The unkempt European
This is a short biography of Morten On-Kuollu, me, and probably the last thing you will ever hear about me.
I am 30 years old and Finnish. But unfortunately, I am not in Finland, I am in India, this godforsaken hell of a country.
It is 1970 now, not quite two years after I followed my examples, the Beatles, here. I’ve come a long way till the day I got into the plane and as I think there will not be a way back home for me, I will try to shortly summarize my story.
I was born in 1940 and thus only have diminished memories on the World War. The demolition in my home town stayed in a certain extent, so I must admit I had a pretty happy and very common childhood.
With 23, I moved to England. I studied there and became a huge fan of the Beatles, who had their first number one hit just then. I can surely say that I am their greatest fan ever. From that day on, I did everything they did. I started to dress like Ringo Starr, learned to play the drum machine beside my studies.
I was working hard, sometimes with more than just one job, working also from the evenings up to the early mornings – I remember often humming “A Hard Day’s Night” – to be able to be at all of the Beatles concerts. As this got difficult, I even stopped studying in order to work more.
And so, in 1968, when the Beatles decided to go to India right after Woodstock, it was clear that I was to go with them. In November, after I had put order into my things, I headed east – only weeks after the mythology of India had been supplemented by four more (and living!) gods.
What followed then is mostly too embarrassing to tell: I fell in love with a European girl here, one of those hippies. I spent a night with her, and when I woke up, all my cash and my traveller’s cheques were gone. I had completely run out of money.
My only thought was that my gods would help me – maybe that was a rest of the hippie-spirituality I had absorbed being together with them. So I travelled across the whole country to Rikkesh, a small town at the Himalaya, where my Beatles were (at least two of them). It took me a month to get there and when I finally crossed the city limit, I realized that they were already gone.
Since then, I have been travelling around. I can’t even talk the language here, only the most rudimentary words by now. All the Europeans I talk to do not want to help me or can not, like the hippies, because they want to go deeper into the country, not out of it.
I hope this wave is over soon and its rollback will take me back to where I started…
Hey Trowski!
I really enjoyed Mortens biography, especially the detailed description of his motivation to the journey to India
And the reason for the disappearance of his money really made me laugh.
But, to be honest, I don’t have the impression that Morten, when he wrote this biography, was as exhausted as he is presented in the novel.
Nonetheless, I like the “writing-style” , when you tried to show Mortens feelings.
See you tomorrow!
I really enjoyed reading “your” biography. Especially the emotions were very good and the whole Beatles story. Did you make a research on the Beatles on the internet to get all those information?
See you tomorrow at school!
Really well done the biography of that Morten, I really like all that background information the readers gets on the time the situation is set in. However, as you already got two quite good comments on you contents I will quickly comment on the language. Well done, too, except for two minor mistakes: it should be “diminished memories of the World War” and later, close to the end, “Since then, I have been travelling” (remember, since is a signal word for present perfect which also makes more sense in that sentence) as well as that “nor” should be a “not” but that not really a biggie.