Mumbai Memories,1983

We slept on the floor at Victoria Station, Bombay, that old gothic, wedding-cake catherdal of a building from the raj, my friend Adi and I. He'd started crying as I'd passed, wearing a Meher Baba button, walking on the streets of Colaba by the Arabian Sea. Told me he'd grown up with Meher Baba's nephews in Pune, they used to steal the shoes of people who came for Darshan (Blessing) , that he'd become separated by time and his habit, his heroin habit, that had him on the street. He remembered 'B im-Bom-Bay', the Pat Boone song I sang to him, and I was surprised it had also been popular over there. He was a Parsee, looked like he might have gone to my high school in America, and then been through a few tough years. You know how you meet someone once in a great while, and you both feel like you've known one another before. In some cases, you may never see one another again, either, and in this case that was true. My passport had been stolen as I'd tried to leave the country after my Pilgrimage — that was the only plausible explanation for its being gone when I'd come back to the ticket counter, having walked back across the terminal to pay the Airport Tax I'd forgotten about. That was an adventure: the thing that gets me is how unsafe I was, how I survived adventure after advernture in my youth. Not long after, I had a dream I was losing blood, and I knew if I 'lost' much more vital essense through fooling around, I'd be done for. And here I am at 58, solid as a bank.