I went to India in 1991, Srinigar. Stayed in a houseboat on Lake Najin. No one was there, no tourists that is, just a few travellers, owing to the tensions, an insurgency. Bunkers of heavily armed Indian army were on every street corner, camouflage nets, concrete, dug in, watchful, tense. When I got off the plane there were fisticuffs over who would take me and receive my rupee but I was loyal to the fiery short young man who I had made the booking with from Delhi. After all I had stayed with his uncle's family the night before and they had been fantastic, hospitality, generosity. He drove me, or rather his chauffeur drove us, in an immaculate black Morris Oxford, back to his deserted luxurious houseboats. There his family, father, wife, children and servants waited desperately for business. No doubt they still had savings to sustain them and they were well off by comparison but things were getting tight. The houseboats are fabulous, Persian rugs, ornate carved dining tables, everything a posh English aristocrat would expect, would demand. I had one all to myself. Jonti and Anna were staying in the adjacent houseboat, tourists from South Africa. We gravitated together in this atmosphere of tension. We met a local Muslim boy on the lake who was studying to be a doctor. We felt couped up on the houseboats so he offered to take us out and show us around Srinigar, to an historic park that was particularly well designed. We were stopped and searched by the army who thought we might have been hostages! Later he took us back to his house and bought us Chinese lunch. He came from a well off family. We were in his living room in his lovely white mansion, dim sim, sweet and sour, when a group of heavily armed rebels, freedom fighters, burst in for a spontaneous meeting. It was a safe house he said, and their leader, a stoic bearded guerrilla fighter with a Kalishnikov (not that I can identify firearms!), a Castro look alike whose aura oozed idealism, politics, struggle, came and said a few words to us. He said tell them when you get home what is happening here, the arrests, the murders. The gulf war had started. That night I woke up to gunshots and thought I heard paddles beneath my boat window. We decided to leave Srinigar and so organised to take a bus together to Leh, Jonti, Anna and I. The bus would be part of a military convoy, the civilian buses wedged between tanks, army transport trucks and Indian supply trucks with tinsel Hindu decorations, their cabins adorned with masks and eyes. We had to wait for the return convoy to snake down the mountain before ours could start up, a five kilometre long procession at least, two hours end to end. The road was barely wide enough for a single truck or bus. Finally our conga line started to rumble.
As we journeyed the convoy occasionally paused for a rest, to breathe. At one of these stops the commander of the convoy, an upper caste Raj in an immaculate uniform with high ranking lapels invited the three of us, Jonti, Anna and I, for English tea and we sat on deckchairs surrounded by a glorious view sipping tea, eating cake, served by his attendants, chatting. He offered to arrange me an Indian wife! I felt like I was betraying the guerrillas. He pointed to the sniper posts on the opposite mountain, Pakistani snipers he said. The convoy took three days, what terrain. We were stuck on a high mountain pass one night because of an avalanche. Road repairs were needed, a truck was lost. I peered over the edge, a cliff, lit a smoke and felt nervous. I digress, this story is about George.
Leh. We finally arrived. The Tibetan plateau. Eleven thousand feet. I took a room on the roof of a guest house and the view was like this.
From Wikimedia Commons
Alan, a lanky South Australian grey haired teacher who was on the run from some incident in the South, and George, a Hungarian Serb now living in Germany were staying there, in this guest house, among others. We formed a little nerd group, nerdy even by Indian traveller standards, and hung out together. Alan pissed George off one day when George and I were playing chess. I was holding my own, at an advantage even, when George made 'en passant’ to turn the tide. I didn't know the move being a novice chess player and Alan took my side questioning George’s shady Serbian rules. George go a little feisty for a moment and stormed off. It was mostly just George I after that! Alan was much older than us but had a crazy innocence about him and seemed to be on a precipice, his life was teetering, maybe that's why he was travelling in Leh. We two or three went on adventures to the surrounding monasteries and villages, roaming fields, riding on the tops of buses or in the backs of lorries.
I only knew George for the two or three weeks we spent together in Ladakh but he is a great friend. A true friend. He wore army greens and everyone, because everyone knew George, called him Soldier. In fact he had been a soldier in the Serbian army, mandatory service, and had been sent to a front line and had had grenades thrown at him. He said how he had pushed his face down into the mud. He could speak Urdu and some Hindi, even a little Ladakhi. Languages. He must have spoke seven. I tried to pick up a bit of Urdu but no hope. We went to chaang pubs together too. A chaang pub in Leh is usually in someone's home, mostly in the old town. You go in and sit in a cosy room and drink chaang, barely wine, with tsumpa, barley flour, or rum and eat mutton perhaps. In one little house like this we sat with some Indian army regulars from the nearby barracks and the Ladakhi mother who ran this pub cooked tasty morsels for us. It was ace. Another chaang pub had lots of regular locals and we joined in with them for a time, honorary regulars. I drank the chaang, no rum, and we would stumble home through the dark streets past packs of mangy dogs singing 'ein prosit’, Oktoberfest songs, which amused George.
Very similar to our guest house. In fact is this our guest house?
So all of that to get here, to the tale about George. I feel like I should go on, say it all, describe everything, everything I can remember, altitude sickness, the road builders up there, smoking pot by mountain streams, the shaman healer, wandering through villages, the beautiful Ladakhi people. Did you know that some believe Jesus went to Ladakh after he was raised? Gurdjieff speaks of hidden esoteric schools in the mountains there, mystical, accessible only to the chosen. Ladakh.
On one of our treks we ranged farther than usual and stumbled upon a monastery, isolated, sited on a desolate moonscape, holy sturdy monastery architecture. We went into a courtyard and I climbed up onto turret thing to survey the vista. I had my sister's Minolta 35mm camera, she had lent it to me so that I might record my journey, her treasured camera, it was generous of her. I took a few snaps. George was down there in the courtyard and he found a cabinet shrine box with a little horn in it. He took out the horn a blew. A deep, resonant moo echoed through the courtyard and out into the surrounding plains, a huge sound, startling, the harmony of the spheres. He quickly stopped and we stared at each other. Suddenly a throng of maroon robed monks swarmed in, a hundred or more no joke. Oops. There was an air of annoyance in them but also some excitement, expectation. They remonstrated with George, told him to take off his shirt. I didn't know what they were saying but George did, he spoke back something, shrugged, and took off his shirt. The moment he was bare chested excited gasps and chants went up from the monks and they began to swarm around George like Muslims around the Hajj, a vortex of turning monks reaching out to touch George's head. Eventually they bore him up, held him aloft and carried him into the recesses of the monastery. I tried to snap photos of all this, the swirling maroon orange vortex with George's pale centre. They would have been great photos if only the lab in Manali hadn’t stuffed up developing the film.
I sat and waited for George who came out about an hour later. I knew that there was no trouble by the joyous attitude of the monks. When George came out he said that the horn had belonged to Lobsang Rampa, a venerated monk, and because it had sounded so beautifully when he had blown it they believed that George might be Lobsang's reincarnation. I thought that stupid. I could have blown that horn just as well. He then showed me a birthmark that he had on his chest just below his heart. As birthmarks go it was an odd one, more of a signet, a seal. The skin was dark, discoloured in the shape of a strange character that evoked mysticism. It was this birthmark, one of Lobsang Rampa’s designs, that had really set the monks off. There was a prophecy, Lobsang had predicted that he would return in a soldier's uniform, as a soldier.
The monks pleaded with George to stay in the monastery for just one night and George agreed. I hitchhiked back to the guest house by myself and sat on the flat roof outside my cubby house room watching the stars, the milky way, satellites, UFOs. I thought it best to leave it to them to sort out this Lobsang thing. The following day George did not return. I began to feel slightly anxious for him so the next morning I woke up early and attempted to find my way back to the desolate location that the monastery honoured. George had been our navigator, translator and guide in Leh. In all honesty I was useless and I realised how much I had relied on him. I wandered aimlessly until I began asking monks for directions. When I mentioned that I was looking for Soldier, something like 'young see Soldier? Soldier Lobsang?’ their eyes lit up and they pointed to the horizon 'over there! Over there!’ So I kept heading over there, zig-zagging my way over hillside and mountain, catching rides when I could. It was late afternoon when I arrived at that moonscape and heard the horn sound again. It must be George. I found him sitting peacefully in the courtyard with a broad smile, horn in his lap. He knew I was coming, he was waiting for me. Word of my search had already arrived in the morning. Bastard. Actually no, I had been having an amazing day and felt that I had imperceptibly changed. We chatted, he told me some incredible things that had happened to him, amazing things, otherworldly things, spiritual things. He said that he had decided to stay with them. George opened his shirt to show me that his birthmark had faded, disappeared, almost vanished, not quite but it was way harder to make out. The monks had said that it would disappear if he stayed in Lobsang's chamber as Lobsang had foretold. This was why he had stayed that first night, to see. George wondered at it all, should he believe? He had been shown incredible things. He had lost his family in the war in Serbia and there was nothing much for him to return to in Germany. He had never been more unconnected, more free, more alone. Why not? Why not stay and find the Lobsang Rampa hidden deep within himself?
From Wikimedia Commons
