Above: Paan-spit-stained airshaft of a cheap hotel room, Delhi
The churn of experience has been churning away, and (besides the eventual, hoped for gobs of butter), bubbles of reflection have been percolating upwards towards the surface. By some conspiracy of influences, I'm in the midst of what seems a paradigm-shifting metamorphosis, time plays funny, and everyday events spin themselves into Significant Happenings. I've been drawn into a nexus, which is all very exciting, but it makes coherent interpretation difficult. Until I pull some sort of perspective together, I'll satisfy the writing itch (and 'to write' in Hindi/Nepali is derived from an Arabic root meaning "to scratch") with a series of snapshots.
So, the last 10 days, in fragments:
After a frantically social last few days in New York, I wake at first light with a wisp of a memory of turning off an alarm two hours earlier, sit bolt upright, and five minutes later am out the door with partner and luggage, unshowered and greasy, and hop in a yellow cab for Newark airport. My panic subsides as the driver sagely selects a route and we leave Manhattan behind. Half to calm my nerves and half to solicit his obstacle-removing shakti, I repeat Ganesh's mantra under my breath. An hour later we are through on board a Virgin flight for Delhi.......................Our first night in Delhi, in a cheap but clean hotel room armed with a big ceiling fan and a window into a paan-spit stained airshaft. It's hot but bearable out but like a convection oven inside, the cement walls and hard mattress radiating the day's heat. The jetlag trance state proceeds through successive rounds of a cooling ritual: rinse off with warm water from the cold tap, dampen topsheet, lie under it until its life-preserving power is exhausted.........................................Wandering the narrow gallis of Old Delhi our first evening, I ask a shopkeeper in my stumbling Hindi where good local eats can be found. His directions are, essentially, "go left, then right, then left again, and you're practically there." At a bit more prodding, a map is produced. The first left is to be taken at a Hanuman temple, and the shopkeeper will take us that far. He wants to share some of his culture and his city, and we wash our hands in a tiny basin, leave our rubber sandals without, and tour the neighborhood shrine. Soon we have caught the resident priest's attention and been walked through a puja. Having completed our darshan (viewing of the divine image) we leave with smiles, marigold garlands, tika'ed foreheads......................................In the day's rising heat we charter a tuk-tuk to the Baha'i lotus temple, that faith's only outpost in Asia. As we wait for the gates to open, I feel myself flushing with a heat greater than that outside, as if I'm the source of the high ambient temperature. Inside the vast, open space within the lotus, silence reigns. I long to slip into the clear blue pools around the temple. Mind occupied with the Baha'i creed that all faiths are essentially one..................................Getting the runaround at the New Delhi railway station as we try and purchase tickets for the next day's departure for Gorakhpur, 15 hours to the East. It is not possible, no, not for four days...until we find the right office, the official one, and buy our tickets for less than half then price we'd been quoted. Despite this, we have found Delhi much less tout- and scam-infested than we had been led to believe. It is less concentrated than Kolkata, and without that city's sense of decaying grandeur disappearing under tropical growth. Instead sprawling, drier (though this is due as much to the season, the last days before the rains begin). Delhi Chicago to Kolkata's New York? Which would make Mumbai L.A....and Chennai?.................................On the platform awaiting the 8:25 Gorakhdam Express, along with what must be half the population of certain small city states. We claim some space, people-watch, sweat, and are oggled in turn. We remark to each other on people's willingness to stare. Buy a 10 rupee folding fan: "folding fan! folding fan!," a chant we decipher only after 10 or so repetitions................................aboard the train, sleeper-class. I awake before 2 AM somehow convinced it is almost dawn, and sit in the open doorway of the car, watching the dark shapes of bushes and the occasional house go by in the Uttar Pradesh countryside. It's not unbearably hot for a change, in fact almost cool in the heavy, grey pre-monsoon skies. Move my bowels at the squat toilet, quite clean and perfectly odor free, since the hole opens directly down onto the tracks. Marvel not for the first time that I'm in India. At 4 A.M. I buy a paper cup of chai (chaay, actually) from the tea-wallas who patrol up and down the aisles, and later some breakfast: aloo chop and white bread with a ketchup packet. India's British heritage reveals itself, like divine will, in unexpected ways........................Divine will. I wouldn't have caught myself using that term a year or even a month ago, but I'm becoming less shy about such things. Do I believe in God? Not the god I forswore as a small child lit up by thoughts of black holes and, later, the prospect of laying bare the workings of reality through string theory and the like. I'm still not crazy about the term, and the capitalization, and most of the connotations. Theology strikes me as futile. The less said the better about the object of faith--but I've discovered faith, and understand, as Michael Gruber writes in the guise of one of his characters, that it's a gift.................I guess we're out of snapshot mode now, and I haven't even gotten to Nepal yet, even to Kushinagar and the first purposeful stop on what is to some extent a pilgrimage...but Michael Gruber. The man has penned three novels that have provided an extremely timely source of spiritual nourishment in, of course, an unexpected form. The books detail the life and most interesting cases of a Miami detective who finds himself embroiled repeatedly in what he comes to dread (and eventually embrace) as Weird Shit: African sorcery and its descendant Santeria, South American shamanistic practice, and less exotic but no less forceful cracker Protestant faith, amongst others. They're a ripping, gripping read, but under the cover of the thriller, part of the books' real work is to challenge the world's current materialist worldview in ways that are hard to ignore. Indeed, one comes to realize (if one hasn't already) that our society is as religious as any other, but with rather perverted idols: money, sex, speed, forward motion, shiny things. Science itself, what should be a method and not a belief system, has taken on cult status. In this light, alternative views become attractive and in fact essential, and Gruber presents a host of related spiritual systems that fill the void. The overall arc of the trilogy is also concerned with the spiritual maturation of the star detective, Jmmy Paz, Gruber being a wise as well as an intelligent writer. There's plenty of other juicy stuff, lots of sex, and also a recurring, hard-hitting racial theme. Better than any white author I've read, Gruber understands the varieties of racism and the ways in which it is instutionalized and sanctioned. They're challening books all around, but the medicine just tastes so good you can't put the bottle down.
In the interest of timely posting, I'll leave whatever typos in and save the Nepal stuff for next time. How time flows, then oozes, sticks, recoils...
Love to all my readers, with apologies if I've gone too far off the deep end this time.
Jonathan
