Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  Maybe it’s the fermented grapefruit juice, the Himalayan air or the full moon, but all of a sudden the Israelis, Californians, locals and even this Australian go crazy. A bloke unveils the massive Torah from its blue velvet cloak and carries it around the room like it’s a rugby trophy. We are all given a chance to touch or kiss it. The Jewish Holy Bible is in the middle of a mosh pit. The boys are pogoing and squatting in a Greek chorus line, the girls are dancing in a twisting gypsy conga and the Buddhist monks are standing staring open-mouthed at the Jewish joy. Finally, we settle down for some more prayers, more bitter herbs, our second cup of wine and a sweet apple paste that represents the mortar of the bricks the Jewish slaves worked with.

  By now it’s midnight and there’s lots of hugging, massaging and a fair share of tears going down with the feast. I talk about my pneumonia nightmare, a woman shares the sadness about her divorce, and a boy from San Francisco weeps about the trauma of coming out. It sounds tragic but it’s actually transcending. My deluded, ignorant, egotistical, empty Buddhist being actually embraces the emotion and the sensual pleasures of song, dance, stories, food and the spiritual power of a shared group ritual. In Buddhist dharma there’s no drama. In Jewish faith I’m encouraged to embrace the highs and the lows and show a passion for living – I’m better at that. Roger gives me a short quiz.

  ‘Do you have deep feelings for nature or do you yearn for detachment? Do you prefer sex or self-control?’

  I admit that a stunning mountain vista and a good root can be quite redeeming. Roger tells me I’m more Jewish than Buddhist. The girl beside me lifts her cup, bangs mine and proclaims me a Jew. I look around the room to embrace my new Israeli brothers and sisters but find they left long ago to smoke hash and prepare for Avishi’s full moon dance trance party. Ohrolam may not have saved their own but they have a new convert. Tonight I’m a Jew and I’m free.

  One week on and I’m kicked off the team. There’s a rival Jewish gang in town, and the more Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch group from Israel doesn’t want me. I stumble into its house when I’m looking for the internet centre (I now haven’t talked to Jonathan for three weeks and I am keen to try to make contact with the ABC to check he is okay). A very young, painfully thin rabbi dressed all in black with little plaits beside his ears offers me coffee from a filthy kitchen. His face lights up when he hears my name (Sarah was the wife of Abraham and is considered the matriarch of the Jewish people), but darkens in disappointment when I admit I wasn’t born Jewish. He invites me to stay for Chabad’s Shabbat but it doesn’t really cater for us non-Hebrew-speaking gentiles. I sit silently with Israeli girls while the men stand, rock and pray on the other side of some room-dividing blankets. There’s no group meditation, singing without words, dancing or inner journeys to take. I’m not the only one feeling disappointed.

  ‘This is too religious, I just want food,’ says a beautiful blonde girl as she stomps out in army boots.

  Chabad only recognises Jews as those individuals born of a Jewish mother. Rabbi Dror Moshe Shaul obviously pities me but tells me that there is only a finite number of Jewish people and all are sparks of the souls who were present when God gave the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai. As his child snorts snot all over me, the rabbi tells me that the spirit of Moses returns to earth in a Jewish body time and time again to save the world from sin. I’m shocked at his beliefs. I didn’t think Jews believed in reincarnation, but it seems this group does; if only just for Jews. The rabbi points to the current Moses – a hairy, decrepit, bent old man who peers down from posters all around the room. His name is Lubavitcher Rebbe. I ask where he is.

  ‘Ah, he is dead,’ states the rabbi.

  ‘Oh.’ I stumble for words, shocked and more confused than ever.

  ‘Well, no, he’s actually not dead, we just can’t see him. He is the King of Israel and will bring redemption, in a minute it will be ready. We in Chabad are the messengers. We are all over the world.’

  The rabbi says the king will come when Jews follow the rules of living as given in the Torah and when gentiles like me follow some simpler steps. I ask the rabbi what he thinks about all the Israelis at Buddhism courses, Vipassana, yoga and the Dalai Lama’s lectures. I open a wound. He rocks in pain.

  ‘They are destroying their souls; it looks harmless and good but it is dangerous.’

  The rabbi is here to teach the Kabbalah and to encourage the Israelis to leave the land of idols and return to the homeland of one God. He cannot rest when one Jew is lost. His mission could be long and impossible. Young Israelis show no sign of wanting to hurry home; in fact most of them seem to want to go to Australia after India. Those I’ve met are hardly nationalistic.

  I fly home to Delhi on a tiny plane and sit next to an Israeli girl with bright green eyes and jet-black hair. She tells me she comes to India every year and hates going home to Tel Aviv and the ‘religious fuckers of my stoopid country’. As we chat about the wonderful nature of Buddhism, she asks me if I’ll stick to its teachings. Seeing I can’t be a Jew, I begin to say yes. But I stop. We are high above the Himalayas and I’ve just heard a propeller splutter and stall.

  The girl beside me sits stoned, still and unaffected, but my two weeks of Buddhist training practically falls into my pants. I scream. My hands are sweating, my heart is pumping and my mind is clutching at life like a randy dog to a leg. The propeller starts again but I’ve buried my Buddhist belief. I don’t want to die. I like life. I’m completely attached to this body and this realm. I try to stop trembling and meditate. I can’t. It’s much easier to contemplate your own death in a peaceful gompa than ten thousand feet up in a tin can. The emptiness of Buddhism sits heavy in my stomach. I actually find myself praying. For the first time in my life I want to believe there’s a God who’s in control. I realise I desire salvation more than the prospect of centuries of learning to control my mind. I’m still full of delusions and a long way from taking the vow of the enlightened, let alone getting the bodhisattva beer discount in Dharamsala’s restaurants.

  A phrase from the Dalai Lama’s teachings comes back to me: ‘Some will be drawn to Buddhism but I really think it’s best that you try and find truth in the religion of your forbears and ancestors. It is very hard to change religion. I think it’s safer not to.’

  I figure my ancestors are Christian and the Jewish religion is at the root of that faith, so I decide to give Judaism one last go. In Delhi I hear that Jonathan is out of Afghanistan and has flown straight to Mumbai. I’m desperate to see him, and Azriel has told me that the city once called Bombay hosts a population of Indian Jews. I head for a reunion with a lover and a faith.

  The Bene Israeli of Bombay balance precariously on the oldest branch of the Jewish evolutionary tree and are fast heading for extinction. Their once thriving traditional Bombay neighbourhood near Victoria Gardens echoes with the Muslim call to prayer on the Friday evening Jonathan and I visit. Wandering the bowels of a soon-to-be demolished ramshackle former synagogue, we find the community’s only rabbi atop creaking stairs smothered in dust, in the eaves of a once sacred space.

  Joshua Kolet looks more Israeli than Indian. He is twenty-nine, pale and delicate with dark curly hair. Joshua lives here with his ageing aunts – tiny grey Indian women wrapped in nylon saris – and his uncle who looks like a brown Woody Allen. Jonathan and I are invited inside for my third Shabbat. The aunts sing shyly through toothless gums and Joshua leads the prayers. Over a dinner of fish, coconut pancakes and curry, he tells us that his ancestors fled Israel after the destruction of the first temple in the fifth century or after the destruction of the second temple by the Romans – no-one is really sure. What is known is that they sailed far and were shipwrecked two hundred and nine miles south of the Bombay Islands. Only seven couples survived. They obviously interbred with the locals but maintained their faith for centuries; refusing to work Saturdays, circumcising their sons on the eighth day after birth, eating meat and making a distinction between clean and unclean fish. When the Br
itish came to India most Bene Israeli moved to Bombay to take up jobs in the trade industry; after 1948 they moved again, to Israel en masse. Joshua’s parents are there, all his friends have gone and the school in Mumbai where his auntie once taught doesn’t have a single Jewish student now. This soon-to-be homeless family radiates a sense of loss. Their Shabbat is a bittersweet affair with none of the joy and carefree fun of Azriel’s in Dharamsala. I feel I’m at the table of Mrs Haversham with her ghosts of better days. I ask the aunties why they’ve stayed in lonely Mumbai. They look at each other and shyly shrug.

  ‘India is my Mother.’

  She must be, for Israel offers huge inducements to attract Jews. Non-government organisations give Indians free or cheap airfares and the government provides settlers low-interest loans, assistance for one year, free Hebrew lessons, housing help and a land with greater economic opportunities. The Bene Israelis are believed to be the poorest Jews in the world and Mumbai is getting expensive.

  While Jonathan works, Joshua takes me to Worly Hill above the sea where one Jewish building remains; rotting from concrete cancer, it sits small and forlorn among growing numbers of gleaming skyscrapers. Inside is ORT (Organisation Educational Resources and Technical Training), an institute that prepares Indian Jews for emigration to Israel. Its Director, Benny Isaac, invites me in with a pat on the back and a couple of jokes. He’s a big bloke with a huge heart and, while he just loves his job, he feels sad that he’s helping to drain his community dry.

  ‘Most of my school friends have gone, most who come to ORT have gone, most of the staff has gone. They’re Jewish, it was their birthright, but mostly they went for economic opportunities. I went to Israel, I loved it, but I love India, I’m loyal to the Mother. India let my ancestors live freely they … were allowed to eat meat, live as they wanted and to be free … The Hindus and we have best relations, they have protected us and looked after us. This is the only place Jews have not been persecuted, I can’t leave.’

  I totally understand his decision.

  Upstairs, I meet the thick-spectacled and slightly hyperactive Levy Jacob who’s recently returned from Israel and can’t stop raving about it. He proudly shows me some freshly killed corpses, the community’s kosher chickens he ritually slaughtered this morning.

  ‘We have to be smooth and painless, it’s very complicated, the chicken must not know he is going to die.’

  I tell him the plucked poultry looks peaceful, and he’s pleased enough to let me supervise the making of non-alcoholic wine from raisins crushed in sugar.

  This Indian community is more lax-conservative than my Jewish reform friends. Benny Isaac poo-poos my story of the Pesach party I attended and frowns when I ask him whether his community studies the ancient teachings of the Kabbalah. Then suddenly he furtively looks around and hunches towards me. In a whispered breath he admits there was one woman who flirted with the mystical side. She wanted to talk to her dead son and enlisted outside help from scholars of the Kabbalah. She contacted her son.

  ‘What did he say?’ I eagerly ask. He shrugs.

  ‘He told her not to disturb him.’

  The experience of Jewish mysticism among the Bene Isrealis was dead and buried.

  I can’t help feeling sad that India is losing a population it has looked after so well to a country where the young suffer so much anger and feelings of rejection. It seems a spiritual homeland does not cure all spiritual ills. In India I’ve travelled a soul’s journey: from hedonism to sickness, from silence to song, from violence to peace, and from learning to die to celebrating life. If I were Jewish, such a story should end with my liberation in the Promised Land. But it’s not an option for me because of my birth. I’m glad, for when I reflect on Buddhism’s belief that we are all interconnected, the Jewish insistence on being ‘chosen’ and different seems elitist and alienating.

  Yet a small flame within me has been lit by what I’ve shared, a flame that warms me with a realisation. India: a land that shares its sacred space, seems a spiritual home worth having.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Birds of a Feather Become Extinct Together

  I’m face to face with one of the ugliest beasts on earth. Nose to beak with a hunch-shouldered smelly Frankenstein with feathers that could rip my limbs apart, crack open my cranium, munch on my brain and consume every part of me (bar my pelvis and thigh bones) within twenty minutes. If it was alive. But this vulture is dead – formaldehyde floppy and reeking of mothballs.

  Mumbai is also dead. The nine o’clock wail of the work-start siren and the hum of millions have been silenced. Today there’s a city strike, or bandh, called by the ultra hard-line Hindu Shiv Sena Party. The streets are empty, bar roaming gangs of Sena goons, carrying wooden lathi bats above their heads, threatening to hurt anyone they find working.

  I’m staying on in Mumbai to spend some time with Jonathan who is shooting a story for ABC TV about a religion, a people and a bird. After driving through the eerie, still streets we scurried between the iron gates of the Natural History Society building. Inside, its Director, Asad Ramani, is showing us the vultures; he’s breaking the bandh because he has little time left to stop the bird of prey from falling off its perch.

  Sweating under the hot lights and wiping his glasses constantly, Dr Ramani tells the camera a story. About five years ago the villagers of Rajasthan started complaining that the vultures were no longer eating their dead dogs, cows and buffaloes. No-one listened to them, until the bird sanctuaries began noticing that the vulture numbers were down and those few birds that were around were droopy and not eating. Since then the Indian white-backed vulture population has dropped by ninety-seven percent and the bird is now officially listed as ‘critically endangered’. At first, a pesticide was suspected but Dr Ramani now believes the birds are dying from some sort of virus that has yet to be isolated, let alone treated.

  Jonathan’s researcher, Kursheed, listens intently, her head cocked and eyes keenly focused on the Muslim doctor. For her, this is more than a five-minute piece of television. Light-skinned and lighthearted, with dark curly hair and a rather beaked nose, Kursheed is a Parsi. Parsi people depend on the vulture to take them to heaven. Jonathan’s story is about this most western of India’s ethnic groups and its relationship to the bird of prey, and Kursheed has promised to get him good access to her people. We’re looking forward to meeting some of her flock in a few days’ time.

  The next morning, with the bandh over, Mumbai emerges reenergised from its enforced break. After conservative, staid Delhi the city feels like a cosmopolitan tropical third world New York – its thick gooey pre-monsoon air contains a whiff of energy and excitement. Jonathan and I spend our first weekend together since our honeymoon swapping stories about our adventures. Afghanistan was tough. While he was filming an interview, Taliban officials chopped down a door with an axe and burst in – luckily the axe was so blunt he had time to hide his camera. After experiencing a country suffering from the hardship imposed by a puritanical Islamic regime, a dreadful drought, disease, famine and war, he is depressed about the human condition. I was concerned my stories would seem rather self-indulgent to him, but Jonathan insists he needs them. I am his keyhole to the world of peace and love.

  But Mumbai is too exciting to keep us indoors chatting for long. We drive around in yellow cabs that reek of damp skin and onions. We pass giant glittering skyscrapers sitting alongside colonial wrecks stained with pigeon poo. Inside filthy flats, fans swirl above smoking men in singlets painted purple by fluorescent lights. Way past midnight the pavement pumps to the beat of beggars, bar hoppers and cricket matches. Smoky jazz clubs ooze hip, drug dealers peddle in dark corners and coconut sellers squat outside the bookstores.

  It’s grimy, steamy and bohemian. At a traffic jam we wait beside a motorbike carrying the Indian version of the ‘Two Fat Ladies’. One in a spotted sari sits sidesaddle behind her husband, the other in stripes spills out of the sidecar; goggles glued to their faces, saris flapping in
the fumes, they chat away oblivious to a goat chewing their shopping and a man selling giraffe-shaped balloons.

  Mumbai is a city that dares to be different, a city that worships the Hindu god Ganesh – a cheeky hybrid of baby and elephant that brings luck and new beginnings. But it has the same old poverty. We pass tin suburbs of slums full of flickering televisions and smouldering mountains of methane-charged garbage; high above them, huge billboards cruelly tease with the treasures of whitegoods and diamond rings. Slightly seedy and slightly Blade Runner, Mumbai smells more of the future than the past – it could well be a western metropolis in a grimy, greenhouse-affected, post-apocalyptic world. There are already special suburbs for the survivors of the economic evolution of the city. These self-sufficient biospheres have an individual water supply, power generators, tennis courts, shops and landscaped gardens.

  If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And the Parsis have, by and large, made it.

  On Monday morning, Kursheed, Jonathan and I begin the day in our funky hotel restaurant drinking proper coffee and eating pastries that give oral orgasm at first bite. Kursheed fills us in on a little Parsi history. She says many Parsis became rich because they were firm friends with the British, who were attracted to the Parsi liberal way of living, light skin, willingness to eat with other carnivores and their ready embrace of modern education and entrepreneurial spirit. During the days of the Raj, the two groups would get together to drink, ballroom dance and make megabucks. When the British packed up and returned home, they even invited the Parsis to come with them – British passports all round, old boys! But most of the proud, loyal Parsis stayed in India. In compensation, the Brits gave them huge chunks of Bombay.