The Days That Were - Tr. Ashish Mehta, RT 30

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>Istanbul
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>Days That Were
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>October 6, 2003
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>In the late Sixties the main path for the young gripped by wanderlust
>ran from India, where it picked up a lot of Aussies, across Asia to
>Istanbul. There it forked. One branch went to Egypt and the Middle
>East, the other to Europe. Istanbul was the hub. In jeans and boots,
>with backpacks and shoulder bags, kids arrived from Bombay and
>Katmandu, from Sydney and Brindisi and New York. Most were between
>eighteen and twenty-five. They wanted to see far places and astonishing
>things, and simply did it, as kids will. They had little money. They didn't care.
>They pooled to buy decomposing minibuses and casually set off across
>Persia.
>
>In Istanbul their-our-habitat was the Sultan Ahmet district, in the
>shadow of the grand domed mosque that loomed against, when I was there,
>grey wintry skies. Dirty ice squeezed from between stones of winding
>streets and a whiff of wood smoke hung in the air. Dark-faced and
>vaguely dangerous looking men who in fact weren't hurried by in thick
>coats. You were Somewhere Else. It was magic.
>
>Many of the wanderers wore beards. These were the freak years, and
>anyway shaving is a nuisance on the road. They were motley: college
>girls from Barnard, a black smooth-talking DJ out of Jersey, drugged-up
>spindrift from the hippie havens of Europe and North Africa, a guy from
>somewhere east with a parrot. Some were truth-seeking tumbleweeds
>pursuing enlightenment, others just adventurers. There was an artist
>from Ohio who showed us photographs of a blue fiberglass sculpture he
>had made of his ex-wife's backside. It wasn't obscene, just rounded.
>All of us were caught in the craving for new things that besets late
>adolescents if they're worth a damn.
>
>I was a bit of an oddity--pretty much out of the Marines by then and
>traveling with a shot-up squid named Len Vanderwood who had been in
>PBRs in the delta and gotten ambushed. He did all sorts of heroic
>things, like chopping the paravanes and using a Browning .30 like a
>fire hose, which only happens in the movies but Len didn't know it.
>We were exotics among hippies, poets, and seekers. On the other hand
>they had crossed Afghanistan in VW buses, passing through towns where
>both you and your girlfriend could get raped and sometimes were.
>
>Most were just kids with an itch, and stayed at the Yucel Hostel,
>pretty much the standard European gig: a buck-fifty if you had a sheet
>bag in a bunkroom with five other people. They would travel for a year,
>remember it forever, and go back to Belgium to be doctors. A few were different.
>
>These stayed at the Gulhane Hotel. The Gulhane was for the lost, the
>doomed, for people too low-caste to sleep under bridges. You went up
>narrow dark stairs and came out on the roof where sheet plastic covered
>a two-by-four framework to form a skeletal barn in the January cold.
>You could stay there for twenty-five cents a night. It was a good price
>for kids who had sold their passports to buy drugs and had nowhere to go.
>Len and I went to see it in a spirit of anthropological curiosity. Your
>two bits bought you squatter's rights to a decomposing grass mat on the
>floor, on which to lay a sleeping bag. Maybe a dozen people stayed
>there. There was no electricity. From a crossbeam at either end a hash
>pipe dangled on a cord. At night the inmates sat in circles beneath the
>hash pipes, jacketed against the chill, staring at what appeared to be
>pie pans of bluely burning alcohol.
>
>The pipe went around. When it burned out, etiquette was that whoever
>then held it filled it from his stash. The flames danced, shadows leapt
>strangely, especially after a while in the circle, and some freak from
>North Africa tweedled on a soprano recorder. He didn't quite play it,
>but neither was it unmelodic. The camaraderie of those who knew it was
>cold outside gripped us, a conspiracy of warmth. We told stories of Goa
>and Marikesh, of mortar flares hanging ghastly in clouds over the ugly
>thumb that was Marble Mountain.
>
>From time to time, so help me, a Turk from the hotel came through and
>called, "Hasheeshkabab, twenty-five cents." Lamb, dog, road kill,
>morgue meat, I don't know. It was well spiked with the herb.
>The lost too had their place in the order of things. I wished them well.
>
>We were the first drug generation. Ritalin was the preferred
>amphetamine, not yet being used to subdue schoolboys. Kids gobbled it
>and for a couple of days were very intense. If you got close to them
>you heard a faint "bzzzzzzzz" and smelled hot insulation. A plaque of
>hash the size of a Heath bar cost three bucks. Most of us experimented
>for a few years, enjoyed the sense of shared misbehavior, got bored, and quit.
>A few ended up at the Gulhane.
>
>The scam of the times was selling traveler's checks. You sold them to a
>South African for forty percent of their face value, unsigned. His
>operatives then forged them for face value. You went to the American
>Express office and said that you had lost your checks. They replaced
>them. A long line of kids waited at the Amex office to report lost
>checks. It was no more moral than shading your deductions, cheating on
>your wife, or downloading music.
>Yenner's, if memory doesn't lie, was the roasted-meat den near the
>Pudding Shop. It was dark and blackened by smoke, like a medieval
>torture chamber but without the cheer. You knew immediately that it
>wasn't Kansas. The roasts were savory, greasy, and smoky. A clothesline
>ran diagonally across the room. On it in those pre-internet days
>travelers left notes to each other, held by clothespins. One I remember:
>"Will the girl in the green dress I met on the bank of the Ganges ask
>for me at the Youth Hostel? Mike."
>
>That's how it was. Wherever you were going, somebody had been there,
>and knew what to do. Calcutta? Sure, try the hostel on Sutter Street.
>(I did. Coming out one day, I saw a naked man with no feet rolling down
>the sidewalk to beg from me.) Israel? Ask them not to stamp your
>passport because then you can go to Arab countries. In Delhi the Pahar
>Gange section is really cheap, the Venus hotel is fifty cents a night.
>You won't find it in a tourist guide.
>
>I don't know where kids go today. I just hope it is as good.
>
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