TRACELESS PATH

I got a night bus from Kathmandu down to Varanasi, Susan was due to follow a day or two later. It was nearly a 24 hour journey and I was glad that the seats were deep and comfortable, I had been expecting the worst but it was really quite bearable, almost enjoyable. When the bus pulled out of the station in Kathmandu it felt good to be on my way at last, goodbye Kathmandu and lots and lots of love!

The route was pretty simple. South to the border and then on down through Uttar Pradesh until we hit the fabled holy city of Varanasi lying on the Ganges. My mind was full of pictures as to what it was going to be like. Many people had told me that Varanasi was one of the most intense places in India and in my mind I had a picture of teeming crowds and never ending funeral processions to the cremation grounds on the banks of the sacred river. The Indians were supposed to be a lot more pushy than the Nepalese who were generally quite relaxed, so I was a bit nervous at the prospect of navigating myself across town to find my hotel when I got there. Visions of being taken to the outskirts and robbed of all I had briefly went through my mind. Paranoia I guess, from too many coffee shop stories back in Kathmandu. The bus had soon left the city limits far behind and it roared on through the night, with the faint shadows of towering mountains on either side of the road, the fag end of the Himalayas before the plains. I had my Walkman on; Tracy Chapman, Burning Spear, Van Morrison, they all got played.

There were a couple of stops at roadside tea houses and during the course of these I got talking to some of the other travellers who taking the ride. There was a Danish guy called Anders from Copenhagen who exuded a quite amazing confidence, he was full of himself and quite addictive company, full of anecdotes and stories from his travels, one after another, a never ending stream of tales. He was casual to the point of being careless. Whilst I kept a close eye on my rucksack and stuff like that, he had just thrown all his possessions including his guitar behind the back seat of the coach, quite a distance away from where he was sitting, and he never looked back. Either he had nothing worth stealing or he really didn’t have a care in the world. He seemed almost too cool to be true and he never stopped talking, telling one amazing story after another. By early morning we had reached the border with India. Customs clearance was boring and lengthy and they took away a Nepalese guy with a big bag of something which he obviously shouldn’t have had, but once he had been dealt with we were eventually on our way.

I will never forget those first couple of hours travelling through the lush green farmlands of northern Uttar Pradesh. Golden sunlight on deep green irrigated fields, women in colourful saris, shack-like villages standing in the heat haze with Hindi music filtering through the skies; you name it, that part of Uttar Pradesh seemed to have it, or maybe it was all in my head, yeah, probably was just all in my head. I hadn’t slept at all during the night ride but now I was so awake from the experience of being in India for the first time proper that I knew I would have the energy to sit there on the coach staring out at the plains for the rest of the day. Northern India, this was the land The Buddha once walked and gave his teachings and it was easy for me to imagine what it must have been like living there over two thousand years ago. A bit more forest maybe, and a few more animals, dangerous ones too, but in essence all the component parts had probably remained unchanged. How wonderful it must have been to be a disciple of The Buddha, wandering from place to place, listening to and meditating upon his teachings. That is no doubt a completely idealised picture, and the reality would probably have been people coping with illnesses for which there was no known cure or dealing with all the other seemingly endless petty little things which dominate peoples' lives, in whatever context they may find themselves.

By the time the bus rolled into Varanasi it was early evening and it was already beginning to get dark. I had decided to go with Anders to a place called the Ganga Guest House which he knew about from his previous travels in the area. It felt good arriving in a place like Varanasi and having a destination to go to, otherwise in those situations it was so easy to feel like splitting apart; in the crowds, in the heat, all the madness and the noise. Naturally the place where we were going was on the other side of town and by the time we got there it was full. After some serious pleading by Anders we were given a reserved room by the owner which seemed to be a big favour and I was more than happy to be part of a group to be given such special treatment. Things felt pretty different to Nepal already. Everything seemed so much bigger, Varanasi felt like it was a place in touch with so many forces, but there is no way I would ever be able to describe what those connections were, except they felt geographical, something to do with the fact the city was in the middle of an immense land mass, a place on the map of a thousand trails; life trails, death trails and all the rest of it. Maybe it was the sky, maybe it was the river, the vast and holy river, or maybe it was the history which hung above the ancient city. Whatever it was, it felt special, like holy purple thunder rolling across the plains and striking deep into my heart. Years ago, I must have been there before, or so I liked to think. Everything was so strange, yet oddly familiar.

My first evening in India was a weird one. The Ganga Guest House was full of travellers from all over the place. Me, Anders and another passenger from the bus ride put our stuff in the room which had been found for us and which was ours for one night only. Then we went to one of the open spaces within its compound walls from where it was possible to order tea and food. It wasn’t long before Anders had a table of people enthralled with his stories and soon he got them to open up a free supply line of dope for him. In short they would furnish and roll the joints and all he would then have to do was smoke them. Ganja in the Ganga Guest House! The dope only served to increase what I was fast becoming to realise was his extremely fertile imagination. Halfway through the evening it dawned upon me that a lot of the stories Anders told us from his life were just bullshit, heavy duty bullshit which just didn’t add up. I had been with him from the start of the day, way back up the road in Nepal, and I saw that he was now telling the same stories to these new people as he had told me before, only now the endings were slightly different.

It freaked me out! I think it was simply the fact that I had never met anyone like him before in my life. I had not had any reason to suspect he might have been lying but now the discrepancies in the accounts of his various adventures were so glaring that it was obvious he was not telling the truth. I felt stupid and vulnerable that I had been taken in by him, although he hadn’t in fact done me any harm. All I had done was end up going to this strange hotel with him, and in which we were now sharing a room, but because I had been smoking a bit of dope for the first time in ages I got paranoid, seriously paranoid over Anders. Suddenly I had pictures of him robbing me of all I had in the middle of the night and me not waking up until hours later with nothing. Oh shit, what a start to my time in India that would be! I was going to have wise up to people like Anders and wise up quick. It all resulted in an uncomfortable evening sitting around a table with strangers and listening to some very tall stories. It was followed by a very bad night’s sleep, and all that on top of no sleep the night before. In the morning I was up early to check out of the Ganga Guest House and find someplace else to stay, as far away as possible from Anders, a serious Danish bullshit merchant if ever there was one.

The next day I ended up in a dormitory that was in a cheap hotel close to the river. The previous evening with Anders had been a strange experience. It was only when was I sitting there at the table stoned out of my head in amongst a crowd of people hanging on his every word that I began to suspect he was lying through his teeth. The thing was that he never shut up but just went on and on, telling stories no doubt dreamt up back in Copenhagen. If I would have confronted him about it he would have talked it away without any problem, he was in touch with an energy which allowed him to ride his way through any circumstance. I would never have been able to get my head round it anyway. Where would I have begun in trying to dissect the information he had been throwing at me all the way down from the outskirts of Kathmandu? There was no chance! He would have run rings around me. But what did Anders do it for ? A bit of free dope, possibly more if he spent enough time with someone to really get stuck into them? All those tales, all that energy that must have gone in to perpetuating them, so that at end of the day it was impossible to separate fact from fiction. If nothing else, to act like that must have given him tremendous confidence. But what were those times like for him when the clever talk dried up?

In one way Anders was a really nice guy, vastly entertaining, something of a free spirit, as shown when he just chucked all his stuff in the back of the bus to Varanasi and then forgot about it all. There was something in the way he had done it which was full of the magic of India. But on the other hand he was not to be trusted an inch because he simply did not tell the truth, could not tell the truth, and to me that made all the good stuff seem pretty pointless. I was out of the Ganga Guest House before he had even woken up. A pity really because the actual hotel was pretty good, great even, and I could have happily stayed there a week or more once a room had become available. My new place was functional but nothing more, being a dormitory half full of Westerners, one of whom was no more than a teenager playing a tabla on his bed and with his back to the River Ganges. That just about summed the place up, although what kind of statement it made I’m not too sure. It was just around the corner from the Ganga Guest House, at the top of one of the hundreds of ghats which ran down to the river. Ghats were essentially loads of steps interspersed with walkways which stretched for miles and miles along the north bank of the Ganga, where the centre of the city lay. They were great places to walk along and watch the life of the people, or just to sit on and soak up the sun, staring for hours across the huge and mighty Ganges. That is pretty much what I did with the day or so I had to wait until meeting up again with Susan. Walk, sit, stare and daydream, activities in which I specialised, although I might not have seen it that way at the time.

I remember having some good conversations with one of a couple of French guys who were in the dormitory with me. They were thinking of walking barefoot to the city of Allahabad which was two hundred miles away, the reason for their pilgrimage would be to go to the massive Hindu holy festival known as the Khumb Mehla. When I told him I had been up in Nepal doing some meditation he said to me it showed and that I looked very calm which of course went down well, being like music to my ears. I must be getting somewhere I thought, doing a meditation course up in Nepal and then bearing such visible signs! Of course I was never going to be averse to comments to like that from anyone, even if in retrospect it was clearly little more than polite French bollocks. It was the first time I had spoken to any French people since coming out to India and they both seemed pretty earthy, different from the other Europeans I had met. Both of them had been in Varanasi for quite some time, studying yoga and going to listen to a baba give teachings on the banks of the river. A baba was some kind of holy man, often a teacher of sadhus who were also holy men and usually ascetic, but not always. The French guys were clearly both devoted to their baba, but walking barefoot to Allahabad would have been a pretty extreme thing to do, well, in my eyes at least. I don’t know if they ever managed it, I wasn’t in the dormitory long enough to find out, but like I said, they both stuck in my mind as being different.

When Susan arrived she checked into a hotel across town from me. We met at a pre-arranged time in a tea shop off Chowk, the main street in the centre of town, it was a place that we had picked out from my Lonely Planet back in Kathmandu. It was full of Westerners sitting around in the garden drinking tea, smoking Indian cigarettes and eating customised Western food made by the local Indians; toast, pancakes, jam, eggs, peanut butter. It was great to see her! I wanted to spend all my time with her and straight away I ended up staying the night in her hotel, both of us together again. Varanasi was also hot, sunny all day, dustier and warmer than Kathmandu, like it was in the middle of a series of vast plains and a long way from the sea, which it was. But what set it apart and what made it so special was the Ganges, that mighty river. It was the reason why Varanasi has been an important Indian city for thousands of years and even in the time of The Buddha it was already ancient. Think about that! It was like no place I had ever been to before, it kind of reminded of a time in which I had never lived, if that makes sense, a time which when imagined made the present feel poor in comparison. But maybe that was all fantasy stuff; what you got was what you got, and it was entirely up to you what you made of it.

After our first night Susan and I decided to find a room together and so I took us back to the Ganga Guest House which I thought was a brilliant idea. It now had a double room available and the owner was a little surprised to see me again after my abrupt early morning departure barely two days ago. There was no sign of Anders and I guessed he had moved on to the houseboat he had constantly talked about on the ride down from Kathmandu. Houseboats on the Ganges in Varanasi were dope houses in other words, full of people getting smashed day and night, filling their heads with wild tales fed from their vivid imaginations. Best of luck to him! One day he would come a cropper I was sure of that. But then again maybe not, who the fuck was I to judge? Was I really any better than Anders? Somehow I doubted it. The room we got was a good one and the first thing that hit me was an amazing drawing on one of the walls of Bob Marley as per the cover of his Uprising album. It was just so fucking incredible and someone had clearly spent a long time on it. When? Five years ago? Ten? Or maybe it was just last month. It was the Rastaman Vibration right there on the wall before us, spirit alive in the form of a wonderful picture. We stayed in the Ganga Guest House for the best part of a week and looking back on it now it was one of the happiest times in my young life. There is no way of course to really describe my feelings, only to say I was in the holy city of Varanasi on the banks of the River Ganges spending all my time with a woman I loved. We would walk for miles through the city, go back to our room, just laze around together and then go out again. Three or four times a day at a minimum, just couldn't get enough of it. And we would eats loads of food; fresh fruits, cakes, bread, street snacks, anything. I was hungry all the time, hungry like a wolf, and she was hungry too.

A lot of time was spent down by the river on the ghats. Sadhus, yogis, babas and many other characters would all be there, exercising, performing yoga asanas or dipping themselves in the river, stuff like that, activities often seen as purification. One day just to impress Susan I took a dip in the Ganges as well. I dove right in and I’m sure that later on it was the cause of a chest infection which gave me some serious grief further down the road when we rolled into Bodhgaya in deepest Bihar. But at the time it was incredible just to dive in and swim out into the holy waters, to turn around and see Susan on the river bank staring back at me, beautiful dark eyes open wide in wonder. The water was full of fuck knows what, I mean they were burning corpses all over the place, and other things which didn't get fired up were just set on the river to float. But that was half the fun of it I guess, and half the danger. And anyway the point of immersing yourself in the waters was for higher spiritual aspiration and I was all for that, anything which might improve the state of my soul. That is why thousands of people do it religiously every day in the utmost seriousness. When I was done I walked up the steps of the ghats back to the Ganga Guest House soaking wet, where I then had a damn good shower.

On another occasion I drank a bhang lassi in the centre of town and went for what I thought would be a long walk on the ghats. A bhang lassi is a kind of cannabis drink sold in certain north Indian cities and it came in three ways - light, medium and strong. I took a medium one and by the time I made it down to the ghats I had to almost immediately sit down. I was wrecked, seriously blasted and unable to walk. It was powerful stuff to say the least and I ended up sat in the same spot on the ghats for a good few hours. Stoned, totally and completely out of it. Just sat there looking over the river, thinking some amazing thoughts and never wanting to leave. In the changing light of the afternoon I remember the river took on the most incredible colours. I would never have noticed such beauty if it hadn’t been for that bhang lassi. I would never have given myself the mental space just to sit down and stare awhile, allow my mind to open up. The bhang lassi did however give me a bad stomach ache afterwards, and also a thumping headache, which is something I didn’t usually get from dope in whatever form I took it, so maybe one bhang lassi was enough. There was also a good second hand English bookshop in Varanasi and it was there that I bought a copy of The Magus by John Fowles which is a fucking great book to get if you ever want something that will completely do your head in. From the perspective of reading it whilst on the weird and wonderful plains of North India, the heat and mystery of the haunted Greek island on which The Magus was set, was something very easy to imagine. Over the weeks to come I fell in love with that book, I really did, almost as much as I was in love with Susan.

One of our favourite places to go on our long walkabouts around town was the Kerala Coffee House which sold excellent cold coffees. We would go there and have at least two each in large steel tumblers, staring out over the incredible street life of Central Varanasi. It was possible to sit there for hours because it was on a crossroads and a whole range of different sights seemed to converge there. Varanasi under the midday sun, it was some spectacle! I guess since then the place has changed a lot, in fact if I went back today I might not be even able to find so many of our favourite spots. Inevitably there will now be lots more cars, lorries and whatever else there is that fucks up the environment. When we were there however, the street traffic was dominated by man pulled rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, along with horse and ox drawn carts. There were also a good many cows just standing there on their own, wandering about in the middle of the streets. The cow was the holy animal for Hindus and Varanasi was the holiest of Hindu cities. If you had done anything to harm a cow in Varanasi the chances are you would have got lynched, or at the very least had a pretty bad pummelling from the devoutly faithful. Fair enough! It's their city after all, they get to call the shots and anyway it was fantastic to see those cows hanging round in the centre of the road oblivious to the noise and movement going on all around them. As far as I was concerned only a great kind of society would allow such a thing.

We took a couple of trips to Sarnath which was about 5 km or so outside of Varanasi and the place where The Buddha gave his first teachings after his enlightenment. Sarnath Deer Park, place of the Four Noble Truths, and it had a massive Buddhist stupa erected in remembrance of that historical fact. When we went there it was usually the middle of the day, probably not the best time if you wanted to try to get some of the atmosphere of what it must have been like to have lived there all those years ago. It was simply too busy and there were too many hawkers by the gates, giving people hassle as soon as they stepped off the bus, bad fucking hassle! Hawkers, a tiresome bunch at the best of times and in these situations with the crowds and the heat, almost intolerable. There was too much of an edge to it. It was a place where you wanted to find peace and holiness, but the times I spent in the Deer Park were usually occupied with thoughts of how to avoid the hawkers when we left, rather than meditating on the teachings of The Buddha. Sad but true, more of a reflection on the state of my own mind rather than anything else. Sarnath was towards the rough end of town, and one time, going back to Varanasi on a crowded bus, Susan got molested by a bunch of Indians. I was literally hanging on to the back of the vehicle, standing on the steps and there was nothing we could do until the bus stopped at a bunch of dust shacks where we quickly got off. An over enthusiastic but horribly repressed Indian male with wandering hands at around the age of twenty was always a good candidate for a bullet in the head as far as I was concerned, and when there was a group of them like that, instant incineration was the only solution. So yes, Sarnath saw me a long way from meditating on those teachings of The Buddha! Maybe there was also something a bit too official about the place as well, like it was now one of the principal sites of the Buddhist religion, but actually Buddhism wasn’t supposed to be a religion, more a philosophy, it was just that places like Sarnath had made it so.

When it came to the other religious sites in Varanasi I found it far more enjoyable just wandering through the back streets checking out the Hindu temples, of which there seemed to be thousands and all of which were still very much in action. There really were some incredible temples tucked away on streets you thought were leading nowhere, places where the sadhus down on the ghats probably went to when things were quiet, the real sadhus that is. They possessed an atmosphere I could never express in words but which gave me such happy thoughts they once again had a strange distant tinge of the familiar to them. That was the feeling I got from Varanasi as a whole. It was a city where in its most hidden places lay incredible things, however you had to know they were there or else you would never find them. Doubtless there were people in Varanasi who would have taught me a lot, but no one as yet had placed a map in my hand to point them out to me. Or more to the point, nothing had emerged to point me out to them. But it probably wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, after all at the time I was a soldier of love, and I was wholly dedicated to giving pleasure to Susan in whatever ways she requested. Most of the time that entailed just being an all round nice guy which, apart from one or two explosive moments in the heat and the dust, I managed to do reasonably well. The landscape of that wonderful city will forever be associated for me with the brilliant times we spent together, once in a lifetime magic between us, and funnily enough that is exactly how it has turned out to be.

On New Years Eve we made a special trip to see the great Indian sitar player Pandit Ravi Shankar. He was playing in a tent-like pavillion on the outskirts of town close to Sarnath and the main thing which I couldn’t get over was that there were far fewer people in the audience than I had expected. Back in England Ravi Shankar was one of the very few names which a decent proportion of the population were able to associate with Indian music, and as a consequence his concerts were very popular. Filling a place like the Royal Festival Hall would have been no problem for him. Naturally I thought that on his home turf, a concert given by Ravi Shankar would be a sell out, but it wasn’t the case at all. He literally sat there just a few feet away from us on a pile of cushions flanked by a couple sitar students, with the audience luxuriously spread out on the floor, most of them sitting on cushions under canvas. The main point about the entertainment he provided that evening was that it went on and on and on and on. It was a real fucking marathon! The first few pieces or ragas were tremendous, but after three hours or so I began to feel a bit nauseous as Ravi and the boys cranked up their sitars and launched into yet another one. They were all at least half an hour long, so once Ravi started up again you knew you were seriously done for. Sitting on the floor all that time also began to get extremely uncomfortable and I was constantly having to rearrange my position in order to avoid walking out a cripple.

The worst thing about the whole experience was that we had come out on a special coach from the centre of town, so in order for us to get back again we were trapped there until the show finally finished. I began to get really paranoid about not being able to get back into the Ganga Guest House as I knew that at a certain time they pulled a steel shutter down over the entrance and it suddenly transformed itself into Fort Knox. A night in the back alleys of Varanasi with a pack of rabid dogs to keep us company didn’t appeal very much I had to admit. All those thoughts left me sitting there for at least the last hour of the performance full to the brim with worry and irritation over our possible fate once we got back into town. By the end of the evening the last thing I wanted to do was hear another fucking sitar and I for one didn’t bother queuing up for the chance to buy my Ravi Shankar tape but headed straight for the coach instead. I was amazed how cool Susan was about the whole thing, she didn’t seem in the least bit worried about our potential late arrival back at the Ganga Guest House. It was past midnight by the time we were deposited in the centre of town and we had to make a scary journey on foot through the back lanes full of barking dogs until we finally got back to the hotel and where we then had to wake everyone up. When we got into to our room I felt exhausted. There was a sense I had let myself down again, all over something as inconsequential as that, but at the time it seemed massive. By now however, it was New Year’s Day 1989!

Every morning we would have breakfast on the roof of the Ganga Guest House. Varanasi had an amazing skyline. Temple spires and monkeys roaming the elevated landscapes in the hot morning sun. Roaming in the sun, those monkeys were everywhere. We would eat toast, read a bit and drink lots of hot sweet tea. Nice preparation for another day of hanging around by the sacred river, of wandering through the city with its maze of streets and alleys, finding temples in which to simply hang around, and places to eat and drink. At certain points along the ghats were the cremation grounds for the dead and every day the fires would be burning. People came to die in Varanasi from all over India and for many it was without doubt the most important event of their lives. I remember going to the main fire ghats in the middle of the day, looking down for a long time at the burning of a body. It was all so natural; back to the elements, disintegration into the void, in one of the holiest places in the world. At the time it seemed beautiful, however I went back to the same ghats late in the evening and found the atmosphere quite threatening. Death hung in the air, sticky and heavy, there was no doubt about that, and along with it came a strange kind of energy. There were lots of weird people who freaked me out, the fires took on a much more menacing appearance, no longer benign, no longer beautiful. I had been warned not to go to the burning ghats at night and now after having been I could see why. It was not for the faint hearted. The way the people looked and the way those fires burned, made me feel afraid of being eaten alive, deep down in my soul.

One day we took a boat ride out on the river to visit an old fort which hung on the horizon a few miles down on the other bank. The best thing about the trip was being able to view the cityscape from across a large expanse of water. Varanasi, what a place! Like nothing else I had ever seen in my life. You got a sense of the size of India from being there, it felt a long, long way from the sea and yet at the same there was all that water, the incredible River Ganges. And there was the sun, the temples, the people, the history. It was the first time I had been to a city which belonged more in the realms of imagination than reality. In the evening on the river the world was filled with deep shadows beneath an orange sky to the west and a lunar bluish black to the east across the plains; really quite something, I can tell you. We also began to make arrangements to travel by train from Varanasi to Gaya in Bihar. For India the journey was a relatively short one, a mere six hours or so. From Gaya it was then a short distance to Bodhgaya, place of The Buddha’s enlightenment and pilgrimage destination for Buddhists the whole world over. It only took a couple of journeys down into the madness of Varanasi central railway station to get it all sorted!

We finally left Varanasi one day in the early afternoon and we were soon staring out of our carriage over the North Indian plains. We arrived in Gaya around eight in the evening. It was quite a scene that awaited us. Bihar was and is the poorest state in India and the station was full of people sleeping rough, whole families sleeping rough, and the atmosphere was heavy; heavy in the sense of a reality being lived which ground people down relentlessly, remorselessly. It was a relief to find a hotel and step inside the safety zone which money always offered, and Gaya was the kind of town where the money you had to offer didn’t have to be much. We had a rough meal in the restaurant that I was unable to enjoy because I was totally paranoid that someone was going to steal our rucksacks which we had left by the stairs. Susan was cool about it but I was going off my nut, continually casting my eyes in that direction to make sure they were still there. The waiters looked suspicious characters and worrying about them made me feel miserable and tired. When we got to our room my fears were partially realised when I discovered that the outside pockets of my rucksack had indeed been ruffled through and little things like my toothbrush were missing. Not much to lose but bad enough when you really needed to clean your fucking teeth before going to bed. The night we spent in Gaya was one I will always remember because of a dream I had in the early morning. In the dream Susan had a knife and she used it to make a deep cut into the tip of my penis. Dark red blood oozed out from the incision and she slowly licked it off her finger. I woke up and momentarily didn’t know where the fuck I was whilst Susan was asleep beside me, her back turned to the wall. Later I reckoned it was because I was so infatuated with her that I had that dream. As if she were beckoning me into some kind of secret society and that the cut into my dick was the ritual involved in gaining admission. It was a crazy, powerful dream and even today looking back, the image remains clear; the dark red blood, such an unusual place to bleed from, the cut so deep, the licking of her finger.

We made the journey to Bodhgaya by bus and it was a fantastic feeling to be heading towards the place where The Buddha had become enlightened. It was a beautiful sunny day and the road ran alongside a dry river bed the other side of which, in the distance, lay a range of hills shimmering in the haze, the hills of Bihar. Somewhere among them would be Vultures Peak, the place where Buddha taught the Heart Sutra. It was obviously a busy route as plenty of people were making their way to and from this special pilgrimage place and the closer we got the more excited I became. When we arrived we chose to stay on the outskirts of Bodhgaya, so we were able to deposit our rucksacks, sign in at the reception, and then walk into town unencumbered. The place we were staying at was the Burmese Buddhist Vihara, a building with long empty dormitories and one bedroom. Since it was virtually empty when we arrived we were able to get the room, which could only be got to by walking through all the dormitories. Kind of like an island in the middle. Weird, but good for us since it was private. We would spend hours there over the coming days, lying around in our own self-enclosed world, in the middle of the Burmese Buddhist Vihara.

Our first walk into the centre of Bodhgaya saw us pay the inevitable visit to the Bodhi Tree which marked the exact spot where The Buddha turned himself into a fully realised being. The original tree was no longer there but its replacement was supposed to be a cutting from it, or something like that. Whatever the history there was no denying that the atmosphere around the place was pretty damn special. Hundreds of Tibetan pilgrims were doing full length prostrations in the surrounding grounds, all of their heads pointing in the direction of the tree. Hundreds of Westerners and people from further east were either slowly walking round the Maha Bodhi Stupa in silent homage or actually sitting and meditating. As opposed to Sarnath which I felt was somewhat sterile, there was definitely something in the air in Bodhgaya and I was even able to handle the beggars at the gates who were real hardcore pros by anyone’s standards. You gave something to one and then you were absolutely bombarded. I remember later how the Tibetan Buddhist master Lama Zopa Rinpoche went round giving money to every one of them. It took him a long, long time and he didn’t miss any of them out; that was what was needed to become a saint.

All told we spent the best part of a month in Bodhgaya. The main happenings for us were a ten day silent meditation retreat held in the Thai Buddhist temple, our attendance of teachings by Lama Zopa Rinpoche at the Root Institute on the outskirts of town, general hanging around the Bodhi Tree area and frequent visits to a group of Tibetan style tents serving food, snacks and drinks throughout the day and evenings. There were always loads of Westerners about and a lot of time was taken up just sitting around and talking, exchanging tales, soaking up all kinds of seemingly fascinating information. It's funny but when we first got to Bodhgaya I had no intention of doing the ten day meditation retreat at the Thai temple. Something about it scared me. No talking, no food of any consequence after midday, lots and lots of sitting and walking meditation. I really didn’t know if I was up for it. The thing was that I was totally in love with Susan and she was sure it was something she wanted to do. I couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from her for ten days, even though inside the temple it wouldn’t make much difference if we were together anyway. We wouldn’t be able to speak to each other, far less able to touch each other, so why didn’t I just hang out on the outside and wait for her? I was obsessed, infatuated, that’s why and I had bleak pictures of her meeting the meditator of her dreams on the inside and having no interest in me afterwards whatsoever. I couldn’t run the risk of that happening, fuck no! It felt like it would be a massive personal disaster if it did. This was despite the fact that all told, the most time we had remaining together after the retreat was only something like two or three weeks. Then she would be flying west to Delhi from Calcutta and up to Dharamsala by road, whilst I would be heading to the far south for a rendezvous with Thomas Deilecke on Kovalam beach. Nevertheless I decided I just had to do the retreat. If Susan was going to do it then so was I. Probably not the best motivation with which to do something like a ten day silent retreat but there you go, you have to start somewhere.

It meant that the first week or so which we spent in Bodhgaya was taken up with discussing the retreat and preparing ourselves for it. We had moved out of the Burmese Buddhist Vihara after a few days because the dormitories had filled up with Westerners coming to town for some kind of course on Tibetan language. I was too paranoid to allow me and Susan to stay in the vihara when we were the only ones sharing a room which was in the middle of dormitories suddenly full of people. It didn’t feel that private anymore to say the least, just didn’t feel right shacking up with a woman in the middle of what was essentially a monastic complex, it was alright when the place was empty, but now that it was full it was definitely time to move on. I insisted that we moved to a hotel closer to town. Susan would have been happy to stay where we were but I was getting more and more agitated about being in the vihara and sticking out like a sore thumb. It was probably all in my mind but the point was that my mind to me was everything. The hotel where we ended up after packing our bags one afternoon was basic and overpriced, but I felt happier there in the anonymity which it provided. There were bad mosquitoes in that place though and I remember lying beneath the mosquito net looking at them trying to find ways of charging its flimsy defences, something which they eventually did. They were real savage fuckers it had to be said, and noisy too, specialists in that high pitched buzzing sound which could so easily bring on feelings of outright nausea and disgust.

I think it was at this point that I noticed I was developing an irritating cough which brought along with it large quantities of mucus coming up from somewhere deep in my chest. My guts were also beginning to get a bit rough as well. One particularly embarrassing moment was when I got a rickshaw with Susan into town and farted, but instead of gas being released a thick hot liquid ran down my leg instead and immediately stank out the rickshaw cab. I had to quickly excuse myself and return to the hotel to perform a hasty mop up operation. It was the kind of experience which lingered in the mind and made one cautious. Suddenly, farting had become a dangerous activity and when the need to drop one came along certain inner procedures now had to be followed to ensure it wasn’t going to be another splash job. However it didn’t make any significant dent in my appetite for food as Susan and I were regulars in the cake shops and chai stalls of Bodhgaya where no end of travellers would roll up and engage us in weird conversations which were nearly always deeply absorbing. We did a lot of walking in the first week as well and if we weren’t in the food places we were heading down the dusty roads of Bodhgaya, checking out the various Buddhist temples, or hanging around in the grounds of the Maha Bodhi stupa.

Throughout the day there would be many Buddhists in close vicinity to the Bodhi Tree either praying, meditating, walking round the stupa or performing full length prostrations. Quite a number of the people who had done the Kopan course were also in town. There was a kind of circuit to be travelled along when in India and Nepal, and it was more than likely that if you saw someone in one place you would meet up with them again in another, even though it was hundreds and hundreds of miles further down the road. Canadian Jim from Kopan was there, he had really got seriously into yoga and meditation since I'd last seen him, and when we sat and talked he would slip into full lotus no problem. Compared to him I was a hopeless case, my knees were always about a foot off the ground and the only way I could make sitting on the floor tolerable was to stack a load of cushions under my arse. Distinctly unimpressive if posture was what you went by. Jim was also in town to do the retreat at the Thai Buddhist temple and by the look of his form on the cushion it was clear to me that he was going to be one of the stars of the show. He was going to be staying at the Thai temple for the best part of a month, as there were two ten day silent retreats offered by the organisers and they ran back to back. I admired Jim's dedication and compared to him I was able to clearly see where I stood, or sat, as far as meditation went. I mean doing a course at Kopan was one thing, with the relatively easy daily routine and fantastic surroundings up in the Kathmandu valley, but doing an austere and strict ten day silent retreat in Bodhgaya was quite another. To do a couple on the trot meant serious enthusiasm and I knew that one retreat was going to be more than enough for me.

When we finally rolled up to register for the retreat I realised once again that although I would be able to look at Susan I wouldn’t be able to speak to her for the next ten days, and there was still so much that I wanted to say to her! If ever I needed an omen that I was going to be in for a rough time it came when I went to put my rucksack in my sleeping quarters which were located in the basement underneath the main temple. I slipped on the stairs as I tried to negotiate going down them with my pack strapped to my back and I cracked my head on a wall. It was a real fucking smack, bad enough for blood to flow from my wound with ease. It left me in a state of shock and as I tenderly fingered my head I could already feel the beginnings of a huge lump forming. Feeling slightly nauseous I made my way to the water tank in the yard and cleaned myself up. What a start! By now my head was throbbing like fuck. The worst thing was I couldn’t really have a good swear about it to anyone as already people were walking round the place in silence, everyone of them trying to be mindful, concentrated and deeply focused, and we hadn’t even had the first session of sitting yet. I had to go and lie down on the straw mat which served as my bed. It felt like I made a big mistake, but to jack it all in before it had even started would have been the ultimate disgrace, all the same I have to say that a part of me was already yearning for the retreat to be over. I just didn’t feel like I was going to be up for it, my cough hadn’t gone away, my mind was totally obsessed with Susan which was the reason why I was there anyway, and now my head felt like it was split in pieces. How was I going to survive ten days of disciplined meditation and silence? In such situations what I needed more than anything else was to have someone like Thomas around, a person I could share my thoughts with about the craziness of it all and have a good laugh, climbing up with him to some higher ground in order to gain a bit more perspective.

For the first few sessions of meditation I was able to sit on the floor with a couple of cushions, however my legs soon started to get really painful, and I mean really fucking painful. In Nepal I had been OK for six weeks but now in dusty Bodhgaya, where for the retreat each day was like all the others, I just couldn’t hack it. Before the first full day was up I had to retire to the back row of the meditation hall and join all the other casualties who had to sit on chairs. Fucking hell! It didn’t do much for my meditator’s ego but there really was no other option. It wasn’t just my legs it was my back as well. The problem there was that because of the congestion in my chest I wasn’t breathing very freely, and it was causing my back muscles to badly tighten up. My cough and the continual loads of phlegm and mucus which were brought up from my chest had really begun to get bad by this point and I was getting through a roll of bog paper a day as I tried to deal with the continuous stream of thick green snot which poured out of my nose. Bog roll in India was expensive stuff! As for my chest, I was sure it all stemmed from the dip I taken had in the sacred Ganges. Maybe it was some kind of purification, a cleansing of my inner shit – who knows? Deep down however, I knew the main reason why I dived in the holy river was simply to impress Susan and now I was paying the price.

The daily routine was something like – wake up, sit, wash, eat, sit, walk, sit, walk, eat, rest, sit, walk, sit, rest, eat, walk, sit, sleep - and that was pretty much it. There were discussion groups held on some of the afternoons, the only opportunity we had to really speak, and also a talk each evening on an aspect of Buddhism given by one of the course leaders. And that was it, for ten days, on and on. After about the second day it felt like I had been there a long, long time. I was really thinking hard that I had made a serious mistake. My health was not good; erupting chest, continual coughing, bad back, sore head and a knackered pair of knees. The last thing I needed was the strict silence of the meditation hall where form was everything and those people who sat bolt upright were seen as being the most impressive specimens. At least they were seen as such by me in the misery and confusion of my position in the middle of the back row. On top of all that I was more obsessed than ever about Susan and I was already convinced that there was one guy in the meditation hall who was sitting as close to her as he possibly could, and it wasn’t me. I was unable to do anything about it of course as I had relegated myself to the seats in the back, marooned on Cripple Avenue. It didn’t take long for me to start imagining Susan and this guy having secret meetings somewhere in the temple grounds or both of them waiting in the mediation hall until late at night when everyone else had gone off to sleep. He was a pretty good sitter as well and by the fourth day or so I was consumed with jealousy and hatred for him. I could sense he was looking at her whenever he could and I doubted very much if he knew Susan was supposed to be with me. Under these oppressive circumstances it was extremely difficult for me to find either physical or mental comfort in my meditation and it left me praying for the food times when at least I could have the pleasure of filling my stomach, and then for the evenings when it got dark, so that I could hide away in the shadows.

The sitting was regularly broken up with sessions of walking meditation but this didn’t bring any relief to my back which was just as painful from my constricted breathing when walking as when I was sitting down. The most comfortable position for me in fact was lying down on the floor. During the walking meditation periods I slowly paced up and down the temple grounds, and as much as possible I kept half an eye on Susan during the course of those walks. What a sorry affair, but I just couldn’t help it as I needed more than anything else to make sure that cunt from the meditation hall wasn’t walking close to her as well. Mindful walking consisted of slowly raising one foot off the ground, feeling the sensation of lift and then slowly placing it down in front of you, then lifting the other foot and so on. Up and down, up and down. My hands were clasped together in front of my chest and my eyes were half open. I think that if my back hadn't been so fucked up I would have got a lot out of the walking meditation. It suited me to move. For me it was less contrived than attempting to sit like a rock, an exercise which even at the best of times left me consumed with pain and frustration.

My chest and constant back pain led me to ask one of the meditation teachers whether or not I should stay on the retreat. It was after about the 3rd or 4th day and I had got to the point of seriously thinking about jacking it all in. In retrospect I think I could have chosen a better moment to approach him. He was really fucking surprised when I went up to him as he was taking his slow contemplative evening walk on one of the paths around the outside of the main temple. This was the time which he used to prepare himself for the talk he then gave each evening, in the middle of the final session of sitting for the day. He would talk on a Buddhist theme for half an hour or so and then he would invite questions from the course participants. The purpose was to generate some kind of dialogue although I was suspicious of it and felt the dice were loaded in his favour. Too much ego when there was supposed to be none. Now I felt I had made a grave error by approaching him, of sounding like a weasel as I gave him the sob story of my bad back and chest. After all, I had so blatantly breached the silent retreat etiquette by opening my mouth, and from the look on his face it was the last thing he had expected as he paced the grounds looking up at the moon. He had a look of horror and he seemed stunned that his silence had been broken; as a consequence my voice sounded to me like the weediest most pathetic thing I had ever heard in my whole fucking life. When I finished whining over my condition he was abrupt but actually quite helpful, curtly informing me that one of the other meditation teachers was a shiatsu practitioner and that I should ask him if he could give me a back massage. As I walked back into the silence I felt a complete and utter dickhead but at least I had got a lead as to what to do in order to find some relief instead of just getting the hell out of there, and in my situation as things stood, that was just fine. I would be knocking on the other teacher’s door first thing the following morning, asking him to give me the once over with his healing hands.

The shiatsu massage turned out to be most helpful, immediately my back felt some relief. Norman the teacher had a small and simple meditation room and as I lay on the floor he said that my back muscles had become incredibly stiff and tense, an observation which I whole heartedly agreed with. He recommended that I came to see him for a massage every day. I felt good that there was at least an acknowledged problem and that I hadn’t just been making it all up in my mind. Guess it was a simple combination of mental stress over Susan along with a severely congested and constricted chest from that ill advised dip in the River Ganges. For the rest of the day my sitting was more bearable and I was able for the first time to go into my meditation and analyse more objectively the physical sensations which were occurring. Up until that point the discomfort had been too much, so at least I now felt like there was some progress. The massage experience brought some stability to my mind and at last I settled down to a few days reasonable meditation. This turned out to be the golden period of my ten day meditation retreat, if such a thing can be described as that. It even got to the point where I wasn’t necessarily itching to get out of the door when I knew a session was coming to an end, instead being happy to just sit there and be with whatever came up.

It was during this time in the middle of the retreat that we were taken for a late night group sitting beneath the Bodhi Tree and it really was more than something special, in fact it was incredible. I sat like a rock for the best part of an hour, my legs were no problem at all and my mind was tuned into all the positive energy which had built up there from over the last 2500 years. But then again, I guess with all the great meditation practitioners who had visited that spot it was difficult even for me to blow such an opportunity. That was the one really great experience for me in the whole retreat. Loosening up, being completely at one with sitting beneath the Bodhi Tree. Other than that, although the shiatsu massage from Norman definitely helped my back, I still had big problems as far as my chest was concerned. The phlegm and mucus being produced had not been reduced to any great degree and I now got the feeling that it would stay that way for however long we remained in Bodhgaya. The reason to me was simple. At that time of year the weather in Bodhgaya never changed, every day was cloudless and sunny. Whilst the mornings were a bit cool, the rest of the day was hot and the evenings mild. Each day was the same and consequently for me, every day with my chest was the same. There was lots of coughing up green stuff, spitting it into a piece of bog roll, another piece, and then another piece. It was an endless process and inevitably it left me feeling more and more tired. To put it bluntly, too much coughing and expectorating was grinding me down, wearing me out.

I continued with the shiatsu massage, turning up at Norman’s room every morning, but after a few days it seemed like the good effects from the first couple of times had worn off. I was back to a state of near physical misery and a not inconsiderable level of mental agitation whenever I sat in the meditation hall. By this stage all I wanted was for the retreat to be over. I had got sick of the taste of the early morning porridge as well, which was definitely a bad sign because usually I ate like a fucking horse and now I was robbed of one of the very few remaining pleasures that I had left. If it wasn’t for Susan I would have been long gone, out of there like a shot, holding my hands up as I walked out the temple gates, admitting it was neither the time or the place for me to get closer to The Buddha. It had now got to the point where there were only a few days left so I thought it would be best to just hang on. No point in making myself look stupid by dropping out right at the last minute. My ego wouldn’t have been able to stand it. After all I had got this far and so I was now going to see it through to the end. All the same I was in a great deal of discomfort, and on top of everything else I began to have a recurring vision of sitting down to a big plate of chicken, chips and peas. A definite impossibility in that part of the world, but a vision strong enough to get the juices of my mouth running and difficult to get out of my mind.

Towards the end of the retreat I actually did go out, not of my mind, out of the temple. This was strictly forbidden of course but, despite the no talking rule, I had heard that Tibetan medicine might be of help for my condition and I knew there was a male Westerner practising Tibetan medicine down at the Burmese Buddhist Vihara, that place where me and Susan were holed up when we first came to town. So one morning I quietly walked out of the temple gates to go and have a consultation with him. By coincidence I bumped into Norman on the way, who was more than a little surprised to find me outside and in the centre of town. I briefly told him my reason for being out of the temple, and for a split second it was difficult to resist the temptation to jokingly tell him that his shiatsu had been good at first but that ultimately it was a load of shit! If the joke fell flat however, it would only make me feel even more of a fuck up, so I decided not press the button. Serious meditators with no sense of humour were the worst people to embarrass oneself in front of, I had no doubt about that, and there were more than one or two of them knocking around the scene in India, that was for sure. To me it was vital to be able to have a good laugh at yourself, but of course there was no guarantee others would share my point of view. Pain was just around the corner if I gave myself the delusion that everyone would think whatever came out of my mouth was cool. It could well have been that for Norman someone taking the piss out of his shiatsu talents was no laughing matter at all and that I would have only got a dressing down from him in public for being outside the temple.

There was a long queue of people waiting to see the Western Tibetan doctor at the vihara. They were all Westerners and I was disappointed to see they were not averse at all to pushing in and behaving in a very selfish manner. In my naivety I thought that anyone in Bodhgaya would naturally be a considerate Buddhist and therefore a little more compassionate. Buddhist or not, they didn’t even have enough understanding to let a sad little fuck like me, who was coughing his guts out, take his rightful place in the queue and get some speedy attention from the Medicine Man. It led to some bleak thoughts on my part about the state of my fellow human beings as I sat there in my weakened condition whilst people continually pushed in ahead of me to get attended to first. Eventually I got to see the doctor and after he had read my pulse I was soon given a bag of pills. The consultation was free but there was a heavy hint that donations would be accepted and when I put some rupees down he made a horrible face to indicate it wasn’t enough. He was an English guy, and the English of course are past masters of the look of contempt so I shuffled out of his makeshift surgery room feeling more pathetic than ever, but nevertheless pleased that I hadn’t parted with too much bread for my bag of potions.

The end of the retreat came into sight at last. I had read books by Westerners who had done these things, they had first wondered what the hell was going on before really getting into it and then emerging refreshed and grateful, but something like that just didn’t happen to me. Apart from a day or two after my first shiatsu massage, and apart from that wonderful excursion to the Bodhi Tree, I just couldn’t wait for the whole thing to end, and it had been like that almost from the first minute it started. It had not been a good idea for me to do it in the first place as I hadn’t had the right motivation, I had only really gone because I was crazy after Susan and just wanted to keep an eye on her. No other reason than that. It was insane! The time we had remaining together was so limited that it was mad for me to invest so much energy in protecting something which was soon going to disappear, but it just didn’t seem that way at the time. I was not honest enough to tell Susan all that of course when the retreat was over, instead I just emphasised how bad my chest had been, so she at least had some idea of the physical suffering I had experienced. It would have been way too shameful if I had guided her in detail over certain areas of my inner landscape as well, of that there was no question. For our first night after the retreat Susan got out her American Express card to book a room in the best hotel in Bodhgaya and it was marvellous. Lying in a soft bed, eating food and being with her. I remember her shaving my face in the fancy bathroom, the cleanest bathroom we had both been in for months, and at that point I knew I had never felt so close to her as I did that night. There is no doubt that the intensity of the retreat probably gave me a lot that I would only appreciate in time, however in the short term its main effect was to make me grateful that I was out of such an environment. It also put into perspective any illusions I might have held about being a serious meditator. To sit all day was hard, not to have much sensual diversion in terms of food and conversation was harder still. It would clearly take a lot more discipline if I was ever going to hack it in that particular sphere of operation.

After a couple of days break we then attended Tibetan Buddhist teachings at the Root Institute which lay in the fields on the outside of town. They were much more relaxed and open in comparison to the retreat, even though they were teachings given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche who was himself not averse to the odd marathon session or two, and on one afternoon I recall that he taught for nearly six hours non-stop. Teachings on the prajnaparamita, the Heart Sutra. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Right to the heart of the Buddha! It was wonderful to see Lama Zopa at last, as he had originally meant to teach at the course in Kopan but he hadn’t been able to make it. He had amazing presence but his speech was difficult to understand and he would endlessly digress, cough a lot and repeat himself. Nevertheless the energy that came from him was incredible. Just merely by sitting there in the robes of a monk and in meditation posture, he was powerful enough to tame the minds of those who were ready. A heavy duty Tibetan lama! Lama Zopa taught at the Root Institute for the best part of a week and Susan and I went to his teachings each and every day. Walking across those fields on the edge of town in the early morning sun, it felt like we were part of a tradition thousands of years old.

By the time Lama Zopa’s teachings had finished we had been in Bodhgaya for just over a month. It was now time to move on. There was only a week or so left before Susan had to get her flight from Calcutta back to Delhi, and from this stage onwards I had the distinct feeling that time was running out for us. Although we had talked about going to the coast and to a resort like Puri after Bodhgaya, what we actually ended up doing was going straight to Calcutta. It took a couple of trips into Gaya to book tickets on a night train heading east and each time we went into Gaya it reminded me of what a place might look like after a big bomb had hit it, in other words very rough indeed. Whatever money that was supposed to be spent on things like repairing dirty great potholes in the roads never even came close to its intended target, being completely eaten up along the way. I remember leaving Bodhgaya late one afternoon in what was then mid-winter, thinking how I wouldn’t want to be there when it was really hot, and that it did indeed get incredibly toasty at certain times of the year. It was all too easy to imagine those winds rolling in from off the plains, blowing down the main street of the town and turning the place into a furnace. It would be deserted of Westerners in the hot season too, with only the locals and the ultra faithful left to soak it all up.

The night train that we took from Gaya to Calcutta was about a 10 hour ride, and after we argued with, and finally got rid of the people who had occupied the sleeping berths which were reserved for us, we actually had quite a good journey. Indian trains were the business, a whole world onto themselves, and infinitely better than anything back in England. They might have been slow but for me it was fascinating just to lie on my bunk with my rucksack as a pillow and watch the endless procession of characters making their way up and down the carriages. Fuck knows what they were doing all the time, but whatever it was it went on throughout the night. By early morning we were in the state of West Bengal where everything seemed to be much greener and wetter than the dry lands of Bihar. I guess a lot of rice was grown there and as the haze of dawn lifted there seemed to be thousands of people already out in the fields working the land. The number of people seemed to grow the closer and closer we got to Calcutta, and by the time we hit the outskirts of the city I realised that everything I had heard and read about the place was probably not going to be enough to prepare me for the immensity of noise, people and traffic which awaited us. This proved to be exactly right as barely five minutes after getting off the train at the central railway station, Susan and I had a huge row which at one point saw both of us sitting in different taxis. God knows what it was about, but it was bad enough to make me throw a major tantrum within the intensity and heat of Calcutta right in the middle of the morning rush hour time. It was a really bad one and at one point I was screaming at Susan just to get in the fucking car that I had chosen. Amazing how these situations can appear, seemingly from nothing! Somehow we managed to make it through, even though I was on the verge of falling apart, and we eventually got to where we wanted to go, which was a hotel over the other side of the Hooghly River and right in the middle of the tourist area. But that was OK, in Calcutta I really didn’t mind running straight for the safe island of hotels which were there to cater for Westerners, rather trying to search out somewhere a bit more authentic to stay.

After Varanasi, Calcutta was the second major Indian city that I had been to and it was different in so many ways that it would be impossible for me to describe. Somehow it felt like it was that much further east and whilst Varanasi was in the middle of the plains, on the banks of the great River Ganges and thousands of years old, Calcutta had only been in existence for about three hundred years. Its design, planning and architecture was heavily influenced by the British who had built it up from nothing and it felt like a place full of empire shadows; it was humid, intoxicating, dirty and hauntingly sad in an ecstatic kind of way. It was also a devastatingly hard city as well, and some of people I saw begging on the streets filled me with terror over what life on Earth could be like if you had a particularly bad throw of the dice. There were cripples on the pavement, completely surrounded by relentless noise with just a tin cup on the ground in front of them. It was no surprise that all the Western hotels were in more or less the same vicinity, and effectively they were a ghetto for the white folks who would always have the means to somehow get the hell out of there when things got just a bit too much. And it was easy to see how things could get too much! We got a good room in a hotel that had a roof garden which turned out to be a great place to spend hours and hours writing letters to people back home whilst taking in the city landscape over a leisurely cup of coffee or tea. It was a place of refuge from the madness that would sometimes erupt from below, but it also felt like a lonely spot. Too many arrogant Westerners liked it there too, and as they sat around for hours and hours, they talked and behaved as if they had no real idea of how lucky they were compared to the vast majority of people in streets of the city, and no doubt I wasn’t really any different to them.

Calcutta was a city of culture, capital of Bengal and home to radical left wing politics, playwrights, poets and countless other masters of the arts. One happy consequence was that it had a good number of cinemas. It soon came to be that Susan and I would take a break in the afternoon from the brilliance and the madness of the inner city streets, to go and see movies like Rocky IV and The Man with the Golden Gun. James Bond was still big in India and I guess that was our kind of entertainment which we both ran to, but we also saw Salaam Bombay which was the sell out movie in the city, saw it one evening and the place was packed with locals which felt like a great experience at the time. The food was good too, especially the street food, spicy and incredibly tasty, like steaming hot plates of chick pea curry called chaats, served up for only a couple of rupees. There was also a covered market in the centre of town which had top quality bakers and confectioners. Places that had originally been set up by non-Indians but there were only a few white faces left behind the counters by the time we got to take a look, and today there are probably none. Susan and I spent hours in that market, just wondering from stall to stall, feasting our eyes on all that we saw. One time she bought me a pack of 20 Marlboro cigarettes, they tasted old and bitter, but they still had that Marlboro hit to them which one could so easily grow to love, just like the manufacturers wanted!

We did a lot of walking through the big city parks which were full of young Indians playing cricket and they only served to make me feel lonely and bored. Huge open spaces in the middle of the city, dusty open spaces with trash blowing into the forlorn looking hedges. We walked around those parks for hours, as if we had nothing better to do, and of course we really didn’t have anything better to do by that stage of our relationship whilst making our way through India. One night I wrote a few lines down to try to give a taste of my experience in Calcutta.

soul of the east,
winds from the river
blown in from another century
of fortune and elephants
with old prosperity buildings
waiting like Victoria
for the death of Calcutta

The reality of the situation was that Calcutta was the end of the road for me and Susan, it was that fucking simple. We had begun in Kopan, we had got it together in Kathmandu, then we had spent a brilliant time in Varanasi and Bodhgaya. It had been incredible, I felt I had learnt so much from her and I loved her, I really loved her. I told her that I loved her all the time but she would just look away, or tell me not to be so stupid. Maybe she knew that it was just infatuation, not the real thing, whatever that was, and that whatever it was we had would never be strong enough to overcome the bigger challenges of life together. She had partly come out to Nepal and India to get away from a relationship which had gone wrong for her and I think she was shocked by the strength of my feelings for her, but it didn’t really stop me. Even when we were in Calcutta with only a day or so to go before we would be thousands of miles apart from each other for the rest of our lives, I was still jealous of anyone, any person travelling down their own particular road through the vastness of India, who happened to talk to her. It was like that. All the time I spent with her was time that I wished would never end, but of course it did end and when it did it nearly flattened me. I was lucky that my chest had cleared up when we got to Calcutta, otherwise I might have got really sick with the physical debilitation and then on top of that the intense sadness over no longer being with Susan. Just as my body recovered it was now time for my mind to suffer, for my heart to ache. I managed to live through the pain, but I know that by the time I finally made it down south to meet up with Thomas on Kovalam beach I was on my knees, on my fucking knees.