Holy Water Plus

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It’s water from heaven, delivered via the head of Shiva high in the Himalayas. He always loved the image, not that he was turning into some kind of new age Hindu hippy or anything. After traveling for eighteen months as an impressionable young man in India maybe his perspective, while perhaps broadened, was getting a little skewed.

But traveling can be lonely. It was so nice to be included in something – to feel like he had a place in this world. So the daily meeting of Brahmins ministering down at the ghats at Varanasi gave him a sense of belonging, despite the minimal ability to actually communicate in understandable Hindi or English.

He was invited by them to sit and be part of the ritual of taking bang. This involved one of the babas pulping marijuana leaves using a rolling stone on the ghat steps, mixing in water straight from mother Ganga as he went. The green paste was then placed in a muslin cloth and then more sacred water poured through, leaving a green liquid in the cup. This was passed reverently around the group between five babas and himself. He felt privileged and special to be part of this, and while there was a slight misgiving about the water, he somehow believed that a spiritual power was protecting him from any harm.

Being stoned from the bang was great, lasting the rest of that day and into the evening. He did a lot of sitting and watching as Hindus performed their daily pujas at the ghats. He slept very well that night.

Weighing in at just seventy kilos, he was not a large man. And he prided himself on being fit. He swam daily in the Ganga, supplemented by his newfound practice of a little hatha yoga routine that he liked to do a couple of times a day, at least.

He found himself in Pushkar now, Rajasthan. It was somewhere he had meant to get to for months, having heard good things about this little lake town at the edge of the desert. Again he was able to swim daily and continue his yoga. But this fucking cycle of diarrhea was hard to shake. Each day he woke hoping it had passed again as had previous experiences of stomach bugs he'd had in India.

The locals took a keen interest in his health as he got to know them over the weeks and months. Everyone had a remedy, the only problem being that each remedy was different from the other. The yoga ritual became more and more an obsession and of course more and more easily performed with his increasingly sleeker body. For some reason, he did not seek Western medical intervention. It didn’t seem the right thing to do.

It only took three months to get down to fifty kilos. He was an impressionable young man.

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