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In the telling, Jobs and Kottke’s trip to India seems crammed with the snapshots of young innocents abroad, faintly credulous Westerners caught in the blank light of ashrams, swamis, and sadhus. Kottke felt “the trip was a kind of ascetic pilgrimage except we didn’t know where we were going.” Before Kottke arrived, Jobs spent a few weeks by himself, and in succeeding years, they were cloaked in surrealistic images. He attended the Kumbhmela, a large religious festival that takes place every twelfth year in Hardwar in north central India. “Seven million people,” Jobs observed, “in a town the size of Los Gatos.” He saw priests emerge from the river, watched the flames of funeral pyres and dead bodies floating down the Ganges. He met a Parisian fashion designer at an ashram, and a guru who, impressed by the smoothness of his skin, dragged him up a hillside and shaved his head. He also spent a nervous night in an abandoned temple sitting near a fire which flickered around a trident. His only companion was a Shivite, with matted hair and a body covered in ashes, who puffed on a chillum until dawn.

Dressed in light, white cotton pants and vests, Kottke and Jobs used New Delhi as their base. Nightly walks took them through shantytowns of corrugated iron and cracked packing cases, past cows eating garbage and people sleeping on cots on the sidewalks. Their sorties from Delhi were made on buses with worn shock absorbers and small metal seats, and they spent several days trekking to see a number of yogis. They hiked along dried riverbeds, carrying water bottles, their feet rubbed raw by sandals. Enticed by the promise of Tibet they journeyed into the foothills of the Himalayas but wound up at the old spa town of Menali, where they both contracted scabies from greasy bedsheets.

Though Neem Kardie Baba and his plaid blanket had been consumed by a spectacular funeral pyre, Jobs and Kottke dutifully trooped to Kainchi. They strolled among the gaudy icons and plastic Krishnas and found the ashram perverted by musicians who were being paid to perform devotional chants. Despite the changes, the pair stayed in Kainchi for about a month and rented a one-room cement hut from a family who ran a potato farm. It was convenient enough, allowed them to read in peace and quiet, and had one other advantage: It was close to a field of marijuana plants which they dried and smoked. They also had rudimentary room service supplied by the wife of the potato farmer who sold them water-buffalo milk which she heated and stirred with sugar. On one occasion Jobs took issue with the way she watered down the milk. Gestures bridged the language barrier and the woman wound up denouncing Jobs as a criminal. At the Kainchi market where merchants sold vegetables from donkey carts, Jobs also drove a hard bargain, Kottke recalled. “He looked at prices elsewhere, found out the real price, and haggled. He didn’t want to get ripped off.”

The hot, uncomfortable summer made Jobs question many of the illusions he had nursed about India. He found India far poorer than he had imagined and was struck by the incongruity between the country’s condition and its airs of holiness. He spotted a crucial lesson wrapped up in the blur of yogis and yellow health cards, darshan and pranas, sadhus and puja tables. “We weren’t going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times I started thinking that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karolie Baba put together.”

By the time Jobs returned to California he was thinner, thanks to a bout of dysentery, had closely cropped hair, and was dressed in an Indian attire that was a millennium away from Pong and oscilloscopes. Nancy Rogers remembered: “He was so weird when he got back. He was trying to live more detached and spiritually. He would look at me with his eyes wide apart and stare and wouldn’t blink. He would invite me over to eat and then play guru. He would come over and look at all the little gifts he had given me and ask, ‘Where did you get