|
India: The Cream of Manali
On the bus from Delhi, heading to the Himalayan gateway town Manali at the head of the monumental Kullu Valley in India's north-west, the first thing you notice is the cannabis, clusters of the plant growing lush and thick, a favoured hiding place for children playing hide-and-seek. Cannabis in the Kullu Valley is an ubiquitous weed, growing naturally on road verges and abandoned stretches of land and in the patch of dried soil outside the Manali police station. It was here, in the massive and deep gorge known as the Valley of the Gods that Lord Shiva spent a thousand years in meditative rapture high on charas, so it was fitting that this God graced the mountains with his favourite herb. That image of Lord Shiva smoking charas (cannabis resin) for religious vision has been adapted by the modern-day Manali souvenir shops for an altogether different experience: the hedonism of Western visitors. The recurrent image, drawn from water-paint, shows a holy man with the symbolic purple om painted on his forehead; his hair is long and unkempt, his beard bushy, his eyes a visionary green, as he holds up a chillum (the tube-like pipe for smoking charas every souvenir shop displays in the shop-window), the smoke from the chillum surrounding the man in wreaths of green smoke.
It's the kind of imagery that many in Manali can recognise as a reflection of themselves. You encounter them everywhere, the wiry (as though they are just skin stretched on a frame of bones), loosely-dressed, stubbly-bearded, goggly-eyed (from too much cannabis), matted-haired Western visitors, especially the long-term ones. The narcotic whiff of hash or cannabis resin is as pervasive as the constant cries of crows; many restaurants spray air freshener every hour to compensate for the strong smell. For breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, late into the night, in restaurants and cafes and guesthouses, the infusion of charas is incessant; more joints are passed around than cigarettes. You could buy ten grams of top-grade hash (mostly the type known as Cream), the kind that wins the Amsterdam Cup year after year, for Rs200, œ3; it would cost œ30 in London, if you were lucky enough to find some. And yet it was here that I had decided to quit all drugs; after ten years smoking cannabis, I decided to give up the drug the week before I arrived in India (I stopped for a combination of reasons, chief among them due to a conversion to homeopathic healing, but mostly because I felt jaded, and sobriety would be different). But my resolve would be severely tested here, surrounded by the kind of resin I had always wanted to try and never got my hands on.
Indulging in charas in Himachel Pradesh, India's north-western Himalayan state, is nothing new. The hippies started the pilgrimage to the Kullu Valley forty years ago. Over the years many Westerners had escaped into the mountains, their visas and passports long expired, living off small-time cannabis dealing, and the Indian media was dubbing Manali as "India's drug capital." What was new was the sheer volume of Westerners that streamed into Manali; in 2001, over 90,000 visited the Kullu Valley, particularly Manali. During my visit I estimated that about two-thirds of the travellers in Manali came from Israel, and one night a stoned Israeli guy told me the reason why so many of them came here. "Two reasons," he said. "Israelis like to travel and Israelis like charas." I suspected, however, that the truth was more mundane, that these young Israelis, many fresh out of obligatory army service, followed other Israelis, hung out in large groups and largely excluded other nationalities from their circle; in Manali, there was even Israeli restaurants and a Jewish Spiritual Centre.
Meanwhile, the Western idea of drugs for hedonistic pursuits had not been lost on the natives. At the Moondance, a popular and sociable travellers hangout where the menu was adapted to Western tastes and the music policy incorporated all subgenres of trance, a sadhu - the ascetic holy men who in the Hindu tradition reject all material things and spent their life wandering and subsisting on people's benevolence - hung at the caf‚ all day. He was a small, wiry man in his forties or fifties; wedged behind the turned-up fringe of his traditional cap you could detect a couple of plastic pouches, each containing a different type of charas. I never saw him utter a word to anyone. He simply drifted from table to table, and at each table he proceeded to deposit a piece of charas and invite, by a series of gestures, the Westerners to prepare a chillum that was then passed around. Returning the favour, the grateful Westerners lavished him with meals and gifts: this was how he lived, having compromised the life of an ascetic, corrupted by the expediency of barter, besides becoming something of an undignified scavenger. Never mind, the Western style offered reward without self-denial, and the way he rocked his head to the trance music gave him the look of old raver forever stuck in the motions and lifestyle of acid house.
Other natives did not bother with the projection of an image of self-denial. The middle-aged owner of one guesthouse, for example, had taken to the indulgences of Western hedonism with more passion than the handfuls of rugged hippies that one sometimes saw sleeping in hammocks, curled like babies. People called him baba, the generic term for someone higher placed in societal hierarchy, and I met him one night after dinner when I joined a group of travellers for some socialising. By this time I was having a hard time staying off charas. It smelled so exquisitely that in cafes I had found it necessary to sit upwind so the fragrance would not drift towards me and torment me; in some restaurants where the ventilation was bad I was forced to plead with Westerners to desist from smoking charas because I was allergic. That evening a chillum made constant circles, and people looked at me as if I was some eccentric - definitely someone who did not belong. The baba, with his big belly and large face, his cheeks reddened by too much alcohol (it was said that he got drunk every night), his eyes hidden behind the kind of large, blue-tinged and opaque sunglasses that you find in roadside stalls, was full of prankish frolics and self-consciously smart wisecracks. Everyone else hung their head in a stupor, eyes red and glazed, too stoned for social interaction other than the occasional spasm giggles.
I had been sipping tea and water, and now, utterly sober, I felt something like an impatience and intolerance welling inside me. The atmosphere was banal and disengaging, and the feelings of alienation that had been growing over the past week suddenly came to the fore. What was the point of coming this far to sit or shuffle around all day in a stoned stupor staring wistfully at far-off mountains and exchanging shallow travel gossip? Cannabis had fudged the travellers' ambition; their active moments were mostly wasted playing cards or billiards (at a place called Tourist Billiard Hall). That night I tried to get them off their chairs to go to a party in the woods, but my pleas only elicited tired grunts, and, as in other days, I was the only one who had preserved my ambition to see and do things. For that I was glad I had quit cannabis before I came to Manali.
© Victor Paul Borg
|
