22) Lotus Eating In Kashmir.

Nineteen seventy-two was to see the rains fail in India inducing drought and famine, with food riots across the nation, but hippie-trippy Arthur was oblivious to such harsh realities, privileged firanghi that he was. He had about a thousand dollars in savings which he parsimoniously drip-dripped to the squabbling masses as he cruised about living the fantasy of the wandering soul-seeker, India and her variegated peoples an exciting, colourful backdrop to his rambunctious adventures. The ruling Congress Party had split in 1968 into right and left with Indira Ghandi as Prime Minister centralising power in her hands. Promoting herself as “Mother India”, she appealed to the people as the saviour of the poor and achieved a landslide victory in 1971 with a promise to “remove poverty”. She nationalised the banking, insurance and coal industries, removed the privy purses of the Princes and made repressive amendments like MISA, the Maintenance of Internal Security Act where an individual could be arrested without trial for up to a year, thus the rights of the individual were subordinated to those of Society.

Three million people were killed by West Pakistan in Bangladesh’s war of Independence and ten million refugees fled into India. In December of 1971 Pakistan attacked India which went on to capture Dhaka and win the war. In July 1972 Indira Ghandi met with Pakistan P.M. Bhutto in Simla to thrash out the ownership of Kashmir but no agreement was reached. She had a special relationship with Kashmir as the Nehru clan originated from that province; she spread her father’s ashes over Kashmir from a plane and returned again and again throughout her life to its natural beauty considering it as the one place where she could find peace.

With all this seething unrest and deprivation whirling around him twenty-two year old dumb, naïve Arthur, the last of the incorrigible individuals, aimed his sights at that same vale of wish-fulfilment, Kashmir, though his inspiration came more from the surreal rock music of Pink Floyd rather than national affiliation. After a harrowing journey along a vertiginous road leading up through the mountains of Jammu, Arthur was relieved to make it in one piece to Srinigar, capital of fabled Kashmir. On alighting from the bus he was mobbed by over-zealous tourist guides who each took an arm and a leg and tried to pull him apart. Fighting them off he espied an old man waiting patiently, humbly at the back of the crowd and he chose him as his honoured host, going off with him to his rickety old houseboat on Dhal Lake. He was the sweetest, wisest old Muslim Arthur was ever to meet, waiting on him as if he was a long-lost Maharajah, smoking Kashmiri Black hash with him from his water-pipe while perusing antique logbooks full of quaint testimonials going back to the British Raj. Arthur lolled around the houseboat in Lotusland for weeks, reading “Myra Breckinridge” and flirting with the beautiful Kashmiri men, their Greek-influenced looks unhinging him. One long cruise on a pleasure boat lay ahead for him if it wasn’t for that old grouch of a Baba, Yogeshwaranand, glowering up in his mountain retreat and promising something better than orgasm of the flesh, i.e. freedom from the flesh.

Swami Yogeshwaranand had established his summer yoga camp at a holiday house in the small town of Pahalgam, two hundred kilometers above Srinigar in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Arthur was permitted to camp out the back of the house in a tent and attend the morning and evening yoga sessions. The old Swami was a hard taskmaster, getting Arthur to twist his legs into such complex knots that he tore the cartilage in his right knee, an injury that plagued him for the rest of his life. Then the old mug sent him cross-eyed by encouraging him to meditate with his eyes open, to truly go beyond the phenomenal world. The image of the gruff old yogi got forever imprinted upon Arthur’s third eye, sitting before him swathed in glowing saffron, solid as a carved Buddha, beady penetrating eyes searching out every breath of the seated acolytes.

And he was eighteen years old behind his father’s flat attempting his first meditation on AUM. And he was seven years old again lying on the laundry roof gazing into the blue sky, aware of his existence. And he was an infant crying for his mother when a lightning bolt struck his head. And he was a baby sitting up in his cot eyeballing the new world he was to find his way in. His mind quiescent, his spine tingling, he was back in front of the Master whose saffron hulk emanated intense presence. Hence forth, Arthur would only have to close his eyes, wherever he might be in the world, and he’d be right back there in front of the Swami, meditating on eternity.

For three months he kept up the Spartan diligence, sublimating his sex-drive with yoga, avoiding the men in the town, meditating on the arduous journey his sex-addiction had taken him on. His shaky temperance was vexed by the presence in his class of a handsome Indian with hairy legs who would exercise in front of Arthur in the shortest of shorts, with his crotch bulging fit to burst an eyeball. He groaned with frustration knowing he’d have to maintain super-human strength if he was to perfect his yoga and gain cosmic consciousness as the world was filled with attractive sights.

Arthur started hearing weird voices in his meditations and feeling an army of soldier ants crawling up his spine to eat the base of his brain, causing an inner light to spark and explode diamond white like a camera’s flash, a veritable fire in the head. When he reported the sensation of a skyrocket having gone off in his spine, the irascible Baba chuckled and informed him he’d just had his Kundalini raised. The latent power of his whole being had uncoiled from the base of his spine and surged through his system to invigorate every nerve centre, particularly that which snaked about his gonads, his sexual dynamo getting charged and his randy desires intensified, sex had him by the balls and intimated it would never let him go. Towards the end of this yogic marathon, unable to handle the mounting pressure of channelling his excess energy, he sneaked hashish into his tent and smoked it in a water pipe to try and chill the threat of his spontaneous combustion.

Pahalgam was a picturesque medieval village surrounded by flower-strewn meadows and backed by snow-clad peaks. The air was pure, the water fresh, the food from the Swami’s kitchen nutritiously wholesome and Arthur thrived, his spirit soaring. This town was the devotee’s gathering point for the pilgrimage to the holy Cave of Amarnath, a necessity for any Hindu wanting to be absolved from his karma. For millennia Armanarth has been one of four required yatras or hallowed walks to divine sites that underpin the fabric of the Hindu religion, and part of why India so religiously hangs onto Kashmir. Young and ancient, rich and impoverished, sadhu and householder, all must trek at some time in their lives into the glaciers high in the Hindu Kush Mountains in the full moon of August to witness the peak formation of an ice Siva Lingam, the world’s greatest phallic idol, inside the sacred Cave.

Amidst thousands of ordinary householder devotees camped in Pahalgam were hundreds of the wildest, most outlandish sadhus Arthur was ever to clap eyes on, each with a freakish rigour to prove his eminence. One guy had held his arms up in the air for years till they were withered sticks, while another guy never lay down, sleeping by hanging across a rope swing hung from the branch of a tree. Next to him was a guy with three-foot long fingernails and dreadlocks he could walk on, and another guy who had innumerable pieces of metal piercing his flesh while he slept on a sharp bed of nails. All of them were naked and, waving huge hash chillums, they’d shout “Alack! Bam Shankar!” Then they’d inhale great plumes of the noxious smoke, get high as kites and as mad as two-headed snakes. The Hindu householders revered them and spoiled them unstintingly, one of the few times in the year the sadhus got as much as they could eat, each guy’s belly swelling large enough to contain a winter’s larder. To Arthur they looked like a circus from Mars, reminiscent of the twisted lunatics he’d once nursed in the mental hospital, and he dreaded having to join their ranks and rend his flesh to find self-realization. Asceticism was too much hard work for this dilettante party boy.

Back at the farm, the motley crew of wannabe yogis quivered and quaked at the feet of Swami Mahesh Yogeshwaranand, complaining of their personal, existential dilemmas, making of the camp a soap opera of frustrated wish-fulfilment. This included a European princess who erupted into the foulest of temper tantrums, throwing her dinner tray up against the wall and running to the Swami with endless grievances of how she wasn’t being treated respectfully by the servants, beseeching him to cure her cancer-riddled body. Another character was Walter, a retired cop from Chicago, who confessed to Arthur that he was once the biggest fucker to ever walk the streets, more corrupt than Capone, hornier than Satan, fucking every woman he could lay his hands on. In thick American twang he told his tale to a stunned Arthur.

“Then came the day I saw the light. I’d cruelly screwed this bitch after stopping her for a traffic violation, the tortured look on her face gave me an epiphany, I saw how really fucked my life and attitude was and I felt I just had to change my ways. Now I’m on my way to salvation, throwing my energies into yoga as zealously as I did at being a bad cop.”

He contorted his body till it cracked, held his breath till he fell off the bed unconscious and tried hard to not even think of sex because he wanted to store his vital juices and shoot them up to his pineal gland. To test his mettle he had his long-time girlfriend with him, who he used to fuck stupid but now couldn’t touch, not even to dream about, though she was always in his face. Every day for months on end Arthur had to hear Walter’s lament,

“I’m dying to fuck Barbie, what a temptation she is, bending over in yoga, showing me her luscious arse or splayed out on my bed with her fucking legs spread. I’ve got to be so fucking strong to resist her, she’s so fucking gorgeous! Oh god, I want to fuck her so bad!”

After the camp split up Arthur didn’t see Walter for a lifetime and always wondered if he succeeded in resisting the urge to blow his load upon Barbie’s scrumptious body and thus reach enlightenment. Thirty years later he met him again in Shangri-la, now looking like a wise old man, smug smile on his kisser, he’d been back in India for the last fourteen years, very lofty and serene he seemed to float along the ground full of wisdom and inner peace. And Arthur thought the burly fellow had really made it, achieved Nirvana and was a high dude while next to him Arthur felt like shit, a fallen yogi, a sinner, a fucker. He asked Walter what he did for a living these many years in tough India and he calmly told how he taught meditation to Japanese tourists. They rarely spoke again but Arthur often saw him in the market place, dressed in luminous white, with a pretty vacant Japanese girl in tow, him murmuring placid wise platitudes to her ga-ga nodding, and Arthur cringing because he felt unworthy of being in this saint’s presence.

Then the guy disappeared and Arthur made inquiries in the market-place about what had happened and it seems beatific Walter got kicked out of the country because he’d raped one of the female Japanese meditation students. Such is the explosive power of human sexuality rued Arthur, squash it down as much as you like, it’ll geyser out somehow, every cell and nerve is programmed to orgasm. And he wondered if Nirvana, freedom from all woes, was just a myth, like a bullshit Hollywood happy ending?

Eventually the old tyrant Swami had had enough of the mountains and the wailing demands of his western followers and he rushed off to rest in the bosom of his wealthy, placid Indian patrons in the plains far below. The very night the ogre left his lair, with all his retinue chasing after him, Arthur mischievously decided to sleep in the Master’s bedroom. The yoga camp was empty, he was free at last, and the first thing he did was have a damned good wank on the Master’s bed and then blow a big fat joint while he nestled back onto the old boy’s comfy mattress. Then to his dismay the universe turned bleak, demonic imps tapped at the windows and ghosts howled in the shadowy recesses of the Guru’s room. While the beady glass-eyes of the big Guru peeked accusingly through every crack and hole, Arthur felt his very soul was about to be carried away on a shrieking wind. He spent most of the night stiff on the floor, shivering and praying for forgiveness, and determined never again to underestimate the influence that these old saffron-clad witch doctors could wield.

He too fled back to civilization, only for Arthur it meant floating dreamily on a house-boat beside the Moghul Gardens of Dhal Lake and flirting with the drop-dead gorgeous local guys who had noticed his homo-erotic mannerisms. Arthur had veiled his beauty with an unruly beard and to the Hindus this meant he was out of the game, but to Muslims the beard is the epitome of the masculine ideal and they found it attractive. Arthur’s sky-wide, lake-deep blue-green eyes didn’t hurt his chances either, giving him that dazzling Alexander the warrior look that certain dark-eyed men are magnetised by. He was twenty-three, at the peak of his sexual strength but abstinent for seven months with his steadfastness leaking away in the attention from dark, handsome men. A stranger in a strange land he was too paranoid to attempt a liaison with the Muslim men, instead dreaming of his peers, orgiastic hippies dancing to Pan’s pipe music somewhere over the horizon.

Still it was wondrous to float upon the lake amidst swathes of pink lotuses, their perfume competing with the roses growing in profusion in the landscaped gardens that swept down to the water, inducing euphoria in his already addled brain. Indian Kashmir was a paradise of weeping willow groves and hilltop fortresses, houseboats like wooden palaces suspended against a horizon of ethereal, snowy peaks. Tourism and handicrafts was the big employer, and everyone made money, made merry and was happy, with barely a word of dissatisfaction or secession that Arthur noticed. Though their Referendum had been denied them and they must have grumbled about Independence over their coal braziers, Arthur never heard any sympathetic longings evinced for life in Pakistan. People went happily to the movies, enjoyed music, made good business and raised thriving families peacefully. It was a munificent garden-state populated by life-loving angels and everyone wanted to possess it, including Arthur.

But winter came, harsh and inhospitable, snow blocking the roads and the houseboats frozen on Dahl Lake, and Arthur desired to chase the sun. Somewhere along the way he’d heard about the scene in Goa, where Dionysian parties raged in naked, jungle-bunny splendour, and realising he was pagan at heart with a nature-worshiping spirit, maybe a Tantric sensory overload and sex binge would bring him that elusive Nirvana promised him in books like “Be Here Now” and “Jonathon Livingston Seagull.” Therefore he decided to go the whole hog and go to Goa, and he was gone.