Claudi and I left Jaisalmer on a night train to Jodhpur, where we grappled with the aggressive noise and bustle (still shell-shocked and timid from 10 days of quiet, slow village life) for a whole 11 hours before hopping on an evening bus to Udaipur. The bus jolted and bumped up across some mountains in the dark, and I sat white-knuckled and lock-kneed, leaning into each turn and willing the wheels away from the edge of the narrow, rocky strip of pavement. When we arrived in Udaipur, it was around 11:30 PM, and the prepaid taxi counter (where you can get a fair fare of 50 rupees to anywhere in town) was closed; our first impression was a rickshaw driver twisting our arms for a 250 rupee fare. We bargained and haggled and whittled him down to the normal fare, but when he delivered us to the hotel we had to fight to get him to stick to the agreed-upon price. We slept and rose in the morning to roam the city.
Is this what the Lonely Planet does to a city? Udaipur is a weird, sad place, distinctly segregated into a tourist playground in the once-romantic, charming Old City, and a real, plain and garish, loud and smelly Indian city. Our hotel was well outside the tourist area, so we walked through the real city on our way to the area surrounding the mammoth City Palace. It's as though someone flips a switch as you turn onto Lake Palace Road from the main thoroughfares; all of a sudden the signs are in English, and every shop is selling the gamut of bottled waters, toilet paper, postcards, 'handicrafts', miniature paintings, jooti (pointed Rajasthani sandals), Ali Baba trousers and paisley scarves for foreigners. Cyber cafes, rooftop restaurants, Your Best Stay in Udaipur! Indian Cooking Lessons! Touts and rickshaws and shopkeepers jumping out at you (“Hello what is your name you like pretty shirt I give you very good price!”--all one sentence). I realize that tourism brings a lot of money to a place, but here it doesn't seem to improve the lives of the most, and instead it causes people to scrabble, wheedle, and con to get every last rupee. It has made a lot of the places I've visited very ugly, the steady flow of foreigners who don't understand the way this culture works. Not that I do...I felt guilty for what has happened to Udaipur, which was a really lovely place once, I'm sure, even though it's not my fault. To me it felt colonial and dirty, the white Europeans coming to town to get their shoes shined and their backs massaged and their hands decorated with henna by the dark-skinned, head-bobbing, obsequious natives.
Claudi and I were both disillusioned with the city—I might even say I was disenchanted, Udaipur—but we still managed to have a good time, and we stayed there for four days deciding our next move. We took a few yoga classes with a kind and welcoming man who teaches for donations. The classes were pleasant and interesting but not particularly inspiring, though I learned some simple new postures to help with digestion. We ate our breakfasts at little eateries whose existence is perfectly summed up with the title “Hole in the Wall”--niches just big enough for benches and narrow tables crammed together, with a specialized cooking station cranking out one or two delicious dishes in alarming quantities for 10 or 20 rupees a plate. If you want parantha or puri with dal and curd, you go to one little hole in the wall; if you want lemon rice or samosa, you go to another. We drank heavenly sugarcane juice in the shade outside the Sajjan Nivas city garden, freshly squeezed by fantastic machines like tabletop printing presses with roaring engines. We took a lesson on painting henna with an artist sitting on the floor in the Namaste Cafe; he liked us, I guess, because we agreed on a price for 1 hour's teaching and after two and a half hours he would only accept what we'd agreed upon. And we discovered the best eats in Rajasthan, at Bawarchi restaurant, a bustling diner-like place, where the food is guaranteed delicious and bottomless and the tables are in constant rotation. The thali arrives, a large round silver platter with small silver cups, and one by one the waiters come to dollop something on your plate: one waiter handles rice, one handles dal and raita, while another keeps your plate full of three different vegetable curries and someone else flips fresh chapati onto your plate every time he passes. We were monstrously hungry, but we had to beg and plead with them to stop refilling our plates after we'd eaten our fill. We ate there two nights, because we knew immediately there were no better options. The place was clearly the local favorite, and rightly so.
We took a day trip to Ranakpur, an intricately styled Jain temple supported by 1,444 hand-carved marble pillars, none of which are the same, a feat of skill and devotion that left me in awe. It was a place of peace, a place that gave me (as I expressed it to Claudi) a “fullness in my heart” The place was stark white and bore no decoration beyond the architecture itself and the saffron-and-sandalwood paste dabbed ritually on the foreheads and bodies of the Jain idols. Still, though, I tbreathed with a life and a joy that made it feel more open, relaxed, and welcoming than the dark and cloistering churches and cathedrals I've seen in Russia and Italy. The wind blew freely through the open structure. It felt ancient, but also timeless. The word devotion began to get lodged in my head.
Finally Claudi and I parted, she making a last-minute decision to board a bus to Ambaji and then Kutch, the Wild West of Gujarat, and I similarly deciding, finally, at the bus stand, to go to Palitana. In one day I traveled from the hills of Southern Rajasthan down across the table-top flat expanse of the Saurashtra peninsula, 7 hours from Udaipur to Ahmedabad and 5 hours from Ahmedabad to Palitana. We hugged in the aisle of my bus and exchanged a hurried goodbye; the last I saw of her she was still asking everyone with any reason to know, in a slow and clear German-accented voice, about the bus routes from Ambaji. I don't think it occurs to her to be scared.
Just. Like. That. I was alone again, after almost 3 weeks of her company, at the mercy of India. Luckily, India is very merciful. My newfound head-wiggling skills won me smiles and reciprocal head-wiggles (the quintessentially Indian gesture of good will), and the folks around me were kind and generous. My neighbors shared their orange with me, and fellow passengers invited me to their home to meet their families and have dinner. I declined as politely as I know how, and all the same one of the men helped me to find my next bus in Palitana, wiggling his head all the while. On the bus to Palitana, nobody spoke English, not even the bus driver, but it turned out fun and fine. I remember worrying about traveling in India with no Hindi, and now I see how unfounded my concern was. In a larger city, where you're likely to be cheated or you or your property to be harmed, someone will always speak enough English. And in small towns, off the tourist beat, Indians are, by & large, not dangerous. They are kind, friendly, respectful, caring, and helpful almost to a fault. There are those who will cheat and steal, but people here care for each other unbelievably. I remember, also, being chastised by a babushka on my train from Moscow to Kiev for leaving my backpack unattended for a moment. And for good reason—Russians are often dangerous. But here I feel no need to lock my door. It's not a question of poverty—people here are poorer by far—instead it seems to be a matter of dignity, hospitality, and straight-up brotherly love.
I took a room at the Hotel Sumeru for 100 rupees a night and slept peacefully and happily.
Palitana is a pilgrimage site for Jains, because of the hilltop temple complex at Shetrunjay / Shatrunjaya mountain, which lies at the top of 3,300 stone steps built into the side of the hill. It takes about an hour to climb, without stopping, and most people have to stop along the way. Shatrunjaya is also the reason I came here. I set out on my first morning looking for breakfast, thinking I'd start the trek in the afternoon, but the streets flow like a river to the base of the hill, and I found myself pulled there. I surrendered. A young man named Pawas showed me around the temples at the bottom of the ascent and tied a beaded bracelet on my wrist for good luck. I dlimbed it! When I wandered through the temples at the top I was awed, again, by the devotion. The ways we worship, I thought like a mantra, The names we call god.
Here at Shatrunjaya all those many carvings on the temple walls—ecstatic dancers, musicians and laughing bodies in joyous motion—seem to make sense. At Ranakpur, with its warm and peaceful silence, there were no such carvings—and that also felt right. But here the air was filled with bells and music, bright and celebratory chants and songs with harmonium, tambourine, sitar-like stringed instruments, many voices echoing up through the maze of temple shrines to the vibrant blue sky. The shouts and prayers of pilgrims and devotees blanket the place, and the carved dancers seem to laugh along, moving with the rhythm of some god's love. The offerings of puja, from coconuts and melons to sweets and incense, flowers perfuming the air, intricate images of holy symbols drawn with colored rice, the bright orange and saffron yellow of the monks' draped uniforsm—this place felt alive with color, lights, belief, love. Each visitor was deep in their own expression of devotion, carrying trays of offerings from idol to idol, sitting with tiny tables in front of selected shrines. The ways we worship, the names we call god.
Some people stay in a dharamsala, a pilgrims' rest-house, for one month to perform the arduous pilgrimage of 99 treks up and down the mountain. That's 3 or 4 every day. Those who are weak or injured and unable to climb up themselves can hire, for an exorbitant fee, a dholi, a chair suspended from a bamboo pole, carried by two to four people (men or women).
I came to a little bit of magic just as I was about to leave, when a young man pointed out a Muslim temple built a little apart from the Jain complex, but inside the main wall. I checked it out—an open courtyard in white and green, round, with niches like coffin-shaped cupboards in the walls, each filled with bedding and personal possessions. A man slumbering in the courtyard rose and invited me to sit, explaining that the Muslims who had come to Palitana in ages past had set up camp there, with their leader stating that “Adinath”, the ringleader of the Jain gods, and “Allah” are different names for the same god. Ahmedkah, the Muslim mystic, the crazy old saddhu, invited me to eat lunch, and we passed around a little stone chillum. We got high and met god, meditated, drank chai, and the other woman sitting with us, Bijia, saw that I have no jewelry and gifted me to bejewelled bangles from her own wrist. I decided to come back up before I leave Palitana, to say hello and goodbye and pay my respects again. (Today I began the ascent at 7:30 AM and had breakfast with Ahmedkah and his family. I carried my ukulele up the mountain to sing him Cat Stevens--"If you want to sing out..." He sang me "We shall overcome" in Hindi.)
The walk back down was difficult, with the wide stone steps encouraging you to run down and my rubber sandals chafing at my feet. I took them off when blisters formed and ran down barefoot. Pawas found me at the bottom of the hill and brought me to his friend Bharat's English class for children, where I sat and talked for 3 hours with students from age 7 to 17, asking and answering questions. Bharat's wife Kujbu invited me for dinner, and Pawas picked me up to listen to some music at a Jain temple in town. He dropped me back at the Hotel Sumeru, exhausted and bewildered and full of magic, and I staggered to bed. People are generous and whole-hearted here.
The next day Bharat picked me up in the morning and I spent the whole day talking with his students, with a new class assembling every hour. They asked me innocent and piercing questions: “What is the name of your god?” (The Earth, I say) “From which caste do you come?” (No caste, I say) “Why did you come to India?” (I can't answer) Kujbu and Bharat fed me lunch as well, and I practiced kite-flying with Kujbu and their 4-year-old daughter Nensy (which is a sweet misspelling of Nancy). Kujbu is a beautician; she does bridal makeup, hair, and mehndi—henna tattoos. She offered to mark my hands.
On my last day in Jaisalmer, 8 days ago, I walked to the lake and watched pedalboats wander bewildered on the water's surface, and I wrote in my journal what I felt about January 4th, 2012. India owns my body, I wrote; she has marked it for her own. I am swaddled in her cloth, with her leather on my head and feet. Her scarves, draped across my shoulders, her knapsack on my back. Her roiling, clenching sickness in my guts, her spices fiery on my tongue. It's taken less than a month for India to conquer my body, and now she goes to work on my soul, or spirit, or whatever lives inside me. Not the microbes rioting in my intestines, not inside me, but whatever moves my mind and heart.
Today, January 12th, I'm glancing down at my hands, decorated in deep ochre and burnt orange brown, and trying to understand just how conquered I am. India, you are in my skin. You are seeping into my follicles and staining my hands, you are decorating me, the way you claim your own. Mehndi, henna, beauty given as a gift. Adopted, adapted, accepted, allowed.
It's exactly one month today.
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