Chapter 17 – ‘Wham!’

(Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia)

“Wow! That’s a great idea!”
Cyavana Swami was sitting in the brahmacāri āśrama, listening to Narasiṅgha Mahārāja’s latest plan. During their time in Zambia, Mahārāja had noticed a car dealership in Lusaka which sold state of the art safari vehicles. If they could somehow or other convince Brahmānanda Swami to purchase two jeeps, then they could both head across North Africa, cross over the Mediterranean Sea into Europe from Tunisia on a ferry, then through Europe to Iraq, Iran and on to India. It could be the biggest and most successful saṅkīrtana party ever! All the money they collected would naturally go towards the preaching in Africa. But how would they convince Brahmānanda?
Mahārāja shrugged “Well, the worst that could happen is that he’ll say no. Let’s go see him.”
They both agreed that since Cyavana was the temple president and a sannyasī, he should be the one to do the talking – Mahārāja may have been a big collector, but he was still junior to Brahmānanda and Cyavana. They headed for Brahmānanda’s office and knocked on the door.

As Cyavana Swami pitched the idea to him, Brahmānanda was hunched over his desk, cradling his large head in his hands, quietly listening with a furrowed brow. Neither Mahārāja or Cyavana could tell what he was thinking. From Brahmānanda’s intense stare, Mahārāja thought that it could easily be, “These two guys are nuts!”
Cyavana came to the end of his presentation and asked Brahmānanda, “So, what do you think?”
Brahmānanda slowly stood up and stretched. Finally he spoke.
“Yeah! That’s a great idea!”
Mahārāja and Cyavana looked at each other and smiled, shocked that they were able to convince him so easily. But Brahmānanda had one caveat.
“If we’re buying two vehicles, I get one!”
“Of course,” said Mahārāja, “You’re the boss!”
Brahmānanda Swami was so convinced of this new plan, that he was willing to borrow money to finance the jeeps. He was even ready to purchase a professional camera, projectors, film-screens, a xerox machine and other high-quality equipment.
“Just think,” he said, “We can do big photo displays, show Kṛṣṇa conscious films to people, print our own pamphlets…this could be huge! This program could generate a lot of lakṣmī for the preaching here in Africa.”

A few days later, Brahmānanda had secured a loan from some of the Indian life-members in Nairobi, and with money in hand, Mahārāja and Cyavana were on a flight to Zambia.

Narasiṅgha Mahārāja: In Lusaka, to save money, we stayed in this one dinky little ramshackle hotel on the edge of town. We figured it would be better to be a little distant, because we were trying to avoid bumping into any of our life-members. We were afraid that if we went into town, the Hindus would see us and they would want to get involved in the transaction. So because we were low-profile, that meant that we couldn’t go out and eat, so we ate bananas, butter, and sugar for a week. That’s all we could find. A couple of times, Cyavana found somebody selling loose corn on the side of the road.

The car dealership was on the opposite side of town and was run by these two British guys. We decided not to wear devotee clothes because they may not take us so seriously, so instead we wore safari suits. It took us a week to negotiate the price of the jeeps, each of which were twelve-thousand dollars apiece. In the meantime, we purchased all the other equipment on our list – cameras, projectors etc.

By the end of the week, Iskcon Africa owned two brand new, bright yellow Leyland jeeps. On their previous stay in Lusaka, Mahārāja and Cyavana had left a large amount of books in storage, and before returning to Nairobi, they decided to load them all into their new vehicles and take them back.

Narasiṅgha Mahārāja: We took off in these new jeeps back to Kenya. Cyavana would drive really fast, but I wouldn’t, so every once in a while, he’d stop the car and say, “Hey! Catch up! We’ve gotta get back!” And I’d argue with him, “Why? What’s the big hurry? We’ll get back to Nairobi and then what? Give another bunch of peanuts to some villagers?”
After about the third time he chastised me, he got angry and said, “Okay, I’m just going! You can catch up when you want!”

So, he took off like a bat out of hell and I just rolled my eyes and thought, “Okay, whatever” and I took off like a bat out of hell after him, and as we were going down the highway, Cyavana drove past this big truck which made a huge dust cloud as it went by. The dust was so thick you couldn’t see a thing, so I slowed way down. But when the dust cleared, that’s when I saw it…

Cyavana later explained that as he came out of the dust cloud, he suddenly saw a pedestrian right in front of him – he steered right to miss him and hit a pothole, which propelled his jeep straight off the highway at about forty kilometres an hour. And right there was a culvert which dropped down about fifteen or twenty feet into a drainage canal. When I came out of that dust cloud, I saw Cyavana’s vehicle was airborne, and the front of the vehicle was being pulled down by the weight of the engine. Then WHAM!! Nose first, the jeep hit the canal and bounced in the air. That’s when I saw Cyavana – a saffron blur in the air which suddenly hit the ground. The jeep flipped over, landed upside down, and all the doors flew open. Both our jeeps were full of Kṛṣṇa Book trilogies – they all flew out like confetti in the air. The books were everywhere. The whole thing happened in just seconds.

Mahārāja immediately stopped his car and jumped out. The first thing he noticed was the deafening silence – only the chirping of crickets could be heard. The pedestrian was nowhere to be seen and there was no traffic on the highway. Mahārāja ran across the road, down the embankment where he saw Cyavana Swami – he was unconscious, sitting with his legs spread out, his back against a battered case of Kṛṣṇa Books. After being ejected from the jeep mid-air, somehow or other, he had dragged himself over to the box of books and blacked out. Cyavana’s saffron cloth was now red from the blood pouring out of his nose and the large gash on his forehead.

Narasiṅgha Mahārāja: Eventually, it became clear to me that he wasn’t going to die on the spot. There was a village about a hundred metres away and suddenly, all these villagers started coming to the crash site – they were all just standing around, staring at us. We were way out in the middle of nowhere. These people had probably never even seen a white man, let alone one who was bleeding out!
I managed to get Cyavana up the embankment, lay him down on the back seat of my jeep, when he suddenly became conscious again and blurted out, “You gotta get the cameras! You gotta get whatever you can from my jeep.” Then he blacked out again.
I couldn’t get it all. I got the most valuable things and stuffed it all into my jeep. There was so much stuff that you couldn’t even see out of the windows. The tyres on Cyavana’s jeep were completely mangled, but I took the spare off the back and put it onto my roof rack. All that took about forty-five minutes. Then I got in the driver’s seat and drove all day and into the night.

As Mahārāja drove, he could hear Cyavana groaning or mumbling intermittently in the back seat. There were no towns off the highway, no doctors, no hospitals, and during the long drive, Mahārāja only saw a group of Maasai walking barefoot on the side of the road, a mangy dog and two antelopes.

In the afternoon, Mahārāja arrived at the border entering Tanzania, which was a couple of wooden shacks and a metal pipe balancing on two oil drums to stop any traffic from entering. As they heard his vehicle approach, four armed guards slowly sauntered out with machine guns. Mahārāja showed his passport and driving license to one guard, while another, looking in the back of the jeep, saw Cyavana, lying down, covered in blood. He nudged the guard who was inspecting Mahārāja’s passport, and pointed to Cyavana. After speaking to each other in Swahili, they returned the passport to Mahārāja, moved the metal pipe, and waved him on.

As dusk approached, Cyavana moaned, “Prabhu, where are we?”
“We’re a few hours from Mount Kilimanjaro” replied Mahārāja.
“I know someone near there – a life-member. He might be able to help” said Cyavana faintly.
Between bouts of unconsciousness, Cyavana gave directions to Mahārāja till finally, at around 1:00am, they arrived at the gates of a solitary estate, surrounded by jungle. The estate, which was encompassed by a high brick wall, was part of a plantation owned by a life-member that Cyavana had made some years ago. Mahārāja jumped out of the jeep, walked up to a heavy wooden gate and banged on it with his fist. There was no reply. As Mahārāja kept knocking, he thought that considering the time, all the residents must be fast asleep. Eventually, he heard the shuffle of feet on gravel getting closer to the gate. There was a pause followed by a familiar accent.
“Ni nani?”
The words were Swahili, but the intonation was definitely Indian.
“Hare Kṛṣṇa!” replied Mahārāja.
There was another pause, followed by the sound of a number of bolts sliding. The gate swung open and in the dark, Mahārāja could faintly make out the portly shape of a middle-aged Indian gentleman wearing white shirt and slacks. His swarthy face with its slicked back hair, and pencil mustache looked haggard. “Er…Hare Rāma Hare Kṛṣna” he replied. His voice betrayed both his confusion at seeing an American Hare Kṛṣṇa devotee on his doorstep at one o’clock in the morning, mixed with the palpable relief that he wasn’t opening his gate to a band of armed robbers.

“Sir, I’m sorry to have woken you up…you see, we had an accident.”
It almost seemed as if he had not heard him. As Mahārāja was in mid-sentence, the man turned around, beckoning Mahārāja to come inside with a feeble wave of his hand. Mahārāja continued to explain their situation as they walked across the courtyard, when he noticed how the estate owner was struggling to walk in a straight line to the house. “Gee!” thought Mahārāja, “He must be really tired.”
Then Mahārāja caught a scent carried on a sudden breeze and realised that the man was not tired.
“He’s drunk!” Mahārāja said to himself.
The man suddenly turned around, his finger pushed against his lips, “Shhhh…shwami-ji, please be quiet” he murmured, “Family is shleeping upshtairs. Only me and my friend are awake.”

As they entered the living room of the house, Mahārāja saw another middle-aged Indian with big sideburns, thick-rimmed glasses and a bad comb-over, lying half asleep on the couch with an empty bottle of whiskey next to him.
“Thish is my friend, Dr. Patel from Baroda.”
Mahārāja jumped, “Doctor?? Quick! Wake him up! We need his help!” He ran back to the jeep and five minutes later, Cyavana had replaced the drunk doctor on the couch.

As he rubbed his eyes and scratched his balding pate with both hands, Dr. Patel attempted to return to a semblance of sobriety. It was obvious to Mahārāja that the good doctor was somewhat embarrassed by the situation – being in front of two sādhus from America who were devout ‘Hindus’ while he himself stank of cheap whiskey. After cleaning the dry blood off Cyavana and examining him, Dr. Patel concluded that Cyavana had concussion, a fractured nose, and a couple of broken ribs. He gave Cyavana some pain killers, but told Mahārāja that he should be taken to a hospital as soon as possible. Bundling Cyavana back into the jeep, Mahārāja thanked the doctor and the estate owner and drove off into the early hours of the morning.

When they were leaving Tanzania and entering Kenya, they were again stopped by armed guards. This time however, the border patrol was not so lethargic. They were totally indifferent to the white man lying in the back of the jeep wearing blood stained clothes, but they wanted to search the jeep and take everything out. Mahārāja tried to reason with them, explaining that he had to take his friend to a hospital immediately, but the guards ignored him. After an hour of rummaging through all the boxes of books and incense, one of the guards waved Mahārāja through with a toothy grin, “Welcome to Kenya!”

Narasiṅgha Mahārāja: I didn’t go to the temple – I drove Cyavana straight to the hospital in Nairobi and admitted him there. Then I went to the temple, told everybody what had happened, and Brahmānanda and the devotees immediately went to the hospital.

Mahārāja’s business with the crashed jeep was far from over, however. Since the vehicle was in his name, there was some legal requirements. A few weeks later, he found himself on a bus with an African brahmacārī going to Zambia again. He was told that he needed to get the serial number of the jeep and take photos of it for insurance purposes. Since the new camera they had purchased in Lusaka was broken beyond repair, Brahmānanda gave Mahārāja a cheap camera to take pictures of the vehicle.

Narasiṅgha Mahārāja: The problem was that I didn’t know exactly where the crash happened. I couldn’t find the village and for days we were going up and down the highway looking for the jeep, or any sign of it. Finally, we found out that it had been towed away and taken to a police station. Then we had to find out which police station – that was a whole thing. When we finally got there, I couldn’t even recognise it – not because it was all smashed up, but because it had been stripped down to the nub by the villagers.

At the end of the first week, the African brahmacārī who was with me blooped, and for the next two weeks I was alone. I didn’t see a white face or an Indian for over two weeks. I was living in the same rinky-dink hotel that we stayed at before on the edge of Lusaka. When I wasn’t travelling to the police station to deal with all the legal stuff, I would stay in my room, read Kṛṣṇa Book and chant.

I hadn’t been given much money by Brahmānanda, so eating was a bit of a problem. I would sometimes just buy bananas and cashew nuts, mash them up and eat that. One night, around 9:00pm, I went out to find something to eat – the streets were dark, and I figured that it probably wasn’t very safe for a white guy to be out alone, so I covered myself with a chaddar. The street outside the hotel was pretty quiet – a few people huddled together talking or playing cards, some street dogs roaming around. Anyhow, I found a street vendor cooking corn on the cob, and there were about three other Africans around his wok, buying some from him. As he was handing them their corn and taking the money, I handed him some shillings. As he gave me my corn, he suddenly realized the hand he was putting it in was white. His eyes almost popped out of his skull! I just took the corn and walked off.

On his last day in Zambia, Mahārāja had just left the police station after getting a final signature from the inspector, and was changing buses to return to Lusaka. Suddenly he felt a hand firmly grab his shoulder.
“Sir, please come with us,” said a voice. He turned around and saw three stern-looking African men in suits. One flashed a badge at him. “You’re under arrest.”
Mahārāja was pushed into a nearby car and taken to another police station.

Narasiṅgha Mahārāja: I’d been told that the Chinese were becoming very close with the Zambian government and were conducting training camps for their police force. These plainclothes policemen had obviously just gone through some interrogation training course under the Chinese. So, they put me in an empty room, and sat me in a chair under a light bulb. I almost burst out laughing – it was such a cliché. I was thinking, “Is this gonna be in a movie?” I had with me a burlap bag with one set of clothes, and they dumped all my stuff out on a table. They had my money, my passport and my beads. They were trying to play good-cop, bad cop, and asking if I was working for the CIA. At one point, they even put a flashlight in my face. But these guys were as dumb as doorknobs.
Finally, my passion took over and I said, “Alright, enough is enough!!” I stood up out of the chair, walked over to the table, grabbed my passport and shook it in their faces, telling them, “I am an American! I am an American!”
I just started shouting stuff that didn’t mean anything – “I want to see the American ambassador! I know the president! We’ll bomb the crap out of you!”
They could easily have pulled out their guns, shot me and buried me – nobody would have ever known what happened to me. But somehow, I scared the bejesus out of these guys. I grabbed my things, stuffed it all back in my bag, and as I did that I thought, “Hmm…I don’t know about this.” But it was too late to quit, so I just opened the door, walked straight out of that room, and all the people at their desks just looked at me as I strode right past them.

This was an old British building with large steps outside and big pillars in front like the Parthenon. As I walked down those steps I was thinking, “Oh God! I wonder if you hear the shot before the bullet hits you?” Then at a point, I stopped, turned around, and the three policemen who had arrested me were all standing at the door, staring at me with their mouths open. They had this confused look on their faces, like, “But you can’t just walk outta here!” Obviously, these policemen saw this white guy and decided to practice what they had learned from the Chinese, but they hadn’t been told what to do if he gets in their faces and starts shouting, “I’m an American!”
I gave them a sharp look, turned around and kept walking. I was grimacing all the way, chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa, waiting for the sound of a gunshot, but I kept walking and pretty soon, I figured I was out of range. I ran and got on the next bus that was going back to Nairobi.

That was the end of my karma with that jeep. Any idea that we were going to travel across Africa, Europe, Persia and India died with that vehicle…