The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(14)

I headed to India, having heard tales of mysticism and philosophies which might perhaps succeed in explaining my situation where Western theology had failed. I arrived in 1953, securing a job easily as a mechanic for an endlessly failing succession of commercial airlines. Their failure rarely affected me; I could leave work on a Monday employed by one man only to come in for work on a Tuesday to find my old contract destroyed and a new, perfect copy waiting to be signed, all clauses exactly the same except for the date and name of employer. India was settling down from its partition and I was in the south, away from the worst of the bloodshed that had stained her independence. Nehru was prime minister and I found myself madly in love, first with an actress whose eyes seemed to look at me and only me from the silver screen, and then with a look-alike girl who sold fruit at the airport and hadn’t a word of any significance, who I idolised abjectly and courted disastrously. It has been observed among even the oldest of our kind that a certain biological incentive drives us, regardless of the ages of our mind. As a child I had felt only a biological incentive to grow and be intellectually despondent at the same. As a teenager I had fought depression with occupation and the conspiracies of the Hulne household. Now as a man in the prime of life, the urge was upon me more than ever before to go out into the world and challenge it like a bullfighter in the ring. I travelled in search of answers, argued with men who argued back, loved from the pit of my soul and was rejected to the bottom of my heart, and idolised Meena Kumari, Bollywood goddess, as a symbol of perfection though I spoke not a word of Hindi when first I saw her films.

Answers failed to arise from either love or God. I spoke of resurrection and reincarnation with the Brahmins, and they told me that if I lived a good and pure life, I could return as something greater than myself.

“And what about myself? Can I return as me?”

This question caused quite a stir among the wise men of Hinduism to whom I put it. I like to think that I introduced the first inklings of relativistic physics into their discourse, as academics sat up earnestly debating the question of whether resurrection needed to be temporarily linear in nature. Finally the answer came back from one wise man with a big belly and very neat eating habits who proclaimed,

“Don’t be ridiculous, English! You get better or you get worse, but all things change!”

This answer gave me little satisfaction and, with my savings from ten years repairing the same jet with a weekly different name, I moved on. China was hardly welcoming, and my timing was poor in terms of visiting Tibet, so I headed south, dodging around Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Nepal, judging my moves on the basis of where the Americans would not be invading, or a civil war was not imminently going to break out. I shaved my head and ate only vegetables, learned to pray out loud with impossible words and asked every permutation of every Buddha, from the one Gautama to his ten thousand aspects, why I was what I was, and whether this death would be my last. I acquired something of a reputation, the Englishman who knew the discourse of all faiths, who could argue with any monk or imam, padre or priest on any philosophical topic they could raise as long as it pertained to the immortal soul. In 1969 I was visited by a cheerful man with round glasses who sat cross-legged from me in my hut and proclaimed, “Good evening, revered sir. My name is Shen. I am with a concerned institution, and I am here to ask you what your intentions are.”

I was living in Bangkok at the time, having discovered that no amount of purity of prayer could alleviate the misery of tropical moulds growing in the folds of your skin during a wet jungle life. The newspapers carried stories of the government’s greatness in big, bold letters, and whispers of communist guerrillas in the hills in far smaller letters of sombre black. I did not know if I believed that the eightfold path would bring me enlightenment, but I knew that I was getting too old to believe anything else so divided my time between fixing cars in my orange robes and meditating on what I would do if I could not die.

Mr Shen, face like a polished conker and blue shirt sticky with sweat down the back and beneath his arms, pushed his glasses a little higher up his face and added, “Are you here to engage in counter-revolutionary activities?”

I had gone through a phase of cultivating wise mystic answers, but frankly one gets too old for such things, so blurted, “Are you with the Chinese security services?”

“Of course, revered sir,” he intoned, bowing from his seated pose, hands together, in the custom that is respectful for Thais addressing a teacher. “We have very little interest in this country, but it has been suggested by some that you are in fact a Western imperialist agent intending to ally with such counter-revolutionary forces as bourgeois separatist the Dalai Lama, and that your temple is a hub of capitalist subversion created to strike at the heart of our glorious people.”

He spoke all this so pleasantly that I was forced to ask, “Isn’t that bad?”

“Of course it’s bad, revered sir! It would be the kind of subversive activity that would prompt retaliation from my government, though of course,” a flash of bright, cheerful smile, “you would naturally be protected by your imperialist allies, and there would doubtless be repercussions.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, realisation dawning. “You’re threatening to kill me?”

“I would hate to go so far, revered sir, not least as I personally believe that you are merely an eccentric Englishman looking for an easy time.”