Chapter 9
New Delhi
INDIA! Anything was possible here. I began learning this at the airport. Procedures and lines for anything were only suggestions. You cut corners wherever you could. You made your own rules, or someone would make them for you REAL FAST. Touts were out in force. Delhi was noisy and crowded. Everything was super-cheap. The little money I had would last a long time. I was relieved. From my bus window I glimpsed the end of the world. People scurried back and forth forever, in a constant haze, which lent a subtle mystery to everything on the broad and crowded streets. The smell of smoke was everywhere. There was a Beijing feeling in the air. I could smell something ancient and primeval. I was at home in the sweet and wonderful chaos. It was annoying and mischievous. It was weird and crazy. Millions of hustlers, touts, and beggars descended on you from all directions. There was an eternal commission racket for everything, and the unsuspecting traveler paid for all this.
At the train station, lessons in frustration were learned almost on a minute-by-minute basis. Long and slow lines for everything drained and exasperated me. Jostling and pushing were mandatory in this celestial circus. I was determined to get to Siliguri. That was my contact point in North Bengal. The young Lama would meet me at the monastery of the newly reborn Tibetan Heavy I had heard so much about in California. His name was Kalu Rinpoche. The guy from Arizona, his teacher, Jim, my black psychic friend, and even Summer had all been touched and blessed by him.
At the special tourist ticket refuge in the train station, I met a Tibetan who told me about the Big Curse and the Rebellious Regent. “This guy is nothing but trouble. A curse is following him and destroying the Kagyu,” warned the Tibetan ominously. I could hear the din of chaos outside the window. It was a perpetual problem. It seemed to surge and crest like the waves of a manic ocean. “You be careful with your teacher,” the Tibetan cautioned. “He’s not your girlfriend. You Americans don’t understand what commitment is.” I looked at the Tibetan and smiled. “Don’t dissipate your energy,” he urged as he helped me with my bags down the dirty stairs. Then I was alone again. Young coolies attacked each other for the privilege of carrying my bags to the wrong platform. The blast-furnace heat of the day drenched me and made me irritable. I eventually hopped on the train to the old Delhi station, but the multitudes of India continued to overwhelm me. I was numb from all the dumb chaos and its constant shifting.
India brought out very extreme emotions in the voyager. The misery was intense everywhere you looked. Half-naked urchins and staring scrawny dogs were soaked in the gray and black of billions of dusty germs. I smelled the air deeply. It was oozing smoke and despair, but also an intense sweetness. My moods swung violently with crazy pendulum thrusts in this glorious playground of WHITE STRESS. This was IT. A coolie materialized out of the haze to help me navigate my ugly load through a dizzy maze of underground corridors and clangy elevators. Dark strange smells were everywhere even down here. I then checked my bags and tried to call the Old Cambodian’s monastery, but the phones were useless.
In India, however, there is ALWAYS a way. Auto-rickshaw hawks pounced on me; and with only a vague description on my part knew at least the direction of where we had to go. I was soon back on the noisy streets of New Delhi, snapping away at them with the cheap Olympus I had bought in Prague. India was a photographer’s paradise. Old memories of my last trip began to float up from unknown quarters. Indeed, India was the same; she never seemed to change. There was something eternal about her. What had changed was the observer. I was no longer an arrogant and useless undergraduate. No, life had ground me down and I was wiser and more humble now.
The Stars from New Delhi:
If we take the Big Bang as creation then one has to wonder how little the creation actually accomplished. Unlike the Biblical accounts, all the Big Bang did was make hydrogen and helium. Obviously, something has happened since. Mainly the development of stars. At some point after the primal flash had subsided, the hydrogen atoms started to clump into clouds which then crumpled into stars under the influence of gravity. Heat and pressure rose up in interstellar tides only to end up as birds, fish, and television sets.
Inside the television set:
The Cambodian’s place was a power-spot. He hadn’t been there in decades, but I could still feel him around. The monastery had been a gift from old Nehru himself. I was warmly welcomed by a friendly skeleton crew who offered me tea and fruit. It was here that I did my first puja in India within the protective walls of the Old Cambodian’s bliss. A Thai practitioner then read my palm. He was impressed. “You have a superb sixth sense and you are a fairly decent meditator when inspired and motivated. You also have a clear mind and will always have money for yourself and others. Long life is certain; you know how to solve problems.” The Thai stopped for a moment and examined my palms with delicate care. He then continued, “Your palms are clean too. Not too many lines criss-crossing all over the place. You have no multiple conflicts in the stars.” I sat relieved. But what about Summer? I mused. Her palms were karmic freeways. How would it affect us?
The Thai invited me to go to Nepal with him. I knew this was impossible. But I told him we would meet again. I took off with the auto-rickshaw driver who had been waiting patiently for me in the nearby grass. Like a master juggler he plunged into the dark rush-hour traffic. We weaved and zigged past hundreds of near accidents, but I knew there was nothing to fear. This was all part of daily life in India. Every Indian driver seemed to know through some mysterious intuition how to avoid an instant death. The crazy traffic was a daily puja encountered every day in a million mindless ways.
Back at the old Delhi train station, I realized it was worth hiring these hungry coolies to lug my writer’s burden of bags for a mere pittance. The coolies knew through telepathy how to find you and your train. My hired Sisyphian grunt was illiterate so he relied on another Indian to read the computerized passenger lists, in order to then find my “first class” compartment and get some kind of tip. First class in India just meant a bare-bones cubicle. Its only saving grace was precisely this. Other classes were noisy cattle pens of sweaty compressed humanity yangling and dangling from every door and window available. Despite all these shocks and inconveniences, my prospects looked good. I had survived my first day in India.
The thirty-six-hour train ride was timeless. India was not just a country. It was a state of mind that embraced extreme opposites. This was new. It was a white solution to WHITE STRESS. All reality was compressed and mixed into a kind of strange identity loss. What prevented everything from cracking up and dissolving was a spiritual immunity permeating through all this creation sweat. It was humming in the lush countryside with its teeming faceless multitudes. It was also the backdrop for an endless drama of seasonal cycles. Life followed death in an unavoidable rhythm, and there was daily and constant AWARENESS of this.
Throughout the journey, there was also this perpetual motion on the train with excited, peddlers hawking all kinds of goods. The constant ring of CHAI!CHAI!CHAI! was heard from the lips of the receding tea-sellers. Sweets, coffee, fruit, cigarettes, magazines, and soft-drinks floated down the aisles in an eternal parade of consumption. The traffic was NON-STOP. I started getting acquainted with my neighbors, a family of four going to Assam. I was an endless source of curiosity to them with my strange western looks and curiously forbidden manners. The Indian autumn heat forced me to strip down to my under-shirt, a new experience, as the train engine sputtered and died near Patna, halfway to my destination.
I timidly hopped off the train to inspect the premises. I saw a dead dog lying near the tracks; its bloated body roasted gently in the sun. The dog’s severed head had a strange quizzical look of sudden death misunderstood. The train started up again, and to my surprise, a photo of Summer I had been using as a bookmark almost flew out the window. I took it as an omen. SHE WAS ALL RIGHT.
A young Indian medical student befriended me and gave me a second palm-reading. The good news just kept rolling along. “Money will come easily to you and fame will quickly follow, but a big gift is coming, something quite unimaginable is on the way. The message was: I WOULD GET WHATEVER I WANTED. My mind was powerful and could attract whatever it imagined at breakneck speed. “You will live at least till you’re eighty,” the young student proudly announced. He too was impressed by my clean palms. My new friend stressed that crowded and congested palms indicated confusion and multiple conflicts. I thought of Summer again. The medical student wanted my address and was wowed by Summer’s photo. So was the family in my compartment. Summer was passing yet another weird test, so far away from receding Prague. I too had passed another test. I had been in India just forty-eight hours and was still “sane.”
