Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Then the steel cupboards open and out come gyasars, thick brocades for the Buddhist trade covered with dragons and other Chinese symbols, and jamevars, the newest rage, silks woven with the paisley designs of Kashmiri shawls. There are tanchois to finger, satiny brocades with an enameling of subdued colors, organzas made with mixtures of cotton and silk, and Dacca jamdanis, fluffs of the sheerest cotton bordered with gold. For those with fat wallets, there are the wondrous “tissues,” the dazzling stuff of dreams. As sheer and airy as clouds but with a fine weight to them, they have silk threads for the warp and gold of the weft—pure gold. There is only one man left in Banaras who can make this thread, but it is hoped that this dying art can be kept alive.

  A private music recital, a fixture of Banarasi nightlife, is as leisurely an affair as the selling of fabric. In these, the aristocratic Banarasis are shown at their decadent best. The wealthy patrons of the recitals insist that concerts in large halls are a waste of time: “After all, how can the musician and audience interact?” Guests arrive, men in loose kurtas and pajamas, women in flowering tanchois and jamdanis. Everyone takes a seat on the carpeted floor. Thandai and betel leaves are passed around. A discussion starts on the finer points of miniature painting, on how to choose a perfect langra mango (a local specialty), or on the efforts being made to clean up the Ganges.

  Then the musician arrives with his party, an assorted group of accompanists and pupils. If he is of the stature of a Bismillah Khan, the men might rise to touch his feet, then scamper around catering to his every whim. Would he like a betel leaf, tobacco, a whiskey-soda? The musicians settle down on an area of the carpet covered with a mattress and sheets and the recital begins. It will go on until the wee hours, perhaps until dawn breaks, with the audience crying “vah, vah!” in appreciation of every beautiful phrase.

  Banarasis like to joke that their city has too much of four things: widows, sacred bulls, steps, and ascetics. It is true that widows, cast out by the often-cruel Hindu society, come here in droves.Wearing widow’s white, sometimes with heads shaven, they congregate by the river to pray and sing, and live out their lives in ashrams set up by charitable organizations. I visited one such retreat, Mumukshu Bhavan, a hostel for those who are “bound for moksha” (liberation). Widows are welcome here, as are those who wish to spend their time in quiet contemplation and those who are dying.

  Unlike the crowded, jostling, littered city around it, the hostel, to my surprise, was a quiet, clean haven. Its many spacious, whitewashed buildings are separated by well-swept walkways, gardens, and courtyards. I saw daily tasks being performed in a businesslike way: a 110-year-old widow being helped with her tea; a man half her age cutting vegetables and laying them on a mat to dry; a rani who had fled an unhappy marriage preparing to sing hymns. Up on a second floor an old man, once the head of a history department, was translating the works of the South Indian sage Shankaracharya. He looked up at me as I passed.

  “I have some mantras I chant. They are of great help to me. Would you like to have them?” He added softly, “The spiritual vibrations in Banaras are a hundredfold greater than anywhere else in the world. If I die here, I will surely gain moksha.”

  Banaras: a city for the dying and a city for the living; confusing, maddening, and enlightening. In many ways, the most Indian of Indian cities.

  Madhur Jaffrey also contributed “Food for Body and Spirit” to Part One.

  OM. This eternal word is all; what was, what is and what shall be, and what is beyond eternity. All is OM.… It is beyond the senses and it is the end of evolution. It is nonduality and love. He goes with self to the supreme Self who knows this, who knows this.

  —Mandukya Upanishad

  Sanskrit for OM

  Worshipping the Wicket

  JOHN WARD ANDERSON

  If there is a national religion in India, it’s cricket.

  IT STARTED AS AN ORDINARY MATCH, BUT AS THE HOURS DRIFTED by, it evolved into a uniquely Indian affair that showed why Calcutta’s Eden Gardens is considered one of the great cricket stadiums and home to the world’s most passionate fans.

  First came the Wave—120,000 Indians leaping to their feet, raising their arms to the heavens and shouting in unison. Then came the showers of firecrackers, bottle rockets, and flares in the stands and on the field in the middle of the game—or more precisely, throughout the entire game. Finally, when India thrashed the West Indies by 102 runs to capture its first major international cricket tournament at home, tens of thousands of euphoric spectators—chanting “In-dya! In-dya!”—rolled up newspapers, set them ablaze and held them torchlike above their heads. Sheets of fire floated about the stadium and orange flames flickered in the stands.

  “You will not find a crowd like this anywhere in the world. They’re really fanatic,” West Indies captain Richie Richardson said after the match, which culminated the thirteen-match game, five-country Hero Cup tournament. “Indians worship cricket, and their cricketers are like gods to them.”

  “The cult of cricket and Eden Gardens go hand-in-glove,” said Krish Mackerthuj, president of the United Cricket Board of South Africa, which lost to India in the semifinals.

  “If you had a stadium for 200,000 or 500,000, for a match like this, it would be full, and that wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world,” he said. “And all the burning paper at the end—it’s shocking, and at first you’re a bit harsh, but later you realize people have different ways of sending the message they’re happy their team won.”

  For many Indians, cricket is the finest legacy of the British Raj. In recent years, the game has supplanted field hockey as India’s national pastime. On weekends, parks and vacant lots are crammed with cricket matches. City alleys from Bombay to Delhi teem with children playing cricket between the passing cars and motorbikes. In rural villages, boys pound stakes into the middle of fields or commandeer dusty roads and transform them into instant cricket grounds.

  The sport, one of the few India competes in at a world-class level, has become an intense source of national pride and a rallying point for the country, which comes to a virtual standstill on big game days. Matches with Pakistan—most of which have been canceled in recent years for security reasons—are a sort of surrogate for the war no one wants, similar to the way U.S.-Soviet basketball games were once perceived as tests of superpower prowess.

  India’s cricket madness began in the early 1880s, when the country’s British rulers needed cricket teams to play against and suited up Indian squads, according to Narrottam Puri, one of India’s top sports authorities and cricket commentators. Indian traders were the first to play the game because it helped them develop British business contacts.“Once they were seen playing with the rulers, their whole stock in society rose up.” Puri said, and gradually the sport became a sort of social equalizer.

  Sociologist Ashis Nandy, who has written a book on cricket, said, “It’s an Indian game that was mistakenly brought by the British. It’s an unpredictable game where the variables are so many, where there are negotiations with fate, and we are playing not with an opponent but with our own destiny. That clicks with the Indian self-conscience, the South Asian way of looking at the world and our own fate.”

  John Ward Anderson is Jerusalem correspondent for The Washington Post.

  I was the Charlie Brown of my Little League baseball team. The only time I got on base was when “walked” or “hit-by-a-pitch.”

  In India, baseball does not exist, but its historical predecessor, cricket, reigns supreme. Boys of all ages can be seen playing in school yards, fields, street corners, and back alleys.

  In the late afternoon, as I pedaled through a village, I noticed a large group of boys practicing their national sport. They waved me over and one boy yelled, “Do you play?” Before I had a chance to reply, I had a fat cricket bat in my hands and stood in front of the wickets. The tallest boy said, “I throw slow,” and prepared with a short run to pitch or “bowl” the ball.

  Having observed othe
rs playing, I knew to position the bat down by my feet as if I were preparing to hit a golf ball, but the laughter around me confirmed my stance was still unconventional.

  The boy tossed the ball and it bounced right. I swung and missed. Over twenty years had passed and my fortune hadn’t changed. The boy announced, “fast now,” and smiled. Hadn’t I borne enough humiliation? I set down the bat, but a small voice said, “C’mon Willie. Don’t think Charlie Brown—think Ken Griffey, Jr.”

  I picked up the bat and dug in. The boy took a long running start and hurled the ball with all his fifteen-year-old might. It bounced and I swung wildly, connecting with a loud “thwack.” The ball sailed over the head of the pitcher, over the heads of the boys out in the field, and disappeared behind some large boulders.

  Suddenly I was surrounded by cheering boys, jumping up and down and patting me on the back, several of whom were shouting, “Six, six.”

  I had just enough knowledge of cricket to know what that meant. It had taken thirty-two years and a journey halfway around the world—but I had hit a home run.

  —Willie Weir, “Cycling India: Letters from the Road”

  A Vision of Vijayanagar

  JAN HAAG

  A chance encounter with another traveler leads to an other-worldly discovery.

  I STEPPED OFF THE BUS IN THE MORNING AT HAMPI BAZAAR, A place so bewilderingly strange to Western eyes that I could hardly believe I was seeing it. There was a double row of broken columns, the equivalent of several blocks long. Though now roofless, you’d call it an arcade if you saw it in Italy or at a California mission. The columns were huge. They stood maybe as much as five or six feet apart, and, in places, two or three ancient steps still led up to a floor paved with granite slabs, straw, merchandise and people. It was such a jumble that it took me a few minutes of taking a step and staring, taking another step and staring, to realize that these were people’s homes and people’s stores. The merchandise—sandals here and pots there, basins, soap, cups, mats, cosmetics, food, fabrics, saris, a thousand item—formed the walls between the columns. Often the merchandise also formed a barrier between the front and back of the stalls. There may have been two families to a stall. Maybe more. There were multitudes crowded between the huge broken columns, sitting about in the streets, walking up and down, staring at the occasional foreigner, no doubt hoping they would buy something; but mostly the vast milling crowd was just living, friendly, curious, and welcoming.

  It was as shocking as if one were to find the Athenians serving tea and having babies among the pillars of the Parthenon, or the farmers of Colorado storing their harvest and selling tortillas out of the cliff dwelling of Mesa Verde. What Westerners might think of as the homeless were, it seemed, putting an ancient monument to the pragmatic test of usefulness. But these people weren’t homeless. This was obviously their home, and their delight. One long line of the arcade stretched in front of me as I walked into Hampi, and a shorter line stood to my right, columns, habitations, people, and straw. It was a bit, I guessed, like the stables at Bethlehem two thousand years ago.

  The young Israeli woman I had met just after I visited the Ajanta caves, who had originally said, “Go to Hampi, go to Vijayanagar,” had told me to look for a certain tea shop. I found it: a woman with a pot on a tiny dung fire and two stools by a column. I had sweet chai. But my adviser must have spoken a little Hindi or Kannada, for the proprietress, though very friendly, spoke no English. We smiled at each other again and again as I drank my tea. My eyes, looking over the rim of my tiny tea cup, wandered around like two barn-yard chickens, struck by the amount of life and dust, activity and a feeling of concealed exuberance the “town” or camp-out seemed to contain beneath its rustic tatters.

  When I left the tea stool, it was a bit of a walk up a hill before I came to more ruins. Already the morning sun was searing hot, so on top of the hill I stopped to find something else to drink. In a shop made of palm fronds and sticks, I had a lesson from a little old man wrapped round by a colorful skirt—a lungi—on how to drink coconut milk straight from the pod. What a blessed alternative it became, from then on, to the always questionable water. After I had sucked up the sweet clear liquid through a straw, the seller, with a huge machete, hacked off a chip, then chopped the whole thing in two so I could scoop out the milky meat. I stood on the hill looking off to where the ruins were reported to be, savoring the coconut, mostly seeing nothing at all but dust and scrubby bushes.

  Then I walked on. After a while, instead of dust, I was walking on a domed surface like a great lava flow, shiny and bald and immense. In my sandals, I skimmed over the dome of black rock and, as I did so, I caught a glimpse of the river. Along the river, strewn about on the landscape, were huge boulders of shiny black rock. They were so immense I couldn’t really believe they were there. It was as if Brahma himself had spilled a bag of black marbles as big as automobiles, as houses, at random, along the river where no trees, no grass, no weeds grew. It was a landscape so desolate, so cataclysmic that I knew even five hundred years ago it couldn’t have been that much different. Why had the Telugu princes, Harihara and Bukka, founded the capitol of what was to become the largest Hindu Empire in Indian history—here?

  My young Israeli adviser had understated it when she said, “There’s nothing like it.”

  I had asked: “What is it?”

  “A river, ruins, rocks.”

  “Different than here?” We both had just been to see the river, ruins, rocks of Ajanta. I could not conceive of anything more spectacular.

  “It’s unique.” She didn’t say much else, except to urge me to go, and, “I slept out by the rocks.”

  “Safe? Where do you leave your stuff when you sleep out?”

  “By a rock.”

  To step into Hampi, the modern name of the remains of the bazaar of Vijayanagar, was a little like traveling in space only to find Mars had long since been colonized, civilized to the point of wonders beyond belief, then abandoned and squatted-in by man’s modern cousins. To step out from Hampi was like arriving on the moon, unreal landscape in every direction, perhaps early mappings for 3001. Still skidding across the immense black dome, I soon came upon the King’s Balance where plaques told me it had originally been a scale on which the king sat on one side and his loyal subjects filled the other side with gold. It was a structure somewhat like a guillotine, or a Tori gate, with no visible weighing pans to sit in. Beyond it stood the Vittala Temple, like a three-dimensional mandala, like a vision, an illusion, or a mirage in the dust and haze of India.

  I had never before seen filigree in stone. The temple, for the most part, was a vast, wall-less building, crowded with clusters of columns, maybe three, maybe five to a cluster. Each cluster was crowned with a capital of intricate stone work so delicate that I, who have tatted lace with silk thread, thought my work quite crude by comparison. Carved into and around the columns were gods and goddesses, demons, elephants, horses, beasts both mythical and real, peacocks, parrots, and plants which flowered with eternal blossoms. The ceiling was coffered and crisscrossed with yet more stone carved lace. The stone itself was a soft gold color, perhaps flecked with mica, as it shimmered in the sun. I stood in a gossamer golden temple made of stone, awestruck.

  The ancient Hindus chose their temple sites with great care and they sometimes spent years looking for a place with the right power and energy. They would search for an area where cattle liked to graze. In a big pasture the cows always had a favourite place. Likewise, dogs were considered to be a good sign. If dogs were found wandering among the cattle, then the site was perfect. But any sign of a cat in the field, and the site was abandoned. According to the ancients, dogs and cows attracted positive energies, whereas cats were definitely negative. The priests tethered the cows and left them there for forty-one days. Then they slaughtered the cows and checked their internal organs. If any of the beasts showed signs of disease then the priests looked for another place. If the cattle were all healthy, the construction of the
temple went ahead.

  —Peter Holt, In Clive’s Footsteps

  Someone near me said, though not to me, “Slap the stone.” And they did. The columns began to sing. It appeared the columns were tuned like organ pipes. Music could be played upon them. I slapped with the light upward motion I had just seen. A deep rich tone rang in the columned court, evoking even with my light touch, harmonics from its neighbors. Was it middle C? I do not know. I hit again, another column, a higher tone. In and out among the multifaceted columns, I wandered round and round, testing their pitches, dazzled by their beauty. What wizard musician had designed them? What Stradivarius had built them? Who had gone and left them standing there, dust-blown in the blazing sun, beside the river of huge black stones?

  I went down to the Purandara Dasara Mandapa that stood partly in the river where a little grass grew, clumps of weeds along the shore, a scrubby tree or two, and a dozen kids at least, young and lean and dark, yelling, jumping up and down, and diving into the water. They careened into the black river from the bits left of the ancient stone bridge as well. What is a mandapa? A temple it seems. It was black, carved, perhaps from the indigenous stone, and very dark inside where the sunlight didn’t reach and the kids didn’t go.

  It was there in the cooling shadows someone surprised me: “Did you like the stone chariot?” in English, sing-song and lilting, as Indian speech is.

  “What stone chariot?”

  “By the Vittala Temple. The wheels are twice as high as you are.”

  I had been so intrigued with the Vittala Temple I had missed the stone chariot.