I flew to London and then to Luxembourg and then I got a ticket on what later became the national airlines of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, or Southern Yemen, but was then called Brothers Air Services. Their fleet consisted entirely of DC-6Bs, but at least they were pressurized. We made a stopover in Cairo and then lumbered on through the night. I was the only sahib on the plane, and all the Indian passengers put down their seats and spread out these futons and the whole plane suddenly became a living room where people were having tea.
Still, I wasn’t even slightly prepared for the culture shock I was about to experience. I got to Bombay, as it was then called, early on a very rainy morning. The monsoons were flowing and I had never seen rain like that. It was raining chains. It was raining ropes. The whole damn country was like a cow pissing on a flat rock, and it was something to behold.
On the bus coming in from the airport, I heard a little commotion in back. The driver stopped and pulled over and went to check it out. When he came forward again, he was carrying a little stick figure of a man who had just died in the back of the bus. Reverentially, he took him to the side door, put him down gently on the sidewalk, and then drove away. Not much paperwork involved there.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do next, so I thought I would go to the best hotel in town and ask them to recommend a place that might be in my budget. I went to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, and they sent me to a place that had probably been pretty luxurious back during the days of the Raj but had since fallen on dark and musty times.
I stayed in my room listening to the rain for a couple of days while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. Then I took a train to Lucknow, where I met Kazim’s father for the first time. Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan was a well-known poet and a prominent politician who had been the leader of the All-India Muslim League. He was also a very, very devout Shiite Muslim, and after the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, the Indian government had decided to freeze all of his assets on religious grounds, and so he could not sell or do anything with all of his treasures.
The family had two palaces. Everybody lived in the city palace in Lucknow, but it had been pretty well stripped of ornamentation by the Hindu government. The one in the countryside was totally extraordinary. It was festooned with things you could have found on the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There was Victorian bric-a-brac beyond all comprehension, as well as furnishings and art that dated back to the Moguls.
There was also a fantastic 700,000-volume library of books dating back to the seventh century. Kazim’s father could not sell any of them so they were all being eaten by book worms. In that library, I once found the body of a dead bat with a two-and-a-half-foot wingspan.
Kazim’s father had many servants in the palace but no money to pay them. Their families had always been in his service, and so they kept the same arrangement they had always had. I had my own suite of rooms and came and went as I pleased. Often I would happen through while Kazim wasn’t there, but it was still cool.
I wound up spending a lot of time with Kazim’s dad. He was philosophical about how the government had seized all of his property. It made him sad, but he was almost Buddhist in his nonattachment. What counted for him was being the proper servant for the will of Allah. He figured that was what was now happening, just as I did.
I was not on a spiritual pilgrimage in India. Instead, I was doing what I always do, which was hanging out with intent. I went to McLeod Ganj in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama had his lamasery in exile. He was there at the time and in the process of giving a cycle of sermons that the Dalai Lama always delivered at a certain age. He spoke in Tibetan so I didn’t understand any of it, but it was still interesting just to be there and listen.
The thing that had largely attracted me to Dharamsala was the abandoned Presbyterian mission camp on the top of this mountain where a guy with whom I had shared a dorm suite at Wesleyan was then living. It was a dreadful climb getting up there but from the top of this ridge, I could see the entire Brahmaputra basin, which is vast and beautiful. I trekked up and down and back up to that ridge for about a month and a half.
At one point, I actually found myself on top of a mountain in India with a holy man, a Tibetan lama. He was using one of the cabins to meditate, but was not averse to my coming to talk with him. He knew English pretty well because he had taught for a year at Bryn Mawr, and he was serious about automobile mechanics. In the Tibetan time sense, things happen in synchrony, never with causality except on a spiritual level. Since there is nothing more causal than an automobile engine, the lama felt that if he could understand how it worked, he would have a better insight into how those in the West regarded time.
I didn’t trip that much on the mountain because it was superfluous, but I did take acid in Khajuraho, a group of nine-hundred-year-old Hindu and Jain temples south of Jhansi that are famous for their erotic sculptures. In splendid isolation, I tripped in those amazing ruins. Looking at all those bas-reliefs of people screwing in every manner and position imaginable while I was high on acid gave me an entirely new sense of the nature of religion.
I encountered many other hippies on the road; they were pretty common there in those days. Many of them were English and had become highly susceptible to shedding all their Western trappings, putting on dhotis, and wandering across the plains. Sometimes they would be in pretty lousy health, and I would try to persuade them that they needed to come in from the cold for a little while because their bodies had not been adapted by countless generations of parasite gobbling. But they had already cast their lot. They weren’t going to have their minds changed by me.
I was in India for nine and a half months, always traveling alone. I did not get laid even once. But I did take out the Dalai Lama’s sister a couple of times. She was a schoolteacher, about twenty-five years old. Compared to the Muslims, the Tibetans were pretty easygoing about things like that. I knew this because Kazim had a sister who was about my age, and the family thought it would be a good idea if I took her out to the movies. For some reason, that was something you could do with a girl back then that wouldn’t get anyone culturally stirred up. She would go with me, covered up from head to toe in a burka and looking like a giant black tent, and I would sit next to her in the theater with no idea what she was thinking or what she even looked like. Talk about a blind date. There was actually something pretty sexy about it all, but things never went beyond the movies.
As happens sooner or later to almost everyone who travels in India, I eventually got pretty sick. Fortunately, it was toward the end of my time there. By then, I had become transfixed by the burning ghats in Benares on the Ganges where they incinerated the dead bodies. I could not tear myself away from the sight. I don’t know if it was then or when I took a fairly lengthy rowboat ride on the Ganges that did it, but I came down with this flu-like thing that had me coughing blood for ages after I got home.
Although my trip to India was not a spiritual pilgrimage like other people back then were doing, very little about my life has not been a form of spiritual exploration. I know that I shed some sort of skin while I was there and came back a different person, in that I could more plainly see the virtues of being more of a Republican than I had been. India, then more than now, was just a grab bag of miscellaneous products of social chaos, some of which were beautiful, some of which were appalling.
A character in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India says that India will show you your true self. In that sense, it’s like the world’s oldest and most complex Rorschach test. Among other things, it showed me that I was much too susceptible to horror and so when I returned to America, I had a different perspective about all that.
In terms of what so many people my age were doing back then by wandering the world in search of spiritual enlightenment, the best insight I can offer is something I was told many years later in Japan by the abbot of the Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto, which is the mother lode of Zen. When I walked in to see him, the abbot was sitting next to a paper wall divider with cranes brushed on it that was thought to be the oldest existing painting in Japan. There were signs everywhere that said NO SMOKING, but the abbot himself was smoking like a furnace. As we were talking, he kept lighting up one cigarette right after another. But then he understood irony.
“You know,” he said to me, “we used to see a lot of your kind around here.” And I said, “My kind? What would that be?” He said, “You know what I mean. The young Westerner who takes LSD and decides that he is a Buddhist. And doesn’t actually have to put in any of the work necessary to become one.”
I said, “Guilty as charged. I can’t defend myself about that, but did you ever take acid?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah.” I said, “So, what were your thoughts on it?” And he said, “I couldn’t understand why someone would want to take a brief vacation in a place where I was already living and intended to spend my entire life, if I could make myself capable of it.”