Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  ‘The only way is up … for me and you now.’

  Shit! Another song.

  The others don’t look happy yet. Several are still crying and most are acting strangely. One girl is creating bizarre art works from seedpods, another one is wearing a Jesus-like crown of twigs and hugging trees. I find myself watching another girl imitating a ladybird. Unfortunately this leads to the ‘Ladybird Ladybird’ song about the house being on fire and all the children gone. Music lodges in my brain like chewing gum in hair; it’s the hardest thing to dislodge and while I can’t imagine living a life without it, I just wish the songs would get better.

  Day Seven

  Song for the day – ‘Feelin’ Groovy’ by Simon and Garfunkel

  Today we’ve been told to really observe ourselves, and the course has morphed into the part of the movie Fame where the students do drama class. Everyone is very slowly putting food to their mouths, placing one foot in front of the other as if they were under water, and sitting down deliberately and demurely. My observations so far today are that I’ve kicked coffee cravings and my sexual visions are minimal. Before I’d got here a couple of friends had emailed me with warnings of sexual fantasies such as ‘mountains of vulvas’ and ‘piles of penises’. They sounded like nightmares to me. Luckily, the closest I’ve come to titillating thoughts is a few images of Jonathan smeared in chocolate handing me an ice-cold vodka.

  Lying in bed I see my brain in visual form as it was and is now. At the beginning of the course it was like that first scene in the movie Contact, looking and sounding like all the radios and televisions of the world were switched on and set at different stations playing a mad symphony of senseless sound and images. I’ve now got to the stage where my brain is like a television left on at night after the station has gone off air – all static snow and white noise.

  We are told we should now be observing a flow of energy throughout the body. I hear girls whispering to the teacher about waves of tingling from head to foot, but I’m still feeling pain and occasional tickles. What’s wrong with me? The Vipassana theory states that unconscious thoughts create physical sensations, so letting sensations arise and pass without reacting gets rid of unconscious pollutants within our mind. Obviously I have a lot more pollutants than I realised. Yet I can feel a tingle of something. It’s as if my cells are realising that suffering is temporary and my mind has moments where it can move above the pain and feel in the groove with another level of being.

  Day Eight

  Song for the day – ‘King of the Road’

  It’s the second last day and I’ve almost stopped craving for the end of the course. There are times when I’m actually enjoying the process. I’m in love with the peace, the self-control, the self-discipline, and the calm. The world outside seems daunting, brutal, loud and ugly; can I ever maintain this state out there in the madness?

  Tonight I realise where a lot of my hate comes from. It’s anger at my own faults or a manifestation of my inability to counteract the actions of another. This comes to me while watching the Goenka video. I feel a wave of boredom and can’t concentrate, I feel hate towards Goenka; in my mind he becomes a fat toad who’s imprisoned me. Then I realise I put myself here and I’m actually angry with my own bad body and mad mind. He begins to make me laugh instead. Every day there is more and more chanting on tape and there is one new section in which I swear Goenka is singing about ‘gay protection’. Probably not what the Buddha had in mind, but it could be a cool new anthem for a meditation float at Gay Pride.

  According to Goenka, we are carrying petrol tanks full of gasoline in our minds, so one spark from past action ignites other sparks and explosions. Vipassana is emptying the tank and eventually the petrol will be replaced by the cool water of love and compassion. At one stage today we all showed we have a lot of petrol left. The audiotape went on double speed and our large-girthed guru sounded like a chipmunk. Hardly hilarious stuff, but all of us exploded like a refinery bombed from above. After eight days of taking ourselves seriously, none of us could stop giggling for about ten minutes, while the assistant teachers and helpers remained absolutely impassive, as if laughter was a defilement they had kicked long ago. I keep giggling in my room for hours. I miss the emotion of joy and I can’t see why mastery of the moment doesn’t allow for its expression. If non-attachment and equanimity don’t allow for hilarity, I’m not sure I want them.

  Day Nine

  Song for the day – ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’

  Someone’s cracked and is starting to hum. I must be progressing, for the tuneless git hardly annoys me.

  It’s been ten days without a mirror and not seeing the thing that most people recognise as me makes me less aware of the boundary of self. My concerns about losing my identity while unemployed in India begin to fade into irrelevance. And for just a few seconds today I did lose myself altogether. While observing my sensations, I felt sick when I could feel the blood pumping through my veins, but I kept calm, and slowly the vibrations within and on the surface of my body melded together with those in the air around me. I couldn’t sense where I ended and nothingness began. For one brief moment I realised I am just vibrating matter – arising and falling away like all the other particles in the universe. I lost it soon enough but I’ve caught a glimpse of the Buddhist and Vipassana notion that there is no ‘I’, no ‘permanent self’ to cling to. I lost my ego, my core. This, apparently is the ‘ultimate truth’ and the way out of self-obsession and self-importance. I do feel some bliss, some generosity and kindheartedness growing within me.

  Then I freak myself right out. I go to ask for some advice (quiet talks with the course assistants are allowed). After nine days of silence and supposed getting of wisdom, this should be the first uttering of a new conscious being. Unfortunately the old me blurts out: ‘I’m a bit confused.’

  The new me freezes in shock as the words boom from my mouth, hit the concrete walls, bounce back and whack me around the head. It takes me a while to work out what I’m hearing. I sound so intrusive and so loud that for the first time I feel infinite compassion – for the assistant and for all the people who’ve ever had to listen to me.

  Goenka’s video chat congratulates us for starting to dissolve our egos. By renouncing our creature comforts, observing moral precepts and trying to gain wisdom through self-observation, I should have also developed tolerance (which I’ve failed to do), truthfulness (which is easy when you can’t talk), strong determination (which I’ve needed) and pure selfless love (which I’ve begun to desire). Last but not least are equanimity, or detachment, and charity, qualities I’ve shown I do have beneath my mad monkey mind.

  This course is free (Goenka refuses to receive payment for teaching people to observe reality) but donations are encouraged and I pay enough for at least two more people to attend. I try to show tolerance to the Israeli in front of me who pays five American dollars as a contribution and others who are noticeably absent for this part of the course.

  Day Ten

  No song!

  The final speaking is sort of an anticlimax. After a morning meditation, we walk out of the hall and for the first time in my life, I find I have absolutely nothing to say. The young Israelis are whooping, laughing, screaming and chatting away in Hebrew. I walk away from them a bit shell-shocked at the exuberance. An Australian girl bursts into tears, shattered by sounds. A Canadian girl and I start up a gentle conversation, but within half an hour I feel the strain of social interaction, that growth of something dividing us, the boundary of awkwardness between beings. We’re back in the real world and while I’ve gained great skills I feel I’ve lost some as well.

  At dinner the hall is raucous. Smiling, open, happy faces grin at each other and whoop in delight. There’s a vibrating bond between us – we’re survivors revelling in each other’s success. I realise the mad one and the piggy are sweet, the designer is a designer and the hippies, hippies. But I feel I’ve weeded out some past conditioning that dictates my prefe
rences and prejudices; right now these people are as beautiful as I make them, things are as scary as I allow them to be, and as ugly and nasty as I create them. The world’s a beautiful place.

  We’re told that to maintain this new state we’ll need to meditate an hour each morning and night, and come back to the centre in a year. This sobers me up. Vipassana has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I’m not sure I could do it again. Brain enemas are not pretty. I also don’t see how I will be able to find two hours a day to climb back into my head. In India, if I’m not working, then maybe, but back in my hectic Australian life? Doubtful.

  Freedom Day

  We’re given a sugar hit for breakfast; after ten days of no sugar or coffee this hits like double-strength ecstasy. But there’s no teeth grinding or wanting to be sleazy, instead we clean up like a pack of happy Brownies. For the first time in my life I feel a level of mental and physical control I’ve never experienced before. We take some group photos and I hug my fellow survivors goodbye.

  I skip out the gates, down the hill and back into India on air. My mind is clear, my heart is open, everyone is beautiful, everyone is worth loving, the world is wonderful and I feel universal love and compassion for all. For the first time in my life I’m living in the moment and I no longer miss my job, perhaps because my need for outward success to feed the ego has diminished. I go to an internet cafe to read emails, ring friends and leave hysterical rants on their answering machines.

  But within an hour my peace of mind is challenged. At the bus stop in the town of Dharamsala a beggar boy begins to hassle me. I stop, look into his eyes and then give him the dinner I’ve bought for the train trip. An old Tibetan monk watching starts clapping and laughing; the boy and I join in. An ordinary Indian begging transaction that normally makes me feel depressed and guilty has become a human and humane exchange of laughter and true compassion. Sure, I haven’t saved his life, but it feels like a greater gift than money handed over out of guilt, anger and resignation. I definitely feel I’ve purged something and I’m ready to be reborn.

  Unfortunately, I have more dead parts of myself to shed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sikhing the Holy Hair

  India has a hair fetish.

  In terms of faith, the Sikhs are not meant to cut it, the Muslims wear it like Mohammed, the Buddhists are bald and the Hindu sadhus refuse to groom or remove their dreadlocks. In terms of facial fashion, Solo Man moustaches are common, the handlebar is still cool and the Willy Wonka twirl waxed and twisted upwards is much admired. In the main, the more head hair the better – men still adore the Travolta Saturday Night Fever mullet and the Liberace wig-look. Beside the roads several sit in the dentist chairs of the roadside barbers, peer into cracked mirrors and preen, lovingly fondling their facial hair, patting down their bouffants and combing their curls.

  ‘A hair is a woman’s glory,’ Rachel recites as she washes her hair every week at our house (her place is low on water). She and most Indian women have thick, long, shiny, bouncy and beautiful locks. Every Sunday the parks are full of girls sitting in a circle massaging oil into each other’s scalps, and the salons buzz to the sound of hairdryers. But Indian girls are paranoid about body hair, they shave their arms and legs and pluck their faces free of dark down.

  Babies’ scalps are shaved on their first birthday so that their first hair can be given as a gift to God, and their little heads are massaged with sandalwood to encourage thick regrowth.

  Hair is just another reason I don’t fit in here. I’ve never had good hair. It’s thin, curly, ratty and neither brown nor blonde. And now India is killing it.

  Every morning since Vipassana I’ve been waking up to notice strands on my pillow. When I shampoo, my hair comes out in my hands and the drain clogs with knots and nests. If I brush my hair it fills the bristles within three strokes. By April I’m leaving strands and knots wherever I go.

  Rachel says it’s just the onset of summer shedding and she oils it for me; greasy and smelling like fried chips it just falls out faster. Rupa the beautician applies mashed frangipani leaves and flowers, mayonnaise, eggs, henna, coconut, curd and eventually even bootleg beer – it grows thinner. Hari Lal suggests a purifying bottle of water before breakfast, Yogesh makes me stay in headstands for ten minutes and Simi prescribes vitamins, but still it falls. It’s now so thin I start getting sunburnt through my part. The girls at the local beauty salon hold a crisis conference and decide on a weekly head massage with a giant throbbing vibrator hand mitt. It’s wonderfully relaxing until the hairdresser yelps – a huge chunk of hair is wrapped around his mitt. Within weeks I have so little hair I can pin it up in one bobby pin. Mrs Dutt books me in to see a nearby legendary Ayurvedic miracle healer, P.K. Jain.

  It’s standing room only in the packed waiting room and everyone is scrunched close and staring. I smile weakly, until a man wearing a tight white t-shirt tucked into ball-crunching black jeans walks straight up to me, stops inches from my face and with a completely serious expression on his, whips a comb from his back pocket and does a slow motion Fonzie-like flick through his well-oiled mullet. I’m rigid in shock. Is this a come on or a pose off? I’ll never know, because at that moment my name is called.

  ‘Missss Seeeeraaaaaaaah, please be coming.’

  In a tin-walled cubicle I tell Mr P.K. my hair woes. He shrinks back from me, nervously runs a hand through his thick locks and then yells, ‘Eureka! I see what is happening, you are shedding your western identity and becoming Indian. Take this, it will help you become one of us.’

  He hands over a huge envelope of cocaine-like powder and ushers me out the door.

  I snort every morning but my hair falls faster.

  At the Apollo Hospital a skin specialist gingerly and disdainfully picks with his pen at the remaining strands and says it is situation hopeless. According to him, when my body needed energy to recover from pneumonia it shut down the growing phase of the hair cycle. Now, three months down the track, all that hair is in shedding phase. He gives me an injection and some medication for my scalp. I read out the contents of this medication to a Sydney doctor who says it’s illegal at home and demands I throw it out.

  It’s too late anyway as I’m now almost bald.

  I’ve never been good-looking or very vain but this is devastating. Obviously some of my resident ego has survived Vipassana, because I feel ugly, freaky and depressed. Meditating doesn’t help, the neighbours begin avoiding me and Jonathan isn’t around for sympathy. Telling me he’d still love me bald as a billiard ball, he flew to Sri Lanka to do some cricket stories.

  After a lonely week of tears and moaning ‘why me’ I decide to accept the inevitable and shave my head. But the hairdresser refuses, horrified I could suggest such a thing. Instead she offers a short haircut. I agree. She lifts what’s left of my ponytail up between two fingers and snips it off.

  ‘Finished.’

  She walks off.

  My ears stick out and my scalp is ugly. I walk out weeping, straight into the arms of a gang of Sikh teenagers.

  ‘Hey baby, what’s up,’ one drawls in what he thinks is an American accent.

  I look up to tell him to shove it, but instead struggle not to laugh. The lads are swaggering around in tight blue jeans kept high under their armpits by belts tied twice around their tiny waists. Their heads are covered in white cotton twisted into a bump. The material is so tight it stretches their eyes into slits and pushes their ears out. It’s hard to look tough in a topknot; their vulnerability makes me trust them.

  ‘I’ve had a bad haircut,’ I blubber.

  They all look at each other and nod in agreement.

  ‘Mmm, not so cool, what’s wrong with your hair?’ (The bravest and the smallest of the gang seems to be asking out of concern but sometimes I hate Indian directness.)

  ‘It’s falling out.’

  Dropping all pretence at tough, they stare at each other and back at me open-mouthed and upset.

  ‘Oh man, that
sucks bigtime, baby,’ squawks their spokesman, forgetting to keep his voice low and yankie-style. The others chorus ‘yeah’ as they step back, wary of my misfortune. Only the littlest stays close.

  ‘You should go to Amritsar, the best town, the best people, the Sikhs, man. We fight misfortune and weakness. Maybe at the Golden Temple God will help you get your hair back.’

  Amritsar is in the Punjab near the border of Pakistan; a half-day train trip from Delhi. Padma’s husband Surinder always raved about it and I decide to go and check it out. Of course I don’t really think a town will make me hirsute but I don’t have much hair left to lose. While I don’t believe P.K. Jain’s explanation that my hair loss means I’m becoming Indian, I do believe that trying to understand more about this country will make my life easier. Besides, Jonathan will be away for another week and I’ve nothing better to do.

  From Amritsar train station I catch a cycle-rickshaw through flat dusty streets bustling with business. And bristles. This must be the hairiest holy town on earth. The men wear their long head hair wrapped up in bulging blue or orange turbans. Beards hang loose and long in ZZ Top-style, or are groomed with neat central parts. There are beards in buns and beards in pigtails, there are beards separated into two braids each tucked behind an ear. There are beards tied down with a cord so tight it puffs out cheeks and thrusts fat lips forward. Some men even wear a facial hair net. But my favourite look would have to be the big bandage wrapped over the beard and tied at the top of the head – these guys look like they’re the victims of a permanent toothache. With my balding scalp I feel more naked and vulnerable than ever and put my dupatta shawl over my head as I travel along the facial hair parade. At a delightful guest house that smells of mothballs and faded glories, I sleep to dream of hair.