TRACELESS PATH

When Thomas and I arrived at the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation bus station in Ernakulum we were both quite excited due to the relief of finally getting ourselves out of the back room of the Basato Lodge, and also due to the prospect of travelling through the night, out of Kerala and into the state of Karnataka to arrive at dawn in Mysore City. Karnataka! I had never been to Karnataka before and within my mind it conjured up princely visions of the dynasties who had lived and fought there in centuries gone by. As with all the bus stations in India which we had so far been to, the one at Ernakulum was a mad arena of activity when we arrived there at around 7 in the evening. What seemed like thousands of people were running this way and that amid the noise of the revving bus engines, however we found our vehicle without too many problems, and after we handed the conductor our reservation tickets he showed us to our seats. My trusty old rucksack was too big to take onto the bus with me so it had to go in the boot, and for a while I entertained myself with the usual paranoid visions of it somehow not being there when we arrived in Mysore. Been there one or two times before I can tell you! But it all seemed pretty safe, I stood right behind the conductor with an eagle eye when he put it in, then just to make sure I lingered a little while after he had locked the compartment and gone about some other business.

There was still a bit of time to kill before the bus departed so Thomas and I wandered across to some street stalls and bought a few things for the journey, which ultimately comprised of peanuts and mineral water. The peanuts were a bargain – four healthy cone shaped packets at just 2 rupees a go, but the mineral water was a rip off at 12 ½ rupees a bottle. Throughout the whole of my travels the most I had paid for water was 12 rupees and that had been in a hotel. But there was no point in complaining. If you got a dry mouth in the middle of the night then water was a necessity, and just to know that you could go glug glug gluggy from a big plastic bottle made all the difference. Anyway, we went back to the bus and took our seats, which as it happened were not together, we both had window seats towards the back, with Thomas sitting in the row immediately in front of me. The conductor appeared again and this time we paid our fares, 80 rupees each for the ten hour trip to Mysore, with the bus going all the way to Bangalore which was another 150 km up the road. It was due to arrive in Mysore at 6 am the following morning and Bangalore by 9 am. Now that we were settled I was able to sit back in my seat and marvel once again at what an incredible country India was. Throughout the land, thousands of buses and trains would be getting ready to travel thousands of miles with thousands of people inside of them going to thousands of different destinations; where else in the world could you possibly get that?

We were soon on the road. Travelling through the outskirts of early evening Ernakulum and then into the surrounding countryside which was already under a blanket of darkness. But along the side of the road for miles and miles there were lights from the many shops, stalls and rickety shacks, which were all packed with people. There was no sign of things getting quiet just yet, that was for sure, and as the bus raced along honking its horn and scaring the living daylights out of anything which was in its way, I began to feel a great sense of relief that we were leaving the scene in Cochin further and further behind us. What with the Om Ashram on Fort Cochin and my namesake Phillip on the streets of Ernakulum, it had all been getting a bit too much. Of course top of that there had been the weed, top quality super strong Kerala grass which at times had done our fucking heads in. But in reality it had been easy to escape, even if it did not seem so at the time. All that we had to do at the end of the day was dip into our money pots and eject ourselves from the situation by way of buying a ticket to the next town up the road, or in the case of Mysore quite a bit further up the road, and a city not a town. That was our privilege I guess, as a pair of white boys travelling in a strange, strange land who were prone to getting themselves into one or two sticky situations along the way.

As I sat there in my comfortable seat ruminating on the hazards of our fortune so far, I slowly became aware that my left shoulder was wet. It puzzled me. Although it was hot I was not sweating, and although the window was open it was not raining. For a terrifying instant I thought that somehow I had sustained an injury and was now bleeding profusely, but a quick check ascertained there were no dark patches on my shirt. It was simply wet and what was more it was getting wetter. Maybe it was the same for everyone, but the old Indian man asleep in the seat next to me seemed completely dry, and Thomas who was just in front of me had not said anything. No, somehow it was happening to me and me alone and I wanted to know what the fuck it was. Then I looked up and noticed that the baggage above my head was dripping wet. I half stood up in my seat and felt for the source of the leak, but it was quite difficult as the bus was tanking along and things were getting pretty rocky.

“Hey, Thomas” I said as I leant over him, “something’s leaking and I’m getting really fucking soaked back here.”
“Oh shit,” he said as he reached up and pulled down a half empty bottle of mineral water, the one which had cost a massive 12 ½ rupees.
“Fucking hell,” I said, “it’s gone all over me!”

He offered to exchange places but that only made me feel ashamed of my outburst, so I miserably sat back down in my seat and let the last drops continue to fall. It depressed me to think that such a trifling thing would disturb me so much, fill me to the brim with negative energy. It would have only found honest expression if I had stood up in the middle of the bus and shouted, “Why me? Why the fuck do these things always happen to me?” Instead of descending into the realms of paranoia at the drop of a hat, I had to learn simply to accept things as they were, so I took the incident as some kind of warning before I then became calmer, thankfully relieved the dripping finally stopped. No big deal after all!

By the time the sun had risen, the bus had climbed over those Western Ghats of Kerala and gone across the border and into the state of Karnataka. After a brief stop at a roadside hut, where everyone got off the bus to drink their first cup of chai of the day, we arrived in Mysore at 7 in the morning. Apart from briefly dozing off a couple of times I had stayed awake the whole of the night with my head full of thoughts I would no doubt never, ever remember. But I felt good, I was full of excitement over the prospect of walking into and discovering a new city, especially one in South India. Thomas looked OK as well, his blue eyes were shining and he was once again fully energized, having fully and finally recovered from his adventures over on Fort Cochin. Which meant we were ready to rock! After retrieving my rucksack from the boot of the bus and consulting the map in our Lonely Planet, we struck a route to where the cheap hotels were located, an area to the left of one of the main streets near the railway station, more or less where the cheap hotels always tended to be in Indian cities. We got there after a 5 minute walk through the centre of town, which at that time of day still seemed surprisingly quiet with only a few places open. As soon as we arrived in the vicinity of all the cheap hotels and lodges we were approached by a man who appeared to be dumb. He communicated with us by gesticulating wildly with his arms and it soon became obvious that he earned his crust as a hotel tout. Somehow he unnerved me and I felt decidedly uneasy when Thomas immediately walked off in the direction the man was pointing in.

“Come on Thomas,” I said, “we can find a place without this guy.”

But Thomas continued to follow him and I had no choice but to go along as well. The place to which he led us was a horribly sweaty and dusty backstreet Indian lodge and where I had no problem in persuading Thomas that we should not stay there.

“No way,” I said, “it’s a dump.”

But when we stepped back outside the tout was still with us, dressed in little more than rags and still waving his arms. And again Thomas allowed himself to be led by him.

“Oh come on!” I said, “this guy isn’t going to lead to us a nice cheap place, all he’s interested in is raking off a bit of commission and taking us to any old shithole he can find.”

But Thomas didn’t seem to want to listen to what I was saying, and he was still quite happy to follow the tout. My tiredness from the night ride was now quickly catching up with me and I began feel my nerves were becoming severely stretched in this new and unexpected situation, all whilst we wandered around the strange streets of a new city in the company of someone who more than half freaked me out. Anger was building up inside of me and the negative energy felt painful and destructive, needless to say it was a place I had been to more than one or two times before. A few minutes later the tout showed us a far smarter lodge run by a bunch of smoothies who looked hungry for business. We had to climb up four flights of stairs to look at a reasonable enough room, but it cost 50 rupees a night.

“What do you think?” asked Thomas as he stood inside, “it seems quite nice.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, barely able to contain myself, “it’s OK, but it is too much! Half of what we pay will go to this guy. We can find a much cheaper place on our own for fuck’s sake!”
“OK, OK,” said Thomas now losing his temper, “forget it. We’ll look somewhere else.”

With that he stormed out of the room leaving me standing there in what was now a horrible early morning sweat, feeling that things had suddenly got absurdly out of control.

“Room good yes?” said the hotel man as I remained standing there wondering what to do.
“Er, no, no,” I replied, “too much money, too much.”

Then all I could do was sheepishly walk back down the stairs with my trusty old rucksack firmly stuck to my back. All I wanted was not to get ripped off and I knew that it should be perfectly possible for us to find a clean room in Mysore at a reasonable price. And a reasonable price for me meant nothing above 35 rupees a night. When I got back out on the street again Thomas was out of sight, but he soon reappeared, waving to me from a balcony in a place on the other of the street.

“Hey Phil,” he said, “this room looks OK, 25 rupees a night, come and take a look at it.”

So I crossed the street and climbed another load of stairs, passing rooms which seemed to be full of Tibetans crouched around kerosene stoves and cooking their breakfasts. This time the room looked fine, small and simple with two beds, a table and chair, and many colourful posters on the wall of Indian films and Hindu deities. It also led out onto the balcony where Thomas had stood to call me and from it there was a fine view of the city.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling relieved but exhausted, “let’s take it.”

When we were lying on our beds after having signed the signed visitors’ book and paid for our first night we were both aware that a major argument had narrowly been avoided. Yet again we had arrived in a place and let ourselves get completely overwhelmed by a new and strange situation, just like we had in Quilon and Ernakulum. It was becoming a habit, a bit of a bad one if truth be told, and it was as if we simply forgot to prepare ourselves for the initial period of stress which arriving in a new town or city in India always seemed to cause. The result of which was that a difficult experience was made even more unpleasant by the friction that arose between us. Nevertheless in this particular situation I felt that I was right and told Thomas that I didn’t see any fucking point in allowing a tout to lead us around looking for a room when we could just as easily do it ourselves, and for a lot less money. But Thomas’s reply came as a bit of a shock to me. He said that simply by looking at the wretched condition of the tout it was quite obvious he needed all the money he could get. So what was the harm in us giving him a little business? We could afford it after all. As I listened to him tell me this I began to feel ashamed of my behaviour, how I had been so concerned with saving a miserable few rupees that I had quite failed to see the bigger picture. Thomas was right to say what he did, but I wished that he had said something at the time, a few words of what he was saying now would probably have calmed me down, well, possibly. Now it was too late to do anything. We were in a room which the poor guy hadn’t shown us and he was probably down there on the street right now, still with next to nothing. All the same there was no point in feeling guilty over what happened. If a similar situation arose in the future I would be more aware of the predicament of my fellow man instead of going ahead and behaving like a selfish bastard, or at least that was the hope, but for now I would just have to forget about it.

We rested for most of the day in our room, recovering from the rigours of the bus journey the night before, then we finally went out for a walk in the late afternoon. It was hot outside but it was different to the sweaty, steamy coastal heat of Cochin, because in Mysore it was very bright, very clear and very sunny. We walked down to the centre of town together but then decided to split and go our own separate ways. Sleeping through the day on top of our early morning incident with the tout had left us uncommunicative with each other and probably a little confused. It seemed a sensible thing to go off on our own and sort ourselves out, so we split after arranging to meet back in our room in the early evening. For me it felt good to strike off into the unknown under the strange new skylines of Mysore; shops, houses, temples, churches and mosques were what was on view whilst walking down streets full of cows, cars, rickshaws and people. Walking through a new Indian city for the first time is always an absorbing experience, just like when you are a child and someone gives you a fascinating new toy to play with. It can be a good form of meditation as well, everything seems exciting and fresh because your mind is released from the burden of the familiar and boring, thus it becomes relatively easy to reach a state of peace whilst walking through scenes of intense busyness.

Mysore seemed to have a high number of animals and many parts of the city were more like farmyards than areas of its inner centre. There were hundreds of cows, the most I had seen in any Indian city since leaving Varanasi a few months ago, their high horns making their appearance quite holy. Many places burnt sandalwood incense which gave the place a medieval atmosphere, strangely similar to Kathmandu way up north in Nepal. The people were also friendly and it seemed that religion played a significant role in the daily life of the city, with their being large proportions of both Christians and Muslims, along with the predominant Hindus. There were also quite a few Tibetan monks to be seen and what with the Tibetans who were back at our hotel, I could only assume there were some Tibetan refugee communities close by. And there was the music as well. Coming out of speakers standing in front of stalls and attached to the telegraph poles, it rang through the streets clearly, whilst the sky above was a smooth turquoise bleeding into a deep orange which lay in the direction of sunset. When I returned to our room I felt good and I could see that Thomas did as well because he lay there naked on his bed looking happy and relaxed.

“Nice place!” I said.
“Yeah, really nice” he replied.

Mysore also seemed to have good restaurants. For breakfast we had gone to the Bombay Bhavan which had served us some murderously good masala dosas, or Mysore masala dosas to give them their full name, and for dinner we went to the Durbhar Marg and got a couple of killer thalis, vegetarian meals served up on huge round steel plates. As we walked back from the Durbhar Marg it began to rain and what at first seemed to be a shower soon turned into a major storm. We took shelter beneath a shop front but after a while we decided to make a run for it back to the hotel and we got truly pissed on in the process, absolutely fucking soaked. But it was a laugh, quite a relief after what had seemed like weeks of relentlessly hot weather, and as we dried ourselves off in our room, we were both in high spirits.

“Well, fuck” I said, “why don’t we have a smoke?”
“Yeah Phil, yeah,” Thomas replied, “do it!”

When I had dried off I reached down into my rucksack and pulled out what was left of the weed I had scored with Phillip in Ernakulum. I opened up the plastic bag and out of habit gave it a good sniff.

“Yeah,” I said, “good, strong Kerala grass!”

I had to be careful when I set about preparing the joints because people were constantly appearing on the balcony outside our room. All kinds, from old Tibetan grannies to turbaned Sikhs, and none of them had any qualms about sticking their heads through the door to see what was going on. Since Thomas was now lying naked on his bed playing with his balls in an absent minded kind of way, and I was stripped down to my boxer shorts because of the heat, I suppose there was quite a lot to entertain them. However when it came to the weed it was impossible to be discreet when performing an operation which involved materials such as beedis for tobacco, cardboard, books, ashtrays, matches and of course lots and lots of marijuana.

“Fuck it,” I said, “we may as well be open. I can’t imagine anyone in this place running off to call the cops and even if they did we've got enough to pay some baksheesh!”

Soon enough the joints were ready, thick beds of weed with generous sprinklings of the black hash Thomas had scored on Fort Cochin laid on top of them, all wrapped up in the tough skin of a beedi.

“Here,” I said, tossing one over to Thomas, “take it away!”

He lit his and I sparked up mine. The smoke soon pushed us off deep into our own heads and for once we did not talk much, or rather for once Thomas didn’t talk much. We just lay on our beds listening to the rainstorm going on outside and drifting off into those usual places brought on by travels through the lands of the stoned whilst being out in India. After a while I picked up the Lonely Planet to see what it said about Mysore. There seemed to be quite a lot to see, especially old Hindu temples, standing as relics of a dead age in the dusty lands of southern Karnataka. Apparently they were amongst the most beautiful ever built, riots of stunning carvings and sculptures, so that suddenly in my stoned haze it seemed like it would be good idea to devote a few days to checking some of them out.

“Yeah man,” I said to myself, “take in some truly dread Hindu culture in the ancient sites of Somnathampur, Srirangapatnam, Belur and Halebid. That will be the tour!”

What with smoking the weed, those places conjured up some truly mystical pictures within my mind.

“Yeah, I’ve just gotta go to Somnathampur!”

The idea had taken hold of me just as I hauled myself off my bed and went out on the balcony to catch a view of the tail end of the storm. Down below the street was like a river and standing in the middle of it there was a little girl was splashing about with joy as people looked on from the balconies of the hotels and houses. Yes, it felt like we had really arrived in Mysore!

When I woke up the next morning Thomas was already awake, lying on his bed and looking at the Lonely Planet. It was still quite early but the streets below sounded lively and the bright southern Karnataka morning sun shone down on them illuminating all you could see.

“Hey Phil,” Thomas said, “why don’t we go to Chakmundi Hill? It’s half an hour on the bus to the south of the city.”

As a matter of fact we could see Chakmundi Hill from our balcony. It was a famous Hindu place of pilgrimage with a temple built on top and where there was a huge stone bull halfway up the steps leading to it.

“OK,” I replied, “let’s go straight after breakfast, no fucking around.”

So we got washed and went down to the Bombay Bhavan for masala dosas, iddlys, sambhar and coffee. It was another fine breakfast and even though we both wore our dirtiest clothes, the people in the Bombay Bhavan didn’t seem to mind, which definitely hadn't been the case in some places in Cochin where more than once or twice we had been given the Indian bum’s rush. When we got to the bus station there was a almighty queue for the buses to Chakmundi Hill, it obviously being a popular place to go to. After waiting for a good half an hour on the bus stand we finally jostled ourselves aboard a very crowded red painted Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation vehicle which slowly made its way through the southern outskirts of the city and up the holy hill. By the time we got off at the top it was already mid-morning and very hot, but the view was magnificent. To one side at the foot of the hill Mysore city lay stretched out before us, whilst all around were the scorched plains of southern Karnataka trailing off for many miles into the hazy distance. The air was different up on the top of the hill as well, thinner, or maybe just more religious. There was in fact a long queue of people waiting to go into the Hindu temple but we did not bother to join it as we were not pilgrims. Instead we went to a chai shop, glad of the chance to sit in the shade, drink some cool drinks and cups of sweet coffee served in stainless steel cups.

After we had refreshed ourselves we decided to walk down the hill to take a look at the bull. When we got there we were able to sit under the shade of a tree. Both of us were in a kind of mental haze due to the heat, so we just sat there and watched the monkeys who terrorized any people who had food with a continual game of smash and grab. It really was a very hot day, you had to take things slowly or else you would end up paying the price, simple as that. Apparently there was a cave around the back of the bull but we didn’t have the energy to check it out, too damn knackered, although a Western couple did venture off in its direction and by the time we left they had not come back out again. We continued to walk down the hill where again we stopped to sit on a rock which offered another fine view of the city, and what with the heat and our feelings of tiredness, it all seemed so dreamy and unreal. By the time we got to the bottom we realised we were both too tired to walk all the way back into Mysore, although it might have been possible, so we got a ride in an auto rickshaw for 8 rupees, both of us not sure if we were being cheated or not. If we were then the driver managed to put on an extraordinarily honest face when he explained to us about the extra tax that somehow didn’t register on the meter, but which nevertheless we would have to pay.

Back in Mysore we decided to eat in a different part of town so we headed off in a new direction. On the way to wherever we were going we stopped off at a street stall selling beautifully fresh papaya for only one rupee a slice, which was fucking incredible if you sat down and thought about it. We stood about on the street for a good ten minutes or so eating slice after slice of that exquisite orange fruit before we finally ended up in the Shankar Restaurant. It was a lively place with what seemed to be thousands of waiters taking orders from customers whilst an army of boys were cleaning the floors. We both decided to try a dish called a rice bath which was basically a plate of rice with curd and salad. It was different, very refreshing and, along with the fresh coffees that we had to finish things off, it gave us enough energy to walk back to our hotel where we then crashed out on our beds for a couple of hours. Under the influence of the mid-afternoon Mysore heat, I had some strange, sad dreams and in the late afternoon I went out for another wander through the streets on my own in order to clear my head. Just like on my previous walk it turned out to be something of a meditative experience once my inner voice had fallen silent and my mind was left to absorb at leisure fresh scenes from out of the heart of a strange new city. I walked from the city bus stand, off in the direction of St. Philomena’s church, a huge Christian construction which by the time I got there had thousands of people inside it, presumably for the early evening service. I did not feel intimidated or shy being amongst them, they were really nice and friendly, so much so that I was even offered a ride in a bullock cart. But I was enjoying myself too much to accept it, taking too many photographs with my trusty old camera, building up those memories to take back home.

By the time I got back to our room Thomas was ready to go out for a meal so we left immediately and went back to the Hotel Shankar where we had so much rice and vegetables for just 6 rupees each that we were both completely stuffed by the end of it. So much so that after we had got only a little distance from the Shankar we both had to sit down again on a wall and watch the world go by, doing sweet fuck all apart from trying to digest all the food we’d eaten. Whilst we were sitting there a young Indian lad who was dressed in what seemed to be very hip Western style clothes came up and began to talk to us. He was quite small, very dark skinned and had curly black hair that went down to his shoulders, which in my mind at least made him look like a Mysore version of Prince, or maybe a Mysore version of a cross between Michael Jackson and Prince, I’m not quite sure. He told us that his name was Bela and that although he had been born in Mysore, which meant of course that it was his home town, he had spent the last four years of his life in Goa. Whilst telling us of the many Westerner friends he had made whilst living in Goa, he then went on to let us know that he had taken many different kinds of drugs there. For the sheer enjoyment of it, he used to go from beach to beach on his motorbike, from scene to scene for what amounted to quite a significant period of time whilst completely blasted on stuff like opium and brown sugar.

Bela spoke excellent English and although he did have what seemed to me to be quite an annoying false little laugh, it was hard not to like him. Thomas did most of the talking from our side whilst I remained pretty silent, lurking in the shadows so to speak, waiting to find out what it was this guy wanted. There was very little to be suspicious of however, because Bela did not give off the slightest impression of being one of those types who would rip you off completely and then leave you alone with nothing in the middle of a strange, vast land. Well, he was not in the Phillip from the streets of Cochin category at least, which in my book was a definite plus. The only thing which held me back from feeling completely at ease with Bela was his seeming obsession with Western music which he talked about almost non-stop after he had given us his brief personal history, and in regard to the music he did not seem able to discriminate between what was really good and what was bad. This must have been why he was able mention Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Madonna and The Scorpions in the same breath, all with the same feelings of awe and reverence. Bela also happened to mention that Mysore was a good place to buy opium and that would we want any? Amazingly enough, it did not take long for us to say that we would indeed, even though neither Thomas or myself had ever mentioned opium before in the whole of the time we had travelled together, let alone taken some. Nevertheless we arranged to meet Bela at the same place where we were sitting at 7 the following evening and then take things from there. After this was clarified so that all of us understood the arrangement, Bela disappeared off into the night. All in all we had only spoken with him for about 15 minutes but after that Mysore suddenly felt different; we had made contact with the locals, so to speak, and who knows what might now happen? Soon after Bela had gone Thomas and I walked back to our cheap hotel and had an early night, our stomachs still both fit to burst from our massive thalis.

The next morning I woke up early and decided I would go and visit the ancient Hindu temples at Somnathampur, which I guess was pretty much in line with the stoned vision I'd had the previous evening. The temples were about 50 km out of town and involved changing buses at a place called Tiraspura, or at least that was what my homework told me. It was a great feeling when the bus I clambered on left Mysore and made its way into the surrounding countryside. This time I was on my own because Thomas had decided to give the temple trip a miss, staying back at the hotel instead and all because he was feeling lazy, it being quite possible he was still feeling the effects of his final few days in Cochin. After a few miles the land stretched away for miles on either side of the road, the red plains of Karnataka; empty, sun scorched and yet strangely beautiful. Just before Tiraspura however, the bus crossed a river and after that the land became more fertile with plenty of green fields, rice paddies and tress blowing in the fresh morning breeze. There was a little bit of hassle when I got to Tiraspura and where I had to figure out how to get the next bus on to Somnathampur. First of all a couple of kids put me on the wrong one, and when I turned round they had big smiles on their faces which made me feel a little sick. Bastards!

Finally after a wait of over 40 minutes the right bus to the temple arrived, only for it to immediately drive to a local garage to get the pressure in all its tyres checked. This turned out to be quite a long drawn out business and it meant that I did not get to Somnathampur until bang on midday, just when the heat was beginning to rise and the light get pretty damn intense. However it did not deter me from having a good look at all the fantastic temple carvings and from taking a whole bunch of photographs which immediately made me feel excited at the thought of what the results might be when I got the film developed, which would probably not be until I got back home. All the same it was a kind of lonely experience, going all the way out to Somnathampur on my own, to stare at a bunch of temple carvings in the dust without having much of a clue as to what they were, and even less of an idea of what they were supposed mean in the first place. It seemed a little pointless all of a sudden, doing those tourist kind of things, as if they were ever going to bring any form of lasting fulfilment.

It took another an hour for a bus to show up to get me out of Somnathampur and when it did I decided that I might as well go on to Srirangapatnam rather than head straight back to Mysore. There was another of bunch of temples there which were supposed to be worth checking out so I figured that I might as well see as much as possible in one go. Have my shot of culture, so to speak, then fuck off out of it. Whilst I was waiting for the bus four Indian boys came and sat beside me. They did not look particularly poor and one of them spoke good English. Nevertheless they were after something and when they found out that I had some dollars in my money belt, probably because I must have told them, they pestered me relentlessly to give them some. The whole thing really pissed me off. They were young, not poor, but completely obsessed with money and their obsession clearly had made them lose all sense of shame, so much so they were at the point of more or less begging right there in front of me. They were lost, it seemed like their whole lives were going to be spent in pursuit of the silver dollar, the golden rupee, or some other such shit. Douchebags! It turned out to be quite a long bus ride to Srirangapatnam which ate up the afternoon, in fact by the time I got there I was not that interested in stumbling around another bunch of relics whilst not really knowing what was what, so I just had a couple of coffees and then got the next bus back to Mysore. On my way to the hotel from the bus stop in town I walked round a corner which had loads of lepers who were out begging on the street. One of the lepers followed me as I walked past them but I did not have anything to give him. The whole thing made me feel so bad that I returned to give the pitiful looking guy a few rupees after buying a bunch of bananas in order to get some change.

After resting for a while on my return to the hotel, and telling Thomas that I did not really see the point in doing the kind of thing I had done that very day, I had recovered enough to go with him to the Hotel Shankar in order to meet up with Bela on the wall outside the restaurant. Yes of course, I had nearly forgotten that after a day of almost normal behaviour, we were supposed to be buying some opium! We did not have to wait long at the Hotel Shankar before Bela appeared, trendily dressed in stone washed jeans and a bright yellow shirt. He suggested that we went and ate at a different place to the Hotel Shankar, a place where it was cool to smoke weed, which seemed pretty good to us I have to say. So we left and on the way to the new place we talked with Bela about music, telling him that our precious Walkman had got broken during our last night in Cochin after falling off the bed and that we now had nothing to play our tapes on. Something which, the more we thought about it, was becoming a bigger and bigger tragedy. Bela then told us he would bring his ghetto blaster across to our hotel room if we wanted to listen to some music, which sounded like a good idea to the both of us, so much so that it cheered us up considerably. We had a good ten minutes or so walking through the streets of Mysore before we arrived at the Durbhar Marg Hotel and after climbing up a set of stairs we walked out onto a roof garden with tables, chairs and a fine view of the city, including the Maharaja’s Palace. Good one!

We sat down, then ordered some food and drinks whilst we talked a little bit about meditation, before moving onto our main topic of conversation, drugs. Bela explained to us that in Mysore there was a choice between two types of opium. There was Pakistani opium which weighed in at 125 rupees a tola, and there was Chinese opium which was 150 rupees a tola. We were still not sure what a tola was exactly but we did not give the game away to Bela by betraying our ignorance. Bela told us the Chinese opium was superior in quality and he advised us to buy that. “Well yeah, he would, wouldn't he?” I thought, with some fair degree of suspicion. It was then that we realised Bela did not actually have any opium on him and that it looked like he expected us to give him some money so that he could go off and buy it. This meant that it could turn out to be a classic rip off situation. Somehow though, Bela looked like he was simply too nice a guy to do such a thing, so both me and Thomas were prepared to trust him. Fair enough, it might have been the case that the opium did not cost as much as what he was telling us and that he was taking a cut for himself, but we did not mind because from what we could understand, the stuff was going to be delivered straight to our dinner table.

Once we’d had a couple of moments deliberation we gave Bela 150 rupees to get us a tola of Chinese opium, thinking that we might as well go for the best, hit the ground running so to speak. He said that he would have to go by rickshaw to the Muslim part of town and that he would need an extra 10 rupees travel expenses, then when he had got that off Thomas he promptly disappeared. We both sat there wondering what the fuck it was we had actually just done. We would know soon enough if we were going to get ripped off or not, simply by waiting around to see if Bela returned, if he still hadn’t showed after an hour then that would be our answer. So we ate another fine South Indian meal which we finished off with a couple of fresh coffees, and lo and behold by the time we were done, Bela had indeed returned. He hadn’t betrayed us after all, not even come close to ripping us off, and suddenly I was full to the brim with the kind of excitement which arises just before you take a new drug and you have a sneaking suspicion it is going to be great to the point of being really rather incredible. Bela handed over to Thomas a sticky black substance which was tightly wrapped in plastic. It was our tola of Chinese opium! Thomas opened it up and had a good look at it, whilst I peered over his shoulder and did the same. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen any opium and the piece before us reminded me of a dense lump of oily hashish. I picked up the opium and put it to my nostrils. It had a faint bitter smell of oil but nothing more, and it was very black and very sticky.

“OK,” Bela said, after Thomas and I had played around with it for a couple of minutes, “shall we pop some?”
“Of course,” said Thomas.
“Yeah, yeah why not?” I replied to Bela who then took the tola and broke some off, rolling up three little black balls.

“You see,” he said “from one tola you should be able to get twelve good pops”.

That seemed about right, because he had just taken off about a quarter of the lump for the three balls we were about to take. He gave us each a ball and then ordered some tea, telling us that it was important to wash the opium as far down into our systems as it would go. If it was only half digested, then the chances were that it would make you as sick as a dog, so under no circumstances were you to take it dry. When our tea arrived, Bela picked up his ball, tilted his head back, popped the opium into his mouth and immediately afterwards took a large swig of tea. Thomas followed suit and then, after a somewhat inevitable couple of moments chronic indecision as to whether I was doing the right thing or not, I popped a ball down my throat as well. Bela told us it would take an hour or so for the opium to come on, in fact it might take even longer because we had just eaten a rather large meal.

After a while we left the roof garden and walked through the streets of Mysore. Both Thomas and I felt quite excited, waiting for the effects of the opium to appear, and the more we walked, the more everything seemed to be suddenly lighter and things like pushing our way through a crowded street didn’t take up that much energy at all. When we got to the centre of town Bela told us that he was going to split because he had to go off and see his girlfriend. We arranged to meet him the next day when he would take us to a meditation centre on the outskirts of Mysore which he had mentioned to us, and then he simply disappeared into the night. Thomas said that he was now feeling the opium quite strongly and he told me that he preferred to walk around for a while rather than go straight back to our hotel. I think that, for once, I must have eaten more food than him because the opium seemed to be taking longer in coming on for me. Although I felt quite good, I was sure there was going to be more to the hit than what I had got so far.

We continued walking on past our hotel and in the direction of the railway station. On the way and on a wide open stretch of ground, there was a circus in town which went by the name of Jumbo Circus. It looked as if it was a big one and straight away for some reason, I wanted to go and see it. We walked down to the entrance where there were the usual stalls selling popcorn and soft drinks. We were over two hours late for that evening’s performance but we were able to check out the times of shows for the following days. Just for the hell of it we also bought some popcorn which soon turned out to be the best popcorn I had ever tasted in my life, being incredibly poppy for some reason. Then after walking away from Jumbo Circus we reached a roundabout and simply sat on a wall, just watching the traffic go round it. It was deeply fascinating, and as with all Indian roundabouts there did not seem to be any sense of order, to us it was remarkable that no one got killed attempting to negotiate it. Thomas was now telling me that he could feel the opium very strongly and that it was as much as he could do to move. I had to admit that I was still waiting for the effects to really work through my system. OK I felt pretty pleasant, but it was nothing that I couldn't handle. As we made our way back to the hotel I told Thomas that I was going to smoke some weed when we got to our room, just to see if that would move things along a bit, pump up the volume so to speak.

This time when we got inside our room I shut the door and windows so that no one would be able to look in and catch an eyeful of what we were up to. I then I proceeded to roll a couple of big joints made purely from our Kerala grass. I didn't sprinkle any hash on top this time, just in case it might have blown us to kingdom come. After I had rolled joints for each of us, we lay on our beds and smoked them. They had a pleasant effect and I felt very, very relaxed. With the opium already inside me I did not have to go through the usual show of fighting with my body to calm things down, it was already there. Thomas and I talked for a while about Bela and whether or not he was an opium addict, Thomas mentioned that Bela’s eyes were very yellow, which might mean his liver was more than a little fucked and he told me he had read somewhere that one of the effects of taking too much opium was that it got damaged. In my eyes Bela didn’t look a mess, in fact his style of dressing was really quite meticulous in its own way, and he certainly put both me and Thomas in the shade when it came to taking care over his appearance, not that such a thing would have been very difficult. He also seemed to be a very relaxed friendly guy, although I guess it was possible that family and upbringing would be able to account for that to quite a large degree. Bela had in fact told us that his father was a surgeon at a hospital in the city and that his mother was a teacher, so in Indian terms he came from a pretty well off family. Mind you there was no question that he did look thin, which would definitely be another sign that he had been taking opium for quite a while. After all what was the point in eating if you were able to pop a ball of finest Chinese opium into your system whenever the urge took you?

Thomas began to compare the effect of the opium to some brown sugar he had taken when we were in Sri Lanka, and how the jolt which the opium gave his body was not as strong as what he had got from the sugar. All the same he felt that opium was a much purer substance compared to the brown sugar, which he suspected had been stuffed full of chemicals and on that score he was no doubt probably right. It was whilst Thomas was talking on and on about the effects of brown sugar, slowly boring me to death, that I began to feel a bit funny. I had just finished smoking a beedi in order to get a tobacco hit after the joint, and as I was lying there on my bed I suddenly began to feel a little nauseous. Each time I lay there and rode a wave of sickness, another one would come along and it would feel that much stronger than the last.

“Fuck man!” I said to Thomas as I sat up at the end of my bed, “I feel really weird.”
“Yeah,” Thomas replied looking straight at me, “You’ve gone completely white!”

I stood up to look at my face in the mirror, stumbled a bit and then managed to regain my balance. He was right. My face was white as a sheet and the pupils of my eyes were very, very small. I looked just like a total fucking smackhead!

“Phew!” I said, going back to my bed, “I think the opium is starting to really come on strong now.”
“Yeah,” Thomas replied matter of factly, “you ate quite a big meal so it has taken longer to hit you.”

All of a sudden I wished I hadn’t smoked the fucking weed. The effect of the opium was more than enough! In fact I was sure that it was the combined effect of smoking the weed and the beedi which was making me feel a bit sick, not the opium. After a couple of minutes I got up off the bed again and reached for the door.

“I gotta get some air,” I said feebly to Thomas as I stumbled out onto the balcony.

A couple of Sikhs were asleep in the corner of the balcony so I crouched down as quietly as possible and took in some deep breaths. Sikhs on our balcony? Fuck knows what they were doing there! The night air, while by no means cool, was still quite refreshing. The opium was now really pulsing through my body in waves and after I had got over the initial shock of its effect, it was becoming more and more manageable, in fact deep down I knew that it was really rather nice. Smoking the weed however, had significantly speeded up my heartbeat so I had to put up with the usual paranoia which that engendered, where bleak thoughts that I might suddenly drop down dead from a heart attack and be cremated in Mysore kept rearing up in my mind.

“Phew, my god,” I said to myself, “this is incredible!”

And it was. I had never taken anything so strong in my life. I calmed myself down by looking up at the stars in the night sky, South India style, looking across at the dark shadowed outlines of the temples and mosques rising up and above the buildings in the city. After ten minutes or so I was able to go back into the room.

“Yeah,” said Thomas who was lying naked on his bed, “you’ve got some colour back”.

I lay back down and closed my eyes. The opium was still pulsing deep inside me and it continued to rise up in waves, sending vibrations through the whole of my body. It was under control and now that I had stopped feeling sick I was able to appreciate its effect, and there was no doubt that the effect was really quite profoundly astounding. It was as if the sun was shining from somewhere way down inside of me. There was now absolutely no trace of any physical discomfort, the complete opposite in fact, and I lay on my bed in a state of bliss. The drug did not make you feel alive in the same way that hashish or even acid did, there was no mental clarity or rush of thoughts, it was as if your mind was in a state of half-sleep and the thoughts which I had were similar to the ones experienced just before I nodded off when I was almost dreaming. This effect from the opium remained with me for the whole of the night so that by the time it was morning the next day I was not quite sure as to whether I had in fact slept or not. We spent the morning just lying about our room, both of us still feeling the effects of the opium from the night before. In my usual rush of enthusiasm for all things new, I told Thomas that I thought it was the most wonderful drug I had ever taken in my life.

“It completely puts your body to sleep, and without any physical distractions it is much more easy to be mentally relaxed”, I said to Thomas.

I also told him that I reckoned I would be able to take opium about 20 times without there being too much danger of me becoming an addict. Possibly I might have been wrong about that, sometimes I could get absurdly over-confident when it came to estimating my abilities over taking drugs, but I had done acid and magic mushrooms many times before, never once feeling my mental health had been in any danger, well, apart from on a couple of occasions when I’d nearly gone to pieces. Similarly with the opium I now felt sure that I would be able to take it for as long as I wished and not run into any problems in regard to becoming physically addicted. All the same we both agreed the hit which opium gave the body made it inevitable that it would produce some kind of craving for a repetition of the same effect. We laughed in a half-assed way about it becoming legal, how if you were ever to advertise it to your family and friends, only four words would be needed: “Opium: The Strong One!” We went on talking like this, a pair of punk ass bums who were holed up in our seedy cheap hotel room in Mysore, until it was noon and time to go for our rendezvous with Bela.

We met him outside the Hotel Shankar as usual. He told us that after he’d left us the previous evening he went to meet to his girlfriend and then returned home to listen to music all night. We mentioned that it would be cool with us if he came back to our room in the hotel later with his music player, and we could supply the tapes, an idea which he seemed very open to. After our masala dosas, rice baths and coffees in the Hotel Shankar, we took a rickshaw to the outskirts of town to visit the meditation centre which Bela had told us about the day before. This area of Mysore seemed to be quite affluent, the suburban streets we rode through reminded me for some reason of towns I’d seen in France, spacious houses in their own grounds, dusty wide roads leading up and down gently rolling hills. When we arrived at the meditation centre we found that it was located in a bungalow and when we went inside I was surprised to see that it was a Tibetan Buddhist centre, although all the people there were Indian. Guess it must have been connected in some way to the refugee Tibetans who lived in settlements close by and which I’d read about in my Lonely Planet. The centre was also part of the same Tibetan Buddhist tradition as Kopan monastery in Nepal, the place where Thomas and I had first met each other months ago, seemingly now from another lifetime. We were pretty far from our previous states of diligence when it came to getting down to studying the teachings of Buddhism and the art of meditation, that was for sure. Would we ever find our way back to those comparatively virtuous states? At that precise moment in time it was a question that I really couldn't answer. The centre was full of Bela’s friends and they all appeared to be middle class Indian youths, smartly dressed and all looking pretty happy with life, nice kids in other words.

We were taken into a front room where we sat down on some thin mattresses which were laid out on the floor, and there was a music player in the corner of the room with a big pile of tapes stashed underneath it. Seemed like it might not have been the strictest meditation centre in the world! A big Indian guy called Ravi started talking to us. He was responsible for the running of the centre in the absence of someone else who was presently at a Tibetan monastery some 60 km or so west of Mysore. Ravi told us the centre had not been open very long and that they were in the process of organising some kind of weekly timetable which would involve meditation classes and Buddhist teachings being offered to people. At the moment however, it looked more like it was just a good place for Bela and his friends to hang out in, with there being plenty of space for people to sit and lie around, beneath the posters of various Tibetan deities which were pinned to the walls. After running through our initial conversation of how we met Bela (“That’s right Ravi, we were sitting on a wall and he came up and asked us if we wanted to buy some opium!”) and how both Thomas and I had stayed at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal, we began to run out of things to say. This might have been due to our coming down off the opium, or because it was a hot, dusty afternoon which drained our energy and soon made us feel tired. The group of Indians who had initially joined us in the front room began to disperse, with people presumably going off to other parts of the centre once they realised we were just another pair of dope heads bumming our way round India. Bela told us that some of his friends at the centre smoked, but if they wanted to smoke there they had to go outside because it was not allowed in the centre, it being best to keep the atmosphere as clean and pure as possible, which was pretty understandable. He was right of course, smoking disturbed the vibration of places and fuck knows what else in the immediate environment. At that precise moment in time the electricity was off, so we could not play any tapes on the music player, however one of Bela’s friends had a pair of bongos which he began to gently tap out a rhythm on.

Tea was brought in as well which was most welcome, along with bananas and fresh mangoes. It was clear that the people in the centre were trying to be as hospitable as possible to us, but the sad fact of the matter was that in our post opium states, neither Thomas or I could really be bothered to jump into this particular social situation and try to make lots of new friends. We were just too spaced, too damn out of it due to what we had been up to the night before. When the electricity came back on we stuck a tape of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here into the music player. The people at the centre were very much into Pink Floyd and it had to be said that in my current condition it did indeed sound remarkably good considering by that point it was over 13 years since that particular album had been recorded, in fact more like 14. After we got to the end of the last part of Shine On You Crazy Diamond we made a bit of a mistake by sticking on a tape by Led Zeppelin, which I think was Houses Of The Holy. Despite being in a potentially holy house, it was simply neither the time or place to listen to Led Zeppelin! We had now been at the meditation centre for a good couple of hours and due to the almost demonic guitar playing of Jimmy Page, the wailing vocals of Robert Plant and the hooligan drumming of John Bonham, I was soon beginning to feel a little bit restless, paranoid even. By this stage there was only me and Thomas left in the room, with the Led Zeppelin tape blasting out of the machine in the corner to no one else but the two of us. Everyone had run for cover, scattered about the place in various small groups, laughing and talking like the old friends they probably were, although since it was India, there was the possibility that some of them had only met each other just a couple of days ago.

Getting more than a little bit edgy I told Thomas that I wanted to make a move, but I didn’t know what to do about Bela, as it was obvious that he was not ready to go yet because he was still busy hanging out with his friends. The arrangement had been that he would come back with us to the hotel to have a smoke and listen to some music in our room on his ghetto blaster. Now however, after the opium from the night before and the effort of having made it out to the meditation centre, I was all for just splitting and going back for a quiet smoke and chat with Thomas. If Bela came along we would have to be on a different level and would probably be unable to trip off into our usual stoned speculations about life, the meaning of the universe and our place in it, subjects which could be so tremendously enjoyable to ponder whilst stoned off our heads. I began to feel quite stressed, wandering what it was that I should do, more or less getting to the point where I wanted to tell Bela we were going to split and that we wouldn’t mind if he didn’t come back to the hotel with us, anything just to get us out of the meditation centre and that Led Zeppelin tape which we didn’t quite seem to be able to turn off.

When Bela came back into the room I used the chance to tell him that we were going to make a move, however he told us that there would not be a bus back into town for at least another hour or so which left me suddenly feeling more than a little exasperated. I realised I wanted to get out of the meditation centre right away and not fuck around there for very much longer. Therefore I suggested to Thomas that we walked back into Mysore, which might have been a very long walk indeed, but thankfully at that point one of Bela’s friends appeared and told us a bus was just coming down the road. We more or less ran out of the meditation centre after very quickly saying good bye to everyone in order to catch it, and we also tried to explain to Bela that we just wanted a peaceful night back at the hotel, but it was difficult to do so without making it look as if we were telling him that he wasn't welcome. I was pretty convinced that he was more than a little disappointed, because it meant he would not be able to come back and listen to music or, probably just as importantly to him, have a smoke of our weed. Nevertheless we left without him after making a somewhat hurried arrangement to meet the next day when we would go for a swim in a river a few miles out of town. All a bit crazy really, but there we are, that was how it was.

On the way back into town Thomas wanted to know why I had suddenly got so tense, in answer to which I flew off the handle for some reason, telling him that maybe just once in a while he should take some fucking responsibility for what we were supposed to be doing instead of leaving it to me to make all the decisions. It was a violent outburst on my part, I had totally and completely allowed myself to get overwhelmed by a surge of anger which, if it had a colour, would have been the deepest red from the bloodiest hell. A pretty wild freak out in other words, god knows where it came from but I was furious and severely tempted to give him a punch. When we got off the bus in town Thomas said he wanted to go off for a walk on his own and quite frankly I couldn’t blame him. My behaviour had not been very nice, it was poor to say the least, in other words I was pretty fucked up from all the opium. Feeling more than a little lost and upset with myself, I went to buy a couple of aerogramme envelopes so that I could write to people back home and tell them what an incredibly good time I was having in India. Funnily enough, after I had bought the letters I inadvertently found myself walking down a street right behind Thomas. It felt weird when I walked past him as he stopped to have a piss at an open urinal which stank like hell, and didn't even bother to check to see if he had noticed me. This time I also walked straight past the lepers on the corner, feeling way too withdrawn to dig into my pockets for any spare rupees to give them. On top of all this I then realised I'd forgotten to keep a photo arrangement I had made with a young fruit seller in the street by our hotel, when I had told the boy I would take a snap of him and which he had seemed very excited about. In order to avoid him I had to take a bit of a diversion before I made it back to the room, by now feeling more than a little drained, exhausted and disgusted with myself.

Back in our room in the early evening I smoked a couple of joints with Thomas once he had returned from his wanderings and we tried to figure out why I had got so wound up with him on the bus. Thomas said that I had simply got it too fixed in my mind that Bela wanted to come back to our room with us, and that all my tension had arisen through fear of disappointing him, of running the risk of being disliked by Bela because of it. On reflection I guess it was true that I did hate looking like a selfish bastard in front of others, even though at times I was more than prepared to act like one. For his part Thomas told me that my outburst had at least made him realise he was becoming a bit too laid back, that the responsibility for getting things together and deciding what it was we were going to do weighed too heavily on my shoulders. This was especially so when one took into account all the drugs we had been taking, which gave the illusion, for a while at least, that I was incredibly together when in actual fact I was falling apart at the seams. It was good talking through these things with Thomas, the smoke enabled us to analyse events with calm minds, giving us the insight to hopefully come up with solutions to our problems, even when more often than not, our problems were self inflicted.

We did not manage get out to eat until about 9 pm that evening, where instead of heading to the centre of town we walked off in the direction of the railway station and the Jumbo Circus. We ended up in a very local kind of restaurant where we were served by a huge waiter who looked like he owned the place, probably because he actually did. It was our worst meal yet, rough and ready to say the least, and a potential killer on the guts. There was a Western girl at a table on her own, sitting and writing a letter, and she seemed to cut quite a sad figure. People never usually came into those kind of places to write letters. Guess it was also sad that neither Thomas or I went over to talk with her, if only as some form of friendly act, although it might have been taken the wrong way and she would have only told us to fuck off. Let’s face it, if that had been the case, who could blame her? It was strange that as we walked back to our hotel after the meal we ran into Bela. He had just got back into town from the meditation centre and he was now making his way home. It was good to see him, good for me to make sure there were no hard feelings between us after our abrupt departure earlier on in the day, and we also confirmed our arrangement to meet at noon the following day to go for a swim. We also said that we would pop some more opium together and have a good smoke of the weed before we left, which made me go to bed feeling almost happy, like we were once again back on the trail, whatever the trail was.

The following morning we slept late, our lack of sleep due to popping opium for the first time, catching up with us. It was one of those mornings when you woke up and fell asleep again, then woke up later feeling more tired than ever. We managed to keep our noon appointment with Bela and got to the Hotel Durbar Marg as arranged, where we sat up in the roof garden. It was there that we all popped some more opium for the day ahead, despite the fact I suffered another attack of chronic indecision just before I was about to put that sticky black ball into my mouth. It was a very hot day and I was suddenly worried that the opium would be too much for me, especially considering how strongly it had pounded through my system just a couple of nights before. Bela took the ball off me, cut it down to size and then split what he had taken off mine between himself and Thomas. Shit! They were now going to be smashed, no doubt about that, and it made me think that the effect for me would only be a small one, certainly in comparison to Bela and Thomas, who'd both had no qualms about finishing off what I was freaking out over. What a dumbass! We then walked down to the city bus station to get a bus going in the direction of Srirangapatnam, a place which I had briefly visited a couple of days ago in my failed attempt to see some temples there. We got on board a bus which then waited at the stand for at least another half hour in the midday heat before it finally left, by which time we all felt extremely hot. Sweat was freely running down from my armpits and along the side of my torso, put simply it was like being in a sauna with some spicy smells thrown into the mix as well, just for good measure. Somehow it seemed significant to me that Thomas and Bela were sitting together and I was on my own behind them, odd man out. After a couple of days having known each other, I could see they were both beginning to form a good friendship. They talked freely whilst I sat behind, happy enough I guess in my own fucked up kind of way, but alone and in silence. It just showed me yet again how much more outgoing and open Thomas was becoming as the trip unfolded, whilst I seemingly remained the same as ever, if not worse; tight lipped, pent up and irritable, in other words I was acting out to perfection the part of an Englishman falling apart in the heat.

We got off the bus just before Srirangapatnam and after crossing the main highway which went all the way to Bangalore, we struck off down a lane which soon headed into lush green countryside. It was a nice afternoon now that we were out of the relative intensity of Mysore city where things were very hot. After a hundred yards or so we came to a small bridge where we stopped to roll a joint of weed. I also decided to settle my mind by pulling out the tola of opium and ripping a bit more off it in order to catch up with Bela and Thomas. The irony of course was that I now ended up probably taking more than what I originally would have if I had just kept things simple back at the roof garden. Bela told us he liked to smoke weed after he had popped some opium because he thought the two drugs complemented each other. So without any further adieu I rolled a big joint of finest Kerala weed and in the process mentioned to him that we also had a little bit of hashish left over from our time in Cochin. Bela said that was great, because later we could smoke that as well, which would mean we would have taken Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati. Broken down this meant Ganga as in hashish, Yamuna as in marijuana and Saraswati as in opium. For sadhus this holy trinity had great religious significance, and I had to admit it kind of blew my mind listening to Bela explain this. It fascinated me deeply, already I couldn’t wait to get back home and tell everyone that one day down in South India I had taken Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati and that somehow it had brought me closer to the meaning of life, even if it was all just deluded bullshit.

After we had smoked the joint we walked further down the track towards the river. My mouth was incredibly dry from the heat and the smoke so I asked Bela if there was a chai shop around, or just any place where we could sit and have a drink. There was only a rather up market looking restaurant however, which when we walked inside was full of wealthy Indians. We sat down for a few minutes or so but the waiters seemed to ignore us and when Bela called one over he was told that it would be at least another five minutes before we got served, possibly even ten. The waiter looked like a right arrogant bastard so we got up and left. Fuck it! Dry throat or no dry throat, I wasn't going to stay around to be insulted by those cunts. We walked across the lawns of the restaurant down to the river, past rich Indian families with big meals laid out in front of them. In my stoned state they seemed to give off a horrible vibe as they looked up at us in horror when we walked past them - red eyed, full of opium and dressed in shabby clothes - with the honourable exception of Bela, who was done out like Prince from Purple Rain.

When we got to the steps leading down to the river Bela started to get undressed and was soon stripped down to his pink and black stripped underpants. I stood a few steps above him, staring at the river and still with an incredibly dry mouth. I was full of trepidation, worried that if I dived into the water in my present condition I might suffer a massive heart attack or something worse. I turned around and was relieved to see that Thomas was dithering as well. His face was also extremely white; that extra bit of opium he’d taken had obviously made all the difference! I turned back to look at Bela who was now suddenly worried that we were going to blow it at this late stage and not have a swim. But then I realised how stupid it was to panic, so I stripped down to my swimming shorts and dived in the river right after him. When he surfaced, Bela turned round and reassured me there were no snakes or crocodiles in that part of the river, and that it was perfectly safe to swim in, something which I thought he could have confirmed to me before. No matter, I caught up with him and we both swam breast stroke making our way out to a bunch of rocks in the middle of the river. We had swam about halfway when Thomas suddenly steamed up behind us doing a very fast front crawl with his head madly swishing from side to side. The crazy German had bastard had done it again! The sight of him made me laugh so much that I suddenly became worried I would drown, because I lost all physical strength due to having a massive uncontrollable laughing fit. When we made it to the rocks, we clambered up on them and sat in the blissful heat of the sun as the three of us talked together, invigorated by our swim in the cool water. Bela told us how he and his friends often came swimming in this part of the river, that it was one of his favourite local spots to visit. There was no doubt it was certainly very beautiful, and it was also a place which Thomas and I would never have found in a million years if we hadn’t got to know someone like Bela who’d been able to take us to it.

As we sat there, Thomas and I began discussing what we were going to do after Bangalore, and for some reason I said that it might be a good idea for us to go to Hampi which was located right in the north of Karnataka and close to Goa. It was a vast ruins from the Vijayanaga empire, and by all accounts supposed to be pretty damn mind blowing if you decided to pay it a visit, especially if you took a load of acid along with you. I had no idea where the idea came from, but as soon as I said it, and the fact it caused a very enthusiastic reaction from Thomas, I began to regret it. If we ended up taking acid in Hampi at this time of year it might well be just too intense by half, so much so that it was madness to even contemplate going there. What was I thinking? Up in the north of Karnataka the temperatures would also be around 45 degrees, in other words very, very hot, really quite toasty, and of course if we went to Hampi it would probably mean that we would never get to Hyderabad and Secunderabad. But once I had mentioned it, the cat was out of the bag and there was no stopping Thomas thinking what a brilliant idea it was, despite the fact that we did not have any acid, however in regard to that Bela told us he had a friend in Bangalore who knew a place where it might be possible to get some.

Thomas then began to talk with Bela about acid whilst I went back in the water for a swim to get away from them, wishing yet again that I hadn’t opened my big fat mouth. By the time I had swam back to the rocks Thomas had asked Bela if he wanted to travel to Bangalore and then on up to Hampi with us. Things suddenly seemed like they were all moving a bit too fast for me, but there was really very little I could say since the whole idea had originated from me in the first place. After about an hour or so in the water, we got out and went for a drink at a chai shop that was located back towards the main road and which we had somehow missed first time around. Fuck knows how! The chai shop was very much a local place and for a while it looked like we were not going to get served, but they loosened up when Bela began to talk with them in their local tongue, put simply it made all the difference. Eventually they brought our chais, along with some snacks which were very difficult to eat due to the opium we had taken, and over our cups of chai we talked about the dangers of becoming addicted to the stuff. Bela was certain that it was impossible to become an opium addict, despite the fact that he looked so thin and his eyes were yellow. It seemed to me like he was kidding himself big time!

After the river we caught a bus to go to a local bird sanctuary. There were supposed to be crocodiles that could be seen in the river, along with thousands of different birds. When we arrived, we climbed to the top of one of the viewing towers where Bela rolled a joint of weed with the hashish we had told him about. Thus we did indeed get to perform Ganga, Yaumna, Saraswati and naturally enough, the effect of the hashish was very strong on top of the weed and the opium we had already taken. It pushed us all into a deep silence as we stood on the viewing tower, looking out at the thousands of different birds in the sanctuary below, without having a clue as to what any of them were called, each of us tripping off into our own inner worlds. By now it was late afternoon and after a while we got ourselves together in order to take a boat ride on the river flowing through the sanctuary. More, it had to be said, for Bela’s sake than for ours, because it felt like it was going to be a big disappointment for him if we didn't do it. Fuck knows why! The Indian who rowed us round was very enthusiastic about the sanctuary and went into great detail about all the different birds there. Problem was that it was very difficult to muster up much in the way of appropriate responses due to all the drugs we had taken and it must have made him wonder what exactly was going on. I did make an effort to let out a few exclamations of “Wow!” and “Look at that!” but it was an impossibly hard task when all I really wanted to do was lie down in the bottom of the boat and stare up at the sky.

When the boat ride was over, during which we failed to see any crocodiles, didn't even come close, we took a long walk through the surrounding countryside so as to make our way back to Srirangapatnam. Our bodies felt light because of the opium and I am sure that we could have just carried on walking for miles and miles without much problem, all the way back to Mysore even. I was happy to walk in silence, listening to Thomas as he talked to Bela about his life in Germany, telling him that being in the countryside that afternoon reminded him of how he used to spend his summers with friends back home when he was a kid, although I doubted very much if there would have been any paddy fields and coconut trees next to the Rhine. On the bus ride back into town I now sat at the front on my own whilst Thomas and Bela were sat together on the seat behind me. Bela told us there was a Charlie Chaplin movie on in town and that we should go and see it. Thomas seemed up for it but I found it hard to really show that much enthusiasm because I would have been more than happy just to go back to our room at the hotel and stare at all the colourful posters on the walls for a couple of hours. When we arrived back in Mysore we went back up to the roof garden of the Hotel Dhurbhar Marg for something to eat. We had more of an appetite by this stage in the proceedings, and for some reason after the meal, we decided that we might as well finish off what was left of the opium, so each of us popped another little black ball into our mouths.

As we walked through town after the meal I decided that I might as well go and see the movie with Thomas and Bela if that was what they were going to do. But then I realised that I had very little money on me and for some inexplicable reason had a sudden attack of paranoia about being left in a remote part of town late at night, so I made a decision to split there and then and leave them to it. I made my way back to our room where I sat around for a couple of hours perfectly content with my own company. I did little more than sit on the chair at the end of my bed, but for me at the time, and with all the opium swilling through my system, that seemed to be most highly entertaining indeed. Thomas returned a few hours after having gone to see the Charlie Chaplin movie with Bela, where they’d bought a bunch of sweets and soft drinks and just had a good laugh, something which I told him I’d had as well. Thomas asked me why I had suddenly decided not to go with them because there was plenty of money between us all and it would not have been a problem. He went on to tell me that it looked strange being with people all day only for me to then just suddenly go off like that. Got to admit I did not really see it that way, so I told Thomas that was simply the kind of guy I was and I didn’t really see it as any big deal, besides that I’d been on opium, in case he’d somehow forgotten. Before we went to sleep Thomas told me that he had arranged to meet up with Bela at noon the following day, however I wasn’t sure by the way he said it if I was meant to be going with them or not, wherever it was they were going.

We did not surface the next day until pretty late in the morning. The opium that we’d had the day before hadn’t been as strong as the first time we had taken it, so I guess some tolerance must have been already building up. Nevertheless we could still very much feel the effects of it in our systems as we stepped out of our room and into another bright hot Mysore day, where as usual everything seemed to be very busy indeed. Before we walked to the restaurant and our midday breakfast with Bela, we went to change some money. By this stage of the trip my bread situation was not that good, I was down to my last 200 quid, and I still had over two months travelling to get through before my flight home. However Thomas had told me he should have enough to lend me a bit whenever the time came for us to split, which I have to say, despite our ups and downs, was kind of reassuring, even though I didn’t know exactly when that split was going to be or how much I was going to get from him.

Bela appeared for breakfast with a friend of his called Anthony, telling us he was a childhood pal and they had grown up together as neighbours. He asked if I was OK after so quickly disappearing the previous evening and I told him that yes, everything was fine, I had just fancied going back to space out in our room at the lodge ratther than watch Charlie fucking Chaplin, or words to that effect. I then had an interesting conversation with his friend about the education system in India, something which I have to admit I didn’t know much about. Anthony told me that he was unemployed but because he'd had an education he would always have respect from others, friends and family, the usual deal. The problem for him now was that to get any form of decent job in Mysore he needed baksheesh in order to buy his way in and that he did not want to go to find work in Bangalore because it was too big, too much like Bombay. We also talked about football. He liked it very much and he mentioned a recent crowd tragedy which had happened at an English football match in which over 90 people died and which I was not aware of. He said that India was one of the worst nations in the world when it came to football, having won only won one out of its last 40 internationals, which was a pretty dire record in anyone’s book.

Anthony and I finally got onto the subject of drugs and he told me that whilst he smoked weed, opium was too heavy for him. I could certainly see his point on that one! He told me that Mysore was one of the best places in India to smoke weed because in Goa for example, it was now far too much hassle, with the local cops busting innocent people left, right and centre, going down really heavy on them. Whilst recently in Kerala, further on down the coast and where of course we had been holed up for a week in Cochin, the police had apparently marched for 15 days deep into the hill country to burn one of the biggest marijuana plantations in the state. A 15 day march seemed to me like it could cover a hell of a long distance, but I did not question him about this because I wasn't so sure how big Kerala was. He told me that in the process of burning all the dope, the cops had hospitalised two whole villages due to the effects of the smoke that had blown over them, which I have to say was more than believable, even if it was just another display of incredible Indian incompetence.

After spending an hour or so drinking coffees and chai, we all departed from the restaurant to go back to the hotel. The general idea was to have a smoke and then get it together to buy some more marijuana, this time in Mysore of course and not Cochin. We had nearly finished the weed we had brought up with us from there, the result of my endeavours with Phillip, god knows how it had gone so quick but no matter. Bela said that he could get his hands on some good local stuff for 50 rupees a tola. It seemed a little bit on the expensive side but since we would be having it delivered right to our room we could hardly complain. When we stepped outside the streets were full of Saturday shoppers and it was not long before Anthony said goodbye to us because he had friends to meet in another part of town. It turned out that he was the friend who Bela thought would be able to score some acid in Bangalore for our trip up to Hampi. But Anthony happened to mention to Bela that he would not be going to Bangalore for at least another week and so for the moment a spanner was thrown in the works in regard to getting our hands on some psychedelics to take up to those rocky ruins in the north of Karnataka.

When we got back to our room I handed the papers and weed over to Bela for him to roll us a joint. It was a bad habit I was getting into, expecting Bela to do all the work with regard to spliff preparation when I was perfectly capable of doing a good enough job of it myself. Maybe it was psychological, that deep down inside us, both Thomas and I still felt we were the all conquering white skins out in the heat lands whilst poor little Bela black boy was merely our servant. On more than a couple of occasions Thomas had taken the piss out of all the British who had struck so hard their way of life into the Indian sub-continent over the last couple of hundred years. Somehow I had never even thought I was associated with any of it, but maybe in the light of my present actions I would have to think again. But at least it did not look like Bela had picked up on any of my shady sub-conscious thought manoeuvrings because he was actually only too happy to roll a nice big joint from the last of our current supply of weed, and as we sat back and smoked it, Thomas and I once again began to discuss our travel plans.

It now looked very unlikely that we would be able to get any acid to take to Hampi if Anthony was not making the trip to Bangalore for at least another week. That idea of mine however, for us to go there, still seemed to be firmly fixed in Thomas’s mind, not only was he enthusiastic about both of us going, he still wanted Bela to come as well. He thought that it would be a unique experience for us to travel through India with a genuine Indian friend, so much more meaningful than sticking with our own kind, simply rolling along from one to hotel the other. All the same, I guess I was beginning to have serious second thoughts about the whole damn thing. For a start it would be at least 45 degrees in Hampi at that time of year and then there was the fact that Bela didn’t have any money except for a small allowance which his parents gave him and which he almost certainly blew on drugs. That would mean we would have to cover his expenses and I was getting to the stage of my journey where every rupee had to be for myself. But when I put these arguments to Thomas he quickly brushed them aside, saying that he was both strong enough to stand the heat of Hampi and rich enough to support Bela on his own if he had to. There was no getting away from it, Thomas was going to Hampi with Bela whether I liked it or not. It just never ceased to amaze me how it seemed to be me who always came up with the ideas only for Thomas to go and finish them off, usually at the point where I had lost interest in whatever it was I had thought up in the first place.

After we had smoked our final joint of weed Bela told us that if we gave him the money he would go and buy some more for us. He would need 50 rupees for the tola of marijuana plus another 10 rupees travel expenses, and then, just like an angel of darkness and with a voice as smooth as silk, he asked us another question.

“And, er, shall I get some more opium as well yes?”

More opium! Our first tola of course was now long gone, despite the fact it was supposed to have lasted much longer than it had.

“Well?”said Thomas looking over at me, “what do you think?”
“Yeah, yeah, why not?” I replied, “in fact we could get 2 tolas of opium this time instead of just the one!”
“Two tolas?” exclaimed Thomas, “oh man, that’s a lot of pops!”
“Well,” I replied, “if we are going to go to Hampi we’re gonna need something.”
“Ok, ok,” said Thomas turning to Bela, “we buy two more tolas. Chinese!”
“Yes,” replied Bela, “very good! And remember tonight I know a very nice place where we can go. Very nice park in Mysore with underwater music. And tomorrow we can pop some opium again maybe, and see the Maharaja’s Palace. It is Sunday tomorrow and they light the palace up at night. V-E-R-Y nice place to go on opium!”

It was not long after wide eyed Bela had left that I suffered a major freak out. So much of a freak out that it was to be the most serious challenge to my relationship with Thomas since we had originally met up and begun travelling together. I really don’t know how it came about, but I suppose that smoking the last joint of weed must have had something to do with it. It took me by surprise because it brought back with full force the effect of all the opium that we had taken the day before. Once again I could feel it cruising through every vein in my body, and if those veins could have expressed themselves in words, they would no doubt have said,
“N-I-C-E O-N-E!!!” But whilst the renewed effect of the opium brought peace to my body, the effect of the weed wrought havoc on my mind, so that before I knew it I was yet again having a severe attack of paranoia and all the shit which went with it. As I looked around our room I saw that it was, to say the least, in a bit of a sordid state, with weed smoking debris and general waste scattered everywhere. I looked across at Thomas who was now red-eyed and looking completely out of it, I looked down at myself and saw how filthy my clothes were, how I had not even got it together to have a wash that morning. There we were lying around in our own filth and barely able to move in a room which had the shutters firmly pulled down.

Compared to all this, the Basato Lodge in Cochin had been a breeze! Outside it was another hot and sunny southern Karnataka afternoon which we should have been out in and enjoying to the full. Then the realisation struck me with full force that we were on the way to becoming opium addicts and going to completely fuck ourselves up as a consequence. And that was not all. I was suddenly convinced that we were going to get busted by the cops because our activities had surely got a bit too suspicious for the other people in the hotel to ignore, so they had picked up the telephone and made that call. Even if this didn’t happen, it wouldn’t be long before we were so wasted that we would suddenly find that all our stuff had been ripped off and we would be stranded in South India with nothing. Then the authorities, the ones who issued passports, refunded travellers cheques, got us back home and all the rest of it, would abandon us. They would plainly see that we were disciples of the poppy and had most certainly brought our misfortune upon ourselves. Yes, it was a severe attack of panic and it did not take long for everything to turn completely and utterly horrible; our room, the hotel, our smoking, the popping, Bela, Mysore, the heat, India, the whole fucking lot!

“Fuck!” I said to Thomas as I got up off my bed, “we’re going mad, do you realise what we've just done?”

Thomas was lying flat out on his bed and looked like he was a million miles away. He reacted to my panic stricken tone of voice however and came back down to earth with a jolt.

“What do you mean?” he said with a look of complete bewilderment.
“What I mean is that things are getting too much man, way too fucking much!” I said whilst trying to keep control of myself. “A couple of days ago we had never taken opium in our lives, hardly even fucking heard of it. Now we’ve finished our first tola, quite a considerable amount if you think about it, and just ordered two more. Jesus Christ! I really don’t think we know what we're doing!”

Thomas now sat up on his bed, he could see that there was something wrong.

“Oh man,” he sighed, “look at you! Ten minutes ago you were completely calm. It was you who even suggested that we buy more pops, but now you are so full of tension that you can’t handle the situation.”

He was right. I was finding it hard to keep myself under control. It was as if a coup was taking place inside of me. The part that had been open enough to let things go this far was now being overthrown by the sharp shouting generals of supposed common sense and order, the ones applauded by everyone from headmasters to politicians and parents. They were the ones now in control and the picture they painted of the situation was without doubt a very bleak one.

“We should definitely not take any more fucking opium” I said, “just look at us! We already look like a couple of addicts hanging around a dirty room all day and waiting for our next fix.”
“But what about Bela? We’ve just given him 300 rupees to get a bunch more pops. What do we do when he comes back? Say “Oh sorry Bela, we just don’t want it anymore?””
“Yes,” I replied, feeling full of authority, “that is exactly what we fucking say. We tell him that we don’t want to become addicts. We tell him that we don’t want to end up like him!”

Thomas was clearly quite shocked by my uncompromising tone of voice, it left absolutely no room for argument.

“Oh man,” said Thomas, “this is too much! Why didn’t you say something at the time?”
“Because I thought everything was OK at the time!” I replied. “It is only now that I can see things as they are.”
“Ok, ok,” Thomas said in a tone of resignation, “we tell Bela that we don’t want the pops. But we tell him the truth. We tell him that we are afraid of becoming addicts.”
“Yeah, of course,” I said, “we’ll tell it to him straight. Then he can do what he likes with the opium, although I’ll tell him he should stop as well.”

Despite getting Thomas to agree that we should stop popping opium I felt uneasy about the whole situation. It was strange. It was like a bad dream which I had somehow experienced before, where the heat, the atmosphere in our room and the sounds outside all seemed so horribly familiar. All that was needed to complete the scene would be the sight of men uniforms down on the street below, racing up to our room in the hotel.

“Look,” I said after a couple of minutes silence, “I’m definitely going to go to Bangalore tomorrow and then, well, who knows? I may just get a train straight to Delhi and go on up to Dharamsala. And if you’ve got any sense you will come with me.”

All of a sudden the prospect of going up to Dharamsala seemed like the only thing which would save me from complete and utter ruin. It had always been where I said I would finish my trip because I knew that it was where the Dalai Lama stayed in residence and that it was supposed to be a good place for meditation. It was as if I was speaking out loud all the thoughts that had just come into my head, and it was a shock to both of us. Now I was discarding all our previously discussed plans, throwing them all up in the air, and giving Thomas an ultimatum. Either he got the hell out of Mysore with me the very next day, or he stayed on and ran the risk of becoming an opium addict. He slowly, slowly shook his head. He must have found it hard to believe what I was saying. Yet I was deadly serious, as far as I was concerned there was to be more fucking around!

“Why are you saying this?”, he asked me, “I thought that we were going to stay here a few more days and then go to Hampi with Bela. Why are you now panicking?”

Thomas looked completely exasperated over the whole situation.

“It’s great here”, he continued, “we’ve got Bela to show us places that we’d never find on our own. Like tonight with the park and the underwater music!”
“I know, I know,” I said, “but I’ve had enough, and as for Bela, well really he is your friend and not mine. When me and him are together and you're not around, we have hardly anything to say to each other.”

And it was true. It was Thomas who was breaking down all the communication barriers in meeting up with new people, not me. In that respect I had hardly changed through the whole of our trip, and that was because I felt woefully ill equipped to do so, it just was not part of my nature. Somehow with regard to this current situation I felt the answer lay not in confrontation but in retreat and that was why the best thing for me now was to head up north as soon as possible and get to a place where I could do some meditation. Get back on track in other words, re-connect with how the whole deal had started in Kopan monastery in Nepal, whilst if I stayed in Mysore I would just continue to be one of the actors in what was essentially Thomas’s story and not mine.

“But what about us?” he pleaded, “it’s too much to hear you suddenly come up with these things. I don’t know what I am supposed to do!”

It was a mess, the whole situation was a complete fucking mess. All my frustrations that had been building up over the last few days as I watched Thomas and Bela hit it off, along with a whole heap of drugs thrown into the mix as well, had suddenly poured out of me, making it look like I was prepared to abandon him which, in effect, I suppose I was.

“Oh man, oh man,” he sighed and fell into silence.

The rest of the afternoon was a miserable affair. We both just lay about the shuttered room waiting for Bela to return, hardly speaking to each other. Both of us were aware that our travelling partnership could end the very next day if I followed through with my plans and Thomas didn’t go along with them. To try and make myself feel a bit better I went out to take a photograph of the boy at the corner fruit stand. It was something I had promised to do a few days ago and I had just not got round to it. However even this didn’t go as planned, what was supposed to be a simple friendly gesture turned out to be another fuck up. I took the photograph of the boy without much problem, but when he asked me how long it would be before I would be able to give him a copy, I realised he expected me to have my film developed in Mysore, something which I had no intention of doing. He simply didn’t understand when I tried to explain that he would have to wait at least three months for it because I would have to post him a copy from home. He just stood there next to his fruit grinder looking miserable and pathetic over this half understood piece of unwelcome news. And it was impossible to get him to write down his address so that I would know where to post his photo to, and I guess that was because he just might not have an address. It was as if he could hardly get over the disappointment of not having a shot of himself appear there and then, as if by magic right in front of his eyes. After ten minutes or so I gave up and left. Both of us looked completely and utterly depressed by the whole experience, all of which just added to the shit state that I had got myself into.

Bela returned to our room in the early evening. He had a big smile on his face as he reached down into his pockets and pulled two bags of weed and two very black and sticky lumps of opium tightly wrapped in plastic. It seemed completely absurd that we were now going to tell him that we didn’t want it.

“Thank you Bela, thank you,” Thomas said, “but look. We don’t want the opium ok? It is just too much for us. We have both realised that we might become addicted.”
“No, no” Bela replied, looking at us both like we had gone stark raving mad, “no addiction from opium. You take opium, no problem!”

As I listened to his smooth voice I could feel the panic rising, it seemed to me like he could so easily persuade us to pop again.

“Look Bela,” I said, trying hard to keep myself under control, “I know it’s a completely fucked up situation, but we don’t want it ok? If I carry on like I have been I know I’ll end up dependent on it, and I just don’t want that to happen out here. So keep it, it’s yours.”

Poor Bela, it must have seemed inconceivable to him that we could so coolly order two tolas of opium and then when they arrived, turn around and virtually throw them out the window. By the expression on his face it looked as if he thought we were playing some kind of weird trick on him, and that we would soon fall back on our beds and explode with laughter whilst slapping our thighs. But it wasn’t a joke! There were no rabbits waiting to be pulled out of hats, instead all that Bela got was some straight talking from Thomas and myself about the dangers of popping opium every other day and not thinking there was anything wrong in it. By the time we had finished he looked quite shocked, as if had just realised he had picked up two of the biggest fuck ups to stumble into Mysore in quite a long time, which of course would have been more or less spot on. He silently picked up the lumps of opium and put them back in his pocket.

“Aha, we’ll take those,” I said just as he was about to pick back up the two bags of grass as well, “we haven’t gone that far!”

Somehow that broke a little of the tension that had built up and we were all able to have a bit of a laugh. At least if nothing else at the end of the day, there was always the weed. Bela then said that he would try to sell the opium for us, but if he couldn’t he would bring us some presents because he thought it was too much money for us to lose. And in that regard he was absolutely right. The money we had paid out for the opium was to him, and also by this stage to us, quite a large amount, but I guess it was just our good fortune that we could afford to lose it without suffering too much in the way of grief. By the time we had resolved things as far as they could be resolved, it was too late for us to go to the park and listen to the underwater music. It was simply too far out of town and somehow it didn't seem like it was really worth going to unless we took some opium or smoked a bit of weed. However there was still time for us to catch the last show of the day from the Jumbo Circus going on just up the road from our hotel, so we quickly bundled ourselves out of the door and went for it.

It was a great circus! An Indian circus if ever there was one, quite unlike anything I had ever seen before in my life. Bela told us the circus came from Kerala and that it was one of the biggest touring circuses in the whole of India. Hence the name I guess, Jumbo Circus. And he was right. With the acts, the crew, the compares, the musicians, the animal trainers and handlers, and all the other performers, there must have been over a thousand people involved. But despite the very big potential for chaos everything seemed to be so relaxed, yet also pretty slick. The ring master was dressed in a pair of brown trousers and white cotton shirt which meant there was no way to distinguish him from millions of other Indians you would see out on the streets every day going to their places of work. The only way you knew he was ring master was because every so often a microphone would descend from the ceiling of the Big Top, into which he would announce in a most ridiculous accent “Ladies and gentlemen, people of Karnataka. Welcome to Jumbo Circus!” It looked for all the world like he had a great job and not only that, he knew it.

The whole show must have been run on a pretty tight budget because most of the acts looked as if they had been thought up in somebody’s back yard beneath the swaying trees and a hot Indian sun. However they were all performed with such enthusiasm that it was easy to applaud and feel connected to some kind of long lost innocence, whilst also for the more successful ones it was easy to shout for more. Two acts in particular were worthy of mention. There was the wall of death in which two motorcyclists revved up and then went as fast as possible following each other around the sides of a circular construction which was suspended in mid-air to one side of the circus ring. Then halfway through the act they started to go in any direction they wanted, at which point you really felt there was a chance they would end up killing themselves. But if they were mad they were still not nearly as spectacular as the psychedelic coloured jeep which roared in from one end of the circus tent to fly off a ramp and land on the other side of the ring before roaring out of the tent again. The driver of the jeep was wearing a helmet which must have been donated by an Indian space agency and when he left the ring he acknowledged the cheers of the crowd by triumphantly waving his arm in the air. It really was truly amazing!

When we made our way out of the Big Top all our troubles from the afternoon somehow seemed to be forgotten and we walked back to the hotel feeling light and happy. Bela came up to our room for a while and he then arranged with Thomas to call around 11 the next morning. He said that he would bring his tape player so that we could listen to some music, and he also said again that he would bring us some presents for the opium which we had effectively now given him, since the chances of him ever having the inclination to sell it would have been almost negligible. Soon after that, Bela disappeared into the night. There was no further talk between me and Thomas as to what was to happen the next day. I suppose he was waiting to see if I was going to calm down about the opium situation and to loosen up on my plan to head straight up to Dharamsala from Bangalore.

On waking up the following morning my resolution to go to Bangalore held firm. We had now been in Mysore for nearly a week and it definitely felt to me like it had been long enough. It was time to move on to a new scene and leave all the opium popping craziness behind me. One of the privileges of being a Westerner travelling through India was that when things got a bit too much we could always bail out and go to the next place further on down the road. Escape in other words, and that was exactly what I was doing. The trouble was that it looked like I was abandoning Thomas to his fate, because if he was going to hang around I wasn’t going to wait for him. He was clearly disappointed when I told him that I was still going to go to Bangalore. No doubt he had been hoping that I would have a change of mind and hang around Mysore for a few days longer, preferably taking some pops. He told me over breakfast that he was going to stay at least another day in Mysore, hang around with Bela, and that as originally planned he was probably going to pop some opium with him and visit the Maharaja’s Palace in the evening when it was all lit up. All I could do was nod my head.

“Well, that’s up to you then man,” was what I said to him.

Thomas then told me that he would come up to Bangalore the day after, to stay there for at least a night in order to visit the Sai Baba ashram which was supposed to be on the outskirts of the city to the south. After that he said he would go with Bela to Hampi. I remained silent on hearing that particular piece of information, but I wasn’t too happy about the Bela connection because I knew for sure that wherever the little guy went, he was bound to pop some opium. After breakfast I left Thomas and went off to have a haircut which I suppose was some sort of symbolic act since I always felt more together and in control of things after getting myself a good cropping. As I was walking back to the hotel from the barbers a man began to walk close beside me and after a few strides he introduced himself as Sri Daniel Roberts, an astro-palmist from Bangalore. Then after a little bit further along the way, he said that for a small fee he would be happy to read my fortune. I turned my head towards him and gave him a good long look. By his general appearance it looked like he had fallen on hard times. His shirt was dirty, his flares ridiculous and his general body odour none too good, but since things were in such a generally fucked up situation with regard to me and Thomas, I felt it might not do any harm to hear what Sri Daniel had to say about it all. So I agreed to have my palms read and took him back to our room in the hotel.

When I walked in through the door with Daniel behind me Thomas was lying there naked on his bed. Luckily there was a small dirty towel close by which I tossed across for him to cover his bollocks, just to avoid any potential embarrassment. I guess I did it more for my sake than anything else because I knew that Thomas didn’t really give a shit about being nude in front of a stranger and I don’t think Sri Danny Boy would have minded either, as long as got his bucks.

“Look Thomas,” I said, “this is, er, Sri Daniel Roberts and he is going to read my palm OK?”

Thankfully Thomas took the hint and cleared out of the room, saying that he was going to take a shower.

Before we began the reading Daniel Roberts produced a folder from his brief case and he asked to take a look at it. It was full of letters addressed to him from famous people, quite remarkable really if the letters were real. There was one from Margaret Thatcher, and another from Cory Aquino sitting behind her desk, in Manila I supposed. Daniel must have written to them all, predicting they were going to win their elections and then when they did, they obviously wrote back and thanked him. Or something like that. There were literally hundreds of letters and I was impressed by the sheer effort it must have taken him to collect them. When I handed the folder back he asked for a plain piece of paper, and when I gave it him he wrote my name on it. He asked me what my mother’s name was and then he wrote her name on the paper as well. Finally right at the bottom of the piece of paper he wrote what his fee was and handed it over to me. The reading was going to cost me 55 rupees, which I have to admit was pretty pricey.

“Or,” he said to me as I sat there staring at the piece of paper, “you can pay me in dollars if you wish.”
“How much in dollars?” I asked, because it did so happen that I had some.
“Ten” he replied, nodding his head for some reason.
“Ok,” I said, “I’ll pay in dollars.”

In retrospect I don’t know why the hell I said I would pay in dollars as that worked out to be much more expensive than simply paying in rupees but I guess my head was still a little fucked up from all that had gone on over the last few days, specifically the popping of the opium. We then both sat cross legged on my bed facing each other. He took my palm and said to me that I should go and wash it. I had my doubts about leaving him in our room with all our precious money belts lying around and all that, but I felt like I had no choice. I went as quickly as I could to the bathroom to wash my hands, barging in on Thomas.

“Well?” he said, standing under the tap.
“Nothing yet,” I replied and quickly rinsed my hands.

A quick scan of the room when I got back seemed to indicate nothing was out of place so I sat back down on my bed again. After we had each lit up a beedi we got down to business. Daniel started off by telling me that I would be born again as a man and that for this life I would live to be 70 years of age no problem. So far so good, although I suspected that everyone got that kind of line from him. But soon he began to come up with things that in my crazy mixed up mind I thought could have only been applicable to me. He told me that for the last couple of years I had been having problems with my stomach which was true, absolutely spot on in fact. My guts had been playing up for a while, something that I put down to having taken too much bad LSD earlier in the 1980s, in other words acid cut with strychnine. He continued with the reading by telling me in the coming months I would meet someone whose name would have the letter J in it and who might be of Irish origin. Sounded hopeful, intriguing even, and my head was soon filled with visions of bumping into a Celtic beauty on the streets of London when I got back home, an emerald empress who would tell me that I looked like the kind of guy who was into meditation. But that turned out to be the high point of the whole damn reading, because Sri Daniel soon went and spoilt it all by asking me for a prize, as if the money I had already paid him was not enough.

“What kind of prize?” I asked, quite taken aback.
“Any kind of prize,” he replied.
Oh dear, oh dear I thought.
“Well, I haven’t got anything,” I told him, finding it difficult not to start getting annoyed.
“Oh please,” he said, “anything! You must have something that you can give to me. You see I have a sister who is very ill in Madras and she needs medicine.”

“Oh Danny boy, Danny boy,” I thought to myself sadly, “you really don’t have any shame do you?” I looked about the room to see if there was anything I could give to him which I wouldn’t miss. The only thing I could come up with was the copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens which I had bought in something of a stoned haze in Ernakulum a couple of weeks ago and which I had found simply impossible to get into. It was something I was never going to get to finish in South India and it seemed absurd to still carry it around with me.

“Well, all I can give you is this book!” I said to him as I picked it up and handed it over to him as his prize. Now it was his turn to be slightly taken aback, but when he saw that it was all he was going to get from me he silently put it in his briefcase. He would have no problems flogging it on to someone after all. We did not have that much more to say to each other after I had given him the book. I could not come up with any more questions to ask him about my life so we just sat on the bed and smoked a couple more beedis. Before he left he gave me a mantra which I was supposed to say nine times every day. Something about invoking the cosmic forces into my body and asking for divine guidance. Spacey stuff for sure, but by this point I had lost quite a bit of interest in the whole damn business because Sri Daniel’s shameless begging for a prize had really pissed me off. In fact the piece of paper he wrote for me also contained his contact address in Bangalore if ever I should need it, something which I very much doubted.

I bring cosmic forces into my body asking for strength, protection and guidance.

D. Roberts
c/o S.M. Row
1 Brigad Road
Bangalore 1
560001

When Sri Daniel left I found that Bela and Thomas were waiting on the balcony outside. Bela was all dressed up in something like his Sunday best which meant today he looked more than a little like Michael Jackson, and he had a plastic bag of goodies in his hand. But he had a worried look on his face and I guess that Thomas must have told him that I was going to split.

“So what did this guy say?” Thomas asked as we stepped back inside the room.

He was looking at me closely, maybe to see if it meant that there would be any change in my plans. I told him all that Daniel had said to me, suddenly feeling a little foolish, as what he had told me wasn’t much at all, and hardly worth 10 fucking bucks, let alone a copy of Great Expectations thrown in as a bonus. Then I finished up by saying that I was still going to go to Bangalore that very day.

“Why?” asked Bela, “why are you going?”
“Oh man,” Thomas said to me, “you are so overreacting!”

Listening to both of them made me feel like I was a betrayer, that I was abandoning them to their fate, and I could feel the panic of yesterday afternoon rising up inside me again.

“Look,” I said, as I lit another beedi, “I’m not going to stay here because I’m afraid I’ll start popping opium again. And I am not going to hang around to watch the both of you pop either. If you want to become opium addicts then that is fine, go ahead, just don’t expect me to hang around and to pick up the pieces.”

No matter how forcefully I spoke, it still felt like I was letting them down. It was an intolerable situation but I knew that I was going to have to leave. If I had chosen to stay, then the part of me who had been so in control of things since yesterday would have simply gone berserk.

“Ok, ok,” said Thomas, when he realised I had reached the point of no return, “but at least think about things when you get to Bangalore. Don’t go and get on the first train to Delhi. I really don’t think it would be good if you went to Dharamsala right now. Just think about things whilst you are in Bangalore. Think about our relationship, you have to take some responsibility. After all Phil, it was your idea to come to Mysore and it was your idea for us to go to Hampi. So please think about things, that is all I ask.”

After listening to his words I had little choice but to calm down. He was right! All I was really doing was running away from situations which I had helped to create in the first place and then fucking things up for others in the process.

“Sure,” I replied, suddenly feeling quite desolate, “I’ll wait for you in Bangalore and we’ll see what happens.”

It was really the least that I could do. If I had quit the scene and then taken myself all the way up north, it would most certainly have looked like I was abandoning Thomas to his fate. Just going to Bangalore was at least keeping things in proportion, it was only 150 km or so up the road, just a couple of hours away on the express bus from Mysore.

Everything calmed down again after this compromise had been struck. Bela had set up his ghetto blaster in the room and we sat back listening to the sounds of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and for me and Thomas at least, some long lost friends in the form of Midnight Oil. Sweet Jesus, I sure had missed The Oils since that fuck up with the Walkman back at the Basato Lodge! Bela also handed out some small presents in exchange for all the free opium he was getting off us. Thomas got a yellow and grey striped sweat shirt which suited him just fine, going perfectly with his blond hair. I got a dark blue t-shirt with an eagle and the words USA written on the front of it, which for some reason made me wonder if I would have been Republican or Democrat. I guess it must have been strange for Bela to have witnessed Thomas and I talking so intensively and for me to have flipped my lid. Just what kind of a guy did he think I was? It was only a few days ago since he had picked us up, and at the time he must have thought we were just another pair of happy of travellers ready for a bit of a good time in Mysore. It had not really turned out like that however, the scenes between me and Thomas had seen different forces at play and on closer analysis it probably didn’t really bear thinking about.

As he lay there on the bed with Stairway to Heaven blasting out of his tape player, Bela looked quite thoughtful, but then again he should have. A lot of what had been said between me and Thomas was actually more relevant to him than it was to us. After all it was Bela who was the one who had been popping opium for the last few years, he was the one with the wasted body thin as a stick, and he was the one with the deep, dark, yet at the same time yellow eyes which told you he had spent many hours of his life living in a different world to most other people. In many ways he behaved like he was a lot younger than his 21 years, more like a boy than a man, but then again there were times when he looked so old that me and Thomas seemed like babies in comparison to him. So he really did need to hear all that had been said, and although Thomas and I were probably going to end up a pair of kaputniks by the time we got to the end of our trip, we cared enough about our fates to go down fighting, or at least I did!

Gradually I got myself together to make a move, chain smoking virtually a whole packet of beedis in the process which made me feel so fucking sick that I had to go to the fruit stand outside our hotel for a nice fresh fruit juice to clear my throat. At the stand there was an Indian who spoke a bit of English so I took the opportunity to ask him to tell the boy that I wanted his address so that I could mail him his photo in a few months time. It turned out to be another scene of complicated negotiation but in the end I managed to get the information I needed, all scrawled on the back of a cigarette packet. The boy was illiterate and I had to get the Indian to write everything down for me, but at least this time I think I had succeeded in getting what was needed. When I got back to the room we made arrangements to meet the following night in Bangalore. Bela gave me instructions on how to get to a bar on the Mahatma Gandhi High Road in the centre of town and we would meet there at 7pm. By the time I had got my stuff together and taken one of the two bags of weed which Bela had bought for us the day before, it was early afternoon. Bela said there was a train to Bangalore at 3pm so the three of us had time to go for a final meal in Mysore. Both Bela and Thomas had gone and popped some more opium again, in fact Thomas had told me that after some careful consideration he was going to now keep one of the tolas we had given Bela. He also assured me there would be no problem with him being together enough to haul his sorry ass up to Bangalore the next day, but still I had my doubts.

“Well, I hope so man,” I said to him, “because I ain’t fucking coming back for you if you don’t make it.”

When we got to the railway station after our food, it soon became obvious that Bela had fucked up on the train timings because the one which he thought left at 3 pm for Bangalore simply didn’t exist. We now sped across town in an auto-rickshaw to the central bus station where I could get a coach instead. It was a chaotic ride through the cow filled back streets with Bela and Thomas already smashed from the pops, and me in the middle of them with my trusty old rucksack slung horizontally across the three of our laps. The bus station was a scene of Indian madness which, as it was now mid afternoon, I guess was only to be expected. There was a horrendously long queue of people for the express bus to Bangalore but somehow Bela in his opiate state managed to get me a ticket, which meant I was able to get the last seat on the bus which was just about to leave the station. By the time I took my place on the back row I was covered in sweat and feeling sick from all the beedis I had smoked in the room, along with all the food I had just eaten. I turned around to look out the window but Thomas and Bela had already disappeared. Now I was on my own!

When I arrived in Bangalore I felt a mess, still ill from all the beedis I had smoked earlier in the day and guilty because of what I had left behind in Mysore. The bus ride had also taken longer than I had expected and I did not reach there until early evening. The central bus station was right in the middle of town and as I made way through it with my rucksack slung over my shoulder, already beginning to sweat again, it was as if I was severely under prepared for the chaos which awaited me. Bangalore was a big, big city with high rise buildings stretching up into the sky and what seemed to be thousands of people on the sidewalks pushing and shoving their way past countless multi-coloured shops and restaurants. There were also hundreds of street sellers with all manner of things for sale displayed on the ground in front of them. And of course there was some heavy duty Indian traffic on the roads as well; state and inter-state buses, lorries, petro chemical road tankers, cars, taxis, auto-rickshaws, cows and of course the odd bullock cart. All speeding around in the dust and making a hot place hotter, with their roaring engines pumping out fumes and no end of other shit to wash out your lungs with. It was on a different scale to Mysore which suddenly seemed like a small town in comparison, and in my current state it seemed to me that Bangalore was pushing itself to the brink, so all I could do was walk right into it.

Most of the cheap hotels listed in my Lonely Planet were in the area directly opposite the central station, but because I hadn’t bothered to study it closely before getting off the bus, I wandered around somewhat aimlessly, spoilt for choice in one sense but in another dreading whatever the choice it was that I was going to make. It was hopeless, I just could not get it together to go in and check out any of the places I walked past. They all looked dusty, dirty and downright depressing and all the time I spent looking at them I was getting more and more tired and also very thirsty. In the end I had to give up and let a street kid lead me to a lodge which obviously turned out to be a shithole, but by this stage I was really too tired to give a fuck. Besides, the kid was black and filthy, and looked like he could do with the rupees he would get for taking me there. After the last arrival episode in Mysore with Thomas, I was hopefully beginning to learn a few lessons with regard to the plight of my fellow man, boy even, although I doubted it. I took a single room for 30 rupees a night. It was at the top of about four flights of stairs and when I finally got inside I flung my rucksack on the floor, sat at the end of the bed and put my head in my hands. Outside it was starting to get dark and everything was horribly hot and noisy. Bang fucking bang - Welcome to Bangalore! The walls of my room were covered in obscene drawings of male and female genitals with little requests written by the side of them in very bad English. Just like what you would find in a hundred thousand public shithouses back home in other words. My god I thought, how depressing, having to lie down with a spunking cock above my head. I tried to be philosophical about it, somewhere along the line I must surely have created the causes and conditions for spending a night in such a room and so now here I was, ready for action.

After resting for an hour or so I went out to look for something to eat and drink. The polluted city air of Bangalore had dried me right up and I could have poured gallons of cold water down my throat at that precise moment in time but would still have wanted more. Glug, glug, gluggy! I walked through the crowded streets trying to find a decent drinks stand and just when I hit the main drag in that part of town, a man started walking close beside me.

“Hello,” he said, “are you English?”
“Yes,” I replied, wondering how he knew.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Philip”, I replied, preparing myself for one of those typical Indian interrogations - What is your country? What is your age? Are you travelling alone? How long have you been travelling? What do you think of our country? Are you married? Why aren’t you married? But it didn’t happen, he just simply told me that his name was John David.

“That’s a strange name!” I said as I stopped at a drinks stand and turned round to look at him for the first time.

He was fairly tall, about the same height as me, very dark skinned and with big sad eyes. Somehow he didn’t look like he was from around Bangalore. His clothes were ragged and he had obviously been wearing them for a very long time because he stank. On his head he wore a bobble hat which struck me as being more than a little odd since it seemed to me that Bangalore was one of the last places on earth where you would have needed to keep your head warm. It was if all the filth in Bangalore had been rolled up in a ball and kicked into his face where it had broke into a thousand pieces to completely cover his body. I ordered a drink and got him one as well because it looked like he needed one just as much as I did. And he did, because when he picked up his glass of juice he downed it all in one go, then after I had finished mine we started walking again.

John David told me that in fact he came from Burma where he had been born into a rich Roman Catholic family which accounted for his somewhat unusual name. A few years ago there had been some troubles and his family had been forced to leave the country, coming to India as refugees. His parents were now dead and due to one misfortune after another he now lived in Bangalore central bus station. On top of all that he had recently contracted bronchitis for which he needed medical treatment. The hospitals had barely looked at him, he told me, but the good news was that he had the address of a hospital in Cape Comorin, Tamil Nadu. It was run by a Swedish doctor and he was sure that if he got down there he would be able to stay at the hospital and receive some much needed treatment. All that he required was 120 rupees for the bus fare. He said to me that he had told his story to many wealthy Indians but they had all, without exception, told him to fuck off, or words to that effect. Now he was telling it to me, and would it be possible he asked, for me to give him the 120 rupees? By the time he had finished we were sitting on a bench outside a big municipal building which lay some distance away from the crowded streets. Yet again I found myself in what seemed to be an intolerable situation, I just did not know what the hell I was supposed to do. The chances were that John David was lying through his dirty teeth, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that he might have been telling the truth. And if he was telling the truth and I rejected him it would all be just too horrible for words.

“Look man,” I said, after a period of intensive thought, “I can afford to give you 60 rupees, but really that is all I can spare.”

He didn’t take the offer. Instead he said to me in a voice which was quite despairing, that he would fall down on his knees if he had to and beg me to give him the full fare. If he was telling the truth I suppose it would have been pointless for him to settle for anything less, because he needed to get out of Bangalore as quickly as possible. Yet it was also quite possible that as a con merchant he had sized me up pretty fast and simply decided to go for it, shit or bust. On top of his pleading, John David was giving off a monster-like smell which was making me feel quite sick, and it was getting to the point where I would have given 120 rupees just to get away from the stink. After a few more minutes deliberation I realised I was going to have to give him the full whack.

“OK, John David,” I said in a tone of deep resignation, “I’ll give you the 120 rupees. I only hope you use it to get to Tamil Nadu.”

I did not know what else to say. It would have been too pathetic for words if I had asked him to promise that he wasn’t lying to me. The only thing which I was tempted to say to him was that I was a practitioner of black magic and I would soon find out by way of using my hidden powers if what he had told me was true or not. If I found out that he was lying to me I would make sure he was dead within a week! But of course I was too chicken to say anything like that and it wasn’t true anyway, so John David soon disappeared into the Bangalore evening madness clutching his precious notes. It was then that I realised what a stupid fucker I was. The simple way to have found out whether he was bullshitting me or not, would have been to go and buy the bus ticket for him in order to get to Cape Comorin, but for some reason I hadn’t thought of that! My encounter with John David left me feeling exhausted so I went straight back to my seedy hotel room to crash out. On the way I walked past what seemed like hundreds of people sleeping on the pavements, right next to all the filth and noise of the traffic on the streets. Although I had only been in town for a couple of hours, Bangalore was turning out to be a bit of a hardcore Indian city. It made me feel grateful for at least having a bed to go back to, shithole or no shithole, and despite the depressing surroundings I managed to get a very good night’s sleep.

The next morning I got up early and did exactly what I had promised Thomas I wouldn’t do, and that was to try to buy a ticket for the first available train up to Delhi. It was still firmly fixed in my mind that the only sensible thing for me to do was to head up north, regardless of what I was leaving behind. OK, if I got a train that day and left Thomas and Bela behind, I would definitely be doing the dirty on them, but so what? That was just the way things went, tough shit and all that, people move on. Things did not turn out that way however because going down to the railway station and buying a ticket to Delhi was not as simple as I thought. When I reached the ticket office and spoke to the guy behind the counter, he told me that all the trains to Delhi were booked up for at least the next three weeks. He said that I could still buy a ticket for the day that I wanted to travel on, only I would have to go next door and show the ticket to the public relations officer. He would then give me an emergency quota form and, because I was a foreign tourist, it would probably mean that I would get a place on the train. So I went ahead and bought a ticket for the train to Delhi which left the next day. I decided that the least I could do was wait for Thomas, tell him to his face that I was going, rather than him finding out I was gone by my absence when he arrived in town later that evening.

When I went to the office next door for the emergency quota form the place was deserted however, and I was told that the public relations officer would not be in for at least another couple of hours. I looked at my watch and saw that it was only 7.30. Nevertheless I hoped it wasn’t going to turn into one of those situations where I just got completely fucked around in the heat, being told to go here, there and every other fucking place apart from the one I needed to go to. But it seemed pointless to wait, so I would just have to take their word for it, that the public relations officer would indeed turn up. So I decided that I could kill some time by going to check out the bar on the Mahatma Gandhi High Road where I supposed to meet up with Bela and Thomas that evening. It was a long, long walk to MG Road. Not because I got lost, but simply because Bangalore was such a big city, with countless shops, offices, government buildings, parks, roundabouts and even a racecourse. It was a bit too much to do on foot and I really should have got an auto-rickshaw, then I might have been more impressed by all that I passed, instead of stubbornly staying on foot and getting more and more distressed over the immense distance I ended up having to cover.

When I eventually stumbled onto MG Road it turned out to be a modern, trendy part of the city with plenty of boutiques, cinemas, restaurants, bars and coffee shops. All the usual stuff you would find back home in other words. But amongst it all, it was simply impossible for me to find the bar which Bela had mentioned, leaving me more than slightly concerned because I was usually pretty good in searching out new locations. The more I walked around looking in vain, the more suspicious I became. Maybe the place simply did not exist and Bela had lied to me because he knew that once I was out the way, it would be easy to persuade Thomas to stay with him and carry on popping opium, all whilst he free loaded on the back of Thomas’s remaining money until it was gone. “Oh Bela boy, Bela boy, you better not be fucking me around!” I grimly thought to myself, trying not to let such stuff rise up inside me whilst I stood there on a street corner in the bright Bangalore morning sun. For the moment there was nothing I could do, I could not find the place and that was that. I would just have to come back in the evening and hope that I ran into the both of them, so I went for a coffee and an omelette before taking an auto-rickshaw back to the train station.

When I got to the office I was given an emergency quota form to fill out, which I was then supposed to post in the letter box, only to return the next day to see if my application had been successful or not. As I studied my ticket to copy down the relevant information onto the form, I realised that I had bought an ordinary ticket for the journey to Delhi and not one which included a sleeper reservation. This meant that even if my application was successful, I would only get a seat and not a sleeping berth. In turn that would mean 36 hours sitting on a wooden bench in a carriage with say, just for good measure, ten to fifteen other people as we slowly hauled ourselves up through the heart of India. All in the middle of the hot season as well! “Ooh, no. No, no, no!” I thought to myself, it just wasn’t on. My powers of endurance were still at the stage where I couldn’t help thinking that if I went for it, then somewhere along the line I would have to be stretchered off the train. There was only one thing to do and that was to take my ticket back to the counter and get a refund. Just forget the whole thing had happened and that I had never really meant to abandon Thomas to his fate at all. In fact it would be best not to mention this little episode to him, because his respect for me would no doubt only further diminish if I did.

I soon paid the price for my little misadventure because getting a refund on the train ticket turned out to an Indian experience to learn from. The first lesson of course is never go to the ticket office of a mainline Indian railway station in the middle of the day. If you are stupid enough to do so you only have yourself to blame when you stagger out of there a few hours later a gibbering wreck. Yes, what I am trying to say is that it took a long time for me to get that refund. People in India know how to queue in a straight line until about 5 or 6 places from the front, then everything expands disconcertingly into a crowd which gets into such a confused state of shouting and jostling that it becomes easy for cheating newcomers to step in and get served before all the other people who have been waiting for ages and ages. It is both chaotic and pathetic at the same time, and after this has gone on for quite some while it becomes a desperate struggle to hold on to your dignity and not try to head butt anyone who wants to push past you. When I finally succeeded in getting things sorted it felt like it was an episode that I would never want to repeat ever again.

Back in my hotel room the midday light which streaked in through the barred window unmistakably confirmed that I had landed myself in a truly disgusting shithole and that the only thing to do was get the hell out of there. My Lonely Planet recommended a place which was just a few streets away so I slung my stuff together and shifted across to it without hanging around any longer, unless that is I wanted to top myself. This new hotel had only double rooms available, but they were clean and cheap so I took one. It turned out to be one of those rooms with no outside windows, just a pane of glass looking onto the corridor, an inner room in other words, but it was painted in a somewhat soothing green colour and its high ceiling gave it a cool, spacious atmosphere. The only thing I could do at that point was lie on my bed and roll myself a nice big joint because it was time to try the weed which Bela had scored for us in Mysore. It was a nice smoke, not as strong as the Kerala grass maybe, which had got me so stoned the only thing I could do was sit on a chair with my mouth open and my head tripping into ever appearing new worlds of stoned visions. As the effect of the marijuana descended upon me I was able for the first time to reflect on the events of the last few days and see things from a new perspective. I was grateful for the opportunity to analyse things from a distance and to face up to the fact that I had possibly somewhat overreacted. Things did not appear quite so drastic now as they had seemed in Mysore, or at the start of the day even, when I had rushed down to buy that train ticket to Delhi. Whatever threat had existed seemed to have disappeared. It was just as well I was still in Bangalore and had not somehow made it onto that train to Delhi because suddenly I felt alright, just like the old Phil again.

“Boy,” I said to myself, “I’ll even have another pop of opium if the chance comes along!”

Now it just remained to be seen if any lasting harm had been done to my relationship with Thomas. After feeling I had regained some kind of overview on the whole situation, I was able to turn my attention to Opium Bongos, a poem which I had begun to write in Mysore but which had somehow got forgotten amongst all the self-induced trials and tribulations of the last couple of days. It felt good to work on it for a few hours and I had high hopes that it might turn out to be a good one!

In the early evening I was back on MG Road watching the early evening Bangalore street life pass by in front of me when I ran into Bela outside a tape booth which was blasting out Like a Prayer, the new Madonna album. Bela was dressed up in his big city kit of white baseball boots, tight black jeans and a hooded yellow sweatshirt out of which his dark face shone. It turned out that the bar he had mentioned was not actually on the high road but down a tree lined side street, so it was little wonder that I hadn't found it. It didn’t matter now, I was relieved to see him and instantly regretted all those suspicious thoughts I'd had about him earlier in the day. When I met Thomas, who was standing outside the bar, we smiled at each other, smiles which seemed to say “Well, it’s a strange world sometimes isn’t it? No matter how much we might try to fuck things up!” He told me they had arrived in town earlier in the afternoon and had got a room in a lodge close to the bus station, the same part of town where I was holed up. Since Thomas and I didn't really drink alcohol we skipped the bar and went for a coffee instead. When we all sat down beneath the bright lights of the coffee shop I could see that they had popped some opium again. But it was alright, after the smoke of the weed I’d had that afternoon I was in no mood scold them.

“For the bus ride,” Thomas said, as if it needed some kind of explanation.

They proceeded to tell me that the Maharaja’s Palace had been great the night before, covered in thousands of lights and shining like a jewel in the crown of a warm Mysore evening. Thomas and Bela had sat for a couple of hours in its grounds, high on opium and smoking grass. It sounded great and I now wished that I had kept my cool and hung around to experience it with them. As we went through the process of trading information with regard to what we had been up to for the last twenty four hours, all I could really say was that Bangalore was a big city and that I thought I had been conned out of 120 rupees by a man called John David who claimed to be a refugee from Burma. Thomas then told me that in his German travel guide it had mentioned such a character and that it warned tourists to stay away from him. Well that was that then, my name could now be added to the list of people who John David had suckered! It made me feel like I had just been thrown down a sewer and what a dirty stinking world it was down there, but at least on my part it had all been done the best intentions. I decided not to mention the various little trips I had made down to the railway station during the course of the day in order to see about going to Delhi, but even so by the time we reached the end of all the small talk, an uneasy silence had descended upon us.

We were aware that my freaking out in Mysore and coming to Bangalore on my own a day early had caused a rift to take place. Now it was Thomas and Bela who were the travellers staying in the same room and eating together, whilst I was the stranger and possibly someone who was not to be trusted. It wasn't a particularly pleasant feeling but there was little that I could do about it. What was done was done. At least I now felt calm inside and was quite prepared to hang around Bangalore for a few days with the both of them, then maybe even go to Hampi as originally planned back in Mysore. However I couldn't quite get it together to tell them there and then that everything was fine now, the freak outs had passed, because somehow the effort to bridge the distance seemed a little too much. No doubt this was probably because of the weed I’d smoked that afternoon, coupled with the fact Thomas and Bela both looked rather pale and were clearly still riding the effects of the opium. It was something which time could only sort out, not words, and until then I would just have to live with the fact that in their eyes I was probably little better than an angry neurotic parent who was not particularly cool to hang out with.

After our session in the coffee house we sat for a while on a bench watching all the people and traffic pass on by up and down the busy MG Road. Thomas told me he would probably go with Bela and try to see Sai Baba the next day, and then, depending on whether Sai Baba was in or not, he would decide what to do next.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said when he had finished, “we’ll just see what happens.”

I guess this was my way of saying to him that I still wanted to stick around and that I had now abandoned all attempts to make a quick escape up to Delhi and then onto Dharamsala, despite my best efforts. After we arranged to meet at 10 the following morning at my hotel, in order to see if we could all get a triple room, Thomas and Bela went to see a movie because they were still high on opium. I went back to my place in an auto rickshaw and back in my room I was once again able to pull out Opium Bongos and give it another couple of hours work.

When I emerged the next morning from the inner room of my hotel, I had somehow forgotten that I was staying in the middle of a big hot city, full of bright tumble down noise and chest breaking fumes. The re-awakening felt quite painful as I stumbled down the stairs to the restaurant next door for a breakfast of iddlys, sambhar and coffee. By the time it was 10 in the morning Thomas and Bela had shifted themselves across to my hotel, and despite the fact they had spent the last six days popping opium non-stop, they both appeared remarkably bright and cheerful. They put all their stuff in my room because we were going to have to wait a while before we all moved into the triple room. The hotel had a 24 hour check out and we were told that the occupants of the only one available would not be leaving until the late afternoon so we wouldn't be able to shift until then. Bela was soon out on the streets again. He told us that he was obliged to visit his relatives who lived in Bangalore or his family would never forgive him, the commitments of a middle class Indian boy were clearly quite strong, even when the boy in question happened to be one who was addicted to opium. He also said that he hoped to visit one of his friends who had lived for a while at Sai Baba’s ashram which lay to the south of Bangalore and that if he did meet up, he could ask him to take us there. This all sounded pretty cool to me and Thomas so we arranged to meet him later that afternoon, around 4 back in the room. Once all this had been sorted Bela disappeared from sight and into the city, his white baseball boots skipping out the door.

Thomas needed to go to the bank and since, somewhat miraculously, he still wanted to give the 100 dollars he had offered me in Mysore, we went off together. We had to make our way back to the MG Road so we decided to take a bus because it was too long to go in an auto-rickshaw without it costing nearly 10 rupees, which for a pair of bums like us in our current states of dereliction seemed way too expensive. Unfortunately the standard of service offered by the Bangalore City Bus Corporation turned out to be disappointingly low. The bus we rode on had too many passengers, far too many passengers, and it meant the temperature inside was about the same as what it would have been like on the side of Mercury which faced the Sun. It was also one of those buses that seemed to stop at the slightest pretext, and it would then take quite a while to start back up again. This was due to the general panic and confusion which seemed to be caused by so many people getting on and off. Somehow the whole set up seemed truly pathetic, and I couldn’t help thinking the indignant thoughts of someone who had lived for many years in cities in the West, where well developed public transport systems were the order of the day. It must have been hellish if you had to go through all that as a commuter in Bangalore, day in day out with no respite in sight. When we finally got off the bus at the end of our ride we were both shocked, bruised and bad-tempered. Yet again India had shown how easily it could take us both completely by surprise and find us wanting.

It took us quite a while before we found a place where we were able to change money. It was one of those situations where you came across everything apart from what you were actually looking for. Thankfully, just before we got to the point of walking around in the heat and shouting curses too obscene to mention, we found what we were after. For me it had been a close one! After Thomas had completed his transactions he handed me 1500 rupees which was very nice of him indeed, and I quickly stashed it into my money belt. The notes now inflated it to an impressive size, easing my poor little rundown mind which had entertained plenty of bleak visions in which I was staggering around India with nothing left to my name. It was over coffee and omelettes that Thomas and I talked for the first time about the scenes which had occurred between us in Mysore and the events of the last few days. Everything was now OK, I assured him. Totally cool! My mind had stopped freaking out and the sergeant major in me had gone home, back to his bleak cell of perverted moral living. The main thing I felt sorry about was having so little trust in either Bela or himself.

“You know how it is,” I said “I just had this one interpretation fixed in my mind of what was going on, and it simply overrode everything else. It led me to behave the way that I did. What can I say, y’ know? It’s just how things happened.”

I knew that Thomas was not going to let me off that easily, and whilst he was relieved that I had now come back down to earth, he was disturbed by the way I had changed the levels of our relationship. I had acted in a way which made it look as if what there was between us meant nothing; the time we had spent together, our experiences of places and people throughout the course of our trip. It was tough for me to listen to him. His words were true for sure, and they made me feel sick with myself because of the way I had been so obsessed with saving my own skin. I sat at the table with my head hung low, rubbing my hands across my face as Thomas hammered the point home again and again that I would have to cool down if I wanted to emerge from such experiences with any degree of dignity. I was determined not to scold myself over what happened, because there was no point in awakening those taunting demons which lurked inside me. It would be too self-destructive and pointless, an unnecessary act of aggression on myself. The only thing for me to do was hope that if similar circumstances arose in the future, I would be more detached from the various interpretations which could be drawn and not jump to the wrong conclusions. Yes, that was the best I could hope for, so I should leave it at that. When we were both satisfied with what our Mysore post-mortem had dug up, we decided that we would definitely go to Hampi together and then from there we would make our way to Bombay. Once we had reached that point, Thomas would probably go off exploring in Rajasthan whilst I would finally head up to Dharamsala and hit those hills. So, there was still life in our relationship yet, as a pair of punk ass bums making our way up through the mighty land of India with all the countless fuck-ups such a journey entailed.

Once we were outside and on the streets again, we went to check out some music shops because Thomas wanted to buy a tape for Bela. I could see he was starting to get sentimental over him and that in his mind Bela was a really nice kid. To me it all seemed a bit over the top, too much of a good thing, as Thomas was already picking up the tab for all of Bela’s expenses in Bangalore and of course had no doubt paid to bring him along from Mysore. But Thomas was Thomas, and I guess it was better to be generous like him rather than someone like me who screamed every time anyone went near his wallet. We soon found a place with a good tape selection and it seemed like all the big record companies such as Warners, CBS and EMI were beginning to make headways into the Indian market because in many ways it was just like being in a place in the West.

“Maybe this one,” Thomas said, picking up The Doors tape, Morrison Hotel.
“Too depressing,” I replied, “you should get him this”.

I handed Thomas a copy of Delicate Sound of Thunder by Pink Floyd.

“He’d be much more into this.”
“Mmmmm...”, replied Thomas, not too convinced. “I think he more likes The Doors.”

Well, if it had been me I would have bought Bela the Pink Floyd tape. It was a live double with all their classics on it, even if Roger Walters was no longer with them. Bela would have loved it, because I remembered how much he had raved about Pink Floyd when he had played us Wish You Were Here at the meditation centre in Mysore. And on top of that it had a really great cover!

“Yes,” said Thomas, “I buy him this one.”

With that he handed over the copy of Morrison Hotel to the shop assistant. Wrong decision, and as we walked out of the shop I glumly thought that maybe my opinion did not count for much with Thomas anymore, that I was still partly in disgrace because of recent behaviour. Shame! The Doors after all were a bit overrated and hadn’t dated that well since their demise at the end of the 60’s, at least that was what I thought, whilst Pink Floyd, well, what can you say? They were fucking great! By the time we got back to the hotel it was early afternoon and we had a couple of hours to wait before Bela was due to come back. Thomas lay on one of the beds in my room and fell asleep, which quite frankly didn't surprise me. I thought it was about time that things caught up with him after all the pops of opium he had taken. It gave me the chance to once again turn my attention to Opium Bongos. If I cleaned up some of the rhymes and shuffled a couple of parts around a bit, I was sure it would turn out to be the best thing I had ever written. And all the more satisfying it would be too after the somewhat painful Song of Ernakalum from Cochin, an attempted piece which had taken up so much of my time in the Basato Lodge only to still end up seemingly going nowhere.

When Bela returned he brought Suresh with him, the friend of his that he had gone to meet, he was slightly built, just like Bela, and gave off a nice initial vibe. Dressed in sneakers and jeans, shirt and baseball cap he looked cool, well used to life in a city like Bangalore, and considering the type of city Bangalore was, that was no mean achievement. After a short period of time in his company you knew that Suresh wasn’t the kind of person who would lie to you, rip you off, or do anything like that. It embarrassed me to think what Bela might have told him about the events of the last few days. But as Bela sat there on the bed I suddenly had the feeling that he hadn’t told Suresh anything, and so I began to look at him through a new pair of eyes. He too, I suddenly realised, was an honest person and all the time it had been my fear and paranoia which had made me distrust him. As they sat next to each other Bela told us that Suresh was going to take us all to Sai Baba’s ashram which was 16 km or so out of town. It felt good to know that me and Thomas would be going with them, it would be more like a little adventure than just the usual lonely trek through strange parts of a strange city and into its equally strange hinterlands. Thomas asked Bela what the situation was with regard to the opium and as soon as the question was asked, Bela pulled out a sticky black lump from his pocket wrapped in plastic. That was what was left of the tola they had kept.

“Mmmm,” said Bela, closely surveying the piece, “four pops I think.”
“Ok, ok, I take a pop now,” said Thomas.
“Yes, yes,” replied Bela, “why not?”

When Suresh said that he was into taking some as well, it suddenly seemed stupid for me not to join them. There was enough for four after all, and somehow I was sure it would be an experience I would look back upon with fondness in the years to come, especially if things went well and we all got to meet Sai Baba!

“Er, look Bela I think I’ll take some as well OK?”

Bela looked at me with some surprise but soon smiled.

“Philip,” he said, “you want to pop?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I replied, looking at him and then looking over at Thomas, “the crisis has been overcome.”
“Oh, very good,” Bela replied warmly before we all laughed together.

He had soon rolled four black balls and after we'd ordered coffees on room service to wash them down with, we popped the balls of opium. It then seemed like a good idea to smoke some weed, just to get the show on the road before we left to catch the bus. That way we would turn up at Sai Baba’s place not only high on opium, but stoned off our heads as well. Nice one! Bela quickly and expertly rolled a couple of joints from the Mysore grass which were soon being passed around between the four of us. Just before we left I took some shots of Thomas, Bela and Suresh with my camera, all three of them wrecked, and wrestling with each other on the beds. Of course I promised that I would send them copies as soon as I got the film developed when I got back home, and it warmed my heart to imagine later basking in the glow of such precious memories.

By the time we stepped out of the hotel and onto the streets, we were all pretty much out of it from the weed, whilst also excitedly aware that the effect of the opium would soon rise up from deep within our systems. The four of us walked along with a special feeling of closeness, Bela and Suresh leading the way, arm in arm and laughing together. Thomas and I, although not quite arm in arm, were both wearing the shirts Bela had given us, whilst Bela was wearing a blue striped shirt I had lent him after he told me how much he liked it. All in all it was close to being the perfect picture. This time our bus experience was a good one, which just goes to show how dangerous it is to sometimes form opinions about things you only scratch the surface of. We were able to get seats, which was fortunate, because after what seemed like a very short time the effect of the opium powered on through all of us. As the bus made its way through the endless urban sprawl of southern Bangalore, I felt so incredibly relaxed that I was convinced I would have been able to quite calmly accept something as heavy as my death happening to me right there and then. And maybe that was it, if you could always have no qualms about dying in whatever the situation you happened to be in, then you might be some way along the path to liberation. Liberation from all the pain and suffering which seem so inextricably linked with existence.

As I stared out the window of the bus with my head stuffed with thoughts of such profundity, I saw that the weather had changed. All the heat of the last few days had evidently been too much and there was suddenly a big, big thunderstorm coming along which tore at the billboards and turned the streets into rivers. When we got to the place where we had to change buses, everything was mud and we had to take refuge in a local restaurant, waiting for the rains to stop. After our nice bus experience we then had another bad one because when we asked the conductor, he told us the bus didn’t go to Sai Baba’s ashram when in fact it did. It meant that we were dropped 3 km away instead of right outside the gates. The conductor had managed to cheat us because somehow we had paid the full fare to the ashram, a pointless con but I guess that was just the kind of thing we sometimes had to put up with whilst making our way through India.

“It happens a lot with the private buses,” Suresh explained as we walked down the road.
“Yeah,” I replied, “what a bastard!”

Fortunately the walk to the ashram turned out to be a beautiful one. The sun was setting way out west over a vast expanse of flat country, the heart of southern Karnataka, where fresh from the storm white clouds hung in billowing shapes of every size on the horizon.

When we got to the ashram, which went by the name of Whitefields, we were in for a big disappointment. Sai Baba wasn’t in! He was 200 km up the road on holiday in a place called Ooty, a hill station in the state of Tamil Nadu, and the whole place was deserted apart from a grumpy Indian caretaker who fired out abrupt answers to our somewhat dismayed questions. That was it then, I thought. All that way for nothing! Just when I was expecting to have one of those magical Hindu guru experiences which are supposed to happen in India all the time, it turns out not to happen. What a bummer! Although there was no point in grumbling about it, I found myself ranting away like a child deprived of his big night out and it put me in a foul mood, with all the supposed calm felt from the effects of the opium instantly evaporated.

“Stupid fucking place!” I said, “I mean, what’s the point in telling everyone you live here when you’re never fucking in?”

Bela and Suresh looked both shocked and disappointed by my outburst and even Thomas had a worried look on his face, probably fearing what might happen next in terms of bad behaviour.

“Oh come on, come on,” he said to me, “that Sai Baba isn’t in is really no problem Phil. All we could do was try to see if he was around and that is what we have done.”

He was absolutely right of course and I realised that I was kicking up a stink over something that I really shouldn’t have been worried about. After all, it was Thomas who had wanted to check out Sai Baba and I had just come along for the ride, so he was the one who should have been disappointed and not me. It was with head hung low that I walked out through the gates of the empty ashram hoping like hell that Sai Baba hadn’t been tuning into what I had said by way of using his supposedly highly developed powers of super cosmic intelligence. More worrying was that the little incident was another example of a quick mood change in me, something which was now happening a little too often. Maybe it really was getting close to the time for me to give the drugs a rest, either that or I just simply wasn’t taking enough of them!

It was a fun ride back into town however. We were going to get the bus when Suresh asked a local taxi driver how much it would cost for the four of us to get back to Bangalore by car, and when he told him it would only be 25 rupees we all jumped in for the ride. It was one of those big, comfortable Indian Ambassador cars with a sound system blasting out Hindi tunes which were a perfect blend of haunting voices wailing over swaying strings and tablas. I sunk deep into the back seat and let it all wash over me, fully recovered from my recent tantrum and once again cruising on the opium. The taxi was driven nice and fast through deepest Bangalore in the early evening light and in what seemed like no time at all we were dropped off in the centre of town where it was extremely busy, with countless thousands of people pouring in and out of the shops and multiple forms of traffic splattered across the city streets going in every which way direction. It was weird to be right in amongst it all because my body felt so still and so quiet inside, like it was a vast chamber of nothing. But being out on the streets was not the safest place to be, we were so slow and so cool compared to everything else that it did not feel like it would be very long before someone picked us out and flattened us, sitting behind the wheel of a vehicle that had suddenly spun out of control.

So after buying some packs of street roasted peanuts we went back to the hotel where we were able to at last shift into the triple room. It was a great room, quiet and spacious with three beds in a row; one for Thomas, one for Bela, one for me and nothing for Suresh because he was going home. It was not long before we were skinning up some joints and smoking the Mysore weed because it seemed the only logical thing to do, the obvious thing to do, the greatest thing in the whole fucking world to do. Bela told us about a guy in Mysore who had achieved the feat of smoking 49 chillums of ganja in a row and that by the time he had finished there was blood pouring out of his ears and nose. Sounded really quite remarkable, more than a little heavy duty, and according to Bela he owned one of the restaurants in Mysore located in the city centre where apparently he was quite a local celebrity. Bela did not like to smoke with him however, because you had to take the maximum amount of smoke down into your lungs and if you didn’t you a got a whack across the head from a world champion chillum smoker who was obviously also a borderline psychopath. Bela and Suresh then talked to us about women. They told us they never went out with Indian girls, they were scared of them, because all they were interested in was marriage and money, although funnily enough Bela seemed to be going out with an Indian girl in Mysore. Both of them had spent a lot of time in Goa and there they claimed they had made out with Western women plenty of times. Something which I guess might or might not have been true.

Thomas and Bela were again into going out to see a film, something which was becoming a habit for them by this stage, and after an hour or so they disappeared along with Suresh, whilst I did not have any desire to move from the room. In fact to see them leave was fine by me because I just flicked open my notebook and once more got stuck into Opium Bongos, so that by the time Thomas and Bela returned it was finished. The greatest thing I had ever written, there was no doubt that in my humble opinion, and it was a huge relief for me to have pulled something decent out of the bag after all the troubles I'd had in the Basato Lodge over The Song of Ernakulum.

Opium Bongos

the poppy wanderers
disciples of the poppy
flowers over dream hills
playing with the poppy
southern blood brothers
playing to ancient cities
and stoned in city hills
still poppy hill playing
the opium sons perform
with bongos and steel

We slept late the next morning, recovering from the pops we had taken the day before, and as we prepared ourselves for the walk downstairs for breakfast, Thomas and I discussed what we were going to do that day. Since Sai Baba wasn’t around there did not seem that much point in staying in Bangalore too much longer, so we decided to head on up to Hampi the very next day. For some reason the original plan, hatched back at The Elite on Fort Cochin, did not even get a mention, the one in which we were supposed to visit the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad after Bangalore, then from there go to Nagpur before ending up in Calcutta. No, Hampi was all that was on our minds now, to travel into the heat of northern Karnataka where the Vijayananga ruins lay, just like they had for at least the last five hundred years. Thomas said that it would also be great going to Hampi with Bela because since he had been there so many times before, he would know all the cool places to hang around whilst we wandered amongst the ancient temples and hot, hot rocks. Somehow, as I looked across at the little guy still sleeping on his bed, I had the feeling he wouldn’t be coming along with us and that Bangalore would be the place where we said farewell to him. There was no point in me saying anything to Thomas however, because it could then so easily have looked as if I was trying to bring about such a situation, that I was still haunted by those Mysore feelings of fear and mistrust, even though it really wasn't like that anymore. It just seemed to me that in his heart of hearts, Bela knew that going to Hampi with me and Thomas wasn’t his scene, that he would be heading back to Mysore instead, no doubt to continue popping opium. What chance did he really have of giving it up when so many people he knew were also into it? Poor, poor Bela. Young but old, strong in one way, but so frail in another.

Eventually Thomas and I left Bela still sleeping in his bed and we went to have breakfast. By the time we returned he was sitting up drinking coffee and talking with Suresh who had just called around and brought his tape player with him so that we could listen to some music. Suresh also gave us a copy of a book on Sai Baba, saying that it was ours to keep, but which somehow I didn’t think I would ever get around to reading. The quality of his sound machine was not that good, it was basically just an Indian Walkman to which he had attached a speaker, so what came out of it was scratchy to say the least. The Michael Jackson tape which he put on sounded vicious, about as welcome as a snake lying in a corner of the room. Not that either Suresh or Bela seemed to mind too much. Maybe the allure of hearing Western music was strong enough for them to overcome any potential hindrances such as not having anything decent to play it on. Or maybe their Indian ears, which had been brought up for so many years on the distorted sound of Hindi pop played way too loudly, could find a beauty in the racket of Beat It which simply escaped me and Thomas. Who knows? We found ourselves gradually moving to other side of the room where we practised some silent toleration, which was no mean feat as we attempted to regain some kind of balance after the effects of the opium from the night before. A couple of joints of weed soon helped us along however, pushing us right back into the same states of bliss as the previous evening when we’d got things rocking after our failed trip to see Sai Baba. By the time midday came along it had been decided we would go to a botanical gardens not far from the centre of town and thus pretty easy to reach. Lalbagh Gardens were mentioned in my copy of Lonely Planet as a good place to go and visit, whilst Bela and Suresh also told us it would be a good place hang around in and smoke some weed for a couple of hours, all of which sounded cool to me and Thomas.

When we finally got outside the weather was fresh and hot after the cleansing storm from the night before, and Bangalore rung out with its metal and diesel pounding, like some vast and uncontrollable beast ever expanding outwards. We hit the bus stand in the early afternoon chaos which was probably the same state of chaos as either the mid-morning chaos, late evening chaos or middle of the night chaos. Silver and red painted Bangalore city corporation buses were bouncing in and out of the potholes and rolling around in the dust. But we were lucky because Suresh the Bangalore city boy was with us, so we found our bus without much problem and it didn’t take us long to get to the botanical gardens. Just outside the gates was a sugar cane stand which we walked across to in order to get some juice. As we stood there waiting, the cane crushing machine completely packed up despite the desperate attempts of the man to re-start it and it was obvious that we were not going to get our drinks. And so with dry mouths from the weed, and a sense of wonder over how sometimes in India nothing is ever simple, we walked into the gardens. The landscape inside was pretty bare, the ponds didn’t have much water in them and the grass was brown instead of green. All because it was summertime in South India, but you could see it would be an amazing place to visit in the monsoon season, full of jungle, but of course we weren't going to be there in the monsoon. Even so, in the middle of the scorching heat, there were still some nice trees and bushes under which we would enjoy some shade. Suresh told us as we walked along, that the gardens were notorious for muggings and other crimes, young lovers were often pounced upon by gangs of robbers who would beat up the man and rape the woman before stealing what they had. Not quite sure if I wholly believed him, but there you go, that was what he said.

“Hey Phil,” said Thomas with a nasty smile, “you better watch it. Stay here too long and you might get raped!”

I didn't quite know what he meant by that, but whatever it was I didn’t like it. The joke stank as far as I was concerned and his attempt at humour plunged me into a bleak anti-German mood for some reason, as we made our way along a dusty path in the bright hot sun. Really, sometimes Germans took the biscuit with their sick fucking sense of what they thought was funny. This mood lasted all the way to the centre of the park where we came across a drinks stand which sold the most amazing grape juice I have ever tasted in my life. All for just a single rupee, and three glasses of grape juice later I had cheered up again, forgetting all about that crass bastard standing next to me, and we hung around there for quite some time whilst eating spicy snacks along with drinking those tasty, tasty glasses of nectar.

We found a quiet place in the park to sit down and have a smoke, deep amongst the trees and away from the people. By mid-afternoon the day had turned hazy and what with smoking in the heat and the distant drone of the city traffic going on outside the gates of the park, all four of us were soon pushed close to the point of falling sleep. There was very little talking, just a lot of lying around and staring up at the white sky, a kind of situation in which, if you weren’t careful, it would be easy to feel your whole life was nothing but a fuck up and that you were well on the way again to becoming a kaputnik. Well, that at least was how it was for me! I was just too damn smashed to dig myself out of this world of stoned thinking and to make any form of sensible communication with the others. We stayed there for a good couple of hours, all of us pretty wasted, and we only got it together to leave when Bela and Suresh said they wanted to go back to the centre of town and see a movie.

When we left the gardens it was through a different gate and where there was another sugar cane stand outside. This time the operation looked a lot more together than the one which had clapped out on us just before we had entered. There were three young Indians working hard on it and the diesel-run cruncher at the front blared out like a demon, pumping out more heat into the air on what was already a very hot day. The men had very little space in which to work because the stand was on a narrow pavement with the park railings right behind it and a noisy road in front. It looked quite an involved operation for two of the men to feed the cane sticks through the crusher in order to get any juice, hard labour no doubt about that, enough to make their faces grimace with the strain. And all for a glass of juice. Somehow it seemed horrific that they had to do that in order to make any kind of living. But when I tasted the juice it was mind blowing, almost too good to be true!

By the time we got back to the bus station part of town where our hotel was located, it was early evening and Bela and Suresh soon split to go and see their movie, yet another one. After the movie they said they were going to hit the MG Road to check out the night life. It had to be said that Bela did not look too great and that he could definitely have done with an early night, but he was obviously too far into his lifestyle to make any changes to it at that precise moment in time. The departure of Bela and Suresh left me and Thomas on our own and so, just like a completely normal pair of travellers, we went out to eat a meal and then on our way back from the restaurant we bought a bottle of beer to share. Alcohol was something that we had just not got into through pretty much the whole damn trip, but Bangalore seemed to be a particularly booze friendly city, with so many pubs, bars and off licenses that it was difficult to pass up on the opportunity to sample the local brew. The bottle we got was cold as ice and a bargain at only 13 rupees.

“Wow,” I said to Thomas as I took a swig when we were back in our room, “East meets West! This stuff is easily as good as what you’d get back home.”

But then again, since it was the first cold beer I’d had in quite a long while, I suppose it was somewhat inevitable that it would taste good. The effect of the beer actually woke me up, made me feel a bit more buzzy, as if putting the life back into me which the weed smoking had taken away. It seemed to have the opposite effect on Thomas however, he was already asleep, although there was no doubt he needed a rest from all the opium he had been popping with his good friend Bela. This had been the first day in over a week that the crazy fucker hadn’t taken any! As I sat there in the room feeling very awake, I began to worry again about how hot it was going to be in Hampi. Maybe it was going so bad that I would end up having a heart attack or something worse, like the blood in my body boiling up to such a high temperature that I would simply explode, badly messing up all those ancient heritage rocks. It suddenly dawned on me that it would be a good idea to go out and buy some kind of heat protection against the sun, it seemed like it was the least that I could do. It was only 10 pm and by the noise coming from the street below, it was obvious that plenty of places would still be open. Leaving Thomas completely crashed on his bed, I slipped out of the door and headed for a local bazaar located close to the bus station.

When I got there I first of all bought a pair of white flip flops for 25 rupees, which for some reason I immediately regretted. Somehow I knew that I was going to find it difficult to wear them, something about their shape and colour just wasn’t right, but their cheap price had suckered me into thinking I was getting a bargain. Maybe the owners had put a spell on me, and I walked away from the stall feeling about as happy as if I had just bought a fish without a frying pan. The hat experience was not as depressing as getting the unwanted flip flops, although the decision I finally came to was to have some unforeseen consequences. I basically ended up buying two wide brimmed white hats, one for Thomas and one for me, and a little coloured cap for Bela. At the time I was simply not aware of any gross interpretations which might have been drawn from my choices. My reasoning behind it was the white floppy hats would look stupid on Bela’s head, and whilst they would also look stupid on mine and Thomas’s, they would be necessary as protection when we walked into the cauldron heat of Hampi where a bright sun would inevitably be shining down on us. It therefore seemed like a cap rather than a hat was a better thing to buy for Bela, its colours would go with his clothes and he would be able to tip it back just like Suresh did with his. But the whole thing was to prove to be a bit of a disaster when the time came for giving it to him.

When I got back from my shopping trip Bela had returned from seeing the movie and he was talking to Thomas who was awake again and sitting up in bed.

“Ooh,” said Bela as I put the packages down, “you’ve been buying.”
“Yeah, yeah, I have,” I replied, “got a few things for Hampi.”

It was at that point I realised I had completely forgotten to buy any fucking sun cream, the whole reason for going in the first place. I unwrapped the flip flops first and tried them on.

“Oh, you got some chappals,” Thomas said.
“Well, yeah, but I don’t think I really like them!”

Both Thomas and Bela gave me odd looks when I said that, as if to ask why exactly did I buy them in the first place if that was the case.

“Yeah, but what the fuck, they were only 25 rupees,” I said, scratching around for some kind of logical explanation. Things then got worse for me when I took out the hats.

“For Hampi,” I said to Thomas and flicked one over to him.
“Great,” he replied as he stuck it on his head, “good idea.”
“Yeah,” I said as I put mine on as well, “it’s going to be fucking hot up there!”

We both had a laugh at how stupid we looked and then I remembered I also had something for Bela.

“Ooh Bela,” I said as I handed him a small package, “this is for you. I thought you’d prefer it to a hat.”

I guess I should have realised I was almost apologising before he had even seen what I had got him and soon I saw there was good reason to. The cap I had bought for Bela was ridiculously small, horrifically so, and it would not even fit halfway on his head. After a couple of attempts he gave up completely trying to get it to balance on his curly locks.

“Shit,” I said, “I didn’t realise it was so fucking small!”
“Oh it’s OK, no problem,” Bela replied in a voice that sounded slightly sad and hurt. He had, after all, bought me a t-shirt in Mysore, even though it was because he’d bagged up on a load of free opium.

“Shit man, y’know, I just didn’t think you’d want a hat like me and Thomas. I thought the cap would look cool.”

I was beginning to feel that, although I had only acted out of ignorance with nothing malicious intended, at least far as my conscious mind knew, it was still a bit of a fuck up. Thomas lay back on his bed with a look of deep resignation on his face. Now I felt there was no doubt that I had screwed up again, however Bela was very understanding, and anyway he was hardly the type of person to bear a grudge. It was not long after this, when Thomas had left the room to go and buy some water, that Bela told me he would not be coming up to Hampi with us. He must have figured it would be easier just breaking the news to me without Thomas being around. Bela said that he would have gone with Thomas if I had stuck to my original plan after my Mysore freak out and gone straight up to Dharamsala, but since me and Thomas were still together he thought it would be cool if he didn’t come along, and I guess that as far as I was concerned it was cool that he wasn’t coming along. After all there was absolutely no point in dragging yourself up through the middle of Karnataka in the hot season if you didn’t really want to go. No point at all! He said that he might stay in Bangalore an extra day or so to see some friends but then he would go back to Mysore and have a good rest from all the smoking and popping.

“Yes,” I said to him, “you really should do that Bela. Put some weight back on, get into some fitness or something.”

I meant it, he was badly out of shape for a guy who was still only 21. So despite the silly hat scene, I think there was a real feeling of closeness between us and that he could see I was concerned for him.

The prospect of the long bus journey all the way up to Hampi was enough to ensure that both Thomas and I woke up feeling pretty moody the next day.

“Eight hours in the heat and dust coming up,” I told Thomas, to which he didn’t even bother to reply.

We went out for breakfast whilst Bela slept on, his small body lying motionless on his bed. It seemed like he had not even heard us getting ourselves together.

“He’s really tired,” said Thomas.
“Yeah,” I replied, “he looks totally fucked.”

It was over iddlys, sambhar and coffee that I broke the news to Thomas that Bela wouldn’t be coming with us to Hampi. Thomas didn’t seem to mind, he took the news pretty well in fact, so maybe he had been expecting it. Then he really pissed me off by saying that the scene with the cap last night might have been the final straw.

“No man, I really don’t think so,” I said, “I just think he knows that he should go back to Mysore and have a rest from all this shit.”

I felt touchy about being reminded so quickly about that unfortunate incident which, typically enough, Thomas had brought up with his characteristic directness. Nevertheless I managed to keep my cool.

“Yeah,” replied Thomas, “but do you really think in Mysore he will be able to stop?”

It was a good question and one which only seemed to have depressing answers.

“No,” I said, “not as long as he carries on hanging out with the people that we have met when we were with him.”
“It must be horrible for him”, Thomas said sadly.
“Yeah, no support, only people wanting a good time, and soon enough another pair of assholes like us will probably come along and support him for a while, because they'll feel special about having an Indian friend.”

Bela was up when we got back to the room, sitting at the end of the bed and drinking his coffee. Thomas gently put his hand on his shoulder and told him that it really didn’t matter he wasn’t coming with us up to Hampi, but it didn't seem to cheer him up.

“Bela, what is it?” Thomas asked.
“Oh, it’s my chest,” Bela replied, “I have been lying here since you two went out and it has felt so painful. The left side.”
“Well fuck man!” I exclaimed, “you’ve gotta have a rest from smoking, popping and all that shit.”
“Yes, really Bela,” Thomas carried on, “you must stop for a while. For five years now you have been popping and smoking with people like us.”

It seemed like this time Bela was listening to us more than he usually did. Maybe he really was in pain and appreciated the advice he was getting from a pair of punk ass bums like me and Thomas. By the time we had finished giving the rap to him we had under an hour to pack our stuff and haul ourselves across to the bus station. It was all a bit of a mad rush but we finally checked out of the hotel and then, when we got to the station, we were told that the bus we needed to take would not be leaving for another hour. Fucking typical! As we hung around, already beginning to feel uncomfortable in the mid morning heat and the relentless crowds of people, an Indian guy in jeans and shirt came up and started talking to Bela. At first Thomas and I thought he was just one of Bela’s friends from Bangalore, but when he went off for a chai we found out that he had just arrived in Bangalore from Goa. He had come up to Bela because he wanted to know where he could buy some brown sugar. Because Bela had been hanging around there with me and Thomas, this guy had naturally sussed that Bela would know the scene. And he was right! Brown sugar was a step further along the road from opium, on the way to heroin, and it was obvious to us that Bela was not going to disappoint this guy. It was certain that as soon as our bus left that station, Bela would be on his way to some dodgy part of the city with his new found companion. No doubt he was already looking forward to his next hit. How depressing! But there was nothing Thomas or I could do about it now. In the end the brutal fact of the matter was that it was his life and we would soon be 500 km up the road and out of the picture. That was the simple truth of the situation.

It could have all turned different however, because Thomas and I only just managed to get on the bus when it finally showed up and which was the only one going north that day. It was crowded, bursting at the seams, and it was going to be a hard ride. Thomas got a seat at the back and I was way down in the front with my rucksack on the floor, tight against my knees. It was with great difficulty that I was able to lean over and take Bela’s hand which was sticking in through the open window.

“Hey,” I said, feeling quite emotional, “you take care of yourself Bela!”

Our hands clasped tight and we then released them as the bus revved up.

“Take care Philip!”

After saying a fond farewell to Thomas, Bela slowly walked back to the Indian guy from Goa who was ominously waiting in the shadows of the bus stand, smoking another of his cigarettes. And that was the last we saw of Bela as we took off out of Bangalore, at the start of another journey.

It worked out fine that Thomas and I were so far apart on the bus for virtually the whole of the next eight hours. It was a chance for both of us to reflect on things, on our recent life and times in Mysore and Bangalore; the opium, the weed, the disgraceful personal performances and the potential tragedy of Bela. All of this whilst travelling through a Karnataka landscape which looked more than a little magnificent. The further north we went, the more barren and the more beautiful it became, with dusty wastes stretching out to the plains of nowhere full of strange shaped rocks beneath a sun blasted broken sky. It was a vast landscape to cross and by the time we reached the town of Hospet all of what we had left down south seemed far, far behind us. When we arrived in what was the nearest place to the ruins of Hampi, it was mid-evening and we had been on the road all day. We found ourselves in the middle of a busy and noisy northern Karnataka town. It was very hot, hotter than Bangalore, hotter than Mysore and hotter than Cochin, where at least at night in all those places, the temperature seemed to drop a couple of degrees, but not in Hospet. Hampi was still another 13 km down the road but we weren’t going to get there that night, not that it would have done much good if we had, because according to the Lonely Planet it was a really small place with no hotels. Most of the travellers who made it to see the ruins had to stay in Hospet.

After the rigours of the long bus journey we went straight across the road and got a room at the rather smart looking Hotel Viswas. It was definitely not the cheapest place in town but what the fuck, it was not the time or place for us to drag ourselves around another bunch of unknown streets looking for a bargain. We had done all that before and had paid the price in more ways than one. Besides, on this occasion, the room we ended up in was not that bad and all for just 50 rupees. It had a balcony looking out on a small square in front of the hotel where there were still a few shops open and a lot of people hanging around in the heat. Quite a nice place to sit and maybe have a few joints, watching the world go by or maybe more accurately, watching it stop. There was also an attached bathroom which had a good shower and one of those weird shaped bogs designed for both Indian and Western style shitting. The rim of the toilet bowl wasn’t the normal round bog bowl rim but one which flattened out on both sides in case you wanted to jump up and squat on it, thus making it like the more traditional hole in the ground. If squat shitting was not your scene you could pull the bog seat down and go in the same way you did back home. It was a really funny shape though, no doubt about that, space age yet somehow totally medieval at the same time. So anyway, after we had checked out our new place out we slung our stuff on the floor and went to look for somewhere to eat.

As we walked around the centre of town we could tell we were now much further north as far as the state of Karnataka was concerned. The food was less exotic, not as colourful, not as tasty as what you got down south, and the surroundings had a certain dusty grubbiness to them. We were also well and truly stared at by the locals when we walked along the sidewalks, such as they were, more like rutted up pavements really. Hampi was now out of season due to the heat, and once again it seemed like we were in a place where a pair of white skins were something of a rare spectacle. It was either that or the fact that me and Thomas really did look rather run down and smelly which brought ourselves to other peoples' attention. In the cities it didn’t seem to matter so much, they were so big you just got sucked into their scenes of anonymity and no one gave you a second look, even if your ragged appearance was close to being a borderline disgrace. But in Hopset it was obviously different, despite the fact that at certain times of the year it obviously got invaded by hundreds of Westerners making their trip across from Goa for a smoke amongst the rocks.

After our meal and immediately next door to the restaurant, we found a great soft drinks bar, one of those fabulous discoveries that you can sometimes make in India. It served ice cold soda on tap for only 50 paisa a glass, an unbelievable luxury for us after having drunk so many warm bottles of the stuff for which we had sometimes shelled out as much as 2 rupees simply in order to safely quench our thirst. In hot places in India soda was the only drink to go for, either plain or with salt and lemon, so Thomas and I sat down and indulged ourselves. We had about six glasses each, and then topped them off with some fresh mango juice and ice cold badam milk. In those conditions all that liquid was by no means excessive, because we would both sweat most of it out of our bodies during the course of the night, rather than have to make countless trips to the bathroom in order to fill the bog bowl full of piss. Back in our room after our visit to the drinks stand, it was difficult to sleep that night, not only was it very hot, but Hospet was one of those places which never seemed to get quiet and when it finally did it, things soon woke up again. Well, put quite simply, that was India!

When I woke up in the morning I had a headache and my energy was low, the periods of dozing which the conditions of the night imposed had not done me that much good at all. Thomas was lying naked on his bed next to mine staring at the ceiling, and with a very sweaty looking forehead.

“Man oh man,” he sighed, “this is too much!”
“Yeah,” I agreed heavily, “it is.”

My body, I decided, was not at its best in such hot conditions. Convinced that I already had blood pressure, heart disease or both, the present climate only served to make such uncomfortable knowledge more certain. As I stood beneath my first cold shower of the day, I longed to be back in the land of my fathers, where it always seemed you would be able to take a good long walk on a cold and windy path by the seashore if that was what you wanted. Although I did not say anything to Thomas, I wanted to get out of Hampi as quickly as possible, just take in the weird and wonderful sights that were supposed to be there and then move on. The heat was definitely getting to me and I knew that if I wasn’t careful, the freak outs of Mysore and Bangalore would only be just the beginning, not to mention all that paranoid shit I’d gone through in Cochin. Dharamsala and the cool hills of Himachal Pradesh still seemed a long way off, something that was quietly beginning to make me panic, making me feel I would never get off the plains. After checking out my Lonely Planet, it seemed to me the best thing to do would be to just hang around for a day or so, then get the train to a place called Bijapur and from there take the bus to Bombay. But I knew it was useless to yet again fill my mind with dreams of escape, after all it was getting to be rather repetitive and would certainly not go down too well with Thomas.

We would soon be in Hampi and I knew the only thing I could do was try to be as open as possible to whatever situations we were to find ourselves in. If I raised the matter with him, then that is more or less what Thomas would tell me, whilst at the same time it would no doubt see me go down even further in his estimation. The realisation of that did not rest easy on my mind, I was tired, uncomfortable, and on top of everything else I was beginning to worry that Thomas and I would run into more drugs which would only intensify the situation. Smoking weed out there in the ruins of Hampi might definitely bring on that heart attack and send me to the realms of hell on a very sweaty one way ticket. And I didn’t want that, oh no, no, no, I didn’t want that!!! Needless to say I kept my mouth shut and tried to play it cool as Thomas and I made our way to the bus station, wearing the our new hats from Bangalore and trying to adjust our eyes to the bright light of an intense sunny morning now that we were up in the northern reaches of Karnataka.

When the bus rolled into the Hampi bazaar it swung itself around in the dust to point back in the direction it came from and that was because Hampi was a dead end town. There was just one wide street, lined with cool drinks stands, chai shops, small restaurants and a rag bag collection of houses. Beyond all this lay the rocks and ruins of Vijayanagar, once capital of a mighty empire with the same name, all of which had been a long time ago. After Thomas and I got off the bus we immediately had to go and have a couple of sodas, both of us conscious that we were standing out a mile by way of being the only white boys in town, and therefore very easy targets for whoever lay in its darker corners. On the opposite side of the road to our drinks stand was a tumble down building outside of which was a sign which requested that all foreigners on arriving in Hampi register at the local police station, giving passport details and any other valuables they might be carrying. Seemed a bit funny to say the least! We had never seen anything like that before in all the places we had been to, and since we did not know what it meant, we chose to ignore it. After finishing our sodas we walked off down the bazaar in the direction of the ruins of Hampi. It was already very hot and we were glad we had our hats, no matter how stupid they might have looked on us.

Just when I thought we were going to get out of the bazaar without any hassle we were approached by a very dark skinned Indian. He was bald headed and walking barefoot, wearing a lungi and Nike t-shirt. Speaking very good English in a deep rasping voice, he introduced himself to us as Francis, and up close he was very, very ugly. So much so that I could sense Thomas tensing up beside me, pouting and staring moodily at the ground, leaving it to me to do whatever talking was going to be necessary. Too timid to tell Francis just to fuck off out of it right away, I resigned myself to running through the usual rap with him, soon telling him our names, nationalities and how much we were paying for our place in Hospet. The last point he immediately picked up on and said that he could get us a room in Hampi for 20 rupees a night maximum, no problem. Nice place too, according to him. But as far as I could see there simply weren’t any nice places in Hampi apart from the usual broken down buildings and shacks you tended to find in such dead end Indian towns. And anyway we did not think we would be hanging around for that long, it was too hot, too damn out of season. Not to be put off by a little setback like that however, Francis soon turned to the inevitable subject, the one which was no doubt closest to his heart, namely weed and whether or not we wanted to buy any. He told me he could get us some very good local grass or even hash if we wanted it. Again I had to disappoint him. We still had quite a bit of our Mysore grass left, the stuff scored by Bela, and we hadn’t as yet thought about getting any more. Besides, Francis really didn’t look the kind of guy you scored from and got a good deal.

“Sorry Francis,” I thought to myself, “you’re too fucking ugly by half!”

Despite these setbacks to the only business that he could offer us, Franics still stayed talkative, not content to slouch back off to the chai shop from whence he had probably came. He told us we would have to be careful once we went out amongst the ruins, everything was quite spread out and people were often robbed or attacked when they found themselves in the quieter places.

“Yeah,” he sighed, “money, passport. Everything!”

So that at least accounted for the police sign, but it did not do much to improve my somewhat fragile state of mind, especially since I was carrying my small rucksack which had my camera and money belt inside it. Grim pictures suddenly appeared in my mind of a deadly confrontation out in the rocks with Thomas and I facing off a couple of mean looking Hampi bandits. It was really quite distressing because the climate and conditions were nigh on perfect to witness me finally go berserk, screaming and fighting to the death with any lousy fucker who tried it on with me. My imagination carried me so far away that I completely lost track of what Francis was saying, and he was definitely saying something because his mouth was moving, only now it had stopped. He was obviously expecting some kind of answer from me but I didn’t know what the fuck it was he had been going on about. All I could do was nod my head and sigh.

“Ok,” he said, “so I see you later.”
“What?” I asked, wondering what the hell he had been saying to me.
“For the chillum,” he continued, “I invite you!”
“Oh...yeah, yeah, OK!” I replied, realising I had committed us to a meeting with him later in the day with his chillum. And so Francis left, saying he would look out for us when we got back from the ruins, something which didn’t surprise me in the slightest.

We exited the bazaar and hit the main path where it wasn’t long before Thomas began to seriously piss me off by going on about the scene with Francis.

“Oh man, oh man,” he moaned, “what an asshole! I don’t know why you bothered speaking with him and now we’ve got to go back and smoke a dirty old chillum with the bastard.”

The way Thomas said all this seemed to be critical of me, or at least that was how I saw it under the current conditions.

“Well, look” I snapped, “I just thought it was the best way to deal with it alright? And anyway you just fucking stood there and said nothing.”
“But man,” Thomas carried on, “you didn’t have to say anything! Just because some asshole comes up to speak with you doesn’t mean you have to go and tell him our names, where we come and where we are staying.”
“Ok,” I said, determined not to plunge myself into a bleak mood in the heat and dust which would only result in more harsh words,“next time you can do the talking.”

There was no point in letting things break out into a full scale argument between the both of us, although it got pretty close to becoming exactly that. The heat and my general feeling of tiredness had dramatically lowered what was already a rather feeble level of resistance to any kind of criticism or interrogation, whether from Thomas, myself or anyone else.

The pathway to the ruins led us through a tunnel in some rocks and when we emerged at the other end, the full extent of Hampi lay before us, visible for the first time, and what we saw completely blew us away. The remains of temples, bridges, walkways, squares and buildings lay amongst a natural landscape of a million rocks and boulders. And in the middle of it all was a river winding its way through the dead and eerily ancient scene, its waters smooth as a snake and heavy with silence. It was so haunting, like an abandoned city, which I suppose is exactly what it was. As Thomas and I stood there letting out awed exclamations of “Fuck!” “Wow!” and “Amazing!” our recent close shaves with the more sordid parts of Hampi and temper tantrums because of that, were all but forgotten. Put simply, we were in one of those places where the external environment really could affect how you felt inside and for a couple of hours we walked around in wonder, having never experienced such an incredible scene before. Inevitably I got my camera out to take some shots and it was then that I discovered that the roll of film inside had not been wound on properly back in Mysore, no doubt done, or not done as it now seemed, when I was stoned out of my mind. It meant that all the recent shots I thought I had taken had never in fact existed. There would be no mementoes of those wild carvings at Somnathampur, no happy ending after all to my saga with the fruit stall boy in Mysore, and nothing to send Bela and Suresh of the night we popped opium and smoked weed together in Bangalore. Bummer! The only thing I could do was make sure it was now wound on properly and to kill the film in one big photo session. So I pointed and snapped like a demon, and even let Thomas take a few as well.

We eventually had to take cover from the midday heat, despite our glorious hats which were serving us well, and we found a nice little cave to rest in which had a fine view of the river in an area of deserted silence. Luckily there was no sign of any robbers. “Just let them come and try to spoil our fun by sticking a gun in our faces!” I thought to myself, fists clenched and at the ready like a pair of pin grenades ready to spin. In fact the cave seemed like it was a pretty good place to have a smoke, so despite the heat and rather harsh conditions, along with my usual paranoid visions of keeling over on the ground with a burst heart, I was soon rolling a couple of nice fat joints with what was left of our grass from Mysore. The exertions of the day must have lowered our levels of tolerance, because the effect of the smoke was strong and we were soon both sitting there feeling very, very stoned. It was a feeling of being stoned in a good way, no doubt about that, a very good way, with a little bit of mind expansion thrown into the mix as well by way of our strange and fascinating surroundings.

The smoke also enabled us to talk dispassionately about our recent experiences and how, as a German and Brit, we were relating to each other. Out of the two of us I guess it was me who needed the therapy more than Thomas, as I was often prone to panic attacks and fits of anger, along with sustained periods of intense suspicion which bordered on outright paranoia. It was the heat, it was India, it was definitely the drugs and it was probably also my conditioning which brought it on, judging one thing as good and another as bad. Or at least that was what Thomas told me. And I had to agree with him, painful though it was. Like millions of others I was just bearing the burden of being a fucked up Westerner; full of fear, full of self cherishing and only wanting to save my own skin. Once in a while it was helpful to see all that and I was grateful for having had a smoke of the weed in the cave to open my eyes to it, because it gave you the strength to look at the pitiful underlying state of your existence full in the fucking face.

We stayed in the cave for a good couple of hours before venturing back out into the sun again. There were very few people around, and in the heat of the afternoon silence hung heavy in and amongst those ruins of Hampi, whilst the odd crow flew high in the sky above us. In retrospect I now saw that it would indeed have been great if we had managed to score some acid in Bangalore because the setting was a perfect one in which to be tripping on psychedelic drugs. We walked down to the river where Thomas took a quick swim, but I’ve got to admit there was no way that I was going to go in, what with the possibility of snakes, crocodiles and parasites lurking in its depths. Thomas was braver of course, and after he had dried himself off we walked through the rocks to an empty temple which had long fallen into disuse. The going was tricky and I was wearing those chappals which I had bought in Bangalore and didn’t really like, in fact I had begun to hate them. They were slipping and sliding all over the place and there was no way they were going to be put into my rucksack when we left Hospet.

“Stupid fucking things!” I cursed as I finally made my way into the shade of an ancient structure made of slabs of granite.

When I got my breath back from the walk I prepared things for another smoke. But this time it seemed like it was a bit too much, our energy had left us and all we could do was sit in silence deep within the temple shadows, not saying a word to each other. As I listened to my heart beating hard inside my chest, not for a moment slowing down, I began to have a guilt trip over possibly sending myself to an early grave. "It was just too bad," I thought to myself, "too bad I have got stuck in South India, chanting Babylon down by smoking too much fucking ganja!" Sitting there in that bleak old temple which was boiling hot, Dharamsala and the hills of Himachal Pradesh once again felt like they were a million miles away. How I lamented the loss of my cool meditation practice! That was weed smoking for you, sometimes it made you feel invincible, other times it could make you feel so weak and pathetic that you could barely move. As we set there, staring down at the barren scene and wondering why on earth anyone would have wanted to build a city amongst so many hot rocks, a young Indian sadhu came along. Dressed in orange robes and carrying a long staff he shouted from time to time at the top of his voice, and from somewhere over the other side of the river he would be answered by another voice shouting back at him. He was a handsome young man with a big friendly smile on his face and he gave us a wave.

“Ooh,” said Thomas, “very nice!”

Despite Thomas’s enthusiastic wave in return, the sadhu didn’t bother coming up to speak to us and carried on his way, into what seemed like the wilderness beyond. Not long after that, we were surprised to see two young Western women bathing in the river. It was quite a shock because we had not seen a single Westerner the whole of the time we had been in Hampi, now all of a sudden there were two and both of them naked. Guess they must have sensed there were a couple of desperate looking bums staring at them who were stoned off their heads because they soon got out of the water and disappeared behind some rocks. The sight of them set our minds racing, other people must around after all! We were too shy, too damn wasted at that precise moment in time to do much about it, so we decided to head back to Hampi bazaar. On the walk we discussed what our plans were to be and I felt quite relieved when Thomas agreed with me that in the heat of Hampi, one day out on the rocks was enough. He thought it would be just as well if we made our way to Bijapur the very next day, from where we thought it would be easy to get a bus to Bombay.

Before we reached Hampi bazaar we stopped at a chai stall situated in the corner of a temple square, which was the first thing we had seen that morning when walking through the rocky tunnel and into the ruins. It was a very busy little corner. Not only was there a chai shop, but also a woman with a small stall selling what mainly seemed to be bananas, peanuts and cigarettes, whilst around her feet were kids and a bunch of monkeys trying to steal the fruit. The chai shop was run by another woman who also had a load of kids with her and the place was full of flies. This might have had something to do with the fact that a small cow was in there as well. Thomas and I therefore decided to sit outside to drink our cups of chai and watch the day draw to a close. It was excellent chai despite the flies, and the young woman came out of the stall to talk to us. Well, kind of, because she spoke very little English, but even so we managed to get along.

“Now tourist no!” she said, sadly waving her arms about, “later, many, many tourist coming. Now going. Coming, going.”

She wore loads of bangles, anklets, nose and ear rings, and although she was obviously poor, her clothes looked very good on her and I realised that I found her really quite attractive as I sat there nodding my head in all the right places. It was not long before I was indulging in some wild fantasies of finding love in north country Karnataka until I realised how pathetic, how utterly pathetic I was becoming. Eventually I had to turn my head away and look over at the food stall where the other woman was having a hard time with the monkeys and going apeshit over trying to save her bananas from them. I hauled myself up and gave her some business by way of buying a bag of peanuts. Sitting there looking stressed, and with a baby in her lap, she was happy to get a customer. In fact she was pretty attractive as well, in an earthy kind of way. She had such a nice smile that I suddenly wished I could have bought the whole damn stall off her and lifted her up to a celestial mansion where she would never have to work again. As it was, I limited myself to just buying another bag of the nuts.

“Ah...peanuts!” a voice said from behind me, and I turned around to see lying on the ground to the side of the stall, a really quite crazy looking old woman. She had obviously been asleep and had only now just woken up. Her face cracked into a big smile and on her head was a wicked set of dreadlocks; very, very natty, natty and tied together at the back with a collection of red and yellow rags.“Ooh,” I said to myself as I walked back to Thomas at the chai stall, “she looks like she could be a power woman who will initiate us into no end of hidden Hampi mysteries!” In fact it was not long before the dreadlock woman had joined us at the chai stall, and as I studied her up close I realised that she looked more like a granny than a sorceress, albeit with a fine head of Rasta hair. Just like the young woman at the chai stall, she could also speak a little bit of English in a very hap hazard kind of way, and she told us her name was Ganga Ma. We talked with her about the ruins of Hampi and all the temples. As we listened, Thomas and I realised that there was a lot more to them than what we had imagined. Not so much in a historical sense but in terms of ashrams, sadhus and ganja. Those were the three things which, according to Ganga Ma, still flourished in Hampi. She also told us there were a few isolated pockets of Western weed smokers still around, but because of the heat, now was not really the season.

“Now, no coming!” she said as she shook her dread locked head and wrinkled up her face.

Nevertheless I could see that Ganga Ma and what she said had aroused Thomas’s curiosity, reawakened the part of him which was prepared to break whatever barriers which needed to be broken in his search for the ultimate India experience. And sure enough Thomas soon asked her whether it would be possible for her to take us on a tour the following day. This was something to which she readily agreed, after all there would be some rupees in it for her, plus a few free smokes if she was that way inclined, and for some reason I thought it was pretty safe to assume she would be. There was little I could do but go along with this new plan, although I was not as totally into it as Thomas, and would still have been quite happy to leave the next day for Bijapur just like we had agreed earlier on. Somehow I knew what the scene was going to be like and it depressed me. We would be sitting around with a bunch of sadhus smoking chillum after chillum of weed whilst feeling way too stoned to say anything, especially when the weather was so damn hot. It didn’t do my nerves much good for me to imagine us staggering around from place to place on the Ganja Trail with bloodshot eyes and pounding hearts in the stinking heat. But I could see that Thomas thought it was going to be fantastic now that we had Ganga Ma with us, taking us through the ruins all over again and acting as our alternative tour guide. It was therefore arranged that we would meet her at the chai stall at around 10 the following morning. Ganga Ma had wanted us to come earlier, but me and Thomas knew that it would be impossible for both of us to get it together before then, so 10 was what we agreed. By the time we finally left the chai shop for Hampi bazaar and the bus back to Hospet it was early evening and getting dark. Although I did my best to play it cool with Thomas, I could not help having a bit of a moan at him, simply couldn't resist it.

“Look man,” I said, “do you really think it’s a good idea coming back here tomorrow? I mean you know how fucking hot it was today and tomorrow will be worse because there’s bound to be a lot more weed involved.”
“Well, look Phil” Thomas replied abruptly, “tomorrow I come back and see the sadhus like we have arranged with Ganga Ma. If you don’t want to come then stay in Hopset.”

That put me in my place, so there really was no choice after that. Just like Thomas said, we had an appointment with Ganga Ma, as the prospect of staying on my own for a day in noisy, sweaty Hospet was really too absurd for words.

When we hit the main bazaar in Hampi we soon ran into Francis, someone whom I had completely forgotten about after our day amongst the rocks. Since as yet there was no bus waiting to take us back to Hospet I had to face up to my responsibilities and join him in his chai shop for a chillum, dragging Thomas along with me who was still showing distinct signs of extreme aversion towards him. Once inside his chai shop we were obliged to buy some drinks, cartons of juice called Frooti, although we drew the line at having food as well, despite his best efforts. Over the chillum, which was a rough mix of beedi tobacco and local weed, Francis poured out his personal history to us. Or rather he poured it out to me because Thomas was too busy sticking his head out the entrance looking for the bus and coughing his guts up from the smoke. But I hung on in there and got the sob story from Francis full in the face. He told me that he had in fact only been in Hampi for about three weeks, before that he had lived for many, many years in Goa although he was originally from Tamil Nadu, which I guess must have accounted for his dark skin. Since the beginning of the year the authorities in Goa had brought in tough new drug laws which had spelt trouble for quite a few thousand people. Indians, Western tourists, stone heads and freaks of every description were being busted all over the place, and even if they were clean, things would be planted on them by the cops in search of baksheesh. It was worse for locals like Francis, if they were caught selling drugs they now faced a heavy prison sentence or even the possibility of being hung. He said that it was too much for him and even though he was only a small time dealer, he knew that unless he left Goa it would only be a question of time before someone shopped him and he was put inside. So he had come to Hampi hoping to find some kind of scene, but because of the heat it was too seasonal, and therefore was clearly going to be dead for half the year.

“Too bloody hot,” he said, “too bloody hot!”

But now he was stuck there, with the buildings, the ghosts, the ruins and all those stray, sad wanderers like me and Thomas turning up every now and then. He said that somehow he wanted to get to Poona, from there go up and across to Varanasi, then to Haridwar and the relative cool of the foothills of Uttar Pradesh. Seemed like quite a trip Francis had planned out, but the problem was he had no money. Travelling was no problem he said; he was Indian and he saw it as his duty to ride on the trains for free. But he would need money for his day to day living, for food and drink. I could see where all this was now going. He finished up by saying he couldn’t beg, it just wasn’t in him, all he could do was tell me how things stood. Naturally enough his whole tale plunged me into a state of chronic indecision because I just did not know if Francis was telling the truth or not. It all seemed quite plausible because I knew that things were getting rough in Goa, and I also knew from my knowledge of India that the details of his trip made perfect sense. Yet it could all so easily be just another John David situation and that yet again I was the sucker who had been picked upon to be shaken down for money. After a prolonged period of hazy stoned reflection I decided to give it the thumbs down.

“Well Francis,” I said, “I’ve only got a couple of rupees and I need those for the bus back to Hospet.”
“Oh I see, I see,” he groaned, his voice sounding more desperate than ever, “it’s OK man, I don’t want to beg, so forget it.”

Suddenly I felt like it was all too sad for words as he struck a look which was truly pitiful.

“Hey Thomas,” I said and turned around, “can you lend me some money?”

I borrowed 25 rupees off Thomas and immediately handed them to Francis.

“Well, look man,” I said, “this is all I can spare and I hope you’re not lying to me. Hope you get to Poona.”
“Yes, yes, thank you Philip, thank you,” he replied, suddenly looking much, much happier.

Well, what the fuck, I thought to myself. Even if he is lying to me he’s so goddamn ugly that some poor sucker has to come along and make his day. He also had a good laugh when I told him we would be back the next morning to go to some of the temples with Ganga Ma. Evidently he knew her pretty well, despite the fact he was supposed to have only been in town for a few weeks. Just in case, I asked Francis whether he thought it was OK for us to go out on the rocks with her, and he replied that she was harmless enough although she drank too much. Still, he was glad we were giving her some business because times were hard for the locals when there were not too many tourists around. On the bus back to Hospet Thomas could not help expressing his disappointment in me for giving Francis 25 rupees, because to him it was obvious that the guy was full of bullshit. It irritated me to hear him go on like that. I resented Thomas questioning my judgement, and I was about to climb up on my high throne of angry indignation when I suddenly realised that he was probably right, and besides it had been his money that I had given to Francis anyway. When we got back to Hospet it was quite late. It had been a long day and after our evening meal it was straight back to the soft drinks stand for the both of us to down another gallon each of ice cold sodas at just 50 paise a pop. Thomas was tired when we were back in our room, and straight away flopped down on his bed where he lay motionless, staring up at the ceiling fan which was pushing the hot air around. For some reason I didn’t feel that bad, so I rolled myself a joint and smoked it out on the balcony before turning in for the night.

The following morning we didn’t manage to get over to Hampi until gone 11. It had been another poor night’s sleep for both of us due to the heat, made worse for me because of the joint I had smoked last thing in the evening, which had the effect of hanging heavy on my body, as a consequence of which when we made our way down to the Hampi bazaar I was feeling pretty tense and strung out. Something was telling me it was going to be pretty fucking stupid spending the whole day wandering around the ruins and smoking weed in such uncomfortable conditions, but there you go, we were too far down the track to change things now. It was difficult to work out whether it was the voice of wisdom in me or the mad army general who had surfaced in Mysore and caused so much inner and outer havoc to my state of mind. I couldn’t just freak out again, because that would probably have been the final straw for Thomas who was so much looking forward to spending the day with Ganga Ma. Therefore I had to stumble along in confused silence as things got hotter and hotter, but I knew I would have to really watch myself, because the conditions were ripe for a tornado-like flare up if things suddenly got on top of me.

It was just as we struck off on the path to the ruins from the bazaar that we ran into Ganga Ma. She had a scowl on her face and did not look very pleased with us.

“Coming...going”, she said waving her arms about, “you no coming for a long time!”

She was right, we were late, we had said we would meet her at 10 and we were over an hour behind schedule. It was suddenly appalling to me that we should have been so unconcerned about being so late when we were meeting an old woman with a head full of dreadlocks who was sitting in the dust waiting for us. We apologised, both of us feeling full of shame and contrition over the inconvenience we had caused her.

“Sorry Ma!”

She said she was now going down to the bazaar to get something to eat and that she would meet us back at the chai shop. She must have been out there waiting for us for so long that she had got hungry. It was then that Thomas did something which at the time I thought was incredibly stupid, and served as an outlet for the feelings of panic and frustration which had been brewing up inside me. He took out his purse, and patting Ganga Ma on the shoulder, gave her 5 rupees.

“Look, look, take this and buy something,” he told her.
“Fucking hell!” I swore at him as Ganga Ma walked off with a new bounce in her step, “what the fuck did you do that for? Now she’ll be expecting stuff off us all fucking day, as if we’ve got tons of money!”

Looking back I guess I must have been starting to get a few wild ideas with regard to what exactly was going to happen to us out in the ruins. As if Ganga Ma, using her dreads as some kind of secret weapon, was going to somehow send us crawling back to Hospet without a cent or a single stitch of clothing. Paranoia! It was really quite embarrassing, all my tension had boiled over and led me to say such a stupid thing, especially in the light of the fact I had handed over 25 rupees to Francis just the night before. Thomas said as much when he sat me down on a rock and gave me an ultimatum: either I calmed down and accepted the situation we were in, or I just forgot the whole thing and went back to Hospet. He would only take a firm decision from me and after some deliberation I said that I would stay, promising to drop all the shit that was already beginning to turn the day into a horrible experience. And I have to say I felt much better after that, hardly raising my voice again at Thomas the whole time we were out there amongst those rocks, as if by confronting me he had lifted a weight from my shoulders.

We sat outside the chai shop and each drank a chai as we waited for Ganga Ma. When she returned we had to explain to her that we didn’t have any weed left so would it be cool to go with her to score some at one of the temples? She was pretty certain that it would be, but she told us to buy some cigarettes and to bring them with us, saying tobacco was always in demand in those places, being an important part of the mix for the chillum which was used to smoke the ganja. So I went to the stall next to the chai shop where I bought some cigarettes and a bunch of bananas off the smiling woman, smiling back at her in return, and after I had stuffed them all into my small rucksack we were pretty much ready to go. It turned out the first place on Ganga Ma’s tour was close to where Thomas had gone swimming in the river the previous day. There was a small temple with a fine view of an ancient bridge which had once spanned the valley, now all that was left of it were a few giant slabs jutting out into the sky, deprived of their once great purpose and unity. We timidly stepped inside the temple behind Ganga Ma and lo and behold there were the two Western women who had been swimming naked in the river the previous day, the ones who Thomas and I, in our stoned haze, had drooled over from a distance. Now we just sat down at the entrance and politely nodded our heads, trying to play it cool. One of the women was very beautiful, silent with very dark eyes and dark hair which was shaved at the sides to allow the tattoos on her head to be visible. Just as well neither of us tried anything on with her because we slowly noticed there was a guy deep in the shadows at the back of the temple crouched over some stoves. When he stepped forward after having conveniently finished making some fresh chai, he looked pretty tough and mean, with their being no doubt whatsoever that the dark eyed beauty was with him. Shit, they probably both were! It was all way, way out of our league, because they quite simply looked like gods and goddesses compared to a pair of wrecks like me and Thomas.

The man was quite friendly as it turned out, and we soon struck up a conversation, telling him that we were out for the day with Ganga Ma who was showing us around all the temples in the ruins of Hampi, which was why we were there at that precise moment in time. Somewhere along the line we also told him that we hoped to score some weed and have a smoke. When we mentioned this he told us that we should be able to pick some up over at the Lakshmi Temple which lay at the other end of the ruins, and for not more than 10 rupees a tola. A whole bunch of sadhus hung out there and it was the place to score from, Ganga Ma would know the scene, so if we stuck with her things would be cool. He also told us that if we wanted some charas he was willing to sell us some, but since at that point neither Thomas or I knew exactly what charas was, we said we’d think about it and tell him a little bit later if we wanted any or not. Whilst we were talking with him the other woman made up a chillum which was soon being passed around and smoked. It was our first smoke of the day and bang, we were immediately stoned, which might have had something to do with the company we were smoking with!

The effect of the smoke meant the conversation soon dried up as everyone reverted to open mouthed staring in silence across the boulder filled valley. Whilst the view outside looked strange, exotic and foreboding, inside the temple and despite appearances to the contrary, the scene was pretty much like any other dope smoking situation you would find back home. Just another bunch of Westerners with their heads no doubt full of their own neuroses, possibly with nagging feelings they should have been doing so much more with their with lives whilst they sat there stoned, still no nearer to solving the fundamental problems of their existence. After a while Ganga Ma must have realised there wasn’t going to be much of a party so she pushed herself off the ground and got ready to leave. It was with some relief that we followed her when she got up to go, and just before we staggered out of the temple the guy asked us if we could get him a tola of weed when we went to see the sadhus over at the Lakshmi Temple.

“Sure man, sure,” I said, “see you later”.

Think it was probably true to say that Thomas and I were quite happy to have an excuse to come back in order to sit down and quietly stare at his beautiful girlfriend, girlfriends even, all over again. Despite the fact they had pretty much fuck all to say.

We stepped back out into the midday heat where the rocks and sand were now scorching. It soon became pretty obvious why Ganga Ma had wanted us to show up on time because she was walking barefoot. She had to skip off ahead of us, moving as quickly as she could in order to find a shady bit of ground, and when we caught up with her she was bent over double, sweating and panting. It really was a bit much, for us to make poor old Ganga Ma undergo such suffering just so that we could see a bunch of rocks and get stoned. But I suppose she would have been the last one to call it quits, for her it was a nice little earner from a pair of freaks, which if she didn’t have would only have meant hours and hours of begging for not much more than a pitiful sum. This time the walk was a long one. By now we had crossed the river and the bulk of the ruins lay some distance behind us, in fact they soon disappeared as we rounded a corner and entered a valley with green fields and channels dug for irrigation. There were also quite a few huts and lots of people working on the land, and on the top of a nearby hill stood what looked to be an impressive white temple with a red flag flying from the top of it.

Some way into the scene we stopped at a small village where Ganga Ma led us into what turned out to be a tea hut full of local men crouched round the sides of it smoking beedis and drinking chai. They did not take much notice of me and Thomas so it must have been a regular stopping place for people on Ganga Ma’s tours of Hampi. We sat down drinking chais, glad of the shade and still half stoned from the chillum we'd smoked with the guy and his gals back in their temple. Ganga Ma told us when we were outside again that we would soon be arriving at the Lakshmi Temple, but warned us to be careful because recently a couple of tourists had got ripped off there and we needed to watch out in particular for one of the sadhus. Her words quickly put me on my guard, just as I was beginning to relax as well, although this time at least I had not brought my precious money belt with me but hidden it instead under my bed back at our hotel in Hospet. Nevertheless I realised that I was still carrying other possessions over which I was ready to fight for if things got nasty, items such as my camera and my floppy hat from Bangalore.

We didn’t have to walk much further until we arrived at the temple. It was located in a hidden corner of the valley amongst some small hills and boulders where, it had to be said, the setting and the building itself were really quite beautiful. The temple was long, low roofed and with a number of other buildings attached to it. At the front were steps leading down to a bathing tank surrounded by trees and bushes. If it had not been for the sound of voices coming from somewhere deep inside the temple, the whole scene would have been completely silent. Ganga Ma went inside and left me and Thomas hanging around the entrance, staring at pictures of Shiva and other Hindu gods and goddesses hanging on the wall above a fine looking couch with a wooden staff beside it. It wasn’t long before she was back with an excited looking sadhu who, as far as his looks were concerned, very much reminded me of Norman Grant, lead singer of the British reggae group The Twinkle Brothers. He spoke to us in very broken English and told us his name was Ramda before making us both pay our respects in front of a shrine to Shiva and then taking us into the temple.

As we were led down a dark corridor there was a strong smell of ganja and we soon found ourselves in the room where it was coming from. Hanging above a circle of ten or so sadhus sitting on the floor, at the head of which was a sadhu sitting in a deck chair, was a dense cloud of smoke. We looked down at the circle where there was a lot of laughing going on, with much rocking about and slapping of thighs. The sadhus were, to say the least, quite an exotic and colourful looking bunch of characters, with malas and other ornaments hanging from their necks or wrapped around their wrists and arms. Most of them were dressed in the traditional orange robes but a couple were almost stark naked and covered in ashes, and nearly all of them had their faces painted. In the middle of the circle lay a pile of ganja and some packets of cigarettes. One of the sadhus was making up a chillum, mixing together large amounts of weed and tobacco which he then sprinkled with water, before packing it into a deep, deep bowl. After having a word with the sadhu in the deckchair, Ramda made room for Thomas and I to join the circle whilst Ganga Ma had to sit outside, lost somewhere in the temple shadows. She seemed to have a worried look on her face and I wondered what was on her mind, but maybe she was just exhausted from all the walking in the Hampi morning heat. We sat down opposite Ramda and I noticed that next to him was the handsome young sadhu we had seen the day before by the river. He looked like he was having the time of his life, chanting homage to Shiva when the chillum was passed to him so that he could fill his fresh pair of lungs up to the brim with smoke. “Enjoy it while you’re young kid!” I thought to myself as his face disappeared in a cloud of exhaled ganja. Ramda leant over to me pointing to the sadhu in the deckchair.

“This temple Baba...holy man, very holy man!”

Ramda could have fooled me. The guy in the deckchair looked about as holy as a bus conductor gone native as he sat there and absently fiddled with a packet of cigarettes before coughing his guts up from the chillum. My initial favourable impressions of the scene were fast beginning to disappear and this process was very much speeded up by the antics of Ramda who soon established himself in my eyes as a right royal pain in the arse. Doubtless he was the sadhu who Ganga Ma had warned us about.

“You, you...you make chillum!” he said to me, pointing his finger right at my chest.

He was not being very polite, sadhu or no sadhu, and I suddenly felt like telling him to fuck off. Maybe we were just displaying our ignorance, for all we knew it might have been an integral part of sadhu circle etiquette for newcomers to turn the others on to a smoke, but somehow I didn’t think so. It just seemed to me like he was wanting to take advantage of us because we were a pair of vulnerable looking white faces completely new to the scene. Whatever the reason, Ramda was soon disappointed as I pulled out our empty bag of Mysore grass and shook my head at him.

“No ganja! No ganja!”

It must have appeared quite a drastic thing to do because a number of the sadhus looked at me with some degree of consternation and Ramda’s face turned quite mean. Here were a couple of Westerners busting in on their party and expecting a free fucking smoke! I realised that my almost instant aversion to Ramda had led me to nearly step out of line with the lot of them, which would have been decidedly un-cool, whatever way you looked at it. Therefore I hurriedly explained that we in fact wanted to buy weed and would it be possible to score some off them? I also pulled out the packet of cigarettes Ganga Ma had advised me to buy and tossed them into the middle of the circle, just to show that we were friends, despite whatever animosity might have been created by my original negative answer. Fortunately Ramda understood what I was saying and leaned over to the Baba to explain the situation. He soon came back to me and asked how much weed I wanted and when I flashed him a 50 rupee note he said that it would get me four tolas. It didn’t seem too bad a deal, the guy with the fabulous girlfriends had told us to pay around 10 rupees a tola, so 50 rupees for four didn’t seem too excessive under the circumstances, and the fact that I had nearly blown things badly didn’t put me in the kind of mood to haggle too much with him. When I handed over the money to Ramda he said we would have to wait for a while because they didn’t in fact have any weed at the temple and they would have to send someone out to a nearby farm in order to get some. Since I was sitting before what was the biggest pile of ganja I had ever seen in my life, I found it difficult to believe that they didn’t have any spare to sell us there and then, but I had little choice but to accept the situation. I looked over to Ganga Ma sitting in the corner of the room from where she nodded her head, so I supposed it was alright, and once everything had been straightened out there was little else to do but for me and Thomas to join in the smoking.

At no point was there a break for at least the next couple of hours, with chillums being made up and passed around from the piles of weed and tobacco which lay in the middle of the circle. Before each chillum was lit, the sadhus would clap their hands and say “Bom Shankar!” and when it was passed to them each one would lightly touch it against the their forehead and chant homage to Lord Shiva. Maybe they all thought they were partaking of a religious act, but to me as I sat there in a stoned haze, it seemed like it was one of the world’s oldest acts of degeneration performed supposedly in the name of religion. Man as a creature, just sitting about all day and getting completely wasted. It was depressing! Despite all their adornments or lack of them, it was plain to see they hadn’t overcome even the grossest hindrances to self-knowledge which, after all, was supposed to be the path they were on. In my eyes all they were interested in was getting completely blasted, but to give credit to them, they certainly made a pretty good job of that. After a while it was too much for me, I was completely wrecked and had to drop out of the circle, likewise Thomas who by this point was on his back with his eyes closed. No doubt about it, those sadhus knew how to smoke!

It was mid afternoon when the circle broke up. It was time for puja to begin and the temple baba heaved himself out of his deckchair to go and perform the ceremonies, with the sadhus following him one by one. Outside the temple there were a number of locals, waiting faithfully for the puja and bowing their heads when the sadhus walked past them. Everyone then gathered in the main temple hall to look down a small dark corridor, at the end of which was a brightly lit shrine with a statue of the goddess Lakshmi. When the baba walked down the corridor to sprinkle flowers over her and light some incense, the chanting began along with bells and horns, the sound of which blasted out into the valley. Thomas and I were witnessing the daily rituals of the one of the oldest religions on earth, if not the oldest, namely Hinduism. We just hung around the back of the group, wondering when our weed would arrive so that we could get the hell out of there. When the puja was over everyone including Ganga Ma, Thomas and myself, went to another room in the temple to eat. Rice on banana leaves with a heavily watered down dhal was what was on the menu. But it was free for us, or so we were led to believe, so we could hardly complain. After the meal the locals left the temple whilst the baba and the sadhus returned to the smoking room and we reluctantly followed them. Once we had sat down Ramda started to again hassle me for cigarettes and I nearly lost my cool with him.

“Look,” I said sharply, “I gave you cigarettes this morning so don’t ask again ok?”
“You cigarettes, give me,” he persisted.
“Look man,” I replied, now getting ready for whatever kind of showdown you had with a sadhu, “don’t insult me. Don’t think we’re stupid. We have no cigarettes, you have them!”

Thomas leaned over and told me it was probably best to let things be, after all if we didn’t have anything, what else could Ramda do? Although I did back off it was difficult to feel calm, that fucker really pissed me off! I was getting tired of people thinking I was stupid, despite the fact that I was behaving in a way which probably was. Really I should have felt sorry for Ramda, he did not look like he was a happy man despite all the weed he was smoking. It seemed like all he had in his life were his robes and his dirty stinking ganja, the same stuff that me and Thomas were trying to buy. At last an old man came into the room and handed out free piles of weed to the sadhus, and when he was finished he gave us ours which was wrapped in newspaper. It looked a reasonable amount and after I had taken away from it a generous contribution for a couple of chillums for the sadhus to smoke I carefully folded up the newspaper and put it in my rucksack. Now it was most definitely time to go and we gave the sign to Ganga Ma that we wanted to make a move. Outside the temple Ramda came up and demanded a donation of 10 rupees to the temple, something which seemed to me like a bit of a sick joke, so we just said farewell and walked off without giving him anything, back into the fertile fields and heading towards the ruins, grateful to have at last escaped such a desperate scene.

We told Ganga Ma that all we wanted to do now was go back to the ruins and the rocks, no more temples and no more sadhus! Lakshmi Temple had been more than enough for the both of us. Ganga Ma in fact apologised to us about Ramda, she said people had been hassled by him before and she had been hoping that he wouldn't have been around, that he would have gone up to Himachal Pradesh. For all her appearance of dereliction, it was clear that Ganga Ma had her standards too when it came to proper forms of behaviour. As we walked back, Thomas and I bemoaned the fate of the temple. It seemed to be such a waste, there it was in a beautiful setting yet the best all those sadhus could think to do was sit around in a dusty side room all day and smoke chillum after chillum of ganja. If we had been in charge of the place then boy, it would have been so very different! Plenty of meditation, with ganja smoking only permitted if it advanced one on the path towards the goal of liberation, you know, that kind of fantasy stuff. All the way back to the ruins we discussed our grand ideas for the place and how to spiritually tidy it up, forgetting the heat and the effects of all our weed smoking.

Once we had crossed the river it was time to part with Ganga Ma. Thomas and I had to go back to the other temple to drop off the tola of grass we had promised to buy for the guy with his beautiful girlfriends, but Ganga Ma looked completely done in so we gave her 30 rupees for her services and wished her all the best. In return she embraced us and said she hoped we would come back again, and with that she was gone, making her way by hopping barefoot back to the chai stall. When we got to the temple there was no one around so we went and sat by the river, but the rocks were very hot so it wasn’t too comfortable. We were soon distracted by the sight of a tall thin man bathing in the river. He wasn’t Indian although his skin was deeply tanned, whilst on his head he had a fair haired set of pretty wicked looking dreadlocks. He was giving them a wash and he subsequently dried them by standing in the water and wildly tossing his head back and forth. It was really quite a beautiful sight, there was something prehistorically impressive and holy about it, and when he stepped out of the water he dressed himself in a set of orange robes. Yes, that's right, he was another sadhu! He walked back up to the temple and after a couple more minutes we turned around and followed him.

When we got to the temple he was sitting in front of it and leaning back against a pillar.

“Yo!” he said slowly and coolly as we approached. We greeted him and explained that we had come to give a tola of weed to the guy who was staying there with a couple of women.
“Not here,” he said with a heavy accent, “they gone shopping.”
We sat down next to him outside the temple.
“You have, er, ganja?”
We told him we had just spent the day at the Lakshmi Temple and had scored some there.
“Mmmmm, many sadhus no?” he asked, to which we both sighed in agreement.
“Yeah, yeah, many sadhus!”

He then told us that his name was Cesar and that he was an Italian baba. He had an amazing face, really quite incredible, and although he could not have been more than 35 or 40 years old, he looked ancient. He had clear dark eyes which had deep-set lines running from them in every direction, burrowing down into his olive skin. But it was also quite a sad face, as if it held much physical suffering, collected together from all his hard years of being a sadhu in India; because it was clear that Cesar had been on the road for a very, very long time. His dreadlocks, which looked fair from a distance, were grey and more like an old man’s when seen close up.

“Well,” he asked, “we make chillum?”

How could we refuse? I opened my rucksack and handed Cesar the grass we had scored. He gave it a close inspection, shaking it about and sniffing it a couple of times.

“Mmmmm,” he said, “I think two tola?”
“Four”, I replied, suddenly with a sinking feeling.
“Four!” he exclaimed squinting his amazing eyes, “ah no, no, no, they no give you four tola, they no give you a good deal.”
“Yeah,” I thought bitterly to myself, “what a bunch of rip off bastards those sadhus were!”

Cesar put the grass down, went into the temple and soon returned with a large round steel plate. He took a couple of pinches of weed and dropped them onto it, then expertly separated all the tiny sticks and seeds from the heads, pushing them to one end of the plate before flicking them over the side.

“Cigarette?” he asked when finished.
“Oh shit,” I said, “we’ve got no cigarettes, we used them all at the temple. We only have some beedis.”
“Mmmm...beedis,” Cesar was obviously not impressed, “ok, I make with beedis.”

So I gave him a handful of beedis which he soon broke up, pouring the tobacco from them onto the plate. Then he mixed the tobacco in with the weed, picking it all up with his fine long fingers. It was a task in which he was completely absorbed whilst Thomas and I stared at him in silence, both equally absorbed in what we were absorbing. When it had all been mixed together he poured a little water over it and tightly pressed the mix between his fingers, and when that was finished he reached into his orange bag and took out a small chillum with a cobra carved into it. It was a beautiful little chillum! Before he lit it up however, he pulled out from his robes what I took to be a lump of hashish.

“Charas,” he said looking at us, “this from Manali. Very strong charas.”

Prepared to display my ignorance, I asked Cesar what it was exactly, and he then explained to me that charas was made from the male species of cannabis plant whilst hashish was made from the female species. Putting the lump over a flame from a match he sprinkled some over the mix and then he filled the chillum. It was ready to go!

Cesar handed me the chillum to start. He crouched over to give me a light and as I sparked it up he chanted “Bom Shankar! Om mani mani Shiva!” Needless to say the chillum packed a mighty punch and it also took some time to smoke between the three of us. Yet as soon as it was finished and despite having one of the most wicked coughs that I had ever heard in my life, Cesar immediately filled it up again from the rest of the mix and this time got me to light it for him as he pulled hard on it, drawing the smoke deep down into his lungs. No doubt about it, Cesar was a heavy duty dope smoker and by the time we had finished the second chillum Thomas and I were totally fucked. All we could do was lie there speechless on the rocks, staring out again over the strange, strange landscape of Hampi, whilst beside us Cesar sat upright, chanting and wailing across the river, and sometimes his sounds were answered by calls coming back from the other side.

It was wild, that was for sure, but it was all a bit too much as whilst I was tremendously stoned, the heat and the smoke had completely dried me out. I was desperate for a drink of water but there was only the river, and I’d heard or read too many stories of fresh water parasites getting into humans and eating away their guts for me to have anything like the guts to stagger down and take a potentially gut busting mouthful. On top of my thirst the blood inside my body felt very hot, hotter than I thought it was possible to feel and still be alive. It was as if the veins in my temples were throbbing so much that I thought they were going to explode, leaving me just a carcass in the dust, only fit for the vultures. Oh my lord! The smoke had suddenly plunged me into some pretty damn heavy body buzzes, and Thomas looked like he was going through the same thing as me because he lay there beside me and groaned, shaking his head from side to side. Cesar on the other hand seemed perfectly fine, he was no doubt hardened from many years smoking chillums in environmentally hostile situations such as Hampi in the heat and god knows where else in India, although it looked like all those years had certainly taken their toll.

It soon began to get dark and Thomas and I realised we would have to make our way back to the bazaar to get the bus. We asked Cesar if he would give the guy from the temple his tola of weed when he got back from his shopping trip. He seemed surprised that we were going and he suggested that we stay the night there. The others would soon be back he said, and they would cook food, make lots of chai and of course continue smoking chillums of weed and charas. But the idea of spending a night out there was nearly enough to make me keel over on the spot, there was simply no way I could do it. Thomas on the other hand was quite taken by Cesar’s suggestion and I remembered how he had said just the night before, that he would have loved to spend a night out in the ruins. Now, it seemed, was his chance. After all it would be perfectly safe, Cesar was not the kind of guy to kick you stupid as soon as you fell asleep as, let’s face it, his chillums took care of that. Thomas told Cesar that he would go for a chai and then he would be back. Yet again I found myself in one of those should I stay or should I go situations, but really this time there was no contest. I told Cesar that I would be back later as well, but the truth was I wouldn’t be because I was going to go back to Hospet and the relative comfort of our cheap hotel.

We left Cesar gradually assembling the stuff needed for another chillum and we made off for the chai shop down a dusty path to the back of the temple. On the way I asked Thomas if he really was sure that it would be a good idea to go back out there and smoke the night away, but he quickly replied that he was absolutely sure that it was. Cesar was one of the most interesting characters we had so far come across whilst being out in India, he told me, and he felt there would be much more he would get to learn from him. Whilst I agreed with him that he would probably get a lot more out of staying in Cesar’s company for a few more hours, I was beginning to realise my limitations. I knew that if I stayed the night out there it could very well just cause loads of inner tension, especially if I began freaking out over the environment I was in and the effect the smoke was having on my body. It would all simply be too much! So I would be gentle on myself for once, admit that it was beyond me and quietly retreat back to Hospet for the night. Besides if anything weird and wonderful really did happen out there with Cesar, I was bound to hear all about it from Thomas.

“Well, look man,” I said “I don’t think I’m going to stay out there OK? Those rocks are too much for me, too fucking much. I don’t think I’d survive and even if I did it would not be very pleasant.”

Obviously the cool thing would have been to stay there and chant Babylon down in the company of Cesar, but I was beginning to realise more and more that in those kind of situations I just simply wasn’t a cool person. And this time Thomas didn’t seem to mind, he was too busy getting himself ready for his next weird and wonderful India experience to really be that bothered if I was with him or not. The only black spot on the horizon as far as I was concerned was that I had left all the fucking weed with Cesar and I could have done with a smoke or two to take back to our hotel room in Hospet. It was dark now however and to have gone back to get some would have taken too long and been too complicated, so I had to retire for a quiet night empty handed, consoling myself with the thought that I would have at least ten ice cold sodas when I got back to town.

Back in Hospet after eating some food and drinking those sodas down to get back a bit of strength, I pulled out my notebook and wrote a few things down in it. A wave of inspiration flowed through me and before I knew it I had written Karnataka Rocks a poem heavily influenced by the events of the last few days and while certainly no Opium Bongos it still had a feel to it that I really rather liked.

Karnataka Rocks

many incredible people
many wonders still to be seen,
stump my toe if that isn’t true
on northern Karnataka rocks

the dreadlock woman enchants us
to go up river and sleep alone
on the necks of ancient temples,
stump my toe if that isn’t true
on northern Karnataka rocks

and we the sons of opium say
“OK, one last time before the desert
and camel ride of our dreams
chasing the dragon with love”,
stump my toe if that isn’t true
on northern Karnataka rocks

The following morning Thomas was back around 9, earlier than I had expected. I had just gone to get a paper when I saw him across the street sitting at the drinks bar, rapidly downing glass after glass of ice cold soda.

“Well, what was it like?” I asked as I sat down next to him and ordered a plain soda and a glass of badam milk.
“Fucking hot!” he replied, before settling down to give me a blow by blow account of what went on.

He said that by the time he got back to the temple from the chai shop the others had returned, only this time just the guy and his girlfriend because the other woman had left on her own to go off up to Himachal Pradesh. She was obviously not the guy’s second girlfriend after all. Thomas found out that they, like Cesar, were Italian and that the woman was called Francesca whilst the guy’s name was Marco. They had all sat around in front of the temple and smoked for a couple of hours, chillum after chillum of the weed, charas and tobacco mix, and that eventually it had got too much for Thomas. He’d had to leave the circle and lie down by the river, it still being too hot to sit or lie on the rocks, they just hadn’t cooled down at all, despite the fact the sun had set hours ago. He told me that he lay by the river for what seemed like hours and hours, his chest so tight that he had difficulty breathing and that at one point he had to crouch down and take some long deep breaths to calm himself. He eventually felt together enough to return to the temple where the Italians were now eating. Despite being offered a plate of food, Thomas said he couldn’t touch a thing and he had to sit on his own a couple of rocks away. He must have dozed off or something because when he next looked up there was only Francesca and Marco sitting there, Cesar they said, had crashed out in the temple.

So it seemed like Thomas’s hoped for supremely mystical experience in Hampi hadn’t occurred, in fact all evening he had barely spoken a word with Cesar who was too busy either smoking chillums or coughing up half his smoke from a dust wracked pair of lungs. There was little else Thomas could do after all that but find a place to sleep, and eventually he settled down somewhere for a very uncomfortable night on the rocks. “Ooh!” I thought to myself with some degree of satisfaction, “just as well I didn’t go!” When the sun rose Thomas was surprised that everyone was up and about after the rigours of the night before. They were boiling up some chai and already getting together their first chillum of the day. He didn’t hang around too long after that, just went to say goodbye to Cesar who was sitting on his own by the river, where Thomas told him that he was going back to Hospet and then to Bijapur.

“Bijapur?” Cesar asked, “why you go there? It’s off the line.”
“What line?” Thomas asked him.
“Any line”, was Cesar’s reply.

Thomas said that he gave Cesar a load of grass because all the smoking the night before had made him heartily sick of it. I was not too impressed when he told me that, as technically it was not his to give, it was the kind of rash thing that I would do only to regret later on. Countless times in the past I had thrown away little lumps of hash or bags of weed, vowing to myself that it would mark the start of the giving up process. It had never worked though, at least not so far. I therefore had to take a quick look at the weed, even though we were still in the soda bar, and was relieved to see that what was left was still a healthy half bag at least. Besides, in return for the weed, Cesar had given him a bit of charas which Thomas took, too embarrassed to tell him that he was seriously thinking of giving up all forms of dope smoking. Not long after this he had left, carrying with him a haunting picture of Cesar chanting Babylon down whilst preparing another chillum in the fresh morning sun deep amongst the hot rocks of Hampi.

Whilst Thomas was waiting for the bus in the bazaar he’d bumped into Francis who showed no signs whatsoever of getting ready to leave for Poona, despite the 25 rupees I had given him the other day. Thomas talked with him until the bus came and he now had to admit that Francis wasn’t such an asshole after all, just a poor Indian who had fallen on hard times and ended up in Hampi. Just as the bus was about to go Thomas had turned around and given him Cesar’s piece of charas which had made his day. And that was that, our Hampi experience was dun an’ dusted, in the can! The only thing left to do now was to get out of Hospet and fortunately when I’d returned the night before, I had gone to the railway station to check the times of the trains to Bijapur. There was a direct express which left at one in the afternoon, arriving in Bijapur at around four thirty. A simple three and a half hour trip, and we had plenty of time to get our stuff together to be on it.

When Cesar had told Thomas that Bijapur was off the line we had not known what he meant, but after spending a tedious day there in the stifling heat I think we both then did. Things had not got off to a very good start because our train from Hospet arrived over four hours late, which considering it was only a three and a half hour journey was pretty impressive even by Indian standards. My copy of Lonely Planet had said Bijapur was the "Agra of the South" because of all of the Islamic architecture which was there, including a world famous mausoleum called the Golgumbaz. Because of the write up we had been expecting to arrive in a substantial city with streets, parks, exotic restaurants and all the rest of it. But it was not really like that at all, it was rather just a one street town with a couple of bazaars running off it, along with some forgotten buildings of Islam. No wonder, we thought bitterly, that the trains didn’t bother to get there on time!

Getting to the centre of town at around 9.30 in the evening we were both a bit deflated, and as a result we carelessly chose the first hotel we came across. It was next to the central roundabout and it offered run down double rooms for 32 rupees a night. The one we got overlooked the roundabout, opposite to which was a petrol station with an Indian Oil road tanker growling away in front of it. We really should have tried harder, there must have been some better places around but somehow we just could not get it together to find them. In the room it was too damn depressing for us to even roll a joint of weed and after getting some food we both just lay on our beds, suffering in the heat and unable to sleep because of the because of all the noise outside which went on well into the night. By early afternoon the next day we had checked out the two main places to see, the Golgumbaz and the Ibrahim Roza, so our "normal tourist" act was over and we headed back to our hotel room to have a lie down. Outside the Ibrahim Roza we had seen a dead mouse with thousands of ants eating into its body, a rather horrible sight and a pungent reminder of what awaited us one day somewhere down the line; death, dissolution and decay. Pretty much the only good thing we had found in Bijapur was a place which served great badam milk; ice cold and bright yellow it slid down one’s throat really rather nicely. Apart from that all the rest of it had been a massive disappointment.

By the middle of the afternoon I couldn't stand our hotel room any longer and went down to the bus station to see about getting a bus to Bombay as soon as possible. The bus station was hard to take, a tough one in the heat, with there being thousands of people either racing around looking for buses or lying in groups on the ground with what seemed like all their worldly possessions spread around them. When I spoke to someone in the ticket office I was told that all the buses to Bombay were fully booked for the next three days, which judging by the state of the place did not surprise me in the least. But there was no way I wanted to spend another night in Bijapur, let alone three more days, and I was suddenly prepared to do whatever was needed to get out of there. After a bit of quick thinking I realised that if we got a bus up to a place called Solampur we would then be able to get a train to Bombay from there. Solampur was on the main rail line between Hyderabad and Bombay so catching a train to Bombay should have been more than possible. First I went back to our room to tell Thomas what the situation was. He was still lying on his bed, but he agreed with me that we should make a move. When I returned to the bus station I was told the last bus that day for Solampur would be leaving in one hour’s time. It was therefore all a bit of a mad rush getting our stuff together and checking out of the hotel, but we made it back to the bus station just in time to join the crush on the platform. It turned out to be another testing experience for us, there were just so many people about, so many screaming children running around that the sight of it all plunged the both of us into a hard hitting rap about the state of India and how things were clearly already out of control. It was just simply going to fuck itself into oblivion!

When the bus arrived all hell broke loose. As soon as it rolled into the station and swerved around to park itself by the platform, people began sprinting towards it, jumping up as soon as it had stopped and even clambering in through the windows, with some of them screaming at those who tried to pull them back down. Somehow the sight of it was sickening, not so much because we knew we would have to stand, but because in India people could so effortlessly behave in such a manner. The crazy thing was that in the buses we were travelling on it really didn’t matter if you got a seat or not, either way it was a rocky and most uncomfortable ride. We finally managed to get on, heaving our rucksacks up and throwing them down the aisle, pissing everyone else off because without those rucksacks taking up so much space, there would probably have been room for about six more passengers, but fuck that, we were on and for me and Thomas that was all that counted. As Indian bus journeys went, the ride from Bijapur to Solampur was quite a tough one, crushed as we were for three and half hours in the early evening heat and the whole time on our feet. By the time we got to Solampur we had crossed over from the state of Karnataka into the state of Maharashtra, and bit by bit we were leaving South India far behind us.

We reached the railway station by nine in the evening where we were told that the next train to Bombay would be in about two hours time. Since it was too late to book sleeping berths, we had to buy tickets for second class unreserved, a section of the train which we knew would be completely packed out with other passengers. We thought we would be able to get around the problem however, by simply going into one of the sleeper carriages and crashing on the floor, where there would at least be more space than the compartments we were supposed to travel in. If a ticket inspector came along and started to hassle us, we could plead ignorance, saying we were just a pair of ignorant Western bums who didn’t understand the situation. And if that didn’t work we could always slip him a few notes as baksheesh. After waiting on the platform for a couple of hours drinking sodas and reading a copy of India Today, we had the chance to put our plan into operation when the train rolled into the station. It all worked perfectly and by the time the train pulled out of Solampur we were settling down on the floor of a sleeper carriage with a couple of Indians for company who had pulled the same trick as us. We didn’t really sleep but just sat there on the filthy floor. Lying down was seriously uncomfortable due to the rocking motion of the train on the tracks. The only other thing we had to contend with was the heavy stink of piss coming from the toilets at the end of our carriage, but apart from that everything was great!

Things went OK until we got to the city of Poona when a drunk stumbled into the carriage. He was a mean faced Indian with cropped hair, turned up jeans and a t-shirt and he immediately tripped over one of the Indians sleeping on the floor next us who sprang up with a violent start wondering what the hell was going on. He just about managed to stop himself from beating the shit out of the drunk there and then on the spot, contenting himself with shouting at him in a brutal manner before he laid back down and went to sleep again. When the drunk realised there was me and Thomas who were also in the carriage and on the floor, he hassled us for many miles with his drunken and completely unintelligible forms of communication. It was a bit of miserable situation because he just would not shut up whilst everyone else around us was asleep and oblivious to this total asshole who was now badly fucking things up for the both of us. All we wanted was a decent bit of rest before the inevitable stress of arriving in Bombay, but instead we had to try and keep our cool whilst this drunk toyed with us in the same pathetic manner which drunks do the whole world over.

It all ended rather abruptly however when the train stopped at a small station in the middle of the night. A chai seller appeared in our carriage and the drunk bought a couple of chais off him and then for some reason gave one of them to me. As the train began to move again the chai seller moved further along the carriage to sell his chai, however before he managed to pick up his pot of chai the drunk went and kicked it over. The chai seller went completely mad, picking up one of his clay cups and smashing it into the face of the drunk. It was all so sudden and violent that my cup also went flying, covering me in hot chai and somehow giving me a bump on the head. The drunk staggered back clutching his face as blood streamed down, too shocked to retaliate. “Fucking hell,” I thought, “the chai seller's cupped him!” In fact it looked as if the chai seller was going to lay into the drunk again until he was restrained by Thomas and some other passengers who had been woken up by the commotion. It was all too much for the drunk and he jumped off the train as it slowly moved through the darkness, disappearing from our lives forever. The chai seller soon jumped off as well, extremely pissed off at having lost his pot of chai, something which might well have had serious economic implications for him.

Dawn broke just as the train pulled itself through the Western Ghats and soon hit Bombay’s industrial hinterland. The early morning was cool and refreshing, but it didn’t stay that nice for long because we soon rolled past mile after mile of chemical plants and factories belching out filth, creating some of the foulest patches of air I have ever had to breathe in my entire life. In other words, it was absolutely disgusting. To the both of us it seemed that as long as he made his money from all of this, the big fat Indian capitalist could do whatever he liked. The plants and factories gradually gave way to smaller units and the homes of the people of outer Bombay, but they were no less heavy, no less intense. All along the side of the rail tracks there were bare Indian arses shitting in the first light of the morning sun, and the bad smell in the air changed from man made to man. India, what a fucking country! As the train made its way through the suburbs commuters ran along the tracks and jumped on the train, soon packing out all the compartments and animatedly talking with each other whilst obviously being so full of life. The end of the line in Bombay did not turn out to be the Victoria Terminus but a station called Dadar which was still a few miles out from the actual city centre.

When the train stopped and we were pushed out onto the platform, Thomas and I knew we would have to be careful. We were both tired and dirty from what had been at times a very disturbed night on the floor of the train, and this was now the kind of situation where either of us could easily lose our cool if things suddenly got on top of us. The sun shone brightly as we stood on the crowded platform with our rucksacks stuck to our backs, not knowing which train to catch in order to get to the end of the line. On top of that we had to face the problem of finding a hotel, and by all accounts Bombay was both an expensive place to stay and very overcrowded. To stand any chance of getting a room at a reasonable price you had to be at the right place early in the day. On the train we had read my Lonely Planet and discovered the cheaper places were in the Colabar area of the city which lay right behind the Gateway to India. For some reason Thomas was convinced that it would be hopeless trying to find a place there and that we would be better off looking for somewhere around the railway station. Potential trouble was on the horizon because I really wasn’t keen on that idea, my Lonely Planet said Colabar was quite interesting and after our time in the relative wilderness I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of just drinking milk shakes and eating fries with fellow travellers, whilst impressing them with tales of all the crazy places I had visited. However I knew that if I pushed things with Thomas it could quickly get messy. On this occasion he sounded so sure of himself that he would only have been broken down by very forceful means of persuasion which no doubt would have had to embrace tantrums, threats and ultimatums until I had got my way. And that would have been too much, way too much, because in those conditions any freak outs would have been major ones, so I decided I would just follow him to wherever he led us.

We managed to keep ourselves together on the platform and after another 45 minutes we were standing outside Victoria Terminus, finally at the end of the line after finding another train and now in the middle of Bombay. When we hit the streets outside the station we were both pleasantly surprised over how much Bombay reminded us of a European city. The streets were wide and tree lined with nineteenth century buildings running down along their sides, full of shops, offices, apartments and hotels. Under a clear blue sky and bright morning sun, it all looked a very rich spectacle, there was clearly an air of affluence about the place which no doubt came with it being a hotbed of Indian industry, having one of the biggest ports in the world, innumerable factories in its hinterlands and of course it was also the home of Bollywood, centre of the Indian film making scene. In amongst it all there was still room for the usual street hawkers, ramshackle huts and beggars, yet somehow they did not have the heaviness attached to them which was found in so many other places in India. They all just seemed to be part of the swinging, almost celebratory way of life, although I’m sure that beneath the surface things weren’t quite so rosy.

I more or less left it to Thomas to find our hotel since we were in the part of town where he wanted to be. It was not long before a tout latched onto us and Thomas just let him lead the way whilst I hung back, determined not to allow a repeat of the last time we allowed a tout to lead us somewhere and we’d blown our tops, which was back in Mysore, something that now seemed like a long time ago. The tout first took us to a hotel where there was a small room available for 118 rupees and into which they had somehow managed to cram two beds leaving zero space for anything else, so we gave that one a miss. He then took us to a place called the Railway Hotel which had an adequate double room on the top floor around the back of the building for 95 rupees a night, and we decided to take it. So we had done it! We had arrived in Bombay with hardly a single cross word between us, and for me at least, that seemed like a remarkable achievement. We spent the morning resting up in our room, recovering from the rigours of the train journey. We did not get any sleep because Bombay was a very noisy Indian city, but this was to be expected and for us it was good just to lie down on the mattresses and rest. Thomas and I also talked about our plans because it would soon be the end of the road for us as travelling partners. From Bombay it would be easy for me to get a train to Delhi and from there shoot up into the hills where I could at last embrace with open arms some mediation practice and get things back on track again as far as my spiritual life was concerned. Or at least that was what I hoped. Thomas would be following a different path. He was quite happy to stay a bit longer in the heat, so much so that he wanted to turn up the volume by going into Rajasthan and travelling right across its interior to the desert town of Jaisalmer which lay right in the west of that vast, hot and dusty Indian state. All that was left for us to do was to decide how long we should stay in Bombay and we would only be able to do that once we had gone to the station to check out the situation without regard to trains heading north.

In the early afternoon I left Thomas resting in our room and went across to the Victoria Terminus, but there I was informed that it did not deal with northbound trains and that I would have to go to Churchgate, another station a couple of blocks away. After studying the map in my Lonely Planet I decided I could walk it as the distance didn’t look that great and there was little chance of getting lost due to the spacious layout of that part of town. It was such a clear, sunny afternoon with everything so bright and colourful that it was a most welcome change from the heat, dust and haze of the interior from where we'd come from. But it was still hot, that was for sure, it was still hot! Bombay was definitely a different class of city to many others in India, for one thing when you used the road crossings, cars and buses actually stopped for you, regardless of whether or not there were any cops about. Under the broad walk arches of its big old buildings street hawkers sold Western products; ghetto blasters, radios, razors, all stacked up in boxes on the pavement as well as loads of other stuff. There were many fruit stalls selling sugar cane juice, plates of watermelon and papaya, fresh pineapples covered in salt and chillies and ice cold glasses of lemon water. And for everything on offer, there seemed to be plenty of customers.

Churchgate station was opposite a giant cinema showing a Stephen Spielberg movie which I made a note of as it might be a good one to catch later if we got loaded up on drugs. Since Bombay was obviously a major city, Indian Railways had a separate bookings section for foreign travellers, but that didn’t stop it from having a long queue. Whilst I was waiting I got talking to an English guy who came in right behind me with a brand new Walkman, on which he was playing the Fine Young Cannibals. By some strange coincidence he came from Harpenden, the same town in Hertfordshire where my parents lived back in England. He told me that he had only been in India a couple of days, he was on his way to Australia but was stopping off in Asia to see what it was like. At the moment he told me he hated it. He had come to Bombay to look up a friend but had so far drawn a blank and now after being in town only a day he was ready to leave. He told me he had never seen anything like it, it was all a bit too hectic, a bit too full-on for his liking, and he felt there was the constant threat of getting ripped off which was making him paranoid. With his pale skin he looked a prime target, with an obvious vibe coming off him of being the new kid in town, a fresh face exposed to the madness that was India. Playing the part of the cool experienced traveller I told him not to worry, that as long as he was reasonably careful he would have no problems. When he asked me how long I had been in India I felt like a self satisfied old timer when I told him it was now coming up to seven months. My final piece of advice to him was that he should head for the hills if it was getting too much for him on the plains, just like it was for me, although I didn’t mention that bit.

When it got to my turn in the queue I was told by the man behind the counter that there were three trains to Delhi every day and each one had a tourist quota of just two berths, a measly amount in my eyes since the trains carried thousands of people. The man explained to me however that it was now the height of the holiday season with a lot people travelling, booking their seats weeks in advance, so I should count myself lucky that at least I had a chance of avoiding such a long wait. The system was that if I wanted one of the berths, tickets for them would only be available the day before they were valid to travel on, and that meant getting to the booking office early. It would be another mad scramble in other words, and this time with not an Indian in sight! On my way back to the hotel I bought a delicious toasted cheese salad sandwich, plus a plate of fresh watermelon and a glass of sugar cane juice. All for only a few rupees. Despite all the rough and tumble, India was rich in so many ways which people would never understand or even begin to imagine if they had never been there. Back at the hotel Thomas had gone out and I was left to lie around for a couple of hours, recovering from my walk to Churchgate which in the heat had left me feeling pretty knackered. My mind drifted towards the bag of grass we still had left from Hampi and which was stuffed at the bottom of my rucksack. Since Thomas’s firm decision to never smoke again after his night out on the rocks, I hadn’t touched any either, but that now seemed like it was months ago even if it was only a couple of days, so I was seriously starting to get the urge to pull out the weed. Then, just as I was thinking of getting it together to roll a nice big joint I had a bit of a brainwave: why not buy some opium!?! After all there should be no problem scoring some in Colabar, and despite the perils of using the city dealers, the opium for sale in Bombay should be good quality stuff since both Rajasthan and Pakistan were only a couple of hundred miles up the road. So there I was, going crazy again!

Thomas returned after a couple of hours, full of impressions over how rich and modern the area of Bombay was where all the airlines were located, because he’d been to the Lufthansa offices to check out the exact time of his flight back to Germany. With just under three weeks left to go from his eight month stint in India, Thomas was now ready to go home. He told me he had bumped into a fellow German whom he had met months ago when he was on his way down south. The poor guy had just had everything ripped off him; money, passport, the whole goddamn sob story. Now he was having to go to the German embassy to sort it out. Problem for him was that he was a heavy dope smoker and he might have trouble, the officials could easily turn around and tell him it was his own fault, that he would have to pay for everything if he wanted to get back home. It made me realize that we should be careful, it would be a fatal error to put too much trust in a place like Bombay, especially if I was seriously thinking of going around and popping some sticky black balls of opium into my mouth again. I therefore decided against telling Thomas about my recent idea to buy some because I had the feeling he would be definitely into it, for us to go out with a bang so to speak, but I wasn’t yet sure as to whether it would be a wise thing to do or not. Maybe I was beginning to learn my lesson from immediately turning any stupid idea which came into my head into a tempting suggestion for Thomas to pick up on. Instead I told him about the situation with regard to trains to Delhi and that I would have to get up early the next morning in order to try to secure a berth on one for the following day. There seemed to be little point in me hanging around Bombay for too long, it was time to hit those hills and clear my fucking head.

In the early evening we took a walk through the city and down to the bay where an orange sun was setting over the Arabian Sea. There were people everywhere, either sitting on the sea wall, walking up and down the promenade or playing on the sands. They were all in small happy groups, eating roasted peanuts and chickpeas from the food stands, drinking coconuts and wearing nice fashionable clothes. It was obviously a very popular place to go in Bombay after work was finished. So many people, countless numbers of people! With Bombay it seemed like mankind was pushing itself to new limits and it made me wonder that if one day it would be like the ruins in Hampi; an awesome but completely deserted monument to another age. Somehow it did not seem possible. It had to be said that we did not impress too many people in the bay of Bombay however, dressed as were in our battered travellers clothes and with ravaged faces from weeks on the road. We then made our way towards Colabar, walking down streets of high rise flats whose inhabitants must have lived like battery hens. They were interesting streets to walk down, paan leaf sellers on every corner sat behind colourful stalls with their incense burning in sweet spirals upwards. It was therefore a little bit of a disappointment when Thomas and I got lost and we nearly had a fall out over whose fault it was, but maybe it was just the tiredness catching up with us, along with the ever present heat. Whatever it was, we had to go through an uncomfortable period of silence after we both blamed each other for going in the wrong direction, although it was definitely his fault.

Fortunately everything was soon set straight by a Chinese looking man who in fact told us he was from Bhutan and who gave us an excellent set of directions so that within ten minutes we had again hit the main street in Colabar with lots of food places on it. Since we were now pretty hungry we went to have something to eat, choosing the first restaurant that we came to, so perfect was our non-discrimination, a modern restaurant serving both Chinese and Indian food. The hip young waiters could not help giving us stares of disapproval due to the state of our attire as they somewhat reluctantly led us to our table. When he went to take a piss Thomas told me there was an air conditioned seating section upstairs but it was horrible, full of rich young Indians who thought they were gods and goddesses which, in comparison to the vast majority of the Indian population, and us, they probably were. The food however was excellent if a little expensive, costing 14 rupees for a vegetable byriani and a couple of naan breads, which for the likes of me and Thomas was pretty close to budget breaking. Halfway through the meal, just as we were at the point of seriously stuffing the food down our throats, something quite incredible happened. Thomas was sat facing the doorway whilst I had my back to it, when all of a sudden he was staring open mouthed and over my shoulder.

“Oh wow!” he gasped, “oh man, oh man, this is amazing!”
“What is it?” I asked before I turned around and felt strange, so very, very strange, like I was in a dream or something, because standing in the doorway of the restaurant was none other than Cesar, the chillum smoking baba from Hampi, waving at us with a big smile on his face.

“Whaaat?!” I said incredulously, as I stared at him in wonder, “I don’t fucking believe it!”

But it was definitely Cesar, with his amazing dreadlocks and flowing orange robes it was hard to mistake him for anyone else. We excitedly motioned him to come in and join us, ignoring the fussing of the waiters who looked as if they had never seen a sadhu in their lives before, at least certainly not in their restaurant. It took a while for me and Thomas to calm down because the chop house we were in was probably one of the last places in India we would have expected to run into Cesar, especially since the last time we had seen him was out on those hot rocks in the wild temple ruins of Hampi.

Sitting down next to us he looked tired, hungry and even older than he did before. We asked him what he wanted to eat, anything was his, but he only ordered two plates of rice and some fresh curd.

“Well,” he asked with a smile, “how was Bijapur?”
“Shit!” we both replied together.
“Yes, yes, it is off the line. Only thing there is good clay chillum.”
“Really?” I asked, “we didn’t see any.”
“No, you wouldn’t know where to go.”

We told him we would soon be splitting up to go our separate ways. When he heard I was going to Dharamsala he said that he would also soon be going to Himachal Pradesh, up to the Kulu valley, to a temple a short distance from the town of Manali. It was now the season. There would be lots of sadhus, babas and ganja to smoke there, and from Bombay it was easy for him to ride up to North India for free on the trains. He said that I should try to go and see him, it was a well known temple where he stayed, and that when I got to Manali I was simply to ask for the Italian baba. Cesar’s suggestion certainly got me thinking, if I was going up to Dharamsala for meditation it might be nice to schedule in a couple of breaks and make my way over to Manali for a serious bit of dope smoking with Cesar. After we had eaten our food the three of us sat there smoking beedis and drinking sodas. By now the waiters had loosened up a bit and were showing some curiosity in Cesar, one of them even came up to ask him if his locks were real or not. When I passed him another beedi, Cesar turned to me with a smile.

“You still have some ganja?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I replied, “we’ve still got the stuff we scored in Hampi.”
“Ah! We smoke chillum yes?”
“Yeah, yeah of course,” I replied, not even thinking to refuse.
“Come, I know place where we can smoke chillum.”

Funny how these things should come about, because as soon as we hit the streets we ran into a guy with a bushy beard and full set of dread locks on his head. Upon seeing Cesar he introduced himself as Mo, and he immediately took up with us. So off we went through the streets of Colabar with Mo and Cesar leading the way, me and Thomas right behind them. We soon found ourselves on a quiet tree lined street quite close to the Gateway of India. It was pretty dark and there were some big buildings along it, one of which we walked up to and, following Cesar, sat on its steps looking out over the road, from where it was not long before a couple of Indians came along, greeted Cesar, then sat with us. They obviously knew what was going on and were happy to wait a while in order to sit in on a free smoke.

Rummaging through my small rucksack I pulled out the bag of Hampi weed and gave it to Cesar, telling him to use as much as he liked. Mo tossed him some cigarettes and whilst Cesar was making up the mix, Mo took out a chillum from his bag, setting it carefully on the ground where it waited to be filled. When it was ready, Cesar handed the chillum to Mo and held the light as Mo fired it up. “Bom Shankar!” Cesar chanted in celebration as the group of us got covered in smoke from the weed. Soon enough the chillum was being passed around as we sat there on the steps in darkest Bombay, drawing the attention of only a few passers-by, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for us to do. For some reason I was unable to get a decent draw on the chillum on the two occasions it was passed to me. It was too damn dark for me to see whether or not I was holding it correctly, which obviously I wasn’t, and therefore it was extremely frustrating to sit there and see smoke pour out of everyone’s mouths and nostrils apart from mine. I was desperate for a decent hit but it would not have looked good if I had asked Cesar for a chillum holding lesson in the dark whilst on the streets of Bombay, so I just had to put up with it. It was also quite astounding to see how enthusiastically Thomas had returned to the smokers fold after only a couple of days ago vowing that he would never touch any weed ever again.

When the chillum was finished the pair of now stoned Indians departed, telling Cesar it would be wise to move on. Relatively safe though the place was, it was still in the pick-up zone for the Bombay cops if they happened to be passing by. Cesar handed me back the bag of weed and we all got ourselves together to move, just like any other bunch of law abiding citizens who were enjoying the peace and quiet of a mid-evening stroll down a Bombay sidewalk. We walked down to the bay and I got talking to Mo who turned out to be rather posh and from Kingston-Upon-Thames. He was a very friendly guy, but soon went off on a very complicated theory about the meaning of existence which was no doubt caused by the chillum he had just smoked. By the time we got to the bay we walked on the near side pavement, the one furthest away from the sea wall. We were looking for a quiet place to smoke another chillum, but Mo and I were completely and utterly surprised when Cesar suddenly sat down in the middle of the pavement.

“Here, we smoke chillum. This is good place!”

Thomas didn’t seemed that phased by it, but Mo and I stuttered about wondering what the fuck to do. It was obvious that if the Bombay cops suddenly appeared we would be totally fucked. It was hard to think of a more blatant way in which to advertise the fact that we were smoking a chillum full of ganja.

“No baba, no. Not here!” said Mo, who suddenly looked like his beard and dreadlocks were seriously weighing him down.

“Yeah, er, you know Cesar, don’t you think we should find a quieter place or something?” I added rather feebly.

Since Mo had the chillum and I had the weed, Cesar had little choice but to get back up again. Walking off ahead of us it was plain to see that he didn’t like it and when we got to the street corner he told us he was leaving to go and smoke on his own. He shouted at us that he was free to smoke where he liked and no one told him what he could or couldn’t do. It was all a bit of a shock! Thomas, Mo and I just stood there open mouthed as Cesar stormed off on his own down the sidewalk, his wonderful dreadlocks flowing down his back behind him.

“Oh man,” said Thomas, “that’s really sad. We will probably never see him again.”
“Well fuck!” I said, trying to excuse ourselves for bottling it, “I would have sat there no problem if I thought it was cool with the cops. But I don’t know what they’re like here in Bombay.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Mo, “and I don’t want to find out either!”

So that was that. Our guru had deserted us, we had failed the test, failed it miserably. For me and Thomas I guess it wasn’t too bad because we already knew that we were basically a pair of assholes, but for Mo it looked like the whole little episode had come as a severe shock. With his beard and dreadlocks he certainly looked the part, but when it came to really putting his cards on the table and playing with the big boys, he had badly blown it. He knew he could never really hope to make the grade without acceptance from the likes of Cesar who were pretty much the real deal. And that was the thing. If Cesar wanted to smoke his ganja in public he would do it, what possible difference would it make to him if the police came along? He was a goddamn sadhu, not a pretender. He was free to chant his praises to Shiva anywhere he liked, and if that meant doing so in the middle of a big, busy city then so be it. There was something mighty about Cesar, and compared to the lives of most others, where timidity and repression could so easily be the order of the day, it was the life of ultimate freedom. But make no mistake, it took no prisoners, to which his lungs would surely testify.

The three of us stood there for quite a long time, feeling pretty foolish and somewhat bewildered. We could not believe we had lost our baba Cesar just like that! In the end we crossed over the road and sat on the sea wall looking out over the bay of Bombay which was filled with the lights of ships waiting to come into port. We got talking again, and apart from smoking weed, Mo was into meditation so we had that in common and he told us about the various paths he had attempted to tread upon, in the course of which he gave me a tip with regard to meditation sitting which I thought extremely useful. He told me that it is important to make sure your balls hang free in order not to block the flow of your chi energy when you sit and meditate, and later I was to realise just how useful this simple piece of advice actually was. Mo was a traveller, in fact he had been to India many times, having just recently hired an Enfield motorbike and rode up into the remote hills of Orissa which, in his own words, had simply blown him away. He had been to China as well, where he told us that learning Mandarin had been a bitch, and he had also travelled to Pakistan, Tibet, Burma and Thailand. In other words he had been all over the fucking place. He was now in Bombay for just a few days before going down to Australia and he told us that he was saving his last bit of opium for the journey.

After a while we crossed back across the road to look for a quiet place to have a smoke and it was more than a little ironic that we ended up under a tree on a quiet patch of pavement not far from where Cesar had left us. Thomas and I sat as watchmen whilst Mo did the mix behind us and filled his chillum. This time I made no mistake when it was passed to me and I took in a couple of huge blasts, straining my lungs whilst I tried to keep the smoke down for as long as possible before exhaling a huge billowing cloud of ganja over Mo and Thomas. It did not take long after that for me to feel quite majestically stoned as we sat there on the Bombay pavement under the protection of a big exotic tree. The experience was slightly spoilt when I got up and felt a painful twinge in my left shoulder. It brought me down on another bad health buzz because I took it as yet another sign that I was giving myself heart disease and having the beginnings of a stroke. Stupid fucker! It was enough for me to hand over what was left of the weed to Mo, and although I had to admit I was hoping for a little bit of his opium in return, all he gave me was a couple of beedis.

It was quite late in the evening when Thomas and I went to look for a bus back to the Victoria Terminal part of town where our hotel was located. Mo had disappeared, back to his dormitory somewhere in Colabar, and we were once again left on our own, stoned travellers in a strange town. Strange city in fact, and there was no doubt that Bombay qualified as a city, and a pretty bloody big one. We stood waiting at a stop but it couldn’t have been the right one because bus after bus sped past us, their drivers wondering just what a washed up pair of Westerners were doing wildly waving their arms about by the side of the road. But we finally got a ride, against all the odds we triumphed and tripped up the stairs of a double decker in order to sit on the seats at the front. Walking back to our hotel room from the stop by the station, we passed hundreds of people sleeping on the pavements, and it was clear that some of them must have been sleeping on the same spot for many years, they looked so damn comfortable you almost wanted to lie down with them.

Despite the rigours of the night before I was up early to go to Churchgate and check out the scene with regard to train tickets to Delhi. When I arrived it was still another two hours before the ticket office opened so I felt kind of stupid since I was the only one there apart from two pretty paranoid looking Westerners, the type who were probably always at the front of any queue. There had been no need to panic after all, the screaming hordes had stayed away for one more day at least, because when everything was finally opened up I got a ticket for the Jamuna Express without any problem, and which left Bombay Central at 8.30 the following morning. It's final destination was all the way up in Kashmir and it called in on Delhi approximately 20 hours into the ride. The ticket, which included a sleeper reservation, cost 109 rupees. Just to make sure things weren’t that simple however, the railway office in Bombay demanded that foreigners paid in foreign currency, which meant I had to cash a travellers cheque at their kiosk, and when they gave me all my rupees back after taking the ticket money, they were cleared out of all their change.

Just as I was leaving the ticket office I noticed the English guy from Harpenden who I had been talking with the day before. He was standing in the queue again so I went up to see how he was getting along. He looked a lot more relaxed and he told me that he'd had a good night’s sleep, something which I knew could make all the difference. Now he was heading out and into the great country of India, no longer feeling so scared, and he wanted to go up to Delhi and then on to Nepal. It was then that I had to break the bad news to him that Nepal was a definite non-starter of a proposition. At that moment it was in the middle of a nasty trade dispute with India which meant it was short on all vital commodities. Hard up for cash, the Nepalese government had demanded that tourists staying there prove they were spending at least $10 a day, an extortionate amount considering how cheap everything was. He let out a heavy groan when I gave him this information, saying that after three days he was heartily sick of Asia. Poor guy, in an instant he was back at square one! When I left him all I could do was wish him the best of luck, sadly wondering for a while what would become of him.

Returning from Churchgate I stopped off on my way back to the hotel for some breakfast, because I had now been up for three hours sorting out the tickets and still hadn’t eaten. I found a nice little place which served up delicious dhal fry with lemon and slices of fresh baked bread along with fresh sweet chai, all of which was more than a little awesome. Sometimes eating in India was just so incredible! When I got back to the room Thomas wasn’t there, so I hung around waiting for him to return. It was not until late morning when he finally walked in through the door, and it soon became obvious why he had taken longer than expected to go wherever he had been going, because when he stood over me whilst I lay on my bed he pulled out a tightly wrapped lump of thick black opium.

“Wow,” I said, “I was going to say to you that we should get some. I’ve been thinking about it on and off since yesterday afternoon!”
“Yeah,” said Thomas, “I ran into a guy on the street and somehow it was just meant to be.”
“Yeah man, it’s a healthy looking bit of stuff. How much did you pay for it?”
“95 rupees.”
“95! Fuck, that’s cheaper than what it was in Mysore.”
“I know,” said Thomas, “now it makes me wonder about Bela and what he charged us, although he did say that his stuff was Chinese which is supposed to be the best.”
“This stuff might be Chinese.”
“No, Pakistan.”
“Yeah, yeah, OK. What did Bela say from Pakistan? 125?”
“So that makes this 30 rupees cheaper than Bela.”
“Yeah, right. But I guess Mysore is a bit further down the road than Bombay, almost off the line. Anyway, was the guy who sold it to you cool?”
“He was OK, but he was an addict.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, his eyes were yellow.”
“Yeah, fuck. Guess there can’t be many opium dealers around who don’t end up taking it themselves. Anyway Thomas, are we going to pop some or what?”
Thomas smiled when I asked this question.
“Of course we are, of course we are!”

We carefully unwrapped the lump of opium and rolled two balls from it. Because of the heat it was very sticky and it had quite a strong smell. The only thing more nauseating than the smell of raw of opium was the taste, so we had to be extra careful when we popped the lumps into our mouths, careful that they went straight down our throats and into our systems. It would have been too much if we had got the taste of it on our tongues. In our excitement the balls we rolled were far bigger than any of the balls we had popped down south with Bela, but before we realised what we'd done we had washed them deep down into our bodies with lots and lots of water.

“Right,” I said, “let’s see what happens.”

After we had popped the opium it didn’t seem like a good idea to do anything too intense. It was then that I remembered the Spielberg movie showing in the cinema opposite Churchgate. When I mentioned this to Thomas he was up for going, sitting in the dark somewhere suited him just fine. Luckily I also remembered the times it was showing and as the first one was at 1.30 in the afternoon, in just under an hour, we decided to go for that. After a couple of sodas in the restaurant downstairs, we felt together enough to make the walk to Churchgate. When we got outside it wasn’t long before we began to feel the opium coming on strong. When I walked along the pavement the ground became softer, the sounds of traffic more distant, as my consciousness rolled over and went deeper within. Boom, boom. Party time again!

The first half of the Spielberg movie was great, full of laughs and special effects, but during the interval I made the big mistake of smoking a beedi, about which I really should have known better. A beedi can make you feel a little queasy at the best of times due to its horribly cheap tobacco, but when you're on opium the feeling of nausea is considerably intensified. It meant that all the way through the second half of the movie I was swaying in my seat, reeling from the effect of mixing up the smoke of a beedi with the altogether different workings of a heavy duty lump of opium. When the special effects came along again I didn’t feel good at all, but somehow managed to hold onto the insides of my stomach whilst space machines reeled on the big screen in front of me. When it was over and we were walking down the steps of the cinema I felt very weak, in no condition to go once more into the brightness and colour of late afternoon Bombay.

“Wow,” I said to Thomas, “this is strong stuff!”

Thomas only had to look at my face to see that something was wrong. He said I looked totally white and that we should find a park or somewhere to sit and rest. Walking down the pavement things improved a bit. Once I got into a steady rhythm, staring straight ahead and letting images come towards me, the feelings of nausea began to disappear. People, cars and buses floated on past and the voice which spoke to Thomas did not feel like it was mine. After half an hour or so we came to a roundabout close to Colabar and just as we crossed the road an elephant appeared. Steadily plodding along with its head bowed and swishing its tail, it looked sadly out of place in a Bombay street full of buses, lorries, cars and road tankers. It must have been heading down to the bay where its owner would make money out of it by giving people rides on the sands. Somehow it was a very depressing sight to witness and only served to make things worse for me.

A little further along towards Colabar we stopped at a drinks stand and had a couple of lassies, a chilled yoghurt drink which was very popular throughout the whole of India. Thomas had a mango lassi and I had something called a chikku lassi. Mine was very thick, more like eating a meal and just what I didn’t need in my current condition. The effort to drink it became too much and I only managed half a glass, regretting I had even gone for that, because I knew that if I wasn’t careful there would soon be a puke pile of frothed chikku lassi on the pavement. Not that much further on from the drinks stand we stopped at a stall selling sandals. I had been wanting to get a pair for a while, a decent pair to make up for the horrible cheap chappals I'd bought in Bangalore and then abandoned in Hospet. I tried some on, staggering about a bit because of the opium, but thankfully not to the point of knocking things over. Somehow I made it through my opium haze to buy a pair for 50 rupees, then just as we were leaving, the Indian in the shop said that they also did repairs, which I didn’t take as a good sign!

Next we found a kiosk which had a display of hash pipes, a rare thing in India where everyone smokes chillums. It was a disappointing selection however, but still I bought one for a friend back home and Thomas got one for his dad which he could use to smoke his tobacco down in deepest Karlsruhe close to the Rhine. As we were haggling over prices I suddenly had to make a move. I rushed out but too late - whoosh, whoosh - I had puked all over the pavement! Guess it had to happen. The funny thing was how easy it all came up. There was no retching or any strain on my guts, just a simple straight forward gush from the inner depths of my system. No problem, I didn’t feel a thing! Nevertheless I had to step back and take a rest because it left me really dizzy and when Thomas caught up with me he said my face was still very white and that we ought to find a place to sit down. Due to the circumstances we went back to the roundabout where we’d seen that poor elephant, and where on the other side of it was a little park in front of the Bombay Museum. When we sat down on a seat overlooking some flower beds I suddenly felt very tired. It seemed like the sensible thing to do would be to go back to the hotel and lie down. Both of us must have looked quite out of it because we got some pretty drastic stares from cultured Indians strolling around viewing the city’s heritage. In fact we didn’t stay there long. The bus stop was just around the corner so we made a fast exit to go back to Victoria Terminus. As I stood at the bus stop however, another wave of nausea came over me and – whoosh, whoosh – I'd puked again! It came up with such force that it sent me back against the railings, staggering dizzily.

“Phew,” I said to Thomas, “that one was a bit much!”

Maybe it was bad opium, but then again Thomas seemed OK, so it must have all stemmed from smoking that stupid fucking beedi in the cinema. When the bus came it looked pretty packed and I realised it would be asking way too much for me to travel on it, so I sent Thomas on ahead and decided to walk back. The way to the hotel was no problem, it was just straight on up the road, so I slowly walked off down the pavement. But I had not got very far when I puked again, this time in front of a bunch of horrified Bombay businessmen. Tears rolled down my cheeks from the force of my inner convulsion, but really it was nothing to get excited about. All I’d done was take a whack of opium which had turned out to be a bit too much for me. Big fucking deal! After that things got better and I began to enjoy the walk, even though I stank of puke. It was like some kind of dream, gliding down whilst being bathed in the rich atmosphere of new and strange Bombay streets packed with people buying and selling all kinds of wares and goods on the pavements. Just before I got to the hotel I topped off my shopping trip by getting myself a couple of handkerchiefs, after all I needed to clean myself up with something, and the ones I bought had some rather nice patterns on them, more than a little hypnotising as a matter of fact.

Back in the room I rested on my bed for a while. Now that the puking fits had stopped, my body was no problem again, in fact it felt like it had turned to gold inside. It was just nice lying there, it felt so good that I thought everything was OK, so I lit up and smoked another beedi. You would have thought I would have had more sense, but no, my desire for a hit from that cheap and nasty tobacco simply overrode everything. Within ten minutes of flicking the stub out the inevitable happened and I started puking again. I tried to stick my head through the grated window to avoid puking up in the room but I didn’t make it and it went all over the walls, splattering the bedside table which was full of our possessions.

“Oh fuck, I’m sorry man!” I groaned in apology to Thomas who had silently witnessed the whole scene.

He didn’t seem to mind, he was pretty blasted himself of course, and he just went to get a bucket and mop from the floor boy in the hotel to clean it all up.

“Here,” I said to him when he came back, “give it to me.”

It was the least that I could do, the sight of all the puke everywhere made me feel quite ashamed of myself in an abstract disconnected kind of way.

“Oh man,” Thomas sighed when I had finished, “you really shouldn’t smoke those beedis!”
“Yeah, yeah, right!” I said quietly, “too moronic for words, I know.”

We had to go out again, I needed some air and walking around seemed to do the trick. Soon we struck off on a route through a different part of town and ended up pretty far down the road running along the bay. We stopped at a stall selling fresh sliced watermelons where we then sat on the sea wall and tried to eat them. I just about managed to finish mine although it was like having a three course meal, opium shrinks your guts that’s for sure, as well as making them puke! We walked down to a place called Chowpatty Beach. There were thousands of people around and it was really quite amazing, a testament to the Indian capacity for creating enjoyment out of virtually nothing. But the thing was that it was not really a very nice beach at all, being right in the middle of Bombay. Just round the corner was one of the biggest and busiest ports in the world, with ship after ship going in and out of it every day, no doubt casually discharging their filth into the waters not far away. Anywhere else and Chowpatty Beach would have been an abandoned stretch of sand populated by just a couple of tramps and people with metal detectors. But this was India so you had crowds of people walking down the rows of game parlours, food stalls and chai shops, everyone chatting away to each other like it was some kind of celebration whilst hawkers with balloons and stupid masks preyed upon the children.

Thomas and I sat on the beach for a while, silently looking out over the bay and the lights of what seemed like a thousand ships on the horizon. But it was a bit too much for me, there was a bad smell coming from somewhere and I could feel the waves of nausea returning. The beach, it seemed, was also an exceptionally popular toilet. We walked back in the direction of the hotel, keeping to the bay road and every so often stopping to rest on the sea wall. Although it was our last night together the opium made it hard for us to speak so we didn’t really say much to each other. Anyway, we both knew the score, it was the end of the line for us. We would be going back soon, back to the fundamental problem of what we were going to do with our lives in the West, something for which in my case at least, I still hadn’t come up with any real solutions. It would have been too pathetic for words if we had just sat and reminisced over the times we had spent together, along with all the people we had met and places we’d seen. So for the most part we just sat there in silence whilst the effects from those big balls of opium we had taken still coursed through us. By the time we left the bay things had begun to quiet down considerably and after buying mineral water, then some bananas from a late night stall, we walked on back to our hotel, in places tip toeing our way past the hundreds of people sleeping on the pavements.

My alarm went off at 7 the following morning. I got up, slung my stuff in my rucksack and generally tried to pull myself together in order to shrug off the post opium haze I was inhabiting. I left my tape of The Twinkle Brothers for Thomas as a present, he’d always liked it and now it was his. When I was all set to go Thomas got up and came down with me onto the street to look for a cab. It was another hot sunny day, no clouds anywhere. Well, this was it, the splitting up of the poppy players! Definitely better like this for sure, rather than if I had just shot off from Bangalore in a profound state of paranoia after my Mysore freak out, something which at the time had been more than distinctly possible. The intensity of things had worn off since then, and in certain respects we were now just like normal people. Well, almost. We crossed the street to wave down a cab. There wasn’t much to say to each other but I did ask Thomas how he expected to get along without me next to him freaking out every five minutes, a question to which he answered by just smiling. A cab arrived where I haggled over the price and then slung my rucksack in the back when the price became acceptable. Thomas and I embraced each other, it was a tearful farewell where gestures said so much more than words. Then I was sitting on the seat of the cab, looking out the window with Thomas standing there waving goodbye to me, his back to the sun.

The platform from which the Jamuna Express left from Bombay Central turned out to be mega crowded. There was trouble too. Police were wielding their wooden sticks and beating a few people up. Crash of wood and spurting blood in the Bombay morning sun. God knows what it was all about. My train was already there however and I eventually found my carriage, right at the end of the very long platform. When I got into my compartment I slung my rucksack on the bunk above and slumped down in my seat. I was breathing quite fast, fresh sweat rolled out of my armpits and my legs felt heavy. Allowing the commotion to go on all around me, I simply didn’t move, and then at 8.30 sharp the train pulled out of the station. As we were heading out of the Bombay suburbs someone came along and asked me if I would swap seats with them, explaining that all his family were in the same carriage as me while he was on his own down the other end of the train. It seemed a reasonable enough request so I shifted down to his seat and gave him mine. Twelve hours later when everyone was settling down for the night, I realised I had been totally and utterly screwed, fooled badly. This was because a man appeared with a ticket in his hand claiming that I was in his berth. I said to him that it couldn’t be, because although officially it wasn’t my berth, I had swapped it with a guy who said it was booked in his name and that he was now in the carriage with his family where I had originally been. But the man simply and quite forcefully said I was in his berth, telling me that I should see the guy and sort it out with him. Feeling more than a little annoyed at being disturbed I went down the whole length of the train to see the guy I’d swapped with, but when I got to the carriage he wasn’t there, and a woman with two children were sleeping on the bunk that was rightly mine. All of a sudden I didn’t know what to do! That bastard hadn’t had the other seat at all, he was only riding for part of the journey, not all the way to Delhi. I tried to wake the woman up but she was asleep or at least was pretending to be. I began to panic. Where the fuck was I going to sleep?

Then I just flipped my lid over the whole situation and they had to call the ticket inspector. Feeling extremely wound up, I explained to him that at the beginning of my journey I had swapped places with some guy who claimed to have had a berth further down the train, however there was a different man down there with a ticket in his hand who claimed that the berth was his. Now I had come back to my original berth and the guy who I had swapped my ticket with had gone, fucking disappeared into thin air, and in my bunk was a woman asleep with two kids! Of course I should have been a lot calmer, behaved more reasonably, but I was upset about being lied to and tired out from sitting for hours and hours on a dusty train slowly pulling itself across the Indian plains just a day after I had taken too much fucking opium back in Bombay. Quite a few people were on my side, doing their bit to stick up for the down at heel tourist and all that, but nevertheless the woman simply wouldn’t move. And I was getting more and more enraged, more and more out of control. The ticket inspector woke the woman up and demanded to see her ticket. But all they did when she finally sat up was gabber away in Hindi before the inspector simply walked off. After ten minutes still nothing had happened so I went mad again and this time some train police came along and told me to get my rucksack because a berth had been found for me in another carriage. So I left the scene ranting and raving, knowing that I had really shown myself up and no doubt given a number of people quite a good laugh at my expense, but what the fuck else was I supposed to do?

The train pulled into Delhi at 4.45 am, nearly twenty hours after leaving Bombay and I hadn’t had any sleep. After I had been shifted to my new berth I just sat there the whole of the night looking at the moon outside the window illuminating the plains. I was also filled with shame and embarrassment over the way I had behaved in the other carriage, although technically I was in the right. Well not even technically, definitely. When I stepped off the train and onto the platform I felt pretty unfocused. The place was just what everyone said it would be like, dusty and dirty with loads of people sleeping everywhere, but I didn't really notice them. Whilst I was on the platform an Indian came up to me and asked if I knew where I was going to stay. As soon as I began to dither he said that he would take me to a very cheap place. Due to my weakened condition I was powerless to tell him where to go and the next thing I knew I was walking with him out of the station entrance and into early morning Delhi before it was even light. It didn’t look very nice, “A shithole in the desert,” as Thomas had once said, but maybe the station was just in the wrong part of town and the almighty pong which hung around the place was just part of my crazy imagination. Oh yeah maybe, but then again, maybe not!

The tout had a taxi so I slung my rucksack on the back seat and climbed in. We didn’t go very far, just across the main road and round some back streets which had a number of hotels on them, hardly a fucking taxi ride in other words. We tried a few places but they were full because it was still only just gone 5 in the morning so people hadn't checked out yet, but we finally ended up at the Hotel Crystal where they had rooms available for 95 rupees. It was a ridiculous amount of money to pay but I took it because they had a pleasant enough room with two soft beds, toilet and shower. I suppose I just felt too damn dirty and tired to get it together to go where the real bargains lay, wherever that was. I was only really looking for somewhere to store my stuff and lie around for a few hours because if all went well, I would be on a bus to Dharamsala that very evening. After I’d gone through the usual routine of filling in the visitors’ book and getting my room key, I took a nice cold shower and slept for a couple of hours, setting the alarm for nine in the morning. There were a number of things I had to do that day, the usual tourist in India stuff if truth be told, like check in at the airline offices to reconfirm my flight back home, check where the buses left for Dharamsala, from where I got a ticket for one, and finally I had to go to the Poste Restante to see if there were any letters for me.

When I woke up at nine I flicked to the Delhi map in my Lonely Planet and decided to walk into town from the hotel because it was not too far from the centre. First stop would be Himachal Tourism on the Janpath just off Connaught Place, where they should know all about the bus service scene to Dharamsala. Walking through the streets it initially seemed to me that Delhi was dusty, dirty and noisy; an Asian catastrophe full of desperate people. I even got so thirsty that I had to stop off for a couple of sodas, but it wasn’t too bad, nothing that I couldn’t handle. After checking out the tourist office I had to go across to the other side of town which was where the inter-state bus station was. It meant getting an auto-rick which in turn meant a fare of 10 rupees; Delhi wasn’t cheap when it came to transport! Half way to the bus station the auto-rick got caught up in a traffic jam where the heat, dust and noise caused by all the vehicles was simply incredible; engines revving, horns blasting and exhausts belching filth into the atmosphere was very much the order of the day. Not very healthy and no wonder so many people in Delhi looked ill. At the bus station there was a very long queue for all the stops in Himachal and it was clear that it would be a long wait. “Fuck” I said to myself, “everyone’s heading for the hills!”

Suddenly I felt disoriented. There seemed little point in joining the back of the queue for tickets to Dharamsala because I would be waiting for hours. As I stood there wondering what the hell to do, a smart dressed Indian approached me and asked where it was I wanted to go. When I told him Dharamsala he led me across the station to a man sitting behind a desk in the open air. It was a private bus company and they ran a nightly service from Delhi up to Kashmir. On the way they stopped off at Pathankot, a town only 80 km from Dharamsala, so from there it would be easy enough to jump on a local bus for the remainder of the journey. The cost of the ride to Pathankot was 140 rupees. It seemed to be the solution. OK, it wasn’t a direct service to Dharamsala, but it looked like all the state buses were going to be booked up for at least the next few days. So I bought a ticket and was told to get to the Old Punjab Bus Stand by 5.30 pm where I would check in with Maya Travels. Outside the bus station I got caught up in a wave of paranoia. Maybe those guys had hired the table for the day and were running a quick scam on suckers like me who were desperate to escape the filth hole that was Delhi. It was quite possible they could do it unnoticed amongst all the confusion of station life. There was only one way to find out whether or not I was being conned and that was to go to the Old Punjab Bus Stand and see if Maya Travels existed and if they did, to show them my ticket and ask if it was valid.

Now according to my Lonely Planet, the Old Punjab Bus Stand was pretty close to the state bus stand so I decided to walk to it. It turned out to be a mistake because it wasn’t close at all and I walked for ages and ages whilst everything just got hotter and hotter. It was really quite exhausting and I made matters worse by getting lost. When I finally reached the bus stand I felt severely depressed over the fact that my lack of faith in my fellow man could have motivated me to do such a thing. I mean really, what the fuck was I thinking? And yes, Maya Travels most certainly did exist. Nevertheless I went inside to check my ticket with the man sitting behind the table. Somehow he seemed to know that I was a paranoid Westerner who didn’t trust them an inch, so he ignored me for a while and even made a phone call whilst I stood over him waiting to be put out of my misery. Eventually he gave my ticket the once over and said it was OK, telling me to get there by 5.30 pm, after which I left his office feeling like shit.

Before I got a rickshaw for my journey back across town to get to the airline office I went to have something to eat. It was a very poor byriani and it dawned on me for the first time that food wasn’t half as good in Delhi as it was down in South India. Wandering around the streets of Old Delhi I had trouble in finding an auto-rick, having at one stage to stop at a stand and get some refreshment by way of eating a chopped up slice of water melon. Eventually I was able to find an auto-rick but it was to cost me 15 rupees which seemed like a hell of a lot of money for a fucking tuk tuk. When I got back to the centre of town I sorted out my airline ticket which put me more at ease and then went to the Poste Restante to pick up any letters that might have arrived for me from people back home; friends and loved ones, the usual shit. Throughout all this I was drinking all the time, feeling so fucking thirsty because of the heat. However I still had enough energy to walk back to my hotel from the centre of town and I was in my room by mid-afternoon. It meant that I was able to rest for a couple of hours before going to get the bus to Pathankot. I just lay around my room, I couldn’t sleep, and before it was time to leave I rolled up a ball of opium from the piece Thomas had given me when I'd left Bombay. I popped it into my mouth and swilled it down with lots of mineral water. It wasn’t a great amount, after the last time in Bombay I was going to be more careful, because it simply wouldn’t do at all if I started puking halfway through the bus journey up into the hills. On my way to the bus stand in another auto-rick, I suddenly became paranoid that I had left a bit of the opium in the hotel room. Bleak visions appeared before my mind of police waiting for me back at Delhi airport when I flew out in six weeks time. You just never knew, they could so easily trace my name from the hotel register, maybe they even had a computer network or something. Guess it just about summed up where my head was at that particular point in time for me to actually believe it was possible.

Once I reached the bus stop there were a few other Westerners travelling up to Pathankot that night, as well as loads of Indians who were probably going all the way to Kashmir. Including myself there were four Westerners; a tall Australian with glasses who chain smoked Charms cigarettes, a curly haired Canadian who had a flute and middle aged thin looking German. Out of these it was the German who I ended up talking to the most. His name was Nik, short for Nikkolai, and he had spent the last couple of years travelling all over the place; South America, Asia, the whole fucking works. As we all stood waiting at the crowded bus stand I could feel the opium coming on. Suddenly it didn’t matter so much if I got the bus or not, and when it finally did turn up it was getting close to 7pm. It was just as well our bus came when it did, because the Charms smoking Australian and curly Canadian were about to storm the offices of Maya Travels because they had more than had enough of all the waiting. It was a nice bus, a deluxe video one with tainted windows and reclining seats. It was soon completely packed out and for some reason Nik missed out on getting a seat, he must have been a bit slow off the mark. He ended up in the front cab with the drivers which he didn’t like, and because I was high on opium I offered to swap places with him halfway through if it got a bit too much for him. When we had got out of all the traffic and madness of Delhi, the video was flicked on and this was greeted with cheers from the Indians. The effect of the opium pushed me way back in my seat and I sat staring at the screen barely moving a muscle. The film was called Ram Lakhan, a typical Hindi movie with lots of guns, songs, action, romance and death. Done on a budget of about 1000 rupees, it was absolutely fucking brilliant. By the time it had finished we were well into the Punjab, now having to frequently stop at police check points which made me somewhat nervous. They were obviously looking for weapons or bombs, because Punjab was a terror zone, but in my mind there was also nothing to stop the police from doing a quick drugs check as well, and if they did I would be seriously fucked.

We stopped for refreshments after a few hours on the road and I made the mistake of downing a bottle of a sweet fizzy lemon flavoured drink called Limca. It immediately reacted with the opium and I had to go to a quiet corner of the car park and puke up. Whoosh, up it came, no problem! I was now seriously beginning to wonder about the quality of the opium Thomas had scored in Bombay because it must have been cut with all kinds of other shit. This time I had not over-indulged or smoked any beedis and usually my bodily system was quiet strong. It turned out to be the only incident of puking however, and after that I was fine, which suited me just dandy. After the refreshment stop I swapped places with Nik and so I now sat in the cab with a bunch of hard looking Sikhs who were taking it in turns to do the driving. It was great, such a good buzz! I just sat in one of the front seats and stared straight ahead up the road in front of me as we zoomed along through the night, further and further into the lands of the Himalayas. I mean come on, how incredible is that? The puke had done me good as well and I was now able to sit back and enjoy the full effects of the opium. There was also a very good music system in the cab which blasted out some wickedly hypnotic Sikh tunes, all designed no doubt to keep the drivers awake as they made their way up to Kashmir. The only thing which caused me any agitation were the constant police check points, they were really fucking good at making me feel paranoid. I don’t why I thought it was a good idea, but as a precaution I took the remaining piece of opium from out of my small rucksack and stuck it in my sock. Somehow I figured the police would never look there if the worst came to the worst. But I was later to pay a price for that decision because the opium and the sock became completely stuck together, which meant in Dharamsala a few days later, I had to throw them both away. By that point I could have done with another pop as well, but chewing my way through a smelly sock to get to it would have been a bit over the top.

At some stage on the road I must have fell asleep because when I opened my eyes it was beginning to get light. It was cooler now, and the sky looked clear. We had got a fair distance up the road away from the dust and heat of Delhi, and just before 6 in the morning we finally arrived in Pathankot. The bus did a bit of a bastard of a thing, dropping us a few miles from the central bus station instead of taking us right up to it. They probably had some kind of long term arrangement with the local rickshaw drivers because we had no choice but to get one into town. I shared mine with Nik who was turning out to be a new companion of sorts. Pathankot bus station was really quite a depressing affair, North India at its grimiest, chai stands serving drinks in filthy glasses and women begging with portable shrines of garish Hindu gods and goddesses. We found out at the ticket office that the bus to Dharamsala in fact went on to McLoed Ganj which was where we actually wanted to go. A further 10 km up into the hills, it was the place where the Dalai Lama and all the Tibetans lived. We had to spend a miserable hour or so at the station waiting for the bus, but when it finally came everything was cool because hardly anyone got on it. This meant that the last stage of the journey from Delhi wasn’t the severe endurance test that it might have if the bus had been packed full of people, carrying anything from all their worldly belongings to a couple of crates of chickens.

The ride took about four hours, with the bus making its way along the plains and gradually into the foothills of Himachal Pradesh. The opium had worn off by this point and it was a nice bright morning with clear blue skies and well defined clouds, whilst on the ground everything looked lush, green and precise. Obviously it was a welcome change from the dust of further on down in the plains, where Delhi was in other words. Dharamsala turned out to be a busy hill station town spread out over some of the lower foothills of the mountains and it took a while to make our way through it and onto the winding road which covered the last 10 km to McLoed Ganj, which for all of us was the end of the line. After all I had been up to over the last few months, it was now time for me to re-connect with the things I had originally came out to Asia for. That meant plenty of Buddhism and meditation, with only some drugs thrown in if absolutely necessary. Time to get back on track in other words and give all that bongo playing a good long rest, or at least that was what I hoped.