Jamatalasi -- the real "Shantaram"

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"Jamatalasi"
or
"An Investigation Into the Genesis of Institutional War"
by Michael Hennessey
This saga dates back to 1969, the year when the world stood on its ear. People for the first
time had suddenly discovered that not only protesting against the Vietnam war was
appropriate social action, but they had also, in most social spheres, had ingested some
form of drug. The drug of choice was hashish in England, but lysergic acid diethylamide
had permeated society, and people were beginning to question just about everything. At
that point in time, rock and roll music was becoming a phenomenon that had enormous
social impact on the way people expressed themselves and was loud, quite direct, and an
extraordinary carrion call for all those who were somewhat disaffected with the mediocre,
the semi-detached, and the consumerism that emerged during the fifties and really ran out
of steam in the sixties. It was approaching the first major post-war slump, and who knows,
it might have been precipitated by these innocuous and initially inconsequential
developments, but people became somewhat interested that time in something other than
the banal material. Hence, a migration to India commenced.
It never happened in the vast numbers that everybody had promoted. In fact those who
actually went to India and stayed there were very few, and they all knew each other, and
they came to know each other over the years extremely well. And they all had names.
The two protagonists in this particular story, Byron and Michel, had known each other
from their early years as public school, semi-blue blood, rich kids. Byron’s history is
quite simple, and extraordinarily funny. His uncle was the cousin of the Queen of
England, family were people who didn’t speak much about money, very intellectual and
on the mother’s side, from a North American family, Canadian by definition, a musician
by training, and a person who, rather than defend a thesis, which was the question as to
the concept of belief, decided to go and meet all of the living saints and visit all the living
religious centers, especially the secret centers from North Africa through to India.
He had done this as a result of having tried to ply a commercial aspect to his musical
training, because he had been exiled from his family home due to an inconvenient
pregnancy and the result of a child, which his parents did not condone as a phenomenon
that they would support if he indeed chose to parent the child, as a single parent. The
upshot was, he went ahead at the age of fifteen and had to earn a living playing for the
erstwhile rock and rollers as a sessions musician for a pound an hour, which was barely
enough to keep things going. His mother became a little sympathetic after about a year of
doing this and gave him a house in London with fourteen bedrooms and stables for six
horses in the back, backward onto Hempstead Heap, and after not such a very long period
of time, half of who’s who in rock and roll were living there, and since they were also so
stoned out of their minds, that it was impossible not only to keep track, but it was
impossible to support. After a year, he kicked them all out, and decided that he would
actually go off and try and meet all these people, and to raise the question as to why
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people believed in things, and if there was a reason for it, then it must have been hidden
behind some of these masks of religious doctrine. And since most religions were already
dead, including the Catholic religion, he thought it would be a good idea to go and visit
all these secret schools, probably inspired somewhat by Gurdjieff and the book that he
had written called ‘Meetings with Remarkable Men.’
Michel, having a similar background, his father being the Lord Chief Justice of England,
and he being a radical rebel, public schoolboy, Mr. Acid, very lucid, extremely brilliant
with a kind of parched desert mouth and deep-set, Mongolian-looking eyes and flaming
red hair, very dynamic and extremely funny, and somebody everybody had wished to
avoid, because he would arrive at three o’clock in the morning with a case of champagne,
inviting everybody to a party at their house. Michel was a very forgivable soul because he
was always the life of the party, and somebody who made people happy. He was also
somebody who had virtually no containment or limitations in his view of things.
With an eidetic memory, which meant he could remember every single phone number of
every single person that he ever met, could reroute just by tapping into the phone lines, a
normal trunk line from a telegraph pole in the middle of nowhere he could route his call
up to a satellite or down through a ground line, through any of the exchanges because he
could remember all the numbers and all the digits that he could hack out.
He and Byron set out to India on very different courses. Michel had gone to India
basically to fuck the girls, smoke the dope, and to have a party. At the same time he was
quite enlightened as to every single aspect of kundalini yoga, this that and the other, and
could not really have cared less about ... But was probably more devout than most, since
he truly understood just about everything that he was interested in after a very short
period of time.
To commence this story, the day of reckoning occurred in the big house in London.
Byron went next door to meet his old friend Dr. Shalvanka. Dr. Shalvanka was then the
Indian ambassador to Moscow and Vietnam, and he and his wife Mary Shalvanka had
brought up Indira Ghandi, as a child. And Shalvanka, being a very close friend of
Byron’s, told him, “Look, if you really want to pursue any of this, I think it’s a very good
idea that you fast forward to India, because India has a living religion, as part of the
people, in most places it’s become distant, and very difficult to engage. Go meet the
living saints and record what they are talking about, once you’ve understood what their
message is then perhaps you’ll find out something as to what you’re seeking, such as a
reason to believe.”
Byron thought, “Ok, well that’s a very good idea, to head off in that direction,” and
having secured financing from the newspapers, to write a travelogue, and a minor
donation from family resources, and a very, very major donation that he truly didn’t
understand which came from his grandmother which came in the form of a checkbook,
with a bank account, which never sent him any receipts, and never disclosed what was in
it.
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And he shot off to North Africa, and met the Ganauer, and the Dervish, and his
grandmother had a house in Tangier, and had been a major social competitor to Barbara
Hutton. The groups linked around the Dervish were pretty concealed, there wasn’t that
much to really grasp, he’d documented as much as there was to document, and moved on
through a list of secret schools and came to the conclusion that whatever the quest was,
there was certainly more substance available than initially would have come to mind, and
that there were things emerging that were quite profound, Chinese squares being one of
them. That all of these sects had interpreted in their own way, the Islamic sects, into
calligraphy, mosaics, and even the carpets that they manufactured, the designs, etcetera,
all spoke of mandalas that had very specific meanings, and they all integrated across all
religious barriers. This was quite profound, from the Jews to the Muslims, to the Sufis...
And he gets to Afghanistan.
And in Afghanistan, being a horseman, he decided to ride a horse around Afghanistan.
The first horse he purchased, he knew it was going to be a disaster, since it was an ugly
horse, and a horse of extremely hostile demeanor. This particular horse actually managed
to throw him off, which was quite difficult, one mile outside of the town that he
purchased him, which was Herat. Herat at the time was the city with two horse chariots
with a bell in between as taxis, operating at a level of sophistication which was surpassed
by the Romans three millenia ago... A phenomenal place, where everybody was smoking
hashish, and very high quality hashish, it was the first society that he had ever
encountered where people weren’t smoking opium all the time.
Afghanistan was in a state of moderate civil war, moderate by Afghan standards. To get
from Herat to Khandahar was a major undertaking, because invariably the hostiles, being
whichever tribe was from either place, would attack the buses, and rob the people who
were not from their own point of origin. They were a little less strident about fleecing
these funny foreigners who showed up, but since Byron was traveling by various modes
ranging from foot to donkey to camel to bus, especially local buses, it was difficult for
them to surmount their amazement and to convert it into more hostilities and in general
the westerners who actually ventured through this country were left alone. But realizing
that this horse had been sold with the idea that he was going to run back to where he
came from because the food was waiting and so was the stable, and to be resold to the
next sucker that came along, Byron decided to use some of the connections of the old
family ilk, his great uncle having been the governor of the northwest frontier and finally
the governor of India, found a way to meet one of the leaders of the Pataan tribe. His
name was Abdul Hak.
And persuaded him by betting him that he could ride the most beautiful horse and his
compand, a very valuable camera with forty lenses, and if he could ride the horse, then he
would be able to purchase him for money. The horse had a very long Egyptian and
Arabic pedigree, dating back a couple of thousand years, and was considered amongst the
Pataans as the most noble horse in all Afghanistan, so he was very beautiful. And of
course, he was thus called Abdul Hak’s favorite. And after all considered this horse to be
only rideable by him. Well when Byron jumped on his back, and galloped around without
a bridle or a saddle, and the horse apparently was quite enthusiastic, Abdul Hak
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surmounted his immediate knee-jerk response which was to shoot Byron, and exceeded
to a purchase which was a lend-lease, if indeed Byron ever came to leave Afghanistan,
and wanted to sell this horse, he would sell him back to Abdul Hak for the same price,
which in fact turned out to be nothing. Because as they got really stoned together, Abdul
Hak revealed a very sad circumstance that with Russian infiltration coming down through
the north of Afghanistan to Muzar-e Sharif, in Balkh, then though the king was with
limited possibilities of surviving, so Byron took off on a six-month sojourn, having
deposited his extremely beautiful former Miss Europe, Danish blonde girlfriend, at Abdul
Hak’s compound, possibly a hostage to live with the women, and went to meet all of the
living sages in Afghanistan, not having the first clue how he was going to communicate,
not speaking Pushtu, having been dressed up as an Afghan with double bandoliers, a very
very fancy rifle, and a sidearm, on the most sought-after horse in Afghanistan, adventure
was primarily what resulted. Certainly a wonderful detraction from the mission. And an
extraordinary tour of Afghanistan, from top to bottom, the entire country basically.
Crossing from tribe to tribe was a little difficult but surmounted in most instances by the
fact that there was this unusual face and the most beautiful horse in all of Afghanistan,
and everybody knew exactly who he was and what he was and so it was kind of like a
passport to cruise.
After six months of this and realizing that the mission was kind of falling way behind
schedule, he returns the horse, picks up the industrious blonde, who was somewhat
relived to get out of her birka, and returns to Kabul.
The blonde bombshell was a sidestep from England. When he departed, he decided he
would go to Denmark, to stay with the queen of Denmark and she gave him a house
which was built into the wall surrounding the garden, at her home in Copenhagen. It had
a door that went into the garden and one that went out into the street. So it was a feasible
way of hosting one of her best friends who was Byron’s mother. They had been to school
together in Heathfield, both having hated it, though finishing the score. And one reason
that he decided to go there was to find an appropriate Danish beauty, to accompany him
on his travels, and it was early in 1969, Denmark was only just beginning to stand on its
ear, and it was extremely funny. And with all of the local orgies being publicized in the
Ekstra Bladet, with everybody fucking everybody, it was too much of an orgy to vacate
quickly, Simon Speed being the primary focus of the Danish Press. Anyway, she had
decided she would come as a self-financed party, her father being the head of Kodak for
Denmark. And she had already made a considerable amount of money being a model.
She wasn’t quite sure after having left the Shah’s place in Mashhad crossing to Herat,
walking with the camel trains at two o’clock in the morning, which was the only time it
was cool enough to cross into Afghanistan, twenty-three miles across the desert, whether
or not she had made the right decision. And after six months in a birka, really was
questioning whether or not she had hooked up with the right character. Byron, having
taken her back to civilization, which was Kabul, promptly pops her into a bus, and drives
up through the Khyber Pass with her, all the way to the Pakistani border, through the
Pakistani border, into a place called Peshawar.
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In Peshawar, which is a city still ruled by the tribal chiefs, as it’s part of the untouchable
tribal area in Pakistan, the town just south of Peshawar has just two laws. You can’t shoot
into the sun, and you can’t shoot across the street, it’s where they make by hand all the
replicas of Kalishnikovs and other weapons of choice, which of course every selfrespecting
man carries.
The day of the arrival was quite notable because they were staying in the illustrious
Pakistan Hotel, which was a fleabag joint, for something like one rupee a night, and
breakfast was the goat that was bleating the night before, hung upside with his throat slit
in the morning outside the front door. As it so happened, this particular day, they were
celebrating an event that happened with Alexander the Great. Apparently some many
centuries before, Alexander had sent some emissaries to Peshawar, to negotiate a
marriage, with one of the chieftain’s daughters in order to prevent the possibility of
martial engagement. As it so happened, all the emissaries were murdered by the then
inhabitants of Peshawar, and returned in pieces on their various animals back to
Alexander, and apparently since they had broken their own rule of accepting a peaceful
delegation entry to them in such a barbaric way, since that day, the entire city comes out
to manifest its atonement, and with long strings with lead and razor blades embedded in
the lead, like cat ninetail whips, the entire population comes out and flagellates
themselves, to a point where the streets are flowing with blood. And that night, after this
particular celebration has occurred, the wounds are bathed, and practically everybody had
faint white healed lines on their backs. However, the owner of the Pakistan Hotel
implored Byron and his pretty accomplice to remain inside the hotel whilst this
phenomenon was to the thudding, or slow beat of drums, transpiring right downstairs and
as far as one could see. The procession encompassed every male person in the entire city.
This was the first gesture of mass hysteria with an extraordinarily unusual result, multiple
slashes healing in an afternoon, a phenomenon that could be attributed to
psychoneurostimulation, whatever, but it was a phenomenon that directly derived from
belief and manifested en masse. And a very good encouragement to accelerate the
enquiry into what was not just belief, the title of the thesis was ‘An Investigation Into the
Genesis of Institutional War.’
Byron, when he was eight years old, had been taught every major date in world history
until his birthday, and knew it, completely and all by heart. He had never as yet seen
firsthand or witnessed a phenomenon of mass behavior which refuted all human logic, yet
was undeniable, a phenomenon that marked his consciousness for what was to be his
future, or rather, what he was going to encounter in his future.
Having left the Pakistan Hotel, he decided in a whim that it might be a good idea to load
up a considerable volume of Afghani hashish because it was extremely cheap, not
knowing what he may encounter in India, by way of quality and volume and price --
which he did. And having very sparse possessions, and considerable sophisticated
luggage, he filled up this luggage with hashish and mounted a train to India. At that time,
the trains were slow.
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But the train was stopped at the border, and on the train, he had encountered this
character called Mr. Patel. And Mr. Patel was eating a fruit with a vast number of seeds,
probably a watermelon, and was spitting the seeds on the floor, and sitting on a chair in a
half lotus position, awaiting some possible moment that Byron would actually look at
him, and provide him the opportunity to open his mouth and ask questions, which of
course he did.
The three questions he asked were “From where are you coming?”, “What is your native
land?” and “Who finances your trip?” and finally a statement that “Anything is possible
in India.”
One of the other people on the train, who was a veteran of the border, had warned of this
woman, who sits at the border and looks into your eyes, and she knows everything. And
if you happen to be smuggling anything, she will know, and she will arrange to have you
arrested immediately. So Byron thought quite quickly about ditching the contraband, lest
there happened to be a very high price to pay for smuggling it into India, and having
hidden all of the money in a money belt which wrapped twice around him in thousanddollar-
bills, which were still available in currency at the time and unexchangeable
anywhere.
Before he could find an appropriate location to ditch the dope, the train stopped, and
everybody was ordered out, and just as predicted, there was the woman referred to as “the
Witch,” who scrutinized the blonde with blue eyes with hatred, and saw that she was at
least seven months pregnant, and allowed her to pass. Looking at Byron, she stared
straight through him and his passive indifference. She could not bring herself to open his
bags, and he passed though as well. The pregnancy comprised one towel, four safety pins,
and about seven kilos of hashish, with considerably more in the bags they were carrying
with very little on top other than a couple of changes of clothes and shoes.
So they are now in India. The train proceeds to New Delhi, the capital of India. Upon
arrival, the blonde and Byron seek out a low-rent hotel, not because they necessarily
needed to stay there but because this was where the fellow migrants of the era, erstwhile
the hippies, were hanging out. And if they had been there long enough, they certainly
knew every single trick, and every single manipulation, and where things were happening,
not only in the various locations one could score extremely high-quality dope, but where
you could buy eight-ounce crystal cocaine for 150 rupees, from the pharmacy. These
hotels were invariably in the back end of nowhere, in this particular case it was the
Crown Hotel at the very end of Chandichowk, a street which at that time was occupied
during the day by three million people. The density of flesh was extreme. It was near the
Red Fort. It’s kind of like a market street but it has the Sikh godwara there, which is the
holy temple of the Sikhs. And the Crown Hotel was in fact quite large, because if you
took the top floor, which the rich hippies could afford, since it only had two rooms, one at
either end of a big garden, it overlooked a lot of ancient Delhi, and was completely
dominated by monkeys. And there’s a very nice place to be, especially when the
temperature’s peaking at about 120 during the day, and at night cooling down to a really
meager 97. Zero air conditioning and a typical Havana fan, circulating to no avail on the
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ceiling, wiring which would have made a monkey a genius. Everything somehow
functioning with an Indian funk. And in the Crown Hotel, they decided to map out where
to go in India, what to see, and what to do.
The North of India had always been related as the place to seek the spiritual guidance,
those long-haired dope smokers who thought that the excuse was to get high and find a
guru. So, in a perverse act of total rejection of this particular band of parasites, Byron
decided to grab the girl and head south.
So after a few days of paying respects to Shalvanka’s referrals; Shalvanka had given a
letter of introduction to Indira Ghandi, so Byron proceeds after having checked into the
Crown Hotel, to jump into a rickshaw, and give the driver the address to of the Prime
Minister of India, which the rickshaw driver, being Indian, spat out his beetle, smiled,
and said, “Okay.”
And two hours later, having cruised through most of Old Delhi, and then past the Red
Fort, up to New Delhi, to the Luttins Buildings, and then onto the Prime Minister’s house,
thinking it was completely and utterly ridiculous, decided not to charge any money at all,
whereupon Byron got out, with his blonde bombshell looking extremely glamorous, and
proceeded down the pathway on bare feet to knock on the door of Indira Ghandi with his
letter of introduction. Upon receipt of the letter of introduction, the guards at the front
door were practically expelled by the opening of both doors with Indira Ghandi, arms
outstretched, welcoming them and deciding there and then that Byron and his female
accomplice were going to stay at her house.
So the baggage was summoned from the Crown Hotel, much to everybody surprise, with
a lot of raised eyebrows, and they were ensconced in a paradise suite in the Prime
Minister’s house, and discussing what the thesis was all about, with Indira Ghandi, she
had some remarkable input. She had campaigned only under the stringent guidance and
strategic input of somebody who she trusted, somebody who was invested in all forms of
Indian spiritualism, astronomy, astrology, and God knows what, and she could swear by
him, up and down. She hadn’t yet made the mistake of exchanging genitals for radios to
try and compete with Mao’s one-child policy, in the rural areas which facilitated the end
to her reign for a while until she had made a major comeback. And Indira was very open
and suggested that certain of the people weren’t worth meeting but others were, and in
the process of filtering out among the flack or distortion, gave a pretty clear road map as
to where to go and how. And southern India fit into this quite well into this because from
Benares on south, down the Ganges, and then in several other places, there were people
of note who were worth visiting but most importantly, in he various southern cities, and
in the tip of India called Kanyakumari, just north of Kanyakumari there was a town called
Madurai, which was apparently very well worth visiting, to see the living manifestation
of religion incarnate. And she said the timing was right because the monsoons were
hitting up north, it was getting very hot down south but not hot enough yet, and
everybody had heard by that time that the beaches in Goa were worthy of a visit, and it
had only recently been handed over by the Portuguese to the Indians, and hence it had a
kind of Portuguese, European flavor as opposed to the post Raj English awkwardness.
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So they took a cruise down through the various sights, including Jaipoor, Rajistan, and
they of course saw the Taj Mahal, but very quickly, arrived in Goa. And in Goa, decided
to have a holiday. There were about three hundred westerners in Goa at the time, it was
probably the peak of the hippie migration. And exactly at the right time, around
Christmas of 1969, the Christmas vacation prompted Byron to reach into his money belt
and whip out a thousand dollar bill, which through a labyrinth of various money changers
and uncles who were semi-directors of semi-banks, managed to convert into rupees,
which at that time was enough to buy a car or a house. Byron opted for the latter, and
purchased a house which was on a beach which nobody had been to yet. And very soon
thereafter, they were living in the lap of luxury with fifteen servants and eating a lot of
fruits, and Goan pork. Most of southern India is entirely vegetarian, so it was quite a
relief to eat meat. And at that particular time in history, the people who had been in India
for a long time, and some of them had been there for several years, had their own tales to
spin, on the various sages that they had met. And a lot of them sounded rather interesting,
so they were included in this itinerary of who to go see. And since Byron had early in his
life, walked around the Sahara, he had this inspiration that rather than taking
transportation, that this would probably be one of the last opportunities ever to walk the
entire length of India, from village to village, and then from village to city, and then from
city to village, etcetera.
Since none of the pathways were on any maps, they decided to try to figure out with a
compass, estimating how far they were, how long they had walked, and how far they’d
gotten, went to head off to a major town. It’s usual that when one gets to a village they
would relay where the next one is, and everybody knows where the major town is. So if
you want to go to a major town from the village where they know where the major town
is then you can go to that major town.
Having had a three-month vacation in Goa, which was a welcome rest from the arduous
travels of the past, they took off and walked south. They came across a place called
Humpi. Humpi is basically a rock which sticks out of the desert. It’s a very large rock,
and on the top, there’s an ancient ruin of Indian temples, and literally thousands of sadus
who arrive there, and there’s a spring, which is kind of nursed as a river that goes through
these ruins. And the sadus are mostly unclad, some of them with elephants as modes of
transportation, which had to be fed vast amounts of food. A lot of them wore absolutely
nothing and who had a sort of strong spiritual ego, they would wrap their dicks around
their tridents and have two people sit on either end of the trident and they would
demonstrate that in fact they had broken any connection to sensual and physical pleasure.
They would smoke scorpion poison, pollen and hashish in very large chillums, cough a
lot, and look completely and utterly spaced out but somehow able to function and sit in
various contortions and express virtually nothing. Lots of music. Totally unreal. When
the sun set, and the moon rose and the stars glittered in the sky, this place could have
been on another planet. Completely and utterly cut off but quite inspiring and incredibly
beautiful, full of people who definitely were from another planet, and who clearly had
some reason to believe.
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After a long trek, down through Karila, all the way to Kanyakumari, meeting various
saints and various sages who would tell stories under banyan trees outside of the village,
which could not be interpreted because nobody spoke English and neither Byron nor the
blonde spoke Tamil as opposed to Hindi, Byron had accumulated en route a little retinue
to keep the blonde bombshell amused. There were a couple of Danish girls who were on
the beach, who had arrived to spend Christmas from Denmark, because Byron had the
inspiration to send from New Delhi 2/3 of the hashish which was smuggled into India as
a Christmas present to his friends in Denmark. And his inspiration for smuggling was
quite unique. He bought a lot of the cheapest Hindu plaster statues which were all white,
the painted ones were more expensive, and with a spray can, sprayed them all brown and
black, and then smashed them up, and then mixed them up with broken up pieces of
hashish which all looked like broken pieces of very very very cheap statues. And they
had been picked up by a guy called Suna who had been summoned to the post office in
Copenhagen to retrieve this enormous case of broken statues, and the lady, being Danish,
was so sympathetic with him and was terribly upset that everything had been damaged
and asked him to fill out a form for insurance, so that he might be compensated, and
especially for the freight. Being rather nervous, on the seat of this box, and he smelled
from many feet away that it was a combination of something more than this broken
plaster, forewent the formalities filling out the insurance form, and with the aid of a
couple of gay friends of his, ferried the case, which didn’t fit into the trunk of their car,
but strapped it on top of the roof and drove it home at high speed and sent the next couple
of days separating the chaff from the gold. And then, with an inspiration, decided to sell
at least half of that which had been sent to them, with the idea that they would come and
spend Christmas in Goa with Byron and his Danish girlfriend.
The gay contingent, being extremely happy to encounter a lot of Western people who,
unlike the Danes, didn’t usually walk around naked, and the Danes were quite happy to
do so, that was the thing at the time, and they felt very at home in Goa. A couple of them
had decided to join Byron and the blonde bombshell on this drift south, especially since it
was walking.
Cruising down the canal to rivers in Karila Bay, from temple to temple, spending most
nights at the temples, talking with the sages, dancing with the music, in a world lit only
by fire, no electric lights, no visible connection with the 20th century, or, for that matter,
the 14th century, this was all pre-10th century Biblical lifestyle. A sense of a living
spiritual phenomenon was pervading and invading everybody. It was a voyage. By the
time they arrived in Kanyakumari which was the bottom of India, the retinue had
changed considerably.
The two other Danish girls had disappeared, along with their boyfriends. The one gay
Danish boy who decided to tag along had also left. But a young man from Oklahoma,
nicknamed Okie, had decided to join the crew. He was very big, and provided a sort of
insurance or reassurance to the blonde bombshell that she wasn’t just walking into
oblivion with this Byron character, and she could grouch and moan and groan as the
blisters became foot-sized and the infections were becoming rather dangerous. Since
walking half the length of India on pathways between villages took rather a long time, by
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the time they arrived in Kanyakumari, revolt was percolating in the blonde bombshell’s
brain.
Conspiring with Okie, she decided to invoke a certain revolution, whereupon she was
going to return, if she possibly could, by a conventional mode of transportation, to
Denmark as soon as possible.
There is very little conventional transportation, and arriving at Kanyakumari at three
o’clock in the morning, there was nowhere to stay, but as usual, wherever any place in
India which has been inhabited over the centuries, or several thousand years, there’s
always a ruin or a this or a that or a temple you could go hang out in and so they found a
temple. The place was absolutely silent. While they were looking up at the full moon,
with the ocean, white as glass, and temperatures that were as usual exceedingly high,
Byron heard this unbelievable rag, really really beautiful Indian music, playing
somewhere in this city, and decided that at three or four o’clock in the morning, when
everybody else had decided to crash out and turn in, it was a ruin temple, to seek out the
source of this rag.
Having found the source of what sounded like a live group of musicians to be a radio, and
the radio being owned by a very handsome southern Indian, who was not just a sadu but
seemingly somebody of higher rank in the Hindu traditions, the Shiva three-stripe trident
on his forehead with a red dot with a little orange wrap and an orange shawl, standing on
the fingertips of one hand with the rest of his body projected to the moon, with a little old
man sitting in a corner with a bowl of booty and fire and some food cooking, Byron sat
down, and after many minutes of being elevated, the sage returned his feet to the ground.
Byron became quite impressed with this man’s physical prowess and yogic ability. And
sitting there and eating his food, and feeling the tranquility from the strident stress of the
female-invoked revolution, decided that it was probably a good idea to get to know this
character.
He conveyed a sense of alarmingly powerful self-possession. He probably had some
insight into this mystical tradition that had not been available through other of the sages
who were marketing various techniques of meditation and trying to encourage the parting
of money for various meditation courses etcetera etcetera and receiving gifts, etcetera.
And this particular character seemed to be somewhat above that, and to the chagrin of the
retinue except Okie, decided that he would follow the erstwhile sage and record his
various conversations. The consternation with the rebellious retinue not only that they
were incorporating two more bodies on the feeding chain, which emphasized a
diminishment of available resources such as money to feed people, etcetera, which was
exasperated by the fact that Byron had not disclosed either to the Danish blonde
bombshell or anybody else that there was a belt full of money, wishing to try to live
according to the non-material universe and as frugally as possible so as not to appear
outrageously rich in an impoverished rural background, this exasperation was
compounded by the fact that they were going to retrace their steps back to the city called
Madurai, which through various attempts at translation had emerged as the destination of
the erstwhile enlightened sage.
11
The walking picked up pace rather rapidly with the leadership of the trident-bearing sage
who perched what appeared to be his father on his shoulder, and hopped along at quite a
clip, with his hair down to his ankles. Every little village that he had encountered, of
course he would stop and instead of entering the village, he would sit under one of the
more notable of the trees, either in the outskirts of the village or possibly sometimes, but
not usually, in the village center, and he would begin telling stories. Of course nobody
understood his stories but every single person in the village was enthralled by the story,
so the result was that food was made available for the entire retinue, and it was absolutely
delicious, and in sufficient abundance that nobody became particularly hungry. And
likewise, in the morning, prior to departure, food was made available, yogurt, various
kinds of sweet fruits and it seemed that life could go on like this forever and ever and
ever without a penny being spent.
Upon arrival in Madurai, things took a turn to the absurd. The sage, each day becoming
what appeared to be more and more self-possessed, arrived in the central thoroughfare of
the town of Madurai, and stood up on a podium and raised his hands, with a trident in one
of them, and the entire throng, which seemed to be everybody in the city, in that
particular street, prostrated themselves on the ground instantly and buried their faces in
the earth. Whereupon the sage turned to the retinue and beckoned them to remain put,
and grabbing Byron, walked him through the mass of people, all the way to the major
temple in Madurai, and given that this was the day of Dirga Puja, which is the most
serious ceremony of the year in that region, he went to the temple of his choice, an
enormous creation, and knocked three times on the door with his staff. The doors were
opened, and a sight beyond comprehension was revealed to Byron.
Two thousand people dancing the creation of the universe apparently in total harmony on
two feet of burning coals, two feet deep, everybody naked, women and men together, and
nobody apparently being burned.
The door was rapidly closed behind them, the sage having decorated Byron with a trident
on his forehead as well, unfortunately ran into resistance from the resident sages in the
temple, not wishing to expose their inner activities to the prying eyes of the spiritually
inept western person, the resistance being surmounted by a demonstration of extreme
physical insistence on the part of the sage, who bared his trident and Byron was thus
permitted to crouch along the walls of the periphery of this temple, about thirty feet from
the actual coals, but so overwhelmingly hot that it was practically intolerable, to witness
this remarkable event which had continued for several hours, until the indication was
given that the sage had done his bit and was to leave.
Upon exiting the temple, Byron, having encountered his first notion of a completely new
reality where people could bathe in flames and not get burned, and dance the creation of
the universe en masse without anybody seemingly missing a cue, or through some kind of
higher guidance or maybe cultural tradition that permitted them to know exactly what
everybody else was doing, with no conductor, was in a state of unparalleled doubt, which
was welcomely received by the skeptical retinue who had not been permitted into the
12
temple, and whose immediate decision was to insist that Byron take the lead and direct
the retinue to the next stop.
The next stop was to be across India, to a place south of Madras called Pondicherry.
Pondicherry is a particularly obnoxious place with beautiful beaches impossible to enjoy
because the local population would use it as their latrine. But it is the home of a former
French inspired sage who built a little town in circles which was meant to be heaven on
earth, circular buildings, dug into the ground which was overseen by a woman who was
the former sage’s wife or girlfriend, referred to as ‘the Mother,’ one of those extremely
pretentious westernized enclaves of spiritual design, a sanctuary or an ashram of some
kind.
The Sage and his father were not too impressed with this place and urged us to continue
our voyage into oblivion. Halfway to Madras, things were becoming rather uptight, but
the sage was conveying daily recognition of some kind of improvement in
communication between himself and Byron, in fact he was quite impressed that Byron
had taken up some of his yogic practices, and was beginning to perform with increasing
dexterity certain of these yoga positions, and seemingly became closer and closer to
Byron, much to the chagrin of the blonde bombshell who was fading in the background
and becoming rather rotund in the belly.
By the time they arrived in Madras, the money that Byron had revealed that they had, had
run out. It turned out that it was a February birthday of the blonde bombshell, and
checking into a hotel, it was up to Okie, who felt that he could find some money from
some western source, to pay the rent. In India things are sort of lax, so the checker didn’t
require up-front cash.
Okie had disappeared to try and find himself an American Express, which much to his
chagrin he discovered didn’t exist in the entire town of Madras, except, on the top floor
of an American company, there was a little desk that was attributed to American Express,
and behind it, a pigeon-hole for letters. Under ‘W’ which was the first letter of the last
name of Byron, retrieved a letter that was actually forwarded from Goa, which had been
sent from Denmark.
Returning with his sad tale that there was no possible way of getting any American
Express communication, hence very unlikely there would be any money, he produced the
letter and gave it to Byron. Byron opened it up and inside there was a letter from Suna
from Denmark saying ‘Thank you so much for such a wonderful Christmas present,
we’ve decided to sell a large portion of the present and to come and spend Christmas with
you, and this is what remains from the costs of the plane tickets, etcetera, and hopefully it
will lend for a more prosperous Christmas. The amount of the check was fifteen thousand
dollars, and it was a bank check, drawn on an American bank.
Okie nearly fell over, and since the blonde bombshell had retired to her bed to
commiserate with herself that her birthday was a forlorn historical phenomenon and now
being persuaded that she was at least six months pregnant, was not available to celebrate
13
this news, and Byron decided to keep it from her until such time as they were able to
convert it into real money.
Okie, being a country boy, bursting with optimism, and rather lanky, took off with Byron,
leaving the blonde bombshell and the sage and his father to contemplate their navels,
went straight back to the American company which was absolutely delighted to find that
there was a bank check for fifteen thousand dollars and offered a discount of one
thousand and produced the appropriate black market rate for fourteen thousand dollars in
Indian rupees, whereupon a largesse of such extraordinary amount was stacked into a
rucksack, and en route back to the hotel, every single vendor of sweet-smelling flowers,
usually sewn together into chains which would then be hung around the neck, was
summoned to deliver their entire jasmine scented volume into the hotel room where the
blonde bombshell in manic depression was reclined fast asleep, and a very large birthday
cake was produced at the same time.
Upon her awakening, she immediately burst into tears, thinking that she was having a
hallucination, shut her eyes, buried herself under her pillow, and when she awoke to
realize that this was in fact something that this had happened, she went very quickly to
summon her nemesis, the sage and his father, from their room next door, and they were
not be found, and they were never seen again.
Having seen that this pregnancy was more probable real than not, Byron decided to hand
over the rucksack of rupees to the blonde bombshell and suggest that she buy herself a
first-class train ticket across India to Bombay and a first-class plane ticket back to
Denmark, and with the remainder, open herself a nice little tea shop or something and to
wait patiently for the reappearance of Byron who, feeling somewhat honorable towards
this future child, decided that nine months should be sufficient to complete his mission,
and he would return to Denmark to join her in her tea shop and complete his thesis.
Exit the blonde bombshell, Okie and Byron take off to Calcutta, where there were certain
things that had to be seen according to local rumour and superstition. They headed off
first of all to a temple, where all of the Indian animals in the pantheon of Indian gods
were manifest in the form of people who were born with these various likenesses
including Ganesh and the monkey god and the elephant god, etcetera. It seemed to be
quite fascinating. Upon arriving in this temple, it was quite unnerving to see that people
could be born with such unbelievable defects. Okie and Byron decided to retire rather
quickly to one of the more renowned opium dens of the Indian pre- and post-Raj period, a
phenomenal opium den, which they stayed in for a couple of weeks, obliviating all of the
prior consternation that had built up with potential of a disgruntled female.
Having rolled out of the opium den in a very very standout funk, some of it addicted,
with a jones the size of Manhattan, they mounted a train to go to Benares where Indira
Ghandi had indicated the particular enlightened person, possibly a guru, who ran an
ashram full of birds. Apparently, if you attained a certain level of enlightenment, certain
birds would come and sit on you, and if you attained samadhi, they would all come and
sit on you, even the most timid.
14
Keeping in tradition with the prior protocol, Byron and Okie traveled from Madras to
Banares, third class, unreserved which meant they didn’t have a seat, and there were twohundred-
thousand people in each carriage, and by the time they arrived in Benares, they
had been sitting on the roof of the train, most of the time trying to hang on going through
the tunnels.
Black with smoke, they jump into a rickshaw, and again being somewhat broke, having
given the blonde bombshell at least 99 percent of the money, a rickshaw was the only
mode of transportation they had the opportunity to splurge on. Having directed him to the
ashram, they were lying back for the first time in at least twenty hours of horrendous train
travel, and relaxing a little bit, as they were passing a particular tea shop going down a
very steep hill, a voice was heard, proclaiming, beckoning, ‘Mr. Byron sam, Mr. Byron
sam, I have very important news for you.’ And since neither Byron nor Okie had spoken
to an Indian on the entire trip from Calcutta to Benares, they were quite surprised to hear
somebody calling Byron’s name. Byron decided to inquire, somewhat shocked.
He walked out to this character, and the character said, ‘Oh, Byron sam, I am so glad that
I could meet you this morning because the young lady whose name begins with E from a
north European country, she is not pregnant, she has sent a telegram to the post office
here in Benares, you must pick this telegram up. Several things are going to transpire in
your future, one of which, you must take with extreme seriousness, and that is if offered
the opportunity to stay in the mountains, stay in the mountains, otherwise you will have
to return to the plains and fight the battle of your life,’ whereupon he said ‘Thank you
very much,’ and didn’t ask for any money.
As the post office happened to look up rather soon, en route to the ashram with the birds
per Indira Ghandi’s indication, Byron jumped out of the rickshaw, ran into the post office,
and there, lo and behold, there was a telegram from the blonde bombshell who said that
she was not pregnant, that she was in Bombay, and that she decided that she wanted to
return, forgiven, and that shouldn’t moan and groan, no more. So a telegram was returned
to her, ‘All is forgiven, meet us in Benares.’ Okie, being somewhat taken aback at the
communication of the return of the blonde bombshell, decided that after the encounter in
the ashram with the erstwhile sage who had instructed him and Byron into his particular
notion of a meditative funk, decided that he would part company and go his own way,
leaving Byron to receive the blonde bombshell at the train station a few days later.
During this period of time, at the ashram with the birds, Byron came to reflect upon what
was said by this stranger as they were coming down from the train station, and the levels
of coincidence, how did he know his name, was there somebody who had come and told
him while they were on the train, finally he concluded that there was no fucking way and
that this guy had really said something outrageous. And it turned out to be true. Could he
be working in the post office? Maybe, but how would he know that this was Byron sam,
and very specifically, not Okie sam, sufficient that he could persuade Byron to go to the
post office to receive a telegram that had been sent to him?
15
The blonde bombshell reappears on the scene, looking extremely glamorous and rather fit,
the suspicion was she had an abortion, or a miscarriage or something, which was with the
fact that she hadn’t gone back to Denmark, and that she seemed to be in higher spirits,
tend to confer that something dramatic had happened.
Since Byron had never disclosed either to Okie or to the blonde bombshell that there was
still a money belt full of money, they decided to travel in comparative luxury by taking a
first class train to the next destination on the agenda which was Katmandu, where there
were several people, including several family friends, who lived there, and other notable
sages were to be met, including Tibetans and Hindus living in seclusion in caves in the
Himalayas. They arrived at Muzaffarpur Station with a considerable bounty of luggage,
which accumulated as a result of the blonde bombshell’s spontaneous largesse.
They cross into Nepal and into a town called Pataan, and from Pataan fly to Kathmandu,
and in Kathmandu, they rented a house, which was at a place called Swayambunat, and
for the next couple of months, reclined in comparable joy and serenity, in a town which
had yet to receive electricity, so again, the world is lit only by fire. Kathmandu at that
time was living in the middle ages, dogs ruled at night, you had to carry a big staff,
otherwise the packs would attack you.
An old white Russian noble named Boris who had ended up in Kathmandu after the
revolution, had bought one of the Rama palaces, in fact the Rama Palace, which he had
filled up with the most beautiful women in Nepal, and used it as a whorehouse to serve
all of his notable friends and maharajas and God-knows-what-else from all over India and
the rest of the world. Boris was living on the proceeds of a restaurant he had started
called the Yak and Yeti, a Russian restaurant which served stroganoff and this, that and
the other, which was frequented by the upwardly elevated maharajas of India and notable
personages, all of whom were friends of his. And as he supplied the women, it was a
good going concern, a very very large palace. The food was very sumptuous, and the girls
were even more beautiful, and one could walk from room to room to room. As it
happened, as you went to get your visa renewed, which you had to every three months,
you had to go into the Rama palace, because Boris sponsored the seat of the immigration
officer, and a gentleman preceding the arrival of Byron in probably 1967 called the Hito
had been in Kathmandu and he had exchanged the stamp, which was the Nepalese stamp,
for a stamp that he had had made, and that stamp was stamped in everybody’s passports
‘Happy Hippieland Kathmandu.’ And you got an extension of three months, and it cost
about a dollar for the endorsement. But as you entered this palace, you didn’t know
where this immigration officer was going to be. So you’d open one door and you’d see
thirty women in semi-clad state either putting on makeup or washing out their pussies or
getting a massage or, if you opened another door, being fucked by God-knows-what. It
was absolutely hilarious, the screams, the giggles, the shouts, and finally he had found the
guy with the stamp and the stamp said ‘Happy Hippieland Kathmandu.’ Byron came to
have many of these stamps in his passport by the time he left Nepal.
You could buy all over India, they had the government marijuana shop, and they had sold
what’s called ganja, but in Kathmandu you could buy ganja and hashish in the
16
government shops, and it was extremely high quality.
A couple of months into this soujourn, Byron had gone to meet the various people who
he was documenting, he had a tape recorder and would record what they were saying
even if he didn’t understand what they were saying, hoping in the long run to get
somebody to do the translation. There was also the miraculous camera which took all of
these shots of these people and Byron was kind of seriously applying himself to
organizing all of the recordings from the many many many people that he had met on
route, and also trying to quantify what was interesting about each and what techniques
were being employed and how they correlated with other techniques, and all in the quest
of some kind of enlightenment.
But he became familiar with some sort of underlying communion or unison of origin of
history. All oral histories tended to confirm that there had indeed been a flood, that it
happened at a certain particular time in history, and before the flood, the gods used to fly
around in their various flying machines and also commune with their own planet,
backwards and forwards, and they had a pantheon of gods and each one of them was
absolutely identifiable with a different name, in all the different cultural and religious
histories. And the Indus valley was very particular in that it related to a god which was a
female deity, and her name was, in the Sumerian, Inana, she’s been through various
incarnations, including Ishtar and Isis, and so on and so forth, and in India, she had
several incarnations and several different names and she was very graphically depicted,
and iconography and she was in her own Sumerian history a licentious being and liked to
fuck a lot of semi-demigods, who were the half creation, man being something that was
created by these gods in order to work for them, and having created them in his, in their
image, the gods decided to fuck their product and even Enlil was seduced to fucking the
female, ma’an, and all of this was surfacing, the apparent coherence of an underlying
science to all of these religious practices, was beginning to emerge. Perhaps there was a
reason to believe.
When this was related by Byron to a very very erudite Tibetan lama, he smiled from ear
to ear, and explained in no uncertain terms that this information was not only accurate,
but the details thereof would be concealed from all who were not enlightened people, and
to qualify as somebody who could be the beneficiary of some specific information, one
had to go through the process of becoming a monk.
Byron decided this was far too elaborate a process and decided to take off into the
Himalayas on a vast trek through the mountains, which is very different from walking on
the plains, much more arduous and considerably more dangerous. And at this time the
blonde bombshell thought that rather than sitting behind as she had done in Afghanistan
and moaning and groaning as she had done in India she was going to join the team and go
walking in the Himalayas.
So Byron and the blonde bombshell take off up the road to the Tibetan border and
proceed to walk to the first town called Dulkha, which took them two days. It takes a
sherpa about four and a half hours of speed walking with no pack, and a mule sherpa who
17
would be carrying about 80 kilos would take about a day and a half. Byron and the
erstwhile bombshell took two days carrying virtually nothing at all and having two
sherpas not only to guide them but also to carry the heaviest of their sparse belongings.
Arriving in a place called Jieri, which is the only location in the Himalayas where a small
plane can land, the blonde bombshell decided to back out, and catch the plane back to
Kathmandu and hang out with Boris at the Yak and Yeti, whereupon Byron took off on
his own for another quest to first of all a Tibetan monastery at a place called Tangboche,
where they painted tongas, and according to the lama in the Swayambunat temple, he was
to meet another lama who was going to give him some indication as to how he was going
to come to some of the mystic traditions of the Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhism, which
had eluded him entirely. And upon arriving in Tangboche, as if written in a letter of
introduction, the lama made himself present, explained that he was expecting Byron, and
that this was not his destination, but he would be pointed in the right direction if he
decided that it was his inclination to do so.
After a couple of days rest, he took off in the direction of yet another monastery, where
he would meet yet another lama who would give him yet another key to the pathway.
After a few moths of doing this, in a migratory backtracking and crossover passage, he
came to the second monastery, the third monastery, etcetera etcetera, and eventually
walking alone across the glacier in the basin of Everest, the wind started to blow. Ill-clad
for the minus forty weather, with the Tibetan boots having been over worn and in tatters,
falling off, he clings onto the side of the fucking mountain, and makes very little
headway in extraordinarily heavy winds. And at minus forty, things looked as if they
were going to get rather dangerous, whereupon two very jovial Tibetans, not necessarily
monks, approached him, and taught him in a very short period of time, how to generate
heat in order to survive.
The instruction form the last lama was to go back to Swayambu, and don the robes on
Buddha’s birthday, become a monk. And thereafter, the doors to all of the enquiring
would be opened.
Very depressed to hear that this was the only way into the secret doctrine of the Tibetans,
Byron decided to continue walking with these two jovial Tibetans who were obviously on
the way to somewhere. Usually at the destination of any Tibetan long walk, there’s a
chung house where you get drunk out of your mind and not really wishing to smoke at
high altitude, not just because you get so high, but because your lungs become
immediately impaired and can’t get as much oxygen, drinking was the drug of choice. So,
en route to this destination village, one of the Tibetans decided that he was going to
continue walking at night because he wanted to get back to his waiting honeychild. And
the other was walking along with Byron, and decided to spend the night and to walk
when it was safe during the day. As they were walking along -- Tibetans have this
capacity of screwing up their eyes in such a way that they can see and recognize faces
miles away on the other side of mountains, and they can see much much further than we
can because they have an exercise which they use called the Tibetan eye chart where you
can put your nose on a nail and there are different colors in circles around and you
18
expand your peripheral vision in order to be able to see all the colors in clarity. So they
practice this from a very early age and they have the capacity really to focus and to see
two miles away and recognize a person.
Well, the Tibetan decides to screw his face up and he was looking down and then he saw
Trumpa his friend, had fallen down the mountain and died when he walked at night, and
he started to laugh. Tibetans are very casual about life and death, he didn’t even bother to
go down there and pick him up, he would probably die if he tried. The two of them arrive
in Trumpa’s village, and go to knock on the door and his very beautiful Tibetan wife
opens the door, there’s no such thing as marriage, under the animistic Tibetan tradition,
and there she is with this young buck some Tibetan boy in bed, and so, the Tibetan
traveling with Byron turned to Byron and said ‘Hey, it’s good he fell off the mountain.’
Because Tibetan tradition is that if you arrive home, and the lady you hope is waiting for
you is actually ensconced with somebody else, that somebody else is required to take him
out and get him drunk, but he said in Trumpa’s case he didn’t think that was going to
work. So it was karma and fate, it was finished.
From this village, about six weeks walk, Byron makes it back to Kathmandu and finds
the blonde bombshell in the Yak and Yeti, now approaching Buddha’s birthday. Byron is
having second thoughts, thinking that he may actually shave his head and become a monk,
which of course is not particularly welcome by the blonde bombshell, who has just about
had her fill of the now several year quest into oblivion, and who wished to live a
somewhat more affluent life with affluent people such as those who surrounded Boris and
the King. The King, who had befriended her, possibly in a more intimate way than not,
who had received from Byron as a present a car before he had completely boycotted the
universe and gone drifting in the Himalayas. It was one of three cars in Kathmandu. And
since no electricity had yet come up the mountains, one could see the pylons at the end of
the first year Byron was in Kathmandu, crawling up the mountains, electricity had to be
connected.
Approaching Buddha’s birthday, Byron had befriended a young English boy, who was a
collector of Tibetan sacrificial artifacts, from the mystical traditions, and he was quite a
trader, this guy. His name was Andy Rogers, he now lives in Northern Thailand, in
Chiang Mai, married to a Thai girl. He became known as Tibetan Andy because he would
go wandering off into the mustang area where the Tibetans were fighting the Chinese and
as the Tibetan refugees were coddling their life possessions he would buy these
extremely valuable tonkas and extremely ancient high-quality bronze statues, from these
departing people. Andy, being a rather cynical character, didn’t believe in anything at all,
had discovered a guy call Pundit, who would sit on the steps high up towards the stuppa
in Swayambunat. The monkeys never attacked him, which was highly unusual. And he
would be speaking in these tongues of many languages, all about the arrival of Buddha on
Buddha’s birthday, and the creation of the Kathmandu valley, and how it happened, and
so on and so forth. This was in March, as Byron and Buddha had very close birthdays.
As it turned out, the blonde bombshell was trying to distract Byron from the more
mundane things and the spiritual enquiry by confounding him with looking up people like
19
the Maharaja of Kuchbehal and the Maharaja of Jaipur, and this that and the other, who
she much preferred to hang out with than enlightened sages with Shiva tridents and
symbology embossed on his forehead, so to compete with Buddha’s birthday, the blonde
bombshell had invited Byron to have dinner at the Yak and Yeti, but Byron had been
called into a very strange phenomenon.
He encountered Mr. Rogers, in his home in Swayambunat, and Mr. Rogers was looking
pale and extremely disturbed, and every now and again he would suddenly burst into a
dance which required his neck moving from side to side just like an Indian classical ballet
dancer, while standing on one leg, and these extraordinary finger movements, and things
that he obviously had not studied at ballet school, and he was proclaiming that he’d been
possessed by this Pundit on the top of the stuppa in Swayambunat, and he had taken him
over and turned him into Krishna. And he was forced to perform this kind of ballet. And
every time he wasn’t focusing on not doing it, he was doing it, so he asked Byron to
ground him and to be there. And Byron asked him how much he’d been smoking, and he
said not much but Byron suggested he take a hit of some chillum, whereafter Mr. Rogers
went into extreme calisthenics which were wholly inconceivable, and became
increasingly paranoid, so Byron invited him to his dinner for his birthday, whereupon Mr.
Rogers accepted and every time Byron let go of his hand he would spin into one of these
movements. Byron was trying to tell him that nobody could possess his mind but clearly
he’d been possessed by something. It was really beyond comprehension by what.
They arrive at the Yak and Yeti, and the 300 prostitutes in the various bedrooms of the
Rama palace, all of whom were extremely beautiful, and Boris was jealous of his friends,
because he didn’t really have any money, but if he liked you, he’d put you up and keep
you, and keep you serviced day and night. Byron had gone into it headlong, and every
day was a party for him, and he was quite surprised when he arrived at the Yak and Yeti
to discover that it was completely deserted, and dark. Given that there was no electricity,
to look for a light switch, one would instead take out a lighter or a box of matches and
look for a candle. So Byron took a candle, only to discover that Mr. Rogers had not only
gone into one of his convulsion dances, but his eyes were spinning around in his head and
he was doing eye movements as well. And standing on one leg, it was absolutely
hilarious.
Grabbing Mr. Rogers to calm him down, just in case anybody might have seen this, and
sitting him down with his eyes spinning in his head, Byron takes off with the candle in
search of another candle, in an attempt to illuminate this. Entering a room with a candle,
which is a ballroom, with one candle illuminating virtually nothing, there was an acoustic
message going on, which could only mean that there were a lot of people hushing
themselves to be quiet. Byron heard this but couldn’t see it, which was a kind of rumble,
shuffling, coughing, and all those indiscreet sounds that had been made by people who
were trying to keep quiet and also hidden. Just as he approached the chandelier, a lot of
candles, music, suddenly appeared from nowhere, through enormous speakers, and
floodlights started to illuminate from inside to windows with very very long silk
billowing curtains, and in through the window first of all came the King of Nepal, his
wife, his son, his girlfriend, the Princess of Nagaland, Tiala Massan, the Princess of
20
Bhutan, the King of Bhutan, this whole retinue of important people, dressed to the nines,
dripping with jewels.
When Byron turned towards where the sound was coming from, he saw sitting around a
table, all of his friends from all over the world, sitting and prepared to celebrate his
twenty-first birthday, which, the year was not congruent, he wasn’t twenty-one. Half of
Asia’s royals, including Prince Purachyachepingpaipek, had appeared at a spurious
twenty-first birthday party, orchestrated by the blonde bombshell, and Mr. Rogers who
had come to partake in this dinner, had been left in the dark in the empty room with his
eyes spinning and doing this dance. Andy Rogers was being paid with a karmic debt for
having purchased for very little money the last relics and sacrificial artifacts of Tibetans
escaping from China and fleecing them as they were coming through the mountains
hungry. For very very little money he had accumulated a vast collection, one of the
largest collections in the world of Tibetan bronzes.
Since this was now his twenty-first birthday, Byron had to tell Andy to shut up because
the blonde bombshell had been making promotions as to aggrandize the moment to invite
all of Byron’s friends from all over the world to make her feel somewhat in the social
strata she thought she had encountered when she had met Byron.
Feeling very self-satisfied and everybody dressed to the hilt, Byron joined them for
dinner and everybody got drunk, stoned, etcetera. And Mr. Rogers, with the onset of very
loud rock and roll music, changed his dance steps but couldn’t sit still throughout dinner.
He became extremely paranoid and disappeared.
And the party was over. The idea was to go and celebrate Buddha’s birthday the
following day, and Byron was going to get his head shaved and join up as a monk. And
so he did. However, having done so, there had been a change in Nepalese law.
Byron had adopted this young kid named Krishna, who was four years old, and had come
out of the mountains with a stick and a handkerchief at the end of it like Dick Wittington,
Krishna had left home at the age of four because his mother had died and his father used
to beat him, and make him go chop the wood, and make the fire, and cook the food, and
he used him as a slave, so Krishna packed up his belongings into a handkerchief and put
his staff through the bundle, and walked for three weeks to Kathmandu to seek his
fortune. He arrived in Swayambunat with his little tiny hands and he met the other street
urchins and started gambling with cards. And winning. And he eventually became the
houseboy at Byron’s house.
The warning from Benares was ‘Stay in the mountains. If you go back down to the plains,
you’re going to fight the fight of your life to survive.’
The intention was to stay in the mountains, become a nice little monk, and get all the
information that was secreted in the secret doctrine, that allegedly would be revealed if he
went through this exercise. And then there was a visa problem.
21
Happy Hippieland Kathmandu visas were no longer recognized by the Nepalese
authorities, and although Byron was very familiar with the King, and with Pundit, and all
the notables, and they all hung out together in the Yak and Yeti, there was a very uptight,
Oxbridge-educated visa authority, not in Boris’ Rama palace but in a government kind of
shack. This visa authority decided that he was not going to renew the blonde bombshell’s
visa or Byron’s visa and they had to leave that day from Kathmandu. So Krishna was
given his inheritance which was a large two-door cupboard with a back of shelves in
either of the doors full of cigarettes and beetle and other kinds of nuts and a two-year
refill with the local wholesale supplier to ensure his career path was on track. He had
already demonstrated his capacities to master poker and other games which he was
winning at the age of four, and he also had a place to stay, because Byron gave him the
house, which was leased for about five years. Byron was intending of course, to go back
down the mountain, and return spontaneously from India to pick him up and formally
adopt him and take him to wherever that Byron was going to go.
The plane had broken down. So there was no way to fly out to Kathmandu. The only way
out was by bus.
Going down the mountain, slowly, slowly, slowly, the echo of this voice from Benares
became more and more resonant in Byron’s ears. Arriving in India, a day and a half later,
the heat steaming from the plains, the smells, the morass of human beings everywhere,
and the harassment, encouraged Byron very quickly to drop any pretext of traveling
anywhere else in India, but to get on a fucking train and go to Delhi with the idea that at
this point if there was to be a return it would occur without the blond bombshell who had
declared her real interest in Byron, and that was the social scenario, and the good looks,
and the whatever it was nonetheless heritage, and the bucks. So she had played her last
great stage a couple of nights before on a spurious 21st birthday, inviting all of Byron’s
friends to appear from all over the world, now she was in the back of a bus, cruising
unceremoniously out of Nepal, at the insistence of a very diligent and obnoxious young
immigration officer. Having been totally exhausted coming out of the mountains, they
fell asleep on the station at Muzaffarpur, whereupon all the possessions that had been
accumulated by the blonde bombshell over this period of time were politely relieved
rather rapidly by some thief. Which had been when everybody had fallen asleep. And that
included, and most unfortunately, the blonde bombshell’s passport. So it was necessary to
take her to Delhi to the embassy to get it renewed.
Mounting the train again first class, even though it had appeared everything had
disappeared except Byron’s passport. All of her rupees had disappeared, and she was
kind of taken aback when it was revealed to her that Byron had been holding out and that
there were many thousands of dollars in thousand dollar bills in these waistbands that had
gone through several different incarnations of coverage, including various ethnic
arrangements and God-knows-what-else to disguise them into waist belts, whereupon she
flew into a tantrum of relief.
The happy couple arrive in New Delhi, and Byron deciding that he’s going to spoil this
poor girl once in her life, took her to stay instead of at the Crown Hotel, at the Oberoy
22
Maidens Hotel which was the former seat of the Raj, and a really, really beautiful place.
Renting the Royal Suite of the top of the building ensconced her in a manner to which
she had not become accustomed. And they went the next day to the Danish Embassy and
discovered that they would not renew her passport. They would not give her another
passport. She had to return to Denmark to fulfill this. There was no other choice but the
blonde bombshell, again, was under command departure.
Byron, having waved goodbye, returned to the Oberoy Maidens Hotel, spontaneously
checked out, moved back to the Crown Hotel, in New Delhi at the end of Chandichowk,
went up to his room that had been reserved on the top floor, smoked a joint, stuck an
opium ball up his ass, was just about to toot some cocaine, when a person appeared who
had bee identified by the echo from Benares as one of the harbingers of what would
happen in the negative. ‘If you come across a person you know whose name begins with
M, who has red hair, you will have gone past the point of no return. No matter how you
try to avoid this, or how you evade what will come about, you will be forced to fight
together with this person, the battle of your lives.’
Upon hearing the echo, simultaneously viewing Michel, Byron reluctantly got up, gave
him a hug hello, put out a line, whereupon Michel took a look at him with his parched
desert mouth and his deep Mongolian-set eyes, with a wry smile and said,
“Where we goin? Let’s get the fuck out of Delhi.”
Thus begun the passage of no return. Byron suggested the mountains, back into
Kathmandu. Michel said,
“No, let’s go to Armura.”
Byron said, “How are we gonna get there?”
Michel said “You got money?”
Byron said, “Some.”
He said, “Well, let’s buy a car.”
He said there was a crazy fucking Austrian named Jurgen, who beat up his girlfriend,
schweise deutch, and somehow when she sees him, she continues to stay with him,
arrived in a replica Hitler staff car, made by Mercedes Benz in 1949. It’s got fourteen
forward gears, this, that and the other, and it’s on a Carnie de Passage, and he’s got no
money for gas.
“If you can figure out how to get the Carnie de Passage off his passport, the car is free.”
And worth 250,000 dollars in India at the time.
Byron, being very close to Indira Ghandi by this time, who he had, of course had to pay a
23
courtesy visit. Now they were best friends, so he could drop by, and the car was put in the
passport of the friend Jurgen, and belonged to Byron so it could have been taken out of
Jurgen’s passport, and put into Byron’s passport. So Indira said, yes of course, and it was
done. However, Jurgen, being a schweise deutch, somehow figured that this was all too
easy, and that he was being somehow defrauded, and this extremely valuable car was
worth a little bit more than just something taken out of his passport. But he had already
signed the sale papers and it didn’t belong to him anymore so he insisted that he be at
least driven to Rishikesh, where he was going to get out and vibrate with the local sages
in the foot hills of the Himalayas at the Ganges, with his girlfriend where he could relieve
himself of his extraordinary anger.
The decision was made, “Okay, we’re driving to Rishikesh.”
Michel was totally against it, having sensed the vibrations with this particular person. He
rode up front with Byron, and the girlfriend and Jurgen were in the back. Jurgen, not
being very familiar with driving style and technique in India became freaked out with
Byron’s driving, and insisted that he, being German, Swiss, Deutch, whatever, knew
better because he knew the car, and took over the wheel at a certain point, and managed
to rear-end a three-and-a-half ton solid teak oxcart and launch the driver up into the air
and land him on the top of his outraged bullock. It was charging around in the headlights.
The girlfriend managed to put her elbow through the window, and cut herself really badly
on the elbow, it was bleeding profusely. And Jurgen, having committed the one foopah
he was hoping to relieve all of us from by taking over the driving, was in a state of shock
momentarily. So he was placed in the rear, and the ox and cart were reattached with an
irate driver and with a rope, managed with a hook, to pull out the fender clear to keep the
car at least going straight, because it couldn’t turn left. And to get the girl to what was
meant to be a hospital, which in fact was a shack, without any bandages. But there was a
rather deft seamstress who stitched up the girl, and the next morning her husband, who
was an Indian version of a potter, took off, by unbolting, this fender, and took out the
light, and sat there with a hammer, and looking at the other side, hammered it back into
shape so that it looked like a copperpot fender, and Byron told him to take off the other
side and make it match. So this was a Hitler staff car look-alike with copperpot fenders.
Jurgen was landed and, when of course, asked to get out in Rishikesh, he was quite
reluctant to do so, but with the insistence of Michel, he got out, fearing that there would
be death as the other alternative. Jurgen proceeds to enter an ashram which he had been
introduced to, and Byron and Michel were cruising around Rishikesh looking for gas, and
after five hours of taxicabs siphoning the gas from their cars, there was a full tank and
two jerry cans full for the final leap to Armura which was on the other side of the Ganges.
Having taken about seven hours to accumulate enough gasoline, driving out of town, had
to pass the ashram, where it was apparent Jurgen had had a vociferous, and extremely
aggressive fallout with the hosts, and Jurgen had been, along with his girlfriend,
unceremoniously thrown out, and sitting on their piles of belongings with a bloody nose
on the side of the road. Michel turned to Byron and said,
24
“Keep driving!”
But feeling somewhat sorry for the girl, Byron stopped the car whereupon Jurgen jumps
in with the girlfriend, and insists to be taken to Armurra, since that was where he really
wanted to go. So Michel said,
“Not on your life!”
And Byron placated him, and finally he agreed. While cruising up the side of the Ganges,
it was surmised that being monsoon season, all the bridges were down. So from
Rishikesh they drove right up to the source of the fucking Ganges, and this source was an
amazing place where the water just came out of what looked like out of the mountain,
and in an enormous waterfall down into a gorge, and over the gorge there was this
suspension bridge, made of chains and looking very ancient. And on either side was this
medieval kind of York type town with little bridges going from house to house over the
little streets that ran up and this enormous great big temple that was clearly a Brahman
temple, in a very high Brahman village at the source of the Ganges.
Michel, being rather a jokester, decides to take the tape recorder and the very fine
speakers that came along with it, and the amplifier, hooked up to four car batteries, to
play Pink Floyd down this gully after sunset. Again, a village that no person from the Raj
had ever ventured close to, it had stayed and remained pre-this millennium, in its creation
there was no electricity or anything of the sort. And as the candle starts to be lit, and they
heard this echoing space music coming out of the source of the Ganges, they quickly
packed up the speakers, the amplifier and the machine into the boxes, into the back of the
shooting brake and out of town, very quietly.
The road, for the last three hundred miles, had not been a road, but a flat track. Suddenly
it took a turn for the worse, and since there was no was no way to drive the car across
from one side of the gorge to the other, the track was the only thing that one could follow,
there were no maps to support any contention as to where one might ford this now
tributary to the Ganges. And then suddenly, out of the blue, as if a donation from God,
the Himalayas suddenly cross across this water, although it wasn’t very broad, they didn’t
know how deep it was, and there was a track that led up alongside the mountain, getting
higher and higher and higher into the wooded side of the mountain, and they decided to
follow that.
As they were going along, now dawn, a lot of rain, the side of the mountain on the
outside of the car was falling down the mountain as they were traveling along so they
couldn’t stop. And after about four hours of doing this, in all-wheel drive, fortunately this
thing was extremely well-constructed, it became apparent that the Ganges had more than
one source. There was a river half a mile wide to cross, and clearly, even if one chopped
down all the trees and made a pontoon on which one managed to get the car, which
weighed three-and-a-half tons, there was no way that you could assure that you could get
it to the other side without going down the rapids without a rope.
25
Hence the decision was made how to do this whole thing in reverse because there was no
way to turn around. Against the side of the mountain, and on the middle of the hump of
the logging track, all the way backwards. This proved to be completely beyond the
endurance of Michel, who jumps out of the car, with the Turkish wolfhound belonging to
the Jurgens, the dog’s name was Keith, and had adopted Michel like a father instantly,
deserted his previous owner, and plunged headlong into the river along with Michel, and
they were seen drifting downriver rather rapidly, slowly making headway to get to the
other side.
After fifteen hours of reversing and having to dig out rocks from the side of the mountain,
to get this thing back to a place where it could turn around, everybody was exhausted and
had forgotten about Michel and the dog. And then the drive all the way back nearly to
Delhi, in order to cross the fucking Ganges, just because this asshole wanted to go to
Rishikesh, to get back up to Armurra, so God knows how fucking long, and one entire set
of tires, because the sun was so hot the fucking tires melted into the road and being up to
the rims in asphalt, when it started, and got through whatever was beneath it, the tires just
shredded themselves, all in one go having four flats. It was impossible to find tires of that
width, so the Indians, being very creative, took truck treads, and welded them onto the
shredded originals, riveted them as well, placed felt on the inside, and then new inner
tubes, got this truck rolling again. A pretty bumpy ride. So, crossing the Ganges was the
beginning of it, but arriving at the first road to Armurra, four hours up into the mountains,
suddenly the road had disappeared, being washed away by the monsoon and there was
nobody there to dig a path, so all the way back, then to the next one, road washed away,
no way in, and Byron was stuck with this increasingly insane Jurgen, who was beating up
his poor damaged wife in the back of the car.
Finally They arrive in Armurra. Byron goes to meet an old friend of his grandmother’s
who was the former governor of Kashmir, who immediately introduces him to a house
along the Kesadevi Ridge which was called Crank’s Ridge, which is where all these old
Raj people continue to live, in paradise, and within a couple of days, deciding that this
was probably the most beautiful location that he had ever seen in his life, Byron decides
to buy this house and live there, but no sign of Michel. Two weeks go by, with no sign of
Michel. Finally he arrives, weighing a fraction of his previous weight, blood coming out
of every orifice, leeches all over him, with a very very very very very heavy dose of
malaria in delirium, and no dog.
Jurgen using the excuse that he was hanging around because he was waiting for his
fucking dog, the dog doesn’t show up, the story was really incredible.
Michel had dropped himself off in the middle of Corbett National Park, the largest game
reserve in all of India, and it was elephant mating season. It’s the only place in India with
an existing man-eating tiger. And he was in the middle of the jungle, walking with the
fucking dog, and at night, the dog freaked because he could see the eyes of all of the
animals, and he became completely paranoid, and would kind of hide behind Michel.
Finally getting to the sort of road, the dog happened to hate Indians, and so when the first
jeep stopped to pick them up, and this took them a couple of weeks to get to a road,
26
walking up and down the mountains in the jungle, both of them fucking starving hungry,
the fucking dog attacked the Indians, so the next thing that came along was a bus, and
there ain’t no bus coming for a week, this is it. And Michel had his neckerchief around
Keith, trying to drag him on the bus, and Keith being a Turkish wolfhound, very big,
managed to slip the noose and fled back into the jungle. And so Michel said, “Sayonara!”
and arrives back without the dog.
Jurgen, for the first time, begins to recognize something outside of himself, notices that
Michel is about to drop dead. And Budananda, who is the former governor of Kashmir,
comes along with Mary Obligo, who is the foremost Ayurvedic doctor in all of India,
fixes Michel up in no time at all. Byron, when Michel becomes somewhat conscious, tells
him the story about these dire predictions, from Varanasi, which of course, Michel blew
off as pure superstition, and ridiculous, and absolutely absurd, and finally after having
stayed in Armurra for about 3 months, Michel declares that he’s going to go back to
Delhi, and pick up some money that had been sent to him. Byron had been quite judicious
and not informing it was clear that Michel would squander anything that came close to
him, didn’t tell him that there was the belt. So in order to keep up the facade, had to
mortgage the two professional microphones for the 5000 report tape recorder which was
the alternative to an Acra, for cinema recording, to the local gas station to get a tank full
of gas to go down to Delhi and arrive broke.
It was back to Delhi, and traveling this time with a girl who had come from Holland, a
very beautiful woman with hennaed hair, who was actually a witch, who had explained to
Michel, independent of Michel, by throwing his tarot cards, exactly what was going to
happen. And there in the tarot were ones around in a square, with the named, designated
character, which was the person who threw the deck, behind them, and the interpretation
was, “You’re going to jail.”
So Michel, being as irreverent as any motherfucker could be, decides, ok, if he’s going to
jail, then he’s going to have a fucking good time before this happens, directs his car, as he
was driving, to the Oberoy Maidens, and very grandly in bare feet and wearing Indian
cardi clothes, a trouser and a short, rents the entire top floor.
So Byron thought, “Ok, I’ll let this play out because I’ve known the guy for quite a long
time and he’d always manage to get away with things.” Since he didn’t know Byron had
the money to cover, it was a gesture he was amazed Michel was able to pull off. Tossing
the keys to the car to the dressed up guy at the front door, in his full uniform, grandly
marching in without a pair of shoes, and renting the top floor without a credit card or
anything, it was great. And the guy who let him do this was the manager called Seigle.
And he was so impressed with Michel’s style, he told him “Great, go ahead!”
And so there they were, at the top floor of the Oberoy Maidens Hotel, without a penny to
their names, and an empty tank of gas, concerned that upon entering the parking lot, it
might run out of gas before hitting the parking space.
Michel immediately orders a tailor to the room, and has a whole set of clothes made for
27
himself, and shoes and everything he can imagine, five of each, and in various colors.
And Byron was sitting there thing, “Well, fucking hell, go along with the show.” So he
had some clothes made as well. And they had a discotheque which had been designed by
a phenomenal Italian architect, using Tesla technology, glass ceiling, glass floors, glass
walls, smoked, and with a massive Tesla coil set up in the back, was able to run lighting
in tune and in time with the music around this entire place, absolutely fucking
unbelievable. And they had a band that had learned all its rock and roll from a little tiny
tape recorder and they were playing Santana with tablas and guitars, and a really good
copy but didn’t quite have the funk. So Michel, who was a really good blues harmonica
player, said,
“Okay Byron, since you are the musician around here, let’s put something behind this
band, and make a reasonable fucking noise, and at least teach them how to play so that
we can dance whilst they’re figuring out what to do.” Of course, it wasn’t mentioned that
Michel was only waiting for five hundred dollars in the American Express, that still
hadn’t showed up. And they were at least two thousand dollars a day, and Byron was
feeling the waistband getting thinner and thinner, even though Michel didn’t have the
first clue that it existed at all.
Lo and behold, the band was very receptive to this instruction, and they picked up on it
like crazy, and it became in a matter of a week, a really pretty fucking shit hot rock and
roll band, and of course Michel was sending out invitations to every notable to come to
dinner and to come dancing and this that and the other, and there’s this great band, and
the Rolling Stones were coming, and so on and so forth, because he had invited them as
well, and everybody fucking showed up. And so not only were they hosting the top floor
of the Oberoy Maidens Hotel but as everybody else were guests too, they had ended up
hosting the entire fucking hotel, without a fucking penny put down.
And the manager, Seigle, was just looking at this with his eyes spinning, and finally
Byron approached Seigle and said,
“Look, as you know, this is getting pretty ridiculous.” And he said,
“Oh, not at all, not at all! All these people coming to this hotel, the hotel’s never made so
much money!”
And so Byron said,
“Well, no, you’ve got to understand that...”
And he said, “No, don’t worry, I know you have no money. But the business is
booming!”
He picked up on the whole game, just played it down the line, and champagne was
flowing, and everybody had to pay for their dinners, and this, that and the other, and it
was incredibly hilarious.
28
So Michel, being a party boy, decided that things were going kind of cool, and since now
he was preparing for the ejection, and so he thought, “Ok, well let’s have one last
enormous fucking party.”
And now he had made friends with everybody, and everybody in Delhi thought that the
two richest guys in the world had showed up, and they knew everybody, and it was the
place to go, and they were competing with each other to get invitations, and it was in the
newspapers all the time, and it was becoming really amazingly funny.
And finally, the Rolling Stones showed up.
And it just happened to coincide with the day of the great big fucking party before Michel
was sure they were getting ejected. And it turned out that everybody from Kush Bihad to
Jaipur, all of them came with all of their friends, and every socially ambitious Indian
wanted to be invited too. So the commercialites, the Billahs, the Tartars, the this that and,
it was a dense pack of these people, and since the Stones showed up, half the friends from
all over Europe arrived as well, so it was kind of a blue blood rockout. Since all of these
very grand people were showing up, Biki Oberoy who was very socially ambitious for
himself, decided that it wasn’t going to happen at the Oberoy Maidens Hotel, it was
going to happen at his house, which was this fucking unbelievable spread. And what was
more, he was going to pick up the tab.
The moment Michel heard this, he ordered the caviar, the champagne and what not, to be
flown in from France. The list of invitees came to two thousand people, and everybody
showed up. The party was structured for a weekend. It lasted a week, during which time,
Michel, who had this eidetic memory, was targeting a possible stroke for another one, the
rich Indians, and the business people, and he was putting one guy through Byron together
with another, and taking commission, so Byron had to do all the documentation, writing
out all the agreements, having them signed, stamped, sealed, this that and the other, with
a permanent notary and a lawyer and God-knows-whom on hand, a whole fucking staff.
The first deal was to import apples, as it turned out, from Seigle’s farm in Kashmir, all
the transportation was owned by the Sikhs. And they wouldn’t let the Kashmirians ever
move one apple down their pathway. And apples were being sold in Delhi at that time for
a rupee each. And it cost about two piza wholesale, for the truck. So the deal was struck
with the top Sikh of all the Sikhs, to order all the trucks to pick them up, and then the
profit would be split. There were something like four hundred trucks doing seven trips
with apples. And suddenly, from not having a single fucking penny in the world, at least
as far as Michel was concerned, the two of them were millionaires.
And all of the debts were paid, everything was absolutely fantastic, and Seigle, being so
impressed with this whole thing, turned out to be a major landowner in Kashmir, had his
own house in Delhi that was magnificent too, discovered that things had gone just a little
out of hand in the Maidens and needed to be straightened up a bit, and that the two of
them would be much more comfortable in his house, which was full of gardens of
different kinds and peacocks and really quite an exotic and ancient, ancient thing, it was
29
one of the love palaces of the Asoka kings.
Seigle was a sex slave. He had dedicated his entire life to black magic and fucking. And
so he had this incredible collection of highly trained nymphs who would dance for him,
whilst he was drunk and stoned out of his mind, and each one performing a different
sensual activity, which she had mastered, and he would revolve them as he kind of saw fit,
but they were all super-trained, classic Indian dancers and this classic Indian dancing
tradition was the dance of seduction and they would fuck you as the process of the dance.
It was absolutely remarkable.
So they were very happy to stay in Seigle’s house, but having gotten into the flow,
Michel was quite reluctant to stop. After all, for him, things were just beginning to get
started and warmed up, and now it was time to go for the big bucks.
And as it turned out, a guy call M. T. Ias Hussein, who was a very small, petite kind of
gentleman, appeared from Calcutta with a rather alarming question. And he was part of
this black magic cult that Seigle was a member of. Seigle, although he was an alcoholic
drug addict who found everything amusing, was incredibly sophisticated and very well
spoken, and had found Byron and Michel to be a fortune of amusement that had eluded
him for many years and was going to keep it going if he possibly could. He introduced M.
T. Ias Hussein to Byron and M. T. Ias Hussein had a story.
His story was that there had been a test of an exchange of money of thirty-six million
Pakistani rupees. At the time, a Pakistani rupee was two Indian rupees for one Pakistani
rupee and there were seven rupees to a dollar. This amount had been exchanged for the
equivalent in Indian rupees by three people, Ujal, Teksis and Mittu, all of whom emerged
from the acting trade from the Dhaka film industry. One of them had been working with
the governor of Calcutta, and they had struck the deal for the exchange and all three had
disappeared and all the money had disappeared.
This was the prelude to a bank robbery that they had staged to go ahead a few days after
the first exchange once it had been proven that everybody was going to be honorable and
deliver. But as these three guys had disappeared, he needed to know where they had gone.
Seigle, being a member of this black magic cult, had filled all of the Oberoy Hotels with
managers and head waiters, etcetera, from this cult. It’s a very secret cult, rather like the
Masons, from a very ancient Indian tradition where they practice a particular form of
magic where they can not only network information, but also, they’re into hyper-refined
sexual orgies and all of them somehow happen to be quite wealthy. They have meetings,
and get together and they perform certain things, and one of the things that they’re able to
do is sit down and tell you exactly what’s going on if you have a problem. It’s either
foreseeing the future, knowing what’s happening, being able to create an image of it, a
vision, they’re all absolutely invested in this thing and they don’t talk anything about it.
M. T. Ias Hussein was the designated head of the Mukta Bihini and the Mukti Foush who
were the freedom fighters in Bangladesh. And they were about to stage a bank robbery, to
30
rob the Quarter Reserve Bank of East Bengal of six hundred million dollars worth of
West Pakistani rupees, to exchange them on the Indian black market through the
governor of Calcutta and buy guns to go fight the West Pakistanis who had invaded
Bangladesh. And they, or Aya Khan had Sheikh Mujit in prison in West Pakistan and the
only person left to organize this, and also the seven million refugees who had flooded
into India who were now in the refugee camps in Calcutta, this was M. T. Ias.
M. T. Ias had recounted what had happened with these three guys and asked if Byron
could approach Indira Ghandi, to see whether or not these people had approached her
through the hierarchies to buy protection, and in which case, it could be possibly revealed
to him as to where they might be so they could be taken back to Calcutta and interrogated
in Bangladesh.
So this was a semi-government-to-government request through a third party first hand,
because everybody knew that India wanted to invade Bangladesh and assume it for itself.
Byron thought this mission was rather difficult, and told Seigle as much, but he was very
impressed with it, and this guy M. T. Ias Hussein, and felt extremely pissed off that the
West Pakistanis were committing the largest genocide since the Second World War,
against its own people in such a brutal way. And when M. T. Ias described what was
going on, Byron was so sickened he decided that he was going to go take a look, the very
next day.
Having quite a lot of money available, of course Michel was very quick to the tabulation
that if these guys were found that all the moneys that they had left with them would be
donated to the persons responsible for locating them, if indeed they were returned to
Calcutta. Michel saw that this was quite a large sum of money, considerably more than
had been made so far in this laborious thing, ridiculous undertaking, and had therefore
focused very heavily and strongly on Byron to go to Calcutta with M. T. Ias.
Byron took off with M. T. Ias Hussein to go to Calcutta. But before this had happened, he
had a quick conversation with Seigle, who said it was insane to go to Indira Ghandi, that
he would use the black magic network, and scout every hotel in Delhi to determine
whether or not anybody was paying anybody, this that that and the other, to keep them
anonymous and in hiding, and to see how far up the ladder it had gone.
M. T. Ias had provided three photographs. And in twenty minutes, Seigle had discovered
that they were living under assumed names in the Presidential Suite of the Oberoy
Intercontinental Hotel. And since his team controlled all the Oberoy hotels, Seigle
informed M. T. Ias and things were in a position to land these guys. And that they were
desperately trying to reach higher and higher up the police chain to secure themselves,
but their costs were very very high to buy their anonymity.
So the recommendation was that the heist should go ahead, and since Byron had had
OTC training in his public school, and knew something about warfare, he decided that he
would go along with M. T. Ias and train some of the troops for the mission before the
31
mission was embarked.
So he flies to Calcutta, goes into the heart of one of the refugee camps, and selects a team,
of what turned out to be Mukta Bihini and Mukti Foush fighters who all had been trained
in Sandhurst or here, there and everywhere, but were disguised as refugees. They hadn’t
been trained in these tactics, and they hadn’t been trained in guerilla warfare, they hadn’t
been trained in how make Molotov cocktails, this that and the other, they were just
normal, kind of conventional troops. So training began, it lasted a week, for better or for
worse, into Bangladesh, fighting divisions of West Pakistani mechanized troops with
American state-of-the-art tanks and aircraft and communications, so this whole thing had
to be staged in a very direct way. And what nobody actually knew was the objective and
that was to rob the Quarter Reserve Bank of East Bengal of these West Pakistani rupees.
So there had to be trucks and they had to go down the wrong way of the refugee trail, this
was quite conspicuous, so it had to happen at night. And if any Pakistani military were
encountered, they all had to be killed, otherwise it would become known that there was
something going the other way.
So Byron discovers his first encounter with banal brutality, and this galvanized his zeal to
really push this thing through: a village that had just been raided by the West Pakistani
troops, in their process of delivering the West Pakistani statement to the Bangladeshis,
they had taken more than two hundred women, raped them, the young women, a lot of
them were pregnant, and they had then set them on shafts or rammed wooden stakes up
their rectums, and then had them staked out alongside each other, their bellies cut open
and their living babies hung with their umbilical cords around their necks. Just as part of
the terror campaign that had been manifested.
This completely blew Byron’s mind, and he went into a state of cold zeal insanity and
along with the rest of the troops who had never really seen anything remotely like this,
managed to capture a sleeping drunken mechanized division and all of their equipment,
and all of their munitions and everything, without firing a shot, just with the energy of
being present with such force, these characters just kind of fell over in their post-rape
alcoholic stupor, and they were all killed, rather like that disgusting scene in Lawrence of
Arabia. All very close up.
Once the weapons had changed hands, they were put to enormously good effect, and as it
turned out, very importantly because on the radio, coming into this, were reports of
seeking confirmation of aerial surveillance that something really weird was going on,
thirty-something trucks were heading in, so, the report of course was given back that no,
it was absolutely spurious, and must have been dirt on the windshield. And fortunately it
was still the monsoon. So they managed to get within five miles of the Quarter Reserve
Bank, before the West Pakistanis figured out what was happening. And they were
blitzing to get there first. So they had to stage an attack on a particular place, where if you
managed to blow up one, two or three tanks, the rest of them couldn’t get through
because there was no way of moving them out of the way. So with some equipment that
was harvested from the first division massacre, they managed to blow up a couple of
tanks in the lead of the column that was gung ho to get to the Quarter Reserve Bank, and
32
it held everything back long enough for the doors of the bank to be blown open just like a
“Kelly’s Hero” movie, in with the pallets, out with the cash, into the backs of the trucks
and then down the refugee trail at night.
It was more dangerous, Byron felt, to be cruising with such bundles of cash through
starving refugees than from a rather tentative West Pakistani army that had seen an entire
division wiped out and nobody quite understood how. So there was some suspicion that
there was something else afoot, possibly the Indian government invading. So the West
Pakistani army was not that gung ho to engage. All the funds arrive in Calcutta, they are
spread into different locations, this that and the other, Byron gets on a plane straight to
Delhi, the order is given, and it turns out that India has now decided to float nightly
blackouts and to fly their planes low over the city to make sure everybody is keeping
their curtains down, preparing for war. So they’ve mobilized their troops, they’ve got
three million troops up and down the West Pakistani border. And they’ve got an
equivalent number up and down the Bangladesh border. To get the trucks into Calcutta
was a major undertaking, but there had to be some payments. So suddenly, West
Pakistani rupees were hitting the market, here, there and everywhere and the word was
out, so it was like hellfire.
Everything was shut down and the way the money was going to be released was if Ujal,
Teksis and Mittu were kidnapped, returned for a military trial, with the Mukta Bihini and
Mukti Foush, to discern whether or not the rip-off had been engineered by the governor
of Calcutta, or if it had been engineered by the three of them, because they had all been
actors in the Dhaka film industry and they knew each other and one of them was working
for the governor of Calcutta and the other two were representing Mukta Bihini and Mukti
Foush. And the assumption was that it had been a rip-off and if it had been a rip-off, then
the exchange could go ahead with the Governor of Calcutta’s people. If it wasn’t a rip-off,
if it had been engineered, then they had to find another exchanger. And that was basically
why the delay.
Seigle, as bright as he was, and belonging to this black magic cult, had arranged for the
hotel people in his group to cordon off the top floor at a particular date and he was going
to fire the siren on the top of the hotel because the Indian air force was every night flying
low over the city, with this blackout, and they were getting war fever-ready because India
had drawn up troops on both the east and west side of India along the Pakistani border
and they had mobilized more than three million troops. Things were getting increasingly
sticky, and timing had to be quick to get this done so that if there was such a large
exchange of cash, that the West Pakistani rupees could in fact filter back into West
Pakistan and with all these mobilized troops on either side, things were getting difficult.
At least that was the assumption at the time.
Seigle had arranged for two days hence and Michel and Byron had agreed, that whatever
money was left with these characters Ujal, Teksis and Mittu, they would be permitted to
keep. It was several million dollars worth of rupees on both sides, and of course an
adventure, it was agreed that Michel and Byron had to get the 1949 Hitler staff car replica
jazzed up for a journey during which time they might not have been sufficient gasoline.
33
So all provisions etcetera had to be loaded up, all kinds of things that hadn’t been dealt
with before, such as good tires that actually worked and proper brakes and things stuck
on this thing and a very rapid engine overhaul so there wouldn’t be any question of
breakdown.
The idea was all the people in the building would be brought down to the basement for an
air raid test. And so the siren having been fired off, everybody had been brought down,
the top floor isolated, Ujal, Teksis and Mittu knocked out with chloroform, put into
laundry baskets, shoved down the laundry chute, straight into the back of the vehicle and
off it would go, seats down, and driven rapidly, a very long way, something like more
than a thousand miles. They would stand trial, and if it was proven there was collusion,
then an alternate exchange would be arranged with the black market, and there was a
certain option made available that Byron and Michel could do the exchange and make
some money there on a very large chunk of cash.
Everything was set. The automobile is placed with some extremely capable Indian
mechanics who guaranteed everything was going to be fine.
At that time, there was a guy called Kevin who had come from England and was known
to Byron quite well, he had stayed at his house during the rock and roll era. He was now
broke in Delhi and he had asked if Byron would lend him some money or give him some
money so he could get back to England, he had been in India for a year. So Byron agreed
and, since there was no time in coordinating this whole program, which included Mukta
Bihini fighters who would be available in case anything went wrong during the blackout
period, the chloroforming and laundry chutes, and also to be a kind of escort. All had
been disguised, one as kind of a taxi little vehicle and just in case anything went wrong.
So came the day of reckoning. Kevin had been calling so frantically that en route to the
pickup at the Oberoy Intercontinental, in the Luchens part of New Delhi, you have very
very very wide avenues, and the place that he knew was the round post office and the
round post office was kind of in the center of either of these avenues all leading up to it.
You could shoot off directly to the Intercontinental. But it was a blackout. There was no
moon, and no light.
So Byron and Michel had loaded up with equipment, some of which included defensive
equipment, and a car at that time with a dashboard full of cash, just to make sure that
anything could be taken care of at any given moment, and a hell of a lot of fuel. So it was
pretty heavily laden. But this vehicle had one liter in each cylinder, and it was a very
torquie vehicle, it could move unbelievably quickly up to certain speeds and then quite
quickly thereafter, compared to a conventional Mercedes it was faster, much bigger and
much heavier.
The launch was meant to be from a discreet place. So they departed from the Crown
Hotel in Chandichowk dressed very casual, nothing fancy, inconspicuous, foreign touristtype
look but not too up market. So all this was kind of staged rather well. Food as well
on board, and amphetamines, cocaine, and opium, in case anybody lost stamina because
this had to be a one-shot deal, all the way, no stopping, this that and the other. And the
34
pharmacology was reasonably well orchestrated and of course some hashish because, you
know, everybody smoked, all the time. So it’s all mostly organized, the vehicle’s looking
spruce and ready for business, nothing squeaking, it even had a paint job. The copperpot
two wings had been kind of filled so it now looked tight-eared, and like a proper Raj
automobile. And they were running late. They had to go pick up Kevin at the round post
office and give him some cash.
So crawling along and actually getting lost in the Luchens maze of avenues because it
was so dark, it could not have been a darker night in Delhi, and it was hot. Finally they
arrive at the round post office and park on the road leading to the Intercontinental, Kevin
appears, jumps into the back of the car and alongside him is an Indian. So Michel turns to
Kevin and asks him,
“Who is the Indian?”
And after Kevin insisted he was just a friend, Michel asked him again the same question
quite sternly. He then says,
“Get the Indian out of the car now.”
And Kevin is then joined with another Indian who is behind Byron, the driver. And
Michel looks at the two Indians and says,
“Out of the car, now!”
One Indian exited, Kevin was in the middle, from the right side of the car. And is waving
his hands. The other Indian reaches around to grab the keys from the car around Byron’s
neck. Michel picks up a commando knife which is a three-sided thing which can be used
as a knuckle duster, and he hits the Indian who just tried to grab the keys, in the jaw, and
his head spun right around, and he fell unconscious on the floor of the car. Michel says,
“Let’s get out of here, now!”
Byron floors the car, in all wheel drive, reverse. And the car comes racing backwards
down the street towards the very high curb of the round post office, it’s about eighteen
inches. It hits the curb, but en route, it’s squirming, the car’s practically out of control, as
if it’s trying to gain traction, and bump, bump, screech, squirm and then crash, it hits the
curb of the round post office, and from everywhere there were Indians dressed in military
uniform, which were police uniforms, with their long staffs, smashing the windows as the
car’s going backwards. Around from either side of the round post office, two trucks
appear with their lights on, and they crash into either side of the then stationary Mercedes,
because its tail is up, its front is down, and it’s on the curb, having hit the curb,
everybody hit the roof, including this kind of limp body. Kevin is petrified, doesn’t know
what the fuck is happening. Michel and Byron have no idea what the fuck is happening,
but the implications in their brain of what they were about to do, led them to believe that
there was some connection, but nobody quite understood what. So Byron turned around
35
and saw Michel, he was covered in blood, and there were people reaching through the
broken glass in a window that was made before the invention of pellet glass, and people
were getting cut, and he saw Michel covered in blood and screaming to get out. Byron
put the car into all-wheel drive, first gear, gunned the engine, foot off the clutch, having
popped the clutch, the car started to rise up the two fenders of the two trucks and of
course, they didn’t have hand brakes, and the trucks separated just as he flicked the lights
on and all they could see were machine guns.
They were arrested, and taken initially to the Janpath Police Station. At the Janpath
Police Station, Byron and Michel were interrogated. From the scene of the crime, Michel
and Byron were shackled around the legs, around the arms, and around the neck. There
were shackles between the legs, handcuffs behind the chain leading up to the shackle on
the neck and then the one main chain that connects the shackles which has the metal
piece in the loop and suspended with the shackles from the roof of the truck, in a kind of
horizontal but really uncomfortable suspension. They were driven in agony for a couple
of hours until they landed at the Janpath Police Station. So there was a real intimidation
going on and unnecessary anger and fury, rage and violence. By the time they were
deposited in the police station, they were all bleeding and covered in everything one
could imagine.
Kevin confessed that he had been approached by two Indians when he was sitting in a
kind of tourist cafe/restaurant, and asked if he knew Michel and Byron, because they had
witnessed him meeting with Byron sometime before. And they had offered him money
because they wanted to have a connection to all of the wheels and deals that were going
on because Byron and Michel by that time were a very newsworthy kind of phenomenon
in New Delhi at the time. To him it seemed innocuous, so he thought he would set up this
connection because they were going to pay him some money as well. They offered him
quite a lot.
There was something amiss, and shortly thereafter Michel and Byron began to understand
what was happening. The guy who had jumped out the side of the car first, unfortunately
ran behind the car, and the squirming and the skidding was as the car was going over his
body, along with somebody else’s. It turned out that he was number two at the Indian
police force. And number one at the Indian police force was Karati Lal, the person who
Michel had hit on the jaw and his head had spun around. He was left on the floor as
Michel and Byron were being dragged out through the glass by their hair by hysterical
Indians with their big truncheons, long sticks with lead inside them, higher than manheight.
By the time they got to the police station, they had been beaten to fuck, just the hysterical
Indian police going nuts. So the temperature was getting a little hot. Then it is announced
that the senior of the two police officers injured was going to live. His head had spun
around but he somehow didn’t break his spinal cord and he had a very severe neck injury,
and that was it. No word could be passed to Seigle, nobody knew what had happened,
this whole thing was very odd, the three of them were being sequestered, and they had
driven around for ages and ages and no lawyer, no statements, nothing was being taken.
36
And clearly this was a very strange operation.
So the next day, having been in the police station twenty-four hours, in shackles, they are
asking “Where’s the money?”
They took Michel and Byron to the Crown Hotel, ransacked the whole thing, to Seigle’s
house, ransacked the whole thing, to the Maidens Hotel, and went through everything,
and couldn’t find the money. And every agency in Indian security had been competing
against each other because everybody heard the rumour of this large amount of money to
get to the cash first. And the presumption was that because M.T. Ias had been seen
meeting and intensively with Michel and Byron, and something had leaked through
security, Byron thought through Indira Ghandi’s security, when the question was raised,
where these three people were, because they had been buying their protection from Karati
Lal. But in his extortion and what not of what he was trying to get out of them, was
where the money was. And everybody had heard that the money had landed in Calcutta,
but nobody knew that it wasn’t already in Delhi, nobody knew that the Governor of
Calcutta was kind of on probation before the change would happen. They knew that there
was a problem, and also that the money was in India. That was kind of conveyed in the
various questions that were being asked in the interrogations.
For the next ten days, for various periods of the day and night, indistinguishable from a
prison cell, interrogations went on, commencing late in the second day. It was suspension
from the ceiling, sometimes upside down, sometimes just feet exposed and beating with
the equipment, two-by-fours on the bottom of the feet, pretty much anywhere, broken ribs,
broken feet, and clearly the decision was that they were going to keep this absolutely
hush-hush because they were interested in the money and not what had actually
transpired, and that they were going to do Michel and Byron in if they couldn’t produce
these bodies after they had been beaten to this extent.
The torture was pretty heavy. Byron managed to get out of his body, because he had been
studying various techniques of meditation, one of them was a Gawenka technique which
was incredibly quick and feeling somewhat sorry for the perpetrators, who were very
nervously giving their all, there was kind of a dynamic between fear and anger that
percolated all the time in the process so the results were more impressive than they
needed have been. At the same time, more clumsy. Byron got rapped around the head a
few times which was really stupid because it could crush one side of the face and he had
turned into a cauliflower. Mostly it was the feet. Because after they get pulverized and all
the little bones have broken, any additional assault is remarkably painful. The way it was
worked was that they kept Byron and Michel separated. There was never anything heard
from Kevin but they would interrogate Byron during the screams emerging from
Michel’s cell, which would go on for hours. But Michel was so absolutely resistant,
defiant in the most outrageous way, even in excruciating pain.
“Fuck you, fuck off you stupid fucking wogs!”
So the more they beat him, the more this pain and anger emitted from his mouth. Byron
37
got away in the long run with his feet pulverized beyond recognition. But by the third day,
they thought they were going to kill him, because he was silent, absolutely no motion, no
response, no nothing. So then the perpetrators became anxious, worried that they might
be somehow found parties to a murder of a foreigner, and a very well-known foreigner at
that. By this time they were getting a little nervous, but with the defiance that Michel was
putting out on a constant basis, it was an invitation for additional assaults. As it turned
out, Byron got by far the worst of it in the beginning, because it was he who was seen as
the person with M.T. Ias Hussein, and also he was the driver that ran over Number Two
of the Indian police force, and totally crippled him for life. So it was a kind of vengeance
thing in the beginning, and the breaking of the bones was not necessary in order to extract
information if they were going to achieve it, and they are very efficient at doing this.
They also became persuaded, as information was spreading like wildfire throughout India,
that the money was not in Delhi, so they had to create charges, formally, and arraign the
characters. But they decided they wouldn’t do that.
After the tenth day of being moved from police station to police station to police station,
they were transported to Tiha Central Jail in New Delhi. They arrived and were stuck into
C Class jail. That is, a hundred and twenty people in a room ten meters by seven meters,
with bars on the roof, and in the front, and three walls and a floor. At nighttime, the
temperature came down to about 120 degrees. Food consisted of what you could get from
the bars if you happened to be in the right part of the circle because people had to keep
moving. They couldn’t stay still. Those who did stay still flopped on the floor in the
center and as the bodies mounted, they either struggled to get out, or they died. The dal,
which was half a cup of dal, half a chipati, and some water, had to be eaten as they were
going past the bars and then they were back in circulation. Shitting and pissing was just
anywhere on the floor, and the stench was beyond comprehension.
Michel got not only and instinct but knew that foreigners were meant to be kept in B
Class jail, or in house arrest, and therefore the idea was that Michel and Byron would die,
especially sustaining the kind of torture that they had, under these circumstances because
of sheer exhaustion, because at the end of these ten days they had been deprived of sleep
entirely. And this was one way to certify that they were arrested and taken to jail and then
they died in jail. And then they could say,
“Hey, who knows what happened? Under crowded circumstances...”
Every day they kept on injecting some rather healthy, beefy-looking low life into the mix,
who was always pushing and shoving either to get to Byron or Michel. And he always
got his food, but he also was trying constantly to find an aggressive intercourse with
Michel in the beginning and to invoke the anger and focus of anger of all those in the cell
towards Michel and hence there were lots of fights that were incredibly physical. Byron
couldn’t walk, so it was as much as he could do to get around, but still, the two of them
had to fight like crazy pretty much half the time in this intense, insane fucking shit hole,
with infection in every different kind, going berserk hence looking like cauliflowers.
Byron had no choice but to stand, otherwise face a fifty-fifty chance of survival in the
middle. And also, all of Byron’s ribs were broken and blood was coming out of his mouth,
38
so obviously one of them had gone into the lung, or definitely within the chest cavity.
Things were looking pretty morbid.
The guards, who were Sikh guards, decided that they would open the door and retrieve
one of these characters that they had stuck in. In a particularly gruesome fight, Michel
had managed to really damage five people with Byron’s help; one of them lost an eye.
The guy who had been stuck in as the agitator suffered a cracked skull and broken arm.
So clearly at this point it was evident that the agitator was part of the setup. But they had
the door open, and Michel, being very astute and extremely fast, managed to walk,
literally, on the heads of the morass and jump from the bodies straight for the door as it
was being slammed shut, but he managed to grab the top knot of the Sikh’s hair, and they
never cut their hair, and as the hair opened up, he wrapped it around his hands, pulled the
guy’s head to the bars, grabbed his rifle, a Leinfield 303, and stuck it right in his head
from behind, and was screaming at Byron to grab the fucking keys, which of course were
in this big, circular deal what-not with a whole bunch of keys, so he grabbed the keys and
opened the door.
Michel wrapped the hair of this Sikh around the gun and marched him with Byron trying
to follow, out of the cell, and across the courtyard, which is surveyed by four towers with
machine guns, towards what was B Class jail. By that time, Byron and Michel had
understood the layout of Tiha Central from the little intel, prison gossip. But Byron
couldn’t make it, he fell over, he couldn’t walk. And it was midday. The temperature, you
couldn’t even begin to imagine, so Michel reorients the very massive Sikh guy, who was
shitting himself, every two or three steps, Michel would whack him in the side, kick him
in the balls, really aggressive until he fully understood that his life was at the end of this
hair-trigger madman. Michel picks up Byron, puts him on his shoulder, with this
character, and marches the guy off to B Class. The door is opened.
What was very apparent was a lot of buzzing, from what looked to be a kind of
surveillance place behind bars, lots of people who were not in prison. And this was very
much noted, it was very frenetic, they were all forcibly gotten out of view, but there
people screaming,
“I’m a lawyer! I’m a lawyer!”
“We’ve seen you! We know you’re here! Who are you!”
So Michel was screaming out, identifying himself and Byron, and that they had been
arrested falsely, no charges, and so on. As the exiting scum lawyers, which were
marshaled out, suddenly, for the first time, people knew that they were in prison, and
where, and also that they were marching to B Class jail. There was an insurrection of
course because half the people from the cell are out and going crazy, and the whole thing
has turned into a carnival.
At the gate of B Class, the door is opened, the gun is broken and thrown away and the big
Sikh jailer runs off, urine down his trousers, and heading away from this situation.
39
B Class jail turns out to be paradise. Everybody’s got his own little house, and there’s a
servant, there’s always a low-class person who is in the jail forever who makes himself
available for a small amount of money, you get a loaf of bread a day, two eggs, and so
this was time to relax.
Immediately, Michel is on the case -- What happened to Seigle? How can they break out
of the jail to complete the mission, what to do, what to do, what to do.
This went on for about three weeks. There was a guy in the jail who was an unbelievable
masseuse who fixed Byron’s feet, very very gently every day in hot water, and massaging,
and pulling it back, and at the end of three weeks, they were looking semi-civilized. The
guy who was doing this had been in the jail for a long, long time, thirty years, he thought,
because he had absconded with his true love who happened to be underage and not
approved from a different sect and he ended up in prison, and he didn’t even know if he
was legally allowed to get out of the jail but he had found a way of living in there and
being a servant and so on and so forth, and he really didn’t know where to go or what to
do so...
In the jail of course they had opium, and hashish and God-knows-what-else to smoke,
and big sunflowers, and flowers, and a tropical kind of garden affair, it was quite
interesting and quite pleasant, and then it became apparent why the jail was so
overcrowded.
The Indian government had invaded the Sikh godwara in Chandichowk, and instead of
the Sikhs fighting against the Indian army, they volunteered en masse to go to prison, so
all of them were in B Class jail. And all of them were very interested in Mr. Michel sam
and Mr. Byron sam, and very famous people, and my God, what to do and, very nice
party and I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else who went
to your party and you are very close with very important people in our Sikh community,
and how can we help you, and...
So they arranged to speak with this low life lawyer called Mr. Korana. Mr. Korana was
meant to go and approach the court and ask where the charges were, etcetera etcetera,
which he did, very quickly. And a couple of days later, Michel and Byron were again
shackled and taken to the processing cage, which is a long kind of series of hallways of
bars and taking hours and hours and hours, in the midday sun, to get through, and they
decided that they would bring this servant guy out of jail. They found out that he could
leave whenever he wanted really. So he was being processed as well to exit, and Michel
and Byron were to be taken for arraignment at the court and official charges preferred.
There was still enormous hostility and aggression targeting the two of them and as a
demonstration of what was to come, they order two of the beefiest guards to climb up to
the top of the railings in these narrow corridors, and they ordered the servant to bend over
and grab his ankles, and they both dropped together on his back and broke his back, and
forced him to crawl with a broken back until he got outside of the prison, just as a spiteful
40
statement to Michel and Byron.
Basically this whole setup and processing procedure was made to take a very long time
so this demonstration of spite could be executed, and lo and behold, Michel and Byron
are thrown into a police bus, a jail bus. They are the only people there. They are in
shackles, this time, chains around the hands but not behind the back. And inside the van
are fifteen of the most aggressive wardens from Tiha Central Jail, one of whom was the
Sikh who had pissed himself and lost face.
The moment this thing took off from the jail, they began their attack with sticks and
batons and God-knows-what-else, and it was become insufferable, impossible to manage,
even though both of them were fighting back like crazy. Until finally, Byron got hold of
one of the batons, and started fighting back at the leg level, getting them down on the
ground.
They arrived at the court at Janpath, which is the beginning of the Luchens part of Delhi,
again covered in blood, all the clothes that had been washed clean and white for the
appearance were now covered in blood and everything. But by the time the bus arrived,
there were fifteen jailors either unconscious or broken but lying on the ground in a heap,
and Michel and Byron, absolutely fucking victorious getting out of this fucking truck,
kicking the bodies out of the way, in fact the shackles had proven to have been extremely
useful instruments, especially in this kind of strangulation process, and hitting with two
hands. They hadn’t anticipated this kind of response, and being Indians, they were all
cowards, so by the time a couple of them capitulated, the rest were trying to beg for calm
and neither Byron nor Michel were interested in the slightest in letting any of them live.
And at this point they didn’t care if they killed them all.
They walk into the court for the hearing for the preference of charges, and the police
prosecutor is there, and he announces twenty-two charges against the two of them, but
twenty-four against Byron. The charges against Byron were being a spy during time of
war, operating a covert army on Indian territory, smuggling guns, attempted murder of
the chief of the Indian police force, grievous bodily harm to three of his subordinate
officers, one of whom will never walk again, the Number Two of the Indian police force,
possession of drugs, bla bla bla, it just went on, dangerous driving, etcetera, damage to
police equipment, a whole list of everything, every single possible thing that they could
throw at them.
So in the back of the court are some familiar faces. And this very smug little Mr. Korana
with a smile from ear to ear, a sleazy guy signing up as the official lawyer and bla bla bla.
So the judge, a very areodyte Indian, no nonsense, very straight, took a look at the
condition of Michel and Byron, and asked if they had been well treated. And Michel
looked up at the judge, and said,
“Well, aside from the fact that there’s been three weeks in incarceration and no offer to
speak to a lawyer, everything’s quite all right. One could have looked at grievous bodily
harm and attempted murder and so on as normal Indian fare.”
41
And the judge was furious, and he looked at the police prosecutor and said,
“These two gentlemen are presumed innocent until proven guilty. And I never want to
see anybody appear in this court in this condition again.”
And the police prosecutor was kind of confused, because they usually collude together,
and he became nervous, and the head of the police became nervous, and everybody who
was there was suddenly alarmed. And the judge recited all the charges. And he said,
“Yes, these are rather severe charges, and we’re going to have to post bail at a very high
number.” Whereupon there was immediate protest from the prosecution.
So they had taken all the money, bla bla bla, so there was the question as to how was bail
to be paid. And then it was stated that according to Indian law, bail could only be paid by
an Indian with fixed assets.
So from the back of the court, a little voice kind of perked up, a bit drunk, a said, “I post
bail.” And bail was set at eighty thousand dollars, each person, the heaviest bail that had
ever been charged, and these were the heaviest charges ever preferred against foreigners
since the independence of India. And of course the bail had to match. And this little voice
was Seigle. Seigle was present at the court hearing and he posted bail by mortgaging his
farms in Kashmir. And then Seigle perked up and said,
“Well what about the car? How are they going to drive around? You can’t arrest the car.”
And it seemed so ridiculous at the time. So Seigle insisted that the car be returned. And
the judge spontaneously said, “Very well.” And increased the bail by something like a
thousand rupees to get the car as well, which was nothing. He used a term, “Jamatalasi.”
Jamatalasi meant everything that was in the car, the whole car, and everything. All of the
possessions had to be returned. As it turned out, Michel’s passport and Byron’s passport
were in a bag in the car. And although they had dismantled the car and found spaces in it
where guns could be smuggled so they made all this bla bla bla about all that, they had
itemized everything, and it had all to be put back in the car under this term jamatalasi. So
by an enormous fluke of extreme Indian police incompetence, they returned the
documents that were inside this bag, in the car.
So bail having been set, shackles were removed, the court hearing was over and there was
no fixed date for a trial. The police begged for time to put their case together, bla bla bla,
and the lawyer, the little street lawyer, was saying “No! We must have the trial very
soon!” Anyway, it was a joke.
Michel And Byron are now out on bail. This was a remarkable transformation, and Seigle
immediately moved them back into his house, and told the story as to what had happened.
He had fired the sirens, locked up the guys in the laundry baskets, sent them down the
laundry chute, and nobody appeared. They were unconscious, and they didn’t know what
to do with them. They were in the laundry baskets, still strapped in. So they knew that
42
they were going to wake up, so they were spraying chloroform into their faces through
the laundry baskets, not knowing really how much they should give them, and the Mukta
Bihini drove them out into the middle of the countryside, kept them completely
unconscious, took them out of the baskets, and left them in completely different places a
hundred miles outside of Delhi, and deserted them, left them unconscious. So they kept
them out for a long time, it was a pretty dangerous thing to do, it was unclear as to what
really happened, as they never resurfaced again. But, they did get their money. And there
was much more money left than anybody had thought. So since there had been a failure
and they could never be taken to be tried, the presumption was that the Governor of
Calcutta was true blue, that they wanted Michel or Byron to go do the negotiation for the
transfer of the money etcetera, so it was very good that they had their passports.
Much to everybody’s chagrin, the day after their release, there was one word in red on the
front of all of the Indian newspapers. WAR. Pakistan and India went to war.
So nothing could happen until the war was finished and so everything was on ice.
Byron and Michel, living with Seigle, decide that they have to take some of this money
which was given to them by Seigle, and return the rest of it to M.T. Ias, in good faith,
because having completed the mission, and to start the program of regenerating the
parties, and the flow to make money, during which time, Karati Lal made himself present.
He appeared at Seigle’s house, shortly after the issue, and made it known that he had a
couple of mafia guys, Sam Biriani and Kishul, and these two guys were handling a lot of
the rip-offs of travelers cheques and cash from foreigners, using people like Kevin. They
made an offer to Kevin to come and work for them so that he would go and befriend a
foreigner, say his uncle’s got a much better rate in the bank, he can take them into the
bank, and then walk out the other side with signed traveler’s cheques and rip them off.
The same thing with passports. And he also made it very clear that they were going to
stick with the charges, and they were going to be reduced if they received payments, so
on and so forth, this could all be handled in a commercial way. But he gave a very severe
indication that it was not going to be cheap.
So, not trusting the judicial system in India, Michel immediately thought, “Okay, well
let’s pay off these fuckers and get this thing done in the right way, get the charges
dropped.” And at the same time, a parallel program was being considered to get some
serious lawyers to look at the case to see if it could be quashed, so Michel had to contact
his father, who was the Lord Chief Justice of Great Britain. And likewise, Byron had to
contact his.
Well, it’s wartime, and there’s a blackout every day, and the blackout continued, and
instead of flying the planes across the town, on the horizon, if you went up to the top of a
tall building in Delhi you could see the shooting on the front, it was the whole, entire
west of India. The front line was apparent, it was glowing. War was afoot, people were
getting killed, en masse and it was a major, major war. So there’s a kind of tension in the
atmosphere, also a kind of moment of, under these circumstances, extraordinary things
become kind of normal. There’s an optimism as well as a concern, the two seem to run
43
parallel.
And so, Michel and Byron start congregating every day as they used to do at a coffee
shop, and working out all of the different procedures and the different channels, they
were going to use to get this and that and the other done. And they basically had it set up.
They would use the Kishul-Biriani vehicle to pay off Karati Lal, and hopefully get it
squashed. They were very pissed off that Kevin had volunteered to join this cheque ripoff
scenario, but that kind of kept him away, they sent him to Bombay very quickly. And
both Byron and Michel were somewhat sympathetic towards Kevin, on the other hand, he
had been the screw in the works that had fucked up the big deal so he wasn’t very popular
with them either. And they kept enough money from this first installment that had been
retrieved by Seigle, to pay off Seigle, any costs that he may have incurred because Seigle
had the money when he put up his farms. So he was compensated royally.
And he was very enthusiastic about the next party, that Michel and Byron get back to the
social business, because this was where he got his thrill. And since Seigle, in his decadent
universe, in this very beautiful place that he lived, was serviced by these unbelievably
beautiful women who had perfected the art of fucking to such a degree that it was part of
a ballet dance. They were ballet dancers that danced erotic and evocative sensual dancing,
and would actually fuck you. There was a whole kind of seduction thing but they did it en
masse. So five or six or ten or fifteen of them would all play a role in the seduction of one
person, or many. And they were beautiful looking girls. And it was Seigle who was their
sponsor.
Seigle thought that Michel and Byron should include something more outrageous at
another party because he understood very clearly that from the initial kind of posturing of
Michel...
Seigle’s girls came from not another cult, but from a school which is an ancient tradition
of seduction, sex, they practice pussy movement, dance and elegant portrayal of their
own sensuality, they strip extremely beautifully and they’re all incredibly good looking
women, ranging in ages from about forty to sixteen. All of them have a very particular
dance kind of costume, made of a very fine silky shimmery mesh, but extremely
expensive, which is see-through so you can basically see through the layers what’s
underneath but as each layer comes off you can see it more clearly it’s as if it’s coming in
focus. As they remove their clothing, they’re always approaching their target in a very
specific way, and by the time they undress the target and mount him, it’s all part of the
procedure, it’s part of the dance.
And they’re all barefooted, with Bombay mango breasts, they pluck their pussy hair, they
are completely naked, you only see the lips of the pussies, and nothing hanging down, the
pussy is something that is really, extremely well-managed. They have unbelievable pussy
control as part of their technique and training, and they can sit on you and just maneuver
their pussy muscles, without any other movement, and bring you to climax. That’s one
particular technique. They are just extremely professional hookers and they do this in a
kind of geisha-type manner so it’s very impersonal in a way, but very warm and much
44
much nicer than this whole concept of geisha; and very in a way surprising, you wouldn’t
imagine that they would go the whole way because it’s such an extraordinary dance, it’s
very professional and you would perceive this as a performance. So Seigle thought this
would be very interesting to incorporate in the next social gathering.
Picking up the pieces, this time, all the money that had been stolen by Karati Lal, he
thought that was the end of their money. However, he didn’t know, as it turned out, who
had esconded, and didn’t automatically presume in the cross-current of information that
any of the money that they had on them had filtered back to the lads, so he was beginning
to put pressure, he wanted them to start doing illegal gold, deals, running his mafia whatnot,
and they resisted, but had to be kind of nice to him, so they spent some time with
Kishul and Sam Biriani, and listened to what they were saying, and then came a problem.
In the process of this organization, everything was kind of upbeat, but Michel’s English
passport was running out of time and had to be renewed. And a passport was a very
important thing to have at that time, in case the shit hit the fan, finally, to escape.
Contacts had been established with the Princess of Nagaland, Tiala Massan, who was a
close friend of Byron’s, and the Princess of Bhutan, Premala, they hung out together, they
were kind of like jet-set, crown jewel-bearing royals who liked to fuck and at that
particular moment in history, Michel had been introduced to Tiala and they were hitting it
off like crazy, fucking in every different spot from here to kingdom come, she was a wild
Naga princess, and Premala was a little more dainty.
Michel and Byron were communicating this entire story in a saga that was written down
in a kind of cartoon poetry. Michel was in incredible graphic artist, so he would do the
illustration, and each of the protagonists who Michel and Byron wanted to keep under
wraps was given an animal, and this particular animal, tigger and whomever else, these
animals were drawn communicating with each other with these words underneath, and
there were so many different channels being approached to this freedom program, as well
as all of the different deals that were going on, and they had gone into the habit of doing
this every day because it became too intense to discuss it openly between Michel and
Byron. It was just such an enormous undertaking to keep track of every different thing
that they were doing.
It seemed like a more appropriate way to discuss things, especially when they came to
disagreement.
Michel, very early on in the game, submitted his passport to the British Embassy for
renewal and it was rejected. It took about ten days for him to realize that something was
going wrong. So he got his passport back, but the British government decided that they
didn’t want to renew it this time, possibly, unless he went to England. But they put up a
snow job, it was very strange.
As it turned out, in the party circuit, there was this incredibly beautiful girl called Felicity
with very big tits, seventeen years old, and Byron had the hots for her. A real party girl, a
Libra. So the party girl had been targeted because her father was the chief spy at the
45
British High Commission New Delhi, the Third Secretary, and she was at the front desk
at the embassy, dealing with passports and visas and things like that. So Byron decides to
use his charms and invite her to dinner, and then to the country, and to Armurra, and very
shortly she had fallen head over heels in love with him, but she had a lot of admirers, and
she had been sought after by everybody, and she had been quite generous with her favors
up until this particular moment. There was a lot of male friction surrounding this woman
who was clearly enjoying it all, but in a way she was very innocent.
The story with this girl is a unique, particular channel. She had had a boyfriend who was
quite an interesting guy, an Indian writer and very very sweet man, very good-looking.
He and the girl and Byron were all getting together in different gatherings, different
parties, so there was a constant flow of these upper echelon Indians, including Shmial
Rawli whose father was the general in charge of the East Indian Army forces, and a lot of
players in this game. And of course there were all the foreign diplomats, the spies, and
the weirdos, and some of the upper echelon hippies, a very big kind of party mix, two- or
three hundred people in Delhi and a couple of hundred more in Bombay, not so much in
Calcutta, it was very much a Bombay-Delhi type of Beijing-Shanghai type thing.
A few days before the seduction program was implemented, this girl’s boyfriend had told
her he would come and pick her up; and he was riding on his motorcycle and he was
killed, he had hit a car -- dead. But she had experienced him arriving in her home. She
went to open the door and there was nobody there. And she felt this eerie sensation and
got on the telephone, and discovered that he had been killed, and she was rather freaked
out by this.
And she had decided to attend the ceremony, of the burning of the body, and then the
scattering of the bones, and she kept some of his ashes. And she felt that she had been
haunted by this person. And she felt rather guilty of all of her sensual transgressions
which weren’t multiple but there had been a number of them. She was not a virgin and so
she had just discovered an orgasm, and was exploring all this because these were the free
love days and she had a lot of catching up to do, from her English public girl’s school
upbringing.
So she had invited Byron to go pick her up at her family home at around seven o’clock in
the evening. And he arrived with Michel, and she invited them in. And he would look at
her, and she would start sitting on things that were higher and higher up, like first of all a
chair, then the corner of the sofa, and then finally on the top of a wardrobe. She was very
attuned to the notion that Byron was going to make a move. Michel had evacuated to the
party at around nine o’clock because this kind of dance was going on, a lot as the story
was being recounted as to why the two of them weren’t so terrible after all, there may
have been a lot of publicity but they were real people, and this whole thing was a setup
and so on and so forth, and she was becoming really nervous. She said,
“There’s more to this story than you know. My girlfriend’s father is in charge of
communications and all of the secret communications you were transmitting because of
the war situation via the embassy radio, and he being the embassy radio operator, were
46
not being sent. None of them had been sent.”
At that time, the British foreign office had stepped into the game, and on the telephone,
Byron had called his father, and his father said,
“Listen. Don’t let them know you have any access to money. Go back to prison. Keep
Br’er Rabbit’s advice. Keep your head down and follow through because as this war
progresses, they’re going to have to release all foreigners and repatriate them under the
treaty and that is the expedient thing to do.” And he hung up the phone.
Byron’s father was pretty sophisticated and had a very senior career in the early British
Intelligence which was essentially military intelligence, and clearly would have known
everything about Felicity’s father, who he was, etcetera etcetera, and had an ear to the
ground as to what was really going on. Byron’s father and mother were now living
separately. They weren’t divorced but Byron’s father was in Scotland and his mother was
in London. So when he called his mother, thinking it would be a good idea for some
communication and for some backup cash in case some things went wrong, she was very
odd on the telephone. She said,
“Listen, you’re making a big drama about all of this. You’ve only been arrested for drugs
and why don’t you go plead guilty and get off? Don’t do this anymore, what is this big
drama?” Bla bla bla bla bla...
And she said she was in constant contact with the foreign office and they’d even sent a
gentleman whose name was the same as Byron’s father’s to talk to her and to modify her
and to keep her calm.
And Byron was saying,
“What the fuck are you talking about? Don’t you read the newspapers?”
“Oh, don’t create drama, we heard that you were running around, making these big
stories. Just stay calm.”
Michel had talked to his father on the telephone, who was much more forthcoming than
the first communication. That was that he would set up liaison and find the three top
Indian lawyers, Anandas, Gupta, and Saga, the Perry Masons of India. He did this
through the Masons, which he thought was a trustable channel because everything else
could have been corrupted one way or another.
So Byron, in the middle of all this, thought to himself, Shalvanka, the Indian ambassador
to Moscow and Vietnam. He should write him a letter because of this strange story about
communications.
Felicity had just revealed that these communications that were meant to be sent secretly
via scrambled radio from the embassy, were not being transmitted, which was telling the
47
whole saga as to what was going on, seeking assistance, both to Byron’s father and to
Michel’s father. So Michel was kind of spooked by this, there was something odd going
on, the passport thing, etcetera. And Felicity was moving further and further away, until
finally Byron got up and grabbed her and kissed her, and she melted into nothing and
made love with him in her parent’s house in the living room spontaneously and very
dangerously not long before dinner. She afterwards promptly got dressed, grabbed him by
the hand and they ran out of the house to go to the party. No condoms, no pill, nothing,
and she clearly enjoyed herself a lot, and Byron knew he had the fix in.
The very next day, she and her girlfriend decided that they didn’t know what was going
on, she was in love with Byron and the other one kind of fancied Michel, and it was very
topical, they were the party boys, they were going to get in there somehow and do their
bit. Felicity went looking for Michel’s passport and couldn’t find it in the embassy
anywhere, so she issued him a new one without any support, had it stamped, etcetera
etcetera, with all the data that was correct, and brought it to Byron as a present the next
day.
And she confronted her father as to why none of this communication was being delivered,
and he was absolutely outraged and wouldn’t speak to her, etcetera etcetera, and there
was a big argument, and finally she started talking to the mother, who was very frustrated
that her husband was never promoted to ambassador. And Felicity had discovered from
Byron that the status of First Secretary was also the Chief Intelligence Officer of the
embassy. The mother being rather socially conscious, and the person with the money,
decided to nail the husband, who was drinking a bottle of gin a day, maybe two, he was
an alcoholic. At dinner, she confronted him with the question.
“Is it true that you’re a spy?”
Whereupon he nearly vomited over dinner and turned bright purple and stormed out in a
half. And being drunk, Felicity noted that his red briefcase has been left in his study as he
left the house. And she broke into it, and there she found all the transcripts of the
communication, and Michel’s original passport. So she stole them and gave them back,
and demonstrated clearly that it was her father who had been obstructing this process and
there was something therefore definitely from Whitehall that was insuring that none of
this communication or that none of this information would leak.
So Felicity is now having a mad affair with Byron, and Byron is actually totally into it,
and practically has forgotten the blonde bombshell who is in Denmark with all the 20,000
some-odd photographs, all the film being developed by her father, the head of Kodak
there.
A schism in the Felicity family has been effected, she refuses to stop seeing Byron, her
father is getting totally freaked out, and knows that the daughter has broken security for
him, very dangerous, the mother is threatening to report him as an alcoholic, and then
because he’s never been made ambassador, and the whole thing was falling right into
Michel and Byron’s laps in the most perfect way. But now they know that there ain’t no
48
support from the British Embassy, very strange stuff from the foreign office,
communications really shut down, they’re being serviced and Byron’s mother is saying,
“No, no, don’t talk on the telephone, you know how telephones are...” and when this
character is coming from the foreign office every day and talking to her and so on.
Time goes by preparing for the next great party. In the meantime, business is happening,
this one that one, and round the clock, but it’s pretty intense, every day, there’s a new
revelation in the Indian press, mentioning spies, the police are announcing different
things that they’ve done, and things that they found, and that the charges are not going to
be dropped, and they hired Anandas, Gupta and Saga, the top law firm in India, and this
is all now amplified.
Michel and Byron were still living in the ancient Asoka king’s palace of sorts, which was
Seigle’s house. It was very very beautiful but kind of run down, at the heel, Seigle was
now an alcoholic and it was ancient, part of his family inheritance, but with all the
servants and was an extremely posh place to invite someone to come. So anybody that
would want to do business would come there. And it was all done very much in the old
Raj way, with the handshake as the deal, and these things were happening from all sides
of India, from abroad and so on. Michel had this genius brain, and knew this one needed
that one to get there, and they’d be brought together, and everybody would always pay.
And they would happen very fast, and they were very simple business things, unlike
today’s kind of universe of complexity. People wanted to make business and there were
very rich Indian families, and Indian industrial families like the Billahs that could do this
that and the other, and they produced this that and the other and there was some character
elsewhere that would want something and they’d be put together. And because it was the
kind of the circle of social what-not, there was a lot of social competition to get to know
this that and the other, and of course this great excitement about the charges being
preferred and there was polarization for and against by certain very clear-cut political
lines, the Governor of Calcutta making objection that this was all a farce put out by
someone, he was to do the exchange. And he being communist, and the whole thing was
being polarized in every which way one could imagine. So a lot of people, those being
ambitious commercial people, would approach Michel and Byron for the contact to this
one, that one and the other one who they knew Michel and Byron knew. So most of the
business was being done domestically with an ambitious unconnected, up-and-coming
would-be, and people were willing to pay and the money was circulating. It wasn’t vast
amounts of money, fifty, sixty grand, two hundred grand, this that and the other but it was
happening all the time nonstop. And they had to generate money to pay off this fucking
Karati Lal and cover all the bases, etcetera etcetera.
The next party, which was staged to reinvest into the aura something to compete with this
black shadow that had been kind of cast by the arrests, and to bring it back to its height
again and to be a real killer. So Michel and Byron initially anticipated doing this at
Seigle’s house, which would have been a great place to do it, but not flashy enough. It
would have been really fabulous for blue blood Europeans if they were the people
coming, but this had to impress across the board. So something new and flashy was
49
needed, hence Bicky Oberoy’s house was chosen. And Bicky had just built this enormous
house, he had a garage with two hundred cars, each one an antique, and which had been
refurbished to the original, there were Maharajas and such, incredibly exotic gardens, and
he was willing to sponsor some of the costs as he had done before at the previous
escapade.
So again the party was, all of them, the Maharajas and such and everybody coming so it
was kind of a big event and then some serious Americans, some serious Euros, and some
royals, and it was staged perfectly, but with the come-fuck-me girls and the dance routine,
and phenomenal music and a great setup for sound. Incredibly dramatic lighting, mostly
with flames, throughout the entire grounds and enormous dinner, basically a dinner-dance,
and much more formal than the first one, and at the same time, much more oriented for
the specific reason, and that was to make money. In the beginning, the first one was just
happening, all on the posturing of Michel. And nobody knowing where it was going to
land up, and everybody was so stoned all the time, leading up to that particular moment,
but if it happened it was fine, if it didn’t so what, it just happened to all click together and
synergize. This one was a studied program. There were formal invitations sent out, bla
bla bla bla bla.
Again, everybody who was invited RSVP’d. And then it was on. Michel had very
specific notions as to what kind of business was going to be transacted including political
business, and the embassy people, the ambassadors, their wives, it was just going to be a
fucking shocker, because nobody knew about the girls who were going to come fuck
them and at a certain point, Michel was seriously contemplating spiking all of the
champagne glasses with LSD. LSD in liquid form that would be dropped into the bottom
of every single glass just to make sure this was going to be a rockout. The big cakes that
were cut into little pieces, all of them had hashish, just as a gesture, which was something
repeated hereafter, after the end of the first end.
The party was so lavish, and so well-catered, and with all of Seigle’s administration of all
of the different kinds of waiters and Maitre D’s , and God-knows-what, and it was really
well-done in an Indian sense, and everyone was dressed in the perfect uniforms with the
turbans and incredibly gracious affair to which half the world showed up. Again,
discreetly, as this was happening in India, where everybody knew it could be extremely
wild but Delhi’s diplomatic communication was like Vienna. Everybody would talk to
everybody because nobody would believe a word anybody was saying but it was kind of
like the central gossip of Asia where things could be communicated.
It was wild, mad, there were lots of elephants at this party and an unbelievable number of
women, and everybody looking extremely glamorous, everybody blitzed out of their
brains, it lasted three days, again. It ended up as one mad sexual orgy, Bicky Oberoy’s
wife trying everything she knew how to persuade Felicity to sample one-on-one girl sex.
She was either trying to get her to fuck a girl in front of her, or for her to fuck her at the
same time. It was just incredible extravagance at every level that you could not possibly
imagine.
50
You could not exceed the reality by stretching it in every way. It was a detailed party,
sponsored by somebody who owned the largest hotel chain in India, a very socially
ambitious guy at the time. Organized by Seigle who ran all of this stuff in an elegant way,
basically with his eyes closed, it was very easy for him, and it was very easy to do this.
They only thing they didn’t have that Michel and Byron had was the guest list. And that
drew everybody, and one, on top of the other, on top of the other, and then the
percolating information flow, so the party happened. In fact, this one cost a lost of money.
There were three days of debauchery and psychedelics and coke and opium and all of
which was being served in lavish style, in a free-for-all, and eight ounce jars of crystal
coke were poured into these very very beautiful silver dishes and there were hundreds of
them all over the place. Everybody was gazonked up to gazunky. There were these nubile
boys, all oiled with their little kind of diapers on Indian style, walking around with a
coconut flame and making the opium pipes for whomever, and it was just total and utter
mayhem, but in such elegance. And there were people getting lost, and people being
found, people fucking all over the place, and by the second day they were coming back
for more, there were people with eyes opened wide with pupils the size of their heads,
and things were becoming again, never out of control, never any theft, everything was
cleaned up afterwards so the next day it didn’t look like Dresden after the bombing,
which it could easily have done, everything was cleaned and mopped up and the servants
were running around and taking care of everybody’s little needs, if they needed a car or
this and that. It was just nonstop, it just went on and on, and they had to extend the
program from the second day, because they hadn’t planned a third day so they had to
circulate information to everybody and where they were staying and when they would
come back, and such, it was kind of like a long wedding weekend.
And at the end of this, Michel thought it was enough of the party. It was even too much
to consider making any more money, time for a holiday.
Felicity was working the embassy and couldn’t leave, so Premala, the Princess of Bhutan,
had a strong bounce for Byron, since Tiala had migrated in view of Felicity to Michel,
thought it was her turn. The idea was that this would be a real holiday for a couple of
months, and during which time, Anandas, Gupta and Saga, who were constantly
pressuring Michel and Byron to plead guilty. They would handle anything that came up
with the cause, and if there was any way of communicating, and the idea was they were
going to go to Goa, where Byron had a house. And so Premala and Tiala appear, the day
before the departure date they had flown in from wherever they were. Tiala had been
zipping around with Michel, so they appear really unbelievably overstocked for a holiday.
And between the two of them, about fifteen suitcases and a lot of retinue.
Felicity was extremely sad that she was not going to be invited, and couldn’t join anyway,
but she had done her bit and she was incredibly popular. And there was this one
American character who was doing everything in the world to seduce her so Byron
thought it was okay, she had served her purpose, and she was a friend now anyway as
well as a lover but he knew that he had set the thing up. Although there was a really nice
energy between them he couldn’t let it ride.
51
Having set up the lawyers, Anandas, Gupta and Saga, the day before departure, Michel
approached Byron and said,
“Listen, how can we trust these north Indian lawyers? They’re going to get paid anyway,
they know they will because of our parents. So if nothing else, it’s a much easier job to
tell us to plead guilty.”
It was necessary to hire another lawyer. So Michel, in talking with a number of people,
discovered that there was a real heavyweight form the south of India who would have no
contact with these Delhi Perry Masons, but who had fought the government and won on
every level and he was really feared. His name was B. K. Achara. And B. K. Achara had
the credential of never having lost a case, and challenged the government on every
different corruption thing, and so on and so forth, but he was going to cost some real
money, that had to come out of the expense account. And whatever was coming in was
being spent anyway. There was no trust at all with the Biriani, Kishul, Karati Lal mafia.
And as time went on, the charges were not being dropped, and they were extorting more
and more and more. And they had Kevin under basically arrest, he was working like a
dog, not making any money and doing one ripoff after the next after the next, and he and
Byron spoke occasionally on the telephone, since he had to appear whenever a court
hearing would come along. And so they had to be in touch and it happened that all the
hearings were all postponed by Michel and Byron because they didn’t want to plead
guilty, they wanted to fight this thing no matter what, and no matter what kind of
protestation was coming from England, everybody saying to go to court and that it was
all going to be okay. It just didn’t feel right, there was something really wrong. And
nothing could be fixed.
Then there was an echo that Byron had and that was basically insinuated by M. T. Ias
Hussein and that was the Americans and the Indian government had very definite reasons
to keep all the information about what had really gone on in Bangladesh and the mass
genocide quiet, and in the international press they were writing five thousand people or
twenty-five thousand people killed, when it was much more in the region of half a million.
And this was clearly being sanctioned by the foreign editors and the bureau chiefs of
Newsweek, Time, etcetera. And so in analyzing this situation, it was plausible to imagine
that there was a political agenda being played around this whole thing to shut up the
central theme in a great fear because M. T. Ias was the head of the Mukta Bihini and the
Mukta Foush, and Byron had actually been appointed his deputy commander. So there
was another layer of speculation as to what might be going on in which case it would be
very serious. The Americans had supplied all the equipment to the West Pakistani Army
and was perpetrating this genocide, and therefore everything would be hushed. The
Indians had another agenda, they wanted to invade Bangladesh under an excuse to do this,
that and the other. And who knew if the English were supporting this American design,
and in fact, were somehow colluding from which time on nobody knew, except that they
made it very difficult for Michel to get his passport, and the communications had been
changed, and very weird words coming out of England from both parental sides and very
little communication at the insistence of the Foreign Office. So the whole thing smelt like
52
a setup in various different channels and something else was going on. And B. K. Achara
was going to be the guy to find out why Anandas, Gupta and Saga wanted the guilty plea,
especially in view of the serious nature of these charges. That was orchestrated the day
before departure.
They got on a plane from Bombay, and decided that they would take a lateen sailed
sailing boat, one of the slow beach-to-beach sailing boats, to Goa, just to relax, during
which time, Tiala and Premala were fucking like rabbits and living like princesses on
board an ancient lateen sail lug boat. Actually like one of those Arabian boats, quite
quick. But being served by their retinue, and everything kind of taken out of Shahar Izadh
and placed in another Shahar Izadh with all the attitudes and the indifference to the
circumstance and the pomp and ceremony being just there and sex being the primary
driving force, drugs as well. And Byron realized that Michel was kind of overdoing it, he
wasn’t sleeping. He was becoming very agitated, really overdoing it with the coke. And
he had been an acid man, never really ventured into the harder drugs, that being Byron’s
specialty, and going down. And in the morning he was plugging a little guli of opium up
his ass and doing three or four grams of coke and Tiala was joining him and they were
just constantly flitting around.
So they got to Goa. They moved into the house, everything was set up, it was very nice,
they had a big holiday. And then on the front pages of the newspaper, it was declared that
one of the three spies had confessed guilt, in a court appearance, and was fined a certain
amount of money, but let off of all charges against him dropped because he was
cooperating with the police, and had testified against the other two spies, etcetera. And
Byron had to get to a telephone quick, and called up Delhi. Delhi said there was no
problem, if the guy goes to court and pleads guilty, that doesn’t mean you have to plead
guilty, don’t worry, enjoy your holiday. Then the next day, it said that the other spies
broke bail, missed the court appearance, this that and the other, it was all speculation that
this had happened, so the speculation was that they would be arrested wherever they were,
because they hadn’t appeared with the other guy in the court appearance where he
pleaded guilty and the charges dropped against him. So he pled guilty to a much lesser
charge, and was of course let off. But he had appeared at the trial, and Byron and
Michel’s lawyers had not bothered to contact them to tell them that there had been a trial,
and they didn’t even know, so this was getting weirder and weirder and the fix was
getting in so Byron turned to Michel and said the holiday was over.
The night before, a large number of jewels containing a very large portion of the crown
jewels of Bhutan had been stolen from the house, so the police were involved, and this,
that and the other they finally found a French junkie and found the jewels on him, then
because she was an Indian princess, like a goddess to the local Indians, they threw the
guy down the well, and broke all his bones, and it turned into a major hassle. So there
was this bad feeling. And Tiala and Premala decide that under the circumstances it was a
vary good idea for them to arrange a jet that was available to Premala’s family to be
available to fly Michel and Byron out of Delhi at the drop of a hat, to Nagaland, where
they could immediately with the assistance of Tiala, be smuggled into Burma to get out
of this thing, because Burma was not part of where Nagaland, although a restricted area,
53
they could land the Royal jets there with clearance and then Burma would not be
obstructed by the Indian forces, as the war was going on.
They return dressed as women from Bombay, dressed up by Tiala and Premala, who had
decided that they could not handle first class on a train, they took a plane to meet them at
the other end, and it was, since you didn’t have to show passports, it was considered
smarter to go dressed as women from Bombay get into Delhi and go and confront the
lawyers as to what the fuck happened. How could they have allowed this thing to go.
So they arrive in Delhi, makeup running, dressed as women with two-day beards, and not
so many in those days because so many of them were rather young. And the first thing
that happened as they were kind of trying to avoid the possibility of any encounter with
any police people, in case they were indeed subject to arrest for breaking bail, the
policeman on the platform at the station, a big guy with a smile, said,
“Oh, Mr. Byron Sam. Why you dressed like a woman? Welcome back to Delhi.” So the
whole thing was kind of blown, given that there was no opportunity for a change, and
thinking possibly that this character had no idea that something had happened, continued
the subterfuge all the way to the layer’s office without going to Seigle’s house or
anywhere in case anybody saw, knocking on the door, had to wait until ten o’clock in the
morning.
Finally, the lawyers appear and they say
“Oh, what are you doing dressed as women?”
And Byron said,
“Well, we didn’t know if we were going to be arrested.”
And the lawyers protested, but this time very seriously.
“There is absolutely no problem. We of course did not accept this trial date, so you did
not break your bail. But you must set the court date within the next month, or, I’m afraid,
if you plead not guilty, it will be very bad for you, in which case you are going to have to
fight this, and it may take five years and a lot of money...”
At this point, Michel is getting agitated beyond belief. And because there’s no trust, the
two of them don’t trust the lawyers in Delhi, the only lawyer they have the slightest
credence invested in is B. K. Achara, who is saying,
“I am not understanding, why, you should plead guilty. I recommend you plead not
guilty.”
So there’s a schism there. A lot of pressure from Kishul, from Sam Biriani’s outfit, under
very strange circumstances, to leave the country immediately, because things were going
54
to come down.
So there’s this kind of pressure, and even Kishul was offering two passports, for free and
plane tickets to leave the country from Delhi.
Assurances all around that that’s not going to be a problem, but clearly, having tried to
play this trick with Kevin’s court date, to precipitate the breaking of bail, they were
trying to do something again, so suspicions roamed wild. What the fuck was going on?
What was the British Embassy and their whole, the whole midgemodge of this
construction was getting crazy and Michel couldn’t handle it.
And he was riding in a taxi from New Delhi to Old Delhi, to go to the Crown Hotel to
take a look through some of the stuff that the police had gone through to find something,
at night, and just rounding in front of the Red Fort, there’s a big corner and the taxi had
been told to drive really fast, and Michel turns to Byron and says,
“Okay, listen. I’ve arranged it with Tiala, the plane is going to leave tomorrow, and I’m
leaving.”
And Byron turned to Michel and said,
“No you’re not. We’re going to continue going until we find out what’s really happening.
And we don’t know enough yet. And you can’t leave.”
He said,
“I’m leaving tomorrow, you either come or not.”
Byron retorts to him,
“No, you’re not leaving.”
And it’s getting very serious, and he says,
“I am, I can’t take this anymore, look it’s done. I’m finished.”
And he produces the passports from Kishul, and said,
“This is the exit.”
And Byron said,
“No. We’re going to see this thing through. It’s still a complete mess but, there’s intuition
that tells me this is not the right thing to do. Don’t use these images, don’t do it.”
Michel was so freaked out, he opened the door, as the car was going around the corner at
55
forty miles and hour and just bails out. He took a look at Byron’s eyes as saw that it was
going to be fucking war. Because somebody had to hold onto this and he had become so
fucking agitated with all the coke he was taking and paranoid and freaked out.
So the next day he appears at Seigle’s house, somewhat bedraggled and said,
“Okay, we’ll hang in there.”
And there had never been any word back from the letter that was sent to Shelvanka. And
this was kind of agitating Michel and Byron a lot. He was a very close friend, and he had
arranged all this stuff, but couldn’t go an talk to Indira under any circumstances
whatsoever. So it was a kind of caulle de sac. But the intuition was go and plead guilty,
and follow the advice of the lawyers. And this intuition served us because B. K. Achara
said to them, one day, he had changed his mind. He had had a meeting with Anandas,
Gupta and Saga. And after this meeting, he said,
“You must plead guilty. You must plead guilty right away.”
So he had done a 180 degree turn on his opinion.
And Byron had this flash, that this was the only way through, it couldn’t be substantiated,
in any possible way, but if this was what had to happen, they had to trust somebody. And
Michel exceeded to this only under the governing principle that at any trial date, the
Mukta Bihini would be up in and around the courthouse, on rooftops in strategic places,
armed to the teeth, and with cars waiting, and the whole thing was to be staged as an
operation, if things went wrong, then they would extract, and this jet would be available
to fly out and so forth, but it would be a process. M. T. Ias was brought in, everybody
agreed, that this as appropriate, and that they would be there.
The next day, Michel and Byron arrive at Anandas, Gupta and Saga’s office, and said,
“Okay. Set the trial date.”
And at nine o’clock the same evening, they said it was set for eight o’clock the next
morning. So things are accelerating whoop de loop! They had the trial date, and
everything had to be organized throughout the night. Everything set up with sight lines,
this that and the other, how it was going to happen.
At eight o’clock in the morning, there was the appearance, and in walks the judge.
The judge was smiling, and he asked the court stenographer to read out the charges, and
he’s bitching about where’s the police prosecutor, where’s the prosecution, and nobody’s
there, so he said okay, here are the charges.
And Anandas, Gupta and Saga didn’t come. They sent one of their employee lawyers, a
lower lawyer, and the lower lawyer, having heard all the charges, was asked by the judge,
56
“What do you think would be a fair compensation to the Indian government for attempted
murder of the Chief of the Indian Police Force?”
And this little upstart lawyer said,
“Five rupees.” Which was about fifty cents.
Meanwhile in the court, Michel was so agitated that, at any given moment, there was the
sense that he might get up and bail as he saw this whole thing going on. And until the
judge starting making, what appeared to be light of these charges, with these ridiculous
fines, and went through the whole litany, and it was Michel who was being charged first,
and his guilty plea had to be for every single charge.
Eventually, he just couldn’t bring “guilty” out. And when it came to attempted murder of
the Chief of the Indian Police Force, he could barely say it.
And the lawyer was saying “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”
And the judge said he had to hear it from the accused because it was seen as though there
was a conflict between them. And finally everything is done.
And Michel, who was kept away from Byron, cast a glance to glance to Byron, that said
“If you don’t plead guilty, I’ll get you before anybody else does!”
Because that was the final crossover, because Byron was the person who had precipitated
this guilty phenomenon against his wishes.
So Then the charges were being read out against Byron. He was very quickly saying
“Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.” But then it came to grievous bodily harm of a
senior officer who could never walk again, this that and the other, and this charge had not
been preferred against Michel. And the dangerous driving, and this that and the other,
about five of them. And suddenly, Byron took a look at Michel, who was getting
increasingly agitated, and in a stroke of paranoia, it suddenly flashed across his face, well
it was his father who was with the Masons etcetera etcetera, everything’s being managed
on the English end of things, and his father was not in communication, having made his
statement, perhaps what was going on here was there other charges could be a real
problem for Byron, so he cast a glance across at Michel, indicating,
“You, if this is a stitch up I will get you before you can escape from this courtroom!”
And when Byron cast this glance at Michel, Michel jumps up in agitation and starts to
rush for the door, whereupon the court clerk, and the judge, say, the court is not finished,
so Michel is escorted back to his seat. And the judge now looking very serious, looks at
his watch, and asked Byron if he would plead guilty. And of course the little lawyer is
57
saying,
“Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”
And finally Byron pleaded guilty and the same bullshit for the costs and the payments,
and so on and so forth. And he bangs his gavel, and says,
“Unfortunately under Indian law, charges of this serious nature, must be accompanied
with a prison sentence. I hereby charge that you will be sentenced by this court for a
period of incarceration, until the rising of the court.”
Bang! And he hit his gavel down again, and turned around, and was on his way out,
whereupon Michel, previously a gung ho warrior, and now having lost his character in
the process of everything and the coke, having become someone who Byron wouldn’t
have invested his future in, broke the restraints from his guardians, rushes to the door,
which is now open because the court has risen, and he’s out there, holding up his arms,
and suddenly the place explodes in gunfire.
Everybody Runs in to take cover, including Michel, and the judge comes flying back and
explains that since everybody is free, what is the commotion, speaking directly to Michel.
And then everybody understood that this prison sentence was until the rising of the court.
Immediately the gunfire stops, and Byron and Michel are paraded back to Karati Lal to
perform the final fingerprinting and getting everything signed off. Karati Lal is shaking,
doesn’t know what the fuck happened. Just before the eruption of gunfire, the police
prosecutor arrived in court and was trying to attract the attention of the judge and trying
to debate,
“What do you mean, fifty rupees for the damage to these vehicles? At least fifteen
thousand!” And he didn’t know what to do, they had completely freaked, they didn’t
know what had happened. So this kind of warm glow began to resonate between Michel
and Byron, to see this Karati Lal, squirming and quibbering and he didn’t get his final
payment and this that and the other, and this had happened so quickly on the heels of
their great coup which was getting Kevin into court, that they were completely
bamboozled, they didn’t know what the fuck had gone down, and they didn’t know who
was playing what, and their careers were threatened, and this was just a farce.
So not only did he not know, but neither did Michel or Byron have the first fucking clue,
why this had happened. Why the lawyers would never talk and B. K. Achara confirmed,
so clearly somebody had to fix him but nobody knew who it was. And the speculations
were, well, it must have been Michel’s father in cahoots with Byron’s father, and they’d
done it all a long time ago, which was why from day one they were saying to plead guilty,
go back to jail, all this speculation was going on. It’s now two days before Christmas. So
another year has gone since the Christmas Goa walkabout.
Emerging, Having watched Karati Lal grovel, with a sense of enormous relief, the two of
58
them were carted off for a freedom celebration that was sponsored by Seigle to the
discotheque, Sensation, which was the one with the Tesla coil electricity, and they were
playing Ritchie Havens, Freedom, and as they were going through the streets, thousands
of people began to congregate and wave and cheer them on, because the word got out and
there was a big big consternation, the final processing took about three hours, and by that
time, all of the supporters who had been on their side, had come out, and created a whole
through New Delhi, to the Maidens Hotel. It was kind of like a rally, for support, all the
way to the Hotel, then at the hotel, there was a big fucking party, and it was all really
funny, and very spacy for the two of them, because, it was, wow, what a fucking
nightmare. And now it was all ended.
Felicity was there, Premala got really pissed off, stole the book which had become an
enormous volume, with all of Michel’s graphics, and the whole saga had been written in
this kind of pantomime.
Because it was written for her, and she kind of disappeared, somewhat to Byron’s relief,
because Felicity was such a delicious little morsel, and she had appeared right at this
moment, and kind of reinstituted herself as the Koo’s Number One. And Michel was
having some frantic arguments with Tiala because they were both so whacked out on
coke, and they were in love one second, and then out of love, and then they would hate
each other and it was all kind of messy. And then there was a phone call from Michel’s
father, and he said,
“It’s your mother. There’s a ticket waiting. Be here for Christmas.” And he hung up. And
Michel turned to Byron and said,
“It’s a ripoff, it’s nothing. It’s just bullshit. But I’ve got to go.”
This is practically the day after the celebration, which was the day of the event. They all
escorted him to the plane, and stuck him in first class, and they had jumbo jets, a new
revelation, a big fucking airplane. And he flew BOAC, British Overseas Airways, to
London. And he asked Byron if he would go with him, and Byron said no, that he wanted
to decompress and take a month off and to think about it.
And why actually leave India? India had become their home, their country, it was where
they lived. So Byron decided no, he was going to stay. He didn’t know what the
indications would be in England. He still somehow had to find out and unravel this whole
fucking mystery. So being very much spurred on with the possibility of romantic vacation
with, instead of Premala and crazy Tiala, with Felicity, Byron goes and grabs Felicity and
she informs him that she’s willing to go but this American admirer of hers, was going to
give her a very big engagement ring, with a diamond, about forty karats, and she thought
she would accept that, being a practical Libra. And also, whatever else he had to offer, in
case anything should happen, she would be able to pawn it and get out of Dodge. Because
in absconding with Byron, she was cutting off all possibility of return to parental support.
So the next day, in the newspapers, three CIA operatives were blown up in a car in Delhi,
59
and then other people who were connected to Kishul and Biriani were killed. And then
Kishul was killed. And nobody knew where any of this was coming from, and it just felt
really strange, too many coincidences and then the thinking was, maybe the Mukta Bihini
were finding out what was really going on, and they decided they were going to take this
on, that one and the other one. Immediately, Byron contacts M. T. Ias, who flies to Delhi,
and explains very very quickly and very clearly that the Americans had gotten really
pissed off with the English, the idea was that they were going to sponsor this thing in the
jail in order that this would be squashed, kept aside, and very quickly all of these
negotiations that had taken place, that it would be a good idea to just to let them rot. They
had known from into the second week, in the prison, that the two of them were there,
because they had their own way of finding out. And the Americans had made it clear that
it would be a good idea just to grease ‘em. And these other characters, had been out to
assassinate the two of them. So they were summarily removed from the surface.
Feeling extremely creepy, Byron decides to grab Felicity that night and disappear back to
Goa. That night, Felicity had been with her erstwhile fiancée, who gave her the diamond
ring, and when he fell asleep after she fucked him, she took his lynx rug off his bed, and
appeared to meet Byron with that too.
So Byron was pretty cash rich at the time, and didn’t really need her to do anything like
this, but she was kind of demonstrating her fidelity to the current bode, and arrived in
Goa, had a wonderful time. Byron starts to wind down a bit, and in a stupid gesture, shot
up some morphine with somebody else’s syringe, contracts hepatitis, gives it to her, and
she ends up in Breech County Hospital in Bombay on the critical list. He recovers very
very quickly and gets a letter from Michel, saying, look, Jeannie and Hamish, a couple of
friends of ours, Jeannie had just sold all the pubs in London that had belonged to her
family, which was all the pubs in London, and bought a big castle, stacks of fucking
money, no problem, come to England, let’s just recover from all of this, and then go back
on the next adventure after to God-knows-where.
Arriving in Bombay with Felicity, on the front pages of all of the newspapers was a
statement that Byron absconds with underage English girl, potential statutory rape, and so
on and so forth, was brought up, etcetera, so Byron calls up Felicity’s father. And speaks
to him directly. He said,
“Listen. Remember who my father is. If you don’t want to be exposed, as a spy, drop
whatever you have in mind right away because I have the testimony of your daughter.”
The very next day, after this had been communicated to the father, the father was en route
back to England out of the Embassy in Delhi, with Mother. And daughter stuck at Breech
Country Hospital not able to be moved.
And Byron gets on a plane, goes to England, and tries to arrange a medevac type plane to
bring her to England, which he achieved. But she was so unstable, she couldn’t be moved
for quite a long time.
60
And waiting for him in London is the blonde bombshell, and she appears with Michel,
and Jeannie and Hamish, and all the rest of the players, and gets driven off to the castle,
and looks around thinking, how creepy, and decides to go back to his house in Highgates,
arrives at the house and discovers that the people he had kicked out, these old rock and
rollers, years before, had broken back in and were living there, and still running up the
fucking bill. So in a fit of absolute fucking ire, ejects them all summarily and in great
shock to them, and moves back into the house, lies down, goes to sleep, waked up the
next morning with the blonde bombshell, Michel, Jeannie, Hamish and everybody
surrounding him, talking in platitudes about this, that and the other, what they were going
to do, and so on and so forth.
The blonde bombshell had been fucking Michel, which gave the excuse for the opening
of the inclusion of Felicity into the mix, and she was imported immediately with a
medevac, and plunked into a hospital in London. Byron looked after her until she could
come out, he got the Queen’s physician, who was also a naturopath, called Dr. Gordon
Latto, to look after her, and with all kinds of things like baths and herbs of some
medicinal sort, she was recuperated and romance continued full steam, and finally,
having decided not to live in the castle with the crew, Byron feeling somewhat
disaffected with this whole coke, drugs, everything, freak-out, decides to go next door to
meet with Shelvanka.
So Byron, in an inspiration, a few weeks after arriving in England, hears that Shelvanka
has returned from Moscow, and he’s invited to dinner. Without anybody else present, he
walks into Shelvanka’s house, prefacing all this by saying, upon meeting his father, and
upon meeting the Lord Chief Justice and his mother, Byron did not know what to say to
anybody because they could not explain why this guilty plea. They did not know
anything about what was really going on, at all. They had been instructed by the British
Foreign Office, by the lawyers, by this, that and the other, but they didn’t know why.
Nobody had told them why pleading guilty was going to be okay. They just trusted that
this was correct. They didn’t know that a letter had been sent to Shelvanka. And Byron
didn’t understand why Shelvanka never responded.
So he walks into Shelvanka’s house kind of pissed off that a really close friend of his, as
both Mary and Shelvanka had become, and Mary meets Byron at the door and says,
“Thank God you’re safe. Come in. And just for your information, Dr. Shelvanka has gone
through enormous concern because it took so long for you to go and plead guilty. And he
wasn’t quite sure if his classmate, who was the judge, would not be revolved out of the
circuit and could no longer preside over your case, as everybody was trying to get him
out. So please convey your respects and thank him very very much, and to apologize for
causing so much concern.”
So after all was said and done, it was the one letter that went to Shelvanka, that triggered
the whole thing, all the payments to Byriani, this that and the other, completely and
utterly off the wall, and the day after the war between Pakistan and India, Pakistan
changed its currency, so all the money was completely and utterly irrelevant, and non61
convertible anywhere, and Shelvanka then explains what had happened.
He had just gone and signed the Indo-Soviet Pact, which put the American forces and
therefore the seventh fleet, under a 48-hour nuclear encounter countdown if they did not
get out of the Indian Ocean. And having endorsed this, he was under extraordinary
scrutiny from everyone and enormous hostility, could not even risk communicating with
Byron. But had done so, through the judge to the lawyers. They couldn’t tell Byron’s
mother because she was being harassed and bamboozled by the British Foreign Office,
that was doing the work for the Americans, and trying to squelch it. Shelvanka had been
in contact with Byron’s father, but his father was shut to the neck, and Michel’s father
had also been in contact with Byron’s father and became good friends, and it was Byron’s
father who told Michel’s father, that everything was cool, and to believe what the lawyers
were saying in India.
And that’s the end of the story.