Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  ‘Gandhi ushered in political change peacefully with strikes, marches and hunger fasts. Non-violence is written on India’s soul, it will prevail.’

  Gandhi, who was greatly influenced by Jainism, knew dividing India on religious grounds and forming Pakistan would lead to bloodshed. The one million casualties of Partition in 1947 must have sat heavily on his soul and he would be devastated to see the hatred that’s since developed between India and Pakistan. But while Gandhi is still much admired in India, perhaps it’s now more as a nationalist than a peacemaker. During a recent screening of a movie set around the time of Partition, the audience laughed and cheered as Gandhi was gunned down by a hard-line Hindu. With the rise of Hindu nationalism, many Indians have come to view him as too pro-Muslim. Others see him as a funny little man all too willing to renounce creature comforts that they’ve worked so hard to gain. In the emerging consumerist India, even his grandson charges for interviews.

  A few weeks on, Rita rings distraught. She was just about to set out on a Jain pilgrimage to Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat, but violence and hatred has flared again. Hindu fanatics are stepping up their campaign to build the Ram temple in the northern town of Ayodhya on the site of the mutilated Babri mosque. Hard-liners are descending on the town for mass pujas and threatening to start building work within weeks. India grows tense. A train of pilgrims returning from Ayodhya to Gujarat is torched by a Muslim mob. The state erupts in secular slaughter. In major towns and tiny villages Hindus turn on Muslim neighbours in an orgy of rape and murder. After four days of violence, around seven hundred people are killed – most of them Muslims burnt alive while hiding in their homes, shops and mosques. The police stand by and do nothing; a curfew is imposed and Indian soldiers shoot at sight. The BJP Hindu nationalist government is accused of whipping up religious rivalry for its own political gains; of creating a monster it cannot control.

  These hard-line Hindus are failing their faith of universal acceptance and earning themselves millions of more lives on earth. They are also breaking my heart, for it seems all religions, even the most inclusive of all, are ultimately perverted by humankind. The Jain desire for self-perfection, help for others and gradual abandonment of the material world, that to me once seemed an extreme reaction to violence, now makes more sense. The cycle of violence needs extreme love to break it. Indian Hinduism and Buddhism made me realise evil and good are not external forces; they exist within us all and we must take responsibility for our own cycles of violence. I push away from feeling fearful and angry with India. I step back from the spiral of regret and resentment within my relationship. These feelings must be replaced with gentle love that’s free of fury – and the need for jewellery.

  Rita stays in Delhi for a few weeks waiting for the violence to abate. It doesn’t, so she leaves for the United States. She gives up on India as a spiritual land, but I still cling to optimism for a secular religious nation that gives equal rights to all. I have faith in this country of many cultures, many languages and many ways to God. I believe its greatest gift – its diversity and acceptance of difference – will not be lost. I don’t want my journey to end with me biting the Hindu hands that have fed me so much. I don’t want to reject religion as the cause of human hatred.

  The ABC has found a new correspondent and now it’s time to leave for Australia and let the tide of a billion lives ebb and flow without us. Aarzoo sets Jonathan free from his brotherly duties, for she has fallen in love on her own. She’s secretly dating an extremely conservative bloke who wants her to take out her belly ring, tells her she has to stop smoking, won’t let her wear western clothes and says she’ll have to stop working if they marry. Billie is still short of a suitable match but is set to fly to America for the birth of her nephew. She lets me hug her goodbye. My Bollywood-loving friend Jeni is staying in India to be with her boyfriend Vinal. I heartily approve – he is a sweetheart and the only Indian man I’ve met who knows how to scrub a bathroom floor; he and Jonathan have become fast friends. Ruth and her husband Indre are about to move to Mumbai – he to manage Preity Zinta, and she to have their baby.

  It’s a traumatic goodbye to our Indian staff family. Mary tries to touch my feet and when I stop her she falls into my arms weeping. Peter is loyally stoic as we pack up, while Moolchand moans as he drops off our last laundry. Rachel proudly pronounces that she is the architect of my new flabby stomach and thighs, and then holds me close for ten minutes while we sob softly. Lakan and Aamar stand in an honour guard at the door. Aamar cannot talk; Lakan bites his lip and says to Jonathan, ‘Sir, I am having such strong feelings I cannot say.’

  Jonathan’s face falls and he hides his distress by hugging them both hard; Lakan and Aamar cling to their sahib, leaving a large wet patch of tears on his chest. As we climb into the car and look back at the people who have become our friends and family, our bravery falters and bursts. We both lose it in the back seat, clutching each other and sobbing uncontrollably all the way to the airport. Abraham drives like he is commandeering a hearse.

  I hiccup tears as we pass a horrendous wedding band and a groom stiff on a horse bathed in neon. I start to laugh when we see a service station stacked with staff sitting and chatting, deaf to the blast of horns from an impatient queue of cars. At the airport turn off, three camels stand knock-kneed urinating; a wise man atop one of them salutes my wave. Outside the terminal, Abraham unpacks our bags and clutches Jonathan before falling into the car and crying inconsolably on the front seat.

  Over the last few years, I’ve imagined bounding through the airport doors ecstatic and excited to be escaping this country, but now my legs feel heavy and painful and reluctant. We drag ourselves into the terminal feeling older, wiser and more Indian than when we arrived. The soldiers clap and yell in delight when we speak in Hindi. I pinch a few baby cheeks and patiently queue for a check-in that ignores my excess baggage. I belch as the security woman pats my crotch behind a curtain, and I compare my mehindi with the newly married toilet-beggar’s, thankful she cannot read my palm through the henna stains. She shakes my hand and strokes my face.

  ‘Goodbye, are you coming back to India?’

  I wobble my head in the Indian way: yes, no, maybe.

  We order champagne as we cross the Australian coast. I feel my soul swell at the sight of my land so red raw and bumped like an ancient crocodile back or stretching with blue salt pan veins on the palm of an ancient hand. These mountains of worn rock, these silver blue seas and white sands all seem so empty; scoured by millennia but not humans, they have an energy and vitality that swells my heart. The words of the guru Krishnamurti come back to me.

  ‘When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature then temples, mosques and churches become important.’

  In Sydney I rediscover my relationship with nature. The ocean becomes my temple and my Ganges. I bathe with an inner joy; floating in clean water, my body is buoyant with the love of life. I lie on my back and enjoy the pain of a strong sun striking my eyes. My feet kick the water into a cascade of diamonds that splash my face. Salt sticks to my skin. There are silent mornings and days of doing nothing but gulping lungs full of fresh air and staring up at high endless bright blue. I walk through the pristine quiet of the suburban bush of my childhood as fluorescent orange streaks across the sky. There are kookaburras and boatsheds and picnics and sand and so much water so silver bright and the light I love. Gleaming cars zoom fast on empty, wide, clean roads. A couple bent double laughs with hysterical abandon at a cafe table. I delight to see such open joy and such easy lives, yet at times the luxury and space sit uneasily. My country and I want it all – to be part of a war but not to face its consequences, to be part of the global community but not a port for its refugees. The city rants religiously of real estate and fashion, of ‘in’ restaurants and the latest stupid styles. I read about obsessions with Brazilian bikini waxes and botox injections and throw away papers full of articles about fulfilling desires for sexual adventure. The worship of land
ownership, the body beautiful, self-help and self-obsession for beings blinded by option overload is strangely unfamiliar.

  I went to India for love and the country tested that love to a large degree. Now, as Jonathan and I finally spend time together, I realise my relationship has been strengthened and scarred by the shared hardship and solitude. Recovering intimacy takes time and we are less starry-eyed but more realistic about life. Our souls share a shadow cast by India. We now both have a new view of our so lucky lives, yet our innocent optimism about humanity has been sucked from our hearts. The overall feeling about our adventure is positive, though. Jonathan’s career has taken off and I’ve gained much in my karma chameleon journey. I’m reborn as a better person, less reliant on others for my happiness and full of a desire to replace anger with love. Plus, I’ve gained another home. For I have two spiritual homelands now – the quiet empty lands of my birth and the cataclysmic crowded land of my rebirth.

  When I remember India I think of its ability to find beauty in small things – the tattoo of circles on a camel’s rump, a bright silk sari in a dark slum, a peacock feather in a plastic jar, a delicate earring glinting by a worn face, and a lotus painted on a truck. I miss the sheer exuberance of a billion individuals and their pantomime of festivals.

  Of all the wild, mad, hair-raising stops in my spiritual skip through the subcontinent, the most holy Hindu city of them all has branded itself on me most boldly: Varanassi on the Ganges. Downstream from the Kumbh Mela and upstream from hell, it’s a city that attracts the faithful and the freaks and those dying or being bid farewell. Souls sent from this place on earth go straight to heaven. A few weeks ago, on a hotel roof above India’s holiest city, Jonathan and I inhaled clouds of hash spiced with wafts of singed hair and burning bodies. We walked among Varanassi’s rats, dogs and street urchins as they competed for garbage in a maze of twisting dark alleyways and stained palaces that rot into the black mud. At dawn we floated in a wooden boat past candles, flowers and human ashes in holy waters littered with bobbing bloated bodies.

  In Varanassi my final puja was to Kali – the fearsome goddess of black skin, many arms, a red tongue and a necklace of bloody heads who destroys egos and sin. At five on a pitch-black morning, I sat in a tiny Kali shrine. A sacred fire burned deep within a dark pit, throwing shadows and light upon the hovering face of a pundit smeared with sacred ash. He offered Kali divine gifts by sprinkling sandalwood, milk and rose petals into the flames. He rang a small bell bringing our senses into momentary oneness with the deity and burned camphor to encourage us to let our small egos merge into the infinite. The small semi-circle of souls started chanting Sanskrit prayers. Blissed and blessed, I floated on faith. Suddenly the explosion of a massive fart ripped the air and an unholy stench arose. The woman beside me lifted her butt cheeks, blurted out another fart and then burped boldly in time with the chants of ‘Om’.

  I remember this because I love what it shows about India. India is the land of the profound and the profane; a place where spirituality and sanctimoniousness sit miles apart. I’ve learnt much from the land of many gods and many ways to worship. From Buddhism the power to begin to manage my mind, from Jainism the desire to make peace in all aspects of life, while Islam has taught me to desire goodness and to let go of that which cannot be controlled. I thank Judaism for teaching me the power of transcendence in rituals and the Sufis for affirming my ability to find answers within and reconnecting me to the power of music. Here’s to the Parsis for teaching me that nature must be touched lightly, and the Sikhs for the importance of spiritual strength. I thank the gurus for trying to pierce my ego armour and my girlfriends for making me laugh. And most of all, I thank Hinduism for showing me that there are millions of paths to the divine.

  Yet, I have brought back something even more important than sacred knowledge. A baby is growing inside me. A baby conceived during our last weekend in the country. This child will forever remind me of the land I lived in and what it took and what it gave. And this baby, made in India, will always remind me that India, to some extent, made me.

  Thanks

  Thank you so much to the people who encouraged and assisted me to write my rants into a book. In particular, admiration and adoration to my agent Fiona Inglis, my editors Kim Swivel and Nadine Davidoff, and the ever-exuberant Fiona Henderson from Random House.

  Lastly and most importantly, I thank Jonathan and the people of India for taking me on this journey. I’ve attempted not to take too many liberties with the people who gave me so much. Names have been changed and some characters merged or divided to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

  Big love to all the Suzies, Ruth, Jeni, Poonam, the ABC India staff and to Prajna, my darling drama queen.