24) On the Hippie Trail to Kathmandu.

The converse of Arthur’s profound sense of freedom as a nobody out on the wide-open highway was Indira Ghandi’s growing power mania at the Centre of things. Her dictatorship of absolute control from Delhi, deposing state leaders who didn’t comply and dispensing patronage to a chosen few so that corruption in public affairs exploded, was all a long way from Arthur’s frivolous ken. The needs of the individual might be subordinate to the State for the disaffected Indian but not for this spoiled westerner, he was “footloose and fancy free” and didn’t give a shit about politics as long as he could be on the move. Tedious bus journeys taking several days got him to the mystic town of Hampi deep in the interior of the state of Karnataka, a landmark of his dream flights.

Hampi was an arcane site, hard to get to and known only to the freak cognoscenti. In the future it would become a hotel hell but when Arthur arrived there were only about seven freaks wandering the vast labyrinth of rocks and river, most of them hanging around the cave of a crazy Siva Baba who made the most sought after black clay chillums in the whole of Hippiedom. The town had one dinky chai shop outside the temple; otherwise it was a ghost town, the ruined stone streets haunted by the thousands of Hindus slaughtered by the Muslims five centuries ago in the downfall of the Vijayanagar Kingdom. Decrying pagan sacrilege the Muslims tried to smash all the sculpted Hindu icons, but there were thousands of statues carved in every crack and crevice and many got overlooked or simply had their noses and arms lopped off, the place remaining a vast art gallery of fallen idolatry.

The countryside around Hampi was a surrealist’s dreamscape with countless boulders piled atop each other in magical balancing acts, hundreds of small caves, temples and pavilions sequestered in their interstices and sculptures of the gods littered everywhere. A placid river wound like a shroud throughout this maze of rocks and to the bedazzled hippies it seemed like a wondrous psychedelic theme park. The mythology of the place avowed that Lord Siva had meditated in the town’s colossal temple and Lord Rama had made obeisance to this Supreme God as He passed through on his long search for the kidnapped Sita, His beloved wife. It was here, in the dinkiest of caves, Hanuman hid Sita’s jewels from the avaricious eyes of Ravanna the demon, and the tumbled rocks of Hampi were the leftovers from the colossal bridge the Monkey God had built to cross over into Sri Lanka to help rescue the celestial princess.

Arthur took Acid in the cave of the Chillum Baba and tripped his guts out, crawling away to vomit up multicolored universes into the dark river from the sanctuary of a carved stone temple, a torrent of archetypal junk and acculturated poison pouring out of his head. On coming out of his psychedelic spin he heard a woman’s voice pleading hysterically for help, over and over in echoing urgency. On tottering outside his refuge, he could just make out the figure of a woman splashing up a storm across the river and a group of Indians glumly watching from the shore. She screamed repeatedly, “Help me, I’m drowning!” But no one nearby moved a muscle, like Elloi from “The Time Machine”, they seemed disinterested.

Arthur called out reassurances and dove in, swimming hard against the current, yelling small comforts every few strokes as he dashed on towards the frantic spray of her splashing and screaming. He sprinted three hundred tedious yards to reach her only to find he could stand next to her as she’d been drowning in chest-deep water. He dragged the spluttering hysteric to the riverbank and left her in the puddle of her profuse thanks, the Indians gazing on with serious, perturbed mien, for most of them couldn’t swim to save themselves. His mind still reeling from the Acid trip, Arthur felt the mystic, tumbled city emanated menace, too downbeat ominous for his awakening soul. He wasn’t interested in learning the art of making chillums or listening to the Chillum Baba’s tirade of Siva parables, and he couldn’t connect to the other freaks that gossiped a scatter-brained sludge of cosmic drivel and tried to outdo each other in freaky Indian-ness, shouting louder than the next bum, “Bam Shankar!” He witnessed the great festival at the Siva Temple, watching from under the wheels of the juggernaut chariot that the natives had dragged out with an idol of the Lord of the Void riding upon it and everyone cheering wildly, and he felt lonely, it was fascinating but it was not his world. He decided he’d had Hampi and he hoofed it out of town.

He made it down to fabled Cochin, Queen of the Arabian Sea on the coast of Kerala, only to find she’d been turned into an old whore by the countless waves of restless sailors and colonialists who had washed up there. All Arthur saw was a cluttered town of concrete and cardboard decaying in the salt wind, fronted by a dirty swamp of a beach with desultory, rubbish-choked waves crawling upon it. He took refuge in the local grungy cinema and got the detritus of his Christian upbringing overwrought by that metaphysical pot-boiler “Doctor Faustus” starring Dickie Burton and Liz Taylor, another woeful tale of a soul traded to Satan for the fulfilment of all desires only to have them turn to ashes in his mouth.

The movie terrified Arthur, he staggered from the cinema to forlornly wander the concrete-cancerous backstreets of spooky Cochin unable to escape the repetitive nightmare of his soul being propositioned by the Devil, his self-worth forever questioned. He called on his guardian angel to give him strength to carry on in the face of his spiritual dread, he would somehow brave it out and would yet reach his full potential, and the Devil could wait an eternity and never claim him, or so he fancied.

He hitched a ride over the Nilgiri Mountains with a Sikh truck driver who kept reaching across him where he sat in the middle and slapping the young assistant hard to prevent him from sleeping till Arthur, the peacenik, pleaded pathetically for an armistice. The slaps kept coming, just missing Arthur’s ducking head, causing him to climb up to the open roof of the cabin where he lay upon a tarpaulin in the luggage rack. Rushing through the night he had his breath swept away by the fathomless stars splashed over his head and the plains of South India opening out into infinity way below him and he delighted in the freedom of being lost on such an exotic, endless road, anonymous and unobligated.

He landed in Bangalore and slept in a park in the city centre where he was lured into a hut made of hessian bags and given opium to smoke. A shrivelled old man prepared the pipe for him and as the smoke curled up into the dirt-brown sacking he sunk into the floor upon his mat with a nice, fuzzy feeling numbing his existence, romanticising the scene as a poet’s inspirational milieu, the denizens’ supine, cool and tranquil. In the dance of the swirling smoke he hallucinated through the haze memories of his childhood, cigarette fumes pouring from his parent’s head like dragons, in front of the TV, over the dinner table, out driving in the car. Beer bottles piled up under the sink, musically clinking when he carried them to the garbage bin, light refracted through the brown glass to dance upon the pavement. Gleaming innocently from the top of the family refrigerator was a clutter of pill-bottles: pain-killers, anti-depressants, anti-biotics, sleepers, his father’s “purple hearts”, pretty shapes and colours, innocuously mysterious. Wagging school, delicious freedom with the midday movie swashbuckling from the TV, he’d break out a giant family-sized bottle of Coca-Cola and utilise his mother’s favourite champagne glass in a euphoric, fizzy toast to himself, it was the ‘Fifties and Coke was the ‘real thing’ and he got very high. Chasing the flying dragon, the smoke whirlpooled, the world spun, his guts heaved and it felt like Coca-Cola was spurting out of his nostrils.

He loitered in the park toying with the opium limbo for a few days but for all the sumptuous, lavish dreams, the stuff made him vomit, an experience he detested, and he renounced it after throwing up his guts for the umpteenth time in the grungy hessian doorway. Arthur had strenuously avoided being a habitual poly-drug abuser, he took his poisons in moderation and had long resolved to eschew hard drugs, sorely aware of the seedy, sleazy destruction it wrought. He already suffered the handicaps of sex addiction, impulsive adventurism and Tourettes-like verbal temper tantrums, he didn’t need to add more drugs to his daily flip-outs. He was of a generation that lived fast and died pretty, he absolutely believed he wouldn’t reach the age of thirty given his feral, madcap exploits on the infinite highway; he just didn’t want to cramp his style and slow his pilgrim’s progress with hard drugs.

He understood the seduction of opium but it didn’t fit with his ‘up’ disposition; he couldn’t see the fun living in a continuous, nauseous doze and dissolving into the gutter. Though it is true he was enthralled by the LSD experiences, enjoying them like confabulated, new-age vision quests, he endeavoured to limit the trips to special occasions, sacred and festive, when he could really appreciate the hallucinating, abandoned dancing.

Marching forthrightly from the grungy hessian-bag hutments, he climbed the ten thousand steps up the sacred hill to the Siva Temple, Lord of the Beasts, and hung out by the colossal, marble sculpture of the white Nandi Bull, and tried to find inspiration in their lofty metaphors. Then he fell asleep on the veranda of the Maharaja of Bangalore’s palace, listening to the roars of the lions from the zoo way down in the city below. The next day he ate the best strawberry pie of his life in a hippie restaurant wallpapered with posters of Alice in Wonderland in bright-fluorescent colours on a black field, a style that enchanted his artist’s heart and which he would hence forth try to emulate. In placid, ‘zonked-out’ mood he stumbled into the town’s hottest cinema and in shock watched “Dirty Harry” splatter the nasty deviants all over the big screen and thus, with his guts truly churned, he fled the city for the refreshing innocence of the open countryside.

Stopping off at every temple and swimming in its sacred tank, he travelled all the way to the tip of India, to Kanya Kumari, where he sat on Vivekananda’s Rock and contemplated the three oceans crashing together, exhilarated and at one with the ends of the Earth. He made pilgrimage to the hallowed temple site of Tiruvanemeli and imbibed the tranquil bliss the great Indian saint Rama Krishna had left behind him at his Ashram after his Samadhi death. He climbed the sacred mountain behind the astonishing, psychedelic temple, visually thrilled by its multi-coloured statues of the gods piled up into the sky, then he had to fight off the tribe of sacred monkeys who tried to tear him to bits to get at his packed lunch.

He journeyed on to Mahabalipuram on the Bay of Bengal and took Acid with a gang of Indian middle-class brats who’d escaped Madras to create mischief by the sea. They’d built a huge, thatched hut near the beach, installed a loud sound system and partied on every night with any western hippie that showed up, smoking ganjha and tripping amongst the sculptured, Dravidian caves to the tune of Elton John’s “Yellow Brick Road”. In ancient days there had once been a great city on these shores, predating Babylon and Egypt, more marvellous and sophisticated, revealing the subcontinent to have nurtured civilisation as much as any other place in the mid-east. The mysterious city’s huge stone edifices now lay submerged deep under the sea with Mahabalipuram lingering on its ocean-swept rim. There had long been seven Temples on the shore’s edge but the sea had drowned six of them. One lone Siva Mandir remained as silent sentinel, buttressed with sandbags, gradually being inundated as the sea crashed against it.

On the darkest of nights, his mind soaring on ganjha, Arthur would sit at the centre of this mystic structure with his back up against the black, octagonal Siva lingam, broken-in-half from some ancient, cataclysmic happening. He hallucinated the presence of hungry, primordial entities swirling around him in the dark trying to find ingress to his inner self and, to outmanoeuvre them, he meditated his way up a silver staircase to imagined celestial heights, light banishing the darkness, troubles forgotten, redemption found. High as a fire-fly he congressed with benevolent spirits, resonant echoes of ancient Atlantis-like priest-scientists from whom he must have learned new dance-moves for at the end of his séance he came to his senses and found himself dancing fluidly, mindlessly around the Siva Lingam. Once a worldwide religion, India was the last place where Phallic adoration remained sacrosanct, the Lingam erect in a Yoni, a fountain of milk erupting from its top, its glamour something Arthur could easily relate to.

It was near the Siva Temple in Mahabalipuram that ditzy, deadhead, complacent Arthur fell asleep on the beach with his wallet by his head and it got stolen, money, passport and all. Suddenly he found himself in desperate straits, as nothing was more unpopular with the Indians than a pretentious, money-less hippie. Western freaks had by now become notorious for ordering up big in restaurants then proclaiming bankruptcy by turning out their empty pockets and the manager, disinclined to rough up the precious firanghi, had to wear it. Usually these importunate fellows were die-hard drug addicts who had no qualms about sponging off the Indians, but sweet-natured Arthur was loath to be one of them. He wrote to an Aussie friend asking him to send him money and in the meantime tried selling hand-painted paper flowers to bemused Hindu tourists, without much success. His fellow hippies helped out as much as they could but no one had much money; his plight dragged on for weeks and for days on end he starved. He had long worn a gold ring, much treasured as it had been given to him by his first love, Tony, when they were teenagers. As he got ready to hock it for enough money to feed him for a week he came to a late realisation that Tony must have indeed loved him to give him such a precious token for it was his own mother’s wedding ring. He sighed as he handed it over, true love as sorely lost as he was.

He’d daily hung around the post office hoping against hope and finally his rescue letter came and he pled with the post master for it.

“Sir, can I have my letter? It’s come, I see it in the Post Restante box.”

“Show passport and you are having it,” said the officious babu.

“But I told you my passport has been stolen, you saw it already weeks ago when I collected a letter here. Please sir, I’m hungry, there’s money in that letter for me.”

“Am sorry, without passport am not allowing letter.”

“You’ve seen my bloody passport many times, it got stolen a few days ago. I need that money or I’m dead. Give me the fucking letter.”

“Bad manners are not getting letter, chello abi. Go!”

“You stupid bastard, that’s my fucking letter. Give it to me!”

Reduced to a babbling idiot by the Postmaster’s heartless intransigence, Arthur lashed out with a kung fu scream and smacked his cold face. The babu reeled back in shock, the Police were urgently called and one riotous hippie was hauled off to a gaol cell to cool his temper. It was the same Policeman he’d reported his stolen passport to and, as he was sympathetic to Arthur’s dilemma, took him back to the Post office and demanded Arthur’s letter be handed over forthwith, after a heartfelt apology from a once-proud firanghi. The nearest Australian Embassy was a couple of thousand kilometres away in Calcutta, he had the munificent sum of twenty dollars which got him food and a cheap ticket on a slow train and off he went. He ate a lump of opium to withstand the arduous three day train journey as he lay upon the carriage floor with the Indians using him as a footrest and, in a soporific, turbulent dream-state, he crossed Tamil Nadu, Orrissa and West Bengal. He arrived in Calcutta looking like a zombie fresh from the grave, covered in footprints and eyes glazed over.

The Embassy staff thought they had a mad junkie on their doorstep, accusing Arthur of selling his passport for drugs, giving him tiresome lectures on the evils of dope-slingers, then making him wait a week for his replacement passport. He had no money while he waited and slept on the streets and would have starved if it weren’t for the kindness of a gang of Calcutta shoeshine boys who took him on as their mascot and fed him assiduously. With his new passport he was able to pick up several hundred dollars in income tax returns sent to the Calcutta GPO by his father and then he reciprocated the generosity of the shoeshine kids by treating them to a grand feast. Afterwards he lay down in a trashy park to doze in contentment for an hour or two but kept one lobe of his brain functioning, he’d learned the hard way and wasn’t going to be easily victimised again.

He came out of his snooze to find a villain crouched close by his side with his hand ever so slowly sliding into Arthur’s shirt pocket where his new passport and cash were sequestered. He grabbed the creeping hand in mid-air and threatened to scone the goonda with a coke bottle if he persisted and, having met his match, the desperado ran off. Arthur had been a split-second away from disaster and with a great sigh of relief he headed out of the bleak hole of Calcutta determined to make the big trek up to the hippie wonderland of Nepal.

Trains, buses, a ferryboat up the Ganges River and several hitch-hiked truck rides over the mountains got him to the legendary city of Katmandhu, Mecca for addled-brained potheads and spiritual misfits. He revelled in the rainbow-coloured Marijuana Cafes, drooling over his choice of different grades of hashish, enchanted by all the souvenirs of calendars, post cards and smoking implements, all of it glorifying the wonders of THC addiction. J.J.Cale and Pink Floyd echoed through the doors of the innumerable cheap, gaudy restaurants in an attempt to lure the hippies who wandered about in bewilderment dressed like extras from a Z-grade ‘Mystic Orient’ movie, the Nepalese locals nipping constantly at their heels trying to hustle some tourist business.

Katmandhu gelled into an over-busy, commercial city with hordes of Indians visiting to test drive foreign cars fast around narrow streets already cluttered and polluted without the addition of a ‘smash ‘em up’ derby. Arthur had to run the gauntlet of this cacophonous free-for-all to play the wide-eyed tourist and have his naiveté stunned by the pornographic statuary decorating all the little temples. Every fucking position dreamed up by the salacious imagination of mankind was displayed in reverent detail, homosexuality and bestiality included, and Arthur felt a healthy reassurance about his own bland, sexual deviancy.

He hung around the famed Buddhist Temple of the Glowing Eyes to scope the colourful hippies parading past and learned that in a few days time it was Buddha’s birthday and the hippies were going to indulge in a spiritual wedding party on this auspicious day. With the happy couple in white khirtas, flowers in their hair, dancing mindlessly about to strummed guitars, Arthur fantasised about the nuptials that he himself longed for. First he had to get his visa extended, and dressed like an Arabian Nights prince, kohl blackening his eyes and a turban wound around his dreadlocked head, he marched off to the government offices as if he were Dorothy off to see the Wizard of Oz.

Unbeknownst to Arthur the CIA had just bribed the Nepali Government into cracking down on the hash trade and curtailing the inebriating activities of the soul-seeking hippies. The visa official took one look at Arthur and knew he had a ripe scapegoat at hand. He asked Arthur if he smoked hashish and, having just come from a state-sponsored Ganjha Boutique, and being on a ‘truth’ quest, Arthur saw no reason to lie and confessed his partiality to the gooey black nerve-candy. Instantly he was arrested and incarcerated in a back room, grilled as to the full extent of his illicit proclivities, then escorted to his hotel where they searched his luggage. He had some lumps of hash at the bottom of his bag and as the cop’s hands went deeper and deeper, Arthur sweated a cool nonchalance; the hands got closer and closer, sweat trickled from his armpits, he whistled a happy song and the cop smiled enigmatically, took mercy on him and relented, giving up the search. As they found nothing incriminating they decided on expulsion from the country as a fitting punishment for his shocking transgression of getting mildly intoxicated.

On the day of the Full moon, up on the Temple Mount, the hippie marriage party danced up an orgasm to celebrate Buddha’s birthday, but Buddha was not smiling upon Arthur, disappointed and miserable in a prison cell awaiting his police escort. It took three slow days to be taken by the cops back over the mountains, in trucks and jeeps, handed from one police station to the next, till thankfully he was kicked through the border-post and into the blessed, tolerant country of India. So much for the compassionate land of Buddha’s birth he thought as he hauled his heavy but free heart up the dusty road that led back to his special oasis at the other end of the Himalayas, Shangri-la.