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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.

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The Bolthole1
 

Hind Cartwheel1

  • 1. 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.
  • 2. 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.
  • 3. 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.
  • 4. 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.
  • 5. 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.
  • 6. 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.
  • 7. 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.
  • 8. 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.
  • 9. 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.
  • 10. 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.
  • 11. 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.
  • 12. 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.
  • 13. 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.
  • 14. 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.
  • 15. 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.
  • 16. 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.
  • 17. 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.
  • 18. 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.
  • 19. 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.
  • 20. 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.
  • 21. 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.
  • 22. 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.
  • 23. 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.
  • 24. 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.
  • 25. 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.
  • 26. 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.
  • 27. 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.
  • 28. 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.
  • 29. 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.
  • 30. 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.
  • 31. 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.