The Hippie Series

I) Hippies

The hippies are everywhere.

The girls shave their heads and the guys grow dreadlocks.

They all spin batons and twirl crystal balls on their fingers.

The men go bare-chested, except for long strings of prayer beads.

The girls wear scarves and silver arm bands shaped like snakes.

Just when I think one is not a hippie, she lets loose and begins singing out loud in the middle of a crowded cafe.

II) Hippie Love

I sat at the back table today.  At the table nearest the edge, where the cliff drops away to the Ganges far below, Hippie Number One was at it again.  This is the same guy who goes shirtless every day, and curses The Man for deeming it necessary to wear clothes at all.  He smokes endlessly, and talks without pause.  He frequently refers to “His Guru” and judging from the smell that wafts across the table, he showers rarely.  

He is American, and because the culture in America was “stifling his being”, he came to India.  Even though he was “free” in the States, growing pot and selling it en masse, he had to engage with kids that “just didn’t get it.”  

So here he is, in this tiny town in Northern India, expounding on spirituality and “the matrix of life, man.”  I hear about it all the time, and I’ve only had a formal conversation with him once.  He talks very loudly, all the time.

This morning I watched him at his usual routine.  His favorite Girl Du Jour (he hasn’t told me this, I have just deduced it by watching) is a European named Sabrina.  He was speaking to her intensely this morning.  

Strangely, he was talking in quieter tones than usual, so I didn’t catch all of what he was saying.  But his body language was impossible to miss.  He would lean forward on his elbows, chain-smoking cigarettes, and jab a finger in her face repeatedly to prove a point.  Then he would sit back, satisfied, and puff on his cigarette for a moment.  

Just as she started to respond, he would sit up and quickly cut her off, racing ahead with a new juicy point for her to ponder, or a paradox to stump her with.  She was a good sport, nodding philosophically and seeming to be interested.  But after some time, I noticed her eyes beginning to glaze over.  

I remembered my conversation with him several days before, and wondered if I had looked the same way.  Something about the mechanical nodding of her head was so familiar.  I remember acting interested for awhile, too.

Before she can get a word in edgewise, he is at it again.  “So do you see what I’m saying, Sabrina?” he asks, his head tilted to the side in what appears to be a gesture of great earnestness.  

“It’s really important that you understand this.”  

His eyes are wide, and he allows the gravity of his statement to sink in.  He watches her reaction, and can hardly contain the self-satisfied smile that wants to creep across his face.  

A breeze blows through the restaurant. Sabrina sits up and begins to respond.  I cannot hear what she is saying, because she speaks in much quieter tones than he does.  As she talks, her red scarf flutters around her neck, and he adopts a very sincere expression, leaning forward and resting his chin on his palms.  

But he is like a panther ready to pounce.  He has allowed her perhaps thirty seconds of free speech, and he is itching to break in.  She pauses, thinking about how she might best continue to illustrate her point.  He jumps.

“Ah ah ah…” I hear him say, wagging his fingers back and forth, the cigarette still burning between them.  “That’s where you’re wrong!  My guru says…”

 And he’s off again.  

I have almost finished breakfast, and when I look up next, I see that Sabrina is now fiddling with the jam jar. She’s not even looking at him anymore.  But this doesn’t slow him down in the least.  It seems to fuel his fire.  Now he must have her attention.  

I take my last bite of yogurt and push the plate away.  I am about to gather my things together when I see that Sabrina is doing the same thing.  She stands up, preparing to leave.  

Suddenly the hippie’s body language changes entirely.  Now, instead of All Wise Teacher, he is her humble servant, taking her hand and kissing it with deep feeling.  She begins to straighten up, but he has pulled her down again and is embracing her, a long, intense embrace that, for once, is conducted in silence.  And yet the silence is so deep, so meaningful, it is uncomfortable to watch.  The hippie clearly wants to impart as much feeling and depth upon this moment as possible.  

As he presses her body to him, his head tilted piously to the side, his motives, which have been clear all along, come into perfect, undisguised focus: he desperately wants to get laid.

III) Hippie Fight

We had just finished a late dinner.  The Ganges flowed by in the darkness outside, and in the restaurant perched high above the inky river, hippies were engaged in animated conversation.  Cigarette smoke floated through the air, and the unmistakable smell of patchouli was everywhere.

Suddenly, one of the Indian boys who worked in the cafe flickered the lights.  Then he turned them off completely.  We sat in darkness for a moment, before he turned them on and began flickering them again.

“Hey, hey, hey!” shouted an Israeli hippie in a leather vest with nothing under it but a string of turquoise beads.  

“We’re trying to talk here!  Could you give us some light?”

From a table against the other wall, an older hippie with sunken cheeks and deeply tanned skin turned in his seat.  

“Zey open at seex sirty in ze morning, okay?” he drawled to the Israeli who had spoken.  

“Zey are very tired, you know?  Now it is nine-sirty, and zey have been vorking all day.  Geev zem a break!”

The vested Israeli was taken aback.  So was his entire table.  They murmured among themselves, and one girl with a feather tucked into her dreadlocks bristled visibly.  She shot daggers at the sunken-cheeked hippie with her kohl-lined eyes. Then she flipped her dreads over her shoulder and returned to her conversation, audibly assassinating him.

The vested Israeli’s pride having been wounded, he now took it upon himself to redeem some of what had been lost.  

“I know,” he said sarcastically so the entire small restaurant could hear.  

“I was just kidding…”  

There was poison in his tone.

The sunken cheeked hippie continued.  “You know, zey really are tired, so maybe you should zink about relaxing, you know?  Give zem a break?  Zey are cooking for people like you and I all day…”

“I know!” shouted the Israeli again, angrier now.  

Everyone in the restaurant had fallen silent. Even the Indian boy who had flickered the lights had disappeared.  My companions and I looked at each other uncomfortably.  

“Let’s get out of here,” one of them said.  

We stood up and made our way to the front room where the cash register was located. As we stood in line to pay, there was obvious tension in the air.  The Israelis had come out together, and were muttering among themselves, twisting their hair up into knots and shooting looks at the opposing crew.

The sunken-cheeked man, I now saw, had glittery blue powder painted around his eyes, and an orange dot on his forehead.  He was laughing a little too loudly at something the barefooted woman at his side had said, and was shooting daring looks back at the scowling Israelis.

Out on the street, I said goodnight to my friends and turned to walk away.  The hippie with the feather in her hair was jerking her head in the direction of the enemy crew, sputtering in angry Hebrew, a burning cigarette in her hand.  

Then the two gangs took off in opposite directions, and I watched the dust rise up around them as they padded barefoot and simmering back to their respective hippie abodes.