25) The Thugees of Manali.

Arthur dallied for a few months in Shangri-la doing yoga diligently, yet enlightenment seemed to recede with the horizon, no matter how much he strove towards it. He was fed up with the travail of surviving India and decided to move on to swinging London and rejoin the world. Then he received a letter from his old friend Compassion, asking him not to leave India, to wait for the old Maestro’s imminent arrival, as Arthur’s companionship was soulfully required. He therefore cashed in his flight ticket and made sojourn to Manali in the Kulu Valley, most hallowed site of the connoisseur dope-smoker where he figured he could have a relaxing time before his beloved Compassion showed up in Shangri-la.

In late 1973 Manali was a small village with barely a hotel on offer, tourists lodging in stodgy backrooms of the locals’ huts built half into the mountain-sides, dank and gloomy as buried coffins. Pine forests crept to the village edge and deep within the chaos of the trees was a primordial wooden temple dedicated to Kali, the Dark Goddess of Destruction and in the vicinity of which the freaks often held their psychedelic parties.

It was at a full-moon shindig in the forests of Manali that Arthur had his big emotional freak-out and psychic breakthrough. A gang of assorted international freaks had dropped Acid collectively around a roaring bonfire and proceeded to create hypnotic music upon whatever instrument came to hand. Arthur couldn’t resist the charm of the Acid-rush moment and, slithering like a snake around the seated crowd, he danced the dance of Salome asking for the head of John the Baptist. His dancing was magical, flowing naturally as if following the land’s energy lines, and the musicians kept him afloat, his fluid motion matching their cadence perfectly. The music quickened pace and abandoned sweet order, became cacophonous, chaotic, and Arthur found himself propelled out of control every which way, stumbling over his fellow revellers, in and out of the fire, spinning onto the laps of the musicians, till he broke down, crying,

“Oh help me someone, I’m so lost, I don’t know who I am, I’m so scared. What’s it all about? What are we doing here? I’m such a fool, please don’t hurt me…”

The freaks were annoyed by his pathetic blubbering and whining, kicking him away when he flung himself at their feet, demanding he “fuck off”, one of the French musicians hitting him on the head with his flute. It eventually dawned on Arthur that he was not about to be roasted and eaten at a demon’s midnight feast and this particular crazy crew were actually benign beings. He soon settled down, curled up in his blanket on the edge of the circle, projecting kaleidoscopic epics on the movie-screen of his mind, and ignored by everyone.

The next day, as Arthur made his way around the village, all the freaks were very friendly, introducing themselves and beaming encouragement. A craggy-faced American, a classic India-freak in pyjama pants with a Kulu hat propped over his long stringy hair, clapped him on the back,

“How are you mate, over your freak-out? You had us worried last night.”

“I’m sorry for making such a fool of my self, acid really lets the demons out but I think I finally got over them. I’m feeling pretty good today, like I’m my real self at last.”

“Every village needs its fool, but don’t worry, we love you for it. You’re a fantastic dancer, really, we were all very impressed. The winter solstice festival is soon, you could be our King for the day if you’ll dance for us.”

“Gee thanks, I’ve been travelling alone so long, I’d love to hang out with some cool dudes for awhile. King for a day, sounds like a lot of fun.”

He felt like he’d finally arrived, he had been accepted into the global tribe of Freak-heads after baring his vulnerable soul, he could carry on fearless and hoped hence forward his flights to the netherworlds would be only euphoric and enlightening. For the next few weeks he danced unreservedly at the parties, ashamed of nothing and he made friends with everyone, particularly the French flautist, a wicked opium addict named Pierre. He trekked through the jungles and high mountain valleys to swoon in the hot spring baths at the sacred temple of Mani Karam. He ate tsampa with the Tibetan refugees in their chai shops and commiserated with their dislocation; and he drooled over the Kulu handicrafts on display in the bazaar, especially the hip, rainbow shawls that he couldn’t afford. In a Manali Buddhist Monastery he was shown his first, authentic Tibetan Thanka painting and the vivid, multi-coloured style inspired his artist’s lust to emulate its divine look. He even got to see the Dalai Lama, who stepped out of a doorway one rainy morning and stood for a seven gun salute some seventy yards from where Arthur stood. The sun broke out and shone upon the smiling priest/king for a few short minutes, he took great breaths of the fresh mountain air and then he was gone, like an apparition from a Lobsang Rampa fable.

Then came the night of a dark moon and the Kulu natives lost all semblance of passive normality, in some mid-winter rite of passage they threw themselves into an atavistic frenzy in the forest’s embrace, dancing in ritualised formations to the raucous bellows of giant trumpets within the purview of the Kali Temple. Then they led into the clearing one of every animal their livelihoods depended on, a bull, a goat, a pig, a sheep, a fowl, a duck, whatever, and in a howling delirium, wielding huge machetes, pagan priests stepped forth from the crowd and chopped every one of the poor creature’s heads off, blood flowing in torrents. Arthur had come to watch the dancing, naively unprepared for the massacre, and being a vegetarian peacenik, was horrified when all the blood suddenly poured forth. Paradise again took on a sinister edge, he got the willies wondering if his demonic haunting wasn’t yet finished with him.

He’d been told the stone slab in the Kali Temple’s inner sanctum had been used in days of old for human sacrifice, and when he inspected it, he thought he could see the outline of a child’s body grooved into the rock. The Goddess Kali was a powerful figure in the collective psyche, having ruled for countless aeons and been the progenitor of all the subcontinent’s gods, Her presence imbued the dark pine forests with a spirit of primeval gloom, the Kali Temple possibly attracting all kinds of kooky cultists from around the world looking for a deranged, motivational idol.

The next day, with the sun shining and Arthur’s fears banished, he met a charming Afro-American guitar player in a café in town, they sang a song together and Arthur was entranced by the guy. There was one creepy old hotel called the Bombay Guesthouse way up on the mountainside that Arthur had always avoided due its reputation as a junkie haven. A creaky two-story wooden box, it could have stood in for the house in “The Amityville Horror”. The handsome black guy invited him up to the Bombay Guesthouse for a songfest and, following him up to its brooding, foreboding presence, Arthur felt his skin crawl but ignored it, he was longing for some hot male company. He hadn’t had sex in over a year and this tall black man was extremely charismatic, leading him on.

They drank chai, dropped Acid and made music in the grungy downstairs parlour, the handsome Yank a dead-ringer for Jimi Hendrix as he strummed away at his guitar, the few hippies passing through all deferring to him as if he were indeed the great rock’n’roll god. The sun set and the night grew eerily quiet and black, and all the freaks had disappeared upstairs, including the Hendrix look-a-like, leaving Arthur alone on the couch, tripping, befuddled and elated, singing like a silly canary. The black guy returned and coaxed Arthur to come upstairs to the dormitory where the party was really happening.

Arthur felt reluctant to enter such an intimate space as the collective bedroom of what appeared to be a hippie family, and the house reeked of weird vibes, dampening his enthusiasm, but reassurances in a seductive voice got him up out of his addle-brained warbling and treading gingerly up a kaleidoscoping staircase. As he wavered at the top of the stairs he gazed through the forbidding, dark doorway into the dormitory space, a large room full of people dressed in black, standing by their black-shrouded beds. An aisle between the beds led straight to an altar dominating the back of the room, dressed in black cloth and bearing a clutter of occult paraphernalia. Amongst all the occult junk, shining in the ethereal light of candles, were a silver chalice, a gold dagger, a bloodied goat’s head on a tin plate and a human skull, affixed to its dome a black iron Kali Ma dancing on a prostrate Siva.

All the while the gang of freaks had been murmuring some mumbo-jumbo chant which increased in intensity as Arthur staggered between them and on hallucinating “King for a day” and “Hail Satan” amidst the wailing he gathered his wits and focused on the altar and the smiling Hendrix double beckoning him forward. He zeroed in on the shape that was hanging above the altar, distorted by the lighting, indecipherable amidst the psychedelic fractals, it slowly morphed into a black, wooden, upside-down crucifix. He took in the two lines of chanting hippies, recognising a few callous faces from the parties in Goa, and they smiled evil encouragement for him to walk down between them to the altar. But as he gazed deep into their eyes their vacuous smiles twisted into vampiric grimaces, and everywhere he turned he saw a reversed cross hanging above a bed. Images from “Rosemary’s Baby” zigzagged across his vision, the hideous goat’s face and hairy claw rending pristine skin, the distorted mugs of the cultists intoning grim sing-song, mesmerised and moronic, but with glee in their ancient eyes. Shrieking in fright he stumbled backwards and, before they could grab him, he fell headlong down the stairs, then jumped up and ran out the door, yelling religious hysteria and unstoppable, like a spirit escaping from Hell.

He scrambled his way up the mountain in the dark on his hands and knees, projecting a protective egg of clear light around him and mumbling a prayer to his guardian angel to aid him in his flight from the evil beings he imagined scrambling out of the Guesthouse after him and baying for his blood. He was lost in total blackness, stumbling up a vertical slope, scrabbling to find a handhold and drag himself up, up, up into the starlight with the Thugees of Manali hot on his ass eager to tear his bowels out. Shredding his hands and knees on sharp rocks he lumbered through the inky darkness to the safety of a peasant’s lodging-house and barricaded himself in his room, to wait out the night. He came down from his drugged mania past dawn, wondering if, yet again, he’d hallucinated the whole ridiculous drama, his childhood Christian brainwash seeping out of his hind-brain with its devils trying to claim his soul. LSD is a powerful psychotrope and anything can be imagined, and he prayed to his personal god to purge him of these paranoias.

Over the next few weeks several hippie tourists were found dead in their rooms, overdosed on heroin, a poison in proficient supply in Manali. Without much ado, their corpses were burnt on pyres by the river, few people attending the funeral rites and nobody giving a damn about the death of dumb junkies; lost faranghis were such easy victims, nobody to claim them, so far from home. More horror movies flashed in his cracked mind, deviants on the run after the downfall of the Hippies Utopia at the end of the ‘Sixties, ending up attracted to the Kali Cult in India, hiding out in the lawless pine-tree groves of Manali, trying to appease an unpredictable universe with the blood of naïve hippies.

It all gave Arthur the willies and he fled the Kulu Valley, happy to still have his head on his shoulders. Ironically, Kulu Manali eventually turned into an Indian honeymooner’s playground with a zillion hotels for consummating couples, love-locked newly-weds on every pathway staring into each others' eyes. Sadly the town also got put on many a foreign embassy’s “notorious, dangerous hotspot” list as more and more tourists were found dead under their beds or deep in the forest or up in the mountain fastnesses where they’d gone for an innocent trek. But Arthur had survived, from yet another snake-pit, as if, being harmless he just could not be harmed.