the floor. I instantly knew it was a bad crash and that it was going to be damaged beyond repair. It's funny sometimes, when you get that kind of conviction. I had been listening to Midnight Oil before I zonked out and somehow in my sleep I must have pushed the Walkman off the fucking bed. Maybe it was a sign that our time in Cochin was nearly up. After all, the Walkman or more to the point Midnight Oil, had been such a part of the scenery that to have it so suddenly snuffed out must have meant things were now moving on. A part of me which clings to things was depressed at the thought of losing our trusty old Walkman which had provided us with such quality entertainment during the course of our trip, but another more sensible part of me knew that it was probably a good thing, despite the fact that the Midnight Oil tape was so devilishly tremendous that we would both miss it terribly. When I woke up the following morning I felt very hung over from all the smoking the day before. No surprises there, it was a regular kind of feeling! I broke the bad news to Thomas about the Walkman when he finally opened his eyes and pushed himself up in bed to some kind of sitting position. He was still ill, he hadn't fully recovered from his day in the sea with Titus and now he had to deal with this.

"You're joking yes?"
"Afraid not man, it's absolutely fucked. It just fell off my bed in the middle of the night."

He began a desperate attempt to mend it although it soon became apparent he didn't have a fucking clue what he was doing.

"Hey Phil, do you think maybe Midnight Oil got jealous of me buying Led Zeppelin?"
"Yeah man, maybe!"

It was a possibility. After all, Thomas had gotten heavily into Midnight Oil, playing them constantly whenever he could, and they might just have resented some competition appearing on the scene, especially from a group such as Led Zeppelin, who were definitely gods from the old guard of rock darkness. Black Dog, Rock and Roll, When The Levee Breaks all of them serious pieces of music composed by Jimmy Page at a time of his life when he was deeply into studying the teachings of premier black magician Aleister Crowley, once dubbed the most evil man in the world. Somehow though I felt it had more to do with the Basato and our room, there was some kind of spirit in it I was sure, and now it knew we would soon be making tracks, so that was why the Walkman got smashed. That was the sacrifice required from us in order for it to let us leave, the price we had to pay. I mean really, what else could it possibly be? Fair enough then, respect had to be given when respect was due.

We made our way over to the Broadway Coffee House and consoled ourselves over our loss by ordering a large breakfast of iddlys, sambhar, utthapam, boiled bananas, masala dosas and coffees. Over the food Thomas wondered whether we should get the bus to Mysore that night or wait until the following morning. I was shocked because I was all set to move that evening and no way did I want to hang around in Cochin any longer than was necessary. Hearing Thomas talk about waiting to the next day brought back all those paranoid thoughts I'd been having of getting stuck forever in Ernakulum. It would mean a sleepless night for me that was for sure, because I was more than ready to get the hell out of town, but Thomas started to moan about the fact that it was highly unlikely we would get much sleep on the night bus. I was more than ready to shoot down on the spot his suggestion to stay an extra day, but a handy sixth sense told me that if I did, we would only end up having a big fucking argument. So although I had no intention of staying another day in Ernakulum, I managed to keep my cool and agreed that what he said might in fact be a good idea. I figured that I would just have to show a bit of patience and wait until later in the day before I impressed upon Thomas the imperative need for us to get out of town that very night. It demanded quite a lot of patience from me because I knew that if we were going to go we would soon have to get to the ticket office and make our bus reservations as soon as possible.

As it happened, by the time we got back to the Basato after breakfast I decided that there and then was the time for me to use my arts of persuasion on him and so I got out the dice from my rucksack. It was a dice which a friend had given me before I had come out to India and he had told me that I should use it if I was ever in a tricky situation. I said to myself that if it was a 6 I would tell Thomas we should go. I threw it up into the air and it came up 6. That settled it, no more fucking around!

"Hey look Thomas, I'm going to the bus station now to make a couple of reservations for the bus to Mysore tonight. You can just stay here and take a rest, ok?"
"Ok Phil, do it."

Great! The dice hadn't let me down. It had come up with what I wanted and I had got my way without the slightest sign of any confrontation with big bad Thomas. The ways of the world were mystical indeed. "Love you babe, love ya!" I whispered to the dice as I kissed it and flipped it back into my rucksack, hoping I wouldn’t ever have to use it again. And so I left Thomas lying there on his bed before I went out to get an auto rickshaw to take me to the bus station. He was still pretty fucked from his adventures over on Fort Cochin and I reckoned he would just hang round the room for the day and rest, even without our trusty Walkman for company. Things were now going my way, just how I wanted them to. The ride to the ticket office was a mere 4 rupees and when I got there I had no trouble in making a couple of reservations for the bus to Mysore. Now I could see light at the end of the tunnel, we were finally on our way out of Ernakulum, although I still had an occasional paranoid thought that everything would go wrong and keep us there for weeks and weeks.

When I got back to our room Thomas was sleeping. I had nothing better to do than hang around, jot a few things down in my notebook and read a bit of Great Expectations again, since with the Walkman gone I had no choice but to try and get back into it. I also pondered the dream I'd had the night before of Thomas lying naked on his bed with a huge erection, big enough for it to almost reach the ceiling. And in the dream, as he lay there with his massive dick sticking up in the air, he smiled and looked straight at me with his blue eyes and pouting his lips. It had been a pretty damn powerful image and I’d decided when I woke up that there was no way I was going to tell him about it. He would find it very fertile ground in which to perform an in depth psychoanalysis on me, and it wasn't something I thought I could handle. After all, who knows where those kinds of dream came from?

Whilst I knew I was definitely not gay or even swung both ways, I also knew that in Thomas I had a friend with whom I felt the greatest freedom. It was just incredibly good to know that I could basically freak out in front of him, do whatever I had to do and at the end of it he would still be there for me. As far as my own life was concerned I knew I hadn't met so many people with whom I was able do things like that, which was probably the reason why I felt he was a true friend. It had taken a trip out to Kathmandu, into the unknown and with the willingness to lose everything, in order for me to meet him. Once I’d thought through all of that I spent quite some time sitting on my bed and staring into space, kind of vacantly, absently; basically now just waiting for the bus to take us to Mysore. I was done with Cochin! I know that it isn't necessarily a healthy mind state, when you’re just wishing for time to move on quickly, as if somehow the present isn't good enough, but that was the mood I found myself in. It was difficult to focus on much, apart from my feelings of expectation and excitement over soon moving up the road to someplace new.

My work on my poem was also done, it hadn’t come off, in fact it had ended in almost total failure, a bit of a tragedy. I had two versions of virtually the same thing and they were both shit, albeit with slightly different titles.

Song of Ernakulum

the sing song boys of Ernakulum
grasping Malabar grass sons
like the hospital hisser Phillip
stronger than the song boy strangers
like the stranger white Philip
smoking weed a thousand times
whilst wearing out his life lines
under broken sewer stars
in the sing song street life
of paint your metal wagon
down town Ernakulum

Sing Song Boys of Ernakulum

sing song boys of Ernakulum
grasping Malabar grass sons
like the hospital hisser Phillip
stronger than song boy strangers
like the stranger white Philip
smoking weed a thousand times
under the broken sewer stars
prince of sing song street life
in paint your spice wagons
around Ernakulum town

Dunno know what it was, but I felt the whole thing missed the target by a million miles, possibly due to a natural born inability to write poetry and too much smoking o’ de dready ole weed.

At some point during all this, Thomas woke up so we went down onto the street for a cold soda, standing there on the roadside and watching all the auto ricks kicking up dust. He had made a kind of lose arrangement the day before to meet Nelson around noon outside the Basato, but there was no sign of him and that was probably just as well. Neither of us were in any kind of state to have one of those Indian conversations which could only be had with Indians in India and nowhere else. In the early afternoon we got ourselves together to have some lunch in the Broadway Coffee House, our last meal in what was without doubt the best fucking restaurant that either of us had so far been to in the whole of the country. After we had polished off our onion otthapams and masala dosas we each had a banana fry, a delicious South Indian desert of bananas stuffed full of coconut which tasted so good the only thing you could do after you finished it was immediately stick your hand up in the air and order another one. And in the case of Thomas, another one after that.

The place was empty apart from a group of Indian men who were sat around a TV in a corner waiting for a Hindi movie to start. We were going to miss the Broadway Coffee House, that was for sure! Outside the restaurant Thomas gave a couple of rupees to a beggar who was sitting in the doorway and who immediately walked off as soon as the coins had been dropped into his hand. It looked like he was in urgent need of something and most definitely didn't appear to be in the best of health. After yet another slap-up meal, both of us were silent. If you had the money you could get whatever you wanted in a place like India, but if you didn't, well that was something else. We walked along the road and stopped at a street stall and bought a handful of toffees each. For some reason toffees were very popular in Cochin and it was remarkably easy to buy them in whatever shape or form took your fancy. They were small, sweet and very chewy, in other words just like what a fucking good toffee should be.

Back at the Basato Lodge I couldn't face sitting around again, falling back into the same absent state of mind I'd been in before lunch, so I decided to go out and have another crack at taking some photographs. It was a Sunday and the streets were relatively quiet, and this time I was confident I would be able to shoot off some film without running into too many problems. I walked down Broadway and into the old market part of town where we had searched a couple of days before for that elusive paan seller Thomas had found on the evening when we’d chewed paans and spat their juices into a bucket in our room. In a way I was glad that we hadn't found him again because an addiction to paan would have been the last thing I needed in all the hazy daze of my Ernakulum weed smoking days.

It was a nice afternoon, the sky was blue and wiped clean after the rains, whilst beneath the brightly painted signboards of the stalls, shops and buildings all looked especially radiant. Everything was such a feast for the eyes that there were many scenes which made me point my camera and click the button. I simply had a delightful time of it, walking down quiet streets and along the relatively empty pavements. Ernakulum looked very beautiful in a ramshackle kind of way, like it belonged to a very different world to the one I was used to, and who knows if I would ever get to see it again? I took shots of some beat up old buildings which made the locals laugh, but it was cool, I was now free of the paranoia which had enveloped my mind the day before, and of course that might have had something to do with the fact I hadn't had a smoke of the weed. By the time I got back to the room a couple of hours had gone by and Thomas was lying on his bed with his head propped up against a couple of pillows. It looked like he had been having an in depth read of his chunky Carl Jung book again, so as far as he was concerned normal service had been resumed.

"Hey Phil, you know it might be a good idea to roll a couple of joints for the coach."

Thomas's suggestion brought the temptation to have a smoke of the weed right back to me, despite the fact I had been doing my best not to entertain any such dastardly thoughts. Before I knew what I was doing I had picked up our bag of weed and was having a good look at it. He was right of course! The bus journey would be a far more interesting experience if we were stoned and it would also be a cool way of coping with the inevitable discomfort of a long Indian bus ride on what might at times be very dodgy roads. However I came to my senses because I knew that it was not the sensible thing to do, I needed a chance to let my body get itself together, and my mind, something which I guess went without saying.

"No man, forget it. We need to take a rest."
"Yeah, of course. You are right Phil. We have been smoking too much. Smoking way too fucking much!"

I had to make a supreme effort not to look at Thomas because I knew that if I did we would have both cracked up at how preposterous it was to even entertain the notion that we were stopping, and we would then have soon started rolling up a couple of beefy little numbers for the trip.

The afternoon wore on and at last we slowly got our stuff together, packing our rucksacks and leaving behind whatever needed to be discarded, which admittedly wasn't much. I took down my Buddha statue from the top of the mirror where it had been since we had shifted to the Basato, before I carefully wrapped it up and stashed it away. I hadn't really paid much attention to it if truth be told over the last few days, but I was determined to live to fight another day, to come out clean at the end of it and find the right path. I decided to take my Walkman because I was still quite attached to it, despite the fact it looked pretty knackered, but I guess there was always the chance of us bumping into a technical genius further on up the road who might be able to work some magic on it. Great Expectations got thrown in as well, I would be able to palm it off on someone, somewhere, I was sure of that, which would be better than simply throwing it the bin. After all it was the great Charles Dickens we were talking about, a man with eyes of burning intensity. This meant that the main debris we left behind comprised a long line of empty plastic bottles of Bisleri drinking water, a substantial amount of wood and paper waste from all our weed smoking sessions, and that was about it.

For the final hour or so we just sat there in our room watching the Basato shadows get deeper and deeper as the early evening began to come on. I realised that we would indeed now soon be going. All those stupid paranoid thoughts about Phillip coming after me with something sharp and shiny, or Thomas falling into a trance and wandering back over to the Om reciting the numbers 666, had completely disappeared. Maybe I’d just been playing games with myself all along and hadn't realised just how much I had been enjoying it. Maybe! But all that I was left with at the end was a restlessness, a desire to push time away and move onto someplace else. That was something I would have to work on. All time was precious, and if I was lucky, I might one day reach a point in my life when I fully realised it. Everything was wonderful and no single minute better or worse than any other, it was that fucking simple. When it was finally time to go, we slung our rucksacks over our shoulders and walked out of the shadows and into the reception of the Basato for the very last time. And there we were, just another pair punk ass bums making our way through India.