Since I don’t have a real job, my current obsession is the endless search for deep, dark pellets of meaning in my banal and self-absorbed existence.  You see, I have this nagging hunger in my seat that, it seems, can never quite be sated.  The consuming urge to bury my head in some vague, new-age feel-good flim-flam (because, let’s face it, reality is too painful and boring) has sent me to the darkest, filthiest reaches of human experience.  For example, it recently took me to the temples and “Malls” of Dharuhera.  I started off in Mysore.  Can you believe that’s the real name?  I was staying in the four star Hotel Sandesh the Prince.  It was pretty whack, as they say.  There are no five star hotels in Mysore.  And it’s no wonder.  Ugh.  After shopping til I dropped acid- which was so freekin’ strong that I couldn’t leave my room for the next few days- I finally went to the open market to see if I could find a reliable guide.  I brought a fist full of rupees (sounds pretty sexy… and I have to admit… IT IS) and started flashing that impressive wad of paper currency around whenever I saw a lonely looking, hairy young man of the boodissylicious persuasion.  Pssssssssst… I’ve got a secret: The best part of this intensely personal journey is that you don’t have to take it alone!  I had the pleasure of procuring the company of Hassan, my fierce and hungry 13 year old guide, who immediately took a shine to my wad and was very dominant and sassy in an unintelligible, foreign way.  Alls I have to say is HOTTTT!!!!!  After he met me back at Hotel Sandesh the Prince, looking sleek in his Mundu with huge erection tenting in front, he forcefully applied a cool, moist turban around my oxygen starved, blasted out cranium and bound my sagging body in the grotesquely soiled “bed sheet of spiritual awakenings.” Then, oh brothers and cistern, he put this earthly body (that I can, at age 58, barely call my own) through temptations and torments the thoughts of which turn me blue with shame and desire. (note: a modest tip will get you these recommendations. But, don’t give them too much. These swarthy buggers love to bargain!) After smoking a strange smelling cigarette that one of his street urchin friends slipped him, he collected the sheet containing my spent body and bound me in heavy rope, tying me to the back of his camel somehow. With me subdued and safely in tow, he proceeded into the valley, my body dragging about 5 yards behind that awful camel, a choleric beast that released streams of rancid gas and whose stools seemed endless as they landed on my face and chest… the sheet provided only the slightest barrier to the offal. I protested at first, quite loudly I may add, but quickly found out that Hassan, a boy of easily enflamed passions, was not someone to bicker with. When language became a barrier, he found it more effective to deliver his messages by simply administering swift shocks to my slight frame with a flat and rigid hand or a well-placed elbow. It seemed like this arrangement continued for over half the day, although at a certain point I left my body so there’s no telling how much time actually passed. I was glad that he stopped every once in a while to wet my lips with some strong smelling, foul tasting liqueur from a greasy rusted canteen; the fact that it was hot made swallowing the libation even more difficult. But liquid is liquid to the profoundly dehydrated.

We arrived at our first layover: the stinkiest most hostile hotbed of pedagogues. I must have been a little tipsy because I was dazed and horny and the first thing I thought was “I’ve died and gone to big dick purgatory”: there were old men… young men… dark men… darker men, half men half beasts. On such recognizably important spiritual plains, one is not self-conscious… thinking about bathing, or oral hygiene… which is really just a capitalistic conspiracy to sell body wash and dentistry and toothpaste and mouthwash. I was so elevated that I didn’t care if I had bats in the cave or if I had something to wipe with or if I got dysentery from swallowing all the water in that river, but I’m getting ahead of myself. My point is, such trivial matters of the flesh vanished as my true nature was reviled… er… revealed. In fact, it is sometimes these very things, petty social norms and cultural imperatives, which keep us tethered to our feet of clay. And then one day, you lift your head up, open your eyes, flare your nostrils and you can’t really tell exactly what stinks because everything smells bad and tastes awful (especially in those parts of Indag) including YOU. Despite this, I was literally passed around like a blunt at a hip hop house party. I protested once, and found myself picking up two teeth from in between a very old man’s gnarled toes. What happened to me in that spartan room with the naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling made the Kama Sutra seem vanilla and overly simplistic. I had no idea how unlimber, how INHIBITED I really was. Yikes.

The next morning Hassan threw me in the river (I don’t remember the name of the damn thing, but I do remember that it smelled and tasted like a rotten meat, urine and BM milkshake). He shouted to the sky and traced things in the air. Then, looking back at me, told me in his broken English (that sounded so juicily ethnic that it jump started my Yoni-on-the-spot!) that we were going directly to the most spiritual, but least known, of all holy places in Indag. It turns out the temple was in a remote region of the Thar Desert which is pretty much NOTHING BUT remote regions. This time, instead of being dragged in a holy shroud lashed to the back of Hassan’s camel, one of the gruff, heavy handed men Hassan had introduced me to gave me my own “baby camel” to ride as a token of thanks for being so maleable. About three hours into the next leg of our excursion, I asked him how much further we had to go. He just smiled and punched the side of his camel. The camel spit and picked up the pace. Every subsequent time I asked, over the course of the next 48 hours, his response was the same except the smile slowly evolved into a mask of rage (along with a modicum of animal lust) and instead of punching the camel, he started punching me. The very last time I asked, he chucked a rock at my head which knocked me off my poor, sweet little baby camel into the broiling sands and shot salt pellets at me using a homemade gun he produced from a basket. I guess I finally got the point when I fell unconscious.

What he never told me was that it would take us another 22 days to get to The Temple of 97 Steps.

On the sixth day out I gave up on everything… sometimes you just have to go with it by checking out of it. At that six day mark, I also realized that I had left a number of supplies behind in my rush to go blindly into the middle of the badlands of north eastern Indag with some feral sand nomad; I’d packed several pairs of yoga pants for my trip and now the extras lay in my suitcase back at the hotel. I realized that, in fact, the only clothes I had remembered were the wide brimmed gardening hat on my head (Hassan’s camel had already chewed a hole in the top of it, so it provided little protection) and the midi kaftan and yoga pants already on my body- thank Ahura Mazda they were espresso colored!

We set out from Jaipur after spending an evening in the monkey colony; we were treated most hospitably there… the best I’ve EVER been treated even stateside, I daresay. And those little beasts are rascals, matched only in mischievousness by my own guide (who routinely tied me up and gagged me with a dessicated camel turd at night when we set up camp, stating in his own primitive way that I talked too much and said nothing). Needless to say, he made me shut up real good for a solid six hours every night for thirty some odd nights- I lost track of this time as the heat, the strange liqueur he kept feeding me and lack of fresh carrot juice had left me compromised. He even fashioned, what he called, a vaysya plaga out of camel poo and woke me on several occasions by awkwardly attempting to insert it in my bento box… just kind of stabbing around with it. When in Indag, do as the mudpeople do. It was unusual, but once I got past the shock and distaste of it all, and offered my guide some gentle guidance, I realllllly enjoyed it. I just chalked it up to all being part of my mystical journey and dealt with the unusual customs that sometimes go along with inner evolution.

We arrived at the temple on day 22. With a huff and a grunt, he pushed me towards the open hole in the ground where I would take the next step… 97 steps to be exact… in my initiation. I held my breath and looked at my invisible shoes. On each step down into the temple, I prayed. I was overcome by exhaustion and dehydration; I was starving, shaky, stinky and had been routinely beaten and viciously made love to, so naturally my link to the material plane started dissolving. When I got to the very last step, needless to say I was TRIPPING MY OVARIES OFF! I had a vision that all of humanity had melted into one big mindblind puddle with thousands of liquidy arms clawing at the air, grasping frantically. Then heaven appeared above the sea of arms. I knew it was heaven even though it appeared to me like common currency and paperwork floating in space. As the paperwork fell in front of me, into the legions of grabbing hands, I looked more closely and noticed that printed in Times New Roman script on each piece of paper was a single word repeated until it covered the page. One said CAKE, another said GRANDMA, a third had the word SALES printed hundreds of times in its margins. I tried to grab some of the dollar bills that floated in front of me, but I ended up catching only a piece of paperwork with the word PAPER written on it. What? Screw this! I felt robbed and wadded up the sheet wrapping me, throwing it as far as I could away from me. I watched in horror as it landed in a small, toothy mouth that appeared in the puddle. I noticed then that there were hundreds of open, pink mouths that had appeared and now floated along with the disembodied arms. There were also eyes and huge bellies forming in this stunning slurry of humankind, all flowing together like pulpy fruit. Then, Hassan called to me. At first I didn’t listen but he started firing the salt pellets at me again so I headed back up that ephemeral staircase. There’s nothing that wrecks a divine vision like the sting of a salt pellet as it enters your neck.

Such meditation and prayer will undoubtedly inspire one towards peckishness. But those poor sods over there don’t even have a HEALTH FOOD CO-OP, and, being bulimic via veganism, I wasn’t going to eat those brownish sand grubs… at least I thought they were grubs, but Hassan actually forced a handful of them into my mouth while I was talking about my last therapy session so I barely had time to react when he kept his hand clamped tightly over my lips. After about fifteen minutes of him cursing at me in Dogri and rapping me along my spine with the knuckles of his free hand, he took his malodorous palm away from my mouth. I doubt that he ever washed his hands; they smelled of garlic, my lady parts (?), curry, camel saliva, smegma and human excrement. I immedagtely vommed my guts out all over my already nasty yoga pants. It was so horrible and illuminating that I am forever changed. I didn’t eat the rest of the time in that god forsaken desert and ended up drinking my entire water supply a little too quickly. My canteen was dry as a bone- I must’ve been quite a sight running my tongue all down into there and around the metal mouth of it trying to get the last drops of liquid I could. Hassan was generally very amused by me and laughed often. He had such a sweet smile. When I grew thirsty, the following two days, I was forced to live on the passwater of my camel- warm, straight from the tap at Hassan’s insistence. This seemed to tickle his fancy, although I had never been quite so humbled in my life… and I was a practicing Baptist as a child! We emerged in civilization, me looking a little worse for the wear and Hassan looking even more sexy and buff, if that’s at all possible! Now that I think about it, it was quite possible because he carried my ravaged corpus most of the way back to the urban center, dropping me only about fifteen times. Back in town, boy, was I getting the looks! Everything about me had gotten a little threadbare… I had forgotten about the hole Hassan had ripped in the crotch of my yoga pants, so my overgrown, sand caked choca was exposed for all those unibrows to see. A group of them had torn me from Hasan and started dragging me to a corner of the town square that had a small worn platform next to a large pile of various sized rocks. As they dragged me closer to the rocks, I noticed that the ground was stained dark brown as was the platform; I have never been dragged around by the scruff of my neck so much in my life; I was beginning to think I was a baby kitten! I cried out, but the men only shook me and laughed with their yellow teeth and dark dead eyes. Hassan (being the clever strapping lad he is) interceded, speaking to them urgently, gesturing to a small shed behind where we stood- which I found out later was a police station! That’s when they looked at me, then at each other, clucked out something that sounded like throat clearing and pulled me into the run-down building for what amounted to another step in my initiation. I was really in good hands… well maybe not good hands in the traditional sense… I was in a lot of hands though… too many hands really. Before you judge me based on these mysterious and somewhat primitive experiences, you must realize that mind expansion is never comfortable and one must transcend the flesh, get rid of the ego to gain true wisdom. This much is true, true, true. I was/am an archaeologist who mined/mines for hidden knowledge. I am still trying to decipher what I learned with the help of my bored certified therapist and my primary care physician.

This old warhorse has her place on Sage Mountain now… right next to that hairy sucker… I forget his name… that Yeti hybrid who liked to smoke hash and kill people with blow darts when he wasn’t taking people on spiritual rides.

Such a rich experience; four months later and I am still picking the sand out of my crevasses. The beard and rope burns are healing nicely. I cannot say the same for my bikini biscuit… but what doesn’t kill us makes us more ready for God, right? This must’ve been how Mary Magdalene or Indira Gandhi felt… I’m just following in their holy snail trails, so to speak! LOLX2! One thing is for certain, I can’t stop thinking about Hassan, who became so much more than a guide and a highly diversified business man. After my plastic surgery next Christmas, when the swelling and bruising subsides, in the spring, I plan on going back. This time, I won’t forget to bring a change of yoga pants, a Brita filter and a case of Cliff Bars.