Not France 3

                     “There is that difference between being kicked in the teeth and reading
                       a description of being kicked in the teeth. Some call it existential.”
                                                                                       Gita Mehta, Karma Cola


I dreamt about it all night. Soman’s flute. It haunted me. Perhaps it was the ruby-robed monk’s vampire tattoo. It was the same ogre. I tried to convince myself that I had seen many other things more beautiful. It was an illusion.
I paid Soman as much as I could barely afford, and what he was willing to accept. Remarkably, it turned out to be the same number of rupees. As I carried my prize out of the shop, it struck me. At the end of the 5th century, the Bodhidharma brought Kung Fu to the Shaolin monastery in China. He had taught that, to go from mortal to Buddha, you had to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life would bring you. At the end of the 20th century, life was bringing me another bout of dysentery, my awareness was in overdrive, and my karma was kicking the shit out of my mortality. If there was any left. I figured out that venerable thin aesthetes, like bodhidharma, had such long beards, because they were just too worn out from their chronic diarrhea to shave.
The girls went on to Dreamland, and I crawled back up the ladder of the roof our guesthouse, to feed the flies. I looked at the embossed ogre on my temple flute, and began to see the connection. It was a curse for my worldly attachment.
I emerged from the rooftop longdrop later that afternoon, to find an invasion of puffy grey clouds, ballooning over the barren snowcapped mountain ramparts above me. Down below ran the white noise of white water, and the ratchet staccato of the crested kingfishers in the garden. There was a wind picking up, but it wasn’t mine.
Below me too, the whole of Ladakh was crumbling. Life had been slower and happier before the arrival of the money economy from the south. Conveys of TATA trucks came like the clouds, crushing communal bridges, and their connection to the earth and each other. Cheap commodities displaced the time and space and love required for their traditional production, and the scale of everyday life. The superficial teenage boy aggression of the West came to town, speeding up growth and killing its quality. After we left, the streams would become polluted, replaced by water trucks. Flour and mustard oil, initially cheaper by the truckload from the Deccan Plain, would become rationed, because the goods could only get through from June to October, and the village infrastructure had been destroyed to the point where there was none in farming. A place where no one was poor would become an ugly garbage-strewn encampment, where everyone was impoverished, on every level. The family would fall apart, and the young future hope, too slow for the invading culture, and having forgotten the skills of the one they left, would languish. A Shangri-La where there was little or no fighting would see toy guns in the shops and real ones in the streets. The wisdom that had once defined what was useful and harmful to the future would be overwhelmed by the seductive cleverness of instant gratification.
But not just yet. You still couldn’t see the charcoal and saltpeter but, every once in awhile, on the wind, you could smell the sulfur coming. Gunpowder was supposed to make all men tall, but my night continued up and down the ladder by candlelight, and I was getting shorter by the hour. Robyn and Julie were hanging off the rafters downstairs, practicing their gymnastics. It got me rethinking about the Vegemite theory of immune competence.
“Julee!” Said the lady of the house next morning, heading somewhere in her armadillo cobra-headed finery. Carol left with my temple flute a little while later, promising to mail it when she got back to Washington. I needed two Lomotil, just to get out of bed. Smiling Steve had heard I was sick, and marched his dzi stones over to the guesthouse, to commiserate.
We sat in the sun-splashed garden, and talked the day away. Robyn and Julie went through the labyrinth, into town, twice. The first time, they bought carrots and turnips for our Dal lake houseboat host, Jimmy. We were planning to leave Leh the next morning. They also brought hard-boiled eggs and bread and peanut brittle for me, although it would be another day before I would be able to eat any of it.
Their second foray was for bus tickets. From the mood they were in on their return, it was, as the bank manager had confirmed, not France.