Hind Cartwheel

In the summer of 1980, a maverick young doctor gave it all up, to hitchhike around the world.

The first part of his odyssey took him

through South America and up through Africa, accompanied by his mythical hunter companion, Orion.

His vision quest continued around the

second cartwheel of the European Grand Tour.

In Hind Cartwheel, blessed by the

living goddess on his thirtieth birthday, he spins the dharma wheel of the Indian subcontinent.

A Rose in Every Cheek

We roared along white ornamented mosques and mudbrick bazaars with cement wainscoting, corrugated tin roofs and sliding accordion doors, all trapped in a web of naked power lines. I looked around and directly into the left eye of a horse’s head that had momentarily found its way inside our vehicle. Around the next corner, our driver had his license suspended for overcrowding. It was like being fined for chaos.

A Rose in Every Cheek When we moved outside again, it was a

circus. It actually was a circus we came across, although it was initially difficult to be sure, as it seemed at times that all Quetta was some farflung magnificent turbaned Far Pavillion sideshow, in the barren jagged mountains of Faroffistan. The lions and tigers painted on the powder blue panels above the entrance gave it away, portrayed in various poses, among the even larger handpainted portraits of the circus stars- tightrope walkers and trapeze artists, strong men and acrobats on stilts, and complete Asiatic pandemonium. Bright red banners with too much white Arabic script hung over the festivities. The food vendors were as surreal as their snacks. Disco music blared out over a stoned pair of dancers on the main stage. There were barbell weights I lifted, lighter than they looked.

A Rose in Every Cheek

He pressed the ‘play’ button. And charging into the basic small space inside a tent in a courtyard of an exile camp in the desert, came the sounds of explosions and machine gun fire, the screams of dying comrades, and a singular roar of recruitment.

“Allahu Akbar!” It screamed. And Lala pointed to his chest, and stuck it out just a bit further, in bashful pride.

I didn’t know what to say, but it wouldn’t have mattered, since I couldn’t communicate to anyone in the tent, with words. Amazing how brotherhood squeezes through the language barrier, anyway.

A Rose in Every Cheek

Lala’s mother ascended out of the subterranean clay floor, dressed in a snow-white cotton kalaa Afghani with hand-embroidered tombaan pants, parahaan overdress, and chaadar head covering. I still wonder how it was so white, in the brown dust of the refugee camp. I still wonder how she produced the complexities of the spiced lamb and eggplant and peppers, and the simplicity of her calm cherubic smile. We sat on thin mats and thick cushions, under the dozens of posters, wallpapering the Jihad back home.

A Rose in Every Cheek

We laughed, patted each other’s shoulders, and basked in the smiling approval of his mother and sister. I thanked them sincerely, as we left to visit other courtyards and other tents, and other sad stories of displacement and asylum.

Mound of the Dead

Robyn prodded me more awake at first pale gray light, pointing to the moustached brown man in the powder blue pajamas, wearing a green shawl, and an iridescent Sindhi pillbox hat with a cutout forehead.

“They sent a limo.” She said, pointing to the battered red horsecart he was standing beside. The cartwheels were splayed, and retreaded with bits of nail-on bicycle tire. The tiny gaunt horse in the harness looked a bit the same way.

“Mohenjo-daro?” I asked. He bobbled his head from side to side, almost imperceptibly.

Mound of the Dead

We followed the inlaid courtyard through to the gardens, and the open expanse of the Badshahi Mosque. The Moghul emperor Aurangzeb built it over a two-year period in 1671. You can see it from fifteen kilometers away.

Mound of the Dead

Capable of accommodating over 95,000 worshippers, it was still the largest mosque in the world during our visit in 1983. We climbed one of the minarets for the view and the vertigo.

A rickshaw pedaled us back to the ‘Y’, and the smooth soporific cycling lulled us all into a new magnanimity and forgetfulness.

Not France

I emerged from the rooftop longdrop later that afternoon, to find an invasion of puffy grey clouds, ballooning over the barren snowcapped mountain ramparts above me. Down below ran the white noise of white water, and the ratchet staccato of the crested kingfishers in the garden. There was a wind picking up, but it wasn’t mine.

Not France

Carol was real too. Next morning she invited us to accompany her on a jeep tour of all the regional Buddhist monasteries, courtesy of the World Bank. She said it was the least she could do for our ordeal in its little cousin, the previous day. Our driver, Philip arrived during breakfast and, sliding back the last of our peanut buttered barley bread, we zoomed off in the back of his jeep.

Not France

I sat crosslegged and transfixed in a lotus position, under the Tantric stoop of this mini-Potala, gazing out at the breathtaking panorama across the Indus flood plain, to where we had been west at Shey, ahead to Matho in the east, and Stok Palace to the south. Inside was a fifty foot high Maitreya Future Buddha, which took four years of clay, copper, gold paint and effort, constructed for the visit of the Dalai Lama, thirteen years earlier.

The Road to Happy Valley

One morning, I sat in on a clinic under the tin roof of the Tibetan Medical Institute. Inside the yellow boards, I watched a Tibetan women doctor spend almost forever, listening to the wails of a large Indian lady in a gold sari. She put three fingers on each pulse, tore a hastily written prescription off her paper pad, and rolled two eyes at me as the Hindu hysteria left. She had more to give the turquoise and coral patients who followed.

Delhi Belly

The third night I emerged from the bed room bedroom, I had to rub my eyes. I had a black beard, Uncle Albert’s red baseball cap, a blue t-shirt, white shorts, flip-flops, and a Kashmiri leather bag. Sitting, beating Aussie Dave in chess, was a guy with a black beard, red baseball cap, blue t-shirt, white shorts, flip-flops, and a Kashmiri leather bag. He looked up, and laughed. Neil worked as a ‘meter maid’ in Whistler, but he didn’t look like a meter maid. He looked like me.

A Sigh made Stone

I jumped on an oxen-powered lawnmower, not expecting the reaction I received, from the giant white bullocks collared to it. They burst into forward propulsion, and it took me what seemed forever to gain their control, and guide them into a steady cascading pattern of grass clipping exhaust, in rows of my own making. Steer steering. Robyn brought me a Limca on a wide turn.

Ocean of Milk

“Namaste.” Rang out across the rice paddies, as we passed Newari smiles and hands folded in prayer. It was hard to maintain our balance and a consistent forward momentum with our loaded packs, on the hot mud paths between the wet terraces, especially when the Himalayan foothill backdrop wouldn’t let go of our eyes. We passed long thatched houses with covered annexes of stacked firewood. There were baskets everywhere.

Ocean of Milk

The only water was the town tap, back across the bridge, next to the thatch-covered woodpile.

Refreshed and drenched and stripped to my shorts, I squinted down at the Grand Prix of soap bubbles, slithering down into a stream under the holes in the rock, and up to find the glint off the gold earrings of two bashful Nepali sisters in colorful dresses, watching my every move with all three eyes. Their mother stood sideways with a coiled headscarf, half-amused, clutching her sickle. All three were serenely beautiful.

Ocean of Milk

A steep descent had to be repaid with a near vertical climb, along a deep river gorge. Huge conifers hung off and onto the cliffs, like a battalion of green trolls, charging up the bluff while trying to keep their heads down. A tired old suspension bridge, over the Khudi Khola, groaned beneath us. The few tin and thatch roofed houses that lingered around its anchors was the Mongaloid Gurung village of Khudi.

Ocean of Milk

A stone staircase on the other side of the valley took us towering above the Marsyandi, cresting on a spur. The trail undulated up and down through oak and rhododendron, and spruce and hemlock forest, forcing us into an ascent across a suspension bridge, and under a kani archway to Dharapani.

Ocean of Milk

The light had changed so slowly

we hadn’t noticed. Gradually, in under a week, with just a few hundred meters of elevation every day, the edges sharpened. The lowland glow crystallized into altitude glint. Clarity infected every experience. Climbing hearts pumped the sludge out of the deep white matter of previous existence. The new light ether brought us into the present, leaving the grist of guilt and shame and worry far behind.

Ocean of Milk

I sat at 5500 meters for an hour, waiting for Robyn to catch up.

When Destiny finally called, Chaos was still on the other line. Maybe it was the altitude. We were both quiet, and upset with the situation, the loss of Julie, and each other. She walked on over the pass, and I hiked into oblivion, stuck in knee-deep snow.

Ocean of Milk

The bank guard let me hold his rifle, while he posed for a photo. When Dan and Bert entered the scene behind me, he looked a little nervous, until I gave him back his gun.

Ocean of Milk

The Company stopped in a sunny courtyard, drinking lemon tea, and eating apple pie and 5 star bars. Revived, we hiked south out of Jomson, passing trains of ornamented horses, blinding white peaks, brown and yellow cliffs, and bright green irrigated fields.

Ocean of Milk

I turned to find Jesus in a saffron robe, and a string of gauri-shankar rudraksh beads, strolling barefoot beside me. The sadhu seemed to have levitated over the steepest and narrowest part of the canyon, cut through the solid rock and a short three-sided tunnel. He dematerialized in almost the same instant.

Rendezvous with Rama

But Gerry had a problem. To achieve artificial gravity, he was spinning his cylinder at 3 rpm, too fast for human inner ear adaptation, and dangerous, because of the Coriolis forces with which the colonists would have to contend. Even Sir Arthur had given his Ramans a twelve-fold less rotational force to live in. I was the life sciences guy. What happened outside was fascinating.

Rendezvous with Rama

The rotational limit I imposed on the design changed its configuration totally. Gerry’s cylinder became the Stanford Torus, the original donut space stations of the science fiction of my youth.

The Fountains of Paradise

The plains spread out below, playing hide and seek with the drifting clouds, dropping silently under us. The caretaker produced two cups of hot tea from his hut, near at the top.

Sybe and I found the six-foot sacred footprint, in a rock formation near the summit. Even if it was a human remnant, the question was who it really belonged to.

Coconut Grove

Our destination on the Arabian Sea really was known as the Paradise of the South. Kovalam literally translates as ‘a grove of coconut trees,’ and they seemed to go on forever. Seventeen kilometers of velvet sand coastline, cool breezes and clear azure water formed the famous crescent.

Smoking Gorillas

The big ecumenical sign in the Muslim restaurant beamed out over our chicken biriyani. ‘All religions welcome, no discussion of politics allowed, no washing in the plates.’ A barber turned up the lights in his shop, to give me a shave. Up and over the bridge, we wandered down a clean brightly colored market street, mobbed by packs of adolescent schoolgirls with ‘Clean Up Bombay’ t-shirts. I bought a pair of buffalo sandals.

Palace of the Winds

His name was Goru, and he was ugly. Big and brown, he belched and farted, and ate with his mouth wide open. He got his chocolate brown Indian eyes and his hooked Rajasthani nose from his parents, who passed on their vegetarianism as well. He only answered to Hindi, and only when he wasn’t eating, smoking my fags, or relieving himself in public. He had nits in his disheveled hair, stubbornness in his veins, larceny in his lymphatics, and lethargy in his limbic system. He was the quintessential native nabob. But, most of all, he was the best goddamn camel in the Thar desert.

Palace of the Winds

I slept on a real alluvial bed, soft and sandy, and surrounded by flowers and errant peacocks, The full moon played luna tunes, in the still desert night. A field of starlight shone overhead. It was the best night’s sleep of my life.