The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  Sabine Bergmann grew up in Northern California and studied Earth Systems at Stanford University. In Bolivia, when she wasn’t busy risking her life, she worked for a local farmer’s aid organization. Currently she serves as a Peace Corps Environmental Volunteer in the Dominican Republic.

  TIM WARD

  Shiva and Sadhus at Pashupati Temple

  The author peers into lives very different from his own.

  HUNDREDS OF GRAY-BEARDED SADHUS, BABAS, GURUS, yogis, and other varieties of holy men come from all over India and Nepal to Pashupati Temple on the outskirts of Kathmandu each February. They come to celebrate Sivaratri, the day of Shiva’s birth. How do they demonstrate their devotion to Hinduism’s wildest divinty? By smoking copious amounts of ganja. Though hashish is illegal in Nepal, charitable organizations set up distribution centers on the outskirts of the temple, and dole it out free to the holy men on this holy day.

  I explained Sivaratri to my friends in North America like this: “It’s like Christmas—the birth of God—but with hundreds of Santa Clauses going to the Vatican and getting stoned.”

  The festival lasted for a week, building up to the day of Sivaratri itself, when it seemed everyone in Kathmandu came to Pashupati to worship. The temple got so packed, more than one thousand police were on duty for crowd control before dawn.

  I woke up at six in the morning, something I don’t do at home in Washington, D.C. on a regular basis. Already the queue to the temple was backed up to the front door of my hotel—Dwarika’s—a good kilometer and a half from the entrance to the main temple. It would take these devotees six hours to make it inside to deliver their offerings and receive their blessings. But everyone stood patiently. They seemed excited, cheerful even, in the early morning darkness.

  Fortunately, I had made friends with a young Nepali named Aristu who had a festival grounds pass. He had been helping his mother who was working at one of the guru tents inside Pashupati all week. The pass allowed us to sidestep the queue and walk straight to the entrance to the temple grounds. We were not really jumping the queue, since I was not lining up to enter the holy of holies—only Hindus are allowed inside the inner courtyard. Aristu flashed a pass at armed guards, and we slipped inside.

  I had met Aristu a few days earlier on the forested, shrine-studded hilltop that rises next to Pashupati. He was a biochemistry student, nineteen years old—the same age as my own son, back in America. He told me that his whole family had become quite religious recently. They all venerated his mother’s guru and practiced yoga. He himself, as a student of science, believed “only 50-50.” Keen to practice his English, he offered to be my guide on Sivaratri.

  Aristu lived amid the rice fields on the far side of Pashupati—a rural area rapidly disappearing as new homes and paved roads filled the valley. Soon the temple grounds will be surrounded by city on three sides, with its back against a golf course and the airport.

  “Twenty years ago, my father tells me, the cry of the wolf could be heard here at night,” he said.

  Half the hilltop has been preserved as a forest behind a tall iron fence. Some three hundred tiny deer race through the trees. Aristu told me the park was created in honor of Siva, for according to the legend (from the Nepalamahatmya and the Himavatkhanda) Siva came to this hilltop ages ago in order to escape the wearying company of the gods at Varanasi. He disguised himself as a golden deer, and joined the local herd. His wife Parvati, knowing his identity, joined him secretly in the form of a doe. As temple literature coyly describes it, the divine couple “frolicked” here for some time until the other gods tracked them down. In the scuffle to retrieve the recalcitrant Siva, they seized him by the shining horn on his head. It broke into pieces. One of the pieces took the shape of a lingam, and was buried at the spot where the main temple stands today. On it, four faces of Shiva as the god Pashupati have been carved. This is the statue all the people of Kathmandu have come to worship on Sivaratri.

  Tradition says the lingam was discovered where the temple now stands when a cowherd found his cow repeatedly dripping her milk onto a certain spot. The local villagers dug up the spot, and uncovered the sacred phallus. The first shrine was built on the site supposedly in the third century. However, historical records indicate it was rebuilt with a golden roof in 1140 A.D. by King Shiva Deva III. But an earlier inscription from 605 A.D. declares that King Amshuvarman was favored by his touching of Pashupati’s feet. This gives historical legitimacy to the idea that Pashupati may have been the tutelary god of the rulers of the Kathmandu valley from ancient times.

  The name Pashupati means “Lord of the Animals.” This is Siva’s earliest manifestation, and remains one of his most important throughout the Hindu world. Seals and vessels from the prehistoric Indus Valley Civilization (4500–1900 B.C.) depict him as a cross-legged, horned god with matted hair and erect phallus, flanked by beasts and serpents. This prehistoric version of Pashupati is believed to be connected with nascent forms of yoga. According to early scriptural references, the early followers of Pashupati were yogis—long haired, god-intoxicated ascetics who covered their bodies with ash.

  In the second century B.C., a formal Pashupati sect took shape. It was founded by the ascetic Laukulisha, who supposedly died while performing harsh austerities. Siva entered his resurrected corpse and he became a leader of the ascetic devotees of the god. He founded a “City of Siva” that drew more than ten thousand yogis, and forged them into a cohesive sect that endured for over two thousand years. At the heart of the sect was the notion that human civilization covered up the true non-dual nature of reality. And so their yogic practices sought to free one from all social conventions. They let their hair and nails grow to stupendous lengths. They covered their bodies in ash, or else wore tiger skins, or went completely naked. Some even masturbated in public. And so they became known as the Order of Lunatics.

  As centuries passed, the Pashupati yogis evolved into three sub-sects: The Kalamukhas—named for the black streak across their face that marked their death and renunciation—were the mildest sect, for they also practiced moral virtues. The Kapalikas abandoned all social and moral codes. They carried with them a bowl made from a human skull from which they ate and drank. They lived in cemeteries, among the dead. Most extreme of all, the Aghoris, the “Non-terrible,” deliberately violated social taboos. They covered themselves in filth, slept on garbage, ate their own excrement, even the flesh of corpses.

  “The process is a ruthless one,” says one scholar of the path of the Pushapati sects. “It requires the individual to abandon all these things which men most cherish, and to strip, layer by layer, the veils of ignorance, conditioning, and delusions which separate his awareness from the immortal soul. True insight and inspiration, a new awakened sense of magic and wonder is the start of the journey to the Eternal. Without this, it is not possible to escape from the world of relativity.”

  Pre-dawn, Aristu and I entered the temple grounds, still a kilometer from the temple, but mashed by the crowd. Strands of tiny, bright, multicolored lights (Christmas lights, I would have called them) flashed along the fences and tree tops. For an hour we shuffled forward in the dark like some massive zombie army. As we neared the main temple, Aristu flashed his badge once more. We hopped a few cords, left the line to the temple, and found ourselves for the first time in open space.

  As dawn broke, we crossed the bridge over the Bagmati River. The ghats leading down to the water’s edge blazed with cremation pyres. So many people receive their last rites here that the river is clogged with the silt of ashes. All week I watched workmen, knee deep, shoveling out the accumulated sludge, trying to get a bit of a flow back into the river. Prolonged drought had turned the Bagmati into a fetid trickle that dribbles through the city. It picks up more sewage and trash than it does water. You know when you are near a bridge in Kathmandu—it stinks. You have to hold a scarf or a sleeve to cover your face in order to breathe.

  On the far bank of Bagmati, we climbed the stairs up the hill
to a viewpoint overlooking the golden-roofed pagoda in which the four-faced lingam rests. Around the shrines and stairways the holy men have made their camps. Tiny, smoky fires glowed orange before the makeshift altars of talismans and icons. The Trisulas (iron tridents), the sacred weapon of Siva, were planted firmly in the ground around the camps. The men cupped their hands and sucked the sweet smoke from their chillims (chillum pipes), chanting and chatting with their comrades and curious onlookers. A haze of ganja hung blue in the morning air. Teenage boys seemed keen to join in the sacred act, though Aristu for one said he had no intention of getting high.

  I was riveted by the human artwork—how each Sadhu marks himself with ash and paint. Vermillion and bright yellow triangles on the forehead, or stark white lines. Some have let their hair grow long and wild. Mustaches twirled at the ends or drooping over the mouth like a walrus. Dreadlocks coiled round and round the heads of others like a massive frizzy turban. They remind me of prehistoric cave painting come to life. Indeed these men seem like something out of time—inhabitants not of the twenty-first century, but of Shiva’s timeless realm.

  Aristu ushered me through a door in a walled compound next to the stairs. Past a series of shrines we found the courtyard where more than a hundred more Sadhus gathered. My young guide pointed out to me the various types. Among the saffron robed Sadhus, we spotted ascetics who sat near naked, but for a loincloth, their bodies covered in ash, their hair wound around their heads in matted dreadlocks. Two men wore black robes and black turbans. Aristu told me they were eaters of corpses. He said one of them lived in a hermitage in the cliffs farther up the river. People were afraid of him. So, the more extreme of the Pashupati sects still do exist, I thought. I looked at the man. He had a gray beard, neatly trimmed. His black robe was clean. He sat alone, looking down, with long iron tongs of some kind resting on one shoulder. He appeared thoughtful, self-contained.

  In another corner of the compound a naked man stood in the center of the group. His disheveled hair dangled down to his ankles. He wore dozens of strands of prayer beads round his neck that looped down and somewhat covered his genitals. I kept expecting these extreme practitioners to have the faces of maniacs. But this naked man, when he turned and I saw his face, had the sweetest, kindest expression. Although his peers seemed to honor and revere him, he seemed almost bashful, looking down, and grinning like a child at play.

  To me it is amazing to see men like this, so out of step with modern times. But, then, Siva’s devotees have always stepped away from their society. They were Lunatics right from the beginning. I tried to talk to some of them. Aristu was too shy to translate. Some knew a few words of English. Some encouraged me to take their picture and then hit me up for a donation. For one ragged pair who had made a pilgrimage from Bihar, I bought a package of biscuits, which they then shared with me in easy silence. Others offered to share their chillims, which I declined, being too much a creature of my own space and time.

  Four months later I had the fortune to visit Kathmandu again and went to Pashupati with two Nepali journalist friends, one of whom had studied in Benares and written extensively about Pashupati and its holy men. With them as my interpreters, I entered the compound where the Sadhus were staying. It was dusk, and a prayer ceremony was taking place on the banks of the Bagmati River. Bhajans (spiritual songs) and the twang of a sitar could be heard in the night air. The music was punctuated by a band of monkeys jumping back and forth on the compound’s tin roof, beating out their own cacophonous rhythms, and screeching to each other now and then.

  About thirty holy men sat around the compound, some readying themselves for sleep, others clustered in conversation. We found a group of three sitting on a raised stone circle, willing to talk with us about their lives.

  Bharati Baba was a Naga Baba, a Siva devotee from Benares. He had a long black beard and slender body—easy to notice from his naked chest—covered with several necklaces. He wore a large saffron turban with a huge orange tika mark on his forehead. His feet sported white athletic socks, something foreign to his yogic body, which may have been donated by a foreign visitor like me. My interpreters told me that though he was the youngest of the group, he was in fact the most senior Baba in terms of attainment. There was, I found out, a very clear pecking order in the world of Sadhus.

  Pancha Das was in his fifties, and had been a Baba for twenty years. He followed the God Ram. He wore nothing but a white dhoti wrapped around his waist and a single necklace—the most minimalist garb I had seen on a Sadhu.

  Hanuman Baba—named after Hanuman the monkey God—was a sixty-year-old Nepali farmer who had left his wife and children at age forty-five to become a Sadhu. Despite his Santa-like gray beard, his yellow robes and white stripes marking his forehead, he was the junior Baba of the group.

  I asked first why they came to Pashupati for Sivaratri.

  “It’s the festival of the Babas,” said Pancha Das, “so lots of high level Babas come here. It’s where we get to meet them and learn from them.”

  “Also, because the high Babas come, a lot of lay people also visit, so we all benefit. So it’s really good for the junior Babas like us,” added Hanuman Baba.

  “Why do you dedicate your life to God?” I asked.

  There was a lot of chatter which I did not understand. I first thought there would be different answers from them. However, in the end I learned that there was agreement in their answers. They all said that the sacred music has something to do with their decision to become a Baba. Music has the power to enchant and apparently all the three Babas were drawn to the devotional songs called bhajans.

  Pancha Das said he was thirty and married when he left his village and family. For him, the path of a Sadhu was a means to rid himself of the bad karma which he had accumulated in this and past lives. He said his present life was devoted to prayer in order to improve his future lives.

  Bharati, the Naga Baba, said that he was only ten years old when he dedicated himself to Siva. Being a Sadhu was the only life he can remember.

  “What’s the most difficult hardship being a Sadhu?” I asked.

  “No problems!” said Pancha Das.

  “God provides everything,” said Hanuman Baba.

  “Solitude is the hardest part to handle,” said Bharati. He looked me straight in the eyes. There was no self-pity there, but also no sugar coating. Perhaps this is enlightenment: the simple ability to just tell the truth about your life to yourself and others.

  “And what’s the most beautiful thing about this life?”

  Pancha Das replied, “Life itself is wonderful. Even when we are in the mountains, we never go hungry. God provides. God finds someone to support us with food or whatever we need.”

  “For example?”

  “Tonight God sent the three of you to talk with us!” said Pancha Das (this was a subtle hint that we were expected to make a donation in exchange for this conversation).

  Another sadhu named Hanuman Das wandered over to our group. He was barely five feet tall, wearing a big white turban that turned out to be mostly hair. He told us he was over one-hundred years old. To prove it, he took off his turban and displayed his matted hair which fell all the way to the flagstone floor. We expressed admiration for his advanced age.

  “It’s because we are vegetarian,” the old man said, “and dedicate our lives praying to God. That prolongs our lives. Watch this!”

  He grabbed his right foot and bent it up to touch the back of his ear, balancing neatly on the other foot. He looked around at the group, pleased at our astonished response. Satisfied that he had made his point, he coiled his hair back up into his turban, and wandered off into the night.

  I resumed my questioning of the others:

  “Why do you choose to stay here, at Pashupati?”

  “Because this area belongs to God. He takes care of everybody,” said Pancha Das.

  “And it brings people, who make donations. So God takes care of everybody,” added Hanuman, making another b
road hint that we visitors had a cosmic duty to fulfill.

  Bharati Baba added that Pashupati is one of the twelve Pindas—sacred sites of Siva: “So we come to pray here. It’s also the only site with a five-faced Siva linga in the whole world.”

  “Five faced? I thought it was four faced?” I asked my journalist friends. They explained that the lingam has four faces—one on each side. But the faceless top which faced the sky was also considered a face—the highest and most abstract face of them all.

  I continued to question the Sadhus.

  “In our modern society life seems to move awfully fast. But you Sadhus seem to have stepped out of time. What’s it like for you, not to be part of this modern world?”

  Bharati Baba was quick to respond, “Modern people need cell phones to talk and planes to travel. But if you meditate for twelve years, you can go into a trance and see the whole world.”

  “When we journalists look at the world, we see problems—political, environmental, and social. What do you see?”

  This generated strong discussion among the Sadhus and my friends. Eventually they translated the response: “Politics and economics just don’t exist for us. When we see ‘the world,’ we see sinners, criminals, and greedy people. So it doesn’t take up much of our attention.”

  “When you look to the future, what do you see?”

  Pancha Das replied enthusiastically: “A lot of joy—joy in the name of Siva.”

  Hanuman jumped in: “We have given our lives to the devotion of Siva. Whatever comes, we accept it in the name of Siva.”

  Bharati Baba didn’t say anything. I think he was finished with us sinners. I interpreted the look in his eyes to mean, “The future? That’s just a stupid question.”

  Tim Ward is the author of What the Buddha Never Taught, Arousing the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India, Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess, and the soon to be released Zombies on Kilimanjaro, an account of the journey he took with his son to the top of Africa. He travels to Nepal on a regular basis as a communications consultant for international development organizations. You can find him online at www.timwardsbooks.com.