SERIES: DRUGS UNCOVERED: TALKING TO GOATS

As our wittiest chronicler of drug culture, Geoff Dyer has tackled the
subject in his non-fiction for many years. But here, in an extract
from his first novel for more than a decade, he turns his attention to
narco-tourism, exploring through his journalist-narrator a vivid
conversation with a beast

The thing about destiny is that it can so nearly not happen and, even
when it does, rarely looks like what it is.

It's just a phone ringing routinely at three in the afternoon (not
alarmingly in the middle of the night) and the person on the other end
is not telling you that the results of your blood test have come back
positive or that your girlfriend's partly clothed body has been
discovered floating in the Ganges. That would be handy, that would
lend narrative continuity and drive - albeit of a not very novel kind
- - to the purposeless drift of events. But no, it's just an editor
asking if you can go to India at short notice, to write a travel piece
about Varanasi.

'Should be really nice,' she said. 'Business-class flight to Delhi.
Short wait for a connecting flight to Varanasi. Five nights at the Taj
Ganges. I'd do it myself, if I could get away.' The trip had been set
up for one of her regular contributors, who had fallen ill. ('You'd
have thought he could've waited till he got there, like everyone
else,' she said.) That's why she was calling at the last minute like
this. And she only wanted twelve hundred words. There was nothing I
had to do in London in the coming week...So I said, yes, OK, I'd go.

The journey from the airport to the hotel was fine. It was terrifying,
chaotic, dangerous, but it bore some kind of relationship to journeys
I'd experienced previously, in other places.For a few minutes after
leaving the hotel all seemed quite normal - crowded, busy, noisy - but
nothing more than expected. Then everything began to converge,
contract and - this was the interesting part - accelerate.

I had been warned that the bhang lassis were strong, far more potent
than the strongest grass, but because Darrel and Lal were having one I
thought I'd join in. Things started weirdly, in that they were
prepared for us not in a cafe, as one might have expected, but by a
tailor who wanted to throw in a couple of suits for good measure

For the first half an hour it was like being stoned, the early stages
of a trip. The three of us walked with our arms around each other's
shoulders, laughing at everything, at the river for instance, solid
and grey as a motorway, busy with amphibious traffic. Then it was like
being completely deranged. We weren't sure exactly where we were, but
we had sense enough to stay away from Manikarnika and not to linger
near Harishchandra where, in Darrell's words, 'all the death could
really bum us out'.

At one of the ghats we saw a thin man with a pale snake draped around
his neck like a boa, like a feather boa, except this boa, plucked
smooth, was a pet snake. The air grew so still it seemed about to
congeal. Mountains of cloud swelled as if a storm were crouching over
the city - only to disperse without a drop of rain falling

Then it was like being a ghost. Darrell wandered off and it was just
Laline and me on our own, wondering where he'd gone, and then I was
wandering round on my own, wondering where Lal had wandered off to
too. I was not unduly alarmed , but I wished they'd been around when I
came across the baba with the road atlas and the wild beard

I thought something was wrong with my hearing, then I deduced that it
was only him I couldn't hear and the reason I couldn't hear him was
because there was something majorly wrong with his voice, in that it
had gone completely and he was completely inaudible. Because he had no
words, he gesticulated wildly. Expressing himself solely through
gestures, his method of communicating was a form of seated, silent
dance. Watching closely I could make out, from these gestures, odd
phrases, even an occasional sentence.

As I watched I began to piece together parts of what he was narrating.
After a while, without conscious effort, I was able to understand him
perfectly. He had come here, he said, to find something he had lost.
What was the thing he had lost? An umbrella, apparently. And several
Biros. Did this strike us as absurd? It did, yes, but I took this as
meaning that the things most of us cared about - iPods and favourite
T-shirts - were scarcely more important than the things we routinely
lost, things like brollies and Biros to which we attached no value
whatsoever, useful though they were for keeping one dry in a storm or
jotting down thoughts and phone numbers.

I thought that's what he was saying, but then it dawned on me that
this metaphorical interpretation was too literal, because although he
thought he had come here on the pretext of finding his lost property,
it dawned on him that what he had lost was precisely the reason for
coming here, that he was here to find out why he had ended up here. He
paused, sat motionless for a while, letting the complex simplicity of
his message sink in, and then, in a superb bit of theatre, he picked
up and flicked open an umbrella. But not just any old brolly. No, this
was a very old, totally useless, busted flush of an umbrella. Entirely
devoid of fabric, it was no more than a spindly metallic skeleton,
incapable of providing shelter from rain or shade from sun.

Later, as the light faded, I saw the goat again, the one with the
clean white coat and the cute black socks. The one I had thought was
going to speak to me. As I passed by, he began walking beside me. He
smelled a bit of cheese, goat's cheese. I felt something touch my leg.
He was butting me gently with his head. I looked down at his goat-face.

'Sah, boat?' he said.

'No, thank you,' I said.

'Very cheap, sah.'

'No, thank you,' I said.

'Sah want boat?' the goat repeated.

'I walking. No want boat.'

'Very cheap,' said the goat.

'No, thank you,' I said.

I had slowed down and the goat, sensing my hesitancy and interpreting
this as a willingness to be detained, tried a different approach.

'Sah, you think is nice being goat here in city? Life here hard for
me. I have children. I offer you boat, but what I most want is to
engage in conversation, a little philosophical discourse.'

I stopped walking so that I could give the goat the attention he
obviously craved and deserved.

'OK. What would you like to talk about?'

The goat paused and then said, 'You take boat, sah?'

'I thought you wanted a philosophical conversation.'

'Joking, sah. What I want is ask what it is like, having thoughts in
human head. How human consciousness different to goat
consciousness?'

'Well, that's a very difficult question. To answer it, I'd need to
have a clearer idea of what it was like to be a goat. I'll be honest,
I assumed you were just kind of lost in your goat-world.'

'That is problem, sah. Because I am goat I do not have tools to
explain what it is to be goat.'

'Well, you see, that is probably the difference. The ability to
articulate things. Language. Self-examination... ' I didn't know what
else to say. It seemed that I was lacking exactly the qualities I
claimed distinguished me from my interlocutor.

The more I tried to articulate the difference between myself and the
goat, the more we had in common. 'You know, I'm really going to have
to think about this. You've taken me by surprise. Also, to be frank,
I'm somewhat past my philosophical best at the moment. Could we talk
about it another time?'

'Tomorrow, sah?'

'Yes, maybe tomorrow.'

'One other thing, sah. Ganoona appear soon.'

'Ganoona? How do you know about Ganoona?'

'I know only that Ganoona will appear soon. In pouch of a kangaroo.
But only those who are Ganoona will be able to see him.' With that the
goat turned and trotted off and I heard people calling someone's name.
The name sounded familiar, but it took a while to cotton on: it was my
name, and the people calling it were my friends, whose names, for the
moment, escaped me.

'Well, I don't think we'll be doing that again in a hurry,' one of
them (Darrell, that was it!) said the next day. He said it as though
it was over and done with, but I suspected that part of me was still
doing it.

. This is an edited extract from Jeff in Venice, Death In Varanasi,
to be published by Canongate in April 2009