Gokulam
My gangsterish rickshaw driver put me onto a nice place in Gokulam and that brought more complications. He introduced me to a guy who was an agent, not the owner. So I would be paying the agent, the owner and the rickshaw driver. I didn’t know how far this went or what was going to happen but I decided to shake him off. He was starting to control my life. I cut off contact with him and stopped replying to his messages. The day after I moved in he came and parked outside on the road and sat smiling and waving at me. I took a photo of him with my mobile and he drove off. I never saw him again, but it makes me think twice about going back there.
The agent was very helpful to foreigners and spoke excellent English. I overheard him telling someone about a shop which supplied Indian sim cards to tourists. They expired after three months, the maximum continuous stay according to the six month visa details. The six month visa was known as a ‘one year tourist’ visa, but the year referred to the period of validity, I think. I’m not sure I ever understood these details, or remember them well but the sim card gave me access to food delivery and rickshaw services which were efficient and surprisingly economical.
The apartment was in an old fashioned stone building of faded opulence in a quiet part of town. It had a hall where mementos were stored, a dark bedroom with a TV that didn’t work, an old, plush lounge suite and heavy drapes over the windows by the large bed. Everywhere on the floor were dead ants and live ones too but it appeared the ladies had sprayed some poison in a quick attempt to clean the place up before I arrived. They were large black ants. Fortunately there were not agressive or very motivated at all. They just proliferated, wandered around and died in that old stone building, as, I was told, was the case with all the surrounding houses. I imagined there was a huge underground nest in the area with as many inhabitants as Bengaluru, all nosing around doing nothing.
The ladies were a lovely, eccentric pair; old spinsters who lived amiably together in a small section of the house on the ground floor. They maintained a simple lifestyle there, cooking on gas burners with half their little kitchen taken up by a display of various sets of vintage crockery. They tended to be a little slow getting things done but their unhurried, relaxed sense of time was fine with me. When I started practicing my violin there over some Indian-style drones I had created and played back on my laptop they were enchanted. My old body had to strain a lot to get into the awkward posture I was accustomed to using and I couldn’t manage more than half an hour per day but it was something. It helped me to keep in touch with a musical language that had once been a large part of my persona. Not that that ever came to anything much.
I hard a large balcony sorrounded with lush trees in which birds and mongooses scurried. I had access to the roof via an iron and wood stair case and often went up there for a smoke if there were people downstairs. Mostly I could sit and smoke charas on my balcony without anyone noticing or caring particularly. I had done this all over Asia now. People here mind their own business and the law has passed on to other matters.
India has always been in a bind about marijuana and charas which are integral to ancient traditions and pujas (religious ceremonies). The earliest diety of Hinduism, Siva, was a smoker who used to be pictured with a chillum by his side until United Nations regulations got involved and the chillum disappeared from the iconic images that were sold in streets and small shops. Of course the older images remain untouched and temple carvings and statues portray the real Siva. Prohibition created a black market and an opportunity for official corruption, helped fill the prisons and caused untold headaches for ordinary people who were forced to comply with officialdom’s latest edicts, even if they made no sense and were an insult to venerable institutions.
More recent developments, which seemed to accompany the global lockdowns, had seen the authorities begin to turn a blind eye to innocent smokers while dealers were still fair game. I was able to sit on balconies all through south Asia smoking quietly without disturbance. It was a great improvement on the old regime but corruption in the supply line meant prices were far higher than they needed to be. Some people were growing wealthy off the weakened restrictions still in place while others were going to gaol for the crime of supplying a natural herb.
I had brought my old violin with me in the hope of finding a repairer in India who could glue a few joins which were coming loose and put a new set of strings for me. I searched for music shops and found a few in a row on a main road. They were tiny establishments catering for different areas of the music business. One with brass band gear, another with older folk instruments and the third, an old family business called ‘Mysuru Musical Works’ which did repairs and sold electric guitars and keyboards, among a multitude of professional accessories.
Before leaving Pokhara I had asked Suresh at the Blues Club if he wanted anything brought back from India and he said “Yes, an electric guitar would be nice” and I intended to give it a go. It so happened there were some nice new electric guitars in the shop, made in Kolkatta, which the lady of the house informed me were by the best Indian company and were well regarded in the industry. They were a little over a hundred dollars and they sounded good with a funky arrangement of switches providing a variety of tones. They were gaudy and futuristic looking with a design that had something in common with recent Japanese motor scooters but they sounded good. I bought the best one and took it back to Gokulam, wondering what adventures I might have getting it into Nepal.
The violin was duly repaired by the husband and, after waiting patiently for many years I was again able savour its mellow tones. It was old but no one could say for sure how old. One hundred years was likely the minimum. It had an old sticker in it which was dissolving in time but stickers meant little as they could be steamed off and placed in another violin to misrepresent it and improve its value. The violin business was full of opportunities for deceit and illicit profits, which is why the world fiddle also means “the use of dishonest methods to acquire something of value”.
There was a small bakery making sourdough bread and it was a fine product. I had recently become aware that sourdough was the ancient bread-making technique which had predominated for thousand of years. It tasted better and was healthier than modern methods which had evolved only in the twentieth century from the capitalist imperative to makes things cheaper and mass-producable so as to maximise profits. Sourdough bread takes more time and trouble than the sliced white loaves billions of people have been consuming in the last hundred years. It necessitates a kind of decentralised cottage industry approach that has struggled to survive as governments have protected the biggest businesses and neglected individual enterprise. Sourdough was coming back though, and I had found a handy local supplier.
Having recovered completely from the operation I would soon be heading back to Pokhara. My housekeeper there was struggling as usual, putting her child through school and keeping up with various expenses so I had tried to send her a few hundred dollars but I had given up. It seemed impossible to transfer money from India to Nepal. I had tried many ways and eventually offered money to an Indian friend if he could do it but he also tried and failed. It may be possible but it is very difficult, especially when your grasp of the language isn’t good and you don’t know all the current political issues involved.
All over the world poor countries are squeezed dry by their rich neighbours. Haiti, Cuba, New Guinea, Nepal, Laos, they could all be rich, and should be, but powerful nations have rigged the game so that all the profits came back to them. The United Nations is worse than useless, doing more to organise new wars than to help the poor. I didn’t understand the rationale in preventing people from sending money to Nepal but I suspect the reasons would be concerned with smuggling or organised crime. There was an ongoing illicit business in transporting gold from Nepal to India without paying tax on it. Where it was coming from or going to I have no idea but of course rich people benefited from it. High profile figures in Kathmandu were being arrested or accused and the government was promising to stamp it out but of course nothing much changed.
Anyway I told my friend to borrow some money as she was in immediate trouble and I would pay it back when I arrived. It was time to book tickets and prepare for my return to Lakeside. I booked an apartment with a fireplace for a month and started disposing the stuff I had accumulated. I had also bought a case for my violin so it wouldn’t fit in the suitcase any more so I had a guitar and a violin to carry back as well as a bulging suitcase. Once again I wondered if I would get through all right but I was starting to trust now that everything would work out in the end, despite the appearance of unpredictable difficulty.
The ladies found me a driver who would transport me to the airport in Bengaluru for a reasonable fee and insisted on detaining me for a drink and a chat before I left. It was clear that my host had grown fond of me and I understood enough Hindi to know she was praising me and my violin playing. She wanted me to promise that I would return and rent her apartment again if I ever passed that way and I certainly would, if I could get free of the encumberances she knew nothing about. She was an innocent with a pure heart and I was a bit sad to leave her behind.
Travels to Nepal 