As we approach the temple, I spot a small boy of about five dressed as the Hindu Goddess Kali, deity of death. Kali is the frightening form of the Divine Mother goddess. She accessorizes rather ferociously with decapitated heads for earrings and a string of human skulls for a necklace, and dwells near cremation grounds. Where worldly attachments are renounced, she points to the cycle of death and rebirth.
This small boy's face is powdered blue, his lips stained red, and he's wearing a long black wig and a white shirt shot through with gold thread. He's precariously positioned on the ground in the midst of this large crowd. A child-goddess-deity sitting in the street. The mother in me is worried that he will be trampled. I'm also aware he could be a slave for a gang of exploiters. I'm fascinated by this vision—the mythological costume, the contradiction. As we move along the congested lane, I notice a growing chaos. Army staff alternately shout and blow forcefully on their whistles. These shrill screams seem to be the only way to motivate the massive crowds to move along when visiting a holy site.
Our splinter group is led by a kind and relaxed twenty-something man who was raised in both the US and India. He speaks in Hindi with the Indian police at the temple's gate. The noise level is intense and the crowd is growing by the minute. There seems to be a certain pressure to get these foreign pilgrims into the temple while they still can. Our leader has to shout to be heard. Inside, beyond the dark threshold, a man with glowering eyes sits on a chair guarding an offering plate that has a few rupees and a single burning candle on it. I don't even remotely feel like giving this guy a Namaste.
We're instructed to slip off our shoes and put them on the sprawling heaps of footwear strewn near the gates. Our guide admonishes us that it's important to give alms for Hanuman when we are in the temple. I unzip the passport case under my top and get out a few bills to hold ready.
Several of us glance toward the piles of various footwear. Will we ever be able to find and retrieve our own later? My concern for my clogs is actually not all that petty, as they're the only shoes I brought with me. While removing them, I lose track of our group for a moment. So many people are moving through this space that it's disorienting. I spot my group and rejoin them. Apparently, now is a good time to enter the temple complex.
I begin to plunge forward as requested but get the sense that there's no turning back, so I hover and hesitate at the gate, feeling dread. Though I'm curious to see the inside of this temple, a deeper voice inside is shouting: “Stay out!” But if I refuse to go in, how will I ever reconnect with my group? I tentatively follow three people that I recognize.
The air feels heavy and dank, and, as I step in, I immediately regret my decision. Then the pushing begins. We're body against body, pressing on each other. A woman on my left and her tween daughter glare at me as they shove their way forward. I crane my neck to see if I can just go back to the place where I entered. My mouth is dry. My hands are shaking. There's no return, no way out—unless, of course, I shapeshift into a spider and crawl out on the ceiling.
As we are pressed forward, it becomes darker. The only light comes from narrow, high windows on the right side wall. These are lined with metal bars. My heart is hammering away in my chest. I scan ahead and see a central staircase descending into darkness. It's designed to support about three people, but a crush of four or five people at a time flows steadily downward. Nobody seems to return. We're going underground? Too many fucking people in here. I try to move to the right, against the flow of the crowd. More men, women, and small children push and press on me and glare.
I spot one of my fellow pilgrims about twenty feet away. I shout to him but, with all the whistles and the yelling, he doesn't hear me. My body surges into an adrenaline rush. I'm shaking all over now and unable to think calmly or logically. I close my eyes for a moment to call for Alice, perhaps in the same way that Gandhi reportedly called out to his own manifestation of God, Ram, as he was being shot. Immediately, I perceive her calm presence and I can breathe again. I'm reminded (yet again) that peace is always available, if I ask.
I remember that, in shamanic traditions, a frightening experience or dream can serve several purposes. It can spiritually “clear the pipes,” by literally scaring the hell out of you so that you get more clarity and deal with whatever you need to for your own evolution, in the same way that an initiation or rite of passage can. But a frightening experience or dream can also be precognitive, serving as a warning to help you avoid danger.
I shout and wave my hands wildly, then put them up in the air and shrug to let an official-looking Indian man sitting on the half wall overlooking the dreaded basement know that I want out. “How do I get out of here?” I ask, enunciating in my clearest English. He points back toward the entrance. Then he shouts something in Hindi at me over the crowd and motions to the wall he's seated on. I'm confused at first, but then realize that he's asking me to give an offering by tossing it over the wall.
I remember the sweaty rupees I've been crushing in my hand and make my way over to him, flinging them over the wall. Presumably, I've tossed them into the basement, where everyone going down those awful stairs is headed.
I look back to see crowds crushing forward. I see no one familiar. I plead with the official again, asking as I point behind me: “Is that how I can get out?” He responds in Hindi, leaving me lost in frustration. Think. No—don't think—feel. Alice is with me.
I accept that I can't go back, so I stop resisting. I turn and allow myself to be propelled forward, mentally clinging to this bit of Rumi's poetry: “Troubled? Stay with me, for I am not.” Suddenly, without fanfare, I'm thrust (spat?) out into a crowded, but roomy, courtyard between buildings. It's flooded with sunlight! I'm suddenly free. I feel like kissing the ground. I made it. Thank you, God. Thank you, Alice.
On the road back through the Mela from Hanuman Temple, we cross a broad avenue where hundreds of sadhus are streaming back from a gathering of some kind. One arresting, bare-chested man is attired in particularly amazing accessories, with dozens of chains of walnut-sized mala beads and dreadlocks piled high on his head, which is topped with a towering white turban that brings his height to nearly seven feet. His chest ripples with taut muscles and his eyes shine. One of the men in our group stops him to ask if he can take a photo. I want to as well but feel a combination of shyness and a weird resolve to keep up with the group.
I get twenty feet or so ahead, then turn around wistfully, wishing I'd stopped after all. I see my fellow pilgrim in position to take the sadhu's photo. In the moment he depresses the shutter, the sadhu whips off the fabric covering his lower half, revealing his penis, which is sheathed gloriously in lush white and red flowers. The photographer is taken aback and abruptly lowers his camera. Ha! The sadhu is laughing and smiling broadly, like Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat, as he slowly covers up his highly decorated bits and walks on. Nothing is what you think it is.
After returning to campus, I shower outdoors in one of the temporary closets kitted out with tiny electric light bulbs, using a plastic bucket and some precious heated water. It's a trick to keep my waiting clean clothes dry, as they are clipped to a clothesline inside the small enclosure. I begin to rinse away the dust and Eau du Kumbh Mela—a complex and heady mixture of musky human sweat overlayed with subtle notes of fried garbanzo bean snacks, dust, incense, and hay. This shower feels like a two-hundred-dollar hot-stone massage.
While I attempt to dress, I hear a couple enter the neighboring shower and begin to bathe together. I can easily hear their quiet sighs of delight as they embrace. It reminds me of how Mark and I used to do this when we had more time for such moments—lazy Saturdays in bed, showers. The years of child-rearing and long days at work have certainly taken their toll.
As I crawl into my sleeping bag around nine that night, the drumming upriver seems to heat up. “It seems to be getting louder and more intense,” I remark to Julia, one of my hut roomies and a Mela veteran. She replies: “Oh, just wait until the tenth—it's
electric!” February 10 is the most auspicious bathing day and will draw the largest crowds. There may be as many as thirty million people here that day. But despite our noisy camp and the swelling rumble of millions more people just upriver, there's a silence growing in me.
The rain begins sometime after midnight, and enormous buckets of water are dumped directly onto our hut's vulnerable hay roof. The roof begins to leak—slowly at first, in little spots, and then in little gushes. The wind whips the soaked saffron curtain against its hay frame, and sheets of heavy rain spray and soak the bottom half of my sleeping bag. These manmade quarters, so carefully constructed, are flimsy in the face of Nature's unlimited power
Then the intensity of the storm lets up just as quickly as it started, and we hear dozens of male staffers shouting to each other in Hindi and leaping around outside in the darkness, closing hay-shuttered windows and checking the integrity of structures.
It feels as if the intensity of the drumming called in the rain. I remember what the lady in white at our orientation in Duluth had said—that rain is auspicious, a blessing. I lie in my bed unable to get back to sleep. Half-soaked, my thoughts turn to the millions of exposed people living in lean-tos and tiny tents constructed of sheets of cardboard and plastic. Moms with brand-new babies. Tiny children. Thousands of stray dogs. How vulnerable they all are.
I've heard the crowds swelling upriver each night, and it's a bit scary. It also makes me feel a strange solidarity with all pilgrims, past and present. In a similar way, as my labor with our Josephine began, I'd felt an unusual unity with all women across the world and across time who'd gone through the experience of giving birth. I felt awed and afraid, but remembering those others before me helped me focus on my task of staying calm. It seemed that breathing was what spontaneously connected me to my earthly sisterhood.
We're now gathered at the bank of the Ganges in our varying states of vulnerability to pray and we've been purified, collectively, by this grand and surely auspicious rain. Our ablution complete, we are ready for ceremony.
CHAPTER 32
Kumbh Mela Redux
Live in the sunshine.
Swim in the sea.
Drink in the wild air.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
Today I find a group of American women who are game to return to the Kumbh Mela. In our group, there is myself, a forty-five-year-old married mother of four and doctor on furlough, a retired teacher in her sixties, a forty-something mom from the corporate world, and a full-time grandmother, also in her sixties. As women, we've been advised to take a male along as an escort. Together we decide, perhaps naively, that it wouldn't be too reckless to go as an all-female team during daylight hours.
We're now forty-eight hours away from the royal bathing day, when the largest crowds are expected. I'm aware of previous stampedes, the worst occurring in 1954 that left 854 dead. With thirty million people on such a wee spit of land, anything could happen. I'm more than a little nervous about it, yet I'm unable to resist. There's still so much to see.
The dusty spiritual circus of colorful ashram tents, with flags and tinsel flapping in the breeze, sprawls endlessly as we head down the main dirt road on foot. I spot a colossal baobab tree that looks like a very stout and misshapen opera singer with dozens of skinny twisted and leafless arms outstretched to the sky. It's surrounded by sadhus adorned with mala beads. Someone in our group says it's the Ganesha tree. As I focus, I can see even from here that there's at least one obvious elephant head in the tree's bulging trunk. When I see it, I feel an electric zing of recognition in my body. I've got to get closer.
Ganesha is the elephant-headed God worshipped by Buddhists, Hindus, and others. Devotion to Ganesha extends far beyond India. He's known as the lord of new beginnings and remover of all obstacles. I leave the small lane, clamber quickly over a low fence, and head down a steep embankment and back up the hill to get closer to this magnificent tree. The rest of the group follows me. As I get closer, I plainly see numerous graceful elephant shapes in the tree's body—a curving trunk, a head with ears, a chest protruding. The bark is smooth and silvery grey, nearly the color and texture of a wild elephant's skin. The elephant shapes look as if they are sculpted from clay. The tree veritably shouts elephant.
A young Indian man sporting a red bandana has his forehead firmly planted onto the bark-covered brow of a larger elephant form and appears to be praying fervently to it. He's the embodiment of reverence. It reminds me that I also go directly to an elephant with my deepest pains. Alice is, in her own way, a slayer of life obstacles. Not wanting to interrupt, we give him wide berth as we wander around the tree, silently marveling at its massiveness, trying to count how many elephants we see within it. The tree's girth is akin to that of the giant redwoods in Muir Woods.
As we return to the front of the tree, an older sadhu impatiently pushes the reverent young man away from the main elephant form and motions to us with a smile, inviting us to come forward and experience the tree for ourselves. The Indian red carpet of spirituality is being rolled out for us yet again. It seems as if the only gracious thing to do is to approach. I hand my phone and backpack to one of my travelmates, sensing that I don't want to be burdened by them.
Mandapa is the Sanskrit word for “the laying down of the physical world,” the lightening of our own burdens so that we can enter more fully into a divine connection. The word also refers to the area in an Indian temple where you remove your shoes and prepare to move into divine communion. It's the place where you leave ordinary life temporarily behind.
I lean my head down and go brow to brow—third eye to third eye—with this tree's main pachyderm. I sense a powerful and wonderful connection between us. My thoughts ask the tree to share its wisdom with me. I feel a strange sense of strength coming from the tree. How many hundreds of years has it been here? Perhaps even a thousand? How much suffering has it witnessed? I want to know so much, to have a deeper conversation with this wise and still friend. A few minutes pass, then suddenly I feel embarrassed, as if I'm taking too much of a celebrity's time at a book signing. It also suddenly feels too intimate.
We decide to return to camp via boat. My feet are grateful. We find an available boatman, clamber onto the familiar splintery deck, and head out on the glorious Ganges. Despite its intense pollution, Mother Ganga remains a regal jewel. The sinking sun and emerging twilight beautifully illuminate the riot of colors at the Mela.
The water's silky expanse reproduces the melon pink and peachy plum of the sky and the liquid gold of the still hovering sun. The boatman's silent paddling creates beautiful disruptions in the field of color-infused light. Together, we fall silent in wonder, as we move noiselessly along with the flow. Time slows as the blazing red-orange disc of the sun descends and a new palette appears—rose, baby blue, and tangerine meld seamlessly and ripple on the river's ever-changing face. It's eerily quiet despite the enormous buzzing hive of humanity nearby.
This ancient flow has provided water to three hundred million humans and other living things for thousands of years. The immense power of her current is palpable. She's terribly vital beneath, yet uncannily calm on her surface. If rivers are our Mother Earth's circulatory system, in this place, we're surely in her aorta, propelled by the force of her mighty heart.
After one of Ben's lectures, an announcement is made that formal mantra initiation is available to all pilgrims at the camp. Unexpected bonus! Despite my resistance to the longer mantras we were assigned, I wonder if a more personal one could help me.
Some mantras are quite specific—designed to heal snakebites, find husbands, or prompt conception. The land we're camping on here at the Mela was, I'm told, cleared of cobras with the use of mantras. Mantras have practical applications, but they're also used as incantations—words possessing the energy to create miracles or manifest desirable outcomes. The word sounds have a vibration. Seeking a mantra of my own, I head to Ben's office near the dining hall.
As one p
ilgrim is ushered out, I'm called into a brightly lit space. Ben directs me to a cushion on the floor. As we get down to mantra business, a soft breeze suddenly passes into the room and briefly lifts the translucent white curtains.
I anxiously explain that I don't want to commit myself to a life in this particular spiritual tradition, but simply want to receive a mantra to deepen my meditation practice. He nods and smiles, then sets down his clipboard and lowers his head slightly to review the form I've filled out. He says he's curious about my path from physician to shamanic healer, asking with a smile and half chuckle: “Is there much of a demand for shamanic healing in Duluth?” I'm not sure if he's honestly curious or outright laughing at me, but I smile and answer:“There's a small demand locally, but I also work virtually by phone and Skype.” “Ahhh,” he replies and nods knowingly.
With a few simple words, Ben invokes protection of the space, as we do in shamanic practice, and asks me to be silent. I close my eyes. As I do, I drop very, very quickly into a state of meditation. Then something really unusual happens. Rather than the deep violet color I often see pulsating in my mind's eye while meditating, I see pulsations of many colors—purple, red, green—as if all my chakras are being scanned. Then I get the sense that Ben is dipping into some kind of sacred storehouse for a mantra for me. A few moments pass and then he chants the mantra he's bestowing on me—and it's beautiful to my ears. It feels so sweet and divine. I realize that it's not something I want to share with anyone else.
Ben takes a few minutes to explain the meaning of the sounds composing the mantra and how it ties into my life's work. The meaning of the Sanskrit syllables magically and elegantly expresses all I hope to do in my lifetime. It feels perfect. He instructs me, however, not to focus on the meaning of the words while meditating, that it's the vibration of the words that will transform me. “By repeating this mantra, something will begin to grow within you,” he says. “It may grow into an oak, a lotus, or a peach tree. It remains to be seen.” Mango would be nice, I think.
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