Meeting Gay Irish poets

After arriving in Manali, I took a rickshaw up the road to the Bodh Guesthouse in Vashisht about 5km from Manali. After getting there and sleeping off the long bus ride, I get a knock on the door. Sure enough, my Irish friend Gerry has made it. She is the seasoned veteran having backpacked by herself through Northern India for the past 11 weeks.

That night we went to The Big Fish restaurant to hang out with some Israeli friends. Things were going well until a funny, awkward fat man in a beanie cap came walking in. "Namaste", he greeted the Japanese group sitting at the table over, "may I sit down?" Not to be rude, the Japanese group said OK but I knew the inevitable. The Japanese were obviously speaking, you guessed it, Japanese. This loud, awkward and just plain weird guy wasn't going to stick around for long and we were the only other table of people sitting in the restaurant.

Sure enough, "Namaste" he says timidly, doing the clasp hands thing (called "the wah" in Thai), "may I sit down?" Before anyone could answer either way, he was sitting at our table. All of a sudden I hear Gerry whisper under her breath, "Oh my God, it's him." Following this everything got more awkward with Gerry uncomfortably leaving the table and leaving me and my Israeli friend left talking to this guy. Did Gerry know this guy? Did he do something creepy to her before I got to India? I was clueless. He was no doubt weird, dominating the entire conversation telling us he was from Italy in an obviously Irish accent. He kept touching my friend who was sitting next him (thank god it wasn't me) and telling stories about how "the best time to go over the Rohtang Pass was when the schools got out in the afternoon so you could clap all the students hands as you ride on your motorbike." Tales of working on a Kibbutz, a traveling circus in the States, and an surprising amount of Irish cultural knowledge for a guy from Italy. A very strange conversation indeed.

Now, I don't know who Cathal O'Searcaigh is but as Gerry explained later, it was definitely him and after looking his name up on the Internet, no doubt she was right. Cathal O'Searcaigh is a famous Irish poet who moved to Nepal to teach English. A documentary team went out to film him and his "work" in Nepal and while filming found that he had been sleeping with his 16 and 17 year old male students. Apparently, this a big deal in Ireland and all over the news. Being the ignorant American, I was clueless to this weird fat man but everything seemed to make sense. The fake Italian with a heavy Irish accent telling us the joys of smacking hands with boys as they leave school, all the touching, everything made sense.

So yeah, gay Irish poets who sleep with young boys. Things just keep getting stranger here.