And so I flew from Tokyo to India. I stayed in New Delhi briefly, but only because the plane landed there. It didn’t interest me. Delhi struck me as just another filthy city with a lot of jerry-built modern buildings.
I went to Calcutta, and quickly left. There was a cholera epidemic, and I found out that this was an annual event. People were dying in the streets. It was hard to tell the dead from the living, mind you – these poor scrawny kids, women and children, living in a patch of gutter, sharing it with their sacred cows. Calcutta disgusted me even more than Tokyo, because there was such an extraordinary contrast between the few rich Indians and the fat tourists and the teeming masses. You can believe me, it took all my courage to walk through the streets. You know how I feel about filth and contamination. This was like plunging in a cesspool.
In that case, why did you do it?
Curiosity overcame my repugnance. They must have thought I was some apparition from outer space, because I walked through those streets wearing white gloves and spraying my throat with a special spray from time to time. I would have worn a surgical mask, but I knew it would have drawn a crowd.
I became a vegetarian during my stay there, too, because I thought there was less chance of getting poisoned from their vegetables than their meat.
After the experience in Calcutta I almost left the country. I said to myself, ‘This country has nothing to offer except a few beautiful temples, poverty, filth, and superstition. I’m not learning anything, I’m just confirming my prejudices.’
But I decided it would be foolish, having come so far, to flee so quickly, and that’s when I took a better look at the addresses Helga had given me. I remembered she had shown me a book about the holy city of Benares, where all the fakirs and babas worshipped by the banks of the Ganges. It had great meaning for the Indians, and it was on my way back to New Delhi. I wanted to please Helga, to show her that I was more broad-minded than she thought I was, and open to new experience. I hired an air-conditioned car and chauffeur and went to Benares – now they call it Varanasi, but then it was Benares. The chauffeur was a student, bright and friendly. He acted as a guide for me.
It’s almost always been my habit to get up pretty early in the morning, so it was no problem for me when he wanted to get down to the river, the Ganges, at five o’clock in the morning, just when the action started.
That’s a sight I’ll never forget. I had read about Benares and it had a certain legendary quality for me, but you never believe that things will be as exotic as they really are. I visited the temples. I saw the burning ghats along the river, where they were cremating the bodies of their dead. The Ganges was just a stream of mud and crap. But it’s holy. Boy, if that’s holy! The people had come down to the river just as soon as the sun was up, before they had to go to work, and they were bathing in this brown soup, this slop, and drinking it.
I was so horrified that I was fascinated. I couldn’t leave even though I knew I was in mortal danger.
I watched, and then we left the river and we marched up some steps to get back to the town. Our car was parked quite a way away, because the streets were narrow and it was impossible to drive a car through them. I was surrounded instantly by beggars. I had deliberately dressed in my oldest clothes, but it didn’t matter, I was obviously an American, and therefore rich. The beggars were a collection such as I’ve never seen before in my life. I had seen beggars in Mexico – small children come up to you and beg, and you give them a few pesos and they go away. But in Benares there were dozens of filthy, horrible, maimed little children, on the verge of starvation. They maim them at birth so they’ll do well in their begging career. The men and women importuned in such a way that I felt as if a mob was menacing me. They yelled and shrieked and whined, and waved stumps in my face – the guide and I gave them what little money we had and managed to get out of there.
On the edge of this crowd, on the steps leading up from the Ganges, was an emaciated old man covered in dust and ashes. He wore nothing but a white loincloth. He was moving himself along the street, along the rough cobbles, on his knees. He wasn’t a cripple – he could walk if he wanted to. But he didn’t. And his knees were like a battlefield, scarred and bloody, and his skin was not only caked with dust but full of scabs. People were bowing down toward him when he crawled by.
I said, ‘Who – what’s that?’
The chauffeur said, ‘That’s a very holy man. He’s crawled that way from some village many hundreds of miles away, and he’s come to die in Benares, because to die in Benares is to be assured of liberation.’
I said, ‘What do you mean, liberation?’ I was astonished, and he looked at me with equal astonishment and said, ‘Why, liberation means to have your soul freed, to join the One.’
I smirked. This was the kind of nonsense that made me put those books aside. But it did astonish me that an ordinary chauffeur, a guide, should speak this way. So I looked at the holy man again. He had terrible bloodshot eyes. He couldn’t have been less than seventy, with short white hair, limbs just skin and bones. The crowd treated him with great respect – but I didn’t get it. He looked like he belonged on Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. To me it was a man who had lost all dignity.
‘That’s enough of India for me,’ I said to myself. ‘I want to get out of here.’
We saw another holy man on the road, on the way back to the hotel. He was standing on one leg, staring up at the sun. That’s what he did in life, stood on one leg and stared at the sun.
The guide said he was a guru. I thought, these people are in a bad way to think a masochist like that is a guru. I’d heard about Western boys and girls who go out to India on their pilgrimages, to discover the East and throw off the chains of their middle-class backgrounds and fill up their knapsacks with drugs. That appalled me. Not only the drugs, but the appointment of India as a place for the ultimate spiritual pilgrimage. India has had a good publicity agent for the last twenty-five years, since the British finished raping the country and pulled out. The young Americans, I decided, looked at the masses of poor people on the streets – perhaps starvation gave the Indians a kind of faraway look – and the kids said, ‘How holy and beautiful these people are.’ All I’d seen so far in India was the result of centuries of oppression followed by a few decades of hypocrisy, and the people were either pretentious or half-starved, depending on whether they were rich or poor.
I went back to the hotel in Benares and scrubbed myself from head to toe, soaked in the bath in cold water with a powerful antiseptic, closed the shutters against the sun and the heat, and then lay down on my bed under my mosquito netting and just sweated. There was no air-conditioning, just an overhead fan that rattled away like – well, like a broken fan. India’s barely in the twentieth century.
I decided to leave the next day.
That night, when I slept, a strange thing happened to me. I dreamed of a dark-skinned bearded man who put his hand on my shoulder gently, and said, ‘Come along with me, Sonny.’
Yes, he called me Sonny. No one had called me that since I was a kid. I didn’t mind it at all. I didn’t even mind his hand on my shoulder, touching me, and usually I mind that a lot. This bearded man exuded an aura of pleasantness, and smiled at me in a way that gave me confidence in him, made me feel he liked me and understood me.
In my dream, I asked him where we were going. He said, ‘Nowhere. Are you ready for that?’
Then I woke up. The fan was still rattling away but the room was cool. It was dawn. Usually, you know, I can’t remember my dreams. But this one was quite clear and fresh. In fact, there was an amazing reality to it. And I knew right away who the bearded man was.