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The Himalayas. Night is breaking into Sunday. The young William Shakespeare reading poet has just arrived in old Kathgodam, near the base of that part of the range which shares the Ram Dass and Yogananda ashrams and sanctuaries, among others. He is not looking for Salinger. Not this time. Not here. Not now.
The poet, a chela, a disciple, a pilgrim, is now heading up away from Kathgodam to Dwarahat, taking the westward route up the steep, mountain cliff-side roads in a small, white taxi-cab. He is not feeling so well. Sea-sickness swayed from on the shoulders of the giants. Om.
The ashram is up in "tiger country," what the locals call the place, as there are still wild tigers roaming around the village outskirts. The taxi-driver stops a few times on the way up. Cigarettes. Tea. More cigarettes.
Wonderful, yes, the view was.
The view was sacred. Once they reached the top, where the sanctuary hid nestled in its bucolic wonderment and a steady freshness of newair and the heights, the poet-chela checked in and took a good, long nap in his airy-smelling apartment cell. Blue walled and blue furnitured and blue chela'd.
His stay there was a holy of holy happenings, not to be enumerated upon.
Weeks later, on his way back to northwest New Delhi from his lofty Himalayan quarters, weeks later, he found himself in a strange predicament.
He had before him a fourteen hour bus-ride. He also had within him a seemingly unbreakable sense of peace and God-residue. The first four hours or so of the bus ride were bearable, but then, but then, he began to grow weary. Tired. His eyelids began to slover down and droop, and his shoulders began to wedge closer and closer to his neighbor's in the bus, a Himalayan "charter" bus which was stacked like a pack of sardines with Indian families and citizens from a wide variation of backgrounds, many wide-eyed and kind-hearted and astute and curious and smiling citizens, all of them and the poet, a sore, foreign, simple American thumb.
The man next to the poet tapped his shoulder, and this was sufficient to wake the poet completely up.
The man, it seemed, did not want to just say hello, but wanted, so it seemed to the poet, by his gestures, for he had one hand covering his mouth, and the other, which he had used to tap the poet's shoulder, he was using to point out the window, beside which the poet was sitting, to switch seats with the poet so that he could more easily vomit his guts out the window there, not desiring to spill any of his spiced fodder on our poor poet. Our poet had the window seat; our poet always got the window seat.
The poet, of course, obliged, and gave the poor to-be-vomiter the window seat. After the vomiter vomited, the poet also, out of the dear nature of his bosomheart, took out from his bag the single bottle of water which he had brought along with him for the long ride, and gave it to the vomit-bespackled Indian fellow. Brothers they were. Then they had the time to and so really did smile at each other.
So, the poet, looking forward, resumed the languid pleasant attitude of the bus-rider. The bus's windows, they stayed open.
No, the vomit was not the predicament. The predicament came, as we were saying, about four hours into the ride, right after the vomiter vomited.
The poet was getting damn tired, yet he knew there was ten more hours to the bus-ride. Also, he was thirsty, and he had given away his water. The bus stopped at one of the check-points along the way, similar in design to all truck-stops which lie scattered about the entire American Midwest, and the poet exited the bus to stretch his legs and maybe grab a drink. He saw a stand. It sold Red Bull. He bought three. Bad idea.
Ten hours and three Red Bulls later, at 3 A.M., the poet arrived at the other ashram in which he was to stay for the remainder of his sojourn in India, in New Delhi. The sanctuary, well walled, with a few buildings and a beautiful, heavenly garden, in a sector in the northwestern part of town, was like an Eden.
Nodding to the grotesque security guard, Prospero the poetician stepped smilingly through the blue, painted gates, and scuddled up the soothing gravel driveway. He tip-toed uselessly up the stairs, a sham yogi, he thought (no such thing, the writer winks), and made it to his room without exploding. He threw his bag on his bed, and then made enough noise to wake up Ganesha relieving himself and farting vociferously and then attempting to slide the mosquito net over the four quarrelsome bearings of the metal bedposts without taking the cover out of the slide.
He damned the Red Bulls under his breath, and swatted at the mosquitos, and thought thankful thoughts aimed towards God. Many, many, many thoughts.
Going back over the years, the writer finds himself enthused enough to go grab his old journal from the times of his India trip.
That night, back in New Delhi, after weeks in a Himalayan Hermitage, seeing as how he could not, no matter how hard he meditated on it, sleep, he tried writing a sketch, a first sketch of the memory he cherished, a fresh memory- of his first bursting through the beds of jungle-land landscape which made up the land between the city and Delhi, and Kathgodam at the Himalayan Range's foothills. The sketch.
"11/12/14
Krishna sings
Krishna sings
And Red Bull wings
And the bus broke out of the jungle, seemingly discharging itself from the density of tall, lightly grouped trees and the invisible yet solid darkness of the endless brushwork, and sped on into another density, that of human housing and all of the various colored lights therefound, it being so early in the morning still- just before the first hints of twilight reach their loudest sky whispers.
The streets showed some people already awake, rustling about their front gates with ruffled shoulders and necks cringed, rubbing their hands together and skewing the airs with vapors.
The young man, awakened in his spirits by the breaching of the jungle, peered out the bus's window with a newfound intensity. The bus had left Delhi hours earlier, and though the traveling by bus was not as hard on his psyche nor his body as the twenty-two hour plane-flight was, he was nonetheless beginning to feel exhausted again.
He sat back, munched on some sunflower seeds, and tried his best to assume a mental quietude, but an excitement in his spirit overtook him. He thanked his Guru, and took to a prayer book which he brought-"
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