They tend to stick all the tourists together on Indian trains, which makes them a good place to meet people. I end up on the ride from Varanasi to Agra with a klatch of Australians, one couple who are hippying it out for a few months plus a mom and her two adult daughters who just got back from a week’s trek in Kashmir. Plus a six-year old girl from the berth next door who keeps coming over and putting on a charm show. We put up a silk scarf in front of the overhead light, and between the six of us manage to come up with a fifth of Whiskey, some RC Colas, a blunt and a few energy bars, so the night goes well, though we get little sleep. Vendors pass through the car at regular intervals hawking cups of chai, bottled water and soda & various deep-fried foodstuffs. The one thorn in our side is the train attendant, who keeps finding excuses to come around and stare at the chicas. I start off trying to stare him down and shame him away, but turns out you can’t stare an Indian down; they don’t give a shit, they just keep staring back for however many hours it takes for you to look away. Throwing a shoe at them works quite well, though! I’m going to try staring at Neal Mohan when I get back and see what he does; the shoe I’ll save for Rajas Moonka.
I’m so ready to be palpably underwhelmed by the Taj Mahal that I’ve psyched myself out before arriving and have to adjust my whole world view when I find myself unexpectedly staring up at the most beautiful piece of architecture on Earth. It’s like a desert mirage, and hangs there like a cloud. Photographs don’t capture the full measure of it’s sublimity, and later that day I delete the ones I took in frustration. In part it’s so exquisite because it doesn’t try to do too much; there are no bombastic broad shoulders fanning out on either side, nothing that bespeaks a mote of insecurity on the part of its architect, just a pristine little elevated square of white marble topped by a central dome that borders on bulging out too much but then stops at just that place, like an alabaster balloon, with a retainer of eight little minarets and a monumental garden pathway. Off in the distance on either side are red sandstone gates that would qualify as world monuments in their own right, but they stay far enough apart not to mar the star attraction, like bridesmaids’ done up in prom dresses, to blur their beauty a bit as they stand off to the side. As the day progresses, shadows play with its surface and the sun subtly alters its color, an intentional effect meant to mimic the presence of the creator since Muslim law forbids direct representation of God. And it does feel like some all-pervasive presence is at work as the dome browns and pales over the course of the day, an ethereal, conscious motion running its fingers through us. Up close you see treasure chests of emeralds, rubies and sapphires that have been chipped into the shapes of delicate flower & vine patterns and embedded along the doorways and the inside of the building.
Being stuck in Agra after viewing the Taj Mahal is like waking up a week after you’ve married a shockingly beautiful woman and finding her entire extended family has moved out of their trailer park and into your apartment. All you can say is ouch. It’s a big thumping city that wears you out quick, and everyone you meet has a cousin with a rug store or a jewelry shop. The one bit of beauty that rises up out of the noise pollution are the pigeon keepers in the Muslim section who send their flocks into the air above the rooftops in late afternoon and direct them with a series of whistles that send them gyrating this way and that on command like magic kites. The food is good, too, high Mughal cooking like you see in the States except it tastes better, but you have to watch where you eat. The local newspaper has a front page story about a scam where one restaurant poisoned tourists, then put them on a rickshaw that took them to a backdoor clinic that gave them a prescription of more poison to keep them sick for a week or so while they charged their health insurance policies tens of thousands of dollars.
My mom wanted to come down and visit for a few days and since I sponged off of her when she was working in Ethiopia and Tanzania I ask her to meet here in Agra. She shows up on the second day and we’re supposed to take a train down to Aurangabad, but a major train accident on the way forces us to shift gears and get a flight from Delhi. So we drive up to the capital and crash at some fleabag hotel beside the airport when suddenly a memory flashes before my eyes like a vivid dream; I am in Dublin the night before Euro Partner Day and we are drunk in a cab going back to our hotel and I’m talking with Tim Evans and Jacoby Thwaites about how great Zaytoon’s kebab is when the Indian cabbie stops the car, turns around with a crazy look and howls: “Kariiiiiimm!” When asked for more context he says that Karim’s in New Delhi has by far the best kebab on the planet and makes Zaytoon look like McDonalds. How dare I praise plebian Zaytoon while regal Karim’s still stands? The owner, he claims, is a direct descendant of the chef of the Mughal emperors and the recipe’s been a family secret for centuries.
I wasn’t planning on going to Delhi so I quickly forgot the incident, but suddenly there it stands before me, the White Whale of kebabs. So I drag my poor mother back onto the street and find a couple of nice kids with a van who say they’ll take us there and back for 400 rupees. We end up getting an impromptu tour of the city’s highlights by night, including the Congress Building, Connaught Place, India Gate and so forth, before descending into the maze of dim-lit Old Delhi with its endless bazaar labyrinths and impossible masses of people camped out by the big mosque around cookstoves and donkey carts, from where we stagger through the traffic in a small alleyway to a bombed-out little storefront that is the promised land of kebabs – woo hoo, Karim’s! And yes it turns out to be the most deliciously spiced, melt-in-your-mouth kebab experience ever. Ladies and gents, we have a new world champion. And end up talking all night to a family from Lucknow that’s crammed in beside us on the benches. Which was more sublime, the Taj Mahal or the kebab? Tough call.
At five in the morning we rustle out of our beds and fly to Aurangabad. There’s a Starbucks in the terminal – I almost weep for joy. And pass through airport security with a look in my eye that says “you can pry this quad venti non-fat latte out of my cold, dead hand”. Aurangabad it turns out is a run-down little city in the rural district of Maharashtra that’s chief claim to fame is proximity to the ancient cave art of Ajanta and Ellora, which escaped the rampages of Muslim conquerors by being lost and forgotten for centuries.
Ellora is a series of 30 caves along a wilderness escarpment, chock full of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist statuary and chapels starting from around 200 AD. At the time it was used for cave monasteries, and the sculpture is downright staggering. First the caves have been grooved out to provide proper ceilings and floors with little stone steps leading up to them, then palace pillars with ornate carvings along them are cut out of the interior. Then there are all these magnificent, vibrant sculptures like what you might see in some lost wing of the British Museum, in quantities it’s hard to fathom. The highlight is a huge temple complex they carved completely out of the rock, Lalibela-style but a thousand years earlier, with all manner of elephant, monkey and lion sculptures adorning its surface and interior chapels, and three stories of hallways carved into the adjoining rockface on either side of the building. In some places you can still see the delicate paintwork that originally covered it. Jaw-dropping.
Ajanta is even more ridiculous. An entirely Buddhist complex with caves that were created as early as 300 BC, it lies two-thirds of the way up a huge, horseshoe-shaped cliff in the jungle and was lost until the early nineteenth century. The statuary is all here as well, and some of the caves have acoustics more perfect than most modern concert halls, but what’s so devastating are the largely intact murals from over 2000 years ago inside every cave, each one qualifying as a major work of art on the scale of the world’s greatest paintings, with long story cycles depicting various ancient events lost in the mist of time, people of all races and all walks of life, as sophisticated and subtle in style as Picasso or Rembrandt, an incomprehensively vast Cave Louvre still sitting here like a prehistoric time capsule, telling us of a civilization and a take on humanity more rich and visceral than you could have imagined. Enough said; some things you just have to see for yourself.
Well I would hate to go on at The Creek after THAT, even with LJ. And so the environs of Aurangabad seem a bit dingy afterwards, though not unpleasant like Agra. There’s a “baby Taj” from four centuries ago that mimics the original but is made of plaster and is crumbling quickly and a little water tank where people come to hang out in the afternoon and the ruins of a fortress complex dangling here and there along the side of a nearby mountain. We also make it out to drive through several hours of rolling farmland to a large crater lake populated with tons of birdlife, large troupes of tree monkeys and several abandoned old temples gone back to the jungle like props out of a Tarzan movie.
The people who live in Maharashtra are so much nicer and more relaxed than most in UP that I’m not prepared for it at first and get quite snappy when anyone approaches, as I automatically assume they’re out to scam me. But these are some of the mellowest people out there, and it’s a pleasure to hang out with them. The one idiosyncrasy is that they all want their picture taken with us. They don’t want to talk, want nothing especially to do with us afterward, just the photograph, ma’am. For example, one guy comes up to us on a bus and asks for a photo, it gets taken and then he goes back to his seat and acts like we no longer exist for the duration of the ride. It’s OK for awhile but they keep coming one after the other for the entire time we’re down there, and the ones with extended families deploy themselves in a long, impromptu rope line that stretches off in the distance so that each one can take their turn being individually photographed beside us.
I start getting impatient but my mother, who is at the end of the day a nicer person than I am, dives into the work as if she were Hillary Clinton and the future of US diplomacy counted on her handling of the whole situation, greeting everybody with a warm smile, a handshake and a moment of total attention, no matter whether the whole operation takes up the entire day or not. I think maybe something got lost in translation between our two generations. Born in the rural mountains of South Carolina, she somehow managed to retain a rural warmth that’s gotten stamped out of me for the most part, even after she moved to Chicago and worked her way slowly up the ladder of social work, from case worker to the head of all foster care, emeritus professor and international aid manager for East Africa. I would love to capture that patience and simple, genuine warmth for myself – but I suspect you’ll all have to make do with me as I am. I’m no Agra, but I may be Aurangabad.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
A Benares of the Mind
The chicken bus border at Bhairawa is the most chaotic and disorganized place I think I’ve ever been. It consists of little more than a concrete gate that says “Welcome to India” with a low-caste drum-and-chanting Kali procession moving past it, villagers trucking grains back and forth on buffalo-powered carts, and two Nepalese traffic cops consumed solely with the mass truck traffic. I’m the only gringo in evidence, and navigating through the street even with a backpack is a big challenge; I’m nearly mowed over more than once. When I ask the Nepalese cops about immigration they roll their eyes and impatiently point me toward India, then go on directing traffic. The Indian side is even more lassez-faire; they keep pointing me further and further down the road until eventually I’m well clear of the border and can do nothing more than get some guy to drive me toward Varanasi sans passport stamp. Has not been a problem thus far, we’ll see what happens when I try to leave the country.
So I’m driving along the border between UP and Bihar in a rickety old South Korean jeep with two kids who don’t speak a lick of English between them, skirting the Buddha trail from Lumbini to Bodhgaya, which is ironically today the most lawless and dangerous part of India, rife with Maoist guerillas, random acts of banditry and out-and-out caste warfare in parts. One local saying is that Gautama’s enlightenment in 600 BC was the last good news to ever come out of Bihar. But I encounter no overt lawlessness (aside from all the psycho driving) as we barrel through what seems like an unyielding urban center all the way from the border to Benares, punctuated with the occasional patch of rice paddies and one sad little government-run monkey forest where the monkeys all sit by the side of the road and watch the traffic go by, just like the people. Anyone who’s been to India will be familiar with the driving “rules”, but it was my first time so I was a bit daunted, seasoned traveler though I am. Driving here involves non-stop passing of donkey carts, buffalo carts, ice cream trucks, wandering sadhus, bicycles loaded down with rice sacks, slow-moving cargo trucks and packed public buses, here and there a cantankerous steer or a sudden flurry of goats crossing the road, honking your horn the whole time to let people know you’re coming and veering in and out of the wrong lane ad nauseum, often escaping an oncoming collision in a matter of centimeters. You spend the first hour in wide-eyed terror, then surrender yourself to the universe, kick back and watch the carnival of life go by.
It’s a long ten hours from the time I leave Lumbini to our arrival in the traffic-choked streets of Varanasi, and night has fallen hard. Everybody here is gearing up for Diwali, every house is lit up with Christmas lights, every storefront sells psychedelic neon Hindu idols and every little kid is packing ten or twenty M-80’s and is busy unleashing them into street traffic. It’s at that point that my driver offers up my very first northern India scam, dropping me at some fleabag hotel that wants 2500 rupees a night and refusing to take me further – in the hopes that he’ll get a big commission on top of what I already paid him. So I trundle into the broke-leg streets of Varanasi with my bags, not having the slightest idea where I am, and eventually get some scrawny bicycle rickshaw dude who looks like he’s about eighty to drive me to a ghat that’s near my hotel. During the ride power in the city goes out – probably can’t handle the load of all those Diwali lights – and my driver suffers what appears to be an asthma attack so that I get out and help walk the bicycle through the noisy, darkened streets until we arrive in the general area of my hotel, at which point I wander around in the dark asking for directions until I stumble across it at a little after midnight. Welcome to India! Life is good.
I’m up with the sun at 6am and go trundling through the ghats all morning. Mark Twain said this city was “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together” and it must have been the riverfront he was referring to (admittedly there were no motorcycles in Mark Twain’s time, so the rest of the city may have seemed quite a bit older), especially in early mornings when thousands of people fan out across the various stone temples and religious-site-cum-bathouses that line the western bank of the Ganges in Benares, with steps leading directly to the water, each with a different cosmic sponsor (in one case it’s a deified local tree). Between each ghat there are little boatyards packed with weatherbeaten wooden sailboats, and circles of sari-wearing women singing and chanting. As the sun rises hundreds of people disrobe into their loin cloths and dive in. Some ghats have fallen out of favor and lie disused and decrepit, others are packed to the gills and have holy men chanting through loudspeaker systems as the celebrants drop in the water and let the river carry their sins downstream. At spots there are barbers shaving men’s hair off in preparation, and at one there are shorn high-caste acolytes in yellow robes chanting for hours on prayer mats. All along the waterfront the boats are just offshore, moving in to disgorge more worshippers. Tourists are few and far between, and the few that are here are of the blonde-dreadlocked, tabla-playing neo-hippie variety that have become such an international stereotype.
It’s a boring old truism that the Ganges is dirty as hell and that no one in their right mind would bathe here. But I wish I had the ability to convey the real beauty of the place. A singular life experience. Admittedly I was not tempted to take a dip in it myself, especially after seeing a heartbreaking funeral for a very small boy, maybe two years old, his father tending the duties by himself, attaching the child’s limp body to a small piece of driftwood and pushing it out to be upturned and sunk into the river along with all of the ashes being swept out from one of two segregated cremation zones. Equally upsetting was the attitude of the bottom-caste crematory staff, who were more interested in trying to stop me and scam me out of money than they were in attending to the man’s needs as he said goodbye to his small child. There are some very tough people in UP.
Around noon it gets hot hot hot here; all you can do is lie down and be poached beneath a ceiling fan as you wait for the furnace of mid-day to break. Then it’s off the wander the streets of Varanasi and see the big Diwali preparations, which include lots and lots of lights, firetrap storerooms crammed to the gills with combustible pyrotechnic devices, and religious processions in the streets with chanting and drums. The festival is based in part on a myth in which Rama’s wife was kidnapped by an evil baron in Sri Lanka, and Rama recaptured her with the help of Hanuman the monkey god, who created a bridge of monkeys that allowed Rama to walk over and get her back. As the sun starts to fade you’re invited into stranger’s homes and offered sweets, and one family even insists on feeding me.
At night the Diwali bomb hits. All down the river Hindu priests are performing fire ceremonies, the ghat steps are lit up with candles and long streams of tiny paper candle rafts are unfurled onto the river until it’s lit up like a kilometer-long birthday cake. The fireworks are not organized in the manner of an American celebration; instead it’s a mass chaos of every man for himself as M-80s blow off all around you, tens of thousands of bottle rockets scream overhead and the big 4th of July-style fireworks get shot from the rooftops for nine hours non-stop.
I can take it for a couple hours but eventually retreat to my hotel balcony, where the mild, elderly, lily white high-caste proprietors sit in their bamboo chairs and look out onto the chaos below like benevolent demigods. Hung along the walls are lush paintings of a Ganges of the mind, hung with flowers and tame jungle vines, where green-hued Krishna descends into the turquoise stillness of the full moon into this imaginary river, as an elephant gazes placidly at its own reflection from the shore. And I realize that this is what my proprietors see when they look out at the dirty, urban Ganges, this ancient but overbuilt matrix of the spirit and material worlds. During my time in India I see so many of these holy sites, irretrievably engulfed by the pollution of modernity but somehow still imbued by them with an eternal, placid peacefulness that entails blocking out the reality around them the way we block out bad smells that we pass on the streets of New York. It is this magic of the imagination that still makes Varanasi such an amazing place, as the primevality that they perceive is passed on to travelers by their actions. It is a collective act of will in a way. My proprietors wish me a Happy Diwali, offer me a lentil square and stare out with a look of profound peace as mass explosions rock every inch of the city, sometimes just a few feet away.
So I’m driving along the border between UP and Bihar in a rickety old South Korean jeep with two kids who don’t speak a lick of English between them, skirting the Buddha trail from Lumbini to Bodhgaya, which is ironically today the most lawless and dangerous part of India, rife with Maoist guerillas, random acts of banditry and out-and-out caste warfare in parts. One local saying is that Gautama’s enlightenment in 600 BC was the last good news to ever come out of Bihar. But I encounter no overt lawlessness (aside from all the psycho driving) as we barrel through what seems like an unyielding urban center all the way from the border to Benares, punctuated with the occasional patch of rice paddies and one sad little government-run monkey forest where the monkeys all sit by the side of the road and watch the traffic go by, just like the people. Anyone who’s been to India will be familiar with the driving “rules”, but it was my first time so I was a bit daunted, seasoned traveler though I am. Driving here involves non-stop passing of donkey carts, buffalo carts, ice cream trucks, wandering sadhus, bicycles loaded down with rice sacks, slow-moving cargo trucks and packed public buses, here and there a cantankerous steer or a sudden flurry of goats crossing the road, honking your horn the whole time to let people know you’re coming and veering in and out of the wrong lane ad nauseum, often escaping an oncoming collision in a matter of centimeters. You spend the first hour in wide-eyed terror, then surrender yourself to the universe, kick back and watch the carnival of life go by.
It’s a long ten hours from the time I leave Lumbini to our arrival in the traffic-choked streets of Varanasi, and night has fallen hard. Everybody here is gearing up for Diwali, every house is lit up with Christmas lights, every storefront sells psychedelic neon Hindu idols and every little kid is packing ten or twenty M-80’s and is busy unleashing them into street traffic. It’s at that point that my driver offers up my very first northern India scam, dropping me at some fleabag hotel that wants 2500 rupees a night and refusing to take me further – in the hopes that he’ll get a big commission on top of what I already paid him. So I trundle into the broke-leg streets of Varanasi with my bags, not having the slightest idea where I am, and eventually get some scrawny bicycle rickshaw dude who looks like he’s about eighty to drive me to a ghat that’s near my hotel. During the ride power in the city goes out – probably can’t handle the load of all those Diwali lights – and my driver suffers what appears to be an asthma attack so that I get out and help walk the bicycle through the noisy, darkened streets until we arrive in the general area of my hotel, at which point I wander around in the dark asking for directions until I stumble across it at a little after midnight. Welcome to India! Life is good.
I’m up with the sun at 6am and go trundling through the ghats all morning. Mark Twain said this city was “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together” and it must have been the riverfront he was referring to (admittedly there were no motorcycles in Mark Twain’s time, so the rest of the city may have seemed quite a bit older), especially in early mornings when thousands of people fan out across the various stone temples and religious-site-cum-bathouses that line the western bank of the Ganges in Benares, with steps leading directly to the water, each with a different cosmic sponsor (in one case it’s a deified local tree). Between each ghat there are little boatyards packed with weatherbeaten wooden sailboats, and circles of sari-wearing women singing and chanting. As the sun rises hundreds of people disrobe into their loin cloths and dive in. Some ghats have fallen out of favor and lie disused and decrepit, others are packed to the gills and have holy men chanting through loudspeaker systems as the celebrants drop in the water and let the river carry their sins downstream. At spots there are barbers shaving men’s hair off in preparation, and at one there are shorn high-caste acolytes in yellow robes chanting for hours on prayer mats. All along the waterfront the boats are just offshore, moving in to disgorge more worshippers. Tourists are few and far between, and the few that are here are of the blonde-dreadlocked, tabla-playing neo-hippie variety that have become such an international stereotype.
It’s a boring old truism that the Ganges is dirty as hell and that no one in their right mind would bathe here. But I wish I had the ability to convey the real beauty of the place. A singular life experience. Admittedly I was not tempted to take a dip in it myself, especially after seeing a heartbreaking funeral for a very small boy, maybe two years old, his father tending the duties by himself, attaching the child’s limp body to a small piece of driftwood and pushing it out to be upturned and sunk into the river along with all of the ashes being swept out from one of two segregated cremation zones. Equally upsetting was the attitude of the bottom-caste crematory staff, who were more interested in trying to stop me and scam me out of money than they were in attending to the man’s needs as he said goodbye to his small child. There are some very tough people in UP.
Around noon it gets hot hot hot here; all you can do is lie down and be poached beneath a ceiling fan as you wait for the furnace of mid-day to break. Then it’s off the wander the streets of Varanasi and see the big Diwali preparations, which include lots and lots of lights, firetrap storerooms crammed to the gills with combustible pyrotechnic devices, and religious processions in the streets with chanting and drums. The festival is based in part on a myth in which Rama’s wife was kidnapped by an evil baron in Sri Lanka, and Rama recaptured her with the help of Hanuman the monkey god, who created a bridge of monkeys that allowed Rama to walk over and get her back. As the sun starts to fade you’re invited into stranger’s homes and offered sweets, and one family even insists on feeding me.
At night the Diwali bomb hits. All down the river Hindu priests are performing fire ceremonies, the ghat steps are lit up with candles and long streams of tiny paper candle rafts are unfurled onto the river until it’s lit up like a kilometer-long birthday cake. The fireworks are not organized in the manner of an American celebration; instead it’s a mass chaos of every man for himself as M-80s blow off all around you, tens of thousands of bottle rockets scream overhead and the big 4th of July-style fireworks get shot from the rooftops for nine hours non-stop.
I can take it for a couple hours but eventually retreat to my hotel balcony, where the mild, elderly, lily white high-caste proprietors sit in their bamboo chairs and look out onto the chaos below like benevolent demigods. Hung along the walls are lush paintings of a Ganges of the mind, hung with flowers and tame jungle vines, where green-hued Krishna descends into the turquoise stillness of the full moon into this imaginary river, as an elephant gazes placidly at its own reflection from the shore. And I realize that this is what my proprietors see when they look out at the dirty, urban Ganges, this ancient but overbuilt matrix of the spirit and material worlds. During my time in India I see so many of these holy sites, irretrievably engulfed by the pollution of modernity but somehow still imbued by them with an eternal, placid peacefulness that entails blocking out the reality around them the way we block out bad smells that we pass on the streets of New York. It is this magic of the imagination that still makes Varanasi such an amazing place, as the primevality that they perceive is passed on to travelers by their actions. It is a collective act of will in a way. My proprietors wish me a Happy Diwali, offer me a lentil square and stare out with a look of profound peace as mass explosions rock every inch of the city, sometimes just a few feet away.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Brown Sugar
I’m tired and intent on spoiling myself in Kathmandu, so the first order of business is to upgrade hotels and find out what passes for pizza in these parts. My buddy Tom Przydrozny beamed out instructions to stay at the Dwarika a few days earlier so I’m booking two nights there. Tom doesn’t let me down – Dwarika is magnificent, luxurious and calm, more a museum than a hotel as its buildings and furnishings are composed entirely of centuries-old woodwork chock full of traditional Nepalese carvings. They were saved from destruction by the hotel’s namesake owner, out of various and sundry demolitions of traditional homes that have occurred in recent decades as the city’s urban blight expands outward across the valley. Otherwise all this magnificent art would have been firewood – often he had to compensate construction crews with an equal weight of plywood in order to save them. I could have spent my entire time in Kathmandu just perusing the inlaid Hindu carvings in these window frames, stupas, headboards and chairs and made excellent use of my time; the furnishings in my room alone could make up a wing in the Met.
The pizza, on the other hand, is pedestrian but acceptable.
Nepal is a deeply Hindu country, though a small minority of Buddhists still live here, and a giant plaster statue of Shiva stands sentinel over the whole of the vast Kathmandu valley as you approach it from the east. Appropriate as Shiva is god of the universe’s endless cycles of destruction and regeneration, and he stands guard, trident in hand, over the most profound destruction of the rural valley and original city, and its re-creation as an impossibly populous third world urban center, a thick cloud of smog-belch hovering over roads choked with construction sites, motorcycles and minivans. Vishnu, the other major extant deity, is the Preserver, he who when possible keeps what’s good from going into the trash compactor of Shiva’s interminable churning. So if Kathmandu is in the throes of Shiva as never before, then Dwarika is a little island of Vishnu amid all the indiscriminate bulldozing.
There are still lovely old neighborhoods in Kathmandu with big square courtyards and wooden window work still attached to their original buildings, but they’re few and far between enough that focusing solely on them is like flying to Paris and talking about Disneyland France. Mostly Kathmandu is a modern third-world Asian city so densely packed with people, rickshaws, pack animals and cars that every moment is a sensory assault, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Stop for a moment in the crushing foot traffic and you’re likely to get mowed down. The locals are so inured to it all that they blithely scamper out into heavy traffic in their business suits and saris and elbow their way through the clogged streets, often with small children in tow and with insufficient regard for life and limb, some carrying huge canvas sacks stuffed with cargo slung across their backs as they bolt out onto the highway. Diwali is coming up so everyone is starting to light candles in their windows and set off fireworks on top of the usual chaos.
Punctuating every part of the city are the ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples that everyone visits while stuck in town setting up their Annapurna treks. They defy umbrella description apart from their antiquity. In some monkeys are considered holy and thus allowed to run rampant, in others it is the rat that is revered and you’re unlikely to escape without having at least one scamper across your leg. There is the vast white dome from the fifth century that attracts hundreds of Tibetan exiles and their shaman prayer flags (I first saw them in Russia and still they follow me), the giant medieval pagoda down by Freak Street and the 2000+ year-old statue of Shiva in his brutish, red-faced Bhairawa the Destroyer incarnation, stepping on the head of a man (looks like Buddha?) with a string of skulls slung around his neck and a pair of nasty looking fangs.
I ask one man what the point is of all these innumerable manifestations of a single deity and he says it’s basically all “illusion” but that the god wears a different face in human society based on the different roles it plays. For example, Shiva brought you into being so in a way he’s like your mother, but when the time comes for Shiva to take your life you don’t want to see your mother coming to lop off your head. “It is as if you have committed a murder and your father is the judge” is the best way he can put it.
The most haunting temple is a little one to Kali where a “living manifestation” of the goddess is installed and made available for viewing and worship from a small balcony. This is a little girl that is plucked from some rural village every few years at the age of four, gussied up like Kali and worshipped until she turns eleven, at which point she’s sent back to her village to resume a normal life. The belief is that she actually is the goddess Kali during that time. She looks cute and a bit sad, stuck up there from 9-5, seven days a week like some primeval Barbie doll. Kali is a strange one to be manifested as a small child. Closely associated with Shiva the Destroyer, she’s bloodthirsty and dangerous, considered a personification of Time itself by those with a philosophical bent. In the early nineteenth century they still sacrificed young boys to her in Calcutta and Kerala, and even now they’ll be sacrificing a goat to her in a nearby temple in two days.
The final stop on the holy site circuit are the cremation grounds along a bend in one of the Ganges’ many northern tributaries. The baths are lined with grimy marble steps where sit a smattering of middle-aged man looking out over the multiple smoke pyres with a wistful look in their eyes, and a klatch of dreadlocked, loin-clothed sadhus, itinerant holy men with their faces painted in chalk, like tribal relics. Sadhus are colorful and give good photo, but as far as I can tell this group is merely a bunch of surly deadbeats who got tired of working and raising their families and now hang out in holy places smoking dope and hitting up tourists for small change. There’s apparently no requirement they become enlightened, they do it “for their own pleasure” as one man puts it, and if they happen to stumble across enlightenment along the way so be it, they share the wealth with the occasional faith healing.
Along the opposite side of the river is a grim-looking concrete hospice where the terminally ill come to die by the side of the river. Every once in awhile an ambulance rolls up and disgorges another body in a burlap sack. The male relatives follow it out and the local funeral director (i.e. an “untouchable”) dresses it up with flower garlands and colorful dusts, then it’s raised to the platform, firewood is stacked on top and it starts to burn, with a big cloud of smoke rolling upwind of it for three hours or more. Further off someone is pouring the ashes from a completed cremation into the river, and a bit further up from that three little children swim. Shiva’s work never stops. And sadly there’s no Dwarika Hotel for the collection of spent human souls. The ashes whorl downstream and dissolve into the mud-color of the river like brown sugar into dark coffee.
The pizza, on the other hand, is pedestrian but acceptable.
Nepal is a deeply Hindu country, though a small minority of Buddhists still live here, and a giant plaster statue of Shiva stands sentinel over the whole of the vast Kathmandu valley as you approach it from the east. Appropriate as Shiva is god of the universe’s endless cycles of destruction and regeneration, and he stands guard, trident in hand, over the most profound destruction of the rural valley and original city, and its re-creation as an impossibly populous third world urban center, a thick cloud of smog-belch hovering over roads choked with construction sites, motorcycles and minivans. Vishnu, the other major extant deity, is the Preserver, he who when possible keeps what’s good from going into the trash compactor of Shiva’s interminable churning. So if Kathmandu is in the throes of Shiva as never before, then Dwarika is a little island of Vishnu amid all the indiscriminate bulldozing.
There are still lovely old neighborhoods in Kathmandu with big square courtyards and wooden window work still attached to their original buildings, but they’re few and far between enough that focusing solely on them is like flying to Paris and talking about Disneyland France. Mostly Kathmandu is a modern third-world Asian city so densely packed with people, rickshaws, pack animals and cars that every moment is a sensory assault, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Stop for a moment in the crushing foot traffic and you’re likely to get mowed down. The locals are so inured to it all that they blithely scamper out into heavy traffic in their business suits and saris and elbow their way through the clogged streets, often with small children in tow and with insufficient regard for life and limb, some carrying huge canvas sacks stuffed with cargo slung across their backs as they bolt out onto the highway. Diwali is coming up so everyone is starting to light candles in their windows and set off fireworks on top of the usual chaos.
Punctuating every part of the city are the ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples that everyone visits while stuck in town setting up their Annapurna treks. They defy umbrella description apart from their antiquity. In some monkeys are considered holy and thus allowed to run rampant, in others it is the rat that is revered and you’re unlikely to escape without having at least one scamper across your leg. There is the vast white dome from the fifth century that attracts hundreds of Tibetan exiles and their shaman prayer flags (I first saw them in Russia and still they follow me), the giant medieval pagoda down by Freak Street and the 2000+ year-old statue of Shiva in his brutish, red-faced Bhairawa the Destroyer incarnation, stepping on the head of a man (looks like Buddha?) with a string of skulls slung around his neck and a pair of nasty looking fangs.
I ask one man what the point is of all these innumerable manifestations of a single deity and he says it’s basically all “illusion” but that the god wears a different face in human society based on the different roles it plays. For example, Shiva brought you into being so in a way he’s like your mother, but when the time comes for Shiva to take your life you don’t want to see your mother coming to lop off your head. “It is as if you have committed a murder and your father is the judge” is the best way he can put it.
The most haunting temple is a little one to Kali where a “living manifestation” of the goddess is installed and made available for viewing and worship from a small balcony. This is a little girl that is plucked from some rural village every few years at the age of four, gussied up like Kali and worshipped until she turns eleven, at which point she’s sent back to her village to resume a normal life. The belief is that she actually is the goddess Kali during that time. She looks cute and a bit sad, stuck up there from 9-5, seven days a week like some primeval Barbie doll. Kali is a strange one to be manifested as a small child. Closely associated with Shiva the Destroyer, she’s bloodthirsty and dangerous, considered a personification of Time itself by those with a philosophical bent. In the early nineteenth century they still sacrificed young boys to her in Calcutta and Kerala, and even now they’ll be sacrificing a goat to her in a nearby temple in two days.
The final stop on the holy site circuit are the cremation grounds along a bend in one of the Ganges’ many northern tributaries. The baths are lined with grimy marble steps where sit a smattering of middle-aged man looking out over the multiple smoke pyres with a wistful look in their eyes, and a klatch of dreadlocked, loin-clothed sadhus, itinerant holy men with their faces painted in chalk, like tribal relics. Sadhus are colorful and give good photo, but as far as I can tell this group is merely a bunch of surly deadbeats who got tired of working and raising their families and now hang out in holy places smoking dope and hitting up tourists for small change. There’s apparently no requirement they become enlightened, they do it “for their own pleasure” as one man puts it, and if they happen to stumble across enlightenment along the way so be it, they share the wealth with the occasional faith healing.
Along the opposite side of the river is a grim-looking concrete hospice where the terminally ill come to die by the side of the river. Every once in awhile an ambulance rolls up and disgorges another body in a burlap sack. The male relatives follow it out and the local funeral director (i.e. an “untouchable”) dresses it up with flower garlands and colorful dusts, then it’s raised to the platform, firewood is stacked on top and it starts to burn, with a big cloud of smoke rolling upwind of it for three hours or more. Further off someone is pouring the ashes from a completed cremation into the river, and a bit further up from that three little children swim. Shiva’s work never stops. And sadly there’s no Dwarika Hotel for the collection of spent human souls. The ashes whorl downstream and dissolve into the mud-color of the river like brown sugar into dark coffee.
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