The Bandit of Kabul by Jerry Beisler

Author:Jerry Beisler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Asia, Central -- Descriptin & Travel, Kabul (Afghanistan) -- History, Drug Traffic -- History -- 20th Centruy, Asia, Central -- Descriptin & Travel, Asia, Central -- Descriptin & Travel
Publisher: Trine Day
Published: 2012-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Bill Wassman

Imperial Hotel, Delhi

Chapter 28

If I were a grave-digger or even a hang man, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.

— Douglas Jerrold 1803-1857.

Dean the Dream showed up in Nepal and told us a harrowing tale. There was a little ice cream and coffee shop on the second floor of a building just off Connaught Circus in New Delhi. For many, many years, Indian intellectuals and artists had mingled on the veranda enjoying the sweets and sharing the sacred herb. It was an easy place for Indira Gandhi’s ever more militant and escalating state bureaucracy in India to target.

On his way back to Kathmandu via a redeye, cheapo plane ticket, Bill Wassman found himself on the veranda with Dean the Dream and a few other road warriors and their female companions. In a “round up the usual suspects” operation, one high-profile Indian artist, one European couple and Bill, representing America, were picked out of the crowd and arrested as arbitrary choices. Dean was somehow overlooked. It cost Bill nearly a month in the squalor of Tihar prison and then deportation to the States. It almost cost Dean the Dream his life.

Dean was staying at the Imperial Hotel, an eminent road traveler’s haven and a comfortable choice for the seasoned Asia veteran. He was afraid to return to his room because he thought the ice cream and coffee shop was such an obvious choice for the raid that this “flying drug squad” might swoop in on another prime location such as the Imperial. With just the cash he had on hand for the night, he checked into a sleazy Delhi hotel that had cubicles for rooms and a bathroom for thirty down the hall.

Unable to sleep because of the noise in the ceilingless room that also allowed the muggy, filthy air of New Delhi to seep into his cubicle, Dean the Dream almost ended up in the murderous clutches of Charles Sobhraj, who happened to be wandering about near his hotel at 3:00 A.M., an hour that is always dangerous in the third world.

Dean met what appeared to be a typical European couple. They claimed that Indian Airlines had lost their luggage, forcing them to try to find cheap accommodations in the middle of the night. They were both drinking from a bottle of Fanta soda and speaking in French-accented crude English. Pointing across the street, Dean the Dream told them what a horror show his own hotel was, and if they could afford anything else to find it. The European couple suggested they all go up to Dean’s hotel anyway, since it was so close, and enjoy some blonde Lebanese hash that the girl had smuggled inside her body and that she was very anxious to remove.

Whether out of loneliness, boredom, or the curiosity of a man living his life on the road, Dean invited them up to his hotel. Within minutes of the three of them settling into Dean’s cubicle, in an unguarded moment, the European man hit Dean over the head with his empty Fanta bottle.

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