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First of all, I must thank my newly found friend for encouraging me to write this. I am not a "blogger." I am a traveller. Inveterate. Usually silent. This is not my blog. I am posting here now, on his blog, after a tireless beer drenched encouragement. We met in a Kolkata bar, one usually wallpapered with travelers, but as you might expect hardly so now, especially in India. Actually, the current state of the "bar" is such that it is more of a speakeasy for expatriates trapped here and looking for escape routes, or seeking out remote places to weather the viral storm. I had come to Kolkata from such a place for the sole purpose of resupplying. The port in the storm where I have found myself will go unrecognized, spoken of only "on background," and I am confident you, the reader, could never find it. I am very comfortable in this assumption. Through the haze of Bidi smoke and the stale smell of Kingfisher, I recounted the following to my new friend, withholding, even in this alcoholic encounter, any traceable details of location. I spoke, more or less, thusly, which may or may not be a word, however... LOOKOUT WEST
"YOU'D BETTER MOVE YOUR CAMP." I have been traveling for years now, living sparsely, harshly at times, and at other times in rich but simple luxury. By years, I mean that I left my homeland in my twenties and am now the recipient of an old age pension generously granted by the country of my birth. I have learned to alchemize any alloyed coin into a pure precious metal. Metaphorically, of course. I have been in India for a a decade or more now, living in the tradition of travelers, mendicants, seekers, although I am as far from monkdom as Everest is from the Sahara. When the global virus consumed us I was isolated by distance, leagues of water. I felt relatively safe, geographically isolated, and no doubt naively so. I was hopping among small islands like some Homeric drunk, eating as much fish as a cormorant. Maskless. Clueless.
I was put down on the leeward side of a sandy island by three darkened fishermen who laughed uproariously as they drifted away from me into calm waters. They tossed me some additional fishing line and a quart of clear liquid in an old detergent bottle that I subsequently found to be
WILD ROSES IN BLOOM
THE PATH WAS TORTUOUS slightly hallucinogenic, which partly forgave its other profound shortcomings. They shouted what I thought might be advice, but since I did not speak their language, I supposed it could have been ridicule. I have become used to ridicule, which, in fact, I have learned to take as advice coming through the back door. I landmarked the spot by studying the shape of a large boulder rising in the bristled dune. I jammed the line and the bottle into my overstuffed pack, buried the rest of the supplies, and took off walking along a wind swept beach littered with colorful plastic. I thought at once of junk mobiles and sculpture. For three days I made shallow explorations into the sparse interior and camped on the beach. It was quite glorious. On the third day I awoke to a loud wind that was close to gale-like, and a man, wrapped in a green patterned fabric that whipped in the wind, sitting quietly on the sand about 10 meters from my tent. His hair and beard were pure grey and wild, his skin burnished red like a ripe mango, his face rather stern.
"Hello," he said. Clearly American. Northeast. New York, maybe
WILD ROSES
UNKNOWN LOCATION Boston. "What the fuck are you doing here?"
We were the same age, more or less, so I was no young hippie interloper. I have been moving in this underworld of travelers for decades, and I knew that despite our ersatz communist lifestyle, we can be extremely covetous of "discovered" spaces. A Ram Das type breathless mantra,"What's mine is yours," often goes up in "Private Property" smoke when the bearded and unwashed cross etherial boundaries. But to find two of us in the same actuarial bracket in the same territory was rare.
"What the fuck are
you doing here," I said.
He began to laugh, short little puffs which gathered steam and ended in a loose phlegmed two-pack-a-day cacophony. He settled.
"Pack up old man and come with me. I could use some company," he ordered.
He sat quietly as I pulled my tent apart and yanked the straps taut on my pack. His hair whipped and the green sarong fluttered. His eyes were watery blue and didn't stray from my goings on.
"Right," he said when I hoisted the pack onto my shoulders.
We climbed wordlessly up from the beach through a
PORTRAIT REFLECTION
"YOU PROBABLY WON'T BELIEVE ME." dune that was covered with wild roses in bloom. The path was narrow and tortuous, steep in spots, then evening out into a mild swell and trough. The landscape and vegatation was stark and weathered, obviously etched and bonsaid by ubiquitous winds. In about fifteen minutes I spotted a small hut on the crest of a dune in the distance. Was it colorful prayer flags that flapped in the blow? The wind was off the water and cool. As we approached I could see that the prayer flags were in fact collections of plastic detritus gathered from the beach. Bottles hanging from colored bits of nylon rope, scraps of fish nets, deflated mylar balloons.
He made us tea in a blackened pot and sweetened it generously. The mugs were white and chipped. Tins of this and that lined shelves. Sardines. Milk. Beef. Peas. A minimal wardrobe hung from nails. A fair number of books lined other shelves higher on the east wall. Two wide windows opened brightly toward the open choppy white speckled sea.
"How long have you been here," I asked him.
"Not sure. I was only supposed to stay two weeks, then he said I
MAKING NOTATIONS
"THAT WAS BUSH LEAGUE." should stay longer, that I wasn't finished."
"And who's 'he,'" I asked, certain to hear about psychotic visions and paranoid voices.
"I'm a consultant to the Dali Lama," he said. "You may not believe me, in fact, I'm
sure you won't. But I don't really give a flying fuck whether you do or don't. The Dali put this all together for me. I'm retired now."
We sipped our tea as the wind rattled the windows.
In the following hours he painted a fantastic picture of his curriculum vitae as "the consultant," how he gave advice to an array of clients so multifaceted they would rival the sides on the most complicatedly cut gem. It was a broad portfolio of dazzling skill-sets: assassination methodology, surgical techniques, international foreign affairs, professional sports coaching, and most recently the acquisition and distribution of vaccines, and, yes, advice to the latest incarnation of the Dali Lama.
"I'm done now," he said as he looked out the windows toward the sea. There was a very long pause, then again, "I'm done."
As crazy and unbelievable as his stories were, crazier still was his rough and coarse ability to make them
THE CONSULTANT
"I'M DONE NOW." sound perfectly reasonable. In fact, I believed him, and still believe him. He sees his current desolate retreat, he told me, as his "doctoral studies," guided by the Dali Lama. It is, in fact, his second stay here, the first, much shorter in duration, being over ten years ago.
"My first time out here was child's play," he told me, "bush league."
I spent about six hours inside that hut, and as the sun was lowering, losing its force and stretching shadows, he invited me to take my leave.
"Well Jose,' he said, "Life's a fuckin' gem. You'll be wanting to get back to your camp, move it up to high ground. It's a high tide and there's a storm coming. I gotta get back to what I was doing."
I never had mentioned my name. The forecast, which I checked before leaving Kolkata, was for uninterrupted fair weather. But that night the sky darkened, the wind ripped, and my camp, if I had not moved it, would have been washed away.
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