IHAD NO IDEA HOW LONG I had been sitting there, zoning out and tripping on the icaros, the chants. The patter of rain had transformed into an undulating wave of crimson dots, while a vocal ribbon of colours coiled upwards in helical formation like the strands of DNA. My stomach gurgled; it dawned on me that I could see the inside of my stomach where an orange-ish liquid formed pools in its folds like prehistoric shale in a network of antediluvian canyons. This orange liquid was now seeping through every hidden cave of my body, saturating my flesh like a spring thaw permeating the earth, like what people described when they talked of LSD.
Suddenly alarmed by this vision, I opened my eyes. Don Miguel’s head seemed to have become elongated and was pushing backward at an unnatural angle. I then turned and stared at my neighbour. Her fingers were impossibly long, and they pointed and moved with a creepy fluidity, each with a life of its own. The walls of the hall were swollen and they pulsed as though we were cradled in the womb of a living thing. At that point, another wave of nausea threw my stomach into spasms. I squeezed my eyes shut and reached for my bucket. The red-head next to me was retching loudly between tormented sobs. The purge had begun.
My ears began to buzz with a crescendo of vibration and my heart pounded along with a distant drumbeat. It sounded just like a dhol, the barrel-sized drum beaten at the Sufi shrines of Punjab on Thursday nights. My father had always forbidden me to visit these shrines. Sufis, the mystics, were heretics according to him and he had no tolerance for their antics. For him, they represented the adulteration of the true teachings of Islam as contained in the Quran and Hadith, the latter being the saying of the Prophet, a corpus four times thicker than the Quran if combined with Sirah, the deeds of the Prophet.
I began to breathe deeply, thinking about my intention. I wanted to know if Paradise and Hell were real. I wanted to purge my demons. As soon as I thought of this intention, it sprang visibly before my eyes like a rope of shimmering colours that stretched to infinity. This rope coiled itself around me and began pulling me out of my body. In a panic I opened my eyes and looked at myself. My white robe seemed to have lost its fullness now. Then a realization hit me: I wasn’t in my robe. I screamed but no sound came out of my mouth. In the next moment, I was engulfed by a dark stillness.
I had no name, no body and no feelings. I was just a presence, a floating awareness in a dark, cozy womb. I had no idea how long I remained suspended there; and then slowly, drop by drop, I began to take form again.
I was back inside my body, walking up a steep green slope. The air was luminescent and exquisitely fresh, and the sky was a radiant purple but there was no sun. My legs had a mind of their own as they carried me along, pushing me higher and higher toward the top. I knew with a strange certainty that someone was waiting for me up there.
I was breathless when I reached the tabletop summit; my ears filled with the ringing of an old-fashioned bicycle bell. About a hundred or so feet away, a wiry little man stood next to a black-framed bicycle that was leaning on its kickstand. It looked like a made-in-Pakistan Sohrab roadster and was fitted with a rear carrier. He was waving at me. Filled with curiosity, I marched toward him. I was about ten feet away when he called my name.
‘Babu Ismael!’
How the hell did this strange-looking fellow know my name? And where did this ‘babu’ thing come from? Babu was the word used by the villagers of Punjab for an educated city dweller.
Garbed in the traditional dress of rural Punjab, a white kurta over a white dhoti—an unstitched cloth wrapped around the waist and legs and knotted at the waist, resembling a long skirt—the fellow was barely five feet tall and wore a huge white turban. His eyes were extraordinarily bright and his skin was wrinkled like the parchment of an ancient scroll. The old face had a fine, white stubble.
‘Hope is the engine that drives the universe forward,’ he said in a lilting, fluid and unaccented English.
Tongue-tied, I merely nodded. The intensity of his gaze made my legs tremble, but I wasn’t afraid of him exactly.
‘Right person, right time, right place makes what we call action; everything else is merely a reaction.’ I remained quiet, still wondering who he was and how he knew my name.
‘Babu, your intention and mine has met across many worlds and made this moment possible,’ he said. ‘I am Khidr,’ he declared as he stepped forward and extended his right hand. ‘Chacha Khidr.’
He had only one tooth in his mouth and it stuck out from his lower lip like a shark’s fin. Curiously, his speech had no hint of impairment one might expect from a toothless man. The skin of his hand was as smooth as silk.
‘I’m so honored to meet you Chacha Khidr,’ I said, not sure if I could believe my ears. Was this the vision of al-Khidr out of legend? He was known as the mysterious prophet, the eternal wanderer and the hidden initiator of those who walked the mystical path. He was known to have coached even Moses in divine mysteries.
‘Just call me “Chacha”,’ he said. His crisp voice, like his brilliant eyes, was in sharp contrast with his ancient tottering appearance. Al-Khidr was known as the Green One, always wearing a green robe. But there was certainly nothing green about him. This man’s appearance was clearly Punjabi, as opposed to the Hebrew Prophets.
‘Yes, Chacha.’ I nodded as I clasped the tight-gripped smooth hand. Since the word Chacha meant uncle in Urdu, the old man had to be from Pakistan or India.
‘Babu, you’re going to help us clean up a big mess,’ he said.
‘I am?’
‘You’ll be leaving for Pakistan.’ His tone was straightforward.
‘Pakistan!’ I shook my head in disbelief. ‘I don’t have the money for that kind of travel.’
‘Once you land in Lahore, we’ll contact you,’ he said, ignoring my protest.
‘Fine,’ I was fully aware that I was in the grip of an Ayahuasca vision which would evaporate as soon as the chemical burnt itself out in the circuitry of my brain.
‘Fate has chosen you for a huge task. Looking at you, I can see that fate has chosen wisely.’
‘Chosen me for what?’
The old man climbed onto his bicycle, his feet barely touching the ground. I saw he was wearing a pair of golden khusa with upturned toes.
‘It’s a mysterious world we live in, Babu,’ he said. ‘Start preparing for the trip.’
Before I could fire off any more questions, he started pedalling away. He quickly picked up speed and in a few seconds he turned into a vertical streak of brilliant light against the purple sky. Then he was gone.
I was left with an overwhelming sense of loneliness in this oppressive vastness, broken only by soft rolling mounds of green. Overpowered by convulsions in my stomach, I collapsed on the grass and began retching.
In the next moment everything vanished. It was pitch dark around me. And then, I nearly screamed when I felt a hand grabbing my shoulder. I sat bolt upright in panic.
‘Open your eyes,’ I heard a voice nearby say. Somebody else was strumming a guitar in the background.
When I opened my eyes, I was staring into the face of Don Miguel. The black headband across his forehead was soaking with sweat, and every muscle on his face was alive with movement in the flickering light of the candles. I was sitting with my back against the wall, my breathing now calm and slow.
The head shaman squatted next to me; the vomit bucket in his hand was pressed against my chest. It had collected most of my purge. The rest made my robe feel sticky and wet against my skin and I smelled horrible.
‘Are you feeling okay?’ one of the Don’s female assistants asked gently.
‘He’s fine,’ said Don Miguel. His face pulsed with so many emotions it was hard to guess what he was feeling or thinking.
The truth is I was feeling fine and was determined to tell them that; it was one hell of a trip. But I couldn’t put these words together into a sentence.
‘You’ve just met with your destiny, Ismael,’ Don Miguel said but I noticed he never moved his lips.
It was the most astonishing thing; he had somehow transferred his words directly into my mind without actually speaking. I wanted to say something, but once again I was lost for words. It was shocking to hear his voice speaking in my head, saying my name. How the hell did he know it? I doubted he would bother remembering the names of every participant present. How could he possibly know what my vision had been? Perhaps it was just one of his stock phrases to keep the crowd mesmerized by their respective trips.
‘Hold on to your breath. You’re not done yet,’ Don Miguel said to me as he and his assistant got up and moved on to attend to another participant who was slumped on his knees and elbows. The guy’s head was completely inside a bucket.
I closed my eyes and let my mind take me wherever it wanted to go. The guitar was incredibly soothing and gradually faded to complete silence.
I was at peace. After a while I was given another cup to drink, which went down effortlessly this time. The second cup didn’t lift me off, literally speaking, to the other world like the first one had. Nor did it facilitate a meeting with any strange beings. But it did take me into my past and gave me new perspectives and insights on secrets long buried there. Most of these visions were gloomy and involved tense interactions with my father. I had just a fleeting glimpse of my deceased mother lying beside me in bed, paralyzed. I was a year old when she died of polio.
As Abba’s sole heir, I had been a complete disappointment. His presence hovered over my childhood like a storm cloud, unpredictable and full of thunder and lightning. My defiance and resolve had only earned me shame and guilt. For the first time in my life, thanks to a little earthen cup of Ayahuasca, I saw my rebellious stance as a sign of having a healthy soul that refused to submit to Abba’s twisted worldviews.
The sacred vine of the Amazon was truly helping me transform my pain and guilt into self-awareness, and I began to understand my father’s limitations. There had never been anything personal in his actions and thoughts. He had just been regurgitating what had been fed to him: a narrative manufactured and perfected over centuries and never questioned or critically analyzed. I felt sorry for him really. He was a prisoner, a victim of indoctrination. I wanted to forgive him and I wanted to see him.
The rest of the night blazed past. As sunlight streaked into the hall from a window facing east, it was hard to believe I had been sitting in this place for the last ten hours. People were stretching, yawning and beginning to stagger to their feet. They approached Don Miguel one by one for a farewell handshake and he hugged each of them before they left the hall.
My neighbour, the red-headed girl, got to her feet and threw herself into my arms, giving me a good three-minute-long hug. I patted her head without saying anything. There was nothing for me to say.
I approached the shaman feeling a little unsteady.
‘Thank you, Don Miguel,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.’
‘A great task has been given to you, Ismael. Make yourself available to it no matter how strange it may appear.’
‘How do you know, if I may ask, what kind of task I’ve been given?’ I asked.
He tapped the headband across his temple and looked me in the eye.
‘The people of the spirit world have their own special method of communication,’ he said.
‘What do you recommend I do?’ I asked, recalling my encounter with a strange-looking man who had ordered me to start preparing for a trip to Pakistan.
‘Learn to shut-off your analytical mind from time to time. All wisdom is in learning how to go with the proverbial flow,’ he said, giving me a warm smile.
‘Provided you know what the flow looks like,’ I said.
‘You’ll know,’ he assured me. ‘You’ll learn to recognize it.’
I nodded and headed toward the exit. I couldn’t wait to take off my robe, which reeked of putrefied soil. I longed for a shower with the special kind of urgency I previously reserved for getting laid.
The locker room was buzzing with activity. The night’s excursion had left people dazed, dishevelled, and keeping to themselves. After taking the most invigorating shower of my entire life, I put on my clean clothes: a pair of red chinos and a gray fleece top. By the time I stepped out on the street, it was 7.30 in the morning.
The sky was blue and the air balmy; traffic was light since it was a Sunday. I began walking toward Columbus Circle to catch the northbound A-train. My body was stiff and disoriented and I felt like I was re-entering the real world after a long absence. My mind was still not fully obeying the practical commands of my brain, as though it sought to drag me deeper into the past.
After getting off the A-train at 110th Street, I stepped into a bagel shop on Cathedral Parkway. My toasted bagel with cream cheese and a black coffee tasted heavenly as I listened to the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ floating toward me from somewhere in the kitchen. In order to prepare myself for last night’s trip, I had abstained from the staples of modern life for two weeks. No coffee, cannabis, tea, beer or alcohol, meat of any kind, salt, spices or dairy. I had forgone the Internet, TV and social media. To complete my transformation into an ascetic zombie, I had also forced myself to stop hankering after women as I hung around the coffee houses near campus.
Savouring my breakfast, my mind quickly latched on to my encounter with the bright-eyed, ancient-looking man clad in his dhoti. The sound of the bicycle bell, the conversation we had, the task he had talked about and the manner in which he had turned into a streak of light before being swallowed by a vast green emptiness—it all remained vividly fresh in my mind, and I realized I was smiling at the memory.
The more I puzzled over the experience, the more convinced I became that my so-called task had something to do with reuniting with my father. I thought of my financial constraints that prohibited even contemplating such a trip. Perhaps Abba would help me out. After all, he was a rich man.
‘Something fundamental had changed within me during the Ayahuasca trip; something extraordinary that was beyond the pale of any rational analysis. To be able to think of my father in a compassionate way was absolutely new to me. But it was proof of a major shake-up in my psyche. Suddenly, I wanted to have a cup of tea with my Abba in the front lawn of my childhood house while we soaked up the warm late afternoon sun.
Ayahuasca had not only heightened my curiosity about the spirit world, it had also made me think about Paradise and Hell in a new way. Petra had told me that by insisting Paradise and Hell were nothing more than the work of my imagination, I had been acting out my personal convictions, all the while secretly believing otherwise. Maybe she was right. Perhaps I was unable to break free from the internal fight I had been having with my father all these years. It seemed as if I had lived my entire life as a reaction, while regarding myself as a man of action.