When i reached the end of my schooling, at Canberra Grammar, i had completely lost any taste for academia. My chance at being a star student had probably been lost during my years at Karabar High, when i learned a lot about life and the rougher edges perhaps of Australian society, but nothing much about the subjects that i was attending, and my studious habits – whatever they were – all evaporated. So at Grammar I had mostly glided through on mediocre efforts – with a few exceptions when i became enthused by some topic for a while – and my marks at the finality of it reflected that, although they were still good enough to get into science at ANU (which was what i had nominated because i liked geology and it was what i’d supposed i’d do if i didn’t have any better idea).
But Grammar had alienated me from the schooling system and in my thoughts i had decided i was somehow different to the other boys and that a university degree and then a career would not realize what i wanted for myself or my life. I actually had developed a quite philosophical attitude towards the purpose of life, it was quite a skeptical one, but it was rooted in my readings of eastern religions – Buddhism and advaita – whose vision of the rat race of life as a wheel of suffering or an illusion appealed to me. Most of the books I was reading were from mum’s shelf and one about modern Indian saints and gurus gave me something to aim for and find out about. I had been in India two years before, when i was 16, as part of a school trip to the Himalayas (probably the most valuable thing i got from Grammar), so going to India didn’t seem too impossible. I could be certain that it would be seen as quite a big deal by my family and would satisfy them that i was doing something with my life. So I booked a ticket and prepared to set off.
A couple of little diversions before i left were to slightly modify my plans – i fell in love with a Swiss girl, Sylvie, who returned home to Switzerland so added to my ticket to India was an onward trip to Europe. And i picked up a job at the CSIRO division of entomology counting and feeding termites, which was a nice little income and a very interesting environment surrounded by scientists, which you’d think might have made me question my spiritual path — instead it convinced me even more that science could only ever be interested in the moving around of different bits of matter and that the real truth was to be got at through meditation (or maybe, drugs). I loved the folks i worked with and the comforting atmosphere of the CSIRO in those days, but i fundamentally couldn’t engage with scientific questions as being important to me. Besides, mostly they were trying to find ways to kill termites, for the companies that funded their work (a sad irony as they all liked the little critters). But anyway i did delay my departure by a month or two so that i could work there a little bit longer and add to my fairly meagre savings, and only eventually set off about a year after school ended, on 23 October 1997.
Arriving in New Delhi, I braced myself for the two months i had planned on the subcontinent. Having always lived in Australia and mostly at my home in Burra, the foreignness of arrival can be very disconcerting. The miniscule luxuries of life before were lost, and the abundance of the family home on the farm – the well stocked fridge and comforts and clear skies and air – Delhi was almost unbearable in comparison. On the first morning I ate a very pale grey omelette alone on the roof of the mid-tier hotel i was staying, as huge black corvids swooped around and watched. I was incredibly homesick. But of course, as i was on a sort of spiritual pilgrimage it was right to suffer and i felt braced by the homesickness. I couldn’t go back, in fact in typical teenage hyperbole i considered that i was ready to die for my mission to find out the truth, the ultimate, if it was here somewhere.
Going down to the street felt a bit like going out into a battle, being approached by hawkers and attracting looks, the heat and dust and dangerous traffic. People spitting gobs of red betel near me as they walked by, perhaps as an insult or perhaps it was just a cultural thing. I was comforted that there did seem to be red betel stains everywhere so it probably wasn’t just about me. I found a bookshop and spent hours leafing through a book on MC Escher, whose pictures i’d always loved, and it reminded me about a book i’d left at home. But there was no point buying a big heavy book so early on my quest. Instead i decided to visit south Italy later in my trip, if possible. I loved the landscapes there and the unusual architecture which intrigued me and seemed alien, unworldly. And of course the way that Escher attempted to capture something impossible or paradoxical within a serene and superficially correct scene appealed to my view of the paradox of life and the world at that moment. That MC Escher book had a big influence on my journey later on. For the moment, it was just an escape.
I had considered going first to Lucknow to visit the ashram of H. W. L. Poonja, one of whose books about awakening i’d found inspirational, but a conversation back in Australia with the Indian man who had a little office in the Paddy Pallin camping shop and who’d arranged my schools Himalaya trip encouraged me to head to south India first as it was less busy down there. He actually expressed quite a few concerns about me travelling alone. Its true that on that trip i don’t think i came across any other western travellers my age traveling alone, although there were a few who were a bit older. Anyway i made my way to the train station to get a ticket on the Karnataka express – a two and a half day journey from Delhi to Bangalore. Met in the ticket hall with impossible crowds a friendly man took my money and disappeared into the crowd to get my ticket – was I a fool to trust him? I had an attitude of just letting things happen. And sure enough, after a short while he returned with my second class ticket and i tipped him as generously as i could.
I had a few days before the train left so i moved to a hostel in the Paharganj area and started to settle into the bustle of the city. I had brought a little cooking stove – a trangier – to cook up lentils and try and save money. I bought the lentils and curry powder and some vegetables but it was very difficult finding methylated spirits! Just trying to explain what i meant in little hardware shops was hard. But i did find some eventually or something similar and i cooked up some lentils in my hotel room (with the door ajar to avoid monoxide poisoning). The dal i made was pretty tasteless and with the prices of street food in India i’d hardly saved any money. So i never really bothered with that again. Instead i sampled the tasty menu at the rooftop kitchen in the backpackers. I spent some money on a fax back home to say i was safe and to share my plans about heading south – that was nearly all the communication i could afford back then!
The train to Bangalore was one of the greatest trips of my life. It seemed to me to be moving pretty slowly much of the time so i just sat back and watched India glide past – dry hill forts towering over the landscape, huge winding sandy rivers with little dotted figures on the bank, bustling stations and sleepy leafy villages. All day and all night they rolled past my open breezy window. I drank copious amounts of chai and kopi from the wallahs to came through the train at every stop, and had the spicy curry dinners squashed into metal tins prepared for passengers. I was sitting opposite an interesting man for some of the trip who’d come from ireland and was inolved in some christian monestary there. He had a spiritual air and struck me with a bit of irony as the most saintly person i’d met in India, which otherwise had not been very conducive to meditative mind states. I was warned about having things nicked on the train but had got grandpa to sew leather strips onto my canvas macpack before i left home, so i could chain them onto the seat. I had also been warned not to acccept any food from strangers but that could be hard with the enthusiastic generosity of nearly every indian person i met in the cabin. These sorts of concerns troubled me and took up a lot of my thinking.
I arrived in Bangalore and took a tut tut (one of those ubiquitous two stroke motorbike like vehicles where you sit in the back) to the christian hostel where i was staying. The driver charged me something like 80 rupees which later i found when I took the same return journey was a stunning rip off – but it’s hard to feel bad when it translates into just a few dollars and cents back home. Still i was trying to do everything on a tight budget even for India, as i had to have enough money left for the europe part of my trip later on. In Bangalore i explored the beautiful parks and visited a shrine to Ramana Maharshi which was built by devotees in some suburb of the city. There wasn’t much to be seen there, just a statue of Ramana in an empty meditation hall and a bit of garden that looked newly planted. It was a bit of an anticlimax as i was still hoping for some sprititual experience to overwhelm me. I was going next to Tiruvannamalai, which was the actual ashram of Ramana and my main reason for coming south, so hopefully that would feel a bit different. I consoled myself buying a coconut from a vendor on the street after he cut the top off with a machette, and enjoyed drinking its sweet water with a straw, a bit of simple relief from the oppressive heat.
I took a bus to Tiruvannamalai which was about five hours. I was sitting in the front seat and had a great view of everyone who jumped crazily out of our path as we tore through the landscape on narrow roads. We stopped once or twice and i drank piping hot chai and had a wee in some leafy bushes beside a small canal. The air in the countryside was humid and fragrant – not like the dusty fumerous cities i’d been in so far. It did feel a bit more relaxed than north india, and i enjoyed the kind of languid sound of the Tamil language that i was hearing for the first time. Coming into the village i caught sight of the sacred Arunachala hill and it began to feel like i was actually fulfilling my pilgrimage in a meaningful way. The Ramanashram had no room so for the first night i stayed in the Sri Seshadri ashram next door and was in paroxyms of pain with a stomach upset for about six hours. But it passed suddenly and that was the only time i got any bad food bug for the whole trip.
I can’t remember exactly my first time walking into the Sri Ramanashram, but i think it was that first night before my stomach took over and i just glided quietly through the mother’s samadhi temple, and past the stone Ramana on the stone couch, and then around Ramana’s samadhi. It all seemed quite mundane at first or even a little bit tacky, i didn’t realise there would be so much hindu iconography there and the rituals with ringing bells and so on were new to me. My reading of Ramana was based on how the Ashram had been in the 1920s or earlier when it was just a few shacks, and his philosophy doesn’t talk about gods or ritual so it was confusing to see all this being conducted in the Ashram. I learned later how deeply entwined the philosophy of advaita is with all the thousands of years of stories and cultural habits layered all over india so that they can’t really be pulled apart and for many devotees they are a valid or at least comforting path. But at the time it was disorienting.
I found another room to stay in the nearby Andhra Ashram which was set up by devotees of Sri Nanagaru, another Ramana disciple who i’d read about in the book of modern indian saints. Nanagaru was in another part of the country unfortunately but the couple of devotees running the place were very kind to me and charged very little for a very comfortable little room near the front gate where i spent about a week or more as I explored the town and surrounding area. I also spent a lot of time in this room seeking an escape from india, reading Thoreau’s Walden, and meditating and eating biscuits and playing with myself and thinking about what i was going to do with my life and whether i should try to get girls. There were some kittens on the Ashram grounds but no one else much around.
I begain to meditate at the Ramanashram – once in a little nook in the mother’s samadhi tucked inside the doorway, another time in the big hall right near the Samadhi where people circumambulate. I had been meditating at home a for a few years using a book of buddhist techniques and pushed myself a bit harder here so i had some satori like experiences – which are hard to describe – but which i ascribed to the atmosphere and to the junction of my life that i had created. For here was the focal power point of the probably most authentic spiritual master who had lived in the last 100 years or more, as far as i was concerned. I had read all about Paul Brunton’s experiences on this very spot. If i didn’t feel something here then probably the whole spiritual thing was bung.
I also explored the mountain, which in those days was still mostly bare with just young recently planted trees and shrubs beginning to reforest the slopes. Little copper snakes slithered among the rocks. I could easliy head off trail and climb up to a prominent place to sit and meditate in the afternoon or cool morning. One time i had a funny experience on a high rock on the southern slope, it felt like someone pushed me from behind, and i would have fallen but it was as if a slice of my life got removed and suddenly i found myself planted on all fours on the surface of the rock. I cannot explain this experience. Another time I paid a boy to lead me to the summit. He set off at a cracking pace with me trailing behind to get to the top just in time to join a little ritual that happened at the summit where a saint lived under a bit of tarp. This saint was (i discovered later) called Ayya Swami and had a sort of hood over his face. The ritual involved a cup of what seemed like milk and some tulasi passed around in a coconut shell. Me and the boy and a lady who had presumably brought the ingredients and the swami all took a sip and passed it around. I remember pausing because drinking something like that broke every rule in the book for westerners trying to not get sick in India. But i decided that the spiritual power of the guru would protect me. I looked into his eyes for a brief second and felt that kind of zap you get on those occasions. It was cold and misty up there. On the way back down the hill, exhausted and enjoying the view, we stopped by another younger swami in a cave facing east, probably about my age or a year or two older. He seemed more like a reglar guy, and i think i gave him a few rupees. I wondered if i could live in a cave like that.
I had heard about another famous guru and thought i’d visit him in his ashram which turned out to be a kind of enormous concrete stadium just out of town. This was Yogi Ramsuratkumar, and we had to wait hours to see him, to finally file past in a line and make obeisances before being led out. I was struck by the absurdity of it – the yogi seemed oblivious to all of us as he sat being fanned at a little distance from where we filed past in this huge otherwise empty hall which was still under construction. But perhaps i got a little buzz from his presence, some transmission. From what i have read more recently i think he was quite authentic but at the time with all the fuss made by his devottees and the huge hall i felt like he was probably some kind of fraud, for why would he keep genuine devotees like me at a distance like that? I didn’t know that’s how it often is and was with Ramana too in the final days. I thought about heading up to Lucknow – but talking to some westerners who thronged in the one cafe near the Ashram which sold small amounts of tasty cheese and bread, i discovered that Papaji had died just one month before in September. It felt like I was destined never to properly meet an authentic living guru in this life (and it’s still true, i never have yet). Some of the other western seekers seemed pretty flaky and i didn’t feel with my high minded life quest, seeking pure enlightenment, that i could join in with their chat about drifting from guru to guru, ashram to ashram (a lot of them seemed to have started with Osho before going to Papaji). One guy said that he meditated just to ‘get high’ and i was a bit shocked. Many of these westerners had come back to Ramanashram because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to go for now. I was decades younger than nearly everyone else there, who were from the younger end of or children of the hippie generation, and they seemed the sort of people my parents would have been if they’d taken more drugs and signed up for the alternative life. I was a quite straight ex-public school boy in comparison and to them i must have seemed some kind of naive child, which is pretty much exactly what i was.
One day the tourist instinct took over so i caught a bus to a nearby temple that was known for some of its erotic stone art. I cannot now find what this temple was but it wasn’t far away from Tirruvanamalai and after an hour or so in the bus i came to a small village surrounded by rice fields. The temple was a not very large structure. Through the stone gate there was a rectangular courtyard surrounded by alcoves and central stucture covered densely in sculpture which if you examined it very closely had a few erotic poses. I took some photos on my camera, making sure that I also took some photos of the non erotic art, just to show that I wasn’t there wholly on the account of the chance of seeing boobs. This reveals really how sexually frustrated i was at the time. It is the eternal and most vexing problem with a spiritual quest is that you spend huge amounts of time feeling sexy. Now as i’m writing this in my 40s, i wish i could feel sexy all the time as back then as that same vitality is what was driving my intense searching for enlightenment. Now when i try to meditate i tend to drift off and it’s extremely difficult to stay focused and motivated on anything at all. But at the time it was a pretty wild careering between a desire to leave my body altogether and a desire to unite it with another.
I had had about a week in Tirru and decided to head out to Pondicherry because i liked the idea of seeing a bit of France while in india and was curious about Auroville, just nearby. All i knew about it was what i had read in the Lonely Planet guide which was my bible, and which promised that staying with one of the communal living communities there was possible. i was quite interested in the idea of communal living and the prospect of building another kind of society. The train to Pondi was slow and comfortable and looking over the fields i had one of those moments when it feels like you are connecting with destiny, or a past life, or perhaps a future life. It was enough of a feeling that i can remember it now though i have no reason to know why it absorbed me then. Pondicherry was busy and I found a nice room at one of the Aurobindo ashrams and hired a bike to explore the town for a few days. I quickly came to like it. The combination of the european familiarity with the delicious sea breezes and a nice cafe over the water where i could sit and write poems (for i was constantly writing in my diary and poems started to flow). I also discovered the Aurobindo library in town full of old books and cabinets it seemed lifted from the 1800s and i sat in a window and read Browning all afternoon. I was beginning to think that poetry might be my calling.
I rode out to Auroville and had some difficulty in finding a place that would rent me a room for any amount of time, rather contrary to what the guide book had said, and generally i didn’t get a very welcoming feeling from the people in the communities there which put a damper on my ideas that it might be some kind of free thinking utopian elysium. No indeed, it was a community full of difficulties and problems like everywhere else. But i did find a place to stay for another week or so, a nice little hut which was surrounded by light woodland and seemed to attract all sorts of curious insects and other creatures. Enormous black milipedes with little red legs, feisty yellowish ants of different sizes by the hundred thousand and small geckos and frogs. I spent a pleasant week getting to know the town, riding all around, and quickly discovered the auroville library where i borrowed books of poetry and discovered by some chance Swann’s way (vol 1 of À la recherche du temps perdu) – diving deeply into this book passed many hours for me in Auroville and i fell in love with Proust’s soft and meandering prose and of course fell madly in love with Odette. So i escaped from India to cold and rainy Paris for a few days.
Of course India reasserted itself every time i needed to find food. There were a few options. The commune provided dinner, which was always tasty. There was a great little cafe that did crepes and things on a nearby road, this place was a bit of a hub for westerners and visitors and i had some nice conversations in there. It was a bit of a different crowd to Tiruvanamalai, a bit more up to date with the world perhaps, and a bit less sincere. It was here i think that i met Zoe – she was about my age, and was travelling with a boy friend, they spoke spanish and were I think from south america. When i first met she wasn’t with her friend and we had a conversation which excited me so much – i fell instantly in love as all the sexual frustrations were released and flowed hopefully towards an outlet in her delicious bright funny person – but alas it was quickly all shut up by realities. So i went on reading Proust and decided that i would definitely become a poet, a frustrated misunderstood poet was to be my place in this world. I wrote some very bad 19th century poems around this time, and completely changed my handwriting to become more cursive. I really changed my whole person – something that started in Tirru but flowered in my meditations and readings in Auroville. I became myself.
Also at Auroville i met Willem. This was in another cafe down by the beach, which must have been all wrecked in the tsunami a few years later. Some local boys tried to steal my nice sandals which i had bought in Delhi on that beach but i managed to talk them into giving them back. I wonder if they made it thru ok as all the simple huts people lived in around there were at sea level. Anyway Willem was properly of the hippy generation and the most authentic hippy i’ve even known well. He was 60 at the time and had a shock of white hair and a very loving piercing gaze. We got talking and immediately he tapped into the spiritual wavelength that i was then continually on – he said he could recognise it – saying that he also had had the realisation – that “all is one”. As said it – “all is one” – he mimed someone cutting a string above his head and him dropping like a puppet. It turned out that in the 60s he had taken LSD and had that realisation that the “I” is “God” and left his former corporate life in Amsterdam behind and been a drop out hippy ever since. I liked that i could talk about these things with Willem and he took me under his wing. I was also a bit grateful to have an adult friend who could help me navigate india a little, although Willem was hardly practical. We arranged that after my week at the commune i would move in with him at his huge “treehouse” in auroville which had just been constructed – this suited me very well incidentally as a cost saving measure as i was beginning to worry about how i would afford the rest of my trip.
Willem broke down a lot of ideas i had about life and was very influential on me for a while. He believed Osho was a true guru and had a view of englightenment and sexual liberation that was based on his LSD experiences. I knew i didn’t quite align with that (I had never taken LSD and was curious but believed drug induced englightenment was impossible – although i had had some mind opening experiences with cannabis not long before leaving Australia), but i was open minded enough to hear his view on it. Nearly everything about Willem’s life was transgressing norms – he was gay and in a relationship with one of the villagers who was also married and the young family spent time with us in the treehouse. They were lovely people and the unusual arrangement seemed to suit them probably because Willem could finance an improved lifestyle and there was potentially a status upgrade with being around westerners. They didn’t seem to detect that he was an outcast from most of the west. I remember one time the villagers brought a bull to us that had an infected wound on its scrotum. They got it on the ground and asked us to come and inspect it. The best Willem could do was rub a bit of antiseptic on it. I spent hours listening to Willem postulating about the metaphysics of the world and telling interesting stories of his life. We listened to John Lennon’s scream therapy album and ‘mother’ was his favourite song. He had some opinions which would have got him into trouble and i won’t go into those now. But at the time, and still now, i felt like he was coming from a good place. He was always very kind to me and i never felt in any danger even though in some ways he was probably attracted to me and perhaps i was being slightly ‘groomed’ – but i wasn’t interested in anything like that of course and he never made me uncomfortable. I realised when i was with Willem that i definitely wasn’t gay, or not as much as Willem was anyway. The conjunction of his homosexuality and his catholicism were interesting topics to discuss. I stayed with Willem again in the following year in Amsterdam but that’s another story.
All in all i spent a few weeks around Auroville and Pondicherry. I had a breakthrough in communicating with home when i discovered a place that had a computer with internet that you could hire for half an hour to email or surf the web. This was right at the start of internet cafes. Even later that year when I was in London there were hardly any places where you could access the internet. I had used email at home but it never seemed that remarkable when the people i would email were just those i had talked to earlier in the day. Now it was an incredible new technology which took my family by complete surprise when my sister discovered an email from me in her inbox back home. And it was cheap! no more faxes or incredibly expensive brief calls on crackly bad lines. It brought my family closer to me and my adventure closer to them, and marked a permanent change, a threshold of some kind. I still have the email address i created there in auroville to write home – ‘aswann@mailcity.com’ (from Swanns way, of course, i was thinking i might adopt the name swann as i disliked my own). Also while in town i viewed a greek play that was performed in an amazingly stilted manner – i think Zoe and her friend might have gone too – or i hoped to see her there. I think I found out afterwards that that style of performance was something Aurobindo had suggested was the correct way to do greek drama. I visited the Mother’s samadhi and it had a lovely atmosphere with incense drifting under an old tree. But i never connected with the teachings of those two or the vision. It always seemed a bit stuffy and indirect. I visited the matrimandir, bought the expensive (even for me) ticket and waited and queued at the appointed time, to get a glimpse of the crystal ball at the heart of the still half constructed building that was itself at the physical heart of the community. It was beautiful in there, but we were rushed through it and I was reminded of my experience at the stadium ashram in Tirru, a feeling of unnecessary limitations and a kind of a poverty when there should be love. But perhaps this is neccessary in a crowded, busy india. Auroville also had an expensive gift shop which was obviously not for Indians but visiting westerners. I bought some incense there and a t-shirt – you can buy Auroville incense all over the world, it’s quite good and whenever i see it i think of my time there. The singing frogs and the glow worms, riding my bike along muddy paths in the warm rain. It was a Frenchy western bastion in India which attracted homesick me. The Auroville bakery had delicious bread and cakes that Willem and i would buy before they sold out and eat for breakfast. The Ashram in Pondicherry also served a wonderful sweet breakfast porridge that i can still taste. Tired of spicy indian food these places probably saved me from malnutrition (tho i still lost kilos in India).
Eventually calculating the time i had left before my onward flight to Frankfurt from New Delhi i decided i needed to begin to head back. I took the little train back to Tirruvanamalai and found the town completely full up as their great annual festival of Karthigai Deepam when they light the ghee lamp on the mountain was just about to start. I managed to find a room for two nights but had to promise to vacate it after that! I was a bit saddened that i’d miss the festival but took the opportunity to do a ‘girivalam’ walk around the hill. I took the track that starts from behind ramanashram and after about a kilometre i came across a donkey on the road. As i walked past he tried and very nearly managed to give me a good sharp kick in the shin – i think my horseriding years came back to me as i put my hand on his rump and managed to firmly push him away avoiding injury. The path wound on through some ruined temple structures, quite empty and atmospheric. I often think back to that spot and wonder if i wanted to just live as a sadhu whether i could just set up there. Perhaps in some other life. It was becoming quite a warm day and i squatted on the side of the path to have a drink and eat my lunch which was lemon rice i’d bought from a nice stall next to the ashram that i used to frequent. The man there lived with his whole family of four or five in a small room behind the shop. He (or his wife) made the most delicious spicy lemon rice wrapped up in a banana leaf and i lived on it once i discovered how good it was. I remember once when i was in his shop eating his rice as we were talking he fondled my brown woollen blanket that i had bought in the Himalayas in ’94 and use to drape around me. He said how nice it was (it is nice) and almost gave it to him, and sometimes wish i had.
Anyway i completed the girivalam but actually i hired a bike for the last little section through the town as i was getting exhausted. Pulling up at the Ashram having completed this important local tradition (that is recommended in the skandashram from ~1200 years ago) for the first time, i followed my footsteps to a room that i hadn’t noticed before – it was Ramana’s meditation hall, the first hall that was built there. This building preserves something of the actual ambience of the ashram in those times when Ramana was actually alive – the new hall was built after he died and even the big stone hall was only finished a little before his death. So most of those years in the 20s and 30s he was in the smaller meditaiton hall which was empty when i arrived. I sat there before his old couch and dropped into meditation and – i think this was the time when i just absorbed that silence that is in the air there. And that’s really all there is to say about it. There is a silence there, it is nothing more than that except that once you taste silence of that quality there is no going back. You have it with you always. So this was the gift of Tirru and of Arunachala and India for me, as i realised in later years, when i was able to sort through all the things that had happened.
I had a few days left before i had to get my train back to Delhi and looking through my guide book i decided to do something touristy again and visited the Theppakadu elephant village in Bandipur National Park. I took the train to Mysore and then a bus out to the village which was full of elephants. It was wonderful to see them up so close, i scratched the head of a little guy and it was like a wire brush with most of the wires missing. He snuffled me with his trunk and it was so sensitive and tickly. It seemed that lots of the village folk had an elephant to help them with collecting wood from the surrounding forest and for things like that. One morning i woke up in my dormitory and at the front door an enormous male elephant was grazing. I was woken by the clinking sound of the chains that were holding its front legs together. It seemed pretty cruel but then i also felt a bit safer knowing he could only hobble about. And when i saw the owners taking their elephants down for a good scrub in the river at the end of the day i could see how much affection passed between each man and his elephant.
Passing back through Mysore for a day or two i felt myself returning to the world. My spiritual quest was over for now and i had to think about finding work in London when i eventually got there. I visited a local maharaja’s palace and felt disengaged from the material concerns of the world. On the other hand i made a few inquiries about where i might find opium as i wanted to try it – fortunately i chickened out when someone suggested i come into the back room of their shop to discuss it – i was terrified of a sting and getting arrested. The hotel i stayed at had an old telephone exchange operating at reception – lines and plugs coiling everywhere, lots of shouting – which delighted me as it seemed like we were back in the 1940s. I had a nice room and felt like i’d given India a good go. Back in Bangalore i bought a samosa from a boy on the street no older than me, from his snack cart. I just wanted a plain samosa but he broke it up with his fingers on a plate and then scattered all sorts of spicy things and sauces on it. I was a bit nervous about germs but it was delicious. Going to buy a ticket for the train back north i had a momentary panic when it turned out that the tickets were all sold out for the dates i needed to get back to Delhi on time, but a senior man in the station took me into a side room (a big cavernous british feeling space) and managed to find me a ticket from some special allocation that was held back. So i was safe and the next day i relaxed back into the two and a half day journey to New Delhi.
Early on that journey I did wonder if i was the target of a possible theivery operation as a bunch of youngish men bought me tea and encouraged me to drink it – i had heard about sleeping pills going into tea given to travellers who then had everything nicked – i refused the tea and the young man poured it out the window. So i suppose it probably had been drugged. I think that was the only time i felt in any real danger in India. And even then those boys didn’t seem to press the point too hard and maybe they were just being friendly. A family joined the cabin later in the journey and the lovely lady there made me take some of her delicious spicy chutney which was as hot as a volcano. I regretfully threw it out a few days later, as it was inedible to me in anything more than a speck. But i had got more used to spicy food and even spicy breakfast. Delhi was a bit of a blur on the return trip. I visited the interesting Jantar Mantar and the old town which scared me. I managed to pick up a letter that had been sent to me poste restante (that old instituition!) from my swiss girlfriend – who i hoped to see soon in Switzerland – and she informed me that she had a new boyfriend! In some ways i was relieved as we had promised that we wouldn’t wait for each other and it made things clearer. But still a bit of a sad letter to get. I was still welcome to visit them in Switzerland for christmas – and I did! but that was a bit of an odd trip. Anyway all that was ahead of me. On my last day i sat in the street at dusk drinking chai from a little vendor somewhere around Paharganj, and myself feeling tanned and my clothes a bit dusty, i felt like i blended right in and was at home. What a cold shock Frankfurt was about to be! I didn’t know then but it was over 20 years before i got back to India. Still that trip changed who i was and set my path for all the years that followed, as i still considered myself to be questing, just in a different place. Grey old London..