Sadhus and Freaks in Manali, India

Chapter 17 - Hand to Mouth to India

The next morning, on which we all had to leave, I woke early and struggled to put on my pink dhoti. I had to enlist the help of the Sikh attendants to work it out. as i walked out i left a crowd of amazed onlookers behind me - i had entered as a mild-mannered backpacker, found a phone box and emerged as Super-Sadhu! Wherever there's a free bowl of rice-I'll be there! Whenever there's a spare seat in a truck going East-you can count on me! And whenever there's a nation of 950 million people grappling with confused cultural identities, struggling with an economic and social infrastructure that's sick to the core-I'll.Well, there's only so much that one hero can do.

No one swallowed my bluff, however and everyone still thought i was a tourist.I still got just as many solicitous shouts upon my wallet from rickshaws, stallholders and beggars. It was too cold to go barefoot and my clarinet made my rucksack seem too bulky for a renunciate carrying only a blanket, a begging bowl and a chillum. Maybe I should just have completely covered myself in ash.

I was going into the mountains again. A quick glance at a map had shown to my surprise that I was very close to Dharamsala, the homeplace of the Dalai Lama. I'd had no idea that I was remotely within range but it was only a centimetre distance away on the map and from there it would be but a short hop to the Kulu valley, where I'd spent my first couple of formative weeks in India as a newly-arrived and green traveller two years before. I hoped to find some old friends there.

The train station was decked out with Sikh warriors with axes and spears and also with sadhus of different colours, all making use of their privilege to travel free on the trains (no longer a de facto right but many conductors still turn a blind eye). With winter firmly in the air, perhaps they heading to warmer destinations.

I'd missed my train so I hit the road with ten rupees in my pocket. I stopped to ask directions of a young student, explaining that I didn't know the way and received the charmingly typical response:

"Indeed! Which one of us can truly say that he knows which direction to go in life-" I was in no mood to let him finish. Discussions of this kind in India tend to wind, bend and circle inconceivably around to the starting point, whereupon the tracks found there serve as fuel for further happy speculation. If there's one thing at which the Indians have traditionally excelled, it's sitting about drinking chai and talking philosophy until the milk runs out. The results can be seen in the various Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and in the mountain of treatise on minute aspects of yoga, meditation and the transcendental-much of it an excellent cure for insomnia.

I strode off and managed to grab a lift in a truck after a few hundred metres of walking. I was taken North for a couple of hours and the guy at the wheel even bought me some excellent spinach and chapattis at a roadside bhaji place beside outrageously beautiful fields of purple flowers. Conversation didn't get too far.

"England! Good fucking, yes?"

The next truck was driven by a happy and laughing guy, with his two sons beside him in the cabin as assistants.

"Fucking girl, ha!"He cried merrily. Every time he saw a woman walking by the roadside he honked his horn voraciously and made the in-out gesture with his finger and cupped hand. Hard to make a conversation like that last for two or three hours.

I began to sympathize with the Muslims again-I'd be nervous if I had daughters with gawping frustrates like these guys around. On the other hand, perhaps the only way they're going to overcome these mountainous sexual repressions is by maximum exposure to breasts and bums-then maybe they'll be able to relax about it a little. They weren't bad guys, just products of a society run by men and infused with rules to leave everyone sexually frustrated. Even in marriage sex in India is often just a brief, clumsy fumble in the dark, trying not to wake up grandma who's sleeping in the same bed.

"I have never seen my wife naked." Vishal, a friend of mine in Delhi, once told me.

"But how is that possible, Vishal?" I asked, stunned. "You've got two kids."

"She wears a sari, no? There are gaps."

Most religions seem to have decided pretty early on 'You know, we've go to do take action about that sex thing'. Somehow India too forgot the age of the Kama Sutra, Tantra and erotic carvings on temple walls. Even the Hare Krishnas try to tell us that Krishna was only spiritually making love to hundreds of sheperdesses at a time.

Nowadays it works like this: no one ever tells you the first thing about sex or where babies come from, you marry someone you've never really talked to and then you live in a house so stuffed with family members that you never get to spend a moment with your spouse alone. Many children in India are conceived in bathrooms.

I got off in a small village at the foot of the mountains and as the day had somehow mostly passed, it made sense to kip down somewhere near rather than go any further up where it would be significantly colder.

Some jazz floated through the air and I pulled out my clarinet and went to join a sax player in a small shop. We played for an hour or two (a crowd of faces apeering, naturally) and my new friends paid for the rip in my trousers to be repaired. They also gave me twenty rupees so that I could eat at the train station where they reckoned I could also sleep.

The waiting room in the station was nice and I hung out there in the warmth. A father and mother ate dal and chapattis with their children from a shared bowl and i wanted to be part of thei family. Near the door was an elderly Tibetan nun and a teenage monk, sitting by their luggage as they returned from some mission or the other. The boy gently sobbed as his guide admonished him for something and I felt happy to witness all these expressions of human warmth. One of those elusive moments where everything seems just right.

The morning brought me a ride from another Sikh, who fetched me some breakfast from his home and I was soon curving upwards on mountain roads, waving a gentle goodbye to the plains of the Punjab that now seemd so simple from on high. Monkeys loped around and in between short rides from guys on scooters, I walked the looping curves of the gently climbing road.

Turning a corner, loud and tinny music came blaring at me in the honour of a Hindu festival. Four guys stood by with a cauldron of sweet semolina, a handful of which they forced into the palms of everyone in the vehicles that came along the road. Indians are always keen to be in on the act, especially when there's plenty of potential for fun, mischief and a sense of self-importance.

Beautiful walks and chilly but exhilarating rides on motorbikes and scooters brought me up to the first of the Dharamsala villages by mid-afternoon. I'd hoped that the Tibetan monks might give me shelter if only for three nights. But a polite secretary sitting at a computer, regretted that they were already full to overflowing point and that they couldn't help me.

I headed up to Mcleod ganj and ran into the usual marks of an Indian tourist town with Kashmiri jewellry, carpet and clothes shops, cheap hotels and bakeries and restaurants serving Western food. It was way too cold to think about sleeping outside but my problems were solved by some Kashmiris I met in the street, who let me stay in the house that they used only for cooking, eating and watching television.

Thank Allah for the Muslims! Saved the day once again. The odds on my blood turning to ice fell to the longshot chance that there might be no windows in this gaff. Gaping holes there were not but chronic damp there was, so bad that fresh layers of newspaper had to be laid down every two days and a layer of mats put out to dry on the rooves.

I was supposed to help with the cooking but fortunately the chef liked to do things his own way and relegated me to the task of smoothing through the rice on a plastic mat, to remove the tooth-crunching small stones that invariably friend their way in. We ate dishes filled with chilli to 'chase away the cold'. As a once-a-week treat they let me join them in an illicit session of Indian whiskey and Coke.

In the days I hiked up to Dharamkot, the highest village up a steep and gravelly path. I'd be passed on my ascent by Tibetan kids sliding on wooden planks in practice for the imminent arrival of snow. Monkeys lurched across the path, looking for trouble and the forest stood thick in the rain capital of India. The lush vegetation dispelled any notion that all mountains were bare and rocky places.

Further up, the snow glaciers presented their god-like craggy heads and they were so close as to be surreal. But by the afternoon a floating dream of cloud imposed itself, just a stone's throw away and the white peaks would commence a game of peek-a-boo with the swirling gassed water.

Dharma-types hung about the chai-shops at this village and I quickly remembered this kind of holier-than-thou India heads. They engage in endless battles to determine who's more spiritual-than-thou. An older chap and I were chatting about snakes and scorpions in the area, numerous on account of the jungle terrain and an eavesdropping ashram kid from Vienna chipped in with:

"But you know, I just hold the scorpion in my hand and I feel no fear! I just feel love for it and there is no danger." Gazing at us with earnest blue eyes that urged us to accept the wisdom of his words for our own good.

It reminded me of a scene from two years before when I sat in a teepee in a Spanish commune. we were having a 'talking circle' and we were only allowed to speak when the 'talking stick' came to us. I came close to throwing the talking-stick into the fire. The person previous to me had announced that he knew beyond doubt that in a past life he had been King Arthur of the Round Table.

But it seeme i was more alone than i thought. No one else laughed when an English girl told us that the flies buzzing around us were in fact stitching together the holes in our auras. Each to their own trip I suppose.

Dharamsala was full of stunning natural beauty and there were lots of easy walks that led high up winding jungly cliffs, painted in webbed shadow and host to an orchestra of insects, including the odd guard bee that buzzed me in case i got any ideas about foraging for honey.

Towards the top, piles of stones could be seen in simple stone stacks monuments to the elements about. They were usually accompanied by colourful prayer flags that hung like the forgotten washing of an absent-minded god. It was a shanti place to be as long as I went early; the clouds began to encroach by about two o'clock and more than once I was sent scampering down the rocky paths before I could get lost in the invading fog.

The Tibetans were pleasant people to be around and the religious thing is quite open and merry, compared to the austerity of Islam or other religions that take themselves more seriously. I've always had an affection for the Tibetan Buddhists since one of them winked at me in a visa office in Delhi, two years before. His well-timed bit of irreverence to the bureaucratic atmosphere had relieved my nervousness and reminded me that it was all just a game. I approached the stern-looking offical at his desk and he looked at me as if i was dirt. I asked him if he liked cricket and his eyes lit up. Five minutes later I had my extension.

The Tibetan trip is a hard one to get to grips with. On one hand they emphasise compassion and the opening of the heart more than any other religion. Yet their practices also border on the full-fledged shamanic, stuffed with a host of demons and deities. At any rate, you've got to respect them for the manner in which they face up to death. From an early age they accept it as an eventuality and make sure they're ready when their time comes. Tibetan novice monks used to spend entire nights sleeping with a corpse in the grave to overcome their fears about death. No Tibetan buddhist even bought a life insurance policy.

Whatever else, the Tibetans have to be admired for the miracle they've worked in achieving such remarkable prosperity since they fled their homeland after the Chinese invasion, stumbling down as refugees into the mountains of India. The more famous of the rinpoches now buzz about between public lectures by private helicopter and the Dalai Lama receives financial support from the mega-wealthy bods of Hollywood. The dalai Lama is as shrewd a businessmen as any Tibetan and it's now fashionable among the famous and the wealthy to support his cause. Buddhism is it, baby. An amazing lesson in how to turn utter disaster into a position of fantastic influence and prestige. And it's still possible to see the small guy himself. Around two thousand people queued to shake his hand when I was there-how many other international leaders is it possible to meet such ease?

After three nights stay, it seemed time to move on down the road and hopefully meet up with some old friends in the Kulu valley. I walked a long way and caught a series of short lifts on scooters before I finally got a ride in a truck going to Mandi, about halfway to my destination.

My drivers weren't shy as to their first thoughts concerning their new passenger.

"Currency? Foreign currency? Dollar?" They asked with hopeful grins after a few minutes of trundling along the pot-holed valley road. I responded by launching into an immediate lecture on the blessed nature of a life of renunciation, spared from the pollution of greed and avarice. I'm not sure that they understood a word but the gist was clear. Whenever they tried to mention payment again an exasperated snort was sufficient to bring silence, lest another righteous monologue should descend upon them.

They were more offended though, when I declined to join in a communal wash in a stream beside the road. >From then on it became bitterly clear to them that I was neither going to rain golden dollars upon their dashboards, nor scrub their backs with a soapy rag. They lost complete interest in me,then; sulking in silence until I was dropped off in Mandi.

Somehow it was already mid-afternoon and it felt cold in the shadows. The river that roared through the middle of the valley basin had run down from the Kulu valley and beyond. It spoke of ice, cold and the insanity of attempting further travel to Northern heights without the surety of a warm bed at the end. But there were no men in white coats around to stop me and so I caught a lift with a jolly local truck driver. He took me a kilometre and then insisted on buying me the ticket for the bus to Manali.

There was hardly room to breathe on the bus but none of the locals got uptight about it and they demonstrated the admirable capacity of Indians to be cheerful and relaxed in the most uncomfortable arrangements. Anyway, it was at least as twice as fast as the groaning engines of the lorries that made a torturous progress on these rocky roads.

I was going home-back to the place where India really began for me, the place of watershed where a whole new life began to unfold and a beautiful new vision materialised. I met people and influences that surpassed all that I'd previously heard and seen; old heads who'd been on the road for thirty years as well as younger freaks just a little ahead of me in track-time. I learned how India gelled as the focus of their lives and its panoramic landscape the backdrop for temporary psychedelic communities. It was quite common to overhear conversations like:

". and so advances the theory that the human race is slowly evolving into the next dimension" without an incredulous eyebrow being raised. Of course, there were still all the hang-ups and shortcomings found in any community but it represented a whole other way of living, a potential that no one in England had ever mentioned.

Lost in these vague reminisces the conductor shouted loudly in my ear, that we were coming into Manali bus station. Moments later I was standing alone in the darkness outside. Manali itself is now a horrible, bustling place with one long road and over a hundred autorickshaws. It's the villages nearby that are the choice places to hang out. I got hold of a candle and some matches and started to march up the hillside road.

Twenty steps later, I realised that I had as much chance of getting there on foot as. well, as an Englishman attempting to walk three kilometres in pitch darkness with a candle along perilous mountain roads, a thin blanket wrapped around him in the sub-zero temperatures.

Fortunately, all the cards were on my side that day and a mini-cab came by with some English travellers. A quick chat established that we had mutual friends up the hill and they gave me a lift up to the village.

Ten minutes later, I was running into the cafe run by my old friends. Techno music blared and I was given a chillum to light (the traditional conical pipe of clay); I puffed smoke sideways out of my cupped hands andthe faces of freaks from all corners of the Earth became a blur. I was given a bed in the chill-out room next door.

The next day, I was taken into the house of my old friends who ran the cafe. By giving the odd shiatsu massage treatment and by the generosity of other freaks who enjoyed my story, I passed a happy two and a half weeks in the mountains.

I'd expected everything to be boarded up and closed for the winter. But the season hadn't ended yet and there were more parties and jam sessions to be had yet before most people fled to warmer climates. The fortnight brought many bright reunions-some more awkward than others as heavy charas smokers often have shaky memories. But if that's true, then they're also equally ready to welcome and accept friends again. Relations were generally smooth in the community of Westerners buzzing around the various garden cafes and rooftops.

There was an inevitable conflict thrown up by the clique-iness if the long-term resident freaks and the first-time India travellers, who often got the vibe that they weren't so welcome amongst this alternative family. But there were enough people with broad enough natures to bridge the gap that occurs in any scene between the established and the new.

The focus of conversations ranged from LSD encounters with aliens, to forthcoming travel plans in India and Asia. This was a place to consolidate lessons learnt on the road. A shanti-shelf in a spectacular valley where apples were-a-growing, chillums-glowing and minds-a-blowing. There were the modern merchants who sold silver on the streets of South Korea; the electronic wizards who could fix a sound system in the pouring rain at a party, whilst on ten hits of acid; there were also straight English couples who lived extended holidays of moving all day from cafe to cafe, eating four times a day and smoking as much as they liked; and there were travellers who had settled down with house of their own, living on a budget not much more than the richer of the villagers.

Of course, there was still a world of difference between any localized Westerner and an Indian as every one of us had the potential to leave the country and earn comparative fortunes. The villagers were of a conservative and religious frame of mind with complex rules and traditions that were being blown apart by the culture invasion that follows on the footprints of the freaks.

The pattern is always the same-the first Westerners arrive looking for the real India and the quiet, unspoilt life. They're welcomed for the break in monotony they represent and the extra rupees they bring in. Gradually, the place wins a reputation as an easy-going resthole for travellers and more arrive, bringing with them an appetite for Coca-Cola, mineral water in plastic bottles and other non-degradable entities, never before seen in these parts. The more travellers come to an area the more it is tamed, thus giving it wider appeal until it makes the pages of the popular guidebooks. Then it's doomed. A one-two-three step formula for destroying in a few years a culture that took centuries to develop. Alright, not destroy exactly but it aint what it used to be.

(Funny, actually, i was reading some 17th century English writers the other day who were convinced that culture in England was all over, what with the government fixing the roads and thus dooming the inns to extinction…)

This village had already changed a lot in the year and a half since I'd last come and there were a load more concrete guesthouses to mee the growing demand for accommodation. The worst polluting factor was actually the Indian tourists who came up to the Himalayas for their honeymoons. They'd then whip out their video cameras in the communal baths and get a few shots of the funny old holy men sat around the tempe fire.But what to do? Just to hope the road to Delhi is washed out more often and make the most of the special times that still exist. It was necessary to employ a kind of alchemy to extract the magical essence of the encounters that could still be had with locals and other freaks. It was still a special place with Nature never more than a few minutes walk away, cows trampling hay, chickens hopping around and far-out glaciers at either end of the North-South valley. The local temple had free public baths, full of the steaming-hot sulphur water that ran out of the mountain. Nothing beat a 3am bath on a full-moon night, then hurrying out to get warm by the dhuni, the fire kept going by the babas. These resident sadhus cooked a couple of meals a day that anyone could come and share.

The baba/sadhu game is often said to be India's answer to a social security system. In temples and dhunis across the lands, many thousands of men in loincloths sit around their sacred fires, relying upon donations from the locals of the odd sack of rice, dal and chapatti flour. Let's hear it now:

"No chillum, no chai,
No charas, no high!'

This was a particularly friendly baba-circle and there wasn't too much emphasis on the kind of etiquette that can make a newcomer feel nervous-Walk clockwise around the fire but pass the chillum to your right! Never touch anything with your left hand! Salute Shiva before inhaling on the chillum! And so on. In fact, every traveller who's smoked chillums in India knows that it's more often the Italian 'chillum fascists' who give you grief for some minor transgression of the code. These people come fleeing from their own spiritual vacuum and swallow aspects of the Hindu culture like feeders upon carrion. The joke is, of course, that no foreigner can become a Hindu and so they are theoretically outcastes, the lowest of the low just like the rest of us whiteys. My sentiments might be better understood by the experience of a friend of mine who had gone walking in the Parvati Valley, way up to the hot springs of Kiergange where Shiva is supposed to have sat for ten thousand years in meditation. She had only been in India for ten days and didn't know better than to draw out in front of an Italian guy in loincloth a lump of charas she'd bought in another valley.

"Where, did you get this…piece?" he asked with squinting eyes.

"Oh, someone sold it to me in Manali!"she answered cheerfully. Upon which the Italian flew into a rage and raised his arms to the sky in disbelief.

"You bring Manali charas to Parvati? You insult the Gods!"

Where was I? Oh yeah, here in this village the vibe was a lot more relaxed and the head baba who was in charge of the meal preparations took pains to ensure that everyone felt comfortable. There was pretty much free license to say or do what you liked and we sat idly around the smoking logs and passing the odd fuming chillum.

Sometimes there didn't seem so much difference between these guys and a bunch of drinkers ordering rounds, as the same contests of bull-shitting and piss-taking still went on-though one would hope that the babas were more conscious of all that was going on. But I'm out of my depth (again!) and shouldn't make sweeping conclusions about babas as the quality of the dhuni varies depending upon the exposure to tourism. This was not the genuine article for most of the sadhus here were not much more than charas dealers. I could only guess at which of them were genuine because I had no conversational grasp on Hindi. Generally I left them to their thing, not wanting to have to prove myself to anyone any more.

In truth, I was tired of who I'd become as my whole trip had backfired on me-though I knew it might only be for a few months, I'd genuinely renounced my former life, taken farewell of my friends and even changed my name, casting myself naked into the cooking pot of experience to see what might happen. But no one walks without clothes for long. Rather than killing my ego, I had, in fact, weaved a very neat raiment around myself as the Mysterious Wanderer, the Hitchhiking Sadhu fresh from a transcendental, transcontinental journey that marked me way and above all the rest. So whilst erasing my former identity on a surface level, a scourging great shadow of a new ego had crept up behind me.

Of course, it was useful to have an impressive tale to tell as a means to getting meals bought for me but that too highlighted the other problem. I had learned to be an effective scrounger. Blag, scam, scavenge-any way I could find an honest route to filling my greedy belly. I had unconsciously developed the look of a hungry dog as I sat in the cafes making other people feel uncomfortable at eating food in front of me. I'm maybe exaggerating a little but it became my natural tendency to size people up as to what they might be able to provide for me.

It sounds pretty base and it was. But it was also part of a transition process I had to fully traverse when I eventually came to Goa. The Hand-To-Mouth journeying is a different thing to the resident Poor Man story and different rules apply. When you're on the move people don't mind helping you along. But when you stay in an area you have to hustle like everyone else and it's not cool to just sit back on your reputation.

Nevertheless, the king never wants to give up his crown and even now, when I enter a new town I instinctively look for a good place to sleep. Even if I were a millionaire, I'm sure that I'd still cast a wistful eye at the remains left behind on unfinished plates. There's even a kind of pride involved that you can live cheaper and with less than everyone else. When the other travellers played anally-retentive games of stressing what a low budget they were on and how terribly soon their money would run out, I took a grim satisfaction in knowing that the money that they had would last me ten times as long.

But that was actually quite untrue. Whenever I received a little more money I'd start to treat yourself to the extra milkshake or piece of cake, deluxe drugs or comfortable clothes and room-big fucking deal if you can live on wood-shavings for half a year. The richest person would seem to be the one who thinks about money the least.

However, I was still fucking broke and that became apparent when six weeks too early, it began to snow. That is, it began and didn't end for a full two days. Even within a few hours, it lay half a foot deep on the ground. Huge flakes of white came floating down and we all gazed upwards at the sky falling upon our heads. The village recovered its virgin beauty once again and the electricity immediately went off for four days (the Power Board do this as a kind of precaution, in case the lines should break).

Predictably, we all whooped and had epic snowball fights until we realised that we had no effective way of getting warm and dry again. Some other travellers kindly sorted me out with a duvet jacket and extra pair of socks. I was lent the odd extra jumper and got through okay.

An old India hand taught me the trick of tying plastic bags on the feet between the socks and shoes, relating how once she'd known a sadhu who had made himself a complete suit of plastic bags when winter caught him unawares.

The snow marked the end of the season and it was clear that it was too cold for any more outdoor techno parties, for which this area has a deservedly good reputation. The police sometimes make matters difficult as they do for the party scene in so many places in the world. Fortunately, they can rarely be bothered to climb to the heights at which the raves are held. As a natural stage setting, the Himalayas are unbeatable-it's even good that you sometimes have to walk for a couple of hours to reach the party. It gives a sense of accomplishment before the action even begins and it weeds out the fringe freaks, leaving just a solid hardcore of partyers.

The first party I ever went to took place in the Kulu Valley and I discovered the freedom of movement that could be attained on LSD. This elixir acted as the lubricant to suddenly understanding what techno music was all about. Previously it had all just sounded like a messy collaboration of drum beats, sound effects and corny samples of people saying, 'wow, this must be heaven!' Only when suitably high did I tune in to the wavelength where techno finally made sense. I learnt that a good DJ takes his dancers on a voyage of discovery, setting the entire backdrop for the partyers to spin off.

And spin we did. Every time I surfaced from the dancefloor, the donor of my dose would gently push me back in, saying:

"Go on! It's good for you!"

The parties are positive and funky events and represent an expressive movement of alternative modern culture; the turned-on gather to expand their consciousnesses and celebrate life together, they combine the grounding of Nature with state-of-the-art sounds and something quite original is produced. But aside from the physical debris left behind by the irresponsible, there are some for whom the entire occasion can be simply too much; the revelations a little too bright, the truths a little too vivid and close for comfort. Many are the acid casualties who suffer sudden identity collapse on the dancefloor and have nowhere to turn.

The party casualties weren't limited to Westerners. The village had a good handful of lost-its who had altogether forgotten the plot. they wandered around smoking too much charas with imbecilic grins on their faces that betrayed their underlying sadness. They lived in psychological limbo, being too weird for the locals, too gauche and dumb for the freaks. Their presence was so irritating that all sympathy for them was choked by the dark shadow they cast over any situation..

Corrupted though much of the original culture may be, it's all just part of the clumsy modernisation of an India that is joining the 20th century and lapping up the ideals of the West in the process. It's a mess but that's about par for the course in India.

Only in the less-exposed areas do traditional values thrive. I met an English couple who lived in a small village further down the valley and I was told about how the girl had been increasingly aware of someone watching her when she went outside the house in the mornings. She told her boyfriend and when he followed her at a distance the next morning, he came across a young Indian guy who'd been masturbating in the bushes a few metres away. They kicked up a huge fuss in the street until they finally met with the leader of the village. With the help of a French guy who spoke good Hindi, he told them:

"I want this matter to be finished by sunset. If that means beating up the offendant-we will help you! But after that, it must be finished."

" If this was England," my friend told him, with a stern face, "We would kill this man! Just like that!"

"Yes, yes, the English are very barbarous." The French translator agreed.

"No, no, no! " The village leader cried. "This is India, not England!" They ended up with an agreement that if the young pervert ever came within sight of the house, they'd have licence to beat him up with full community support.

For in the mountains the torch of Hinduism still burns strong and with a typically charming glow. In the couple of weeks that I spent up there, there were two 'god-feasts' when householders invited the local gods to their houses and provided an eight-course meal for all-comers. A grand and costly 'puja' to win favour with the local deities (and of course, in the village itself!). The ceremonies went all day, the effigy of the local god was carried up the hillside on the shoulders of honoured attendants. The god was surrounded by an entourage of trumpet-blaring and horn-blowing heralds who emitted a screeching fanfare every two or three minutes, just to let everyone know that the god had arrived.

Then the meal sessions sat and each new crowd took their place around the edge of the allotted area and brahmins would then came round with baskets full of rice, dal and six other types of beans and curry in a banquet for the whole village. A constant stream of young and old women could be seen scurrying back from the feast with tiffins full of food for family members unable to attend the feast in person.

I walked down to Manali, resolved to leave before any more snow could come and block the road down to Delhi. In town, I had a chance meeting with the French couple I'd met whilst waiting for a lift at Calais! We didn't have much to say to each other and it was strange to exchange our stories of how we escaped the port area. The details seemed bland and irrelevant, now.