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.