India. I must repeat, just that word: India. One more time? India. Yes, I'm here, in that world Columbus thought and hoped he'd found upon landing in America. In his mind, they were the same. I can only laugh.
How can I possibly describe it? I beg you humor my poetic license, for compressing six weeks into a few short passages. It has been said, and many a time, that you either love India, or you hate it. I leave it to my esteemed readers to discern of which opinion I am.
In a word: unsystematic. That was the selection of my sitar teacher, after a moment's pause. It's so apt. Let's look at the grand picture, by climbing to the top of the minaret of the largest mosque in India. You see the guts of a cell, bubbling and frothing and churning out combinations and permutations of encounters. Whatever works, stays. Thus rises the coral of Old Delhi, that maze of construction and decay and renewal. Hence are revealed the three faces of the Hindu God: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; aka god of Creation, god of Preservation, god of Destruction/Rebirth. Buildings leaning atop one another, people leaning atop one another, animals leaning atop one another. Everything is leaning, and everything is lean. Anything aspiring to cleanliness or newness is instantly filthified, anything dirty is as it should be. Why waste effort on unneeded tidiness, when lord Chaos will destroy your efforts?
I enter the reef armed with my compass and a knowledge that there are two main roads: one to the east and one to the north. Beyond that I am a wanderer and an observer, and observed, too. Everywhere are people. All Indians. Perhaps this is off tourist season for the heat (30 heat-related
deaths yesterday, with temperatures reaching 48 degrees Celcius (for you slow converters, that's about 118 F)). But I suspect that even in the height of gawking crowds the unbridled population boom can outstrip all the airlines of the world depositing their human cargo. But where are the
women? Ah, there's one, totally covered in black including a full face veil. Ah, another, in a red sari. Ah, a third in blue, a granny, with wrinkled brown midriff exposed in the traditional manner. And there, two women more, in a lighter blue and a brown. The women here are the most beautiful I
have seen anywhere in the world, a driving force to study the ancient texts of the Kama Sutra. But they are swimming amongst the hundreds of men! Children abound, too, male and female. Some play on little ferris wheels of four cars bulging with four kids each, rotated by hand by the attendant. There's one eating an ice cream. Another lying on the doorstep. Move aside, quick: the grating horn of a motorcycle pushes it through the swarm. The three-wheeled cycle rickshaws rule here, for other vehicles mostly cannot navigate. The tire marks are imbedded in piles of cow dung everywhere, true original skidmarks. The rickshaws are pedaled by sweaty men in their ubiquitous blue-strapped, white-soled plastic flipflops, with a cargo of two people semi-comfortably sliding off the forward-tilted seat (why tilted???), or a family of five on the same seat, or an air conditioner, or a 2m-high stack of boxes held by a precariously perched carrier. Walking is the optimal transport here, for wheels are not too happy on the cobbled, pitted, irregular ground. Just be careful not to be run over by a rickshaw: you do know where those tires have been. Oh, and avoid the feces-encrusted flicking tails of the city cows and oxen (there are many varieties). The goats generally aren't a problem. They pick their way through the world admirably, baa-ing every once in a while and sampling the trash strewn curbside, yummy. The dogs are pretty mangy and some don't look so thrilled but the new puppies are happy as all puppies are. All of the animals eat their share of refuse. There are no trash bins (recycling? are you kidding?); or, more aptly, everywhere is a trash bin. Just toss it in the corner. If it's edible, it'll be eaten, if not, perhaps someone will sweep it together, load it onto a rickshaw, and pile it in some vacant shop. Or, perhaps not. Feel free to use the "Public Conveniences" when the bladder presses: just don't breathe through your nose when standing facing the designated wall, standing with back exposed to traffic. I haven't figured out where the more severe urges are to be released, because the squatting places are much more spread out and I saw none in Old Delhi. The toilets here are distinctly not Western style. My hips get angry
with me during the few inevitable periods of lengthier squats, and it is sometimes a hazardous operation to place the hands for balance... Toilet paper is not used here, instead there is a low spigot and a large plastic cup which one fills and repeatedly washes the left hand during the
And the semen of life that is India was spilt once in mythological times by the gods upon the Ganga (Ganges), in that 5000-year-old city of Varanasi. On the west bank of the river erupts the famous Ghats, strata of rocks hewn into steps and held together against the flooding force of the Monsoon with great metal staples. A hundred steps up, the buildings begin, fortress against the rising water, and the walls of another great and even narrower maze of streets and habitats and shops lead away from the river. Meanwhile, I sweat along the rising and falling footpath along the ghats (stairmaster
shmairmaster) and watch the dhobis wash their clothes by whipping them overhead and dashing them against the rocks, beating out the dirt. Houseboats line the shore, anxious to take a Westerner along the river and charge them double or triple the price demanded of the hordes of Indian tourists.
The bathers are those tourists, frolicking in the holy water, some supported by makeshift floats, some lathering and washing, the youngest are naked and jumping off the steps, some swimming out a few score meters and returning, others lazily drifting back and forth, some floating on their backs. Hopefully those floaters are living: for you see, too, the dead bodies escaping their rock confines with which they were sunk. You see, if you die in Varanasi, you skip immediately to Nirvana, do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not deal with the arduous cycle of reincarnation. It's a nice deal, if you ask me; many others agree, and so the Varanasites cremate 150 to 200 bodies a day, going all night, the bodies wrapped in gold foil and placed under stacks of wood sold for a month's salary; the burners then assure complete ashification by unhesitatingly poking their tongs into the heart of the flame, the heart of the body, and tending the fire moving bones like so much wood. The
ashes drift downstream to where the bathers splash and drink. It's a holy place. I tried to reach enlightenment through the practise of vagyoga under the tutelage of Madonna's Sanskrit instruct, Guru Shastri. Vagyoga is the practise of physical postures (yoga) with meditation and breathing (pranayama) and mantra chanting. I see it as hyperventilation taken to an art form by centuries of
refinement. So I'm not particularly surprised that people have "enlightenment experiences" standing on their heads and hyperventilating and getting a head rush and seeing colors and feeling weird feelings. It is my suspicion, though I am still intrigued and learning, that these very normal feelings are to what people generally refer when they talk about "Spiritual Energy" or other similar Energies. Not to demean the profundity of said experiences! but merely to bring them back to earth, and away from the associations with gross sounds and subtle sounds and celestial sounds and superconscious sounds that are all a part of the magical, divine powers of that "perfect" language Sanskrit, the Latin
of India; or those magical centers in the body called "chakras," finite in number and rich in symbolism for the powers a focussed mind can attain through them and their associated sense and mantra: earth, smell, perineum, Rm; water, touch, navel, Ym; fire, sight, heart, Vm; air, sky, I forget the correlations they make so little sense to my unindoctrinated mind. Varanasi is also a center for music, and I took advantage of this to greater benefit than my yoga classes, learning a few fundamentals of sitar and tabla (indian drum pair). India has a deep and rich classical musical tradition, which focusses on melody and improvisation in contrast to much of the development of
Western classical music which focusses more on harmony. I think that learning the philosophies and techniques of both (and more) enlightens and inspires the best music. The subtle variations of embellished notes in Indian lends much of that gorgeous flavour to their melodies. You have to kind of skirt a lot of the bunk about male notes and female notes and the Way to do things, for the rich
tradition is still more Tradition and less a continual process of invention. Hence the process of learning is to do exercises, exercises, and more exercises; the typical student spends years doing these before moving on to the heart of the music, the raga. Loosely, a raga is a jam on a scale with certain forms of embellishments. A raga has a particular time to be played, e.g. afternoon raga, evening raga, and it is inappropriate to play the raga at any other time. It desecrates the raga, like walking in front of the tabla with shoes on. Myth, ritual, and religion permeate. This is an ancient culture and it has a long and solid memory. Oddly, this smacks of system, and I said before that
India was unsystematic. Feel free to resolve the paradox if you can. The Indians just live with paradox, it's a way of life, and even a matter of pride.
Pride, yes. Imagine a nation thick with people and steeped in ancient ritual and learning. Now imagine exploding independently into world preeminence after centuries of external rule, with a simple bomb blast. It's a matter of great pride for the Indians. And if you'll have my spin on the nuclear testing thing, mass destruction capability is a global problem and we all have to face the consequences of being able to blow the whole planet to smithereens, together. So if more people are thinking relevantly about the issues, perhaps the risk is greater in the short term but I think the reward also greater. Besides, the real nasty risk now is the biological stuff, and that can be developed in any underground lab with far fewer resources; nuclear weapons are big and loud and very deadly but they're big and loud and blatantly scary, so people take notice. I call to mind a short story about "The Gun without a Bang."
Varanasi was nearly empty of tourists. Everybody escapes to the mountains. Ethan and I followed, to see what all of the fuss was about. It's about the Himalayas. I saw them once from the air, high above them, but now after a classic Indian epic bus journey, I was IN them. The bus tickets were
purchased under less than wholesome circumstances, on the third floor of the government bus station where, we later learned, the unlicensed agents resode. At the ordained departure time we were led a frightening distance from the station, but happily the ticket was valid for a private bus and we even got our front-row seats and stretched our legs over the steps that lead into the bus. Of course, it was not Air Conditioned as advertised, but rather fan- and window-cooled. It got a flat tire at 1:30 am and at 3:30 the crew had patched the spare tire innertube three times and we were on the move again flushing the sweaty stagnant odor out the windows. The main bridge was out in
the mountains, so at 6:00 we turned down a detour goatpath-cum-alternate main highway. Hairpins down, hairpins around, sheer cliff on the left, then the right, half-a-lane, another full-sized bus passing from the opposite way... Twenty hours after departure we pulled into Manali.
The temperature was lovely, and we stayed in Old Manali, which was an old small Himalayan villiage in perfect rustic style. The strong and beautiful women there carried huge baskets of grass or hay or bricks or sticks up and down the mountain. Shepherds roamed the slopes, driving flocks of sheep or herds of cows or gollops(?) of goats; each had a preferred grazing geography,
and the mountains afforded diversity aplenty. Hiking up near the beginnings of snow, we emerged from a glade of vast trees onto a nearly level tongue of grass that projected from the mountainside where grazed four of the most beautiful animals I've ever seen. They were so peaceful and shining, huge eyes calm and deep: no wonder the Hindus worship cows as holy. The goats stuck to the steeper hills rippled with patterns of sliding dirt held by tenacious scrubs and a lush grass coating. Powerful cold rivers polished the white rocks at the foot of the mountains, and daily the valley breathed with mist evaporating and condensing with the currents of wind warmed by the sun and directed by the heaving earth. The mountains are huge! Climbing for a full half-day we scaled barely half the elevation of the smallest peaks; directly opposite, illumined by the setting sun, was a
dramatic cliff, the rubble of its collapse fanning out below, its minerals nourishing the fertile valley life, and the cliff itself a black and pink slab adorned with a wide, full waterfall yet in its morn, for the Monsoon would soon come and the summer melt more snow and the torrents would gush and scream Water! After a long day of hiking, we could rest at the Rasta Cafe, where a Master Japanese mountainman expertly tended the fire with Zen-like subtlty and passed the holy chillum filled with tobacco and charas. For the holy five-leaved Shiva plant grows wild in them thar hills. Shiva, god of Destruction and Rebirth. Partaken by many a holy man, the sadhu, in their dredlocked wandering quest for enlightenment. I, too, am on a wandering quest for enlightenment, though with vehicles diverse and nonconstant. We bathed in the hot springs at Vashisht and sat with the Sadhus there who shared with me the secret of the Shiva ring. The local people live in harmony with nature. They use materials from their environs and to the environs they return. We sipped delicious chai (milk tea) from their metal cups and ate by the light of their hearths and spoke to them of their world and ours; we asked how they felt about tourists, armed with cameras and curiosity and bringing trash
and development and superior construction materials and money: and they liked the money and the leakproof corrugated metal roofs and seemed to take no notice of the plastic bags and candy wrappers and napkins and bottles that polluted their springs; yet some towns forbade foreigners from passing the night within their domain... the birthing scars of newness were apparent and it frightened me. But the world is, and the world will be, and whether we blow ourselves up or no, life will hang on like the brand new bacteria in tritium nuclear reactors who now have enzymes to zip around and repair the great swaths of radiation burns to their DNA. The excretions of one are the
nourishment of another, and there was once a time when CO2 ruled the atmosphere and the plants polluted the air with a toxic, noxious gas that could eat away organic materials and metal alike: yet that gas is oxygen and we cannot now live without it; so perhaps our discarded plastics and rubbish will become the food of the future, for the dominant species then if it is not us... This is optimism, for those of you who are wondering. With the rubbish the tourists bring freedom, and information. The world is getting smaller and I think these people want to be a part of the community: they teach English in their schools and send their youth to learn business, and they invite us into their homes and share their food and drink and love our pictures and the children ask for chocolate and we give it and they are happy. Enough of my preaching, I will share sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touches more to the purpose.
I think to date I have neglected the description of tastes... Indian food is some of my favorite and I must laud its merits and gain a few converts so that American demand will increase and correspondingly the supply will hopefully follow (so selfish of me). Indian food is of two main types,
North and South. South Indian food consists primarily and most notably of dosas, large thin pancake-like circles, folded in half yet still overflowing the plate, stuffed with potatos and spices or whatever other ingredients the cook fancies. North Indian food is my favorite, however: generally speaking, dishes of semi-liquid eaten by grasping with chunks of the warmest tandoori breads; you use the fingers of the right hand for all, adding the sense of touch to the dining experience, and you do get messy. My most preferred dips are Baigan Barta, an eggplant-tomato-spice brown mixture; navrattan korma, a yellow melange of nine veggies and a dash of raisin; and the simple sahi paneer,
literally tomato cheese, a red sauce covering squishy milk curd cubes. And the naan, that critical ingredient, made in an instant by slapping a dough into the tandoori oven, which then we find emerging just in time to replace the last disappearing naan, fresh and hot and soft and absorbant.
Lassis are like yoghurt milkshakes, sweet and flavored with fruit (mango!). And the Indian sweets make one's mouth pucker from the sugar intensity: balls of a semi-porous sponge-like rice and sugar derivative soaking up a glucose syrup, or a yellow-green sugar base of fudge-like consistency layered with pistachio or some brown or dark green or white layer and topped with silver foil that you do in fact ingest. And after dinner, a sprinkle of anise and sugar aids the digestion; as does the red betel nut, here called paan, which I generally eat en route home: I prefer the sweet paan: a few betel nuts, anise, honey, secret ingredients sprinkled from the metal cannisters of the paan wallah, the concoction wrapped in a leaf and popped whole into the mouth for slow chewing. This kind of sweet paan is a luxury for most, but people eat packets of shredded betel much like chewing tobacco, and you see the red splotches on the pavement everywhere as evidence of the copious spitting that is so deeply culturally ingrained. Whole tile corners are stained red with the stuff in Connaught Place, which is a big circular colomnade serving as the heart of New Delhi. New Delhi, by contrast with the Old, is a planned city built by the British with wide roads and traffic roundabouts; the distinction is evident. Yet the Indian mentality has crept in, and Indian style perches within every available cranny of the plans. The beggars lurk within the pedestrian subways, many with lost fingers or feet given to the altars of traffic accidents or leprosy; some make good money, too, sometimes more than honest shopkeepers. Children are born into this way of life, living in tarp shelters spread along the sidewalk and supported by the fences-building materials
are fully improvised and surprisingly effective, I hazard even ingenious. The family planning signs "One is Fun" fall on English-absent eyes and the cycle continues. The kids post out by the traffic lights and beg 1 rupee and make the universal sign of hand-to-open-mouth indicating food. But I
catch them smiling sometimes. Not that that's justification, but maybe just a little solace that happiness can be found even within the cruelty of abject poverty. In the meantime, I purchase my plane ticket which costs more money than many of these people will see in their whole lives and then walk by beggars just outside the travel agent. It's what I wanted to see, how I wanted to be prompted to make moral choices right and good. There is a lifetime of more thinking to be done.
Tomorrow I depart from India. I am sad to leave: of all the countries I have yet seen, this has been my favorite. I am certain I will return, and I recommend it to all as an inspiring, rich, ancient place where many thousands of years of civilization have developed to art forms a way of living in the world and a deep philosophy of existence. India: this was, in a way, the pinnacle of my travels, looming in my mind as unapproachable and intimidating, so foreign as to be incomprehensible. I found it none of these, but rather engaging and strong, and below all of the differences, the human connections are obvious and powerful. While my uninformed myths are partially dispelled, what remains is an educated love of that mystical name which has drawn traders and poets for centuries. I think it inevitable that soon we will all feel the Indian influence whether we go to India or not, for they are anxious to connect with the rest of the world and become a part of that emerging superculture. 'Course, you have to be here in person to feel It. I used to disdain the word spirituality, but now I take it for a shorthand for some ill-defined but very normal group of informations. Spirituality is dense here. I will be back.
Good thoughts,
-xaq