Dharma Sutra
David Pugh
Austin Macauley Publishers
Dharma Sutra
About the Author
Dedication
Foreword
Copyright Information
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Wall of Death
Chapter 2: Palm Wine Daze
Chapter 3: The Guinness Beach Party
Chapter 4: Winter’s Discontent
Chapter 5: How Osama Bin Laden Changed My Life
Chapter 6: Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye
Chapter 7: Down in Africa
Chapter 8: Night of the Long Shaft
Chapter 9: The Happy Hippo Hostel Hotel
Chapter 10: One Night in Ziguinchor
Chapter 11: The Sirens’ Cry
Chapter 12: The Beach of Broken Dreams
Chapter 13: Jungle Jeffery
Chapter 14: The Man with Dead Eyes
Chapter 15: Stealer of Souls
Chapter 16: Away, Away in India
Chapter 17: Vanaprastha
Chapter 18: The Long Walk to India
Chapter 19: Love Calls You by Your Name
Chapter 20: Light as the Breeze
Chapter 21: Goodbye to Little Tibet
Chapter 22: The Song of Suliman
Chapter 23: Remus the Butler
Chapter 24: Foreplay at the 4H
Chapter 25: Remus the Adventurer
Chapter 26: An Eye for Nepal
Chapter 27: Kathmandu
Chapter 28: My Brother, My Killer
Chapter 30: Indian Daze
Chapter 31: Baba Jan Singh
Chapter 32: North or South?
Chapter 33: The African on the Roof of the World
Chapter 34: A Perfumed Ladakh Garden
Chapter 35: Night Hawk Down
Chapter 36: The Song of Suliman: A Beer at the End of India
Chapter 37: The Gregory Girl
Chapter 38: The Song of Suliman: The Fireflies of Rameswaram
Chapter 39: The Bard of Bakau
Chapter 40: Momentarily Blessed
Chapter 41: Life in Exile
Chapter 42: The Song of Suliman – Waiting for Rama
Chapter 43: The Fisher of Men
Chapter 44: The Kingmaker
Chapter 45: Death of a Ladies’ Man
Chapter 46: Stalemate
Chapter 47: The Long Road to Lithang
Chapter 48: Love at the Lhasa Inn
Chapter 49: The Zambezi Bongo Band
Chapter 50: Knock on Wood
Chapter 51: I Think I’ve Sold My Soul
Chapter 52: The Greater Song of Suliman: Shanti on the C.T. Road
Chapter 53: In the Arms of Kali
Chapter 54: In the Arms of Kristna
Chapter 55: The Gospel of Issa
Chapter 56: Santana’s White Magic Man
Chapter 57: Everybody Knows
Chapter 58: Seducing Angels
Chapter 59: The Reluctant Disciple
Chapter 60: Distant Drums
Chapter 61: Mother Should Know
Chapter 62: Necessary Evil?
Chapter 63: The Power Behind the Throne
Chapter 64: Mother Knows Best
Chapter 65: Eve of War
Chapter 66: It’s Five O’clock Somewhere
Chapter 67: High Noon at the Happy Hippo
Chapter 68: Same Time, Another Place
Chapter 69: I Can’t Remember If We Said Goodbye
Chapter 70: If I Couldn’t Lift the Veil and See Your Face
Chapter 71: The Greater Song of Suliman–Part Two
Chapter 72: The Blackheart Man
Chapter 73: When the Healing Has Begun
Chapter 74: I’ll Go the Whole Wide World
Chapter 75: The New Gods
Chapter 76: Subhadra Revealed
Chapter 77: Yo-Yo Girl Cop 3 Exposed
Chapter 78: The Body Is the Light, the Body Is the Way
Chapter 79: The Broken Hills
Chapter 80: Take This Longing
Chapter 81: Subhadra Realised
Chapter 82: The Song of Suliman Reprise – The Black Knight of the Soul
Chapter 83: The Temple of the Heart
Chapter 84: The Angel of the Kalinga Utkal Express
Chapter 85: The Dreams Beyond Philosophy
Chapter 86: The School for Stolen Children
Chapter 87: Transhumanists – The Seekers of Absolute Power
Chapter 88: The Truth to Be Told
Chapter 89: Rishikesh
Chapter 90: Let the Sideshow Begin
Chapter 91: Upon This Rock I Shall Build My Church
Chapter 92: African Epilogue
About the Author
David Pugh has been a published comic strip artist and writer since 1976. He was the last artist to draw Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future in the Eagle comic.
He has eight books still in print; Loner anthology (Rebellion 2019) three new Slaine anthologies, one Polish edition and one in German (Rebellion, August 2018), Neil Gaiman’s Shadow Death (Papercutz, USA, 2016), Slaine: The King (2013), Slaine: Time Killer (2007) and writer and artist of Obvious Tactics (Black Library, 2002). Following eleven years on the Daily Mirror’s Scorer newspaper football strip, he became a voluntary graphic designer for a Tibetan charity in Dharamsala, India. 2017 saw his essay published in Minds Wailing in Remembrance, an Indian tribute anthology to Tibetan monk Tenzin Delek who died in a Chinese prison.
Dedication
To my uncle Davey Morgan Powell, July 1917 – April 2001, the man who taught me to draw, to use my imagination and, most importantly, showed me the beauty of travel. I’m sure he would have enjoyed journeying with me and approved of my views on organised religion but would have frowned on Jeffrey’s sexual shenanigans. Thank you for your love and for helping me to find my way.
Foreword
I first met David Pugh over twenty years ago in the town of El-Bawiti, near the Bahariya Oasis of the Western Sahara Desert; he was holding a child’s skull. I told him we were standing in a former Coptic Christian cemetery that Islam had covered over. David said that he hoped the child had had many happy and fulfilling rebirths since its small remains had been laid to rest on this spot. We began a discussion around the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. We had both discovered the great coincidence that the forty-nine day process of rebirth, the Samsara coincided with the development of the pineal gland in the foetus. The gland has been known as the Third Eye for thousands of years and is the source of our dreams and creativity. David was interested in the concept that sexual stimulation could produce large amounts of oxytocin in the gland and release a stream of consciousness that could be called a waking dream. The book you hold in your hand was brought into being through the process of linking the Sacral Chakra direct to the Ajna Chakra, the Third Eye. The second chakra is the source of sexual desire as well as that of our creativity. David and I have met many times in the course of our travels, most recently in the Amazon jungle where we participated in a five-day ayahuasca ceremony. David discovered from the experience that all his conjectures in DHARMA SUTRA were proved correct and he very much hopes that you will share the insight he has discovered. I fully concur with his view that the transitional state of existence, which most people naively call death, is nothing more than a process of rebirth which should be embraced rather than feared. Fear of death is a construct of the Abrahamic religions in an attempt to control the masses and make them pliable to the will of the State. There’s entertainment and wisdom found in David’s words, like me he has discovered many truths through the course of travelling this fascinating planet.
Richard E Burton, traveller and adventurer.
Copyright Information
Copyright © David Pugh (2019)
The right of David Pugh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788488037 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781788488044 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528960458 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgements
A great inspiration for this book and the key to a life well lived can be found in the words and wisdom of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.
Special thanks to Esme Traverzo for the front cover photo and Samuel Pugh for his editorial contribution.
Chapter 1: Wall of Death
My father was an adrenaline junky, a suppressed adrenaline junky. For nearly twenty years before I was born, he raced motorbikes at breakneck speed. He’d had repeated success on Pendine Sands in South Wales and had qualified for the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy. A month before the big event he was down for the Mount Epynt race and asked his brother to sweep and check the track. Will didn’t do it and my dad took a spill, breaking several bones in different parts of his body. His nurse was the woman who became my mother. She presented him with a Donald McGill postcard of a patient totally covered in plaster, asking the nurse for help with the bedpan. My dad was hooked and after a brief courtship, he married her but on one condition, he was never to race again. After the initial nuptials, leading to my birth, he was a happy and proud thirty-five-year-old father. As the years of responsibility dragged on, he became irritable and short-tempered. My sister came along six years after me, following the stillbirth of a brother; my mother’s fear of life grew with her protectiveness of me. Having been a war nurse, she considered cutting off my trigger finger, National Service was still in place. She had visions of me being shipped off to an Asian jungle to fight the Red Menace.
In 1966 my father turned fifty; my mother’s figure never returned after my sister’s birth. He would sit mesmerised in front of the BBC’s Top of the Pops, not believing what he was seeing, Pan’s People gyrating in very short skirts on the black and white screen. He thought he was missing out on life and felt envious of a new generation of television, sporting super stars. In 1967 the skirts got shorter and the camera angles lower, flower children were broadcasting to the world that love was free and it wasn’t self-indulgent to do your own thing. During that Summer of Love, Fabien Gruber’s Cirque du Vitesse came to Weston-super-Mare, where our dad moored the family caravan. Fabien boasted the world’s largest Wall of Death motorcycle track and challenged anyone to perform higher and faster than his own riders. My dad was possessed with an envious frenzy, his midlife crisis had reached breaking point. ‘I’ll do it!’ he shouted out.
‘You do it and I’ll leave you!’ my mother protested.
‘I am going!’ was his response.
Over the years the threat of his running away grew and grew. He would drive off into the night in the family car for hours on end, saying he would work as a circus mechanic, travel the world with the show and ride the Wall of Death. He always returned, saying nothing about his outburst. Now the circus was in town, and Dad would show everyone that he could ride this monster track and be a hero, if only for one day. Fabien kitted him up like an astronaut, got him to sign an indemnity form, that Cirque du Vitesse would not be responsible if anyone tackling their wall would indeed die. Dad took off, seventeen years of frustration was powering that machine, faster and faster, higher and higher. My mother threw up and fell into a vertigo faint as Dad reached the very rim, a seemingly impossible feat. The crowd was going nuts as Dad kept going around that rim. Barely slowing, he took the bike down to the arena floor, like a conquering gladiator he threw off all his armour, stripped to his underpants and soaked in the applause, laughing and laughing, knowing he had done something almost impossible. I’d once found a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums under my dad’s pillow. My mother was a fundamentalist Christian and believed in delayed gratification, though she was terrified of dying. My dad was in search of more in this life, he had suppressed his true self too long.
As he stood there in his flannels, the crowd chanted, ‘Who are you?’
He rotated his body like Spartacus facing the arena throng, arms raised, fists clenched, laughing still and shouting,
‘I am Dharma…Dai Dharma!’ That day a new fifty-year-old hero was born. Fabien Gruber became his manager and for the next thirty years he became a champion to rival Evel Knievel. He wore the famous green spandex trousers with the red dragon clutching a spinning wheel rising out of the waistband and that red cape with silver stars. He may have been one of the first silver age superheroes and an inspiration to his generation. Dad changed his name by deed poll to Dharma, I was so proud of him that I adopted the name too. As my first name was Jeffrey, this decision would cause quite a few problems for me, when the activities of the Milwaukee Cannibal came to light in 1991. Not many people had the patience to allow me to explain, ‘No, he’s D-A-H-M-E-R!’
Chapter 2: Palm Wine Daze
The Gambia, West Africa, December 2001
Remus Jallow was all smiles when our family turned up to see a palm wine tapping demonstration at his “Nature” as he called the little palm forest he had inherited from his father. He was particularly attracted to the two women, his attention was focused on the daughter, who was of marriageable age. Like all West Africans, he saw marriage as the route to riches, but Evangeline was having none of it. He gave his demonstration on how he used his hoop to walk up the tree. The mother wanted to try; Sylvia slipped the hoop around her waist and took a few steps up the tree, affording Remus a glimpse of her white panties under her khaki mini skirt. From that moment on, Remus was focused on finding out what was inside those knickers. He had no experience of a woman of Oriental extract, thus there was new territory to explore. It didn’t stop his attentions towards Evangeline; she was still his most likely ticket to Western riches.
Remus and I took an instant liking to each other; we were polar opposites, who together would have made a formidable human being. We called ourselves brothers and the fondness would remain, despite the bizarre events and twists of fate which would follow us through the next thirteen years. This atmospheric and quite magical clearing in a small forest in The Gambia was the scene of another midlife crisis, which would change the course of my life. I can’t underestimate the power of this little piece of jungle, drinking palm wine under a huge African full moon is not just intoxicating, it’s darkly seductive. Two months earlier I had turned fifty, seventeen years locked in the same home studio was breaking me. All that time drawing comic book adventures in isolation gave me a yearning for the real thing. I sensed that meeting Remus could change my life and somehow he sensed that too. He boasted that he had shamanistic skills and could see inside people, curing their ailments. Sylvia, despite several attempts at becoming an artist, had become a stay-at-home mum, and saving money had become her passion, certainly more than bedroom passion. Remus picked this up and worked his magic on her, while still pursuing our daughter. At six-foot-six and all natural muscle, Remus was a hard and horny dreadlocked man, capable of satisfying more than one woman at a time. He mesmerised Sylvia, she became a sex-starved zombie in his presence, finding herself aroused in a
way she had never experienced.
‘What would it be like to have sex with this friendly black god?’
Her friend, Alexandra, had told her that she would love to visit the Caribbean and taste Jamaican Steel just once in her life. Sylvia was shocked by this, having a convent school upbringing had given her a very fixed moral code. Now she found herself wanting this experience with the good-looking, charismatic palm tapper. Her feelings shocked her; she had never known anything like this, it was sexual vertigo. Years later Remus boasted that he could do this to all women and offered to put the spell on his common law wife to have wild cravings for me. At the time I was oblivious to this happening, I didn’t learn the full erotic details until weeks later back in the UK, when Sylvia started running up huge phone bills to The Gambia and would disappear to the bedroom five or six times a day. Then it all came out, the full details of what happened on our last night in Kotu, at the Guinness beach party.
Chapter 3: The Guinness Beach Party
The Jallows invited us to spend Christmas Day 2001 with them. Being Christian in a majority Muslim country meant they really pushed the boat out to impress their Islamic neighbours. Vast amounts of pork and alcohol were served all day, just to proclaim their freedom from what they saw as an oppressive religion. Remus kept several pigs in the compound and slaughtered a medium-sized one for the whole family, of which we were honoured to be included. We had never eaten a pig so freshly killed and under-cooked, it was very soft and easy to eat, but we all suffered the consequences later that evening. At the time unlimited amounts of palm wine were being consumed, along with kana, the deadly distilled version. Remus seeing himself as a Rastafarian meant ganja smoking was obligatory.
After lunch Remus, the four of us, Sylvia, Evangeline, our son Edgar and me along with Remus’ step brother, Ebrima Mboge went for a beer in Serrekunda’s famous Lana’s Bar. Ebrima was a really cool, football playing young Rasta; Edgar struck up an immediate friendship with him. Guinness is brewed at seven and a half percent by Julbrew, The Gambia’s own brewery; it used to market its signature beer as Joyful Julbrew, today they can’t advertise under new Islamic laws. Several Guinnesses were consumed at Lana’s on top of the palm wine and kana, and we were experiencing the first stomach clenches of Banjul Belly; in this case it was more than likely the under-cooked Pig’s Revenge. We determined to push on and celebrate the Lord’s birthday, the way he would have done had he been there, turning water into Julbrew.