Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  “I think so.”

  So we sat. And sat. And sat some more. My legs had gone numb but no one moved, so I tried not to fidget.

  “What do you think they’re waiting for?” I finally asked my friend.

  “Something,” he whispered mysteriously. Then he giggled softly. “Anything.”

  Indians still hear the call of the hermitage, and still they obey. Every year thousands upon thousands of them renounce the world to look for something greater. Spiritual values are besieged by secularism and Western materialism, but even the crassest and most cynical Bombay businessman feels the pull of the forest. The most august title a man can hope to bear, today as much as in epic times, is not “maharajah” but “maharishi.”

  —Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India

  More sitting. Now my arms were numb too. I was hungry and hot and thirsty. And bored.

  “I think I’m ready,” I whispered. I’d never make a guru lover. A bit of meditation once in a while is all right, but I suffer from an overactive brain and an underdeveloped sense of patience.

  “Yes. We’ll try another one.” Even my friend seemed perplexed by all the silence.

  “They usually talk more,” he explained as we rejoined the throng. “He was one of the silent ones.”

  As the heat and dust rose together and the crowds grew thicker, silence became hard to find. This was a strange affair—part carnival, part religious revival, part showcase for the nation’s cream-of-the-crop gurus. A high-hype commercialized religious romp—or something else?

  My Kathmandu friend had lent me one of his religious books, a delightful nineteenth-century account of an English Victorian woman’s wanderings with a swami in the Himalayan foothills. I sat with my new friend in the shade of an empty canvas tent as the crowds milled by and read a few fragments of Sister Nivedita’s (her Indian name, given her by the swami) truth-seeking experiences:So beautiful have been the days of this year. I have seen a love that would be one with the humblest and most ignorant, seeing the world for a moment through his eyes. I have laughed at the colossal caprice of genius; I have warmed myself by heroic fires and have been present at the awakening of a holy child…My companions and I played with God and knew it…The scales fell from our eyes and we saw that all indeed are one and we are condemned no more. We worship neither pain nor pleasure. We seek through either to come to that which transcends them both…Only in India is the religious life perfectly conscious and fully developed.

  I looked up. Among the crowds were the occasional Western faces, the faces of seekers, coming to the mela to find answers to all mysteries, coming to find comfort, coming to “play with God,” coming to experience the “perfectly conscious religious life.”

  Singing, chanting, dancing, and discordant sitar sounds exploded from a score of pavilions. Babies rolled in the sand while sari-clad mothers washed and polished huge copper rice cauldrons at the water taps; ancient hermit-like men displayed themselves in the most contorted positions in little tents with hand-painted signs nailed to bamboo posts. “Guru Ashanti has sat in this same position without moving for eight years.” “Rastan Jastafari eats only wild seeds and drinks one glass of goat’s milk every eight days to the honor of Shiva.” A fairground of fakirs! There were men with necklaces of cobras and pythons; a troupe of dancing monkeys playing brass cymbals; more fortune-tellers with their little trained birds; peanut vendors; samosa stands, reeking of boiling oil; groups of gurus huddled together deep in gossip (“So what’s new in the enlightenment business, Sam?” “How’s your new ashram going, Jack?”“Harry, can I borrow your cave up on Annapurna for a couple of years?”).

  There were special compounds for Tamils, for Tibetan refugees, for Nepalese pilgrims from the high Dolpo region of the Himalayas, for ascetic members of the Jain religion, and a hundred other far more obscure sects.

  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon a scuffle occurred near the river. A bronzed Swedish cameraman had just had his expensive video camera smashed into bits of twisted metal and broken computer chips by a crowd of irate Bengali tribesmen. Generally everyone seemed to tolerate cameras and tape recorders but this unfortunate individual had broken some taboo of propriety and now stood towering head and shoulders above his antagonists, gazing at his ruined machine in disbelief. The police arrived, then the army, and together they formed a flying wedge to rescue him, while shouting, cursing, and spitting roared all around them.

  “You have to be very careful,” my friend whispered.“You never know what can happen here.”

  A few minutes later there was another commotion on the far bank. Thousands of dhoti-clad bathers were running around, shouting and pointing at the fast-flowing river. Loudspeakers were urging calm and I could see another phalanx of police and soldiers scurrying down the dusty slope to the water where they stood hopelessly gazing at the water. Stories spread like a brush fire through the tent city. Someone had been lost in the river. An old woman, a young child, a famous sadhu—someone—had stepped beyond the cordoned-off section of shallow water into the main flow of the current, eddied with whorls and churning froth. He, or she, had been caught in the undertow and had vanished. People strained to spot the body. But mother Ganges swirled on, India’s eternal stream of life and death, filled with the ashes of cremated bodies, bestowing fertility on the flat lands, rampaging over them in furious floods, swirling and whirling its way from the glaciers of the high Himalayas to the silty estuaries of the Indian Ocean. Omnipresent, indifferent, endless.

  My friend had to leave (suitably rewarded with rupees and two rain-stained copies of Newsweek “to improve my English”). I sat on a bluff overlooking the merger of the two rivers. The sun sank, an enormous orange globe squashing into the horizon, purpling the dust haze, gilding the bodies of the bathers.

  The moon rose, big, fat, and silver in a Maxfield Parish evening sky. There were thousands of people by the river now. The bathing increased but everything seemed to be in slow motion. I watched one old man, almost naked, progress through the careful rituals of washing. He was hardly visible through the throng and yet he acted as if he were the only person there by the river, unaware of everything but the slow steady rhythms of his cleansing. After washing every part of his body he began to clean his small brass pitcher, slowly rubbing it with sand, polishing the battered metal with a flattened twig, buffing its rough surface with a wet cloth, until it gleamed in the moonlight. Then he disappeared and other bodies took his place by the river.

  The Laws of Manu, the ancient text spelling out all rules for Hindu existence, speaks of four types of holy man. There is the brahmacharya (one who has taken a vow of celibacy), the bhikku (wandering mendicant), the vanaprastha (forest hermit renouncing worldly things), and the grahastha (simple householder). The householder, Manu says, is the highest of all. By his honest trade and industry he keeps all the others alive. Without him, society could not exist.

  —Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India

  I sensed timelessness and began to feel the power of this strange gathering. Each person performed the rituals in his or her own way and yet from a distance there seemed to be a mystical unity among all of them, all these souls as one soul, cleansing, reviving, touching eternity in the flow of the wide black river, linking with the infinity, becoming part of the whole of which we are all a part.

  I made my way slowly to the river and knelt down. For a moment there was no me left in me. The river, the people, the movements, the night breeze, the moon, life, death, all became as one continuum. A smooth, seamless totality. An experience beyond experience. A knowingness beyond knowledge.

  I washed my face and arms and let the water fall back to the flowing river where it was carried away into the night.

  David Yeadon has written and illustrated more than fifteen travel books, including New York: The Best Places, Backroad Journeys of Southern Europe, The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of
the Earth, Lost Worlds: Exploring the World’s Remote Places, and The Way of the Wanderer: Discover Your True Self Through Travel. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, and occasionally in Japan, with his wife, Anne.

  Saying that Indians are a gentle, dreamy, fatalistic people, detached from the world only describes the effect, not the cause. “Strange” is the word, for spontaneously, in their very physical substance, without the least “thought” or even “faith,” Indians plunge their roots deep into other worlds; they do not exclusively belong here. And in them, these other worlds rise constantly to the surface—at the least touch the veil is rent, remarks Sri Aurobindo. This physical world, which for us is so real and absolute and unique, seems to them but one way of living among many others; in short, a small, chaotic, agitated, and rather painful frontier on the margin of immense continents which lie behind unexplored.

  —Satprem, Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness

  Monument of Love

  JONAH BLANK

  The heartstrings are sometimes anchored by place.

  NOT ALL ARRANGED MATCHES ARE EMPTY OR LOVELESS. SOME bloom into blissful harmonious romances, some blaze and smolder as lifelong seductions. After all, the Kama Sutra is an Indian text.

  The Taj Mahal, the very symbol of India in Western eyes, is the world’s greatest monument to love. It was built by a heart-broken Mughal emperor at the death of his adored wife. In the courtly gardens of the Taj, I met an old man who might well be Shah Jahan reincarnate.

  His hair was snowy white, his mouth had not a single tooth, and his dark walnut skin was creased like crinkly wax paper. He wore a long black formal frock coat in the heat of the afternoon, leaned on a weathered teak walking stick, and gazed at the world through thick glasses with smart cherry-red frames. His name was Mr. Krishnan. If he had not actually existed, he would have been dreamed up by Gabriel García Márquez.

  “I have come here at least once a week for seventy years,” he told me. “My wife and I used to sit by that fountain in the shade. Sometimes she would cook a basket of samosas, and we would spend the hours feeding them to each other. She was always at her loveliest in the light reflected off the walls of the Taj.”

  The light is different here, just as to painters the light in Venice is unlike light anywhere else. Perhaps the walls of the mausoleum reflect not only light but love.

  “When my wife died,” Mr. Krishnan went on, “I began coming to the garden each and every day, I felt closer to her here even than in our home, because this was where we shared our happiest moments. For nearly two decades I walked about the hedges each afternoon, by myself but not quite by myself. When I sit by the fountain and shut my eyes, I can still taste the samosas.”

  Their two children have long since moved away, to Delhi and to Chandigarh, but Mr. Krishnan could never bring himself to abandon Agra. He has left the city only three times in his life, and on each occasion he felt unbearable pangs of loneliness that did not subside until he sat in the gardens of the Taj once again. In recent years the government had begun charging an entrance fee for the monument. It is two rupees—less than a dime—but Mr. Krishnan cannot afford such a daily extravagance on his civil service pension. Now he visits only on Fridays, when admission is free. “All the other days of the week,” he said, “I spend eagerly looking forward to Friday.”

  The Taj is always overrun with tourists, and on Fridays even more so. Most of the gawkers are Indian, but there are also Germans, Brits, French, Americans, Japanese, and Aussies by the busload. Mr. Krishnan does not mind. He does not even seem to notice.

  Mr. Krishnan has no favorite time of day to see the Taj. He has been here countless mornings, when the sunlight bounces off the white marble—marble inlaid with semiprecious stones and then sanded smooth as fresh butter—with such brilliance it hurts your eyes. He has been here countless evenings, when the sun turns into a blazing red comet, paints the mausoleum yellow, then orange, then pink, then deep purple before dropping from the sky to make room for the moon. He has been here countless nights, when the crowds have all gone and the site is silent, when the air is so crisp and clean you don’t even notice the swarms of mosquitoes from the mud flats of the Yamuna River below, when all you can do is stand spellbound by the contrast of the pure, man-made whiteness of the alabaster minarets against the deep and infinite blackness of the heavens.

  Mr. Krishnan has seen the Taj at all hours and from all angles. One of the custodians is a friend of his, and once let him climb up to the gilded dome at midnight. He has explored the structure from top to bottom. Many times he has descended to the tomb far beneath the exquisitely tiled floor, its dead air hot, humid, and thick with the trapped sweat of centuries. Although a Hindu himself, he always speaks the name of the Islamic holy place with hushed reverence. God is love, he says, and this is most certainly a temple of love.

  An anvil the spirit is pounded finer on, India. Skinny, and flashing eyes.

  —Gary Snyder, Passage Through India

  “Shah Jahan did not plan to be buried here,” said Mr. Krishnan. “The Taj was meant to be a mausoleum only for Mumtaz, his dear lady. Do you know what the name ‘Mumtaz’ means? It means ‘excellent, ’ and she was indeed the most excellent of women. As for his own tomb, the Shah intended to build an exact replica of the Taj, but all in black marble instead of white. A perfect mirror image, for the wife is a perfect reflection of the husband.”

  Beneath a tree to our left, a family of Sikhs had spread out a blanket for a picnic. The father was happily lifting his baby daughter up above his head with one hand, bouncing her in the air to make her laugh. The mother was unpacking a small case of food: curries in metal pails, breads wrapped in tin foil—and a basket filled with delicate brown samosas.

  “Why was the black Taj never built?” I asked.

  “A sad thing,” Mr. Krishnan replied. “The emperor Jahan was deposed by his wicked son Aurangzeb. He was imprisoned over there,” the old man pointed up the river to Agra Fort. “For years he would sit in his cell, unable to do anything except stare out of the tower window at the city he once ruled. But I like to believe that every day when he stared downriver at the Taj, he was cheered by the sight of his dear wife’s resting place.”

  Mr. Krishnan’s gaze strayed to the marble dome, and he was silent for a solid minute.

  “But one good thing arose from this tragic situation, “ he said. “Because Shah Jahan could not build a separate tomb for himself, he was buried here in the Taj alongside his lady love. Whenever I think of them, side by side for all eternity, I cannot help but feel happy.”

  The afternoon was waning, and Mr. Krishnan had to go home to take his heart medication. After we’d shaken hands and started to walk away, he turned around and called out to me:

  “May God bless you with happiness—may you get married very soon!”

  Jonah Blank has worked as a newspaper editor and foreign correspondent throughout Asia. Currently he is an Asia analyst with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. This selection was taken from his book, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India.

  From a distance it looks like all the photographs you have ever seen; floating in space, heat waves diffusing its focus. It is not until you pass through the Jilo Khana, the red sandstone gateway, that you really see it: the central tomb of Begum Mumtaz-i-Mahal, white marble, soaring brilliant in the midday sun. You run your fingertips over the traceries and arabesques formed by semi-precious stones inlaid in the marble. It is then that you understand your massive failure of imagination. You take a very deep breath, shade your eyes and peer up at one of the towers, glaring white against a blue sky, and you know what you had not known before: that 350 years ago, before settlers hardly had a foothold in the New World, at this place on earth men had the ability to create such astonishing beauty. It is a triumph of what can be, and a reminder of a past only dimly understood.

  —Shirley Streshinsky, “Interlude in India”

  Chai! Chai! Cha
i!

  JERROLD STEWARD

  Drink a cup of chai and imbibe the essence of India.

  “CHAI GARAM. CHAI GARAM.”

  A deep, disembodied voice echoes from the railway platform, calling to the train’s sleepy passenger. Roused from a miserable attempt at sleep, the weary traveler quickly withdraws a single rupee from his wallet and eagerly thrusts it through the bars of the compartment’s open window. Soon he holds a red clay cup, brimming with steaming liquid. Like a parched wanderer in the desert, he brings it to his lips. Bliss.

  Loved by some, hated by others, chai--the Indian tea consumed by the masses as well as the maharajahs—is one of the constants on the subcontinent.

  If you’re like most Westerners, when you think of tea you probably picture an elegant porcelain pot with some exquisitely aromatic Assam or Darjeeling leaves steeping inside. Nearby stand milk and sugar, ready to serve if called upon. A decidedly British sort of arrangement. To no great surprise, considering the long years of the Raj, this setup can be found all over India, but only in first class waiting rooms, Western-style restaurants, and starred hotels. If this is what you want, be sure to order “tray tea.” Alas, it won’t always be available.

  On the other hand, maybe you’re visualizing something a bit more utilitarian. But the tea bag has failed to penetrate very deeply into Indian culture.

  Okay, you’re wondering: what is chai? What are its magical ingredients? What special alchemy produces it? Pull up a chair in one of my favorite chai stands and watch the chai-wallah at work.