by Frank Kusy
The good following wind ran out at Kuwait airport, where our plane was disembarked and we were informed that owing to fog over Delhi there would be a six hour delay. ‘How depressing,’ I thought. ‘What on earth am I going to do for six hours in this stark, bleak and clinically sterile airport lounge?’
The answer was: meet Kevin.
Like good, typical English types, Kevin and I circled each other warily – despite being the only two Europeans in the vast lounge area – for three hours before finally being driven together at the foreign exchange counter.
‘Do you think we’re better off changing money here or at Delhi airport?’ was my opening gambit.
‘I don’t know,’ responded Kevin. ‘But I tell you what, they better have a cheese sandwich waiting in Delhi. This Arab lot haven’t even got a coffee shop!’
In retrospect, it seems quite incredible that a chance conversation at a near-empty Arab airport should have led to a deep and mutually rewarding travel friendship lasting over two months and taking us 15,000 kilometres around the continent of India and into the Kingdom of Nepal. But once I had got over the shock of Kevin being an ex-7th Day Adventist boat builder, and Kevin had reconciled himself to the company of a Buddhist astrologer, we decided to take digs together in Delhi.
With the coming of Kevin, my diary took on an entirely new dimension. The reason? Kevin was allergic to just about everything about India. Pigs, dogs, beggars, lepers, even holy men, queued up to attack him, and for no apparent reason. ‘What is he doing here?’ I found myself wondering as he tried to cross the road on a busy traffic crossing and nearly got run over. ‘I mean, I’m here to check out the birthplace of Buddhism. But Kevin has no such excuse. His only goal, as far as I can work out, is to score a cheese sandwich!’
I quickly found in Kevin, however, a most congenial travelling companion. He was amusing and pleasant, held a lively, informative conversation, was extremely open and accommodating, and didn’t snore. He even supported – though he never quite understood – my Buddhist practice. “Have you chanted yet?’ he asked me once, and when I said: ‘No,’ he shook his head in mystification and said: ‘Are you sure? I’ve been hearing that bloody chanting everywhere I go!’
What was truly wonderful about Kevin though was the carefree way in which he laughed at vicissitude. Racked with discomfort from mosquito bites and sunburn, and unable even to find a cup of sugarless tea anywhere, he was able to maintain: ‘I’ve never felt better in my life!’ When I pointed out that he’d had flu for the past three weeks, he said: ‘What I mean is, I’ve never felt in better mental health!’
Sometimes Kevin challenged my own mental health, like when he went off on a one and a half hour whistling rendition of ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ and ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the Seaside’ (two tunes I absolutely hated) but this was a small price to pay for his boundless enthusiasm and optimism.
‘Where else,’ I found myself asking, ‘could I find a travelling companion who can liven up your day by accidentally changing the combination on your padlock so that it takes you a whole afternoon to escape from your room? And who else, when bored, spends his time bouncing coconuts up and down the walls, then blending slivers of Cadbury’s chocolate, coconut juice and Indian rum into a personal cocktail in a malaria tablet bottle?’
The only thing that dented Kevin’s enthusiasm – apart from his ongoing battles with beggars and rickshaw drivers – was the near absence of European cuisine. ‘I ordered chips,’ he raged on one famous occasion, ‘and all they’ve given me is six slivers of raw potato!’ On another famous occasion, in Varanasi, he finally located a plate of cheese sandwiches, but had to turn them away. ‘I couldn’t eat that plate of sandwiches,’ he complained in his own diary. ‘To be honest and blunt, they were disgusting. Stale, stained black and bone hard, I opened them up and found bits in them. I think the main “bit” was a dead spider.’
The search for the Holy Grail of the edible cheese sandwich would take Kevin the whole of his tour round the Indian sub-continent, and only conclude when we came to Kathmandu and he found a bakery which served him up endless plates of the stuff.
I suppose the summit of our trip – if one discounts the time Kevin was forced to eat five chilli omelettes in quick succession and nearly had a stroke – came when we decided to have our heads shaved bald.
‘If I’m here as a Buddhist,’ I told my young friend. ‘I might as well look like one. Besides, it’s too hot for hair.’
Kevin’s broad, ruddy face creased in amusement. ‘You haven’t got the head for it, Frank,’ he laughed. ‘Me, I’ve got a lovely head. I’ll look just like Sean Connery.’
And it was true, once Kevin’s light, brown locks had fallen to the floor of the ‘Disco’ barber’s in Kumily he did look just like Sean Connery. Only trouble was, the next town we came to, he was unexpectedly mobbed by a crowd of James Bond devotees who wanted him to sign autographs and bless their babies. All of a sudden, Kevin didn’t want to look like Sean Connery anymore.
At some point, of course, we had to part company. Kevin wanted to go help the lepers in Poona – a mission he quickly abandoned when he saw the conditions there – and I wanted to pursue my own mission, namely to visit the holy sites of Buddhism in India. I knew from a quick meeting with Naveena Reddi, the dynamic young leader of our Nichiren movement in Delhi, that I shouldn’t expect too much. ‘Buddhism was a thriving force for 1700 years after the Buddha’s death in the 5th century BC,’ she told me. ‘Then it was slowly absorbed back into the fold of mainstream Hinduism. Nowadays, all the sites associated with the Buddha’s enlightenment have either been abandoned or are under Hindu administration.’
She also told me not to expect too much (yet) of Nichiren Buddhism in India. ‘We are still very young,’ she said in between frantic cab rides across central Delhi. ‘We have as of now just 1000 members (*50,000 in 2015) and only about 200 have a gohonzon. The task ahead of us is daunting. Yes, India is the origin point of true Buddhism, but it has been crippled by the caste-bound regulations and nature-god worship of Hinduism for thousands of years. Consequently, it is very difficult to practice here; people are very reluctant to cast off Hinduism. How can they embrace the gohonzon, which is a mirror reflection of their inner state of Buddhahood, when the Hindu faith teaches that Vishnu or “God” is external to their lives? In short, the Indian people have forgotten what Shakyamuni, the original Buddha, taught – namely, that ‘God’ or Buddha is within their lives. So, to achieve kosen rufu or lasting peace in India will be tough. But we will, without a doubt, achieve it. Without a doubt!’
I plunged into Bihar, the poorest state of India, with some trepidation. Not only was this the first time I had really travelled anywhere on my own – if one discounted my first aborted attempt to see Mount Sinai – but nobody spoke any English. Ten days later, I plunged back out again, very much worse for wear and feeling somehow ‘cheated’.
‘What ho, baldy!’ Kevin greeted me as we met up again in Varanasi. ‘How was your Buddhist experience?
‘Not that great,’ I had to confess. ‘I melted in 40 degrees of heat seeing the Buddhist temples and cave paintings of Ellora and Aurangabad, I nearly got shoved off the roof of a bus near Patna by 25 Bihar bandits for not singing loudly enough for them, and I’ve just crawled off a 12 hour train journey from Gaya so desperate for English conversation I started talking to Frank Sinatra on my Walkman.’
Kevin laughed. ‘Didn’t you see the Bodhi tree, then?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said grimly. ‘I saw that. But as soon as I sat down to chant under it – thinking to myself: “Here I am at last, and at the same age – thirty – that the Buddha gained his enlightenment under this very tree”, a weird little monk sprang out of nowhere and insisted I chant his mantra instead. I told him: “The Lotus Sutra is the highest teaching of the Lord Buddha, and the title of the Lotus Sutra is Myo Ho Renge Kyo, so what’s the point of chanting anything else?” He couldn’t answer that and went away, but it le
ft a bad taste in my mouth.’
Kevin gave a quick polish to his own bald head, and then said: ‘Cheer up, Frank. I’ve booked us out on a bus to Sarnath this afternoon. You wanted to go there, didn’t you? It’s got a box of the Buddha’s bones and everything!’
I regarded my eager young friend with weariness. The very last thing I wanted to do after 3000 kilometres of the most punishing travel of my life was get on another bus.
But I knew Kevin. When he was on a roll like this, there was no denying him. And ironically, just as I had given up on having my ‘Buddhist experience’, I had one.
Twenty minutes out of Varanasi, we arrived in Sarnath and trudged up to the famous Dhamek Stupa where the Buddha was supposed to have given his first sermon to his five disciples shortly after his enlightenment.
‘I should be in bed,’ I yawned as I peered up at the tall but uninspiring commemorative mound. ‘From what I’ve read, this is just about the only intact thing left on the Sarnath site. Everything else was destroyed by the Muslim hordes centuries ago and is now just bits of rubble in the Archaeological Museum.’
But then we came to the modern looking Mulagandhakuti temple erected by the Mahabodhi Society in 1931. The walls were adorned with beautiful Japanese paintings and in the main shrine there was a lovely gold statue of the Buddha. Beside the statue was a plaque informing the visitor that here, in the silver casket within the shrine, were believed to be the original relics of the Buddha, as recovered from a 1st century BC temple discovered during a 19th century archaeological dig.
Nothing could have prepared me for what came next. As I was reading this plaque, and inwardly bemoaning the fact that I still felt nothing (apart from bored and hungry), a party of 20 or so Japanese people marched in. They were all immaculately dressed in white shirts painted with striking black ideograms, and they all knelt down within the shrine area and opened up prayer books.
‘Oh, okay, time to leave,’ I thought, but just as made to do so, they began to pray. And to my astonishment, the first words that rang out in the silence were...Nam myoho renge kyo.
I stopped dead in my tracks. A group of Nichiren Buddhists on pilgrimage from Japan? What were the odds? Tears of joy and gratitude sprang to my eyes as I ran over to join them in a wonderful gongyo ceremony. It is hard to describe the effect this experience had on me. Two and a half months I had been wandering round India – chanting away to myself in complete isolation – and at my lowest ebb, when I had begun to think I was the only person who knew about the Buddha’s highest teaching, let alone practice it, not just one, but a whole pack of people who shared my belief had turned up here in Sarnath. It was as if the universe was saying: ‘There you go, Frank, you’re on the right path after all!’
It was just what I needed.
Chapter 16
From Tozo to Tozan
India had been fun. It had taken me two or three weeks to really pick up on that, but as I did so, I found that the childlike quality of the country – the simple curiosity, the warm-hearted openness, the sheer craziness of it – struck a chord in me. Six weeks into my tour with Kevin, around February of 1985, I had forgotten that I had ever worn a suit to work. By the time I returned in April, I had vowed never to work again. Somehow, I determined, I would be going back to India on a regular basis – and that was when I really got down to writing.
Dick Causton had said I should squeeze out the sponge of my travels, then produce something of value with whatever came out. I decided to use my experiences to write a book about the real India, a serious accounting of its poverty, politics, and religion. But the real India was far more surreal than serious. It was like a giant playground wherein everything—people, traffic, and livestock—bounced off each other at random.
I had attempted to put pen to paper before, but – apart from the ill-fated astrology book – I’d never got past the first three chapters. I’d simply lacked the incentive to go any further. Now I had all the incentive in the world. It was either getting paid to write about India or return to the drudgery of running an old people’s home in Clapham.
Though going back to work at the home was never really an option. Not only had I well and truly burnt my bridges with Mr Parker, but a letter from my mother, sent shortly after I left for India, told me I had got out at just the right time:
Hi darling John,
Mrs Teasdale phoned me a few days ago. She was surprised when I told her that you’ve left on the 2nd Jan. She thought you will go only on the 18th and wanted to talk to you before she sends off your references. She has told me that they already have some difficulties at the home and Mr Parker is beginning to realise how much work you have done and how well. I said that it is a pity people only appreciate the good ones once they are gone. They have had a committee meeting and Mrs Teasdale said she wished you could have been a fly on the wall, your name kept coming up. They lost 7 patients in the home and the new girl they appointed in your place is not very satisfactory. I expect Mr Parker thought he can run the show with a part-time person, working just 1 – 2 hours a day! Well I think you did well to leave and let them see how they can do the job. Lots of love, Mum xxx
A few days back from India, I packed up my bags, left my poky little flat in Clapham and moved in with Anna. Then, fired up by my determination to become a successful writer, I sat down and began typing up the diary of my travels from 597 sheets of near-indecipherable handwriting. It took me twelve long weeks to complete, and – sorry to say – took a great toll on my relationship with Anna.
‘You’re up all night writing that bloody thing!’ she complained at last. ‘When will you ever come to bed?’
She had a point. I was often slumped asleep at my typewriter when she came upon me in the morning.
‘I’ve got to get this done and off to the publishers’ as soon as possible,’ I mumbled in my defence. ‘You believe I’ve got a future as a writer, don’t you?’
‘I believe you’re a selfish, inconsiderate bastard,’ she retorted unhappily. ‘It was Brenda’s birthday today, and you didn’t even send her a card!’
Anna was right, of course, but it wasn’t just my compulsive nature that was driving me on and driving us apart. It was something in her that I was having trouble dealing with.
A few months earlier, Old Bill at the home had taken me aside and whispered: ‘You got a good one there, Mr Queasy. Don’t let her go!’ I had winked at Bill then and told him: ‘Yes, I know, I have no intention of letting her go!’
But that was before I learned of Anna’s problems.
If I thought I had problems – what with the early death of my father, the Jesuits and my hyper-critical step-father – they were as nothing compared to Anna’s. Convinced that she had never wanted to be born – she’d been an ‘accident’, she said, and cruel nuns had ripped her from her real mother’s arms and put her up for adoption very quickly – she had an almost complete lack of respect for her life. It was only when she had encountered Buddhism, two years earlier, that she had found the courage to break away from an unhappy marriage and start rebuilding herself from the inside out. I asked her once: ‘What was your first real relationship?’ And she had replied, after a great deal of thought, ‘Well, the biggest one I had trouble with was the one with me. I found that whenever I looked to other people for happiness, I just messed them up.’
She was not going to mess me up, I was determined about that. And I was going to try real hard to change her opinion of herself.
But it wasn’t easy. Every time she came close to enjoying herself – letting herself go at a party, being pampered by friends, even having good sex – she would wake up next morning in floods of tears, racked by guilt.
‘I don’t know why I do this,’ she would sob uncontrollably. ‘It’s just that I don’t feel I have the right to be happy!’
I hadn’t noticed any of this when we were just seeing each other at the weekends – Anna had been very good at concealing it – but now that we were together on a 24/7 basis it b
ecame very noticeable indeed.
Without even being conscious of it, I began to withdraw...
*
‘So you want to become a published author?’ said Brenda, bravely recovering from getting her birthday card three days late. ‘You should do another tozo. Only this time, since you’ve got such a big target to aim for, you better make it a special tozo!’
‘What’s a “special” tozo?’ I echoed warily. ‘Do I have to dress up in a suit or something?’
‘No, silly,’ laughed Brenda. ‘It’s when you chant seven hours for seven days for complete victory in a major decision. You can do that, can’t you?’
This time I did not baulk at the proposal. I had learnt a lot about myself in India. Primarily, that the reason I had been so comfortable working with old people was that far from being too young to be old, I had been too old to be young. Without even realising it, my grim, restrictive Jesuit upbringing had smothered the happy child I had once been almost out of existence. It had taken prolonged contact with India – and with Kevin, who was six years my junior and about twenty years younger in spirit – to bring that child back to life again. I felt lighter, freer, more at ease with myself now, and when I laughed, it was not shy and restrained as before, but loud and contagious – a true reflection of what I felt about myself and about India: that both things were so wacky, so absurd, that I just had to laugh.
I could even laugh at the prospect of 49 hours of near-consecutive chanting. Though there was another, much deeper, reason for that.
When I had left for India a few months before, my Buddhist faith had been shaky, to say the least. By the time I returned, it had become rock solid. A string of ‘coincidences’ – starting with meeting up with Kevin and culminating in Sarnath – had convinced me that the universe was lending me its protection. Indeed, as I continued on in my travels without Kevin and traversed the foothills of the Himalayas and the deserts of Rajasthan for the final leg of my journey, I found myself continually surrounded by ‘good friends’ who came to my aid just when I needed them. I would never forget, for instance, being lost in a dense rainforest on the trekking trails of Nepal for three days before being rescued by an impish Norwegian with a map and a bearded Italian with fresh bread and sausages – they had both been summoned to my side by my desperate chanting.
