Every day we saw colorful saris and turbans, glittering bangles, and 1,000 gods with Ganesha over doorways. We saw mountain-top forts in the desert landscape, camel and donkey-drawn carts, cows in the streets eating trash, dust storms, and poverty beyond measure.
We smelled aromatic spices in the cooking and heaped in colorful mounds in market stalls, chai tea in the shops, incense and marigolds, cow dung and human waste.
We heard the jangling of women’s arms, the constant honking of horns, the squawking calls of the peacocks on roofs in the morning, the warning cries of monkeys when a tiger came near, and blaring Hindu temple music coming from country tractors and temples.
We saw people waving, people smiling, and people staring. We saw jeeps overflowing with women’s fabric fluttering in the wind, men getting roadside shaves, and heavy loads of wheat or sticks carried on women’s heads.
Small interactions I treasured (why I travel)
One morning, as we boarded our bus in the small town of Surajgarh, Rajasthan, there were half a dozen school boys of around 11 years old dressed in white shirts, white pants and striped ties watching our loading process. As I passed them to get on the bus, I told them they looked handsome. As I looked out the window of the bus, they smiled and waved at me, then motioned for me to come outside to speak to them again. I did, and they practiced their English shyly: Where was I going? Where was I from? What was my name?
A family at the Taj Mahal asked to take a photo of me and when I assented, the family took turns to pose with me and finally all came to be in the photo. I looked into the gentle eyes of the brown-skinned grandmother as we stood side by side – I was tall and she was small, and we smiled.
Coming out of the world’s largest Hindu Temple, an older lady from the countryside walked alongside me and we looked at each other. She put her hand up in a little wave, and then we reached out wordlessly and touched each other’s hand, then walked on.
I remember appreciatively the young man who rescued me from the run-around that the touts were putting me through when I was alone in Delhi. He said he saw what they were doing to me, leading me farther away from my destination, and he walked me several blocks to a tuk-tuk driver and gave him a thorough briefing on the touts’ unscrupulous behavior and firm instructions to take me exactly where I wanted to go and no place else (when he saw my upset face, the tuk-tuk driver refused to take payment from me).
The young Sikh couple in the veggie restaurant – He in an embroidered white tunic top and white pants, with a lavender turban in beautiful contrast with his black beard. She wore a matching lavender sari that set off the jet black of her long hair. They both wore black diamond-studded shoulder sashes as holders for the engraved silver daggers in their decorative silver cases at their waists. They cuddled together, so obviously in love. As the man strode athletically by me, he gave me a big smile.
Siddhartha
I read this book again after many decades, rediscovering it. I read it slowly, a bit at a time, as our bus or train passed through the farmland, small villages, and arid mountains of Rajasthan.
Siddhartha said, about his son. “I am fighting for him, I am trying to reach his heart. I will win him with love and patience….”
The ferryman told Siddhartha “He also belongs to everlasting life. But do you and I know to what he is called, to which path, which deeds, which sorrows?..... Do you not chain him with your love? Do you not shame him daily with your goodness and patience and make it more difficult for him? If you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.”
Siddhartha “… felt a deep love for the runaway boy, like a wound, and yet felt at the same time that the wound was not intended to fester in him, but that it should heal.”
At the end of the book, looking into the river, Siddhartha sees all the faces and forms …”in a thousand relationships to each other, loving, hating, and destroying each other and becoming newly born. … Yet none of them had died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another…. The smile of unity over the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness over the thousands of births and deaths….”
The trip to India.....the smile of unity over the many forms of humanity in every form and situation, the flow of the timeless river.
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| The world's largest Hindu temple (in Delhi) |
