Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  Exhausted, we reached our little hotel. I just wanted to go upstairs, lock myself in our room, lie on the bed with the overhead fan on, and read about India. I never wanted to see that insane, chaotic vision in person again.

  I tried to make plans to avoid the lack of structure that might sweep one or both of us into the country’s irrational, crazy mouth. But I needed some direction; I needed to be in India for a reason. It was clearly no place to take a vacation.

  Meg had direction: her rugs. I needed to tap into my own interests. I didn’t want to live through Meg, to be led through the rug markets of India like a helpless child. We both decided that it would be good for our relationship to explore a little independence, to see if we had developed a center that we could come and go from. But my idea of freedom, although I didn’t voice it, was sexual freedom. I was stuck in some adolescent mode and I could only equate freedom with the ability to get laid anywhere, with anyone I wanted.

  I heard there was a new guru in India who dealt exactly with that problem. He had a huge following of Westerners. His name was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and word had it that he advocated you could only get over your need for constant sex and get into greater spiritual realms by having so much sex that you got sick of it. His theory, or at least the way it came down to me, was that because sex had been forbidden by our puritanical parents, we all thought—as I did—that sex was what we wanted more than anything else in the world. Until we got past that, we would never grow up; we would never pass on to larger issues of commitment and meaningful labor. And best of all, what the Bhagwan advocated for getting through these sexual hang-ups was doing it—doing a lot of it. He preached a kind of homeopathic sex cure, fucking your way to the other side. And if there was anything I needed a cure from, it was those compulsive thoughts about sex. All I wanted was to get laid over and over again with a stranger. I had the notion that pure, isolated, uncomplicated, nonintegrated sex could cure me. Sex was best for me with Meg when I could manage to turn her into a stranger through fantasy, and that was getting more and more difficult. So I wanted to keep Meg as a comfortable friend and explore the rivers of anonymous Dionysian sex; that was my idea. I had to go to that island of licentiousness, that bastion of free love located right in the middle of the sexiest-sounding town in India, Poona. I was sure the Bhagwan had a great sense of humor and had decided to locate his free love ashram there just for the turn-on of that name, Poona. Can you imagine pooning in Poona? Just saying it gave me an erection.

  Before we explored my sexual healing and her rugs, Meg and I made the mistake of deciding to see one or two of the sights together. It was the end of February and still pleasant, but we were told that within a month’s time it would begin to get too hot to travel and by April it would be unbearable.

  Our first side trip was Meg’s idea. She wanted to see the Taj Mahal. I wasn’t real interested; I’d never been keen on grand palaces. But Meg really wanted to see the Taj and I agreed, because after the Taj I wanted to see Benares and Meg wasn’t real interested in that. We made a deal to take turns.

  On the train to Agra to see the Taj, Meg ate some scrambled eggs. Two hours later, just as we stepped onto a glorious walkway that led over golf-course-green lawns being cut by giant lawn mowers pulled by white Brahma bulls, Meg collapsed into a moaning heap. She had never been in such pain, she cried. I didn’t know what to do. I was torn. There was one of the wonders of the world, a trumpeting edifice of white marble just crying out to be explored, and here was my girlfriend practically dying at my feet. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did it: I left Meg in a heap and ran to the Taj to take a quick peek. Of course I couldn’t enjoy it. With the thought of Meg lying out there in a sick heap on the lawn I could hardly see it. But I could hear it. It was crowded with Indian tourists all calling out and yelling to hear their echo, although there were Silence signs hanging everywhere.

  By the time I got back, Meg had dragged herself into the shade of a flame tree and some sort of Indian holy man was bending over her, trying to force-feed her something. I could see her groaning and turning away from the Indian as he held a dirty glass of some vile liquid to her lips. He said, “Please, I am trying to give the madam some health.” Meg was moaning, “No, no, no, take him away, Brewster. Please take him away.”

  By that point I was almost carrying Meg. She was doubled over in pain. I managed to find a bicycle rickshaw, and as we headed for town I screamed at the rickshaw driver, “Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!”

  He took us to a small clinic in Agra. There was a long line outside, but when the people saw two Westerners, one of whom was in great pain, they stood aside to let us pass.

  As soon as the doctor saw her he wanted to give her a shot. I said, “But do you have throw-away needles?” and he said, “Did you bring your own?”

  Whatever was in that shot calmed Meg’s stomach down. We took a room in a small hotel nearby and both of us fell right into a deep sleep.

  We awoke very early the next day, and still in half-sleep, without breakfast, we took a rickshaw to the train and that’s when it happened again: we went back in time. It was ancient, ancient, ancient. There were no sounds of motors, not a car anywhere, only thatched huts and shacks and people coming out of the shacks in multicolored robes only to lift them and squat in a soft morning haze of burning cow dung, amid the moans of cows and the easy, soft pedaling sound of our rickshaw. Both of us sat there silent and suspended in the newness of a place that had not changed its slow habits for two thousand years.

  In Benares we decided we would splurge and stay in a Western-style hotel where I could buy Indian beer and we’d have a small swimming pool. We arrived at night, went to sleep early, and got up early. It was still dark when we woke a sleeping rickshaw driver and got him to take us to the ghats on those holy shores of the Ganges.

  It was still dark when we arrived. There were very few people around, but there were several boat-tour men; so off we went for a rowboat ride across the black, swirling Ganges. There were no lights and therefore no way to get your bearings. Our boatman rowed in silence. The river rushed and swirled. We sat silent and dazed, waiting for the first light of day to show us the ancient river’s edge.

  As the light came, the sounds came with it. Now we could see that one side of the river was completely empty. The sun rose from that side, illuminating the other: a teeming sprawl of people moving like ants in and out of ancient domes and arches. The sounds of women squeezing and beating laundry on the stone edge of the ghat used for bathing, cowbells, finger cymbals, and chanting all mixed in the air; but no matter how cacophonous it all got, it was always soft, sweet, and human. Even the sound of handsaws cutting wood was like music to our ears. Ancient sailing ships that looked like they’d just sailed out of the Bible glided by.

  Not far from us we saw another rowboat, much larger than ours, filled with eight or ten Japanese tourists who were all clambering to one side with cameras raised, while their Indian guide cried out to please trim ship. Then we saw what they were aiming at. A fully extended arm with a gnarled, clawlike hand extended out of the water, rising up into the air like a shot from a Hollywood horror film. Another boat between us was trying to lasso the arm with a rope so that they could drag it elsewhere, out of the view of that morning’s batch of tourists.

  We returned to shore. Walking along the ghats was like walking in the land of jolly death, a bizarre, haphazard carnival; people doing their washing, people selling food, beggars of every odd shape and form, some with extra limbs growing out of their heads or chests.

  We kept on walking, stunned, through it all. We were walking on another planet. We walked until we got to the burning ghat at the far end of that holy-unholy spectacle. After a while I figured out that what we were seeing was a middle-class Indian funeral, or I should say the tail end of a funeral, because the body by now looked pretty well cooked. It was my first—I had never been to a funeral before this. I had missed Mom’s because I was in Mexico, and now here I was at the fune
ral of a stranger.

  I imagined that it would take a huge pile of wood and brush the size of a haystack to be able to burn a human body. That’s how I’d pictured Joan of Arc being burned. But this was a very small, hot pile of logs not much bigger than a bonfire on a beach, and there, right on top, in the middle of the orange flames, was the body. I could only think of it as “cooking” because of the way the two slim Indian men dressed only in their loincloths kept poking it with long poles and turning it like a big barbecued pig. And it smelled like roast pig. For a moment I actually thought I perceived my mouth beginning to water. As we stood there watching and listening to that stranger’s corpse burn, I was thinking how strange it was that I should be so protected from death, or at least the sight of death, for so many years. I also knew that because I’d been protected from death for so long, it had, for that very reason, always been on my mind.

  We watched the body burn, sputter and pop and slowly melt into the flames. It would have been better, I thought, if Mom could have been cremated like this, out in the open, slowly, rather than being shoved into a white-hot oven on a cold metal slab. Nothing graceful about it. This was slow and organic. It was a clear meditation on watching the dead return to the elements: some parts to ashes, other parts as smoke into air. It was beautiful.

  A member of the deceased’s family came over to Meg and me, smiling. He was a tall, thin Indian man dressed in a long white robe. He introduced himself and told us that we were watching his brother burn. He said he was a dentist from Lucknow and the whole family had come to Benares for the cremation.

  After Meg and I shook hands with him he offered us a sip of holy water, as he called it, from the Ganges. We both politely but quickly declined. Imagine, I thought, a middle-class dentist from Queens offering me a glass of the East River at a funeral in New York.

  IN THE STATES, one would be put down for an interest in Tantric sex practices by being called a “swinger.” But in India you could get away with what would be considered crass swapping back home. In India you could indulge your wildest needs with the fantasy that you were a Tantric monk in search of a female surrogate with whom to unite your cosmic polar opposites. I admit, this vague Tantric idea was just an excuse for me to become a rhythm pig, a naked animal coupled with another naked animal with some faint notion that we could in the end return to being our respectful, independent human selves. I’m sure this was the concept of most swingers’ clubs, and Rajneesh’s ashram in Poona appeared to be a swingers’ club for the spiritually minded. It attracted a class of people who felt it was too tacky to swing in New Jersey. They had to go to India for spiritual validation. That was my cynical view of it at the time, anyway. Nevertheless, I was gravitating toward Poona. If I only lived once (not an Indian concept), I had to try it. Meg—good old wholesome, motivated Meg—still wanted to shop for rugs in Kashmir and learn traditional hatha yoga in Bombay. So we went our separate ways.

  What frightened me on the train all the way to Poona was that I no longer knew the difference between an obsessive compulsion and an intuitive instinct. Meg knew the difference for herself, and I was envious of her for that. I was feeling completely dependent on her for this quality. In fact, I think I’d been running off her intuition for years. She held the power of her intuition over me and would only lend it to me when she felt the cause was worthy. Meg, my conscience queen. She obviously looked down upon the Rajneesh Ashram with disdain. And she said to me—just like Mom said to me when I, having been raised as a Christian Scientist, decided to get vaccinated for polio—“Very well, dear, it’s your choice.” Meg just said, “Do what you have to, Brewster. I’m going to Bombay to study yoga, then I’m going to Kashmir to buy Oriental rugs.” Then she added with a smirk, “They’re disease-free and they last.”

  It was hot, very hot, when I arrived. There was no more room for people to stay in the ashram, so I checked into the first hotel I could find. It was a humble little place called the Ritz, and it served mainly vegetarian food. Some of Rajneesh’s followers, or sannyasins, were also staying there. You could tell who they were immediately by their long, flowing orange robes and the malla with the black-and-white photo of Rajneesh hanging around their necks.

  I was told by one of them, a German, that there were about four thousand people spread out all over Poona come to be with the Bhagwan. I was a little taken aback. Not only did I hate orange but I also hated crowds. I got lost in them and always felt like a statistic rather than a person.

  I went to bed early and I got up early and headed down to the ashram while it was still dark. It was a short walk from my hotel and easy to find. There it was, a large ornate wooden gate with a big sign over it that read SHREE RAJNEESH ASHRAM. There was an Indian gatekeeper guarding it who looked like he’d been up all night. He was stretched out in his chair, half asleep, with an empty bottle of wine beside him and a copy of People magazine open in his lap. He directed me back into the ashram to the dynamic meditation pavilion with a loose hand gesture. “Oh yes, you will go just so straight ahead and then when the sun rises you will hear the music,” he said with a thick Indian accent, his head bobbing back and forth as if he was actually telling me, “No, don’t go.”

  I walked back until I found the cement pavilion. It was a large green area with a stone floor and a green opaque plastic roof covering it. I squatted with my back against the cool cement wall and waited. Then the sun slowly began to come up and the music began. It was emanating from a number of huge rock and roll speakers and sounded like a combination of Indian spiritual ragas and disco music. It was almost too sexy for that hour of the day.

  As the music got louder, the pavilion began to fill up with lithe young people all dressed in orange robes, coming from every direction. As they entered they would immediately wrap orange bandanas around their eyes or put on orange sleep masks like the black ones you get in first class on the airlines. Then they’d begin to swing and sway. Soon the room was packed with these beautiful lithe men and women all swaying in the most languidly sexy way. No one had any underwear on. I could see hints of everything through their orange robes. I could see pubic hair and breasts and the way the men were hung. And there I was, trying to dance in beige pajamas with underwear on. I was the only one in that room without orange robes and a blindfold, and I couldn’t stop looking. I’d never seen such a collection of beautiful people in one place before.

  It was the most sensual dancing I’d ever seen, and I felt completely undermined by it. I think I would have felt better if I was in a room filled with people in wheelchairs. I was too much in my eyes and head again, and I felt awful. I longed for the safety of my familiar relationship with Meg.

  After the dynamic meditation dance was over, people filed out for breakfast at the cafeteria and I followed along, feeling even more alienated because no one was speaking any English around me, only German. And also, it was starting to get really hot.

  After breakfast there was a brief break where people hung out and spoke German, and then it was time to line up to go hear the Bhagwan speak. I got swept into the crowd, but I didn’t panic at the thought of disappearing. I was able to remember who I was: because I was the only one not dressed in orange.

  We were ushered down a narrow passageway into a large open tent that faced an empty stage. After everyone got settled (I’d say there must have been close to two thousand people, all orange as far as the eye could see) there was a long silence followed by a small commotion of whispering, which was followed by an announcement over the PA system. The voice that came out over the system was smooth and hypnotic and spoke with an Australian accent, saying, “Would whoever is wearing the perfume or scented soap please remove themselves from the gathering.” There was a silence and no one moved. Then everyone started looking around and whispering again. Soon five or six young men, all with beards, started up the aisles, bending over now and then to do what I can only describe as sniffing. They would lower their faces close to people’s heads, take a sniff and then move on.


  I could not contain my curiosity any longer, so I asked the young blond woman next to me what was going on. She told me, in a thick Dutch accent, that the Bhagwan was very sensitive to all smells and that the strong smell of any perfume could cause him to leave his body. I was not sure what she meant by “leave his body.” I wasn’t sure if she meant die, or astral-project, or what, but before I could ask I saw one of the languid sniffers discover the scented culprit and lead her out of the tent. As soon as this happened the whole atmosphere got very concentrated and charged. The focus of energy was enormous as two bearded men brought out a great white VIP executive’s chair. As soon as the chair was set and the two men went to stand on either side of it, the Bhagwan swept out in his white robes and sat. Yes, I thought, the perfect guru. He was like Kennedy, the perfect president. He had the charisma. He had the aura. He had the look. He was a tall man with a balding head, long hair on the sides, and a flowing white beard. His face was open and expressive, but his eyes were the thing. I had never seen eyes like them. His eyes were anything and everything you wanted to read into them.