Round and round. The days and nights, turning circles. The brown jets of vomit. Clear running water, splashed over my face. I lived off fruit and bowls of rice broth and after a week it grew easier, the spasms in my gut more manageable and the world somehow crisper and more stable around me. I did small tasks about the compound, sweeping and mopping, folding laundry into piles. I repeated the name of the Buddha, usually abusively. One of the monks gave lectures in English. I listened to him describe the Four Noble Truths, the eightfold path that leads to the cessation of suffering. Forsake anger, give up pride. Sorrow cannot touch the man who is not in thrall to anything, who owns nothing.
But how to do that? Without heroin there was nothing to distract me from my self-disgust. I spoke about it in veiled terms to Phra Anan and he told me to take refuge in the Buddha. Officially I was “cured”; it was time for me to leave. The trouble was that I didn’t have anywhere to go. I couldn’t see any way forward and though I still wasn’t sure if I deserved to live, let alone live free of sorrow, I knew I wanted nothing more to do with death, my own or anyone else’s. I asked if I could stay. Phra Anan spoke to the abbot, who
agreed, on condition I worked hard and adopted the same rules as the novice monks. I was given a little hut in the monastery grounds and for the next four years Wat Tham Nok became my home. I shaved my head and wore the robes of a novice. I ate my last meal at midday. During that time I didn’t sing or dance, take intoxicants, or have sex. I didn’t wear a watch. I wrote letters to people seeking treatment for their addictions. I counseled the foreigners, always careful to ensure that they only knew me as Monk Saul or Monk Andrew, names I alternated with each new intake. I followed the real monks round on their morning alms and sometimes I handled money, which they were forbidden to do. I’d often walk behind them, carrying donations, the overflow from the metal bowls that the townspeople filled with rice and curry, with other monkish necessities, soap and candles, toothpaste, socks.
Wat Tham Nok and the little nearby town became the limits of my world, a body whose third eye was the fissure in the rock on the hillside where thousands of swallows nested, the “bird cave” that gave the monastery its name. It was pleasant to sit in the assembly hall, with its giant reclining Buddha, too vast to contemplate at once, and attempt mindfulness in front of a segmented hand or toe or single passive eye, which seemed to look out on the world with infinite resignation. When my thoughts wandered, the statue’s great eyes sometimes looked as dull as those of an opium smoker. I’d try to observe my thought, see that it was fleeting, and relinquish it. I tried, in all things, to relinquish control. Then I tried to stop trying. The greatest transcendence is not the greatest transcendence. Therefore it is called the greatest transcendence.
Though I was lonely I found my work comforting, and as I followed the simple, menial routine through months and years, I gradually began to feel less connected to what I’d thought and done before. The monks taught that to escape suffering one must reject the impulse to act on the world. The desire for change, they insisted, is just another form of craving. I felt I’d no right to act at all, so it seemed all the easier to turn inward and imagine that in renouncing my politics I’d given up nothing important, just a source
of pain. As the world of the armed struggle faded, it came to seem like a dream. The liberation I’d fought for was surely impossible, illusory. For now, whispered Chris Carver. For ever, murmured the voice I heard in the tiny sounds of Wat Tham Nok, the beating of swallows’ wings, the flick-flick of a monk’s plastic sandals on a path. The Dhammapada begins, Mind is the forerunner of all processes: it is chief and they are mind-made. If one talks or acts with an impure mind then suffering follows as the wheel follows the ox’s tread. So I tried to purify my mind, to accept that the only possible sphere of liberation was the self. I thought I had a chance to achieve peace. I might as well have been doing push-ups.
Two things happened. There was the blessing for Mr. Boonmee’s taxis, the last in a long line of last straws, and there was the postcard an ex-addict sent to the monastery office. She was a Canadian who’d found herself on holiday in southern England and decided to send us greetings from the cathedral town of Chichester. I picked it up out of the wire tray on my desk and in the face of its acid blues and greens, its little curlicued banners titling a selection of bland views, the room I sat in, with its stone floor and piles of dusty papers, seemed forlorn and somehow ridiculous, part of a childish game I was playing with myself. I was sick of the birds rustling in the trees, sick of the very air, which lately had been heavy with threats and corruption. It was one thing to renounce the world and contemplate the liberation of the self. It was another to sustain this while watching the monks greet military officers and local politicians arriving for the ceremonials on the king’s birthday.
It took me a long time to put a name to my disillusionment. I wanted to go home. After so long living in an institution, the prospect of formlessness was frightening, but Wat Tham Nok had come to seem as oppressive to me as any Jesuit seminary, the monks no different from the guardians of established religion anywhere else in the world. When I went to the abbot to tell him I intended to leave, he made me a present of a protective charm and expressed the wish that I would soon find a wife and start a family. Then he
returned to his papers, exuding an air of benevolent, unshakeable unconcern. Phra Anan was the same. I left Wat Tham Nok feeling I’d made no more impression on the place than a pebble thrown into a pool of water.
I landed at Heathrow airport in the summer of 1981, armed with the Canadian addict’s postcard, a new passport, which had been issued without fuss by the British embassy in Bangkok, a tent and enough sterling to buy me a train ticket to the south coast. I expected to be arrested and I think, had it happened, I’d have accepted it with equanimity. But the immigration official barely glanced in my direction as he waved me through.
In Chichester I sat under the Market Cross and watched middle England go about its business, supremely oblivious to the wider world. It was the place depicted on the postcard, no more and no less. It gave me pleasure and a kind of relief. For the first couple of months I lived on a campsite, picking and boxing fruit to accumulate the deposit to rent a flat. By the following year I was living in a bedsit near the railway station, working for crazy Olla, trying to keep my head down and tread lightly, to live a humble life. I accepted the faintly ridiculous role in which I found myself, the inoffensive little guy in the woollen waistcoat, the ex-hippie selling scented candles and doing his best to hide from the sharp-suited eighties.
Then one day Miranda stopped browsing the rack of greeting cards and asked whether I’d like to take her for a drink.
Olla’s shop was an odd vantage point from which to watch the new decade assemble itself. After my long absence the difference in mood was stark. If I watched the news or read a paper, both of which I tried to avoid, I found myself dragged back into questions I thought I’d buried. Miranda used to berate me for my lack of politics. She was always getting involved in causes: Amnesty, Free Tibet. She bought mugs and sweatshirts. Her concerns had the character of enthusiasms, fleeting, scattergun. Once in a while she’d wonder aloud about going on a march. As her cosmetics business grew, she benefited from all the things she vaguely disapproved