Change of Plans

I am in a hotel in Delhi recovering from the past few days. Robert and I had colds all the time we were in Varanasi and I had stomach trouble. We were feeling better but the trip from Varanasi to Bodhgaya put us under again. The train was four hours late. We knew when we left the hotel that it was going to be two hours late so we planned accordingly but by the time we arrived at the train station, it was another two hours late. We had reserved seats and the people in the compartment were nice, but Robert’s back was hurting so he climbed up to the bunk above and lay down for most of the trip. It was dark when we arrived and it was a slow and bumpy ride in an auto rickshaw from Gaya where the train station is to Bodhgaya. The good news is that our guest house was spotless, the owners were great and the room was large (largish) and comfortable. However, when we woke up the next day our colds were worse. We went to the temple on the site where the Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. When I was last there in 1998 you could touch the tree and people climbed up and tore off leaves and it looked in very bad condition. It is now fenced off with glass panels so no one cant get to it and the tree is now healthy and beautiful. It is not the original tree but one from a cutting from a tree in Sri Lanka that comes from a cutting of the original tree. The area is large and there are hundreds if not thousands of pilgrims from all over the world chanting in their various languages, meditating, reading, prostrating themselves, and circumambulating the temple and tree. It is a powerful place because of the amount of devotion. Robert is an atheist, occasionally militant, but he too liked the place and went back for a second visit.. On the second day in Bodhgaya both Robert and I came down with a fever and a doctor came to the hotel, pills were administered, and I began to feel better immediately. Robert however threw up his pills as soon as he swallowed them and didn’t take another dose until the morning when he began to feel better. In the afternoon of the third day, I came down with a worse fever and diarrhea and the doctor came again and this time it was shots, one in the behind and one in the hand. The doctor stayed after the shots and in 15 minutes I was feeling better and he left. In the morning I woke up feeling better than I had felt in weeks. I realized that much of my experience of traveling with Robert on this trip had been colored by illness that I wasn’t aware of. I knew I had an almost constant cold but I didn’t realize how ill I had been. After this we began to talk about cutting the trip short and then we received news that Robert’s brother had died. We reserved seats on a plane to New Delhi and left that evening. The plane was four hours late. I received emails telling me this but I didn’t check and my phone had no coverage in Bodhgaya so I didn’t receive their texts. Therefore we waited four hours at the airport. They gave us a terrible boxed lunch. Well, the white bread sandwiches with the unidentifiable spread were terrible. There was also some sort of fritter that was tasty but soggy. The mango juice was OK. I threw most of the meal away. I had my bags of moong dal to sustain me. The food on the plane was better. The bread was still white but it had texture and tasted of yeast. It was spread with very good butter. There was also another fritter but it was warm and there was a tasty dal preparation to go with it and a very sweet sweet. We had booked a hotel from Bodhgaya and went straight from the airport, found the hotel, and collapsed. In the morning, we began the ordeal of finding a plane back to Los Angeles that left that day. There was one at 2 PM that we were hoping he could catch. He called the booking site on which he had booked his return flight using Skype on my iPad. After three hours that consisted mainly of holding, we realized that they could do nothing. They would refund a cancelation fee and return the rest of his ticket, but they needed a death certificate and that hadn’t been issued yet. So we hung up, went on line and found a flight that left about 8 and took about 20 hours with one layover. After Robert had entered the credit card information, the site froze before it could issue the confirmation. That caused a call to American Express to make sure the charge had not gone through. We finally booked him on another 8 o’clock flight with a longer layover. After that, I began working on my return ticket. I found a good flight and everything went well until I realized I had sent them an email address that was the first half of my Gmail account and the second half of my Yahoo account. I sent an email with the correction and within 8 hours I had a confirmation email so I can get through security and get on the plane. I went with Robert to the airport. We took the express subway that works very well. It is world class. Los Angeles should have a system like this one. Everything went well at the airport and I waived good-by to Robert after he had successfully passed the guards at the entrance. I had decided to stay a little longer to finish up Hindi classes, retrieve some stuff I had stored with a friend while we traveled, do some shopping and spend some quiet time digesting this trip. It will take longer than a couple of days, however, despite all the difficulties of this trip, I realize that I enjoy being in India still. I think I can no longer travel at the budget level that Robert and I have been traveling at and I don’t know what that will mean or how often I can afford to come back, but I now think I do want to come back. India in the 21st century is a very interesting place, a combination of the past, present and future that is unlike any place else in the world. The influence of the European and North American countries is very evident. Indians like TV’s, modern appliances, Western clothes, Macdonald’s, KFC and pizza. And the disfunction of the country is constantly evident, yet it works, and it works better now than when I first came here in 1998. I hope I am able to come back and watch India’s transformation into its new self for some years to come. I was going to take a couple of Heritage Walks this weekend but I realized I don’t have the stamina. So I am going to take one more Hindi class, see a friend from the class, do a little shopping and try to keep doing less and noticing more.

Varanasi

Sunday, January 3, 2016, Rahul Guest House, Bodhgaya, Bihar, India. 7:07 AM. Bodhgaya is the place where the Buddha achieved enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi Tree. I am sitting in the open area outside our room. It is cold but I am bundled up. It is a little foggy. Birds are singing, dogs are barking, two pigs are running across an empty lot and in the distance I can hear chanting from a temple or monastery. We had a long day yesterday getting here from Varanasi. Before we left the guest house there we knew the train was going to be two hours late so we changed our departure time but by the time we got to the train station the train was an additional hour late and when it arrived it was behind by a total of more than four hours. Once we got on it, it didn’t lose any more time but it was almost six and quite dark by the time we got off the train in Gaya from where we had to get to Bodhgaya about 8.5 miles away. When I was first at Bodhgaya in 1998, bandits at night were a problem and no one drove after dark. Banditry is less of a problem now and the road from Gaya to Bodhgaya is quite built up and well-traveled. We got an auto-taxi and arrived at the guest house about a half-hour later. The guest house is great. A freshly painted white on the outside and gleaming within. Our room is not that big but seems spacious after our cramped quarters in Varanasi and we have twin beds. Robert and I don’t mind sleeping in a double bed, but twin beds are really nice. We are away from the main action in a small area with other guest houses and a couple of rest houses. We ate at a Thai restaurant last night that was brightly lit, clean, friendly and served delicious food. I had a coconut chicken soup and egg fried rice. Very nice. I don’t have the lay of the land yet here so that will come later. I will close this blog with some thoughts about Varanasi. We were sick the whole time. Robert had a cold on arrival and I came down with one a day later. I also had intestinal issues for the first three days but they resolved after that. The trip thus far has been exhausting and our energy in Varanasi was very low. That said, the time there was wonderful and healing. The Ganges is everything. Our very small room had a very small balcony and we could stand there and watch the river, the boats, the bathers, the strollers along the ghats, and the kites in the sky. Then up on the roof there was a restaurant and a large open seating area. We spent quite a bit of time up there. Then there are the ghats, the stairs going down to the river. One can walk along them and they are very busy with both locals and tourists walking, and sellers selling food, pictures, socks, massages, haircuts, hashish, floating lamps for the river, flowers for the river, and whatever else an entrepreneurial mind can imagine that someone might buy. And there are the saddhus, the holy men, some of whom can be quite aggressive. And the beggars. As my mother would say, it is enough to make one lose one’s sanctification. I do get a little angry from time to time. I have been in Varanasi twice before, once in 1998 for three days and again in 2007 for about three weeks. Arriving at the river this time felt like coming home. After that the days merged into each other. We slept a lot. We read a lot. Each day we made sure we spent time outside the hotel but we spent a lot of time on the roof. It was kite season and two young men associated with the hotel flew kites for much of the day from the roof. There were kites everywhere. But for me, always, it was the river. The river and the cremation fires. The Ganges moves slowly here. The boats going up river, from north to south, hug the bank and the boats going with the current, from south to north, ride in the middle of the river. There are most boats in the morning and the evening but the river is busy all day long. The shore across from Varanasi is empty so there is nothing there to distract the eye from the boats carrying tourists, pilgrims, cargo and the people who live in Varanasi who use the river to get from one place to another since the traffic inland is so dense. The surface of the river seems serene yet powerful, something one can watch and meditate on for long stretches of time. The funeral fires are the same. One can get quite close and watch the men building the pyre, taking the body to the river for one last dip, placing the body carefully, and then lighting the fire at the bottom. They have long poles and they carefully manage the fire. It is a long process that I never watched at pyre from beginning to end but there are always several fires going. It is a privilege to be allowed to watch this process, to see the end of human life so carefully enacted. I appreciate it especially as I see my own end draw ever closer. In Varanasi, I started writing poems again. Here are three river poems. 1. A flame Moving slowly Down river At puja time Every time Is puja time But I cannot Always See the flame 2. Sun on the morning river Funeral fire slowly catching A cow eating marigolds by the pyre And the dogs going crazy For a dog reason. 3. The river does its work washing my anger away While we were in Varanasi, the year changed. Happy 2016.

Christmas in Varanasi

On Christmas morning in Varanasi, Robert and I got up early and took a dawn boat ride on the Ganges, something that all tourists here are supposed to do. This is the second time I have done it and it is very much worth doing. We arrived here two days ago but only had a hotel for one night so we spent Christmas Eve morning finding a new hotel. These days in Varansais every hotel has wi-fi, usually free, so it was easy to find a new place. Booking.com, etc., has made traveling much easier. In Delhi, before Robert arrived, I met a German woman who recommended a place in Varanasi. When we needed a place I looked up her recommendation which I read as the Gita Guest House. I could’t find such a place. Then on our first evening here, we walked along the river and I saw the Sita Guest House and when I looked at my notebook I realized that what I took as a G was a fancy German S. Booking.com had a deal and here we are. The room is small but it has a balcony overlooking the Ganges and we are happy. Christmas Eve, there was a Christmas concert at our previous hotel so we walked over and had supper there and listened to a sitar recital. It was followed by kathak dance. Both were good although the amplification left a little to be desired. And then Christmas morning, we were out on the river. I am happy to be back in Varanasi. We are giving ourselves 8 nights here. It is good to stay put for a while and Varanasi is a great place to do it. The ghats along the river are always alive with people and at this time of year the sky is filled with kites. I can’t figure out how to post pictures on my blog. They have changed the procedure since I last blogged. I am posting pictures on Facebook. I have five from Lucknow up and today I posted some pictures from Ayodhya where we last were. Ayodhya is celebrated as the birth place of Rama. We tried to go to the new temple that honors the site but the times posted in the books were wrong and we arrived too late. We did go to a very busy Hanuman temple and joined the people climbing the stairs up to it and circumambulating the inner sanctum. It was very alive and throbbing with energy. In the evening, we tried to find a performance of the Ram Lila, the story of Rama and Sita. It turns out the name in the guidebook is different from the name the locals call the building so it took us awhile to find the place. When we did, the building was dark and the gate was padlocked. We found out that someone had died that day and performances were canceled for a week. We had a tough time in Ayodhya. I took some pictures on the shared taxi ride back to Faizabad where our hotel was. The ride was crowded and bumpy but I got a few good pictures. Those are the pictures on Facebook. We have had a good time but being sick, and having difficulty in getting from one place to another and finding a hotel have seemed more difficult than before and we are happy to have time to rest in Varanasi. I hope everyone is well and enjoying the holidays. Everyone, including our boatman, have been wishing us a Merry or a Happy Christmas or other words to that effect. One man added “Good Friday” to the list just to make sure he got things covered. I hope your holidays continue to be happy.

Chandigarh and Lucknow

I think of myself as a conservative, cautious, shy man but yesterday morning at 7:30 AM I was on the back of a motorcycle racing through Lucknow looking for an auto taxi. We found one and I was on my way to the Tila Wali Masjid, a mosque built by Aurangzeb that predates the founding of Lucknow which is, by India standards, a very recent place being founded in the mid-18th century. Persians were invading India and a fish jumped in the Gomati River and this was taken as a good sign and they built a city that became a cultural capital in India noted for the purity of its language and the skill of its poets, musicians and dancers. I have taken two walking tours of Lucknow. After the uprising of 1857, the British took control of Lucknow and the cultural life of the city pretty much disappeared although even today the citizens of Lucknow think their Hindi-Urdu is more refined and polite than elsewhere in India. On the first day in Lucknow, Robert and I went to the Residency where the British residents were beseiged for five months before being rescued. It is a large area with many multistoried brick buildings, all now in ruins and showing signs of fire. It is a moving site. The episode had tragic consequences for both the British and the Indians. Yesterday, at the mosque, I was shown the tree from which the British hung the rebels after the Uprising. The walk this morning was in Hindi and my Hindi wasn’t up to it, but I enjoyed walking through a series of crumbling palaces, libraries and other buildings of which I never understood the nature. Oh, one, I found out belatedly, was a tomb for someone’s mother that was finished by her grandson. On the first Heritage Walk, we visited the building where Ghandi and his two goats stayed. He traveled with goats apparently so he could have fresh milk. Before Lucknow, we were in Chandigarh. Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab-Haryana and is a planned city built in the 50’s and designed by Corbusier. We went for a auto trip around Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Except for the High Court we couldn’t get too close to the buildings because of security. If we had had more time, we could have obtained a pass, but we didn’t. I saw enough. The buildings are enormous in scale. Robert says they are designed to make people feel small and powerless. Now in their decaying state, I think they seem fragile themselves. Sic transit gloria mundi. But they are still very active. There were crowds around the High Court with a lot of attorneys dressed in black with white neck bands of various sorts. Quite British. In the morning we had been to a folk art rock garden built by one man over a period of 40 years. It is big in area and enormous in scale. It is truly amazing that one man could do all this. The builder took refuse from the building of Chandigarh and turned it into his fantasy. The first part is small and cramped and then it opens into a small ampitheater and a waterfall, one of two. The first part, as I remember it, is less colorful than the later sections, more monochromatic. The first part is largely white and gray with a lot of free form shapes. Later he became more representative. We had an excellent dinner last night, three kinds of chicken, kabob, a mirchi korma and one whose name I can’t remember but it was a large chickend ball in a sweet, mild gravy. The whole dinner was delicious. For lunch I had a kathi roll and that was also delicious. The Aroma food court is attached to a quite fancy hotel and has a range of food from fast food outlets to quite good places. The chicken place had it’s name in Urdu. The kathi place was Australia. After eating we went upstairs to MacDonald’s for desert and Internet. The hotel in Chandigarh did not have wi-fi. Tomorrow morning we head out for Ayodyah. It was reading about Ayodyah that first got Robert interested in India so it will be a pilgrimage of sorts. Then we think we are heading out for the place where the Buddha died. By then it will probably be Christmas.

Long Day, Short Blog

It has been two weeks since I have blogged and a lot has happened. I have had a cold, diarrhea, and tension headaches caused by bad posture when studying and using my computer. Now I am typing on a suitcase set on a chair in the hope that this will be better for my neck. I have started three blogs before this one, but have been too busy to finish them. I will finish this one. The big thing that has happened is that my traveling companion Robert arrived in India. He let me know on Friday that he was coming for sure and last Monday he was here. Wednesday we left for Amritsar and the Golden Temple. We had a good time in Amritsar (I hope to send the best of the unfinished blogs in a day or two) and then this morning, Saturday, we started out on a trek to the hinterlands of Punjab. We took a three-hour ride on a state bus (very basic) to Faridkot where there is a fort, a palace, a shrine to a Sikh saint-poet, a library and a clock tower. From the bus station we took an auto rickshaw driven by a stately Sikh that the young translator called Bap-ji. He took us to what we think is the only real restaurant in town, the hotel restaurant of the Trump Plaza Hotel. It turned out to be quite good. Robert had chicken soup, and I had chicken kabobs, yogurt with mixed vegetables, and tandoori roti. Both of us were a little under the weather by this point and ordered accordingly. I have been leery of Indian food since my bout with the runs. I hope I get over this. After lunch, we found a bicycle rickshaw whose driver had only one working leg. He took us to the palace, library, and Sikh shrine, but we missed out on the fort and the clock tower. The shrine was great. It honors Baba Sheikh Farid, a 13th century poet I have read. Inside the glassed shrine there is a large remnant of a tree. I don’t know what this is about. Research. The driver took us back to the bus station and we took a private bus with Bollywood music playing the whole time to our next stop where there is a big fort that we will see tomorrow. I have never been so deep into non-tourist India. Few people here speak English. I directed our rickshaw driver in Hindi and had to use it again with the young man at the hotel desk to find a restaurant. In this town so far, I have found no Western restaurants so it was Indian food tonight. There are a strip of small restaurants opposite the train station and I ate in one of these, dal made of small dark beans, Indian cheese with peas, rice and very good roti. The bread up here is great. It has been an exhausting day. Robert has been having trouble with his back and the bus rides don’t help. We can get a train out of here, but there is one more small town that Robert wants to see that is reachable only by bus. Riding through the Punjab countryside was great. It is very agricultural – a lot of wheat, a little rice, I think, and beautiful patches of bright yellow mustard that they were harvesting. I also saw a woman winnowing wheat by tossing it from a basket into the air. There are also a lot of brickyards with tall chimneys over the kiln and stacks of bricks around. The bricks here are used a lot in the local buildings and they are beautiful, a soft red, and molded not cut, so each one seems slightly different from the others. Long day, short blog. I hope to write again soon. Luke

A Bit of the Life of a Hindi Student

Sunday, November 29, 2015. New Delhi. It has been 10 days since I last blogged. Mostly I have been studying Hindi. I go to class five days a week for between 3 and 4 ½ hours plus a half hour lunch break. It takes me about an hour depending on the time of day to get there and about the same or a little more to get home. Then usually I spend at least an hour doing homework. This is in addition to the half hour or more I spend doing Hindi vocabulary in the morning using an app. So I am busy and also exhausted. Hindi twists my brain and taking the Metro twists my nerves. It is almost always crowded and sometimes it is very crowded. It costs a little more than twenty cents one way. If it all gets too much, I take an auto rickshaw for about $2.50 to $3.00. The ride is terrifying but sometimes I just can’t take the press and the shoving in the metro. Getting in and out at rush hour is the most frightening. You are pushed along in the crowd and have very little capability of determining your own direction or speed. I am getting better at it, but some days it is still too much. Well, I have been having a little fun. (Actually, Hindi classes are fun—there are four students and the students as well as the teachers (three in rotation) are great.) A week ago, I went to Safdarjung’s Tomb. It comes perilously close to the “if you have seen one minor Mughal tomb you have seen them all” category, but the grounds are large and well maintained, the tomb is larger than usual, and it has the distinction of being the last important Mughal building. Few people visit it so it is a calm oasis in Delhi and I enjoyed my time there. Then I took an auto rickshaw to Habitat Centre which is nearby. They have art galleries and hold music and dance concerts. I went to a couple of galleries. The second one had a group show by women. I lingered there and one of the women asked me to to speak into a camera for a video they were making about the show. When I came in and was looking at the first woman’s work, I was near a table where several of the women were talking so I talked about the importance of community in making art. Then another woman started talking to me and when she found out I am a performer she asked me to collaborate with her. I have emailed her since and told her I can do nothing until I am done studying Hindi. Then, if I will be in Delhi for a while, I would very much like to talk with her. I received an email from my traveling this companion this morning. He hopes to know in a week whether he can come to India for two months with the reasonable expectation that his brother will be alive when he returns. If that is the case, we will start traveling as soon as he gets here. All of this uncertainty has been a little wearing, but I am doing well. I bought three scarves yesterday as a way to compensate. They are more expensive than I usually buy but they are beautiful. It isn’t quite cold enough to wear them yet, but it soon will be. For more fun, yesterday morning I took a walk run by conservationists through the ruins of a predecessor city of Delhi, Jahanpanah, the city of the second Tughlaq sultan. It is obscure. The entrance we went through had no signs giving its name. It would be difficult to visit without a guide to lead you through the ruins and up and down the dark and narrow stairs. The history goes in one ear and out the other, but the ruins themselves are evocative and one ends up on the roof of a three-story building that would give a good view of Delhi if the air weren’t so bad. (Last night I thought were was a fire in my hotel because I smelled smoke, but when I opened the door I realized it was just the cooking fires outside the hotel—my room is not hermetically sealed.) At the beginning of the walk, we went by the unsheltered tomb of a 14th century Sufi saint. It was being cleaned by someone from the adjoining village. There were both Hindu and Muslim offerings at the shrine. This is usually the case with the shrines of Sufi saints. The walk ended at a 14th century mosque. It was huge and was built as a thank offering for something but I cannot remember what it was. We climbed up to the top of that and were terrified by four boys probably aged 6 to 12 who climbed to the tops of the domes and then jumped from one to another. If parents only knew what their children were doing. Oh, my Thanksgiving. I went to class in the morning, had a very good pizza with a friend in the afternoon, and then the two of us went to the most popular Sufi shrine Delhi in Nizamuddin, one of the seven urban villages in Delhi. Begumpur where I was yesterday is another, and Paharganj where I am staying is a third. They keep cows and other animals and the atmosphere is markedly different from the rest of Delhi. The shrine was very crowded because it was Thursday night and there was qwali, Sufi singing. Again I was on a guided walk and we were about 20 so getting through the crowds was not pleasant, but the atmosphere in the shrine was intense and moving. I have been there twice before in the day time. At night, the shrine was transformed. We stood or sat and listened to the musicians while being fanned by large green fans. The man with the fan on our side was old with a long white beard and gave a very convincing blessing. This afternoon I plan to go on another guided walk through the ruins of another early city. This evening will be devoted to Hindi. Tomorrow morning, Monday, my week will start all over again.

Mini-Blog from a Hindi student

Wednesday, November 18, 2015. I am settling in. By the end of classes on Monday I was ready to chuck Hindi and head for home, but I had a great conversation session Tuesday morning with Anshu and I decided to stay. Hindi is intense. I don’t have time for anything else. On Monday and Wednesday I have three hours of classes and on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday I have four and a half hours. Then there is homework. I am using an irritating app to learn vocabulary. It helps. I have done hardly anything touristy. On Diwali morning I walked over to the Ramakrishna Mission Ashram and sat in the temple for a while. That was good for me, but not very touristy. I keep thinking I will go somewhere after class, but I am always tired and come home and nap and study. Hindi class is fun. The teachers are good and the fellow students are great and we laugh a lot. I work up at 4:30 Tuesday morning and realized it was Sanskrit class time in Los Angeles, so I called my teacher, Brother William, up on Facetime and had a little session. With both Hindi and Sanskrit, learning languages is my favorite thing to do these days. I had a great meal for dinner last night. The restaurant I go to gives some of its dishes fancy names and I didn’t write this down, but it is mixed vegetables and paneer (the Indian fresh cheese) in a spicy sauce. I had it with rotis (called chapattis in some parts of India) and was very happy. It is almost 7 AM when the hot water (well quite warm water) comes on and I can shower and do a little wash and then go have breakfast. My class doesn’t start until 11 but I will study at the school.Iif I don’t get on the Metro early, it is impossible. Very crowded cars and pushing when you get on and off. It’s the pushing I hate. The news from Robert’s brother is confusing. Sometimes he seems a little better and then he is a little worse. In general, he is staying about the same. It looks like I might finish the course in December before Robert gets here. OK. Time to get under the shower.