I am still alive. This is a living life, being lived while it is also being remembered. I tell many of these stories - such as the Ajanta Caves - because it is such a unique tale - but the gist of this journey isn't in the "stories" but is in the living in between the tales. That is the rub - how does one get into the internal struggle, the relationships that occurred and the thoughts that made the person?

This is where I think of it as war. Yes there was the real shooting war between Pakistan and India while I was there. The scrambling under the furniture when the air raid sirens wailed and the shortages of fuel. Message to those in prep for war - watch the fuel lines - the U.S. tries to hide the fuel shortage but in India when they were prep for war there was an instant line for kerosene that appeared overnight. Before one could just hear the guy yelling out his fuel call and a few appeared to get cooking fuel but just before the war broke out there was a line a mile long and he could only sell a little bit.

Even now as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down - in USA there was little impact of the war on general citizens. I see it in med shortages and we even were back ordered on saline. We still are limited on pain meds IV administered and antibiotics. Every time someone wonders why I scream THERE IS A WAR ON AND THOUSANDS OF GUYS ARE COMING HOME IN PIECES YOU IDIOT! - for which someone higher up grabs my arm and tells me to calm down and that starts an argument about who is the idiot - them or me? Since my son is in the thick of it all (although I know he is really above it all) I get a bit of slack - mine serves and theirs don't. He did his bit in Iraq and Afghanistan - I have the flag to prove it - flown over a war zone - terrific.

Anyway that is the war part - and that when this whole India thing was over I headed out through Afghanistan and traveled through it (Kabul to Herat) by bus. Not many white women can saw that - especially to have done it alone.

Where am I in Nepal? I am going to post this so I have it down and am in 2012 maybe I keep pecking away at it during the year and not leave such gaps. bye now.

So! I land in Kathmandu and move back in time an indeterminate amount of decades. One thing I noticed was several Anglos sporting bandages on their foreheads. I thought this must be a really rowdy place with lots of drunken brawls for these guys to have black eyes and damaged heads. It took a few weeks to see that it was from the low hanging lintels of the hotel doors in Nepal - as the average height is 5'4" or something like that. These poor guys, mostly stoned from too much ganja (weed) didn't notice they were running into door tops, being 5'10" and +6' in many cases. They were the Kareem of the mountains.



I set myself up in a hotel to see what was up, what was to eat, and most importantly what was to smoke. The cafes (I think I remember that they were called pie shops because they served western style pie) were set up for foreigners to eat pie, drink chai and smoke ganja. The preferred method of smoking was a chilum pipe which is a smoke stack looking affair, made of natural clay that was filled with leaves of pot and hashish was placed on the top. It was held with two hands, some what like making a whistle with your thumbs and using the palms as an echo chamber although instead of blowing and making sound one puffed on the pipe smoke you were pulling into your hands and inhaling massive amounts of grade A ganja and hash. The smoke was so thick in these places that one never needed to touch a chilum and they would get a buzz. The flies were so stoned they could be petted - if anyone cared to pet a fly. There were people from all over the world. Australia, Germany, Holland, USA of course, England, Ireland, France and Italy to name a few. A mish mash of people smoking and tripping out in Kathmandu.

I hung out in the pie shops and had my room over the shop directly facing the street. There were times that I just held onto my bed and thought that if I just stay here and don't move, it will all clear up in a matter of time. How I had any ability to think at all is the grace of God. I will spare my revelations - and they were many and unraveled many ideas I had in my head - which was the purpose of my trip in the first place. I never was one to indulge in anything but that which was supposed to expand my mind and spirit (however misguided that was). There was a morning I woke up from a sleep to the sounds of people in the street below. I looked out the window and saw a line of men squatting and having their morning bowel movement and smoking cigarettes, chatting away as if this was a social occasion. I went back to my bed as I really didn't want to watch a bunch of guys taking a shit. About 30 minutes later there was a squall of squealing noises and the sound of animals running down the street. I got up again and looked out to see that the swine had been let out of their pens and they headed for the poop to gobble it up like it was desert. I couldn't pull myself away from the sight of these pigs with crap running out the side of their mouths and eating up every bit of crap that was deposited from the guys who work in the pie shops and cook our food daily. Whoa that was a sight I shall never erase from my mind.

I understood why there wasn't the human waste lying around in Nepal like there was in India. Not enough pigs, I guess. It was a daily routine that I just learned to stay on the bed until it was all over.

I moved from the first hotel over the pie shop to another place that didn't have a shop under it that was cheaper and less noisy and set myself up there. It was on the Swayambu Stupa line of sight over the river. We always called it the Swayambu river but doing a search now I found there isn't a river actually named that. I'm lazy and will refer it to the Swayambu river because that is the way I think of it. The Stupa is a Shrine to Buddha with the Bodi tree and the eyes on all four side of the top that is one of the symbols of Kathmandu. It is an active temple with chanting monks and blowing of their horns making the most haunting music ever.

There was a division of the area by the river - those who were in Swayambu and those in Kathmandu proper. I was a Kathmandu person - never living over on the other side. I was 22 years old, smoking waaay more than I ever thought I would ever partake of the weed and then at the same time someone gave me some acid (LSD) straight from Berkley, at the same time I was swallowing opium balls to control the dysentery (remember the guys cooking my food taking a communal crap? they use their hands to wipe - just wrap your mind around that for a minute), and that day truly "blew my mind". It was in May, a holiday to celebrate Buddha's birthday and without thinking of what I was doing - it all went in to this very little person. I was and still am 5'3" and have never weighed more that 120 unless I was pregnant. I was out of my fucking mind!!!

The monks were chanting, the army was marching and I was standing in the river trying to get a grip on reality which was running away from me at a rapid rate of speed. I started holding on to the ground for dear life hoping this wasn't the trip I would never return from like Charlie on the MTA (old song - look it up). I couldn't get a control of my head for love or money and did the only thing I could think of.

Standing in the river I called on The Lord Jesus Christ to help me. Now mind you, I have been in India, immersed in yoga, Theosophy and Vedanta (the deepest form of Hinduism) during my stay and before I even got there. I always thought Jesus was just a collection of stories about a guy that maybe or maybe not walked around much like the Holy men of yonder years. One thing I always believed though was that God was real and for some dumb reason, He loved me personally. So - I made my plea.

I sensed a voice thought inside of my mind and heart that said "why are you calling on me?", to which I answered, "everyone says you are the Savior and I need to be saved and I need it now", to which I sensed that I was through seeking through mind expanding anything - except study and the drugs were over for good. So it was. Never did I pick up a cigarette, pot, mushroom or acid again - it was over and I was delivered!

I would like to say that the misery of the "trip" was over but it wasn't. I still had to go through the whole mess of the drug trip to the extent that I ended up talking to a Catholic Priest looking to join a convent to escape my life. This didn't make me any smarter, it just "put the fear of God in me", in such a way that I knew I would never go back.

The Priest was (as most of my encounters with Priests have been) kind of weird. I wasn't a Catholic - it isn't the kind of organization that one just joins - so there was lots of stuff I needed to do first. He talked to me for awhile and I wandered off. Thinking I would do what was needed if that was the path I was to take.

I managed to get back to my room and hold on to my bed until it was all over - the Monks chanting over the river and all the energy that was vibrating though out the universe and me. I finally came down to some sense of normalcy and started to piece my life back together that had been blown apart. The first thing to hit was bronchitis from hell. I coughed up gunk that I could never thought could come out of my body. It made it for sure that I would never smoke another thing - at least up to now and I can't imagine starting up again now.

This all happened within the first month of my time in Nepal. I stayed for 4 months - so there is much more to tell but this is all for now. This is the Passover story where the Last Supper is the Communion and on the third day Christ rises. I never think of it as Easter (which is pagan in origin) but the end of the Passover where the Blood was put on the lintel of the houses and the Angel of Death Passed Over and the Hebrew children were spared. All this other stuff is not in my mind set. Anyway, I need to get to bed before I fall apart. Tata for now. I hope to get back with the rest of the story because this is only 7 mos in to a 24 month journey.

Now - when I met John, sitting on his perch, there was a girl drawing a sketch of him as he squatted there. I joined them and started a conversation. John hopped down from the pedestal when the drawing was finished and the three of us went to a lassie (a yogurt drink) shop and got acquainted.

The girl was Joanie - newly arrived from Africa where she was working on a development of a village. She had a Masters degree from Sarah Lawrence University. I was impressed. Me, a high school drop out in the 10th grade. She was a neat gal and I took a liking to her right away. We hung out in Bombay for a short while until the John thing turned up and I went to the caves from the previous story.

After we looked through the caves and were appropriately impressed we left the dry town the events took place in and I headed for Varanasi. The Ganges, the Holy City, as if I hadn't my fill of cremation, I was going to see lots of it.

John and I parted ways and I stayed on in Varanasi. I found a hostel to stay in for a couple of nights and wandered around the city. It is OLD. Eventually I found a guest house type of hotel and set up to read the Bagavagita - the poem of the pantheon of Hindu gods. I also came down with a terrific case of dysentery and discovered sugi (Hindi for cream of wheat) that finally was the cure. During one of my sitting at the ghats (cremation site) I saw a sadu (quite dead) floating his way to the ocean without being cremated. It turns out that the sadus (holy men) and babies can be tossed in whole without being ashes first because they are without sin.

As I sat there day after day, meditating on life and death a women began to bring me a slice of cantaloupe every day. I never could figure out why. I wandered through the city and ran into Joanie of all people. We got reacquainted and I regaled her with my tales of John and the Ajanta Caves - with the cremation of the poor couple. We really hit it off as friends that for some reason or other would last.

After about a week or more in Varanasi, I was getting close to my visa end of six months. I decided to head for Kathmandu, Nepal. I made it to New Delhi and got a visa, got on a plane and set out. A young Nepalise guy plunked himself down next to me on the plane, with a deep sigh that said alot. We chatted on the flight ,which wasn't very long, and he was my guide to Nepal.

He was a very good looking guy and easy to like. He dealt cards at the casino - so he even had a job. He led me to the hotels where the foreigners stay and I got a room. I will finish the Kathmandu story another day.

Never know what to do with this blog. Is it about now or about stuff that happened 40 years ago? I guess that which happened 40 years ago impacts today in someway - as long as one has memory. My journey to India and around the world shaped who I am today and certainly makes me a different kind of American. When a person spends 2 years out of the country and long enough in a place like India, you loose the American centric thinking. At least I did.



I found a piece I wrote some time back:



The bus shuttered to a dusty stop. The road and as far as eye could see was dry dust. We collected our packs and dragged off into the dry afternoon. John and I had arrived at the Ajanta Caves. I had met John a week or so ago as he was perched - for all the world- like a gangly white bird - on a pedestal outside of the Rex Hotel in Bombay. He had spent 3 months (count them 3 months) in a Bombay opium den and was just re-emerging into the alternate reality that I choose to refer to a the "real world". I mean - I liked by drugs as well as the next guy but 3 months?? His hair was thin, fine and matted into wads with shoots sticking out like rays from the sun in a kindergarten drawing. He wore John Lennon style glasses and white kurta and pajamas.

Now finishing the story.
We trudged up to the entrance of the cave area. In my mind I see these high cliffs where the Buddhas are set up in caves. There are steps slanted along the side of the canyon that you walk up to the caves. At the bottom is a green park with a pool of water fed by a waterfall at the end of the canyon. It is all super green from the dusty street we just walked through.

We decided to camp in the grass at the bottom of the caves. It is so odd, even now thinking about it, that I really didn't know this guy - he wasn't a lover, or even a person I particularly liked, just a guy that said to me one day, "I would like to attend the Ajanta Caves with you", so I said O.K. I had wanted to leave Bombay but didn't want to go back to Madras and it was getting closer and closer to visa expiring - and here I am - at the bottom of the caves with this guy whose grip on reality was rather frail and he was full of lice on top of it. I discovered that lovely fact when he was scratching for all he was worth and asked me to look at his head and see what the problem was. I did and saw my first case of head lice. What to do? Cut off all of his hair - that's what - so I did. I became a cosmetologist years later but this was my first hair cut. Fortunately, he needed all of his hair removed, that was easy.

We left our gear at the bottom of the caves and headed up to the chai stand at the top of the path before we started looking at the caves. A tour bus pulled up and a group of Rajistanies (people from the state of Rajistan), not sure of the spelling, but they are very colorful people. When National Graphic magazine does stuff on India, they frequently use these people due to their jewelry and bright clothing. The women cover their faces with coins, attached to their ears and lips, use scarves to wrap around their heads but their bellies hang out for all the world to see. They were just tourists out to see the caves.

We sat up at the chai shop and ate cookies and chai while we waited for the group to pass on by as it was quite a crowd with kids and all. So we sat. The afternoon was dropping into the end of the day and all of a sudden we heard wailing and crying coming from the pool area at the bottom of the caves, close to our gear. We were trying to figure out what was going on - there were too many languages and little English - so it was difficult. It turned out that one of the women leaned too far into the pool and fell in. She was drowning because she couldn't swim, so her husband jumped in after her to save her. He couldn't swim either so they both died. The tourists were all related to each other - so it was a disaster of the first order. Kids lost parents, parents lost their kids and siblings lost siblings. It was awful.

We left the chai shop and went back to our camp site so to speak. We were sitting on our bedrolls listening to the commotion. As we sat and watched there started an orange thread winding down the side of the cliff. It was a whole monastery of monks, each carrying a bundle of wood, walking in single file, to the bottom of the canyon to make pyres for the dead. Twilight was falling as they piled up the wood, wrapped the bodies and placed them on top. They chanted their prayers and set the wood alight as night fell. We sat in awe of the fire and the odor of burning flesh as they were cremated right there. What are the odds of that happening on a casual trip to the caves?

The family sat for awhile and then left just as they would have on the usual trip. We really had no choice but to continue our plan to sleep there for the night so we could take in the caves the whole next day. The fire burned until we fell asleep - oh to sleep the way of the young. Wish I could now.

drinking again. It seems as if I like to write when the beer is in the blood. I'm watching a Kung Fu Movie. Michelle Yeo is my favorite actress in the whole world. She did Crouching Tigars, Hidden Dragons. I am now watching Tai Chi Master with Jet Lee and Michele Yeo. I love that stuff - especially since my son is a Kung Fu Black Belt. I know the flying and a lot of the Ping direction is so much special effects and all but still he is brilliant in directing the action of Kung Fu.

My

See if I can continue

Back in Madras - I remember the women's last name was Patel. It is as common a name as Smith here - so I'm not tipping any nasty secretes. Anyway - I hooked up with Clare and we got an apartment in Madras that the first person I met in the airport lived in and moved out of. We set up an apt - sharing a one bedroom, living room, kitchen and bedroom - this was right behind the Hotel that we started in. It was still close and the disco tech that was there playing Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel in beautiful surround sound attracted the college boys from the Madras Institute of Technology and the party was ON. My time in Madras began to unfold. The guys from MIT knew connections to get ganja (pot, grass, weed - you know what I mean) and Clare and I began our life together. The guy across the hall was a Yoga Guru and attracted lots of westerners to the studio to take instruction from him. Through the hallway we met loads of guys that were living at the Theosophical Society guest houses and coming to the yoga studio for lessons. There was Douglas, James and William. I picked up on James as we had the same sarcastic sense of the absurd.

We were hanging over the balcony of the stairway together one day - looking out at the world and a newish VW bug was parked out front. We both started laughing at the same time - looked at each other and the affair was on. We both though that WOW - what a modern fancy car that was to see on the street - and then jumped to - for God's sake it is a bug - not a Cadillac. In India it looked like a limo.

I rode on the front of his bike down the palm lined streets. We sat and talked under a Banyan Tree (one of the largest in the world) in Adyar - on theosophical grounds- for hours on end about how the world was made, the truth about God, the living mind of the universe - on and on and on.

God no where. We got drunk together and stumbled down the middle of a Madras Street and realized that we were the freest people in the world and if we wanted to have dinner in Paris, France tonight we could hope on plane and do it. Maybe only once but we could. Just didn't want to. So we stumbled back to my apt and slepttogether for the night. A few nights strung together for a little while.

Sleep - yes sleep. It is now 3:09 in the am where I am - California. Sleep alludes me. The older (maybe not sure - but a boyfriend 20 years my senior - 40 to my 20 told me he didn't sleep as much as he used to) I get the less I can sleep. It is a drag because I used to like to sleep and still do - just can't.


Anyway - I woke up after a great sleep and they fed me breakfast and then bid their goodbyes and sent me back to Helen's with the driver. Back at Helen's I just settled into living with them for awhile. I would walk around Bombay and just take in the rush of the throng of people there.

My mother knew an Indian woman who was having a torrid affair with another Indian guy that was a friend of the man who would become the father of my sister. I knew her name at that time and knew she lived in Bombay somewhere. As my luck would have it - someone Helen knew also knew this lady when I mentioned her. (don't ask me how all of this shit came together the way it did - it just did.)

I located her and she invited me to her house to stay for a couple of days. She had never married. She was of the Brahman cast (priestly cast and therefore the highest cast in the system). I managed to get to her family house by train and she welcomed me into her home. The women were quite separated from the men in the home and I was with the women. We were all introduced - extended family living under the same roof - maiden (although not a virgin - if what my mother told me was true) aunt living with her parents and brothers, wives, nieces and nephews.

I had dinner with them and the woman (can't for life of me remember her name at the moment) invited me to hang out with them for the night and next day take in some sites with her and her niece. I spent the night there and again slept like I wish I could now. I got up in the am and had breakfast with the family as if I belonged and felt so relaxed - it is hard to explain the Indian culture of hospitality.

When you are invited in, you become one of the family - no matter how different you may be. I would just sit back and listen to the language and be lulled into a blissful state of relaxation and forget I was American and different. I hung out for part of the day and we headed out for a beach site. It was somewhat of an entertainment center of a beach and they had camels that could be hired for a ride.

Just the thought of riding on a camel with this distant contact from my mother's life of the '50's was just such a mind blower. We rode on the camel all over the beach and paid our few rupees and walked around for the rest of the day with this little niece. It was quite an experience.

I ended up back at Helen's and continued my visiting with all of her friends. Many people she knew were in the movie business there in the Indian Hollywood. Actresses came to her house for lunch and we went to their places for lunch as well. Most of these "stars" were slightly older and had moved from playing the main love interest to playing the older sister type roles - much as Mr. Singh and moved from the romantic leads to the heavy.

I finally decided to go back to Madras and my friends there. I hopped a train and headed back.

To be continued - I need to sleep sometime.