Chapter 26 Acid and Gurus. Goa, India 1995

"Acid is the true guru." D tells me as we sit on the shadows of his porch overlooking the dusky sky, palm trees rustling against russet clouds over the sea. "With acid there are no books to consult or teachers to guide you - You're just alone with your own perceptions of reality and it's up to you to make sense out of it. I never went as high in my meditations as I have with psychedelics."

I listen with a slice of papaya in my mouth as D occupies 70 per cent of the conversation. Despite an introduction from Ali, it took weeks of hanging around before he decided I was kosher enough to be noticed. D has been too long in Asia to waste his words on passing travelers, the kind of which he has seen thousands in the last thirty years. Anyone who has stayed out here for that long develops some kind of filter system for social interaction. It's just too exhausting to invest energy in someone who isn't going to be hanging around.

"And when Ali or I tell you something that doesn't fit with your own experience then ignore our advice - There are no absolute truths."

"And what about enlightenment?" I asked, 18 years old and full of questions.

"I don't know! You'll have to make up your own mind if there's such a thing as a final state or not. My training led me to believe there is such a level that can be reached but I don't expect to get there. I'm as much a slave of my own desires as anyone."

B still looks the part with long, flowing beard and patient, light-blue eyes - but he would no longer claim to be anything: Not a teacher nor a student. He could still be quite marketable, though, if he were of such inclination. One day in a café, he and another old Sadhu hand, Jacob, argue tongue-in-cheek about which of them should be the next great guru to make millions for us all.

"It should be you, Jacob," D insists, "You'd be much better at persuading everyone to get their wallets out to pay for your seminars."

"But that's why I should be behind the scenes with you as the front man - I mean, you've got the right image, baba! Whatever you'd say they'd just lap up! Then we'd make the T-Shirts, the books, the Cd's-"

Naturally, no one is ever going to do anything at all.

These days, D lives a modest life with wife, dog and motorbike. He has a well-placed house in earshot of the shore and enjoys a simple life in Nature, listening to the music of the sea, wind and crows. He claims to have few friends but wouldn't seem to need more than those with whom he has light chat on the beach in the mornings and at the lunchtime café table. By his own admissions, he's a little of a social inadequate. Much of his time he plays paddleball on the beach with his wife and walks the dog up the long stretches of the beach and up on the hill for dawn each day.

Other than the imminent end of his fortune, life is pretty smooth. There are parties once a week at which to take the sacrament of acid and though the hay-days of Goa may be fading fast, he finds himself in the right place. He has nothing to achieve and nowhere to go except on the occasional visa run.

In a sense, the legacy of his days in the caves stay with him, whatever else he may have lived through. He still rises early in the mornings and takes a low dose of bhang in the manner prescribed by his guru. He still likes to take out the odd photograph or book relating to the old days and history lives again on his porch. It's a time that has passed away, its knowledge all but dead, diluted into modern times and only through talking to him do I appreciate a little of what has been lost.

B likes to illustrate this by citing from the little pocket book of Chuang Tzu that he lent to m eon my first season. The Chinese master of millennia ago speaks of the Original Nature of Mind that is chased away by the hunger for knowledge. It laments that people now run around in desperation trying to collect little pieces of facts on which to base their reality. Thus, despite the protests of his friends, D intends to title his unpublished manuscript: "Too Busy to Be". Though he does not exclude himself from this mania.

"When I'm sitting on my porch, I always find myself reaching out for a book or something - How many people can just relax into themselves without needing to do anything to achieve serenity? That's why I liked living among the Thais," He says, "Before the whole country was ruined by TV."

There sometimes seems within him a sense of disappointment that he ever came on down from his retreat in the Himalayas. His guru had offered him the opportunity to escape it all and he declined the golden key. Though, of course, he can't be sure. Either way, at some deeper level, his heart still seems tied to those timeless rhythms and it leaves him an unimpressed scepticism to the flurries of day-to-day life, even as he gets caught up in it all. In fact, he's never more the devil's advocate than when talking about his own life. I once suggested to him that he could rewrite his autobiography from his current position, thirty years on from his first arrival in India.

"What the fuck do I know now?" He responded, "Who really gives a damn about what I think? I don't know that I'm any more clear about things now than I was as a teenager in the caves." He waved his hand dismissively. "I don't want to set myself up as a wise old man looking fondly back over the course of his life, extracting any kind of teaching."

He wonders for how long his niche here will last.

"Every year a few of the regulars drop out of this Goan scene, disillusioned with the way it's going. In many ways we're waltzing the swan song now until it's finally not worth coming here any more." That much is clear. Police, thieves, tourists and pollution are choking this scene with sleaze that it's still possible to step around without dirtying one's shoes. But every year the stories get worse though we also get more tolerant of the nasties with our innate capacity to adapt. As I leave he hassles me about my lack of a torch and insists on lending me a spare.

"You're in the tropics now, man. There are snakes everywhere - Small ones that can't move out of your way fast enough yet that could cripple you for life. A flashlight was the one invention from the twentieth century that my guru carried."

Neither D nor Ali waste much time by way of regret. Ali has succeeded in obliterating his scalp, all of his teeth and a Thai doctor recently predicted that his ankle would collapse after two years. But this last complaint is another physical incidence that Ali has let slide until there's probably nothing that can be done about it. Although it gives him more pain than he'd ever care to talk about, it seems that he just takes it as part of his daily menu and refuses to allow the agony to take over his attention.

Sometimes now, at the parties, though he still takes large doses of acid, he ends up standing by the sidelines all night, 'cheering the babies on!' as he puts it. By being happy for everyone else's happiness, how can he go wrong?

Even if it does mean that I have to carry him to the water in a few years time so that he can go swimming, I can't picture Ali being anything other than amused by the situation. In the sea he'll be free of the handicap and be reconfirmed that he was never really meant for life on dry land.

I pick my way through the palm tree jungle to the bar where I know Ali will be chasing his own tail to his new found love of techno. As I arrive he slips me my dose for the party later and we compare notes of the previous event the night before.

"By my lights it was pure darshan!" Ali exclaims, "All of the dancers there were into the ecstatic union trip and the morning proved to be nothing short of bea-tif-ic! It was a space that you could take any which way you liked and yet with a unifying 'da-da-dah!' that left everyone with their mouths wide open." I've grown used to his erratic speech and now in five minutes of talk with Ali I can express what would take hours with anyone else. Like short-hand.

Ali doesn't have to risk his neck any more since he hit lucky with a film studio in Bangkok that has used his look in a thousand back-drop scenarios. He is thus free to play the fool as much as he likes without notions of future survival to drag upon his high. He trips and dances and swims for days at a time without stopping for sleep or food, putting my youth to shame as I collapse of exhaustion in his wake. I've never met anyone with so much energy output and it was what struck me so much from the first time we met in the Himalayas.

For his part, he seems amused by this young English kid who has been following him five kilometres out to sea with a persistent earnestness that reminds him of D as a young man. In my first season in Goa he gives me a house to live in and hits of acid whenever I was up for it. At any moment he was ready to lend a a psychedelic ear to whatever trip I was going through and I'd often debrief with him in the mornings after long, soul searching nights alone on acid.

One time I had been dancing all night and had come back down from the dawn on top of the hill to find five people already at the 'breakfast club' on the beach. I carried on dancing until it was just too hot and then joined them as I felt the need to drink a lot of water. But despite how much fluid I drank my thirst continued to rage unabated. I was actually dehydrated and needed salt though I didn't know it. I sat there on the sand, not saying a word but trying to understand my situation whilst colours still rampaged around me. Then Ali suddenly cut through the rest of the chat and managed to float one comment straight over to me on the other side of the river:

"Tom," he drawled, "In these situations I always try to keep a head." He then disengaged by laughing and resuming the general chat, "That's the title of my new book - 'Heads in water'!"

In a sense that's what he always did for me: Throw one hand through all the haze to clasp mine and drag me through. Only by knowing him and did I see that there was some kind of future to this path, that there was somewhere to go. Without knowing that I'm unsure if I could have held my sanity together through these last Goan years. Now I have a model, a framework into which to integrate all my experiences.

All the many, many hours I've clocked up with him out at sea were all, in a sense, training for life and for acid, which is just a very concentrated form of life. However ugly things get around me I know that all I have to do is keep on taking the next stroke, focusing only on the pocket of life around me - Looking at the horizon will only convince me that I'm going nowhere. And all that I get out of the sea is what I have the capacity to take. Since I learnt that then the quality of my life experience has trebled.

It's been an honour to walk down the same road as these guys and I can't imagine a better fortune than in having such guides. Thirty years older than I, they are into the second halves of their lives and with this book I'm trying to ensure that what they've learnt never dies out. An Israeli friend of mine told me that when I was dancing at a party last season, she saw Ali watching me from the side with a smile that the torch was being passed on. There can be no comparisons in this way of life but many elements of Ali's character have been absorbed into mine: I speak many of his words, I gesture in the same incomprehensible way and I dance in a shadow of his spirit - But I draw the line at head cancer and losing all my teeth.

He's the one dancer at a party that no one misses and many assume he's escaped from the asylum - But then, in India, who would notice? In a mixture of mockery and respect, the Israelis call him Dr Hoffman.

For four seasons I solicited the stories and wisdom of these two misfits until my 'apprenticeship' is a common joke amongst certain sections of the long-term freaks whose conversation hasn't changed much in thirty years. Better than sleeping pills.

I spent uncounted hours out at sea being lectured by Ali on the finer uses of the small toe to pivot one's motion and man evenings on D's porch, trying to draw out stories of his cave man days. But maybe there is no teaching, only learning. For sure, both of them would be horrified to hear the word 'guru' anywhere near them.

I learnt from their stories that there is only one person making the movie of our lives and that if we don't like the way things are going - Then hell, just write yourself a better part in the script. Steaming full speed ahead without a map, I clutch bananas in my left hand and a sword in my right, scanning with feverish eyes to slay any Buddhas I might see hitchhiking by the roadside.