Dharma Sutra

By David Pugh

The relationship of Jeffrey and Sylvia Dharma is changed forever following an African holiday. Sylvia has a romance with Remus Jallow, a West African palm tapper and moves to the Gambia. She becomes involved with Molefi Bankaketse, a Botswana hitman to take on the dangerous Bob Jatta, a sexually dysfunctional people trafficker whom she has publicly offended. Bob Jatta, is an irredeemable villain, and lets us into his twisted mind as one of the narrators of this novel.
Feeling confused by how his life has suddenly changed, Jeffrey goes to India and finds love in the Tibetan community of Dharamsala. Sadly his love for Rinzen is unrequited. Rinzen was born in Lithang, 3,954 metres up on the Tibetan Plateau, Jeffrey thinks he’ll try his luck there; hoping to find another equally beautiful Tibetan woman. While waiting for a bus to Lithang in Kangding in Sichuan, Jeffrey has an erotic encounter with three young Chinese women. Arriving in Lithang he falls in love with his hotel manager, an otherworldly Tibetan lady with a love of English poetry.
An inner voice tells Jeffrey that he must travel to Puri in India. There he forms a cult of sexual self-realisation with Sylvia's former lover, Remus and the two are joined by a former Japanese adult video star. Lord Krishna seeks these three humans to be the avatars of his Jagannath incarnation, along with sister, Subhadra and brother, Balabhadra. The three are represented as members of the black, white and yellow races of the world. He wants them to carry his message of universal love and racial harmony to all. Guidance comes from a beer-loving Jesus and the words of Leonard Cohen.
Dharma Sutra’s main characters narrate their own story, and in addition, other captivating characters reveal their interpretation of this voyage of sexual self-discovery.
Dharma Sutra uses Indian mythology to give weight to the stories, and you’ll visit some unusual locations around the world, which will make you question your perceptions. Dharma Sutra is a thrilling magical realism journey, unlike anything you have experienced before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Pugh
• Release date: Mar 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215526811

David Pugh

David G. Pugh is a coauthor of "Winning Behavior" (0-8144-7163-3) and "The Behavioral Advantage" (0-8144-7225-7), and cofounder of the Lore Institute, a professional development and corporate education company.

Book preview

Front cover Dharma Sutra

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.

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. 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. 

David Pugh

dharma SUTRA

DHARMA PRESS

Copyright © David Pugh (2019 & 2024The 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 Dharma Press.

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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.

Lana’s Bar is on London Corner, a junction where you can see real African life going on, shrouded in exhaust fumes.

Ebrima turned to us, gesturing to his left,

‘You see that road there, it leads to Badoom.’

‘Do not go there; it is full of cut-throats and mercenaries, who will kill you for one dalasi!’ I have visited Serrekunda countless times over the years. I’ve often walked down that road alone but disappointingly, never found Badoom. Ebrima worked as a bumster, a beach boy who can show you the real Gambia. The bumsters are procurers of ganja, women and boys, personal service offered to rich older white women or men, if necessary. They elaborate on the dangers of travelling alone, when the only real threat is to your wallet from the drain they can put on it. There is a very true Gambian saying, The white man always pays. Ebrima then asked us if we wanted to try the real Gambia experience, a visit to Rasta Garden. Imagine walking into a Gilbert Shelton or Robert Crumb underground comic from the 1960s and you’ll start getting a picture of Rasta Garden, Kololi. It was an outdoor dancehall pulsating with riddim, cloaked in clouds of marijuana and dimly lit. Stoned young Dutchmen, long hair covering all but their noses and spliffs, were struggling to stay upright at their tables. Elastic-legged young Gambian men were wearing huge boots that allowed them to lean backwards in Crumb’s Keep on truckin’ pose.

It was now well past midnight, the sound deafening, Sylvia on the dance floor with Remus, I was holding my stomach, peering through the smoke for a toilet. Men were pissing against the dancehall wall, when I found the toilet I saw why they preferred the wall. It was a very small room with a tiny hole draining into a soak-away tank; too many had missed the target. I found a broken pipe to hang onto and lowered my backside as far as I dared, trying to keep my light trousers out of the filth. The young pig was truly having his revenge. Evangeline and her brother Edgar had had enough, they demanded that Ebrima find them a taxi and escort them back to the hotel. Sylvia just wanted to dance until dawn, despite her wobbly bowels she was moving well. We decided to call it a Christmas Day, the most memorable ever.

A beach party for our last night, December 27th, was hastily decided on. The Jallows would organise everything, I must bring a case of Guinness. The preparations for the day-long party start early on the 27th. Ebrima and I carried a crate of Guinness from the wholesalers to the beach, only to discover the party was being hosted by a relative, Captain, in his beach bar. I was so embarrassed, I ordered a crate of soda from him for the kids, and Captain was laid back about my faux pas, giving me a welcome hug.

Chapter 4

Winter’s Discontent

Manchester Airport, December 28th, 2001

‘Can you drive back, I can’t concentrate?’ Sylvia asked me at the off-airport car park.

‘Sure, it’s been a long day but I’m fine,’ I was still high on the Smiling Coast spirit I had digested. I loved the place, I was depressed when I had arrived but now had a new enthusiasm for life.

Remus had behaved oddly towards me that morning. Some of his father’s trees were in the newly built hotel grounds. I asked him if he had been compensated for the hotel’s use of the land. He told me that he had, he could help himself to the hotel breakfast buffet, as long as he could fit it all into one bread roll. It sounded to me that his control on his father’s land would slowly slip from him. This land was about seven minutes’ walk from the beach, land that could pay for the education of countless generations of Jallow children. I spotted him carrying his bread roll in two hands, as if it was gold. He wouldn’t look me in the eye; I suspected that he had been canoodling with Sylvia the night before. Ebrima had kept me talking for over an hour, before they strolled out of the forested beach road. I had suggested to Ebrima we go look for them, but he just told me to chill, enjoy my last night in Afreeka. Ebrima loved life, though he was poor he was happy, enjoying the vibe and playing football. Within six months he would be dead, a passenger in a drunken car accident, bleeding to death on a hospital trolley, while waiting for someone to assess the extent of his injuries. In The Gambia you have to queue for a voucher to get you through the hospital compound gate. Then it’s another queue for a voucher to get treatment. We have it easy, if Ebrima’s accident had happened in the UK, he would be still enjoying the vibe, not dead at twenty-three. For the next two weeks Sylvia was not herself, she was phoning The Gambia every few days, the woman who would only ring her mother on a free weekends call plan, to save us money. She told me she loved to hear Remus’ deep chocolate voice, with the sounds of the compound behind him. I had asked how far things had gone on that last night. ‘I guess you were kissing, did he touch your breasts and between your legs?’ I choked.

‘Yes, but only through my clothes,’ she lied. I guessed more had happened but it was another week before she hit me with every little detail of their movements together. I had booked us into a hotel on the River Avon for the night of her 50th birthday. It was a disaster. She had gone into the bathroom and came out wearing the long black dress she had worn on that last Kololi night. ‘I want you to play along with me,’ she requested. She told me all about Remus trying to get her into Captain’s toilet and how her feelings were being aroused. Then came the details of the walk home and of the electricity that’s generated by two people who want each other. I’d experienced the same with a friend’s wife in the summer of 1977; it led to a three-week affair that Sylvia had given her approval of. Now she was asking for that same kind of approval from me. ‘He stopped me in the lane, it was so quick, my skirt was up, my panties pushed to one side and two fingers were inside me,’ recalling this with widening and distant eyes. ‘When he discovered that I shave my pussy, he broke away and did a little dance, like this,’ she demonstrated his hopping movement. ‘Then his fingers are inside me again and I cum and cum, do the same now,’ she demanded. I obliged and she went into that ecstasy she had experienced with him. ‘Have you ever seen me like this before?’ she looked possessed. ‘And his penis, it was so long…’ indicating nearly twelve inches. ‘I wanted it inside me, I still want it!’ she pleaded. I really never had seen her like this; she was in a sexual frenzy as I tried to simulate Remus’ long fingers. She told me of her disappointment that he didn’t have a condom and of her need to have his prick inside her. Her mouth was the only way she could appreciate the length and thickness of his member. When she told me how he had licked and stretched her, I spontaneously ejaculated. That was the end of a supposedly romantic evening and the beginning of many troubles; both our worlds had been changed forever.

Chapter 5

How Osama Bin Laden Changed My Life

September 11th, 2001

I was working on an unusually well-paid computer-generated comic strip for the Radio Times, when I heard on the radio about the twin towers attack. I had witnessed Ramadan in Tunisia and Morocco during hot North African summers and really admired the discipline of Muslim believers. I was shocked that Islam was being blamed for the attack.

We had been planning a Christmas driving tour around South Africa; everything was in place, thanks to the fax machine more than the internet. We were to fly with Air Gabon but days after 9/11 they, along with many other airlines, suspended international flights. Our money was refunded and the fax machine was kept busy with hotel cancellations. Disappointed, we could only find one affordable African destination to spend Christmas, The Gambia. The Gambia is 90 percent Muslim; it seems like it’s more than that, as each time I’ve visited more Islamic regulations are in place. The one saving grace of Gambian Islam is that there are many, many Bad Muslims as they style themselves, who drink, smoke ganja, fornicate and prostitute themselves without the slightest qualm. The Bad Muslim epithet lets them off any manner of sin, including human trafficking for the sex industry and the wholesale movement of cocaine. Bissau City, which I’ve visited with Remus, is a major entry port for Columbia’s finest. To get to Europe and up all those eager decaying noses, it has to go through The Gambia. Aboboulaye Jatta, childhood friend of our Remus, made a living out of trafficking and narcotic import. He lived half the year in England, a big shot with lots going for him, large house in the Home Counties and a mansion, where he spent the winter in Brufut, The Gambia, overlooking the Tanji Bird Reserve. Bob, as he was affectionately known, was a self-made chief, to whom respect was always due. For me, he was a nasty piece of Allah’s work but considered himself a Good Muslim, though God knows how many disrespectful young men he had dispatched to greet their seventy-two heavenly virgins. What’s more he deeply loved his mother and was so kind to her, ensuring that not a hint of his wrongdoings reached her blessed ears. Before 9/11, I could never have imagined that the doings of this piece of shit would dog the rest of my life.

Chapter 6

Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye

All four of our family had spent Christmas 2002 in Goa, India, and took the train to the ancient city of Hampi in Karnataka. That train journey for me was the beginning of a love affair with the subcontinent, an affair which will probably last to my dying day. I had bought a copy of Trains at a Glance, with its foldout map. There all the rail networks of India were before me, and I wanted to travel every one of them. Sylvia enjoyed the sights, tastes and smells but kept bitching that she’d rather be in The Gambia. Summer 2003 I decided Sylvia, Edgar and I should do a tour of Rajasthan, flying to Delhi, discovering the Gem bar in the Paharganj and travelling through the desert. We visited Jaipur, Jodhpur, the Rat Temple at Deshnok near Bikaner, discovered our first government authorised bhang shop in the golden desert city of Jaisalmer. We bought bhang cakes and rode camels through the dunes, camping under brilliantly clear stars within sight of the Pakistan border. In December we return to Goa but Sylvia’s discontent was burning through me. The discontent continued through to January 2004, until I had had enough, ‘Bloody well go out there now, I’ll buy you a ticket!’

‘But I don’t want to go by myself,’ she said.

‘What, you want me to walk you into the arms of your lover?’

‘He might not really want me; I’m too old for children,’ she was scared that her fantasies were no more than that.

‘Okay, I’ll take you,’ in truth I was aroused by the idea of crossing a line of taboo. It took me until January 2006 and several more visits to India before I mustered the courage to break with ingrained conventions. Sylvia contented herself with writing Remus deeply erotic letters. I warned her that as Remus couldn’t read, someone would be reading them aloud to him and possibly with a group of palm wine drinkers listening in. ‘I hope I can turn them all on then,’ was her reply.