Prepare to meet Kali—in Hell!
—Indiana Jones

Once I heard a story of a lone Brit astride a Royal Enfield Bullet, a classic motorcycle, the chassis unchanged from the ’50s, and he was driving along India’s highways, fulfilling some post-colonial dream, when somewhere ahead of him on the dusty highway that runs between jungle and mountain he encountered what appeared to be a wall of oncoming traffic, an impossible and anachronistic vehicular rampart.

At the far left of the road, in the slow lane, limped two heavy-humped oxen, long horns painted blue, pulling at a cart loaded with hay; a Hindu in a collared shirt riding a bicycle past this, a tuk-tuk ripping past the bicycle with a whole tangle of tied-upped chickens squawking on the back bench, then a half-rusted car with those old voluptuous streamlines around headlights and taillights passing the tuk-tuk, and finally a huge Tata truck, the king of the road, its bed weighed down with cardboard boxes, boxes piled so high they stood above the cabin and had to be tied down, looking like some Dust Bowl refugee, this Tata truck overtaking them all on the far right—all these vehicles, of various eras and velocities, happened to align like the planets do sometimes, so as to form a solid Indian phalanx, from one shoulder of the road to the other, as the Brit on his motorcycle approached.

This is the best analogy for the state of India: contradictory and anachronistic, pre- and post-industrial, and dangerously, prolifically out of control. A swarm of humanity steers this thing, not some face of politics. Gandhi understood this better than anyone. He never tried to control India, merely to make himself a cog of cogs that would set the swarm to the real work.

There is progress, and there are those left behind, those who have to swerve into the ditch to avoid what’s overtaking them. Men lying face down under the curb, men with sores on their features, with bleeding bones sticking out from amputations, skeletal old women with no one to help them, and filthy children who don’t deserve it. Gutters and begging bowls are India’s welfare network, and charity is their universal health care. The poor put ads in the paper. “My child needs an operation, please help him!” And in the same streets the other billion-plus of India’s swarm go about their business, with a blind eye to the down and out. Rich Brahmins glide by in their rickshaws, their salientian faces each a study of the lion in repose.

It takes brute cunning to survive in India. The best word to describe the country, encompassing all its vast disparities and cultural, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and geographical distinctions—the word is wild. Wild, from the Mumbai slums to the tribal hills, from the Backwaters to the Himalayan plateaus, from Tamil fire temples to Assamese Baptist churches. The only order and direction is natural selection. Caste is a food chain, and the cities are Darwinian pits, where the ruthless flourish and the rest sink to the slummy bottom and into extinction. Indian history is that of a thousand vying kingdoms, a disunited country, oblivious to the lesser masses. It is free market corporatism to an unholy degree.

Progress of the kind measured in three-letter acronyms by statisticians is quick for the wild nation. The laborers toil ceaselessly for nothing and sleep on the factory floor like slaves. The rich grow richer off ghetto sacrifice. Extortion is common: sometimes outlawed, sometimes permitted, and sometimes sponsored by the state. Cruelty is a virtue.

Yet for every mean generalization there is a good one. Look past the ruin and rubbish to the beauty of the country, and be numbed by the complexity of the city. The multifarious Indians are curious and childish and cunning. For every one that offends, ten will surprise and spoil with thoughtless generosity and fraternal humor. Here men and women preach and practice and sing of love and broken fetters. They crusade for the Untouchables, for women, for the poor. Saints and poets flourish as they only can in a wild chaos: Gandhi, Amma, Teresa, Tagore, Narayan, Ray, Mehta, Shankar, etc. The cultural atmosphere at once classical and progressive.

There is life and noise and warmth in every corner, an ancient heart beating in every city, and spirituality under every tree. The oldest stories and customs survive here, customs not seen in the West since Rome, Greece, and Babylon, graced by modern innovations. The story of Rama as told by television, novel, and comic book, and Bollywood-invented gods, worshiped by the most ancient rites of man.

She is a work in progress, this India—grand in scale, elusive in spirit, and willfully, wonderfully wild. I have known a little of her, and will return to see more of the north, and the mountains and deserts and jungles I missed, each land different than the rest, and to see where she will next steer her ancient patchwork self.

Each Bengali village orbits a pond called the pukur, where the villagers bathe and wash their clothes and water their animals. Holy men called fakir tend to the villages spiritual needs. The fakir brings rain when it is dry, and at night he paces around the village, hitting the ground with his staff to scare away the wild things. There are Muslim fakirs and Hindu ones. At one time in Bengal, the Muslims were as common as the Hindus, and they lived together very peacefully, though the Partition changed that forever.

The principle heathen deity among the Bengalis is the Mother Goddess Devi, usually linked to Parvathi, and with ten avatars of her own. Among these are benevolent women like Annapurna, goddess of food and plenty, and bloodthirsty terrors like Kali and Tara, who appear as mad and black-skinned horrors with lolling tongues and sharp teeth. Their dozen hands hold a dozen blades, and they wear the severed heads of men around their necks.

The Kali worshipers of Calcutta feed their goddess with the blood of sacrifices, and the devotees of Tara drink from skulls and practice Tantric rites on the new moon. In Tarapith they live in the ash of cremation grounds and throw bones at those who come to interfere in their inverted society, which refutes all the order of Hindu caste. To these heathens, even the malevolent aspects of the Devi are goddesses of love, personifying the intimidating courage of a mother’s devotion.

The Bauls of Bengal also throw off the chains of Hinduism, and society in general. They are wandering minstrels who sleep under trees and wear long shifts with checkered patterns and play the ektara, a single stringed instrument shaped like a gourd. Sometimes they stop in a small village, and all the Hindus come out to hear their songs of love, though the Baul creed forbids them from staying in one place for longer than three days and soon they must move on. They play on trains and on street corners and are the happiest of men.

In Bengali, their name means “mad” or “possessed,” for they yield to personal passion, to inward need. The Bauls say that God does not exist in Heaven but inside each man. “Seek truth within,” they say—within, rather than outside in the Hindu world of temple rituals and temporal masters. Seek God in love and music, passion and pleasure. Thinking this, they live like Krishna, traveling from place to place, singing their love songs and practicing their arts of seduction, and never tying themselves to anything.

“This is the best life. The world is my home,” said one of these minstrels in William Dalrymple’s new book on the Indian sacred. “When you walk, you are freed from the worries of ordinary life, from the imprisonments of being rooted in the same place.” Ah, what happy example for an unattached rambler like me!

While in Calcutta for the second time, and with an interest in all this Bengali mystique, I went to see the Temple of Kali in Kalighat, the holiest of that black goddess’s shrines. The story goes that when Kali was murdered, for being vicious bloodthirsty or for whatever reason, her husband, Shiva the Destroyer, was raised to such angry heights that he nearly destroyed all the three planes, Heaven and Earth and Hell. Vishnu only quelled his world-burning revenge by dancing on and disintegrating Kali’s corpse. Bits and pieces of her flew all over India, and now reside in her temples, like the saintly relics of European cathedrals. Calcutta maintains Kali’s big toe.

So I went to the Temple of Kali one sweltering afternoon with James of Edmunton, the deer hunter I had met in Kodaikanal who had just arrived in Calcutta from the steamy south. The Traveler’s Bible warns not to follow the Hindus that approach outside of the temple, who show you around in the friendliest way and then ask for an obligatory donation, but I’m in the habit of spiting these people, especially when they come from a priestly caste with a tenet that forbids begging. So when one Brahmin named Babu approached James and I on our way into the temple, we willingly allowed him to guile us through the market of holy trinkets and into the crowded temple courtyard.

Babu showed us the Barren Tree, the flowerless arbor where women pray for healthy grandchildren, and took us to a stand in the back. He got us us garlands of the Akanda, a flower holy to Kali, and two hoops and some incense, and he showed us the cupboard where we could put our shoes. Then he took us past the normal line to a secret entrance into the prayer chamber. This was a relatively small room packed full of worshipers all jostling for a space in front of a square hole in the wall that looked on the malicious, simple idol of black-faced Kali, shrouded in cloth of gold and surrounded by gilded offerings. They pushed and shoved against each other until they could see the goddess, and then threw in some Akanda flowers and managed a quick prayer before being forced away by the tumult.

This rite observed, Babu took James and I out into the courtyard on the other side of the temple. A few priests were preparing food under the colonnade there. Some 1200 of Calcutta’s poor come to the Temple of Kali every day for a free lunch, made up of rice and vegetables and the seared produce of sacrifice, for like those of the ancient Greeks, the Hindu sacrifices are in truth a ritualized excuse to barbecue a goat. Knowing this, I asked Babu, “Where does the meat come from?” and after he had answered, I asked, “Where are the sacrifices?” and led our guide towards them. I wanted to see some blood.

In the stone pavilion that Babu had indicated, two priests brought out a small screaming goat, its legs tied, and the knowing natives watched on. It was not the first—the block was already wet with blood. At half-past seven in the morning, when the head priest beheads the first goat, he takes up the severed head that he may bathe his face in its blood. The sacrifice we witnessed, one of the sixty sacrifices performed each day, was no less sanguinary than the first, and was performed by the head priest’s disciples. Placing the tied and squealing kid between two wooden boards on an uneven rock already carmined with blood and Akanda petals, the priests then ran a dowel through holes in the boards so it held the kid in place by its neck. Now the device was arranged like a guillotine and with a similar purpose. One priest hefted a massive blade with a reverse-curved edge. The kid issued one last bleat and was silenced.

The priests tossed its body into the corner of the pavilion, where it bucked as if trying to run, creating a circle of gore, and they took the severed head from under the dowel. They walked it around the circle of shouting pagans and drew blood from its neck with two fingers to paint the mark of Kali on rapturous foreheads. This poor goat, now reduced to paint and twitching meat for the spit, was one of fifty or sixty killed that day. The blood goes to Kali, the meat to the temple kitchens to feed the poor, and all the blessings of charity to the rich castes who fund it.

Babu took us out to the Shiva pool, where there was a stone idol of Kali’s vengeful husband. One at a time he took us down to the statue and guided us through a solitary ritual of puja. I went first. I lit my incense and circled it around three times, saying, “Om shanti,” put my hoops around the god’s elbows, lay my Akanda garlands over Shiva’s crowned and grinning head, and placed a pile of the flowers in his lap one by one—the first for myself and the others for my parents, my love, my sister, and my travels.

Then Babu brought out his ledger and asked for a donation for the poor. He showed me how people from other countries had donated between 2000 and 4000 rupees (that is $50 and $100), but told me that 1000 rupees would be sufficient. I expect that some of these philanthropists were fabricated, or otherwise I severely underestimate the common sense of people. I replied that I could not afford a donation and was only there to learn, but I thanked him for showing me around his temple. I would certainly consider donating money to a charity or donating my time to service when I someday returned to Calcutta with more of both. Brahmin Babu had ways of dealing with those reticent to donate—this was his job, after all—but I resisted them all with stupid stubbornness and gratitude.

Angrily did Babu dismiss me, and as I left he pulled the last of my flowers, the blessing of travel, from Shiva’s lap and returned it to me without comment, and never told me what I was supposed to do with it. While I waited in the shade, James came down for his puja, which did not last very long, and then refused the donations in much the same way I had. Babu led us back to get our shoes and pay the woman for our ritual items, and then he asked for a tip, which we also refused.

Money can procure anything in Calcutta, but the City of Joy is especially good for leather. Knowing this, I went around a few showrooms and to the Hogg Market, a mixed up bazaar with a meat market full of yet-living flesh, a dusty produce warehouse, and a maze of random stalls, including one that seemed to deal entirely in American country music. In the basement are the luxury crafts stores, the artifacts and apparel, without brand stamp but of excellent quality nonetheless, and into this subterranea I followed a guide who approached me in the street. These take you to shops for a commission, and are sometimes worth following.

He wound me around the cool and sleepy hallways to a shoe store. Six salesmen lounged about the room, and one of them approached me while the others watched. My guide waited at the entrance, hunched over and expecting his payment.

“I look for leather shoes,” I said casually, in the broken English that anyone can understand, gazing around at the store, as if the thought of footwear had suddenly sprung upon me and I had wandered in without any anticipation of buying something.

Crieth the salesman: “Sit down!” and he slapped a couch in the center of the room, but I ignored him and browsed the shoe racks. It is a constant power struggle in these equations. Allow yourself to be served, or put yourself in a situation where you need what is offered (i.e. it’s raining and you need an umbrella, or it’s late and you need a room), and you are sure to receive the bad end of the math. So I browsed the shoes calmly and picked out one I didn’t really like. “Very nice one,” said the vendor, and he told me a little about it. I put it back with disgust, then picked out the pair I really wanted and considered them with the same expression. They were black and long with crinkled leather and flat toes and were very rock and roll.

“Real leather?” I asked, not really knowing.

“Of course,” said the salesman. “From baby cow,” and he stroked the shoe as lovingly as he might the real animal. He then selected an ugly pleather thing from the rack and said, “This fake, you see? No good. This real leather, very good quality, baby cow, embossed leather. No wrinkle. You bend, no wrinkle. It will last seven years, no problem, guarantee. Here, try on.”

The others had brought out a pair in my size (and there are few of those in India), and I slipped them on and looked for things to complain about. “They don’t fit here,” said I, running my hand around the space between my ankle and the shoe. “It will fit with sock!” the salesmen protested. “Look at these wrinkles,” I whined, and the salesmen assured me they would fade. Make them desperate! and then you ask, “What’s the price?” I had asked around at a few stores earlier, so I already knew what would be fair and what would be an exorbitant demand in that market.

“For these,” said the salesman, pursing his lips as if in deep thought, “One thousand six hundred fifty rupees.”

“One thousand six hundred fifty!” I echoed, and I melodramatically reconsidered the shoes as if he had told me they were cobbled from gold.

“You have discount,” stammered the salesman. “First customer today, first customer discount. Ten percent off.” On a calculator, he showed me this meant 1500.

In an affected rage I informed him, “I go to store earlier, all real leather, air conditioning, nice showroom. Their shoes are only seven hundred rupees, fixed price.”

“Yes but this good quality,” pleaded the salesman. “Much better than other shoes.” Again he made a comparison between the ones I wanted and pleather shoes. “See, very good quality, baby calf. Embossed leather.”

I looked entirely unconvinced. I studied the shoes, bending them around as if they were worth nothing.

“In showroom,” said another salesman, “These cost three thousand rupees. Good quality, good brand. Only here, no air condition, good price.”

I became forgiving: “Yes, it is good quality. Very nice shoes.” The others thanked me. “It’s just more than I wanted to spend,” and I put them on the floor with high tragedy and brought around my own lesser shoes, dejected.

“What price you offer?”

“It was seven hundred at the last store.”

“No!” said the first salesman, exasperated, “seven hundred so small. These good quality,” and he pointed out many of the shoes’ fine features once more.

“I know, very good quality, I like them.”

“So say price.”

“They are good quality, so I’ll give you more than at the other store. Eight hundred is a good price.”

“Last price?”

“Eight hundred.”

“You pay eight hundred, I make nothing. I pay more than that,” said one of the salesmen, I’m assuming the manager or merchant.

“I’m sorry, I’m on a budget,” I said, full of morose self-blame, “It’s more than I want to pay.” I got up to leave— the bargainer’s ultimate weapon, though it must be used at the proper moment and not too soon.

The merchant got out a piece of cardboard and wrote down 1650, then 1500, and then had me write down my price—that is, 800—and then he said, “This is how much I pay,” and put 1150, “I will give you for this price,” and put 1250. “Very little profit, but you are first customer.”

I considered this, as a dictator might consider the truce offer of some lesser nation, and then told him, “Last price, one thousand.”

The merchant sighed. “One thousand fifty. I take hundred rupee loss. You are first customer.”

To these generous terms I agreed. My guide took me to a leather merchant down the hall, where a repeat performance of all this act—I was very patient that day—got me a red leather satchel and a jacket of supple sheep’s leather, for 1200 and 2800 rupees, that is $24 and $70, respectively.

For travelers, India is as rewarding as it is difficult, and on my last day before leaving, and the last day of my visa, I faced down all difficulties with a tremendous morale, which stemmed from a vague feeling of homeward bound. I joked with the touts and on one occasion pulled a rickshaw-wallah around a block in his own vehicle, saying, “You need rickshaw?” to all the incredulous locals, and fulfilling a lifelong dream. I bought what I needed (or rather what I wanted), mailed it home, and met my friends, all successfully in the face of wild challenge and complexity. “A cheerful man does best in every enterprise,” as the blind poet wrote.

That morning I walked down through the clean-swept cobblestone alleys, tile eaves low and wide against the sun, to the mission of Mother Theresa. Indian nuns in their two-toned habits, in wimple and guimpe, sat prayerfully in the vestibule, and I went past and through to the courtyard. I saw her marble tomb, her barren room: a small bed (she was very short), a writing desk, and a table with a bench; no comforts or conveniences, only the appropriate ornaments: a statue of Mary, a Crucifix, photos of her and the Pope, and a sign, written in red ink on a strip of masking tape, that said, “My Vocation is Love.”

Now to take up an unrelated subject, the people of Calcutta have another custom of interest called adda, which is a daily meeting of minds in some venue—porch step, park grass, restaurant, or living room; over coffee or cards or in the ticket line for a show—for discussions of art or politics or sports, or of spiritual or philosophical matters.

Regarding the more esoteric topics, please afford me the following rant:

If you have never heard an Indian wax philosophical, count yourself lucky—it is the most irrelevant and impractical bunk, all meaningless metaphysics and quasi-esoteric pathos. Not that it’s hard to follow the train of thought. This is a theoretical subject being wrestled with, something never before considered, and the thought train really never leaves the station. Rather what comes out is a cerebral miscarriage. Shapeless and figurative of opinion, the Indian debater worms around the most general of subjects, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing with his own point of view, as he change topics and refuse to accept evidence unless it’s worded as some worthless romantic imagery, which causes him to coo in self-satisfied delight.

It often aggravates, this faux-intellectualism, reminding me of the nonsense rhetoric of the old Greek sophists, rambling wordy circles around tight-lipped men of action with no patience for it. Would that Socrates were here to reveal their tangled illogic and strangle them in it, or otherwise I prescribe a good punch in the jaw.

As for an elucidating example, I could never reproduce this tendency towards abstraction. The best way to understand it is perhaps by browsing some online message board for politics & philosophy—amateur scholars of pop culture in a grand arena of ad hominem and ego, spouting nonsense and trying to sound smart. Or read the first paragraphs of high school essays, e.g., “People everywhere have always liked to build tall buildings. Is this because people are short, or is there another reason? We may never know the answer to this question,” or, “Throughout time man has wondered about the meaning of life. Sometimes they think and talk about it, and sometimes they fight wars about religion and things.” Now spread this out to book length and you have an idea of the simple-minded torture of Indian philosophy.

To afford a taste, an article I read about adda begins: “It is possibly worth a thought as to whether man created adda or whether adda maketh a man. The truth must be that both are correct.” To which the only reply can be, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Rant ended.

The same author of this article, a certain Nondon Bagchi, writes, “The hallmark of a good adda is that those conversations are of the finest quality, and, had they been recorded over the years, there is no doubt that it would have made for enjoyable and stimulating reading, listening or viewing.” Some adda, the article continues, regards the trivial philosophies mentioned above, and is a way of cementing ones own opinions through fluid debate, while adda can also inform on practical matters, such as current events or horse racing, though the proliferation of the Internet is quietly usurping this role.

Indeed adda, this important toe on Calcutta’s cultural footprint, is in danger of amputation in our Age of Information. Older Bengalis are too busy for it, and the idle young take their discussions online, where anonymity allows them their self-conscious fear of being assertive and opinionated in public.

Yet I was lucky enough to engage in some adda during my last days in that sweltering city. James of Edmunton had met two gruffly suave Londoners, Fran and James (who I’ll just call James II, with apologies), and a sweet Danish girl named Nana. Our adda venue alternated between Khalsa Restaurant, with its Punjabi kheer pudding that I insistently proselytized, and the rooftop terrace bar of some skyscraper in front of the Hogg Market. We ordered Kingfishers and upended them into a glass of water. The beer stayed in the bottle, but the headache-inducing glycerin, which the Indians use as a preservative, flowed out in oily waves.

Our topic was chiefly travel, the places we wanted to go and the beauty and charm of the places we had been, though we often ventured out into the alien issues of our respective nations. Fran said that she had heard my own Portland compared to East London, which I took as a compliment. We also digressed to complaining about India’s low points, a necessary and therapeutic venting of frustrations.

And really Reader, if you plan on living abroad, or spending any length of time in some foreign corner of the wide world, I heartily recommend you do so, but don’t forget to find some corner where there are other internationals, a foreigner support group of people from the same generic Culture, who understand just how crazy it is here, who you can complain to at the end of the day about the incessant honking or the weird looks, who will understand your reminiscences over good burritos and nacho cheese—because sometimes that just needs to come out, and we need a taste of the Western roots.

On this note, that same day that James and I went to the Temple of Kali to receive pagan blessings and observe a ritual sacrifice, we went on to an air-conditioned mall, an upward spiral of trendy storefronts and trendy people, for a completely diametric experience. We went up to the food court, fully stocked with fast food embassies, and as appetizing as the Indian varieties looked, I relished a Subway chicken and ham sandwich with honey mustard and a chocolate chip cookie. Fran and James II met us there around one, and we went in together to see Clash of the Titans in 3-D, savoring the Hollywood cheese, the predictable plot, the clich・dialogue.

Don’t take this for granted, Reader, lest you be stuck someday with interminable and nonsensical Bollywood dance numbers, a broken speaker bombing the bus with music and static, and ridiculous kung-fu fights where the hero wields two umbrellas hooked together—but enough ranting! It is as rewarding as it is difficult, this India. Strange things try every traveler, mentally and physically: horrors seen, difficulties encountered, the long days, the crowded streets, so much that it seems unendurable at times, but adventures, real adventures, always seem that way.

Each leaf on the tree is a holy scripture when you have to teach the soul how to read.
—Martin of Bolivia

I left the City of Joy for the City of Lights: Benares, the Holy City, nine millennia old. I had heard legends of the corpse fires, the septic River Ganges, but very little of the culture and warmth and energy I found there. The City of Lights is also called the City of Learning, for both Indians and foreigners come to Benares to learn to play the classical Indian instruments—sitar, sarode, tanpura, tabla, harmonium, and their human voice—so that, unlike most of India, every foreigner who lives in the city seems to be there for a reason. The sounds of their rehearsals echo through the alleyways and sing out over the river.

I took an overnight train to Benares from Calcutta. I was glad to be on the top bunk, since my feet always stick out and that way nobody trips over them. Still it was difficult to sleep, as my bed smelled like rotten vegetables, and the chai-wallahs walked up and down the aisles all night shouting for any sleepless business. There was another outlander a few rows down, who was curled hermit-like in a blanket since when I boarded the train, but I met her the next morning.

She was a Greek named Effi, and her friend Jenny, both of them from Thessaloniki, was in a coach a ways down the train; and they were on their way to meet a man named Jacques who was known by two or three degrees to all the Hellenes, it seemed, though neither of the women had met him before. Effi had been living in Goa for a decade. She bought shirts in Thailand and sold them to Indian tourists, and she loved the country and its ways, though the food didn’t agree with her. “I can’t eat spicy food. I just don’t like it,” she said.

We agreed to split a cab on arriving in Benares. On the platform, Effi got a porter by shouting, “Coolie!” and turning to me said, “I love India. Where else could you do this.” We met Jenny a few cars up, and then Jacques, a high-cheeked Asian with his long hair tied up in a ponytail. His father was French-Chinese, his mother one of the Hmong people from Cambodia, and Jacques himself had been raised in Australia, though I think he identified closer with Greece. He usually spent six months in India, mostly in Benares, making jewelry, and then six months in Greece, seeing friends, free camping on Samothrace or in one of the other places frequented by his circles, and selling his stock of jewelry to wealthy tourists from Germany and France.

Some force attracted Jacques to Benares and kept him there. Once we had made it back to the guesthouse where he lived, in an ashram next to he Hanuman Temple on the ghats—and this was no mean feat, because Benares is overcrowded and frenzied as a bee hive, and the alleys around the temple were very confusing, so it took me a few days to get used to finding the place again—once we made it there, Jacques showed us a room in the guesthouse where we could stay, for the Greeks had invited me to keep with them.

Jacques and the Greeks talked of something rotten in the of Hellas, penniless Hellas, its people impoverished by bad governance and poor alliances with the rest of Europe. Effi and Jenny said the only way out was a rebellion to overthrow the government. They talked about the “energy” of the place, a product of its past and its people, and I listened avidly. I supposed I sensed a power, what’s the verb?—lurking, hungering, meditating—a power in old Varanasi, especially at sunset, when the electricity goes dead and the old rites echo down the water and the musicians practice and the smoke of the corpse-fires fill the air. The wind carries sweet melodies and deathly horror both. You feel a cold shift in that weird air at nightfall, a reversion to a primordial era, as if history refused to release this one spot of earth.

This city I speak of can be found on one of the only bends in the Sacred Ganges that generally flows from west to east, and here from north to south. The stone stairways and temples of the ghats line the west bank, each donated by some regime seeking religious legitimacy, like the treasuries at Delphi. A few hotels and the great pink pillars of the water treatment plant poke through the ancient facade, which itself is really only a few hundred years old, the Holy City having been dismantled by the Mughals. Some of these hold great puja ceremonies at dusk, and at two, the Harischandra and Manikarnika Ghats, funeral pyres burn day and night to cremate the bodies of those who would pass into the next life from this place.

Across the river, there is nothing but a barren floodplain of crystalline sand, like jagged glass in the sun, that spans for a mile or more between the river and a line of trees. On a clear day one can see the forest there, and to the north the railroad bridge, and to the south the pontoon one. Thankfully, the monsoon rains fill in this plain when they come in July, and they clean the river and the ghats as only nature can. Last year the monsoon did not come, and all of Uttar Pradesh suffered from the drought. The people of the Gangetic Plain prayed for rain and tended to their old rituals.

Bodies commonly wash up on the eastern shore. Pregnant women, children under ten, Babas, lepers, and those who have been bit by cobras are all too holy or unholy to be burned and are instead tied to rocks and sunk in the river. When the hawser lines rot, the bodies float up, bloated and putrid, and sometimes beach themselves there. Flocks of vultures and packs of wild dogs like jackals wait there to gnaw on the bones. No one lives there, though a few quays and thatch huts mark the eastern bank where the ferries debark Indians set on picnicking amid the Stygian horrors of that hellish, shadeless desolation.

O Charon, pilot me back from here!

Returning to the saner side of the Mother Ganga: just behind the temples there is a network or warren of alleyways, too tight for vehicles and barely wide enough for two lanes of foot traffic, called the galis. This is a fascinating place, resembling an Arab souq or Turk bazaar in the overwhelming multitude of sensations.

Dirty restaurants fry samosas and cook dhosas on hot gas grills, and chai-wallahs heat tea over coal fires. Storefronts sell cigarettes and cookies, pharmaceuticals, pan leaves with narcotic betel nut inside, and incense sticks, with sweets lined up on racks. There are workshops in niches where the craftsmen repair shoes or shirts. Cloth merchants sit on clean white sheets, surrounded by libraries of folded fabric, with wardrobes hanging outside over the alleys. Grocers lounge among their fruits and vegetables on wooden shipping crates, with scales and weights to figure the price. Music stores play their albums and instruments and show Asian girls how to pluck the sitar.

Running along the tops of the wall, the power lines are as incomprehensible in function as the neurons of the human brain. The temple stupas loom over corners, and the alleys ring with puja bells and mantras, and with the life of shuffling crowds. Westerners lounge with books and coffee in the many German Bakeries. Monkeys play on the bannisters and jump from sign to sign overhead, and the Sacred Cows shamble through, eating garbage from the gutter piles. Motorcycles race through the crowds with horns blaring. There is a constant chatter, and the noise of children playing and heated haggling and oil frying, and always from somewhere there is music.

Ah, the markets of the Orient!

When the power is out, and that is as often as not, some turn on chugging generators and others put out candles amid their piles of flowers or fruit. The alleys gleam in this magic, medieval light, and the stars come out in full. Look down the river and it looks as it did a hundred years ago: a few lanterns amid the formless mass of temples and fortresses, and on the banks the flicker of the eternal funeral pyres, for death never slumbers.

The city does nap during the hot afternoon, and resurrects at dusk. On the ghats, kites flutter overhead. Touts deal hand massages, but only to men. They offer a handshake and don’t let go. Vendors sell ferry trips and puri snacks and ghunga boats: palm bowls with roses and daffodils and a candle. Priests set up altars with yellow cloth and scattered petals and ritual equipment, and the crowds find seats up and down the ghat steps. Strings of lights stir overhead, and the ghunga boats float out between the gondolas. The candles flicker off the waves like refracted stars. Song erupts from the south, and the generators rumble to the north. The power is unreliable, the spirit unquenchable.

At seven on Dasaswamedh Ghat, the puja begins, with seven liveried Pujarees performing the ceremony simultaneously, synchronized to music. The seven Pujarees went through all the rituals of the puja, waving censors and hurling petals and oil in all directions, accompanied by much chanting of mantras, beating of drums, ringing of bells, and hammering of plates—a sublime cacophony of life. Aides brought out great oil lamps with curving handles to each of the Pujarees, who hefted these in blessings to the four directions. The crowd clapped and prayed and stared and photographed.

It is nothing like the rites of the rest of India, and not ancient at all. Fifteen years ago, two hotels convened to try and give tourists some reason to take boat tours at night and not just at sunrise, resulting in this extravagant puja. Yet Hindus took to it as much as foreigners, and the righteous compete for the honor of tugging on the string of one of the many bells.

On my first night in Benares, after having lunch with the two Greeks, I lingered on the ghats to watch the preparations for the ceremony, and a German girl there whom I had previously met in Kodaikanal. I ran into many people I knew in Varanasi—Sebastian the Swede from Bombay, the Vancouver kids from Kochin, Isabelle and Cecile the Quebecois who cared for me in Vadakanal, Cullum the Irishman who celebrated St. Patrick’s Day there, and his Welsh girl, and once again Morris and Tora, though not till a few days later.

Evi and I got some chai, then went down to the docks when the ritual started with a British Columbian named Jerry and a Finn named Walter from her hostel. “It’s weird,” said Walter, “but after these are over I always think, ‘Why did I go through with all that?’ and before I go I ask myself, ‘Why am I going to this?’ but I still always go. I don’t know why.” I told him, “My friend always called it Phomo: fear of missing out. It’s what makes you go out drinking when you’re tired from an all night train, and go to a monument even if you don’t want to see it, and go to religious events even if they don’t mean anything to you. Fear of missing out.” The Finn thought this a perfect diagnosis for his condition.

This night was especially auspicious for me: exactly seven weeks had passed since I met the fortune-teller Rabi Kumar in Hampi and received my blessed mantra. At the end of seven weeks, the fortune-teller said, I was to throw the charm into a holy river, and what holier river is there than Mother Ganga? As the puja commenced, I cut the string necklace from my neck and wrapped it around the metal capsule of the mantra, and from down on the docks I threw it into the black water, where it splashed amid the gondolas and the candles of the ghunga boats and was gone. Now I could leave India.

Jacques served us breakfast the next morning, of curd, dried rice, peanuts, and a few kinds of fruits, with honey and tahini from abroad. The Greeks delighted over it.

“It’s good to eat simply,” said Effi. “Organic food is better for you, and you get more full from it. The fruit is so good, so fresh. It’s always better to eat the food that grows in your area. If you are in India, you don’t need stuff from the north. If you are in Greece you should not buy mangoes or whatever. Buy local things, not from South America.”

“Except coffee,” I slyly added, knowing well the Hellenic, or really Mediterranean, addiction to caffeine.

“Yes,” the Greek conceded with a laugh, “except coffee. I could not live without coffee.”

That day was very hot, so I lingered in the room reading or went out to the wide terrace, which looked north and south all along ghats and Ganges. Around four we went back to the Dasaswamedh Ghat and wandered around separately, taking in the different pujas, one on each ghat. I sat with Jenny for a while and she told me about herself: of her marketing career, which managed to be both brilliant and unrewarding, how she could not decide what to do with her talent—there are things she enjoys, but so unambitious that they make her feel useless—and of her spontaneous and unsatisfying marriage to a Siwan Berber.

Her New Age parents had been very supportive. Hearing that it is an Egyptian custom for the bride’s parents to give a gift to the groom, and vice-versa, they asked, “Well, what does he want?” Jenny told her parents that recently her betrothed had been looking all over for a chainsaw but could not find one, so that would be a nice gift. Her doting parents duly bought one of these and took it with them to Alexandria, where there was a big scuffle over the chainsaw in the luggage claim. Ah, the devotion of parents!

When it was dark, we bought some fruit and vegetables from the Dasaswamedh market stalls and went back to the guesthouse. Jacques had prepared a big meal for us and some other Greek girls, Natasha and Helene. He seems a magnet for the Greeks, his house their consulate. It was a good and simple meal, mushrooms and rice, salad, and even cooked paneer with tomato sauce, similar to the Greek fried cheese. In the words of the Indians, “Same same but different.”

Jenny was an expert in a kind of massage, and she offered to give us all one after dinner. When I received mine, I lay down on the bamboo mats away from the others and told her, “I’m going to be paying attention, I’d like some good massage tips,” but Jenny was silent. This was a different kind of massage.

Now Jenny was carrying around in her bag a number of Tibetan cast bronze bowls of different sizes that produce different pitches when struck. The night before I had seen her and Effi use them in some weird ritual out on the terrace, which involved incense and flower petals and a lot of waving things around while chanting, and Jenny also used them for her massage.

“Everything in the universe vibrates,” she said, laying out the bowls on the ground,—“even though we might not understand it. These vibrate at a high tone, and it shakes all the cells inside you. It is massage through sound.”

I lay on my stomach while Jenny put the bowls on certain points of my back, legs, and feet and rang them with a baton, sometimes one at a time and sometimes with two or three of different sizes, delivering a relaxing resonance to my cells. She listened carefully to the sound produced, putting her ear inside the upturned bowl. A dull or deadened sound marked a damaged equilibrium. Over my feet the ringing bowl stopped as if stilled by a hand. “I’m not surprised,” said Jenny, who had been fussing over my feet earlier, as they had a few open sores and I didn’t have any shoes. After I had moved to my back she noticed a difference between the left and right sides of my body, the right being dominant, but by then I had already fallen asleep.

I woke a while later and went over to the group very sheepishly. Natasha said, “What happened? What did you do to him? His face is different. You look so cool now.” I felt relaxed, but probably for the nap and the fruit. I ate more and watched as Natasha ran her hand slowly up and down Jacques’ chest, a few centimeters from the skin. He said it was warm, with his monkish politeness, and the Greek noticed some problem, which Jacques attributed to an accident, very mysteriously, in which his lung had collapsed. Eventually he pressed his palms together to stop the healing and said, “I am too tired for it.” It was very late.

The next day was as hot as the first, but I wanted to see the city. I left the guesthouse and jumped over the cows crammed into the alleyway.

A small herd of Sacred Cow commonly parked itself out there, at night and during the day’s hottest hours. I sometimes avoided them by coming up the stairs from the ghats, or went around the other side of the building, through a pack of stray dogs I had befriended; but otherwise I had to shuffle, charge, or leap past the tightly nestled cows, as they swung horned heads about with a curiosity that would arrest my passage and knock me down. They had more power than they realized and commonly bowled people over. Jacques still suffered a back ache from when a cow had kicked him.

The beasts were even more of a burden in the narrow crowded market warren of the galis. They stopped for no one. Families scrambled out of their way, and children climbed up onto porches to avoid them. Sometimes one thing or another would set the cows off, and one or more would come charging down the gali. I myself was nearly kicked by a bucking calf, and once I saw a cow nearly miss an old woman as she padded across the lane, apparently oblivious to the bovine threat. I have heard stories of cows charging into the merchant stalls and devastating the lists. During such rampage, most people dive into stalls and shove against the wall. There is nothing to do but watch the cattle stampede about until they have exhausted their fearful energy, and then to clean up the mess.

A much more constant reminder of the bovine presence were the cow pies in every corner. Everything about the cow is holy to the Hindu, including its excrement. Stepping in a moist pie with the left foot is considered very good luck. The most devout Hindus will touch the backside of a cow as they pass, and the Brahmins have been known to make holy ash from burning the product and to wipe it across their walls and look for runes in the way of asylum inmates. Innocent to all their significance, the cows wandered around the galis of Benares, snacking on garbage, defecating where they would, and having a good time of it.

Anyway, I got some masala dhosas from a dingy restaurant we had found that made them with apple slices, raisins, and nuts—very delicious! I was wracked by indecision: having exactly two weeks left on my Indian visa, I could not decide what to do. I wanted to see the Himalayas and Tibetan temples of Sikkim, and to cross the chicken neck around Bangladesh to go to the jungles of Assam, and both these sounded very romantic; but in two days the Sangeet Samaroh would begin, a famous festival of Hindu classical music in Sankat Mochan Temple of Varanasi, one of the greatest cities of music in the world. The festival would highlight all the masters of India.

I thought, “I will come back to Calcutta and see all that and more, but this may be my only chance to see such a music festival!” And so I would leave India, having spent three months there, without seeing the Taj Mahal or the Himalayas, but condemn me not!

Travel is full of such decisions as I made in Benares. Often you must prioritize a few days in a city like Paris, or must chose a route through a country with things to see and do all over. You can’t see it all, and that’s difficult to accept. Moreover, anywhere you go, at any time, you will see or do something that made the trip worth it, so it’s important not to worry too much and to just enjoy wherever you happen to be.

One of Jacques’ friends in Benares was a Bolivian musician named Martin, friendly and talkative, tall and lanky, with curly hair and hard-edged Andean features. They had been brushing elbows in the galis for a long time as members of the city’s foreign crowd, but did not finally meet until the highways of Pakistan, where they both happened to be hitchhiking. Martin was in the Muslim lands learning, playing, and listening to intoxicating Sufi melodies, though these Indian days he has turned his attention to Indian music, particularly the twanging tanpura and melodic Hindi vocals.

The day before the festival began we met Martin and his friends Nadj and Yogesh—names equally intoxicating, though Nadj was a French girl volunteering there and Yogesh was a string-wearing Brahmin tabla drummer from Benares, full name Yogeshwar—in front of the Haifa Hotel for an excursion into the hills. The three arrived late and tired, as Martin and Yogesh had been jamming and drinking a red tea preferred in Tibet until the exhaustive hour of five in the morning. We broke our fast at the Maya Cafe, on the top floor of an apartment building, in the living room of the resident family that also provided the chefs and servants, and ordered something called kichari.

“It’s very nice,” said Martin with his methodical energy, kissing his fingers before forming them into an okay sign. “You have this in the morning, you are full all day.” It took a long time to arrive, and Martin had no trouble filling the gap with his colorful stories and descriptions of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Hindustan. The kichari came in a Jethro-sized glass bowl, full of rice, dhal, and vegetables, and fulfilled its promised role. I had the honor and glory of finishing mine first.

Martin had arranged for a friend’s car to take us the sixty kilometers to the River Lakamiandry for about $12. He had been there about a week ago with two friends. After swimming in the lagoon for a while, a Baba came down from an ashram that was hidden in the hills above and invited them to visit for dinner and stay the night. They had hearty ashram food—“It’s really good, really filling, very natural,” said Martin, making the okay sign with his fingers—and left in the morning, well-rested on cots placed for them in the yard.

The car dropped we six off at a chai shop on the side of the highway, where we had some clay cups of tea, archaically heated by a coal fire in a fireplace made of mud. Very slowly, after much slow conversation, we turned and marched up the rocky Lakamiandry gorge, a barren riverbed surrounded by scanty trees, with only a few stagnant pools left in the rocky plates of the torrent that follows the monsoon; and we followed this gorge to its end, where there wallowed beneath high encircling cliffs a jade-green lagoon. The waterfalls were dry, but we found shade and good rocks to sit on and found the water welcoming cool. We slipped happily into the lagoon, and otherwise chatted, read, smoked, and sang the afternoon away.

We were the only ones there in that isolated spot except a small group of American girls whom we found already relaxed by the pool, but they left after a while, leaving us to our very satisfying company. Martin told many stories, including this one from the Afghanistan-Iran border, possibly the least world’s least touristy border, and the furthest from Western culture and its greatest culinary blessings:

“I was in shop and said, ‘What is this?’ They gave me some to try.” Martin pantomimed putting a bit of food in his mouth, and then his face lit up with a revelation. “Cheese!” he cried. “I bought the whole thing,” said Martin, holding his hands out to show that the cheese came in a block a foot wide. “It was very expensive, like, twenty dollars. I had it with me, snacking on it on the bus. Then we got out at the border.”

Martin had a few hash joints with him, and rather than putting them in his bag, which would be searched, he left them on the bus at his seat. “I thought it would be very nice. I would go back on the bus, there is my cheese, my hash. But then the bus left without me! I am, “No, my cheese!” He seemed to feel anew all that ancient rage, and he waved his hands like a superhero villain, eyes raised to heaven in condemnation.

Once in Iran, Martin called the bus company and went all over the place trying to track down his lost cheese, but it was impossible. It may be difficult for you, Reader, with your well-stocked supermarket and well curdled milk, to empathize with poor Martin, but I felt keenly his pain. Cheese is woefully hard to find in Asia! They say that the Laotians still make bread and cheese as the French taught them to, and that the baguette is a prized commodity there, approaching a currency. I am excited to invest in some, although the returns will be minimal to all reckonings but my hungry tastebuds.

Meanwhile, Yogesh called over a dog with some cookies and by making the noise, “Ah, ah, ah,” by which the Indians call dogs. He could be called a very Westernized Hindu, and often criticized the Indians, especially those we saw in their collared shirts who had climbed up to the lake to look at white girls in their swimming suits. However, I could not understand what he intended with the dog. Luring it by the water’s edge, he grabbed it by the hind legs and threw it in with a big splash. The dog scampered out and looked at us pitifully. It was nearly sunset then, and the European girls cooed over the dog and bemoaned its frozen state. Yogesh insisted, though, that the shock of water was good for it.

“I threw him in last time,” said the Brahmin, “and look how healthy he is. Cold water is good for him.”

Yet the Reader will see how foolish we Westerners later looked when we turned another blind eye to Yogesh’s advice.

We did not ascend to the Rama Ashram until near sunset. Martin led us clambering up a rockslide to the flat, dry plateau at the top of the ridge, and then along the path the Baba had shown him that led to the ashram. It crossed the pillars and platforms of the dried up river and went on past a few isolated farmsteads. When it grew dark, we followed the sound of the generator until we reached the mud walls of the ashram compound.

Now when we were down by the lagoon, Jenny had diligently filled up two plastic bags with the trash that surrounds everything worth seeing in India, and she had these with her as we approached. Yogesh told us, apparently uncomfortable with the situation, “You should leave the garbage outside. Do not take it into the ashram.” We replied very rationally that, “No, no, come on, animals will get it.” Of course the monks would appreciate that Jenny had cleaned up the ecosystem, we insisted.

We entered the compound through the small northern gate, and Martin had us wait there like the dwarves at Beorn’s house whilst he and Yogesh met with the hosts. Jenny asked one of the monks at the gate, “I collected this trash around the lake, where can I put it?” The man looked in the bag and cried, “What is this? Why bring this here?” “I collected it from the lake,” replied the Hellene, “to clean it up.” Crieth the monk: “It is garbage! Get out!” Word reached the Baba talking to Martin, they began to argue, Martin using his knowledge of Hindi and Yogesh his knowledge of etiquette, often more useful and more difficult to understand. You see, the monks thought our innocent mistake very rude and wanted us out. “It’s too late for you to be coming here,” they said, “but too late for you to leave.” The sky was dark and the stars out in full.

In the end Yogesh helped smooth things out, and we were accepted, though not so warmly as on Martin’s first visit. The monks arranged six cots and blankets for us in one of the courtyards between the little buildings.

“I told you,” remarked Yogesh, “but you did not listen. I know India. When you go to an ashram, you bring sweets and flowers, not garbage.” Martin said, “We’ll come back next week, with some gifts for Babaji. We’ll bring our instruments and play for the ashram, show some respect. That will get his favor again.”

Having been settled, we washed our hands and went in to see the Babaji, the principle authority of the Rama Ashram in all matters. He was a well-fed old man with a long frosty beard, dressed in yellow and reclining silently on a yellow couch in the temple courtyard. His twinkling eyes observed our approach. A television was turned on and broadcasting dramatizations of some old Hindu epic, Ramayana or Mahabharata. The gurus used to tell those stories aloud, not so long ago.

I was the first to approach the Babaji, and I did not know what to do. As the old autocrat watched me, I performed the namaskar greeting, making a small bow with my palms pressed together in front of my chest. “Namaste,” I said, and I was surprised to see out the corner of my eye Martin and Yogesh prostrate themselves like the subjects of Persia, bowed over their knees with their heads to the floor. Confused, and reluctantly, I did the same. When all of our group was abased in this way, the Babaji considered it merrily and waved us on to the temple, to the shrine of his father or grandfather who had achieved enlightenment and founded the ashram. We paid our respects to this ancestor’s statue, and on emerging received a burfi milk treat, by way of Communion.

We sat down on a strip of carpet on the dirt of the courtyard for dinner with about a dozen monks. They served hearty wheat roti, mixed vegetables, sweet kheer rice pudding, and a very good pickled something—food for men to do work on. After dinner, we threw our palm plates over an ashram wall and left the inner court four our outer one. On the way we passed the Babaji, now lying on a bed and being massaged by three monks, and bent a head his way.

Back at our beds, we sat and talked. “Westerners do not like to do this,” said Martin of our ritual proskynesis,—“They want to hold their heads up always. But it is good to show pranam, respect; to show that some things are greater than us. The Babaji is a wise man. You can feel it. He is like a king here. They all do what he says. Foreigners come and pay him respect, and it makes him happy. I felt good energy from him.”

“Of course he was happy,” said Effi. “If I had three people giving me massage, I would be happy, too.”

At ten the generator went off and all the stars and noises and silences of the mountains could be appreciated in full. One of the monks woke us rudely just after sunrise We received fried dough and puri rice by way of breakfast, prostrated ourselves before the Babaji, and were shown the door.

The festival would begin that night, but the best acts did not start until midnight or so, which gave us plenty of time. We spent another afternoon lounging by the lagoon, adding two long-haired Germans from Stuttgart named Benny and Nina, then took the crowded buses back into Benares, which was dark by the time we arrived. Martin invited us all to his apartment, a cool and quiet place on the ground floor of a building near the Assi Ghat, for tea and music.

“It’s nice to practice,” he said, “but it’s good to play for other people sometimes.” He and Yogesh actually earned plenty of jobs with their skills. Martin planned on going to Thailand or somewhere in Southeast Asia to chant his melodies around a touristy beach and earn some money, though Jacques later warned him, “They’re not that kind of tourist.”

The tea Martin made was pu-erh, a leaf from Yunnan, and it was the favorite choice of the Tibetans and his Korean girlfriend, a Sinologist translating classic texts into modern Chinese. The Bolivian put a spoonful of this precious stuff into a tiny clay pot and poured in an iota of water, then poured this first blood into three cups and, with a pair of chopsticks, dumped each out onto a little rock, so that it drained off the palette and into a water bottle through a tube. Ceremony complete, he now filled the teapot and immediately emptied it through a filter into a glass pot that he redistributed among eight tea cups. The tea was strong and did not need much steeping.

Then came the music. Turning on a drone machine, which produced a constant harmonic resonance to the same purpose as a metronome, Martin took up a synchronized melody on his tanpura, a sort of fretless lute. This was shaped like a sitar, with a gourd body, a long neck, and four strings that made twanging, meditative noises like bee-ow that added only a little to the static undulations of the drone machine, and was a perfect accompaniment to vocals.

Yogesh set out the two drums of his tabla, each held on the floor with a cloth ring. The smaller teakwood drum is called the dayan (meaning right in Sanskrit) or just tabla drum and makes a sort of snare sound, while the large brass dugga (left) drum makes a deep bass resonance, sometimes sounding like a deep pool of water. Ropes zigzagged from the top to the bottom on each, with a sort of cork clamped down on the middle, which Yogesh adjusted by pounding on it to get the tone right, like guitarists adjust their strings. He put some baby powder on the drums and began to play.

Yogesh said the tabla was one of the most difficult instruments in the world. “Some people practice tabla for decades,” he said, playing his right hand all over the tabla in a gentle rhythm, and pounding the dugga with the bunched up fingertips of his left, “and still they cannot play. I have played twelve years, but do not practice much, only play a little sometimes. They say it requires full mental focus to play, but I still have ninety-five percent of mine. I look around the crowd, think about things—it just comes naturally.” His fingers took off and the percussion got much harder, so I understood why he needed the baby powder.

Martin announced the raga, literally “color” but better translated as “melodic mode.” Most are about the time of day or the season of the year, and changes therein. The raga allows for improvisation between the lines, that they would play, and they set into it. Over tabla and tanpura, Martin sang long, drawn out notes, with sudden, sometimes erratic shifts in pitch, sliding up and down or vibrating back and forth. The style emphasized vocal technique more than tune, was more demanding than soothing. As he sang, he moved with the music—his face contorted and his eyes closed tight and his hand waved about as if casting a charm.

The raga they played, while only loosely defining the song that emerged, did have a writer: an almost mythical Persian named Amir Khusrau. Under the medieval Mughals, the legend goes, Khusrau invented the sitar, sarode, tanpura, and a thousand other instruments; he made the tabla by splitting one drum into two, and wrote a thousand Sufi songs, combining Indian temple music with Middle Eastern melodies, and this is the basis of Indian classical music. Many of the performers at the festival played improvisations of his ragas, the singers especially.

Classical Indian vocalists sing in syllable-notes, the equivalents of the Western do-re-fa-so-me-la-te-do. Each syllable-note means something and must be interpreted by the audience. One famous raga, often played at this time of year, is about the changing of the seasons, and the notes represent colors, like the colors provided on a painter’s palette. Only a real artist can apply them in the right way.

“It starts,” said Martin, as we waited for breakfast in Maya Cafe one of the mornings after the festival, “with black and blue. Seh—seh—seh—,” he bellowed, “then the morning comes. The sky changes to blue. It is the same, but different. Seh—seh—,” (dragging it out longer) “then the sun comes, red, Rah—rah—rah—!” and he waved his hand as if painting the sky and threw his fingers forward like the sun’s rays, and suddenly I saw the deft purpose to his movements, which I had noted too in all the performers: not the erratic forms of some melodic ecstasy, but the language of the story he was telling through noise. There were no lyrics to read, only sounds and rhythms and the motions and expressions of the performer.

Vivaldi might shake his head, but this is something different.

The first night of the festival coincided with the first hours of Easter, which happened to bless both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity on the same day, and which the Greeks realized after we had returned to our guesthouse from Martin’s performance. “Happy Easter!” they cried, hugging each other and me in an effusion of national spirit. For the Orthodox Greeks, Easter is a time of going to Church for a hasty blessing, and then turning off to other pursuits: feasts of pig and lamb, family reunions, egg fights. “Please,” begs the priest of his congregation as he nears the end of the first round of prayers,—“Please stay for the whole service,” but nobody listens—food and fine company await!

A few days later at dinner with Jacques and the Germans Benny and Nina, they explained the rules to this egg fight. Rather than hiding their hard-boiled and crimsoned eggs, the Greeks take them in hand and hit them together. Pointed top hits pointed top, convex bottom the same, and whichever combatant’s egg does not break, he turns to the next challenger and repeats the brawl. Jenny got six hard-boiled eggs from the kitchen and gave one to each of us, and we performed this tradition, moving around in a circle. My egg first quashed Jacques’, then the Saxon ones, and even those of the Greeks, so that it was proclaimed champion and, tenderized by glory and combat, devoured with relish.

Jenny told this story: “My brother was in the military. It is compulsory in Greece. I visited him on Cyprus to spend Easter with him, and my mother sent me with all these dyed eggs. My brother had a degree, so he was an officer in the military. He and all the other officers had on their full dress uniforms, looking very smart and clean, and they took all the eggs—only my mother had not boiled them properly, so when they hit the eggs they exploded. The eggs got all over their uniforms, their only ones. They smelled like rotten eggs all through the service.”

But on that night after returning from the lagoon, even as Effi and Jenny spoke excitedly of these customs and more, they were too tired to consider a trip to the festival, which I was eager to make. Departing from the guesthouse around one, alone into the Stygian depths of benighted alleyways, I hired a bicycle rickshaw to take me to the Sankat Mochan Temple, a few kilometers away. It was a temple to Hanuman, the ebullient monkey god, and one of the oldest and holiest in Benares. That night, the music that had been going since six that night and would go on until six that morning could be heard from a mile away: the watery percussion of the tabla.

Having run the gauntlet of the security details out front, I followed a covered arcade into the temple. The marble floors were scarcely visible, being covered by a horde of Hindu men, most of them sprawled supine across it, asleep or halfway there. They slept between the columns and in the open courtyard at the center and on the platforms around the shrines. At one end of the temple there was a raised dais, as in where a medieval king would sit at the feast, where the performers, also sitting on the floor but higher than everyone else, plucked expertly at their instruments, producing a wonderful, improvised sound. Next to them there was a roped off area for the VIPs. The Mochan family that owned the temple sat there, as did some of the other classical grandmasters, and some foreigners and agents of the press.

I noticed Martin and Nadj between one of the columns, eyes drooping, and went to sit with them. Martin told me that the tabla player on the stage with the bowl haircut was one of a famous Benares musician clan whose father had just died, and he played in the rapid, frenetic Benares style, jolting and shaking to the beat. (I’m afraid that the program was written in Hindi, the names hard to discern from others, so only a few are presented, and only a few of those are spelled accurately. Ah well! most of the names of pharaohs and Arab kings and Chinese emperors are the same phonetic garbles, so I can’t feel so bad, amid this company of eminent and error-prone historians.)

The tabla player and his band finished their performance, which had lasted over an hour, and prayed for blessings. There was a short intermission, and then a sitarist, Rara Krishna, a disciple of Ravi Shankar, and a tabla player named Kumald Kubla took the stage. After Rara Krishna, Martin and Nadj left for home. An old man, venerable and apparently very famous, began to chant some mantras, with harmonium, tabla, and two tanpuras, and I slept for an hour. At 4:30 and again at 6 they shouted out to Hanuman for the early morning pujas, and I left after the second of these.

The banks of the Ganges in Benares is the holiest place for a Hindu to die, allowing liberation from moksha, the dharmic cycle of rebirth, and good Hindus must be burned within a day of their passing. Thus, the fires on the ghats consume 210 corpses daily. The details of the funeral rites are fascinating, and the business. It costs at least 1200 rupees, or $24, for a pyre. For 500 rupees, poor men are often burned in the Harischandra Ghat, close to my guesthouse, that has in addition to its fires two electric furnaces that can reduce a man to carbon in twenty-five minutes, the length of a fair nap. But the well off will be burned at Manikarnika.

Usually friends and family came to see it done, all of them men, though sometimes the Untouchables who work in the cremation grounds handle the ceremonies involved. The devoted help to carry the wood from the great piles down to the cremation grounds and bear the body to its last bed there. It comes down the steps on a litter, cloaked in colored cloth. Orange or red marks a young girl, blue a boy, and gray an old man.

The closest living relative, a brother or father, takes the body into the river for a last bath, and then they all place it on the piled pyre and sprinkle it with gee and sugar and cover it with more wood. The wealthy can afford to be sprinkled with sandalwood powder as well. Then someone lights a fan of special grass in the eternal fire and takes it smoking around the funeral pyre. The smoke will guide the dead spirit beyond the veil. With his smoking grass, he lights the pyre, and they all watch as the wood goes up.

It takes about three hours for a body to burn, but the funeral disperses before then. Those who came will bathe themselves in the Sacred Water before leaving, even in Winter when it is very cold. Most deaths and burnings happen in summer and winter, but it is only in winter that the poor warm themselves by the corpse-fires and steal coals to cook with. By leaving early, the loved ones avoid such sights, and the gruesome process of cremation.

After a half-hour the sheet has burned away and the body is there with blackened skin and a distinctive odor. The feet often stick out the back, and sometimes a stray dog will steal one. After an hour the skull bursts. After two there is only coals and bones and a pile of ash, and after three all that is nearly indistinguishable. With the industry of a death camp, the Untouchable laborers at Manikarnika shovel ashes into the Ganges. Other workers sift through the silt with pans, looking for the gold teeth or jewelry that the dead wear to their cremation. A white suited man hovers nearby in a rowboat to buy any treasure.

A Hindu silk merchant pointed him out to me as we overlooked the ghat from a tower twenty feet above, which the Ganges sometimes covers in the monsoon season. I had taken a ferry there from the Assi Ghat, a required passage for all visitors to Benares, in the early hours of the morning, just after the conclusion of the festival’s first round. It was not yet seven but already too hot to be in the slanting sunlight.

“Women are not allowed here,” said the merchant,—“do you know why? They would cry and throw themselves in the fire. Suttee. See only men down there. Men do not cry.” The silk merchant took me up into another abandoned tower where a squalid crone, surrounded by the rotten instruments of witchcraft, blessed me and the names of all who love me, though I could not make any donations to her cause.

I wandered back through the galis, stopping to see a few places of interest and to eat some dhosa and idli, and then followed the ghats, crowded with Sunday throngs. Men huddled around dice mats, families shared packets of puri, boys flew kites, and children scraped down the concrete slope as if it were a slide. There were the shouts of hawkers, the splashing of bathers, the chugging of generators, and the distant music of a band playing at Dasaswamedh Ghat. I tossed balls back to the cricketers. It was Easter, and I made my way home.

That night Effi and Jenny brought back another Greek girl, Maria, and the long-haired Germans Benny and Nina came, and Jacques and Helene were there, and Martin and Yogesh brought their instruments and a French girl named Vanessa. We all had a good time of it out on the terrace in the warmth of the evening, which made the place feel alive in an upside-down, underworld sort of way. Martin and Yogesh played and Jacques brought out papaya, peanuts, grapes, and bananas.

Just around midnight Maria said she wanted to go home to her guesthouse near the Lalita Ghat; she had just arrived that day to Benares and was really tired, and I offered to guide her. Of course I didn’t know where the place was in the mazy alleyways, but she said it was near the German Bakery and I knew that. We walked the ghats to the Dasaswamedh Ghat, and we crossed the deserted market and entered the northern gali. The alley turned dark, with shadowed porches and portholes suggesting twilight terrors beyond our vision. In the distance a swinging light illuminated a mess of closed shops and a nest of random signs and dangling wires. Two dogs fought over a sandal, and two figures drifted towards us, moving in and out of the shadows.

“This is such a spooky alley,” I remarked. “This is like a Hollywood set of a spooky alley.”

“I’m not going to say anything,” said Maria.

The two figures in that fantastic scene were soldiers—night watchmen!—and we begged directions from them and a few other people in the yet darker alleys. Soon we were stepping lightly over molding trash and dodging stray dogs and other perils, but eventually found the Hotel Puja, and I set out back into the maze, looking for the Lalita Ghat so I might walk back along the river.

“That way and right,” said a Swiss drunkard, pointing the route with a whiskey bottle. The first right went down into a subterranean tunnel. A lamp, twenty yards away, flooded the immediate hallway with light but left all that was beyond an abyssal black square. A gurgling growl emerged from that unknown, but whether it was animal or machine I never knew. I shook my head fearfully and left that passage for the alley.

When I finally found my way out from the warren, I was overlooking the Manikarnika Ghat. The corpse fires and their attendants looked especially sinister and cultish at night. Coming through the infernal smoke, I followed the ghats until I came to the Dasaswamedh Ghat and on an adventurous whim again entered the warren of alleys. Here the galis were much darker and weirder. The silhouettes of beasts sulkily raised their maws from horrid feasts to consider me with eyes that I could not see. They made no sound as I flitted past them in the moonless black.

After many trials of courage, which I cannot help but remember with a tempered glee, I came back to the guesthouse. My friends, however, were nowhere to be found. I went back down and began walking towards Sankat Mochan, dealing tersely with the sly rickshaw-wallahs. Eventually the blackness deepened on the benighted street and shadowy forms emerged before me, six in number, lowered heads growling softly, a heavy prelude to battle, and I had to get past them if I wanted to proceed, and I thought, “This is what I get for walking a girl home. This is the hero’s reward. Alone in the dark with a pack of rabies.”

Hark! the small engine rumbles just behind, the stirring sound of a tuk-tuk, whose headlight illuminates the street and blinds the vicious hounds, who scatter before the little vehicle. To my very rescue came this tuk-tuk. “Namaste,” says the driver, “where you go?” He says, “Fifty rupees,” when I tell him. “Twenty,” say I. The hounds reconvene in the street, and I hear their low growls, wicked as death. The driver goes to forty, and I suggest thirty. “Twenty-five,” he says for some reason. Dogs come closer, no longer fearing the headlights or the gently throbbing engine. “Okay,” I concede, “twenty-five.” The driver looks bemused for a moment, but I get in and we speed off into the night, scattering the beasts with our charge.

Now we come to the rest of the festival’s five nights.

On the second night of the Sangeet Samaroh, I came in late with the others to the temple of the monkey god to see a few singers and instrumentalists. Most were duos. They would come in and sit down, lotus-like as yogis, with a bow to the gods and a prayer and a few words of introduction, and then the instrumentalist would start on sitar or sarode, guided in their improvisations by the “melodic mode” of the raga. For a half hour the instrumentalist would play to set the theme, and then slowly work down to a mere melody, permitting the tabla player to make an entrance. The tabla player finds the raga and splits off it into a frenetic solo, and it’s unbelievable how fast that fingers can hit the drum’s stretched skin. Then two masters play variations on the raga, diving in and out of each others’ themes, always coming back to the main melody, and they jam like that for an hour.

Most notable of the second night, where most musicians came from Benares, was a skilled player of the sarode named Chowduri, accompanied by flute and tabla. The tabla player was the grandson of the grand master: Kishan Maharaj, of whom Martin related the following story:

Once Kishan was to play in Switzerland. They had an auditorium for the performance, with stands and a stage for him to play on. When Maharaj saw the arrangement, he declared, “I will not play to men seated over me. They must all be underneath.” (Nadj asked, “Was it acoustics?” “No,” said Martin, “he was just the master.”) The Swiss removed all the stands from the auditorium and had everyone sit on the floor, with the Maharaj on a dais—the classical setup, like that in the Sankat Mochan Temple.

Now before he died, Maharaj gathered all the other master musicians around his deathbed and said to them, “You must do one thing for me—watch over my grandson!” Some of these masters stood on the side of the temple stage that night, observing their student, and young Maharaj continually looked to them for criticism—the slightest nod, the subtlest frown.

This music festival was serious business, as the Reader will perceive. The grandmasters of India all wanted to perform there. The Mochan priests permitted only those performers who in style and instrument complied to the strict standards of tradition, to the definition of pure classical music, and because of their rigidity barred a number of prominent and accomplished contemporary musicians from the festival for their bold departures from the old ragas of Amir Khusrau. And still only the best could play. There was once a law in place banning all those who made a single mistake for twenty years of future festivals.

As Martin said, “That’s the way they keep their culture.”

On the third night, we arrived in force during the performance of Chamla Mishla, the best singer of the energetic Varanasi style, accompanied by tabla, harmonium, and tanpura. That night I had seen a priest in a strange costume out among the crowd. He wore an orange peaked hat and a long yellow cloak with all sorts of strange charms attached, and with many trinkets and devices around his neck, so that he looked like a wizard. He had a pouch full of ash at his waist and kept smearing it on people’s foreheads. Halfway through Chamla Mishla’s piece, the priest and his disciple walked onto the stage uninvited. The disciple carried a load of flower garlands, which the priest placed around the singer’s neck before giving him an ash mark. The crowd clapped piously, not knowing what else to do. Then the priest blessed the tanpura player, and seemed likely to bless the whole band before an usher ran out to shoo him off the stage. The priest and his disciple sat in a corner and would not be moved.

After the performance, the priest was unceremoniously ejected from the temple. I saw him in the parking lot, shouting at everyone and smearing faces in a malicious way, while the Hindus stood around watching mirthfully.

The other noteworthy act was a local woman named Gamala Shankar who played a mohan veena, a Spanish guitar strung sitar-style with twenty strings that produced a strange twanging noise. She played it across her lap in such a slow and melodic way, more zither than guitar, that reminded me of some avant-garde or post-rock guitar work. There was also Vikku Vinayakram of Chennai, world-famous, who sang in his own distinct, energetic, and vaguely African style and played on a sort of water pot called a ghatam. He performed with his grandson, I think, who also sang and played a small hand drum.

Yet the highlight of the festival, for me and anyone else who was there, came on the fourth night. I arrived around one, as usual, and saw Pandit Vishmanith of Delhi, a fat and bearded singer with a harp, accompanied by a harmonium and two dunpulas. The place was packed. Everyone knew that the last hours of the last nights of the festival, those were the best. My group found a spot in the open courtyard before the stage, wedged in between a hundred Indians, and watched. Then Niladri Kumar took the stage. He was the son of Kartick Kumar of Calcutta, who was a famous disciple of Ravi Shankar, and was himself a doughy and pampered-looking minstrel concealed under what most people would call a mop of black hair. His face was too narrow for his round head, and the loose white shirt he wore could not hide his softness.

Poor Niladri receives such an unflattering description only because he was silent at the moment. When his hands, not pudgy as the rest of him but calloused and fine-tuned masterworks of machined precision; when they reached for the familiar limbs of his long-necked sitar and took gently to the strings, and the minstrel began to play, and when the sounds came out like two sitarists playing at once, he changed entirely. He closed his eyes and swayed as if mad or possessed by the music. Sometimes he grinned, flashing white teeth. Sometimes he looked up as if he saw an angel and played as sweetly, and at other times it seemed from his face that some devil was torturing him and he played with such a fire as only the devil could dance to. Such is the magic of skill and passion.

The sitarist set the raga, and then in the usual way was joined by the percussionist, who happened to be Vijay Gartel of Mumba: big, bearded, red-haired, and resembling a Viking in most every way but attire and subtlety, as he was an excellent tabla player, and by then I had listened to enough to know the difference. Niladri’s playing was almost folksy at times, almost rock and roll, but with the twanging impulses of Indian music blended in perfectly. He kept up a steady tune and at the same time squealed up and down on the strings. He would play quick as Rachmaninoff and then crash his fingers across in a measure of discord. At the conclusion of each cacophonous discourse, sitar player and table player would look at one another like lovers, then set into it again.

At the end, at the climax, Niladri began playing two notes very fast, growing steadily higher and higher on the scale, with the tabla following along, curious, excited as all of us. People clapped at the impressive speed, as they had at many feats that night, but this time Niladri raised a hand to still them. He still had a ways to go. And we tried to follow. A minute went by. Higher and higher he got, playing fast as a fiend, and when he had got as high a pitch as the instrument would allow, he added in a few heavier notes to the two alternating one, cymbals to their tinkling bells, building up the rhythm bit by bit.

We had all been following him raptly, every head in the crowd, and then with a few slides of his hand the sitarist on the stage just slipped away from in front of us and reappeared at every angle at once. His hand stroked up the neck, squealing along the strings like a rock star, and he set back into the impossibly quick theme, jamming a gamut of strings with every other verse—a clashing tumult and a virtuoso finger-picker all at once.

The temple went mad. Hindus jumped up screaming and clapping so you could barely hear the tabla bursting out all the bombast of an urban drum circle, but Niladri rocked with thunder and lightning that no one could take away from him. They cried out to him, “Hara har maha Deva,”—In the name of God, you are good. Some just held their heads, and their mouths hung open as they rocked up and down. To quote an author, “There are people with their hands in their hair, holding in their brains.” All of us, we knew we would remember it as a moment of history, not one of those powerful events shared by nations and announced to the world by some tepid broadcaster, but an intimate sparkle of the eye as we later share the wordless remembrance of Niladri Kumar’s flood tide overdrive.

“Wow,” said Martin, and then he dragged it out into, “W—o—w.” I felt the same way, only I swore.

Other acts followed, but even Pandit Jasaj of Mumbai, who is called India’s greatest singer, could not compete in my mind. Other musicians touched his feet. He was a venerable old man who appeared to have no eyes, only deep brows, and though old he still sang with skill and energy—just not the adrenal kick of Niladri.

On the final night I arrived around 11:30 with Jenny and Helene (Effi had flown back to Goa), and met Martin, Yogesh, Nadj, and Jacques at a chai shop out in front of the temple. Interesting sounds lured us inside: the band included a saxophone, the sound strangely skewed so it sounded Indian, and a woman on a violin. These two played around each other, and from outside it sounded as if the two instruments were one strange one. Why the Mochan priests allowed these foreign devices to elude their moratorium, I cannot say, but the band was Tamil, rather than from the principle musical metropoli of the northern river plains, so maybe that explains it.

Saxophone and violin had as accompaniment a tabla player, a mouth harpist, and a bakhawas drummer, his drum having two sides that he played at the same time. The percussionists sat aside as the violin and saxophone dueled, each challenging the other to a particular set of notes, which was impressive to see by the differences of their instruments. Then the percussionists dueled. At first each performed a solo, and the drummers did admirably. Then the mouth harpist took up his little twanging device, commonly associated as an instrument with harmonica or washboard or perhaps whiskey bottle. The large man started with a few notes that had me wondering if he could produce a solo at all, but then he began to rapidly sling them out, making sounds that I can only compare to the Transformers, and I cannot understand their provenance. It was very impressive.

There was also a beautiful sitarist whom Martin said he would marry. “It’s obvious she wants to marry some foreigner,” said the Bolivian. “If she marries an Indian, no more making music. Just making chapathi.” Then a singer came in, and entirely exhausted, I lay down and slept for a few hours.

When I awoke, two famous brothers were singing, Rajan and Sajan Mishra. They sang the sunrise raga, a raga about gods and the struggle of good and evil. They kept going in and out of the jittery vocal elevations that I had begun to find very annoying, but then something strange happened. The brothers made way for their student and their patron, a wealthy nobleman of Benares, who sat down and began to sing with his famously-trained voice; only he was very bad and kept slipping up, missing notes or screwing up those same vocal elevations that the Mishra brothers had mastered, reminding me how technical was this art of Indian song. On his severest mistakes, he would turn about to his masters, as if to say, “Sorry guruji!”

As for the audience, those pious classical purists, they despised this rich and otherwise unable songster. “They’re very radical people for the music,” said Martin. “Some people that go, go just to wait for mistakes.” They hollered and waved their left hands, a most obscene gesture.

After the noble student had left the stage in shame, Martin went to the back of the temple to spit. He had been chewing some pan leaf, containing tobacco and betel nut, which acted as a minor narcotic. Jacques knew where to find Varanasi’s best pan and had brought some to stay awake. As Martin reached the open door, his mouth full of yellow spit, he saw, occupying the space through which he must pass, lest he dribble pan juice all down his front, none other than brother Sajan and the son of Mochanji, chief priest of the temple—for the Mochan clan own and operate the Sankat Mochan temple, as most Indian temples are owned by a Brahmin family.

“Why did you bring him here?” asked the Mochan prince of the brother, who was suitably cowed, all waving hands and bowing head. “Why? He is inexperienced. He ruins the mood of the performance.” Quoth Sajan, “I’m sorry, Mohanji! He is still learning,” to which the priestly prince replied, “You shouldn’t have brought him.”

But the lanky Bolivian shoved his way past this epic conversation, spat out gouts of yellow pan drool into a flowerbed, and returned by the same way, avoiding the stares of a famous singer and a patron of the art as he went. Martin told of us this when he returned, and reminded us of the old rule: one mistake and thou art barred from the festival for twenty years. Though this Draconian law no longer applies, said Martin of that poor failed student, “He will probably never sing in Benares again.”

Such is the way of the Sangeet Samaroh, and following another duet of the brothers Mishra, so did it end. I now had five days remaining until my visa expired, and not many options.

On our way back that morning, or maybe one of the others, Jacques asked me where I would go next, and I told him to Southeast Asia: Thailand and Burma, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. “Ne, ne, beautiful countries,” said Jacques, using the Greek word for yes, “but Burma is very expensive. I heard the visas are very expensive now.”

“How so?”

“They slapped on a higher visa cost, and you have to pay one-hundred dollars a day, or something like this,” said Jacques. Then, seeing the rickshaw-wallah struggle up a hill, he patted the man on the back and told him, “Bas,” meaning “enough,” and sprang out of the couch gently as a cat. The rickshaw-wallah kept huffing though, apparently wanting to accomplish his goals, so Jacques veered over to walk along my side of the carriage, for I had not been so noble—or was I more noble, for nobles tend to weigh on others? Anyway, my host continued, “Ne, many countries are like this. Burma, Venezuela, other countries in South America. Many have slapped on higher visa costs, especially for USA.”

Eventually the road evened out, and the rickshaw-wallah cried, “Chello!” and Jacques leaped ably back into his seat as if nothing had happened.

Jacques always seemed to belong wherever he was, or to be doing exactly what God or karma intended him to do, whether it was drinking chai on a street corner or sitting on the rail of a balcony, observing the world. He applied a maximum of focus to every bit of jewelry produced and to every conversation, listening to others patiently and delivering wise verdicts and earnest sympathy; and always cool, calm, and collected, and positively zen.

He told me some good places to go in Thailand, “Very nice, very shanti,” and I wrote them down to remember.

I lingered around another day in Benares, getting over my exhaustion with one night of good sleep in a bed, for the days are so hot that afternoon naps are not sufficient; and I bought a ticket for a train that left the next evening. Before this joyous night of uninterrupted sleep, Jenny, Jacques, Nadj, Martin and I went to a very high-class restaurant called the Crystal Bowl, which Martin had discovered by the recommendation of some local. “I used to hate it in this city,” he said, “but then I found all these great restaurants. Benares is the best city in India for food, I think.”

“And now you will never leave,” said Jacques.

O Annapurna, Indian food is truly great! That goddess of culinary delights was the favorite of Yogesh, though he did not join us at the Crystal Bowl. Martin complained that his Brahmin friend was always coming along on things, and that Martin always had to pay for it. On our trip to Lakamiandry and the Rama Ashram, we had divided all the costs by one less than our number, each sponsoring a fraction of Yogesh. “I can’t buy him dinner,” said the Bolivian.

We had tandoori tikka masala with chicken, tandoori aloo masala, and kaju curry, a specialty made with cashews, plus plenty of naan and roti bread. The masalas were red as blood, just as they should be, the bread freshly cooked, the cashew curry rich and delicious, and we followed that feast with a strange desert that Martin calls the cornerstone of the menu: a stack composed of pineapple slice, brownie, and ice-cream scoop, all laid out in one of those sizzling cast iron plates they normally use to serve chicken and prawns and things, and sizzling like normal, though by miracle of science the ice-cream does not melt, and then they pour chocolate over the top of it which steams and bubbles in the pan.

“Wow, perfect,” said Martin, and he kissed his fingers and formed them into an okay sign.

Jacques and I would both leave the next day—his visa expired just before mine, and he was also going to Bangkok via Calcutta—though on separate trains, and so we said goodbye and see you soon to everyone and each other, since who knows what travel has in store?

No money no honey,
No chicken no curry,
Full power twenty-four hour,
No toilet no shower.
—Obnoxious Indian Rhyme

Rather than let this become a tale of three cities, my narrative will proceed quickly to Benares, as quickly as I traveled.

It was 27 hours by train from Madras to Calcutta, and I thought to break this up by visiting a city halfway between in one of the states scarcely attended by tourists. The city I visited in Orissa is worth mentioning only once and in the following way: do not visit Bhubaneswar. It is interesting only because of the nearby Sun Temple, and the annoyance of the city’s rickshaw drivers, newly come down from a strike where they blocked all the roads and halted the city. At issue was the municipalities proposal of a few local city buses, which would have deprived them of business, and this in the context of a recent hike in gas prices to 50 rupees a gallon (and that’s more expensive than in the states).

I arrived there in the morning and left at night; another night asleep on a bunk on the train, and in the morning, Calcutta, the City of Joy! A place with a reputation that perhaps cultivated my own favorable impression. Ironically, we tend to enjoy things most when we go into them with low expectations and an open mind.

I exited the train station in a cheerful mood and took a ferry across the River Hooghly to the east bank. I meant to go to Babughat, but ended up at another one much further north, and so instead of arriving amid the old Victorian mansions debarked on a run-down neighborhood full of clay workshops making god statues. These began as anthropomorphic but headless figures, for the artists added the much more detailed heads added later, and finally painted the cast, set it on a log, and floated it out into the Hooghly. Some of these turned up on the paradise shores of the Andaman Islands, where the travelers wondered at them.

I wandered south from there along the wharf and got some breakfast from a stall that was handing out palm leaf plates to the poor. The buildings were gaily painted ramshackles. The asphalt of the road had rocks set in it, to keep it from melting around that time of year and that time of day, as it was noon and crushing hot. Turning east, I made for the main road and the metro station I knew to be nearby. It was actually very far away. Some young Indian heading in the same direction told me to follow him, and he walked ahead, blasting music from his headphones.

“This neighborhood very famous,” said my guide, turning back to me. I asked him, “For what?” He looked embarrassed and said, “Sex. It is bad neighborhood.” I looked around and noticed the sly alleyways, the promiscuous women hanging around one of the BP filling stations, and saw what he meant.

The metro was closed for Sunday, so I took a bus to Sudder Street, the travelers ghetto near the great green field of the maidan, where some gamble and some watch a dog spin around on a can and some play cricket and some play a game called kabadi, where the players hold hands and try to touch each other, lowering their heads and chanting, “Kabadi-kabadi-kabadi!” Anyway, I got a room at the Hotel Maria, which someone later described as “a field hospital.” Filthy walls, monastic accouterments, putrid bathrooms—but it was a traveler’s place, and the rest of Calcutta looked very fine, having been cleaned up substantially in the last two years. No Sacred Cows walk the street, and few beggars, and every morning the sweepers go up and down the gutter.

It is unfortunate that the City of Joy is known for Mother Theresa and for its poverty, which is much less than the rest of India. It is the city of the poet Tagore, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, a city of art and culture and progress, and a colonial capital. It suffered under an influx of refugees from Bangladesh, first during the Partition and then during Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan. By the fluke of its population’s religion, all Bengal’s agricultural hinterland went to Bangladesh, and all it’s industry and its chief port, that is Calcutta, went to West Bengal and India. The city has learned to live without the country, which will still suffer from Jinnah’s greedy dream for decades to come.

On my first visit to Calcutta, I saw mostly its tourist ghetto. There are plenty of used bookstores and music shops with old vinyls and cassettes, plenty of rickshaw pullers hassling the tourists, and many guesthouses and rooftop terraces. The Western cafes on Sudder Street sell pancakes and burgers and fried chicken, but there’s little need for continental fare when sub-continental is so delicious.

Bengalis especially have a reputation for culinary excellence. Any average Hindi-speaker, visiting a produce stand, will take the first things that come under hand and pay somewhere close to the asking price. The Bengalis are reputed to be more particular. They squeeze-test each fruit, piling a small amount of choice items in the corner, and conclude their survey by saying, “I will pay this amount, no more.” You can get very good deals on produce if you speak Bengali to the merchant. Bengali food itself is sweet and spicy with lots of coconut and often river fish from the Hooghly or the Ganges Delta.

There are fine restaurants on all of Calcutta’s streets. Even the ones that cook chapathis on clay ovens full of red hot coal serve delicious fare, and a whole meal will cost 20 rupees. Pedestrian can get thalis at streetside picnic tables, and the vendors sell all sorts of things: shirts and padlocks and fake printings of books. The neighborhoods appear ancient. Trees sprout out the sides of the old colonial buildings, rotting in the tropical air. The upper floors may look similar to the century-old ones, in style and their state of degradation, but they are new additions—and severe fire hazards: one great blaze struck the nearby Park Street just a few days before I arrived. In the streets below, New York-style taxis vie with hand-pulled rickshaws for business.

Calcutta is, in short, a city that simultaneously occupies the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, in the paradoxical way that only comes about in India.

The Indian Museum is housed in the wings of a monstrous Victorian palace on the end of Sudder Street, and is organized in the way that museums used to be; that is, a collection of historical, geological, and fossilized flotsam and jetsam, arranged by era, genus, species, family, or whatever taxonomic category applies, into ancient wooden chests and cabinets, and hastily labeled with a mere name, I believe by the Brits that composed the collection, for specialists, with little in the way of elucidation for the general public.

Little has changed since John Anderson organized the zoological and anthropological sections around the time of Abraham Lincoln. There remain, especially in the upper floor, rooms full of cabinets with thousands of mollusks or rocks or types of fabric. Antlered skulls and stuffed birds line the walls, the trophies of some British hunting expeditions. There are Egyptian artifacts, Maryan statues, Bihar bronzes, a whale skeleton from some maharaja’s palace, a full glyptodon, and several mastodon skulls.

I was sitting on a bench on the Museum’s second floor and a young Indian in a blue silk shirt and colorful party hat sat next to me. “Which country?” he asked, along with the other standard questions: “How old? Married?” and I told him all these things and found out that he was 25 and also unmarried and here with his family. “You are very handsome,” said the Indian.

“Hey, well, thanks man,” I said, thinking this no more than the pseudo-gay manner of most Indian men—and incorrectly!

“Did you hear me?” asked the Indian, “I said you are handsome.” I told him that was very flattering, and he added, “I think you are very sexy,” and, “Can I kiss you?”

“What? No, sorry man, but we’re not going to kiss.”

“I want to kiss you. Hey, you come to the bathroom,” and he kind of nudged me.

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Come to the bathroom,” and he leaned too close and whispered, “I want to kiss your penis.”

“Well, you can’t. Sorry man, but I like girls, you know, so I don’t think it will work out between us. I’m really flattered and all. I mean, it’s really confident of you to just ask me. That’s pretty cool. But I don’t roll that way, and I’m not going to go to the bathroom.”

He followed me around for a while, saying, “Hey,” and informed me several times of the most direct route to the bathrooms, and once he grabbed my ass; but eventually he was discouraged and left, I suppose to find his family.

Visiting the great marble palace of the Victoria Memorial, or rather its surrounding gardens, was an altogether more comforting experience. Indian lovers nestle under every bower, displaying their affection with the innocent and timid tenderness that is permitted to them, as gangs of grim young men swagger about, staring with envy at the spectacle of romance, and often holding hands with each other in the manner of the love-starved Indians.

Yet the highlight of my visit to Calcutta was surely a small restaurant called Khalsa, just around a corner from Sudder Street, that served rice pudding! Many Indian menus include it, but serve it hot like porridge and not cold as God meant it to be, as I had not had it since leaving Cairo. Not Khalsa! Their kheer was a Punjabi delicacy, served cold and sweet, with cashews and grapes or raisins mixed in. I savored it after my meal and thanked the owner profusely, that venerable old Sikh with a huge gray beard and a baritone voice. As I sauntered back down Sudder Street, picking my teeth, I saw the Swedes Morris and Tora coming the opposite direction and immediately informed them of my discovery, thereby winning an excuse for a second trencher of the Khalsa kheer.

The next day I returned for more (and some fine chicken korma), and nearly missed my train because of it.

Open the door in front of me

The sun is now shining down on me!
Meet me as soon as you can,
Bring me the money you owe for me.
I’m taking my head out of the sand.

Oh maybe I’ll go see the world!
There’s plenty of places to see,
Voices I never have heard,
Look at the way it ought to be.

Oh I’m all alone, oh I’m all alone,
I know you’re still listening to me,
Isn’t a lot as far as I see.
—The Walkmen

I did not do much before we left Kochin. I bought a pair of jeans and leather shoes from a shop, and found on the street market a few weird Indian shirts and a blue Michelin vest with the crest of the Man stitched onto the breast. It had apparently been donated to the needy of India, only to be sold in a street corner. I sent all this stuff home in a package, sewed up in a white sheet and sealed with wax, as per Indian law. I ate Keralan food, spicy beef malabari, and a sort of curry with coconut and pineapple called shahikuruma.

Lola and I left Kochin via a late bus an hour south to Alleppey or Allepuzha . . . O Reader, I confess, I find this business really droll in absence of such main characters or festivals as have previously occurred, and I find it difficult to focus on something so monotonous as spicing and adding subtelty to what are by now everyday occurrences of the road, for Internet consumption. Accept, then, that in this chapter, much will be condensed, and that a lot happened that I will not relate, as a lot happens in our day that we tell no one about or take no notice of.

So we went to Alleppey, which is a sleepy jungle backwater built on two canals, not to be confused with the greater and capitalized Backwaters, that thousand-mile network of lakes, rivers, streams, and man-made canals, plied by fishing boats and houseboats, bolted together with Chinese fishing nets, from Kochin to Kollam, and which was our chief region for being in Alleppey, a gateway to the stream.

Nevertheless we spent two days there before departing, principally at the India Coffee House, a chain of restaurants in Southern South Asia that serves decent coffee and good dhosas, with tomato or beets instead of potato. We lived in a thatch hut on the roof of a guest house that let us use its kitchen to make a lot of fish. We hung out with an old wayfarer from Nashville who long ago, as one of the “long-haired freaky people” mentioned by “the sign,” had driven his Volkswagen Bug down the wrong way on a one-way street in Hayt-Ashbury until encountering a gang of Hell’s Angels, who informed him of his mistake and bodily turned his car around and set it back down on the road.

We took a ferry south through the Backwaters. At first the channels were narrow, lined with houses, plantations, and duck farms, and then we veered into a wide main channel, a half mile across, with houses barely discernible through the thick jungle foliage on the banks. Passing under a bridge we came to a long avenue of Chinese fishing nets, hundreds of them lined up on either side, winding with the river for miles. Their struts, bare of nets, hung over us like claws.

In the afternoon we disembarked at the ashram of Amma the Hugging Mother, a place called Amritapuri, and stayed there for a few days with all the maniacs and crazies lost in the rigors of their idle discipline, the tedium and security of total stasis, who had not accompanied their guru on her touring as apostle-roadies. Amma built the complex in her old town, on top of her parents’ old home, and around the horse stable where they made her perform her first darshan, as for a Hindu girl to hug strangers was and still is considered unacceptable in traditional Kerala. Those high pink buildings and temples are really obscene, standing there in the middle of the jungle villages and waterways, although the views from the top are incredible.

Now every morning at five in the horse stable, while women chanted the Mother’s Thousand Names in the the Temple of Kali, a bearded white man officiated over a strange ceremonial puja, with a weird little man for an understudy. Women sat meditating all around the wall and around a group of we spectators—Morris the Swede, Deepa from Michigan, Lola, and myself, all about to fall asleep, and all of us started when the priest rang a shrill golden bell. He waved his hands about and threw rose petals everywhere and burned a whole lot of things in a fire in front of him (the smoke smelled very good) over an hour and a half. The Indians only showed up for the end, when he distributed a communion of smoke, rose water, and sweets.

It was difficult to reconcile the Amma whose posters were plastered all over the ashram, who said things like, “Recognizing the Divine Mother in you, Amma bows down to her own true self,” and whose followers said things like, “I had to stop meditating at 10:15 and here you are telling me the time. [Turning to the sky] Thank you Amma!” and who has a thirty-foot high Stalinist poster of herself plastered on the rear wall of the massive meeting hall where she delivers her darshan when in residence—to reconcile that Amma with the Amma who with intelligence and practical purpose applied millions of donated dollars to well-crafted charity projects around Kerala and India, for education, health care, housing, and spiritual awakening.

Her own temple in the ashram is bizarre: a shrine to Kali, one of the bloodthirsty and vengeful aspects of the Devi principally worshiped in Bengal, whose Tantric followers make blood sacrifices and drink bodily fluids from the skulls of corpses. An on the second floor of this temple, offices and volunteer stations for folding her magazines and a second-hand shop and the office to sign up for service. I myself sorted garbage for three hours into recyclables, paper, compost, and garbage. For the last of these, we wheeled it off across the ashram to a furnace and burned it.

I enjoyed the hard work and had a very good time of myself at Amritapuri, where I walked around barefooted wearing the orange sarong I’d bought, talking to all the crazies and eating my fill at the free lunches. I made friends with a group of like-minded visitors: the Swedes Morris and Tora, the Bengali girl Deepa, Mara and Jenna from California, Kevin of Seattle, a sports journalist from Calgary named Taylor, Loere of Toulouse, and Sam and Liv, circus performers from Bristol. Morris and Taylor were my roommates in the Amma dorms, which were three mattresses in a room with a view, in a sixteen story building.

At night after dinner we sat in Amma’s great hall playing cards. Fatima the half-wit came and sat at our table. Picking my harmonica off it, she blew wildly in the instrument, then put it back and leaned her hatchet face onto Lola. Deepa observed this enviously and remarked, “I wish I had breasts.” Fatima’s older sister came and asked us to watch her for a while, and we agreed.

Most of us had breakfast together, sometimes putting cinnamon and sugar in our soggy rice and eating it as pudding rather than with curry. Once we went to the Ayerekel beach up the road from the ashram, and in some cases met up again later down the road—and in the other cases, may we do the same, as Amma wills!

Now recall that Amma’s ashram is positioned in the middle of her old village, and understand that this village continued life as usual, disregarding the monstrous pink monastery and the hysteria of its guests, or “inmates” as the signage referred to them, insofar as such a feat of normalcy is possible. The peasants kept at their old jobs, the temples at their old schedules.

One temple in particular, a shrine to Kali on the road by the breakers of the shore, would for a week every year loudly broadcast Malayalam music during all the daylight hours, at a volume vastly disproportionate to the size of the temple. The noise of this echoed across the entire Amritapuri compound and disturbed the meditation of its “inmates,” who put up with it with their characteristic passive-aggressive and non-confrontationalist approach.

One night the little shrine of Kali finished its bombastic broadcast for good, and two priests led a procession up the street. One was a fat mustachioed man in a white dhoti who was always ten paces of and frowning back towards the second, a hardened old man with short white hair in an orange sarong who danced about the place. He was the Pujaree of the puja rite and the locus of the procession.

Ahead of the Pujaree and the other priest marched a pair of drummers and two columns of little girls, lined up from shortest to tallest, carrying oil lamps made from coconuts. To either side, torch bearers held the five-armed trident standard of Kali, a fire on each end. Behind the Pujaree walked a man with an umbrella who did his best to keep the aged dancer covered, even though it was dark and clear-skied and all the stars were out, and a pack of male revelers cheered and shouted at the back as if at a cricket pitch.

Looking up the street, a flame burned in front of each house, set in a sort of pedestal on a table. The residents stood serenely behind these alters as if posing for a daguerreotype or preparing for Communion. As the procession passed, the dancing Pujaree dipped his finger in a wide bowl he was carrying and put white bindis on the heads of the residents.

The procession went slowly and noisily and with a frenzy of light and sound up the road, stopping at each house on the way, and at a clearing it steered around a bamboo shrine and turned back towards a sort of fairgrounds near the ashram, where all the women of the village had found places to lay out the little metal tins of their picnic dinners.

Lola and I stayed at Amritapuri for three nights and then took the ferry further south to Kollam, on a lake near the Backwaters’ end. We stayed at a cheap hotel and ate cheap local food at a place called Friends, where they only had a few things so we had to point at other tables to get vegetable masala, boiled eggs, chapati, dhosa, onion soup, and chai, all for 30 rupees each, or 70 cents.

Lola had read Gandhi’s autobiography and I was in the epilogues of War & Peace, and so with the Mahatma and Pierre Bezukhov as examples, we discussed the relationship between self-denial and freedom as we ate. Does renunciation free the soul or limit it? If simplicity is closer to God, why are all the steeples and minarets and temple gopurams so high? Well anyway, Lola made a solemn vow not to eat after sunset, which is something Gandhi does as part of his diet, and the Jains do to make sure they don’t eat any bug wings in their strictly vegetarian food due to the darkness of the hour.

One morning we took a train to Trivandrum, or Thiruvananthapuram, the Holy Serpent City. There the god Padmanabha has been sleeping for 5000 years on a five-headed cobra in the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple, which is only 260 years old—but when did faith and math have anything to do with one another? Through the hundred-foot high gopuram gateway tower the temple complex spans across acres of lanes and courtyards and structures, into which non-Hindus are barred.

After having breakfast at an Indian Coffee House (It was the strangest shaped restaurant I had ever seen: constructed like a corkscrew, with a single lane swirling up for five stories around a central column, booths on the outside of the curve, and the kitchen and bathrooms set in the middle, so that just to see if a table were available you had to walk all the way to the top and then slide back down—it was not stairs up this corkscrew—around overworked waiters hustling skywards to their patrons; in fact the building was so inefficient I wondered at the disproportion of someone’s influence and common sense, that allowed that person to propose, apparently on a whim, such a horrible idea, and not only see it go un-criticized, but have the entire plan carried out and employed for years!)—after that, we located and circled the temple, visited the wooden halls of the Kerala palace to learn of its strange, matriarchal royalty, and went off on our own for the afternoon.

I spent my time in the Victoria Memorial Library, going through old issues of The Hindu to find an article about our own Barack Obama and his love for fried chicken that I had seen in Kochin but not cut out: “‘Something smells good up in here,’ said the President, obviously expecting to be served some chicken soon.”

That very night we went as far south as we could, through palm forests and past ridged mountains, to Kanyakumari or Cape Comorin at the tip of India, the meeting point, however dubiously, of the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, and Bay of Bengal. There on the same rocky promontory covered with temples, one can watch the sun rise from the sea and set upon the ocean, though one will find it difficult to occupy the intervening hours. We woke early to see the sunrise, along with such a seething mob of Indian tourists that I thought the cape might sink.

In the evening, we went into the Kumari Amman Temple, also visited at some earlier time by one Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. It has changed only a little since then. Kumari, a virginal aspect of the Mother Goddess Devi, was worshiped there. I was delighted to find an old custom prevailing that required men to remove their shirts, because it was very hot outside.

Lola and I, along with two little lesbian yoga students named Ren and Pony, entered the low and many-columned temple and bought vials of oil to dump into the vulva-shaped lamp laid out on the ground so that the virgin would grant our wishes. Carvings of gods and men and dancing girls and strange beasts marked all the walls so that it became a blur. We also bought a few offerings, incense and spices, and waited in a long line to give them to a priest in front of the little shrine. A Hindu in the line explained how it would work, and at the front, the priest took the offerings, heard our names, and told the goddess just who had sent those incense sticks and packets of powder, and that that person deserved a blessing, and then sent us on our way with green leaves full of more powder to rub on ourselves.

The Tamil people are among India’s most devout, and most pagan. They follow their ancient rituals to a tee. They worship Shiva in a multitude of forms, as fire and water aspects, as a local hero, with each town having a legend regarding the principle deity, and by fascinating customs that have not been seen in the West since Greece and Rome. They wave incense about and make strange offerings. For example, you may make a wish of the magic wishing cow, but if it comes true, you must shave off all your hair and donate it to the temple in the north of the region. There was a big scandal a few years ago when the priests were caught selling the hair to a wig-making company, but they have stopped such impious commerce.

From Kanyakumari we traveled north into the heartland of Tamil Nadu, to its exact center at Madurai, and were stuck there for a night on our way up to the cool mountains of the Western Ghats, to Kodaikanal; however Madurai was so nice, in its own way, that we stayed there for an extra day. It was as dirty and noisy and as swarmed with traffic as most Indian metropoli, yet compensated for it with the vast tranquility of its Sri Meenakshi Temple and the quality of its food, which was excellent.

Morris, our Swedish friend from Amritapuri, told us of this when we happened to meet him in the lobby of our hotel. “It’s the same dishes they serve everywhere else,” he said,—“dhosa, idli, sambar—only it’s better. It’s really nice.” Morris and Tora had arrived there the day before from the mountains. We drank rum on the roof and listened as the city quieted itself.

Already I had sampled some mughali biryani from a nearby store, and the next day we dodged tuk-tuks and bicycle rickshaws on our way to a crowded local place around the corner called Sree Sabarees. The sign advertised “memorable coffee,” and it was a fine brew, served in a strange way. The metal cup came in a metal saucepan, and both were half-filled with coffee. The idea was to pour the coffee from cup to saucepan and back again to cool it. The Indians do this at distances that can be measured in yards. The food was also very good: the idli firmer, the sambar soup fuller, and everything on the menu very delicious. They cut up paneer cheese and buttery paratha and served it in a bowl with curry, and made other such delights.

Now I have mentioned Sri Meenakshi Temple, the height of southern Indian architecture, with no fewer than a dozen gopurams, each carved with a painted blur of deities and demons. The residing goddess is an aspect of Parvathi. Unfortunately for Shiva, her third breast fell off when the two met. The thousand-pillared hall runs a circuit around the Hindu-exclusive inner shrine, where the greater mysteries occur. The ceiling is painted with lotus flowers, and the columns decorated with strange composite beasts.

Now Lola and I had been arguing back and forth about the nature of the Hindu idols that inhabit most temples. I opined that these statues of bronze or stone were in fact the actual god. When a pilgrim bowed before that little statue, he was bowing not before a mere representation, but before Shiva himself. To Lola, this did not make any sense. How could Shiva be in a thousand temples at once? How could the Hindus make the same mistake as the Israelites did with their Golden Calf? “So they’re idolaters?” she queried. “I can’t accept that.”

This came to a head in a Madurai bookstore where we consulted several religious manuals and asked a few Hindus present (and where I overburdened my backpack with texts). Lola asked the staff our question, and the manager responded, “We believe that it is a god.” “It is a god, or a representation of the god?” asked Lola, who (I am obliged to note) is applying for law school. The manager replied, in the face of her doubt, “Are you an atheist madame? It is faith!” Lola reluctantly ceded the issue, which meant that she would have to buy me ice cream in Kodaikanal.

Morris also did shopping in Madurai. The Swede had discovered that optics are proportionally cheap in India, and that they sell “retro ugly” frames, the kind of niche style that would cost a hundred dollars in the West, for a pittance. Morris himself got contact lenses and I think five pairs of glasses. Lola bought a few, and I bought a pair with red and gold frames and light brown lenses that make me look like a porn star.

While in Madurai I also visited the Tirumalai Nayak Palace, a noteworthy event only because a Bollywood team was shooting a scene there. The director was showing a beautiful actress whose named, as far as I can tell, was Sneeha, how to spin around delightfully from her throne down the carpet, following the camera on its crane. The famous Sarat Kumar was sitting in the crowd in his crown and royal clothes, looking very serious and focused, as if trying to put himself in a kingly frame of mind or to remember his lines. He was a big, bulky Tamil with a thick beard and began his life as a bodybuilder before becoming an actor, though now he wishes to enter politics—the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Tamil Nadu.

One day in the middle of the month of March we took a bus up into the hills to Kodaikanal, a smaller and reputedly more authentic hill station than Ooty or Munnar, though one Hindu told me, “It is boring there. Only good for honeymoon if you want to make hanky panky.” From the bus station we climbed up the hill and checked into the squalid dormitory at the Greenlands Youth Hostel. Outside the filth of the room, a high terrace overlooking a pine and cedar forest that rolled down to the flat plains below. It was a beautiful sight.

We ate biryani at a street stall in Kodaikanal proper. This would have tragic consequences for our stomachs later on, but at the moment we felt very fine in the clear mountain air. We went down to the Tibetan market no the lake and I bought some yak wool blankets. There were also some very good Tibetan restaurants in town that served noodle soup and momos and beef. Some Israelis recommended that we rent a house in the nearby town of Vadakanal, and we took this suggestion back to the dormitories. James of Edmunton, who has killed two deer with his bow in the wilds of Alberta, liked the idea, and the next day we found more recruits.

We spent the night with James and a Korean girl named Lillie and with an Irishman named Cullum, who was very excited for Saint Patrick’s Day. He cradled a whiskey bottle in his arm and said, “Once I held me son here, but now all I have is me whiskey.” The next day he sat out on the veranda of the dormitories building with his adopted son. “Toast to the saint?” he would ask every passer-by. “It’s not a question, take some damn whiskey. It’s obligatory. There you go. Bad stomach? Come on lad, whiskey cures everything. Ah, it’s alright, he had some earlier, or I wouldn’t let him get away.”

It was not bad whiskey, but I turned down the second offer of the day, for my stomach was starting to roll. Lola had already came down with a bug the night before. Mine began to take to me as James and I walked back from Vadakanal, having discovered and rented a cabin for the following day, a small place with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a view across the hills. That night I became very sick, and the next day sucked in my gut (or what was left of it) and hiked up to the road, took a taxi to Vadakanal, and hiked up the hill to our chalet with the others we had recruited. In addition to Lola, James and myself, there were four girls: Thalia of Canada, Barry of Boston, and the Quebecers Isabella and Cecile.

Sickness had laid hold of me and would not led up easily. I spent five days in that cabin in the mountains of Tamil Nadu, in sickness or recovery, cared for and fed by five North American girls, as James of Edmunton went out to buy food or supplies. One by one they filtered away, and on the sixth day Lola and I took a bus back down onto the plains, to the Kodai Road train station. There we parted (after exchanging some adorable letters), Lola going south to Rameswaram, and I east to the temple towns of Trichy and Tanjore.

I had an last minute ticket, and the train was full. In the unreserved cars, Indians crowded onto the benches and filled the aisles and the doorways so you could not see the floor in most places. I wedged myself in between a family and the wall, expecting a long journey, but everyone was in good spirits. I shared my iPod with some Hindus and showed them how it worked, and eventually got a spot in one of the doorways. This is the best place to sit: cooled by the wind, looking out at the world as its speeds past.

Trichy was a crowded place, a transit center and site of pilgrimage. All the cheap rest houses were full, so I had to stay in a real hotel. In the morning I saw the bigger temples, Sri Ranganathaswamy and Sri Jambukeshwara, and the rock fort high above the city, but as a non-Hindu was not permitted into any of the sanctum sanctorums. It was so hot I drank a gallon of water that day. I almost forgot my porn star glasses in my hotel room, and had to leap off a moving bus as it left the station to go back and get them.

Then I went off to Tanjore and spent two nights there in a monastic cell at the Ashok Lodge. Through the gopuram, it’s menagerie of gods unpainted, there was a pavilion and beyond it a high-towered temple made of a dozen tiers, each intricately carved. Grass surrounded the stone temples, and trees and a few solitary shrines. I was blessed at the Nandi monolith, lit a candle before the statue of Ganesh, received a red bindi at sleeping Vishnu on King Naga, and a smear of flour at the Shiva lingum in the principle temple, through two columned hallways full of offerings: Nandi statues, golden mirrors and displays, and bronze artwork. The temple was sublime and peaceful and open to all.

At night I had dinner with two pretty German girls, and in the morning visited the temple again and went to the palace museum, where there were some famous bronze sculptures I wanted to see. The artistry of Tamil idols, especially from the Chola period, is famous for its detailed movement and sensuous sexuality.

I met Lola at the Tanjore museum, which was strange after we had said goodbye and did not expect to see each other outside North America, but India is smaller than you think. She said she would probably be in Chennai at the same time as me. I went there that afternoon on a confusing number of trains, to try and find a way north.

Chennai, also called Madras, is a large and largely soulless city on the Indian Ocean, once a center of Hindu piety and now a major corporate center. I arrived late and spent two nights at the Salvation Army hostel there as I could not get a train north to Orissa until the next day. I bought a few books for the twenty hour trip, got my beard trimmed, and went to the American Consulate to have more pages sowed into my passport, which was full. Lola arrived that day and we had dinner and looked around a little, but there was not much to see. The next morning I said goodbye to her for the third time and went to catch my train.

Tell the boys back home
I’m doing just fine,
I left my troubles and woe.
So sing about me,
For I can’t come home,
I’ve many more miles to go!

So don’t cry for me
Because I’m going away,
And I’ll be back some lucky day.
—Tom Waits

The state of Kerala is distinguished from the rest of India by its small size, its muggy jungles and backwaters stretched along the feet of the Western Ghats; by its independent history and colorful culture, its matriarchal traditions, its kathakali story dances and kalarippayat martial arts, its traditional customs and devout Catholicism; its language, Malayalam, a relative of Tamil and as distinct from northern Hindi as is Russian; and by its freely elected communist government, the world’s only, which gives it India’s highest literacy rates, standard of living, and suicide count.

Amma, the Hugging Mother, who lived at her massive pink ashram in the middle of the austere Keralan Backwaters where she grew up, who sometimes spent twenty hours hugging thousands of people, and who since her charitable activity after the 2004 tsunami has been a global celebrity; that Amma tried to deal with the problem. She went to rural areas, where farmers in droves bent their plows into razor blades, hung their harnesses from the barn rafters, and ended with a final revolution all the proletariat’s labor and toil, and there Amma offered to pay for the higher education of thousands of these farmers’ children, and why?

The problem was not a lack of education—the communists provided all that—but a lack of jobs. For many of these socialist wretches, there was no work! What company would build their factories where minimum wages were highest? Kerala may be egalitarian, but the rest of India is far from it.

The Keralans, intent on the state-sponsored misery they call communism, refuse also the delights of the Holi Festival, that great equalizer of North India. In the streets of Jaipur and Udaipur, in the maidans of Delhi and Bombay, in the alleys of TK, where Krishna was born, and in parks and neighborhoods all across Gujarat and Rajasthan—there men and women, old and young, bureaucrats and businessmen, journalists and the voiceless poor all smear and throw handfuls of colored dye at one another, until they and all their shirts and sarees, however expensive, are covered in purple, pink, teal, red, and orange. They hurl colored water in buckets, shoot it out of supersoakers and water guns. They smile up slowly to clean-faced spectators and rub a great indigo streak down each cheek and say, “Happy Holi.”

In Fort Kochin, all was quiet. The fishmongers just past the lashed-together Chinese fishing nets on the northern esplanade, the antique vendors in Jew Town, the warehouse workers and merchants along the wharfs of Mattancherry, and the tuk-tuk drivers and trinket peddlers all over town opened their businesses and shouted at passer-bys, just as they normally did. Kochin, like much of the deprived state, thrived on tourism. Today was no different.

Lola and I had come down from the Niligri Hills to Kochin for Holi, only to hear, “No Holi here,” from everyone at the train station. We cursed the Bible, as the Lonely Planet clearly said Holi was celebrated everyone in India—but apparently not in the Tamil zones, you sods! You inflate that book with so much smug wit and advice for spendthrift tourists that it’s the size of a brick, and you can’t get anything right! Half the recommended restaurants are closed down, and none of the recommended hotels are good deals. Travelers in hostels can’t give the things away. They tear out the few pages they need and leave the paltering tome where it belongs—in a garbage fire! No book burning was ever more just than that.

Anyway, a few people told us that the young Kochinese would celebrate Holi when it started the next day, and that a small Gujarati community lived there who held a Holi Festival every year, so we checked into the Sapphire Tourist House in Ernakalum, the cheaper neighborhood across Lake Vembanad from rich and peninsular Fort Kochin, and began an investigation. This first day of inquisition ended, as so many inquisitions should, with fish and prawns in Fort Kochin, followed by two bottles of Old Cask rum, shared between a New Yorker named Fate, a girl from Texas and London named Leslie, a Manhattoe named Rebecca, who was already very tight, and Lola and myself.

I ate breakfast the next morning at Hotel New Colombo, where I ate all my breakfasts over the six days I spent there. I had an egg sandwich with pineapple, orange juice, and coffee, and felt horrible. We expected some Holi festival that day, so I bought a white T-shirt that said “Party Like A Rock Star” from a peddler on the Ernakalum boardwalk and Lola got a white dress with black polka dots to be decorated by all the thrown paint. We spent a long time looking around Ernakalum for some festival and heard nothing but rumors.

The next day we followed one of these rumors across the lake to Mattancherry and asked around for the Gujaratis. The enclave of that northern state lived around a huge Jain Temple they had constructed there. In a nearby Shiva shrine, a good looking northern girl, a daughter of the Brahmin Pujaree, told us to find the Haveli Temple (although I later learned that this only means courtyard), and that Holi would be held there tomorrow.

Now, this was the first of March, when Holi is generally held, but as it was not a holiday in Kerala no faithfully combative Gujurati could get that day off. However, the gods work in mysterious ways! The following day all the drivers of buses, trucks, and tuk-tuks had conspired to strike on account of a raise in gas prices to 50 rupees or $1.10 a liter, for which they blamed the government. That’s what you get for trying to control the market, communists!—some people think you really do. With all the buses parked, businesses would not be able to staff themselves, and so the second of March was a holiday all across Kerala, and the Gujuratis would take advantage of that in their celebrations.

We asked all around the neighborhood for this Haveli Temple and failed to find it, or any solid information about Holi. Everyone had a different thing to say, a different place, time, day, and often just a remark that, “No Holi here, only north India.” In front of a sealed blue door we saw five Canadians pantomiming a throwing gesture, familiar to us who had used it many times, and they had also no luck. In abject failure, we took a tuk-tuk up to Fort Kochin for lunch, a vegetable thali at a cheap local place, and then walked back down to Jew Town and to the Dutch Palace, full of murals from the Ramayana and relics of the Kochin royal family, and to the Synagogue, where Lola was surprised at having to take off her shoes.

How did the Jews come to be in Kochin? Well, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, when the Canaanites disintegrated all over that Empire and beyond its borders, a small detachment came by boat to the shores of Kerala. The local pagan chief, who was bare-chested as well as all the Keralan women, welcomed those robed and bearded Jews and gave them their own little kingdom on the eastern shore of Lake Vembanad, where today stands Ernakalum.

There they lived happily for some centuries, but—alas, the cursed luck of the Chosen People! A fleet of Moors and Portuguese discovered the little Promised Land and sacked it. The last King swam across Lake Vembanad with his wife across his shoulders, and that Hebrew Aeneas established Jew Town on the peninsula of Kochin. Recently, most of the Kochin Jews moved back to Israel and settled into a town outside [Ber Sheva], depriving Kerala of much of its color so that Israel may have a little more, though 48 still live there.

The next day appeared to me our last chance for Holi, and we were desperate. I asked all around for the Haveli Temple and, failing this, for Krishna Temple, and received shrugged shoulders and contradictory answers, people pointing in every direction and speaking of a Palace Street and the Jain temple, and finally sat down on a curbside and looked like to cry. Walking down the road, we saw the blue doors from the day before, only today they were open: “This is it!” I declared. We entered, ecstatically asking, “Holi? Holi?” of everyone we met in the temple grounds, who said it began at 11, though the little old Hindu said, “This is Hindu temple, no Hindu, out, out!” and shooed us with his hand. Even this treatment could not diminish our spirits!

We had bought packets of dye—Lola a lot of small ones in different colors, and myself two large bags, one purple and the other orange—and bought some squirt guns at a store around the corner from Haveli and tested them with a bucket of water set out there. After breakfast and tea, and earlier than the appointed hour but too anxious to wait any longer, we took up our weapons and went back into the temple.

Through the blue doors, a stone corridor led under the blocks of houses and shops surrounding the Haveli Temple and into the grounds of the shrine: a wide courtyard of dirt, with a low and simple building at the center. Off to the right there were washing stations and shady trees, and to the left it opened out into a wider area with a colonnade along the wall.

At first the priest shouted at us and said, “Only Hindus!” so we went out and shot at each other in the street until they let us in. The festival was not to start until 11:30, but children were already arriving an hour before then and we started unloading our dye powder on them. One got hold of my squirt cannon and filled it with mixtures of dye that he sprayed thickly over everyone. More and more people entered the courtyard in clean shirts and pants and joined the festive fray of running, screaming, strangely colored men, women, and kids.

The Canadians arrived and smeared yellow dye down the arm of a Western photographer with a white beard. “You’re not Hindus! You can’t do that!” cried the venerable tourist, and he left immediately. Indian journalists stuck around, almost cradling their cameras and always ready to turn and protect them with their bodies in case some overzealous kid ran up with a squirt gun or a handful of powder, not respecting the sanctity of expensive electronics.

Mothers watched their kids from the colonnade, and young men grabbed one another as a mob and dumped buckets of colored water on the victim, and Lola went off to buy more bags of dye. The temple served idli and rose milk and ice cream, and the fighting continued. This went on for a few hours until everyone looked tye-dyed.

At the end the high priest gathered all his messy congregation within the temple for a final blessing. After some song or mantra, he splashed buckets of water across them, and another priest sprayed them with a supersoaker. Everyone cheered. When the whole laity was soaked, the priest threw out a bucket of pink dye that erupted into a cloud and doused everyone, and then he threw out more buckets. Pink mist steamed out the open doors, and shell-shocked men and women and children emerged from it, eyes wide and mystified, their faces and their whole bodies covered in pink.

“Can you imagine this happening in a Western church?” asked one of the Canadians. “This is crazy.”

I watched the final rite from the back of the temple and maintained the diversity of my shirt and pants, which I later mailed home as trophies. Out in the courtyard, I watched the Hindus emerge, looking shell-shocked and dazed. One of them offered my betel leaf, a minor narcotic, as Lola and I sat on the colonnade and I chewed it and spit out yellow. Soon all the Hindus gathered up and walked or rode in tuk-tuks down to the Kochin Beach to wash off the mess in the sea. I observed this ritual, and then Lola and I went back to Ernakalum, to try and scrub off the paint.

“Oh, it will be on for two weeks,” said the Hindus, apolagetically.

Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.
—Mark Twain

After the escape from Paradise Beach, I traveled in short order a string of towns in southern Karnataka—Udupi, Mangalore, Madikeri, and Mysore—before crossing the Western Ghats via the hill station of Ooty. Herein are those travels covered.

Cat, Lola, and I left Gokarne on the 4:20 train to Udupi, two hours south of there on the coast of the Arabian Sea. I had spent that afternoon tracking down a used copy of Moby Dick and drinking lemon soda and eating mango ice cream at a chai shop on Car Street and met the girls at the bus station at 3. It was the first time Cat had taken a local train, and she enjoyed the experience of hospitable locals, an easy pace, and good scenery: the wide rivers and jungles of western Karnataka.

I sat next to a man with his head in his friend’s lap. Indian men have no scruples about affection, even holding hands on the beach. He sat up and fell asleep on the shoulder. The train passed across rivers as wide as lakes with fishing villages on the forested banks, and continued into a verdant green country that grew steadily dryer and rockier as we moved south. Chai wallahs with their samovars and beggars with their haversacks moved down the aisle, as did a solid-faced Indian man in drag, who clapped loudly in everyone’s faces.

This is a strange custom of India: it is said by some that if you pay these primped up sages they deliver a blessing, and by others that if you do not they apply a curse. The transvestite slapped the man next to me lightly in the face to wake him up off his friend’s shoulder but received nothing. Even the Indians seemed perturbed by him/her. It was the first time I had ever seen them perturbed by anything.

Three English backpackers in local garb and dreadlocks, named Georgia, Harry, and Charlie, disembarked the train with us, and we all split a taxi from the station into Udupi proper. Our cab driver’s name was Valerius and he asked me, priveleged by the length of my legs to sit next to him in the front, if I was Christian. “Are you reading the Bible?” he asked. I answered, evasively, “Not right now.” Undeterred, the Valerius asked, “But do you live with the word of God in your heart?” I asked him if he was Catholic, and he said, “No, not Catholic, Christian. I was Catholic but now I am only a follower of Jesus.” What strange things the Jesuits wrought!

The hot exhaustion of the day, the lateness of the night, and the apparent lack of accommodation in Udupi combined to put a sour temper on the Brits, especially Georgia, who became infuriated with the Indians and treated them horribly as we went from hotel to hotel asking for a place to lay our heads. “Yes I know it’s over there!” she cried,—“I heard you the first time. Hi, rooms? Do you have any rooms? Vacancy? No rooms? Eight hundred rupees! I don’t understand it, how can they all be full. I think they see tourists and they turn us away, they just don’t want us here.”

We all entertained theories on why all the hotels turned us away as we wandered the dark streets. Eventually we settled into Hotel Janarda, where our triple room had a television. It seemed very novel after so much time away from cable’s comforting glow, and we eagerly sat in front of a Jackie Chan movie and Michael Bay’s horrendous Armageddon, and continued to watch it as long as the power grid was working.

As for why the other hotels turned us away so contemptuously and unhelpfully, I cannot know—because we were foreigners or because they were truly full—but we found out later that Udupi is one of Hinduisms most sacred sites. Few travelers know about it or are attracted by the two inches it receives in Lonely Planet, and the Hindus want to keep it that way.

The following day we went to the Sri Krishna Temple complex that ran in a circuit around Shiva’s Anantheshwara Temple, with eight gates leading off from the circuit to the city. Three pagoda-chariots of different heights rested between the Anantheshwara and the Sri Krishna Temples, and there were other lesser used chariots tucked off in the corners, as well as an elephant with a hawkish mahout who would have made an excellent Nazi and may have enjoyed that profession more than his current one.

Now Anantheshwara looked like a long, low warehouse with upturned eaves, and the Sri Krishna Temple, entered through Dravidian-style gates—high, tiered, and overdecorated—contained a dozen shrines and halls of old stone and wood connected by courtyards with high tin roofs. Therein witness India’s propensity for contradictions, indescribable in the way that most of India is indescribable: ancient shrines with tin rooftops, cows and tourists, pop music and chanting, Krishna icons and comic books, weird looks and genuine hospitality, monks who will invite you for lunch and touts who give nothing away for free.

Hindus line up to experience darshan, a ritual of divine contact, in front of a little gold idol of Krishna, which to them is the god himself, just as to a good Catholic the Communion bread is literally the body of Christ. Krishna is seated on a soft pillow inside a dark room and could be viewed only at arm’s length through a sort of lattice screen carved with elephants and spirits, which the Hindus caress in the rapture of their darshan. Prayers spill from their mouths, and they look at their god and then turn away and float off into the rest of the temple.

This was all very strange, but the first temple we went into was a much smaller one, called the Chandreshwara Temple. The god sits in a shrine in the middle of the room. At night they take the god out in a little gold palanquin an walk it around the shrine in a procession. Priests bang or wail on their instruments, and the laity follow somberly behind. By day, however, another ceremony was taking place.

We heard music upstairs, and venturing there found a wedding underway. Manjula-Ganesh, said the banner at the end of the long, columned hallway, and on the stage under it sat the bride and groom in exotic and multi-hued costumes, across an unlit fire from their bare-chested rishi. The bride’s brother stood behind her, a strong, mustachioed Hindu in a red jacket and white turban, and other family members and dignitaries stood there as well, watching the rishi perform some rite. Lola and I took seats at the back, behind two hundred Indians, and Cat went up to take pictures.

A lone Christian, whose mother had been the bride’s neighbor and who did not know anyone at the Hindu wedding, came and sat by me and practiced his English. I asked Roshan about parts of the ceremony, but he was as clueless as me. “It is Hindu wedding,” he said. He asked me about my hobbies, told me he liked television, especially WWE wrestling, and knew a lot more about it than I did. He told me he was already thirty. “I must marry in the next two years, or it is the end of the world. Tell me, until how late will you roam about tonight?”

I treated the question as seriously as it was delivered. “I don’t know,” I said,—“I’ll roam about as long as there’s something worth doing.”

Some uncle of the bride invited Cat and the rest of us to lunch upstairs, though Lola, still feeling ill from some bad fish on Paradise Beach, went back to the hotel. Cat and I were among the second crowd to be seated at the long metal tables set out on the cement in the half-constructed third floor. Servants, shirtless and wearing orange dhotis, placed banana leaves before us, then went around with tins of rice, breads, curries, chutneys, and sweets—two dozen dishes, things I’d tried before and things only served at weddings, which kept falling onto our banana leaves until I thought I would burst.

Leaving the wedding with the crowd, we had to turn down offers of food at the Shri Krishna Temple and spent a long time sitting in the cool tranquility of the Anantheshwara Temple. I wondered at the gods and watched a young mother and daughter pray before an idol. The girl looked to her mother to know when to put her hands to her forehead and when to kneel and when to prostrate herself fully, but became bored with the whole thing before the ritual was concluded and had to be forced through it like a doll.

There was a festival that night. Around sunset, three musicians seated under the eves of the Sri Krishna Temple started a cacophony of noise with their drums and horns as Hindus piled inside to receive their evening pooja. There was a pool, one floor beneath ground level, off the back of the temple, with a shrine in the middle. Some Brahmin priests boarded a little raft tied to the ghats there and paddled it around. It had a generator on-board to power its floodlights and gaudy colored bulbs. Two bands circled the pool, one playing an imperial marching tune, the other trumpeting some Indian religious noise.

An hour passed, and then the Brahmins emerged carrying the little golden Krishna idol, which they bore up into the pagoda of one of the chariots. Hindus crowded up to pull two of the three great chariots around the temple circuit by long ropes. The surly mahout menaced with his stick the elephant god, who had earlier delivered a kiss to me, and who presently raised his trunk and trumpeted a salute as the chariots began to move.

The elephant and the mahout joined the procession, behind a band and some fire-bearers and devotees, which made its way to the wide lane on the other side of the circuit. The chariots stopped there, and the Hindus lit a lot of things on fire, and little kids in monkey suits danced around in the flames. Someone shot off cheap fireworks that exploded so close to the city that they showered the temples and the congregation in sparks. A few of the explosives failed to go off in the air, and landed, sputtering flames, amidst the crowd, who moved away tensely.

As the Hindus prepared to pull the chariots back to the Sri Krishna Temple, I moved into the crowd with the two long-haired Englanders, George and Charlie, that gathered around the two lines of rope. I heaved as much as I could in the little room allowed by such a mass of people, many of them only vaguely touching the rope to receive whatever blessing that conferred, and with great sweating effort and some chanting by the Brahmins we settled the chariots back where they belong.

Cat and I learned later that there is a festival in Udupi four nights a week, that it is among India’s holiest places, that all the goldsmiths in the alleys around the district buy donations of precious jewels and metals from the temples, which receive them from all across India, to turn into jewelry. Yet few foreigners know of it, and the Indians want it that way.

The two ladies with whom I shared my room did not know what to do or where to go the next day; we had left Gokarne in such a hurry and with no plans; and I, having decided to proceed down the coast to Mangalore that night, regardless of what the indecisive womenfolk decided to do next, I set off early the next morning. Something told me that it would be good to visit the fishing village of Malpe and the nearby St. Mary’s Island that the Bible recommended as a day trip.

Malpe: filthy streets, sewers like open sores, harbor so crowded with blue-painted fishing boats it seemed impossible for any of them to leave, docks lined with red fishing nets mended by a horde of Indians, and a boat across to the shallow atoll of St. Mary’s Island, itself almost capsized with Indian tourists and a Bollywood film crew, palm groves bisected by cobblestone paths, with strange crystalline formations of gray granite on the beaches, the shore lined with sea shells rather than sand, and the heat! I sat in the shade with my shirt off, licking a mango ice cream bar and waiting for the ferry back to the lee shore.

I returned to Udupi in the afternoon and went down to an ancient restaurant near the Krishna Temple, Mitra Samaj, a restaurant known for the excellence of its masala dhosa in the birthplace of the masala dhosa.

Now, the dhosa is a wondrous invention, better by far than the telephone or peanut butter—a sort of fried pancake, wrapped cylindrically around a ladled stew of potatoes and onion and masala curry, green in color, slightly spicy in flavor. Tear away a bit of the cylinder, but use only the right hand, the left is for dirty things and insults—tear away a bit, and use it like a plastic bag at a crime scene to pick up some potatoes and as much of that masala as you can get, dip it in the hot soup and the spicy white chutney, toss the soggy bundle in your mouth, and don’t bother to hide the evidence of your savoring it—it would be impossible!

I met Lola at the hotel, and we packed up our things. She had gone to see the AIDS Train that was in town for one day only, a surprisingly progressive champion that did not fall into the rut of “abstinence only,” but handed out free condoms and provided free phones so visitors could call their family in the country and let them know what a problem HIV had become in India. At the station across the street we got on the next bus heading south to Mangalore, and took a tuk-tuk to the Hotel Surya, where I had arranged to meet Cat, and saw the Welshwoman coming up toward the road as we arrived.

Cat did not know where to go next. She wanted to get away into rural India and be alone with her camera and her subjects and experience something spiritual like Udupi. Her baggage was in a locker at a train station, but she did not have a ticket. Lola and I would go to Madikeri and told her to come, but she had not decided either way when we went to get chai and samosas at a local place, then went up to the mall near the train station, browsed a Western bookstore, and ate at Pizza Hut. It was no small wonder that after all she decided to go off on her own and pursue whatever mystic quality she was looking for in India. Lola and I saw Zombieland at the mall’s cinema.

There was not much to see in Mangalore, though the nearby Jain temples and the exhibit of some Maharaja’s car collection are supposed to be very admirable. I had chosen Mangalore out of the Lonely Planet map for one reason only: the food, especially the spicy seafood, the deep-fried prawn koliwada and the fish in coconut curry. I enjoyed such treats the following day before Lola and I got on a bus up into the mountains of the Coorg region. The tiers of tea and spice plantations broke into the lush forests, and in the troughs between steep hills lay rice paddies, dry that time of year. Arriving in the uneven hill station of Madikeri after dark, we trooped around asking at hotels (the sun takes much of your bargaining power with it when it goes) and checked into the Paramount.

The next day, Lola lost her debit card to an overzealous ATM. It was a Sunday and in India, where horror stories circulated of malfunctioning cash machines and rude employees who cut up any devoured plastic, no matter how much its worth, and said, “If it’s not our bank, we can’t return it, that’s our policy.” The thousand incarnations of worry ran amok through Lola’s head—how would she pay for things? get a new card? explain this to her parents? survive? Though it was Sunday, the security grate was cracked open, looking in on a marble room that would have been familiar as a bank anywhere in the world, and into the crack of doom Lola cried, “Is anyone there? The machine ate my card, and I need help—please!”

The two Indians standing by a rack of sunglasses on the sidewalk reminded us that Sunday was a holiday. “I know,” said Lola, despairing, and she explained her situation before heading back toward the abyss. One of the Indians pointed to the other and said, “Manager.” Collecting herself, Lola turned to this one, who smiled broadly, and implored him to help, falling not quite so far as to her knees, but close. The manager said, “Let me see what I can do,” and went inside. He returned from the blackened bank a few minutes later with the card. Lola cried, “Thank you!” and almost hugged the man before remembering where she was, but the manager seemed rewarded enough by her rapturous expression.

A nearby tourist office, that some Swedes had recommended, arranged a trek for us that would depart for the hills and plantations the following morning, all things permitting, and stay out there overnight, returning on the second afternoon. Lola and I had that day for whatever we could find to occupy our time. The travel agent offered us a tour of a nearby enclave of Tibetan Buddhists and an elephant training camp, but we decided to make our own way to the sites.

The trip began on a local bus, an hour east on a winding road through dense fir forests, to Kushalnagar. Local buses in India work like this: instead of a sign on the front to say where the bus is headed, an Indian is hired to lean out the window and cry the name of the intended town—for example, “Mysoremysoremysore,”—and instead of a door sensor, an Indian is employed in the back to whistle with his fingers whenever all the passengers have boarded. The buses are the same width as buses anywhere, only five people are crammed across instead of four, two in a seat wide enough for one and three in the seat big enough to fit two. I could not figure how many more benches the Indians placed from front to back, but I can say that someone tall as I had a tough time of scraped knees taking a seat.

In Kushalnagar the forest subsided into rolling green plains, though the air was still cooler than the coastal flatlands. From Kushalnagar we hired a tuk-tuk a short way to Bykkopar, and then to a town just within the Tibetan enclave. Some Tibetans, exemplifying the humble charity and quietly gregarious spirit of most Buddhists, noticed our confusion and offered to let us ride in their tuk-tuk most of the way to the Golden Temple. The Buddhists are respectable not only for their amicability, but also for their absence of culinary taboos—we enjoyed beef dumplings and pork noodle soup at a Tibetan restaurant near the temple.

The Golden Temple itself, distinct from the Golden Temple of the Sikhs in Amritsar, was a newly constructed marble, like most of the enclave. Within the great tiered shrine, the top crowned with rays and towers, the great hall was painted with demons and Buddhas. Three gilded statues of Bodhisattvas, each thirty-feet high, sat in meditation at the far end. Buddhists chanted and played discordant prayer music in another shrine.

Our next stop: the Dubare Elephant Camp, 350 rupees away by tuk-tuk. Let us hitchhike! A cement tuk-tuk carried us to the bus station in Bykkopar, and we returned to Kushalnagar, took a private bus north, and walked the last mile to the camp through a palm forest and wide plantation fields.

The camp itself was across a wide, shallow stream, with many rocks and islands and willow trees with roots like whips. The ferryman informed us, as he took us across, that we only had fifteen minutes before the camp closed. We refused the entry price and watched a few of the lumbering beasts bathe, dragging chains from their heavy hoofs; then we hopped back across the rocks like little Mowglis, hitched to Kushalnagar with a nice old Indian couple from Jaipur, and in a jeep a ways further, and took a bus back to Madikeri.

At 8 in the morning Lola and I met our guide at the travel agency. Kirin Kumar, the agent’s cousin, was a simple, awkward, honest-faced Indian, an middle-aged and country-bred bachelor, who always seemed bewildered by the responsibility we trusted to him. Two Londoners, David and Beverley, would accompany us on the trek. They had well-fitted backpacks, Nalgene bottles, professional camera equipment, hiking boots, and wilderness shirts. I was wearing flip-flops and cotton shorts, and Lola had a pair of crocks, and we could not have been more prepared for adventure.

As a young gentleman-caller, David had lived with Beverley in a room of her parents house—no mean accommodation: the house had twenty rooms, and they had their own floor to themselves. Beverley’s mother sold the house and gave all the profits to her daughter, and the young couple spent it traveling. David proposed to her on the peak of a Himalayan mountain, looking up through the icy gale at Everest. They had been all over Southeast Asia and were reminded of it constantly. Anything they saw or heard drew forth some relevant anecdote about Sumatran volcanoes or Thai cockroaches.

With some of Beverley’s dowry David purchased increasingly expensive camera equipment, until he had a suite of cameras and lenses and tripods worth many thousands of dollars. He sold his pictures to stock photo agencies that paid him 50 cents every time one was downloaded. The pictures of animals were generally his best sellers. “I only take pictures of unique individuals,” said David,—“Unfortunately, there’s not many of them.”

Kirin led us on a local bus out to a town in the hills called Dhalibidoo. Six-hundred people lived there in homesteads spread in the forested hills surrounding a number of rice paddies, connected by raised footpaths and forest trails. Tethered cows trumped around the empty fields, and calves and piglets squealed in pens around the periphery. We left our things at the house of the Family Rai, where we would spend the night. The young couple had a young daughter named Hema, and the grandmother lived there, as well as a mut named Tony, chained up in the front. Though they used well-water and an outhouse, they also had satellite television and blasted old 90s hip-hop. Ah, India.

On that first day Kirin led us west toward the ridges, across the rice paddies of Dhalibidoo. Rice paddies in India’s breadbasket riverlands yield as many as four crops a year, but the mountainous farms grew only one, which had already been harvested. As we crossed the dry paddies, Kirin showed us touch-me-nots, small ferns that close up when you touch them, and pointed out butterflies and magtails and magpies.

David quoted the old English magpie rhyme: “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told; eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten for a time of joyous bliss.” We looked all over for a second magpie to secure our joy, but in vain!

We entered the forest and climbed up a short ridge and down into a gully where a small farmstead grew cardamon in the shade, then climbed back up two-hundred meters of a rib bone to the long bald spine of Mount Nishani that ran from north to south. Kirin pointed west into the deep valley, where a solitary house stood out among the forest, and the Mangalore Road cut through it on its way north.

“There is the deep jungle,” said the guide, conjuring all sorts of romantic images: the tiger hunts of the Maharajas, the vibrant hues of cobras, the intense green of the foliage, the sublime discord of insects and birds, predators and prey, caught up in a dense floral confluence under branches so thick the sun cannot penetrate but in dappled patterns and dim purple light. There lie ruined temples, black walls split with overgrowth, hiding secret caches of some king’s cursed gold. Ah, the imagination goes grinning wild! “We go there on longer treks,” added Kirin.

On our way up to one of Mount Nishani’s vertebrae, Kirin pointed out some tiger’s droppings near the ridge trail. “They sell it at zoos,” said David,—“If you put it in your backyard, the neighborhood cats won’t shit there. They can smell it.” A tiger had crossed Nishani a few years ago, said Kirin, and left tracks up and down the ridge. It massacred almost fifty cows, that feline Jack the Ripper, before returning to the jungle.

We saw another type of feces: Some cat had picked out and eaten the best coffee beans, and left a turd that looked like some kind of peanut candy. David said that in some parts of the world they made coffee from those choice beans. They call the expensive ordure crappuchino. In my head I began devising ways to market my own bowel matter. Perhaps if I eat only the choicest foods, the idiot rich will buy the digested remnants, too.

The trail scrambled back down the hill through old streambeds with mossy walls as high as my head, and then passed through fields of rusted sword ferns, and Kirin halted us for a break under a tall oak tree. I noticed a sort of seat up in the tree, made of sticks lashed between the branches for a bench and foot rest, and asked about it. Hunters would sit there, said Kirin, and wait for wild boars to come. It was a local custom there to eat pork meat at a certain time of year. Kirin himself, a good Hindu, enjoyed all kinds of meat except beef. This reminded Kirin of a story of his, which he proceeded to tell with many digressions into laughter:

“I very young, I climb coconut tree with my brother. I climb all the way up with knife in my teeth and no way to get down. [Laughing] He stands at the bottom and catches coconuts. I—I finish, and then, no way to get down. [Laughing] So I hold on as long as I can, and then just slide down. [Laughing and pantomiming a scream, his arms held out in a sort of bear hug around the imagined trunk] Big scratches all down my arms, chest, legs—I used a rope to climb next time.”

Soon we returned to the Rai household, and the old grandmother served us banana trunk curry, rice, chapati, and coffee. Lola and the Brits pent themselves up indoors, and I went and sat over the rice paddies to write and enjoy the wilderness. Too much time in cities had made me almost forget the lively sounds and clean smells of the forest. Long after dinner, when the family had gone to bed, I unleashed Tony and ran out with him into the misty moonlit paddies.

Kirin Kumar arrived an hour late the following day, with a taciturn Frenchman named Jay in tow. David and Beverley had left early that morning, just after breakfast, and Lola had commissioned me to catch one of the piglets from a nearby pen.

I crouched and waited behind a haystack for the snorting mob to come up. One or two saw me peering and returned my look with a dread they appeared to quickly forget as they turned back to their task, rutting around in the hay for food. In a flash I sallied out, and the piglets scattered like crows. The sow started a terrible noise from where she was tied up to a stake and all the children made for her. I caught one little piglet by the back under my hand, but he wormed out and scrabbled up through some bushes to the sow’s pen, where I wouldn’t dare venture.

We set off east rather than west, past coffee and pepper farms. Along one side of the trail was a path leading back through a thick forest to an ancient looking temple with an intricate dome. Kirin told us it was a sacred grove, a forest of the gods that no man was allowed to touch. On one day a year the villagers congregated before the temple for a celebration, and the priests went up that path and attended the temple’s god, and then everyone departed and no one was allowed in the grove for another year. Anyone caught trespassing was fined $20—and that’s ten day’s wages for most of India.

Kirin pointed out wild mango and jackfruit trees and took a nearly ripe pomelo, a sort of Indian grapefruit, from its tree to enjoy later. We took a main road, then followed the Madikeri River to a place with shallow rapids and rocks, and there relaxed during the hot noontime. Kirin cut up the pomelo, which was sweet if you took off the skin—what a metaphor! After the break, we scrabbled down into and back up from a creek’s ravine, then up and over another mountain, and returned to the Rai household without further incident. We had lunch, and Kirin led us off toward the main road and the post office, where we waited for the bus back.

On the trail to the main road, off to one side was a little clearing in the forest; at the center, a sort of table made from sticks, garlanded with flowers, with bottles and offerings underneath, and there was a pile of rocks in front of it. An old woman of Dhalibidoo had died two weeks before. Her family burned her three parts—legs, torso, and head—on that rocky grave, where they erected the shrine to her memory. They took her head and some of the other ash to the temple in the sacred grove for puja, then put it in the Madikeri River, which flows into the Cauvery, one of India’s seven sacred streams. In a month, the monsoon rains will come and wash the shrine away, and the old woman will be but photos and memories.

The bus to Mysore took five hours, and its length was compounded by my bitter contempt for one of the other passengers. I had been warned before about men like him, who stare interminably and, in their opinion inoffensively, at women, and had laughed at the stories. At first I laughed at him, too, sitting ahead of us on the bus and staring back over the low headrests straight at Lola with an unreadable, placid look.

I asked him if he was married, and the stargazer, a sour-looking man about forty, interrupted his observation to tell me in his little English that he was married and his family was in Chennai, a long way away. “Well what happens in Madikeri stays in Madikeri,” I said with a smile. He went back to staring at Lola. Reading my book, I put it right in between the two, and the man moved up and down and side to side to restore his field of view, not urgently, but as if I were getting in the way of some film or painting. Lola asked him to please, stop staring at her. The man bobbled his head and kept staring.

Now my big brother instincts took over and my blood started boiling. I told the man off and slapped him in the back of the head with War and Peace and flicked him there continually, trying to antagonize him into a real confrontation. He would just turn around and stare at me inquisitively, as if I were the rude one and he was doing something perfectly admissible. The man said something to me in Hindi. I told him I didn’t understand and asked him if he understood my middle finger, only realizing after that he was saying, “Kushalnagar,” the name of the town where he would disembark, as if to say, “I’m only staring to Kushalnagar, so take it easy young man.”

During this strife, the mustachioed ticket valet, who was sitting just across the aisle from us, said some words to our stargazer, and they conversed pleasantly for a bit. The valet sat back down and looked at me helplessly. Not long after, when the Indian woman sitting next to Lola started shouting at our watcher, the valet stood up and argued fiercely with her until she stopped complaining. I wasn’t going to start a fight on an Indian bus and get kicked off in the middle of nowhere, but in my hot-blooded state, I sorely wanted to. I stared daggers at him when he left, and he patted my arm and walked off.

In Mysore, the Youth Hostel was full of visiting teachers, so our tuk-tuk driver took us to his friend’s place, a seedy place called Vishnu Bhavan. For dinner I had spicy Hydrabadi masala chicken, and despite the appearance of a blood-bloated bed bug, I slept very fitfully and woke up at 8. In Mysore I continued my food tour of southern Karnataka. Lola and I walked through the opening bazaar and found a place called Indra Cafes Paras for breakfast. All the tables were full, and food continually cycled out from the kitchen. There is no waiting to pay the bill in India, no enjoying coffee and conversation—finish and leave, or the waiter will shout, “Jao, jao!”—Get, get! even if you haven’t paid yet.

To start I picked out bisibele bath, which was rice with a spicy chickpea and lentil gravy. There was uddina vada, a sort of fried doughnut with spinach inside, and idli rice balls, both served with the same chutney and spicy soup as the masala dhosa—and Indra served the dhosa as well, with masala potatoes or rava onion. They made deserts as well: milk treats called burfi, made with cashew, chocolate, coconut, or pistachio, and a sugary treat called gulag jamoon, a specialty of Mysore.

That day we visited the Mysore Palace of the Wodeyar Maharajas—the gilded cage that the British built for their gilded peacock princelings, in a beautiful Indo-Saracenic style. The emblem of the double-headed eagle and the elephant-horse-lion of the royal House of Wodeyar was everywhere. All along the marble walls ran a painted scene of a royal parade, soldiers and bands and caparisoned elephants, with the Maharaja himself riding in a golden howdah. In the garden outside there were high, tiered Dravidian temples, and courtyards and soda shops, and lines of Indian tourists.

A dealer of perfume and incense caught the two of us, sauntering back through the bazaar. We smelled his scented oils alongside a French couple from Marseilles who had been Couchsurfing. They told Lola, who was considering the offer of ten perfume bottles in a rosewood box, that she could mail it all home. “How many packages have you sent already?” I asked. “Five.” “Wow,” said the French,—“You’ve done better than us.” Eventually I got two bottles of something and a hundred incense sticks (sandalwood, jasmine, cinnamon, and rose), and Lola got eight bottles, incense, and coconut oil, for $16 total.

We ate dinner at a Tibetan restaurant, full of robed Buddhists watching the India-South Africa cricket game, had drinks at a hotel bar, and later that night, following an Indian’s recommendation, took a tuk-tuk to Planet X. It turned out not to be a night club but a sort of Chuck E. Cheese funtown that also served drinks. We rode the go karts.

Ooty was a crowded hill station in a hollow of the Niligri Hills of Tamil Nadu, between Mysore and the border of Kerala. The real name is Ootacamund or Udhagamandalam, but the Brits who built their summer homes there found it unpronounceable.

The road to Ooty swerved up along beautiful ridges and promontories, through dense forests and tiered tea plantations and vegetable farms, and tiger zones and tribal ones, and the bus broke down only once. We took an afternoon bus there from Mysore, after eating at Indra Cafe and visiting the train museum, and did not arrive until 6:30, when it was already getting cool. The whole place was cool, green, and wet, and I was happy to pull my sweatshirt out from the bottom of my bag.

Checking into the Green Valley Hotel on the lake and went to dinner and had drinks with a stout Irish lad named Ivan and his Brooklyn girlfriend Ger, talking about Thailand and the Indians. We had to leave the next day in order to get to Kochin for the Holi Festival, although I could have stayed in Ooty a while. It was crowded and dirty from Indian tourism, a city of old and poorly maintained colonial buildings, with an infill of ramshackle domiciles that appeared to use the solid British buildings as support.

I left early to walk around the next day, snacking at weird local places, and went up a hill and past the nursing school at the top, then past St. Stephen’s Church to the square the Indians call Charing Cross, and ended up at the Botanical Gardens. I spent a few hours reading there, where it smelled like potpourri, before walking back down toward the lake. On one side of that road stood the Shrine of Baby Jesus, and statues of Jesus and Mary peered out from niches on the facade.

Christianity is common in Kerala and the surrounding areas, though it is Christianity on Indian terms. Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are worshiped in the same manner as any Hindu god, by burning tapers and incense set in tall pagoda towers before icons, by hanging flower garlands on them, by prostrating oneself barefoot before them, and by individual prayer and communal music; and like the deities of the Hindu trinity, the Christian God appears in many aspects or incarnations, Baby Jesus being but one. In Alleppey in Kerala I later saw a statue of Jesus painted blue like Shiva or Krishna or one of the pagan gods.

But who is the king of all of these folks?
And I’m lost, and I’m lost,
And I’m lost at the bottom of the world.
I’m handcuffed to the bishop in the barbershop line,
And I’m lost at the bottom of the world.
—Tom Waits

“Life is small,” said the tuk-tuk driver. “You must do big things. You live easy, you die easy. Do something big. Easy to do, Khatmandu.”

He turned his attention away from the road to say it, and I thought he might hit a Sacred Cow. They say if a tuk-tuk driver hits a cow or a person in India, all passengers should run away as fast as they can, before a mob forms of howling, violent natives. I thought I would rather be anywhere than hanging out the side of the auto-rickshaw next to the turbaned driver, no matter his wisdom. Tom was in the back with our bags and a Swiss girl who was also going to Hospet to get a bus. She had just said goodbye to her boyfriend, whom she met a week before leaving on a year-long trip. They had only spent a little time together since then.

The tuk-tuk driver swerved all over the dusty road through a crazy Indian city, indescribable in its random chaos, to a soundtrack of groaning cows, squealing tires, goat bells, car horns, and shouting merchants, and eventually we spilled out into the gutter in front of a restaurant where all the Paulo Travel buses stopped. Tom and I waited a long time out on a cement bench, and our bus was very late and very unhurried. We had sleeper berths for this trip, that is two beds side by side in a cofin big enough for one man. Jostled, sleepless, clutching at the grate windows as a prisoner would, I yearned to be away from all the noise and struggle of the real world, somewhere by the sea.

Many kings ruled Paradise Beach.

There was the great eagle that swooped down from the forested headland to catch fish, and who soared around on thermals and considered all the people that had come to his beach. There was the Baba, a shaman who spent half the year in a cave up on the mountain, who would dance around the Paradise Café, smoking a chillum and saying strange things in a voice like a didgeridoo. Then there were the foreign lords, the tatterdemalion princes, holding court in one or the other of the four cafés like the crusader kings of the Holy Land: Tall Andy, Vince, Phee, and especially Rhythm, a short man from Beverley Hills who some say gives Americans a bad name.

He had been coming to Paradise Beach for seven years, from back when it was a few huts and tents on an unexplored beach without electricity or Internet, a footnote in Lonely Planet. This year twice as many travelers came to Paradise as the year before, a change that most of the kings observed with heavy fear and loathing. The bus that once ran twice a day to the dirt road across the ridge from the isolated beach runs every hour, and the motorboats pull into the bay more often than before, letting off groups of day-trippers in their collared shirts and backpacks. More people means more life, more music, and more going on. On a night just before the new moon, Rhythm organized a trance party.

The coolies brought down a nice sound system to a spot on the beach, a circle formed naturally by the black volcanic rock. five thousand rupees worth of fireworks illuminated the sky at twilight, and the place filled up with ravers. Little Rhythm strutted around in his arrogant way, his chest puffed out like a rooster’s, his beard like Jesus’, his long hair tied in a bun, and he talked to his subjects regally, only looking at them when he was speaking and at other times glancing all over the small pond of his domain, his attention as divided as the great eagle’s.

Around midnight, a squad of Indian police oficers crept down the mountain on the treacherous path from the road. They wore brown uniforms and mustaches, and they carried the long bamboo batons that they normally employed against the Indian men who came to watch Westerners in bikinis. The police scared them out from the bushes as they would fowl for a hunt. Presently, the dozen policemen mixed in among the ravers on the strand and marched between them with hawk-eyed glances from side to side, batons swinging at their hips, and the ravers watched them in a confused stupor. All of a sudden, at some unknown signal, the policemen began to savagely beat everyone around them. The revelers scattered.

Under a rock one German sat with a group of Indians, whom the police assaulted without impunity, until only the German was there, all the others having been routed. He got up, shouldered his bag, and walked calmly down the beach at a steady pace. A police oficer shouted something at the Saxon’s broad back and, receiving no reply, thwacked him hard with a baton. The German staggered, then kept on walking at the same steady pace, his heart pounding, for his bag was full of drugs; but he acted boldly, and the policeman turned away toward easier targets.

They rounded up as many ravers as they could and searched their bags for grass and rupees. Having taken these things, they sent the prisoners off without charge. They took the sound system and told the owner he would have to come pay a fine to have it returned. Satisfied with their raid and loaded down with plunder, the police climbed back up the trail and disappeared over the headland, and the night was again starry and silent but for conspiratorial whispers and crashing waves. Candles flickered in the coco-thatch huts of Paradise Beach until very late.

Morning came. Rhythm stayed in his bungalow up on the cliff, as Achilles stayed in his tent on the beaches of Ilium. Baba danced around the Paradise Café and lit incense sticks and put them in the corners. He washed his clothes in the shower and went out onto the promontory, ash smeared on his bony bare chest, and howled a mournful dirge into the wind. The eagle hunted for fish and dismissed the strangeness of men. The courtiers, some of them bearing welts and bruises, went to their computers and wrote home energetic descriptions of the brutal injustices that had been committed.

At a table in Manju’s, another king of Paradise, a paunchy, jocund French-Algerian lawyer named Jemal, crafted a response with the fire for political justice that is written in the French genome. “It is ridiculous what they have done,” he declared. “I am going this afternoon to the chief of police!”

“Are you going to put a shirt on first?” asked an English courtier.

“Yes, I am going to wear a shirt! I will dress very nice!”

An Indian serf watched this conversation with disinterest from a palette on the back wall. He took an order five minutes before and had yet to get up to deliver it to the kitchen in the stilted structure on the cliff above. Each of the four cafés maintained a population of serfs, surly bachelors who slept on the floor at night and sent their pittance home to support their families. Their situation and their clientele of rude, hazy-brained space cadets made most of them irascible, ornery, and lazy. Those foreigners who visit Paradise Beach were too passive and drugged to say anything, and so this behavior went uncorrected.

Jemal continued after a sip of his Budweiser, “You must show them respect, and they will do anything you say. They still have a hospitality. I will go and say, ‘I want you to write down exactly what the rules are. Is there no music? There is a festival this week, and I’m pretty sure there will be music there. I’m sorry! I don’t know the rules! If you write them down then we won’t get in trouble in the future. Is trance not allowed? They play it all day on Om Beach. Can the party not exceed a certain size? What is it: ten, twelve people? Please, I just want to understand,’ ” and with a sudden Gallic fire he added, “And I will not leave until I have the list!”

He was concerned for the state of affairs on Paradise Beach. “Everyone is talking,” he whispered to the conspirators around the table,—“Everyone wants to know, ‘Who told the police? Who is the rat?’ I must find out. I will ask the chief of police. He must know that it is bad for business.”

The superintendent in Gokarne received the French lawyer, who wore a collared shirt and a pair of slacks to the interview, with all the hospitality he was due and then, when the conversation became politely serious, pretended to not understand English. Jemal left the town empty-handed and returned to the beach.

I hope that this story acquaints the Reader with the strange state of affairs on Paradise Beach, with its knights and squires and magicians, a menagerie of big fish in a small pond. At home these men would be nothing, but here they were kings.

At around 4 a.m. the bus dumped a dozen passengers off at a moribund warehouse in the forest. I sat there in the warm dark until another bus came to take us to Gokarne town. It was a quiet place in the early morning, except for the tuk-tuk drivers. Tom and I ducked into a chai shop for tea and idli to escape them. One of them followed us in and waited patiently until we finished eating, then drove us up into the headlands and down to Kudle Beach.

Gokarne is arranged in the following way: The busy town, with its temples and dusty lanes, lies just adjacent to the filthy Gokarne Beach on the Arabian Ocean, the first of five beaches running south. High, wooded headlands divide Gokarne Beach from small, noisy Kudle immediately south. Next there is Om Beach, a picturesque beach split in two by a narrow rocky peninsula that makes it resemble the Om symbol, and then Half-Moon Beach, where there is no electricity and only a few coco-thatch huts on the small strand. The final and furthest beach is Paradise Beach.

The encircling headlands fall away from the forested ridge to rock cliffs as they meet the sea, and a rock promontory divides the beach into two sandy strands, each two hundred meters long. The Paradise Café sits on top of this promontory, a great coco-thatch hall with hammocks and low seats along the front, looking out at the promontory and the pirate flag waving there. Huts and bungalows run up the green hill behind it, simple shanties for two dollars per night, containing only a mattress, with more behind three similar establishments all along the beach: Manju’s, Om Shakti, and Ever Green.

Tom and I ended up on Paradise Beach but did not start there. In Kudle, six miles away, we found two huts and locked our things in them. Around ten we went south into the hills, hiking up and back down to Om Beach, and crossing that, back up onto a treacherous path along the edge of the next headland. Descending on steep natural steps down to Half-Moon, we called out to Tamara, who was walking barefoot around the rocks below, a Saxon princess in a bikini and sarong. Cat and Lola had taken a boat from Om to Paradise, and Tamara was the only one of them with the courage and energy to climb back up into the cliffs. She led us back the way she came, through a maze of trails.

“I got lost on the vay here,” said the German. She told us about Rhythm’s techno party, which happened the night before I arrived.

On Paradise Beach, Tom and I jumped in the water, had a cold drink, and then started the walk back to get our things. “But why don’t you vait?” asked Tamara. “Because then we wouldn’t want to go at all,” we replied, “because it’s sunny and the ocean is cool, rum is cheap, and everyone is stoned.”

We hiked back and arrived sweaty and sunburned in Kudle Beach. After having a soda, we repacked our things and sneaked out of our bungalow camps, who did not have our passports or our money, under a pall of paranoia, and back up to the top of the headland where the tuk-tuks were parked. One of these brought us to Paradise Beach and was not suited at all for the dirt road there. The road cut out under the mountain behind Paradise Beach. It was with some sweaty dificulty that we, along with a big English rugby player in a backpack as big as me, climbed to the top and scrabbled down the other side into Paradise.

Ah, sublime uneventfulness! Must I return to you so soon? All that languor in Hampi and Goa and I still feel, after that hike and that bus ride, that I could spend days in your sandy bosom. We, the five of us, sit in the café waiting for food that the serfs take forever to cook. We read in hammocks or on the beach, and we meet the kings of Paradise and discern their strange stories, and we meet strangers from all over the world. We go down to the sand and jump into the sea. The water is cool and deep, and dolphins play out around the shoals, visible from a distance as a flicker of dark gray, the flash of cetacean flukes.

The sun sets. We sit there on a dune to watch the star drop over the headland. The jungle spills down from the top of the ridge to the sand, a few rustic bungalows there between the palms, but where it meets the sea the promontory is all jagged layers of rock. The Baba dances on one of them, whirling around his white scarf, until the sun disappears. The shaman hears Shane blow the conch shell from the other side of the beach, and he wraps his scarf around his shoulders, picks up his walking stick, and comes back along the cliffs to Paradise Café.

Tamara plays Tom’s guitar, and I test my harmonica. There was no moon, and the Milky Way came out full and bright. When we feel like it, Om Shakti Garden sells bottles of rum for one dollar and twenty cents, and Manju serves cheap food. We sit and spend a long time at dinner. An Israeli named Or sits down with his fine guitar and plays one of the five hundred tunes he knows by heart. A Persian named Michael, who looks like some King Xerxes with his huge beard and his great bundle of hair, and who wears in spite of it a cowboy hat and a short black sarong, sits with us and looks through an algebra workbook. An Algerian in a white turban plays my harmonica much better than me, and he tells me, “I can’t teach you harmonica. You just have to learn the sounds. Just keep playing. People will say, ‘Stop playing that harmonica,’ and you tell them, ‘I’m learning.’ ”

I say, “Alright.”

Back at the Paradise Café, the kings convene to watch all the jesters and minstrels. They sit at the center of crowded tables or out on the veranda between the hammocks or around the fire in the sand on the promontory, self-important magnets. Smoke slips through their fingertips and drifts out their mouths.

A Jew named Or asks pretty girls to play his guitar, and Michael the Persian flips on his cowboy hat and moonwalks across the floor in a perfect emulation of Michael Jackson. Jemal can play all of Dark Side of the Moon. An old Welshman named Martin on his guitar, a forty-year-old beauty with worn out strings, accompanies a Swede named Niels who plucks the mandolin with a fire, despite being hopped up on ketamine. Martin tells stories of the old greats, of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards, and was once elbowed in the face by Van Morrison, whom he asked for an autograph for his mom, “and then he just ran off toward the stage. He’s a very short man, you know.” An Israeli buys weed from the jungle man who supplies the beach. “This is paradise!” says the Jew. Everyone says that.

I was one day at a table in the back with Tall Andy and some other lost souls, Andy telling a story about tripping on acid in a bat cave, losing his mind to the beauty of fluttering wings. A Hindu serf came in from Andy’s domain at Ever Green Café with a message for the tall prince and then ran out. Andy remarked to us, “Do you get the feeling that we’re in a palace when messengers come knocking?” Vicky, a caver from Toronto with her long hair in dreadlocks and a phoenix tattooed on her back, replied with an aristocratic laugh, “Yeah, and the courtiers are waiting outside.” No madame, they are already here!

There are wars fought over which iPod is connected to the speakers and whether it will play jungle trance or chill out music or jam bands, and the bitter, cliquish rivalries of the court wax to shouting and wane to passive contempt. Playground politics, children in a fort.

Time loses meaning, the days are all the same, the place is inescapable, and no one questions the order of the Brave New World of Paradise Beach. It is one of those places that gets stranger, scarier, and more eccentric the longer you stay and study it, but most subjects are too stoned to see under the surface. They sink instead into the welcome oblivion of “sublime uneventfulness.”

“There’s one good thing about this place being full of drugged-out space cadets,” said Tom,—“It’s really quiet in the morning.”

Only a few people were up, waiting for their eggs and toast and porridge. There was the ambient sound of the breakers on the rocks and of a hen and her chicks pecking around under the tables. Smoke drifted up past the pirate flag from the plastic burning on a lower shelf of the promontory. Another fire smoked in the clay kiln, and flies swarmed the cooling pastries. The three boat masters sat around the gerum table shooting pucks around and looking to the sea, where Tall Andy waded slowly into the surf and dunked himself under as if being baptized, and beyond there, the Baba came down the path on the northern headland with his walking stick, a wizened man in orange and yellow.

A courtier attired as a wizard told an Austrian girl that she might have a bladder infection, because the symptoms she described had once affected his girlfriend.

“It’s probably from the bathrooms,” said Lola. “I feel like I’m going to get AIDS every time I go in there.”

One bathroom and one shower room served the eight bungalows of Paradise Café. The two rooms adjoined each other in a coco-thatch shack behind the open hall and against the cliff, which formed the back wall. In the shower people set their bars of soap on the rocky ledges before standing under the cold water, and in the cubicle with the toilet a candle burned there when the power was out and lit up the roots of trees in an eerie way. The dirt floor looked like it had been used for some butcher job. The looped rope that one tied to seal the door reminded, with its dampness and filth, of gonorrhea.

“No,” replied the Austrian girl, “it’s from having sex in unsanitary conditions.”

By the time the Baba arrived, the Argentine with hair like Einstein’s had laid out his jewelry in the back of the café, and with his wire cutters and pliers and the detritus of the beach he began crafting more. Not all the accessories were for sale, and he shouted at people who touched them. The Baba got up from the table where some of the lords sat and made a big show with a tennis racket. He swung it around in huge, energetic motions and leapt through the air to swat imaginary shots, making sound effects with his didgeridoo voice.

The old English lesbian—she described herself as a raging one, that unhappy but obnoxiously outgoing woman, with a big nose and an overbite—delighted over Baba with her hoarse, horrible voice that could be heard across the café, and glowered at anyone else who showed the shaman any attention, as some fans of an unpopular band will publicly disdain all casual newcomers. Phi was her name. “I’m having a crisis,” she kept broadcasting; “do you know what a crisis means?” But he was just Baba and did not care about such things. He went off to dance on the rocks, and Phi started telling some gossip and called for a chillum.

The Baba attended a few duties around Paradise Beach. Every day he picked up the stray dogs that lived on the beach and took them, one at a time, down to the water to wash them. The dogs squirmed and struggled in his lanky grip. Once I watched, fascinated, as Baba blessed his friend’s Sprite. With solemn attention, he used the straw to take some soda from the bottle, making a vacuum with his fingertip, and he dripped it three times on his golden bell and rang the bell over the drink. He handed the Sprite to the man who ordered it, who was grateful for the benison.

Baba’s hook nose and gleaming eyes shone out from the leathery folds of his face and his thick salt and pepper beard, generally tied in a bun. He bound up his long, matted hair in an orange turban so faded that it appeared pink, and he sometimes wore a jacket of the same color. He wore an orange or a black sarong and sometimes wrapped scarves around his shoulders and walked about with ash on his bony bare chest. Strings of stones hung from his neck, and one one of these there was a golden bell. He spoke only a little English and compensated for it with wild charades and animal sound effects, but who could understand what he meant?

To the kings he was a novelty, a court jester to entertain them. They had collectively spent decades in India, without really seeing any of it. “I didn’t come here for real India,” said Tall Andy,—“I came here for some erotic dream, some fantasy.” Paradise Beach was their kid fort against the world of confusion and work and passed judgment, yet it’s hard to escape from all that. I, however, was engrossed by the Baba.

“How are you Baba?” I would say. “Very nice question,” replied the Baba, and he made animal noises and jerked around.

The Baba took a liking to Lola, whom he called Maharalaxmi, and he once tried to lick the jingling bangle she had around her ankle, fawning over the accessory as he prostrated himself on the ground. One day Lola lay in the hammock smoking a joint with Niels the Swede there on the veranda, and the Baba walked up, leaned his staff and bag against a pole and interrupted them, talking nonsense with his didgeridoo voice.

Martin, the old Welsh rocker, half-asleep in a nearby hammock, could not help but overhear his noisy intrusion and detect that the girl wanted the shaman to leave. It was none of his business, Martin knew, but as an older brother and a romantic he felt he had to do something. He went over to the three and asked Lola, who carries a pharmacy in her haversack, for some medicine for his swollen foot. Lola took him up to her hut on the hill to retrieve a drug.

When they were alone in the bungalow, where Cat was asleep on the mat on the floor, Martin said, “I gotta tell you, you need to watch out for that Baba. He’s not a good Baba. I’ve met good Babas up in the north, real Babas in monasteries. He’s just a tourist Baba. You shouldn’t trust him. Don’t fall for his tricks.”

Lola said, “Okay,” but her look seemed to say, “What did you think I would do with him?”

Suddenly the Baba was there, though he would not enter the chamber of his Maharalaxmi, and his spindly arms were everywhere at once in the door frame, lost in an activity of rage. “What you do? What you do?” he cried at the Welsh intruder, emphasized with animal grunts.

“Baba doesn’t like me,” Martin later confessed as we sat on the veranda one night. He told me the story of the Baba’s anger and added, “He talked to me after. He said, ‘Namaste,’ as we passed each other on the trail over there. I said, ‘Namaste,’ back. Then he got really angry again and said, ‘Me no bad Baba. Me good Baba, good Baba. Ooh ah eeh ah,’ you know how he is. You see, he knew that I knew what he really is.”

Martin said, “A real Baba told me to be careful of these tourist Babas, the ones who hang around beaches. They’re not good Babas, he said. They just want money and to talk to girls,” but I add of my own observation: I never saw the Baba take any money or ask for it, and could never myself discern why the Baba was there or why he did the things he did, but I would not call him a phony.

They say that on the full moon he stands on the promontory and rings his bell, and the whole island comes to its sound to celebrate. He had a trickster’s wisdom in his bright black eyes, and a purpose and power to his rituals. He was just one of those mysteries of India.

Festivals rank among India’s chief attractions, and the Shivaratri in Gokarne promised to be a good one, though we could not tell what would happen. I had heard variously that they would open a cave containing Shiva’s penis, that they would pull giant “Shiva-powered” chariots down the street, and that they would throw bananas at children. All of these sounded well enough to warrant investigation.

This brought Tom, Lola, Tamara, and I into Gokarne Town on a Friday afternoon. The streets were lined with sweet sellers and cloth dealers, so many it seemed impossible for them to all do business, and all the cafés and restaurants were full of people. We walked from the bus station to Car Street, which ran from a Hindu temple called Venkataraman, with something like an artichoke on top, all the way to the beach.

“Why did we bring girls to the festival?” I asked Tom as we sauntered down the crowded street, the girls looking at T-shirts and Ali Baba pants and chillums in all the shops on the way.

“I know, what were we thinking?”

Tom and I expressed our frustration at the plodding pace of the women through various analogies about leashed dogs, and suddenly said, “Hey look at that!” having seen the huge, colorful, inert shapes that loomed against the sunlight at the end of the road.

The chariots were really two massive pagodas on four tightly spaced wheels of bolted wood. One was thirty feet tall with five foot wheels, and the other pagoda was seventy feet tall with ten foot wheels. It looked as if an elephant would have trouble moving the large one. The beast heads that opened their jaws in the space between the wheels were smeared with saffron dye, and the dark wood of the pagodas were carved with idols all the way up, until they came to a platform—thirty feet off the ground on one, twelve on the other—with screens bearing colorful frescoes of the heathen gods. Above this, each chariot had a sort of onion dome formed by a thousand small pennons of red and white hung from a thousand sticks that sprung out from the central column.

Passing these monstrosities, we met Cat, who had taken a boat to the beach rather than the public bus and had been soaked by the rough seas. “I thought it would be easier,” she said. We walked slowly through the crowded passages out to the beach, past the Ganapati and Mahabaleshwara Temples, and past line-ups of Hindu pilgrims in white. The Indian crowds moved with the same graceless, haphazard eficiency that characterizes much of the country.

I cannot understand how those lines of people, hands on each others’ hips, shufling forward in step without any order but that which governs a mosh pit, cannot result in trampled corpses; nor how the dry thatch houses, with people burning trash in the alleyways and throwing cigarette butts everywhere, don’t burst into flames; nor how the wild, lawless trafic does not end in any fatalities. Not only do these chaotic situations function without incident, but they move faster than our ordered Western ways. It is a wild miracle endemic to India.

We emerged from this horde onto the strand just in time for the fleeting sunset, red behind the smog on the horizon, and we walked down, through lines of beggars seated on blankets weighted down with piles of rice and rupees, to sit in the sand. On the way back through the crowded passageways, which were this time so packed that I had Indians pressed into my chest and back, I was separated from the rest and saw only Tom’s head above the shorter crowd and Tamara’s back way ahead. Eventually Tom caught up with me, with his arm around a dried up old Indian woman in a red saree, about half his height.

“Dude,” I said, “where’d you get that old lady?”

Grinning ear to ear, Tom replied, “I don’t know, she came up to me. I think she wants me to help her through the crowd. She’s so little.” Tom had felt a hand grab his from behind. Thinking it a beggar or a pickpocket, he clutched the hand and brought it around only to find the old Indian woman on the other end. He led her safely through the crowded streets until they came to a temple, where she released his hand and waved goodbye. “That was really cool,” he said.

The great chariots did not move that night. Instead, just after dark, a smaller white pagoda, covered in Christmas tree lights with a lawnmower engine on the back, was pushed down the street, proceeded by a group of ecstatic drummers and two lines of torch-bearers. Two robed men sat in the throne on the pagoda. One was an Indian and the other a White man with a childish face and a mean, unhappy countenance. He had his hair shaved except for a streak in the back. As the Indians came up to him to receive a sort of flower blessing, we wondered if he was some yogi Lord Jim who had persuaded the savage natives to worship him as a god.

The real festival came on Monday, but it took a while for the boat to leave. Phi the Englishwoman had come into the Paradise Café that morning in her usual vest and skirt with a necklace of skulls around her neck and raptor claws in her ears like some queen of savages, and she announced loudly that she had arranged a boat to Gokarne Beach for fifteen people. “Paradise Beach will all go together,” said the countess. “We’ll show them! Happy birthday Shiva!” She sat down and called for a chillum.

Around noon I was ready to leave, not wanting to miss the festival entirely, but the countess and her court were content with their smoky sloth. Lola was sick with some fish from Manju’s and Tom and Tamara had left the previous day for a yoga ashram near Trivandrum. Tom and my parting, after a month on the road, was a brave one. We shook hands stifly over Steve the Austrian. “Come on dude,” I said, unsatisfied, and we circled around the Austrian and gave each other a manly, brotherly hug. The German and the Canadian walked off down the beach in their backpacks with a spring in their step, happy to leave Paradise Beach and get back to India.

So on the festival day it was just Cat, Martin of Wales, and myself, and to me in my agitation we also seemed like the only people who were not stoned. Phi was nowhere to be found. I went around and told Or and two Israeli girls and Steve the Austrian and his friends that we were leaving if they wanted to come, and picked up a few others on the way to the beach.

I called out from the surf to the three boatswains in their anchored ferries, but they just whistled and pointed down the coast. Eventually their three managers arrived and demanded one hundred rupees for passage from everyone, all fifteen of us. A tattooed German tugged at his long, sharp beard and said to himself, “They do this every time! I hate it! Every time it’s a contest to get it for fifty rupees. Why can’t we just get on the boat and go?”

Or and I argued with them for a long time. By the time we agreed on eighty rupees, Phi came down the stairs from the hall, her squire Shane in tow, and delivered some exhortation to valor in which I took no interest. She sat in the prow, the queen of savages, as the boat heaved and nearly tipped on its way north to Gokarne Beach.

It was such a hot, sweltering day that the heathens delayed their festival from noon until 4 o’clock. The small chariot already rested in front of the artichoke temple, but the seventy-foot-tall one had not yet been moved from its spot at the end of the road, near the beach.

The street between was full of people: throngs of locals, Indian women in their colorful sarees, Indian men in their dhotis, and Hindu priests in their orange robes, with many tourists in varying grades of Indian adventurism, from the pink-skinned northerners in neckerchiefs with their socks up to their knees, to tanned old souls with white mustaches and tattoos, in their leather vests and bright-dyed sarongs, hemp bags over their shoulders. Wallahs walked about with bunches of fist-sized bananas, perfect for throwing, and shouted, “Bananabananabanana,” in endless streams of syllables.

Around two, the police in their brown uniforms with their bamboo batons cleared the way in front of the grand chariot. Coolies set up ladders to the upper platform on both sides, where doors opened in the painted screens, and Hindu priests, young ones with shaved heads and old men in strange garb, climbed up inside in an endless stream so that it seemed impossible for the pagoda to fit them all. Everyone threw bananas at them. Children peaked out from the door and ducked back and tried to catch thrown fruit. To hit a child in the head with a banana was the highest honor of the day and delivered the greatest luck from Shiva. Men cleared out areas of the crowd so they could get in a full throw, hurling the bananas as they would the cricket ball.

The police pushed the mob back so the coolies could run out the two ropes, each thick as a man’s thigh, in front of the great chariot. The monstrous thing would be pulled by men. Clods of them crowded around each line so you could not see the ropes anymore. At the appointed hour, they began to heave and cry out. The crowd stuttered, in the street and on all the balconies and rooftops. Would they be able to move it? The great chariot jerked, and the wheels began to move. The crowd erupted with applause and bananas. The yellow specks streaked towards the screened platform and its open doors as the chariot began to lumber forward.

It moved in a circle of activity. Just in front of the rope pullers, Hindu priests and devotees shouted and threw each other in the air and whirled around in some spiritual ecstasy. The police kept them moving forward, and they shoved back the crowd ahead and to the side of the chariot. The street was barely big enough for the lumbering vehicle. In some places the wheels came within feet of the wall. There the shouting police pushed men back and beat them, and the men tried to make room to throw fruit. A Sacred Cow got caught in one of these meat presses and started to sway and groan and defecate.

Inside the circle of oficers, some servants cleared the road ahead of the wheels, and others darted around behind the vehicle with wooden blocks to jam under the wheels to keep it from rolling backwards. The pullers fought a tug of war against gravity. Robed Brahmins shouted mantras to keep them moving and in step. The street was not straight and the pavement was not even. The chariot often stopped as its course was corrected, and then it would start again with a shaking groan. All this time the bananas kept flying.

Here again I wondered how something like this could happen without any fatalities. I was hot and sweaty, following the chariot in the middle of the crowd of brown faces. I had bought a bunch of bananas for two dollars and threw them at the priests and tossed some to children. Eventually I offered them to some Indians and a swarm descended and snatched away as many of the remaining fruit as they could.

I saw Tall Andy and Vicky of Canada, dancing in such a tripped out ecstasy that the packed crowd had made room for them to flail about to the drummers’ beat. Vicky’s bare feet were coated in mashed bananas. Rhythm also danced in this crowd, but I could not see him over the Indians. Further back I saw the Baba’s walking stick, a yellow flower and orange ribbon tied to the top, and arranged around his shaman staff were Phi, Shane, Vince, and several knights of Paradise. I asked Phi, “How’d you do?”

“Real good,” said the Englishwoman, stumbling around the crowd, her face red and sweaty. “I hit so many priests. They warned me three times,” and turning to her squire she remarked, “The cops are going to come down to the Beach and beat our asses. You know this, right?”

At the end of the road, the chariot stopped under the artichoke temple. The coolies moved the ropes onto the other side of the chariot and did the same with the wheel blocks so it was ready to roll back the way it had come, the police cleared out another corridor through the packed crowd, and the whole procession began anew. It traversed the street again in the same chaos as before. As it came to rest I joined the mad press of people rushing to the front of the chariot to see the priests emerge from its front. They rushed down the stairs or climbed them slowly, and the mob heaved to touch their colorful robes. In the back, those priests waiting threw down the bananas they had collected to a waiting crowd, and pilgrims threw them back up, trying still to nail a priest.

I climbed under the chariot and duck-walked to the back, looking out at the feet of all those people who caught falling bananas and put them in plastic bags. They shufled for space on the road, which was covered in a banana paste. As I climbed out and moved back down the street I saw the smaller chariot coming. It’s onion dome of flags shook and the whole thing rumbled as its bearers raced down the street, not content with a slow pace.

“The cops are going to come down to the Beach and beat our asses. You know this, right?” At the time I had dismissed Phi’s remark as the ramblings of an egotist, but as it turned out Phi had not said, “I hit so many priests.” She had said police.

On that auspicious day, the stoner kings and hippie chiefs of Paradise, as they always did, went to Laxmi Café, an enclave of the kingdom in Gokarne where they could smoke upstairs, but our party wanted nothing to do with them at that point and avoided the meeting. There Rhythm and Phi, Tall Andy and Vince, with energetic exhortations and paranoid rhetoric, mustered all the knights and squires to retaliation against the police for the raid on Rhythm’s trance party.

According to Phi, this reckoning was a long time coming. “The politics are so old that there’s only one person, and that’s me,” she added, as if it were not obvious, “who remembers where it started, and I only know the story from other people.” She told me a story about Reiner, the German founder of Paradise Beach, and some legal incident between him and the police regarding a boat. It did not make any sense. Phi hopes to write a history of Paradise Beach, and I wish her well. All this chronicler can say is that on the second floor of Laxmi Café, the kings of Paradise shared hot words, then smoked, then went outside and bought bananas.

They decided on a point-based retaliation. Hitting a policeman’s head or hat with a banana was worth the most points, after a bombardment of the superintendent, who was still holding hostage that sound system. The dozen of them bought bananas by the bunch, paying anything that was asked, and hurled them at the police as if it would hurt. They laughed and ran away as if they were in trouble. Phi expected a violent response, expected to see the police “come down here with their fucking sticks and beat everyone fucking senseless,” and hoped to be gone by that time.

“I throw bananas at them every year,” Phi later told me, “but this year they took notice. They called me aside a few times, gave me three warnings. They’ve never done that before. They once put surveillance on me for three months, you know. It cost them a fortune. It was fucking annoying.”

“There are so many stories here,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Phi, “because we’ve lived a lifetime here. This is like a home.”

It had been a good day for Phi. Not only had the retaliation succeeded, but she had received a message from a girl she used to know.

“She’s a dificult girl,” said Phi that night. This girl, Adi by name, did not have an email address or a phone. She was a 22-year-old runaway who had left home without telling her family where she would go. Phi, the 45-year-old countess and a self-described raging lesbian, met her on Paradise Beach for a brief romance. Today Phi went into her favorite café in Gokarne, where she had taken Adi often, and found three messages waiting.

“That’s great,” said Martin. “True love always finds a way.”

“Oh she’s not my true love,” said Phi. “My true love is back in the UK,”—along with her ex-husband and her son, the ill-starred lad,—“but I like her, and I’m fucking crazy, and I can’t help myself. I see it as separate. This is me in India. It’s different than my life back home.”

The next day Phi said, “I’m waiting for the message that will change my life,”—her Indian life, I suppose. Paradise Café had two computers hooked up to the Internet via satellite and powered by the café’s solar panels. It was the only link to the outside world on the beach. Phi sat at one of them, writing a message, and just when she was about to send it, a skip in the power shut down the computer and she lost it all.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” she cried, jumping out of her seat and raging around the place, “I spent two fucking hours on that. I just had it fucking perfect! For fuck’s sake! I can’t believe this!” (and turning a crazy grin on one of the serfs on duty), “You owe me a beer.”

Rhythm had equally poor luck with romance, and the fault was not his own. A year before he had been engaged to marry a Teutonic princess, living in Germany, and was trying to get a visa to go there to take his vows. It took a long time. There were some problems at home he had to address, some issues in India, and the German authorities proved uncompromisingly dificult. finally the princess came herself to Paradise and said, “Are you delaying so long because you don’t want to marry me?” Rhythm dismissed her angrily from his kingdom.

“She doubted me,” he said, “and I couldn’t go through with it after that. It really broke my heart. Since then, I’ve had a rage inside me, and sometimes it spills out. Even here.”

One day Rhythm gathered all the knights of Paradise to his banner for a great quest of discovery. Two days had passed since the destruction of his techno rave, and he had decided to find a new beach, unspoilt, somewhere across the mountains. Here is a tale of the tragic impotence of these destitute kings!

It was the biggest thing to happen in the kingdom since Reiner the German, a legendary figure, discovered Paradise Beach. Phi, the noisy English countess of Paradise Café and a deputy of Rhythm, had been whispering about it the night before. She was sitting with a friend on the rocky outcropping at the far end of the beach where many people go to watch the sunset. “It’s a great beach,” said Phi, “No people, a good place.” Cat, who was taking photographs there, asked what she was talking about. “Can’t tell you!” announced the lesbian—a court secret!

The lords talked about it all night and worked themselves into a crusading fury. They spread the word: We leave tomorrow to find the Promised Land! In the morning Phi went around shouting in her hoarse voice a call to arms: “Eight o’clock, get up Paradise Beach!” Most people slept through it. She and Rhythm and a few other important figures met in the great hall of Paradise Café to wait for their mustered legions. Little Rhythm wore his usual white V-neck shirt, which looked more like a blouse on him. A few subjects drifted in. “You’re really going?” said one who looked around as if to say, “This is it?”

They waited an hour and a half. A total of seven disheveled warriors had pledged themselves to the cause, including its leaders. If Rhythm was disappointed, he hid it under his boastful egotism. “We’re going,” said Rhythm to the few lazy courtiers and Indian serfs hanging around. “We don’t know when we’ll be back. Who knows? We may stay overnight if we find the beach. We could be back tomorrow.” With that, little Rhythm led his six knights and squires up the mountain path, shorter and prouder than all of them, a Napoleon in pajamas.

I wish I could tell the Reader of the fanfare of conch blowing, but few noticed the departure of Rhythm and his army. Nor did many of his giggling subjects take note when the army returned that night an hour after sunset and Phi cried in noisy triumph, “We’re back!” having found nothing and given up the quest. They sat down in their familiar court just as the evening festivities would begin, and started lighting up joints under a pall of bitter disappointment and despondent blame.

They talked. The failure of the expedition was not any fault of their coterie. The fault rested with their subjects who in the hour of the kingdom’s greatest need had failed to answer the call of duty. Betrayers! Usurpers! Where were those good old boys they remembered from years past, and who were all these new faces, these Outsiders? The lords schemed quietly and then dispersed among the merriment, spreading bad vibes through their dashed hopes and scorn. The air had an anxious tension, like a high school dance after some incident of teenage insult in the hallway.

Into this situation we six unwittingly entered.

That night was our last night together. Tom and Tamara would leave the next day for a yoga course outside Trivandrum on the southern tip of India. Cat, Lola, and I would continue slowly in that direction after the festival, maybe not together, and we might never see each other again. We bought bulb-shaped bottles of rum from the Om Shakti Garden and mixed them with Coke on the sand bank as we watched the sunset and played music. Tamara and Tom and I lingered on the dune after it was dark. We looked at the stars and exchanged words about lunar colonies and gravity and fusion physics, the existence of God and the purpose of religion.

Beaming with drink, we went back to Paradise Café and sat around the speakers with some Israeli girls and Vicky the Canadian, talking and smoking and listening to music, and noticed the tense atmosphere, like the air before a thunderstorm, only as a vague static. Cat felt it more keenly. She was six years into a ten year plan to stop smoking, and she was the only one not on Soma in that Brave New World of Paradise Beach. “Maybe if I was stoned I would enjoy it,” she said later, “but now I just see all that’s wrong with it. Sorry if I’m being a downer.”

Cat sat down on the veranda, sipping beer among most of the lords and ladies of the court, and at some point, under influence of the drink, antagonized by the untempered and irritated comments of Phi and Jemal, the Welshwoman told the Englishwoman, “I don’t like you.” All the blame over the failure of the expedition, which was at its heart a childish rage over the loss of Paradise Beach to Outsiders—all that anger had found a scapegoat! Just as the Athenians took Socrates to trial over the loss of the Spartan War, so did the lords of Paradise turn on Cat and our party. Phi rose up like a tidal wave that washed, stumbling, over all those around her, and she screamed out obscenities in her hoarse, horrible voice. Jemal joined in the tempest.

Cat shouted back at the lords, as King Lear cried out into the storm, “This place is not real! It’s a bubble! You’re all living in a bubble!” and the evening dissolved into chaos!

Jemal informed us the next day (after Steve the Austrian found him lying in the dust on the mountaintop, too high on ketamine to get down by himself) that Cat was the most hated woman on Paradise Beach. Our entire party was despised and ostracized by any who noticed such petty politics. More insanely, we found ourselves under suspicion: five lords of Paradise suspected in their smoky paranoia that Cat was a spy! This secret council had spotted Cat taking photos and talking solemnly on their beach, and they thought she might be an investigative reporter or even a government plant—but planted by whom? Who could possibly care about Paradise beach?

I believe that Shane of Blackpool was one of the five. He was a shadowy figure, a grandee of the court who blew the conch every night at sunset. He had been coming to Paradise Beach for sixteen years, but he spent the summer at home, where he lived like a vagrant, selling comic books at festivals to save up money for the six months of Paradise, and all those drugs and all that fear over the loss of the only thread of stability in his life, which was the kingdom on the shore, drove him to his rampant intrigues.

We only learned of this distrust from Jemal, who was dispatched by the council to suss out the truth by whatever remained of his French charm amid his disconcertingly jocund character. He spent the evening talking to Cat and buying her beer at Manju’s in order to uncover her secret identity. Like most endeavors in Paradise, this one came to nothing, and the following day, the accusations dropped, and we were welcomed back into the fold.

Reader, we had been in Paradise for too long!

I didn’t meet Rhythm until the day before we left.

I was sitting at the table just above the veranda where there was a power adapter for the speakers, typing on my netbook, and a short man with a dark beard sat next to me with his Macbook. He had a white T-shirt on his puffed up chest and wore a blue sarong and was remarkably tanned. He said he was from Beverley Hills but that he had lived in Portland for a while and liked it a lot: “It’s got nice people, an active nightlife, youthful culture, and a lot of green. It’s a perfect blend.” We complained about Seattle, and he struck me as a coolly sarcastic personality.

“You’ve found your way to the top table,” said Cat as I joined her on the veranda.

“What does that mean?”

She told me that I had been speaking to Rhythm. I was amazed. “That was Rhythm?” I mouthed. Little Rhythm, the high king of Paradise Beach, was there working all that day on the tedious task of mixing some new party playlists on his Macbook and equalizing the volume on all the songs. He took it very seriously and considered himself an expert.

“We’ve all heard these songs,” he said of the Beatles songs that Lola had turned on that evening. “Put on something good, something that we haven’t heard before.” Was it the royal we he employed?

Rhythm nodded his approval when I put on a Grizzly Bear song, and later when I played some West African grooves he asked to take some of my music.

He sat there all night overlooking the revelers, and I drank UB around the fire: Uplifting Beer from Bangalore. Jemal came with his black guitar and sat on the veranda playing Beatles hits that the gathered crowd requested, and I sat in front of him setting a melody on my harmonica with some techniques Martin had shown me. finally Rhythm emerged from his cloister, bearing the printed lyrics for Sympathy for the Devil. Jemal protested, “But there are no chords.” “So,” declared the king,—“we have the words, just work it out.”

So we minstrels played for the king and his court. The man who was usually dressed like a wizard jammed a few circus songs on the guitar, and Jemal took over again and played until after 3 o’clock when we all went to bed.

“Yes, in a few days I leave. I’m leaving the paradise,” said the Austrian girl with the bladder infection.

“Eventually everyone has to,” said Tall Andy, looking up from his journal. “You can always come back. This is the beauty, no?”

This conversation, when I overheard it, profoundly disturbed me. O Reader, how can I express my happiness at leaving that place? I packed my things and set them in the great hall of Paradise Café as I said goodbye to Martin, Or, and the others. Lola and Cat would take the boat, and I would walk out. I wanted to. It was hot, near noontime, but I ran up the steep path to the ridge and down past the farms to the bus stop and sat there sweating in the shade by the water, playing my harmonica. I never once looked back.

In a few months, when the weather turns hot and steamy before the monsoon, Rhythm, Tall Andy, Vince, Jemal, Shane, and Or—those lords of Paradise, those tatterdemalion princes, will all return home to their jobs and their emails and their work contacts and their social events. The foreign envoys and courtiers will go home, and the serfs will find work elsewhere for the season. The Baba will climb up to his cave with the other sadhu and meditate. The great eagle will still be there, snatching fish from the glittering surf, building his nest, and laughing at those who pretend to usurp his throne, knowing that in the end they are all but jesters.

Talking shit about a pretty sunset,
Blanketing opinions that I’ll probably regret soon.
I’ve changed my mind so much I can’t even trust it,
My mind changed me so much I can’t even trust myself .
—Modest Mouse

The taxi to Pernem left around 11. I got up in no hurry and packed my new bag, a North Face—or should we call it Norse Faith? It was made in Thailand and cost me $12 after heavy bargaining. The purchase was necessary: my canvas haversack from Varna was falling apart. A cobbler had sowed part of it back together in Aurangabad, but all the stitches came out again. The Norse Faith pack fit my things better, and I could lock the zippers.

I broke my fast on eggs and coffee with the four girls at their hostel’s diner, and met the Quebecois Lola and the Venetian Paula in the alley courtyard of Tom and my apartments. Cat and Tamara would spend another day in Goa and meet us in Hampi later. On the way to the train station I bought a harmonica that I had long considered in passing from a music store on the main road, and I practiced playing chords while we sat on the platform, awaiting a late train. A drunk Dane came up to us and tried to play the songs in his head on Tom’s guitar. He kept pawing at my knees and saying things he thought witty and laughing. Eventually he wandered off.

Tom identified the Dane as a schizophrenic addict, having seen them in the hospital where he was a nurse. He had dealt with a few problems in that career. Just before leaving, a small Korean woman with dementia came in and had to be sedated. “She was a tiny woman,” said Tom, “and we gave her enough sedatives for five people. We tied her in a chair with a belt, but she would worm her way out. We saw her in the hallway and said, ‘What are you doing here Houdini?’ and gave her more drugs. She kept calling me her grandson.”

Our train took us south through the small state of Goa to its colonial center of Old Goa. We negotiated with the tuk-tuk drivers for a long time, and eventually got into a van with a Nepalese driver who hated the mountains and who would wait for us an hour in Old Goa and then drive us to the capital at Panjim. Monstrous churches and merchants’ houses and gardens filled Old Goa, once big as London Town and today silent as a graveyard, and crowded with Indian tourists and pilgrims. Inside the Basilica of Born Jesus, I looked in vain for the remains of Francis Xavier, a famed missionary.

Xavier died on the way to China, and the Chinese buried him with lime to hasten his decomposition; but when his brothers uncovered the remains they found them miraculously intact. Poor Francis did not remain this way. His right arm was sent to the Pope in Rome, where it wrote his name on a piece of parchment. A Goan Catholic woman bit off his right toe. They only found her out because blood sprayed from the wound and left a trail leading from the church straight to the woman’s house.

The Sherpa hustled us impatiently into his van when we returned from sightseeing, and he took us to Panaji. We bought tickets for a night bus to Hampi, a twelve hour trip that left at 7:30. In the time remaining, I wanted to eat some of Goa’s famous cuisines. I asked most everyone we passed, and all of them said, “Hotel Regal. Yes, good food.” We took a table in the cramped restaurant, which advertised itself as having “No AC.”

I split dishes of spicy red chicken vindaloo, milder mutton xacuti, and paneer masala with Lola (Tom and Paula being tragically vegetarian and unable to enjoy such treats), eating the thick dishes with roti flatbread and spoons. We had Kingfisher beers with dinner and rolled a spliff in the parking lot of the bus station with the Mexican that Tom and I had met in Goa; Tom abstained but bought a pack of Valium for 30 rupees, and all this combined made the bus trip to Hampi more tolerable than it would have been otherwise: wedged into chairs under the sleeping berths and over the wheels, our knees at our chins, our window broken and boarded up with plywood, it was like being in a coffin, but what do we luminous beings care?

The bus disembarked a few kilometers from the Hampi Bazaar. A great swarm of tuk-tuks descended from the road as the bus pulled into a dirt courtyard, and they parked themselves all in a mass. The drivers screamed at the passengers as they emerged. Haggling for a tuk-tuk was a grand effort, and we had to wait until most of the other passengers were gone to get a good price. Tom went with Paula to a pharmacy to administer her last rabies shot after a monkey scratched her in the north. I went with Lola through the dusty, touristy Hampi Bazaar to the river crossing.

Mike, the Scotsman who gave Tom his guitar, told us about a bungalow camp in Hampi called Manju’s Place. It was across the shallow River Tungabhadra that passed through that strange landscape, with its forests and temples and rocky mounds. The only way to cross the river was by an overloaded motorboat that went between the ghats on the temple side to a landing on the northern bank, which cost 20 rupees with luggage. The attempted Hampi bridge had fallen into the water, so the closest one was 45 minutes upstream. Every once in a while, men would attempt to offer a cheaper crossing by hand-paddled basket boats, but the mafia always shut down these operations. They still went on in secret.

The northern bank was the calmer, quieter part of Hampi, called Virupapura Gaddi. A road led up a hill from the landing, and broke left past German bakeries and bike rental shops and hotels, on to other roads through strings of villages to the cold lake of the reservoir and the Monkey Temple on Anjenadri Hill. Take the road from the landing straight instead of left and it passed a few bungalow camps and went into the rice paddies, then curved around and arrived at Manju’s Place on a sort of island surrounded by paddies and banana plantations.

Manju was a heavyset and mustachioed Indian in a collared shirt and colored dhoti who prayed every night before the pictures of Shiva and six other gods in the corner of the gazebo that was the center of his camp. It was carpeted with bamboo mats and ringed by cushions and low tables where people usually sat—European climbers there for bouldering and Australian and American hippies lost in sloth. On one side was the kitchen and Manju’s house, and on the other were the thatched roof mud huts, containing beds and mosquito nets, shaded by the lines of palm trees. We booked huts and lounged about in the gazebo, sipping coconut and banana lassies and eating pizza. Our greatest concern was spending too much time there in happy relaxation.

Just north of Manju’s Place, across a plot of paddies, loomed one of the strange stone hills of Hampi. Long ago, glaciers rolled the boulders around as our hands do pebbles, then melted, and left great mounds of rounded stones, infused with India’s verdant vegetation. The countryside rolls and swells with these strange mountains as the sea does with waves, and in the troughs between the land melted into the gridwork glass of rice paddies, divided by earthen lines wide enough for a man to walk, that mirrored the palm trees and the strange rocky landscape. Man had made it even stranger by stacking great boulders in a way that seemed impossible. Gravity should have tumbled those structures, but it did not.

That night we hiked up past the boulderers, climbing walls in their pointed shoes, to the top to watch the sunset. Monkeys played on the rocks below. Across the rice paddies and jungle we could see a gash where the Tungabhadra would be, and on the other side the ghats and the eleven-storied Virupraksha Temple in Hampi Bazaar. The night noises began in the rice paddies, the oppressive concert of frogs and insects, and the delicate mosquitoes emerged to feast. It seemed a fine place.

The next day Lola found some badminton paddles, but we could not find the birdie. The seven-year-old son of Manju’s Nepalese servant told us it was in a tree on one of the lawns. I grabbed some branches and started shaking it. “Hey,” I said, “there are ants here. What? Hey, they’re biting me! Whoa!” The red ants clung to my hand by their mandibles, and I scraped my hand on the grass to get them off, then said, “I’m not doing that anymore.” Lola went up to shake the tree and then she screamed and said, “Ants, ants!” and made the same resolution as I. Then the smiling Nepalese boy produced the birdie from a nearby bush.

His name was Ankit, although for a while I was calling him Hanky. We played badminton and Frisbee, and then Ankit sat in the gazebo and drew pictures while I wrote and some climbers smoked a spliff. The stone got too hot to climb in the middle of the day. Tamara and Cat arrived safely that day from Goa, having had a much more pleasant experience on the night bus than we did. I played my harmonica with Tamara on her guitar, and then we watched the sunset and still had not seen anything of Hampi.

We all came to India for different reasons.

Tom was in India to discover and change himself, through yoga and meditation and self-denial. He abstained from India’s worst points, its attractive vices, and actively sought out its best, the beauty of its villages and its people. He carried a small bag and was an astute, outgoing traveler. But he missed his girlfriend Jessica. “You know what,” he said, “I’m just not enjoying it. I keep thinking, ‘If only she was here,’ and I’m not going to waste my time if I’m not enjoying myself.” He decided to cut his trip short—he would spend a week practicing yoga at the ashram north of Trivandrum, fly to Delhi or Kathmandu and spend two weeks in the north, and bring forward his return ticket with Etihad Airways. (“Jihad Airways?” asked Lola, and Tom replied, “Yes, one in ten are destined!”) He wrote out the reasons for leaving so he could make it clear that it was not Jessica’s fault, that there would be no resentment, and he explained his points to the circle of girls we had around us, who offered their cooing sympathy. Tom was already planning his next trip, with Jessica’s company included.

Tamara was nineteen and from a farm in the Black Forest, where her family raised horses and cattle, and she had left to Africa two months before, to Zanzibar and Tanzania, names she spoke with happy reminiscence, and the coastal countries around. She was a pretty, ebullient girl of middling height. The henna tattoo on her wrist said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish, stay free.” She wanted something different from life than the grind of work, and wanted to see different things in Africa and India. In April she would fly to New Zealand to work on sustainable farms, but she considered pushing her flight back to spend more time in India, and she considered postponing her return home until a full year had passed and it was summer in the Black Forest again. Maybe she would go to Canada and pick apples. Her future was a bright place of possibilities, and she was not worried.

Laurence, or Lola, the Moroccan Jew from Montreal, missed her huge, hugely supportive family, who dealt in real estate and imported furniture. She was used to their administration of her problems and even relied on it. They had been surprised when she bought the plane ticket and even more when she left. “Alright, you’ve proved your point,” said her sister. “Now come home.” But Lola felt no need to. She was alone in India, making her own way, getting over the breakup of a four-year relationship. His room became her walk-in closet, the place where she feels the greatest peace. This extroverted girl filled her backpack with cheap Indian bangles and jewelry and contemplated a visit to Kashmir to buy the cheapest pashmina shawls in the world. Haggling was in her blood.

Paula was seeking something—perhaps the challenging isolation of ten days of silence in a vipassana meditation course in Tamil Nadu. “I don’t marry causes,” she said, “I play with them.” She played with a Goth cause in college, where she studied Turkish without learning much of the language. For five years she taught Italian in Istanbul, and now she did not want to continue it. “Were the last five years a waste,” she wondered, “and what will I do now?” Paula’s mother was English but her city was Venice, and she was as cynical, curious, and classy as most Italians. She had a journal that she filled with weird newspaper clippings from the Hindustan Times, and when she got it in her mind to do something, she was rudely tenacious. She struggled to be different, to ask questions that others did not. She asked me, “Have you ever left a place, satisfied that you’ve seen everything?” and after I’d answered said, sullenly, “Me neither.”

Cat was a photographer from rocky Wales. The photos she took for her degree were published in a book by a non-profit organization. “A thousand were printed, if you want to track them down,” she said with that quintessential irony of the Isles. She told Tom, who was practicing with his Nikon, that the best pictures told stories, and she was always seeking the perfect angle to tell some of her own, which she hoped to put together in a book when she got home. This directed her towards many curious situations as she had to get to know people, often the simplest or strangest people, before asking them for a photograph, and she was outgoing in her pursuit of this. She planned on going off on her own to India’s rarely visited rural regions.

“And why am I here?” I wondered each time the soul-searchers I had surrounded myself with brought up the topic. I had to get to Tokyo so I could get home, but India was more than a road for me. I wanted adventures and trials and was afraid of changing too much.

We rented bikes from a place near the river and rode them on through the rice paddies and villages, with palm trees and great mountains of rounded stones in the green, bright country. Indians in colorful clothes waved at us from the mud pathways that gridded the paddies. The size of our party made it slow and segmented, but eventually we parked our bicycles at a store under Anjenadri Hill, the white of the Monkey Temple visible at its craggy peak.

Through the Temple of Angina Devi, mother of the monkey god Hanuman, and past the beggars, a white stairway cut its winding way up into the mountain. Monkeys jumped across it, from wall to wall, on their way to cool caves to wait out the hot afternoon sun. They were already full of the bananas that tourists paid them for a photo—the remains littered the stairway, sometimes entire bunches that had vanished under a simian swarm—but would still stop for another fruit if one were offered or visible. A few of the primates considered the way with sagacious boredom.

The stairway passed under a low rock ceiling and up out of a shallow cavern, scaling steeply to the peak. “Welcome,” said the man seated on a blanket there, alms before him. The Temple of Hanuman was a low, white adobe building with a red stupa on top. Prayer flags fluttered noisily in the steep wind, and ribbons wagged from the sacred tree in the uneven courtyard. The countryside stretched on and on: the winding Tungabhadra, the stoney mounds, the ruined fortress of the Anegondi.

I went inside the Temple, past a squatting sadhu in the anteroom, through the main hall, and into the shrine of the monkey god, where before the colorful idol of Hanuman a Malaysian priest blessed me with a red line on my forehead. Tom and I sat down on the flagstone in the anteroom next to the bearded sadhu, bare-chested in his dhoti and turban, squatting on a mat with a knapsack to his left and a metal tin on his right. They called him Maraji, which means great man. He had left Persia just after the Revolution and had been to many places since then, and the others joined our palaver.

“Why are you here?” asked Paula.

Maraji replied thoughtfully, “I am unusual. You ask these questions, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Where are you going?’ but you only hear a little, and not the most important parts, of someone’s life. If I only say a little, you’ll get the wrong idea about me.”

The thickly-bearded Babaji called his disciples in for lunch and had us invited to join. We sat in two lines on the floor of the main hall and ate rice and cabbage with our hands and drank the well water that the monks gave us. The Babaji reclined silently under a blanket on the couch at the room’s far end. His hair went down to his chest, and his bright eyes watched us.

Maraji talked to Tamara in German, having lived in Austria for years, and Tom and I started talking with a Malay who, when we asked him, said that he was from “here.” Hanuman, he said, was an exuberant, youthful spirit, an aspect of Shiva who “jumps and flies,” and so his priests were open to travelers and had a sense of humor. When the Malay was not talking to travelers, he meditated, trying “to realize God, to become God.” He would meditate on the divine while watching incense sticks burn, and he knew by this devotion the time it would take to burn sticks of certain compositions or brands.

The most interesting part of it was that the Malay lived in the temple for only a part of each year, and outside of there was a television executive in Singapore, producing movies and shows, wearing a suit, dealing with contacts, and loving the city, ever his home. “But cities are transient,” he said. “Here, it will be here forever. Here I am free, and here I will perish in my physical form.” The story of how he came here “is an epic on its own,” but the Malay was satisfied that he had discovered the light of belief. He told us, “You give up your body for Him, for your belief, and take what he gives you. It doesn’t matter how difficult it gets, because He is behind you.”

“In your opinion,” asked Tom, “is it possible to connect with God without believing the stories?”

The Malay replied, “There are in fact a million ways to realize God, as long as you do it in the right way.” He respected equally Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, and Hanuman as aspects of God, that the Hindus call Rama. I mentioned the similarities between many messiahs, and he said, “They aren’t similar, they are the same.” Just as the Singaporian TV executive in his business suit and mannerisms was the same as the Hindu sage in his dhoti, scarf around his neck, living on a mountaintop in Karnataka.

After lunch, Maraji and the Malay left us, and we went back down the mountain to our bikes. Cat had gone to a village and photographed the locals. Lola’s tires had deflated. Most of us rode on to the reservoir, up a steep incline since a great embankment retained the water. Tom, Tamara, and I found a rock with a sheer face fifteen feet high and jumped off it into the welcoming cold of the lake. We lay on the rock sunning ourselves and talking to the other travelers there. Lola and Cat arrived in a little basket boat, and Paula came as well. The Venetian wanted to jump, but her terror allowed her only to the edge of the cliff.

“It’s good for you,” said a Briton. “Experiences like this are a shock to the system. They get your adrenaline flowing for an instant. When you do something like jump off a cliff or go skydiving,” he explained, it resets your body’s adrenaline floor. “Otherwise crossing the street or going to work can trigger your shock and become terrifying. So doing reckless things makes you less stressed.”

Our group extended and divided itself on the way back to Manju’s Place. Tamara and I dropped off our bikes at the rental shop and walked back along the rice paddy road, then turned and went up the rocky mountain north of the bungalow camp, where I’d seen the sunset with the others two days before. I asked the German if she liked India, and she said she did and did not. “It is beautiful,” she said in her lyrically earnest accent, “but so ugly as well. I saw poverty in Africa, worse poverty there, but there vas not so much wealth there alongside it.”

India, like Man and like God, is so many things, such a multiplicity of contradictions, and also one. I agreed with Tamara and would say further that it is impossible to put a finger on India without devoting one’s life to its realization.

After dark, accompanied by a cold shower and a chicken fajita, I went with Tamara and Lola to the Tipi, down past the bakeries and bike shops on our side of the river. Some Brits told us there would be a party there, but really it was hard to distinguish from the gazebo at Manju’s Place. Stoners lounged around on cushions, sipping beers and fooling around with instruments. Eventually a band formed, based around a well-plucked Turkish dulcimer, with a guitarist, a drummer, and a flutist. Lola and I had Kingfisher beers, and Tamara, a German who hates beer, had a chai. She saw a chess board on one of the tables and challenged me to a match, and after I had beat her and Lola, a contemplative Spaniard with a thick beard approached.

The two girls took my flashlight and went back, but I stayed to finish the game. Before moving, the Spaniard, who was seated in the lotus position and was very stoned, would breath deeply, straighten his back, and close his eyes. He warned me off a few foolish moves, and then told me, “You know what a sectarian is? It is someone who sees only one sector of the world. You must open your mind to see more sectors. Turn the board around and look at it from my point of view. See what I plan to do.” But his mind was too open. He beat me and shook my hand, and I walked back to Manju’s in the moonless twilight.

Every morning at around 8 Laxmi the elephant goddess descends the steps of the ghat or landing, and is bathed in the waters of the Tungabhadra. The day after we visited the Monkey Temple, our group split up into separate parts. I left early to see the goddess bathe and met Tom at the riverbank where the ferry landed to take us across.

Great flocks of schoolchildren in their uniforms waited on the ghat, not for the arrival of the goddess as I originally guessed, but to brush their teeth in the river water under the guidance of their teachers. They rushed down in groups and splashed around in the shallows. Upstream, women washed themselves and their clothes, men defecated and dumped their trash, and two boys threw in a dog they had shot because it went crazy. They did not have enough money to burn the corpse. It would have cost $1.

We went to the road that ran along the top of the ghat for chai and idli. Paula was telling me about how stories lose their interest the more they are told, same as people and conversations the more familiar they become, and then I said, “Hey look,” and pointed to the great black thing lumbering down the stairs. “Oh my God,” the Venetian cried out, “an elephant!”

We followed Laxmi down to the river, where she weaved between the oblivious washing women. The beast was black with a mottled pink nose between two short trunks, a foot long each and shaped like dull knives. A golden bell hung round her neck, and the remnants of yesterday’s painted symbols clung to her flanks and ears.

With a hooked stick, the mahout riding on the elephant steered her into the Tungabhadra and submerged her fully, so that it was only the mahout in his turban riding above the current. He took the elephant back into the shallows and turned her on her side in the water. Some servants joined him with brushes to scrub the elephant’s flank, and then she rolled over so they could get the other. The hand-shaped end of her trunk stuck above the water like a periscope. Laxmi rose and washed herself with water from her trunk, and she yawned and hung her mouth open with pleasure as the servants scraped her hooves. She let the mahout back up onto her neck with a raised leg, and then, splashing water with her trunk, the elephant climbed back out and onto the stairway.

Tom, Paula, and I followed Laxmi and the mahout up to a street alongside the Virupraksha Temple, with a deep, empty pool between us and the eleven-storied tower. I went up and pet the hard and bristled leather of the beast’s nose, and Laxmi lifted her trunk towards my bag, looking for rupees or sweets. She must have been ten feet tall. She balanced the mahout’s hooked shaft in a fold of her trunk and sometimes used it to scratch her legs. It was strange being near something so gently humongous and so sacred as the elephant, an incarnation of Laxmi, wife of Ganesh and goddess of wealth.

The mahout, whose name was Raju, came out and told us that Laxmi was a good elephant. With buckets of dye, red and saffron and white, he painted the Om and the eyes of Shiva on Laxmi’s ridged face and on her trunk and ears, and he said she was 21-years-old and had spent her first ten years in a forest before being tamed. Laxmi considered us with wise, lively eyes and swung her trunk playfully or sucked on the tip with her curling mouth. For a coin she would give a kiss. For a ten rupee bill, Laxmi delivered an elephant blessing, laying her trunk in full on the pilgrim’s head. She tossed the money back to her master with the trunk that received it.

Tom went into the mahout’s house, Paula went off to find a newspaper to clip, and I wandered the long, dusty, crowded street of the Hampi Bazaar, which I loved for its hodgepodge and lively character, eating when I felt like it and enjoying the sunshine. I walked up to the temples on the rocky hill south of the Bazaar and played the celebrity amongst schoolchildren, then came down again into the packed noise.

Those who beg for scraps on the streets of India are a ubiquitous part of the country. Every Indian traveler has to come to terms with this poverty, and with a sense of helplessness in the face of it.

There are haggard, desperate-looking women, whose emaciated features and ragged, faded, immaculate saris say, “I will die proudly, if the Samaritan passing by is not a good heart, for that is God’s will.” From their seat on the sidewalk, they smile and hold up wrinkled hands. Their husbands or fathers are dead, and they have no skills but mothering. Some of them hold children, for whom they show an obvious and tragic affection, and they beg with a much more intense desperation.

The children look like monsters with frazzled hair and bare, dirty feet, and they pat their bellies and open their mouths like baby birds. Some carry little siblings in the crook of their arm. Some follow the rules of a Beggar King or Fagan and can only take alms of food, though they will take flowers or treats, too. These are the street urchins. Asking foreigners for one school pen or one rupee is second nature to most of India’s children, who are otherwise its friendliest and most earnest and affable inhabitants. Even the poorest will cry, “Hi! What’s your name?” and give their own with wild grins. They are very polite and wave goodbye.

The men begging in most places are sadhus, holy men worthy of respect, who have taken voluntary vows of poverty in their old age and live off what others put in their begging bowls, their only possessions. They wear orange robes or plain dhotis and cover themselves in ash and never cut their hair. In Hampi three of them wear costumed liveries in vibrant colors, dangling with apparati and ornaments, and they demand money for a photograph. The lazy begging men go to Bodghgaya or Dharamsala, and like statues of dead men they line the paths that the Buddhists walk. The good monks smile and put a coin into each of the hundred cups on their way to the shrine.

Our group did not remain separated for long. Around one I met Paula beneath the tall Virupraksha Temple. Tom rode by on a rented bike. He had just been down to the temples at the far end of the Bazaar, where a circle of sages invited him to join their chillum-smoking circle, and they prayed to Shiva as they smoked. A policeman arrived with an angry look, and Tom snuck out when he was not looking. He was still jittery with fear of Indian prison.

We went down the road to the first restaurant that was full of Indians and sat out front, talking to children. Within an hour, Lola and Cat and Tamara were also there eating with us, and the owner had invited us to learn how to cook Indian food the next day and was playing chess with Tommy.
After the Indian won he challenged Tamara, but he was busy with new customers so I took over and got very into it. All the others had left by the time Tamara and I finished our game. “I’ll have to keep traveling with you until I beat you,” said the German. We went down the road into the Virupraksha Temple.

In a courtyard of stone, the goddess of wealth was hard at work blessing the faithful and tossing their coins and bills back to Raju the mahout, who sat cross-legged in the corner behind her, the elephant’s benedictions enjoyed equally by Western pilgrims with their cameras and Hindus with their red dots and frightened children. Monkeys climbed all over the walls, and Hindus went to different altars in different parts of the complex to receive their pooja, a sort of blessing, by rubbing idols or painting themselves with dye or eating treats or washing the face in smoke and in rose water.

Finished with temples, we walked down to the ghat and the ferry landing. The last ferry left between 6 and 7, and after that, crossing the river became very expensive. Tamara suggested that we had enough time to visit the Mango Tree. We followed the river west on a cobblestone trail into the jungle.

I had first heard of the Mango Tree from a Belgian in Amman. He described it as a place downriver from the temples, a series of tiers under a huge old mango tree overlooking a jungle idyll and a perfect sunset, with good food—he ate all his meals there—and a swing hanging from the arbor. Going south from Bombay, I had asked people who came from Hampi about it and they said, “Yes, I went there, but I never noticed a swing.” It was with great satisfaction and relief that on entering I noticed a swing hung from the mango tree, which had been banned after too many children warred over it.

Tamara had a salad and I a pakota, a savory pie in a fried chapati. Well sated, we went back to the landing and took the ferry across. Fireflies glittered the undergrowth around the trail, and the frogs had begun their din. The gazebo at Manju’s Place was crowded with climbers and hippies and backpackers. I sat within the circle of tables and told stories of the sadhus.

“They are mendicant sages,” said I,—“wise men. When a Hindu turns fifty—okay, around fifty—when he retires, then,”—I corrected myself, responding to interruptions,—“after he’s raised a family, mastered a profession, and all that, he renounces everything and all his possessions except his clothes and a begging bowl and a water tin. He puts on an orange robe or a dhoti, and he stops cutting his hair, and he walks the country, begging for what he needs to survive. He is a sadhu. The sadhus devote their life to personal purification, to improve their karma. Some walk all the way to the holy city of Varanasi to die. If you die there, you escape the cycle of rebirth. They say the roads to Varanasi are lined with corpses and fires.

“Some sadhus do strange things,” I continued. “I heard of one sadhu who held his left hand on his head like this, until the hair had grown over it and it was fused to his scalp. He couldn’t move it at all. There is one who stares into the sun every morning. At first it was only for a while, but every day he would stare for longer and longer, until now he stares into the sun for twenty-five minutes every morning. No, he’s not blind. Apparently a little sunlight in the morning when it’s weak is good for you. My friend told me about a sadhu who drinks his urine every morning—”

“That’s common,” said Lola, adding that the president and several ministers also drink their piss.

“The sadhu says it’s very healthy for you,” I replied, “but I’ve never tried it. He persuaded a Frenchman to do it, at least. Who knows? Maybe it works.”

The next day we rented scooters and drove them all over the roads and temples south of the Hampi Bazaar. Tom had one of the skeletal vehicles and I another, and Tamara drove one with Paula, for despite her heritage the Italian had never learned to handle one.

I immediately took to it and began driving like a maniac without hands or with only one, swerving past tuk-tuks and herds of Sacred Cattle, honking at everyone I saw in the manner of the natives. My experiments climaxed in an attempt to drive the scooter as I would a motorcycle, leaning the bike into the curve and turning the handles away from it, which spilled me out in the dirt near the Elephant Stables. Tom, the nurse, took a look at the shallow cuts on my leg and said, “They’ll be alright.” But when would my pride recover?

We had driven through a dry, rocky, green country south of Hampi and ended up on dirt roads around the Elephant Stables and some old fort, where we parked in the shade of a tree and bought coconuts. The coconut-wallah chopped the caps off with a wickedly curved blade and put straws inside. Once the liquid was drunk, he cut them open so we could eat the crisp white meat. A policeman stopped our caravan as we tried to leave the stables, saying we had to pay for a ticket, but we argued with him for a long time. Eventually I started my engine and drove around him, which was what most Indians did when they saw a police roadblock and wanted to avoid paying baksheesh.

For a while we lost ourselves in the dirt roads trying to get back to the highway. We eventually found our way back to the Hampi Bazaar and settled down at the restaurant where we had lunch the day before. “I feel bad going to the same places over and over,” said Tom, “but once I find a good place, I don’t want to leave.” I agreed, and said, “I’m a creature of habit.”

Tom was not shaving for the whole of his trip, and his beard had got so long that he carried a comb around in his pocket for it. “I wish you guys could see me without my beard,” he remarked. We asked to see his passport photo, and he dug around in his bag for it—but it was not where it was supposed to be! A flood of fears. Where did I lose the document? Who has stolen it? How will I get home? Where can I stay without a passport? Tom left immediately to resolve his anxiety. Travelers carry only a few possessions and must know where those possessions are at all times, especially the essential and expensive ones. (Tom found the passport in an envelope with his tickets home, where he had left it after trying to change his departure.)

Tamara and I played another game of chess, and then the German went off to teach the Italian how to drive a scooter. (The scene was as follows: Tamara, sitting on a rock, reading her book, while Paula drives in circles about an empty dirt lot, shouting regularly, “How am I doing?” “Yah yah, gut gut,” said the German, until she got on the back of Paula’s bike for the drive home, and then she cried, “Slow down!”) I took my scooter and drove it down the dusty road of the Hampi Bazaar that ran down from the Virupraksha Temple to a mountainside at the far end.

The road ended into a long courtyard between two ruined colonnades that barely kept back the jungle. At the end of this stood a temple, and beyond that a long, uneven stairway that went up to a sort of gateway in the crook of the mountain: two raised platforms on either side of the trail, each supporting eight columns to hold up the flat roof.

A man was sitting there on the right platform, leaning against a pillar. He wore a checkered shirt, gray striped pants, and a black baseball cap, with a digital wristwatch and beaded bracelets on his wrists. The weariness and energy on his face made his age entirely indeterminable—somewhere between 25 and 40, I’d say. He held out his hand and we shook. Holding onto my hand, he sang a song about animals or something, and then patted the stone next to him and said, “Up here. No, no way,”—as I made to walk around behind the temple, instead urging me to jump up right there—“Up here. Yes good.” He grabbed at my hand, then stopped and said, “Shoes.” I took of my sandals and before he could say anything threw them in the dirt below. The stone would have been fine. (O India, was this the spiritual experience I was so ready to receive?)

Rabi Kumar, for that was the fortune teller’s name, smiled with rotten teeth and vibrant, penetrating eyes, and his words were sure and confidant. We spoke in a sort of pidgin English that the Reader may find a curiosity.

“How long in India?” he asked.

“Three month. Go to Kerala.”

“Three month good. India bigum.”

“Very big, India.”

“Let me see, let me see.”

He took my hand and studied the thumb very carefully and exclaimed, “Ah, eagle. Eagle, very good. Know eagle?” and with hand gestures he explained, “Snake, hsss, eagle comes, schwoot, snake, yah! Away! You are brave man! Strong man!”

After such flattery, I was ready to believe any fortune Rabi told me. Though not attired as a soothsayer, in paint and sagely robes, he held all the merry gravity the Reader expects from one with a magical trade. He looked at one line on my palm, asked me my age, and told me how old I would be when I died. Another crease, confirmed by some swirl on my scalp, told him my marital future, how many children I would have, and whether they would be sons or daughters. “Do I want to know all this,” I thought, “or isn’t it just rubbish?” Rabi told me of the future, but Reader, how can I tell thee? This business of fate should not be spoken of so indiscreetly.

“Money coming, money going. Coming, going. Always money. Ah! Black, black!” cried Rabi, seeing something on my palm and glancing from those lines to my face. “No wear any black! No good for you. Hmmm. Every morning, wake up, drinkum half bottle water. Good, full power. Give you power, okay? In night, cannot sleep, sleep no come, okay? Say, ‘Om nom shivaya, Om nom shivaya,’ say seven times and you sleep well. It’s good. Oh! You be careful of taxi.”

“Indian taxi?”

“No, Indian taxi good. America taxi. Taxi in street, you cross street, boosh, yah!” he clapped his hands, then pointed at me. “Three times taxi comes. Yellow and black. Three time, be careful. Trouble for you, I am telling, okay?”

“Yeah, it’s good, you know?”

I asked Rabi about the life expectancy he had foreseen for me, and he replied, “No, no years if no careful. Ahhh!” he exclaimed, seeing some scratches on my foot from my fall on the scooter,—“Whatum this? Careful, careful! You must be careful!”

Rabi told me, “You know mantra? Mantra good, much power.” He drew something on his hand like a necklace with a capsule and pointed to the capsule and said, “Put things in, good things, to power and protection, good luck. You want? Make two, one for wearem, one for home in America. Schwoot!” Rabi told me to return to the gateway the next day with some incense and some kind of explosive white powder that I did not know. “No worry,” he said, “I buy, you no understand. Incense, incense! Ten in morning!”

I shook his hand, got my shoes, and made to continue on up the road. “Monkey temple ahead,” said Rabi. “Give no money, only want alcohol.”

Beyond the gateway the road went on in coarse flagstone through cactus and scrub and the lonely rocks. The scenery grew more solitary and exotic the further I moved from the dusty Bazaar. I found the Hanuman shrine, a painting of the monkey god in a cave, and the two little old ladies in front asked me for baksheesh. The road went on until it came to the other side of the mountain and wound into a vale where there lay an abandoned temple compound, surrounded by the encroaching jungle. It was named Achyutaraya, and it resembled a fable of India.

I went back the next day as Rabi instructed. I arrived at ten and sat on the platform of the gateway where I’d met the fortune teller, who was not there yet. I took out a packet of incense and lit two and dug a hole in the hard dirt for them with my pocket knife and put them there so they looked like a smoking V. It seemed like the correct thing to do. Then I took out my harmonica and played a few melodies. Down below, past the long colonnades, the Bazaar looked clean and calm in the distance and the morning light.

After a while, when the incense had burned down a half an inch, I saw Rabi coming up the stairs. He climbed up onto the platform and sat across from me.

“Hi Jon.”

“Hi Rabi. Have mantras?”

“Slowly slowly. Fastly no good.”

“Shanti shanti,” I said.

“Shanti shanti” means “peace peace,” and is the same as the Greek’s “siga siga” and the Arabs’ “shway shway.” Slowly slowly, we must move. With methodical, sacral care, Rabi took a spool of thread and a small newspaper sachet from his shirt pocket. He unfolded the sachet carefully and showed me the two metal capsules inside, like steel painkillers, then carefully refolded it and put the package back in his shirt. He took the string and measured out four lengths of it, each a foot long, and cut it on the coal of the incense and tied the ends deftly so all four lengths ran side-by-side. He did this a second time and then set both lines aside.

Now he took out his cell phone and selected some chanting song from it, which played out hoarsely over the wind through the mountain. The fortune teller took one of the capsules from his pocket and loosened it and gave it to me to open. Inside, he put a line of ash from the incense sticks, and he closed it back up with a grin. He tied one of the strings to it by the middle of the line, so that there was a length of string, each of four threads, running out to either side, and then he tied together the four lines with seven knots, like a Norn weaving my inescapable fate into a thread. He wrapped the mantra up in this braid and waved it through the incense smoke and blew on it.

He did this with the second capsule as well, and wrapped it up in the same bit of newspaper and tied it up with a string. He told me what to do with it when I returned home, and told me not to tell anyone about the rite or it would be “trouble for you, I am telling, okay? Say to no one. Do not tell. Your mother, she will say, ‘What you do?’ Tell her, ‘Shanti shanti, mother,’” and he waved a calming gesture.

The first mantra, though, he tied around my neck. “It falls off,” he said, “no problem. Just throw. After seven weeks, you throw in sea, or in river, schwoot.”

The incense was nearly burned out by this time. Rabi put some of the last of its ash on my forehead. By some coincidence that lends credence to this rite, the ceremony concluded, the music stopped from Rabi’s cell phone, and the embers of the incense consumed themselves, the last of the smoke floating up in lonely, disintegrating plumes, at the very same instant. What had inspired me to light the incense without instruction, so that it timed things so perfectly? The fortune teller smiled and said, “You see?”

“Magic?” I asked.

“No magic!” he cried, offended. “No magic man! Only power!”

The fortune teller took another look at my palm and my scalp, as a doctor will habitually check over the pulse and pupils of a patient who comes in with a sore foot. He pointed out again the eagle and the age and marriage lines, then said, “You travelum. Have good mind, you. Parents no understand good mind. Shanti shanti, okay?”

Despite Rabi’s warnings, I showed my friends my new mantra and the bracelets that the fortune teller gave me, elastic bands with beads and wood. What harm could it cause, so long as I keep the important things secret? “Are those swastikas?” Lola asked of some of the charms on a bracelet. “That’s great.”

The four girls left that day. Paula would go to Bangalore, and from there to some vipassana retreat in Tamil Nadu, and Lola, Tamara, and Cat would take a night bus to Gokarne on the coast. Tom and I would go there the next day, shanti shanti. In the hot afternoon after they left we rented bikes and rode up to the reservoir to jump off the rock and swim, enjoy the cold water and hot sun and the company of a gang of Australian girls. When they arrived they had the rock to themselves, but the tuk-tuk driver who took them up there had called all his friends. Presently, six Indians in slacks and collared shirts watched them awkwardly from five feet away, took pictures with their cell phones and showed them to each other.

A few hippies, with a measure of ritual, passed around a chillum, a tube with a cloth filter on one end and embered herb on the other. They pressed the filtered bottom end to their foreheads before inhaling from it. Tom and I smoked and blasted off down the road on our rickety bikes. We stopped to consider the pretty sunset that worked its way down into the mountains across the reservoir, everything carmined, then steered down the steep hill of the embankment. Our bikes rattled as if they would fall apart. With all that incautious inertia, we sped around tuk-tuks and motorcycles and Sacred Cattle in the busy village marketplace, full of strange activity and blaring horns and people. Children gave us high fives and cheered as we passed.

O India, you deceiver, what are you, really? Are you kind or wicked? How do you treat your pilgrims, your penitents? Where will your roads take me?

There are few more melancholy sensations than those with which we regard scenes of past pleasure, when altered and deserted.
—Sir Walter Scott

They wore the strangest clothes, loose and dyed bright in unmatching indigo and aquamarine, belted by fanny packs full of cigarettes and hash and music fliers, almost like costumes, and to some healthy few on vacation from a career, it really was a guise. Others were old and tired, with the sallow, sunken features of addicts and long scraggly hair, the women all Janis Joplin and the men all Willie Nelson, and they had been in India for a long time.

They reminded me of Diogenes the Cynic, who lived as a dog in the streets of Corinth, sunbathing nude, sleeping in a bucket, eating and defecating and fornicating wherever nature dictated. When King Alexander asked him, “Diogenes, I have heard of you, now what can I do for you?” Diogenes replied, “Could you move to the right? You’re blocking my sun.” He was making a statement: mankind can be much happier with a simpler existence, as Adam and Eve in the Garden. The hippies of Goa have all of Diogenes’ slothful vices and none of his witty virtues, those lazy, worthless people, accepted into paradise for the foreign money in their pockets.

How critical can I be, O Reader, while still conveying how much I enjoyed myself in Goa? Of all the towns along the coast of that old Portuguese colony, we turned down crowded Anjuna and the sleepy south and decided on Arambol, a busy hippie enclave in the far north. It had been so highly recommended (and the other towns so often scorned) by fellow travelers, always the best source of information, and sounded like the best mix of lazy days and active nights. The last person to advocate Arambol was the Venezuelan hypnotist who put me into a trance in Bombay and failed to find any evidence of a past life. “You’ll love it!” he cried.

Goa looked primeval as we approached it in the train. The jungle on the other side of the open sores of plowed earth was a solid wall, a jagged roof of verdant green limned in white over a thick nest of palm trunks so shaded as to appear a murky midnight purple. It took us a few hours on local buses to get to Arambol: a dusty road, crowded with Russians on speeding scooters and chugging Royal Enfields, lined on either side by touristy shops that sold beaded jewelry, cheap folk instruments, braided bags, leather fanny packs, and hippie garb, medieval in aspect and bizarre in coloring. Posters and rugs displayed Ganesh, Krishna, Marley, Guevara, Lennon, and all the other hippie deities, including the icon of the bud. At the end, this street turned down past a few more shops and spilled out through a parking lot of scooters onto the golden strand.

Tom and I found accommodation at this corner, a minute from the beach, when a man called to us in a deep voice, “Need rooms? Where you stay?” We bargained hard for two shacks in the alleyway and received them for $3 each. I shared mine with a few cockroaches and with the rumor of a giant black rat. In the mornings, a Sacred Cow walked by on a regular errand. He had the long horns, dangling chin, and hearty hump of India’s strange cattle. Many of them wandered the beach, between the restaurant tables, lit up by candles at night, and the lounge chairs just above the surf, where Tom and I spent most of our time. We turned away the touts who sold necklaces and massages, and who preferred female clients anyway.

The beach still had a natural feel to it—no concrete and glass, only sand and palm. Sharp-prowed fishing boats, heaving with nets, with a single long pontoon lashed to the side, were beached between the deck chairs. Unobtrusive restaurants were built of thatch between and often around the trunks of the untouched coconut palms. To the north a high tiered plateau lowered into the water and became a series of jagged rocks. Parasailers coasted over it on curved wingspans. Across this there was a freshwater lake, divided from the sea by the thin white line of a sand bar. To the south of Arambol the beach curved around a bulge in the coast and went on toward Morjim and Anjuna.

And, thank the Muses, the trance and house music so ubiquitous, so overwhelming in most young coastal retreats like this one, that was all kept away, and there was only the surf and the noise of people. People lived in Arambol—long-term hippies and contented locals who followed the Goan code of susegado or easy living, living off the casual visitors. I would say that over a fifth of Arambol’s foreigners were there for months. They kept the place nice and lively and livable. The Brits and Russians who came to party rudely and drunkenly, and whom the Goans could not stand, went elsewhere.

That first day we sat on the beach and swam, and at night we sat in the little courtyard outside our apartments, under a net to catch falling coconuts, and listened to a band jamming in the restaurant across the alley, which lit up the palm trees with a spectrum of lights. We thought it a fine life. On the beach we picked out and ate a red snapper and a hamsi, and on the main street we met a Mexican and went with him to Coco Loco, where his Indian friends asked us, “Do you know any card tricks?” Tom showed them a good one, and the chief magician, taking this as a direct challenge to his skill, performed several.

I had very little interest in yoga—that glorified stretching seemed so vain and New Age—but Tom, who had been doing it for four years, had me in a courtyard with Jo, the English yogi he’d met on the beach the day before, going through the routines the next morning. We were her only students in that quiet part of the season, which gave her more opportunities to forcefully stretch my muscles in ways I would otherwise have appreciated as torture. It was Tom’s twenty-fifth birthday, and this was the start of his perfect day, which turned out to be a sound one for me as well. After the course, Jo recommended Shree Ganesh, down at the far end of the main shopping street, for breakfast.

Shree Ganesh was a narrow coco-thatch hut built around a half a brick wall. Branches and bamboo and two intersecting tree trunks hold up the peaked roof, covered in carpets and fans, and posters decorated every available surface of the walls: icons of Ganesh and Shiva and ads for everything Goa had to offer. Plastic tables with leather table covers wobbled on the uneven dirt and under the strain of eating, as each was crowded with flies and food and seated regulars, shirtless hippies and long-haired musicians and tattooed yogis, strangers sharing conversation over the few simple surfaces.

The only kitchen was the little cart set outside on stacked bricks, the spokes of its tires rusted away, with a gas stove on top where Ganesh filters chai and folds omelets into sandwiches served on metal tins. He lives in the back behind a curtain, where his wife mixes cut fruit and muesli for the health conscious. I ordered an egg and cheese sandwich and chai and sat back to look at the ads on the wall, for classes in Yoga, Tai Chi, Ayurvedic massage, Tibetan healing massage, guitar making, coin and card tricks, kitesurfing and windsurfing, and for trance parties and tattoo parlors and orphaned kittens. Tourists in tuk-tuks and Russians on scooters rushed by in a great hurry, but inside I found some measure of peace and gratitude for good, simple, Western food.

We set ourselves up in chairs on the beach: swam, read, listened to music, talked about the future, about retiring to a mansion in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela and ending life in that “sublime uneventfulness” I enjoy so much, and we dined after the brilliant sunset on hammerhead shark and kingfish. Tom suspended the terms of his clean-living to enjoy fish, beer, and charas on his birthday. We were feeling very fine, walking under the twilit palms to the sounds of surf and jungle, trying to find a cab to Morjim. That night was a full moon, the first and brightest of the year.

The Full Moon Parties of Goa are endangered legends. There has been a noise curfew in Goa for the past ten years, ever since the locals got tired of the heavy bass on the beach keeping their kids up all night, and strung out Brits lying on the road between home and the school. A few clubs get around this. Coco Loco, with its good police connections, hosts a party late every night. Other ventures must bribe the police. The place we went to, Blue Waves, with its thirty hour Марафон beach festival, had apparently paid a lot of baksheesh.

Tom and I negotiated a cab there and arrived after midnight, when the marathoners were just arriving. The Goan trance party looked as a rave would look in a tightly budgeted made-for-TV movie. Russians danced alone on the wide, smokey floor, lost in their own world of tribal beats and drugs, into which I put my feet. Neon posters plastered the back wall, and opposite that, across the dance floor, people were passed out in a string of pavilions that looked down the dune to the fire-dancers and loafers on the beach.

At four we left the place and ran back for an hour along the beach. The bright moon illuminated our road, between the pounding surf and the forested hills. Stray dogs chased us, but we turned and charged at them, shouting like animals, and escaped across the rivers that flowed into the sea. I felt that spirit of freedom that the hippies often talk about.

Another uneventful beach day began after breakfast at Shree Ganesh. Everything was closed by the time we went looking for dinner, and so we went back to Shree Ganesh for toasted sandwiches and milk chai, and sat at a table with a John Lennon lookalike named Darius, who was plucking at a mandolin and whistling. He had been in India a long time, summering in Dharamsala, wintering in Goa, and playing music in both as part of a folk band that performed traditional Celtic, American, Turkish, or Middle Eastern tunes—whatever their instruments supported. “This guy showed up with an alto sax,” he said, “so now we’re kind of playing gypsy music.”

His friends, a Russian couple, came and sat with us. The girl was very pretty and hunkered down in her vest so it came up to her chin. The man was built low and strong, and he had a goatee and fierce Cossack’s features, softened noticeably by his amiable character. He started pulling cigarette butts out of his fanny pack and put them in the ash tray.

“That’s too much,” said Darius. “What do you think these guys will do with them? You know they’ll just end up in the street, anyway. Floating down a river.”

“No!” cried the smiling Ivan.

As the Russian toasted a cigarette in his lighter, drying it out so it smoked better, Darius asked, “So, what do you think of the Russians here in Goa?”

“They’re horrible!” said Ivan. “They drink and drink and drink—so much! Vodka, vodka, vodka! It goes to the head. It takes the ceiling out,” he said, miming some Slavic equivalent of losing your head, “and they go mad. They just want to start fights. They are rude to everyone. They work and drink and do drugs back home, and then they come here, to Goa, nowhere else in India, and they drink and do drugs and go to trance music rave. They don’t know any music, but they say, ‘Oh, yeah, trance, this is a good beat, let’s party, time to dance,’” and he slackened his face in a moronic gesture and made a noise like hrrr, then sealed those features into an expression of rage that, strong as he looked, was almost comic on a face so naturally cheerful, and he declared, “I hate Russians!” His girlfriend was laughing.

I later cultivated an idea for a movie, based in part on this premise, and revolving around Goa’s two distinct factions, the hippies and the Russians. Here is the film pitch for the movie that could be titled Ruskie Groove or Coco Loco:

The principle characters are a mean, hard-working Russian, who we’ll call Ivan, and a lazy, jack of all trades, master of none hippie, who we can call Darius. These polar opposites meet without much attraction at a hash dealer in Arambol, both seeking drugs for their own reasons, and the hash dealer says, “I have to go get something, come with me.” The Russian and the hippie have a few awkward conversations in the hash dealer’s car, and then get out, leaving their baggage on the back seat. The hash dealer runs out of the bushes, gets in the car, and speeds off, pursued by several officers of the Indian police.

Thus are Ivan and Darius enmeshed in a buddy cop sort of pairing, tracking down their possessions: Darius his violin, a Stratovarius or something fancy from the days before his torpor, and Ivan his mother’s ashes. The old woman loved Goa and wanted to have her ashes scattered there.

Darius: What does it look like?
Ivan: Like gunpowder, or maybe cocaine.
Darius: No! What are the ashes in?
Ivan: In vodka bottle. What you look at me for? The, how you say—the vase, it broke on the airplane, so I put in vodka bottle. It is good vodka, from my village, not cheap Ukrainian shit! [He spits on the floor.]
Darius: Man, they’re your mother’s ashes!
Ivan: Shut up! It’s what she would have want!

These two get in many misadventures. They go to the beach, Darius in a sarong, Ivan in a speedo. (“What’s with that?” “I must get even tan! Fuck you!”) At night they go to a hippie jam circle on the beach, looking for the dealer. “What is this music?” says Ivan, “There is no trance?” There is a vodka bottle going around, and Ivan snatches it away, looks in it for ashes, and then downs it. He approaches a girl and says, “Dance with me now,” and when the girl refuses he says, “Fuck you bitch! You break my heart!” He gives her the finger and screams in her face, which really happened to a girl we met. Darius comes back and finds Ivan in hippie gear, sitting out on the beach. They have a talk.

Ivan: I don’t know. I work and I drink, and I thinking life is more than hard work, hard drink. I think maybe it is good to take easy sometime.

Ivan’s family arrives in Goa for the funeral, and Darius helps him pretend that nothing is wrong. He meets Ivan’s sweet and beautiful sister. She at first doesn’t even notice him, but then he cuts his hair and acts distinguished. He plays violin at the funeral, not his violin, but a decent one, and impresses her tremendously. And so both characters realize a median between the hard-working, hard-living ideal of Russia and America and the lazy freedom of the hippie generations that are besieged in Goa.

South India seems a small world sometimes, especially its traveler’s circuit, where you happily meet the same people again and again. On the last day of January I ran into Tamara and Lola, eating lunch at a place on the beach.

The German and the Quebecois had rented a scooter and driven it from their huts in Anjuna to Arambol (at a safe 40 kilometers per hour, wearing helmets) to try kitesurfing. That ended up being to expensive, but Tom and I did meet Tamara later in the streets and went with her to see a soulful Korean woman play guitar. “I’m free,” she kept saying, and she cackled like a maniac. We went to Shree Ganesh and sat with Darius, and Tamara and the mandolinist played an improvised duet. Tom went to bed, missing his girlfriend, but I went down to the beach with the girls and a few beers and told them the story of Santiago and the Sword, which few Readers will remember.

A year had passed since I left home for London, it is remarkable that a year ago my mom was crying in the airport, and I was waiting in the security line in my REI gear, ready for unknown things to come, and not really ready at all. I spent New Years in a trashy bar off the Interstate, playing pool and talking to overweight girls and listening to the ACDC playlist, and my friend threw champagne glasses around at midnight so we had to leave. Back then I wondered at maps that seemed to take on a new meaning now that I knew I could visit many of those places, and now I know I can see them all.

Unbelievable, as Sven would say. Good on you, as Steve the Aussie would. Bob the Drunk Welshman might even buy me a drink. I know Jean would say, Man that’s a long time, and Amelia would have something witty for me. Skip told me that a year on the road makes it impossible to go home, but he spent ten years lost. I know where I’m going. Someone asked me of my trip, “Does it all blur together?” and I replied, “No, it’s all very distinct in my mind.” To this I must add that all the time before I left for London, all that life seems a blur!

Tamara and Lola asked me if a person changes when they travel. They do! Travelers just don’t see it, no more than a man who looks in the mirror every day discerns the changes of age. He only notices his maturing when he sees a photo. I must go home to know how new I am!

I don’t miss the specifics of home, the people, places, food, and weather, so much as I miss the feeling of home, of familiar surroundings and familiar people that I know will be there tomorrow, where the events of life are not rapid and intense but slowly cultivated. I know I am mortal, but sometimes I prefer the dreary, routine passage of time. Nothing lasts on the road: you must enjoy its transitory pleasures, warm yourself by the bright and flickering flames that quickly burn out. Is home the same? Will it be changed as I, when I return, to wash up on the shore like Ulysses in rags?

I have learned a lot about travel—to take it slow, to watch my things, to get names and give my own—but I still have a long way to go to finding those true places, never on any map. They beckon so subtly, and require a great effort and perfect timing, but ah, the boons! The things I have seen! Such stories have I heard, such friends have I met, such adventures have found me in the last year to make me the envy of my former self—adventures like the following tale.

I spent the next day writing in a cafe and swimming in the ocean until Tamara found me at the former. She and Lola had gone back to Anjuna the night before and had returned with their two traveling companions, Paula of Venice, the Italian that the Reader has already met at the Laughing Club of Mumbai, and a Welshwoman named Cat, a professional photographer. We went to Shree Ganesh for a quick dinner. I ate a few omelet sandwiches and Tamara had a thali that later made her sick, and we left before the others to meet Tom on the beach of Arambol, where hippies converged around sunset.

There was a circle, O Reader. An accordion player sat at the center. Tamara was next to him, strumming the rhythm on Tom’s guitar, and there was a man who sometimes played guitar and sometimes scooted around, making circles in the sand, and chanting or making animal noises. I was there, clapping a beat, next to Tom and a cute Canadian girl named Casey. Women stood just outside our circle, singing or belly dancing. Moving further outwards, the Reader finds a section of percussionists on stretched pans, and sometimes other musicians, on trumpets or saxophones or flutes, whatever they brought with them, whatever could fit into the music. Past them the fire-dancers practiced with glowing sticks or their unlit batons, shadows sat in circles with the ember of a rolled joint between them, and then there was the sunset on the surf and the jungle. What a strange place!

After this dispersed, we went down the beach to an open pavilion and sat in the sand, drinking and smoking. All the tables were taken. A big band was jamming on the stage, all sitting, backing up an excellent bassist who appareled himself as Jimi Hendrix. Tom walked Casey home and then went to bed himself, and Lola and I walked Tamara back to her hut after a stomach virus struck. (“I didn’t even have any beer,” said the German, still clever in her second language.) Cat, Lola, Paula, and I went down the beach to Coco Loco. We could see from the jam bar a group of fire-dancers and took seats in the sand among the watching crowd. The performers whirled flaming hula hoops, sticks, or balls on chains in wild, dangerous dances to the club’s trance music, a live flute and drum vaguely detectable jamming over the beat of the music.

Now that the scene has been set, we come to the story: There was a scrawny man between us and the square of the stage, facing away from the fire-dancers, resting on his shins with his hands on his knees in a state of deep, inconvenient meditation. He had on a sari and a tight shirt, and his curly brown hair was tonsured on top but long down to his neck in the back. His eyebrows looked sharp enough to cut, and his clean-shaven face was more wickedly confident than serene.

We enjoyed the show for a while, and the disciple changed position. He hunched or prostrated himself over his knees, his arms tucked under him, so he was a little pill-shaped thing in the light of the whirling flames. This was fine, only then a puppy came up off the beach and started licking his hair and neck. The man did not move. Then Cat came back from the dance floor and, seeing the puppy, squatted down on her haunches beside it. She rested her hand on the sack of vegetables next to her and pet the puppy for a good long while.

At this point, Paula asked Lola and I, “What are you laughing at?” We had tears in our eyes and busted guts, and thought the scene would come to its climax when Cat suddenly looked up and said, “Oh my God!” but her revelation was not the one we expected. “I love this puppy!” she exclaimed, her hand still on the frayed round prop. Our laughter renewed itself. This went on for what felt like several minutes as the Welshwoman cooed over the dog. Then the sack of vegetables that she had been leaning on, which was in truth, the Reader can guess, the head of the meditating man, suddenly sat up and turned a withering look, a sorcerous, wicked expression, terrifying and not at all soothed in its calculating clarity, on the woman. I was hunched over at that point, and I was still laughing when Cat came back without having said a word.

“I’ll be back,” said Cat, “if it’s alright. Do let me know when you want to leave. I’m just going to—”

“Apologize?” Lola cut in.

“No,” said Cat. “To have a boogie. Don’t be mean,” and she went off to the tribal dance floor, where the flutist and the drummer were in an ecstasy of their own.

The story does not end here, O Reader, for the meditative man held a grudge against the creature that had so disturbed his awakening to nirvana. We watched the fire-dancing for a while, and suddenly heard the puppy cry out from the crowd. Thinking nothing of this first whine, it was only after it came regularly that we looked around and saw the man, still crouching where he had been, holding the puppy tightly in his lap, a wrist across the dog’s throat.

“Hey!” we cried across the spectators, “Let that dog go!” but the man ignored us and considered the dog with the calmly malevolent glower of his eyes. Finally Lola got up and went over to him and said, “Dude, you have to let the dog go. He’s crying. He doesn’t like it.”

“The dog is fine,” said the man, in an approximation of Satan.

“The dog is not fine, he’ll be crying again when you start squeezing his head again. He doesn’t like it. Let him go,” said Lola, and she grabbed the man’s hand. He held the puppy in a tense, immovable grip and turned up at the rescuer that wicked gaze of his, holding it steady and unblinking for a full minute, as if marking her face for some purpose. The Jewess did not look away until the corners of the man’s thin lips curled up in the evilest suggestion of a grin, but when she did not back down even then, the man curled up over the puppy, lying silent in his lap now that the torment had stopped. “Seriously?” said the girl.

People who had long taken notice of this strange scene and respected it pacifically were now actively watching it, but only another girl had confronted the man in support of the captive and Lola. The man’s friends, in a circle near him, watched so listlessly that they might have been mannequins. I do not know what he had in mind: a punishment or a faith healing, an ayurvedic massage, or some sort of sadistic indoctrination, but the man straightened back up and glared at the insistent enemies of whatever conversion he had in mind for the poor pup. Finally, I, who had been standing just behind Lola, stepped across the crowd.

“Come on, man,” I think I said as I grabbed his suddenly compliant hands and moved them away from the dog, “It’s no problem. No worries. See?” I added, as the puppy renewed its squirming and finally jumped free, “it just wants to go sniff stuff. No worries. You didn’t do anything.”

The man glared wickedly at me this entire time, and he did not smile. He folded his hands back in his lap and watched me return to my seat. The way the crowd was sitting left him a clear view straight to Lola. For a while she ignored his gaze, and then she held it, and then she said fiercely, “I’m sorry if I offended you, I was just worried about the dog,” but no matter what the Jewess did, the meditating man would not remove the curse of his thoughtful glower.

Eventually, of his own will, he stood up, and in an open area near the corner of the stage, did some sort of ritualized bow and held his hands together in the namaste greeting, and he blew a kiss our way. After a visit to the bar, he sat among his listless friends, meditated a little, and several times paced back and forth behind us, either looking for his canine subject or intimidating us as an animal would. He held a rock in his hand as if it were sacred. We wondered if maybe we had broken him out of his own world, stopped him just short of his ascension. We started back when Cat returned from her boogie, looking over our shoulders regularly for any sign of that strange man.

Not every spot is magical for everyone. Sometimes you get somewhere, look around, and think, ‘Hey, this place is a squalid rat hole. I’d really rather be in the Netherlands.’ And that’s OK.
—Seth Stevenson for Slate magazine

The Jan Shatabdi Express to Aurangabad coasted out of Bombay, through hills and mangrove swamps, then sugar plantations. As the sunlight deepened to gold and then red the train passed up into the wet nooks of the Deccan, a green country of sparse fields, scattered trees, snug cottages of clay and thatch, and solitary plateaus, conical or in strange shapes, of a rich brown color, as if the earth had been overturned. We stopped in stations, sometimes for twenty minutes, and bartered through the window for bananas or sesame treats while the Sacred Cows wandered around the platforms.

Tom and I had seats, and many Indians stood in the aisles or around the open doors, looking out on the landscape of their country. They talked to us with interest about their jobs and families, about Indian conservation efforts and the falling water table, and they bobbled their heads at us, a sort of side-to-side movement that translates as a subdued affirmation, between a nod and a shrug of the shoulders. Tom was looking for ashrams to study yoga for a week or two. It was one of the reasons he came to India, and he told me about meditation: “You don’t think about the past or the future, your problems, or money. Focus on breathing, on here and now.”

Arriving late, we had enough to worry us in the here and now. It was pitch black outside the few crowded circles of lantern light, where Indians huddled eating idli and drinking chai, and the stream of headlights like ray beams in the dust, leading a thousand tuk-tuks and a hundred half-ton trucks through that transit hub. We followed the road north, asking for directions from the Indians we passed, who had either never heard of the Youth Hostel or bobbled their heads and pointed us onward, but we got concerned that we had missed it.

A Marathi stopped his scooter next to us and told us to get on. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” we said, we being two men a head taller than most Indians with bags to match. The Marathi rider insisted, so we got into a very uncomfortable position and started driving. We noticed that we were almost back at the train station and told the Marathi, “Here! Here!” and thanked him—alas for good intentions!—and hailed a tuk-tuk.

The tuk-tuk, or auto-rickshaw, is a uniquely Asian contraption, something like a lawnmower engine with a metal bucket on top. Both sides of the bucket are open, and the front has a blurry little windshield. Stretched canvas covers the top. Inside, there is a bench that can fit two and usually fits three, and the driver sits just in front of that on a little chair and steers the tuk-tuk with a set of handlebars like those of a moped. The meter is attached to a pole next to the helm, but it is unplugged and broken.

Tom and I rode in one of these up near an intersection, just past where the Marathi mopedist picked us up, and went through a gate to the derelict Youth Hostel. The famous manager, Miss Freeda, was gone, it was so late, and the Indian nightwatchman told us, “Lock doors, ten o’clock. Passport photocopy. Photocopy! No English!” I spoke really quickly to confuse him, then we dropped our bags in our rooms and ran off down the street to get some take-away from a restaurant where a fat boy shook our hands and asked us to be his Facebook friends.

We ate the food upstairs in the long, hollow male dorm room, full of beds on rickety metal frames with mosquito nets hung from the top. I had a tin full of chicken fried rice but no utensils. The Indians eat with their right hands, even rice, which they mix with their curry dishes and throw around their plate, forming a ball that they throw in their mouth. The food was too hot for that, and I was hungry, so I used a lemon peel to scoop it out.

Aurangabad had that pungent odor of engine exhaust, rotten fruit, and stale urine common to much of India. (Everyone who writes of the jungle country mentions its filth, and now I’ve got it out of the way.)

Indians differ in their concept of lewdness, so that spitting phlegm or defecating are common in the street, and belching and ruder flatulence in the restaurant, where the waiter comes to your table, drinks from your water pitcher, and leaves without a word. They are not rude, just unimpeded by decorum. There are too many people, and it is too hot, to worry about offending someone by looking over a stranger’s shoulder to read something in his hand. Mark this not as a complaint, O Reader. This is just how India is, and it’s no wonder that the wild, raw character of the country has liberated so many pilgrims of their ambitions, their class, and their discomforts.

The streets seemed even more crowded, dirty, dusty, and noisy in the morning, full of small honking vehicles. As in most Indian places, tuk-tuks were as common and as crazily insistent in its scavenger movements as the fly. The buckets on wheels careen into spaces not nearly big enough for them, and slip through the fingers of bigger cars with an instinctive alacrity, a feel for the chaos of Indian streets. “Hey!” the driver shouts to the passing tourist, as he coasts alongside or screeches to a halt in the middle of the road the tourist is crossing, “Where you go? Station?”

We walked up to the bus station and bought bananas and water on the way for our trip to the cave-temples of Ellora, which was the reason we came to Aurangabad. On the way the bus passed Daulatabad, the City of Fortune that the Emperor Aurangzeb built for his capital. He marched his court there 4,000 miles from Delhi, only to find he did not like it as much as he thought and march back, and his indecision brought down the empire. The citadel capped a huge hill, and the only path up went through a pitch black cave that screeched with bats. Black walls and temples, crumbling and overgrown by the enduring forest, surrounded the base of the hill, and the new road passed through one massive gate to get through the complex.

Ellora offered similar sights. From the parking lot full of monkeys, as much a novelty as camels were when I first came to Arabia, we entered the park that traced a mountainside from north to south. To the west, the sheer path looked over green basins of dirty water and across the palm plantations of the long, flat Deccan. The Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist shrines were carved from or into the rock face on the eastern side of the pat: temples and courts and congregations of gods, carved from single stones, entire freestanding shrines and life-sized statues of elephants; walls, bannisters, and columns, intricately carved with a profusion of pagan symbolism, gods dancing and murdering and meditating. We became familiar with Jain Lord Mahavira, meditating in his lotus position, and with Buddha preaching with his fingers forming an Om, and with Shiva the Destroyer, sharp-toothed and murderous, clutching swords and bodies in his four hands and standing on a mountain of skulls.

The greatest monument was the temple twice the size of the Parthenon built by Ashoka the Great—out of a single stone! A massive complex, multi-storied, with more shrines on the roof, and more in the colonnade built out of the rock face. The entire mountain was shaved away around it.

Tom and I were very impressed, but the groups of Marathi students found the two White People with cameras so much more fascinating. The boys in pink polo shirts, the girls in dresses of brown and blue, they mobbed us at the entrance to the temple and held out their hands in a crowd as if we were celebrities or holy men, until a teacher came up behind them and slapped a few skulls and told us, “Sorry, sorry.” Inside, they cheered when they saw us and waved to us from across the compound. They clumped together in the shadow of the stupa just outside Shiva’s main shrine for photos to be taken and sat next to us and took a few themselves.

This preoccupation was not limited to the young. Adults who were strangers asked us, “One photo please?” and snapped a shot with us overlooking the temple courtyard. Some even wanted photos on our cameras, just to pose, I guess. They asked us our names and shook our hands. For the rest of our time there, we would hear Indians shout out, “Jon!” and, “Thomas!” from all over the park, and look up to see them waving as if it were a miracle to run into friends like us.

We wondered at it with a skinny, scanty-haired Swede who was working in Oslo and who, like most Scandinavians, had enough money to do whatever he wanted but handled his money in such a careless, generous way that they never seem pretentious in the slightest. He had hired a driver for the day, for $10, and drove us back into Aurangabad.

Miss Freeda, the smiling Indian matron who ran the Youth Hostel, on our return cleared up any confusion that the watchman had left with us the night before. In that metallic manager’s office we met an Israeli girl named Gabriella, short and freckled with curly black hair, and I asked her to join us for dinner. Tom and I were attracted to the place that the Bible said had pizza and ice cream, but Gabriella told us, “I went to a local place for breakfast. It was really good. I prefer simple Indian food.”

The Wandering Jewess spoke English fine, but it was obvious by her simple sentences that Hebrew was her first language and from the way she carried herself that she had been traveling a long time. She was one of those travelers who starts off conversations with the rude convenience of, “Do you speak English?” that I always found so obscene that I scrunched up my face when I heard it. We walked up with her to a pharmacy near the bus station, and then back to the diner, set in a four-story building owned by an Emirati landlord, which was eight years old and looked, with its crumbling walls and faded paint, like it had been built in the 1960s and poorly maintained since then.

The Hyderabad Darshan was in a sort of massive gutter that ran along under the building, below the street level, beneath a liquor store and an internet cafe and just next to the chai shop where the owner got his tea. A few tables inside, a few outside the nook of the restaurant, the walls decorated with pagan icons, and across the gutter’s narrow but busy thoroughfare, the kitchen, dhal soup boiling on a gas stove, a haggard chef chopping peppers, a woman rolling chapatis in the back room. The three of us took an empty table and ordered masala dhosas that were the best we’d had, and chai from next door.

Happily fed on the good, simple fare she had promised, Gabriella told us she was living like a hippie by taking public buses and by staying and eating at the cheapest places. “Well,” I said, “I’ve been living like a hippie for a year, then.” She was going to Madhya Pradesh, the barren country of central India where few travelers went—and to her, that was its appeal. “It’s not the first time I’ve traveled alone,” she said, “but it’s the first time I’ve tried to be alone.”

She got all the usual hassle that Western women receive from Indian men—the stare downs, the prodding feet on the bus, the requests for kisses or money or an email address, and the indiscreet photographers, the pick-up lines, so flawed and so self-assured, that come whether a man is around or not. “They’re like mosquitoes,” she said, “They’ll still come, whether you spray deet or not.”

We walked back to the Hostel. In the male dorm there was a new lodger, one of those glad highlanders of Scotland, witty and good-natured and light-hearted, too few and far between on the road, Mike of Glasgow. He was a rocker in Scotland’s rock-and-roll capital who had taken three weeks off university to travel South India, and now he had a cotton shirt and Ali Baba pants and a beard he had not seen until that afternoon. “Where I was staying in Hampi,” he said, “there weren’t any mirrors. I got here and, whoa, I have a beard.” He told us about the “loveliest” people in Hampi and Gokarne, and mentioned some salty expats he had met.

“British?” I said. Mike confirmed it, and Tom asked, “How did you know that.” I said, “Ah, British expats are the worst. They just go to the darkest corners of the world and drink themselves into a stupor, and then berate everyone around and make awkward sexual comments and complain about the most inane, racist things.”

Mike laughed and said, “It’s true, but if you lived in Britain, you’d understand why.”

Back home Mike played in a band and knew some people who had made it big in America. Tom told him, “One of the things I want to do here in India is learn to play guitar. I need to find one. I figure I’ll go back knowing a few chords, maybe play a few songs.”

“Hang on,” said Mike, and he rushed back to the far end of the dorm room to his piled things and came back with a guitar. “I bought this used back in Glasgow for forty quid. She’s not great, but she plays alright. Good for learning,” he said, and he handed the guitar over to Tom, who had that incredulous, delighted look of the recipients of unexpected charity. The Scotsman flew back to Glasgow in three days, and, “I’d just been plannin’ on giving it to a cabbie.”

He drew some of the chords on a piece of paper and showed Tom some basics. “This is great,” said Tom, “Everything on this trip is just working out.” It usually does, Reader!

Ellora is the first of Maharashtra’s must-see attractions, and Ajunta is the second. I went with a large group composed of Tom, Mike of Glasgow, the Jewess Gabriella, the two London girls Emma and Frankie, and myself, to the bus station and bought some water and a weird, sweet fruit called the chikku that I initially mistook for a small potato.

Getting to Ajunta that day, a four-day holiday weekend in India for Republic Day, was a crowded, complicated effort and difficult to describe. On the packed public bus, with benches instead of seats and crowds in the aisle, I sat next to Emma. She was some sort of sustainable architect, studying how to built refugee shelters out of recyclable cardboard boxes and plastics—resources that, to my knowledge, the world’s abandoned already employ.

Our bus ended at some place called the T-Junction, where we paid seven rupees to walk from the bus stop through a covered market of tourist shops so we could line up for the “pollution free” buses that ran the last four kilometers to the caves. This was complicated by huge lines of Indian vacationers and Thai pilgrims, by the shouting matches begun by those who tried to skip these lines, by the howling of the touts with their handfuls of geodes and alabaster elephants, by trees full of glaring monkeys, by the heat of the day, and by a more general feeling of thirst and exhaustion. Travel wears you out, especially in India, where every day is a dirty, pushy, unpleasant, disillusioning kind of adventure. It’s no wonder so many backpackers stop and stay in nice, quiet places like Goa, Gokarne, or Hampi, or seek the tranquility of an ashram.

Finally, we got into the aisle of one of the environmentally friendly buses that are the only vehicles allowed near Ajunta’s sensitive caves. The only thing green about these buses was the paint, unless the black smog pouring out the exhaust was, as we supposed, magic anti-pollution dust.

The cave temples of Ajunta lie carved from a horseshoe-shaped cliff. A river runs past the bottom, a thirsty gray one that waits for the monsoon to fill its huge course, and separates the cliff from a high grassy ridge with a wooden stupa on the top. Buddhist monks carved their caves directly into the cliff face, which is marked by the trail that connects the porches and colonnades of the temple porticos. Inside, the rock-hewn rooms were either long, arched halls with the dimensions of a cathedral and a spherical stupa at the end, or wide monastery chambers with a Buddha seated in a recess at the back, and they differed from the ones at Ellora in the preservation of the wall paintings.

The painted murals depicted scenes from Buddha’s life that made no sense to me, other than as a menagerie of decadent princes and mystical animals. Siddhartha, the story goes, was the son of a Brahmin who wanted more (or less) out of life than wealth and pleasure, and so he traveled and lived as a poor man. His parents did not approve. They plied him with gifts of gold and betrothals, including a beautiful black princess who was particularly enamored by the future Buddha, but Siddhartha turned them down and pursued enlightenment. He canceled the marriage to the black princess, whose grieved expression appeared in many of the paintings.

There were many Thai tourists at Ajunta, and some prayed and prostrated themselves before the statues. Monks in orange robes guided them in prayer. Out on the stone path between the meditative chambers of the monasteries, a rush of coolies bore fat Thai tourists on palanquins, shouting for people to get out of their way. We left the temples close to sunset back to the parking lot to join the huge line of tourists waiting to get on a green bus. A man started running up and down the line screaming, “Single file! Caro!” which means, “Do it!” Tom took up the mantra, and some Indian men behind us started cracking up and saying it, too.

Vendors from the market chased us all the way out to the road, hands full of jewelry and rocks. The hills were pink with the remnants of the sunset, and the waxing moon was out and turned up like a bowl, facing a different direction in India than it does back home. Here Gabriella left us, heading north, while we tried to find a way back to Aurungabad. I haggled for a long time with a jeep driver while we waited for the bus and finally got the price down to $2 a person, but after we had sat in the car for a few minutes, the driver told us to get out, having conferred with some other jeepsters. We were advised to go to the bus station a mile away and started walking.

A man in a tuk-tuk drove alongside us, shouting prices that reduced as steadily as our march. He would not be turned away, and sometimes he veered his little rickshaw right in front of us and stopped it so we had to walk around, with him screaming and honking there in the road. Finally he got to 20 rupees, and Tom said, “Alright guys, we don’t know where this place is. I’m willing to pay the fifty cents or whatever for a taxi.” It is a peculiarity of travel that things seem expensive in a relative way. A beer for $1.50 would seem a bargain back home, but in India, where you sometimes pay that much for accommodation, where you can buy a new shirt for $2, where you can travel 5000 miles for $10, $1.50 seems like an extortionist price for a drink.

The five of us disentangled ourselves from the tuk-tuk into a crowded place on the road and shoved our way onto the next bus to come. I was standing in the aisle, not held up so much from my legs as from the press of people around me, and all the bench seats held two or three people.

Back in Aurungabad, starving in the dark, we got a tuk-tuk to a place called Swad Restaurant. All the tables were set for thali, with a segmented metal plate and small dishes on it. “Tuk-tuk is all you can eat?” I asked the boss, “More will come? It’s not finish?” and finally he said, “Unlimited.” The thali is a wonderful thing, and only sometimes unlimited. Each dish contains a different curry sauce, and set on the plate are chapatis, rice, salad, and chutney. A servant comes around and, as each of these items are consumed, refills the stock.

I struggled with my desire to see Daulatabad the next morning. Over the ramparts of Aurangzeb’s City of Fortune my tourist mandate to See the Sights warred with my traveler’s desire to see something real, something not on any map—“true places never are”—and outside the norm.

Miss Freeda proved to be a zealous authoritarian. “You will leave today?” she asked primly at around eleven, “You know check-out is at ten. And what time will you be leaving soon?”

The train to Mumbai left that night after 11, and we put our packed bags downstairs in the common room. Some workers (Miss Freeda called them Outsiders in the same way a terrified American would say Arabs or Joseph Conrad says Others) were clearing away the tables and rolling out mats, and on the porch a young karate club practiced their techniques. Tom told her we wanted to stay for the demonstration. So we sat on the cement wall around the porch, Tom testing his new guitar, me reading War & Peace, and the kids in white robes perfected moves or did aerobics. The air sounded like chattering children, shuffling feet, newly discovered guitar chords, a constant cacophany of car horns, and the drills and hammering of India’s progress.

The karate kids scooted up slowly, and we started sharing hand tricks—fart noises, whistles, and finger snaps—and then the disciples started doing things we could not, jumping around with spinning legs and holding their heels up level with their foreheads and sliding our their feet into splits on the concrete. They staged an impressive demonstration where an adorable brown girl with a clip in her short hair and a red dot between her eyes, confronted by four attackers, also in fifth grade, dropped her purse and dealt with them in short, violent order. The little girl retrieved her purse and left her assailants lying on the ground, one of them in real pain, and she smiled and skipped away.

Then Tom got out his Nikon, and all the Marathi warriors wanted a photo. An older girl kept them in line with slaps and smacks, and we took photos and shook hands and exchanged names for a long while. We left after the practice, always better than the pompous show, and went back to the Hyderabad Darshan that Gabriella had showed us. We ordered a spicy bulgur dish called sakudana khuchdi and uttappa, a sort of greasy pancake with onions and parsley, and ate with chai from next door. The owner fried our uttappa and then sat down and talked to us. Jitendra had slicked back hair, a gold watch, a tight red shirt, and a weary but self-sure look about him. He fasted on Thursday now that he followed Ganesha.

Tom said we wanted to go to the market, and Jitendra took us there in a tuk-tuk at Indian prices, rather than what they charged tourists. He stopped first at his other restaurant that his brother ran for him, then off into the busy, dirty streets, full of tuk-tuks and pushcarts and madness. Jitendra’s haggling tips: Offer a quarter of the asking price at the start, walk away, offer something a little more, then hold out your offer and say, “Take it, take it!” “If he want to sell, and you give him twenty rupees,” said Jitendra, “he will sell.”

Tom and I got our bags from the Hostel and brought the London girls with us to the Darshan for dinner. I combed my beard with the flip-out comb I’d bought, and Tom sowed an India flag onto his bag with the skill of a true nurse. We kept on sitting there for a while, Tom playing his guitar and me fiddling with notebooks, and when it was closing he called us inside. The three of us sat around a table in the back. One of his cooks brought in hot peanuts wrapped in newspaper, a small bottle of Magic Moments vodka, and three cigarettes, one with cloves in it, for the master, and then the three employees sat eating and laughing around another table.

“They work all day,” Jitendr remarked, “and now this is their time. See them joking each other?” He told us that the three slept on the floor of the Darshan and pointed out their bedrolls behind a chair. They had no expenses or wives and sent their pay home to their parents. “I have ten families,” said Jitendr proudly, and he told us that his wife and children, his mother across town, his father in Hyderabad, his brother and nephews at the other restaurant and their families, and his employees and theirs all depended on his patronage.

He seemed happy to take care of us, as well, that godfather of Aurangabad. He told us about Hyderabad, and if we went there, his friend would help us. When we had to leave, he gave us bottles of water and rode with us in the tuk-tuk to the train station. On the way Jitendr pointed out the quiet neighborhood close to the station, the one we walked through on our first night in town, which was “very dangerous. Robbers here at night. They call their friends and get together in big group. It is safe to walk, but not with any wallet or things.”

The night felt warm and lively, not dangerous at all. “It’s a magic moment,” cried Jitendr, “Everything is a magic moment now!” He found our platform and hugged us goodbye, lingering like a father might, looking for things to concern him. “Go home to your wife,” I said (he was hoping to get lucky), and then he left.

“This was a perfect day,” said Tom as we walked down the platform, “Just hanging out, meeting people. I don’t know, I like this better than just sight-seeing.”

The train was running late, so we sat down under a stairway on the platform. A great crowd of two dozen Marathi gathered around us when Tom got out his guitar to practice the chords Mike had written down for him. We tried to explain that he was learning, but no one understood. They pointed, chattering, and must have thought he was warming up. “Can you play this by Michael Jackson?” asked an Indian. Tom cried, “No! I can play E!” Eventually the crowd figured it out and went to look at a Korean who had brought out his camera.

Back in Bombay, I exited the Victoria Terminus feeling at home. The day was still cool, and I felt fresh from the night train. Some costumed dancers performed in the parking lot, for the benefit of a visiting dignitary. Tom and I didn’t know it at the time, but these were the only Republic Day festivities we would see on that auspicious day. The military parades and screaming hordes would go on for hours in Delhi, but in Bombay they ended before 10 in the morning. We walked past the performance into the crowd of taxi drivers who shouted prices and negotiated our way to Colaba. The driver said he had not enough change for us, but after I started asking street stalls for change, he pulled the right amount out of his shirt pocket.

The day was another slow, pleasant one. We checked back into the notorious Red Shield, met some people, and conscripted them into a trip to the park. There was Sebastian the Swede, Adam of London, Tamara of the Black Forest, and Lola, a Moroccan Jew from Montreal, who led us to a botanical garden she had found. We laid out Salvation Army sheets on the grass, and Adam and Tamara took turns on Tom’s guitar. Adam played a few Radiohead songs but forgot some of the words. “I haven’t played in a few weeks. It’s amazing how easily it falls out of your head,” he said.

Tamara played a song about a breakup in harsh German by her Frieburg band, the Play Money Millionaires. “Playing guitar and singing isn’t easy,” said Adam. “I know it’s cliched to say, but you really have to feel the song. You have to know the words an let them come out, to concentrate on the rhythm and the chords, and the words and the tone. It’s too much.”

The two musicians gave Tom some instruction on his instrument and spent plenty of time demonstrating its uses, for Tom and the whole of Bombay. By ones and twos, a big crowd of Indians gathered around to watch, until we were entirely surrounded. They stared and took photos or lay on their backs and listened. Some children came up and introduced themselves. We ate a Bombayan mix of rice cracker and spices called bhelpuri and chatted.

Just outside the Red Shield, a man backed up his car and almost ran us over, then he leaned out the window and said, “Hey, you want to be in a Bollywood movie?” Bollywood directors commonly picked up foreigners to appear as extras in shows, movies, and commercials, because the White people about Colaba will will wear less modest clothing and will—and please, Reader, savor the irony of this—they will work on a movie set for longer hours and less money than the locals! The novelty of the job is enough for travelers. Indian actors are up in arms over it. Their jobs are being stolen by cheap foreign labor!

Most projects pay 500 rupees for a twelve hour shift, but this driver called Tamara over and told her that he needed someone like her, a foreign girl with a pierced lip, for two days, and he would pay her 10,000 rupees—that’s $200! “Yah, it’s so unfair,” she said. She was ready to leave Mumbai, and would, eventually, decide to turn the money down.

Later that evening, the same group as before walked up the promenade known as the Queen’s Necklace for all its lights, and watched cricket on the way to Chowpatty Beach. We got ice cream and Indian khufi, bought at least a dozen ice cream bars for begging children, and sat among the twilit crowd on the sand looking down on the toxic water of the bay.

Tom was annoyed by the chai sellers who all stopped and lingered at our group shouting, “Chai! Chai! Chai!” One of them mistook a confused look from one of us for an order and squatted down still shouting his mantra and waving his little kettle in our faces. Tom offered the man his water bottle and kept repeating, “Water? Water? Water?” The Indian jerked his head around, the way a bird does when confused, and endured silently this treatment longer than most people would, then finally he stood up and walked away. Behind him, a little Hindu couple cuddling on a blanket were gasping with laughter.