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 and the barbershop liar,
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. A mob forms of howling, violent natives, and it is not a good place to be. I thought I would rather be anywhere than hanging out the side of the rickshaw next to the turbaned driver. 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. Query, O Venus: Doth love wait for our dreams’ fulfillment?

The tuk-tuk driver swerved all over the place through a crazy Indian city, indescribable in its random chaos, to a soundtrack of groaning cows, goat bells, squealing tires, car horns, and shouting merchants, and eventually we spilled out into the road in front of a restaurant where all the Paulo Travel buses stopped. Tom and I waited a long time, 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 coffin 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 Cafe, 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 cafes like the crusader kings of the Holy Land: Tall Andy, Vince, Phi, 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 power 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. 5000 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 officers 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 officer 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 bag full of drugs, 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 Cafe 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 cafes 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 Cafe 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 $2-per-night shanties containing only a mattress, and also 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 difficulty 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 cafe 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 Cafe.

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 $1.20, 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 500 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 Cafe, 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.

Or the Jew 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 40-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. A Hindu serf came in from Andy’s domain at Ever Green Cafe 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 descend into shouting and 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 only the 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 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. His girlfriend once had the same symptoms.

“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 Cafe. The two toilet 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 room 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 eery way. The dirt floor looked like it had been used for some butcher job. The looped rope that one tied to seal the door made one think, 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 Argentinian with hair like Einstein’s had laid out his jewelry in the back of the cafe, 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 leaped 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 cafe, 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. She tried to tell the Baba what the word crisis meant—“I’m having a crisis,” she kept broadcasting—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, sealing the end with his finger, 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 girls and asked Lola, who carries a pharmacy in her bag, for some medicine for his swollen foot. Lola took him up to her hut on the hill to retrieve some 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 cafes 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 best 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 efficiency that characterizes much of the country.

I cannot understand how those lines of people, hands on each others’ hips, shuffling 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 traffic 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 Cafe 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 stiffly 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 a 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 four o’clock. The small chariot already rested in front of the artichoke temple, but the 70-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 officers, 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 $2 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 beat of the drummers. 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 shuffled 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?” I dismissed Phi’s remark at the time 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 Cafe, 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 Cafe, 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.”

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

“She’s a difficult 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 cafe 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 Cafe had two computers hooked up to the Internet via satellite and powered by the cafe’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 difficult. 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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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, and he 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 courtiers 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 Cafe 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 at 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 on the mountain, 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 squire of the kings who blew the conch every night at sunset. He had been coming to Paradise Beach for sixteen years. He spent the summer months 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 coolly sarcastic and a fun 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. “But there are no chords,” said Jemal. “So,” declared the king,—“we have the words, just work it out.”

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 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 Cafe 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. The Baba will climb up to his cave with the other sadhus 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.

Far away,
This ship is taking me far away,
Far away from the memories
Of the people who care if I live or die.

Starlight,
I will be chasing the starlight,
Until the end of my life;
I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.
—Muse

Bored of the monotony of the Middle East, of the slow transitions that characterized my overland journey, changes as subtle as colors on a spectrum, I found myself needing a sudden shift; and so, having traveled an indirect route from the Thames and Fleet to the Nile’s Second Cataract, from highland moors to snowy mountains, from Scythian steppe to seas of sand, by bus and train and the power of my thumb, I flew out of Amman and across the holy desolation ruled by the House of Saud to those seven wealthy kingdoms by the sea.

Indians and Filipinos manned the great way-station of Sharjah, conscripted from the provinces of the Empire of the Buck. Emirati men in long robes and turbans, laptops slung across their slim shoulders, shuffled between the terminals, and Emirati women spooned food court fare under their veils with a deft hand, a wide-eyed babe held in the other. Their minarets were oil towers and glass skyscrapers. Outside the windows of the station spread a panorama of brown earth, short green trees, the layered sky of sunset—I had lost two hours midair—and the finned vehicles of my escape.

I had nothing in my stomach but a small feta pizza and a slug of whisky. I carried a courier bag with my valuables and electronics in it, and the haversack I bought in Varna, now splitting at its seams, contained naught but clothes, shampoo, band-aids, sowing needles, and a copy of War & Peace, things no sane thief would steal. The passengers ready to board the plane to Bombay were split evenly between Indian businessmen in leather shoes and Ukrainian Krishnas in colorful sarongs, with yellow lines running down their foreheads to arrows on their noses. The Indians could not keep their eyes off the strange pilgrims of that Berkeley-born order, and the Hare Krishnas told me they worshiped a God of Love. I pulled out the Indian guide book I bought in Israel, my Bible for the next three months, and started reading.

I lusted for India, for its sweltering culture and spicy cuisine. The continent represents a fifth of the human race, 1.3 billion people. Travelers spoke of it in whispered tones. India, that backpacker’s heaven—diverse, difficult, cheap, with good food and plentiful weed—and all of them say, “It is chaos. Nothing can prepare you for it. You will love it.” India, an impossible nation, a country of greatness, of powerful faith and violence, of colorful history and myriad cultures; a work in progress, with the most staggering divide of wealth and poverty on the planet—“a nation often beset by famine and frustration, struggling towards modernity and industrial power through the burden of her multiplicity of peoples, cultures, tongues, and religions,” as Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins call it in the introduction of Freedom at Midnight.

The careful, colorful prologue of that book drew me to begin in Bombay, at the Gateway of India, “the rude arch of yellow basalt” erected for the King-Emperor George V on his visit to the crown jewel of the British Empire in 1911, the threshold of so many foreign adventurers:

“A strange world mingles there in the shadows cast by its soaring span: snake charmers and fortune tellers, beggars and tourists, dishevelled hippies lost in a torpor of sloth and drug, the destitute and dying of a cluttered metropolis. . . Once, that vaulting Gateway of India was the Arch of Triumph of the greatest empire the world has ever known. To generations of Britons, its massive form was the first glimpse, caught from a steamer’s deck, of the storied shores for which they had abandoned their Midlands villages and Scottish hills. Soldiers and adventurers, businessmen and administrators, they had passed through its portals, come to keep the Pax Britannica in the empire’s proudest possession. . .

“All that seems so distant today. Today, the Gateway of India is just another pile of stone, at one with Nineveh and Tyre, a forgotten monument to an era that ended in its shadows half a century ago.”

Bombay survived Independence, the largest city in India, the capital of Bollywood, and the center of India’s youthful modernity. The megalopolis is the vivid crater of an explosion of growth, a cesspit and a pinnacle of humanity, for beneath the crystal skylines and the imperial monuments and the misery of the slums, the seven swampy islands that formed Bom Bahai are connected by an infill of garbage. They call it Mumbai now that the Hindu Marathi faction, Shivaji’s Army, has taken control and rededicated the city to the ancient Kingdom of Maharashtra. The landmarks of the Raj and of India’s cultural plurality remain, and though the new rulers have changed the names, everyone knows that Chhatrapati Shivaji (meaning Shivaji, King of the Universe), the busiest train station in Asia, is the Victoria Terminus.

I arrived at that station at the end of the line in Bombay, a year after setting out from home and with two blank pages left in my passport. The massive colonial structure was built in an Indo-Saracenic style that combined Hindu and Middle-Eastern designs in a mass of towers arrayed about a huge dome. Crests throughout showed elephants, boats, trains, and crosses, and the gates opened onto the imperial neighborhoods and polo maidans of the peninsular crab claw at Bombay’s southern end, the center of its metropolis. Arrayed around the toxic bay enclosed by that pincer of land are the oldest bazaars and markets, the University, the neighborhoods of Colaba and Fort, and the Gateway of India.

Cabs in India are cheap, if you can get the driver to turn the meter on, but I hate the easy ways. I took a tuk-tuk to the dark alleyways of Andheri train staion, and after a hot chai and some doughy things in spicy gravy from a spicy street stall—always follow the crowd when it comes to street food, O Reader, and wash your own vegetables—and after becoming lost along the platforms of the dark station, I boarded the wreck of a British machine, the slow train to Victoria Terminus. Five million people go through there a day, but it was still quieted by the earliness of the day and the darkness. As hot as it was, hot enough for shorts and a T-shirt, the sun would not rise for an hour yet.

Bombay was coming alive. Squatting vendors slapped piles of fresh newspapers to the pavement, to feed the worldly appetites of the world’s largest democracy. Food stalls sizzled, and the cooks cried out the names of their delicacies to the great crowds of workers in collars and slacks or colorful saris who poured out from the station. Clusters of narrow Muslim women, shrouded in black robes, turned away like shadows as I passed, and burly Sikhs took no notice of me. They never cut their hair, which they wrapped on their heads in turbans, or their beards, so they could never hide what they were, and would always have to defend it.

I walked beneath the eves of Victorian ramparts, the clocktower, the heights of offices, the jutting upper floors of apartments, the strangled columns of banyan trees and the pillars of palms, past fenced off polo maidans and Christian churches. Under the colonnades or benches or in the open spots between bus stops and trees, vagrants slept curled under blankets, alone or in couples or entire families laid out on mats, some restless babe squirming against a gaunt mother. They were the homeless of Mumbai, or the country poor sent to win bread in the big city, or teens that have run away from villages to escape poverty or bad grades, or the Pavement Dwellers whose shantytowns have fallen under a construction project. I was clearly lost, but by following my compass southeast, I came out of the city to a wide plaza along the surf, looking out past the Gateway of India on the Arabian Sea.

My hostel of choice was the Salvation Army’s Red Shield, a high building of red and white and wood just behind the Taj Mahal Hotel that was occupied and besieged during the Mumbai terrorist raids two years ago and still bears the scars of conflict under a patchwork of scaffolding. The Red Shield came recommended by both the Bible and fellow travelers, and it was notorious for its bedbugs. The reception desk was empty when I arrived, so I followed the noise of a hymnal up the stairs to a common room, where six Indian staffers huddled around a table while the security guard read from the Gospel of Saint John.

Two other travelers waited for the mass to finish so they could inquire about beds. One had a mustache and a mop of hair and could have been from anywhere, and he would have told me he was from nowhere, he had been on the road so long. The other was a tall Canadian with short hair and a fresh beard, with ears and a baseball cap prominent. He sat cross-legged on a table, back straight against the wall, and lost in the concentration of meditation. When Thomas woke up, and when the sergeants of the Salvation Army told us to ask again at 9, I started talking to him in the way of travelers, and he and I went around the corner to a Punjabi restaurant called Bagdadi. We ordered chai and channa masala, a spiced curry with lentils popular in the old Mughal heartland of the Indus River valley, with a bread like naan but thinner, called roti. O Reader, I love this food! Rest assured, a fuller report is coming, once I have tried all the tastes of the south.

Tom was a palliative oncology nurse. His patients were the hopeless victims of cancer. Unlike physicians of other branches of medicine, he became familiar with his patients; and unlike other physicians, he knew his patients would die. “I had some amazing conversations,” he said back in the Red Shield dorm room, when we were talking with a Londoner and an American named Joe. “They have so much to say about life. I think my problems are important—my job, my girlfriend, my family—but what does that matter next to life?” Tom’s girlfriend was a pretty travel agent back in Toronto, a high school sweetheart, and he would miss her sorely in the three months of his long-planned trip, his second international excursion after a visit to Thailand’s beaches and jungles.

For him, India was a place to discover change and enlightenment. He had renounced meat—easy to do in vegetarian India, where the cow is sacred—and smokes and grass and most of alcohol. “Many people come to India to change themselves,” said the Londoner, “so it’s a good goal.” Tom intended to volunteer in villages and study yoga in Rishikesh and climb mountains in Nepal, but my descriptions of the Dravidian India that lies south of Bombay made him want to go there for a few weeks while the weather was fine. First, though, he had to wait for the delivery of his bag, which the airline had left behind in Abu Dhabi.

There were many characters in the hotel. It was their first trip to India or their tenth. They came for yoga classes and meditation, to volunteer, to have adventures, or to idle away as much time as their money permitted. Common items were extensive journals, long hair, loose shirts or tight singlets, a month’s stubble, pegs of hashish, and the puffy leggings called Ali Baba pants, connected loosely around the knees. They smoked out on the porch and talked about Udaipur and Goa and all the places travelers want to go with so little time for it, and all the cold weather and hard work they did not miss from back home. The Army served a simple breakfast between seven and nine in the morning, and I was always up too late, and once too early, to receive it.

Tom and I had lunch with a Danish couple, Rasmus and Malacca, at a place famous for its South Indian food—Laxmi Villa, in one of the alleys behind the Taj Mahal Hotel. Leaving the Danes, we wandered around until we came to some slums on the Bay of Bengal, a rocky strand where children defecated on the rocks and tried to hit us with their simple kites. We asked directions to a cafe, next to Churchgate Station and the Lord Brabourne Stadium (where we tried and failed to buy cricket tickets), that served shisha to young Indians in a glass smoker’s box. I was addicted to the stuff, which is sadly as much a novelty in India as in the states. Farewell to ye, packed narghiles!

I took a nap when we got back, having been awake since I left Amman, and then went back to Bagdadi for chicken kadai. Thankfully, they gave me a fork for the meal. I went with Tom to a famous bar called Leopold’s and had a drink with a Polish cinematographer. There is a novel called Shantaram that one-in-five Indian backpackers are currently reading, the story of an Australian convict who escaped from Aussie prison to the slums and jails of seedy Bombay, and was there reborn. Much of the novel takes place in Leopold’s, which in the 1970s was Bombay’s expat bar.

Paintings of the world’s wonders—the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China—decorated a frieze along the high ceiling, where whirring fans kept out the sultry, sweltering night and a forest of red columns met the white roof. Unlike most Indian places, that were sealed and dark and humid as a reptile house, Leopold’s left its huge segmented doors open for ventilation. Despite a recent bombing and a drive-by shooting that webbed the window with bullet holes, it remains a prime watering hole and rehabilitative center for travelers to India. So many crowded around its concentration of cafe tables that, in my many visits there, we often had to order twice from their selection to get any of the foreign beers, local Kingfisher, or the draught drinks in high glass tubes with taps on the bottom.

Back at the hotel, we woke up the poor manager, the one with a blind eye behind his glasses, to let us in after the midnight curfew, and I fell into a card came with a gang of Aussies and two German girls. It was a version of Shithead, an Australian variant of the American game Asshole that I had learned from a girl off the coast of Lycia, but played by as complicated a set of rules as three males can cultivate over five years of close friendship. They had just finished explaining the role of Presidents and Vice-Presidents to the incredulous German girls when Joe came in looking tight. The three Aussie blokes played most of the girls’ hands, and explained rules to Joe, and they shouted to pass faster the flask of rum and the bottle of white wine that were circling the table, and I held my own, though I never became President.

The markets of Bombay throw themselves across an area big as any normal city, alleys of stalls between fortresses full of them, organized into districts of electronics and watches, shoes and bags, fruits and vegetables and spices, meat and viscera. Strange things break the order: colorful rainbows of fake flowers from China or stolen car parts. The merchants speak Bombaiya, mixing Marathi Hindi, Indian English, and street slang, and shout out at the tourists who venture into their world.

From the Crawford Market, we went north to the Mangaldas Market. Tom was unused to the wild Asian traffic, confluences of cars that move like threading needles, and to the excessive use of horn. The Arabs contented themselves with a constant tapping, but the Indians screamed their louder, penetrating horns for long lengths of time. I was familiar with it all, but Tom’s surprise reminded me again how far I was from home. An old man found us as we entered Mangaldas and asked, “What are you looking for? Scarf? Sari?” I said I wanted a scarf, and he led us forward. The crowds hid from view the cobblestones of the long street, and a strange Indo-Saracenic mosque peered over their heads from the far end.

I bought a scarf in a store, with a little back and forth haggling, and then our decrepit guide led us into the warren of clothvenders who lounged on their merchandise and tailors who wore theirs. Tom was out to buy a pair of tailored suits in one of the world’s cheapest markets—because a good fit is better than quality, and the quality of these was very fine.

The old man took us to a cloth stall, and while the fashionable young merchant was unrolling bolts of black striped cloth, the tailor arrived, a distinguished Indian named Makwana with measuring tape around his neck and a well-trimmed white mustache and wire-frame glasses, to assist with choosing fabrics. That finished, Makwana took us back to his nook, where two assistants showed us a hardcover Italian fashion catalog, “2010, just released.” They used it as a reference book for their own work, Indian emulations at a twentieth the price, and had Tom pick out the styles he wanted. For $240, the Canadian ordered two suits and shirts. Makwana would come by for a refitting on Thursday, and they would be done the morning after.

We took a cab north to the Chor Bazaar, the Thieves Market, where you can buy anything. The dirt lanes and dirty towers looked more like bits of Cairo than India. At some stalls, teams of Moslems, in knee-length sherwanis and trousers and little hats of white cotton, tore at old cars with their bare hands and had them dismantled into bit parts, and the sellable bits set aside from the repairable ones and the junk, in twenty minutes. Goats wandered around the streets. They would go home at night for food, and at Eid would be sacrificed. We had lunch at a street corner diner, then continued up to a sort of stadium surrounded by goats. A man had just slit the throat of a chicken, and it kicked around in a bucket making a lot of noise. We went out onto the street near the leatherworks—Muslims deal with most leather produced in India, though the Hindus will wear it—and bargained hard with a cab driver to take us back to familiar things.

The sun had almost set on the Gateway of India. A construction crew was busy setting up the scaffolding of a stage for the coming Independence Day celebrations, and we mixed with the tourists and hippies and con-men and beggars that flooded the forum. The girls asked for food, and refused money, to feed their families. One swooped in and tied a string of flower petals around my wrist before I knew what she was doing, and I untied them and gave them away to another beggar. The touts sold random things to the foreigners—tours or information, hash and weed and opium, and giant inflated balloons that served no purpose and that I never saw in the arms of anyone but an Indian. A snake charmer walked the crowd with his defanged cobra in a leather bag across his shoulder.

(A man sometimes danced down the street outside the Red Shield, flagellating himself with a leather whip so long it wrapped around him harmlessly, and his wife accompanied him on the flute like a cobra charmer, which as it happens was the man’s second profession. To those who look out the windows at this noisy spectacle, he stops and glares and shouts, “Throw down money!”)

As we left, the strain of the crowd too much for us, a Brahmin, in his saffron robes and his most meditative expression, approached with a partitioned tray. He said a prayer as he tied a red, orange, and gold cord of cotton around our right wrists, put sugar beads in open hands, and a red dot on our foreheads. Then the Brahmin held out his own hand for a Western blessing.

“You must give more than that,” cried a passerby. “He is a holy man, you must pay more. One-hundred each. No, hundred for each! He is a holy man! Hey!”

We paid a hundred rupees for both of us and wandered around the court, protestations at our back, and then down the arcade. On the way, we saw the Brahmin again, blessing two German girls with all but the third eye of the red dot. They paid ten each, when we asked them, and we were outraged. We asked them, “Where are you going in India? What are your plans?”

Several times, Indian tourists in collared shirts asked, “One photo please?” We posed, the hired photographer snapped a few, and they all departed, leaving us in confusion. Were we Westerners, gathered by habit around the British Gateway, a tourist attraction for Indians? The Hindu next to me, his round face dark as chocolate, said, “Those fucking people. They come from Varanasi. You know it? They are not from here. I am Maharashtran. My family is from here for twenty generations. They just come here. They come and the fucking Tamils come.” He told me, “I am Indian, but I am Maharashtran before I am Indian,” and called Gandhi “a fucking bastard of India” from South Africa.

Sachin Hande was born in South Africa (Gandhi in Gujarat) but he was a Marathi, a native of Maharashtra, a Hindu—like the men who killed the Mahatma in the streets of Delhi. “Look at that fucking girl,” he said as a beggar girl passed. “They are Maharashtran, and they are like that because of all the immigrants. They are Untouchables. You know what that means?” Sachin was also an Untouchable, like the old sweepers of Bombay who benefited so much from Gandhiji’s visits and support and from their liberation under Gandhi’s nation, yet once the Untouchables lay so far beneath the caste system that a devout Brahmin would not share an open road with one, much less a meal. If caught in the same room, ritual ablutions were sure to follow to cleanse the priest of the taint.

But Sachin was a Marathi and a Hindu before he was an Indian, and he hated Gandhi.

Later, another Marathi, the package wallah who wrapped up some things of mine for home in newspaper and sowed them shut in a linen sheet, told me that only 23 per cent of Mumbai was Marathi, and that, “the other seventy-seven, from outside!” Know that the Marathi speak the word “Outsider” with a sense of horror, as a Westerner might say, “Arab,” or as Joseph Conrad would say, “Other.” Such conversations are awkward to liberal outsiders. Few open-minds tolerate hatred. The German girls had left, and Tom and I finally excused ourselves to go nap when Sachin started shouting at Tom, “Ten thousand for two suits! Fuck! You got ripped off! I can get one suit for one thousand seven hundred! Fuck!”

“He-he-he, ho-ho-ho,” went the old man, as he had every day but Sunday for the last thirteen years. “Now,” he continued, “China laugh.” The old Indian had an audience in a spacious circle before him, and, by the gray light of the emerging sun, that gathering emulated his every move as he twisted clawed hands around and laughed, “Eee-heee-hee, eee-hee-hee! Now, Korean laugh,”—that was for the benefit of the attending Koreans,—“Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha. Danish laugh!” He held his gut and laughed, “Oh-ho-ho, oh-ho-ho! American laugh. Yea-haw,” and he slapped his knee.

No jokes or slapstick prompted the laughter. It was an exercise in humor, a workout for the diaphragm and the smiling muscles, for the laughing man and his audience. The half-dozen laughing Hindu women bound up saris distinguished themselves as regulars by their energy and their knowledge of the leader’s softly spoken commands. There were two other Indians in the circle, and the rest were foreigners—three Koreans, the Danish couple Rasmus and Malacca, the two German girls from the promenade, an Italian globetrottress, Tom, Joe, and me.

We three were exhausted. The night before Tom and I went back to Leopold’s with Joe and Kathy, the pretty blonde German. “Midnight!” said the bespectacled receptionist with a surly sense of humor as we left the door of the hotel, and at our assurances that we would be back in time for the curfew, he only laughed. We had Kingfisher beers with the Polish cinematographer, and left with the intention to do something crazy. An hour later, we were strewn out on a stairway in the Red Shield, drawing pictures with Kathy’s graphite pencils and passing around bottles of Indian rum and port wine.

“One, two, three,” said the laughing man and his Hindu disciples,

Laughing is for me.
We are the Laughing Club of Mumbai!
Laughing is the best
Thing in the world.
We are the happiest
People in the world.
Laughter is the best
Medicine in the world.

So went the Laughing Club motto, and so the morning meeting adjourned, and we foreigners went to Bagdadi for channa masala and roti and chai. The Italian girl couldn’t handle any more of the stuff, and said Indian food was all the same, just curries and flatbread. “All the same compared to what?” I asked, and I saw the cogs working as she tried to think of something else to say, something other than, “Italian food,” but that’s all that came out. The Italians, like the Turks, as the master races of cooking, tend to look down on the food of all other nations.

Tom, Joe, Rasmus, and I left the table early and in a rush, since we had booked a tour of the Dharavi Slums, the largest slums in Asia, and the ones in Slumdog Millionaire—and hesitantly, O Reader, since even we are not so inhuman as to be tourists of human misery! The tour guides knew the slum, had spent three months knowing the residents, and sponsored schools and programs in Dharavi with the money we paid them for the tours. Photography was forbidden. Rasmus’ girlfriend Malacca had taken the tour on one of her previous visits to India and recommended it.

We met Shiva and Ganesh, one our guide, the other our driver, in the Land Rover that would take us to the slums, and said hello to Reuben, a trauma surgeon from New York. Reuben had accrued vacation time and overtime, and instead of taking the offered money, he took six weeks off and bought a ticket to India with his already substantial funds. The five of us talked about netbooks and phones and things, and then Shiva pointed out some of the Chols, the long tenements built by textile workers when Bombay was a manufacturing city, in ordered lines and tightly spaced.

We passed a youth home for runaway teenagers, a series of two-story shacks built on the sidewalk by the Pavement Dwellers, and the tragedy of the Red Light District. Young girls, lured from India’s villages to Bombay by promises of good jobs in the city, are there bought by brothels and made to work off the debt of their purchase, held by force or by addiction to opiates. Only the ones who are close to freedom can stand out front. Those who buy themselves free see no opportunities for one so shamed and work at the brothels as matrons. “And look,” said Shiva at the end of the road, “a police station. The police can go to the girls for free, any time. Every once in a while there are raids, but they never catch anyone. One of the clients always warns the brothel that the police will come.”

The Dhobi Ghat is a washing compound north of TK train station. There were several dhobis throughout the city, but this one was largest. Two-thousand workers slapped clothes clean in a thousand vats of gray water, arrayed out like a V from the overpass where we stood gawking. Clotheslines obscured our view, hung with sheets and shirts to dry. Nobody owned the Ghat or managed it. The workers lived there and ran their own pools and washboards, conducted business with a few neighborhoods or hotels or businesses, picked up clothes from them, cleaned them in the compound, and dropped them off. The decentralization of the Ghat made it strangely efficient: clothes were never lost, because each man was personally responsible for his loads of laundry.

When the Reader considers that this human laundromat is in a country that is an IT superpower, has launched lunar missions and developed the atom bomb, he begins to grasp the strange contrasts that make India. Economists call it schizophrenic, with a tenth of the sub-continent advancing at a breakneck pace unknown in human history, banners of Nehru at the head of their rising waves, and the other ninth remaining poor and dirty and low-caste citizens of a world that consists entirely of the village or the neighborhood or the slum, under the low protective ceiling that Ghandi built. How does it stay together?

Ganesh stopped the car over a green, sickly looking swamp, with a sort of city on the other side of the road. It was the outside of Dharavi, where property moguls had built apartment complexes. The center was far too condensed for that. Dharavi was a city built on, with, and by the things that the world threw away. The foundations were garbage, the buildings shanties, the occupants the urban poor—but they represented a massive concentration of votes, so politicians promised them much and sometimes they had to follow through on those promises. That is how Dharavi got its water and electricity and sanitation, but it got its industry on its own.

One quarter was a man-powered recycling plant, a toxic dump of a business, based around a maze of dirty lanes and open sewers and dead-faced, glaring men. They earned between two and three dollars for their twelve hour shifts, then slept on the factory floor and mailed it all out to their country homes, where it was worth more. Inside the cobbled together factories, the workers shuffled around great vats and roaring fires, shoveling in aluminum shavings or plastic and breathing in the fumes. We climbed up from a factory onto the hot tin roof and looked out over that strange wasteland, contemplating the rising smog. “Well,” said Reuben, “it’s only twenty minutes off our life, give or take.” As for the workers, Shiva said none would not live long enough to see the side effects of the conditions.

They set the plastic with machines they made themselves and cut it into pellets, sorted by quality, to be molded into toys or keyboards by other factories. They cleaned out paint cans by putting them in kilns and burning out the excess paint, then applying a new label and sending them back to the paint manufacturer. The raw materials of their industry lay piled outside: old computer monitors, plastic jugs, empty paint cans and gas tanks, sacks of plastic shreds and crushed cans. Such waste came from India, but also from America and China, and the Dharavites built a city out of it.

We came to the slum’s main boulevard, a busy lane of traffic on foot and in auto-rickshaws, and took in the city outside the constrictive lanes of the factories. The buildings looked like impressions of buildings made from garbage. The people were happier and better dressed. They were professionals. Students, lawyers, doctors, technology specialists, and police officers (70 per cent of Mumbai’s force) lived there in Dharavi, because their family came from there or because they could not afford to live anywhere else in India’s most expensive city.

I followed Shiva into the tight warren, lanes shaded by the closely matched eves of the tenements and barely wide enough across for one man to walk, avoided the blue chemical waste of the sewers where they were open gutters, and peeked into the hovels where I could. My college dorm was larger, and families lived there, under a five-foot roof, with another family living in the second story, reached by a little ladder. Yet, they had carpets and pots and flat-screen televisions. The women wore sarees or burkas. Dharavi’s Hindus and Muslims lived in separate neighborhoods, but got along peacefully enough. The locals waved to us on their way to the store or working on some cottage industry, molding clay pots or rolling chapatis in the sun of little courtyards, and the children popped out in packs and screamed, “Hello!” The bolder ones shook our hands.

Later we came to a preschool, which was as distressing and as heartwarming as any preschool anywhere in the world. We moved on to a primary school. The students were studying for an exam, and we saw keyboards and computers on the open books. “These kids will write the operating system we’ll use in ten years,” said Reuben. We conversed about the rise of the Third World. The West hired China and India to make its junk, and the Asian nations used that money to make a middle-class of modern professionals. Most Americans have called an Indian for technical support, and more and more are going to Thailand and India for cheap therapeutic visits of competitive quality. “Once they have a middle-class of consumers,” said I, “the relationship is over.”

The tour concluded at the vocational school that organized it. An American volunteer was up teaching computer-related grammar to a group of Indians, who paid 50 rupees a week for the lessons and received all their money back if they finished the course. The owner, an energetic young Indian, came down to talk to us. “It’s not about having a good time,” he said of the tour. “It’s about understanding.” Ganesh was waiting outside. He drove the five of us back to Colaba, though he had to bribe a policeman on the way.

I slept nearly all day the next day, except for a brief excursion to Laxmi Vila for a newspaper and a grilled paneer, that is cheese, sandwich, and another for dinner at Bagdadi. Joe and Tommy and I went to Gokal afterwards, a seedy Indian bar down the street full of people who want no more company than a whiskey glass. Joe and I had $1 mugs of Kingfisher, with a chemical taste of some preservative that gave horrible headaches, and Joe talked about the months he spent teaching English in Taiwan, the openness of the Chinese, and the strangeness of that country’s wild west.

I was weary of Bombay. Weighed down by the aggressive cries of the street-vendors, the hands of the beggars, the taxis that swerved in my way, the giant inexplicable balloons that salesmen pushed in my face, I found myself becoming bitter and mistrustful of the Indians, all of whom appeared to see me as a dollar sign or a photo opportunity. This annoyance was particular to Mumbai, I know, but it twisted me. Tom was also angered by our treatment and would complain later of a lack of compassion; but it is easy to lose your empathy when humans act so. It was time to move on from Bombay, a good city to visit, but four days are enough. I’d been there five.

Tom and I went with Joe to the Churchgate Train Station. He had a 30 hour trip to Delhi, and hopefully to a science writing job with an English paper. A Harry Potter book that someone pressed on him was his only company. “You know,” he said, “I’m actually getting into it. I want to know what will happen.” At the ticket office, a busy woman told us that the only train to Aurangabad not entirely book left in three hours. Tom and I bought our tickets, and reserved some for Goa for when we got back, and rushed around the city to be ready in time.

Yet you too in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone — and as short-lived, alas!
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I’ve mentioned a few of the camera problems I’ve had to you, Reader, but not nearly all of them. Luckily my friends provided me with a few shots to fill in the gaps. I posted a batch of those, and the ones I took myself between Aswan to Haifa, to my Flickr pages. Here are a few favorite ones.

Wadi Rum

Photo by Jean.

Nuweiba & Dahab, Egypt

Photo by Yashar.

Mount Sinai, Egypt

Photo by Amelia.

Cairo

The Western Desert

Aswan & Abu Simbel

Jerusalem

Hebron

Tel Aviv & Haifa

Amman & Jerash

I know I want to sing
So I know I can.
—Kyp Malone

Why did I write two songs about Egypt? O Reader, I had plenty of time.

My Eid Goat

Christmas brings a great deal to television, in themes and movies and commercial bumpers. The Mohammedan festival of Id al-Adha is no different. The bumper, a 3D cartoon, begins with a nervous looking sheep. A butcher’s cleaver falls from off screen just next to the beast’s head, who then collapses on his side in an expanding pool of blood. This similarly themed song is set to the tune of that classic nursery school rhyme, My Highland Goat. The notes at the end of each line are for the kids singing along—it is, after all, a childrens’ song.

Oh my Eid goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
Was feeling fine (e-ine-e-ine-e-ine)
Until he saw (e-aw-e-aw-e-aw)
What’s on my mind (e-ind-e-ind-e-ind)

It’s time for Eid (e-eid-e-eid-e-eid)
The crowd grew nigh (e-eye-e-eye-e-eye)
Out in the street (e-eet-e-eet-e-eet)
That goat must die (e-eye-e-eye-e-eye)

They took my goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
And tied his feet (e-eet-e-eet-e-eet)
We were all ready (e-ady-e-ady-e-ady)
For some fresh meat (e-eat-e-eat-e-eat)

I took my knife (e-ife-e-ife-e-ife)
And slashed his throat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
The blood did spill (e-ill-e-ill-e-ill)
Out of my goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)

We cut him up (e-up-e-up-e-up)
With our chainsaw (e-aw-e-aw-e-aw)
And took the parts (e-arts-e-arts-e-arts)
And stacked them raw (e-aw-e-aw-e-aw)

We cooked him up (e-up-e-up-e-up)
On our hot grill (e-ill-e-ill-e-ill)
Now my poor goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
Just a smeared kill (e-ill-e-ill-e-ill)

Now I am full (e-ull-e-ull-e-ull)
But I do fear (e-ear-e-ear-e-ear)
I’ll need a goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
For Eid next year (e-ear-e-ear-e-ear)

The Bedbug Blues

Our beds for 18 days in Dahab were infested with bedbugs, those “small, elusive, and parasitic insects of the family Cimicidae” (Wikipedia) that rise hungrily as you fall to rest. We saw them scurrying on the walls and pillows and sheets around 2 a.m. Like roaches, the durable pests refused to be crushed or battered. Amelia had experience with the deadly snakes and spiders of Oz, and she decapitated the parasites with a small, sharp knife. Ah, dear Cimex lectularius, for all our lost sleep in those late hours of unexpected carnage, I wrote this song for thee on the train back from Aswan.

I’m trying to sleep,
They’re trying to eat.
I got some bedbugs
Between my sheets.

They come out at night,
I’m feeling them bite.
Leave a buffet line of welts
When I turn out the light.

I got the bedbug blues,
I got the bedbug blues,
Won’t sleep tonight,
I got the bedbug blues.

I feel little footsteps,
They creep down my spine.
I turn to my baby,
She’s out of her mind.

Hopping all over,
Tangled up in her hair.
Those nightly terrors,
Run back to their lair.

She’s got the bedbug blues,
She’s got the bedbug blues,
Won’t sleep tonight,
She’s got the bedbug blues.

I go to the manager,
We got an infestation.
He sends up the bellboy.
To fumigate our vacation.

Ten cans of Raid,
Well they aren’t enough.
They get us high,
But bedbugs are tough.

We got the bedbug blues,
We got the bedbug blues,
Won’t sleep tonight,
We got the bedbug blues.

I asked the Lord,
Have mercy, Lord please.
They’re drinking my blood,
Soon as sun’s down on me.

I’m trying to sleep,
They’re trying to eat.
We can’t get along,
I’m no piece of meat.

I got the bedbug blues,
I got the bedbug blues,
Won’t get no sleep tonight,
I got the bedbug blues.

So goodbye, so long, the road calls me dear,
And your tears cannot bind me anymore,
And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes—
Can I kiss you, and then I’ll be gone.
—Tom Waits, “Old Shoes”

I met Amelia at the House of Peace after returning from Hebron, and we caught a 6:30 bus to Haifa, a peninsular town on the coast north of Tel Aviv. While we waited at the train station for our CouchSurfing host, Amelia found a packet of Tim Tams, the Australian Oreo, two wafers around light cream and coated in chocolate. Once someone asked her what cuisine Australia produced, and the only things she could name were kangaroo steaks and Tim Tams. (Vegemite is a Kraft product that found a market in Oz when Americans turned it down.)

She reprimanded me for thinking to eat them with cold milk. The Australians follow the British in calling their cookies biscuits and in eating the treats with tea or coffee. Tim Tams go especially well with the latter: bite off a pair of opposite corners and you can suck coffee through the porous wafer, although this trick requires perfect timing, and anything less will melt the Tim Tam into a crumbling tragedy. Amelia was very excited about the cookies. She shared them with the security staff, the women at the convenience store, and with Shimry, our host, when he arrived.

Shimry apologized for the mess of his car, a beat up little Honda, but it had been so long since we drove in any private vehicle that neither of us cared. A tall Israeli with a shaved head, he did tech support in Tel Aviv, spent most of that time arguing on the Internet, studied physics and philosophy at Haifa University—“It doesn’t really attract the smartest students,” he told us—and enjoyed good beer, which is how I picked him out from the lists of CouchSurfing. He drove from the train station by the sea halfway up the hill that Haifa occupies to his apartment. His long-haired roommate, a big cat named Looloo, and two albino lab rats shared that dirty but spacious flat. He cleared some things away in the kitchen so he could make coffee and enjoy a Tim Tam in the proper way.

There was an American-style bar down by the city zoo that was a little pricier than the “sleazy” one we tried for initially, but Shimry assured us they had a huge menu of international beer. I sat there in indecision, staring at the dark Trappist brews from Belgium and the wheat beers from Germany and the British ales and remembering the names and tastes of the ones I’d tried in those lands where beer is an art. “Look at him,” said Amelia, “now he’s never going to leave this place.” Eventually I settled on a Taybeh dark, from Arabia’s only microbrewery, outside Ramallah, and fell into a conversation about beer and Oregon.

The next day we had our minds set on a picnic. We bought cheese, salami, a baguette, and a cheap Israeli red wine at a supermarket and walked with it under our arms straight up the hill, past the point where “it can’t be much further,” and the point where “we must have passed it by now,” and made it to “why didn’t we take the bus?” when we finally saw, at the peak of the hill, a building so strange it could only belong to a university campus. The meadows of Carmel Park ran along the curve of a ridge and looked down on a forested valley that ran all the way to the villas on the sea. There were a few cars parked there and two locals rode through on ATVs, but otherwise we were alone with a pair of grazing cows, which looked on Amelia’s affection for pulling bovine ears with a violent disdain.

We made sandwiches with the treasures we had bought, so different from everything we’d eaten in the past three months, and finished off the wine, and talked until the sun started to set. I made unsentimental Amelia wait to watch the disc’s final plummet—it would be the last Mediterranean sunset either of us would see for a long time. “It’s just another sea,” said Amelia, “you’ll see better ones in Asia.” “But this is a sea with so much history,” I argued, “and Odysseus was lost in it, and the Romans called it Our Sea,” and she laughed at my insanity. We went to a cafe for coffee and a hollow doughy roll that Amelia remembered having in Czech Republic on our way back to Shimry’s apartment, then bought beer and some things to make vegetable soup and had a good dinner.

There were a few other places to see in Israel—the baptism mecca of Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee; the last Crusader fortress at Acre; our friends’ kibbutz near the fence of Gaza; the Palestinian village of Bil’in, where the Wall separates the town from its olive groves, and the protesting inhabitants are teargassed every week on Friday—but O Jerusalem! we were tired of religion and suffering and Israel, and wanted to get out and move on to some new road. This of course took us back across the King Hussein Bridge, where we paid $40 for the right to leave the country, to Amman. It was the fourth time I’d come to that city, and Amelia’s fifth.

I had to get an Indian visa in the Jordanian capital, since in Israel the embassy outsourced the work to travel agencies that took two weeks to do it; and Amelia was plotting her trip north to Kurdistan, the northern region of Iraq where people are safe, the economy is stable, and George W. Bush is a messiah. Flights there from Amman cost nearly $1000, so she settled on meeting Jean in Damascus, who also wanted to go, and taking the trying overland route. Eventually, Jean would persuade her to visit Iran instead, and they would fly into Tehran and receive 15-day visas in the airport, where Americans must pay $100 a day and be on a guided tour; but these plans had yet to come to fruition, and we had four days in Amman.

We checked into Cliff Hotel and found ourselves in the same Room Number 2 where we stayed last time, which still smelled of felafel from Hashem’s. Neither of us could take that stuff, so we went to get schwarma and tea and shisha (or teasha) down the street, falling quickly into old habits. We watched TV in the hotel common room, around the oil-burning furnace.

The next day, a Thursday, I went early to the Indian Embassy by the First Circle on Jebel Amman to request my visa. I had to run around making photo copies and printing tickets and getting money, but eventually I received the promise of a three-month visa in a week’s time. I would fly to Mumbai on the 17th, in ten days. I brought breakfast back with me, banana muffins, and we took a cab out past the lists of Western restaurants, bearing such shockingly out of place names as Applebees, Fuddruckers, Popeye’s, Burger King, and TGIF, and emerged in the wide parking fields of two great shopping centers, the Mecca Mall and City Mall. When I had seen that horror New Moon in Cairo, Amelia promised she would see Avatar with me and was true to her word.

We bought pizzas and milk cartons at the City Mall’s Carrefour, and picked out a bag of sweets for the show; when we received our box-framed 3D glasses, it seemed in most respects like some primary school date. We took our seats in the fourth row center of the sold-out theater and played with our glasses.

The Arab audience talked quietly through the first part of the movie, but at the flying scene, where the protagonists made a spectacular dive on their pterodactyls, they started whistling and cheering. The floodgates loose, this exuberance continued during the PG sex scene. During Jake’s big speech against the foreign occupation and its imperialistic greed for resources, the fervor exploded. The audience found it impossible to turn quiet, and a few scattered members kept whistling while the rest shushed them noisily, and a ten-year-old boy in the front screamed, “Shut the fuck up!” All through the last battle they cheered every explosion, every kill, every climax of the rendered action.

An effete, erudite (I tend to confuse the two) critic might call Avatar a cliched, uninspired film. The obvious political overtones, referring to “shock and awe” and “preemptive strikes,” were not lost on the Jordanian audience. The characters and plot devices are drawn from stock archetypes, and it is, at its heart, another sci-fi flick about scientists on an alien world—but it has a steady beating heart, a tender love to the bulk of its expensive creation, that involves the audience easily and inextricably in its predictable arcs. Like most of James Cameron’s movies, Avatar excels in the art of its storytelling, the creative depth of the world, and the leaps and bounds of its technology. Amelia and I left smiling, and we stopped in a store on the way out so she could buy a pea coat to keep warm in the mountains.

The bakery across the alley from the Cliff Hotel had cinnamon rolls the next day. Discs of flatbread fired noisily down the metal chute from the ceiling into a bin in the corner as I bought some pastries for breakfast.

Amelia and I went to the Wild Cafe up on the hill to use the Internet, and we reminisced on things. At night, we drank the arak I gave her for Christmas, then went out for beers with some Belgians and a Brazilian. The next day, a Saturday, was her last day in Amman. I went with her to the pharmacy for more eye gel and to the bank to change shekels. We got coffee and reminisced some more, both full of gratitude for good company on the unsteady road, for the inside jokes, for the easy-going, for the trust and the kindness, and for being more than a stranger to at least one friend.

That night could have been any other night, as we had a big chicken dinner. I bought beers at the liquor store where we’d once yelled to our taxi driver, “Stop!” on Kate’s birthday, the night we started our company ten weeks before, but the world keeps turning. We talked sparsely, feeling the imminence of separation. “It’s a sad day when you have to set your alarm,” she said. The world keeps turning. In the morning I walked with her out to the corner to hail a cab that would take her north to the bus station for a shared taxi to the Syrian border. We shared an embrace and a sad goodbye, and then our partnership ended.

It was the first time I’d been alone since descending through the Cilician Gates into Syria, and I missed my constant companions sorely, especially Amelia. In the week that followed, I kept busy uploading a backlog of photos and writing, and I would hang out with Australian soldiers, a Norwegian named Erasmus, a girl from Utah named Hannah who knew Santiago and had met Jean on his trip back to Syria, and a Nipponjin named Takato on his way to Yemen—“But Al-Qaeda is there, and they closed all the embassies. Isn’t it dangerous?” Amelia had asked him when we first met in the Peace House. “No,” said Takato, “don’t worry, they released him last week.” “What?” “The Japanese man they kidnapped. They released him. He was only in jail for a month.” But I still felt isolated, very far from home, and very glad and grateful to have the memories of the last three months.

Amelia, I thank you. India is next.

They fill the children full of hate
To fight an old man’s war
And die upon the road to peace.
—Tom Waits

Our bus returned Amelia and I from Bethlehem to the Damascus Gate, and under the setting sun we walked back up the Mount of Olives, through the crowded rows of the Jewish cemeteries. The Mount is prime real estate for the dead—the buried there end at the front of the line when the Last Judgment comes around.

Tuesday we tried to enter the Temple Mount, that holiest site of Abraham’s test and Mohammed’s ascension where one prayer is worth ten thousand, but the guards shut the gate in our faces. Only a certain number of non-Muslims could enter during the two daily windows the Mount opens to tourists, and we were two too many. Dismayed, we went up through the Old City, the streets full of Nigerian pilgrims, Zionist American tour groups with their hired riflemen, girls with unloaded guns slung over their backs huddled around some map as part of their army training. All Israel’s women serve two years in the army, and men have three, except the Orthodox Jews paid by the government to study the Torah.

After locating with some difficulty the rock-covered grave of Oskar Schindler, we walked northwest of the Old City to visit the Jewish Orthodox neighborhood there, Mea Shaarim. The inhabitants live and dress as their forebears did in nineteenth century Europe, locked in a simpler era by that peculiar regressive fancy that strikes every human faith in some way.

They wear the black clothes that the medieval Church demanded they wear, with tzitzi tassels hanging out the men’s jackets. Some wear the teffilin, a black box strapped to their forehead and black straps on their wrists. Most men have a hat: at least a kippa or fedora, and often the cylindrical Slavic fur hats, the shtreimel, spodik, and kolpik, of the Hasidic Jews. Beards and sideburns and sidelocks were common. The streets were bare of life and decoration as a ghetto. Stores sold simple, often handcrafted things, used books, and antique furniture, and, I noticed, the mattress stores carry no size larger than a twin.

The “residents faithful to the tradition of divine command” had posted the following sign: “To women and girls who pass through our neighborhood, we beg you with all our hearts, please do not pass through our neighborhood inimmodest clothing. (Modest clothes include: closed blouse with long sleeves, long skirt, no trousers, no tight-fitting clothes.) Please do not disturb the sanctity of our neighborhood and our way of life as Jews committed to G-d and his Torah.” Another stated: “Groups passing through severely offends the residents. Please, stop this.”

Ibrahim served a big dinner that night and gave us a talk about paying the bills, so we were sure to donate before we left the next morning. It was a crazed place, Jerusalem, and we were tired of the politics of faith, and ready to go somewhere secular and get a drink.

Tel Aviv called to us as the place to welcome the New Year. If Jerusalem was the locus of Israel’s religion, then Tel Aviv was the bastion of her Western liberalism. The glass coffins of offices and apartments lined the sunny beach like diamonds, and you could find people swimming in the sea and drinking at bars and washing clothes at the laundromat at all hours of the day. It seemed in its modernity infinitely far from the squalor and politics of Cairo and Hebron and Beirut and all the rest of the region. Though young, educated activists take to the streets in protest against their government’s treatment of the Palestinian problem, the Telavivans never leave their vibrant city to show support where it really matters.

Amelia and I were CouchSurfing for the first time in Tel Aviv. By that wonderful Web site, travelers meet locals who offer the hospitality of extra beds or vacant couches, and of a local perspective, a free guide. In some places, like South America and most of the Middle East, CouchSurfing can be difficult as the young people to whom it appeals live with their parents, but in Israel hosts were common (and I hear that Indians will invite their guests to stay for a week or two).

We took a bus up to the University and asked directions to find Ehud’s apartment building, and our host welcomed us inside. Ehud, a physics student, lived in a clean, well-decorated flat with leather couches and modern art in what used to be the wealthiest area of Tel Aviv, but took credit for none of the room’s taste. “It’s all my roommate,” he said. “I let her do everything. I’m useless at it.” He was in the middle of cooking an onion soup for her and had only a little time with us before he had to go to work, but that was enough to display his generous hospitality.

Ehud served us leftovers and then started mixing drinks, White Russians—“I used to be a bartender”—and some fruity liqueur as soon as a glass was empty. I asked about Israeli beer, and he brought out a Goldstar dark lager without a thought. His apartment stocked more booze than food. A week before, he and his roommate, Alinna, drove up to a small Orthodox town to buy food. Because every family there has at least eight kids (if you have eight children in Israel it nets extra benefits from the government), grocery prices are much lower. They came back with a trunk full of Goldstar and Absolut. Both Ehud and Alinna had that Russian biology common in Israel, where one in five speak the language.

“Jon,” said Ehud, “you studied history and seem like a philosophical kind of guy, so I have a philosophical question for you. What are you drinking?” He stirred another White Russian, then continued: “So, I don’t know if you’re religious, but religions say that God has a plan for everyone, that everyone has a fate. Everything you do is planned. It’s all destiny. You can’t escape it. There’s no, how do you say—yes, right, there’s no free will.

“In quantum mechanics, though,” and he waved at the big red physics book on its leather chair, “you see that at the most basic level, within particles, you can tell where an electron is, or you can tell how fast it’s going, but not both. Even with the most advanced computer in the world, even with a computer that nobody can make yet, you couldn’t tell. It’s random. There are tiny variations that nobody can predict. So I’m reading about this, and it just makes me question everything.”

We kept talking, applying Chaos Theory and the lawlessness of history to the mundane existence of a human, and listening to Balkan Beatbox, until Ehud’s friend Cho-Cho arrived, fresh returned from a tour of duty. Curious, we asked them about military service in Israel, where at 18-years-old all men serve three years and women two. Israel had consigned Ehud to an armored division where, after his eight months of busy training, his keen intellect languished with nothing to do. For every young Israeli conscripted to a job examining satellite photos of Gaza or working in a hospital or learning a martial trade, there are ten who sit idly at a dead border or deal with Palestinians going in and out of the Wall. No wonder so many Israelis travel for months after their release from such a purgatory of duty!

“It’s not dangerous,” said Ehud, “and it’s not useful. It’s just like any other thing. If you study hard in university, you have the same amount of discipline that you would if you took apart and scrubbed your rifle every day and marched around.”

Ehud finally escaped his mandatory service ahead of schedule via the neat trick of a mental breakdown. When Alinna came home from work, she told us that her two years were wasted time, that she started college two years later than she would have in any other country. We talked until Ehud had to go to work. Then we sat there watching TV with Cho-Cho and Alinna and eventually went to bed on the mattress they’d laid out behind the couch. In the morning when we were up, Ehud made omelets in his underwear, blaring Tchaikovsky’s 1812.

Ehud worked at a hotel down by the beach, a sleazy by-the-hour place where he could study physics behind the reception desk. His most common clients were East European prostitutes and Hasidic Jews—“Because they’re not getting anything good at home,” said Ehud. The prostitutes left him a small tip each time they came through, and the Hasidic Jews avoided his eyes.

We met him there in the early evening after exploring downtown Tel Aviv and having a beer at the mahogany and gold Brewhouse on Rothschild. Our CouchSurfing host poured us coffee from a thermos and then went to deal with something while we sat in the lounge next to an old woman from Ontario named Karen. Tel Aviv is nice, Amelia said, “but expensive. “Yes it’s expensive,” said Karen. “Don’t think we’re licking honey in Canada. I don’t want to tell you what we’re licking.”

There was a Californian named Mark working there as a handyman, who had first come to Israel as a professional soldier. He was heavyset and had a shaved head and an East Coast accent. Once he and his friends had packed up all their gear and ATVs in the trailer when a call came to each in turn: “Be on base in six hours.” They returned from Gaza City a week later to find everything gone.

“Where was your wife?” asked Karen.

“Come on,” said Mark. “I told you a dozen times. We’re not married.”—“What do you mean you’re not married? She bore two of your children.”—“Well we’re not married.”—“You should marry the girl. Isn’t she good enough?”—“She says I don’t make enough money. I make 200,000 shekels a year and she says it’s not enough. I give her a house, a car, groceries. She doesn’t have to work. Isn’t that enough?”—“Do you understand this?” asked Karen of Amelia and I. We shrugged.

Mark said, “You want to see pictures of my gun?” and I said, “Yes, definitely.” He showed us a photo of his M4 on his cell phone and told us about the armor piercing bullets and all that, then showed us a video of his Gaza team. “That guy’s always sleeping,” he said. “We stop for five minutes and he falls asleep. See, he’s sleeping here. We call that guy the Student, since he’s always studying. That guy has to wear a map on his back when we walk around. It really sucks. Oh, check this out.” He had a video taken by an undercover friend of his, of a Gazan lying on a stairway in the dusty street. Miliants would run up to the him and spray bullets from their Kalishnakovs, so the body jerked around and splattered. “He sold secrets to the Israelis,” said Mark, matter-of-factly.

We excused ourselves, said goodbye to Ehud, who was working all night, and went down the street to Momo’s Hostel. Our friend Rob of Perth, who we met at Ismaelia House in Cairo, was staying there, and we arranged to meet him later in Florentin before going to Mike’s Place for nachos and a pitcher of beer. Mike’s was an American bar right next to the Embassy, famous for being bombed in 2003, that served American fare with the atmosphere of a place just off the Interstate. The only Israelis who went there were after foreign girls.

Mollified, we retrieved Rob from his hostel and took a bus down to Florentin, picking up a few bottles of beer on the way. Denniz’s friend Rachel lived in the neighborhood and had told us that on New Years Eve the main street became a party, blockaded to traffic and filled with young revelers. The three of us pushed through them until we came to a corner under a streetlamp and met two Texans that Rob knew. I never got their names, but one was a large blonde girl with a tremendous affection for Black culture and the other looked like a Giovanni Ribisi action figure.

Florentin had no official countdown, so when Amelia’s watch said the time was right and the decade was about to change, we started shouting seconds alone. Our enthusiasm dissipated when nobody joined us. A dozen groups spontaneously did the same over the next few minutes. Eventually we decided it must be New Years and we could celebrate. We stayed a while longer until the lack of music got to us, and then we got on a bus back up the strip. The Texans started singing old 2Pac and Biggie songs, and they fell in love with Rob when they learned that the Australian knew all the verses.

We went back to Mike’s Place for beers. The band had stopped playing and their equipment littered the stage, and we sat on benches around a wood table and watched people. The Texans were confused about why Amelia and I were in Israel and why we had been traveling for so long. “So,” they said, “you just go to a place and look around for a few days, and then go somewhere else?” Yes, we said, enjoying their incredulity.

A drunk Hindu businessman from Bangalore named Gururaj started talking to us, and he invited me to call him when I come to that part of the world. His more sober friend was ready to leave and tugged Gururaj away. “Don’t let him do that!” cried the Texan girl. “If you don’t wanna leave, you stay. Just say this to him: ‘I will cut you,’”—she emphasized that cut with an extending drawl,—“Come on! ‘I will cut you!’ That’s what we say in Texas when we mean business.”

Our bill when we asked for it included a lot of extra charges labeled “Quality Discount,” and even inebriated we could tell they weren’t discounts at all. “What are these?” I asked the waitress. She went and got the manager, an porky American, who with an aggravated, overbearing friendliness asked us, “Hey, is there anything I can do to help you?”

“What’s this Quality Discount?” I wondered. “Well,” said the man, “here at Mike’s Place, we have a policy of not charging anyone cover, so y’all got in here free tunight. The quality charge is something we charge after ten, since there’s no cover. There are signs up everywhere.” “We didn’t know that. We didn’t see any signs.” The manager got very defensive, and I issued some platitudes about how much we respected his institution and its policies while assuring him that we wouldn’t pay the charge. “Oh, you’re not paying. You’re one of those guys,” said the man. “Well okay, fine buddy, great way to start out the new year. Well let me tell you something, karma always comes around. Enjoy your fourteen shekels. And don’t come back.”

We walked the few blocks back to Momo’s Hostel, complaining all the way, though I felt eerily heroic. Rob and the Texans went to bed, and Amelia and I started hailing cabs. It was so late that all the cabbies tried to charge us an exorbitant fee, until Amelia declared, “Let’s just walk back. I walk back home all the time in Melbourne. Sometimes for miles.” Instead of doing that, we got on a microbus headed most of the way to the University. Amelia said as we sat there, “Doesn’t it seem like there’s something off about this city? I don’t know what it is. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like a Western city, but something’s off.”

We tried to figure out what it was the next day. Tel Aviv is surely a bubble, a fresh, sterile, secular Western metropolis in the middle of an ancient, noisy, faithful East, and it seems unaware of its isolation—not arrogant, just blind. More than that, the population of Tel Aviv, compared to the other cities of the Levant, with their Arabs and Coptics and Nubians and Druze, and compared to the cities back home, was homogenous. Nearly everyone was Jewish and speaks Hebrew and English or Hebrew and Russian. They came with few exceptions from Russia and America and pockets of Europe.

(The most fascinating exception is the community found in Ethiopia, practicing a fundamental form of Judaism. Nobody knew where they came from, but the Israelis pulled them into airplanes, shipped them into Israel, and started teaching them Hebrew. ”I didn’t know what was going on,” anyone will tell you. “All of a sudden, there were black people.”)

New Years Day we took a break and went to a theater in the mall to see Where the Wild Things Are, and I gorged myself at the pre-Shabbat cafeteria on the thick, rich Slavic food you can find in Israel. The day after we picked out more of Israel’s strange traits, as I walked down the beach to Jaffa and Amelia tried to shop on the Shabbat. Along the grass promenade that ran along the sand were picnickers and cyclists and women in skirts and groomed dogs on leashes, and I was not being oggled as a remarkable aberration, a stranger in a strange land, an Other. “He was one of us,” as Conrad says, and no one treated me any different.

Old Jaffa, the Port of Jerusalem, where Jonah boarded a ship to Tarshish and where Christian pilgrims disembarked on their way to sites of pilgrimage, is a museum piece. I wandered through the quiet old town and had a grilled cheese sandwich at Said Abuelafia & Sons, since 1879. You can find many distinct foods in Israel, such as schnitzel sandwiches and salami and the largest concentration of sushi restaurants outside Japan.

That night we took a bus back to Jerusalem, though we had to wait until the Shabbat ended at six. We returned to the Peace House and got beds in the back room, and the next day the Temple Mount turned us away again. We went to the Israel Museum, to see the vast model of King Herod’s Jerusalem, the Second Temple prominent, and the Shrine of the Book where the Dead Sea Scrolls are maintained in worshipful solemnity.

As our contribution to Ibrahim’s Peace House, we made a soup with what we could find and what we were hungering for: Spinach, cauliflower, onions, and a lot of garlic, with potatoes and yams mashed into a paste to give more body to the tomato sauce broth. Ibrahim asks for donations to keep the place running, and those who can’t afford it help in other ways, by doing laundry or cooking for people. A group of German backpackers had shown up, asked Ibrahim to pay for their cab fee, and then stayed for a few days, eating their fill at dinner. “We’re pretty good at telling who will and who won’t donate,” said Irene. “They won’t.”

A good Muslim, Ibrahim never kicks anyone out from his house, although in their self-righteous bickering his lodgers often ask him to. Only once has he broken the Mohammedan principle of hospitality. An American man and wife had come to Jerusalem with their dog from some devout recess of the country, where a preacher told them, “God has spoken, and He wants you to stay at Ibrahim’s house.” The wife was pregnant, and Ibrahim gave them his own room and bed and took the woman to the hospital when the time came. On the roof at the same time, their dog gave birth to nine puppies, which ran around the Peace House making a mess of things.

A month passed and Ibrahim’s birthday came. He was holding a big party, and he asked the pilgrims, “Would you be able to move out of my room before then?” “No!” said the pilgrims, “God told us to come here, and we won’t leave until He says. If you want a place to stay, go to a hotel. Our Lord will get you a room.” Well, Ibrahim asked them to leave again and again, and finally a squad of Israeli police showed up.

“Ibrahim,” said the officer, “do you have Americans in there? They called and said you were trying to kick them out.” Ibrahim told the police what had happened, that it was his own bed he wanted the Americans to leave. The officer went to the pilgrims and said, “You have to leave.” “You’ll be punished,” said the pilgrims, “if you do this. God told us to come here, and we won’t leave until He says.” The officer replied, humorlessly, “Well then you call your God and tell Him to send down a fax in the next five minutes.”

While this was happening, the police found that the Americans had overstayed their three week visa by three months, and so God never had to fax the Israeli police.

I spent the next day apart from Amelia in Hebron. I had heard horrible stories of the city, one of the flashpoints for hostility between Israel and occupied Palestine, with one of the region’s saddest stories. In 1929 there was a massacre. Palestinian riots carried off nearly 50 of the Jews who still lived in that sacred city, the Canaanite city where Abraham was buried, though good Palestinian neighbors sheltered and saved the lives of hundreds more. The Jews left Hebron, and it became Egyptian and then Jordanian, until the Six-Day War. Victorious Israel sent 500 settlers to the West Bank of the Jordan to live in the ancient city, in the middle of 160,000 Palestinians, who call the place Khalil.

I arrived outside the souq with Catherine and Katerina, from Germany and Austria, who I met on the bus. They were volunteering at the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem and told me some things about the city.

The streets were full of Israeli soldiers and melancholic Arabs. Nets covered the souq like an aviary, to catch the trash thrown from the rooftops of the adjacent Settlement, a neighborhood on a hill closed off by a wall of sealed buildings and barbed wire and gated roadblocks, and there were watchtowers and sniper nests and spotters on all the rooftops. Israeli boys come out under military escort to slap Arabs and insult them. The Settler families are notorious in their zealotry and seem intent on removing the Palestinians from their Promised Land through antagonism and cruelty—turn them into refugees; let Jordan and Lebanon deal with their camps.

The Teutons and I left the souq for a great plaza surrounding the two shrines built over the Ma’arat HaMachpela—the Cave of the Patriarchs. The Ibrahimi Mosque and the Sanctuary of Abraham synagogue were once connected by the octagonal chamber around Abraham’s tomb, but now the heavy doors and walls and the bulletproof glass installed in the space between the two temples prevent any contact. The place is segregated by religion—no Jews in the mosques, no Muslims in the synagogue—for the safety of both. Fifteen years ago, a Jewish settler entered the mosque and killed 29 Palestinians at prayer.

When the Teutons left, I stayed to talk to people—to the Observers who watched the courtyards with cameras and notepads, who have been dispatched there by the six neutral countries participating since the massacre; to a man whose shop was closed and sealed since it was on a street adjacent to the Settlement, who is now unemployed. I asked, “When will the Israelis leave?” “Never,” he said. The Observers are in Hebron until they do. “The Israelis are supposed to leave?” “Yes,” said one, “it is in the Hebron Agreement that Israel will turn over control of the city to Palestine.” “Have they?” “No.”

I wandered the town alone, bought lunch at a kebab place and a kefiyeh in the souq, and set off for the return journey. On the bus back to Jerusalem, I sat next to an unknown girl, as terrifying a prospect in the Islamic World as it would be to an adolescent boy back home. The gentleman fears to look at, much less brush against or talk with those sensibly scarved Muslim maidens, flipping delicately through pocket-sized Qur’ans.

The bus re-entered Israel through the fortress gates of the Wall in Bethlehem, its sheer ten meters covered in as much political graffiti as the Wall of Berlin. There, next to a huge tower, I saw the sign that Denniz had painted there and shown us in a photograph: red letters on a white rectangle, a quotation by Kurt Tucholsky that also hangs in the entrance of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem: “A country is not just what it does, it is also what it tolerates.”

Jerusalem was a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohammedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present. Its people, with rare exceptions, were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through.
—Lawrence of Arabia

On Christmas Eve, as our taxi drove to the bridge across the River Jordan, we passed a convoy of fifty pick-ups, vans, ambulances, and tractor trailer trucks. They bore the flags of Palestine and Turkey, were filled with waving men and desperate supplies, and honked in return to welcoming Jordanians. The murals called them a “Lifeline to Gaza.”

The obese Palestinian man sitting next to us in the taxi said they were sent by George Galloway, an Englishman. They would drive to that Red Sea corner where Jordan, Israel, and Egypt meet at Aqaba, Elat, and Taba, and then cross Sinai to the Gaza Strip, and cross the sealed border at midnight on New Years. Several thousand volunteers planned to walk across the same border at the same time, bearing school supplies. They would celebrate with milkshakes instead of booze.

It was a complicated situation! The Gazans had nothing but what Israel would allow them, and that little was not enough. Egypt had buried an iron curtain along their border to stop the tunnel diggers. Humanitarians were putting themselves at the prows of boats, Titanic lovers in supply ships, and steering their craft at the blockaded shore. The zealots of Israel that had marched through the territory waited for trials that might never come.

What can I say, about this or any other facet of the Road to Peace, but what people tell me? The man seated next to us had gone to Jordan to visit his mother, who could never visit Palestine. He hoped he would be allowed back into his own country. We had our own hopes: Our visit to Syria, and the accompanying stamp in our passport, made us immediately suspect in the overtaxed eyes of Israel’s border guards.

Now, due to political happenstance and war, a Syrian stamp raises red flags at the Israeli border, but won’t exclude you from that country, so long as you say the right thing. You’re just there as a tourist, and have no intention of visiting the West Bank. Say the wrong thing—like the man who, when asked about his visit to Iran, said, “It’s a nice place, you should go there”—and the stone-faced Semitic Cerberus will slam a big black mark in your passport that bans you from the Nation of Israel for ten years.

Of the countries that do not recognize Israel’s rite to exist, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Libya take the added measure of refusing entrance to any traveler with an Israeli stamp in their passport, or with an Egyptian exit stamp from the Israeli border. Israel will stamp a piece of paper if you ask, although they’ll ask you why and accept only a very good answer; but those hostile nations of the Axis of Evil look for gaps in your passport dates, where you may have slipped unstamped into the territory of the Jew, and they look for the detritus of the sticker that the Israelis put on your passport at the border.

Only at the King Hussein Bridge can a traveler escape this black mark. There, the Jordanians and Israelis stamp a piece of paper, and it looks, to any intervening eye, as if you had been in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan that entire time. First, though, you have to wait in line for a long time, and then you have to ask them, “Can you stamp a piece of paper?” and endure their shouted questions, “Why? Why? Why?”

They berated the couple ahead of us for asking and sent off a bearded Palestinian man to wait for special attention. I asked him how he was when filling out some form. “I’m fine,” said the man. “Nothing more than normal. I was watching you, though. You should be careful about what you say. And that kefiyeh you are wearing is the Palestinian colors. You should take that off.”

I did what he said, then and in the interview I had with a young Israeli woman. I told her I was going to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, to see touristy things and party, and that I had no interest in West Bank. “I’ve seen Syria and Jordan and Egypt,” I said, “so I’m not really interested.” “Can you even get in the West Bank?” asked Amelia in her independent interview. She said she wanted to go shopping in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the Israeli lit up and wrote down the names of choice shopping malls.

By the time we got out of there, it was five in the afternoon and dark, and although we hoped to get to Bethlehem, we had nowhere to stay, only the tenuous offers to assist of some CouchSurfers already hosting full groups of pilgrims. We sat on a bench considering this, and an old man in a red checkered kefiyeh approached us. “Hi, where you go?” “The bus station,” I replied tersely, tired, and wary of trouble after pledging to avoid the Palestinian West Bank where Bethlehem lay.

He was also on the bus to Jerusalem, that short man with a sparse beard and a weak chin, approaching sixty but still animated by work and family and an inexplicable energy. He said his grandfather lived to be 140 with 75 grandchildren, and he showed us an interview in the 1959 National Geographic to prove it. “Everyone says, I don’t believe it,” said the man. In his half-senile, digressive way, he told us stories of talking with Prime Ministers and dignitaries and cult leaders, most recently with the same George Galloway who had organized the Lifeline to Gaza convoy, and he had visited Portland and Melbourne. He did not even have a passport, just a sort of international card. “I am not a citizen of any nation,” Ibrahim proudly declared.

I first mistook Ibrahim Ahmad Abu El-Hawa for the Wandering Jew, but he was a Bedouin Arab, though his family originated from the Turkish Black Sea. The international advocate of peace in the Holy Land invited us home to stay with him, and we said, Of course. We got out of the bus at the Herod Gate of Jerusalem and got into his son’s taxi, that took us up around the walled city to the Mount of Olives where he lived, just uphill from the Garden of Gethsemane and down the street from where Jesus ascended, in a big five story fortress he designed himself. Ibrahim had four sons and four daughters and 28 grandchildren—“Wait, one was born before I left. Twenty nine!”

Two of these families and 23 of these grandchildren lived in the house with him. We sat in the family room with Ibrahim and his wife, who he called his honey, and his wife’s deaf-mute sister, who howled intermittently, and the young children piled through to see their laughing grandfather. One girl started crying, and she clung to the old man’s presence like a shy kitten as he showed us through the rooms of his house, surprised at the new kitchen, and onto the balcony that looked out over the Bethany Gate in the Wall that wound across the hills about Jerusalem. The City of Peace is not on the flat arid plain where it commonly appears in Hollywood, but clasped within a circle of steep and verdant hills.

“My cousins live there,” said Ibrahim, pointing across the Wall. “There is Palestine, here is Israel, and there is Jerusalem. Three states, all right here. And everyone who lives here,”—he waved at his fortress and his neighborhood,—“is Muslim. No Jews live here. None at all. And everyone there,”—he pointed toward the other side of the Wall,—“is Muslim, too, but that is Palestine, and they cannot come here.”

Ibrahim dismissed the iniquity with a joke and a wave and led us downstairs to a deep open court between his house and the rock of the hill. His grandchildren rushed about, excited by the observance of strangers, and one of his daughters rushed inside to get a headscarf. We talked to a few people, at chicken and salad and bread and Coke, and then Ibrahim and his son Mohammed drove us off to the Peace House.

“There is room for twenty people,” said the old man. “I do not even know who is staying there. I don’t know how I know them! I will have to ask, How do I know you?”

In the crowded kitchen of the three-story house, he posed that question to a group of Ecuadorians visiting from a kibbutz near Gaza, where they plucked defected Hamas rockets out of the sown fields, and to a few other lodgers who had found the place by accident or recommendation. He sat us down around the table and a Maori woman named Irene served us all rice with vegetables and corn beef, and a chocolate cake for Ibrahim’s 68th birthday.

One Californian woman on one of many visits. Mohammed had seen her in the airport looking lost. “I was supposed to pick someone up,” he said, “but his plane was cancel,” and he told her about his father’s open house and offered to take her there. “I don’t trust you,” said the woman, “but I trust God. Lead on!” Her trust was not misplaced, as it turned out. She was there with the Israeli husband, a hairy bucktoothed fellow, whom she had met in that same house and their newborn daughter. It was a very strange company, and a very strange Christmas Eve.

In Bethlehem, 15,000 pilgrims crowded about Manger Square and lined up to enter the Basilica of the Nativity through the low Door of Humility, and within that chapel a Franciscan midnight mass broadcast itself all across the world.

On Christmas morning, Amelia said, “Presents?” We had each received money from family and notes from friends, but real presents are different. I gave Amelia the book and bottle of arak I’d bought her, having gifted her the wool socks a few days preemptively. She had told me that the present she bought me was weighing down her bag—“Doesn’t it look bigger?”—but that it was something I would surely use while traveling, and so I was surprised when she put a slim leather wallet in my hand, to replace the duct taped Oyster card wallet I’d been carrying since I first stepped into the London Underground eleven months before.

We left the Peace House that morning with two other lodgers, both about my age—Josh, an Iranian Jew and Los Angelene come to the Holy Land to learn the craft of wine-making from its Israeli vintners who have in recent years outgrown the sweet stigma of manischewitz; and Janina, a golden-haired German girl in a yellow Indian scarf with a red right hand, who volunteered on the same kibbutz near Gaza as the Ecuadorians, but needed a break from her constant companions—and took a bus to the Damascus Gate.

Old Jerusalem has seven gates: Damascus, Herod’s, Lion’s, Dung, Zion, Jaffa, and the New Gate. The eighth, the Golden Gate, was sealed in the sixteenth century—according to prophecy, God will come through that door at the End of the World, so the worldly Jews blocked the door to keep out the Rapture. The Damascus Gate leads into the largest of the Holy City’s four quarters, that of the Mohammedans, though those busy markets were not as crowded as on most days. Friday is the Muslim holy day, though this has little bearing on business in Jerusalem; Saturday is the Jewish Shabbat, and they shut down most everything in its observance; and Sunday is the Christian day of rest, so no beer is available. Thank God for the differences in His religions, that these don’t all come at once!

At the Jaffa Gate, past the yellow ranks of a Falun Gong protest, we saw a sign for the Free Tour company that offered a free guide for gratis at the end of the trip. Our diminutive guide walked us up to a rooftop at the center of the four districts, and under the window of Samuel Yosef Agnon, who wrote, “Jerusalem is connected by its rooftops and divided by its inhabitants,” we looked out over the calm strata above the crowded streets. The Muslim Quarter was a vast covered souq surrounding the Temple Mount; the quiet and posh Jewish Quarter showed signs of its recent renovations; the Christian Quarter was a skyline of steeples and towers and domes and crosses; and we had walked through the empty stone streets of the Armenian Quarter to get there.

Jokes and history ensued; we saw a street where Life of Brian was filmed, a new synagogue, and the Wailing Wall. The Jews lined up to pray against it, and they stuffed it full of their notes, and would not turn their back on it when they walked away. Obama had put a note in the wall on a visit of state, and it appeared in the paper the next day. Above on the Temple Mount stood the supreme golden dome of the Temple of the Rock, over the stone where Abraham would have sacrificed Isaac and the spot from where the Prophet ascended. A prayer there, properly performed, was worth ten thousand normal ones; a prayer in Mecca is worth a hundred thousand. To prevent violence, non-Muslims were not permitted inside the mosque.

One Rabbi came up to me while I stood ruminating over the and led me over to the last of the Second Temple wall. He kissed it and had me do the same, and then prayed for me: “Married? Then I bless your luck with ladies, your family, your business, your America.” He gave three Amens, three Hallelujahs, and three more Amens, then asked for a donation from this simple traveler. I thanked the Rabbi and wrote out a note to place in that sacred rampart. Every three months at 2 a.m. cleaners come around with a giant vacuum and empty the crevices. Until then, may God grant me my wish!

Our tour ended where it had started, and we four turned back to see in greater detail the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is a Byzantine church, sacred to the multitudes of Christian faiths, and strange in its devotions, and beautiful in its complex blend of designs; indeterminate and irresolute, like a candle’s flickering flame, and yet seemingly eternal in its heights and paintings and rich themes.

There is the stone where Christ was anointed, and there is the cave where Adam was buried, and there are the nails from the Cross, and there is where the Cross stood, in that Rock of Golgotha; there a procession of Armenians chants, and the singers prostrate themselves before a priest in a crown and another in a silver cape and black cowl; there is where he was imprisoned, in that dingy burned room; there is where he was buried, in that great shrine beneath the high dome, painted with stars and rays like the firmament, all Calvary carved away around it; and there are stranger crevices, burned black with soot from candles; and stranger processions from all over the globe: Italians and Spaniards, severe Muscovites, Indians chanting in Urdu, Nigerians in states of religious ecstasy.

What can you say to that place, five Stations of the Cross in such a line, the site chosen three centuries later by Queen Helena and the original church built by her son Constantine, Emperor of Rome? Of course it is not Authentic! But, it is Earnest, and a powerful conduit of the spirit of a persecuted religion of unmarked graves and secret meetings in the catacombs of Rome, a goal of Crusaders and Knights Templar, a wonder for the pilgrims of the earth. No wonder this is called the Center of the World! A city so over-pinned with dreams, it is like a dead insect on a mantle and under examination.

Our Christmas dinner was a travelers pot luck—Chinese noodles by Irene, and boiled potatoes, vegetables, and rice by Ibrahim and his honey—accompanied by tea and good company. Amelia and I had a bed downstairs in a long sitting room with four couches, all of them occupied—two Ecuadorians, a Quebecois, and Joshua the winemaker. There was a well-kept kitchen, a bathroom, a hallway that Japanese visitors kept disappearing into, and two bedrooms, one for a Born Again Orange County girl named Dawn, and the other for David and his wife Karmel.

The older couple happily received us in the kitchen and told us stories of the House and Ibrahim. David was a Jew and an Englishman and a medical psychiatrist and a whole lot of other things. He had a goatee to go with his frazzled gray hair, and the paunch that all old men are entitled to bear. He told us, in his soft, erudite voice, that “there are more poor Israelis here than there are poor Palestinians.” There have always been more Jews in Judea, and the Palestinian Arabs are Syrians and Jordans who flooded in after the creation of the State of Israel, before those two nations attacked Israel. “The truth is not what you think it may be,” said David. Obama had read his book and said, according to David, “That’s fine, I agree with everything you say, but—I have to remain President.”

The following day Amelia, Josh and I went back down to the Old Town and looked at the Austrian Hospice and climbed a fence onto the ramparts, which we followed from Lion’s Gate to Herod’s. We got lost in the warren of streets and received directions from a short woman who spoke like a newsreel during the Second World War. We had arranged to meet David and Karmel at Jaffa Gate at 2:30. Both our parties were late, and David’s included a pretty Moroccan woman named Jamila, who was volunteering at an agency for Palestinian settlements. Josh walked with her, Amelia with Karmel, and I with David, who strolled like an Englishman in a beret and red sweater, swinging a cane at his side, and talked about history and travel as he took us through the crowded streets of Jerusalem to Queen Helena’s Cistern under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Cistern was a rock cave with a deep pool, reached by stairs in the back of a small chapel, and dimly lit by electric lights and the well shaft of a cloister of the basilica. The curved walls and flat water echoed sound sacredly. Josh, who sang in a choir, set a sort of Gregorian chant from near where the stairs slipped into the water, and David sang “Come Bird of Paradise” and told us to listen close for its lyrical symbolism. Karmel asked us to sing something. “I can’t sing,” said Amelia, and I added that, “I’m also inept.” She ran us through a simple Hebrew La-e-la-a-ill-la-la.

A Brazilian man listened to our haunting songs from the stairway. “I heard that Brazilian women are very pretty,” David told him. “My son told me that, and my wife won’t let me go there. They’re supposed to be very pretty. So why are the men so plain looking?”

David took us to a Syriac Orthodox Church of Saint Mark in the Armenian Quarter that claims to be not only the first church but also the site of the Last Supper. The three black-robed priests were holding a service, chanting in Aramaic and waving censers before the altar, so David led us down some steps to the room where Jesus shared body and blood. It was a dingy space, and Jerusalem had risen above it on layers of construction. In the chapel, there was a famous Icon, which we viewed by candlelight, of the Virgin Mary, supposedly painted by Saint Luke. The historian evangelist did not know what the infant Christ looked like, so he painted Jesus as he knew him: a babe with the face of a man.

When the service had ended, a old nun, plump but active, came in to see us. Justina wore black clothes with a wrap on her hair and her sleeves rolled back. In twelve years overseeing the chapel, the ex-math teacher had witnessed five miracles—cures for cancer, the illumination of the dining room of the Last Supper—and one only a year ago. She told us the story:

“That day, I can’t forget it, a man from Russia, his job policeman in Tel Aviv, came to the Church for tour. No language between us. He spoke Russian, he spoke Hebrew. I speak English, I speak Aramaic. No language between us. For one hour I talk to him. I spoke English, he hears Hebrew. He speaks Hebrew, I hear English. For one hour, nothing strange between us. I thought he spoke English. He thought I spoke Hebrew. He says to me, ‘Justina, I feel peace in this place. I never felt it in any other part of Israel. I feel the Holy Spirit in this room.’”

Three months passed. The Russian man returned and spoke to Justina, but this time, she did not understand his Hebrew. The man got angry, but Justina could not ken the source of it. The priestess lit a candle and prayed before the Icon, asking Merciful God to send a translator. After ten minutes, a guide who she knew entered the chapel, who spoke English, Russian, and Hebrew. “I became happy,” said Justina, “because Alex translate between me and that man. I say, ‘Alex, My Lord sent you to me!’” Alex told her that his wife had a vision and demanded he take a taxi into town to see Justina. Another miracle!

The policeman told Alex how Justina had lectured him in Hebrew three months before. He was sure the old woman was trying to get rid of him by pretending not to understand. “At that moment,” Justina explained, “I feel power. Something put it in my brain. I understand what happened exactly.” The Lord had allowed her to speak to the Hebrews, his first children. “Glory to our God!” she exclaimed, and she waved her hands towards the sky.

After this epiphany, Justina went back to talk to Jesus through Saint Luke’s picture. “Why did you wait three months to show me the miracle? Why, why why?” She received an answer in “five days only.” A French professor, who had been there before, arrived and said he would translate for his companion, another Frenchman who spoke no English. The two Franks set at it, and Justina remembered that she had a book about the church in six languages, which would make an excellent addition to the professor’s library. On returning with the book, she heard the guide speaking in English! “Why you lie?” she said. “Why you say your friend no speak English?”

Then, as before, she realized what had happened, and to avoid appearing crazy, she “shuts up.” “I turn to Jesus and I say I am sorry, I will never ask you you must do something for me. Glory to our God!”

We thanked Justina for the story and went to a place called Miguel’s just inside the New Gate, owned by a Christian who served us plates of food and a fine Palestinian microbrew called Taybeh. David told stories to make us laugh. He talked about holistic remedies, and then said that he sometimes had prophecies or saw the spirits of the deceased around their surviving loved ones. On Amelia’s shoulders, he saw a shadow of grief. “There is some sadness in your past,” he said, “isn’t there?”

“Everyone says that,” she replied. I made a joke about seeing the spirit of my beer and got another Taybeh.

David and Karmel went to a lecture on medieval Muslim treatment of Jewish subjects, and Josh and Jamila to smoke cigarettes at the Wailing Wall; I walked off to the bus station with Amelia, still exhausted in the wake of a cold. Alone in the basement kitchen of the Peace House, she asked me, “So, do you believe it was a miracle?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t disbelieve her,” said Amelia. “She may have experienced something, but I can’t believe in miracles until one happens to me.”

“Well, I believe her. The world’s a much more magical place if you can believe in miracles.”

Anything old, you want to see it, you must go down.
—Justina

Amelia’s eye infection was getting worse. What started in Cairo as a swelling of the right lid had now spread to the left, and the drops she got from the eye doctor in Amman had run dry.

David recommended the world-renowned Eye Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, on Mount Scopus, and we took a bus there the next day. The doctors checked her vision and told her that some sort of eczema had blocked one of the tear ducts above her eye, which was swollen with oily tears (perhaps that is the specter of sorrow that David saw looming). They prescribed warm compresses and gentle massage, and a minor antibiotic gel for the infection.

The Order of St. John was originally a crusading order, also known as the Knights Hospitaller. They ran an institution of medicine on Rhodes, which doubled as a fortress against the infidel Turk, and was a steadfast thorn in the Sultan’s side. The Sultan tried but could not take the fortress of Rhodes, and so he concluded an agreement with the Christians that allowed them to leave with their swords and their dignity. The Knights sailed off to another island, became the Chevaliers of Malta, and renewed the fight against bacteria and Turks. The Eye Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem bears their noble crest, and signs of donations by the Knights Templar.

While Amelia and I were waiting in leather chairs in a sunlit hallway, for a doctor to print a receipt and certificate for Amelia to show to her travel insurance later, I said, “In the last two days we’ve seen knights and miracles. This is a pretty remarkable city.”

“Knights and miracles,” she repeated quietly.

Ibrahim brought to the table of the Peace House that night heaping plates of food cooked by his honey. There was buttered rice, tender chicken, mounds of vegetables in gravy, fresh bread, and tea with sage and mint. Our host shouted, “Welcome!” “Food!” “Eat!” and, “Thank you!” to everyone who passed by the open door of that merry room, and with words like those, made the world a better place.

He felt sorry for the capitalist way of life, those houses rich in possessions but poor in love—like Tom Waits sings, “A house where there’s love is a palace for sure.”

Poor, noble Ibrahim! His Peace House attracted some strange characters, the characters that travelers often talk of on their way out of the Holy Land, people with Jerusalem Syndrome who think they are Saints or Christ himself, and Ibrahim told us stories of some of them.

A man once stayed at the House who called himself Jesus. He was an American Jew and wore only a rice bag with holes cut in it. He stayed for twenty days, and every morning at 5:30 knocked on the door of Ibrahim’s apartment and said, “God has given me a new name. Call me this.” “Okay,” said the Arab. “I don’t care what you’re called.” One day the pilgrim said, “Ibrahim, God has asked me to move, and he wants you to give me a tent, a mattress, and a sleeping bag.” He took these items to the King David Hotel, where Presidents and Kings stay on visits to Israel, and set up a camp in the garden, and lit a fire, and left.

Ibrahim received a phone call. “Ibrahim, come down here or we will collect you.” The Arab raced to a taxi. Jesus had taken a stack of Ibrahim’s business cards with him and put them in the tent for the police to find. “Ibrahim,” they said, “What are you doing? You have houses all over town. You are welcome all over the world. Why do you pitch your tent here?” Ibrahim explained who it really was, and the police asked, “So what is his name?” “In twenty days he has twenty names. Which do you want?” “Well draw him.” “I couldn’t draw myself!”

A great many of Ibrahim’s guests, most of them Christians, attempt to convert the old Arab to their faith. He said he was Ibrahim, and Ibrahim would never change. And they fought, the Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and Ibrahim told us they should “Do what you want outside this home. Go kill each other outside this home.”

The Peace House set the stage for a clash of self-righteous egos, men who consider themselves holy by the mere fact of voluntary poverty and hardship. Those braggadocios and self-proclaimed messiahs spoke only in the first person, and had serrated conversations, looking for openings in the other guest’s holier-than-thou parables to tell a related tale about themselves and some spiritual conference they attended.

“We’re human beings who sometimes have spiritual experiences,” said Irene, the Maori woman who thought that her race was a lost tribe of Israel. “Nay!” spake the Bulgarian holy man, tangled beard on his chest, who was off on a three year walk to India, “We be spiritual beings, and sometimes we have human experiences!”

In truth, the pompous fools (who I called religious nutters and nutbags and nutjobs and worse things on most occasions) began to wear on Amelia and me. We retreated out into the sitting room to hover around the light of a laptop, or down into the basement where David and Karmel held court. Josh and Jamila were usually down there, and David told great stories around his kitchen table.

“This is a true story,” he began, standing over us like a king. “There was this old fisherman who sailed the waters of England, and I asked him, ‘Aren’t those seas rough?’ He told me, ‘Oh, yes, they are. The first time I was out, I went down below for dinner, and I was at the end of the long table, and the Captain, he looks down and says, “You going to eat that soup son?” and I says, “No,” so he says, “Well pass it up.” Well all the hands worked to pass up the bowl of soup, and the Captain eats it. I say, “Can you keep it down sir?” He says (patting his belly), “Well of course son.” “Good,” I says, “cause I couldn’t.”’”

Once David was walking with a group of pilgrims from London to Assisi, living entirely of what they could earn from begging, in emulation of the original Saint Francis. They would stand outside a cafe with wooden bowls for hours, until they had enough for a cup of coffee, and then go in and sit. When some rich Frenchman or Latin lady left an expensive sandwich half finished, David or one of his acolytes would ask for the leftovers. They received support in some places and even met Mother Theresa on the road through the Alps. However, it was hard yakka, as the Aussies say, slow and hungry work, and David got fed up.

“And I’m a Jew,” he said, “and we Jews talk to God, so I said, ‘Saint Francis, won’t you send us any help?’”

Following this outburst, a mangy dog appeared in the road from around the hedge row. It had no collar and would not be chased off, but followed the company doggedly, exemplifying all the “sagacious kindness,” to use Melville’s phrase, that canines can possess. The dog set point a few meters ahead of the band, begged with them, shared their privations, and would not be parted from David. It whined outside his window and put its head on his knee. David, being a sentimental man, developed an affection for his dog. He named it Leo, after Francis’ own constant companion, and found himself tugging sandwiches out of the hands of zealous waiters so the mut could eat.

One day, just up the road from Assisi, Leo scouted up ahead. From that direction there came the horrible, alarming noise of squealing tires. David ran up ahead. The dog was vanished. The Jew looked everywhere. He waded through the ditches and pushed out into the thickets, calling, “Leo! Leo!” but saw no sign of his dog. It reduced him to tears, and he never knew what happened to the animal.

In Assisi, a priest of the Church met their group. He said, “Go to the hotel and get a room. Don’t worry about a thing, I’ll pay for it. And you look hungry. Go to the restaurant and order as much as you want. I’ll pay for it all.”

David had an interesting biography. He lived in the West Bank until some of his friends received calls from Hamas: “If you let that Jew into your house again, we will blow it up with you inside.” Some of his genius progeny forced him to move, and he and Karmel had set up a sort of Japanese garden as a meditative retreat in Turkish Cyprus. As a medical psychologist, he developed a new field: Psychoneuroimmunology, preventing cancer by preventing the neurological shock of depression and disillusionment. He was like a faith healer, and trusted alternative medicine in concert with the practices of his mentor. He had told off the Prince of Wales and knew the Dhalai Lama and the President of America. He had survived an attempted poisoning by Kashmiri separatists.

David believed that old guru saying that there are many paths to one Truth. Under the name Baba Dovid, he wrote a book of New Age teachings called The Leaves From the Tree of Life. He gave a copy of this to Amelia and to me before we parted ways, along with copies of a pamphlet called “The Universalist” and an article about himself from Healing Today, titled, “Son of Nostradamus, Mystic Prophet of our Time.” As a journalist, I feel obliged to quote it.

“Like Nostradamus,” writes Anna Betz and Colin Vernon, David is a Jew. “Though recognized as a Jewish mysic, he is a Master of the occult with links to numerous esoteric groups world-wide. Known to the Sufis as ‘Shaykh Dawwud Ysuf al-Haqqani’; and to the Sikhs and Hindus of Northern India as ‘Babaji’; he has been recognised as a ‘Teacher’ by Buddhists, is a ‘priest of Isis’ and on the death of the chief Druid of Cornwall, was offered his robes by the widow.”

“Like Nostradamus,” the repetitious article continues, “he has made many predictions which have been fulfilled; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; the Gulf war; the dismantling of the Berlin wall. His prediction of a loss of a royal partner was fulfilled in the tragic death of Princess Diana, written in a letter to Prince Charles, three years before it occurred.” The abilities come “through him” and “not from him,” says the humble prophet. The authors continue that if you should ever meet Baba Dovid, “you will not doubt that the spirit of Nostradamus is still very much alive.”

On Monday Amelia and I went off to Bethlehem, on the other side of the Wall in the West Bank. The festivities around Christmas had ended. The police were stacking up their metal barricades and the garbagemen piling the refuse of ten thousand pilgrims. Through the souq we came to the Square of the Manger before the great church. Alleyways spoked off with other holy sites for the various faith, including the Church of the Lactation, where a drop of Mary’s sacred breast milk had splashed on the rock of a cave and turned to venerated powder.

The Basilica of the Nativity was a small thing over the grottoes where Jesus Christ is said to have been birthed. The marble square and silver star that a line of Nigerians prostrated themselves before failed to impress Amelia. “I thought he was born in a manger!” she said. “What’s with the marble?” There was a little manger on the other side of the cave, with a plastic Jesus nestled inside it, and the whole town was a cottage complex of woodcarvers who dealt Nativity scenes in olive, the same wood as the Cross to which that babe would be nailed.