Magic Bus (30 page)

Under the neon lights, at birch-veneer desks, multilingual operators tout Star Alliance around-the-world tickets and Lonely Planet international phone cards. I feel churlish recalling Geoff Crowther's advice to travellers in his second BIT newsletter. In 1972, he asked them to minimize their part in the expansion of Western materialism, writing, ‘Many places on the way to Nepal have already become little more than extensions of Portobello Road.' I'm relieved when Arun finishes for the day and we pack up to go home to India.

‘So you think the attainment of self-knowledge is illusory?' I say to him as we drive through leafy, booming Okhla Industrial Estate.

‘Not illusory but deluding,' he replies, our taxi avoiding a golf cart which glides between the headquarters of BMW and Land Rover India.

‘An American poet named Wallace Stevens wrote that the last illusion is disillusion.' In Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, the
traveller follows the mental path beyond life's everyday illusions to reach perfect knowledge. ‘I don't buy that.'

‘You believe modern man has moved beyond disillusion?' asks Arun.

‘I think we have to. In the West, we've dismantled civil society and deconstructed ourselves, which is one reason why Islam is advancing as a moral force. I think the sixties generation recognized the need to find a new way forward – through self-discovery.'

‘A pretty notion,' says Arun, as we pull out into the evening rush hour. Outside the perimeter fence squat homeless transients, sleeping under makeshift shelters. Pigs sift empty plastic bags in gutters. ‘But do you know the story of Buddha's disciples planning to build the first temple to him? To guide them, Buddha placed one empty alms bowl over another. Every stupa came to be based on that simple design. His point is the bowl covers emptiness with emptiness.' He concludes, ‘Self-discovery is a myth because there is nothing to find.'

I think of the West's spiritual emptiness, its incipient commercialism, the culture of laziness and ask, ‘So how does society move beyond disillusion?'

‘By being realistic.'

‘And learning from other's mistakes.'

‘Thank you for the advice, but India is too big to be changed by incomers' ideas.'

‘You've embraced the twin gods of capitalism and material prosperity.'

‘You give meaning to life by preserving it in words. I give it meaning by securing my family's future. It is a simple choice. Anything beyond that is illusory.'

Arun is a champion of India's astonishing march to affluence.

His brother, on the other hand, is one of its auditors. We eat together with their parents, wives and two children in a worn, pebbledash bungalow in Chittaranjan Park, beneath a flight path a dozen miles south of Old Delhi. Here, too, East and West are woven into a complex mosaic. After dinner, we sit together on
hard sofas in their front room, drinking herbal tea beside their new white refrigerator. The tax-inspector brother drills me with an endless stream of statistical questions. Does Britain use pounds or kilos? Do Amtrak trains run on time? What is the mean temperature of Irish post offices?

‘Why on earth do you want to know that?' I ask.

‘To see if air conditioners are an allowable expense for cooling their computer equipment.'

‘India's old problems will be healed by prosperity,' says Arun, picking up our conversation from the train. ‘Both poverty and the conflict between the Hindu and Muslim are economic matters. As was the conflict between Christians and Jews in twentieth-century Europe.'

‘By which date does Revenue Canada require the submission of completed income-tax returns?' asks his brother.

Their wives refill my cup, offer me more sliced mango and tell me that they are Brahmins, the caste said to have emerged from the mouth of Lord Brahma at the moment of creation.

‘Ours is an inter-caste marriage arranged by our parents,' explains Arun's wife, her hair escaping in long strands from its pins. ‘Would you care for another After Eight?'

‘I had other offers and could not decide on a husband,' says the second woman, a telecom economist. ‘So my family's guru compared the astrological charts of my suitors.'

‘My boys eat
roti
with a knife and fork,' says the mother with pride.

Arun's children watch
Atomic Betty
on the Cartoon Network. Wax drips from a shrine on to the television set. The evening breeze wafts through the grilles. The fourteen-year-old
ayah
, who is frightened of ghosts, eats alone in the kitchen, squatting on a newspaper on the floor.

‘Your flower children believed that happiness was a yardstick for living,' Arun says to me, shaking his head. ‘More important is repaying our debt.'

‘Which debt?' I ask.

‘At birth we are given energy, an animal strength that is creative,
moral and spiritual. Our task is to enhance it, to make it grow, to pay back the providence that gave us life.'

‘Every human must unleash the power which lies dormant within him like a coiled serpent,' says his wife.

‘One day I hope to visit the headquarters of the World Bank,' says his brother.

The next morning, I wander around the neighbourhood. When ‘my' flower children first hit India, Chittaranjan Park was jungle. Now, it is a colony of Bengali refugees, who – like Arun and his family – were displaced from east Pakistan by the Bangladesh war. In the sunlight, barefoot, retired civil servants walk around the J-block ornamental gardens feeling the dew between their toes. Six or seven members of the colony's ‘Laughing Club' stand in a circle chuckling on cue. One beaming practitioner assures me that ten minutes of laughter is more therapeutic than an hour's jogging. Overhead, an El Al Boeing descends on its final approach to Indira Gandhi International. Along the main road, hand-painted lorries with the sacred ‘
om
' on their bonnets rattle past broadband internet booths.

I head across town to meet the man who touched – and enlightened – more Intrepids than any other Indian; a living connection to the early days of the trail.

A bug-eyed three-wheeler buzzes me along broad roads lined with palm trees, opulent office blocks and rotting slums. Here, in the filthy, brown air, is Delhi in all its ‘nagging symbolism,' as wrote the travel writer Jan Morris. ‘Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.' Mughal leaders once rode out on bejewelled elephants from the Red Fort. Now, at traffic signals, most drivers switch off their engines to save petrol. When the lights turn green, the motorcyclists jump up like clockwork toys to kickstart their bikes.

My rickshaw drops me at the south gate of the Jama Masjid and, as arranged, I walk through the bustling, congested lanes to Karim's
cafeteria. The close, urban heat clings to me like a damp kaftan. I watch a grocer weigh out potatoes twice on his hand scale. A boy brushes past his stall, slips a cucumber into his sock then washes it out of sight at a spigot.

Even in the crush of diners at Karim's, no one could miss Rama Tiwari. He is a remarkable-looking man; a hairy cherub with broad Mongol face, smooth domed head and a glossy black ruff of locks which tumble forward into his salt-and-pepper beard. As I enter, he leaps up from his table and strides toward me with stubby arms outstretched, roaring, ‘People is like oxygen for me! I breathe you into my heart.'

I love him at first sight. Under the cool fluorescent light, his face glows with eager warmth. He wears a loose salmon shirt with matching cotton trousers. His skin appears to be the colour of polished cherry wood.

‘We talk now. Talk talk talk. Then, later, we will dance,' he says, wrapping an arm around my waist. He stands no taller than my shoulder. ‘Come sit.
Sit
. You are kind and sweet to take an interest in my life. I want you to ask me anything.
Everything
. And what I do not know I will make up for you in a great Indian epic full of beautiful partners and good sex.
Sex
,' he repeats in a breathless, panting laugh which seems to erupt from his core.

Rama plops down on a cushion, kicks off his shoes and tucks his feet under him like a lissom child. I sit beside him but, before I can ask my first question, he places his arm on my leg.

‘Before talk I will order life-nurturing food. And before food, water.
Water
.' He pours two glasses and hands one to me. ‘We will toast together because our bodies are 70 per cent liquid. To life, my friend. To
life
.'

Rama is no shrinking violet. Over forty years, he forged a meandering chain of marvellous book shops for foreign travellers. He owns bibliophilic homes in Varanasi and Kathmandu. He operates library-like offices in Delhi and on Venice Beach. He's due to fly to California in the morning.

‘Now we make another toast,' he hurries on, gripping my wrist, refilling my glass. ‘This time to writers, to poets in the eye of the
storm.' He lifts his glass above his head. ‘May you find stillness in the midst of chaos.'

Rama's is a rags-to-riches (or pulp fiction to first edition) story. He was born in a poor village between Lucknow and Kanpur, ‘where you can smell the soil and the rain'. Books fascinated him from the earliest age, not least because of his parents' acquisitive passion for holistic tomes. At that time, it was the custom to throw sacred scriptures into the Ganges as an offering. Rama was appalled by the waste and began to call on neighbours, then on nearby villages, offering to buy and to preserve their manuscripts.

‘I rode my bicycle because my father wouldn't let me borrow the bullock cart,' he remembers. ‘In a day, I would buy maybe one hundred books. I'd take them home and flip through every one, all for my self-satisfaction, to see how writers displayed knowledge, how with every page they tried to extend that knowledge. I'd sit in my room for fourteen or sixteen hours with my feet swelling and forgetting my food and water.' He smiles. ‘Maybe, in my last life, I worked in a library and just got a heart attack.'

At the age of twelve, Rama's first job was cleaning floors in a Varanasi bookseller's. In time, he worked his way up from office boy to salesman and then department manager. When the first Intrepids reached the city, he noticed both the paperbacks they bought and those which were carried with them.

‘When I heard the words “hippie man” I thought “happy man”. You see, Varanasi was always a factory of happiness. Kabir wrote his
dohas
and Tulsidas his
Ramayana
there. Mirabai left her palace and husband to wander around the city with the
sadhus
and get realized. Even Buddha came to Sarnath to give his first sermon. So, when the hippies followed everlasting Krishna and the Beatles to our holy city of learning, I saw a chance to feed their appetite with my passion.'

Rama began by trading books on the pavement outside the Tourist Bungalow. At first, he couldn't afford a blanket on which to display his stock.

‘The books were shown on cardboard. Of course, later, I got a
blanket, then I got boxes, then actually trunks and, when the trunks got heavier, I built a little stall.'

Rama exchanged Ginsberg for Gandhi,
The Dharma Bums
for
Bhagavat-Gita
,
Autobiography of a Yogi
for
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
. He also sold classic works – D. T. Suzuki's
Introduction to Buddhism
, the Vedas and the Koran, as well as many of the sacred texts he collected as a boy. Newcomers, hungry for knowledge of the East, surrendered their Western titles along with 50 rupees. Rama then sold on the dog-eared copies of
Catch 22
and
Naked Lunch
to kids heading home.

‘The arriving hippies wanted to leave behind the loaded mechanical mind. They wanted to search in themselves to find heart-
chakra
. So they read my books and found mystics and teachers with good approaches. We pilgrims grew together.'

I ask him if that is the reason his wordy empire is named ‘Pilgrims'?

‘It is more a question to myself; who I am, what my relationship is with this world, with other brothers and sisters,' he replies, dipping his head in thought. ‘The simple answer is, I'm on a pilgrimage and I see everyone else as a pilgrim, too.' He smiles at me, cocking his head inquisitively. ‘And you?'

‘Not a pilgrim,' I answer.

‘All my life, I believe in one earth, one people, one family, one god,' Rama goes on, his eyes crinkling with optimism. ‘I wanted to create a book house to help people learn about meditation, yoga, magic, tantra, sex.'

‘More sex?'

‘More and
more
sex,' he cries with his panting laughter. ‘I wanted to welcome and
namaste
all oxygen-giving pilgrims.'

As he relates his story, our meal arrives: chicken
mughali
,
makhani daal
,
palak paneer
. ‘Now we say a little prayer for the food,' he gasps, catching his breath. ‘Oh, Lord, it is yours – and we will offer it back to you tomorrow morning,' he chortles. ‘Now
eat
.'

I cannot recall meeting a more joyful man in my life. I want to adopt him as my guru.

‘I remember on the road to Rishikesh there once lived a
Fire Baba,' he tells me, wiping a smear of
daal
from his beard. ‘His cheerful charm and chillums gave comfort to many hippies who stayed around him. One day, a German disciple came to him and said he had a visa problem and had to leave India. Fire Baba said, “That is no problem. Give me your passport.” The German fellow handed it to Babaji, who opened it and made the sound, “
Om
one, two, three, all India is free.” Then he tore the passport in half and put it on the fire. “From today your name is no longer Günther,” Fire Baba said. “I am giving you holy name Sant Samosa Ram. Now chant ‘
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti
' and be happy.”'