Hippie

A sadhu in Kathmandu

The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, I have been told, is a sensory whirl: the colours and sights, smells and sounds waft around you, a gripping menagerie. In Paulo Coelho’s new book, Hippie, it is a phantasm as two women – one high on LSD – weave their way out of the maze. The whole act of walking through and exiting the melee is described so vividly that one can actually share the trip. The high one sees everything as beautiful and calls everything incredible till: Finally, an idea came to her. Instead of looking for an exit, she ought to walk in a straight line, in a single direction. For those who have been there – not just the bazaar, even the trip – this is sheer nostalgia. Then, you don’t have to be a drug-taking, bra-avoiding, free-loving, subversive to relate to the best selling author’s latest. But if you have been any of these, then it is your story. Paulo was and this is his story.

The protagonist is Paulo, a thin Brazilian with a goatee who wants to be a writer. Before the momentous one aboard the Magic Bus to Kathmandu, Paulo had been on a few journeys with an older girlfriend, a rich divorcee, which ends soon after they are abducted mistakenly. But not before they visit Titicaca lake in the Andes between Peru and Bolivia where they partake in a hippie ritual near the Gate of the Sun which was sculpted from a single stone, and across the upper part were angels, the gods, lost symbols of a culture that, according to the locals, would show the way to recover the world in the event it was destroyed by human greed. Those holding hands and marvelling at the magnificence are not bubbleheads wearing floral windcheaters and shiny winklepickers when they are not skinny-dipping but a tribe with a genuine desire for world peace and all-around wellness. The book just as well helps you with devising a meaningful itinerary, as it did me, while at the same time helps you imbue some tittynopes of understanding about a whole new way of loving and living – including budget travelling – of a tribe of hardcore travellers and compulsive love-makers often derisively called hippies.

Some proximal enlightenment, I’m hoping

You pick up other useful stuff as well. Say, coca leaves as an effective antidote for soroche, altitude sickness, named after a mountain in Ecuador. I have been to Ladakh on a motorcycle and my attempts to tackle soroche with diamox made me nauseous; I am thinking of packing coca leaves next time. And of course no sex for the first two days.

There is the eye-opening flat-effect. His thoughts veer close to the edge as he approaches a border making him panic from the memories of an earlier experience. He has to exorcise the ghosts lest he lands himself in another dire situation. This is where he thinks about those in concentration camps: how those walking to the gas chambers never had the slightest reaction, never attacked their executioners. Apparently when the panic is so great the brain blocks out everything, there is neither terror nor fear. This temporary stress-induced schizophrenia is called flat-effect.

The Kathmandu Durbar Square

As an aside I wondered at the women who were about to perform sati in a not-too-ancient India. This self-immolation in the pyre of the dead, usually much older husband, in many places was aided by opium. In Rajasthan, where sati/jauhar was as common as road rage in Delhi today, opium is still consumed in large quantities – as a welcome drink, actually. Similarly with the wives and slaves, whores, catamites and security detail who decided to ‘follow’ their favourite pharaoh into the pyramid. Sometimes the brain, I am sure, can do with a hand to kick in the flat-effect.

It is not always the great writer’s own enriching experience and glittering insights or stellar findings. Some places and descriptions read very brochurish. Then, you need information to lend the narrative a perspective. The same way, say, you need to visit museums before exploring a place.

Speaking of museums brings us to Amsterdam, the country with the highest concentration of museums in the world. Could there be a connection, I couldn’t help asking myself, between the free, legal availability of marijuana in the country with its prolific number of museums?  There are 75 museums attracting about 7 million tourists each year, says Amsterdam.info. Could it be an aftermath of the clarity, the clear-headedness, the searing logic, intense scrutiny and ability to simplify and process facts that comes with smoking pot? There definitely, if you have used it you will agree, is an urge to understand and rationalise things. Lending perspective goes with the territory. It definitely produces much ‘serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship in this increasingly mad and dangerous world’ as Carl Sagan wrote. What if as Mr X!

Where the action is – Thamel

It is at the Dam Square in Amsterdam where Paulo meets Karla. Paulo comes across as a pauciloquent agelast to a vivacious and affable Karla who brims with sexual energy. Men are drawn to her, like bees to a flower; only here the flower has the power over its nectar dispensation which is erratic at best and exacting at worst. Along the way she had taken on many lovers including a sailor from Bombay, who, in addition to being an excellent lover (something she rarely encountered), led her to discover Eastern mysticism. A little clichéd, perhaps, but I will pass admittedly feeling chuffed for a fellow countryman. There is a rich psychiatrist, who, just before she walks out on him suggests she might be bipolar – though in not as many words. A bit too close to home for me. All around her, travellers are milling, holding copies of ‘Europe on 5 Dollars a Day,’ a Frommer first. But she is waiting for him, whom the clairvoyant said was on the way.

He turns up, he is Paulo. They sit across the Dam squaring up each other up. He makes the first move with the dumbest thing one could say: Excuse me.

“Excuse me what, exactly?”

“Nothing.”

The sizing up continues. He was crazy skinny, and he seemed to wash his hair. They have dinner at a Hare Krishna, Hare Rama langar. Paulo goes with the group afterwards leaping to and fro and singing at the top of his lungs. There is a drug den – recommended by Karla – which Paulo visits and returns after interviewing a regular. Maybe the sobriety, he gets an offer to be a mule. Karla buys a ticket to Kathmandu. Some coquettish machinations, just short of emotional coercion later, Paulo buys his own as well. Things are off to a rickety start: Karla tells others on the bus that they are just travel companions, later the passengers get bullied at the border.

Captivating stories of fellow passengers come out along the way including the bus driver Michael who once used to be an Indiana Jones-type doctor. Passing through Turkey, a layover in Istanbul and everybody makes their own plans. Paulo goes to explore Sufism while Karla opts for the bazaar. She watches the Bosphorus smoking cigarette after cigarette. A sense of foreboding also might have come over her as she sat captivated by the red bridge that connected two distant continents. 

The Magic Bus was supposed to go all the way to Kathmandu. But the reader is let off at Istanbul. The photographs are all an attempt at visual completion of the journey – of me in Nepal a few years ago. This is me with the Frenchman Pierre whom I met in Tibet; Pierre was trying to make a connection with his daughter who died many years ago. Besides taking pucker-face photos, we had a good time in Kathmandu.