Magic Bus (27 page)

Then, with a (forged) student card in hand, the typical Dharma bum set off to search for a guru, God and a long, slow Tantric fuck. He – or she – might begin in Varanasi, in a houseboat or ashram on the banks of the Mother Ganges. Or at Rishikesh, like the Beatles. Or in Pune dressed in orange robes as a disciple of Bhagwan Rajneesh, later to become Osho, in whose hedonistic community thousands bonked their way to spiritual fulfilment. Or they checked out Hardwar, where the plump, thirteen-year-old Guru Maharaj ji promised to Give Knowledge (and graduated to hiring the Houston Astrodome to spread his teachings). Other spiritual tourists might head for the northern hills to study Buddhism or ramble south to Puttaparthi, where Sai Baba conjured holy ash –
vibutti
– out of thin air before rows of astonished, white faces.

Of course, not everyone came to India for Truth, dope and sex. Many came just to keep up with their friends. In 1967, Norman Flach, a nineteen-year-old from Rosetown, Saskatchewan, went travelling because he admired story-tellers and wanted to have his own tales to tell. After two years on the road, working on a kibbutz and singing Tom Jones hits with Turkish bus drivers, he walked into a tiny Delhi ice-cream parlour and two former classmates. ‘Hey, man, want to share a banana split?' they asked him, as if meeting after school at the Rosetown Rio.

No one knows how many young men and women followed the overland trail between 1962 and 1979. The Indian government estimated there were ten thousand ‘youthful' foreigners in the country in 1967. Five years later, after the Beatles had popularized the route, that same number crossed the Wagah border from Pakistan in a single week. In 1973, there were 250,000 French
nationals alone in India. In Varanasi, I met an old hippie who guessed that close to two million Intrepids had – like him – reached India by land.

My first Ganges day ends as did so many of Ginsberg's, sitting inside the red-stone eyrie above smoke-stained Manikarnika ghat. An awareness of death, or of life's transience, pervades the embankment. Here, mortality meets immortality, sanctity cohabits with poverty. Here, also, the question of whether to live as one has always lived or to decide to reinvent oneself and start anew is easily addressed. Behind me, axemen hack and split tree trunks into fire wood. The oily pilgrims' shed, a poor house for the dying, rises on my right, overlooking the burning platforms.

It is the hour of
aarti
, when the gods are praised with incense and fire. As I watch, a green bamboo stretcher is carried down the narrow lanes. The corpse is tinsel-wrapped in a vermilion shroud. The
doms
, the ghat's funereal outcasts, spread branches on top of the body, as well as
ghee
and five combustible, sacred elements. A young male relative touches a thick straw taper to the wood. The curls of smoke shiver the muslin shroud, flashing its golden foil lining, and the flames lick the sole of a foot.

‘Burning, some red juices dribbling out of nose or eye, down cheek, dropping off bright red hot ear,' Ginsberg wrote more than a generation ago. ‘Scalp split and cream color skull still smooth and dry in the heat peeping through the blackened hair.'

As he watched the Manikarnika cremations, he imagined the fires burning his fear away, ‘burning the dross inside me'. He contemplated release from the Wheel of Existence and trips to the ‘ultimate unknown'.

I don't think I would have much liked Ginsberg, the first holy soul, jelly-roll, drop-out traveller. He was a cocky self-publicist, exaggerating his connections, doing so much morphine that his head spun. He liked to have himself photographed with beggars. His stay in Varanasi ended in disappointment; alone in the nine-door room, cold and exhausted from a cocktail of abuse, suffering from kidney attacks and ‘washed up desolate on the Ganges bank'. But in India and afterwards in America, he remained
alive
, an
original, transcending traveller full of hope and – through his writing – regeneration. He was the glittering link from Thoreau and Whitman, by way of Nietzsche and Kerouac, on a journey from Romanticism and idealism, through numb and mindless nihilism, from death to ‘this now life… this here life'.

I spend my evenings in Varanasi descending to the river at dusk to watch the lighting of the widow lamps, their cane baskets hoisted atop arched bamboo poles. I hear the crack of brazier coals, the lowing of cows and the cry of an owl. Funeral parties await their turn at the burning platform while along the shore hundreds of saffron-robed children sit cross-legged on mats, singing their evening prayers to the river.

My scepticism makes me doubt that I – unlike the faithful who come here to die – stand on the threshold of enlightenment. I don't wake each morning aware of a new cosmic truth. I'm not anticipating an imminent release from the cycle of birth and death. My dreams don't elevate me toward sublime, High Romantic visions and the stars. But I see here the importance the sixties placed on the individual, inner journey, as well as the decade's enduring legacy of transcendental –
transcending
– travel.

‘Stop trying not to die,' Ginsberg wrote during his sixteen-month Indian sojourn, ‘fly where you can fly.'

Sky and water are the same luminous blue, and a rowboat, its oars dipping into and lifting out of the airy fluid, seems to be swept downstream by an invisible hand. I listen out for voices on the river and hear tourists float by the ghats.

I backtrack 500 miles to reach the mother of pop ashrams, following the Ganges north-west until lines of slender hills rise out of the plain like the fingers of a Himalayan hand. On a knuckle of earth stands Hardwar, Gateway to the Gods. Hindus flock here in their millions to bathe in the ice-blue waters that rush out of the mountains. On the station platform I side-step a troop of red-assed monkeys and hail an autorickshaw to take me the final few miles upstream. The road is jammed with weekend pilgrims. Ardent devotees fly spangled banners from overheated Ambassadors. Two-wheeled
sadhus
cycle with Char Dham prayer flags on their handlebars. The blare of klaxons and clang of bells echoes into the open pine woods and off the far dark cliffs.

Rishikesh, tucked into a cleft between steep hills, flanks the narrowing river. My driver drops me, deafened now by the mobile piety and his tortured engine, at a slender footbridge. A scruffy Carnaby Street spreads along the near bank. I push past its souvenir-and photo-shops and over the eddying water, my progress slowed by an idling calf, toward a sacred, retail precinct of tapering temples.

On the far shore, numberless holy men daub themselves with ash. Beggars ring their alms bowls with – depending on their age – the high rattle of youthful exuberance, a persistent, middle-aged
tick-tick
or a single, sombre death knell. Day-trippers in colourful saris ignore them, as do their husbands, while buying ice cream. Shops sell plastic beakers for collecting the sacred water. A ragged, barefoot boy runs in front of me, pausing first at a sweet stall then a toy stand, at each stop holding out his hands. Between Ayurvedic chemists and spiritual bookshops (top sellers:
Christ Lived in India
and J. K. Rowling) a woman wraps her tame boa around by passers' shoulders and earns a few rupees for each photograph.

In 1962, Ginsberg sampled this ‘pure and sacred atmosphere',
writing in his diary about clear-skinned, shining-eyed youth and homeless women ‘dressed in orange robes and singing Sanskrit hymns to nirvana'. Until then, Rishikesh was little known outside the Hindu world. Only a very few Intrepids had joined the ecstatic, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrims crossing the river by the open ferry. But the City of Saints rose to international attention in 1968 with the arrival of the Beatles, whose five-week stay changed for ever the trail, Western fashion and our perception of India.

George Harrison had long been attracted to the East. In 1965, he first met Ginsberg and heard the sitar. Within a year, he was a student of Ravi Shankar, a great Indian sitar master. Harrison's haunting playing of the instrument on ‘Norwegian Wood' inspired Brian Jones to use it on the Rolling Stones' ‘Paint It Black'. He invited Shankar to perform at the seminal Monterey Pop Festival. The sitar had a profound influence on the Beatles' work, as did Hinduism in Harrison's life. Sales of Indian instruments soared, along with popular interest in Eastern religion and philosophy.

In 1967, Ginsberg, wearing a Tibetan oracle ring and brandishing finger-cymbals, dropped in on Paul McCartney at his London house. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful happened to be there that day. They listened to his prayers and poetry and discussed Eastern mysticism: the need to reach beyond the material world, the Hindu belief in the World-Soul, Buddhism's ‘four noble truths'. A few weeks later, all four Beatles, along with Jagger and Faithful, attended a weekend initiation seminar with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The giggling guru was in the UK to promote his Westernized version of the ancient Vedic quest for unbounded bliss. ‘Expansion of happiness is the purpose of life, and evolution is the process through which it is fulfilled,' he assured his audience. Five months later, the Beatles – along with Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys and a trailer load of Hollywood movie stars – arrived at his Academy for Transcendental Meditation in Rishikesh.

‘We wanted to try to expand spiritually,' McCartney said of the experience, voicing the spiritual cravings of a generation, ‘or at least find some sort of format for all the various things we were
interested in: Indian music, Allen Ginsberg, poetry, mantras, mandalas, tantra, all the stuff we'd seen.'

Their stay was a mixed success, ending for Harrison and Lennon in mutual confusion, anger and accusation. Ringo hated the food and flies. But as well as filling – as McCartney said – ‘a little bit of emptiness in our souls, a lack of spiritual fulfilment', those few weeks were a period of remarkable creativity. Almost all the songs that would appear on the
White Album
and
Abbey Road
were composed beside the Ganges. The phenomenal success of the Beatles and their music conjured India and Nepal into
the
hip destination.

In Rishikesh I set out to find the Academy. At first, no local seems familiar with Transcendental Meditation. The manager of the Green Hotel not only doesn't know of the Maharishi, he has never heard of the Beatles. Perhaps my pronunciation confuses him. At the Swarg ashram, one of the dozens in town, an aged ascetic tells me to walk along the Ganges, ‘past the yellow house'. As every third house is a dirty shade of yellow, his advice isn't particularly helpful. But outside the Sri Ved Niketan ashram I stop a tall white yoga teacher. ‘Follow the path over the bridge, then turn up a dry riverbed,' says Australian Michelle. ‘Ahh, the
swami
here will take you.'

At my arm appears a spindle-thin, silver-haired holy man dressed in a cotton robe. His forehead is banded by ash. In his right hand is a bucket of Ganges water. In his left he carries a staff. I didn't hear him approach, but he nods to me and I follow, walking one step behind him in silence away from the town.

The
swami
moves like a leggy girl, elegant and effete, his slender, brown feet barely leaving an impression in the soft sand. After half a mile we reach the riverbed and turn inland. A high brick wall encircles acres of wooded hill. He gestures toward it with a gracious twist of his hand. We pass through a Hobbit-like gatehouse, glide up a snaking concrete avenue and squeeze through a line of barbed wire into the vast compound. Vines smother the main buildings. Saplings displace the cobblestones. The terraced gardens are wild with weeds and howling monkeys. Around us mushroom 120 river-stone meditation houses. The Academy is deserted.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi developed his tidy meditation technique while living as a recluse in the Himalayas in the 1950s. The repetition of a simple mantra for twenty minutes twice a day was said to unlock one's ‘inner genius'. In India, Transcendental Meditation met with little success so, in 1958, the Maharishi took it abroad. In 1965, forty students at UCLA enrolled on an early course. Ten years later – after the Beatles' flirtation with TM – there were 600,000 adherents in the US. Today, 4 million people are said to practise around the world. Maharishi Vedic City, ‘Capital for the Global Country for World Peace', with schools, university and massive 2,000-seat Halls of Bliss, strives for an earthly utopia in the heart of the Iowa cornbelt. The Maharishi himself controlled this billion-dollar corporate empire into his nineties.

At his meditation mushroom, beneath a great overhanging oak, the long-limbed
swami
sits, tucks his left leg underneath him and says nothing. Behind him, I pick out the original lecture hall where the Beatles received instruction from the Maharishi. I also spot the ruined bungalow where Prudence, Mia Farrow's reclusive sister, stayed. At her front door, Lennon wrote, then sang with McCartney, ‘Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play…'

A
mauna
or vow of silence can last for years so, in lieu of conversation, the
swami
agrees to mime answers to my questions. I ask him first if anyone still practises TM at the abandoned compound. He laughs without a sound and draws a definitive ‘X' in space. Next I ask if the Beatles' cottages are still standing. Each boasted a four-poster bed, a dressing table and occasional hot running water. He draws another ‘X' between us. Not a guitar string remains to be found. Finally, I ask if the local tailor who dressed the Maharishi's pupils in distinctive pyjamas and tinselly waistcoats, creating a look which was adopted by all flower children, is alive. A third big ‘X'.

Then the
swami
clutches his stomach.

‘Are you feeling unwell?' I ask him.

He shakes his head and points at me.

‘Am I unwell? No. I'm fine.'

He throws his head back in laughter, again in silence, and makes a gesture of listening to his chest with a stethoscope.