Chapter 11-12. Asha’s Trade - Osho

Life of Osho

Chapter 11-12. Asha’s Trade

Asha and I got together when the rains broke. We moved into a room on the edge of the Park, an old hotel room with that high-ceilinged, almost sepulchral quality so prized by the English in India. There was a four-poster bed, an ancient lumbering fan, and outside the window the rain fell as calmly and evenly as if it was going to rain forever. I was making tea on a Primus, mixing the sugar and the milk powder, moving through a present moment as thick as honey.

“I’m down to my last few hundred dollars” Asha said.

I didn’t say anything. By this time all I had was an old camera someone had given me, which I was trying to sell on M.G. Road.

“There’s a guy coming up from Goa to see me“ she went on. “He wants me to do a run. I’m not sure, but I think it’s a false-bottomed suitcase to Canada.”

I could hear the nervousness in her voice… But when the ‘scammer’ as she called him arrived, far from being the oily gangster I had imagined, he turned out to be a suntanned young Dutchman – alert, humorous and quick-witted. I’ll call him H. He had brought the suitcase for Asha to examine, and it was expertly made. There were two and a half kilos of Manali in the false bottom, and two and a half in the false top, and the only thing you could feel was that the lid was a bit too heavy. But then the lid had those criss-crossing straps so that you could pack things there too. We started to talk and quickly found we had a lot in common. We all loved India, and had no desire to go back to the West. H. as it soon became clear was into smuggling as much for the adventure as for the money…

To cut a long story short, we decided that Asha and I would do the run together;- and soon afterwards we found ourselves checked into a Bombay hotel, with our tickets to Brussels. The plan was that I take the suitcase to Brussels where Asha was to get a new passport with no trace of India on it, and then take the case on to Montreal. The first thing was that I, unkempt and dressed in crazy orange clothes, be made to look normal. There was a tailor’s shop, Paradise Tailors, right by the hotel where we were staying – little more than a shifty old Indian with a Singer sitting under some wooden stairs, but he measured me up and said he’d have some Western-style trousers ready in time for the flight.

I had an expensive haircut, then back at the hotel I tried on the navy blue blazer with brass buttons H. had lent me. I put on a pair of glasses I had but never wore (“makes you look intellectual” H. had said) and through which I could not see properly. What I did see looked eerily like a successful dentist.

Worse followed. I went back to Paradise Tailors, but when I tried to put the trousers on I found I couldn’t get my foot into them. At first I thought I must be trying to get my foot into the pocket, so I turned them this way and that – but no, he had made the legs so narrow I could not get my feet into them at all. My self control snapped.

“Paradise, you arsehole!“ I screamed. I was like The Imperialist in revolutionary propaganda. Paradise leapt to his feet and flapped round his broom closet like a frightened hen. Finally he fished round under the spot where he had been sitting and, muttering viciously to himself in Mahratti, produced the rest of the cloth I had bought and with which he, like an Indian tailor in a panto, had hoped to abscond.

Finally he fitted panels, large diamond-shaped panels with malevolently crude stitching, into the sides of the trousers.

They looked insane.

Check-in was at two in the morning.

Going through Emigration I was pulled out and told to wait. I sat down on a bench with two Africans. They looked guilty as hell. I tried not to think. Asha drifted past, looking dead cool. “Oh, are you on this flight?” she said sweetly. “Well, I’ll see you in transit then.” I could have murdered her. Then Emigration gave me my passport back again.

Finally we boarded. The cabin was monstrously hot and full of what were apparently Korean businessmen. They were all dressed the same and didn’t move. It was like Zen at its worst. After a long delay the plane taxied off to what by now I was sure was certain doom in Brussels.

Neither of us could sleep. There was one trippy bit where we seemed to be caught in a loop, flying round and round over Mount Ararat in a bald and ghastly dawn. Asha and I had a furious whispered row up there. At last the airline served some breakfast and mercifully we both passed out until just before landing.

Coming through Immigration in Brussels a muscle in the side of my neck started to twitch. I had not known muscles could do anything like that. It was as though I had some small animal inside my shirt collar. I’ll never get away with this, I thought… Then the bag didn’t show up on the carrousel.

There were lots of dark blue ones, but each time I thought I had spotted mine it turned out to be somebody else’s. (“Don’t look around. Don’t make eye contact,” H. had said. “Whatever you do, don’t look alert – that’s what they’re watching for.”) Another flight was starting to come through, and still no suitcase…That first run was the only one I got frightened on. I don’t mean that later I developed nerves of steel; but while the run was actually happening I didn’t get scared. That was one thing I did learn from drug-running: real physical danger does not produce fear. On the contrary real danger produces fearlessness…

Suddenly the suitcase was there. I picked it up and headed for the exit. “Rien, merci.” I said to someone in blue, in my best schoolboy French. He made a chalk mark on the side of the bag and I was sailing towards the glass doors… and through them...

Asha was there, looking wonderful, with a bunch of roses. So was our contact, another young Dutchman. “I came through in that blazer a month ago” he laughed, as he ushered us out of the airport. I couldn’t believe it. Sunlight, autumn in Europe, thousands of dollars. “You looked really straight” he said, as he opened the doors of a beat-up old VW.

“You could have been a dentist.”