My friend Spencer expressed something to me exactly as I had thought—in India, it’s impossible to take a bad picture. It is, I would add, also impossible to capture an Indian moment inside a picture. As telling as it is to take a photo of a beggar or a street performer, I wish I could also capture a shot of the on-lookers with looks that range from reproach to indifference to a smooth interest in me—one in a million momentary tourists who come to India to have their lives shaped, yet leave little impression on the county herself.
Holi is the Spring festival of India. Though traditionally Hindu, one gets the feeling that no one withholds from the celebrations. Without even walking out of my guest house on Holi, I had to make haste to evade the desk clerk, who anxiously awaited his chance to be the first to smear me with the bright pigments that signify a new flowering in the spring time. I avoided Karuna, the woman who runs the kitchen in the guest house next door where I ate my breakfast, knowing that her perseverance in smearing me with colors would outlast my playful, if stubborn, resistance. A friend asked Karuna if the traditional smearing of pigments on people was a form of blessing on Holi, Karuna chuckled out a soft “Nooooo….”—a surprising answer in a land where everything seems to have some spiritual significance.
Then we actually made it out to the streets. Some older locals had warned many of the remaining Art of Living Westerners to basically make camp in our rooms and not to go outside at any cost. We were told to buy fruits, water, and crackers to last several days. Fearful stories of people getting their pants pulled down and all sorts of mayhem circulated. The universal idiom of Holi is, “Don’t wear your Sunday’s finest.” However, it is, of course, tradition to wear white.
The shops in Rishikesh were gated shut, an interesting scene in a town I had never seen slow down. From the alleyways and rooftops, and hiding around corners, people of all ages waited to douse passers-by with pigments and water balloons and follow these up with roaring laughter and an affectionate hug. Our plan had been to hike up the foothills to Neelkanth Temple, said to be a sacred site of one event or another in the endless history of Hinduism. Before getting to our meeting point, I was soaking wet in spots and had at least five distinct colors across my face and clothing. Doubt set in as to how sound our plans were.
Once meeting, we moved together as a group of six or seven for no more than 15 minutes before the chaotic bombardment of water balloons split our group up. Still with two friends, we bought seats in a ten-seater (though the name may be deceiving, it’s actually a normal Jeep) and took a sleepy, scarry, and, for my friends, nauseating trip one hour into the Himalayan foothills. The temple itself was almost completely not noteworthy.
I bought a “Puja thali” from the vendors outside, (an arrangement of traditional offerings) and, entering the temple, a priest mechanically told me how to offer each item. Feeling somewhat uninspired at the end of the two or three minute offertory, I asked if I could chant y own puja. Receiving the Indian head nod, I started into a Shiva puja, not two minutes into the prayers, the priest tapped me on the shoulder and urged me onward—the next pilgrim had come with his thali. None of us speaking Hindi or really knowing what this temple was dedicated to, we bounced through the few rooms, doing our best to take the prasadam and darshans of whatever it was the temple had to offer, and we retired to a room that seemed forgotten by the other devotees so that we could meditate.
As we navigated our way out of the complex, we passed a horrible scene of a bunch of insensitive Indian men joking and celebrating around a terrified monkey that they had chained by the throat. The monkey shrieked and pushed violently to get away from the men who really seemed to be getting a great joy out of it. My blood boiled. I was of course ready to smack the men, but thought that I might be just a little more acceptable to the conservative Hindu society if I left nonviolently. Even as I write this I question what I really should have done. “It seems so ridiculous to start an animal rights project in India,” I reflected with one of my friends while we walked away, “when so much needs to be done with human rights here.”
Leaving the temple was really the best part. Escaping the hillsides of trash and debris which surround any “civilized” part of India, the refuse does relent to breathtaking views of surrounding valleys and foothills. The walk back to Rishikesh is a three- or four-hour walk at a strolling pace; as paths wind back and forth to go either up or down a hillside, the distance must be at least double or triple the distance that the bird flies.
As we reached the bottom of the foothills and came within a kilometer or two of the Swargashram section of the city, we chanced upon a path that took us to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Maharishi’s ashram has been closed for many years, supposedly due to some tax problems, and is now under the possession of the national parks, though no one is allowed admission (at least not unless they bribe the self-appointed guard of the ashram.) This is the ashram that was home to Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation retreats in the late 60s, and saw visits from the Beach Boys and Mia Farrow and, most famously, the Beatles (a sign by a local café points up the hill and reads “Beatles’ Ashram, 100m.”)
Many of Art of Living’s earliest American teachers were originally involveds with Maharishi’s TM movement. HH Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, our affectionate “Guruji” in the Art of Living was in charge of many of Maharishi’s affairs from a young age. Even the meditation technique espoused by the Art of Living, Sahaj Samadhi Meditation, is likened to a powerful (and less expensive) version of Transcendental Meditation. For the Art of Living Westerner in Rishikesh, Maharishi’s ashram is one of the most exciting spots of pilgrimage—many of us had been buzzing about attempts at getting through the gates or past the guard.
Entering on our accidental path through the back gate, we only had to step over a three foot tall broken down wall to enter. The ashram is beautiful. It is a real travesty that the government will no longer sell the ashram to anyone. The visitor is left with the impression that this is the most recent of India’s priceless and only partially forgotten ruins. Vines growing up the sides of beautiful halls and kutirs, fallen trees across paths and once stunning brick walkways that are giving way to the grasses growing in their gaps beckon one to think of the days when month-long meditation retreats pushed the participants’ limits of four and five and six hours of Transcendental Meditation a day. Why couldn’t John and Paul’s patron “Fool on the Hill” have paid his taxes?
The front entrance to Maharishis’ ashram, which we made way to exit through, was, to my dismay, much better maintained. My friends headed for the hole in the gate, getting ready to slip through, and I looked at that askance and thought, “No way am I stuffing my ass through that.” I gave my friends my bags and said I would jump over the wall. To save further explanation, I didn’t land well. A humble crack and a numb sensation, not ready to take in the pain, were all I really noticed.
I pushed my weight onto my left leg and tried to sit down gracefully, as one of my friends yelled, “Just sit down!” I hobbled over to a café once I thought I could get up, we had been planning on having our dinner. However, as I pushed myself along using the ball of my right heel, I thought to myself how common it is in my family to not go to the doctor when we actually very much need to. “Umm,” I interrupted nervously as we neared the café gates, “I think I should probably suck up my pride and go to the hospital.”
“For real?”
“Umm… yeah…”
“Well, let’s sit down and see how you feel, then we can arrange everything.”
Sitting down (the picture of me all Holi-ed out is taken right at this moment) I actually started to feel all the pain that had been numb to me before. Tears of pain and frustration began to well up. “I should get going now…” We got a motorcycle to take me to the taxi stand, and an autorickshaw brought me to the (ominously named, if you are as skeptical as I am) Government Hospital. With my pronounced limp, I walked by more than one idle person and wheel chair and plopped myself down in the emergency room, the pain again flooding to my attention.
“What you need?” “I sprained my ankle…” Trying not to scream.
“So, what you need?” “I need an X-Ray, I need a leg brace, I need to see a doctor.”
“Oh, X-Ray not possible, today is Sunday.” It was Wednesday. “Take off,” pointing to my sock, “Let me see.”
I pealed off my sock, soaking wet from the melted ice (from the café.) And showed them my bloated, dead looking ankle.
“Hanh, Swollen.” The doctor wrote me a prescription for what turned out to be anti-inflammatory and pain-killer.
“I need and X-Ray.”
“X-Ray not possibly, today Sunday.”
“The guy’s not here?” I gestured in circles, frustrated and still on the verge of tears.
“Guy not here. Come back tomorrow. X-Ray I can’t do, but anteshtetic, I can do, here.” Handing me the paper.
“Okay, okay, I need a brace. Hard brace for my ankle.”
A blank expression. “A brace—like a cast, stop the movement in my ankle.”
“No. Cast comes after X-Ray, tomorrow.”
I tried to draw a picture of an ankle brace.
“Ah. Use bandage. I’ll write prescription.”
He added an ace bandage to the “prescription” and I walked out of the clinic, too infuriated to actually ask for the wheel chair, but in far too much pain to really resist the flow of events. Buying the drugs and bandage from the Chemist across the street, I took an autorickshaw to the ashram. Putting myself back in the hands of Art of Living was a great move. Before even walking to Guruji’s kutir, I was intercepted by a friend from the States. “What happened to you?”
Now the tears were more ready to flow. “I sprained my ankle at Maharishi’s ashram.”
“You shouldn’t be walking around! Come, sit!”
Without too much desire to defend my actions and the flow of events, I kind of collapsed into the care of friends. Within a few minutes a Swami was giving me a healing blessing, an ayurvedic (traditional Indian herbal) doctor was looking at my ankle and using marma (acupressure) points and a car was being arranged to take me to have my ankle X-Rayed and treated.
We went to a walk in X-Ray clinic and walked out with two X-Rays in less than fifteen minutes and for less that $4. The Osteopath at a local ashram hospital was called in at eight or nine PM on a holiday night for consultation, and a half-caste (to allow for swelling) was put on my leg. The official word: I have a fractured tibia, right at the ankle where it comes in medially. The piece of bone is disconnected, so they want to check on it after a week before putting on the permanent cast. I am Casualty #577 at Nirmal Ashram Hospital, or so says my perscription to take anti-inflammatories, elevate my foot, and keep wiggling my toes.
Anyway, total service. Life is now a bit different. I spend most of my days sitting at a local guesthouse, reading, relaxing, and listening to music. I’ve been able to get much more into the text part of my study here, which is good, breaks up the flow of meditation courses I’d been on and the anticipated volunteer work I’ll be doing in Bangalore. As I’ve commiserated with friends, there’s a big part of me that is just screaming, “I want my Mommy!” and I’ve been somewhat filled with doubts, thinking maybe it is time to head back to the States and that being temporarily handicapped in India will be completely unbearable.
I notice that so much of my security, so much of my sense of being taken care of as I travel is actually a sense of being able to take care of myself. Now, I find that I must have a more fundamental security and work through the uncomfortable notion of not knowing where help will come from. Day by day I watch friends leave Rishikesh and I see them off with uneasy smiles, silently thinking, “How the hell am I going to get by?” I suppose that everyone is used to being able to care for themselves, but it’s a matter of opening up and just stating whatever it is that I need, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me to ask for it. Cognitively, I know I can’t jump up and do a small chore when I feel restless, and I can’t make up for rough communications or relationships with people by walking out and buying them something, or taking care of their material needs myself. What I mean to say is that I realize, on some level, that I am used to being able to be these external things, sometimes even as a way to ignore or distract from the (in Eastern thought, “All-important”) mental or emotional states I may be experiencing. As I reflected with a friend the other day as dusk set in on our guesthouse, “I am left with this question, ‘Who am I when I am not my actions?” And in some way, my life has become that of an observer. So I wait and wait for my leg to heal.
I have gone out and done one amazingly interesting thing in the past few days. Yesterday I had my astrological charts made and analyzed for the first time. The Indian science of Jyotish incorporates (and predates) what we normally think of as Astrology and Palmistry in the West but it also borders with energy work, Ayurveda (the aforementioned Indian science of health), and Vastu Shastra, the Indian predecessor to Feng Shui. Jyotish is, to say the least, pervasive in India. In the closure to John Keay’s Into India, which I finished reading last night, Keay calls Jyotish “That most Indian of sciences,” and refers to its endless refusal to be understood or simplified. Jyotish is referred to for ever moderately significant business decisions, life-problems, and, probably most famously, for marriages—arranged or otherwise.
A merchant who has befriended most of the Art of Living Westerners who passed through Rishikesh, not excluding myself, took me to the Jyotish. It was his long time friend’s home—a small ashram and school where boys are adopted from villages in the surrounding areas to be given a chance at succeeding in modern city life. We sat down in a beautiful living room in her home in the ashram, and she called for someone to bring chai as we waited for Uncle to come down. (Most elderly and respected men in India are called “Uncle” by almost everyone who meets them. This, at least, makes remembering their name easier.) The experience was wonderful. We informally talked about my charts, and, to my wonder, Uncle would burst out with a long talk about something in Hindi, seemingly a revelation, and, in time, one of my friends would give a simplified English version of whatever Uncle had said. It was mostly a time for me to reflect on myself and my life, however, it was also an amazing peak into part of India that I had not yet tried to learn. I left dizzy with knowledge and very excited about what I’d learned. That night I opened a book on Jyotish written for Westerner’s to check one thing that the Jyotish had mentioned, and I realized how amazingly complex the science really was. Inundated with Sanskrit terms I’d never caught wind of before, I shut the book, glad for how simplified my introduction had been.
Today I began to read V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinees Now. I am pressing onward in my attempts to try to understand Indian society and social groups. My original goal was to analyze spiritual communities in India, yet from the outset I seemed to recognize that what I needed to come to terms with most was the society itself. When so much of India is foreign to the visitor, even acquiring the barebones understanding that I currently have has been dizzying. Though I do like all the books I’ve read thus far, Naipaul’s book promises to be more comprehensive than Dalrymple’s Age of Kali, or MacDonald’s Holy Cow (and more serious than the later) and, at least, more up-to-date than John Keay’s (1973) Into India. Also, as I remarked proudly to a friend over breakfast today, “Yep, this is serious… this is the first book that doesn’t have a map of India in it.” I smiled widely, “You know, because they trust that you know where everything is…”
