Maldon to Trivandrum
November 21st
New Moon
I woke up at six in the morning, after maybe four hours of not very sound sleep. The flight was at half past twelve, but trying to get to Heathrow from Maldon for half ten was a tricky business because of the level of traffic at that time of day. So we had to leave at about seven to be on the safe side. This would almost certainly mean arriving quite early, but leaving any later could easily mean arriving a bit too late for comfort - depending on the traffic conditions on the notoriously clogged M25 motorway.
I felt pretty rough that morning as i sent out my final couple of email messages. And i looked with mild trepidation towards the next leap into the void, which i was just about to make. It didn't worry me too much, although in a certain way it always scares the shit out of me but, in the night, i had one brief moment of sudden horror at the prospect.
More daunting than leaping into the unknown was the fact that i'd be alone for at least a couple of months. After the extreme loneliness i felt at times in Mexico, it wasn't an inviting prospect and i really felt like i wanted to go straight back to Australia and my friends. But it had to be done. There was no escaping it. I wasn't even really sure why it had to be done - it wasn't just so i could finish this travel diary! It was simply the way the wind was blowing and, as usual, i had no choice but to blow with it.
Here we go again!
- - -
Flying. It was so familiar to me by then, that when i was in a plane i felt like i'd been in it all my life. It had that same, physically uncomfortable, but mentally relaxing feeling as catching a train or a long distance bus had for me.
I was obviously born to move, i thought. It felt so totally natural - maybe from doing it in excess! My father used to tell me he knew i was going to be a traveller from the moment i started speaking, because my first word was "Orinoco" - the name of a great river in the north of South America. I'd always wanted to go there and visit that river whose name i allegedly uttered so early in life. One day maybe i would.
Sometimes, though, i wished i could stop. More during that journey than ever before, i'd felt like i really didn't ever want to travel anywhere ever again. But i doubted i could achieve that, even if i really did want it. The freedom, the release from worldly worries that comes from being in transit is something that i thought i needed to keep my mind alive. I'd become addicted to it in a certain way. In another way, it was something that was an essential part of my life, something that stopped me from slumping into a self-destructive and unhealthy complacency, or rut, or self-imprisonment. It also helped me keep fear at bay. And fear is the most destructive element of human nature.
Travelling did scare the shit out of me though. That leap into the void, the unknown, freaked me out intensely in some ways and at some times. But that was all the more reason to do it. If you didn't do things that scared you, they grew inside you in a sort of psychological cancer and reduced your life to a sort of trance. When you did do it, and kept doing it, it got easier - although it never seemed to stop being scary!
It was also a form of spiritual meditation, for want of a better word. To travel, following the wind, kept me tuned into the natural rhythms and energy of the universe. Nothing in nature stays still, nothing stays the same. To give myself up to the rhythmical, cyclic influences on my life, to let it drag me from place to place, trusting the natural flow of things to provide me with what i needed to live the right life for me, certainly - for me, at any rate - sharpened my senses to all the other influences, to all the other aspects of nature, the environment, and life itself.
Before the stop in Dubai, the screens which were displaying our route showed Europe and north Africa. Afterwards they showed India, South East Asia and northern Australia. To see Darwin appearing on the map, a long way ahead, but there nevertheless, was quite an emotional feeling for me. It was a long way away from me still, in time if not in distance now, but it was good to feel i was on the way.
- - -
I got almost no sleep on the plane and when we arrived at Trivandrum i wasn't feeling my best at all. It's a small and simple airport, but for some strange reason they take your passport off you at passport control and everyone has to stand around in a bunch on the other side waiting for them to be returned.
I'd met an american man called Bill on the flight from London and again while we waited in Colombo airport for the flight to Trivandrum. We decided to share a taxi into town. We took along another man who'd been on the flight from Colombo too. He came from Surinam in South America and had lived in Asia for eighteen years i think. He was dressed in orange monks robes and was, i thought, a buddhist monk. I might have been wrong there, as i couldn't tell the difference, and he could have been a Hindu. Whichever it was, he'd been the other one too, some time before. He was interesting and had travelled a lot, but i'm afraid i never asked his name a second time and hearing someone's name once is rarely enough for me to remember it.
In Trivandrum, we went our separate ways and i wandered around a bit near the railway station, trying to find somewhere to stay. But the combination of exhaustion, culture shock and the effect of a noisy, dusty and crowded tropical city spun me out so severely i couldn't handle being there. I knew Kovalam beach was only a half hour's bus ride away and i decided it was where i had to go. I met the Surinamer monk on the way to the bus station and he was feeling pretty much the same way. He was planning to catch the train to Goa the next morning, but being in the city was getting to him too and he'd decided Kovalam was the best place to spend the time he had to hang around.
In Trivandrum, i was overcome by this powerful feeling of "what the hell am i doing here? and what the hell am i going to do here?" This feeling was to last for a few days, during which i had very serious doubts about whether i really wanted to be in India at all. It just seemed so pointless. I think it was partly the result of, for the first time in a long time, not having anything to aim at, or anything in particular i wanted to do. I had some vague ideas, but there was no real substance to the them, and all i could see ahead of me was a two-month long void of aimless hanging around.
During the first four or five days, i also suffered from the worst jet lag i'd had for years. It was strange really, as it was only half the distance to Australia and i hadn't had jetlag this bad, as far as i could remember, since the first and possibly the second time i'd flown there from London.
Soon after i got to Kovalam i found a room and slept almost continuously for twenty four hours. It was incredible. I didn't remember having slept that long ever before - although i did have some vague memory of being surprised at sleeping close to that amount of time on another occasion. When i woke up, i felt physically much better, but i was quite depressed and haunted by that feeling of not knowing why i was there.
That night i was in a restaurant at the edge of the beach and an american woman from somewhere in Georgia sat down and started talking to me. Her name was Kelly and she'd arrived there the previous day too. We talked for quite a while and, although i crapped on a bit more than my fair share, she told me some interesting things. She seemed to have had a fascinating and varied life and a lot of her ideas and views on life and reality matched mine pretty closely and i really enjoyed talking with her that evening. I would have really liked to have got to know her better, as it's not every day i meet someone who i can communicate with so easily and who sees the world in such a close way to how i see it. But unfortunately, apart from a brief hello in passing, the next evening, i never saw her again.
We got onto the subject of death somehow and Kelly told me a story that affected me intensely in a number of ways. When she was a psychiatric nurse, they'd brought in quite a crazy patient who needed some attention. While she was trying to deal with him, she tried to tune into his thoughts so she could help him better. She got this sudden psychic flash of what the world was like from the inside of his head and it freaked her out so much she had to get someone else to take over and go away to try and get her head back together. She'd basically seen a reality that had no boundaries, no distinction between herself and other people and things, the earth, the universe, everything.
I can't remember how she described it, but she explained it really well and i understood straight away exactly what she was talking about. It's something i'd experienced in some ways, possibly all my life, although never, or not often, with such dramatic and graphic immediacy. And it's something that i was always conscious of and that to a certain extent governed the way i lived my life. Aware that the universe is really some formless, borderless soup and that we created ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our personalities out of it and maintain our distinction, our individuality, our ego, by a combination of personal and communal effort throughout our lives. Until we finally gave up the illusion and went back to the soup.
I was fairly convinced that the same level of conscious awareness of this aspect of reality is what distinguishes a lot of so-called "lunatics" from so-called "sane" people.
Kelly said the man died fifteen minutes later.
It was an amazing story and i thought a lot about what it must have been like to have experienced that close mental contact with someone like that so soon before they died. Later on that night, i lay in bed, unable to sleep because of the jetlag, the fact that i'd only woken up eight hours earlier and the caffeine that i'd ingested from a couple of teas that afternoon. I wondered if she'd helped him by doing that - made his death easier for him by sharing a part of his life that he'd probably never been able to share with anyone before.
That led me on to thinking about the woman i'd watched die at Zipolite, almost exactly six months before. And this train of thought led me to wonder about the effect on me of sharing someone's death so intensely. I began to realise that i was still, in some sense, carrying this woman's death around with me. I was being haunted by her - or at least by her death. It occurred to me that the long and still vaguely lingering illness that had hit me less than a month after it had happened could be connected with that somehow. I'd never really been able to understand or explain that illness, which was unusual for me, but then i thought maybe it began to make sense.
As i became conscious of this, i was able to see it more clearly - some people would say i started to imagine it more clearly - and i could feel an almost physical presence somehow attaching itself to the front of my body.
I'd bought some incense and some candles that afternoon, from the little shop right outside where i was staying, and i got up and lit a candle and three incense sticks. I felt i had to improvise some sort of basic ritual which would help my mind focus on resolving this thing.
I did a bit of a dance and then, saying a few words to her to encourage her to leave, i grabbed the woman that was hanging onto the front of my body and threw her back towards the ocean where she'd drowned. As i did this, i could feel her, almost physically, with my hands. Then i quickly blew out the candle.
As i did this, i felt a really strange, sort of creepy feeling, that i've felt before in the presence of ghosts. It passed quickly and i felt a strong sense of relief as i lay back down on the bed in the darkness.
Now, i didn't know if what i sent back to the ocean that night was the actual ghost of the dead woman or just something i'd created for myself as i shared her death with her, exactly half a year and half the planet away. But i didn't really think the distinction meant much - in the interconnectedness of everything, where could you draw the line between the two anyway?