When I arrived back at our camp that evening I found Lothar had gone completely insane. He was both afraid and dangerously aggressive. I spent the entire night in the stepvan with him. I feared either suicide or murder. Knives, a chopper and a machete were in plain sight, but I dared not hide them for fear of catching his attention. I had to control his attention, keep him focused on small intricate puzzles.

“Look what they have hidden inside this coffee bean..see how it shines. Look. Open another and another..”

At dawn he finally fell asleep. He and his girlfriend Maria had driven us all over northwestern India for the past two months. He was a sensible, experienced and tough traveller. I depended on him and trusted his judgment. What could have driven him mad, and so suddenly? I went for a shower and a few cups of sweet milky chai. When I returned to the campsite, Lothar, his dog Ottoman and the stepvan were gone. With the help of my friend Harish I searched for him all through the hospitals and jails of Delhi. He was gone leaving no trace. I took a bus to Kathmandu.

My last rupee was gone and I had sold anything I had of value. I was living in a cement box of a room in the Tourist Camp in Swayambhu. As I sat on my rope bed, leaning my back against one wall with my feet propped up on the other I contemplated what a previous tenant had painted on the cold grey wall.. a colourful, geometric play of triangles inside a square. It had a remarkable effect on my mind. I found it stabilizing and soothing. Hand stitching a shirt for an American woman who lived in the village got me 70 Rs, some of which I spent on a brush, children’s watercolours and a student notebook. I began painting geometry. Figures eventually appeared in my little paintings. Howard the Duck stretched those lines, pulling them apart, escaping a world he never made. I was living on chillums and chai and visions drawn out by the paintings. The Vajra Dakini stood on one leg, her chopper raised high over her head, a skull bowl in the other hand, a necklace of skulls, an apron of bones. I painted her in a snowfield high in the Himalayas and set her twirling around the axis of her spear in an ecstatic dance of joy, of life, of freedom from the small concerns of life on earth. Lord Shiva, sits in his mountain home on Mount Kailash. His lingam is erect and out pours a rainbow which surrounds the earth in coloured light. I travelled to Bhadgaon, to the palace of the Malla Kings. They had ruled Nepal centuries ago, as Tantric Kings, before the invasion of the Rajasthani Gurkhas. In those days the palace was a museum full of riches and wonderful art. What most caught my attention were modest little paintings of simple geometric forms, triangles arranged inside a square, decorated with lotus petals. They were called Yantras. (Since that time the place appears to have been looted .)

There was a loud angry German called Helmut Maharaj who lived in the same camp in Swayambhu. His room was blackened by the fire that he kept burning in there. The smoke escaped as best it could through window and open door. All the homes in the village were arranged this way. One stayed low and duck-walked around a room to keep from choking on the smoke which became thick and acrid three feet up from the earthen floor. Helmut had been in India and Nepal even longer than I had and had become a furious sadhu. He was also a painter of yantras. He painted exquisitely on tree bark. After many weeks I dared to approach him. I wanted to know more about these paintings which had captivated us both. “Beware of yantras. They trap you and you will never get free again.”
I knew he was right and I vowed in my heart to nonetheless, one day escape. I was very hungry and I asked him to share his food with me.
“Fuck off. Go find your own food!”
That was different..to be refused. One day we were sharing a patch of warming sunshine.
He said,
“I have never taken a Guru. If I did I would choose the Englishman, Sri Anandaji. He lives in a little village in Gujerat called Mehmdabad.”
As he continued to speak with admiration about this man a light shone out of his left eye and entered my eye. I recognised this sign. It meant
“Pay attention!”.
I would seek out the Englishman in Gujerat and nothing would divert me.

My parents, great travellers, arrived in Kathmandu and stayed at a nice hotel. I ate, bathed and fed all my friends there, too. They took me with them down to the Terai, where the Nepali mountains meet the Indian plains. It is a jungle, full of wild animals. We stayed at a nature reserve. I rode elephants for the first time and found them to be the very finest form of transport I had ever experienced. Unlike camels and horses, their swaying gait is relaxing and reassuring. They beat mechanized transport all to hell. The Mahants speak elephant language. We rode through 12 ft, high grasses, looking for tigers. We saw rhinos. We took a canoe ride along a river and a crocodile took a flying leap for our little boat, missing us by only 2 ft.

We flew to New Delhi to meet Lindsay, my brother’s wife. She and I decided to travel together. She had never been to India before and I was delighted to show her around. I told her I had received a sign and I must find an English guru in a village in Gujerat. She understood perfectly and decided to help me get there. My parents gave me a few hundred dollars. I was fed, washed, rich and ready, all topped up for my next adventure.

We took the first train we could find, headed south. We met a ‘magician’ on the train. We were intrigued, but we soon became bored. He was entranced with us. That evening we arrived in a dusty town in Madya Pradesh. We spent the night and in the morning began looking for transportation east to Gujerat. No trains, no buses, no trucks headed east.
“You can’t get there from here.”
We found those words to be remarkably funny, significant and frustrating. We got on a train headed for Ajmer. We really wanted to get high, but, oddly, we feared the man who shared our compartment. Eventually he told us that he was the new police chief for Pushkar, on his way to take up his new post. His english was good because he had been studying drug enforcement in the USA. Years later he and his men murdered an entire family of 14 people in Pushkar. The village rose up and attacked the police station. He was convicted of murder and is still in jail.

Before dawn we arrived in Ajmer and started to look for transportation to the sacred village of Pushkar, ten miles away. We had missed the bus. The driver of a horse drawn tonka persuaded us to go with him. It seemed like fun. We loaded our bags on the covered and gaily decorated carriage. He called to a friend to join him and we headed through and out of town behind the clip-clopping horse. How lovely to be slowly riding into the wilderness as the dawn light shifted and changed the colours of the desert around us. Soon the horse was straining as the first small hill appeared. Lindsay and I realized the horse could not possibly take us over the considerably higher hills ahead. I started to get my knife out and I suggested to Lindsay that she find some weapon as we would no doubt have to fight our way out of this trap. The two young men began to anticipate the fruits of their robbery plan with leers and gestures toward us. I anticipated slitting their throats. Lindsay was equally ready to fight. Suddenly, around the corner of the road came a white Mercedes stepvan, lurching wildly. It was Lothar, missing all these past months. He recognised me at the same moment and pulled his van over to the side of the road. We hopped off the cart, to the dismay of our would-be robbers. I gave them the finger.

Lothar was still mad and now he was also delirious with fever. He could barely keep the van on the road because he could hardly see anymore. But Lindsay knew how to drive: she was a truck-driving American momma. Lothar had been in the desert. He had lost his little dog Ottoman. I mourned that vicious, brave little dog for a long time after….lost in the desert, his master gone mad. Lothar had been without food or water for too long. He was near death. We had all rescued each other, early one morning in the foothills of the Kingdom of Pushkar.

As we pulled into the village people cheered at the sight of Lindsay, a pretty little slip of a woman driving that great big van, having manoeuvred the dangerous hairpin turning road. I applied wet cloth to Lothar’s head to bring down the fever and soothe his delirium. While looking for a room to stay, I found a young German woman who knew Lothar and agreed to care for him. I had no time for him now. We were on the move. Suddenly Lindsay, all clean and white, dressed in ironed khakis and starched shirt, silver jewelry and crystals, got violently ill. She needed a bathroom NOW. None here, none there. Ah, here we have one. She went in and was violently sick from every orifice of her body. There was no water and wouldn’t be any for hours. She stood there, stunned, covered in puke and shit. Then she started to laugh. She laughed and laughed until tears poured down her cheeks. Later she told me that for one awful minute she had almost broken. Her laughter had delivered her India in the palm of her hand. Wow!

We kept travelling south. The coincidences and chance meetings kept coming, at, even for us, a remarkable rate. Together we pulled magic and mystery from every shadow in the land. We finally parted in Goa, exhausted by two weeks of non-stop, excellent weirdness.

I took the boat north to Bombay. It was one of my hometowns in India. I had been stuck waiting for money for months on end in Bombay. I knew the city very well. I got a room at the Stiffles Hotel and went looking for my friends at Diptis House of Pure Drinks.. Diptis was just a little wooden box of a room a few steps up from the street. As long as any of us had any money we would spend it on fruit lassis at Diptis. Dipti was a clean, shiny man who knew all us hippies, who we are and where we are. He kept our messages to each other in his desk and was happy to be a guardian angel to the rag tag crowd of foreigners who constantly passed through town. He told me Ganesh Giri was in town, asking for me.

I had first met Ganesh Giri years before, just a few yards down the road from Diptis. I passed a tall, very thin, long haired Indian man, dressed entirely in rich raw silk, a long kurta, vest and silk lungi. His elegant appearance, different from anybody I had seen before, caused me to stop and turn around as soon as I had passed him. He did the same.

He spoke only a few words of english. We walked together all over town for the rest of the day. He made those few words into an endless story. He fascinated me. I couldn’t leave his side. I wondered if he was a prince. He said, “Come to Chowpatty and sleep with me.” I wondered if Chowpatty was a palace. I followed him into the night. Chowpatty was the downtown beach. He introduced me to his friends. They were a jolly bunch of sadhus who made me very welcome. They shared their food with me. We sat up late into the night around a little fire. Ganesh Giri explained that this group gambled everything they had gathered during the day on a numbers game and lived on luck or its lack. Then he laid his silk lungi on the sand, another long piece of cloth, his turban, spread out beside that and we laid down to sleep under the stars, side by side. It was my first taste of sadhu life. Just before dawn, he and Santosh woke me up and we went looking for chai. In my mind, which was so blissed on love and the pleasure of his presence we had become Rama and Sita and Lakshman walking in the Gir jungle at dawn. We bathed in a spring in a little natural oasis under Malabar Hill, in the middle of the city. He took my hand and led me into an entirely different India, far from the life of foreign cosmopolitan hippies grooving on the surface freedom afforded us by the generosity of India’s open-minded people.

The sight of this richly dressed sadhu and a lovestruck foreign girl annoyed Indians and disgusted my friends. He was well known to many as a treacherous thief and womanizer. We didn’t care. Whenever we met we walked together until I dropped from exhaustion. He was a Naga from the Juna Akkada. He showed me sadhu life and sadhu secrets, places and poisons, temples and sacred spots. He gave me little black balls of “medicine” that contained datura and gold and I never knew what else. He never lied to me.

I hadn’t seen him for such a long time and now he and I were back together. But now, Ganesh Giri was dying. He was so thin his knees and elbows were huge knobs on thin sticks. He could barely walk without panting and stopping to catch his breath. He had smoked too many chillums, eaten too much poison, taken too much cobra venom into his blood stream. He had reached a state of exhaustion. We had both run as far as the road went. We sat in Diptis and quietly argued over which one of us was guru to the other. The next day we sat there and I said.
“This is the end of life for both of us. Lets go to the Gir Forest and meditate until the lions eat us, or we attain enlightenment.”
We argued about lions for a while and then he agreed to my plan. I said I had only one little stop to make. It was on our way. I had to see the Englishman. It was the only thing I had left to do in my stupid sorry excuse for a life. He agreed. I bought train tickets to Ahmedabad and we left that night. The train was impossibly crowded and we spent the whole night crouched up in the little string luggage rack near the ceiling. Two dozen people were jammed into six spaces. No problem. We were together again, on our final adventure.

The next morning we were in the ugly, unfriendly little town of Mehmdabad. Nobody knew the name Anandaji. I said, “He’s English, farangi”.
We got directions. We took a horse drawn tonka and headed towards the Society. Eventually the driver found the place, a large cement house, covered in bouganvillea. Ganesh Giri went in first to check things out. I waited outside with the bags and the horse.
“Get the hell out of my house you filthy sadhu! What do you mean by coming in here? What is your sampraday? Liar!! Get out! Get out!”
What a furious, roaring voice. Poor Ganesh Giri had no strength to defend himself. His protests were weak and softly spoken…barely audible over the blasting anger of that voice. I rushed in to rescue my comrade. I stepped into the little room and was captured by brilliant blue eyes. So unexpected. He looked up at me and roared,
“What the hell do YOU want?”
I stood my ground and answered arrogantly,
“I want enlightenment of course!”
Silence. He was taken aback for half of a heartbeat.
“In that case, you may stay. He..”
He points at Ganesh Giri.
“He has to leave now. And take his lice with him!”
I agreed immediately. I went out with Ganesh Giri to the waiting horse tonka.
“I am staying. You must leave.”
He looked dismayed. He feared for my safety. I gave him half my hasheesh and money. We agreed to meet in Bikaner in a few days and off he went. I never saw him again. I returned to the room and the furious Englishman. I plunked down my bag. I knew destiny when I saw him.

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