Chapter 8


Scoring

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^ ^ ^ ^

It was as if I had ripped off the lid
from a seething underworld of greed and envy.
A hornet’s nest—it was a miniature volcano I set in action,
and not so miniature at that!
Henri De Monfreid

 

When we checked in, only one other room was taken. The occupants were several unseen, but not unheard, young European travelers. They were enjoying their dope to, what was for that place, the most alien pulse of "hip-hop," discordantly echoing down the valley, "If it’s too loud, you’re too old!" How many times had I muttered that mantra when asked to turn down my rock ‘n roll.

This was a new breed, a new generation. Years ago, it had been all about folk tunes on local-made shanais, tablas, and sitars. Now it was rap and hip-hop on high-tech Japanese boom boxes. Why bother coming all the way? But, I knew that answer well. Charas!

Despite this irritant, I was content. The wonder of the Beas Valley lay at my feet. Perhaps, this was what my ex-pat dealer friend in Japan had meant. With this view, all the dope needed, food on demand, I could hang for months. When the money ran out, just walk up the road. By that time it would be winter, and I wouldn’t last long. If I had really come here to end it, why go any further? Even the noisome hip-hop could be forgiven, since it was quickly overwhelmed by the harmonies of river and wind. Almost as if sensing this question, Gul appeared at the door. "Dad, I want take you to boy with good shit…the best in Manali. Very good boy, very honest, I dealing before. Numbar one!"

Gul took me by the arm, and we started to wander up the road, back toward the village center, the bathes, and the crowd of sadhus. Maybe Rajendra was still in town? Gul, however, had no intention of another meeting with those infidels. He had business on his mind. About a quarter-mile from the hotel was a small tourist restaurant, in reality a shack with an open-sided tent structure occupying the front garden. A board offered up a long list of Indian and western-style treats from masalla dhosa to "chease boorgers," all foods appealing to munchie-possessed charasin. Two tourists, my "hip-hop" loving neighbors, were engaged in an intense conversation with a young local. As we entered the tented area, this fellow, who from the almond shape of his eyes might well have been a refugee from Tibet, turned from the two tourists and warmly greeted Gul. I was then introduced to this "Manager," who proceeded to seat us with some ceremony in an incongruously grand Naugahyde booth. With a leering grin the Manager asked, "Sahib liking to try our famous house chai. Making super numbar one from Manali’s own…." I knew at once what he meant; it wasn’t chai he offered but bhang. It came quickly. While we sipped our "chai," the Manager excused himself and returned to the others. Both were typically disheveled in the manner of young travelers to India. Although they may have deserved to be characterized as "Euro-trash," they weren’t overt freaks.

While Vashist had its fill of freaks, these buyers were something quite different. More likely they were students, or possibly computer programmers on holiday. They still wore European clothing, their hair short and demeanor, though softened by the effects of the hash they openly smoked, retaining strong traces of a Western compulsion for business. When they resumed conversation with the Manager, it was obvious they were dealing, and in this place it wasn’t about the price of masala dhosa. I could hear only traces of their muted discussion, but I knew all too well what was going down. How many times had I been in the same situation? Their transaction was sealed over a chillum.

One deal made, the manager returned to attend to our needs. Gul had intimated, yet in a carefully non-explicit way, that he had had some business with this man in the past.

"Dad, if wanting anything…any stuff…this Manager good boy, very honest, very safe."

Before I could get down to business, Gul excused himself, giving the proprietor a particularly acicular look that I interpreted to mean: "I’ll see you later about my cut."

While there was little of the paranoia that would accompany such a transaction Stateside, it wasn’t as if I could throw caution to the winds. In those parts the local Man shows a blind eye to casual drug use and dealing. Certainly, there is no interference when sadhus use it, as much official lip service is paid to freedom of religion. But the arm of the law is always there and, at individual discretion, can be applied. If for some reason the local authority needs a squeeze, or wants to punish a particular dealer for some unrelated indiscretion, then what better way than by making a bust. Maybe there is a push on by the Central Government and they need bodies. Maybe the Americans are fed up by what they see as overly relaxed attitudes and tie some pending loan or aid package to an improved body count. Therefore, while there is little actual fear associated with trafficking, the experienced know it is wise to always be a little careful. Also, it is useful for the seller to promote a sense of danger. In doing so he elevates his position, making his service, as well as the product, more valuable.

There we were, dealing in an absurdly covert manner. The only ones who could overhear our furtive dealing had just scored themselves and were well on their way to being stoned out of their minds. The price seemed to me to be astronomical—one hundred and fifty rupees per tola (.4 oz.). That was a whopping fifty cents per gram. When I first traveled to Afghanistan in 1969—that same journey to Balkh—I had been able to buy a key of the finest hand-pressed, black leaf "Mazari" for the equivalent of ten U.S. dollars, a penny a gram. The same kilo later sold in New York for over three thousand. Now a key of this Manali shit, much lower in quality, would cost around six hundred dollars. The kicker was that, if I wanted to sell it in the States, it probably wouldn’t command a much higher price than twenty years before. No wonder the drug trade had been so appealing, and why those still engaged migrated to other, more profitable, commodities.

The new crop was just beginning to come onto the market, and the manager proudly declared he could sell the "first press." To underscore the pitch, he first showed me a sample of last year’s, which by that time was dry and crumbly. Then with an exaggerated flourish he presented a resinous piece from the new crop, pliable as "silly putty," pungent with that unmistakable odor marking it as, if not primo, certainly acceptable. In my heyday, I made a point of scoring only the finest—a matter of pride if not honor. It fitted with my sense of adventure and exploration, traveling to the ends of the charas-producing earth, ferreting out the best of the best. I had a reputation to protect. I also had my karma.

Although my anticipated score was trifling, compared to the real business going down, both the manager and I played out the ritual of dealing as if there were hundreds of kilos on the table. This made sense from the manager’s perspective. He had no idea where this sale might lead. How often had a small transaction burgeoned into a large one? In this world where caution was king, and paranoia a state of well being, people tested the waters. On my part, it was an old game, and I fell into it quite naturally.

Maybe, it was the rush of the bhang. It had been a long time, and it seemed very, very strong. But I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering. As I went through the ritual of bargaining, thoughts of other deals in far away places and times flashed through my brain. How fuzzy the details now seemed. Moments that once held an acute sharpness with, quite literally, life and death significance, now seemed so blurred.

^ ^ ^

The image of another nemesis, in my vernacular of the time, "a real motherfucker," even worse than Nazir, popped into my mind. It wasn’t as I had first seen him, but the last time, bloated from incarceration, deathly pale, sweat pouring from his obese body as he spilled his guts on the witness stand. Morgan, my erstwhile business partner, was the closest thing I had to a male friend since leaving boarding school. I first met him in bar in Chiangrai, deep in the heart of the Golden Triangle; it must have been in the Spring of ’69—a lot of karma was laid down that year, and most of it bad, real bad. In those days he was physically impressive, blond, blue eyed, decidedly Aryan in all the magnetic malevolence this term signifies.

How could I have known such a casual meeting would so impact my life? Maybe his gold-tipped Shermans should have made me wise. For some reason that, knowing what I know now, I am most hesitant to contemplate, there was an immediate attraction. We seemed on the same wavelength, two swaggering merchant-princes—how I favored that analogy—meeting at different stages in our careers. I was the experienced international trafficker, overseeing shipments of weed and opium; while he was the small time domestic dealer, on his first foray into the international scene, making his way to India and his fortune.

Morgan sucked up to me, stroking my ego. At the time I was flying, a real big op going, beaucoup shit back to the World. That was how I thought in those days…in Nam talk. When I was back in Cholon, I wished I wasn’t, but when I was away, I wanted everyone to know Nam was home. I was high on myself, and so it seemed only natural that Morgan would be too. It was an intrinsic danger in the business. All that quick money goes to your head. Even more was the rush of beating the system. I seemed to be winning, misreading luck as evidence of my superiority. Later, in a more lucid moment, I realized Morgan’s adulation stemmed from the belief I could help him make a buck, that and deeper reasons, which became apparent only later.

The meeting was brief and very soon we went our separate ways. Oh, I had some suspicion of what he was about. He had clumsily hedged around, asking me where to score, "no business, just for my head ya know." After getting my shipment off to Hong Kong, I went back to Cholon, forgetting all about him.

Then, as if fate was playing its hand, I ran into Morgan again, about a year later during the Collective Mind scam in Kabul. This was the height of the worldwide hippie explosion and drug-seeking overlanders flocked to Kabul. Strung out, often penniless, they were more than ready to join the magical mystery tour the Mind offered. And we did have our moments, behind the high walls and well-guarded gate. Some of those birds…they were so wild…just didn’t give a shit, would do it anywhere, anytime, with any one, just like shaking hands, answering the call to make love not war. I even got one of them so spaced she screwed my poor old chowkidar, the watchman who came with the house for only an extra ten bucks a month. Babu thought he had died and gone to paradise. There was his houri. But we were all there too, a circle of freaks watching him do his thing, then before he could savor his conquest, taking his houri en masse. How quickly paradise could turn to hell, but the bird didn’t seem to mind. She claimed to have been out of body, watching the whole show like she was someone else. It really turned her on and led to her receiving the title of "Perpetual Motion Machine." We laughed our asses off over that one.

We were madmen, the Nam mentality coming through. Cholon was still my home, at least in my mind. My stuff was there, and so were the people I liked to think I cared for, and supposed cared about me. I knew I would soon go back. Yet what that back would be I wasn’t sure. So what the fuck! Whatever popped into my head, I went for it. "If I get away with it, so much the better. If not…." But I always seemed to get away. That was the case at least until Mei arrived.

My hospitality at the Mind wasn’t solely out of generosity. It was from these guests that I planned recruit mules to carry the drugs back to Chad. It had become my m. o. to recruit others for dirty jobs. Hell! I had done more than my share. In the months of September and October, I had been practically commuting between Kabul and New York—too bad they didn’t have frequent flyer miles in those days. By the time I transferred planes and all, the fight on Arianna/Pan Am one-way was thirty-six hours—Tehran, Beirut, Athens, Frankfurt, London, New York. I made four round-trips in two months. I was pushing my luck. Even the most naive of customs would begin to suspect. I had to get someone else to take up the slack.

It was quite simple; just find some Americans down on their luck, clean them up and hope for the best. Morgan, particularly as I already knew him—in those days even the most casual acquaintance seemed an old friend—seemed the ideal candidate. During the previous year, a bout of hepatitis had disrupted his plans for a quick return to the States and fortune. Instead, he blew most of his funds, including the refund on his return air ticket, and had no other choice except to try to get back to Europe overland. A month before arriving in Kabul, he had lost his remaining cash at the Wagah border, when he had to baksheesh his way out of a charas bust. The Paki customs inspector had taken one look in his bloodshot eyes. "Charasi!" He was carrying a small amount, just enough, he figured, to buy the plane ticket when he got to Amsterdam.

Now he was in Kabul, penniless. One of a legion of foreigners waiting for funds from home, living on credit in some sleazy hotel, his passports held hostage. I had become somewhat of a local celebrity among the freak population—the Mind’s parties were infamous—so it was only a matter of time before Morgan learned of this ferenghi filmmaker who might help him. Just the ticket, or so he seemed. He had come off clean from the bust—nothing in his passport or, more importantly, his jacket; at least I assumed as much since they took the baksheesh.

I offered him a run to the States, just a small stash concealed in the magazine of a camera going back for repair. If that worked, I promised a chance to distribute the tons of charas I was planning to export to the States. Of course Chad, who was a major investor in the Mind, would have other thoughts on this matter, but it is my policy to always offer promise to those with whom I do business. That deterred any immediate profit taking by rip-off. Hey, all is fair in love, war…and business.

We spent those frigid, late fall nights gathered around the glowing bukhari. The rarefied air of Kabul, combined with chillums of oily-black Mazari charas and cheap local red wine, made for rich imaginings, at least for that brief high before faltering into stupor. The wine was an interesting oddity in what was then a strictly Islamic kingdom. It was produced by a minor Italian war criminal on the lamb, perhaps in only in mind. He had made his way to Kabul in the late forties, surviving on his skills as a vintner. As Morgan and I sat bullshitting, we conjured great plans of the scores we would make. It wasn’t just for money we lusted, nor for the freedom money would confer, but even more for that feeling of beating the system, being able to survive, and to survive nicely beyond the systems conforming restraints.

Somehow things hadn’t gone as planned. The day Morgan was to fly out, he came down with a fit of nerves. It was cold outside, but he was sweating. I could see this sort of thing wasn’t his bag. Rather than risk the whole operation, I told him to pass. Maybe, he could do something for us on the distribution end when he got settled back in the States. Always keep up that glimmer of future reward.

Many months later, after fleeing, first to Delhi, then to New York, I tracked Morgan down. To his credit, albeit with much self-interest, it was his efforts that got me back on my feet. We began a partnership, paving the way for a move back to the West Coast. At first, Morgan was put off that I was no longer alone and was—which was true, I suppose—no longer the same person he had come to know. Already, I had begun to merge with Mei. We had weathered some hard times, the Mind thing exploding and all, and we were back in the States hungry. I was trying to scrape up enough bread to get back to Cholon. I knew how to make money there. Chad had practically put out a contract on me. Not only had he lost money on the Kabul fiasco, but Mei as well. He had kept his interest in Mei to himself, thinking there was always more time. Now she had slipped from his grasp, made doubly worse because it was to me he had lost her. He was, in a word, pissed. Thus New York was too hot. As big a city as it is, when you are in a tight circle, it can be incredibly small. Morgan bailed me, helping me peddle the few pounds of charas I had been able to salvage.

Although Morgan was unsettled by Mei’s presence, he soon came around; she could be charming when it suited her, and he had a weakness for the exotic. Besides, I gave him what he needed—product. Eventually, Mei and I came to provide Morgan a sense of belonging, of family, for which he, like many in our generation, so longed. We took him under our wing, but more because of his value as a seller of our products, than from any feelings of affection. The plan was simple. In the future, I would bring back the charas and Morgan would sell it.

Being an introvert was one of the reasons I had been a successful smuggler. In my calling, I couldn’t afford to have too many people know my business. Even a few friends were more than I needed. Besides, I have always favored a single deep, all encompassing relationship, rather than many shallow ones. For a brief time there had been the beginnings of such a relationship with Morgan. As it turned out gender held no barrier for him. But the kind of intimacy I sought was improbable, if not impossible, to find with another male—even if sex was excluded.

I had found everything I needed in Mei. Very quickly, I wanted no one else in my world except her. With Mei I had it all, a partner in business and pleasure, someone on whom I could rely, instead of just being relied on. Others, even Morgan, were business, people to put up with for the profit they brought.

But as dealer and smuggler, Morgan and I made an effective combination. As long as we stuck to our respective roles, we were charmed. He couldn’t carry; that was my special talent. Maybe he just didn’t have the cajones. For that you had to be a particular kind of crazy—armed with the ability to let go of the future, to put it all into the hands of some obscure abstraction…like fate. I was that kind, at least for a while, but Morgan didn’t even come close. Oh, he did turn out most useful at the other end. I didn’t have the patience to deal. For that you needed those essential people skills to trade with small-time dealers, people I saw only as low-life. Morgan seemed to have an innate fascination for bottom-feeders and sleaze. He was a real networker and had a huge number of contacts. Once the shit was in country, he could move it. By divvying up the duties of smuggler and dealer, we were able to concentrate on the special skills each required. How different were the roles, introvert versus extrovert. But even more important was that in such division we were also able to husband our nerve.

And with that nerve we had gone on to other adventures in other parts of the world. Peru, with its Andes and cocaine, was a growing distraction. Both Mei and Morgan went along, but only for the thrills. Film became the focus for our trips, and we lost ourselves in it. We believed we were filmmakers, which though only self-delusion served to dissipate the tension and paranoia. We were so much into it that the dope part was just something tacked on at the end, almost an afterthought. In our heads we were filmmakers; that our money came from the drugs was just a mild inconvenience—soon to be rectified by the sale of our first film. Yes, those were high times, happy times, but they were times clouded a reality, which even then I knew must eventually be faced.

Beneath Morgan’s casual camaraderie were disturbing needs. Much to my surprise—I must have really been zoned for Mei sensed it much earlier—I discovered that my macho friend was queer. It wasn’t so much that he was homosexual, that I could handle as long as it didn’t threaten me. As I have already intimated, there is within me a measure of sexual ambivalence that, if we are sensitive to it, lies within all of us, regardless of gender or overt sexual preference. We are just too close to being one another—a chromosome here, a bit of DNA there—for there not to be some leakage, some cross-over, some confusion. Of much greater concern was Morgan’s psychological state. Whether because he was a closeted gay, or his gayness was symptomatic of deeper anomaly, he was prone to come apart under pressure. I mean, we were all fucked up, otherwise we would have been selling insurance in the burbs and raising kids; that wasn’t Morgan’s sin. It was okay to be as fucked as you wanted on your own time. But he let it get in the way of business; he let it come to the surface; he let it hang out.

There was that time in Pakistan, when we were sitting on our heels, waiting for the connect to arrive. Well at least I was waiting. Morgan went off, supposedly to meet with some local carpet dealer. We were both carpet freaks and took great pleasure outdoing one another in our acquisitions. I was a little nervous because Morgan was holding our stash, but even though I knew he could be a fuck-up, I didn’t think he would be crazy enough to spend it on carpets. After an absence of several days, I went out to track him down. There were only so many hotels in Peshawar, and Morgan wasn’t exactly and unnoticeable character. I finally located him in a particularly sleazy but colorful dive above the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. He wasn’t buying carpets.

Morgan did like to get down. Entering his room, I found him hastily extricating himself from the embrace of one local Lothario, another sprawled half asleep on the far side of the bed. Both boys seemed nonplused by my arrival, perhaps anticipating they were now going to perform for this new ferenghi—an opportunity to make a little extra baksheesh. Morgan, after a momentary display of confusion, retreated into his all too familiar guise of pompous outrage, demanding I get out and quickly.

The next day he apologized, but feigned surprise that I hadn’t known of his predilection. He was quite drunk and let it all hang out. There was a part of Morgan that was turning out to be quite a monster. He wasn’t only a fag, but a sadistic one.

"I want to fuck ‘em hard, rough…take the suckers, force ‘em to do what I want ‘em to do…what they want, but only deep down in the darkest recesses of their desire. You know, my cock is the key, unlocking all that deep down shit…yeah, if you get my drift"

He said all this getting really close in my face, gazing intently into my eyes so as not to miss my reactions. I could smell the mixture of Chivas, charas, and tobacco on his hard, rapid breath. His eyes were red and glassy. Was he trying to gage my own deepest desires? I started to think we might have it out. He had the advantage of a natural tendency to violence, but I was in better shape. I knew I could take him if I had to.

"It’s so much better when they don’t want…think they don’t want to…but have to all the same." His eyes bored into me in a way I had never seen before. It was almost as if he was fucking me with those red-webbed eyes.

"You know Guy, I keep having this feeling in my…gut…that you…you know…that part of you wants it too…to have that secret need unlocked, eh? That’s what I mean, when part of them…you…wants it, and for a moment escapes from the control of that other part, just freaks out and opens up. Maybe you just haven’t gotten there yet, but there’ll come a time. Yeah, there’ll come a time when you’ll beg me…or someone…to take you…yes take you hard man." He was leering, the saliva forming on his lips as he spoke those last words. I thought he was going to try to bone me there and then. Visions of that fucking, queer-assed Ian flashed through my mind. It was such a little switch, just a flick this way or that. If it had gone the other way, perhaps that very minute I would have spread before Morgan—and loved every minute of it. There is a certain release in surrender. But it didn’t happen.

Maybe Morgan had been snorting coke; it was as if he was possessed by all the demons in hell. His voice got real husky and sort of from on high. "You’ll surrender and love it…for the moment. Then, that other you’ll get back in control, but it’ll be too late. I’ll possess you. Then what do you think…what’ll Mei think, eh, bastard?"

The mention of Mei pulled me back. Panic seized me, a panic that made me want to strike out at Morgan as I had at Ian. Then, I realized how high he really was. This was his dark side, one that he would never have dared expose under normal circumstances. Now, perhaps, I held power over him, for he had opened to me, showing me what lay beneath that public facade. For Morgan, sex was an overt display of power, and the thrill he felt in fucking a boy was the domination. He believed he held power over the person he had fucked. For him sex was like counting coup in ritual battle. Leaving me, he returned to his boys, presumably to count some more coups. But it was they who would be counting, ripping him off and with it all our scoring money.

It was then that I realized he would have to be cut loose. The problem would be when and where. Our lives had become so intertwined; we knew each other’s secrets too well. Once I had gotten out of this mess, I vowed, never again to let a man so close to me. Strange how I thought it was different with women. But there I was thinking it was gender specific, that it was the maleness that was my enemy.

After the split, I tried to develop my own distribution, but it was just too crazy. I was used to dealing with men of honor like the Pathans. I found those dealing in the States were of another breed. Later, upon reflection—I had so much opportunity to reflect in those long days in the slammer—I realized that was only to be expected. After all, those Pathans were carrying on an age-old profession that, in their own world, wasn’t nefarious, but well within the bounds of their social system—they were farmers selling their crop. They were breaking none of their own rules, although in theory they did transgress the rule of the distant Central Government. Ignoring the wishes of a faraway, alien power was part of the tribal way and looked on as a sign of honor. How different it was from the States where the drug trade fell between the cracks of social propriety, to the vermin who survived in that subterranean level.

I had been removed from such sordid reality for so long that I was caught completely unprepared. Ultimately, my naiveté was rewarded by a day of terror. Two thugs—they could have been homies of Pacino’s Scarface, replete with open-to-the-navel polyester shirts and gold chains, broke into my home, ripping off my remaining stash of Peruvian flake, less than a key, a mere remnant of the trade I hoped to escape. It sat in a big 16-mm film can in my basement for over a year—the Seal-a-Meal being such an indispensable invention to the trade. By this time I had grave doubts as to the righteousness of the coke business, and I wasn’t hustling to unload it. Yet it was one thing to recognize evil, another to flush it out. I even tried on several occasions, but the coke was my nest egg—there always seemed to be an excuse. The risk had been great. So I thought I would be a fool not to try to cash in.

Mei and I had just returned from an extended, business-free trip to India. This journey inspired the adventure trek scheme, and I figured I better not jinx it with smuggling. After all, we had our nest egg. Having shot our wad on the trip, we were cash broke, and I decided to sell a couple of ounces from the stash, "just to get the business going." Although Morgan had long been out on his own, I still had one of his leftover connects. I thought this slime would turn the trick for me. I should have seen it coming, as our relationship was rocky. I had been his supplier, the main man. Then I took off, leaving him with nothing to move. He got very upset, and it became even worse when I made the mistake of telling him I was quitting. He went near crazy! Still, he needed the money. So he calmed down and said he would help me out. I needed the bucks too badly to worry about him. I wanted to believe all was well. Like the good Calvinist I had been trained to be, success in this world was a sign of God’s blessing, proof—to use a most non-Calvinist term—that my karma was good. However, corruption once done is inescapable, and payback came to wreak its vengeance. The immutable law was evidenced again.

The doorbell rang, I thought it was my connect. He had called to arrange a pickup. God, was I naive…so unparanoid and, as was usual in those days, stoned. Not on coke, however, I only got into that in Peru where it was a throwaway, where you needed "incentive." No, I was just on some local sinsemilla, to calm me down, keeping me from getting too edgy. The front door was at the bottom of a flight of stairs. I buzzed it open from the top. When I saw them, my first thought was "the Man"—they looked like typical narcs, real seedy…polyester…gold chains on hairy chests…maybe they were, but just off-duty. The next thing I knew, they bounded up the stairs and put a gun to my head. When I realized they weren’t there to make a bust, it was already too late. My connect had set me up, deciding he might as well rip me off since there was nothing more to be gained by playing straight. That rat told them all about my place; who would be there, and what the layout was. While one of these cretins had me, the other guy rushed into the living room, grabbing Mei. Cretin-looking or not, these guys were pros, initial shock, then assurance that, if I cooperated, no one would be hurt. I think what scared me the most was that the pistol was small caliber, .22 or .25 at the outside. A true hit weapon, deadly at close range, and very quiet. I kept thinking, just give them the blow, make them happy, and maybe that will save us. They were expecting only the amount the connect had ordered, just a couple of ounces.

As I said…I was naive…or maybe just too sloppy. I had been getting away with too much crazy shit for too long. I took my luck for granted. My entire stash was in that film can, out there in the back room for all to see. "Okay, big man," the pistol holder said—why he referred to me as big man I will never know—"get the coke and nobody gets whacked. That’s the deal; all we want’s the blow, no trouble. But if you give us…." To reinforce the message his eyes shifted to the knife-wielding cohort who, grabbing Mei tightly, made a slitting motion across her throat. I would have done anything to keep her from harm…anything but go straight that is, which would have spared us from this in the first place.

With my head still jumbled by the pot, I mumbled, "No sweat man, I’m not into violence man…whatever you want man, just don’t hurt her." My only thought was to give them the dope and get them out of there. I led my captor back to the stash. His eye widened. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. After that they tied us up. The goon who had been with Mei kept holding the knife to her throat…sort of caressing her with it, mumbling obscenities in her ear. I think he was disappointed it all went so smoothly, hoping for a little fun. Maybe he wanted to kill us. I kept thinking, "Oh Lord"—yeah, I guess we all get religion when push comes to shove—"If you let us live through this, I’ll never touch blow again."

It was all over. Mei and I lay, bound like hogs, on the living room floor—we were lucky they didn’t slaughter us. Rip-off deaths were increasingly common in the mid-Seventies, a product of escalating profits and the subsequent heat. I took this as a warning. One minute, I had been sitting there zoned and happy, secure in my nest egg of almost a key of coke—at a thou an ounce, I had over thirty thousand. Then poof! It was all gone. What could I say? I had Mei to worry about. Quite naturally, she was freaked. It wasn’t everyday you stared down Death in your own living room. Only too soon the money thing would begin to sink in. We were no longer "rich hippies."

Later, initial thankfulness gave way to anxiety. The nest egg was gone. All my planning was based on that cushion. Now we were broke and there wasn’t much of a profit margin in the travel business. I congratulated myself that I had sworn off only the blow, for I needed cash and the only ready source was my old standby charas, just something righteous—a few ounces like my old buddy Paul. It would be easy enough. When I returned from one of my tours, I could stash a few in the gear, just enough to get by until the business could turn a profit. There would be no more weight, and definitely no blow. I had learned my lesson about that devils brew.

And I stuck to my promise, until suddenly, like an evil ghost from the past, there was Morgan, begging me to get back in just one more time. I needed the money and a few ounces just didn’t get it. Starting up a business as tenuous as adventure travel was tougher than I planned. Most of the people who went in for that sort of thing weren’t the kind to pay top dollar. It was hard to find high rollers that wanted to rough it.

Morgan wanted to go south. That meant only one thing. Sure, I needed the cash, but not that badly. I would make one last run, but it would be for charas, and it would be big. I was really tired of all this shit. I wanted to get back…get to a life. I had been out weirding for so long the straight world looked exotic. Just one more good haul and Mei and I would retire. Then we could buy a place in Humboldt, maybe somewhere up on Rainbow Ridge, looking down on the sea…a whitewater view but though redwoods. I could still run my tours, take photos, and even grow my own—it was real safe the hippie turned real estate agent assured us, "just do your planting on the adjacent Government land." That would be more than enough. I thought fate was again stepping in, taking us toward our future. This was most certainly the case, but where it was taking me wasn’t as I imagined.

Morgan came wired—wired as in sound, wired as in SNITCH, RAT, wired as in SURVEILLANCE—a fancy little Nagra SN in the small of his back. He knew this recorder well; we had used several of them in our films—nothing but the best for smugglers…and the DEA. Mei had some intuitive suspicion. She drew me aside.

"Pat him down! I don’t know why, but I think something is wrong. Why won’t he take off his jacket?"

But I dismissed her, accusing her of paranoia.

"You know, the rip-offs screwed your head. Good old Morgan, no way! Maybe he’s a little too kinky, a little too much a fucking flake, but we’ve been through a lot together. He can’t be a rat. He doesn’t have the nerve. Besides, this is the answer; one last score and we can kiss goodbye to our money woes. Humboldt here we come!"

I wanted to believe.

That evening drunk and high, I jumped headfirst into a heated discussion of old times and exploits. Morgan eagerly joined the exploration. Yet had I been more attuned, I would have realized he was only giving me the lead. We were talking about me, not him—that should have tipped me. We talked of wild escapades that got wilder in the telling. Oh yes, we had quite a run, young, dashing entrepreneurs making fortunes in the fabled East and South—that was how we remembered it. What went unmentioned was how things began to sour. Too many times Morgan had fucked up, giving into his weakness for young, dark skinned men, taking us to the brink, like he had with those Baluch boys in Peshawar. I didn’t wish to dwell on that part, instead I reveled in the victories, the successful deals we had pulled off, the close encounters with the DEA—how stupid they were.

The Narcs weren’t the only dumb ones, I later glumly thought. They had time on their side. Give us smugglers enough rope and eventually we would hang ourselves. Morgan skillfully orchestrated the whole conversation, and I couldn’t have laid out a more damning confession if I had tried. My big mouth visibly upset Mei, but I was too drunk and stoned to notice. It wasn’t often I could savor those triumphs in shared conversation. They formed some of my greatest work, evidence of my courage and intelligence in the face of a powerful enemy, yet they had to remain buried, but not for long.

Why, at that moment, I trusted Morgan I will never know. The only answer I can find is that he was telling me what I wanted to hear, taking me where I wanted to go. In the end, the meeting produced an inescapable indictment. It was so damning that at the trial, many months later, the prosecution had only to set a stack of tapes out on the table to totally silence my defense.

^ ^ ^

While I was caught in a bhang-enabled split screen of consciousness, Gul retreated into the corner with the two travelers. His commission assured, he could afford to relax. Gul could never pass up a chance at a contact. It was almost an instinct. "Perhaps Sahibs want seeing Kashmir?" If they did, then it was their lucky day because he just happened to know…. "Very beautiful this time. Yes, some little trouble…not concern the tourist…except," he laughed, "price now very cheap. My family having very beautiful houseboats on Nageen…far from city…far from trouble. We give double room with three meals, eggs in morning, meat for lunch and dinner…anything you…our cook very the best…only three hundred…no, you are now my good friends, only two-hundred and fifty rupees per day…each." (Double the going price.) "Just give Uncle Aziz this card and say, Gul send you. When at Srinagar, taking taxi to Nageen, tell driver only ‘Moghul Delight.’ Remember Sahibs; only this boat good; all others cheating you. In Kashmir five fingers not same, many men bad. Uncle Aziz giving best deal, honest deal."

"Well, Guy Sahib, what you think?" The cooing voice of the manager jerked me back into the moment. "Get a hold of yourself Guy," I thought, "this is the business." When I was in places like this so far away—but far away from where—I often found it hard to focus on things which later would affect me so greatly. After all, this present was the "real" world. It was the past, not to mention the future, which was ever-increasing fantasy.

Struggling, I forced myself back into my smuggler persona. The charas was very dense, but not quite like the hand-rubbed Mazari I had favored in my Afghan days. Now that had been some exceptional shit. This, however, would carry well. Besides, it was the only game in town. I wasn’t about to advertise my presence or interest. "All purveyors of charas are invited to tender sealed bids for the amount of three kilos to Sahib Guy c/o the Hotel…." I guestimated I could get at least two and a half keys into the strobe batteries’ innards, maybe a little more.

"If I buy three kilos, can you give it for ten rupees a gram?"

"So sorry, Mister Guy, this is pakkaa, nup, very finest Manali, first shake. Very scarce now, harvest just beginning. Difficult to find…even one kilo!" Somehow, I wasn’t up to this crap any longer. There had been times in my life when I enjoyed, even savored, the haggle. Now I just wanted to be done with it, to retire with a joint or chillum, and return to what had increasingly become my principal preoccupation, the reordering the contents of my mind. I had devoted so much of the past year to this work. It resembled what I used to do with mountainous files of slides and miles of film, during the years I couldn’t travel: rearrange, edit, recall, trying above all to gain some continuity, to make a sense of my past. Now I was putting into order all those memories. What excited me was that I could view them through a different filter. The tequila of SoCal, the beer of Kobe, only clouded the recollections. Perhaps, my old friend charas would give me a clearer perspective. Perhaps with its help, I could sort out the ghost and move on.

Totally stoned, I reached into my fanny pack, my one concession to the newfangled tourist attire, and pulled out ten one-hundred dollar bills, still crisp and clean in the Japanese bank’s sealed plastic wrapper—untouched by human hands.

"I have this," I said, gesturing to the neat package of bills resting on the table top, "you have that, plenty of that," indicating the charas. "With this you can fill many dreams, with that," I laughed pointing to the chillum clutched in the traveler’s hand, "you can only dream."

Despite the attempt by the manager to keep his cool, I knew the power of the US greenback. "You give me three kilos of this shit that grows all around here, and I’ll give you all ten of these that come from far away," I raised my voice in emphasis, "lovely one hundred dollar bills."

There was a pause, and then my adversary shrugged with a pretended hopelessness. "No way, Sahib, so sorry. You want too sastaa…too cheap."

Yet there was something, a subtle intonation in the way he said it, that led me to believe the deal would be made and at my price. I would leave; there would be sweat, but in the end I would get my three kilos for the thousand.

I shrugged and joined the other smokers. As I smoked, I thought about the deal I was about to make. Through it I was committing to a future, allowing for its possibility. One thousand represented more than a third of my remaining funds. That was a big cut. It would last many months, maybe years, if I wanted to hole up in some village. However, if I could get the shit back to Japan, and if I could sell, say twenty-five hundred grams at five thousand yen…. The numbers mesmerized me.

It was hard to follow the train of mathematics. I had to start over several times. Finally, I got to the total yen figure. "One and a quarter million…hmm, no that can’t be right…twelve and a half million yen! That’s more like it! Let’s see divide by one hundred and thirty…no that’s too hard…divide by one hundred…if I divided by ten it would be one million two-hundred and fifty thousand…so by another ten it would be one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, US money. So let’s just call it a hundred thousand—a hundred to one, that’s about right for shit". Almost like the old days, except the numbers have been inflated a hundred times over. I relished the thought of such profit. I could start a new life. Anyway, it would be good to have an option, another hole to hide in.

Once I reached the saturation point, both in anticipation of profit and consumption of the herb—I was dizzy—I signaled Gul that it was time to go. Gul looked at me through those charasi’s blood-shot eyes, and for a moment I thought I saw intense hatred. Flashing my money must have really shaken him. How long would it take him to put together such a roll? Gul also knew this wasn’t all I had. In the black leather fanny pack, which I kept so close, were the means for Gul to change his life—much in the same way the one hundred thousand would alter mine.

Gul responded, "Ji, Dad." Again I sensed a malevolent undercurrent in his voice, but tried to ignore it. My rational mind preferred to ascribe it to bhang-induced paranoia, while at some more primal level still wondering if it wasn’t more. How long had it been since these folks ceased to be simply an exotic other, lumped together in my mind as Indians, Kashmiris, natives, wogs. That was an easier mindset. Stereotypes could be applied, replete with assumptions and expectations. Idiosyncrasies could be ascribed to cultural difference. I was well past that, and each "native" was an entity, making it ever so more complex. Was this because I now cared? Or was that too self-serving? Maybe it was just that I had crossed the invisible line and now was also a "native"—more likely "gone jungli" as the Brits used to say. But a native of what? That brief instant of resentment in Gul’s eye lingered in my mind. I would have to watch that.

We were now about to enter terra incognita, a land where much could happen and few questions asked. Charas, if used correctly with discipline, could be a great truth giver. It could peel away the most artfully built facade. At the same time, it could allow the user’s fantasy to come to the fore, taking over, covering with deeper illusion rather than stripping away. Which now was the case? Was I merely reflecting my own ill ease at being a boss, or was Gul not the faithful servant he pretended? Did he dare to dream? Did he dare to imagine himself better than this sahib?

Later that day, a Brit couple checked into the room next door. They were semi-freaks, on their way, but yet still too newly arrived. The man had that typically urban English working-class look of our generation, modeled on what I have come to think as their particular style of rocker, sort of like Jagger or Richards, wafer thin, deeply molded and lined face—in a word, wasted. The woman was considerably younger and healthier, maybe from the country, definitely of a higher caste, very blond, with almost translucent skin. My imagination went to work: a runaway from the village parsonage, taking up with this rocker wannabe. Maybe this was her first trip to the East. Yes, she was a bored, blooded bitch looking for a bit of excitement before settling back into that morass of mediocrity from which she had come—that is, if she lived that long. Meeting her briefly in the hall, I coolly nodded, but the thought of her lingered in my mind—a little chunky for my tastes, but we were in the mountains and nights could be cold. I knew this woman would be warm, that she held the power to thaw even my frozen soul. But then that couldn’t be; she did that for another man. The thought made me feel even colder, even more alone.

As I said, these Brits couldn’t have been on the road for very long. Most likely they were in the business. Possibly they were "mules" sent out with a promise of a free adventure to fabled India, if only they would bring back a small package. It wasn’t hard to find such volunteers on the lists of the dole. Maybe Ian had sent them. How crazy that would be, but it was a small world. Although this latter possibility seemed remote, that they were there on business wasn’t. This was harvest time in Manali, and buyers from all parts of the world were beginning to trickle in—like bees coming for the nectar. It was nothing like in the "old days" of the late Sixties and early Seventies. But people still smoked, and someone had to fill the demand.

From the restaurant connection, I had acquired a rather ample ball of charas, supposedly as a taste, and was well on the way to euphoria. Yet, despite the welcome delirium, I had an uneasy feeling that something was off. My head was spinning on a different frequency than was usual to charas. I had been in India for one week and free of the infamous "Delhi-belly." Perhaps, this was because I had come to automatically avoid the more obvious sources of this "bug," the principal being contaminated water. But even the most careful traveler occasionally slips, and I was no exception. The vague feeling of being on the wrong wavelength was quickly transformed by more definite signals from my gut. After having made the journey to the toilet a half dozen times, I knew this was for real. All I could do was swallow Lomotil, curl up in my sleeping bag, and wait for the next wave that would send me scrambling back to the loo. Soon, it seemed as if I was nothing but bowel. Outside of this sensation, I was lost to the world. Eventually the Lomotil kicked in, and I drifted into half-sleep.

Sometime later that evening—other than it was dark I had lost all sense of time—again my gut woke me. After gaining slight relief, I looked around the room and found Gul not there. The door was open to the hall and to the doorway of the Brits’ room beyond. From under their closed door, smoke seeped out into the corridor; its pungent aroma easily betrayed its origin. The smell whetted my own appetite, and for the moment I felt good enough to contemplate smoking a joint. I searched around the semi-dark room for the makings, but found nothing. Then I heard Gul’s voice coming from the other room. Though muffled by the closed door and obviously slurred by charas and God knows what else, I could decipher the words: "Shabash, shabash, good! That’s really good!" Well, if it was that good, I wanted some too. Going across the hall, I noticed the door was slightly ajar. I decided to proceed native style, just enter, no knocking. That would mark me as being too Western, too hung up in my culture.

As I opened the door, a totally unexpected sight met me. It was "shabash," but not in the way I had expected. Instead of seeing three inert, stoned forms sprawled apart, the sight of Gul and the couple in the midst of a rather intricate ménage à trois confronted me. The man had his back to the door; the woman was on all fours facing him. It was obvious from his groans she was pleasing him. From her position, that pleasure could come only from her lips; occasional sucking noises, amidst their collective moans, confirmed this. At the same time, Gul was administering to her needs, kneeling stark naked behind her broad uplifted hips; the darkness of his hard, angular body contrasted starkly with the soft, pillowed mounds of her ass. He moved in and out violently; his hands punished the down-soft flesh with slaps and pinches; she moaned deeply with obvious pleasure. Gul answered her moans with a humiliating stream of oily curses.

This wasn’t making love; it was something more primal. I can’t even begin to guess what was in her mind, unless her submission was atonement for the sins of her forebears. Whatever it was, it was getting her off and, as Gul’s brutality heightened, so did her cries of pleasure. Gul, no doubt, was working out all the injustice he had suffered from Angrezi over the years, all the bowing and scraping. There was also that special injustice of that last Angrez girl, the one he had guided, the one who had promised him the world, only to be snatched from him by a power much greater than he could ever hope to possess. Now he had another Angrez woman, and he was making her submit to his will. That two Angrezi men witnessed his triumph only made it better.

Transfixed by the unexpectedness of the scene, I was immobilized. Gul was the only one who could see me. The others were too far-gone in their pleasure to feel my presence. With his eyes boring into me, Gul dug his dark, rough-callused fingers into the snow white buttocks, spreading the quivering mounds further apart than even her most submissive posture offered. Without skipping a beat, a smirk crossed Gul’s face, his mouth transformed into a wolfish muzzle. "See sucker, see what I can do. See how your women want me," was the message that spewed with silent venom from inflamed eyes. Was this the real Gul? Was this a momentary liberation from the crushing constraints, his culture’s and those of an endless succession of tourist employers? This certainly was the living fantasy about which Kashmiri houseboys and mountain guides boastfully whispered.

Suddenly, as if carried over the edge, Gul’s body shuddered. The woman groaned. Her disappointed tone belied any unwilling exploitation. Realizing Gul was momentarily out of the action, she leaned backward to allow her companion to continue Gul’s work. The break in the rhythm shook me out of my stupor. Although my own cock was now erect, my stomach had other plans. As I retreated, I caught one last fleeting look. The woman was now bent back under the weight of the boy friend. Gul roughly grabbed the long white-gold hair and pulled her head back, bending her neck to what seemed almost the breaking point. Gul caressed her lips with the tip of his cock, but she wasn’t satisfied by such tentative contact. Her tongue lurched out as if to grasp the regenerating organ; her lips locked hard on its trunk greedily sucking the remaining fluid from its inflamed head. Gul’s eyes flashed with triumph—"Who’s master now?"

I fled. The only release I needed, or got, that night was on the john. Although momentarily excited by what I had witnessed, I was again totally captive to my bowels. As I strained to ease the wrenching pain, I thought, "Hadn’t these people ever heard of AIDS." But I knew I was bullshitting myself. How I wished it’d been my cock and not Gul’s working that night. In the darkened toilet, commiserated only by the release of gas, and the few odd bits of shit that had somehow evaded the dozen or so earlier visits, I realized I was growing to hate Gul. I hated him for his youth; I hated him because he could still hope to find release in this life.

Morning comes early when you sleep outside, even though that day was deeply overcast as if in sympathy with my condition. I knew from experience that the next twenty-four hours would be the worst—unless, of course, the "Delhi Belly" was something malevolent, like viral diarrhea—I kept looking for the telltale signs of mucous, and worse, blood, but they, to my relief, didn’t appear. I resolved not to eat, and to drink as much of the new bottled water as I could hold. This bottled water was an innovation. In the past, there had been only tea or sickly-sweet Indian soda pop from which to choose. Now, in keeping with the trends of the West, "designer" water had suddenly appeared in the markets of India. At five to twenty-five rupees—depending on how far one was from Delhi, it was obvious for whom the product was intended. I lay there on the porch, gentle drizzle tapping on the galvanized roof above, the clouds cloaking all but the very depths of the valley below. I felt a gentle ache in my gut. As the hours passed, I moved in and out of a dream-like half sleep, where past, present and future became one.

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^ ^ ^

Around me is a web and a spider industriously weaving. I struggle to sweep away a growing shroud of confining strands. I am both within and without, struggling and at the same time witness to my struggle. No matter how hard I try, the busy spider continues to work at even a faster pace, first walling out the world beyond, almost to the point where I, the spectator, no longer see myself. Just as I loose sight of my struggling form, to my horror, I realize that this wall is actually around me. TIGHTER! TIGHTER! I strike out, cutting through silken threads, only to see the spider replenish them faster than I can cut them away. The spider’s smile is not at all hostile. To the contrary, it is an open, comradely smile, as if we were engaged in cooperative effort.

Half awake, wondering where I had felt such threads before, I strained to think back over the pain as their glassy fibers scored my flesh so like…yes, that was what they were like…spun glass on a Christmas tree.

I was in the living room of that suburban track home, the ruins of Christmas around me. It was the last year that we had a tree, the year when, right after Christmas, Father took off to "the convention," soon to become "parts unknown." It was left to me, now "the man of the house," to take down the tree, the last tree. I remembered how that spun glass—"Angel Hair" they called it—clung to me, cutting into soft, chubby flesh, taking weeks to heal—the scars forever to remain.

In my struggle I gain a momentary advantage. The webs fall away, permitting my eyes to regain that other, the witness, the spectator. Again the spider gives me that encouraging grin, then redoubling its efforts draws me back into that captive self. I look closer, to see this tiny jailer. I make out on its spider’s body a head masked with a most human face. My eyes focus; it is almost as if I know whom I will find. This isn’t the first time I visited here. I expected it would be her, Tara. But then, just as I reach for that gestalt of recognition…I see what can’t be….

The rain stopped. Clouds thinned to a mist by the strengthening sun, lifted curtain-like, revealing the incredibly lush green of the valley. I love to follow this lifting of the veil, to examine how the mist drifts in and out of the towering deodars, massed rank upon rank up the valley’s walls. How apt was the expression "cloud forest."

As I looked down-river to the South, I could see the deep cut of the Beas, its bed strewn with mammoth boulders, as if the Gods had engaged in some gigantic game of marbles. This brown-gray serpent, a true naga of Hindu lore, split the great U-shaped valley into two worlds. How many ancient kingdoms such rivers had defined? Each bank and all that lived there isolated from the other. Only in the most recent time, when humans came to master the art of bridge making, had the inhabitants come to think of each other as one people. Yet even here, in what was only the shadow of the Himalaya, the forces of nature weren’t to be mastered easily. Environment had great power to shape human destiny and, while this was ultimately true everywhere, how cushioned I had become by my culture. It was one thing to dominate a Sierra or Alps, and another the Himalaya. For unlike its North American or European counterparts, the Himalaya was on another scale, and its power beyond the scope of human coexistence, let alone control. At times, if it was willing, it might permit a visit, a pilgrimage, but any attempt at control would most certainly end in disaster.

The hours slowly passed, punctuated only by interminable journeys to the loo. These inevitably resulted in little, as I no longer possessed anything to release. Between the trips was time, gnawing, grating time. I became desperate to keep my mind under control. The only thing that could blot out the past was to concentrate on the future. I knew that as soon as this wave of illness was over—even though, at the time, I felt near death—I had to make my move.

As the morning wore on, and I began to tire of my mental struggle, I decided that perhaps a joint would be good for what ailed me. I was starting to feel better, and the trips to the loo were occurring with much less frequency. Relax my mind; set free my imagination; and all those sorts of hopeful expectations that offer up the excuse to escape from the straight and narrow. After a fruitless search for the hash ball, I yelled to Gul, who was still nodded out. Must be exhausted from last night’s exertions, I thought with more than a trace of rancor.

After several minutes Gul roused himself. With a sheepish grin, yet with no mention of the previous night’s amorous adventure, he told me he had lost the ball of hash. This, I knew was a lie, but in my weakened condition I decided not to argue. I now realized Gul couldn’t be trusted, but it was too late to replace him. The only thing to be done was to get out on the trail where we both might be released from our temptations: for me, the indulgence of thinking of past sins; for Gul, the indulgence of committing present ones. Even as I thought of this, I marveled at my own hypocrisy. Had I been fit and not haunted by a fear of AIDS, I would have been right in there, mounting and thrusting. I countered this thought with a "boilerplate" piety that always provided a useful escape: "Yes, hard walking, clean air, simple food, and the company of the mountains might bring things right."

I instructed Gul to find transportation, oh…and of course there was that business at the restaurant…. Hoping Gul would carry out orders, I mercifully fell into a fitful sleep.

My prognosis proved correct. The following morning I felt fit enough to eat some porridge and drink black tea. I was weak, but on the mend. Gul was out early. When he returned, he brought news of a jeep and driver that would take us the hundred or so miles to the Darcha trailhead in northwestern Lahaul.

To save money, I considered traveling by bus or lorry, at least as far as Keylong. Gul lobbied for private transport, which in a way made some sense, as we did have all that gear. And he knew who would be schlepping it from bus top to bus top. Also, I reasoned, Gul did have the legitimate concern for its safety. This wasn’t Gul’s country, and he distrusted the local Hindus and Buddhists as much as I was growing to distrust him. My weakened state made Gul’s arguments for the jeep seem rational. After all, it would only cost fifteen hundred rupee, which at this stage of the journey was still a pittance. Of course, there was the other side; it was hard to make a commission on a bus ticket that was very cheap and had the value printed on it. The price of the jeep, however, could be easily inflated to accommodate Gul’s "action."

"How about that other matter?" I asked.

"The manager said ‘ji’ Dad! Insha’Allah, he will bring your shit this evening."

"At the price I said."

"Ji Dad, at the price you say, one thousand Amrikan."

"Well, well," I silently told myself, "my son, you must have made a killing." Little did I realize just how much of a killing was being made, or who was being killed.

That seemed to take care of the charas problem for the moment. Now I had only to decide about the transportation to the trailhead. After meditating over my map, seeing the distance and envisioning the terrain involved, I didn’t relish the thought of another bus ride. What if my stomach acted up? Also, I had to consider the ever-increasing pile of saman, now overflowing our room.

"Thik, let’s go for the jeep. But fifteen hundred, no more, got it."

"Ji Dad," Gul said, trying to appear uninvolved.

I realized that, most likely, he had just put three hundred rupees into his pocket—smart boy Gul. But what was three hundred compared to what he would make on the charas.

Throughout the day I felt my strength returning. Part of my recovery I credited to not smoking. My head was clearing along with my stomach, and that was good. It had been quite some time since so intense a bout with my old friend charas. Somehow, it was different now than I remembered. In the past, drugs had been a vehicle to unknown destinations, an adventure in uncharted lands, their power to distort brain and nerve turning the familiar into the bizarre. Now it was all changed, the adventure gone. It only made me feel weak and dizzy. What was wrong? Was it that I had outgrown drugs, or had my imagination so atrophied that there was no longer anything to stimulate. The "hippie" philosophy, or at least my read on it, always proclaimed dope, or at least the psychoactive drugs, to be neutral. Drugs only broke down the social constraints, releasing what was within. If this was the case, then maybe, just maybe, there was nothing inside.

After Gul left, I began to think about the charas again. A dialog arose in those seemingly diverse heads. How often I have cursed that old fart Whistler for planting the idea about multiple heads. It was a time bomb threatening to blow me into total insanity. Of course the son of a bitch had been right. We all operate with several different heads, or at least perspectives. The smarter we are, the more heads kick in. Yet when I tried to explain this idea to another one of the Profs, she had countered—they always have a counter—"In folklore, Guy, what is it that has more than one head?" I thought a moment, but she was impatient. "Monsters, Guy, monsters!" This was also the truth, but once the realization set in, once I became aware of my conflicting minds, there was no escape, monster or no. I did have more than one perspective, more than one head. For a while I let, what I guess is, my "good head" take the floor.

"Look, old man, you’ve been down this road before. You know it’s time to chuck it in. You have to act, not just think about it. You’re like a drunk reviving from a bad hangover. Let’s not score that shit. Let’s put that behind us. Yes, we’ll enter the wilderness without a stash. Okay?"

But another, more malevolent head wasn’t about to let things slide.

"Hey, asshole! What are you going to do after this grand tour is over, sell your photographs, write a book? Oh sure, I’ve heard that one before. Even if you could, what’ll you live on till the money comes in? Even if you survive, what’ll be the payoff? Chump change my dear, chump change for a chump! As if you’ll ever even get that! No, forget that crap! Just one little score, and you can leverage it into something legit."

On and on went the debate. It was still underway when Gul returned; the "good head" had the floor, and in a desperate attempt to capture the high ground took control of my vocal cords. I found myself muttering to Gul that I was thinking about canceling the deal.

Surprisingly, Gul took this in stride. At least he didn’t flinch when he heard the news. Perhaps, he too was suffering the results of overindulgence, or like me, he knew the dangers that lay ahead. But it was none of these. Gul wasn’t about to lose his commission, nor as it turned out his potential catch. For despite all his faults, Gul was a good judge of character. That was his long suit; that was how he survived. He knew as soon as I fully recovered, I would be back to my old tricks. I am, after all a charasi—you know, "Charasi combene marsi"…something like old charasis never die…they just fade away. It was strange, if there was none around, no big deal but…hey…trail life was tough, walking for six, or eight, or even more hours a day, plodding, plodding, plodding. Even here in the Himalaya with its incredible challenges, mind-blowing vistas, and all that good shit, after the first rush it could get boring, just like anything else.

Yes, having a touch of the herb helped. It made things much more philosophical, so to speak. Every peak, every rock, every pebble took on a new complexity. Colors became more vibrant, people more strange. There was the dizziness, that breathless rush that overwhelmed you with the morning’s first tote. I mean, there were times I just had to lie down and let it sweep over me. Gul knew I would want my stash.

Everything was in its place. My kit for this trip, including the burlap sacks of food and other locally obtained items, was securely packed in a half-dozen bags of assorted sizes. The largest was my own red expedition duffel, containing all my personal gear, tent, and sleeping bag. I could withstand the loss of any of the other pieces, but this was essential. In it were the things that would provide two of the three essentials, warmth and dryness. The third, energy or food, could be obtained along the way. All else, even my case of beloved cameras, with me since Nam—"Good God! That was over twenty years ago!"—could be lost and the trip still go on.

My eyes came to rest on the camera case. I realized, though I had gone to great trouble and expense to get this case and its contents to India, I’ had yet taken a single photograph. In part this was to save film, but also I no longer felt the great fascination that once held me. I always needed the impetus of curiosity behind my photography. It was the tool for intellectual explorations. If something interested me, if I felt I wanted to examine it more closely, or thought I might meditate on it later, then and only then would I be motivated to take a picture. I had to feel a need to have the image, to want to hold on to it for future contemplation.

Urban India had become too familiar, presenting the same block to my photography I found in my back yard—perhaps because in my mind it has become my back yard. If I had an image ingrained in my mind, or if I thought I could always come back to it, then what was the point of photographing. While some photographers enjoyed making the usual unusual, to communicate their own unique perspective, or to proclaim some inner feeling, my work had never consciously been about myself. To the contrary, I studiously worked to avoid intruding into the image I produced.

Not that this was possible. I had wrangled with this for some time to the absurd point where I had subjected it to academic study. I posed the problem of how to visually portray another people, another culture, without obscuring the subject in the filter of reflexivity and reflectivity. I attempted to show the futility by extrapolating from thermodynamics the Heisenberg principle—that in an echo of Einstein’s relativity, each observer brought change to what was observed—I warned you it was absurd.

During the mercifully brief period in my life when I had fancied myself a visual anthropologist, it sounded so much more intellectual than photographer, I became so obsessed with this idea that I gave up taking photographs altogether. Instead, I put the camera into the hands of those who would have been my subjects, allowing them to capture their own "realities," express their own inner feelings. But this, as I would find characteristic of most academic endeavors, resulted in little more than a masturbatory exercise, a hermeneutic vortex leading nowhere. My subjects were making pictures that were theirs and could signify only their own experience. I was expendable, at best a provider of equipment. This was a role I found completely unsatisfying, completely without gratification. It had been very esoteric, very intellectual, but in the end, totally devoid of any pleasure I had once derived from my "art." Would I eat the sandwich or only describe it? Again, I had thought too much. If only I could think less, thinking always led me into trouble.

Now I was going to try again. Just take pictures for myself and not worry about all the ramifications. There were no more papers to write, theses to propose, word-biased professors to please, no more justifications, no more analysis, no more bullshit. Just let the pictures speak for themselves, trust the pictures. I would still try not to be what I thought of as "artsy," letting the inner-self hang out, instead I would work toward a goal of documenting as "objectively" as possible the land and its inhabitants lying before me. I returned to an idea, once held so long ago, that what I saw was a fleeting way of life soon to be extinguished. It was valuable to record. Perhaps this wasn’t politically or intellectually correct, but it was something that gave purpose and with that purpose came hope.

Well, if I was going to preserve this "fleeting way of life," it was time to get started. Tentatively, almost shyly, I picked up my well-worn tools. They were my oldest friends, some pre-dating my relationship with Mei. These old Fs and F2s—I was busted before the F3’s took hold—had been with me almost from the beginning of my adult life. They had traveled as far and wide as I. Each nick, dent, and scratch recalled some moment of extremity: red-hot shrapnel in the siege of Khe Sanh; that rocky ledge on the western face of Nanda Devi; the twenty foot fall when the porch collapsed from the weight of the Kalash wedding party in Chitral; a kick from a transcended Jivaro, high on ayahuasca in a jungle back-water of the Peruvian Amazon; the endless jolting from a Tuareg camel crossing the Sahara. These little black boxes with lenses, filters, and miscellaneous gear were the source of my magic. They enabled me to capture people, places, and events, separating them from the dictates of time, suspending them forever as they were when, by some act of fate, I met them with my camera. Film held the past fast for me.

I selected my longest lens, a 180-mm, and took the first pictures of the trip. Earlier, in the throes of my illness, the interplay of mist and cloud among the deodars had mercifully distracted me from the pain. Now, in some attempt at tribute, I suppose, I wanted to get it on to film. The choice of subject made me realize just how distant I had become from what had once been my chief means of expression—even at times superseding speech itself. When I was up to speed, I favored wide-angles, 35, 28, 24, 20 even 15-mm—I wasn’t the spy-type of photographer—I wanted to get into the action and produce a perspective that would make my audience feel engaged. For the moment, I was content to stand back; the camera didn’t feel comfortable; it had yet to become a part of me, as I knew it must, if I was to do good work. Now was the time of re-acquaintance after a long separation, and this needed time.

Even through a view finder well-worn and hazed by the dust of many continents, the scene appeared in great brilliance, enhanced as it was by the hallucinogenic filters of hash and sickness-induced fatigue. I instinctively knew this wouldn’t translate well to film. As often was the case with this type of scene, I would eventually—if and when I got to see the results—wonder why I had taken the bloody picture. The things that made the scene so beautiful, the interplay of light and shade, movement, the delicate gradation of tone and hue, were too subtle to be captured by the film. But anything to break the ice, take the first shot.

After a couple of exposures of clouds and rain—was this some trick of Freud translated through Chinese—I changed lenses. I went to wide, and took three shots of the surrounding valley. One was down towards the town. It appeared like one of those miniature villages seen in model railroad complexes. Another was to the West where the hills look like great, emerald-green breasts cleaved by the nala leading to Chamba. The last was to the North, to the serious peaks of the Pir Panjal, perpetually cloaked in ice and snow. Here, I suddenly faced a taste of what lay beyond—a warning to those who had no business to go on. The visible peaks were small when scaled against the true Himalaya. Yet looking at their jagged, ice-bound crest, it was certain that Death was no stranger. A perversely pleasurable chill went through my body and, for a brief moment, I longed for a tryst among those crags. I hungered to know. I yearned for the comforting finality of her embrace. Was it strange that when I envisioned Annihilation, I saw not the skull-crowned, snout-nosed, fanged horror of the tangkhas, but instead an unfocused "her?"

I knew I had better change channels. Thinking about death too much was obsessive, bad for the soul. I sensed that if I ever did conjure Death’s face clearly, she would move from a fantasy locked in my mind to reality, an external power over which I would have no control. Instead, I forced myself to think about business. Yes, I told myself, I wasn’t going to score, but just suppose I did anyway?

I tried to redirect my mind by focusing on details. If, just if, I decided to score the shit, then what things would have to be done? After all, this was no joking matter. Maybe up here in Vashist, high as a kite, fantasy could reign but, if it was a go, I had better check into reality quickly. Being able to regroup had always been my strength, the reason I had enjoyed a measure of success rather than being one more stoned-out junkie. I could break away and return to the world outside my head.

I thought about the immediate problem of storage. Out of old habit, I hid the method of shipment. After—if there was to be an "after"—the trip was over, once I got to the sanctuary of a houseboat in the Vale, then I would complete the packing. This required caution, for odor was a big problem with charas, particularly with better qualities. The same resin that made the shit so potent also made it easy to be detected by dogs. I knew the Man was relying more on dogs, both real and virtual, but I could beat them. I would take my bundle, mold it into a shape that would fit inside the plastic battery liner, then cover it with melted wax. I had learned the trick early in my travels, and it served well. Once encased in wax, there would be no smell, even after baking in the Delhi warehouse, awaiting shipment. Sealed inside the liner, then placed in the battery, the chance of detection was remote. It always surprised me, but for some reason my own appearance never triggered any bells. No, I had little fear of a cold bust, I just didn’t fit the profile. To get me you had to have a snitch; you had to be waiting.

^ ^ ^

Like the time Mei and I returned from Chitral with four kilos of the best "honey oil." Chitral was one of my favorites. Lying in the extreme northwestern corner of of Pakistan, it had until quite recently been an independent kingdom. While tall, snowy mountains encircle it, making it much like an earthly Shambhala, it has served for countless ages as a meeting place of the three great Asian cultures—Chinese, Indian, and Persian. Like that mythic Shambhala, Chitral is isolated, cutoff for most of the year from the outside world. Or at least it was at that time, before the Shuravi invasion sent a Afghan refugees flooding over it’s mountainous borders. It was a perfect hideaway and with a little money you could do almost anything. We had set up a small lab with Morgan in the former ruler’s ramshackled summer palace, Birmogh Lasht, the Plain of Walnuts. It was an incredibly beautiful place, perched on a wide plateau almost a mile above the main valley with an amazing three-sixty vista that included the monsters in the Tirich Massif, as well as lesser peaks of the Hindu Kush and Hindu Raj. I didn’t have too much time to get bored with that view because for the better part of a month I was about the agonizing business of refining. We cooked, washed, removing the solvent from the crude oil, and finally purified the mess until we had worked forty keys of Chitral’s finest into four keys of clear, sweet, light honey oil.

The hardest part was getting the ethanol for cooking and the petroleum ether for the final purification, not to mention the ice. Neither was readily available in Pakistan; ethanol or grain alcohol was, in that Islamic country, worse than charas. Buying pet ether was like asking the CBI to bust you. I got around the first by having my Chitrali connect, the manager of the hotel where I stayed, work the previous winter moonshining the local mulberry crop. The only trouble was that the son of a bitch got into his own product—winters in Chitral were long and cold. If he hadn’t turned sherabi on me, I could have doubled production. The pet I imported from Nam where it was no sweat. I could have bought the come of Satan in Cholon, if I had enough cash—and was gullible. It was no problem bringing the pet through Pakistani Customs, because they weren’t really interested in what foreigners were bringing in, just what was going out. I had it bottled up like whiskey and, since I was there at the Government’s invitation to make a film, all it took was a little baksheesh, one bottle of real Johnny Walker Black. Morgan and I played Russian Roulette that month taking turns at the distilling. You had to be careful when you cooked, otherwise the whole thing would blow. We could have used kero, ordinary petrol, or even wood or grain alcohol, but the pet was the only way to get the oil really concentrated. Those were the days before a/c electric of any kind reached Chitral. I had a generator hooked up to a jeep that gave us the juice for the hot plate, and for ice there was a glacier a half days trek away. I had four boys running ice.

Once I had solved the material problems, the refining went on without a hitch. It was just tedious and dangerous. Cooking with that volatile alcohol, and then that final stage with the even more volatile pet. After all that, I thought it was rather ironic that our biggest hassle came when we were packing in Pindi. God, that was close. We had placed the container of oil—a big ghee tin—into a bathtub of hot water to make it more fluid. Somehow, Mei spilled a little of the oil into the tub and, when the water drained, a thick film formed over the tub’s surface. You can imagine. There we were, deep in the Man’s territory, in Flashman’s Hotel, a Government hotel. Bearers were running in and out, and all we had were a few rags to wipe the tub. It was like blood at a murder scene, it just wouldn’t go away. Finally with the help of some rubbing alcohol, we got rid of most of it…but I always sort of wondered.

I wondered because that time we were stopped. Maybe it was all the stamps from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Peru, Thailand, Nam, and such, or the fact that we did look rather scruffy. Having just spent a number of months living in a remote corner of Chitral, we were well removed from the World. However, there was the chance that a bearer, chowkidar, or sweeper had detected something strange about the tub, some telltale odor and reported it. What ever it was, when we arrived in New York, the custom agent politely, but firmly, escorted us to an isolated room, telling us to wait while they made a thorough search of our baggage.

The flight had been over twenty-four hours, we were exhausted and groggy from the Valium that I always used to calm myself for the ordeal of entry. Despite the fatigue my mind was racing. Was this it? Was this how it was going to end? How am I going to protect Mei? She was frightened. I could tell only because I knew her so well. Besides I was scared shitless so…. But she was quite a trooper and outwardly kept calm, feigning surprise mixed with outrage—not too much to signal guilt but enough to seem the proper response to undeserved prosecution. We sat there on those hard metal folding chairs in a bare, greenish room that seemed to scream, "Welcome to the belly of the beast!" There was a mirror, which I had to assume wasn’t for our convenience. I resisted a sudden temptation to wave to the audience of Customs and DEA agents I knew must be on the other side. Then giving Mei a deep look—was this to be the last time I saw her? I started a patter of complaint while, at the same time, trying not to sound too nervous.

"Son of a bitch, why us? I hope this doesn’t take too long or we’ll miss our connect…er…flight." My God! I realized I had freaked on that telltale word. Then recovering myself, "Oh well, I guess they are just doing their job. I hope they don’t break anything."

"Jesus, Guy, I’ve got to pee, I wonder where’s the toilet?

"Just try to hold it Mei. I’m sure this won’t take long."

I wasn’t sure at all, but we both knew our future depended on maintaining a collective cool. It was in moments like this, moments of extremity, which always proved the depth of our relationship. Being both of strong will, we bickered a lot about small things, but when faced with a crunch we became one mind, responding with single energy to the collective threat. We realized that, if things went bad, it would mean separation; we would each have to face a new, unknown reality alone. The thought was too terrible, and we pulled together with a supreme effort of will.

We kept up the whining patter of conversation, hoping against hope the nervousness—no, abject fear is more accurate—didn’t show. I figured that those slugs were too lazy to go through everything, I mean we had mucho saman. I was sure they were listening, believing we would do their job for them. But we kept our cool and, after about an hour, a rather disgruntled agent told us to clear out. God, were we happy, like being strapped into the chair and then getting the call from the Governor. So much depended on just a little action or inaction. If they had dug a little deeper…? But they didn’t. Maybe love protected us. We were so much in love. We were inseparable. Again, I would have killed to protect Mei…I would have given my life. Yet at the same time I put her through all that shit. I guess I figured it was my life, and she had "signed on" free and clear. I mean, that was her choice, she knew who I was before we connected.

^ ^ ^

Early the next morning, after the usual miscues on an early wake-up, we finished packing. Gul and the barely awake manager, temporarily seconded as a bellhop, carried the baggage down to the garden to wait for the jeep. Inured by now to "Indian time," I made only a mild fuss, but even this restraint didn’t calm the manager, little used to early rising. As it turned out, there was no real need to hurry on our end because the jeep, in keeping with the general system, was also late. After a while, it dawns on the traveler to adjust to a perceived pattern of difference, but just as you think you have perceived such a pattern, it changes, the hour difference becomes two, or four, or time loses all meaning.

Eventually, I worked it out. I wore on my left wrist, along with a cheap but useful plastic digital watch, a Rajastani bracelet. It was quite beautiful, massively made of woven silver mesh, adorned with flowered bas-relief medallions. At times, casual observers would ask, "Why two watches Sahib?" Then, I would first point to the watch, "This Angrezi time," and then to one of the round silver medallions on the bracelet, "This Indian time." Surprisingly, I usually got a knowing laugh. It was as if the Indians also knew the frustration of not having a firm system of time to order their existence. But then such an order, who could impose it on cultures as old and set in their ways as those of India? The British tried and to what end?

Gul took advantage of the driver’s tardiness. Had it been arranged? With seeming disinterest, he casually broached the subject, "Hey Dad, maybe you should get the shit, eh? Very good price, and we not see more until Kashmir…maybe not even there now those motherfucker militants run things. Even if we find, Dad, it cost much, much more."

Like a magnet, the case with the strobe equipment drew my attention. As it was, with its hollow battery, it was of no use. That extra case cost plenty to get this far. If this was to be a one-way trip, why bother with it, for that matter, why bother with any of it? It wouldn’t take too much to reach the Rohtang…

"Namaste. Kyaa haal hay, Dadee Sahib?" It was as if almost on cue. I heard that dreaded word through a haze inhabiting my mind like the mist that clouded the forests. It was the restaurant manager, my connect.

"Thik, okay," I said reflexively, but thinking: Son of a bitch, now Gul has him using that fucking word. And now it has become ‘Dadee.’ Bloody fucking familiar, this wog! Then I caught myself. Where did that come from? I sound like the old days, when I was running with Morgan.

No time for wool gathering, old man, I have to deal with this, now, right now.

Under his arm the manager carried a bundle tied up in a piece of stained muslin—the charas. Gul stood in the doorway behind him, armed with what was now becoming an all too familiar smirk. Increasingly, I was reminded of Dirk Bogarde whenever I thought of Gul. It was in The Servant, the film where a gentleman’s gentleman manipulates his master, to the point where he becomes master. I suspected this too would be my fate, unless I was extremely careful. Perhaps by the end of the journey, it would be me, who was cooking, cleaning, and schlepping the bags, and me, who would deferentially seek Gul’s pleasure.

At first I wanted to protest. Hadn’t I told Gul it would be a non-starter? But I was too stoned to create waves; easier just to go with the flow; let fate take its course. The manager opened the muslin wrapping, and laid the great turd-like mound down on the tea table beside me, shoving aside the clutter of teacups, loose tobacco, maps, water bottles, and biscuit wrappers. It had been a long time since I had seen this much shit.

"Three keys, are you sure?"

I looked at the bundle. I reached down, touched it, then hefted it gingerly. It was soft and pliant. With little difficulty, I was able to break through the black-oily crust to the dark green gold that lay inside. The weight felt about right—I prided myself on my sense of weight. At least it was in the ballpark. What was more important, it seemed firmly packed; a fact that was quickly proved when I sliced through with my Swiss Army knife. That was the important test, that it was pure, no surprises lurking inside, no adulteration. How many times had I heard tales of pine resin, or even cow, yak, or camel shit, wrapped in a thin layer of charas, being fobbed off on some cherry smuggler. The exact weight wasn’t important. I could tell it would more than fill my strobe’s hidden compartments. No, it was the quality that counted.

"On my honor, Dadee Sahib. It three kaygee"

"Hey my friend, I am not your Daddy."

"As you wish Sahib," said the manager without any sign of offense.

"For one thousand, right?"

"As you wish Sahib, one thousand dollars Amriki."

Before I could really grasp what I was doing, the deal was finished and the restaurant manager out the door. I was left holding my pungent bundle. All of a sudden a delicious rush of fear swept over me; it was a fear I hadn’t felt for more than a dozen years. That fear of holding, of knowing that any time, anywhere, the Man might suddenly step out of the unknown…BUSTED. Why did I enjoy this? Why couldn’t I just sit back and enjoy the comforts of life, the beauties? On the contrary it was just those things that made me nervous—made me feel I was going soft.

No, it was good to be on the edge again. Motherfucker, it was good!

I gouged out a rather large chunk and from that made two balls. One I passed to Gul, the other I put into an empty film can, surreptitiously storing it away.

"Here Gul, our ration to Padam. Use it wisely my son."

Reflexively, I underscored the last word with sarcasm. Yet I was feeling good. I had made, or at least had let be made, a decision. There was now an alternative. Another hole to hide in! That was what Mei used to say. I now had an alternative to inevitable closure; life again was open-ended. Romantic though it might seem from a distance, as I approached my fantasized tryst, Death’s distant beauty might take an unexpected, less pleasing form.

An aura of paranoia radiated out from that inert, pungent turd, sitting on the tea table. At the same time it radiated hope.

The turd spoke to me, "Well big boy, Sahib Dadee or whatever shit-assed Angrez name that you go by! Do you have the balls to take me where I need to go, My devotees wait anxiously, ready to reward you, if you are brave. But are you, Dadee Sahib?"

Months and thousands of miles from now this ball of resin would magically turn into piles of currency, maybe yen, maybe dollars. What did it matter? What mattered was that it would empower me, free me to make the next move, free me to build dreams—if I had the balls.

I wrapped up the bundled and called to Gul, "Here, stash this away."

"Stash, Dad?"

"Yes ‘stash,’ I mean pack it away somewhere safe."

Gul carefully wrapped the bundle in several layers of plastic and with marked reverence placed it in the large sack of rice. Gul had done well. Out of the thousand dollars, two hundred would be his. He had hoped for more, but I was no virgin and, rather than botch the deal, he opted for a more modest profit. Besides, there was another, much more important consideration, one that I would learn of only much later, but one I will share with you to at this time.

I wasn’t Gul’s only employer, although his work for me was an essential element of his other, more important duty. The boss to whom he owed his ultimate allegiance was V. I. Singh, Inspector of the CBI, the equivalent of the FBI or Interpol in India. How fortunate Gul had considered himself when he had first met the good Inspector. "Allah, blessed be his name, must have been watching over me," he thought, because now there was a way out of his troubles. He had been busted with a few grams of hash. It was no big deal, unless Singh wanted it to be one. Gul was, after all, a Kashmiri. However, it wasn’t a street tout like Gul that Singh was gunning for.

Recently, the drug section of the CBI had been getting a lot of heat; the Americans were whining that there wasn’t enough "interdiction." In this was an underlying threat that linkage might be made to future aid. Of course the CBI. wouldn’t want to disturb the large operators, those modern Moghuls of international commerce in Bombay, Delhi, or Calcutta for whom drugs were just another commodity to be moved in the world market—another source of that desperately needed foreign exchange.

There was another level in which the CBI could freely act. It didn’t take much intelligence to know that the street touts, those working the tourist trade, and more specifically those of Kashmiri origin, had their hands deep in the trade. "Besides those Kashmiris are a troublesome lot, and it’s a fact that much of their drug profits are going to arm those fundamentalist maniacs." The word went out to roust a few and then use them as informers. The Inspector’s orders had been clear: "Use the touts to bag some of those hippie-traveler types, Euro-trash if you must, but try for Amrikans." The CBI-walas knew if they could throw a few bodies to the American DEA, their own masters would be pleased.

Of course the Inspector had been more of a curse than a blessing. Gul made his pact with a devil and, like all such pacts, it couldn’t be broken. He had to keep giving up bodies, ensnaring and then betraying. At least they would wait until the poor victims got back to wherever they came from before busting them. That was cleaner, no expense of trial or incarceration for the Indian Government, a body to count in the drug war for the DEA. What was equally important for Gul, no real worry about payback. By the time the poor victim got out of prison…well as one famous rebel chief had said: "Delhi is a long way away."

Gul was paid three thousand rupees for each body snared. He had already scored three times. How happy was his widowed mother when he sent her the money. His family, impoverished since his father’s death, could now afford to build their own home. At times, he felt almost sorry for his victims. It had been particularly hard with that English girl. She had clearly been in love with him—his ticket out of India. He could almost feel the British passport in his hand. But then Singh had pressured him, and when Gul found that she wanted to take some dope back to a "cousin" in L. A., he knew he was going to have to sacrifice her—a bird in the hand. He had to think of his family first. They desperately needed the cash, and he knew he would have a devil of a time getting an exit permit to leave India without Singh’s approval.

That had been almost two years ago. Ever since the troubles in Kashmir, business was slow. Besides needing money, a never-ending need, he also had the Inspector breathing down his neck. When I came along, it was like another gift from God of which Gul, in his youthful conceit, imagined he was the worthy beneficiary. The only trick would be to stick with me throughout my "program," to make sure, Insha’Allah, that I didn’t get second thoughts, that I didn’t lose my nerve.

The jeep-wala told Gul the trip would take about twelve hours. He didn’t want to arrive in Darcha too late, since he planned to return the same evening. It would be quite a drive over the 13,000-foot Rohtang Pass, even in the light. But in the dead of night? The driver would really earn his thousand plus rupees. Despite the driver’s self-avowed desire for an early start, he pulled up to the hotel shortly before eight—most likely, I realized later, through the machinations of Gul. Aside from the lateness, there had been another change. Instead of the jeep, which in India meant a jonga, an Indian built Suzuki four by four, the driver appeared in an Omni, a micro-van that was another Japan-India co-production. The Omni, albeit new, looked rather dangerous, and for the life of me I couldn’t believe it would have the power to make the long climb.

The driver, Dorje, whose central Asian features gave him away as one of the many transplanted Lahaulis living around Manali, excused the change as necessary because of the large amount of saman. Although dubious, I took heart in the seeming professionalism of Dorje. Perhaps, it was his sweater, which in big, multi-colored block letters had the word "STRONG" emblazoned across it. I mused on how the power of suggestion was known far beyond the precincts of Madison Avenue.

It would be another hour before we could be off—only after taking chai, exchanging addresses, and a final group photograph with the hotel manager, Gul, and our new friend and co-conspirator, Dorje. Gul was equally anxious to get on the road. He had studiously avoided the Brit couple since the night of their debauchery. The charas and excitement brought on by the sheer carnality of it all had, for that moment, stripped him of his inhibitions. The cool, clear light of morning brought him back to his senses. Although he ultimately had a higher master, the Inspector, to do his work properly he had to psyche himself into working for me. It was through me he could get those things that he needed, money for his family, a body to count for the CBI, and ultimately his ticket to the World.

"What possessed me," Gul might have thought, "to give myself away." The cardinal rule in this business was never to tip your hand. No matter what you felt about a sahib or memsahib, about any of these ferenghi fuckers, only let them see what they want to see, the faithful bearer, ready to do whatever was their bidding. His revenge would come in the money paid and the gifts, the baksheesh, he would duly extract. If they wanted to make the mistake, if they wanted to smuggle drugs, then Gul would only be too happy to oblige. It would be, after all, their choice.

When he finally got the gear loaded, the good-byes said, and we were actually underway, relief filled Gul’s face. The last thing he wanted was to face the couple again. He had enjoyed the woman, for she reminded him of that other English girl. He even imagined he was in love. But there was no place in his plan for love; the road from the village was a long and hard one. Escape from the grinding poverty and oppression had long been his only goal.

Like other Kashmiris in the trade, he hoped to find someone who would take him from this nowhere, from these desolate mountains to the wonders of distant cities like London, New York, or Tokyo, places he had seen only in those big, glossy posters in the airline offices ringing Connaught. He often thought to himself, how crazy were these tourists who left all those wonderful places, spending untold lakhs of rupees to come to this wasteland, but then praise be that they did. If he could only make it to the West, there he could make his fortune. He heard that even the most common laborer made five dollars an hour. That was almost one hundred and fifty rupees. It was rare when he could make that much in a day. In his dream, he saw himself one day returning to Kashmir, loaded with all manner of ferenghi goods: color television, VCR—if those militant fuckers had been blown away—a good kero heater, fancy sport clothes. Maybe he would open a shop, or better, a string of houseboats. Yes, he would become a houseboat owner, an employer of other poor village youth who would serve him, just as he had served. Now, all these dreams were on hold, for he was in the clutches of the CBI. All he could hope for now was that someday, if he served well enough, they would let him go.