Catching Up

I've been out of town for three days. Ben and I went to Mathura and Vindraban, Krishna's home towns. He was born in Mathura and he gamboled with the gopis in Vindraban. (I am sure I have the spelling of Vindraban wrong, but Ben's napping and he has all the travel information in his bedroom--yes, we are back in Delhi at Veronica's and we have the luxury of sleeping in two separate rooms. We manage in the same room but our schedules are so different that it is hard.)

I have two drafts waiting to be finalized -- mostly about Christmas in India, and a lot of stuff in the journal that I haven't even started as a draft blog yet, but it's been six days so I thought it was time for an update.

Some of you know I lost my cell phone. I now have a new cell phone, a small Nokia, and the same phone number. I had to file a police report, but fortunately Veronica's downstairs neighbor had business with the police and the constable comes to visit her since she is a long-time resident, so the neighbor, a friend of hers who had also lost her phone, Veronica who had to register her new housekeeper and myself all had coffee with the constable and did our business. It was especially helpful that someone else had lost her phone and could help me write the English letter that was eventually turned into a Hindi police report.

So we are back from our first excursion in India. We arranged a car and driver through the driver, Amerjit, that Veronica uses. The driver we had is Amerjit's younger brother, Amkhan. His English was limited but he knew his way around Mathura and Vindriban. At first we tried to tell him where we wanted to go, but when we gave up and let him drive where he wanted, things turned out much better. The temples, mostly to Krishna and Radha, are pretty much a blur now, but the ghats, the steps down to the river along the Yamuna river in both Mathura and Vrindiban (I think I'm getting closer to the spelling) were great. There were colorful boats to take you to the sacred sites (we declined), people worshipping here and there and, in Vrindiban, a steady stream of pilgrims doing a prescribed pilgrimage around Vrindiban.

We were repeatedly warned about the monkeys stealing cameras and glasses, but Ben put his glasses on briefly because he had lost track of me and a speedy monkey grabbed his glasses and retreated to a rough. A boy said he would get the glasses back for 200 rupees and he offered the monkey food, and the monkey dropped the glasses down and took the food. Amazing little transaction.

I'm still not up to snuff. Now it's my lungs, so I didn't have a lot of energy, so I never knew exactly where we were, what temple we were in, or why we were there, but I had a great time. We stopped frequently for tea, and outside a major Krishna temple in Vrindiban Ben made me drink a sweetened hot milk drink for medicinal and restorative purposes. It was delicious and it came in this unfired clay cup which I had to throw down and break afterwards. It had something to do with Krishna. In Mathura, they wouldn't let me into the major Krishan temple because I had forgotten I had a travel clock in my pocket and no electronic devices were allowed so I went shopping again. (I could have gone back to the cloak room and deposited it, but shopping seemed more attractive. I went to a government shop run by the state of Utra Pradesh, and bought a pinkish-brown sleeveless wool jacket made from homespun cloth from the Gandhi Ashram. Our friend Gautham, the gay political activist I will write about later, has a tailor who redoes his clothes so they show off his figure better. I am going to take the jacket to his tailor. Gautham is 26 and I am 67, but I have some vanity left and the jacket can do with some taking-in here and there.

The jacket is part of my plan to dress (above the waist) like a lower-middle-class Indian man. I have already bought to men's shawls and I am going to buy two more and some scarves. Ben reminded me that I used to wear shawls around the house when we lived together 30 years ago. So I am finally coming out of the closet as a shawl-wearer. I have aready worn my red one to the movies and my brown one to dinner in the hotel in Mathura. Ben made a face when I did it, but he walked around Vrindiban today with these ostentatious forehead markings he got in a temple from a very chatty priest, so he got even. I have pictures of Ben but not of the shawls yet.

I just bought a round-trip ticket to Poland on the internet. That was fun. It made me feel very international.

Ben and I are ordering home delivery pizza. That should be interesting.

We have an invitation to a New Year's Party tomorrow evening and then on New Year's Day we are going to Allahabad for the Ardh Mela.

I hope to go to bed early tonight and get up early and catch up on blogging tomorrow.

Luke

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