Happy Journey

My last week in India I was busy. Busy figuring out how I could breakdown and package my souvenir gift to myself, a 50 pound steel frame Indian roadster. Busy with coworker/ friend as he took me to his family’s tailor he had told me of for months, getting silk and khadi dress shirts in a 8 x 12 shop in the old corridor of Bangalore. Busy wrapping up work projects and savoring the many things I didn’t photograph or write of previously, the corner coconut stand, my favorite sweets shop, the street seller outside my apartment who manned his cart each evening fanning burning embers with a plantain leaf to roast corn, reminiscent of Mexican elote I ate on Los Angeles streets while visiting my grandma. And savoring the progress made in negotiating with tuktuk drivers and other purchases, one of the lasts being ankle bangles for my niece, chimes that serenaded temple halls and city streets to the rhythm of children’s frantic steps and dances.

There are many things I did not write of in India, some due to time, some to keep to myself, some because I was in the moment, and many I just simply lacked the language. Most of what I what I wrote were observations, easier to do than feelings. And observations I didn’t document but still reflected on, observations I felt inadequate to comment on: insights into globalization, India’s internal politics and powder kegs of Maoist and Kashmiri insurgencies that reappeared, notions of love, marriage, family, caste, poverty, village life / happiness.

I ran out of time to write about the second part of my two week backpacking trip through Rajasthan, the week I had outlined to spend with an American born Indian friend who I was suppose to meet on my 25^th birthday, only to cancel due to a family emergency. And the following week I spent without Internet or guidebook roaming the desert, turning 25 on the roof of a village cement slab alone. Or the family I met in Jodhpur, a tea and spice shop run by seven sisters after the death of their father, and the spontaneous Christmas night I spent bopping around a city thousands of years old only to end up in their shop and sample saffron tea as my Christmas celebration. And making my way to Gujarat, and spending New Year’s Day at Gandhi’s Ashram, standing in the very place where he stood each morning and night in reflection and prayer.

I ran out of time to recount the trip where my first love, someone I hadn’t seen in 7 years visited me in India. A reconnection born in the age of Facebook and enough time between us. And the 3 weeks together we spent, flying by helicopter to Himalaya, to Gangtok, Pelling, than the Queen Hilltop station and rolling tea fields of Darjeeling. And 3 ride share jeeps, 2 trains totaling 24 hours and 1 tuktuk to the holy city of Varanasi on the river Ganga. That flows from the abode of the gods, Himalya, from the foot of the preserver Vishnu. Witnessing with a friend, turned lover, turned stranger and now friend the end of samsara, life and rebirth, along the funeral pyres of the river, and the nightly prayers of floating candles down Ganga. And recalling with her old memories, studying if people really change, and where does love go. And laughing. A lot.

After six months alone in an apartment 10,000 from home I came back to California. And after the product of much searching, decided to leave the company that had afforded me so much. With newfound realizations, many to do with the necessities and cadence of my own heart, I decided to continue to pursue a career in renewable energy and trade the ocean for the mountains. And head back to Colorado.

The month at home was one of adjustment, relaxation and family and friends. Marveling at the changes in my now toddler niece. And her saying “noñi” a reflection of the intended Spanish “niño” for godfather (knee-no). I went surfing with a friend when he came into town. I stayed up late around campfires. I flew to Boston for St. Patrick’s weekend to see old college buddies while I had the time and the money. I prepared for the move and packed what few things I owned.

And I took a trip with my grandma to Death Valley as I had promised her in India. The place where her husband and my namesake took her on a second honeymoon, some fifty years ago. To see California poppies and wild horses, and at night driving into the desert against the silhouette of old company mining town building frames to look up at the stars.

I convinced my dad to drive out with me to Denver where I had no plans just a destination, taking the scenic byways route and hitting three national parks along the way in Utah. We detoured for a small mountain town of Paonia Colorado prior to reaching Denver, an old coalmining town where coal is going, and fracking is sadly coming. But where agriculture has always been, since the displacement of the Ute Indians. And an eclectic mix of off-griders, alternative living, growers, artisans, hippies and farmers call home. That and a leading institution in solar energy training. I decided right then I would delay my return to Denver.

A lot had changed when I did go to Denver, to say hi and then bye to old friends. Places I once visited were closed, and more than anything, things just progressed. I often figured well away in India for six months (and having not lived in Denver for almost two years), things would stay the same; people would wake up, go to work, come home and do it all over again. But I was wrong, places and people did change. Things I was not prepared to digest.

But the real loves in my life, ones spread all over haven’t. The ones who support me and keep me grounded despite my “ungroundedness.” After months in a hotel room it became apparent I wanted something more homely, a dog maybe or just a room to call my own. On each of my trips in India my coworkers would leave me with the expression “Happy Journey” as a substitute for “have a safe trip.” I found those simple two words more encompassing of the purpose of travel or at least the intent of mine, and the greater journey I am on. Over these past few months I have learned many things, mostly concerning myself and my heart, and the pressing need to adhere to it. And though it pains me have to leave many things behind, including people I thought would be with me all the way, I look back on the odd and few things that have come with me in these nomadic past few years. The things trapped in the inner folds of my pockets, in zippers in backpacks. And realizing after all my friends and family, despite my wanderings and experiments aren’t leaving my side. And that I am embarking on the path of a Happy Journey.

Three Kingdom's and Three Questions

Hundreds of years ago in Udaipur, the White City of the Mewar Kingdom, stood guards in the inner recesses of narrow halls of the City Palace. Hidden, upon entering a doorway you could be asked a question, a prompt, for a codeword. With hesitation, stumble or error you were swiftly cut down by a sword of Damascus steel. I fielded many questions in my two week solo travel, of which 11 of the days were spent in Rajasthan, India’s Northwest state bordering Pakistan. Three questions in some variation in particular, none fortunately that carried the sentence of death with my answer.

1.       The most common, “Where are you from?” Many who pose this are shopkeepers, tuktuk drivers, and commission players, still others innocently curious. My skin complexion had them guessing.

“Are you from Spain?”” I was asked by one in Jaipur, the millennial city of crumbling walls and the weeds that overtook them, overhead which flew the paper kites of a hundred thousand children. “Yes” I answered. And as I walked around the sandstone walls of the old bazaar, I pictured myself as a Spaniard of a lost age. Not some blue blood tough, see by my Moorish eyes, that let me travel through Morocco and what would later be French Algiers untouched, passing through to Cypress and a stop in the narrow streets of old Constantinople. Merchant of dates, silk and silver.

In Udaipur I found a street stall, one of the best I have tried in all of India. At these I am an anomaly, Westerners pass by and look at me, Indians don’t know what to make of me (many in North mistook me as Indian, and would come up to me throughout the trip speaking to me in Hindi). There I ate the best potato paratha doused in ghee and dahl. It was all over my face and hands at the end. Sitting around the small ledge that surrounded the street stall, I passed sauces and spices to and fro as requested, ducked as dishes went over my head, and squeezed to make more room when another came to sit. At the end I was catching a few intrigued smiles and one man took it on himself to point out I could get more sauce for free since I was out, and extended his arm to greet me. I showed him my messy hands but he didn’t care, he shook it anyway. And in answer to where I was from, I received a name and a welcome to the city. Then he walked away.

“Obama” some would say or “Land of the brave” “The Mighty Dollar,” when I truthfully said America. Something my mom requested me not to do given that I was 300 miles from the Pakistani border. And in recent months IS and Al Qaeda both have been jostling to outdo the other in some sort of intrusion into India. But to be American was a welcome novelty. “Good country” they would say. And when they say something that India was wrong in its “population, pollution and politicians” I would say there was more to this place. And when I share the things I have seen and felt, and yes this is a good country too, they  felt proud.

And I thought of how the President would be visiting India shortly, at the invitation of PM Modi on Republic Day. And laughed how he wouldn’t have a tour guide who helped him jump the railings of the lines to get into the Taj Mahal, and to the shouts of Hindus, Muslims, Sheiks, and foreigners in a hundred tongues, climb over a sea of pushing and shoving people to get in to the Taj Mahal. The ageless symbol of love.

2. “Are you married? Or do you have a lover at home?” On seeing I was travelling alone.

In the shadow of the Taj Mahal stand rows of jewelers that the tour guides on commission drags tourist to. It’s all a game, and I was just playing along, picking up piles of sapphire, emeralds and rubies and the precious star of India, letting them run through open hands. I got lost in the sapphire though, that looked of gentle waters of a moonlit cove. The jeweler took this as a sign to show me sapphire necklaces, earrings and rings. “Do you have a lover at home?”

Nope. “While you can buy for your future love.” And that seemed like the oddest thing to me. “Hey here you go, I was in India two years ago and though I didn’t know you yet, I got this for you,” and I would go off in an excited tangent under her amused, patient gaze about the Persian artisans, descendants of the original craftsmen that the Mogul king enlisted, who carve into the marble to inlay with precious stones, designs of lotus and peacock.

I made it to Jaipur the next day 12 hours late, after 8 hour train delay and eventual cancellation due to winter fog that forced me and the Swedish couple I met to spend the night in Agra. Now I had only one day in Jaipur. Coming out of the district of metal workers, cobblers, carpenters, silk dyers and later the sheds of block printers, pashmina and cashmere weavers and their shops in the front, an elephant with colored designs passed my tuktuk. I went to reach my hand and touch his leg as he passed us on the road, but he greeted me first, and his whole trunk came into the backseat of the tuktuk, sniffing around and kissing my face and ruffling my hair. I squealed with delight, a sound I didn’t even recognize and the elephant pulled back in surprise.

Returning to the hostel in the evening, I was too tired and didn’t feel much like being social. Until meeting an Irish law grad. He had done a semester in Paris and we got to talking about the distinctions of Napoleonic law, which he contended was a continuation of Roman law. And I talked of how I remembered Dublin cobblestone roads in the rain and their muddled reflections of dull yellow lights. And we talked a little of politics, and I got to thinking of Michael Collins, the IRA, Green Tiger, all these things that lay dormant in my nerdy me. And I was excited and awake again. Another conversation in another room. An Italian, Argentinean, several Indians and myself. Laughing about first instances of Delhi Belly. And talk of girls, trains and girls on trains. I thought about this girl I met once in some train station in Southern California, awhile back. We talked of the beach, music and just laughed. And the smile and wink I got as I walked off. I lay in bed to the sound of snores and distant night trains cutting through the desert and thought of thoughts I haven’t thought of in a longtime.

I missed my train again the next day after waiting five hours on its delay. The platform was not updated and peering between the cars of a train on my platform, I saw it pulling out of the station on another. I ran after it and people were leaning out of the car waving me on, but I didn’t make it. I let myself have a 30 second outburst than sat on the open bed of cargo car on the abandoned tracks next to the station to figure out what my options were. It would be getting dark soon.

I threw myself into the street to the immediate courtship of tuktuk drivers. I pitted two against each other for information and price. 2:52 pm, next bus leaves at 3:00. I tossed my bag in the back and rocketed off in the rattling tuktuk to the sputtering choking sound of its engine under my seat. We were racing through traffic and ignored the whistles of traffic cops. He hesitated to stop and I just yelled “Go! Go!” In front of us another tuktuk slammed into a bus and sent the back tires up in the air as it came to a sudden stop.

BOOOM. This second sound came from our tuktuk. A cop from the other side of the street had seen the driver ignore the commands of his partner and had come out of the street and swung his stick down to crack on the hood of our car. The driver and I instinctively ducked, and with an exchange of yelling, we drove on and never stopped. We chased the bus down, waved it over and I got on, and fell asleep to the sounds of wailing babies and men boarding the bus and walking down the aisle, chanting what they were selling. And after several fretful nights’ sleep, I finally passed out.

I was dropped on the side of the road in Ajmer and took another tuktuk to the local bus stand for the 30 minute ride into Pushkar. I was only affirmed I was on the right bus after pointing to my ticket and the old man next to me repeating “Pushkar, Pushkar.” We climbed the mountains and came down into the small city. I had the name of my guest house on a slip of paper, at our stop he motioned me to follow him through the narrow alleys of Pushkar, a loose strand from his turban tailing behind him, as he walked slowly with hands held behind his back past small window shops and oxen and hogs walking silently through the streets. We got to a small opening and pointed my way. 

I walked into a narrow alley of a bunch of children lighting a firecracker. I stopped. Dud. I kept walking and it exploded with a resounding boom that amplified off the walls. They ran up to me jumping and smiling, and I assume laughing but I couldn’t hear anything for a few seconds.  

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Under the morning sun I went to the roof of the guest house and watched the owner’s son kite fight in and dance as he cut two kites in the distances and we watched them spiral to earth. And kids in distant roofs jumping ledges to retrieve their kites that came crashing down.  

I washed my barefoot feet in the ghats to cleanse my sins. To my right the males of family with shaved heads with a long strand signifying a recent death in their family were also washing, to my left a lady was a performing a puja of leaves, incense and candle which she placed on the lapping lake under the eyes of a baba, priests I had to be told to avoid.

They gift you roses from the local fields to place in the lake (if you are lucky you can watch the lemurs fetch them out to munch on) and then demand a large donation. If you refuse they will curse you and create a scene. “Are they really priests then, if that’s how they act?” I asked the owner of my guest house, as we sat on cushions on the roof patio, to the sounds of another guest playing Creedence and Coltrane on guitar. “Yes. Modern priests.”

“Gerald! Gerald!” Damn those Babas are good I thought. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my friend from Calcutta, the one I met in the hostel the night before in Jaipur. He was only in Pushkar for a few hours and was tired from carrying his two bags so I took one. We walked around the lake and its 52 bathing Ghats and choose one to sit at.

He told me about how Lord Brahma created the world from this lake, and from the ripples of a single lotus pedal sprung forth the surrounding mountains that I descended in the rickety short local bus last night in complete darkness. “Pushkar, Pushkar,” the old man kept saying to my look of apprehension last night. My friend wasn’t religious he said, but he felt at peace in coming here. One of the holiest spots in all of Hinduism. We talked of the ending year, his new job, moving to a new city far from family, Calcutta and finding out shortly after his love of four years was engaged and in love with someone else. “I’m numb to it now and want to start over.” I sat listening and nodding as I looked out over the lake.  He was heading to Delhi New Years to meet a new girl. We laughed in that in both of our two week trips we each packed 2 pairs of jeans. Whereas I was switching mine each day, he was saving one pair just to see the girl and look good.

He was heading to Ajmer, to see the tomb of Sufi mystic where it is said that if you say prayer there it will come true, only if you don’t tell anyone. At the bus stand I gave him back his bag and with a handshake passed him my prayer to relay.

3. “Do you have any siblings? What are their names?” And that since I was the oldest, how I was told countless times that I was in a position of responsibility and trailblazing. The wayward one.  

I found myself talking about my family to complete strangers. Alone, And though I had made it conscious to decision to pretend Christmas was cancelled this year (and this was easy to do because I didn’t see any decorations or hear any music), I talked of my brother following my dad’s footsteps to a be firefighter, my sister at school in Portland. And all my friends and family I missed deeply from the way I could picture their laughs in the moments I wish I could share with them.

Outside Jodhpur in the 28 caste villages, I visited the home of the Bishnoi people and their unique branch of Hinduism that reveres nature even to the extent of self sacrifice, as had happened hundreds of years ago when the Maharaja came to the village to fell the holy kherji trees, and while the men were away in the fields, over 300 women and children were slaughtered as they circled the trees in prayer to shield them.

I woke the morning of my 25^th birthday in the Vishnoi village on the fringes of the Thar Desert. With the youngest son’s help, I rode the motorcycle through the village, complete with stalls, fumbling the clutch and sending the bike thumping when in the wrong gear. He reached from behind to honk the horn as we dodged goats, donkeys, roosters and cows. Much different than the first time I drove a bike in the backwoods of Maine.

The slow morning bled into a red afternoon of bidis and masala chai. I intended to write in my journal on the village mat I laid on in the courtyard. But I handed my journal to the children at my feet to draw in and write their names in Hindi as I fell asleep, waking to a perfect big eared caricature.

I had a change of plans and found my entire second half of the trip was open. “How long is this bus?” I asked a man loading his family into the bus I decided to take and head south in the direction of an eventual flight back to Bangalore I had to catch in a few days. “8-9 hours,” my face said it all. “It’s actually a good thing, we will get there when the sun is coming up, any earlier and you will freeze to death.” 

We got there at 5 am and I thought I really would freeze. Die on my first full day as a 25 year old. I called the homestay I was staying at, apologizing it was early but wondering if I could get a bed to sleep. I came over and there were no free rooms so he allowed me into the family wing and made up a bed. He turn kept apologizing because it was one of the hard rigid village style beds. I didn’t mind, told him I had slept many nights on these just fine, and passed out until the family life was playing out in front of me and the sun was coming through the windows.

I wandered around the alleys and rooftops of Udaipur the next two day and the nights drove me back inside the homestay where in the courtyard fire I sat with his family around the fire. The mother of the owner continued to feed me though I begged her I was full. They told me of their family, the haveli which had been in their family for almost 200 years. The son and owner had recently married, they handed me their baby to play with. He was a tour guide in the city and spoke of the Mewar horses, the car collection of the king full MGs, Rolls Royce and Bugattis, Hinduism and his late 20s in learning of my bday. A conversation that went late into the evening and left me sore from smiling and laughing.   

I eventually made my way south to the neighboring state of Gujarat to stick with my original return flight through Mumbai to Bangalore. On New Year ’s Day I just so happened to be a few kilometers from Gandhi’s home and Ashram along the river, and in the place where he stood each morning and evening in reflection, thought of everything.

Don't Worry Be Hampi

The train pulled into Hospet after 3 am and I opened the latch, and with half my body leaning out and bag slung over one shoulder, shawl tailing out the open door for several feet and whipping in the night air, I hoped out of the moving train and onto the deserted platform. Under yellow lights and stars I could make out a few bodies of individuals and families sleeping on the ground around the station and quietly passed them to awaiting tuktuk.

There was only one awaiting already fully loaded with a family, so I sat upfront on the single seat meant for the driver, with the father of the family sitting on his opposite side. I kept making funny faces to the baby in the backseat, who smiled under her blankets.

We dropped them off a few kilometers away and continued the next ten kms with me in the backseat, leaning out of the car as he smoked his bidi and the embers flew about the tuktuk, just so I could see the moon. I stopped leaning out though after a ravenous stray charged our auto, jaws chomping and the tuktuk jerking violently to avoid him with an evasiveness reserved not even for dodging potholes.

He dropped me off at the entrance of 100 feet tall pyramidal entrance of the Virupaksha temple where a hundred pilgrims slept under blankets. In the morning the temple gate would open and river would be free to cross. So I slept.  

I woke up and looked around sometime after sunrise; all were awake except for a few. Monkeys were running around everywhere disturbing those that still slept. I paid 50 rupees to enter the 700 temple of the god of destruction, and after passing before the Deity, dropped another 5 rupees down the trunk of the temple elephant Lakshmi, who passed it to his caretaker and returned her trunk to my forehead for a blessing.  

On the edge of the town begin the ruins of deserted bazaar. A level marketplace outlined by stone corridors overgrown with weeds. Here merchants from all over Indo-China once exchanged goods and openly sold emeralds and rubies. At its edge lay another temple and path through a set of switchbacks behind a mountain, which eventually cut off the view of the new bazaar and sight of moving people in the distant village. Succulents, oaks, thistles and brush between precarious boulders that formed valleys, ridges, and mountains that looked of the sand castles you make on the beach as the sand dribbles out and accumulates in round balls. Each turn revealed hidden temples and outposts. I passed through an old temple ground complete with several buildings, with no company but a half a dozen holy men in orange robes who floated by.

I climbed the mountain and sat on a ledge overlooking the river to the left, the temple grounds below and plantain groves and coconut trees alongside a stream to the right. I had run out of water so headed down another way to the village, fell asleep while awaiting food on a comfy pillow floor, and made my way to cross the river.

There I met an Indian girl, a rare talkative solo traveler, and we talked on the river steps next to bathing men, women spreading linens out in the sun, and kids running around. After the boat ride she asked me to join her for lunch so I ate again. Her friend came and she told me to join them at the lake, as they left on a moped. I checked in my room by the rice paddy fields and within ten minutes was on a bike heading out of the village, past goat and cattle herders, hunched over men carrying bundles of weeds on their backs and a sickle from their hip, and a lonesome white donkey walking all alone on a dirt road. I explored the alcoves of the lake but never found them. Instead on a rock face two men who, though we shared no similar language, motioned me to join them over their makeshift dinner of rice as I came out of an outcropping. And so I joined them, with a wagging tail stray next us, and none of us spoke, just smiles. They encouraged me to eat more rice from the open bag where the three of us ate with your hands and scooped handfuls of mint rice with curd and peanuts up. They sprawled out after on the rock, to watch the sun dip below the ridge and wanted me to stay, but I wanted to drive the bike back while it was still light. Dodging potholes, cattle and cars is hard enough when you can’t drive in the day.

Back at the guest house, in an open air terrace of pillows and candles and hammocks, I motioned for a beer and hoped the boulder wall for a better view of the sunset over the raised rice paddy fields and river. Overhead herons flew, dogs played in the fields, and I found a Spanish man and Portuguese gal. We talked well until it was dark and they invited me to dinner, to a quiet place they had seen last night, after discovering the owner drunk and passed out in the street and kids standing over him laughing and poking him. They carried him into his guest house and got to talking with the family. There we ate a meal of thali and the kids came in and fell asleep where they dropped. The power cut and we continued conversing over candlelight. It came back on, and the three of us sat as the family relaxed next to us, the wife and husband watching a black and white TV, while the kids slept about her, later whimpering as she lifted them and put them to bed.

I thought of waking up as we pulled into the driveway after driving back from seeing grandma in LA. And standing on the toilet seat to get a piggyback ride from mom or dad to bed.

The mosquitoes came out, and I thought of how after dinner my dad would take us to nearby Christopher Park and when we felt our first bites, we walked back happy.  

I woke in the morning to a message from the Indian girl to meet her early afternoon, before the last boat to cross the river, which I planned to take to catch my bus in Hospet back to Bangalore. I checked out and chucked my bag in the corner where other backpacks piled up and got back on the bike, and at the village intersection turned right for Hanuman’s birthplace temple, the Monkey God, principle character of the Ramayana epic. At the top the morning breeze met and cooled my sweat. A barren tree with ribbons billowing in the wind. Monkeys gorging on offerings of bananas. Next to it stood a cement pinnacle with a circle stone at its base that worshippers placed their hands around, and a miniature cave with three deities decorated in flowers and bindi, the markings of a thousand oil candles and incense and ash on the floor. The temple was white and red on the exterior, and the inside had a papier-mâché look of metallic gray paint and red and blue markings, with chants and a layer of undisturbed smoke of incense and candles at its ceiling. We approached the deity on hands and knees and stood whisking the rising incense in our face in commune with the divine, and after a series of prostrations and bows, I stood alone as the room cleared. In a state of meditative trance, watering eyes I get when I can’t explain something beautiful, all tampered by a subduing equanimity.

“Where are you from?” asked the attending holy man that stood next to the deity, overseeing a table of donations, coconut water, sugar, leaves, red kumkum, and clay oil lamps.

“America.”

“Here, please” and he poured the holy water in my hand to drink and run the remaining through my long hair, and parting my hair, with thumb marked me with a  red bindi and turned to the wall and rubbed the remaining powder on the wall, streaked with a  thousand red marks from previous pilgrims.

As I made my way down the white steps behind me I heard the cheerful sing-song voice of Hingilish children ask all those they passed “Helloooo, where you frommmm?” As I stood on an overlook the two girls passed me and asked, I answered and gave them slight bow and “Ram Ram, Namaste” to their delight. They motioned for a picture, hoped over eagerly after to inspect it, and went about skipping hand and hand down the steps, stopping in conversation with old women holding their sarees as they climbed.

I took the bike further down the road to Anegundi, passed small villages and terraced paddy fields with boulders sprinkled about. Anegundi was on the smallest villages I have yet to see, and as it was Sunday, the dirt streets were quiet but for children everywhere playing in the streets.

Bought a coconut for 20 rupees that the man spun in his hand as he sliced it open for me to drink. Walked alongside the river, exchanging greetings with all that smiled my way. The banks were covered in thickets. There was an opening on a flat rock where women washing dishes and clothes talked, and I sat alongside the river. I later found the circular boats of intertwined reeves docked and lapping in the water, and climbed into one and fell asleep the sound of the river, playing kids, and roosters. 

I made my way back to Hampi early afternoon to meet the Indian girl. “You should stay another night, don’t leave yet.” She said what I had been thinking all day. So, I did. I skipped my bus, took her up on her offer to stay the night with her, and made plans to meet her later that evening after she said bye to her friends.

I had found a small eat on the outskirts of town near the river earlier in the day while joy riding, so went there for a meal of Aloo Gobo, cauliflower in gravy, and chapatti. At the foot of his restaurant was a path, he said after dinner it was the best place to see the sunset. As I climbed I found a company of other travelers up there, and barefoot children jumping boulders carrying insulated jugs of chia, the Indian mainstay tea, effortlessly following them. I cut open my hand as I slipped on a boulder, and the blood looked even redder and pure against the setting sun.  

We met up later, I showered to clean the dirt and blood out. We talked on the porch till the last of the daylight disappeared and then walked around the guest houses and their restaurants on the street, while on the opposite side stood paddy fields that softly reflected stars and moon, and housed a symphony of crickets and other company.

On our way back to the room we found a few foreigners she had met earlier on her trip outside their rooms so we joined them. The power was out again and the only light came from the candles and their smokes.

In the morning I rented a bike again from a ten year old kid, and without any exchange of information or ID, just 200 rupees, I took her to Anegundi. She was doing a report on cottage industries rival, namely community art forms that have been threatened to the point of extinction in many villages. Whereas Channapatna near Bangalore continues to make wooden toys that she remembers playing with in her childhood, or Jaipur in Rajasthan is known for block printing like the shirt she wore yesterday, Anegundi is known for banana fiber products. Here, a woman has dedicated her life to reviving the craft and even founded an eco-heritage nonprofit not only to support the local women working in the trade, but to safeguard the village ruins, promote sustainable living, and foster community centric economic development. She invited the two of us to lunch in a friend’s garden, that with the sound of the birds, magpies, laurels and many others I don’t know mixed with the laughter of the school kids next door during recess.

After lunch we decided to split for a little bit, while she interviewed some of the women and spoke to the director of the nonprofit. Over her shoulder during lunch I saw a stone path that bent behind a tree through the garden so, leaving my sandals behind that I had taken off before lunch, I decided to follow it. The path led out of the garden to a flat rock with pink, purple, green sarees spread in the sun drying, and a littering of kids clothes. To the right was a rock ledge I hoped and through the brush, sat on a boulder overlooking a rice paddy field. This field led to another, and another, and I followed on the compacted mud paths with imprints of feet and hooves. Soon I was on a dirt road, and I kept walking, past a cow herder who motioned to me. He didn’t speak English, but he pointed to my pocket hearing a sound and I pulled out a bell, the same worn by cows and goat. I had bought it yesterday in the bazaar from a lady under a Banyan tree who sold coins from the East India Company, Pre-Independence era and Nehru’s time. The lady didn’t have change so she pointed to the bell. Perfect, I thought. I had had a bell on my camping bag since the Rockies to warn bears we were coming but had ripped it off before Rajasthan. This will do. I forgot I had left it in my jeans, not noticing the jingles as I walked, jumped and climbed about. He smiled when I pulled out the bell. Then motioned for a smoke, so we both did, in the middle of his herd, and then parted ways. I walked through the grazing fields, saw a rock cropping and began to climb and leap from one boulder to another. I saw in the distance a temple of the same stone and made my way. Under crumbling arches and the empty nests of the deities in the temple’s inner sanctum, I sat. To the west stood a formidable ridge and the remnants of the old cities defensive parameter, and another abandoned temple. I traced my barefoot meditative steps back to her, and found her in the village on the dirt porch of a woman’s house surrounded by four sitting older women all seated differently. In a dirt intersection where a man reading a paper manned his both, a dog slept on a pile, and another grouping of old ladies sat talking on an opposite porch. And old roadsters passed, goats and barefoot kids.

Back in Hampi I waited for the boat in the hammock sipping a mango lassi, watching red ants with the sun behind them illuminating them, as they crossed a clothes line. We crossed the river and shared  a ride to Hospet. She had a 7 pm train and me a 10:30 pm bus. At a train crossing, the idling tuktuks and bikes spewed petrol in the cold night air. In our open air tuktuk, next to us inches away where others, piled with families, children, men on bikes. And she sang a Hindi song about love in my ear. We parted at rail station and I bummed around Hospet for a little in search of food and clean clothes for the 9 hour night sleeper bus. And in the end, just stood at a wooden shack with sheets of tobacco pouches and jars of treats, with a few men watching an old film, and with a chia in my hand and a shawl wrapped around my head, sipped and sighed.