Magic Bus
Page 27
Roddy drops his gaze away from the horizon and fixes his eyes on me.
‘I’ve lived a life of genteel poverty. I write poems. I sing songs. As for checking out of Nepal, there’s no way I’m going back to the West. In Ireland today you need a supply of mobile phones to throw at muggers. And those guys who stayed behind to change the system from within? “Thanks, buddy. You did a great job.” No, I’m staying on the edge of the abyss with the Nepalese.’
‘At the End of the Road.’
‘I’ll die here, man. They’ll take me to the Kali temple burning ghat and watch my toes curl. Or I’ll go like the Tibetans, cut up and fed to the birds. “I can fly at last! LSD didn’t do it but death sure does…”’ His laughter has a suggestion of tears. ‘Nirvana is a Buddhist concept. Idealism is part of life here. The Nepalese speak of hunger while they dream bright dreams. But this isn’t nirvana and maybe Penny has forgotten that. In nirvana, there’s no loss or regret or misery because there are no more journeys to make. And who wants to be stuck on their butt in paradise with no stories to tell?’
Roddy lowers his eyes and turns away without uttering another word.
We leave the faithful spinning banks of prayer wheels and return to his sanctuary of birds and bamboo, the terrace suspended between the stupa and the city, between the sacred and the profane. The shadows have crossed the garden, casting all but the patio into shade. A single candle burns in an upper window of the tall white house.
Penny is awake again, sitting back in a cane armchair, at home.
‘I remember the first time Orrin and I flew back to the States for his mother’s funeral,’ she says, freeing us from the clutches of silence, restoring our good humour. She’s wearing moccasins sewn together with string and there’s a flower in her hair. ‘At LAX we were shoved into a little room with a dozen long-hairs and fellow undesirables. This button-down guy in uniform calls us to his desk, ready to give us the third degree. “You been out of the country for nine years,” he said, like it was a crime. I halfexpected him to send us to Alcatraz. “Nine years,” he repeated, flicking through our passports, looking at the visas. “You’ve been living in…” then he stopped and this weirdness came over him. “… Kathmandu,” he said under his breath, over and over again. “Kathmandu.” I don’t know if it was the name, or if he’d been here, or if he just dreamt about Nepal during his tour of Vietnam, but he looked up at us like there was some sort of holy light shining out of our backsides. He closed our passports really slowly, handed them back to us and just said, “Wow.”’
Roddy sits down beside her and strokes her hair. Her purple bangles ring as she reaches for his hand. I notice once more the beauty of her high cheekbones and her seal-grey hair.
‘What a long, strange trip it’s been,’ she says. Then she’s quiet for a long minute. ‘Jack,’ she adds, turning to face me, ‘Roddy and I are going to talk about our retirement plans.’
‘We are?’
One by one, Penny takes hold of Roddy’s guitar-picking fingers.
‘My old mother from Guernica had a saying. “La esperanza muere última.” Hope dies last. Lose hope and you’ve lost everything.’
‘Just split for a couple of hours, will you?’ Roddy asks me, the light flashing again in his eyes. ‘There’s a bicycle under the banyan tree.’
I freewheel downhill into the fading light, laughing until my shoulders shake, almost colliding with a passing Sherpa.
The sixties marked a shift of consciousness. Ordinary people did extraordinary things. A generation rejected old, unfeeling ways, questioned established practices, searched for new values. Then, in the seventies, the oil crisis and later Reagan economics forced on them a financial reality-check. Jobs became scarce. Time grew expensive. Borders closed. Hippie chicks swelled into earth mothers and their children needed new shoes. Lonely Planet, Greenpeace, Apple and MTV went from alternative to main stream. Revolutionaries reinvented themselves as CEOs. Some kids couldn’t adapt, of course, retreating to log cabins in the Sierras or making a last stand as ecowarriors in mid-Wales. But most of them – like Penny and Roddy – found peace in themselves, even as the rainbow bridges were brought down by bombs and rueful self-interest; and the New Conservatives, born of the alliance between big business and ‘hard-hat’ working-class Americans, unpicked the liberal legacy.
Around me, the sprawling, modern suburbs bring to mind a dozen other Asian capitals rather than a one-time idea of paradise. I’m on a footbridge over the meandering Vishumati when the street lights flicker and fade. The city’s electricity fails, due to a Maoist grenade or an overdue bribe, and Kathmandu is plunged into darkness. I swing off the bike to get my bearings. The flashing billboard for Virgin Blended Scotch (‘There is nothing like a virgin’) no longer lights my way. The road back to Swayambhu is equally dark. So I push into the disorienting press of bodies, listening to the mixed languages of old Nepal – Tamang, Magar, Gurung, Hindi – following my nose toward the heart of the old city.
In the twilight, bicycle rickshaws clatter through the maze of cobbled streets, their drivers hissing a path between the faceless crowds. Tilting wooden houses rise above half-seen holy men and dogs. The calls of pedlars echo off crumbling buildings. Great weeping stands of bamboo loom over the red walls of the Royal Palace.
I reach Durbar – or Palace – Square as the oil-lamps are lit. A dozen extraordinary, time-worn temples, some dating back to the twelfth century, appear to dance in the glimmering flames. They rise on tiered brick steps, their asymmetrical position heightening the sense of movement. Shiva and his consort, Parvati, gaze out from high windows, their faces turning in the shifting shadows. Stone lions paw the ground outside the House of the Living Goddess. The erotic carvings on Maju Deval’s roof struts seem to rock together in eternal copulation.
In the flickering half-light, it’s easy to wish away the present. I hear no English spoken. All the hotel signs are blacked out. No cars pollute the alleyways. The jumbled medieval city seems remote from modernity again, ready to be discovered anew.
In the sixties, the magic buses used to park along Basantapur Square. Their drivers – Chattanooga Bob, Jon Benyon and Blossom – drank Guinness on the upper decks. Rudy and Speedy Eddie smoked Mustang and Manali downstairs at the Eden Hash Centre, lighting their pipes with Flying Horse matches which exploded and burnt holes in their trousers. Their passengers let go of time at the Dupo Dope (‘Your Old and Favourite Joint’). Cat Stevens wrote songs in a chai shop in Asantol. Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who had introduced Timothy Leary to LSD, swept along Freak Street pontificating on the aspirations of the great psychedelic revolution. In the Cabin, Roddy tuned his guitar and sang about the first social movement in history propelled by students. Orrin took in travellers’ problems and rucksacks at Dreamweaver. Rama Tiwari arrived in town with his trunk to build a ‘Himalaya’ of books.
Kids checked into the Inn Eden, the Hotchpotch and the Matchbox, dirty warrens of cell-like rooms with low, ornamental, head-cracking doorways, and debated how best to heal the world. At the Bakery (with its sacred dhuni fire, mosaics of the zodiac and I Ching hexagrams, as well as the best record-player in Nepal), many newcomers sold their jeans for strings of amber and red-felt boots embroidered with flowers. On their first night in town, Tony and Maureen Wheeler splurged on a two-dollar hotel. Their second night was in a budget one-dollar room next door. Newari snake-charmers played their flutes outside the central post office from where travellers sent home traditional wooden statues, hollowed out and filled with ‘temple balls’ of hash. Crows squabbled in the old palace trees, their black wings sweeping over the terracotta rooftops, Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes and hand-drawn ‘Kathmandu or Bust’ signs. Beneath them, the Intrepids tripped out of smoky black rooms, popped into the mud-floored market to buy bananas, paused to meet friends at a curd shop to hear the news from home, then returned to the Tibetan Blue to refill their pipes and ask in a tone of rising panic, ‘Where to now, man? Where to now?’
My hair stands on end as party people at Paddy Foley’s Irish Pub sing along to ‘Katmandu’. In the Himalayan Java coffee lounge, laidback Japanese tap their feet while ordering American-style hash browns. Intoxicated Russian tourists sway to the music outside the Moon Stay Lodge and Monumental Paradise. No one takes much notice of the distant crack of a rifle shot.
Goa
31. The Long and Winding Road
From 20,000 feet, I can follow the frothy, palm-fringed arc of India’s western seaboard to the horizon. Then, with a lift of the imagination, I can see further up the coast to Gujarat and dust-red Rajasthan. I can reach back over the Khyber, along the trail through Afghanistan, around sacred Bamiyan and beyond the shadow of the lost Buddhas. I can follow the arrow-straight pipelines across sad Middle Eastern borders, catch sight of turquoise Isfahan sparkling in the sun, sense Khomeini raging in his black tomb, even hear glass chimes tinkling in Cappadocia’s ashen valleys. The Anatolian steppe rises across my path, raw and timeless, leading me down to the blue Mediterranean and the gates of Europe. Beyond them, back thousands of miles and a good generation, I can just glimpse (if I squint against the glare of the setting sun) Penny at Dover, straggle-haired Ginsberg at JFK and Ken Kesey firing up Furthur at Big Sur.
A scimitar of golden sand shimmers beneath the silver belly of the Airbus. We descend over Goa, the first Portuguese possession in Asia. When the Old Conquest colonists left in 1961, the Intrepids established the trippy winter retreat here beside the calm waters of the Arabian Sea. Over a generation its full-moon beach parties morphed from guitar-picking singsongs and psychedelic happenings to the Goa Trance scene. Ravers took over the northern shore. Thousands copulated on Calingute Beach. Local Indians found themselves unwelcome in the waterside cafés. Wasted lowlifers, off their heads and with no ‘philosophical flowers’ in their hair, bartered away their passports and dignity at the Wednesday flea market. I’m about to face the man who set in train the chain of events which helped to bring them all here. My aircraft banks over the ocean. The landing gear grinds down and locks.
The evening light is plump and golden outside the terminal, perhaps because of the smog of hash smoke. I catch a taxi north from Dabolim through lush green fields surrounded by hamlets with white-painted churches. At Mapusa we turn west toward the string of former fishing villages which line the coast. In Anjuna’s back lanes low-built houses are tucked beneath overhanging coconut groves. Orchids grow in husks lashed to tree trunks. The barking of wild dogs rises above the singing of the tree frogs. Every second porch displays a ‘To Let’ sign. Fireflies glow under the satellite dishes. I knock at a screen door. Its cement frame is encrusted with sea shells. Alice opens the door.
‘We thought you’d be here earlier,’ she says.
I’m right on time.
She’s tall and shiny-faced with a nervous thinness. Her mouth is set and her body tense. She moves aside, not so much to usher me into the house as not to stand in my way. I step into the dim front room. ‘This is Joanne,’ she says, introducing her twelve-year old Samburu daughter.
The room was once painted sky-blue. Backpacks and old leather suitcases gather dust on top of a metal wardrobe. Empty tubes of cooking spices are locked in a metal-mesh cupboard above a tableful of seasonal fruit. In the corner shrine, candles pool at Bhairab’s feet. A line of incense ash falls on a crucifix. Joanne’s bed is a thin mattress on the concrete floor.
A melon moves on the glass table. A haggard man, tired of life, lifts his head, pushing aside unread newspapers and unopened envelopes. His eyes are dull and slightly hooded. His white beard is stained nicotine-yellow. I walk towards him. He wavers to his feet and steadies himself by grabbing my hand. His bald head – the melon – is overlaid with forward-combed threads of thin hair. I notice his bent back, bowed legs and the tight dome of a swollen belly. ‘I’ve brought you whisky,’ I say. ‘Johnny Walker Black, right?’
‘You star,’ he says, and slumps back down into his chair.
I sit across from the first independent travel guide writer. I start to tell him about my trip, the retracing of his original journey, and how his – and Tony Wheeler’s – work taught a generation to move through the world alone and with confidence. He snaps open the bottle, lights his last B&H Extra Mild and says nothing in response. My heart sinks as the whisky level drops. After an hour, he pushes aside a rejected application from American Express, lays his head back down with the soft fruit and falls asleep. Above him buckle shelves of his five dozen guides: BIT’s Overland Through Africa, Lonely Planet’s South America on a Shoestring, the Kenya and Uganda guides which Alice helped him research, all his Asian volumes, undertaken with his second wife, Poon, every book rotting in the tropical humidity. I notice also Newby’s Traveller’s Tales, works by R. D. Laing and Carlos Castaneda, The Many Ways of Being and Drugs of Hallucination. I can’t see a copy of the original Overland to India.
In the adjoining kitchen, Alice and Joanne whisper in Swahili. When Crowther starts to snore, anger and disappointment swell inside me. I stand. I pick up my pack. I’m about to walk out. Then, Alice appears at my side. ‘Take him to the bar in the morning,’ she says. ‘Buy him a drink.’
‘Is that meant to make me feel better?’
‘It’ll make him talk.’
In the spare bedroom I fold myself under the mosquito net. The sounds of unknown creatures rise out of the dark. The beating of the overhead fan blocks out the sound of the sea. I drop into sleep. In the middle of the night I surface from a dream. I’m disorientated, detached from the familiar, not yet connected to the new. In my dream I imagine scrawling words across Crowther’s face with a felt-tip marker; words from Roddy’s parting prediction at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan airport.
‘My vision of the end of the planet is everyone taking a holiday in the same week,’ he said. ‘All the aircraft crash into each other in one great fireball. No more travel agents. No more pimple-faced immigration officers. Just a single, surviving traveller who arrives at his hotel with a singed copy of Lonely Planet crying out, “What do you mean, there’s no internet café?”’
Geoff Crowther was born in Todmorden near Halifax on the day the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After school and a spell working for the Humberside water board, he hit the road. In London at BIT, he collated his travel notes into the Intrepids’ first, impulsive guide. He and Tony Wheeler collaborated to produce the original Lonely Planet India handbook. His journeys informed the imprint’s first African and South American guides. With their success, he bought acre by acre, cheque by cheque, an old banana plantation in northern New South Wales. In the rainforest he created a writers’ retreat and nudist commune (the only clothes permitted were Wellington boots because of the snakes). He left his common-law English wife for Poon and built her a Korean-temple-cum-bushwhacker’s-chalet on a mountainside. Crowther travelled as he lived, his excesses mirroring those of the age. Every time he returned from a spell on the road, Poon made him have a venereal disease test. Then he drove around the commune collecting his partners for a group visit to the clinic. He drank in those days, too, a six-pack of beer set beside the IBM to see him through the morning. The story of his life was legend among guide writers.
In the morning, Alice points me towards the ocean. Crowther left the house early. I walk barefoot along a sandy lane, through the soft embracing heat, past St Anthony’s Church (patron saint of lost travellers). Coconut palms rise above the paddy fields. A heavy blossom drops from a tree, plummeting to earth like a falling bird. Waves
whisper along the beach like lovers sharing secrets.
The Guru Bar overlooks the rocky bay. Crowther sits alone under its palm-frond balcony with his daily crossword. Only geckos keep him company. Beyond him the Arabian Sea glints in the morning sun.
‘Is a symbolic tale an allegory?’ he asks me without lifting his eyes. The wire arms of his pilot spectacles ride halfway up his temples. ‘Nairobi Times is best, a crossword without clues, but I can’t get it. So Indian Express has to do.’ His hand shakes as he fills in the boxes. At his side are a bottle of Wite Out, a dictionary and an empty glass.
‘Allegory is spelt with two “I”s’ I say.
Crowther leans back on his chair and laughs at himself. A raw grinding of gravel and phlegm. His flat feet are splayed on oversize flip-flops. He wears a pair of old shorts and a floppy, faded sweatshirt.
‘Nobody comes to visit me here,’ he says.
‘Can I top up your beer?’ I ask.
‘You star.’
I buy two for him, one for me. The drink loosens his tongue.
‘Kathmandu,’ he says. ‘You’ve just come from Kathmandu.’
I nod.
‘From Delhi catch the Upper India Express – platform 13, 8.10 p.m. – to Patna. Cycle rickshaw to steamer Mahendra Ghat and Ganges. The Raxaul train leaves at 10.20 p.m. Cost in 1969: 17.50 rupees with student reduction.’
‘Very good,’ I admit.
‘In Durbar, hash cookies were on every menu. The Cabin restaurant’s telephone number was 14724.’
It’s my turn to laugh. ‘You have a good memory.’
‘I never let go of my journals. Slept with them. Drew maps by hand. No laptops back then. No photocopiers in Africa. If you lost a journal you were royally screwed.’
He stamps the table with his fist, misses the fly, knocks over the bottles. I buy him another beer.
‘Got screwed by lice too. On a bus, your neighbour’s head would be crawling with them. They’d drop on to your lap. You’d feel them biting the back of your neck. Crabs were a pain in the ass too. Literally.’