TITLE: Shanti bloody shanti
GENRE: travelogue narrative
WORD COUNT: 75,000 approx.
BY: Aaron Smith
Synopsis
Epiphany and wisdom can come from the strangest of places, like an LSD trip in the slums of Calcutta during the festival of colors, where everyone is covered in paint. This happens to Aaron, a thirty-six year old Australian ex-punk rocker, ex-heroin addict, X-gener on the run from a failed marriage to a nightclub diva. Painted green, he realizes he is truly free as long as he lives in the proverbial now.
Aaron reflects back on how he departed Australia with long time friend and occasional partner in crime Frankie, a deluded society misfit and failed artist often mistaken as a terrorist and occasionally even Osama Bin Laden. Frankie, who thinks he is really an alien, convinces Aaron to go to India to ‘find himself’. Aaron agrees after discovering there is a contract out on his life for having an affair with a cocaine dealer’s girlfriend. Arriving in Bollywood for Christmas, and then Goa for New Year’s Eve, they end up in the hippy utopia Auroville. Aaron falls out with Frankie, who changes his name to the Kobra (for his newly-discovered kundaline powers). Frankie the Kobra is in his element, befriending the urine-drinking commune elite and seducing doe-eyed hippy chicks. Aaron leaves and heads for the Andaman Islands, a remote tropical paradise, where he makes a living fleecing tourists at poker. He plans to re-unite with Frankie in Calcutta for the festival of colors. But Frankie never turns up.
Aaron then follows the Ganges River haphazardly from Calcutta to its source in the Himalayas. He bumps into his Andaman Island poker buddies at different points on the road, including Nimrod, a young Israeli stoner Casanova who always sports Elvis glasses. Searching for Frankie is like looking for Kurtz from Apocalypse now. Aaron is almost blown up by terrorists on a train. Then, after falling ill from a dodgy cup of chai tea in Varanasi, he has a near-death vision in which his spirit animal, the cockatoo, bestowed him by an Aboriginal elder back in Australia, tells him to change his life. Some twenty-two kilos lighter, he then studies yoga with a Jamaican Rastafarian, and has his fortune told with unnerving accuracy, before discovering a murdered headless corpse on the banks of the Ganges. Frankie periodically sends emails. He is lost in either a harem of Israeli nubiles, the opium dens of Orissa or the people’s revolution in Nepal.
Aaron falls for Dahlia, a blonde dreadlocked Swedish Barbie dressed pretty in pink. With Nimrod and some other travelers, they decide to head to the Himalayas and the source of the holy Ganges. Here Dahlia tragically drowns. Retrieving her body, haunted by her ghost and suffering the wrath of Shiva, they escape the mountains and seek spiritual refuge in Dharamasala, the home of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Aaron reflects on his journey through India and his inner voyage of self-discovery from his new home in Brazil, with his fiancée – whom he was predicted to meet by the Indian fortune-teller.
This is a true story.
