OM SHANTI OM

Chris Gayle discovers marijuana, denounces hair care.  

When Girlfriend and I set off on a trek around Kasol a day after my book launch, the rules were clear: personal hygiene would be a personal choice. No judgments would be made, no snide comments would be passed and we would spend our days in sun-soaked, rain-drenched Himalayan hermitage in blissful quest for the muse. We were damned if we couldn’t squeeze some literary juice out of a month in the hills, what with Girlfriend having quit gainful employment and yours truly never really joining the ranks of the big boys in the taxman’s scheme of things. We were, therefore we’d write.

For those who don’t know (I say that grandly, but I hadn’t heard of the place till Girlfriend drew out the itinerary and circled our stops in idiot-proof red on Google Maps on her tab), Kasol is apparently where half the Israelis in their early 20s come to let their hair down and generally bum around after two (for women, four for men) compulsory years of military service.  Seriously, I’ve learnt more Hebrew from shop signs here than I did in twelve traumatic years of catechism classes. 

Generally marijuana-friendly and devoted to the thaandav-doing, chillum-toting Hindu stoner deity Shiva, the town is a pint-sized cross section of little gullies and one winding main road by the banks of the River Parvati, whose valleys produce some of the best hashish in India. Once the stronghold of Hindu pilgrims and babas, Kasol now boats of a vibrant multi-cultural hippie populace, from suitably unarmed Israeli forces to backpackers from Europe and America, dreadloacks and tie-dye everywhere.  

The baba is the collective- if curious- patron saint of the movement. Armed with nothing but chillums and a Beatles-worthy catalogue of variants of the same song, they stomp up and down these mountains in valiant search of the self, pausing only at the Hot Springs atop Kheer Ganga for some TLC. Our own plan was a little less Deepak Chopra, but the destination was the same. We’ve been here a few days now and we haven’t made the 4-hour trek to Kheer Ganga yet, but encouragingly, the babas don’t appear to be in any great hurry either. You can find them holding court in several of Kasol’s cafes, surrounded by awe-struck millennials and spouting platitudes to Shiva while smoking (and graciously passing around) the holy herb. We haven’t gotten much writing done, but all is, as the Israelis would say, sababa.    

                                       Icy Highs's Music Recco: Kula Shaker- Govinda  

When your shit smells like roses

I'm a man who has woken up choking on his own alcohol-and-drug-cocktail-riddled puke countless times since adulthood, got urinated on by a crazy Swedish teenager in exchange for sexual favours regularly for about three months and seriously considered taking a shit on camera for an amateur Glaswegian film-maker with good intentions whose intentions I cannot now recollect.

Despite which, I'm oddly paranoid about hygiene. I will happily cook in the nude, but my body refuses kebabs outright because somebody told me all Turkish men are compulsive nose-pickers. I'd like to think this is reflective of a common school of human hypocrisy I like to call, "my shit smells likes roses". For instance, I have slept/passed out (what's the difference really?) on pavements back home in Chennai in my smack-attack days, but even then I couldn't have a cup of tea without washing my hands fanatically if I'd partaken of public transport. Even more funnily, I went through at least two years of college without ever using public transport, because everybody knows public transport in India is cattle-class, as Shashi Tharoor (in)famously tweeted.    

So, here we are then. A detergent-happy, dirty old man and you, an undergraduate with tits most men would sell their souls for. I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes. Clearly, your first mistake was: "don't worry about taking off your shoes." In young-people-parlance, "WTF?!!" How can you not insist that people take their shoes off when they enter your Lilliputian place of residence? Who knows where they've been?

It doesn't make it any easier that you're my temporary flatmate. You're here because your French boyfriend is here on an internship selling Frenchy eco-friendly electrical products to companies that frankly just don't care about carbon footprints or corporate social responsibility. These things don't matter in Asia because we've been blindsided for long enough; we think the wild ugly West should pay for what they've done first. I don't.  I'll fuck you if you're technically the right mix of X and Y. That, and clean.

But you piss in the shower. I can smell it. You piss all over my toilet seat. I have to wreath the damn thing in toilet paper first thing every morning because I'm scared you'll inadvertently pass on some contagious disease. I have to actually stop breathing every time I pass by your open door because the gases that escape the barely chambered walls of your box-room existence smell of old pizza and very-worn socks.

Yet, you're hot. You're silent-movie hot. Not that you talk funny, but I wish you were in a movie so I didn't have to smell you. When you charmingly extemporize on your disdain for showering, I'm really just imagining corpses and people-in-comas. That's not sexy. When you complain about your boyfriend working on Sundays, I'm full of empathy for the poor bastard because he's forced to live with the terribly stained underwear you regularly hang on the fucking bathroom door knob.  Just so you know, those chopsticks on the flush tank were left there for a reason - so I can move your bloody underthings when I need to lock the door.

And when you're seated at the foot of my bed, your dopey eyes making eyes at my weak desperate self, all I can really tell myself is: "you're too old to excuse this kind of behavior". The morally correct course of action would be to bend you over my knees and spank some sense of hygiene into you. But I worry that would sow them wild thoughts in me ol' head. Besides, you'd probably fart in my face or something, for a laugh. If only you'd stop smelling of super-market cologne and onions. We could have been so much more.