Though we could hear the Swami’s voice drifting up to our room from the courtyard below, he was too muffled to understand, but when we headed out we could hear what he was saying quite clearly: he was reading aloud and from his inflection and tone it was obvious he was enjoying himself. In our daily audiences with the Swami I sometimes became preoccupied by his elocution rather than what he was talking about – the way he spoke. I never did enquire of him how he came by his posh, Home Counties accent; most likely it derived from proximity to an expat school teacher or a university lecturer from his youth. He was shameless about showing off how well he could speak English; and we were respectful enough to listen passively, but, it must be said, we were being talked at a lot of the time.
The Swami would’ve spotted his two guests crossing the courtyard on the way to the street door, but he paid us no mind. We were slipping out to the cantonments to meet Rhadasham, a local idler (“Hashish? Yes; excellent for direct action upon the mind!”) who, because of the Swami’s strict dietary restrictions – no meat, no fish, no fowl – had arranged for us to consume a discreet omelette with a couple of his artist pals; hence the secrecy. The double-doors of the room where His Holiness Bal Yogi Ananta Sri Vishushita Swami Paramanand Saraswati Ji Maharaj had installed himself had been opened wide and we could see him reclining on a waist-high platform, his head supported by a hefty bolster, his orange robe pulled up to mid-thigh, one bare leg crossed over the other, a paperback held aloft in one hand; my guess was that as it was so hot he was staving off lassitude. But even from a distance I recognised the distinctive cover of the book he was holding: A Translation and Commentary on the Baghavad-Gita: Chapters 1-6 by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the same paperback that I’d read from cover to cover during a stint as a dishwasher at a grand hotel in Southport.
A more benevolent perception would have him innocently idling away the mid-day heat perusing a new analysis of one of Hinduism’s holiest scriptures while he waited for the mercury to fall. The book interested him more than it would have done if he hadn’t once shared living space with its erstwhile author: the Swami and the Maharishi had once been acolytes of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a renowned and much loved teacher in northern India, known more simply as Guru Deva. Charged by his teacher with the responsibility of teaching meditation to the masses, the Maharishi set off on a two-year journey around the country to do precisely that; three years after the completion of his Indian journey he embarked on a world tour to extol the benefits of a meditation technique he referred to as Transcendental Meditation (TM). In 1967, in a coup which exponentially increased public awareness of his mission, he persuaded the Beatles to give up drugs and take up TM. They followed the Maharishi to India and lived in Rishiskesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, practicing meditation under his guidance. Intrigued by the diminutive, giggling yogi who offered instant bliss with his simple meditation technique, other Western rock stars, actors, and hangers-on joined the Beatles in Rishikesh.
The Swami’s absorption in the speaking of the book rather than the reading of it prompted the uncharitable thought that he was getting his voice box in shape for his daily lecture to the poor, and not so poor, who crowded into the ashram at 7.30 a.m. every morning to listen to him discourse on religious themes. They came in their hundreds to receive darshan, the blessing a devotee receives from being in the presence of a saint. His hour-long talks, given from a dais elevated above his audience, were preceded by the communal singing of a devotional mantra led by a blind harmonium player. The blind musician’s pre-lecture, half-hour rendition of Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai, Jai Ram, crackling out of a hefty, old fashioned horn loudspeaker hanging off the balcony of our room, functioned as an alarm call, which we two comatose pilgrims usually greeted with sotto voce curses. The Swami would have preferred us to be in the audience listening to his lectures, which were given in Hindi. We did attend one of his gatherings at the beginning of our stay but not being able to understand what he was saying it was hard to pay attention. But I remember the devotion of his audience, the flowers placed in front of the dais, the fruit laid at his feet; and the bodies crouching up to the dais to touch his wooden sandals and then bringing the hand that touched the sandals to the forehead. It was disagreeable being stared at by so many adoring people, so we stayed in bed during the Swami’s perorations, listening but not listening to him broadcasting from our balcony to the litter strewn wasteland across the street. One morning, standing on the balcony drinking tea, I saw a several cyclists climb off their bicycles and stand and listen intently to the Swami’s lecture booming out of the loudspeaker.
Unlike the Maharishi, the Swami elected never to leave his beloved India, citing his fear of spiritual pollution. As a sannayasin, one who has renounced all social and family ties, he travelled from town to town, teaching, and talking to whomever wished to hear his message, before moving on, forbidden by his vows from living permanently in one place. A group of wealthy householders had invited him to come to Meerut for an extended stay, and that is where we met him, in the town that provided the spark that ignited the great uprising against the Raj in 1857. Our ostensible reason for being there was to assist in the translation of a book he had written. Our sojourn with the Swami came about entirely by chance, by an extraordinarily circuitous route whose starting point was a seaside pub in northern England.
But before going to live with the Swami I came within a cat’s whisker of leaving India: I had been separated involuntarily from my two companions and was in a very distressed state, but in the blink of an eye the appalling mess I had gotten into evaporated. This is what happened.
I
In my early twenties I read everything I could lay my hands on about mysticism and meditation in India and Tibet, but in the small circles in the small town I lived in, I didn’t know anybody who was interested in such things. Until, that is, I got into conversation in a bar with a lanky, tousled haired chef who was to become a bridge to a world I only knew from books: he had actually practiced meditation in an Indian ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas – in the company of the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Possessing an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, he had been engaged by the Maharishi’s ashram manager to prepare Western style meals for the famous foreign guests whose arrival was expected at any moment.
I looked out for Mike each Monday evening, his one night off from his restaurant job, in whatever ale house I thought he might be found in. Our conversations, as would be expected, frequently turned to the subject of meditation. After closing time we drifted into late-night sessions at one back street drinking club or another and talked about TM and consciousness, and the mystics who populated the books that so absorbed me. Out of these conferences grew the idea of actually going to India to seek out monks and swamis, and even receive an initiation or two. Mike was very keen to return; there was some unfinished business there, I thought.
I had a hodgepodge of ideas about the practice of meditation and the changes in consciousness it caused but I didn’t really get it. In the sort of texts I had been reading – such as Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda; A Search in Secret India by Dr Paul Brunton; Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David Néel – the miraculous was commonplace; and soaking up this niche literature the way I did, my perception of what was involved in meditation practice became somewhat skewed. I imagined meditation as a form of magic, and I wanted to do it because I thought it would make life more entertaining.
In the meantime, I achieved my goal of becoming a bona fide meditator: I went on a 35-mile journey up the coast to a suburban house in Blackpool where Mike introduced me to a teacher willing to initiate me into Transcendental Meditation. The initiation ceremony, a subdued, unfussy process, took place in a quiet front room graced with a picture of Guru Deva and a bouquet of fresh flowers. After being given a secret mantra and instruction on how to bring about the blissful state promised by TM the instructor left the room. I spent 20 minutes immersed, effortlessly it must be said, in this my very first attempt at meditation. I can’t say exactly how long it persisted, but my mind effectively divided into two parts: one half morphed into a detached entity, an uninvolved silent witness to what was happening in the distinctly separate mental space that was the other half: I observed myself, in a garage, engaged in the close inspection of a car which a Chinese man was trying to sell me.
II
It was the hottest time of year to contemplate a visit to the subcontinent; and the distance didn’t bear contemplating: a prodigious 6,000 miles by land transport across nine countries; nevertheless, propelled by the mindless optimism of youth, four hungover travellers set out; I had never been out of England before. We squeezed ourselves into an overloaded Austin minivan that, miraculously, carried us over the Alps and down the length of Italy to the port of Brindisi, from where we boarded ship, bus and train to eventually fetch up at a frontier post separating Pakistan from India. We were now three travellers: Mike, his lifelong friend Roly, and myself, with meagre funds insufficient to meet our needs.
Mike’s portable battery operated record player, which had survived the long journey intact, caught the attention of one of the Sikh border guards. She asked us to play some of the music from one of the LPs Mr Mike had been carrying in a plastic shopping bag. The record player’s batteries were still charged, so the guard and her companions were able to listen happily to a couple of songs by Donovan, a popular English troubadour of the time. Enquiries as to why we were travelling with so little money were deflected by insisting ample funds were waiting for us at a bank in Delhi. After examining our teeth – yellow staining indicating a predilection for hashish – the guards stamped our passports and waved us through.
On Mike’s first visit to India he had gotten to know a very minor Bombay film actor, Quadir Khuroo, a resident of Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, who he thought might be able to help us get out of the pickle we were in. It was to his home we headed, a mere 333.7 miles, the greater portion of which was a precipitous road snaking its way up and around the foothills of the Himalayas.
Without apprising Quadir of the true extent of our poverty, we agreed to rent from him the upper floor of a little cottage on a tiny island on Dal Lake, the ‘Lake of Flowers’, where he lived with his extended family. The cottage was boxed in between two houseboats, one of which was home to the Khuroo clan; the other, ‘The Khuroo Palace’, consisted of exclusive accommodation for tourists with money to burn. Getting to and from the island necessitated crossing a narrow stretch of water in a shikara, a kind of gaudy water taxi attached to the Khuroo estate.
Quadir generously agreed to defer payment of the rent until our funds arrived, which were, in a manner of speaking, in the pipeline. It was intended that I would go to Delhi (a 1,000 mile round trip) and sell the American Express traveller’s cheques I had fraudulently obtained by reporting my original cheques stolen. They were replaced, over the counter, no questions asked, at the busy American Express office in Athens, thereby doubling the money I had to hand. The black market cash would be used to purchase 100 handmade embroidered shirts, kurtas (stylish hippy leisure wear), from a local tailor in Srinagar; the kurtas would then be air freighted to England where a pal of Mike’s would offload them at various retail outlets and remit the proceeds to us. We were sure this hippy attire would sell quickly, and with the funds raised we would settle our bill at the Khuroos and begin trawling for mystics.
I took a bus to Delhi, found a dormitory bed in a hostel, and in a short time was inside a shop selling my cheques at lucrative black market rates; it was all very easy. Keeping a little back for a side trip I wanted to take before returning to Srinagar, I telegraphed the money to Mike and Roly, who set in train the order for the kurtas.
A few months before leaving Southport I had gotten into a routine of paying a weekly visit to a shrine belonging to a family of affluent Sikh dentists; they had converted a ground floor room of a rather grand house they owned but did not live in, into a sanctum for their guru, Maharaj Charan Singh, the head of an extensive spiritual community – known as Sant Mat, or Rhada Soami – located on the outskirts of the town of Beas in the Punjab. On Sunday afternoons middle-aged and elderly men and women converged on the house and congregated in the shrine room, whose centrepiece was a large framed photo of the heavily bearded Sant Mat guru, surrounded by flowers; somebody would give a talk on spiritual matters, after which the flock gave themselves over to devotional chanting; afterwards tea and biscuits were served to all. Because of my youth I felt awkward and out of place at these pious gatherings, but at the same time I found participation in them mildly comforting. During the talks I stared a lot at the guru’s photo: he measured up to what I imagined a guru might look like, but was he really as serene as he appeared? When I knew I would be going to India I thought that if it could be managed, I would visit the Sant Mat community. I felt unconscionably shy amongst these upright strangers and could not bring myself to speak a single word to the hosts or any of the guests. Not even to tell them I intended to pay a visit their revered guru on his home turf.
Beas is not very far from Amritsar, the city I had to pass through on my return to Kashmir. After getting off the bus from Delhi I went directly to The Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, to escape the pulverising heat. The Sikhs are admirable people, always the first religious group to step up with aid when calamity upends a community. At The Golden Temple they operate a kitchen and serve a simple vegetarian meal to anyone with an empty stomach, for free. Later in the day I caught a packed local bus to Beas; it had no air conditioning and after a sweaty 28-mile crawl I fetched up at Sant Mat soaked. A custodian welcomed me without formality or form filling and took me to a room where I could stay the night; no charge was made for my accommodation, neither was payment requested for the evening meal or the breakfast that was brought to my room. I had noticed that there seemed to be very few people about and when I asked a softly spoken administrator when I would be able to see Guru Maharaj Charan Singh, he told me that this would not be possible as he was in London.
It was a tiring, bumpy ride back to Srinagar. The shirts had been bought, packed, and dispatched; now we just had to wait. Our faces had become familiar to the neighbourhood residents and in our social interactions we were familiarly addressed as Mr Mike, Mr Roly, and Mr Alex. We twiddled our thumbs in the cottage, read what few books we possessed, I wrote my diary, we tried to meditate, which was difficult and sometimes impossible due to the endless racket of domestic life emanating from the Khuroo domain. And also because we sometimes smoked hashish, which is antithetical to the meditation process, a fact which I was clueless about. We were always on the lookout for things to do to pass the time until we could extricate ourselves from the Khuroos.
One day we took a bus to a village near Srinagar to visit the venerable Swami Laxman Joo, recognised as the foremost authority on Kashmiri Shaivism, an ancient tantric system. Laxman Joo had been an acquaintance of Mahatma Gandhi and the acclaimed sage, Ramana Maharshi; Meher Baba, the renowned spiritual master, had been a visitor to his house; likewise Baba Muktananda, the originator of Siddha Yoga. By all accounts the Maharishi was friends with him. Actually, I didn’t know who Laxman Joo was at this time, it was Mr Mike who knew he was living in a village not far from where we were housed. I subsequently read about him in Paul Rep’s Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, where Reps says the yogi “presents the 112 ways to open the invisible doors of consciousness” and was entranced by what I read. I also listened to an audio recording of him talking about Kashmir Shaivism: his voice had the hypnotic timbre of a cello, which made this listener sit up and pay attention. We eventually found his house, perched on a hillside above the lake: his housekeeper came to the door and told us the Swami was not at home; he was giving lectures in a distant place and would not be back for some time. Some weeks later Mr Roly and I paid another visit, but we had no more luck catching him this time than we’d had before. Foolishly we never sought him out again.
Living in a monk-like cell in a Hindu temple not far along the road from Dal Lake was a young man Mr Mike had a passing acquaintance with. His tiny living space in the Durgaganj Temple was barely large enough to squeeze us all in for the meditation sessions we did together. I liked the temple and its environs, liked retreating behind its walls: it was a refuge whose ambience pointed to the reason for coming to India. Exploring the grounds on our first visit our attention was caught by an orange-robed sannyasin (a person who has renounced material possessions), sitting in the doorway of a tiny house and engaged in nothing more leisurely than watching the world go by: as we approached him he greeted us with a warm smile. Apart from having perfect teeth he spoke very good English and was more than happy to engage in conversation with the three foreigners. At one point he showed us a photo of himself in the company of the singer and pianist Nina Simone and claimed to be her Guru. Could the great diva have been this swami’s disciple? After we returned to Dal Lake I couldn’t get this charismatic fellow out of my mind and decided to return to the temple the next day to talk to him further. As I walked along the lakeside I rehearsed the questions I thought I might ask him, but when I reached the temple the house where we had seen him was empty: he had left that morning and no one knew where he had gone or even if he would return. For some desperate reason I had set my heart on seeing and talking with him and was painfully disappointed by his disappearance.
On another occasion I went to the temple with the intention of simply spending time there and seeing what I could see, but coming through the gate I saw a large crowd had gathered, with everyone staring intently at something. Squeezing through the bodies I caught sight of what was commanding the crowd’s attention: sitting upright in a full lotus posture was an orange-robed sannyasin: his face was ashen, all the blood and life having drained away. An elongated, T-shaped wooden support had been wedged under his chin to prevent his head from tipping forward. I was told that he used to live at the Durgaganj Temple and had been away on an extended pilgrimage and had returned the previous evening; shortly after arriving he chose a spot to meditate and sometime during the night left his body. Whether the sannyasin had died from illness or had been in the deep trance state of samadhi – sometimes used by adepts as a means to exit this material world – nobody I spoke to was prepared to say.
III
Murphy’s Law is universal: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and our shirt project followed that trajectory perfectly. For reasons we were never able to discover our parcel had been delayed at the export shed in Delhi; and it was also impounded at the airport in England because of non-payment of import duty, so the money for that had to be found before the parcel could be released. Compounding the difficulties, Mr Mike and Mr Roly hadn’t taken the precaution of examining the shirts that had, supposedly, been handmade for us: many of them were spoiled with stains of one kind or another, and the seam and hem stitching was poor. In the days before mobile phones and the internet a long distance telephone call was difficult to make – it had to be booked in advance – and it was expensive; the next best alternative, post office aerograms, were unreliable and slow; drip by tortuous drip we were apprised of unfolding disaster: in a nutshell, the kurtas were impossible to sell. It was all very difficult. To raise a few rupees during the poverty stricken wait for funds, Mr Mike sold the swindling tailor middleman his remaining LPs and his record player, which, soon after changing hands, broke down and could not be repaired.
We had been living in the cottage on Dal Lake now for a considerable time and had not paid a single rupee in rent; we had lost every penny and were unable to vacate our accommodation because of what we owed to our benevolent landlord. Day by day the debt escalated and became progressively more challenging to pay off; the Khuroos were, quite understandably, pissed off.
However, there was a Plan B, but we could exert no control over it. We had been waiting – now very anxiously waiting – for the arrival of Mr Mike’s UK income tax rebate; after an interminable delay the cheque finally materialised, which, in those pre-internet days, could only be cashed at a Delhi bank. It was Mr Mike’s turn to go off and save lives. He went off to Delhi; we waited; there was an inexplicable delay in telegraphing the money, then came distressing news: the money which would have liberated us from the Khuroos had been stolen, by a Hindu monk.
The thief’s name was Rhaghavendra and he had been a member of the Maharishi’s entourage when Mr Mike had been cooking in Rishikesh. He and Rhaghavendra had become friends, and when Mr Mike finally got his hands on the tax cash he went to Jabalpur to look up his old pal; he arrived exhausted from hard travelling and fell into a deep sleep, which was when the cash was lifted. As Mr Mike reported it: “Rhagvendra happily told me that he had been praying for this gift to arrive because a great friend of his desperately needed money – so he gave him mine. I never thought of it as stealing but just thought it was a pain in the neck the way all of these karmic wheels were grinding us down.” Obviously it would have been unwise for Mr Mike to return to Srinagar, so he continued to hang out with Rhagvendra. Mr Roly and Mr I were now captives of the Khuroos.
IV
The angry shouting went on the whole day and into the evening. We didn’t dare go out and had no option but to stay at home and listen to various Khuroos raging below us. They were trying to figure out what to do about the foreigners and the money owed to the family. It was an intractable problem: they didn’t know what to do with us, and neither did we. It was all very uncomfortable. I was sure the only thing preventing the situation deteriorating to the point where something bad happened to us was the presence on the property of a fakir, Pia Baba, a revered holy man, who was on one of his periodic visits to Srinagar and was living on the ground floor of the cottage. Such was his fame that whenever he was a guest of the Khuroos he received a never ending stream of supplicants, which included Hindus and Sikhs as well as Muslims. As long as Pia Baba was around his proximity would, we hoped, exert a pacifying influence on the overheating Khuroos. He was our insurance policy.
It was impossible to simply disappear – easily done in most other parts of India – by jumping on a crowded bus or a train. There was only one road out of Srinagar to Jammu, the winter capital of the Indian union territory, and it was a rugged 165 mile journey; there were no other routes, no side roads. It was dangerous road to drive on at night, so if you needed to get to Jammu and avoid mishap you left at dawn and made the perilous trip in one day. But if you could afford to fly, that was a simple 45-minute journey. Our ignominious fame ensured that however we tried to leave Srinigar our attempt at flight would be spotted.
If we were serious about flight the only option was to resort to devious means to achieve it. Mr Pushkas, a meditator whose house we had visited for TM sessions, devised an escape plan which involved hiding us under a tarpaulin in the rear of a truck going to Jammu, and our TM companion had even found a trucker willing to help us. The prospect of getting out of jail lifted our spirits enormously; in the late afternoon of the day prior to our departure we left the island with only passports and a change of underwear, carrying nothing else with us so as not to arouse suspicion in the minds of the watchers. We were so desperate we had not even discussed what we would do after we had left Srinagar; we were focussed only on putting as much distance as possible between ourselves and the Khuroos, and beyond that we were incapable of thinking clearly. When we met up with Mr Pushkas again he told us, very regretfully, that the driver had had second thoughts and had become too fretful of the consequences if he was stopped by the police and his truck searched, which sometimes happened. How would he explain the presence of the two foreigners hiding under a tarpaulin in the back of his truck? It would be obvious we were on the lam.
But our indefatigable helper was not discouraged and hatched another, more audacious means of escape. Meeting him in a tea house a few days later, he outlined the plan he had concocted. Once a month a forest sadhu, a mendicant ascetic who he knew, came into town for supplies; our friend had told him of our predicament and somehow persuaded him to let us accompany him on his return to the forest. I have to say, I had fantasies about us both becoming his disciples and learning whatever it was he would teach us. Two days hence, we were to go to an intersection in a nearby suburb at a certain time and wait; the sadhu would approach us, make contact and away we’d go, all boats burned.
Once more the prospect of adventure lifted our spirits. After we left the tea house and were on our way to Dal Lake we saw a colourfully garbed sadhu jangling towards us: I guessed from the three ash lines and the red mark on his forehead, and the trident in his hand, plus the various bells, whistles and beads arrayed about his person, that he was a follower of Siva, the God of Destruction. When we were nearly face to face he flicked his matted locks away from his face and said: “Hey man, how’s it going? Wanna come down the temple for a smoke?” We declined his offer and made our way home.
On the Sunday, despite being wracked with nerves, we left the island for what we hoped was the last time. We did as we had done before, taking with us only the clothes we were wearing, our passports, and a change of underwear. We shuffled from corner to corner at that intersection, but no one approached us. To be disappointed yet again was hard; neither of us spoke as we trudged back to Dal Lake, our spirits in disarray. I can’t say I blame the sadhu: he must have seen us and concluded we were ridiculous; we were so obviously ill equipped for the austere existence of forest life, and I’m sure he realised how unwise it was to carry passengers like us. We were too far gone with frustration to see the absurdity of what we had been prepared to do.
V
A detective came to the island, and interviewed us in the presence of the elder Khuroo, and asked a lot of questions, the answers to which always returned to the same point: we had no money and there was nobody we could ask for any. I suggested we arrange for me to be repatriated to the UK and then by some means raise the funds to cover the debt, but Mr Roly thought this was an atrocious idea, principally because he would have to stay on alone with the Khuroos until our sorry saga played itself out to a finish. We had already been resident on the little island for four months; Mr Mike had been off the radar for about six weeks and we had no idea what he was up to. We had sent several telegrams to Rhagvendra, begging for aid, but nothing came of our pleading. Mr Roly and I began arguing and in no time at all we were shouting at each other, with the elder Khuroo and the policeman reduced to listening to us in shocked silence; but we couldn’t work out any kind of strategy to address our predicament. For the foreseeable future we had to submit to incarceration in a pretty little cottage on a Himalayan lake in one of the most beautiful valleys in India. We were both very down and Mr Roly became virtually catatonic and only spoke to me when I spoke to him.
In the end there was simply no other option. We tried to organise my repatriation from Srinagar via the Tourist Office, but they couldn’t do it; then we visited the Tourist Registration Officer, who said No, they couldn’t help either; we must go to the C.I.D, they said, but they were useless; finally we made an appointment with the Director of Tourism for Kashmir, who was… unhelpful. The only place where the kind of assistance we needed could be found was at the British High Commission in New Delhi.
VI
On the morning of my departure I wake up early, everyone asleep; it is very still, the only sound to be heard comes from Pia Baba quietly chanting. He gives me his blessing before I leave the island.
It’s a fine day and I walk and walk until I come to a weary halt a considerable distance from Dal Lake; the hours have gone by and there’s little to no traffic; it’s mid-afternoon and I’m still at the same spot, cursing my immobility. A truck stops and when I tell the driver where I want to go to he laughs and explains I will not get a ride to Jammu this late in the day; everyone leaves very early because it is such a long road. I ask him if he can take me as far as he’s going. I clamber into the cab, grateful to be moving at all. About 10 miles further on the driver pulls up alongside a row of shops and tells me this is where he turns off. Through the cab’s side window I can see the pyramidal spire of a temple through a gap in the shop fronts and wonder if it’s a spot where I can spend the night. I thank the driver for the lift and climb out and cross the road. Unusually for India, the temple grounds are deserted and quiet. I inspect a roofed-over wooden platform-cum-shelter; it is spotlessly clean and the perfect place to roll out my bedsheet. At dusk a young man approaches and introduces himself: he is the local schoolteacher and lives at the temple, and it is his responsibility, he says, to ensure pilgrims staying overnight are cared for. He says he will prepare some food for me a little later. I am a pilgrim of sorts, though I do feel I have lost my way. But yes, something to eat would be very nice. After dark the young man returns, carrying a tray with a freshly prepared vegetarian meal, and a cup of hot tea, for which I am effusively grateful. The tea is Masala chai, made with milk and aromatic herbs and spices, and uses jaggery as a sweetener instead of sugar. It is prepared in heaven for lost pilgrims.
I wake at dawn and return to the road. Two Sikhs going to Jammu give me a lift; there is nothing to hold onto and for the entire journey I am unmercifully banged about in the rear of a 2-ton truck with worn shock absorbers. When we reach our destination the driver stands by the tailgate of his truck, waiting for me to tip him for the ride, but I am unable to give him anything. My poverty shames me. To bankroll this journey Roly sold his watch, a 21st birthday present from his mother. The night before I left, the Khuroo’s cook came to see us and using sign language communicated that his trousers were torn and tattered and please before I leave would I give him some trousers. That day I had sold the only other pair I possessed. A few days earlier Mr Roly had sold his sweater.
I get off the bus from Chandigarh late at night and have no idea where I am. I point myself in what I think is the general direction of the Embassy district and start walking. Around midnight, dead beat, I lay under some bushes in the middle of a traffic island. When I wake in the early morning I discover with horror that my shirt has a big rip in it; but there’s nothing to be done about that. Without eating, washing or shaving, I walk to the British High Commission, where I’m told the person who arranges repatriations is not in the office at the moment, and won’t return until after lunch; please would I come back then. I spend the rest of the morning in the British Council Library reading newspapers. When it’s time to go, I collect my hungry, dirty, exhausted self and point myself towards an air ticket home. Minutes after leaving the library I am slippery with sweat in the debilitating humidity.
I had set off from Srinagar with 60 rupees and have five left, enough for a breakfast of sorts, which I will see to after I have done my business. Turning a corner I am just a block away from the High Commission when I encounter Mr Mike ambling along the pavement towards me: “Jai Guru Deva!” he exclaims. Stunned by the unbelievable coincidence of meeting up again like this we are unable to speak and instead embrace each other. Sitting on the grass outside the Indonesian Embassy we talk about the likelihood of such a chance encounter in a city as densely populated as Delhi (Population: 3.531 million+); go figure. We talk about Mr Roly, now a prisoner in Srinagar, and we two, free.
VII
I got no closer to the High Commission. We found a cheap hotel charging seven rupees a night for a bed; after a wash and a shave we went out and bought me a cheap shirt before disappearing into an air conditioned disco, this Mr Mike’s idea. Next morning in the company of a German medical student I enjoy breakfast at a café whose external signage declared that it housed the “Committee for the Change of Food Habits.”
After breakfast Mr Mike took me to meet a fellow who had been extremely kind to him. This was Mr Pathak, a Brahmin politician from the highest rank of India’s social classes, who he had met in unusual circumstances. Shortly after saying his final goodbye to Rhagvendra, Mr Mike was standing on the platform of the Jabalpur railway station waiting to board the train to Delhi when he was approached by a liveried servant who asked him if he would be so kind as to walk with him along the platform to meet his master. The servant led him to the last carriage of the train, which was, reported Mr Mike, so luxuriously appointed it would not have been out of place on a Bollywood movie set. The man he was introduced to claimed to be the middle-aged son of a Maharaja, acting First Minister of the State of Madhya Pradesh, and had been educated at an English public school and an English university.
Though Mr Mike was travelling on a 3rd Class ticket Mr Pathak suggested he accompany him to Delhi; on arrival he was given a room, gratis, in the Madhya Pradesh State House, supplied with fresh clothes, and fed. Next afternoon, taking the air around Delhi’s upmarket Embassy district, he bumped into a bedraggled young man in a ripped shirt dragging himself along the pavement to the British High Commission.
A plan was concocted for us to accompany Mr Pathak to see his Guru, currently residing in an ashram a 3-hour bus ride along The Great Trunk Road.
VIII
Mr Pathak introduced us to the Swami on the understanding that, being native English speakers, we were well positioned to help in his Guru’s efforts to translate a book he had written into English. But the Swami remained, understandably, a little aloof from the two dead broke hippies who turned up on his doorstep, though less so after we started work on the translating and he realised we weren’t inarticulate idiots. The modus operandi we contrived was that as the Swami perused the Hindi text he would extemporaneously dictate an English translation, and either Mr Mike or I, as scribe, would record his words as he uttered them. The book, called ‘Sparks’ in Hindi, was a slim volume of aphorisms, nothing too weighty; he fancied the English translation should be titled ‘Scintillas’. Our job was to suggest lexical and grammatical improvements as we went along and, in a general way, improve the readability of the text. We had a look at the Preface, which the Swami had composed in English, and told him there were a few things we could do to tighten up the prose and make it a more fluid read. We did that and read the results to him, which he approved of. So began a ritual of morning meetings, the Swami dictating, one of us taking notes, with the rest of the day spent editing the text into good shape; we worked hard at our task as it justified our bed and board at the ashram. And there was a small but much appreciated perk: a daily delivery of a packet of cigarettes – ‘Charminah’, the cheapest of the cheapest smokes – delivered to our room every morning by Rampal, the caretaker.
Not long after we had arrived the Swami had asked us about our respective occupations, and I, unthinkingly, as I had just spent two years at art school, told him I was an artist; cue a visit to the local stationers to buy art supplies and subsequent sessions spent drawing portraits of His Holiness perched on his dais as he talked to us, with Mr Mike on recording duties while I laboured at art. This was the pattern of our days: listening, recording, and editing and re-writing, interspersed with bouts of sketching and colouring.
The Swami ensured Mr Mike and I had enough to eat. In the early evening an old hunchbacked woman came to the ashram to prepare dal and potatoes for us, and this would be the last food of the day. She returned in the morning to make chapattis and milky tea for our breakfast. After each meal we opened the shuttered door of our balcony room and hurled the single-use clay bowls the food had been served in across the road onto a rubbish tip; we were obliged to do this to ensure zero pollution from our low caste status.
After our morning meetings the Swami would occasionally say, “We will have lunch out today;” and then an hour or two later he would be chauffeured and we transported by truck to whichever house in the city the he had been invited to perform a puja, a ritual offering of light, flowers, and food to the divine. The residents of Meerut considered it a signal honour to have this revered holy man in their midst and vied to receive him in their homes to perform this sacred ceremony of purification.
The presence of the Swami obliged the householder to feed whichever members of the community were inclined to visit while he was in residence. Invariably it was the poor, in significant numbers, who were to be found waiting patiently until the holy business drew to a close before being invited to step into the house and tuck into the free lunch supplied by the host. Mr Mike and I took our place among the lines of hungry guests and ate our fill of the vegetarian food. Afterwards we returned to the ashram and waited out the heat of the day. Towards evening the hunchback would come and prepare our dinner, and when night fell we would repair to the ashram roof and discuss the meaning of life with our Hindu provider.
We didn’t eat meat, fish, or fowl and neither did we, as far as I can recall, consume any fresh vegetables or fruit. We followed this dietary routine for the duration of our stay with the Swami, about three months or so. I don’t know when it was exactly that I began catching an occasional whiff of something in the air, a phantom odour that teased my nostrils for a brief second or two; it wasn’t a food smell or anything else I could categorise; it was an elusive, tantalizing fragrance. But then it dawned on me what it was: our spartan diet had recalibrated our digestive landscapes and as a consequence we had unwittingly cleansed our insides. The salty tang of dried sweat had been superseded by a scent which had taken me utterly by surprise: it was the smell of my own body.
Conversely, at one point during our stay I became sick with an intestinal infection that turned my shit to bloody water; and as well as being given glucose injections and various medications by the local doctor, the Swami insisted I go on a fast. Mr Mike became ill too, with jaundice, which stemmed from a bout of hepatitis, and he had to be taken care of. It was the Swami who orchestrated our medical care and monitored our progress back to good health. He never said anything about it, but he arranged and paid for the doctor’s visits and the drugs he dosed us with. I liked that side of him, not broadcasting his good deeds.
After an energetic start our enthusiasm for the Swami’s little book began to wane: there just wasn’t very much to it, but the wind disappeared from our sails completely when we discovered lightly camouflaged plagiarisms, bits and pieces here and there which had been lifted from the Maharishi’s master work on the Bhagavad Gita. The Swami too lost enthusiasm for the project, though the reason for that never emerged; I suspect that, in the end, he realised his slight work didn’t bear comparison with the Maharishi’s magnum opus. Nevertheless, we continued to meet with him every morning as usual, but we would just talk, us endlessly plying him with questions about religion and spirituality, and him occasionally tossing us a question. We had little to no contact with him during the day, but in the cool of the evening he would repair to the roof and sit under the stars and converse for an hour or two with a small group of devotees and the two impoverished Englishmen.
Being around the Swami for such an extended period conferred on us a bogus status we could do nothing about. We were universally seen as disciples of the Maharaj (Sanskrit: ‘Great King’), and received numerous invitations to people’s houses to eat a meal, usually breakfast. The Swami was always aware of who had issued an invitation to us, but generally he refrained from commenting about our dining out; only occasionally were we discouraged from accepting an invitation from someone he disapproved of. Despite occasional reproofs we rarely turned down an invitation to a meal as it was something we liked to do: it got us out of the house and, more significantly, our host could be relied on to provide more savoury fare than chapatis and milky tea. One morning we were enjoying marvelous local food in the house of an Air India steward; he was a nice man, though the Swami didn’t think so, spoke perfect English, and had a big family, who had arranged themselves around us in a group, silently watching us put away a delicious breakfast. Nobody else was eating, which made us feel a little uncomfortable, but more disconcerting was the unfailingly stern gaze of the grandmother. After finishing the excellent repast we made small talk with our host before diplomatically making a move to leave. At this he reached over to his grandmother and pressed a wad of rupees into her hands; she stood up, came over to us and fell to her knees, fully intending to kiss our feet. I don’t think we let her, and we refused to accept the cash she was trying to press on us, though we certainly could have used it. The whole family bowed in our direction as we left. To these devout people we were venerable English yogis and disciples of the great king currently in residence a few streets away.
And we were prone to attracting odd but sweet people, like the man who lived next door to the ashram, a bank teller who couldn’t stop smiling and who had been on hunger strike for higher wages. We often received invitations from him for dinner – the food I cannot remember, or his rather limited conversation, but his regular greeting was memorable: “Goodnight!” he’d say as we entered his house. And when I asked him when the photo of himself hanging on the wall was taken, “Next year!” he replied. He was a sociable, unfailingly kind man. I don’t know if he ever got a pay rise.
A letter bearing terrible news from Mr Roly arrived at the ashram: he was under house arrest and would be formally arrested in a few days. The Swami was fully informed about the roots of our plainly reduced state – the debacle of our business venture and the theft of Mr Mike’s money – and our exasperating inability to pay off the Khuroo debt and extract our friend from his confinement. I am at a loss to know how it came about, but Mr Pathak reappeared at the ashram and told us he had to go to Kashmir and would make it his business to call on the Khuroos to see what could be done about Mr Roly’s situation. Mr Roly, it transpired, was now in a position to pay off a portion of the debt hanging over him – about a quarter, or perhaps even a third of it, I think – with money his impoverished parents had scraped together. After a prickly arbitration process Mr Pathak was able to persuade our financially exploited landlord that this part payment, coupled with a solemn promise that the balance would be paid after Mr Roly returned to the UK, was as good a deal as the Khuroos could expect to make; this was the settlement reluctantly agreed upon by the Khuroo patriarch. After negotiations were concluded Mr Roly and Mr Pathak departed Srinagar by bus early the next morning, but as they were leaving the terminus a man was seen – and heard – running alongside the bus, banging his fist against the bodywork and shouting loudly: this was the dhobi wallah, the laundryman, who had not been paid what was owing to him by Mr Pathak, who bellowed to the driver that he should not stop the bus to accommodate this rascal. The bus sped up and the poor man was left inhaling diesel fumes.
A skeletal Mr Roly finally reached Meerut, visibly traumatised by his detention; we were enormously relieved to be reunited with our friend, much diminished though he was. After my departure from Srinigar, Mr Roly said, the Khuroos were so paranoid that their foreign tenant would escape their clutches without settling his debt, they insisted that wherever he went he had to be accompanied by a Khuroo lackey to ensure there was no flit. The Swami cross examined the grey faced Mr Roly about his experience at the hands of the Muslims, a religious group he was not inclined to be generous to. In our very first interview with him, he had asked us about how we had gotten to India, and when we told him that we had travelled by train through Pakistan to the land border in the Punjab, he asked us, with serious mien, if we had noticed the distinctive smell Pakistanis had. No, we said, we failed to notice that.
We wanted something the Swami was in a position to give us but wouldn’t; nevertheless, we nagged him about it more or less continuously: in TM and meditation circles in general, ‘initiation’ was the thing, being inducted into the arcane business of refining consciousness through a particular type of meditation. It was Mr Mike’s initiative to begin with, asking to be initiated into pranayama meditation, the ancient practice of breath control, but the Swami havered always, saying we were not ready. I wondered too if our lack of unquestioning reverence may have coloured his reluctance; because we were not displaying sufficient devotion to a sannyasin of his elevated status. He cited the deference shown to him by a Dr Hoffman, a German disciple who corresponded with him regularly: in one of Dr Hoffman’s letters which the Swami showed us, Mr Mike and I burst into laughter at the Dr’s reference to the “horrible, western material atmosphere” in his country. Swamiji was not amused by our reaction, but then we found his unrelenting gravity a little trying. But another, more pertinent reason was that he thought it unwise to be a practitioner of TM and a practitioner of the kind of meditation we were asking him to initiate us into. But one morning he teasingly said to me, “Don’t worry, you will not leave me emptyhanded.” He finally relented, saying we should speak to Mr Pathak, and if he thought it was ok, he would seriously consider our request. Mr Roly was thinking about leaving early and going on his way, but at Swamiji’s urging decided to stay for another week, attracted I presume by the dangling carrot of an initiation.
Mr Pathak taught us a puja, a devotional homage to celebrate the occasion of our initiation and a preliminary cleansing and purification of the mind before the act of meditation. These were the initiatory instructions given to us by Swamiji:
- Begin by forming the Gyan mudra, the mudra of knowledge, with each hand.
- Comfortably incline your head forward so it points to the space between the collarbone.
- Concentrate your attention on the roof of the mouth.
- Inhale; the sound of the mantra in the mouth will be RA. Concentrate your mind on the vibrations emanating from the mantra.
- On the inhale feel the subtle breath passing right down to that place between the penis and the rectum; the end of the breath is when it touches that place.
- The sound of the mantra when the breath touches that place is MA
- Exhale.
- Exhalation and inhalation should be of equal length.
Another strange phenomenon: towards the end of our stay the caretaker began delivering two packs of Charminah to us each day instead of the usual single pack. Mr Roly didn’t do nicotine, so the reason for the extra smokes was a mystery.
IX
The Swami’s sojourn in Meerut was coming to an end. As an expression of their indebtedness to him for gracing the town with his presence, the burghers decided to honour him with an official parade. On the day of the procession a flatbed truck parked up outside the ashram and a team of men got to work decorating it with streamers, enormous quantities of flowers, baskets of fruit, and lots of multi-coloured neon. A golden, garlanded throne was built up high on the truck bed, and it is here the Swami would sit cross-legged during the parade. In front of, and below the throne were stacked the great holy books of Hinduism, the Vedas. At dusk, a workman fixed in place above the throne’s backrest an illuminated portrait of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Jyotimath, and the Swami’s Guru. I had painted the watercolour of Guru Deva at Swamiji’s request.
As night fell, the truck looked splendid, all dazzle and glitter. And when Swamiji ascended the throne, with all the light and colour around him, he radiated the aura of a true Maharaj. The truck pulled slowly away, we three walking beside it. The route of the parade had been set out so that the Swami’s transport could file through the streets unimpeded by other traffic. We were soon walking among dense crowds of onlookers; families waved to us from windows and balconies, and in every street the truck drove down there were hordes of people milling about; the multitudes parted to make space for us to walk; ice cold water was brought for us to drink, and we were given an unending supply of sweets. The number of people who came out to say goodbye to Swamiji was unbelievable; it dawned on us that we had grossly underestimated the scale of the event we were participating in. In any case, the three English disciples were soon helplessly submerged under garlands of sweet smelling flowers. At one point Mr Mike and I were persuaded to play the cymbals in the band accompanying the parade. The business went on for 2 – 3 hours, and everywhere people swarmed about us, smiling and laughing, wanting to pay their respects to the English yogis. At one point a thirsty Mr Mike approached a public water dispenser for a drink: after lifting the cup to his mouth he violently spit out what he had imbibed: cow’s urine, a traditional medicinal drink with powerful cleansing properties. Prior to our departure the following day a local journalist, who had come to the ashram to conduct an interview with the Swami, sought us out for a chat. We asked him how many people he thought had turned out the night before: easily more than 100,000, he said confidently.
Our goodbyes to Swamiji were subdued and respectful. I cannot recall what I said to him at the moment of departure, but whatever it was it elicited touching last words from him: “Your heart is my concern.”
On a solo visit to India more than a decade later I needed to visit a photographer’s studio in New Delhi to get some visa photos done; waiting to be served I strolled around the shop, idly glancing at the photographs on display; I got a jolt when I spotted a framed headshot of the Swami, with his curly black hair cascading over his shoulders. I had a sudden pang and desire to see him once again and though the photographer thought he was in Delhi somewhere he had no idea of his whereabouts. In the intervening years I have been unable to unearth a single thing about him on the Internet; he has disappeared completely.
Mr Mike and Mr Roly were able to get their hands on sufficient money to cover the cost of returning to the UK, but I couldn’t raise enough to get all the way home. For a reason I cannot now recall I separated from my companions and travelled alone through Pakistan, across Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey; I stepped down from a train in Istanbul, penniless, and got the business of repatriation in hand. I returned to my parents’ home and stayed with them until I found a job. When my employer realised how unsuited I was to the work I was doing I was fired. Within a week I had relocated to a Tibetan monastery in Scotland and was soon meditating each morning and evening.[1
I am sorry to say the Khuroo debt was never paid.
[1] See post: 3 Monks, a Fraud & a Coalminer; November 11, 2014.
Endless Buddhas 
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