4:
The darkened room smelled sweet and musky and there was a fug of smoke in the air. On rice matting all around me lay Laotian men, most of them much older than myself, with their heads on hard, slanting pillows. In front of me a girl prepared my pipe. She took a thin metal spatula and dipped it in a bottle of liquid, then held it over a hot lamp so that the liquid bubbled and became thick enough to roll into a glutinous bead. She coaxed the bead into the pipe, held the bowl over the lamp, and passed me the mouthpiece to draw on. As I inhaled, I felt immediately restful and soothed, as if I was floating off on a soft, warm cloud.
This was my first taste of an opium den, and I rather liked it. It certainly beat the police cell I had been sitting in a couple of days earlier.
Becoming a Buddhist monk had not dampened my curiosity about the world, and I had long been curious to sample opium, which had played a hugely important role in China from the early eighteenth century. In those days, it had been the sole escape permitted to the coolie classes from their otherwise hideous daily grind, and it had continued to be so until the late 1940s, when it had been banned. It was clearly extraordinary stuff, and while I was in the East I was eager to understand for myself by trying it.
I had asked around in Bangkok and discovered that opium was frowned upon in Thailand but not actually illegal. If I wanted to try some, I was told it would be best to go to the north of the country. But I also heard that in neighbouring Laos they still had the kind of opium dens where one could go in and pay to smoke as many pipes as one liked. To me that sounded a much better option.
Getting into the former French colony of Laos had proved harder than I anticipated. I boarded a train in Bangkok bound for the capital, Vientiane, and when we crossed the border, I presented my Rhodesian passport, as usual.
“What is this?” scowled the border official.
“It’s my passport,” I said.
“We don’t recognise this passport,” he said, pushing the document away.
“It’s from a British colony called Southern Rhodesia and it’s a valid passport,” I said, trying to sound firm without putting his back up.
But there was no persuading the fellow. He had simply never heard of a country called Rhodesia, North or South, and he was not prepared to let me through. For my part, I was not prepared to turn around and go back to Bangkok just because an ignorant official knew nothing about geography. As a compromise, he said he would have to consult a higher authority. He would send my passport to Vientiane to have it checked, and meanwhile I would just have to wait.
The waiting facilities consisted of a grotty cell, where I was consigned along with a ragtag bunch of other tired, dirty-looking travellers – most of them Thai – who had also been denied entry. There was no ventilation, and the cell was hot and sticky and reeked of stale sweat. I had proved on Mount Koya that I could cope with physical discomfort and deprivation, but I had no particular inclination to search those conditions out if they could be avoided. All I could do for the moment was find myself a space on the floor and settle down to wait. At least the city was very close to the border, so it should not take too long.
I had reckoned without the painfully slow pace of Laotian bureaucracy. Nobody was in any hurry to process me, and I passed first one night and then two, sustained on miserable portions of rice and tea served in filthy glasses, before the word finally came back that yes, Rhodesia did exist, and I was to be allowed into the country. I arrived in the dilapidated but still airy capital in the same clothes I had been wearing three days earlier, irritable and utterly exhausted. I found a small hotel where I treated myself to a long-overdue shower, and then addressed myself to the reason for my journey. I knew that opium was a way of easing cares away, and after my gruelling treatment on the border, I had never felt more in need of starting this experience.
“Can you tell me where the nearest opium den is?” I said discreetly to the desk clerk in shaky schoolboy French. If I had been misinformed, and Laos actually had zero tolerance of smoking opium, now would be the moment I found that out.
However, he responded as casually as if I had asked the way to the post office. I followed his directions and now here I was, floating away on my cloud, wanting for nothing. I liked it so much that when the effect began to wear off I had another pipe, and then another. It had been worth the trouble of getting here after all.
I was in no hurry to return to Bangkok, so I went back to the opium den the next night, and again the next. For two splendid weeks, I had about twenty pipes a day. Then I just stopped. Everyone I met was astonished that I could take all those pipes every day from scratch, and after two weeks solid not have any addiction at all. But I believe my monastic training and my basic strength of character had set me in good stead. I was as convinced then as I am now that drugs are fundamentally not a good thing, especially for people who have not had any kind of mental training. For anyone with fragilities in their psyche, narcotics may well accentuate those fragilities. Alternatively, for those who have hard lives from which they wish to escape, opium fulfils that wish. The drugs then become a refuge, and they will eventually take the person over. But in my case, I was not trying to escape, and I had not taken enough opium for it to start changing my physio-chemistry. I certainly did not need it to carry on with my life.
A year earlier, I had set out from Japan on a small freighter. I had worked out that this was the cheapest way of getting to Hong Kong, and it had the added benefit that it was scheduled to stop for a week in Shanghai. Foreign tourists were not allowed into China, so this was a rare opportunity for me to visit a city that had once been fabled as the Paris of the East, with the best art, the greatest architecture and the most thriving economy in Asia. Its old colonial buildings still looked very much as they must have done before the Communist revolution, even if Chairman Mao had turned everyone into drab, grey robots wearing jackets like his own. A few short years later, the Cultural Revolution would create an atmosphere of fear that would deter any of the population from engaging with a foreigner. But this had yet to happen, so a few of the locals were curious enough to try to talk to me, and I was able to have a sort of communication by writing Japanese characters on scraps of paper before rejoining the freighter to Hong Kong.
Arriving by sea at one of the greatest natural harbours in the world was a magnificent experience. In those days, Hong Kong still had a real waterfront, and it was not yet as wealthy a financial and commercial centre as it would become. I found my feet quickly. I managed to get a modestly paid but undemanding clerical job through an Italian businessman whom I had helped out while he was on a trip buying antiques in Japan, and I was invited to stay with a couple of English girls, whom I had also met in Japan, in the maid’s room of their flat in the residential area of Happy Valley. Thanks to my new boss and flatmates, I made a lot of social contacts very quickly, and was soon having a thoroughly good time. I made tentative steps into a more settled existence by buying my first tailored suit and opening my first bank account, with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank; these were the days when, if you were a young white person, you could open an account and they would grant you an overdraft almost immediately. But enjoyable as it all was, Hong Kong was still very much a British territory. There were English street names, English-language newspapers for sale on the street corners and British special constables on the beat, so to me the colony felt like a slightly larger version of what I had known in Rhodesia. In years to come I would make my home very comfortably here, bringing up my children in a fine house on the pinnacle of Hong Kong Island. But for the moment I was still hungry for experiences of the more traditional East, and I was by no means sure that this was the best place to find them. After a few months, I decided it was time to move on. Instead I would explore the unique culture of Thailand, which was the only Asian country to have kept the Western colonial powers at bay.
More than ninety percent of the Thai population is Buddhist, and Bangkok was – and is – a city of immense, awe-inspiring temples, vast monastic complexes with rows of golden Buddha statues and jewel-encrusted towers. The smell of incense hung everywhere in the air, and saffron-robed monks were a common sight in the streets. To walk around the city was to immerse oneself in a centuries-old Buddhist tradition, rather than the British colonial one.
Not that I was any great rarity as a foreigner. There was a thriving expat community, which greatly eased my entry into life in the city. I managed to get a job teaching English and maths at the American International School. I had no teaching qualifications but they were short of teachers, I had some university experience – even if it did not extend to a complete degree – and I imagine I must have been their best available option. I also found a place to live with an expat Englishman who had a spare room at a cheap rent, and whose house was near the school. My job was to teach eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and I approached it in the manner of an Englishman at a colonial school, maintaining strict discipline. The class had to stand up when I entered the room, and after they submitted their first homework assignments on random scraps of paper, I told them they had to buy proper homework books if they wanted any mark at all for their work. Whenever any of them were cheeky, I smacked their backsides with a ruler. I did not see anything old-fashioned or controversial about this: it was entirely normal by the standards of the education I myself had received. It was true I did not regard my schooldays with much affection, but they had equipped me with knowledge and confidence to go out into the world, so it seemed to me a perfectly good approach. And as the level of cheek in my class dramatically plummeted and the presentation and quality of their homework improved considerably, it was clear it was working.
My methods caused something of an uproar among the children, however. They started calling me ‘Hitler Higginson’ – a nickname that came to my attention when someone daubed it on a lavatory wall. I noticed some boys goose-stepping with one finger held above their upper lip in imitation of a toothbrush moustache, and the fact that they stopped the pantomime as soon as they realised I was watching confirmed that I was the target of their satire. I thwacked them for it, but I did not actually mind.
Unfortunately, I was none too popular with some of their parents, either. I raised eyebrows when I attended a parent-teacher conference wearing an ascot, the kind of silk cravat that people wear nowadays with morning suits at weddings. It was regarded as a sure sign that I was queer. This was seen as a shockingly bad thing in those days, although it was a prejudice I did not share, not least because any form of prejudice was the enemy of curiosity. At the same time, because I was the youngest member of staff, and more presentable than most of my middle-aged colleagues, I had teenage girls hanging around outside my classroom and competing for my attention. I caused further controversy when I sat on my desk in the lotus position during a civics class and talked about the principles of Buddhism. So while part of my class saw me as a Nazi disciplinarian, in some of their parents’ eyes I was an eccentric crank who could negatively influence their children. Perhaps it was no surprise that the headmaster did not know quite what to make of me. He would have been even more confused if he had known that I was actually a monk.
I was called into his study one day and told that some of the parents had brought a motion to have me dismissed. This was actually rather interesting: for all my stern approach to classroom behaviour and my flamboyant non-conformism, I took my job seriously and I wanted the children to learn. I was also confident that I was a reasonably good teacher, and I was unwilling to go without a fight.
What saved me was a split among the parents. The children were roughly divided between missionary and military families. The missionaries wanted me fired for having the temerity to beat their children’s backsides, but to the military lot I was a hero: they wanted me decorated for gallantry for bringing much-needed discipline to their children. Happily, the military group outnumbered the missionaries. One of their number reminded the headmaster that beating students was perfectly acceptable under Thai law, which reassured him that he was not going to get into any trouble for keeping me on, and I was allowed to continue teaching.
While all this was going on, I was invited one evening to an expat pyjama party. It was the kind of gathering where young men wore lipstick and nighties with balloons for breasts, and to my mind it was a grotesque affair. I ended up sitting on the sofa in my kimono, wondering how long I could leave it before discreetly slipping away. Next to me I noticed a tall, young Englishman in pyjamas and a thick woollen dressing gown that was absurdly out of place in the humid heat of Bangkok. He looked as alienated from the rest of the gathering as I was, so we fell to talking. We got on well, and after about an hour we agreed it would be more civilised to go to his house, where we could talk in peace. We ended up drinking an entire bottle of Jack Daniels and talking until eight the next morning.
The Englishman’s name was Kevin O’Sullivan, and he was to become my closest friend, as he remains to this day. By the end of the night, I knew his life story and he knew mine. When we woke up mid-afternoon, he said: “Look I’ve got all this space and I live here on my own. You’d make a great companion. Why don’t you move in?”
Now that I had discovered the delights of opium in Vientiane, I wanted to take some back so that I could share the experience with Kevin and my other friends in Bangkok. Of course it would be inconceivable to bring opium into Thailand nowadays. It would carry a life sentence in prison, or even the death penalty, if one was caught. Singapore is equally tough, and so is Malaysia. But this was 1964, and while attitudes were not entirely approving, they were nothing like as severe.
I bought an antique opium pipe and I managed to buy a little bottle of raw, unadulterated opium to go with it. Then I set about planning how I could get it over the border. The pipe could be dismantled and packed in my knapsack. If I was questioned about the pipe, I could easily say it was a souvenir. The bottle was more of a problem. I decided the only thing to be done with it was to stuff it down the front of my Y-fronts. It gave me a rather exaggerated codpiece bulge. All I could do was hope that it would play into the common Asian assumption that Westerns are much better endowed than they are.
As I passed through customs I did indeed receive a startled glance in the direction of my crotch, but to my intense relief no one was curious enough to investigate further. My calculation had been spot on, and I was through.
When I arrived back at Kevin’s house, I showed him my contraband.
“You really must try this,” I said. “It’s amazing.”
He did not take much persuading.
“Shall we invite some others to join us?” he said. “Who shall we ask?”
We decided to invite a friend who was fairly senior at the British Embassy, his Australian girlfriend and a Chinese-English fellow whom we were convinced was a spy for MI6. They all came to dinner, and at the end of the meal I asked if they would like to try opium. They reacted just as I had assumed they would: they had all heard so much about this drug, but they had never come into contact with it before, so nobody could resist the opportunity.
At this point I realised I had not given any thought to how I was going to get the opium into my guests. It was generally smoked in a den for good reason: making a pellet from the liquid was a skilled procedure. I had watched it being done in front of me enough times, so I set about doing it myself. But try as I might, I could not get the hang of it. With our guests now waiting expectantly, I racked my brains for another way.
“Tomatoes!” I cried.
We had some little cherry tomatoes in the kitchen, which I now started cutting up so I could drip opium into each one. I passed one to Kevin, who had volunteered to go first. He popped the tomato into his mouth and bit on it to swallow. Almost instantly he started retching dramatically.
“That won’t work,” he gasped, spitting the tomato onto a plate. “It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted. There’s no way I can keep it down.”
He swigged great gulps of water to try and take the taste away.
It was the MI6 chap who came up with the solution.
“Why don’t I go to the pharmacy?” he said. “I’ll get those vitamin tablets that come in glycerine pill capsules. We can just empty the powder out and put the opium in with an eye-dropper, and then we can swallow the capsules.”
It sounded a much better plan, so off he went, and the rest of the gathering waited in nervous anticipation. Despite the fiasco with the tomatoes, nobody was in the mood to chicken out, and when he came back we set about putting the liquid opium into the capsules.
As a way of swallowing the stuff, it worked well. Kevin went first again, then the embassy fellow, then his girlfriend, then the MI6 chap and finally me. Nobody gagged or retched, and everyone was relaxed and pleasantly excited now.
It took about half an hour for the full effect to kick in this way. When it did, the impact was wonderful. Everyone lay blissed out on the floor saying over and over again how amazingly relaxing it was. I should stress that there was no question of the evening becoming debauched: in contrast to hashish, for example, opium took away any sexual urge and indeed capability to do anything but lie there and drift away, so there was a childlike innocence to it all. It made us feel coddled, nurtured and incredibly safe.
Unfortunately, this state was not to last long. What we had not realised, in our inexperience, was that the dosages we were giving each other were huge. It was not so bad for me because I had already built up a certain immunity after smoking so many pipes every day in Laos. But the others had none whatsoever.
After two or three hours, one guest after another started vomiting in the various toilets around the house. Each of them would recover enough to float off again, so the experience was not completely spoiled, but after a while they would throw up once more. And so it went on all night. It was not an evening that any of us would forget in a hurry, and if there was any apprehension that I was seducing these poor people into becoming opium addicts, it was well and truly dispelled by the end of the night. I am almost certain it put everyone off for life.
I emerged in slightly better shape than my friends, but I now had a particular problem of my own, because I had an unmissable appointment the next morning. I had made up my mind to return to Japan, and I had been accepted on to a one-year course in sixteenth-century history and traditional Japanese architecture at Kyoto University. That morning I had an appointment at the Japanese embassy to secure my student visa. The timing was appalling, but I was due to leave soon and I could not risk putting the appointment off.
So I went off to see the consul and, even though I was feeling groggy, we managed to have a good conversation. In those days, very few Westerners, let alone young ones, spoke Japanese, so he was agreeably surprised that I could talk to him in his own language. He had just stamped the visa into my passport when the exploits of the previous night caught up with me and I had the sudden, unavoidable urge to vomit. I spotted the consul’s wastepaper basket and threw up a noxious mixture of opium and breakfast into it.
The consul sat blinking. This was clearly not what he was used to, especially not from a young Westerner seeking a visa.
I looked back at him miserably and wondered what on earth I could do to salvage the situation. There was just one possibility, I decided in my enfeebled state.
“Bangkok belly,” I groaned, clasping my stomach.
“Ah!” he said sympathetically. The Japanese are proud of their cleanliness, and he could clearly well understand how a poor foreigner could fall victim to the inferior hygienic standards of, in his eyes, this lesser nation of Thailand.
I went back to Japan by ship to start my course. Through the local Rotary Club in Kyoto, I found a couple who had a beautiful hanare, a detached villa at the back of their main home with its own private entrance. It had a little kitchen and bathroom, and a living room/bedroom upstairs. I settled down to study.
Naturally the course was all in Japanese, so it was pretty tough to follow. The historical terms were difficult and there was a lot of dictionary work, but the professor was very kind and patient. Architecture was easier to grasp. Japanese aesthetics are extraordinary, and no other culture I know has the same refined aesthetic sense. The Japanese treasure bare simplicity and equilibrium. The room I am sitting in now in London would be considered fairly tasteful by Western standards – it is full of objects from the East, as well as photographs of family through my long life – but I also know deep down that these things are clutter. This is the way Western and most other cultures operate, but the Japanese would have just one corner of the room with a painting or a hanging scroll, and perhaps a piece of porcelain. Affluent people may have a warehouse at the back of the house where they store things, so they can rotate the works of art according to the season, but they would not have more than one at any given time. It is an incredibly restful and deliberate way of living, and my house in Kyoto was like that – without the warehouse, of course.
I was, as the Japanese say, like white blotting paper – shiroto – on which experience was waiting to be written. Having emerged from a country of space and wildlife, I had almost nothing imprinted on my cultural DNA. While passing at speed through Trinity College and parts of Europe and North America, I had absorbed little of those cultures. During my previous stay in Japan, I had acquired a deep understanding of the values of the country by learning its spiritual philosophy. Now, in Kyoto I lived, breathed, worked and studied Japanese art and culture.
Our architectural professor had assembled an eclectic group of people from all over the world, all studying Japanese traditional architecture. He would take some of us to geisha houses in the evening. That introduced me to the hidden world of these traditional female entertainers, who act as hostesses and entertainers, and eventually I managed to get a job teaching English to a group of maiko, or trainee geisha. At the same time, I studied flower arrangements and the tea ceremony – those key elements of the samurai tradition alongside kendo.
At one point I was invited by my tea master to attend an incense-smelling ceremony – kodo-shikki, a ritual that had originated in Kyoto in the twelfth century. Incense in a burner was passed around the guests. Then everyone was given seven or eight incenses to smell in separate incense burners, and we each had to try to identify which one was the same as the original. I was the only foreigner there but, to the evident astonishment of everyone in the room, I won. The competition was run by a tayu, a courtesan with a higher rank than a geisha – today there are none left because the training is too arduous. As a result of my winning, she became interested in me and we became good friends – she subsequently added materially to my knowledge of traditional Japan.
But I was aware that I could not stay in Japan forever. It was now six years since I had left Rhodesia to study in Ireland, and five since I had left Dublin to wander the world. As my course in Kyoto drew to an end, I knew I should eventually get back to Europe and work out what I was going to do with my life.
I had already ruled out being a doctor, and the purpose of my studies in Kyoto was to satisfy my interest in both the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573-1603) of history, during which the whole of Japan was consolidated under the rule of the first Shoguns, and traditional Japanese architecture began to change, not because I wanted to train and practise as an architect. Now that I was a monk, I could in principle spend my life in a monastery, but I was far too curious about the world at large, and the variety of people and cultures in it, to do that. In truth, my real bent was for trying as wide a variety of experiences as possible. I had proved my entrepreneurial prowess at school, and the idea of starting businesses appealed to my disposition to try new things. I still did not have a university degree, so the most sensible option seemed to be to go to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to take an honours degree in Japanese. If I focused in particular on business language, this would give me a good grounding to return to Tokyo and start building something for the future. Given the head-start I had in the language, it would hopefully not be too taxing.
Another advantage was that the next available course would not start for a year, so my global odyssey need not end quite yet. I could visit some more countries in the interim, and top of my list was India – the place where Buddhism had first originated, and where my ancestors had been very active.
I made a tantalisingly brief stop in Burma, which is perhaps the most Buddhist country in the whole of Asia. It was also under a military dictatorship, so it was largely closed to foreigners. The longest visa I could get was for forty-eight hours, and they only gave me that because I was a Buddhist monk. It would be another thirty years before I returned and got to know the place properly. Having briefly stepped back in time some fifty years in Rangoon, I then continued to Calcutta, which was a sudden and massive contrast to everything I had been used to in Kyoto. If Japan presents itself in muted colours, India is in full Technicolor.
The old stronghold of the East India Company and the British Raj, Calcutta had once prided itself as a glittering centre of industry, commerce and culture, and as India’s largest city. That last boast was still justified when I got there: with a population of more than six million, it was fifty percent bigger than Bombay and more than twice the size of Delhi. But that soaring population had become a problem. After the partition of India in 1947, a massive wave of Hindu refugees had arrived from predominantly Muslim East Pakistan (soon to become Bangladesh). Calcutta’s infrastructure had struggled to cope and the city had become a byword for wretched poverty. The misery of so many people’s existence was impossible to avoid: there were beggars in all directions, some of them grotesquely mutilated, while women and children sifted through piles of rubbish in search of something to eat. For far too many, being an inhabitant of Calcutta meant sleeping on the pavement. The whole place was choked in fumes, grime and human filth.
This poverty was an eye-opening experience for any traveller, and in principle I well understood the value of knowing how pitiful life could be for the numbers who lived on the streets or in the slums of Calcutta. In truth, however, the impact of facing this appalling poverty and hardship was so intense that I am afraid I had little desire to linger. Instead I made my way north-west to Delhi, which the Raj had made its altogether statelier capital in 1911 – a status that had endured after independence. Here it was more possible to enjoy the chaotic eccentricity of India: the bustling streets where sacred cows, bullock carriages and herds of goats competed for space with rickshaws, bicycles, cars, trucks and pedestrians; the cacophony of car horns, animal noises and human voices; and the distinctive blend of spices, exhaust fumes, incense, sewage and tropical flowers that hung permanently in the air.
India was part of my ancestry, since my ancestors’ many involvements in various aspects of Indian life. My great-great-grandfather had spent his life here, as first superintendent of Chittledroog, far to the south, in Mysore, where eventually he became a great friend of the Maharaja of Mysore and helped him improve the lot of his people. But I was also keen to celebrate India’s independence from the British Empire. In Old Delhi I sought out the ashram where Mahatma Gandhi had apparently made his devotions. Established there was a wonderful guru called Raihana. She was old and gnarled, with wild hair, and my first reaction – to my shame – was that she was incredibly ugly. But within moments of talking to her, that first impression fell away and I saw instead an amazingly radiant, peaceful person. Such was the power of her aura.
I stayed at the ashram for a couple of months, absorbing the intense spirituality of the place and slipping easily into its rhythms. But my curiosity about artificial forms of enlightenment had not yet been satisfied. I had still not experienced the kind of psychedelic drugs that were the basis of the mind-altering rituals practised for thousands of years in Native American cultures and elsewhere. Before I ended my globetrotting adventure, I wanted at least to try them, so as to be able to make a comparison with my monastic experiences.
I had made a friend in Bangkok who was a dedicated disciple of Timothy Leary, the American counterculture guru. Leary famously believed that artificial psychedelic drugs such as LSD could be of major benefit to humanity. My friend said that since I had been in a monastery exploring spiritual enlightenment, I certainly ought to try LSD; if I wanted, he could arrange for Leary to send me some. That was a perfectly legal thing to do at the time, because no one had got around to criminalising the stuff, so I agreed, and my friend was as good as his word. One day I found a letter with American stamps on it waiting for me at the New Delhi poste restante. It was from Leary himself, and inside was a piece of blotting paper with a ring round it and a note saying: “Try this to see how it compares with your monastic experiences.” I wish I could have kept and framed that note, but that would have been hard to do: the whole point was that I was meant to swallow the circle of blotting paper.
I fell to thinking about where I should do this. My friend in Bangkok had given this experience a serious build-up, and it was quite an honour to get the drug from its most celebrated international advocate, so I felt I ought to do it justice by taking it somewhere suitably magical. As I considered the options, I realised the answer was obvious. There are few more entrancing places in the world than the Taj Mahal, the great Mughal mausoleum in Agra, which is just over a hundred and sixty kilometres from Delhi. In those days, it was not besieged by the queues of tourists who flock there today, but it was hardly undiscovered either. Ideally, I wanted a solitary experience, in which I could savour the extraordinary atmosphere while under the influence of the LSD. My best plan, I figured, was to travel to Agra and stay behind after the site closed for the night.
I discovered that the gates closed at midnight and re-opened at four o’clock. On my appointed night, I entered the grounds in the late evening and scouted for a suitable hiding place. I found some thick bushes, and about a quarter of an hour before the place was due to close, I hid inside them and settled down to wait. I watched the final few visitors leave and heard the gates being locked, but even then I was in no hurry to emerge. I stayed for about two hours before I came out. With no guards in sight, I was confident I could now have my psychedelic experience undisturbed. I made my way to the end of the Long Pond, the great ornamental channel in front of the monument which is familiar from every tourist view of the place, and placed myself in the lotus position, which by now was comfortable for me and the best position to take for an experience of this kind. I took my wallet out of my pocket and retrieved the small piece of LSD-impregnated blotting paper. I hadn’t brought any water with me, but it was easy enough to swallow on its own.
I was just about to put it in my mouth when I heard a shout behind me.
“Goodness me, there’s a bloody foreigner here!”
“We have to throw him bodily out, isn’t it!” said a second voice.
“Hey you, foreigner!” called the first voice.
I was in no mood to be bodily ejected. Instead I sprang up and ran. A long and comical chase ensued as I tore around the grounds of the most majestic monument in Asia, evading a couple of security guards, hiding behind fruit trees and ducking down into sunken parterres to evade capture. I was fitter than the guards, so staying ahead of them was not too hard. I was relieved that I had not yet taken the LSD. Being chased while hallucinating might not have been quite such fun.
Eventually, they got the better of me, and I finally submitted to capture.
“Okay, okay, I’ll go peacefully,” I panted.
We were all completely exhausted.
“You better had,” said the stouter of the two guards, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. “If you don’t, we’ll have you thrown in jail, isn’t it.”
As they escorted me back to the main entrance, I looked at my watch. The chase must have lasted the best part of two hours, because it was very nearly four o’clock – the time when the gates were meant to re-open.
I sat outside to get my breath back, and smoked a cigarette. At four o’clock I strolled back through the gates with my head held high.
“You can’t bloody well touch me now,” I said, mimicking their accents shamelessly.
“Yes, you’re right; we can’t,” they shrugged.
But I was in no longer in any state to have a transcendental experience. After I had made my point to the guards and strolled around the gardens for a short while more, I returned to my hotel for some much-needed sleep.
In the event, it was another few weeks before I took that LSD. Through a mutual friend in Delhi I was introduced to a distinguished Englishwoman in her mid-fifties called Freda Bedi, the first Western woman to become an ordained Tibetan Buddhist nun. She had lived in India for more than thirty years and had been arrested alongside Gandhi in the struggle for independence. When the Dalai Lama and thousands of fellow refugees fled Chinese persecution in their occupied homeland of Tibet, she had been asked by Prime Minister Nehru to help them, and she had built a monastery at a hill station called Dalhousie at the start of the Himalayas. I now went to stay there for three months, and befriended the lamas, or Buddhist teachers there. In this cool, pine-scented spot, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, it was a privilege to deepen my spiritual understanding alongside these wise and enlightened Tibetans. But I had not forgotten my plan, either, and after a few weeks I asked one of my new friends if he would come with me to a guest house which the monastery owned, overlooking the whole plain of India, while I took my LSD.
He was not interested in taking the drug with me, but he said he would be happy to keep me company. He made it clear he found the whole business amusing.
“You Westerners are so funny: you want a short cut to everything,” he said. “We take a longer view of how to make spiritual progress.”
I knew he was right, but for twelve hours or so I took my short cut, allowing this extraordinary substance to take me on a psychedelic waking dream. The scenic beauty of the location was magnified and spun in fantastic directions as the LSD conspired with my mind to play hallucinatory tricks and took me off on extravagant conversational paths to the amusement of my Tibetan companion. Afterwards, I was not convinced this would offer much lasting benefit to humanity, but I could certainly see why its devotees made such a fuss about it. I was very glad I had taken the trouble to experience it with an understanding and wise companion, and in such majestic surroundings.
Time was moving on, and I was conscious I needed to start travelling back in the direction of Europe. En route, I wanted to see Afghanistan, where one of my ancestors; Sir Henry Dobbs, led a mission in 1921 to Kabul, to start the process of establishing diplomatic relations with that country. In the twenty-first century, this benighted place is top of every traveller’s danger list. But these were the days before the Soviet invasion and the jihadist resistance which led to government by the Taliban. The people were relaxed and hospitable, eager to press glasses of dark, sweet tea on visitors; smiling schoolgirls walked freely in the streets, their skirts above their knees and their heads at best half-heartedly covered; market stalls groaned with apples, cherries, watermelons and fresh dates; strains of music curled constantly in the air. I was entranced.
In the next few years, Kabul was destined to become a major hippie hangout. The big attraction was hashish, and a lot of them started moving on to more dangerous drugs such as heroin, often with tragic consequences. Several years later the American consul told a younger friend of mine: “We should have built a coffin factory. We were shipping so many dead kids back to the States.”
For my part, I wanted primarily to see this country because of Sir Henry’s involvement, and because another ancestor, also on my mother’s side, had fought in the Khyber Pass. But I was not entirely impervious to the other aspect that would subsequently lure the hippies. I was intrigued to learn that the Afghan equivalent of a pub was a hashish den. Being of curious disposition, I was keen to discover what such a place was like.
I was directed to a basement with an earthen floor, a very high ceiling, and cushions around the perimeter, with people slouched all over them in a stuporous daze. In the middle of the room was a granite block on which stood a huge hookah. It was a more picturesque and less squalid version of the opium den in Vientiane. The servers put pure hashish over some hot coals in the hookah and customers would be invited to partake by inhaling the smoke through the hookah’s water pipe which cooled it down, before going back to lie on the cushions. The communal mouthpiece did not strike me as very hygienic, and I had done quite enough lying around in Laos, so instead, I decided I would buy some hash to take back to London to share with my Bangkok friends, who were by now back in London. I asked for one kilo, which came in about ten patties. I wrapped them up and put them in my bag, but it seemed a shame to leave without having a few puffs. So I did my best to wipe the mouthpiece free and took a few deep drags before I proceeded on my way.
I had smoked marijuana leaves before, but not hashish, and I had not realised how powerful it would be. One of the effects of the drug is to induce paranoia, and as I got out in the street I took it into my head that a local branch of the American IDA or Interpol was bound to be on the watch for people like me. I decided to try to outwit these imaginary watchers. For the next three hours, I valiantly dodged in and out of shops, cut down the most obscure alleys I could find, hid behind cars and generally threw myself into this paranoid adventure. Naturally, I got thoroughly lost in the process, which added to my distress, and it was more by luck than anything else that I eventually found my hotel. When I got there, I was still as high as a kite, and I lay on my bed with my heart pounding, imagining that the police would soon be breaking the door down. Finally, I more or less passed out, and by the morning I had recovered my wits.
I was due to leave the country in three days’ time, and while I had now developed a wary respect for this substance I had bought, I had no intention of throwing my patties away. Instead I had to work out how to get them back to England undetected. I managed to get a Tupperware container and some Araldite-type glue in the market. I sealed the hash inside, and added a note addressed to myself, saying: “I hope you haven’t been stupid enough to open this, but if you have just shut it up and Jim will pick it up from you in London.” I signed it ‘Chris’, who was as fictitious as Jim. The idea was to make it look as if I was merely a dim innocent doing a friend a favour, so I could naively plead ignorance if caught. When I sealed it, one could not smell a thing so I was pleased with my handiwork. But I decided I needed some further distraction to stop any customs people looking through my bag in the first place.
After thinking the problem over, I returned to the market and bought an old Afghan musket, a relic of the Khyber Pass days. I made sure it had been disabled and could not be used. It was also very large – about two metres long – and I hoped it would be a good way to divert attention from my knapsack. I was planning to cross four borders on my journey back to London, so my plan needed to work.
My journey took me first to Persia, as Iran was known in those days, where a fellow student from my architecture course in Kyoto had offered to put me up. I visited the fabled city of Isfahan and the extraordinary ruins of Persepolis, where I saw the tomb of Emperor Darius, who had been a childhood hero of mine. Back in Tehran, I spent hours hanging around antiques shops where scruffy chaps would turn up with sacks over their shoulder. I would stop them before they went in and ask what they had. They would show me jars and other objects they had excavated. I would pull out some money and ask them what they wanted, and they would take some notes. They were not expecting much, and I paid far less than I would have with the dealers’ mark-up, but I probably gave them more than they would have got from the dealers. So it was a good arrangement for all concerned – except the dealers, obviously – and I managed to get four or five superb antique Persian objects that I still treasure.
From Tehran I flew to Lebanon, where I stayed with a professor of English at the American University, who was a close friend of my mother, in his farmhouse halfway up a hill between the snow slopes and the sea. Beirut was a wonderfully cosmopolitan and sophisticated place in those years before civil war broke out, and I spent several enjoyable weeks exploring it. After that I made a brief stop in Belgrade and then continued to London.
At each of the four border posts I passed through, I approached the customs desk and said: “I’d like to declare my Afghan rifle. It’s quite safe – it has been disabled. But you can check if you like.”
At that point, whatever their nationality, the customs officers would pick the gun up and brandish it around childishly, pretending to shoot one another. As a piece of distraction, it could not have been better. I am also a great believer in the value of poker bluff, so after that I would open my kit-bag and start pulling out the filthiest clothes I had, making the customs men recoil from the stink of my socks. Having given them a flavour of the noxious contents, I would ask them innocently: “Would you like me to empty it out?”
“Oh no, no, please don’t worry,” they would insist. “That’s fine, you can go ahead.”
This worked like a charm each time. It helped that there were virtually no kids of my age travelling at that time. I did not have long hair, I still cannot grow a beard, so I did not have one then, and I also made a point of dressing in clean jeans and a clean shirt so I did not look notably scruffy. Nevertheless, those were the days of innocence. Nobody waves a gun around for fun any more at an airport, and today I would be jailed for most of my life, if not actually executed, for smuggling hash in that quantity. Today, it would be fundamentally stupid to risk one’s future, if not one’s life, and I would strongly advise anyone against taking such a risk.
My parents and brother were living in London by this time, and they came to Heathrow Airport to meet me. As I was going through the final customs post of my long journey, I had an awful vision of being discovered with the hashish and waving to my family through the bars of a Black Maria as I was hauled off to the nearest police station. Fortunately, the mindset of a British customs official in the mid-Sixties was no different from that of a Persian, Lebanese or Yugoslav one. My precautions with the musket and the Araldite held fast to the end. The only problem I had was trying to open that glued-up Tupperware once I got it home.