Magic Bus (28 page)

‘A doctor? You want to see a doctor?
I
want to see a doctor?'

Finally, he pretends to strum a guitar while tossing his head back and forth as if singing a pop song.

‘A musical doctor?' I ask. ‘The Beatles' doctor!'

The
swami
leans back on a huge orange cushion and smiles with divine satisfaction.

I descend back to town, the name and address of the Beatles' doctor written on a scrap of paper. Mangy
sadhus
, believers who renounce all worldly goods in their spiritual quest, puff hashish on the narrow, corridor-like streets. A revered
mahant
in beads and blossoms blows a conch shell. Israelis in dreadlocks float off to yoga class. A stoned German reads Tolkien under a hand-painted sign which warns ‘Western Tourist Murdered by Chillum Smokers'.

I cross to the west bank and plunge into a frantic m
ê
lée of pilgrims' buses and rickshaw repair shops. On Railway Road, between a nursing home and a men's outfitters (‘Excite inner wear for the sensuous man'), I find the red-brick Guru-Dev-poly Clinic.

‘Welcome,' says Dr K. P. Singh, holding out his hand. ‘Please come in.' He is a compact, energetic sixty-year-old with pencil moustache and beak-like nose. ‘I offer spiritual treatment alongside full modern Western medicine.'

His surgery is a two-room, neon-lit, cross-cultural refuge. Holistic Ayurvedic health care is provided in the left-hand room. In his right-hand office, Singh proffers Viagra, Canesten cream and ECGs. ‘VAT, aches and pain, tone up and sexual disorders' are his areas of speciality.

I explain that my needs aren't medical, and Singh, courteous and mannerly, invites me to sit down.

‘Ah, the four mop-tops,' he says, offering me a cup of his Himalayan tea. ‘The
swami
never speaks an untruth.'

‘He never speaks,' I remind him.

‘I served as the Maharishi's medical officer during the Beatles' stay at the Academy.'

As a child in Gorakhpur, Singh contracted polio. His parents
prayed for his health, promising to make him a doctor if he recovered. His survival was to them a miracle, a rebirth, and they encouraged Singh ‘to serve the people and nation'. After graduation in early 1968, Singh's first posting was Rishikesh.

‘I knew of the Beatles from newspapers but I had never heard their music,' he says, pushing the thinning grey curls back from his ears. ‘I sat with them on the banks of the Ganga most days. You see, they had no one to talk English with but the Maharishi and me.'

‘Were you with them that evening when the whole ashram walked to the travelling cinema?' I ask. A procession of about a hundred people, decked in hibiscus and frangipani, strolled down the path into town. ‘When McCartney first played “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da”?'

He nods, answering, ‘They were not allowed to make very large music during their stay.'

‘And did you join them the night they drifted downstream in boats under the stars singing together?'

‘In the mornings and evenings the Beatles played on the roof of their cottages, but most of the time they were silent, living just in their rooms.'

And writing more than forty songs including ‘Blackbird', ‘I Will' and ‘Across the Universe'.

The Academy had no rules or timetables but breakfast tended to be followed by meditation. Afternoons were free for sunbathing and sightseeing. One day, at the long communal table, McCartney started composing ‘Back in the USSR' on his acoustic guitar and Mike Love – amused by the take-off of Beach Boys harmonies – suggested adding some lines about Russian girls. He wrote ‘Rocky Racoon' sitting on the ashram roof with Lennon and Donovan.

‘I understand they came here to find a path away from drugs,' I say.

Since turned on to pot by Dylan in 1964, the Beatles – like almost every sixties rock ‘n' roll group – had embarked on a heady exploration of hallucinogenics. By 1968, they wanted to cross the universe without LSD.

‘Mr Harrison aspired to reach God through music. He said that material things had become unimportant to him. They all tried to find a world apart from that of money and business. So they talked to me of spirituality, and how to make donations to orphans and the handicapped.'

The Maharishi gave two lectures each day and, in return, he asked the Beatles' advice on how best to promote TM. Singh often sat at the back of the lecture hall pondering how best to deal with Ringo's flatulence (he had brought a suitcase of baked beans from the UK).

‘They were very affectionate to me. And it was a new experience to treat the richest men of the world. Years later, Mr Harrison sent his eternal thoughts to me,' he says. Then he adds, ‘Do you enjoy my tea? It improves freshness in the blood, concentration, memory and eyesight.'

‘How did their visit change Rishikesh?' I ask, nodding my approval and wondering if the Beatles had drunk it too.

‘Their visit brought knowledge of yoga to many Western people. Now they come to Rishikesh every day looking – like you – for health and peace of mind.'

‘Looking for nirvana too?'

‘That is a little more difficult to find. Especially because…' he hesitates. ‘Much of a doctor's business here is with narcotics abuse. Unfortunately, many of the visitors seem unaware that the four mop-tops renounced drugs.'

I buy a jar of his tea. Singh gives me a second to pass on to Paul McCartney ‘when you next see him'. On the wall behind him is an American Medical Association lumbar-spine-exercise chart and a plaque from the Divine Light Society. His clinic's name – Guru-Dev-poly – combines the ancient Greek word for ‘many' with the name of his and the Maharishi's guru. As I stand to leave, he asks me to photograph him outside his clinic.

‘One day, two monks were looking at a flag pole,' he says as I take out my camera. ‘The first one said that the flag was moving. The second responded that the wind was moving. The Sixth Patriarch happened to be passing by and, hearing their argument,
told them, “It's neither the flag nor the wind. It is the mind that is moving.”'

I whistle ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da' back over the Ganges and up the path along which it had first been sung. A damp patchwork of brilliant saris and ochre cloaks dries on the stone steps. Marigold petals line the water's sandy edge as if the river itself radiates an orange aura. The
swami
– whose name is Narayananda Saraswati – has no objection to me spending a night in one of the deserted mushrooms. At least, he doesn't express any reservation. At dusk we sit together in silence watching camphor candles float past us on our hilltop, twinkling points of light and memory sweeping away on the black current toward the indistinct horizon.

I lie down to sleep on an old meditation mat, planning to leave for Delhi in the morning. In the dead of night a blackbird sings.

To be first in the queue, I reach Hardwar station before dawn. But the ticket hall, waiting rooms and platforms are already knee-deep in bodies. Three or four thousand people appear to have fled a storm and taken refuge in the station. Except this storm will never pass. It rages without stop, night after night, in the land of a billion souls.

Narrow pathways snake between sleepers lying on the concrete, beside steel trunks, with and without blankets. I step around dozing pilgrims and beggar children curved together in protective embrace. Next to them, a young woman stretches herself awake, shaking the red plastic bangles on her wrists, arching her back like a scarlet cat. Behind her is the booking office.

‘Sir, you must attend to Room 5 Platform 1,' says the clerk. The sign above his head reads, ‘All tickets can be bought here.'

Room 5 Platform 1 is closed. As arrows of light pierce the grey sky, a kindly school boy takes my hand and walks me over the bridge to the advance booking office. I queue for thirty minutes at the Enquiries window to learn that there is one seat left on the first Delhi train. On a torn slip of paper I write the train number, the date and my details, then join the booking queue. An hour later, when I am only two places from the front, all of Indian Railways' employees – 1.44 million by the last count – take a collective tea break.

‘Your train's booking is now closed,' says a helpful stranger beside the deserted information desk. She and her three plump daughters in fruity-coloured saris sit on a mat like scoops of ice cream on a plate: banana, lime and cherry. Geckos scuttle on the beams above their heads. ‘You must go to Room 5 Platform 1 in one hour.'

One hour later, both the first and second Delhi trains have left.

At Room 5 Platform 1 – a panelled office of wooden desks and twine-tied bundles of cancelled tickets – I am allocated a seat on the next train (having changed my class of travel; there are eleven different classes on Indian Railways). I return to the first booking office with a new scrap of paper and buy my ticket. I go back to Room 5, pay a 25-rupee supplement and am allocated a seat.

All the sleepers are on their feet now, drinking plastic bottles of Krishna mineral water (‘Taste of Purity'), shitting behind the goods sheds. I sit on a stack of burlap sacks, swatting away mina birds, waiting for my train. As I take a sleeve of crackers from my pack, a dozen local children scramble around me, dirty hands outstretched. They've been fighting for the chance to unload a freight car and earn a few piastes. I give a cracker to a boy with a lazy eye, another to the toddler standing next to him, distributing the food evenly around the hungry semicircle. Taller kids appear behind the children, crowding them forward. A girl – maybe twelve years old, with a baby on her hip – reaches over their heads and grabs the package from my hand. She is as startled by her action as me. Then she runs away with the crackers, leaving the others still begging and me with no food left to give.

‘For your kind attention…' is all I catch of a muffled announcement. I join the throng sweeping toward the Bandra Express, a mile-long tube of filthy, two-tone-blue carriages. Every day, 14 million passengers travel on India's railways. This morning, half of them seem to be on my train. Five hours late, I lurch out of Hardwar – and a fellow traveller falls off the luggage rack and on to my lap.

My compartment is an unswept cell. Its bench seats are sardined with people. At any moment, I expect its revolving fan to snap off the ceiling and slice me like salami. Across from me sit a policeman heading to Laksar to deliver a summons, a young businessman with a nose as long and sharp as a needle and two quiet brothers from Bijnor. Beside me, a walrus-like Sikh, dressed in elegant white with a magnificent turban, stares at his miniature mobile phone. Dozens of eyes gaze in from the corridor as I'm the only foreigner in the carriage. Until a lean Westerner in pyjama bottoms pushes
his sitar case through the steel door and drops into the pinch of space beside me.

‘You the writer?' he asks me, inches from my nose, looking down into my notebook.

‘How do you know?' I say as we shudder over a set of points.

‘This is India,' he shrugs. ‘Once you jump on the tiger's back, it's hard to jump off.'

Jonathan's accent tells me he's Welsh. His greying hair is swept back from his crown and tied into a neat ponytail. His long face has firm skin and precise, neat features. He must have spoken to Australian Michelle. Or the silent
swami
.

‘I'm following the old overland trail,' I tell him.

‘The long and winding road,' he nods.

‘When did you do it?' I ask.

‘Still on it,' he answers.

Jonathan tells me he was born on Anglesey, the son of a lighthouse keeper and a CND activist who filled their tubulous home with alternative blasts of bebop and Brahms. To get away from the racket, Jonathan joined the local Labour Party rambling club, climbed all the Cambrian mountains, stood on top of a dozen peaks and ached to escape Wales.

‘Then it was the 1960s, even in Bangor.'

‘So you started hanging out at the Cavern Club?' I say. Seeing the sitar. Thinking Beatles.

‘The Philharmonic Hall,' he says. ‘At first, Europe seemed exotic. Amsterdam was a big scene. I heard Callas in Venice. But I felt a misfit in the West. I realized that if I was going to live life I couldn't stay wrapped in cotton wool, listening to the Monkees.'

In 1968, Jonathan reached India and – like others before him – felt at home. He dressed in a bright orange
kurta
, bell bottoms and a Chairman Mao cap.

‘Life was one
lassi
to the next. A rupee bought four
chipatis
and a dried-pea curry. An extra 50 piastres bought a bowl of yoghurt,' he says, recounting his first years with warm ease. ‘When money got tight, there was a sack of brown rice in the van. But the poverty, dear God, that transformed me.'

The young businessman switches on a well-travelled laptop. The two brothers look over his shoulder. The Sikh holds his mobile between the bars of the window to get a better signal. Beyond him spreads the Ganges, or at least its muddy riverbed. The holy water has been diverted through Neeldhara for a couple of weeks to enable a new sewer to be built. Beneath a rail bridge, thousands of lean men, women and children squat in the slime, scooping up handfuls of silt, sieving it through their fingers, searching for devotional gold medallions or even a single copper penny.

‘In '68, 95 per cent of Indians lived in poverty,' says Jonathan. ‘Religion held back
realpolitik
. The caste system stagnated social change. The country's desperation turned me on to the Marxist interpretation of society.'

As I recall Chatwin's comments on travellers driving Afghans into the arms of communists, the businessman raises his sharp nose. ‘Yet you – with your dollars – were content to bum around this “desperate” place?' he says to Jonathan. The laptop's screen is reflected in his dark glasses.