Magic Bus (31 page)

Rama puts his arm around my waist again and roars at his story.
Sant Samosa Ram
translates as Saint Little Pastry.

‘Sounds to me like Fire Baba was full of hot air,' I say.

‘Always there were a lot of things going on in those years,' he chuckles. ‘I listened, I understood and I lived for the moment – so forgive me if I don't remember much else.'

His path to self-realization wasn't without disillusionments or puffs of elated amnesia. In Varanasi, his landlord doubled the rent, so, like most of his customers, Rama turned his back on the heat, dust and crush of India. In a dream, he'd seen the need for a shop specializing in holistic and spiritual books for tourists in Nepal. A decade before Mind, Body and Spirit publishing found its niche in the West, Rama made a modest start in Pokhara. Later, he moved Pilgrims to larger premises in Kathmandu.

‘I dreamed of building a mountain of books, a Himalaya of books and, since that day, my life has been happy bread and butter. Every moment is now like Christmas and
Holi
and
Diwali
rolling together in a big soft bed.'

Some of his early customers became partners: a Vietnam veteran who structured the first business plan, a wandering Welshman who edited Pilgrims Publishing's new titles, an Australian librarian who taught Rama about the international book trade and still runs the company's website. Today, the Thamel store rambles over twenty-four rooms. His Patan shop carries over 20,000 rare and antiquarian volumes in English, German, Hindi, Sanskrit and
Nepali. His Feed ‘n' Read restaurant serves burgers alongside Ayurvedic herbal remedies. Rama even reopened a store in Varanasi, designed to look like a Victorian English library. Pilgrims grew and changed with its clients, adding New Age titles, trekking maps and luxury travel guides to its religious primers and series of Himalayan classics.

‘When I came back to Varanasi, I said to the tourism minister, let us turn the city into a world-literature library. To contain all knowledge. According to our Hindu philosophy, God is infinite. The entire space and beyond is part of the infinite God. Which means every page of every book is part of God. So I told the minister, “Put all the statues out of the temples and replace them with books!
Books
.”' He hurries on, ‘I like to read between the chapters, between the paragraphs, even between the lines. In that empty space I try to sense what the writer is saying. Why did she choose this word? Who is the person behind these sentences? Also, of course, I love the older editions of books, with the beautiful bindings, the beautiful papers, the fascinating ink colours, which for me are just like… yogi's semen.'

‘I've never seen yogi's semen,' I joke.

Rama's head rolls back and his mouth opens to expose a fat pink tongue. ‘You haven't? Then, my friend, you have not
lived
!' He is roaring now, play-acting, babbling, ‘Oh, when the yogis hear of this they will come and beat me. All their lives they are chaste and celibate and now we joke of their semen.'

Rama's laughter is contagious, rippling out of him, shaking the table, spilling the water from our glasses. He rises to his feet declaring, ‘We must go now to the temple and ask to see blissful Shiva semen.'

‘Or we could just look in books.'

He slaps my back with such enthusiasm that the cook glances up from the kitchen. Then he wraps his arms around my neck and howls, ‘You and I are not so different from hippie seekers. Or Indian wanderers of first millennium BC. All want just to be happy as children. But hippies made one mistake and it broke them. Now dancing,' he announces, clapping his hands, startling me as much
as the other diners. ‘We go now to Ruby Tuesday's to dance and sing. I breathe
oxygen
.'

‘What was their mistake?' I say, taking hold of his hand to pull him into his seat. ‘You searched and were not broken.'

‘They imagined peace of mind was not with their families or in their home countries,' says Rama Tiwari. ‘They didn't see we can only live in happiness if we conquer the restless dream that paradise is in a world other than our own.'

As the waiter clears away our dishes, Rama calls –
yells
– for the bill. He is known at the cafeteria and indulged like an ebullient, much-loved boy.

‘I believe books need to be about truth, the
truth
of experience,' he goes on. ‘Writing shouldn't be about ego or money or fame but about selfless sharing and helping others. We all live under one sky so, when we do something positive for others, we are in fact doing it for ourselves. The diamond is made from the clay, all comes from Mother Earth, all belongs to the One.'

Rama snatches the bill when it arrives and, as I try to pay, he tells me, ‘Every day I pray to Lord Tourist, “You have given to me and now I give back to you. Thank you for sharing with me.”'

On the street, India assaults us in temple bells, mounds of turmeric and blaring Hindu-pop. Countless shoving bodies compress our personal space. Crows pick at the rust-red soil. Street musicians pound drums and ring cymbals.

As we walk, Rama says, ‘No people have time any more to listen to a little music, to go to dance room, to have sex and go to sleep. No time to get up early, at sunrise, and go for a little stroll. People now work, take a short holiday, have such poor dreams.' We turn a corner, and he asks, ‘After your travel book, you next should write about what people all over the world do with their hands: wash babies, cook dinner, pet the dog.'

‘Not hands,' I say. ‘Hearts.'

‘That is even better,' he roars, the laughter rippling out of him again. ‘Write to help people find their way back home.'

I don't think it's that simple.

‘Do you know the poet Tagore?' Rama goes on. ‘“The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”'

Rabindranath Tagore's poem is called ‘Journey Home'.

It is time for me to leave India. There remains one last border I have to cross. A part of me still believes that my destination lies in the pure, clean Himalayas, or at least in a world other than my own. Earlier, I told my host that I will leave for Nepal at the end of the week. In his hand he carries a suitcase for me to deliver to his Pokhara shop.

‘Inside are only books and clothes and old things. No bombs,' he laughs. ‘Not from this old hippie.'

‘Nepal has enough bombs of its own,' I point out.

‘Now,' he cheers, hailing a passing rickshaw and wiggling his hips like a teenager, ‘we
will
go dancing!'

Nepal. Divine home of the gods. Snow-capped mountain kingdom. Spiritual centre of the universe where – in some districts – mortal life expectancy hovers around forty-seven years. Rocky strip of land that brothers have squabbled over for centuries. Nepotistic apartheid state of spectacular inequality. Last battleground of Maoist guerrillas. The End of the Road.

I brush away Gorakhpur's touts and mosquitoes to catch an overloaded bus to the border. The tattered rattletrap judders forward, collecting another dozen dusty-faced passengers, bedding rolls and baskets. Inside, it is impossible to move, even to fall down and, beyond the cracked windows, India appears to be almost as airless and chaotic, with overheated lorries and swaying tongas jamming the road and suffocating progress. Our teenage ticket collector spits betel, calls out destinations, swings out of a window and over the roof like an acrobat to chide his captives into giving up their coins.

In the aisle, a woman peels an orange in strips, removing the pips, placing the segments one by one in her son's mouth. The child, then, is sick on my knees.

At least there is space onboard to think. As we cross an ashen flatland of thatched villages and stagnant ponds, I realize that my role – as Rama suggested – isn't to help people to find their way back home. Home doesn't lie at the end of my road, it remains years and miles behind me. I have no desire to return to beginnings, to geographical familiarity, to complacency. I want to move forward, to reach for the unknown, even in a world where every corner is known.

Old Nepali farmers have a saying to discourage people from leaving their land: ‘To those who stay, the soil. To those who leave, the pathway.' A farming culture naturally prizes the soil over
the open road. But modernity has transformed not only Nepal into a land of migrants – of people moving out of the countryside or out of the country, leaving behind the settled culture, the soil. Perhaps it's my last illusion, but the new horizon rouses my joy of life. I can't turn back now.

The border runs through the middle of squalid Sunauli. I have to wake up the dozing official to stamp me out of India. One hundred yards on, I join the queue at the Nepalese immigration post. An inspector asks me to open Rama's suitcase. I've already flipped through its contents: dog-eared copies of Ian Macdonald's
Revolution in the Head
,
World Without Borders
and
The Great Rock and Roll Trivia Quiz
, as well as six pairs of yellow shoes and a white kaftan. He considers the dated contents and, with a sceptical lift of the eyebrow, asks me, ‘Sir, you are having no Beatles LPs?'

I'm happy to be on the threshold of Nepal. In the sixties, the Intrepids pushed the frontier of the exotic back to this line. Here, their search for an individual paradise must have seemed a real possibility, away from India's crowds, in the clear mountain air, among a people of legendary hospitality.

‘Your old road is rapidly agein',' sings the woman ahead of me in the queue. In English. Not under her breath. ‘Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand…'

I recognize the slim, skittle-shaped body, the seal-grey hair, the wide feline eyes. My heart skips a beat.

‘Penny!'

‘Hey, Jack,' says Penny.

I give her a huge hug, her bangles ringing against my ears.

‘I can't believe it,' I tell her.

‘Good karma,' she says with an indulgent, complicit smile. ‘Like I said, there's a connection between us.'

‘Penny, you look great.'

‘Jack, this guy says I don't have enough money to come into Nepal,' she says, turning back to the immigration officer. ‘I mean,

I lived in Kathmandu before he was even born.'

‘We're fellow travellers,' I tell the official, laughing, showing
my passport and wallet. Three months have passed since I left her in her cave. ‘What happened in Turkey?'

‘All sorts of weirdness,' she says as our visas are stamped. ‘The police kicked me out of Cappadocia. Even though it's a World Heritage Site and I'm an ancient relic. I grabbed a bus to Tehran, but it was so damn hot I flew to Delhi. No way I could walk around Iran inside a tent. Been chilling out in Pune ever since.'

‘And now?'

‘Going for a swim,' she says, ‘in Pokhara.'

‘That's my first stop too,' I laugh.

Penny fixes me with her jade-green eyes and squeezes my hand. Her moonstone and
I Ching
rings flash in the mid-morning sun. ‘Jack, did I ever tell you,' she says, ‘you're a typical Scorpio.'

Ten minutes later, our clattering Tata coach groans into gear.

Nepal immediately looks different from India. There are fewer people and the land seems softer, a pleasing patchwork of family banana plantations, dappled forests and low-lying floodplains thick with weed. Its neat brick houses are covered in yellow-flowered creepers and surrounded by picket fences. A sleek black water buffalo wades in a fast, clear river. A strip of luminous cloud marks the northern horizon. Penny holds her head out the window, gazing forward at the sky, happy and humming to herself.

‘I first reached Shangri La La La in 1970,' she says, picking up her easy monologue, unfazed by the time that's passed. ‘Sixty-eight had been a bad year, a
very
bad year. Things improved with Woodstock but, other than that, man, those days were the pits.'

1968. The year the sixties soured. The single most turbulent year since the end of the Second World War. The year when vague ideals of a better world, of more participatory democracy, of liberation, met with sharp realities.

That glad, confident year had dawned in colours psychedelic. Women went bra-less, tank tops were tie-dyed, ‘Everlasting Love' boomed out of transistors from Littleworth to Big Sur. Berkeley professors came to class barefoot with flowers in their hair. The peace symbol replaced the crucifix and Star of David for millions of young believers. People power aspired to stop the draft, to
legalize grass and to levitate the Pentagon on the collective will of a generation.

Then, Martin Luther King, civil-rights activist and an apostle of non-violence, was murdered in Memphis, touching off a wave of rioting in US cities. Two months later in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy, the one leader whose appeal crossed America's racial divide, was killed. The bombing of North Vietnam after the Tet offensive inflamed hatred of the establishment, uniting world youth in revulsion and rebellion. In May, in Paris, ten of thousands of students took to the streets. Their graffiti proclaimed, ‘We will invent a new original world.' But their optimism was perverted by political extremists and the dogma of Sartre and Foucault. In August, Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia. Anti-war protesters were beaten and maced during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In November, Richard Nixon was elected US president.

By year end, 1,200 students had been arrested on American campuses. Tokyo University was occupied for three months and the LSE shut down. The embittered New Left splintered into the Weathermen, the Red Brigade and Baader-Meinhof. The flower children's innocent spiritual trip was hijacked by Timothy Leary, whose half-baked chemical theories contributed to heroin's ruinous ascendancy over mescaline and LSD. Jefferson Airplane sold out to commercialism, singing ‘White Levi's' to the tune of ‘White Rabbit'. The Monkees hit number one with ‘Daydream Believer'.