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.
-----
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 25th
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.
