Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  This was a far larger, middle-class house a few blocks away. Here there had been a marriage three days before, and the bride had just been brought to her new house that morning. The old men started up the music and the eunuchs began to dance. A crowd of beggar children gathered to watch beyond the garden wall, but from the house itself there was no response. After a while a toothless old woman peered nervously round the door and smiled. Then she went back inside again.

  The hijras of Rajasthan [once known as nazirs] believe that their tradition will be passed down through their disciples. “This house and the land we own were given to us by the rajahs. It has been handed down for generations by our gurus. We cannot destroy it,” said Shardabai, the guru hijra of Ajmer. Unlike the urban hijras, these dignified, courtly hijras make their livelihood from farm produce and the rent they receive from their tenants.

  When Shardabai walks through the streets of Ajmer, people come and touch her feet in respect and receive her blessings. Mothers bring their sick children to be cured by Shardabai’s prayers. Her disciples are invited to dance and sing at marriage and birth ceremonies. “People love and respect us because we live a traditional way of life according to custom. My disciples cannot break these rules. They have to toe the line,” said Shardabai with quiet authority.

  —Aruna Har Prasad, “Uninvited Guests,” World Magazine

  Meanwhile Panna, despite her bulk, was putting on a fine display. She wobbled her head one way, wobbled her bottom the other, all the while singing an Urdu verse which Zakir translated as follows:God bless you,

  You are very sweet,

  You are very lovely,

  God will give you long life.

  This classy poetry appeared to do the trick. People began piling out of the house: two daughters-in-law, several small children, some unmarried daughters, two old grandfathers and the new bridegroom. The new bride, required by Hindu etiquette to be blushingly coy for several weeks after her marriage, cowered beyond the open window, twitching the lace curtain. Vimla now took centre-stage, while Panna grabbed an unwilling daughter-in-law and whirled her around in a waltz for a few steps.

  As Vimla pirouetted, pulling her sari over her head in a parody of the Dance of the Seven Veils, Chaman Guru put down the cymbals and got down to the serious business of collecting money. The grandfathers both put fifty-rupee notes in the plate, while one of the daughters-in-law presented Chaman with the traditional gift of a plate of flour. But this clearly was not enough as far as Chaman was concerned. She signalled to Panna to carry on singing. A few more fifty-rupee notes were offered, but again Chaman shook her head. Eventually, as the song wound on to its thirtieth verse, the bridegroom presented Chaman with 1000 rupees. Bowing and scraping, the eunuchs withdrew.

  It was a strangely farcical routine, and must be extremely tedious to enact day after day. But when society closes off all other opportunities there are only two choices for the eunuchs: dancing and prostitution. Of these, going on tolly is probably preferable—and possibly more lucrative.

  I was always struck by the eunuchs’ lack of bitterness. Through no fault of their own, through deformity or genetic accident they found themselves marginalized by Indian society, turned into something half-way between a talisman and an object of ridicule. Yet in their own terms they seem fairly content with their lives, and they do not rail against the fate that has left them with this role. In the rickshaw on the way back from that morning’s tolly I asked Vimla whether she would like to be reborn as a hijra in her next life. She considered for a while before answering.

  “Do you have any choice how God makes you?” she answered eventually. “I pray for our welfare in this life. But the next? It is in the gods’ hands.”

  William Dalrymple also contributed “A Sufi Spring” to Part I, “The Other Raj” to Part II, and “Breaking the Fast” to Part III. This story is from his book City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi.

  At a dark, deserted Delhi intersection, an army officer with a pot belly and a bruised nightstick approached me. I visualized myself held incommunicado for several months in a dank jail cell or sold off into the Bombay cages. When the officer turned on his walkie-talkie I knew I was finished. “Madame,” he said, “you will never get a scooter this time of night, I will do the needful.”Within minutes he escorted me into an autorickshaw, the driver sullenly turned on his meter, and I pressed my palms together in Namaste.

  —Mary Orr, “India Sketches”

  Sick under the Bo Tree

  JAN HAAG

  Illness is everyone’s worst fear, but the author finds peace through healing in a sacred place.

  I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY BUDDHA, TWENTY-FIVE CENTURIES AGO, chose this unutterably forsaken spot to sit under a Bo tree. For this is not the identical Bo tree under which Buddha sat, but its progeny. The present tree was brought back as a sapling from Sri Lanka where a cutting of Buddha’s Bodhi tree was taken by the nephew of Emperor Ashoka before the original tree died.

  Getting to Bodh Gaya is one story, being there in the crucifying sun is another. It takes more than five hours from Patna to Gaya by train, a distance of not more than seventy-five miles. Arriving at the Patna train station at dawn, I was early enough to have a choice of train car. I chose a car half-drenched by water leaking from the roof onto the seats opposite me, thinking it might mean the car would remain cooler and stay less crowded. Not so. Bit by bit, even before we left the station, people encroached onto the wet seats, sat on the wet floor absorbing the water into their clothes and, soon, the heat had dried the residue. Before we had gone ten slow stops on this slowest of all local and stopping trains, we were, as is usual in India, packed tighter than any American can realistically visualize. The ceiling sprouted fans in all directions. Not one of them worked. I sat in the doorway, my legs hanging down over the metal plates of the stairs, just above the gravel, grit, and shit of the railway embankment, grateful for the wind when we were in motion.

  The searing heat and the inhuman crush never overcomes the patient good cheer of the ordinary Indian. But I was ill, in a torment of loose bowels, and hungry. I feared to eat the cucumbers which were the only edibles available on the train. But after I ran short of my tepid, supposedly “good,” water obtained from the last hotel, an Indian—Indians are always kind and observant—offered me half a long, pale, English cucumber. Cut lengthwise and sprinkled with chili, I could not in all politeness refuse to eat it. So, I let go of the fear of his dirty hands, the dirtier hands of the vendor and the filthy basket in which the cucumber had rested since it had been taken, no doubt, unwashed from the earth. The heat is so intense in India, I told myself, it makes all clean. I felt momentarily refreshed. I had been in India years before and not been sick. Indeed, I had just come down from Kathmandu specifically to recoup my health, to steady my bowels, to find something I could or wanted to eat.

  After the five hour train ride to Gaya, it took another hour to get from Gaya to Bodh Gaya in a three-wheel motorized rickshaw. I didn’t know it then by name, but I arrived in the town of Buddha’s enlightenment the day the pre-monsoon heat struck. Each year, a month or so before the monsoon begins, the heat jumps, from one day to the next, by ten or fifteen degrees. It is expected. And it is welcomed. It is a sign that the monsoon will be good this year.

  Arriving at the gates of the Burmese monastery at noon, with the sun firing down its incinerating blasts, I wept to find a sign on the locked metal fence announcing that it would not be opened again until 2:00 p.m. Tears ran down my cheeks as I banged on the gate, rattling its chain, rocking its hot-as-a-branding-iron frame. Finally the ubiquitous young Indian lad appeared (on my side of the gate), gleaned my story and disappeared. Within a few minutes a toothy old man—four teeth stuck straight out like individual canopies over his lower lip—came and opened the gates. Dressed in a dhoti, he spoke a bit of sing-song English and was, for many days to come, as kind as a grandfather to me.

  It is necessary,in the first place, to realize that though a reformer, and p
erhaps from a priestly point of view a heretic (if such a word can be used in connection with a system permitting absolute freedom of speculation), the Buddha was brought up and lived and died as a Hindu. Comparatively little of his system, whether of doctrine or ethics, was original or calculated to deprive him of the support and sympathy of the best among the Brahmins, many of whom became his disciples. The success of his system was due to various causes: the wonderful personality and sweet reasonableness of the man himself, his courageous and constant insistence upon a few fundamental principles, and to the way in which he made his teaching accessible to all without respect to aristocracy of birth or intellect.

  —Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and The Sister Nivedita, Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists

  He led me out of the blazing sun into a room that seemed cool by contrast even though it must have been well over one hundred degrees. Electricity for the fan was temporarily off then, as I found it was to be at least half the time for the duration of my visit. The room was thick with dust, and the undersides of the shelves of the whitewashed wall recesses were blackened by soot from naked candle flames and their surfaces encrusted with wax—this should have been a warning about the electricity, but I was too ill to recognize it at that moment. There were two hard pallets with clean white sheets folded across them and yards of greyed mosquito netting. I lay down exhausted, ready to vomit, begging for water which the fellow with the teeth got, tepid, from a garden faucet. I tried to ascertain, as any already indisposed tourist would, by asking impolite questions, whether or not it was safe to drink. He assured me the monastery had excellent water. This was confirmed by others on the following days, though where it came from in that parched landscape I never knew. Up from the ground somehow. Was it a well? It was good water they said—but nothing could keep it from being tepid. I, who do not like ice-water, longed for the clink of just a few civilized cubes against a sparkling clean glass. I slept and woke and slept again.

  Was I close to death? I might have been. Probably I suffered from heat stroke. Certainly I suffered from hunger. They served no food to guests in the monastery. It was more than a mile into town—what was I to do? Two days later I persuaded the ancient one to get me some food. He brought two small watermelons for me from the town; he, no doubt, had sent the lad. One I ate straight down, for the water and for the sugar; by the next day, the second had began to sour in the heat. I ate it anyway, not knowing when I would get another bit of food. It was a mistake. Diarrhea began again. On the third day I bought a plate of rice across the road at the grass and bamboo shack that seemed to be home to the lad and a considerable number of other family members. I ate two spoonfuls before I carried it home, and then it, too, spoiled before I was hungry again.

  If diarrhea or heat overcomes you, one way to revive yourself is by taking the locally available Vijay Electrolyte (a mix of salt and dextrose) with water. Of course, if you have the misfortune to face something like the September 1994 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Gujarat state, this won’t do you much good. Antibiotics, flight, and prayer are in order.

  —JO’R and LH

  The incandescent sun circled in the sky which was pure white, as if the heat had burnt up all the blue. Across the road was the Falgu River, a mile wide, flatter and drier than the Sahara. Palms, gone pale in the light, shagged its edges. Almost no one moved from mid-morning to twilight. On my bed, I lay wondering if this was where I would leave this world. I didn’t care.

  Though I rarely read novels any more, a desire to reread Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain had recently come over me while I was sitting in Korea in the three month’s silence of Kyol Che (the Buddhist winter practice).

  When I could stand a bit better, and needed something to do other than feel the pulsing of my despair, I asked about the English Library that was mentioned in my guidebook. From the porch of my room in the separate dormitory, a fellow pilgrim pointed toward the farthest corner of the second floor of the main hall. I mounted the back stairs into an emptiness of grit more desolate than the river beyond the road. One or two bits of English furniture lay about and parts of an old four-poster bed, a broken chair. Otherwise there was nothing on that vast second floor of the monastery.

  Below the library, on the ground floor, in the long darkness of their refectory, the handsome, bronzed, young (they were actually in their forties but looked twenty), orange-clad monks watched television all day. At night, returning on their motorcycles, I knew not from where, they slept on the refectory floor or on charpoys in the garden. They were delightfully friendly and hugely enjoyed the tourists-cum-pilgrims like me—when I began to appear after the worst of my illness. The dozen or so of us staying at the monastery were a motley crew. There was one regal, young Anglo-Indian woman who, with a Spanish companion, was helping to build the first small structure for a Tibetan monastery, out in some field. There was a young English girl, named Teresa, tall, round-faced, who was planning to return to England to study law after some two years of wandering. She, more or less, saved my life. There was a lovely, smiling Indian woman by the name of Jesse, who called herself a Christian sadhu. She went about doing her version of good which did not necessarily jibe with the monks’ idea of good. She had, apparently, quite out-stayed an originally warm welcome. There were also a Korean lad with his Japanese friend; several portly nuns from Thailand who spoke only Thai; and still others whom I saw only in passing in the mosquito-filled nights when the fans stopped their indolent turning, went dead along with the twenty-five-watt light bulbs, and we all wandered out, candles in hand, from our suffocating rooms to dodge and swat the insects.

  I stepped across the dust and desertion, tiptoeing my way to the farthest corner of the monastery’s shadowed upper story, and there, on the slanting-like-a-teeter-totter shelves of what had once been a piece of nineteenth-century furniture, was a crazily tumbled collection of books: mostly novels, detective stories, a few scientific treatises, almost nothing to do with the spirit, less to do with literature, obviously stuff pilgrims had unloaded from their backpacks rather than carry onward. To my amazement, and thanks be to Buddha, there was a densely printed, translated-into-English paperback of The Magic Mountain. Was I surprised? I suppose so. But the heat under the uninsulated ceiling was rising. I grabbed the book and fled.

  In my room, through the days that followed, I read it slowly, interspersing my heavy-headed lack of enthusiasm for Mann’s ponderous Germanic analysis of the world before chaos—or just when chaos was beckoning—with visits to the ladies’ room, thick with mosquitos and crackly with lizards. I tried to catch the water in the shower and the sink and garden faucets when the water was on. The whole system apparently worked by an electric pump and went out as often as the fans. I drank and drank and drank the tepid water. Nothing slaked my thirst. Jesse taught me to toss a bucket of water onto the composition stone floor and to hang sheets, in my case, two sarongs I had bought in Thailand, dripping wet from a line so that the evaporation of all this water cooled my room—if ever so slightly.

  Over maybe a week’s time I got better, and I got worse. I became friends with healthy Teresa who had worked for six months on a sheep ranch in Australia and as a nanny in the outback. She brought me an egg that Jesse cooked and bitter black tea which is an excellent way to stablize the bowels. Finally, I asked for a doctor. He came and prescribed electrolytes, just as they do in the USA, and almost in the same form: a sickishly sweetened liquid like Gatorade, which I tried to drink but couldn’t. The doctor also gave me medicines, also abominably sweet. But the doctor, a most sympathetic Indian man, with medicines—he threw in some antibiotics in mercifully swallowable pill form—and house visit included, cost only about five dollars—better odds than a health care plan.

  I wondered, I wonder still, why I didn’t just let myself die. Not sadly, or for any reason or lack of reason, but simply because I did-n’t know where to go or what to do. I had no interest whatsoever in living. Indeed, one night when a funeral procession carrying candles and bran
ches came walking along the road and out across the river bed, I quite envied the corpse, draped and asleep on a bier of wood, decorated all around with withered palm fronds that rattled in the wind.

  Eventually, however, with the help of Teresa, I shook off my ennui enough to stagger, at twilight, into town to eat omelets on chapatis. She took me to a rather magnificent lean-to built of stripped young saplings and palm fronds at a wide place on the dirt road in central Bodh Gaya. She had been in town for several months and knew a good many of the people, all the paths, and most of the restaurants.

  Bodh Gaya.

  How can I give you a sense of it? It’s actually a pretty little town and must be beautiful in the rains. It’s flat but surrounded by fields. It’s animated because enough tourists and pilgrims come here to have inspired the entrepreneurial spirit in some of its inhabitants. But the friendliness is still genuine. There are monasteries housing monks of many nationalities scattered all over the town and fields. At this season, it was May, they looked closed-up and deserted even though, with a search, one could always find a door open and a monk, at last, to lead you to the dharma hall.

  After a few days of omelets and dharma halls, I found my way, very early one morning, to the Mahabodhi Temple. I entered the sacred ground. The dawn was already losing its crimson hue above the horizon at what?—4:30, maybe 5:00, in the morning. I was alone. I stepped through a little low wrought iron gate into the complex, or maybe it was wrought copper, for it was turquoise-green with age. Beyond this decorative barrier, a rather wild, somewhat jungle-like garden grew among pillars and stupas. There were shoulder high flowers, some green things I didn’t know, and lilies. One had the feeling it was watered here. I stepped into the temple. It was silent, gray, stone, and lonely. Statues and carvings stood about in shafts of early light. But I knew this wasn’t where I wanted to be. It was the Bo tree I had come to see. There was no one around to ask where it might be.