Chapter 21 - Katmandu, Nepal 1975

B wakes in the hotel bed which he shares with a beautiful Australian girl. It's 4am. Old habits die hard. As she sleeps her breathing is like that of a satisfied cat that may yet rouse with a fresh hunger. He doesn't feel like waiting around until daylight so he slips into the bathroom to wash with cold water. He dresses and slips on his jacket, taking pains to close the hotel room door quietly behind him.

In the narrow streets he can hear the sounds of the locals going through their graceful early morning routine. The sounds of frogs being strangled drifts through the wooden walls as the collected mucous is coughed up from the day before. There are puddles in the street and the cold water splashes onto his sandalled toes as he walks.

He comes to Durbar Square and the cramped buildings to either side give way to a wide expanse where three or four large temples sit. Against the light of the sliced moon on the wane, D can make out the contours of the temple roofs that project from the central base in symmetrical overhangs like upside-down hats. Stone steps each a metre high lead up to the temple and D flops his way up to a high seat. He lays down his jacket to give his bottom kind protection from the cold of the stone - Haemorrhoids have a way of dispelling the serenity associated with meditation. He sits in silence.

Although D has chosen to be amongst people again he can only do so by storing up on the sanity of aloneness in the early hours of the morning. He makes his peace with the world before the sun rises and is thereafter anaesthetised to whatever dross and hassle the city throws at him. The air is crisp about his face but its bite will melt, come the sun.

Venus eventually shows up over the houses in the Eastern sky and D wonders if the Australian girl has awoken yet, confused by his absence. The memory of meeting her the night before drags his attention down to the lower chakras and he opens his eyes with a sigh.

The sky brightens and he becomes aware of another presence. He flicks his eyes to the right and observes a well-built man with shaved scalp a few metres away on the step below him. He is sunken forwards in a posture of despair, his head held unmoving in his hands. A twitch of his thick knuckles betray the life within them but otherwise he seems dead to the world.

Ali parts his fingers to allow the growing light to attack his eyes. Yet another meaningless day to be endured. No one has turned up to deliver him the promised money from the Thailand run and he cannot be bothered to feel aggrieved. He has no idea how many rupees he has left in his pockets and does not care to know. He consumes little else other than cigarettes and coke each day and cannot consider his future sustenance to be worthy of any mental effort. He goes through the necessary motions of life, not through any real inclination to go on but just by an instinctive obedience to the pulse of his own heart that continues to beat despite itself.

He stretches up Hs hands and tilts his head back with resigned abandon and discovers that he's not alone. What he sees prompts him to turn around and look more closely.

B's initial annoyance at the unexpected company has dissolved entirely as he meets someone clearly more dislocated in spirit than himself. He doesn't assume there is a mutual interest and so awaits to see if the destitute soul before him wishes to talk.

Ali's utter ennui cannot smother this moment as he stares into D's eyes. They are wild with a vibrant vitality that seems of another world and they wear none of the belligerent fatigue earned each day by the people in the street. He has the face of a sadhu with no lines of worry etched by stress into his face, though there is yet the reserved detachment that makes him a hard man to fool. Ali brushstrokes the awaiting blank canvas by asking:

"Did you have problems sleeping or do you always wake this early?"

"Every day for the past seven years."

Below them a vendor of peanuts roasted in their shells trundles his cart along with one hand, the other busy splitting the casing along the seams and popping the nuts into his absent-minded mouth.

"You don't look like you've been getting much sleep yourself" D remarks with a distant gaze. Ali shrugs.

"The falling asleep part I don't mind - It's the waking up screaming that's no fun."

By the time the first mid-morning chillums have been lit in the rooftop cafe across the square from where our two outcastes from reality sit, they have traded the gist of each other's recent histories. Both are glad to look for meaning in a story other than their own. They head back to D's room to have breakfast with the Australian girl. For her part she's so inspired by the intensity of the lives each of these guys lead that she's inspired to fly all three of them to Thailand.

Ali reunites with the American Vietnam veterans who ripped him off. Apologies and excuses are made, he's provided with a little roof-top apartment in which to live and all is forgiven. D takes his leave for both of them need to be alone. He goes to live in a small Thai village in the remote North. The Australian girl returns home to her studies in Perth. But so much does she believe in D that she sends him $20 each month which is almost enough for him to live on.

It's the 1970's. Vietnam is over and Thailand is booming. The markets are awash with appropriated army equipment and the radios are playing "Blood on the Tracks", the last great album that Dylan will make. Our psychedelic heroes have fresh heavens and hells to play with and somewhere in a distant village in the mountains of Wales, I am being born.