Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  I was playing the Fender most of that morning with the TV on channel three, mostly backs of Dave’s eyelids but then the swaying aisle suddenly showed up, Dave skittering up to the front and out to the side of the road and behind a huge poinsettia bush. All the traffic going by, kids laughing and pointing at him. Dave doing his business with his face in a cluster of those dark red leaves. And then he wanders back to the troupe. Looks like Pete’s decided to take a lunch-break. Dana making sandwiches. Everyone staring at him, Patrick offering his condolences and a shot of India rum, Dave saying no thanks, he’s got a better solution. He gets down on the ground puts his head behind the bus’s right front wheel, says to Pete, “Go ahead, put it in gear, back it up.” He peeks over to where Pete is standing by himself eating a sandwich. Pete finishes off his sandwich with two big bites while Patrick clicks away. Lettuce cheese and tomato by the look of it. Lets the crust fall, wipes his hands together. Says anything you say, mate, gets on the bus starts the ignition revs the engine. Dave doesn’t move. Joke seemed to me it was going too far. If he was trying to make light of the situation, fine, but this was going too far, wasn’t a joke any more. I phoned him up. Dave, I said, it doesn’t look like you’re having a good time. Life in the real world ain’t so hot after all, huh? No, he said, not under these conditions. He’s staring at the tread on the wheel, the litde stones caught between the treads. Almost a Persian carpet design, those treads. The treads move, move forward, suddenly lots of blue sky, those poinsettia bushes, everyone standing around staring. Dave ignores them, gets on the bus. Pete grinning at him, sorry mate, put it in the wrong gear. Next loo-stop. More poinsettia bushes. The bus moving off, Dave watching it go. The bus stopping about forty feet away. Pete’s sense of humour. Playing loo-stop games. Dave gets back on the bus. Thanks for sticking around, said Dave. Real polite. Not me, I would’ve ragged him out. Back down the aisle. Both Dana and Kelly staring at him, I can tell, though they’re both kind of blurry at the edge of the screen, Dave had his eyes focussed on the back seat. Two more loo-stops that afternoon for Dave. I was starting to feel sorry for him. Back on the back seat, he closes his eyes, phones me up, asks if I’m ready for re-entry. Any time, I said. Okay, he says, go open up the door. I do. And all there is out there is a lot of outer space, stars twinkling, a full moon glowing fire-engine red, and I get sucked into a vacuum vortex straight toward the stars which all funnel together into a cone shape and the stars become one star and I’m thinking I’m travelling through the gaping eye-socket of that Afghani back in Dara. I just let myself fall. And Dave’s voice comes booming from somewhere. But you have to promise, he says, to let me behind the wheel again, whenever I want to. Or else what, I think or say or shout. Or else I’m going to leave you out here in this limbo forever, and Hell is just around the corner from Purgatory up there on the left. I look and I see a dark molten landscape and walking towards me is a curly-haired Jewish type. He says hi, my name is Fiscus, do you know how to get out of this place? Nope, I said. This place is worse than Macy’s at Christmas, he says. He has a stethoscope around his neck, he’s wearing a Red Sox cap, he’s got what looks like a chest wound. How are the Bo Sox doing? I ask him. They made it to the World Series this year, he says. Really, I say, I thought the Yankees beat them out, what year’s this? ’86, he says. They blew it in the seventh game against the Mets. Sad elfin twinkle. Maybe next year, he says. I float on past him, star getting closer, below crags of rock, volcanoes shooting fire, strange dark shapes like lizards flicking out their tongues. You got it, Dave, I say, and an echo comes bouncing back to me. Promise promise promise?... Scout’s honour, I say. Cross your heart, he says, spit to die. I cross my heart. Spit towards the star. White glob sails, expands, becomes a sailboat I climb aboard. I set the rudder straight. That star starts getting bigger. It blooms into a wonderful red poinsettia. Red as blood. Shaped like the wound in Fiscus’s chest. And it swallows me up.

  When I opened up my eyes I was squatting behind another poinsettia bush and I was surprised, the pain wasn’t so bad, the shards in the gum didn’t hurt like they used to and neither did the ribs. Thing is, Dave could’ve picked a better time for transit city, I almost fell over backwards. But I managed to grab onto a branch and when I looked past the bush first face I saw was Kelly’s, looking at me through a window. I didn’t mind, I knew why she was looking at me. I grinned at her and stuck out my tongue. She did a double-take so I stuck out my tongue again and ever so slowly, like dawn over the Ganges, a smile, a small smile, spread across her face like mayonnaise.

  I wiped myself with a poinsettia leaf and when I got on the bus I sat down next to Kelly.

  She said, “You’re back.”

  I said, “I’m back.”

  Dana looked back at me. First me, then Kelly.

  “He’s back?” said Dana.

  “He’s back,” said Kelly.

  Dana gave me a close look. I smiled at her. A friendly smile. It was good to be back.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  She gave me a smile. “I think you do too many drugs, Mick.”

  “Anything’s possible,” I said.

  Charole was sitting next to Dana. “What are you talking about?” she said.

  Dana looked at her. “It’s just a coincidence, that’s all. Three of us on one bus, all of us fans of ‘The Twilight Zone.’ ”

  “Ever read Sybil?” Kelly asked me.

  “Nope,” I said, “never read Sybil.”

  “You should,” she said.

  And that was it. She went back to her paints. Blue mountain canvas this time. There were blue mountains ahead of us, snow-capped, north.

  We stopped that night on the Nepalese border, Hotel Lumbini, where Buddha once slept, likely on the same mattresses, sagging, full of springs. I cacked out right away, still hurt to move, bug still active. I couldn’t handle it. Plopped my mattress on the floor near the can, it was western t.p., and in the morning Charole said to me, when we got on the bus, “You’re back.”

  Dana must’ve talked to her.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  “Where were you?” she said.

  I was wondering when someone was going to ask me that.

  “Somewhere in the bottom of my cerebellum,” I said.

  “You do too many drugs, Mick,” she said. “But here’s some more.”

  She handed me a bottle of Lomotil. “They’re superstrength, Nepalese variety,” she said. “Plugged me up tight all last night.”

  I said thanks and that was about the time that Tim and Teach walked down the hotel steps, Kelly beside them.

  They both looked tired but not as tired as the rest of us looked.

  Tim deLuca nodded at me and Charole. Teach said, “Hello, Michael, how are you?” Really concerned.

  “I’ve been worse,” I said, popping three Lomotil.

  The upshot is that Tim and Teach didn’t get back to Kabul from Bamiyan in time because they had the tires on their truck shot out by either Mujaheddin or Russians, they’re not sure which, it happened at night, but they said the trip to see the giant Buddhas was worth it. This to Patrick, they’d spent the night talking to Charole and Kelly. And no, they hadn’t seen Jenkins in Iran. All they saw was lots of tanks and none of

  the family, they’d already left. They said there were a few scary moments on the bus to the Afghani border, they were spit on a few times, but that was about it.

  They said they took a train from Lahore to New Delhi and a bus from New Delhi to the Nepalese border. They were fairly certain we were behind them and so they decided to camp out here at the place where Buddha once slept and wait for us, because they missed us. No, they didn’t say that.

  But there was a definite energy change in Nepal, so it seemed. Kelly was the one who mentioned it. In India, everyone had their hand out, wanting baksheesh. Not much of that in Nepal. Just lots of friendly people, smiling kids, those mountains. Kelly figured it had something to do with altitud
e. All this on the way to Pokhara. Slow trip, they were widening the highway, boulders in the middle of the road, we had to wait till they were moved. Deep mountain valleys I couldn’t look at. On one hairpin corner I’m sure the left hind wheel of the bus was spinning on nothing.

  Kelly avoided the subject of Dave, which was fine by me. It was like we were dropping the past. I was happy too. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, yeah I’m dropping the past right now. Ten little mushroom capsules. Twenty little mushroom capsules. There is another world, I’ve seen it, and it’s a better world than this one. I miss that Fender. Not that that’s where I’m going necessarily. Dave says I’ll have to take quite a few more whacks at the wheel of life before I get it right. It’s nighttime. Soon just gave me the last sponge bath and then she kissed me goodnight, a sad little peck. So here I am by candlelight, pencil in hand. I’ve seen my last morning. Weird feeling, knowing that. There’s nothing I can offer. It’s just the end of a book, the end of a string, the end of a daisy chain. I’ve asked Soon to burn me like this was the Ganges and to set my ashes loose on the Ko Samui breeze. She said she would do that. And to give these pages to the next publisher that wanders in with an enlarged liver. She said she would do that too. But I still have things to write. It’s hard though.

  Over in the other bed there’s a new patient. Little kid, ten years old. Dave says he’s not really there either, he’s just being born right now but ten years from now he’s going to buy something called crack for fifty baht and it’s going to lay him to waste. Dave says a drug epidemic’s going to start creeping up on booze and cigarettes on the Top Ten Killer List. Just like trees dying from the tops down. More kids dying than old people. Proof, says Dave, that civilization as we know it is about to end. Real cheery stuff, Dave. Then Jenkins walks in sits down next to the kid. Rope burns around his neck are deeper and I can see right through him. I tell him what Dave just told me. He just nodded his head. The way he was sitting just like in that picture of Kelly’s. Except for the rope burn and the bullet holes in his jacket. Stray bullets, he called them. Stray bullets in downtown Tehran while he was buying a falafel. What the hell’s a falafel, I said. Something to eat, he said. Grinning. Salad and pieces of roasted lamb in pita bread. Made me hungry or made me think I was hungry, haven’t been hungry for a while. He says to me, we got to get you out of here Mick and he stands up and comes over and lifts me up and carries me out of the hospital on his shoulder. Down to the ferry and onto a bus and next thing I know we’re on those red-hot streets of Bangkok, in front of this giant Buddha with green eyes. And then he drops me gently to the sidewalk and says he’s sorry he can’t take me any further, but it isn’t bad where he’s at, though it’s kind of lonesome. He said he’s been told to wait for me here so when I die I’ll know where to go. Everybody has someone to help them, he says, and my dad is busy with some pizza-joint waitress he loved who just got lost in a snowstorm somewhere in Saskatchewan and she’s freezing to death. Just come here, he says, and we’ll go together. I like that. I like Jenkins. It’s nice to know you can still wear farm caps and blue denim jackets in that great Ballpark in the Sky, where the pitches, said Jenkins, are all strikes and there is no foul line. And then he fades into the green emeralds of that fat Buddha’s eyes and the eyes blink and I’m back here in bed, staring at the other bed. The kid is gone, the bed’s made up. Good. I should get back to writing.

  Day 67

  Departure: 9:00 a.m.

  Hotel: Fishtail Lodge.

  Point: You’ll likely want to forget about Kathmandu and just stay in Pokhara. If you get there early enough, send them all on a climb up Sarangkot, ponyback, for a view of the most beautiful mountains in the world, the Annapurna range. The one with the twin peaks shaped like a fish tail is called Muchhapuchhare, which is said to be the birthplace of the

  Hindu gods. The King of Nepal has decreed that “his”

  mountain shall never be climbed by any dope-smokin’ Western expedition or even by Her Majesty the Queen. His excuse: so that there is one peak in the Himalayas that is so sacred

  it’s inaccessible to man, and so no man can conquer all on

  the face of the earth. But go ahead, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Climb it overnight, and on the way back, stop at Lake Phewa Tal’s supposedly healing waters and take a much needed dip. But be circumspect: legend claims there’s a goddess in the lake (that temple on the shore is for her)—she might be watching.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Dec. 17

  This morning while Pete swerved the bus around sharp corners on a narrow highway that brings back less than fond memories of the Black Mts., Mary asked C where F. was. That threw a pall over things. Not what I needed. Mary picked up on it, asked what’s wrong, & I finally shed a few tears. Lied. Said I missed my family. Said my best Xmas was that last one with dad when I was 5 & I got the Barbie doll. It’ll be strange this year, knowing mom’s not in the world. Mary said the holiday’s a sham; shepherds aren’t out on the hills with their flocks in winter, gazing at stars. Unless, of course, said C., it was a mild winter. Later. We’re in Pokhara. We’ve just gone on a ponyback ride up to Lake Phewa Tal. Everyone except Mick, who’s still laid low. He should’ve come with us. Lake is supposed to have mystical healing powers, thanks to a goddess that dwells in its seaweeds. The supposed reason C. talked me & D. into going around a corner & taking a skinny-dip into those frigid turquoise waters. Now I’m sneezing, & so are C & D. The 3 lesbos, C. calls us. Her & D are the only ones who got up to no good, she didn’t have to lump me in. But I do feel refreshed. Alive. Tomorrow it’s Kathmandu. It’s like the night before Xmas. Kind of.

  Day 68

  Departure: 8:00 a.m. You don’t really care how many miles it is, at this point, just as long as you get there by nightfall, right?

  Hotel: Blue Star; tel.: 2323

  Points: 1. Here it is, Kathmandu. Next stop has to be Shangri-La. But you may just want to stay put after a taste of Kathmandu. Actual proof that potheads must have a few brain cells left, to hone in on a city like this. It’s my favourite little town in the world and I wish I was there right now, eating banana cream pie at Aunt Jane’s. But let the people discover Kathmandu’s subtle charms on their own. All you can do is provide a few pointers for them.

  2. The most historic part of the city is Durbar Square downtown. Just off Freak St., as they say. Presiding over the square is Hanuman Doka, the old Royal Palace, recently restored to something approximating its former grandeur, thanks to a humongous grant from the United Nations’s kitty. Tell them to make sure they take a close look at this building. There’s the giant bell, the ceremonial drums and the god of terror (can’t miss him) and, if you have a zoom lens, all kinds of erotic coupling going on between the small wooden figures nestled just under the eaves, and they’re doing it with a lot more style and energy than those woozies back in Khajraho managed to come up with.

  3. Also in Durbar Square is the Temple of the Living Goddess, which has an interesting history. Once upon a time there was a naughty king in Kathmandu. He liked little girls. Yeah, one of those. But he was caught in the act.-'Completely mortified, he made minor retribution by building the Temple of the Living Goddess, and instituted the practice of finding a young pre-pubescent girl to be, for a while, a goddess. This girl is found among the general populace through her astrological chart and how well she does in a dark room filled with decapitated animal heads and horrible noises. The goddess only makes one or two public appearances a year. Once when she is drawn through the streets in a golden carriage, the other when the king comes by to pay homage. Though some say

  she can often be glimpsed, staring out, somewhat longingly, it is suggested by some, at the city from behind one of the few windows in the temple. Once she reaches puberty, she’s turfed out into the street, a mere mortal again. Not an easy shift, particularly when legend has it that her future groom will die young. Kind of a handicap when it comes to the dating game.

  4. For the gambl
ers in the troupe, there’s the casino at the five-star Hotel Soaltree-Oberoi. They can lose their money, what little they have left, playing blackjack, baccarat, pontoon, roulette, Indian poker, and, of course, the slots. Only foreign tourists are allowed to get robbed in this way, so tell them to make sure they take along their passports. By this time on the trip, there’s always some wise-ass asking you about kickbacks. The answer is no, you don’t get any kickbacks from the casino. Too bad, huh?

  5. On a hill outside the city is the Buddhist temple Swayambhunath, though you can call it the Monkey Temple. There’s a large number of sacred monkeys there, wandering around loose. Suggest to your troupe they don’t eat anything while visiting the temple. Those monkeys ain’t slow when it comes to grabbing Oh Henrys. They also like to scream and rage at tourists, which is completely understandable, but sometimes they can get a little carried away. Last time I was there, one of the little suckers went so nuts that he jumped into that huge temple bell, just as it started to toll. He emerged from the thing holding his skull and looking a little dazed. And then he attacked the prettiest girl in my troupe and nearly tore her head off.

  6. Another important Buddhist stupa (there’s lots in these parts) is Boudhaneth, which I mention because it’s the largest in the world, it’s 2,500 years old and it has these four huge eyes that look really eerie as they stare out across the valley.

  7. There’s also the Balaju Water Garden, just a bike ride outside the city, with its 22 dragon-headed water spout and its image of Vishnu and its Olympic-sized swimming pool, and Patan, a little suburb of Kathmandu that is mostly all monument, temple and stupa, and the temple of Kastha Mandap, which is said to be built from the wood of a single tree. (“Kath,” by the way, is the Nepali word for wood.) And then there’s Freak St., the Kathmandu zoo, the Tibetan refugee camps on the outskirts of town where they’ll trade for anything. And then, of course, there’s the restaurants. It’s said that any dish that’s made in the world can be found in Kathmandu. I suspect it’s only a slight exaggeration. Check out the Wiener schnitzel and jand (mild beer) at the Annapurna, the curried pork with black bean sauce at the Yak & Yeti, the chicken in almond sauce at the Ming Ming, the eggrolls and won ton at the Tung Fong, and absolutely any of the pies in the pie- and chai-shops in Pig Alley. If anyone wishes to lose their appetite, there’s the animal sacrifices to the goddess of destruction, Kali, every Wednesday and Saturday, out past Patan.