Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  ‘How do you know you’ll be able to get rid of the extremists even if you do get independence?’

  He stares at me and gulps.

  ‘Do you want a discount on that shawl?’

  I get one. Business here is bad.

  Death seems to be the only growth industry in town. In the blazing heat of the afternoon we visit a graveyard which has overtaken a sports oval and stand above men buried in the dry dirt of the playgrounds of their youth. The graves are decorated with tinsel and plastic flowers. Headstones are carved with the gentle curves of Urdu and the straight strokes of English:

  ‘When slaves are martyred they are relieved of all their pain.’

  ‘Don’t weep on my grave because thanks to Allah I am a martyr.’

  ‘Do not shun the gun, my dear younger ones, the wait for freedom is yet to be won.’

  The sound of soft weeping wafts from one grave. A woman is sobbing over the hump of dust that entombs her son. Mukhtar stoops towards her and asks permission to intrude on her grief with a camera and questions. She sits up and pulls aside her veil to talk to the camera like it’s a confessional and a comrade. Her name is Mehmooda and her son Mohammed was a twenty-two-year-old militant who died in a gun battle with the security forces last year. Mukhtar translates.

  ‘I handed him over to Allah, he would take care of him. He used to pray five times a day that he would be a martyr fighting security forces, Allah heard his prayers. He wanted to belong to Allah. On the day of judgement he will speak for me in front of Allah. His blood should not go to waste. Inshallah, his death will help Kashmir.’

  Inshallah is a common word in Kashmir. In this state nothing is taken for granted. Everything is ‘if God is willing’. The word ‘Islam’ actually comes from a root of a word that means ‘complete surrender’, but Mehmooda’s fatalism astounds me. In India I’ve slowly been learning that I’m not in complete control of my life. I got sick, Jonathan is constantly called away and India’s general disorganisation means things never really turn out as I expect, but Mehmooda’s faith and fatalism makes me realise how much I still cling to the belief that I have power over my destiny. Perhaps it’s time to let that go. Back at the boat on the lake of lotuses I shiver with thoughts of surrender, for it seems such surrender requires sacrifices I could never make. I’m not sure I want that depth of faith and I can’t imagine being capable of it.

  My reverie is interrupted with a request from our driver. Hassan is tall, stooped and big nosed and he’s getting married in the morning. We’ve known him for two days and he insists we come. He bows and promises, ‘The best of Kashmir will be on display.’

  I need to see it.

  After a huge breakfast of pancakes and a morning tea of coconut cookies and fudge cake, we are picked up by a friend of the groom and driven to the old part of Srinagar town. Open drains carry human effluent along the narrow lanes. We twist and turn through crooked alleys echoing with the sounds of life lived close; women call from high wooden windows and children chatter as they chase bicycle tyres.

  We enter a tall wooden home painted green. Atop a dark creaking stairway in a sun-lit room, the groom’s family surround us as special guests and long-lost friends. Hassan’s little sister, specially dressed in a blue nylon tutu, sits me down cross-legged on a cushion and squats in front of me to cup her chin in her hands and stare. An embroidered cloth is laid out on the floor and the groom’s father washes our hands with water poured from a massive silver teapot. A Pepsi is bought from a shop down the road and placed beside me. I take a tentative sip but as soon as I put it down the little girl picks it up again and pushes it to my lips. The room fills as all the male members of the family gather to eat with us. No surprise at what’s on the menu.

  Twenty-one types of mutton.

  Mutton is to Kashmir what beer is to Australia. To refuse would be a major social faux pas, akin to atheism. I haven’t eaten animal product for months as summer in Delhi is not a good time for meat and the health authorities have closed down many of the butchers. But there’s no room for vegetarians here – there’s not even any room for vegetables. There’s mutton on the bone, mutton in gravy, mutton with peas, mutton in tandoori, mutton with cream, mutton with spice, mutton kebabs, mutton shanks, mutton intestines, mutton flank, mutton balls and saffron rice with mutton bits. Then there’s mutton made in ways I cannot describe, with special spices and softening sauces. Jonathan and I sponge bits of mutton together with our fingers and try to flick it into our mouths – a move the men around us perform with ease. We end up with bits of mutton hanging from our collars, ears and hair. What’s worse, our plates are like the magic pudding. Every time we pause for breath the men rush to fill up our load and insist we eat more. The food is incredibly delicious but my belly is bursting with heaviness, my throat tightening in protest.

  I stop eating.

  The room goes quiet, the men lean back and blink sorrowfully and the little girl pauses with my Pepsi in midair looking like she will cry. I relent.

  ‘Okay, just a bit.’

  They grin and pile on another three animals. After four platefuls they can see I’m nearly dying and serve the finale.

  ‘Your full stop to the meal, Sarah, eat, eat, it’s good.’

  On my plate is a meatball the size of a tennis ball coated in green goo. It’s meant to help digestion. I summon a strength of commitment I’ve never had before, force it in my mouth and sit back in agony.

  After a chorus of burps and another handwash it’s time for talk. I’m stuffed silent by food and listen to a lecture by a charming uncle clothed in a beautiful hand woven woollen Kashmir suit and shawl. He lists stories of why Indian security forces are evil and how they must leave Kashmir.

  ‘What do you do?’ Jonathan asks, ever the journalist.

  ‘I’m a mechanic for the Indian airforce, I work for them in the day and against them after work.’ He winks and smiles sweetly.

  Trying to leave politics aside, I ask some young girls who’ve snuck into the room who they like from the movies. They mention some Indian actors but their deep dark eyes grow soft and their smiles wide as they talk of ‘the handsome boys of Laiksha e Toiba’.

  ‘Who are they, a boy band?’

  ‘No silly, they are our freedom fighters, so strong and brave they are.’

  Jonathan and I plead off the wedding ceremony because it won’t happen for many hours yet. We thank our hosts and roll back to the houseboat, but there’s no time to digest the food or the folklore, for Mr Bhat is waiting at the gate with a special salwar kamiz in purple polyester for me to wear at a dinner with his family.

  Four hours later and we are fed the same meal again – all the twenty-one types of mutton in all their glory. I rock and nearly retch at the sight of the stacked silver plates but Jonathan pulls me down with a stern look and I open my mouth like a guppy ready to explode. After a few bites I’m so full that my cheeks are sticking out like a Cabbage Patch doll. Mr Bhat sees my slack eating performance as a personal affront, so I shove it in, trying to turn my groans into moans of pleasure. Kashmir is killing me softly with food.

  And a great deal of love. I’ve been told ‘I love you’ more times today than at the three o’clock ecstasy peak at the Mardi Gras.

  Yet hate triumphs again. The next day the current cease-fire explodes with the bang of a car-bomb that kills an Indian journalist and several policemen. Mukhtar lives near the scene and will hear the ringing in his ears for days. I’m relieved to be returning to Delhi, but uneasy about leaving Jonathan in the thick of the danger. I leave laden with sadness about the future of an area racked by religious violence. But before I can escape the politics, on my way to the airport the taxi driver insists on telling me why he would rather Srinagar belong to Muslim Pakistan than secular India.

  ‘We Muslims have given India the wonderful mosques, the beautiful places, the Taj Mahal, India would be nothing without us.’

  ‘So why leave?’

  ‘Our past is in India, the
y don’t treat us well, our future is independence, if we can’t have that we must be with Pakistan.’

  He asks me to describe the Taj Mahal, the tomb of Mogul King Shah Jehan and his wife Mumtaz, and a glory he has never seen. I edit out my experience of running a gauntlet of the most pernicious sellers in India to share the spectacle with thousands of people imitating Princess Di. I skirt the stench of the dreadful foot odour in the inner sanctum. Instead I rave about the inlay of jewels and the majestic marble that’s yellowing from the pollution. He nods happily. I tell him about Shah Jehan’s grandfather Akbar the Great who built the majestic Fatephur Sikri down the road from the Taj. It’s a wonderful palace complex with painted rooms, giant chess boards (where kings used real dancing girls as pawns), massive libraries, mosques, and a chamber where Akbar would encourage debates between Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian and Parsi scholars. Akbar, the Mogul Muslim, ruled an India where different religions were respected and tolerated, but my taxi driver is no longer interested in a land of pluralism. He wants to live in a state defined by its religion.

  At the airport my body is patted down by three different sets of over-exuberant women in curtained booths. All finish the feel-up with a hug and a kiss. In the last security check a large, lumpy woman with jet-black hair and gypsy eyes holds my hand and won’t let go.

  ‘I am Leila, come sit with me, sister.’

  As I’m the only woman flying out of Srinagar today, Leila is in no hurry. She orders coffee from her assistant and we squat on the floor of her booth, hand in hand. She tells me about her heart troubles, her husband’s problems at work and her wish that her two children will leave Srinagar for America. I tell her about Australia, my ‘husband’, why I’m so skinny, my hair disasters, my Vipassana course and my trouble digesting mutton. After twenty minutes Leila and I are the best of friends. And then we talk about Allah. I tell Leila I’m a Christian by culture but have no God. She lets go of my hand, stands up and shakes me by the shoulders.

  ‘Serah, my child, you have learnt about death, you have learnt to be silent, you have learnt about Kashmir, but you haven’t learnt about Allah. What are you doing? He is right here with you right now. You must learn to give control to him.’

  I stare at her dumbly. She looks as if she will slap me, then softens and sinks to my side; cradling my head in her embrace, she rocks me like a child.

  ‘My friend, can’t you already feel your soul yearning and longing? A woman gets lonely even with a husband, you must get to know God, I urge you to save your soul.’

  I promise I’ll try.

  Leila takes me to the tarmac and supervises my final body search. She kisses each of my cheeks and my forehead.

  ‘Next time in Kashmir, you stay with me, you my daughter, I love you.’

  Through the plane window I look down. Three soldiers have let go of their machine guns to wave at me from the tarmac, and Leila is with them, blowing kisses. I’m heavy with heartfelt sadness for Kashmir’s future. India will never give up its share of the state; as a secular nation it cannot give in to a religious division of land. Pakistan will never give up trying to get all of Kashmir; as a Muslim nation it feels it should have Muslim areas. As the plane loops around the lake, my wet eyes swell with the sight of the perfect symbol of this country and this valley. The lotus. Out of the slime, out of the shit, out of the crowded, worn land rises exquisite, glorious perfection.

  For the first time since summer began I feel a regrowth in my desire to be a perfect being, to rise above my muddy mind, to be an unspoiled spirit that can soar above place and circumstance, to be happy and strong and open and beautiful. Is this God? Or is India indeed fertilising me, nurturing a new spirit to bloom?

  Inshallah.

  INTERMISSION

  My Wedding Season

  November is tourist season. Friends venture back to the Biosphere and I travel with them to Rajasthan. The laughter and the Australian laconic humour revive a lightness of being, and I join them on a road trip to ancient palaces, fort hotels and evocative ruins. In Jaisalmer we take a desert safari of baking sand and cracked skin, of chapatti-making around fires and camels farting in our faces.

  In December I head home to beautiful brashy Sydney and prepare to make one of the biggest leaps of all.

  Marriage.

  Thankfully, my hair has grown enough to look slightly glamorous. Just after Christmas in front of our families and friends, Jonathan and I profess undying love and promise to be together forever. Afterwards we purge our hotel room of stayers, plot our future and review our past. We give the jingoistic astrologer in Rishikesh good marks. As he predicted, Sonia Gandhi did not win the election and India won the cricket. I had faced death and some spiritual truths. And, after a year of ridiculously hard work, Jonathan learnt to dance – only hours ago we did the Cha Cha to a Barry White song for our wedding waltz. We dismiss the rest of his reading, including his warning of danger for Jonathan. Instead, we plan a year of togetherness, fun and love.

  But India will ignore our script.

  Our first year of marriage will be a time of separation and struggle. As Mr Rakesh predicted, Jonathan will suffer great risk for great success, and I will become a karma chameleon.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Big Pot Festival

  Our newlywed travel plans become unstuck in an ungodly traffic jam above the biggest spiritual festival on earth. India’s Kumbh Mela. After a fortnight of honeymoon bliss on a beach, Jonathan and I don’t feel like being apart just yet. It’s January and Delhi is still wrapped in its noxious smog that carries memories of disease and disaster. So we quickly fled the city and set off on a combined work and extended honeymoon trip. And here we now are. Going nowhere.

  While Jonathan sits patiently in the car, I’m standing at the railing of the town’s bridge beside a giant knot of tinsel-covered trucks, beeping buses, black buffaloes, wagons, rickshaws, bicycles and cows with painted horns. There’s not a whiff of road rage. Kumbh Mela pilgrims squat beside their vehicles, beckoning boys with steaming glasses of chai and touts selling fluffy toys, fairy floss and roasted peanuts in newspaper cones. A train trundles past, a conveyer belt of bulging human cargo; a row of men ride the roof cheering and waving, their faces flashing ecstatic grins.

  Far below us on the sandbank of the Ganges is a mass of humanity so large it can be seen from outer space and so strange it seems like a settlement from another world. Stretching to every horizon, a moonscape of grey dust is pock-marked with craters full of rubbish and speckled with beings; the saffron flags of Hinduism fly high from bamboo castles and low from squalid squatter camps. Rivers of the righteous flow across the sands; pilgrims with long wild hair, tattered robes and bright saris walk on cracked feet caked in dust. Cripples and lepers line the paths; their sores weeping with puss, twisted and bleeding stumps for limbs. Camels, horses and jeeps stir up the fine sand that swirls upwards, caking my skin, encrusting my eye sockets and grinding between my teeth. Smells rise: shit and burning onions, incense and urine, sandalwood and spicy sweat, heady hash and burning cow patties.

  As I shut my burning eyes and block my nose to reduce the sensory overload I become fully aware of the noise. The bridge beneath my feet is vibrating with the buzz of a human zoo of millions joined in symphonic song. On percussion, the rumble of trucks and the growling of generators. On brass, the beeping of buses, the duck calls of rickshaws and the tings of bicycle bells. On vocals, a cacophony of chanting, singing, screaming and whistling. Rising even higher is a melody of keyboards, cowbells and sitars. Loudest of all is the constant ranting of lost and found announcements distorted through loud speakers – a roll call of children and elderly who may never be claimed. Together, this noise could be the hubbub of the three hundred and thirty million gods of Hinduism chatting at a heavenly cocktail party, or perhaps the collective roar of souls in hell.

  A young Indian swami in a bright orange robe with his forehead painted yellow joins me at the bridge rail. He mumbles a mantra to the nuc
lear orange sun, then turns his sparkling eyes to mine. In perfect English he states, ‘You are living in India but still you are amazed.’

  I step back from the spectacle to stare at him. Has this holy man read my mind, my future, my very soul?

  ‘How do you know I live here?’ I stammer. His bushy beard wobbles as he laughs.

  ‘Your driver told me.’

  He motions to a huddle of taxi-wallahs squatting and chatting about their passengers. I ask him why he’s here.

  ‘Because a Hindu’s aim in life is not to have another one.’

  He shrugs and points to the river below, then tells me a story about how the shallow stinky Ganges came to contain the nectar of salvation.

  Once upon a time in a Hindu legend the Devas (the gods of heaven responsible for sun, wind, rain and fire) were weakened by a curse. They cooperated with the demons to stir the cosmic ocean of existence and from the milky depths a pot, or a kumbh, containing amrit, the nectar of immortality, emerged. The Devas decided they didn’t want to share with the demons and a chase across the heavens began. During the battle (equivalent to twelve human years) four drops of nectar fell to earth and at each spot they landed, the Kumbh Mela is celebrated. Allahabad is the most special of places because here the three holy rivers of Hinduism meet – the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. So, every twelve years this town hosts the Maha Kumbh Mela; literally translated as ‘The Big Pot Festival’. But this current festival is extra special; at this Mela the planets are exactly as they were when the nectar fell from the heavens.

  My swami sidekick says I’m extraordinarily privileged to be here as this cosmic lineup is an auspicious, once-in-every-one-hundred-and-forty-four-year event that will generate enough energy to transform these muddy waters into the immortal nectar.