The Buddha of The Brothel

By Kris Advaya

When Kris made a trip to India to study Ayurvedic massage, he never thought he would find love, adventure, and heartbreak. Traumatised by the loss of his friend and army abuses, Kris came to India practicing meditation and chastity, but both efforts were turned head over heels when he caught sight of Radha, a sex worker in Pune' s notorious red-light district. Before he knew it, Kris was wrapped up in the world of pimps and crime lords, losing his hold on the life he had been pursuing and all the dreams of stability he had once built in his head. To be with the woman who had stolen his heart away, a life-altering decision awaited. A true story, The Buddha of the Brothel is a poignant look into the world of godmen, spiritual seekers, and the men and women whose lives are ruled by the sex market and its overlords. Advaya' s account, written in refreshingly sparkling prose, is by turns anguished, humorous, hopeful, and bewildered, as he wades through a world he had never expected to encounter. Sure to appeal to readers of Gregory Roberts' s Shantaram with its less than glittering setting, this is a literary memoir that opens readers' eyes and minds and will not let go easily of their imaginations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Sep 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9789386538161

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The main thing in life is to always have low expectations. And when that fails, to at least never fall in love at first sight with a streetwalker. Not when you’ve been a spiritual celibate for six years, and undoubtedly not when you’re lost and sleepless in India. If you do, though, and become plagued by deranged ideas of telling your tale, make sure you dive into it before your brain gets fried by chemical pain management, before the memory of your path and of those days begins to fade. Trust me on this. But most of all, tell the world you love her more than life itself, and, word by word, the world will patiently absolve you of the past.

CHAPTER 1

November 1st 2004

On a Monday morning, the weight of humanity descended on the city of Bombay. Docile vigour reigned. Millions of ricewinners marched religiously in their regenerating procession of hope. Graceful housewives glided towards markets as their sons and daughters returned to the unsung summits of competitive learning. The children who would not be schooled indoors began another set of tests in survival’s outdoor academies. Under the coastal sun, the mingling of a thousand sounds was like a high-pitched roaring of the ocean, effervescing with the joy of dreaming big right here, right now.

I had landed at four the previous morning and after the mandatory losing game of bargaining with a cabman promptly scudded towards the downtown. Not for the first time—and yet this particular journey inflicted such soul-smothering exhaustion on my limbs and brain cells—that I decided on a day or two in the city instead of heading straight for CST. Still only twenty-eight, I felt I had gotten too old for spending first nights on the great station’s floor, with crinkled sheets of Times of India as my bedding, the buzz of tireless traversers as my lullaby.

The yellow Hindustan Ambassador taxi with a black roof, an ancient yet reliable king of these roads, started with a familiar dissonance and swiftly sped into the night. Riding shotgun, I folded my hands, tried my whole-souled best to meditate, but as always my arrival was soaked in the adrenaline of ecstasy. I was back in India.

Even after a patriotic revival had rebranded it into Mumbai, the city was still a magnet for migrants from all corners of the country, for the brave and hardy Nepalese, and for the oftmaligned Bangladeshis. Driving from the airport into the city, it seemed as if half of the newcomers had been sleeping their night away on the sidewalks leading downtown, wrapped head to toe in blankets, sheets, and rags. The post-apocalyptic scene had once been my first sight of India—thousands of apparent mummies abandoned at the wayside, survivors too busy holding on to life to fuss over burials, yet still managing to wrap their dead in cloth to elude the faces of their own likely fate. Apart from the homeless (and an ungrounded cab rider), the predawn city was a steamy void. An exceptional silence prevailed, a treat that could not be savoured without first tasting Mumbai’s daytimes.

My chosen hotel was a second-floor-only enterprise. Its single rooms turned out to be four-by-six-feet sections of a windowless hallway separated by wooden partitions, which didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling: respiration was respected. ‘No problem, sir, no bite,’ the receptionist smiled compassionately after kicking the cockroach he’d just crushed under the bed. He sure wasn’t used to goras.

The inner fog of the following afternoon took me to the sands of Chowpatty beach, where you could sample local junk food and bury your stinking feet in the muddy sand. No one with functioning sensory systems and the power of reason would dare swim in the polluted waters, and sunbathing would have allured throngs of gawkers, yet the presence of the sea breeze made the saunter worthy of its sweat. Stuffing my face with vadas, I watched pairs of male friends walk hand in hand and straight couples too shy or fearful to touch each other’s skin, witnessed the serenity of the ambiance break my heart and dampen my eyes. And saw my jet lag, as ludicrous as ever, unfold on cue.

My meandering thought process at last settled on the framework of the coming months.

For some time now, I had been looking into all available options of learning a South Asian healing technique—a type of bodywork or anything to do with Ayurveda. To help the sick and the distressed, of course, to an extent. Above all, though, my nomadic heart cried for seasoning its empathy with manual labour if it was to ever settle down, even if it meant squandering unprofitable talents (speaking languages without an accent didn’t pay as handsomely as it was once believed to). I felt the gifts of genes had in any case been diminishing in tandem with ambition and competitiveness.

As always, there was also the question of my sadhana, or whatever I was supposed to be doing to accelerate the journey towards the promised end of suffering. Was there anything more effective than trying to annihilate as many thoughts as humanly possible through incessant mantra meditation? While stringing along by itself, the usual mental chatter now replaced with the automation of ‘Om Shree Ram Jay Ram Jay Jay Ram’, my chanting had begun to feel like a misfire. Well, there were cosy flashes of disembodied bliss, but the procedure had turned into a fairly mundane addiction, and repeated dosing, even at higher concentrations, could simply not provide the relief of the early days.

Another issue jabbing me with regularity was celibacy. Touted as a prerequisite for the Awakening, it was an aspect of spiritual practice that I strongly wanted to abide by, but felt a monastic life was the only way I could do it with any chance of success. And even then, only in a forest hermitage, pre-emptively gazing downwards, away from accidental womanliness. No auxiliary method seemed to work. Neither the exacting dietary restrictions (my digestive tract had parted ways with meat, fish, eggs, and even onions and garlic) nor cold baths followed by early-morning yoga stretches and pranayama. My self-control did become reasonably powerful, though even that proved nothing but a self-aggrandizing sham.

Late at night, on that narrow, arbitrary line dividing wakefulness and slumber where willpower slowly dwindles, I often found my hands getting busy on their own. I was usually already halfway there when I recognized the stiff state of affairs. By then I had to sanction a conclusion or I would have to toss and turn through an interminable night.

The issue of celibacy was bugging me more than I was prepared to admit, and I was on the brink of reconsidering my options. Thoughts of settling down, a horrific nightmare a mere year before, were making their first appearance ever, and yet I felt so profoundly different from anyone else—now weirder still after my OCD-like mantra practice had made me more than a trifle unstable—that I knew the marriage could become a martyrdom. Considering my pathological fear of marital failure, masturbation didn’t seem as awful an option during the day’s introspection as it had in front of the washbasin at the midnight hour.

An unreformable walkaholic, I decided to give in to my urges and return to the lodge on foot. The sun god had sunk deep into the Arabian Sea, and despite Mumbai’s ever looming humidness the temperature felt almost bearable (unless you insisted on moving your limbs).

Not long into the stroll, my bladder began signalling the urgency of release, an unpromising omen wherever public toilets were as scarce as sightings of yetis. In an urban setting, the problem was made worse by a lack of alternatives where you could avoid being verbally abused by the owners of the nearest building or having your manhood checked out by a handful of spectators. Dozens or even hundreds of them if this was downtown Mumbai and the manhood non-native. My instincts were repeatedly whispering me to find a coffee shop or a cheap restaurant, order a cup of tea, and use their bathroom. Nope, none of them featured a toilet. Of course they hadn’t. Bad energy or spiritual pollution or simply a waste of a few lucrative square feet. I was practically begging passer-byes, addressing them like a bhakta imploring his chosen god, ‘Please, sir, toilet? Shauchalaya, krupaya, sir, please, sir.’ I was just about to experience a profound Enlightenment, was going to be done with caring about judgments and suchlike puny issues by taking a leak in the street like a cow in a meadow, when I finally discovered a narrow humanless lane.

Within two seconds of opening my zipper, I was experiencing a pleasure of orgasmic proportions; I should not have put my trust in places serving coffee. If the whole process could be recreated without martyrizing the bladder, I was certain it would be a New Age sensation among the incurably lazy or those looking to hold on to a one-rupee urinal fee.

‘This is private property! You can’t do your business here!’

A young man sporting a skullcap and a livid voice had appeared out of nowhere and suddenly stood within my stream’s reach. While I still recalled the tense eye contacts that followed recent neo-con games in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the sporadic urging that I study the Quran (as though I were an unwilling policy maker of willing coalitions), my apologies wouldn’t stink of fear tonight. The kid’s eyes shone with the glint of enterprise, not hostility.

‘I’m sorry, man, I just couldn’t find a single damn toilet. I must have been searching for like an hour.’

‘Ah. It’s okay then . . . So—you want to fuck an Indian girl?’

‘No! What? No, it’s okay. I’m fine. Yes . . .’

‘Sure? It’s only a thousand rupees. Not even twenty dollars.’

‘Sure. But thanks anyway. Another time, maybe. Definitely.’ I was feeling increasingly embarrassed by our exchange and his look of total bewilderment. A brief, uneasy silence was an opening for shifting his expression as though struck with amnesia or a uniquely rapid onset of split personality.

‘I was only joking. So . . . which place are you from?’ He tried to force a smile, steer the conversation away from failed pimping, knowing all the while that the act was unconvincing.

The scene was more and more farcical with every passing second of our pretend oblivion. Looking back, however, had I been able to forecast the strange events of the following weeks, any shade of humour would have been beyond me. It would take the bulldozing effect of years to enable seeing sex for money in a light that wasn’t tinged with sorrow.

Having swung around, military style of turning still alive in my muscle memory, I retreated as fast as my joints would let me. Walking into the sticky darkness, I perceived my heart beating faster than I would have expected it to, and I was sweating again.

Why did I feel so disconcerted? It couldn’t have been because of moral outrage, could it? I considered prostitution, if voluntary, as far less depraved than many perfectly legal ways of screwing your fellow men. Was I tempted? Beginning to feel desperate for a touch of an actual woman instead of a sweaty palm? Then why didn’t I just take the kid up on his offer?

Examining my known motivations, I had to admit callous pleasures with a stranger would never satisfy a closet romantic, cynical as I may have seemed. And the tremendous vividness of my imagination made masturbation virtually as good as the real thing, sometimes better. And always cheaper.

Boarding the cherry-red semi-luxury bus to Pune in the morning, the inglorious events of the previous evening had already been graciously blanked out. The journey itself was uneventful if such an observation can ever be made about travelling through India. Sure, the continuous, unabated honking of our driver to exhibit his dominance over the traffic kingdom was mildly annoying, and roadside urinals and their hundred-yard perimeter at our midway stopover did reek of an industrial grade concentration of urine, but these were all circumstances to which I’d gotten so well adjusted over the preceding trips, that I hardly noticed their bite anymore.

On reaching Swargate station in Pune, a chaotic shed of a bus depot, I found a working phone booth and called Arun to let him know I had arrived. An Ayurvedic doctor and an episodic meditation teacher, Arun had been recommended by my previous teacher, Swami Brahmananda, as an expert on Indian massage and meditation. I was out of a job, and experiences had confirmed that any work involving limbs more than the grey matter was highly beneficial to curiously damaged nervous systems. Giving a massage to a friend once, I had attained rare contentment even without a happy ending for either of us. On top of that, the friend, a fruitarian heavy-metal frontman, had complimented my untrained fingers with praise that was unanticipated coming from someone who evaded paying compliments even more than paying for overripe bananas. So it had made perfect sense that being already hooked on the fickle temptress that was India, I would give learning Ayurvedic massage a try.

The hairless master arrived in half an hour on his locally manufactured Bajaj scooter. Only five feet tall and in his midforties, Arun looked in surprisingly good shape (he would later tell me he practiced hatha yoga for an hour every morning, and he included this hour in what he called his eighteen-hour-workday, which also comprised of meditation, eating, power walking, and napping; basically everything except sleeping). A Hitlerian moustache was well-matched to his Napoleonic stature, yet he also possessed a pleasant-enough smile and a persona that seemed pervaded with an air of femininity, a trait not uncommon among older generations of South Asia.

His family’s two-bedroom apartment was nestled in the exact centre of a nouveau-riche housing complex. Complete with a lawn, a weathered gate, and a drowsy security guard, it was surrounded and dominated by new apartment buildings springing up like mushrooms after a downpour, lending credence to Arun’s claims of India’s newfound opulence (although dozens of uninhabited structures gave the area a very non-Indian hollow look of a ghost city). After a short stop for a cupful of syrupy tea during which Arun introduced his lively wife Malini and the two kids, Suresh and Rajesh, we continued to his private Ayurvedic facility about a mile away.

I was greeted by a gravelly street and the smell of singed rubber. The clinic stood less than two hundred feet from a mini shantytown, a citified village whose residents made up the majority of Arun’s patients. Not all were dirt-poor, though, he added just as something expensive rocketed past us. Some nonconformists preferred staying in the slums—for reasons my small-town mind would never understand, even if by now Indianized in too many respects. The difference of mentality was as clear as in the self-imposed apartheid on Goan beaches: Europeans and Americans searching for a patch of sand away from everyone; Indians, never far from a crowd, yearning to be close to everyone.

The clinic being as small as it was, Arun also rented a minuscule one-bedroom flat in a four-storeyed apartment building across the street, a ramshackle structure of the colour of thinned strawberry ice cream. Its meth-lab-deco kitchen was used to manufacture his medicines while its living room, equipped with a bare minimum of nondescript furniture, acted as a makeshift spa where massages and related treatments were given to an occasional moneyed client. And in the following two months, the apartment was to be my home away from home.

Arun having left, I climbed the stairs to the typically Indian rooftop and began gazing at the starlit sky with wide-eyed reverence, imagining the magnificent infinity of a coal-black South Asian night as the inspiration behind the holy darkness of Kali and Krishna. Scanning adjacent rooftops, I saw they were all deserted in spite of all this beauty being available for free, inclusive of natural air conditioning. The silence was only disrupted by a Hindi soap opera being watched at full volume somewhere below, its soundtrack composers bent on relieving the audience from having to guess appropriate reactions to on-screen action. Tuning out the sounds, I sat on the floor cross-legged and with appreciation moved into my own holy blackness of the world behind shut eyelids. A sudden thought of a possible change of sadhana under Arun’s guidance triggered a barrage of images from the years spent studying philosophy and meditation techniques, culminating in the current mantra drill as taught by Swami Brahmananda.

The split from Brahmananda came about the previous winter after an uncomfortable scene in his beautiful ashram in Kerala one night. I had just sneaked back from an unscheduled sunset swim in the Arabian Sea, feeling as good as a constipated gut permitted, and joined the ochre-robed swamiji and a visitor, a lanky kid of about twenty, in their theological discussion. We were enjoying the mild, flowery-scented air of a December Malabar night when the young man, not among the subtlest you could hope to meet, started asking questions on the nature of Enlightenment. Like many practitioners of yoga he seemed to have been greatly impressed by a couple of famous modern gurus who were not epitomes of modesty when promoting their great awakening. At last, the kid’s thirst could be contained no more.

‘So, swamiji, are you enlightened?’

There was an awkward silence, with even the muteness of birds and insects conspiring to drive it home, after which the swami responded in his polished South Indian English, ‘Actually, when speaking about Enlightenment, one should not be talking about oneself, and it is rather a question of following our master’s teachings the best we can and trying to assimilate them in a proper way, so that the . . .’

‘But what about you, swamiji? Are you enlightened?’

Another long, oppressive stillness followed. The night suddenly felt arrestingly humid. The swami, a picture of composure not ten minutes before, was visibly distraught, his feet fidgeting nervously as if the lower part of his body was already preparing for an imminent escape.

‘We are all still aspirants,’ he finally blurted out, hurriedly got up, and disappeared into the night like a child who’d just been found out. Manning up had not yet been assimilated in a proper way. And while I would still mutter the chant of Ram, holding on to it like a drowning man to a deflated life raft, my faith was bruised beyond repair.

The following nine months were clouded by increased difficulties in adjusting to the life back home. The worst part, however, was the shrinking of the joy and bliss afforded by my bi-daily sitting sessions. I was in need of some proper assimilating myself.

As it turned out, there was a plant that could ease the spiritual withdrawals I was going through. It could also help my ongoing insomnia if unhurriedly boiled in milk that had been fattened with butter. And would you know it, this miraculous variety of hemp had dispersed from the same sanctified regions as my mantra.

After having embarked on an orthodox spiritual path, I’d given up all intoxicants and other psychoactive substances, even caffeine (until my first trip to India where I was offered coffee or tea by every household in the country). Yet here I was, a few years down the progressively steep line, getting illegally high to self-medicate problems of my own creation.

Was I still a genuine seeker acting this way, though? Breaking the rules not only regarding sexuality but now drugs, too? With this uncertainty in mind, I rose from my inner dark and left the roof disoriented, barely avoiding a hernia while closing the leaden vault of a door, before descending to my new home. While the sulfurous smells of Ayurvedic oils kept assaulting my nostrils, they were no match for intercontinental fatigue, and with a flicker of hope that the days to come would bring a fresh outlook on things I fell into a long yet restless sleep. My outlook’s readjustment would not need repose or days.

CHAPTER 2

Iwas roused by the coolness of the morning air and an outpouring of emphatic voices in the street. It was the one-man word-of-mouth marketing of vegetable and coconut sellers, intoning their own, very secular brand of mantras. As they passed my window, pulling their squeaky wooden carts, I felt their slogans rang out the same meter as the one in which Brahmins chanted prayers or shlokas: ‘Co-conut, co-conut, co-co-nuuut!’ ‘To-mato, to-mato, to-ma-toooo!’ In the age of vice, sanskritisation had reached the dharma of produce distribution.

Arun’s clinic was packed. It was a Tuesday, making both consultations and drugs free on this day of Mars, since in addition to wearing a red-beaded necklace, Arun’s karma was supposed to profit massively from being charitable when the militant planet was in charge. Mars was not in a good position in his astrological chart, he diagnosed his primary obstruction. He could get anger-related issues, he murmured with a unibrowed stare that didn’t call for commentary.

Being thoroughly examined by a constellation of eyeballs in the austere waiting room was one of those things that couldn’t faze an old hand anymore. I now even found myself staring unapologetically back home, though not to everyone’s delight. The stock Balkan types, in particular, all macho in their swooshing sweatsuits, would sometimes beat you up for a mere passing glance in their direction. And always if it was disco night, there were blondes to impress, and push-ups were banned.

Taller than average in Asia, I was too thin to look imposing to my Indian audiences: no amount of exercise had succeeded in making my legs as bulky as Hrithik Roshan’s arms. My hair and complexion were a more obvious attention grabber. A mix of diverse genetics, my bronzed father’s oily black hair and my mother’s sensitive, translucent skin had produced such a contrast that I had throughout my childhood and adolescence been perfunctorily asked to sit down before and after every blood test, the nurses having been genuinely scared my pale face might hit the ground at any moment. The more recent, fiercer sunrays were beginning to change that, yet my pigmentation still needed weeks of defying cancer before my birthday suit could represent the Latvian flag.

My introduction to his practice over, and having agreed I would help him with patients during mornings, Arun announced that lessons on massage and meditation would be launched the following day. I should first get an essential Ayurvedic textbook, available exclusively in a bookshop near ABC. Appa Balwant Chowk, as the official name went, was a marketplace in the old part of the city, Arun explained, well-known for the variety of literature one could unearth there, especially textbooks and manuals.

And so the moment I finished my lunch, I was out in the windswept road, waiting for a shared auto-rickshaw van to haul me to Yerawada, the first stopover in this backbreaking commute. The yellow mutant’s enterprising driver waited for other prospective clients, stalling until the six-seater was stuffed with ten resigned martyrs, and with an overweight trader in my lap we shakily reached our terminus where regular-sized auto-rickshaws were already appraising their prey. State-controlled buses being highly erratic in their timings, the wasteful and the hurried would have no choice but to settle for the alternative, its price specified by levels of urgency and haggling skill. Not an unreasonable strategy, I had to admit, though one that in this case couldn’t work just yet.

Saving the rickshaw fare, however, would come at a price.

Again punished for my chronic stinginess, I boarded the wrong bus and ended up in the Municipal Corporation Bus Stand, a good mile off my destination. It seemed like a minor error, the tiniest of lapses. Could have happened to anyone, couldn’t it? And yet the mistake, one that I wouldn’t have made had I not been immersed in my chanting at the bus stop, became the pebble that would incite a vast landslide of consequences.

Since the day was still in its early teens (much like my emotional maturity) and ABC within walking distance, I decided on another of my strolls through crumbling city streets and a brisk tour of the tourist attractions lying near or en route to the famous chowk.

Shaniwar Wada, too central to be missed, used to be a grand fortress of the Peshwa dynasty. Its structure was so impressive externally and so barren on the inside that it could have been a beauty pageant contestant. Farther down the road I entered the Dagadhusheth Halwai temple, the main shrine of the city’s patron god Ganapati, the Lord of obstacles and intelligence. The way things would develop, the elephant-headed son of Shiva must have taken one good, omniscient look at me and picked out that clear-blue afternoon as the perfect time to play one of his more malign pranks on an unsuspecting