Only Little Cholera 1

                       “People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man  
                         can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being  
                         surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a
                         creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.”
                                                                                                        Marcel Proust



I kissed her goodbye so she’d remember. Our hearts flipped and our tummies rumbled.
A slow-moving swarming caterpillar of humanity had groaned to a final stop in front of us. Closer inspection revealed the rough shape of a train. The Doon Express, in the flesh. Baggage and people surged off, and jostled back onto, the overflowing roofs of the coaches. I pushed into the teeming mob where I thought a carriage door might be, and eventually found myself scrunched up in a roof rack space that, only a moment before, had been a large jute bag of rice. A big dragonfly was caught in the light housing beside me. I wondered why I had even paid, for the same amount of space. After three hours of yogic torture (all the more enjoyable with dysentery and nowhere for the cramps to go), I emerged onto a sea of sleeping pilgrims and a maze of turnstiles. Gaya, literally, The Demon. Lord Vishnu had left a sacred footprint somewhere near here. I never found it. Three others were thought to have created the belt of Orion. Vishnu. Nothing. Vishnu with you.
In the station darkness, I could just make out the silhouettes of uniformed officials sticking sharp objects into the arms of fellow disgorged passengers, in the line ahead of me. As the queue advanced it became apparent that, while the syringes were occasionally changed, the needles were not. Then, much too soon, it was my turn. A hand grabbed my left arm. My right hand grabbed his.
“What’s going on?” I inquired.
“Oh, nothing.” He responded.
“Then why the injections?” Says I.
“Only little problem.” He offered.
“What little problem? I asked. Because, now I was curious.
“Only little Cholera.” He finally admitted.
“I probably already have Cholera”. I said. And he let go.
The Ajatsutra across the street charged me thirty rupees for a double, with no water to wash away my loostoolspatter. By this point, hitting the fan, it was all one word. I realized that, in my next life, I was coming back as a fly.
The next morning, after an omlette and chai, I headed for more holy shit. On my way towards the bus station, a rickshaw walla, with a crewcut and a ponytail, sidled up alongside. He spoke no English but we finally negotiated a price that, I had thought, would take me to the terminal. It seemed a little exorbitant, but he assured me with backhand gesturing that my destination was a long way off.
I climbed on up, and he began to trot along bumpy rugged streets, and then the ghats and temples and banyans along the sylvan banks of the Falgu River. His ponytail bobbed in rhythmic synchrony with his trot. Local boys ran alongside, and a bicycle rider pleasantly practiced his English, until he turned off.
As the road smoothed, I gazed up, under and through the saccadic branches of sunlit leafy mimosas, to the cottonball clouds beyond. It became a drug, the perfect soporific calm of the little mechanical noises, warm air resistance, and rolling glide through the Bihar countryside. Sun-splatterd tranquility. I awoke to the sight of rivulets of perspiration running down a naked back, running around a sacred pool, along a river lined with coconut palms and umbrella’d monks, against a floating landscape of rice paddies receding into distant mountains.
We pulled onto the main street of Bodhgaya before I realized he had run, not to the bus station in Gaya, but to my ultimate destination of the day, thirteen kilometers away. For seven rupees and a Limca, which he drained in one gulp.
I wandered the skyscraper temples, mesmerized by the frescoes, wreath-laden chanting pilgrims, birds, white scarf serenity and the most venerated tree on the planet.
Ficus religiosa, a third generation descendent of the original Bodhi tree, under which Siddartha Gautama had attained enlightenment two and a half millennia earlier. A handful of leaves the priest handed me would ultimately make the journey to my library.
It took Siddharta three days and three nights of meditation to achieve insight, the same length of time it took Jesus to achieve reincarnation, and roll away the rock occlusion to his cave. It took me three hours, tops.
After my class under the Bodhi tree, I paid my respects to Gautama and his mother, draping their images with white muslin and five rupee notes. I left the Mahabodhi Complex for the searing heat, and the other temples scattered along the dusty trail. The Tibetan temple was colorful, and had an impressive law wheel fresco; the Chinese temple felt neglected, the red-tiled Thai temple was sharply sloped with golden atmospheric projections, and the Japanese pagoda’s highlight was a Buddha of serene proportions.
My Limca rickshaw wallah had waited for my enlightenment, and jogged me another thirteen kilometers back to the Gaya station. Dysentery had taken over the planning for my next reincarnation from Destiny. I spent most of my time, waiting for the Bihar Express to Patna, in the toilet, slowly working my way through an entire Bihar newspaper. No reading activity was involved. The station manager fished what was left of me out of my squat, and advised me to find a seat on the train. This would not be easy. This would be impossible. There was a difference between the Orient Express and the Bihar Express. There were not whole cities occupying every carriage on the Orient Express.
My previous day’s tactics got me into the interior of the coach, but I had to dislodge three jute bags off an overhead luggage rack to find any space at all. The owners were unimpressed. Drove my karma to the dharma but the dharma was dry.
The fans didn’t work. The overhead light bulb in my face went stroboscopic. The train lost its race with the humidity and its appellation. The only ‘express’ thing about it was the wish to die and the temporary gratitude for its arrival in Patna.
In the last year of his life, Buddha passed through this place, bestowing on it a double prophecy. Patna would have a great future but, at the same time, it would experience ruin from flood, fire, and feud. I had clearly arrived during the second prediction. The station platform was in full flood, and looked like Kafka and Conrad had collaborated on a design for an overcrowded refugee camp. In a surging swell of cacophonic cotton, my height was the only thing that saved me from drowning. I dogpaddled my way out to a rickshaw wallah, who peddled me, past numerous open fires, to several places, before I found room at the Hotel President.
If it is the same stark shelter I paid far too much for in 1983, its current advertising doesn’t reflect the choleric cholera collation I consumed there, just before midnight. ‘In the evenings you can enjoy a romantic candle light dinner at our restaurant where vegetarian/non vegetarian foods are being served.’ My own romantic candlelight dinner was slightly less than total culinary fulfillment. The candles were necessary because there was no power. The vegetarian thali was the same temperature as the subzero air conditioning, which was the only thing connected to a backup generator. The feud over the bill was the only passion.
My rickshaw wallah woke me at five, and peddled us to the bus on which he had arranged a seat for me the previous night.
“Salaam Aleichem.” I said, greeting the obvious Moslem driver, on boarding. The busload of Hindus broke into riotous laughter. I was on the final leg of my north Indian Odyssey. A cricket pitch went by, followed by a thousand flat fields of rice.
By midmorning I had traversed a gauntlet of border points, and had made my crossing into the Terai plain of southern Nepal.
The red and blue banner waving above me at the last frontier post, was the only national flag in the world that wasn’t a rectangle. I had left chaos for contrast. The subtropical lowlands would ascend sharply to more than 240 peaks over twenty thousand feet, and eight over six thousand feet higher. The names were legend- Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Kanchenjunga, Dhaulagiri, Annapurna, Manaslu, and one more. Sagarmatha to the Nepalis, Chomolungma to the Tibetans, I grew up learning of it as Everest, and its association with Edmund Hilary, the humble Kiwi who had ‘knocked the bastard off,’ long before the climb had been appropriated into the yuppie bucket list checkbox.
Nepal was the homeland of Buddhism’s peaceful founder, Prince Gautama Siddhartha, and fierce, ruthless Gurkha warriors. It was red rhododendrons flowering through the snow. It was the living goddess and the Grateful Dead. It was boring dal bhat, and exotic Newar cuisine, with mustard oil, cumin, coriander, black peppers, sesame seeds, turmeric, garlic, ginger, fenugreek, bay leaves, cloves, cinnamon, pepper, chilies, and all the western food versatility of the Kathmandu cafes.
Where I stood, the small houses around me were made of bamboo and mud and cowshit. As my journey gained altitude, they would toughen into unbaked bricks and tiled roofs in the hill country, and stone and slate in the Great Himalayan Range. I had come to see the mystical magical majestic mountain kingdom of my imagination. And I was in a hurry. Destiny was waiting. ‘Katmandu, I'll soon be seein' you, and your strange bewilderin' time will hold me down.’
But I was still closer to mother India. My rickshaw wallah didn’t only slow for the potholes, he savored them. I still had an overnight stay in Birganj, before one last bus would get me to the kingdom’s medieval capital. My snail-paced conveyance finally dropped me at the entrance to the ‘Deluxe’ New Sagar Lodge. I shuddered at the thought of what the ordinary version might have been. Heat up the clutch, set at 50 deluxe. I woke the attendant. Three times. He took me the long way around the corner, to a blue, green and orange box with dirty sheets and a broken ceiling fan.
I went out for a bad fried egg, and the discovery of a shop whose purpose was clearly nonprofit. I was paying for a brand new stethoscope when a voice surfaced from behind me.
“What are you going to do with it?” It said. I turned to find two smiling travelers, one an ascetic bearded long-haired Briton, the other a clean-cut stocky German. You could just tell.
“It’s only four dollars.” I said.
“Yes, but what are you going to do with it?” Asked the hairball. He told me I was obviously a fellow traveler, heading to Kathmandu, or I wouldn’t still be in Birganj at this time of day. If I were heading to Kathmandu to work in anything that required a stethoscope, I would have brought one with me. Since I wasn’t heading to Kathmandu to work, I was either going there to slip into the drug culture, or to go on a trek. I wouldn’t be purchasing a stethoscope if I had been a drug addict, so I must be a trekker. But I still wouldn’t need a stethoscope to go on a trek, so what the bloody hell was I going to do with it.
I told him that it was none of his bloody business, but if it turned out that I would become favorably disposed to him, I might tell him, after we got to Kathmandu.
I told him that I knew that he and his friend were going to Kathmandu for the same reason he knew I was going to Kathmandu. I told him that, despite his hirsute appearance, I knew, from his vocabulary, that he was a nurse and, from his accent, that he was from Leeds and, from his slang, that he was less than twenty-five and older than twenty and, from his dress, that he had been in India for just over six months. I watched his eyes.
“Tim.” He thrust out his hand. “This is my friend Thomas. He’s a computer programmer from Berlin.”
“I know.” I said. And introduced myself. We were instant friends. I took Tim and Thomas to the bad fried egg restaurant at dusk, through the clouds of insects. We had sag paneer, and Coca Cola. I never thought I would miss it. It tasted like the burger I had on my escape from East Germany. The mosquitoes that breeched the dirty sheet defense I had constructed that night were after blood. My wake up call intruded after only an hour of sleep.
Tim and Thomas were waiting downstairs in a rattrap for the final push to the Land of Gods. We entertained each other so completely we didn’t notice the hills sneak under us, or the oak, elm, beech and maple trees, or the sky-stretched Himalayas, off in the distance. We were leaving the heavy light of India for lightness of Being. She was receding behind us, not only in miles, but in centuries.

                             “That's why I'm goin' to Kathmandu
                              Up to the mountains where I'm going to
                              If I ever get out of here
                              That's what I'm gonna do”
                                                       Bob Seeger, Kathmandu