(photo from very thankable unknown source)
By Jason B.R. Maxwell
Curtin University
1607279
Reader’s note; Names in this story have
been changed to protect individuals. Yet all events are true…
Prelude
Gina Mercuzio looked like the dark free
gypsy Sam White admired. Sitting cross legged with a perfect posture on a Turkish
pillow in the St. Andrews market chai tent, her long braided black hair was dancing
as her deep true laughter took Sam’s attention like moth wings have gravity. She
had such earthy skin and a long yet elegantly rounded face which changed so
much with all the flow of her conversation. But it was her eyes, that dark certain
something beyond, opal born of some inner calm yet with sparks of fire. So when
her friend went to get another cup of chai and she started rolling what
obviously looked like a joint, Sam took her chance. “Hey do I know you from
somewhere?” Sam said with a smooth smile. “Hey maybe, I was told I have an old
soul so it’s entirely possible” - the fire had been sparked. Sam and Gina
talked and talked as easy as breezes play with gum leaves, swirling great
cosmic subjects into experiences of destiny and past lives and then switching
to gems and the resonances of certain stones. Yet as Gina mentioned a party, some deep
continental part of Sam started to move. She had heard of de’ja’vu, but this
was it, she had been here before. It was the spokes of the sun streaming past
the rainbow canvas of the tent, just like that, it was the tribal tattoos
reaching a joint towards her, just like that, it was the way Gina blurred the
rest of the world, became so immensely focussed, so intensely high definition….
It was 1979 and the purple smoky haze of the sixties had settled in all the right
pathways, valleys and oasis’s of existence in Australia. Yet for Sam, the adventure
of other existences was stirring, waiting for their wings to open…
I
“Are you an artist Sam?” – the live
mandolin and djembe music was loud, Sam’s back was turned -talking to poet friends
she had met before- yet she heard Gina’s voice even though it was barely a
whisper... “Yeah I guess, how’d you know?” “Well, it’s the jewellery you wear,
its beautiful and so unique, especially this piece…you make it yourself don’t
you?” -Gina’s heavily jewelled arm
graced up to touch her ear ring, a black oval of varnished blackwood with a
silver snake dancing through the space.
III
After the tarot cards were
scattered, after the dancing spinning fires, after the DMT with the bent
psychologists, the goldfish-stall-owner and the unemployed, the cyclone of that
nights party brought existence home again. And Sam was excited. In the dawn
crystal air, as she drove the Kinglake tractor across the red clayish dirt of
the spud fields, there was a new purpose, an intuition, an electricity in her
dreamings. It was India. That rich, vibrantly entrancing word. India. Gina had offered a free ticket and
accommodation as part of a business trip, delivering jewellery and buying gems and
clothing whole sale from Ragisthan. “Delivering Jewellery?” Her boyfriend
puffed, “to India? Sounds abit suss to me Sam…” “well, I don’t know… , Darion
said she’s legit, she’s got connections...she goes over all the time, she’s coming
here to buy a few ounces, we can trust her, we’ll ask her about it if your that
paranoid, but its India Mark! A free ticket to India, I’ll get a chance to see
the Taj Mahal, see Bagwan Ragnish, I’ll find myself Mark… and get some real
materials to work with, imagine if we didn’t have to work on the farm anymore,
imagine if I earn enough to get a studio...”
IV.
In Delhi it had just finished
raining. The monsoon rains had started
to brew its thick intoxicating soup in the air. Yet for now it was not yet
putrid, not yet mature, and as the plane doors opened the heat hit her like a
fresh steaming wall. Fredricko, the short stocky ‘other traveller’ who Gina had
twirled into her ideas of the gemstone trade, pushed past with a smile. “Wow…
warm like a womb Sam!” and it was, the womb of the eastern culture laying out
the way to her new life. Gina greeted a
tall man in a long black Turkish tunic who laughed down into his beard. She
spoke a few Indian words to him and she gave him all our bags and they jumped
in his beat up three wheeled car to get to the Motel. After they settled in, a night of smoking and
revelry began. Sam and Fredricko were told to not worry about their luggage. That
the jewellery was delivered and the customers were happy. This gave them a
sense of pride. A slightly edgy unsure pride, considering they didn’t even see
what was in their ‘luggage,’ but it was a pride none-the-less. They were smoking hashish, strong bloody
hashish, unlike any hash Sam had ever smoked, why question? The slithering
smoke relaxed her more than anything she had ever experienced. The world
blurred again, but this time Gina wasn’t there, no one was, the world had
disappeared and she was warm, content in herself, her own Indian universe. The
next day they got train tickets to Ragisthan where they would buy gems. While
Sam was waiting at the train station she experienced her first form of culture shock.
It was a muddy naked man, a sadhu, or holy man, who was just standing there,
still as a statue. What shocked Sam further was that everyone was just walking
past him, women, children, just walking past as if he really was a statue. The
next day they arrived in Ragisthan and then it was on to a hotel called the Ever
Green. Once they got to the hotel Gina met a small, toothy-crooked-smiling boy
called Suja who was the most polite and well-spoken little man Sam had ever
known.. “Guud afternoon maadem … you stay with me -no problem - I will
translate for you hapilly…” Suja was Nepalese. There was a light in his eyes, a
dawn light, all of a sudden the blur that was in Sam’s head stopped. The next
day Gina took Sam and Fredricko shopping. A glimmer of the warm friendship they
all shared back in Australia appeared as amethysts, star rubies, agates, tigers
eyes, quartz, and all manner of lush nuggets and perfectly facetted stones
dropped into their hands at the cheap, lavish Bazaars. They had done it, they
had made their creative fortune in India.
V
“Hey mem saab look…” the light was
a lucid golden sunset, Suja was in the Ever Green courtyard under a tree
spinning a rope… No, spinning a snake, no, a rope… Yes, definitely a rope…
VI
The blur wasn’t gone for long. The
blur returned as they smoked again and again, ‘celebrating’ their sudden fortune
in long, silent starings and music. But where was Gina in this comfy haze, this
new Hotel womb? She kept disappearing, crossing over a cultural bridge that
over time, Sam and Fredricko began to mistrust. “What were in those bags we
carried Sam? Have you seen those people she’s been hanging out with?” “I don’t
know Freddy, it’s Gina, you know, the mystic? Quite frankly I don’t want to
know. I’m happy in my karma that way… And hey, just because they look shady
doesn’t mean they are.” It started getting hot. Really hot. The thing about
Ragisthan is that it’s in the middle of the desert, the hot staring middle eye
of India. 40 to 45 degree Australian days don’t come close to the baking, brain
frying Ragisthanian heat. Drowsy sleep came
easy. Sam’s new life was constant as a mirage. Yet as the heat rose, Sam
vaguely became aware of a tension between Fredricko and Gina. From time to time
she heard them arguing, and it sounded like the shoutings from some distant desert
war. Then one day, as Sam came back from the pool, she saw Fredricko, forehead
against the Hotel room wall with a mango lassi in each hand, mumbling to
himself… “The golden haze … can’t escape the fire… the gold… the golden trail
of blood… mara and the gold it kills….the haze of gold it kills!” And then he
dropped the milk drinks which gashed onto the floor like thick, yellow blood.
The next day the mad yet handsome sunburnt Italian was gone. Now the Motel was
a lonely oven. Gina was barely anywhere to be seen.
VII
“O by the way, can I have another
ten thousand rupee for the opium err I mean hashish, you’ve been smoking?” -like
a monster in the darkness, Sam realized she had been smoking opium. But she reasoned, monsters weren’t real now,
were they? “Sure…” she said weakly, handing over the notes. From that moment
onward, the monster had control. Gina made sure that only dreams and the hookah’s
nozzle kept her company as the money kept leaving Sam’s wallet. And yet in that hot oven, they were magical
dreams, dreams of kaleidoscopic, multi-armed gods and goddesses telling her
things, showing her great rainbow visions with whispers. And then walking
through rainbow archways, rooms where floating spheres of light came through
the eyes of lion headed men and women… Sam
woke one morning and the blur receded in that same way it receded the day she
had met Suja. The sun streamed through
the white dancing curtains, and there was Suja, smiling, yet staring at Sam
from the corner of the room with fiercely piercing eyes. Suddenly the ticking
clock, the noises from the next room, the flicking curtains all slowed and another
world came to her, Suja held up his arm, comically jutted out a finger and said
“mem sab… I’m going to show you something…” and then he rose, cross legged,
rose three foot clear from the floor.
VIII
From there things began to sink
into darkness. Because of the monsoon floods, she heard rumours of a break out
of cholera in Ragisthan and Sam was sick; conjunctivitis, dysentery, the nauseous
blur it seemed, was never going away. After a heavy smoking session to numb her
pain and nausea, she fell into a drug induced coma and experienced the height
of a near opium overdose, she knew it was so because she had felt herself leave
her body, and yet she didn’t think it was her body, when she looked down, it
was someone else in the bed.. When the drug left her, out of mercy or a sudden
lack of interest from Gina or both, she had been in that bed for two weeks. She
suddenly decided she needed to go to the toilet since that’s what normal people
did, wasn’t it? She collapsed from the effort... When she finally made it to
the mirror she got a major shock, the person on that bed WAS her. When Sam
first went to India, she weighed eight stone and yet now, from a period of
three months, she was five and a half.
After this revelation, reason came back to her. She told herself, it was
time. She couldn’t stay in the hotel with a money hungry parasite feeding her
opium…
IX
As Sam left to go to Bombay by
train, she felt lighter, as if she was leaving an old part of herself behind.
On the way, the train stopped after the rain at sunset. The smell in the air
was alive. It was all alive. Sam feared the floods had swept away the tracks.
But as she looked out she saw everything was fine. Suddenly she saw the snake
charmers, fully tribal and proud, walking across the tracks from one endless
sand horizon to the other, their oxen and their curved swords at their sides.
She realised then that that was power, for true power comes with freedom, even the
trains were transfixed…
X
“O no sorry mem sab, all we have today is daal,
japarti and rice, nothing but daal and rice, O an chai yes, we have chai, it is
very nice chai, yes very nice…” with daal, japarti and chai in front of her and
her blurry Bombay world, a cow stuck its head through the window a few foot
away from where she was. She gasped, but then she also felt blessed, she knew
these creatures were considered blessed animals and she could suddenly see the
peace in its large all seeing eyes. Unfortunately in the confusion, her new silver
bracelet had been stolen. She reasoned that she probably fed someone’s family
for a few days, so it wasn’t all bad. Even in her state she knew she was still
a fairly wealthy westerner. Every day she saw slums and filth, how could she
complain? After this experience she slowly wondered out onto the street and for
the first time she started feeling happy, still sick, still blurry, but happy.
Street performers, a husband and wife were building a huge clay dome over the
husbands head. A dome nearly a full foot thick over him as he was laying down.
When she went back three days later, he was still there, head in a clay bell in
fifty degree temperature, with no air holes in sight. It was then she reasoned
it was time to call her boyfriend. She was no street performer, she was sick. Without
any health services she felt she could rely on, she needed advice… “Go see
Gensi Lansing, he’ll look after you…” This was Marks friend who was a Buddhist priest.
He had an ashram, a holy place, in Bombay. She was saved. It was like a palace,
an artist’s white marble palace, with pillars and wide open windows where cool
breezes whispered about compassion. The happiness she felt as she left the
restaurant unfolded now like a lotus. They had the antibiotics, they had the
food, the water, it was all kindness, totally free and safe from the snakes poison
that was chasing her on the street. So the blurry world started receding,
making sense. Yet she knew she had found the place for her wings to rest, and
there was a way home…
Epilogue
After a quick trip to get her Gems
back from Ragisthan with Gina nowhere to be found, the Federal police
interviewed Sam at the airport. Gina Mercuzio was a drug runner and they were
hot on her trail. She had been importing blocks of hash to Australia, hash made
to look like bits of wood fixed behind doctor’s golden name plaques. They went
through Sam’s suitcases, her handbag, her everything. They weren’t going to let
Sam get on the plane, not until the very last minute. But all she could say was
what she knew, that she had no idea where she was, who she was, she was invisible
in that culture. But all Sam craved now was her own culture. Where things were
known to her and monsters were visible at the very least. On a stopover in
Indonesia they gave Sam special medicine for malnutrition. When she arrived
back in Australia, Mark walked straight past her because he didn’t recognise
the body that was now wondering in a new spiritual happiness. She had glimpsed
at power. She had realised that her spirit was changed at a fundamental level
and there was now truly more to this world than what was seen or talked about
in books or reason. That with freedom, we
could do things that defied logic, that skipped the A+ B that always equalled C
and reached into a deeper area of the human psyche. A psyche that led beyond a segregated
mentality, a world where the true artist existed, and with a pocket full of
gems...
Works Cited
White, Sam. Interview on India. Interviewer; Jason B.R. Maxwell, 2014.
Recording.
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