HESE STORIES ARE DESIGNED to
be read in random order. Clicking on the little icon that follows this paragraph
will take you to one of the twelve; at the end of which the same icon will
take you to another, and so forth. If you prefer to read sequentially, use
the "Next" and "Previous" buttons at the foot of each
page; but stick to one of the navigation systems, because mixing them may
take you to the same page twice or not at all. The rest of this page is
an Introduction to the collection.
N THE LATE 1960s, which ran
roughly from the Summer of Love in '67 to the Fall of Nixon in '74 (mere
chronology was hardly a top priority in those days), a new international
subculture emerged: the Traveling Freak.
The road to India was wide open then, and very cheap
from Europe, in the days before the Iranian and Afghan revolutions. A British
student could hustle all the way to Delhi and back in a summer vacation,
traveling rough for a couple of dollars a day, if that; but for the full
experience you needed months or even years. Some tolerant parents looked
on it as the modern Grand Tour, the post-graduation once-in-a-lifetime chance
to See the World. They tended to get less sympathetic the second time, or
the third.
Dope (hash, mostly) was part of the attraction, of course,
since it was widely available and indeed often legal till Washington started
putting the pressure on. Acid rapidly appeared, following the laws of supply
and considerable demand. And there were certainly junkies around, and others
intent on using the opportunity to get as high as possible. But many of
the travelers found they smoked less, or less compulsively, on the road
than they did at home; there was less to blot out, and more to see (to groove
on, to dig, to get into).
India, especially, was a trip. A deep and ancient culture
of unbelievable diversity, where cows roamed the city streets, rubbing shoulders
with women in saris and Sikhs in turbans and businessmen in suits and holy
beggars in loincloths and cripples on the corner and fat housewives with
pounds of gold jewelry, and students drinking coffee and discussing Marx
and Lennon; a kaleidoscope of such color and interest that you could spend
the day sitting on a balcony and watching the street and never get bored
for a moment. Indians do conform according to their caste or sub-group,
but there are so many subcultures and they look so different that the effect
is of dazzling spontaneity.
And they, in turn, didn't care what we looked like;
we were just another caste. In the days when jeans on women and long hair
on men were signs of subversion (They want to destroy our society! Well,
yes, or at least ignore it), this was a huge relief, and led to an explosion
of play with henna and kohl and fabrics and rings and all that fun stuff
that later got co-opted by the Music Machine. Keef Richards got together
with Anita Pallenberg in Morocco, and they became the public image of freak
style; but there were hundreds of Keiths and Anitas in Goa, with everything
but the money and maybe the talent.
Sure, we were freaks. And proud of it. And on the road
we met each other, and it was a blast. We formed a community, without of
course ever intending to, and that sense of belonging was also part of the
attraction. We were Italian and Dutch and French and German and British
and sometimes American (the Atlantic being more expensive to cross), but
we were none of them; we didn't want those wretched western societies. And
it was wonderful to find we were not alone.
Some of us did it briefly and stopped; some founded
businesses, big (the Lonely Planet) and small (textile imports) to fund
their roving habits; some settled into unobtrusive middle age; some rotted
to death in jail (Midnight Express); some OD'd and some just burned out;
but even now you can see some of us, the old folks in Lhasa and Kathmandu,
Lamu and Bali, watching the changes and wondering. This little collection
is for all of us.
The stories are snapshots from that era. I wrote them
in 1982, and I would write them differently now, because I know different
things. Not necessarily better, I think, just differently. They are very
short, the longest being less than 400 words, and self-contained, but they
were always meant to be taken together (there is more about this in the
Essays section of this site)
to give some sense of that world.
I was influenced by Hemingway's splendid collection
of short-shorts in our time, which were later published as epigraphs
to the stories in his first major collection, called, confusingly, In
Our Time. In my original printed version, I titled the stories "chapter
one" etc, to follow his example; I did think of nicking his title too,
but I quite like my own, with its connotations not just of travel but of
the space between us all, and the way our experiences flow into each other's
and distinguish themselves, the way we are all different and all essentially
the same.
A note about the graphics
The eyes are a crude reminder of the Eyes of Swyambhunath, just outside
Kathmandu, which is a very holy and wonderful place that is equally welcoming
to pilgrims and tourists and monks and monkeys.
The icon is a hypercube, a two-dimensional representation
of a four-dimensional object. I have used it as a logo for at least seven
years now; this is therefore the end of that cycle, and it has come gracefully
to the home it didn't know it had. Would that we all were so lucky. Here
it is in a larger form. Namaste.
