company at all. As a result, most of my time in Pushkar was spent alone with Wilbur Smith.
Jeremy, meanwhile, had been ousted from the royal entourage by Fee and Caz. He didn’t seem to mind too much, though, and I almost thought I detected a certain relief that he was now being left alone by Liz. Whenever I saw him he was alone in the courtyard, reading a book called
Feeling briefly sympathetic towards him as a fellow cast-off, I asked him what it was about.
‘It’s a must-read,’ he said, in that pompous voice I’d almost forgotten.
Bye-bye sympathy.
‘Here – read the back,’ he said.
‘ “
‘Blimey. Sounds good.’
‘I’ll swap it for your Wilbur Smith when you’ve finished,’ he said.
‘All right.’
One morning, I was tucking into a banana pancake when Liz, Fee and Caz, just back from their dawn seance or whatever it was they did, came and joined me for breakfast (one boiled egg each, in case you’re interested).
Despite the fact that I would far rather have been left alone with Wilbur, they seemed to think that the courteous thing to do was to come and sit at my table, disturb my peace and talk unadulterated shit to each other without addressing a word to me.
I tried to blot them out and concentrate on the bananariness of my pancake, but the invasion was just too brutal.
‘Did you get there today?’ said Fee.
‘What – to nirvana? Are you crazy?’ said Liz.
‘No – not nirvana. To the other one. The one below nirvana but above tranquillity that I was telling you about. What’s it called again?’
‘Thingummy,’ said Caz.
‘That’s the one.’
‘I definitely got to tranquillity,’ said Liz.
‘Brilliant,’ said Fee. ‘I mean, that’s the basis. You’re well on the way now.’
‘I think it’s the first time I properly got there, actually.’
‘Oh, I’m so happy for you. How did it feel?’
‘It felt… um… kind of…’
‘Tranquil?’ I offered.
No response.
‘… as if… as if my body belonged to someone else, and I was just a guest in my own head, observing the world and myself from a height.’
‘That’s amazing,’ said Caz. ‘That’s more than tranquillity. I think that’s the next one up. I hardly ever get the from-a-height thing.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. You’re doing really well.’
Liz sighed.
‘I am soooo glad I bumped into you two,’ she said, touching each of them on the leg. ‘You’ve opened my eyes to… to… to the WORLD!’
Oh Christ, I thought. She really has lost it now.
‘My karma,’ she went on, ‘really has changed. I’m into a whole new realm.’
I couldn’t take this any more.
‘Karma?’ I said, slowly. ‘Karma? My fucking arse. Why don’t the three of you get a life?’
Silence descended on the table. Fee and Caz stared at me, their facial expressions utterly in tune with one another. Neither of them looked even the slightest bit angry with me, or even offended. They both, quite transparently, just felt sorry for me. In their eyes, I was now on a par with the lepers.
Liz, however, didn’t feel sorry for me. This much was obvious. I was on the receiving end of one of her looks. Not, in fact,
‘Come on, Fee. Come on, Caz,’ she said.
They took their boiled eggs and moved to another table.
That afternoon, in a complex operation of ostentatious secrecy, Liz moved her mattress and backpack into Fee and Caz’s room.
I was sipping my afternoon tea – one of many afternoon teas – in the hotel courtyard a few days after Liz’s defection, when I heard the sound of screeching tyres coming from immediately outside. There didn’t seem to be many cars in India, and hardly any in Pushkar – let alone ones that could get up enough speed to be able to screech to a halt – so I looked up from my book to see what was going on.
A fat man with a moustache, dressed in jacket and tie, appeared in the courtyard at a run, looking stressed. He examined us all one by one, then, when he saw the blob in the corner that used to be Ranj, he started howling.
The howl brought three more people into the courtyard, one of whom was a woman in a sari. She took one look at Ranj, then screamed and fainted. The other two people were youngish guys in jeans and designer T- shirts.
‘Fuckin’ell man,’ said one of them. ‘You fuckin’ twat.’ I recognized the language as deepest Putney. This was obviously a brother. He grabbed Ranj by the arms, but Ranj refused to support his own weight, so the second young guy approached and took him by the other arm. Together, they frogmarched him out of the courtyard.
Ranj didn’t particularly seem to wake up through the whole episode until I heard his voice wafting in from outside, saying ‘Wait… Wait… Wait… WAITIJUST WAIT.’
Ranj then reappeared, on doddery legs, and walked up to me.
‘I want you to have this,’ he said, putting his chillum into my hand, and closing my fingers around it.
‘Thanks, man,’ I said.
He gave me one last don’t-mind-me-Pm-just-off-to-the-gallows look and tottered away, into the arms of a waiting brother.
The pair of them disappeared, and the car’s engine started up. It then cut out, and I heard the sound of a car door slamming and an argument. All I could make out was someone saying, ‘He’s not worth it. He’s not worth it.’
