benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

Its an excuse trotted out again and again by those accused of drug trafficking at airports.

‘Its not mine,’ or ‘Somebody must have planted it there’.

I’d always assumed that it was a fabrication, a final and implausible plea for freedom by those facing years, decades even, in a dank, overcrowded prison thousands of miles from home.

Now, I’m not so sure.

It was Christmas Eve. I had passed security at Marrakesh Airport and was waiting my turn in an achingly slow passport queue.

Eventually, my brother overcame this hurdle, and then I presented my passport and waited in silent amicability for the requisite checks and stamps. As the official was about to conclude I was seized from behind by a Moroccan police officer, marched back to security and into a small curtained booth.

All the while, the officer spoke to me in French while I called out ‘Anglais, Anglais’ and protested that French is no longer the international language (I jest.). He did give me a funny look, though, as if to say, ‘Come on, you know what I’m saying.’

Inside the booth he presented me with two of the aforementioned condoms packed with something – hash, heroin, I don’t know. Now I’m not certain whether he did switch to English, or whether in this moment of desperation we spoke in some kind of universal language, but from here on I understood what he was saying.

‘They are yours,’ he said.
‘Non,’ I replied. Needless to say, I had not seen these items until this moment.
‘They are yours,’ he said again.
‘Non.’
He felt around my cock and balls to see if I was concealing anything. Another officer slipped through the curtain and double checked his partner’s work.
‘They are yours!’ They said in unison.
‘Non!’ I shrieked.
‘Passport.’
I handed it over and the pair scrutinised it, muttering ‘Australian’ under their breath.
‘You are here with a child. You came before with a child.’
‘Non.’
‘Yes a child.’
‘No, just my brother and he’s gone through.’
‘You were here with a child!’
‘Non!’
Clearly, the officer was stressed now that his gutsy arrest was rapidly fragmenting into a case of mistaken identity.
The two men muttered with one another, pointing at the passport and at me.
The original officer turned to me and flicked his wrist without saying a word. I was dismissed.

I could not feel the airport tiles beneath my feet.

Before I begin, I would like to emphasise that I have based the following on just over one week at the Sivananda Ashram in addition to a very light reading of material on Hinduism. What I say below reflects only this experience and should not be taken as an attack on Yoga as a whole, let alone Hinduism.

***

We arrived at the Sivananda Ashram on an auspicious evening, the anniversary of the death of its founder, Swami Sivananda (or was it his birth? Surely I can be permitted some slippage) and after a brief meal we found ourselves locked in a chanting session, scattering rose petals and dust and uttering syllables that bore no meaning for us.
Returning to our room Monique declared that we would leave immediately. I on the other hand acknowledged that the place had its eccentricities, but suggested she was being too quick to judge. When this failed to alter her disposition, I sulked that I had always wanted to learn yoga and would never have such an opportunity again.
She agreed to give it three more days.
As we settled into our separate twin beds, we had to remind ourselves of why we had voluntarily submitted to the edicts of a religious compound. In fact this journey to the Keralan countryside had begun over a month previous, and many thousands of kilometres away at the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a popular trekking spot in south-western China. There we had met a charming English couple who enthused over the Ashram, and the virtuous yoga it promotes.
The Sivananda Ashram was founded many years ago by Swami Vishnu-devananda, a devotee of the Swami Sivananda, a well-known yogic authority who is revered by thousands today.
Swami Vishnudevananda and his followers articulated a particular form of yogic practice which they felt would be attractive in the West. Judging westerners to be obsessed with physical health, this Yoga emphasised its physical dimensions, that is, all the twisting, bending, holding, stretching that pops into the minds of most Westerners when they hear the word ‘Yoga’. Beneath the surface of this physical practice lies the barely discernible bones of a Hindu cosmology that only becomes visible the more one embraces the Sivananda institution.
Our English friends had advised that we undertake the ‘Yoga Vacation’ course, a title which is particularly nuanced. The Ashram is not a resort. If you wish to stay at the Ashram, then you need to commit to activities totalling more than ten hours per day, including four hours of chanting and meditation, four hours of physical yoga and two hours of lectures. On the second day we were told that ‘Yoga Vacation’ is a vacation from ourselves, from responsibility from ours own needs, from life’s patterns and routines, from being enmeshed in the worldliness that we must overcome to achieve Bliss in this lifetime.
To this end, we were required to attend a set of communal spiritual exercises called ‘Satsang’ first thing in the morning and last thing at night. These sessions consisted of half an hour of meditation followed by an hour or more of chanting and prayer.
Far from focusing my mind, I found these sessions arduous and above all rigidly conformist, as like most religious practices, they orbited around the authority of a single person, in this case the Swami, or teacher. As a consequence of this imposition, my mind rebelled. When I tried to follow the directive to meditate, my mind wandered freely to thoughts of Monique, food, family, friends, David Sylvian, The X Files, conversations I had years ago. When I managed to quell these moderately sensible thoughts, nonsensical ones would arise in their place. My favourite was a dog dressed in a military parade uniform that marched past my mind’s eye giving a salute.
I found that the chanting we endured in these sessions served to prepare our minds to receive a set of religious tautologies. Its true that chanting has benefits. It is relaxing. It does focus the mind and it can redirect you from thoughts that you would wish to escape. Yet the chants have such a powerful simplicity that they tend to occlude all thoughts except those which have been sanctioned by the centralised Ashram authority. What’s more the quality of the singing was quite poor, like a dirge sung by the tone deaf.
And as meditation and chanting cleared our minds of external thoughts the Ashram began a steady drip feed of indoctrination. The philosophical kernel of this proselytising ranged from the intellectually rigorous to the ridiculous. By and large the sermons during Satsang were general, vague and patronising. One morning, an apprentice-Swami took the session. She was a painfully withdrawn looking woman, with dark eyes, a tired body and haggard mouth and who spoke with a regional English accent. I imagined that she was the daughter of a Methodist minister who, ‘went off the rails’ and ended up imitating the mores of her parents in saffron garb. And, sure enough, she gave us a pep-talk on abstinence, her eyes periodically flashing a deep malaise.
One evening some days later we were joined in Satsang by a group of three hundred school children who were attending Yoga Camp 2009 at the Ashram. During meditation an intense, mass-hysterical coughing fit broke out among the children during meditation. This sallow woman took the microphone and wagging her finger advised the children, ‘Don’t cough, swallow.’
‘She has sex on the brain,’ I whispered to Monique.
The lectures were somewhat more substantial. In them the Sivanandan philosophy was only revealed partially and gradually, with the parts that are most palatable to idealistic backpackers given emphasis while the more unsettling and bizarre aspects were only slowly revealed.
After ten days, this is what I managed to piece together. At the heart of this Yogic practice is the idea that the world is an illusion, a mire, Samsara, that needs to be transcended through realising this illusory nature, and through this divine knowledge one becomes unified with god. One becomes God in effect.
From my very limited knowledge of Hinduism, this is because the world we perceive—a world characterised by the difference between its parts—is an illusion.
We are all already God, insofar as everything comes from god, but we are completely ensconced in this world of illusion called Samsara. So we need to transcend our worldliness. This can be achieved through meditation, physical exercise, and the performance of one’s duty.
We ought to pursue these acts in such a way that we do not to enjoy their fruits. We must live our lives without becoming passionately attached to the objects or people we encounter while living in the world, and without expecting any kind of reward or gain from the things that we do. The act is performed simply to serve God.
This excludes all forms of love, even those which we might cherish, such as the love of family and the joy in friendship. I became aware that a youngish woman attending the program had recently suffered the loss of her children through an Islamic divorce. I wondered what she would make of such a principle.
What I particularly dislike about this philosophy is that it degrades the world and the human self. It is a doctrine in which the world is shit, human relations are shit, love and hatred are sensations that create pain and illusion and must therefore be transcended.
I also reject the claim to absolute knowledge made by the practitioners of Sivananda Yoga make. According to the Swami, Yoga is not a religion. It is a ‘subjective Science’. Unlike the objective science which seeks to understand the nature of things through studying objects, this subjective science seeks to understand the nature of things through a set of practices that, through internal observation, are observed to confirm the truth of God.
Following Popper, we would say that if Yoga is a science, then there must be a means through which this so-called experiment can be falsified.
If Yoga permits that it is possible to be mistaken in one’s perception of the world, to imagine it to be real when it is an illusion, then I do not see why it is not possible for one to be mistaken in one’s perception of oneself. In which case, what means would a practitioner of this ‘subjective science’ have to tell the experience of Bliss from the experience of indoctrination?
Yet despite these doubts, I grew increasingly adamant that we should remain for the duration of the course. Looking back, it is hard to relate to this impulse, but then again, the physical yoga at the Sivananda Ashram is incredible. The body opens up like, if you will forgive a terrible metaphor, a lotus flower. As the body is the medium through which we experience the world, this body now experiences the world in new and exciting ways. Its hard to describe if you are not a practitioner, but it feels great.
Of course, its intentions are not only to tone the bodies of self-obsessed westerners. Each of the twelve basic asanas or postures that we learned are a means of disciplining the body for devotion to god. The butterfly loosens our hips for extended meditation and prayer and in the Salute to the Sun one prostrates oneself again and again in worship of the divine.
In any case, good yoga alone can’t completely explain my compulsion to remain.
About a week into the program, an American arrived, vaguely handsome with curly hair, his eyes seemed in a perpetual state of alarm. He joined us for one yoga class and promptly disappeared.
Why was he so disturbed while I was so relatively relaxed? I am sure you’ve heard about the experiment with a frog and a pot of boiling water. Apparently, if you put the frog near the pot when it is boiling it will immediately jump away. But if you place the frog in the pot of water and slowly raise the temperature until it boils, the frog will remain where it is and die.
We, like the frog in the pot of water, were so gradually ingratiated to the eccentricities of the Ashram that we scarcely noticed the profound shift in our milieux. For this American, however the experience would have been like stepping into another world, or a cult.
Also, I was determined to remain open minded for the duration of our stay and not present the kind of scornful atheism of Richard Dawkins and others. I attended every session, chanted along the names of deities, gave everything to the physical exercise of yoga. But there was a point where open-mindedness reaches its limits and I had to make a choice whether to proceed down the path offered by the Ashram, or violently diverge. My mind trembled on this point for a while and in retrospect, the Yoga Vacation might have been a vacation from myself from which I never returned had it not been for one dramatic affair.
During one of our classes, Monique had an attack of vertigo, something which she has experienced before but which occurs so rarely that neither of us anticipated for a moment that it might happen during our time here.
We were practising a set of very intense breathing exercises, the specific nature of which I won’t describe, but which are held to be extremely ‘purifying’ of bad energies as well as of toxins in our lungs.
Monique stopped in the middle of the exercise and rested her head in her hands. One of the junior instructors who was assisting the Swami and compelled her to continue with the exercise.
‘Its part of the process, its your body trying to release the toxins.’
‘I’m having an attack of vertigo’
‘Your cheating yourself by trying to leave and not experiencing this moment.’
This exchange continued for some time, all the while Monique was doing her best not to vomit or faint. Eventually, she began to cry and left the yoga hall with the junior instructor followed behind her. Some moments later the instructor came back inside.
‘Is she okay,’ I asked, at this stage not yet knowing what had happened.
‘The body is releasing its toxins, some people can have a bad experience but its important that you continue with the exercise to get the full benefits. Try to get her to come back inside.’
I stepped outside and was horrified when Monique explained what had taken place. Ambivalence was dispelled and I began to view the Ashram in an ominous light.
It was as though my mind, that disagreeable collective of thoughts, feelings and perceptions, kicked into a self-protective gear. I became actively disdainful towards the Ashram and loudly voiced my scepticism about the Ashram, particularly in ear shot of devotees.
I could not decide if such things were heroism or if I sacrificed some of my dignity in acting in such a self satisfying way. But then I am never as strong as I would like to be.
I began to contemplate whether the Ashram might rightly be called a cult. Firstly, because we were encouraged by the Ashram authorities and through the exercises we pursued to purge ourselves of our individuality. As has been described above, we were directed frequently to pursue our daily activities, physical yoga, Karma yoga, meditation in a way that excluded our egos. We were also told to be wary of our own intellects. Doubt and criticism go against the universalism preached at the Sivananda Ashram, because they are obstacles to unity with God and experiencing reality as it really is
Our movement was restricted in subtle ways. We were unable to leave the Ashram unless we received permission to do so.
If the Sivananda Ashram was acutely a cult, a we would not have been able to leave at all, or we would have been strenuously prevented from doing so. And yet the rigidly ordered day and the subtle indoctrination makes a person less likely to risk banishment from the Ashram by disobeying these ‘voluntary’ restrictions on our movement.
A singularly disturbing part of life at the Ashram was the way in which personal space was obliterated.
Those living in dorms had literally no space of their own.. Monique and I at least had a private room that we shared (although a stone desk was fixed to the floor to separate our single beds to prevent coitus).
Whether one had a private room or not made little difference, as the Ashram day was spent almost exclusively in public settings. I felt very much in the thrall of others when meditating, when practising the yoga postures, when eating. The net effect was that we all became exhausted, that the exercise of individuality became unnecessary, something in excess to that which was necessary to function productively in the life of the Ashram. As Monique articulated, even when we did have an hour or two of spare time, it became difficult, even impossible to decide how we would spend it. We were at a loss to exercise this most basic discrimination, and in its absence yet more work improving the body and purifying the mind became the only attractive proposition.
At the same time, I was hesitant to succumb to the temptation to label Sivananda as a cult. For just as the Swami claimed an absolute perspective when he spoke of the universal, by labelling Sivananda Ashram a cult, I was also claiming an absolute perspective over the activities and experiences of all of those engaged in spiritual practice there. The word ‘cult’ is a rhetorical device to exclude a spiritual practice from legitimacy by differentiating these practices from ‘legitimate religion’.
It became imperative to me that I uncover some other means to critique what I was learning and experiencing at the Ashram. This quest contained a supreme existential importance. I felt that something fundamental was at stake, that if I could not give expression to my concerns, then some of the ‘mud would stick’, as my friend Andreas put it.
So instead of claiming an absolute perspective, I decided to mount a critique using the set of values I had already acquired before attending the Ashram, without claiming that they possessed some universal significance. I acknowledged that I was sceptical, hostile even, towards authoritarian knowledge structures, ways of thinking that promote power relations that are virtually fixed and immutable, a relation of power-knowledge that approaches what Foucault calls ‘domination’.
I decided that the architecture that made one excessively visible, the regimented schedule, the chanting in unison, the rigidly enforced group meditation, the silent collective meals, the lectures and even the group exercise classes together constituted an authoritarian power structure, something to which for whatever reason I am hostile. You could call it ‘my faith’. On this basis I could extricate my mind and Ego from the week week long bombardment.
I was struck by the parallels between what I was experiencing and some elements of the film The Invasion that Monique and I caught on a hotel’s satellite television a few weeks earlier. If you haven’t seen the film, it is worth seeing, though it is by no means brilliant. Its the second remake of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original film was about communist indoctrination, the second about 80′s me-generation selfishness. This version film has more subtle ideas in its background. In the film, a virus from space spreads through the world’s population connecting them to a unity and freeing them of passionate attachments.
Nicole Kidman plays a psychoanalyst who tries to resist this universality and who has a sun who possesses a rare immunity to this virus.
When Nicole Kidman’s character asks one of the infected what will become of her son in the new universal human world, she is told that anything that cannot conform with the universal will have to be eliminated. In much the same way, the limits of the so-called universal of Sivananda Ashram are revealed when one looks at which it excludes, namely individuality, worldliness, passion and pleasure. So, in fact, universalism is not universal at all, but a most acute particularism.
Subsequent conversations confirmed that I was not alone in this thinking.
I learned from Rolf (not his real name), a forty-something German man who has been connected to the Ashram for many years, that the Ashram leadership, both past and present, compromised their own ascetic principles
‘Oh yeah, tell me about it, I mean, even these Swamis, they don’t deny themselves anything, I mean even the founders, like Swami Sivananda, he had his own private plane. He had a cheese addiction! He had a big belly out to here,’ he said gesturing with his arms.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, oh man there’s so much I could tell you. Excuse me, I need to release some gas,’ he said, taking a few steps away and fanning the air with his arms.
I agree with the Yogic insight that the self is an illusion. But perhaps the self is never more of an illusion when it imagines itself to be autonomous of the world. If we strive to be universal, we begin to pretend, falsely, that we are no longer under the persuasion of the world, of others, of and of knowledge. We fall into the trap of believing that through sheer will we can lift ourselves out of history, out of language, out of politics and out of ideology. Through this hubris we close ourselves off from becoming critical beings in the small, limited way that life affords us.
Is it possible to strive for a perception of the divine that does not occlude reason and doubt, and does not reside in a false and impossible universality? I am talking of a spiritual perception that one obtains from remaining open minded, from seeking, remaining critical, from engaging with the world and from failing our own divine aspirations.
If I am to have a spirituality then this is where its heart will lie.

You’ve probably never heard of Auroville. It lies some ten kilometres north of the former French colonial town of Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu, southern India.

It follows the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, who believed that man was a transitional being.

It was established in the late 1960s by his French-Egyptian devotee, Mirra Alfassa, who assumed the humble moniker ‘The Mother’. The Mother intended Auroville to be a city of the world, a laboratory in which experiments could be undertaken of a social and technological nature to lay the foundations for a new age in the human story, and a new species fit for such an age.

Upon arriving, we were directed to park our motor scooter at the front gate and proceed to the visitor’s centre. There we had to endure a video explicating the town’s universalist philosophy before we were able to receive a visitor’s pass that would allow us to view the town’s centrepiece, a golden metallic sphere called Matrimandir.

It is, truly, an arresting sight. This large golden dome set in a vast plain catching on each of its myriad points the glaring summer sun above.

From what I understand, it is something of a spiritual power plant. The dome is internally lined with a set of mirrors and crystals which capture the sun’s energy and, I’m not quite sure, I suppose redirect it to the Aurovillian community.

There are myriad projects run out of Auroville. There is a vast Centre for Scientific Research, which runs a number of projects looking into sustainable energy. There is a food laboratory, experimental farming communities, arts and crafts circles, a number of experimental theatre groups and so on.

I was quite fascinated by the work they performed, particularly that to do with renewable energy, and an exhibition explained that a number of technologies developed by the Aurovillians to do with water recycling, solar power generation and so on had been exported to the outside world.

We took our motor scooter around in an attempt to see something of these projects. But it was Sunday, and there wasn’t a great number of people around, and most of the major buildings had security guards posted out the front.

Essentially, Auroville seemed to me to be something like a cross between Confest and the CSIRO. Large, looming research facilities with electric gates posted beside shacks selling vegetarian food and unfortunately naïve ‘hippy’ art.

The first major problem I had with Auroville is that, for an ideal community, I think that it was really unfortunately landscaped. It was ultra-low density, a bicycle or motor scooter is fundamental to drive from, say, ‘Certitude’, which was the name given to the local school, to the Solar Kitchen, and then home to snooze off the chappatis and korma.

The second critique belongs to Monique and to a German fellow I met at the Pondicherry market haggling over bananas: Its a bit cult like. When I was too busy being optimistic Monique was whining about the self-aggrandising nature of the place and of the role of The Mother. Why did she call herself The Mother? Why does a community need to have a central worshipped figure to orient itself around?

I am now very sceptical about people like The Mother and Sri Aurobindo who claim to have ascended to a higher level of reality. This seems to me to have many more tactical, rhetorical and instrumental dimensions to it than they and their followers are likely to acknowledge.

And as the German said, why hasn’t anyone heard of Auroville? In Germany, and in Australia also, Auroville may as well not exist. Why does this community choose to cut itself off from the outside world if it is so committed to experimenting with the forms that are supposed to save the outside world. I certainly got that impression while we were there, that the outside world was an encumbrance.

It is possible to do one-week volunteering sessions at a project in Auroville. But according to the German you get treated like a total outsider while you are there. You haven’t given yourself over to the Mother, you are not echt-Aurovillian.

I think that the isolation of the community is understated both as a draw for those who choose to devote their lives to the place and a drawback to those who idle through. There is something undeniably flat about the mood at Auroville. It has none of the dynamism that makes the city such a vibrant place to live and create.

An alternative form for an Auroville style community would be to redevelop some decrepit corner of a city into a similar place for research and experimentation into science and social forms.

In any case, Auroville has failed to foster meaningful ties with the world beyond and seems to be more than a little fascinated with owns universalist resplendence. For that reason it will always have the whiff of cult-compound, no matter how many solar panels it produces.

I know I shouldn’t talk about Global Warming all the time. Its self-indulgent, and alarmist. But I couldn’t help myself, some urge, some dark neuron felt the impending calm that Laos brings and resisted. It wanted to upset and distort.

And so I told Stefan and Karl, our new German friends, of the horror global warming would bring. Famine, mass extinction of the human species, and it wasn’t going to be a glamorous apocalypse, no, no grand explosion to wipe us out once and for all, but slow, steady to decline into squalor, disease, suffering and decay.

They argued, that people are becoming responsive, I countered that there was not time. Monique groaned, probably praying that the Germans weren’t taking me too seriously. They didn’t, but argued vigorously.

The reason for this anecdote will become clearer later.

We parted to meet again at 8:30, beside the night market, at the foot steps leading the grand old temple that sits atop a hill in the middle of downtown. We took some cocktails, and some photos, they left us again to go market shopping. We moved to another bar, this time on a streetside location. We drank some more, grew merrier, closer I felt and as the bar’s in town closed one by one, their lights flickering out like eyes closing to sleep, it was decided we should go bowling.

Liquor licences in Luang Prabang only allow for trade to continue until about 11:00pm in the evening in normal circumstances. The exclusion to this rule is bowling alleys, which are allowed to operate through the night, and thus become the pseudo-night clubs of this ancient city.

This appeals to me, I’ll try to explain why. There’s some romantic about things, phenomena which are a byproduct of other decisions. I enjoy the lack of intentionality in such things and they acquire something that cannot reproduced deliberately. What is historically analogous? I’m trying to think. Soviet film culture, those vast symbolist epics that express themselves with a nuance that cannot be bought in a ‘free’ society. What else? Sex parties in Tehran, a desperate, free sexuality that would become crass and exploitative were it not for the repressive moral regime and the need for people to come to each other to no longer feel wholly subsumed in it.

It is as though from the clutter of structures, physical, mental, ideological, are productive in ways that are surplus to design. And it is this surplus that I savour.

Which is not to say that the bowling alley was some kind of paragon of culture. It was, it must be admitted, a dive, filled with indulgent backpackers. But it was wholly, wholly, out of this world.

One was either taking a game of bowling seriously, or, more likely, was clustered around one of the alleys two bars, the main reception where games could be organised and Beer Lao purchased, or another, more illuminated bar, a crawling mess of fairy lights, and liquor bottles, and unsteady on their feet westerners, served by Laos people with coy expressions.

I feverishly took photographs, trying to grasp and preserve something of this irreplaceable moment. One of the Laos girls stuck a beer bottle in the photo. Good for her. I smiled appreciatively. I mustn’t have been the first to feel that this was something entirely unique.

I floated around, talking, laughing, cataloguing. I had a photo taken with a policeman with a bag of something in my back pocket. I watched Monique with an Irishman who insisted that I was gay, an assessment whose consequence, if taken seriously, he perceived might be beneficial to his interests.

Someone painted my fingernail green, in honour of St Patrick’s day.

Karl and Stefan talked to pair of women, one German, one American, Stefan keeping a polite distance in honour of his absent partner.

We bowled, Stefan with the American, Karl with the Irishman, Monique and I joining our considerble athletic prowress.

I bowled respectably, knocking a pin off the corner now and then, suffering more than a few throws that landed in the gutter. In my peripheral vision a Laos man motions with his arms, trying to advise me as to how to bowl more effectively. My fingers did not even fit in the wholes of the light, pink ball I had chosen.

Monique and I cheered one another’s failures.

The American and the irishman bowled well, Stefan and Karl too. The game was at a close, with one ball left to bowl. The scores were something like 45, 60, 4.

The ball had just rolled into the gutter, and I watched the other teams began to act as though the game had finished. I decided a speech was in order.

As I gathered the fragments of my mind, I was not only thinking of the tragic, losing game Monique and I were playing. I remembered my earlier pessmism about our planet’s fortunes. It is entirely strange to fear something so calamitous that is also at the same time real, not a figment of our anxieties as is most often the case. It cannot be dismissed.

And yet this is not the end of the human story. Standing before the disinterested audience I reminded them that it was St Patrick’s day, ‘as such, I think you will agree that it is appropriate to quote from the emerald isle’s greatest playwright. I am talking, of course, about Samuel Beckett.’

I grew silent, to ensure that I held the attention of my audience The quote was ‘We will all fail’ and I looked each of the fellow players in the eye. ‘Each of us, yes we will all fail, but we must learn to fail better.’ And at that I turned and bowled. It skimmed the side and five pins fell.

Postscript:

I had wanted to end on that thought, but there are a couple of other incidences worth reminding.

I was cheered after my moderate success at the eleventh hour and the Irishman approached.

‘Well done, seems like Beckett helped you.’

‘Luck of the Irish’ was all I could think to reply.

‘No, no, no’ he said, my cliché had draining his enthusiasm. He walked away disturbed and furrowed.

The alley began to close and we then sat in that slovenly, purposeless way that drunken people do when there is no more alcohol. The staff floated around us grumpily, doing everything short of physically shoving us to compel us to leave.

Eventually, someone took the initiative and we obeyed, spilling out into the street.

Tuk-tuk drivers crowded around and we quickly negotiated a price back to downtown. A large, bald man joined us in the back. I never determined where he was from because he was so drunk he could hardly speak.

Stefan later insisted that he was ‘A Russian neo-nazi.’ Or maybe it was Karl.

‘He is a neo-nazi, can’t you tell from his shaved head?”

‘If he was a neo-nazi, why would he be in a Laos. Would a German neo-nazi holiday in Laos.’

‘No perhaps not.’

‘No, he’d go to Saxony or something.’

A driver approached the man and insisted that he had failed to pay for his drive to the bowling alley earlier. The man could hardly answer.

The Irishman approached to mediate.

‘You didn’t pay the man. Pay him now.’

‘Wh?’

‘You didn’t pay for your drive. You owe this man twenty kip.’

The German woman from earlier was seated next to him.

‘I don’t think he has any money. Take out your wallet,’ she ordered him.

The man fumbled around in his pants and pulled out a wallet.

‘Now take out twenty.’ I was impressed by the Prussian efficiency of her actions

His fat hands curled around the notes, drawing them up to his eyes and then returning them to their leather home. He would then look around at us bemused.

‘You owe this man 20 kip’, the Irishman repeated with irritation.

‘He has US dollars. Give him three US dollars. One…’ she counted with him ‘two, three.’

All the while the Irishman stood over this man and I began to wonder exactly what his agenda was. I couldn’t recall when we met him, where he came from, and how we started to bowl with him. Maybe he was working for someone. Was this some sort of a conspiracy?

Eventually, he took out the required funds and the tuk-tuk driver disappeared. But why hadn’t he followed him into the alley for payment? Why wait outside. Scenes of the earlier mayhem flashed before my eyes. I began to understand.

It emerged that the Irishman was not going to travel with us.

‘Alright mate,’ I said. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you. Maybe we should have coffee tomorrow.’

‘Sound’s great, where are you staying?’

Not remembering the name of the guesthouse, and not wanting to remember I said non-committally,

‘I’m not sure, one of the places on the main street.’

There must be at least fifty. The Irishman said nothing and walked away, stepping into a white car that had mysteriously pulled up beside the tuk-tuk. He sped away.