5th Installment

Hell first, then Heaven.

Throughout the centuries religious ideologues have dispensed the wisdom that discipline and self mastery are necessary to walk the arduous path to Nirvana. "Repress your desire, deny the pleasures of the flesh, self flagellate and you too can enter the Kingdom of God," or so my primary school teachers would instruct me. The journey was long, minutes seemed like hours, stomaches heaved and arseholes quivered, but here I am, broken and fatigued on the shores of Paradise. This is the story of the torments I endured on the path to Shangri La.

Canto I - Ear Wax Mountain.

It is now clear to me dear reader, that the might of the British Empire in India was not crushed as some 'historians' would have it, by the will of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian people or due to its exhaustion after two world wars but by poor sanitation. After a month of Indian cuisine my health had deteriorated to the point where my lower intestine would cough up its brown nectar regardless of whatever social situation the rest of my corpus was engaged in. Woe betide the traveler caught off guard without loo roll or a pot to plunder. With this confession it will come as no surprise that the prospect of a city break in Kuala Lumpur would be of great relief even to the seasoned traveler.
By the grace of God we landed in KL and we made merry. With the guidance of St Christopher's fair hand we landed in Bangkok and we sang and we drank and we made merry. But just as Shiva ushered in merriment and abandon so to did he connive against me, not content with my loose stools he turned his attention to my aural cavities. For the past year or so before this trip my ears had failed to produce the usual measure of protective wax. This did not concern me but only compounded my belief that I was somehow genetically superior or somewhere further along the evolutionary tract than the base human being. Be warned friends, such hubris can never go unpunished.
Having flown with such frequency over the past month the congealed ear wax upon my person had compacted due to the variegated air pressure, leaving me partially deaf. For days I roamed the streets of KL and Bangkok forlorn, segregated from the rest of the hearing world.Constructing my own internal muted world I raged upon the gods who had forsaken me. Dumbed down and delirious I mumbled my way to a doctor's couch where examination fell upon me. No man knows dread until he is approached by a Thai nurse holding a fist full of six inch singular tipped wooden ear buds. She began to dig, each shovel load more gruesome than the last. Black stagnant twists of ear candy were heaped in a steel surgical bowel. After what seemed like hours later I came to gazing at an ear wax mountain brightly lit under florescent lamps. Relief washed over me like the warm waters which would greet me one day. Finally I realized my body was fallible, I was mortal, ready to join the rest of humanity and relinquish ubermenschian delusion. No longer was I condemned to walk the planet for eternity.

Canto II - For the Love of Terra Firma

One hundred and eighty souls arrived at the Gulf of Thailand at 4.00am waiting for the ferryman. As dawn broke the bay lay flat and still, its meridian shimmer allowing no incline of its secret depths or tempestuous virulence. Sunrise marked the sky with hope, illuminating towering cushions of cloud, each one a different dream scape shifting with the flow of morning colour. There is perhaps a mystical promise of hope that one day human incongruence would be laid to rest , lumpen and without pulse on the morticians table. Clutching violently to this hope 180 wretched souls thrust themselves upon the water all too eager to take flight from the horrors of whence they came.
Irrespective of class or caste the souls were herded beneath deck. Each with their adornments, trinkets and self image they boarded the vessel not knowing the fate that awaited them. There is dear reader, an unalterable natural law that bears upon all men. Known to the Egyptians, to Plato and the Theosophical Society, handed down from time immemorial The Great Law of Equalization would pronounce its name once more. Sires and seers spoke of this law and the systems by which it might be recognized. First there is death, the dark lord for whom all men must one day cower. Then there is excretion, the humiliating excess that even the most refined dignitary must produce and stand aghast. Finally there is sea sickness which one day all men must face.
So the boat proceeded out of the bay and into the high waters. The more vain amongst us refused the sick bags that were circulating presuming that The Great Law of Equalization did not pertain to them. There we were, some more distinguished than others with their designer handbags, branded rucksacks, fashionable hairstyles and well applied makeup, all so very different, one better than the next. Then began The Great Equalization. Stricken with panic some ran to the toilet but to avail as it was already awash with vomit. Like rats they ran on deck projecting their breakfast overboard. A tepid salty mist caked the air stifling any attempts at curative deep breaths. Torrent after torrent of partially processed food , bile and stomach lining cascaded off the windows, crawled and dribbled along the deck. Hunched double, divested of their adornments and pretensions the 180 souls docked on the paradise island of Koh Toa.