TEN THOUSAND FLIES OF PANIPAT P.P.

One day in 2001 a person came up to me when I was replacing a wheel of my jeep near the Indian town of Panipat. I recognised him vaguely and vice versa.
“Are you that Pantau-woman from Dharamsala?”
I looked at him and saw a dirty old hippie standing in an aura of visible smelly odour.
“No, it’s not me, you’re just seeing a spiritual apparition,” I replied.
Now in the west you cannot get away with such quips and you would only elicit strange looks, but (thank you Jesus) in India people immediately get it and have a good laugh.

I had been talking to this guy once before, and, if I remember correctly, it was at the Om Hotel in McLeod. We engaged in a conversation about Barbra Streisand. He told me he had been working as the personal cook of Barbra Streisand for a short period of time. It was somewhere in the early 90s; a period when The Barbra was eating nothing else but healthy food, and she and her body looked fabulous. One night, the hippie had told me, after a health-food dinner party at her Malibu mansion, he had woken up, as he heard some stumbling in the kitchen. Despite Streisand’s armed security personnel, he feared someone had broken into the house. Arriving in the kitchen, there he found Ms. Streisand on her knees on the floor in front of the double door fridge gobbling up leftovers; a bowl of greasy fruit-soup and some very fatty fibreless food products as if there was no tomorrow.

To be honest, I never believed he worked for Ms. Streisand, and he never found her on her knees in front of the fridge eating fruit-soup. Many foreigners in India are on drugs and many enjoy making up new histories, sometimes to impress people, other times because their past reality is so ugly, they can’t go back to their countries. They need to hide in places such as India, Thailand, Cambodia etcetera.
“What are you doing in Panipat?” he asked me.
Panipat is about the dirtiest place in India and famous for its flies. According to legend there are 10.000 flies for every Panipattian. Panipat is located along the highway N.H.1 between Delhi and Chandigarh. At Chandigarh the highway ends and for the next 8 hours you need something with four-wheel-drive in order to cross the Shiwalik Mountain Ranges before you get to the Himalayas. During the previous week I had had a few meetings with a Delhi publisher and was on my way back home. The driver-cum-bodyguard I had hired for the 16 hour trip had fallen ill when we were staying in a cheap hotel in the Tibetan refugee camp of Majnukatilla on the outskirts of Delhi. Rather than finding another driver, I decided to drive back home myself. I always observed I was the better driver when being driven by professional drivers in India, thus I would often have them sit next to me on the passenger seat anyway. Indian drivers are too lazy to use the stick-shift, trying to drive in second gear all the time, while I would change to the 5th gear already at 65km an hour on long straight highways, saving much on petrol.

After I finished replacing the flat tire with a new wheel, the hippie and I sat down in a little dhaba next to the road to take a breather. A nearby street vendor sold us some fresh pressed sugarcane juice with lemon for 10 rupees per pint, while I ordered a Coca Cola at the dhaba as well, as the drink tends to kill all stomach bacteria as effectively as the best pharmaceutically produced antibiotics.
The hippie, who was missing a few front teeth and one finger, told me he had converted to Buddhism. “What about you? You’ve been living in Dharamala for nearly a year; do you have any plans to become a Buddhist?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I am not a religious person really and I don't believe in GOD. I don’t want to be told by some other people what I can’t and can do. It’s always the same stuff with those religions. You get a whole list of things you cannot do anymore. Don’t do this, don’t do that and if you do you go to hell: that wouldn’t make me feel good, just deprived…and finally really hot in hell.”
“So why did you come to live in Dharamsala?”
“Well, I was depressed in the Netherlands and travelled to India to find a cure. Looking at all those poor Indian people that crossed my path, some dying right in front of me, I started to feel a lot better about my own life. Within weeks I didn’t feel depressed anymore. After some time I ended up in Dharamsala and I thought it was such a lovely little town surounded by a ghastly country that I thought that, if I would live there, I would feel pretty good every day. I would be able to see the beautiful Himalayan Mountains with snow on its peaks, breath in the clean crisp air, and gaze at the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetan monks that roam the few streets. I can sit in petit cafés talking to hippies and backpackers and other creatures that always have some interesting stories to tell, so I would never feel alone and lonely. I also met a Tantric Yoga-master who is teaching me to become a Yogini. As there is no gym in the Himalayas, I thought yoga is a good alternative to sports. I like to keep my body in good condition and shape. Also, I need to climb 200 rocky one-foot high steps to my room three times a day that lead from the road to my room higher up the mountain. Great work-out. I am fitter than when I was an athlete. A workout at an altitude of 10.000 feet is pretty good; my red bloodcell count is going off the charts.”
The hippie nodded.
“O, and I was able to write a little book about my first year in Dharamsala. It’s about to go to press and will be sold in India and Nepal.”
“Congratulations. But Buddhism is not really a religion. It’s more like a philosophy. The Dalai Lama and all the lamas and Buddhist scholars focus on teaching the path to happiness. Buddhism is all about Enlightenment. It is about learning how to overcome suffering. Because if you wouldn’t suffer anymore, you would feel good. The next step is about gathering wisdom, so you would get a greater understanding of the workings of the universe, and with the knowledge and wisdom you have discovered, you can start helping other people; and THAT is really fulfilling and it keeps you in a state of happiness.”
I nodded.
“Where are you headed?” I asked the hippie.
“I am going back to Dharamsala. I have no money and have been hitchhiking from Delhi to get to the Himalayas. The truck-driver who gave me a lift fell asleep behind the wheel between Sonipat and Panipat. The truck hit a buffalo that was about to cross the highway, then the truck and buffalo hit a tractor and then the truck, the buffalo and the tractor fell over on the other side of the meridian. Thank God we both survived, but the Buffalo is dead and the tractor driver broke his arm after flying through the air for 50 yards, landing in a heap of dirt. Poor bloke. About a million flies descended upon his open wounds. I fled the scene as you know that Indian police will arrest anyone involved in an accident and I have spent too many days in Indian prisons already. No fun.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Sitting in the back of your jeep with the windows open so you wouldn’t smell me.”
I turned into a salt pillar for a few moments. “Okay, but you need to sit on a plastic bag, because I don’t want you to shmutz the fabric of my seats. This jeep is practically brand new and looking at you, it appears that the rear end of your trousers is full of dried-up diarrhoea.”
“Fair enough.”
“And while I am driving I want you to keep me awake with some smart talk about Buddhism. Tell me more about it. If you can convince me that I should have a look at the teachings of the Buddha, I’ll offer to buy you some new clothes, a meal, and give you 5 rupees so you can have a good wash in the public bathroom in McLeod. You should also consider a haircut. I can see the lice falling out of your dreadlocks.”
“I am sorry. I can’t accept that offer,” the hippie told me.
I looked at him surprised.
“Why not?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind the new clothes, the meal, the wash and the haircut, but it is not the right thing to do for a Buddhist to force his believe onto someone else. Buddhists do not convert others, especially not by means of force. We’re not Christians.”
I took in his words.
“But I can ask you to tell me more about it and you would be allowed to give me some information, right?”
“If you phrase it that way, I think it is alright.”
I opened the backdoor of my hardtop jeep, put the plastic car cover over the backseat and offered the hippie to get in. I was looking forward to getting an explanation on Buddhism, despite the fact it would cost me 60 rupees to have my car seriously disinfected at the end of the journey. Perhaps one day in the future I would be able to talk to other people and tell them what I have learned about Buddhism.