Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  Because Billie is an extremely high-caste Brahmin, her father will only consider very elite men. Good breeding is not enough; they’re culled if they have a relative who is divorced, if they drink, if they have the wrong job or salary or if the parents are showy. I’d been nervous about meeting such a strict man, but I’m welcomed to a family dinner with a warm hug from him and a rowdy romp with the strictly vegetarian Brahmin dogs. Billie’s dad is an erudite and well-travelled man who makes me feel instantly comfortable. He lists his favourite restaurants in Sydney and the least favourite men he’s met so far for his little girl.

  ‘We only want the cream of the crop, we are not Punjabi refugees,’ he insists while winking at Aarzoo.

  She groans. ‘Stop teasing me, Uncle-ji, cheeky man, you are.’

  We laugh at their ritual ribbing. But Uncle is glossing over a serious problem – so far he’s only found a few ‘suitable’ boys and Billie dismissed them quickly. One because he wanted to talk to her alone and the other because she didn’t like his parents.

  ‘Sarrrrrrah, I just want someone who is from a pleasant family, yaar? I’m not getting married to him, I’m getting married to his family. They have to be nice.’

  Aarzoo agrees but rolls her eyes.

  ‘Billllllllieeeeeee, you are going to become a spinssssster. I’m a rough refugee spoiling your reputation and I’m going to hug you, here I come.’

  Billie screams – she cannot stand being touched.

  She and Aarzoo are the Oscar and Felix of the Indian X generation.

  Aarzoo is turning twenty-eight and wants a groovy party with alcohol where she can wear a shortish skirt. That leaves out her house and the homes of all her friends as they still live with their parents. It’s time to call in a favour from her rakhee brother, but Jonathan has turned around and gone again, this time to Pakistan. As the good sister-in-law, I let her party at my house.

  In some ways it’s all very Indian. The bootlegger arrives at nine, Aarzoo at ten and her guests at eleven, Billie’s parents drop her off and pick her up two hours later, young married couples talk about their sons and one man insists I run up and down the stairs and bring him warm water all night. In other ways it’s all very western. Lots of girls get changed into tight jeans and t-shirts in their cars and the boys spend the night screaming into their mobile phones. Most drink bourbon and Coke and couples sticky-kiss in the corners. They keep screaming and fighting over the music until four o’clock, and when they eventually blow up the stereo, they abandon for home. I feel like I’m back at my post-HSC party.

  Indian society forces its middle class to live an extended adolescence; most married couples usually live with one set of parents and unmarried ones must lie, sneak around and borrow bedrooms to fulfil their sexual desires. The ABC house becomes a bit of a fuck pad for a few young lovers in the next few months and it’s something I don’t feel entirely comfortable about.

  This crowd is where the west meets South-Asia head on. Most of them work with Aarzoo on the first Indian reality TV show. It’s loosely based on a mixture of ‘Survivor’ and ‘Temptation Island’ but drastically altered for Indian tastes and sensibilities. The American shows are seen as materialistic, individualistic, immoral and tacky – everything that this country hates about the west. Aarzoo finds ‘Temptation Island’ especially excruciating.

  ‘It is absolutely disgusting to an average Indian. They are not wearing any clothes and what is the concept? It’s tough enough in life to stay together, here you are spending millions of dollars trying to pull them apart. It’s bizarre.’

  ‘What do you think would happen if they tried to do an Indian one?’ I wonder out loud.

  ‘There would be rrrrrrrrrrriots.’

  Shot in Ladakh, her show is called ‘RAAH’: Romance Adventure Aap aur Hum (You and Us). Aarzoo and her mates force young married couples to ride bikes, abseil down mountains, trek, cross rivers and (shock horror) cook their own food. They all freak out, especially when they break a nail or lose a blue contact lens. I love it.

  Aarzoo’s generation believes it will be able to adapt consumer culture without its destructive downfalls. But her parents’ generation is beginning to worry that things are going too fast. The city’s first rave is held at a farmhouse and soon after there’s the first big cocaine bust. Television discussions and newspaper articles rant about pernicious western habits, ‘revealing, loincloth clothes and strange techno-music’. I don’t think they need to worry too much: Indian culture may just be strong enough to take what it wants from American cultural imperialism and reject what it doesn’t.

  India’s one billion people simply refuse to play by the new Raj rules, and their rich traditions and absorbent, flexible Hindu faith may well survive the global onslaught. Aarzoo and her friends will party all night and get up at six to take pilgrimage to a temple, and Billie will definitely marry a man her parents choose. The top films of this summer are all Hindi musicals and most Hollywood hits are still not showing in Delhi. About seventy-five percent of the film clips on Channel V and MTV are Indian songs, and local literature is booming. India has changed the food Goliaths to suit her tastes; McDonald’s has taken the beef out of the beef burger and Pizza Hut adds spice and chilli. The funky new crowd is just as likely to wear a salwar suit and a sari as jeans. India is too nationalistic to give into the cultural cringe. The new cars carry the same old stickers that brag ‘INDIA IS GREAT’.

  I’m sure Hinduism will also ultimately absorb the New Age philosophies of the west that are beginning to infiltrate the New Delhi scene, many of which are based on Hindu truths anyway. Hinduism is like a sponge – it’s already an amalgam of thousands of local beliefs and faiths and I believe it will continue to move with the times and with the people.

  I begin to meet people a bit older than Aarzoo who are attending New Age courses. Groups meet weekly to workshop ideas about modern marriages, workshops on career fulfilment are common and eight-week courses concentrate on individual growth and the transformation to prosperity. Non Resident Indians (NRIs) are lapping them up, and are usually cashed up enough to pay the huge fees (most of the courses cost more than one hundred American dollars and some are even charged in that currency). I’m cynical about any teachings that charge vast amounts of money but there’s a unique seminar in town that I’m willing to pay for.

  The seminar involves studying the transmissions of an alien called Kryon. Kryon is as big as a house, has eleven spinning sides, hovers in the orbit of Jupiter and communicates telepathically with nine chosen earthlings. Brought up on a steady diet of Star Wars, ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘X-Files’, I do believe we are not alone in the universe. I like the idea of ET existentialism and I’m still feeling slightly nervous about Hindu gurus and intense religious study. I decide learning about Kryon could be fun and also perhaps give me some insight into how India is changing spiritually as well as economically and culturally. I’ve also learnt to suspend my disbelief over the last year or so and outrageous beliefs such as alien transmissions no longer seem that bizarre to me.

  The course reading is The End Times, a bright orange fluorescent bible of bizarre psycho-babble. Kryon channelled its teachings to a Californian baby-boomer businessman Lee Carroll in 1992 after jumping into his thoughts while he took a shower. The entity begins each chapter with ‘Greetings! I am Kryon of magnetic service.’ He then goes on to reveal he is the technician that designed us and that we too are from a different dimension. Kryon says we humans volunteered to come to earth in human form to fulfil a special mission or ‘lesson’. Unfortunately we have forgotten what that is and are marooned here with no purpose. The ‘Who Am I’ course will help me rediscover my mission, and I need to hurry. Kryon is here to raise the vibration of the planet and the last two times he did that he had to terminate humanity. There was a plan to get rid of us all in the year 2000 but at the last moment we humans earned the right to stay and control our destiny well into this century.

  The course is held in an ‘NRI
Complex’. Perhaps because there are a billion Indians they like to put themselves into categories. Most will identify themselves as being from a certain state and associated culture such as Punjabi or Keralan or Bengali. But, of course, occupation and caste also divide groups, and Non Resident Indians are now a caste of their own. Their Complex is a set of massive towers of flats that have been bought with American dollars by Indians living offshore or Indians who spend a lot of time overseas. It looks like a highrise space station. Skyscrapers loom around a courtyard dominated by a tall obelisk like the pillar in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Behind the pod bay doors is a self-sufficient suburb of luxury, with apartment towers, a swimming pool, restaurant and kindergarten. It’s a bizarre bubble of cleanliness and uniformity. Foyers are decorated with Greek columns and Roman busts and porthole windows.

  On the top floor of one building I am welcomed by the course assistant whose name is ‘J’ and an incredibly fit and farty Doberman called Sweetie. The course chamber is a private home but its walls are bare bar a poster of a fat white child puckering up with the words ‘kiss me quick’ printed above her. Before we start the course I promise I won’t reveal the names or the journeys of my fellow inner space travellers. What follows is a starship log of my own personal voyage.

  We start the trip by staring into a mirror for twenty minutes for inner secrets. All I see are puffy eyes, tiredness and the need for makeup. J sees sorrow, an issue about money and rebelliousness in my face. Maybe my mirror is faulty, maybe he’s right, but then again, maybe he’s guessing. After all the ego-reducing of Vipassana and the Buddhist course I’m finding it hard to concentrate on myself so intensely. I’m worried self-analysis will lead to spiritual paralysis. In the hours that follow, the only thing we have to think about more than ourselves is our parents. I begin to slump, drowsy in the moist air that’s rank with Sweetie’s breath. The thick atmosphere is making my limbs wet and heavy, I feel I’m breathing water and my mind is soggy. Luckily we are allowed to disobey Kryon by turning on the fan (he says appliances have magnetic fields that disturb our magnetic makeup). I stand under it, splash myself with water and try and get back to the mission of finding my mission.

  At eleven, ‘S’ walks in wearing her pajamas, a creased bed face and sleepy eyes. She and her partner, ‘R’, are the humans Kryon chooses to communicate with when he wants to talk to India. I don’t know how the alien gets a word in. A tiny, wide-eyed attractive woman in her late thirties, S starts talking and doesn’t stop. I brace myself against the wall, shrinking from a ballistic spray of stories about her life, her son’s life and Sweetie the dog’s life. The tales are fired at machine-gun rapidity in scratchy screechy Hinglish and every sentence ends with an exclamation and a penetrating stare. All I catch is: ‘there are three things in the world: sex, money and power, my dear’ and ‘all enlightenment is an accident, isn’t it?’ and ‘Sweetie is an important guide’.

  That perks me up. One of the course objectives is to put us in contact with the guides Kryon promises will help our mission. Previous participants have sworn that the smelly Sweetie is their spiritual saviour. When S finally shuts up, we try to make contact with our guides by imagining we are standing on the edge of a cliff with a big black cloud in front of us. With our eyes closed and arms outstretched we ask our guides to come out from ‘beyond the veil’. S says when our hands start tingling that means our guide is holding them. My hands tingle. For some reason I think of Mira Sorvino from Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. S sees Mahatma Gandhi, and one girl feels the tender touch of Sweetie’s paw.

  The actress and the dog are supposed to help us escape our past karma, astrological influences and the Kryon implants that stop us from understanding the true nature of time, space and our mission on earth. I’m intellectually attracted to the whole alien thing, I’m happy to accept that God is a universal force, but it seems a bit egocentric to believe I am one of the few chosen to know my mission. Why me? Perhaps it’s a mistake and I’ll sabotage the grand plan. Maybe I’m Kryon’s Zachary Smith from Lost in Space.

  After a break, we do another exercise that’s the antithesis of my previous Buddhist and Hindu training. Instead of imagining death we engage in a rough rebirthing. Breathing our way back into the womb via humming and rapid hyperventilating, we imagine ourselves as foetuses and attempt to relive the pain of birth. We then watch ourselves grow and try to remember our childhood, stopping to share our first sexual abuse. The book Bitter Chocolate by Pinki Virani, estimates that at least twenty percent of Indian children are abused within their extended families, so our teachers seem disbelieving and disappointed when none of us cough up or break down. Tissues are placed before us and we’re encouraged to cry at any childhood pain. I feel a big pressure to perform but unfortunately I’ve no repressed tears to shed. I was a happy child and I’m a sooky adult – my expressive past is making me look like a failure in the New Age present.

  I also fail when we are told to remember past lives. Kryon receivers S and R recognise each other from hundreds of past incarnations, including one as prisoner and guard in a Nazi death camp. S’s teenage son remembers losing his legs in the 1971 Indian– Pakistan war, and another girl recalls being a famous singer. I crumble with performance anxiety and invent a story. I tell the group I’m seeing myself in a past life as a man in a dinner-suit at a roaring twenties party on New Year’s Eve in New York City. It always amuses me that people always see themselves somewhere interesting and never as a slave, a prostitute, a builder or housewife – I make my invention the conductor of an orchestra.

  The course finishes with some chakra cleaning, pop psychology and self-indulgent crap. I think back to the British Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo’s concern that psychotherapy can become over-focused on empty dilemmas, and I have to smile. I feel empty, trained for a mission I don’t believe in. When Kryon does raise the cosmic vibrations of the planet, I’m not sure I’ll be able to vibrate in time.

  Ground Control to Kryon. Get me out of this New Age nightmare. I’m going back to my guru girlfriend. Aarzoo may not know the secrets of the universe but she helps me enjoy India to the hilt. We only have six months left here before Jonathan’s contract expires and I want to enjoy it all I can. Of course I’m still interested in higher truths but I’d like to wait until the end of summer before I attempt to access them again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Face to Face with God

  A man with a mullet and three thumbs, wearing a white Simon Le Bon suit and a pink pastel jumper around his shoulders, is jumping over vicious crocodiles to rescue a girl. She has big eyes, a big nose and huge tits, and has fainted up a tree. He carries her to his boat but the motor is dead, so he puts the rope between his teeth and swims – dragging her across the ocean to hospital. Moments before, she’d won an international bike race and he’d donned Rambo gear, multiplied into one hundred clones and danced with a small army of himself on the beach. Later, in a palace, he’ll pelvic thrust while wearing a slashed tank top, leather pants, a fringed suede jacket and bandana. Her mother will be killed by a car, her father will sing a song to a can of Coca-Cola, and she will fall in love with the man with three thumbs in front of a wind machine, while jumping from planet to planet in a Jackson Five-inspired intergalactic song. After four hours, eight songs, seven dances, one interval and a couple of million dollars, they’ll all live happily ever after.

  I walk out of the movie Yaardein (Memories) on a high. In India, going to the movies is a spiritual act, as transforming as going to a temple and just as entertaining. The monsoon is heavy; moving is like swimming and breathing like sucking on bubbles; every afternoon the rain buckets down drowning the city in mud and mayhem. It’s safer inside the local modern multiplex watching high-pitched, high-volume Hindi films alongside chatting women, screaming babies, girls talking on mobile phones, and boys imitating fight scenes in the aisles.

  India’s melodramatic ‘masala movies’ are a spicy recipe of action, violence, music, dance, slapstick humour,
moralising and, most of all, romance. There must be a love story, a death, a birth, a marriage, a battle between good and evil and eight song-and-dance routines before good will triumph and tradition be upheld. Heroes with fluffy quiffs, ball-crushing jeans and rubber hips get the girl, the chaste virginal light-skinned chick obeys her elders and the cute niece or nephew will be rescued from danger. The cigarette-smoking vamp will die of a terrible disease, the bad man with the big moustache will be shot and his sidekicks or a trio of corrupt cops will be locked up. The rubber-faced funny guy and simpering servants will smile happily and the good, religiously righteous mother may die and come back as a ghost in a shimmering chiffon sari.

  I’ve always loved a song-and-dance flick. Indians are great groovers specialising in pelvic thrusts, head wobbles, shoulder shimmies, knee slides, moonwalks, jumps, turns, spins and the Punjabi arm-flicking light-bulb dance. In happy songs, entire street-mobs move as one. In love songs, doe-eyed men and dreamy-eyed girls with trembling lips will run towards each other so that he can play with her dupatta in front of spectacular scenery. This year’s popular backgrounds are the Swiss snowfields, New Zealand waterfalls, Thai beaches and Australia’s Parliament House. I don’t get most of the lyrics but Aarzoo translates some lines as she passes popcorn.