“Are you alone?” the border official asked, breaking a silence of over an hour.
“Alone?” I spat back, startled out of the small eternity I’d spent watching his fat fingers lumber lazily over a pile of paperwork.
His question was not official, but a subtle reminder of just who was in charge, and how long he could keep me there.
I sat with his inquiry for a moment. It seemed cold – cruel almost – conjuring the drifting clouds of emptiness within.
I said nothing.
He peeled back a pair of coke-bottle eyeglasses; his jaundiced eyes grew thick with demand.
“Are you traveling with others?” He barked again.
“Others?” I responded coyly, thinking my loneliness none of his business. He grew impatient.
“ARE YOU TRAVELING WITH ANYONE ELSE?” he shouted as if I were deaf.
“Yes!” I finally copped, narrowing my gaze into a wild-eyed stare.
“Who then…” he demanded, “and where are they?”
“The voices…” I said, raising a finger to my head, “you know, the voices.”
My answer slipped inside him like a jagged little pill, shattering what was left of his crumbling resolve. His hands began to shake. A visible wave of irritation ran from his head to his feet. He fumbled for a moment, then mumbled something through clenched teeth. He reached into his desk, pulled out a stamp, and snapped it against my passport – then waved me away.
I climbed back onto my bike in a moment of small triumph.
A moment later, India was in my face.
Cycling into the center of a rolling riot, I merged with a tornado of taxis, motorcycles, cows, chickens, street-children, rickshaws, ox-carts, dogs, bicycles, and food carts. Forever parting the herds were the mammoth, multicolored busses – none of which was complete without its psychotic driver, ear-splitting horn, stickers of Shiva, or its sub-window racing stripes composed entirely of sun-dried vomit.
I followed the river of chaos into the town of Siliguri, where I turned my gaze to the expanse of slums along the Mahananda River. Whipping my head back and forth, as if watching a pingpong match, I stole glances between a handful of children who frolicked on the outskirts of the impoverished sub-city, and the rambling insanity before me.
Constructed entirely from scraps of plastic, cardboard, twine and tarpaulin, the slum seemed a tribute to all things failed. Stealing one last look, I peered down on a group of feral dogs that fought or mated, while pigs rooted through mountains of paper, plastic, and garbage, or scrapped over the bounty of an over-flowing sewer.
The scene brought us pause.
When I finally turned my attention back to the road, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
For there, within an oncoming rickshaw, I stared straight into the face of a dead man – his head bobbling mercilessly on his lifeless body, the sum of his awkward weight corralled upon the lap of his son.
I craned my head to follow them, then back in a silent scream, as I nearly collided with a water buffalo.
Breathless and shaken, I pulled to the side of the road, then stared for a moment into the omni-directional madness.
A voice came from within, and spilled onto my lips.
“Welcome to India, knuckle-head,” it announced. With that I sought shelter for the night.
The next morning, perched over a map in my cheap hotel room, I ran my eyes over my proposed route across the country. Although I’d ride from border to border, it represented the smallest possible slice across Northeastern India, a 21-mile stretch of flatland that separated Eastern Nepal from Northwestern Bangladesh.
Call me a sucker for punishment, but it hardly seemed enough.
With a plan tucked into the back of my head, I slipped into a train-station, forked-out a handful of rupees, and boarded a train. Sixteen hours later, I stepped into the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world: the sacred city of Varanasi, on the banks of the mother Ganges.
Stepping from an auto-rickshaw onto soil that was first inhabited in the year 1400 B.C., I was instantly swallowed by the tangled commotion, the inextricable anarchy that lay at the heart of every Indian city. Casting my vision outward from a stifling circle of inner-city traffic, I panned across the swarms of Indians that surrounded me.
Women in brightly colored saris peered mysteriously out of silk scarves, balancing a variety of goods on their heads – all of them alighting the streets in reds, yellows, blues and purples. Bustling flower markets produced shocking orange garlands of marigolds, housed next to a rainbow of fabric shops. Peppering the scene was a host of Indian businessmen who waggled their heads at one another, their electric-white smiles glowing against rich mahogany skin.
My eyes scanned the environment until they landed on a strange scene. A three-limbed monkey picking lice off a mutt that lay sleeping in the middle of the road. As I watched, the dog awoke. When it realized what was going on, it lunged its teeth at its groomer, sending the startled primate screeching skyward. As a host of onlookers burst into laughter, I took it as my cue to move.
I footed my way out of the new town and dropped into the labyrinth of tiny back streets within the old town. Constructed in the time of horses and donkeys, the back streets were no wider than two men standing shoulder to shoulder. I muscled my way through the crowds, and carefully tip-toed over a slurry of cow manure, garbage juice, feces, rats and rotting food.
Decades of evaporated urine coated the narrow alley-ways, where they were reconstituted by each passing cow. The odor nearly knocked me to my knees.
When I picked up the pace, I dashed past a gauntlet of men, as they tilted their heads intermittently from doorways, and spewed thick streams of red-stained saliva onto the streets. It was the crimson by-product of the mildly hallucinogenic betel-nut, which most men held pinched between their cheek and gums. I bobbed and weaved while their weighty wads hit the ground with audible splats.
Now holding my breath, watching for spit, and mindful of my feet, I broke into a slow jog. That’s when the crowd suddenly parted, opening to me like the red sea. I thought it a sign of respect. That was, until I turned to find a bull the size of a pick-up truck charging at me from behind.
I bolted to what I thought was a safe spot in the center of the old town. Once there, the bull became the least of my problems. For a group of men noticed my western skin and descended upon me like flies. Before long, the touts and hawkers were pushing pictures, postcards and incense into my face. They tugged at my arms. None of them were taking no for an answer.
“Boat?” others called. Those calls seemed to alert a squadron of street-children, who joined the crowd and began pulling at me with their poop-stained hands. They cupped them in front of their best sad faces, and chanted “Five rupees? Five rupees?”
I elbowed my way out of the crowd and bolted through the labyrinth again. I ditched and dodged, forever looking behind. When I turned my head back, the light had opened, and I stood before the banks of the mighty Ganges.
Finally alone, I took a quiet moment to look around. I rolled my eyes along a strand of temples, mirrored along the river’s wide-flat waters. I stood at the center of a 7-kilometer stretch where up to 60,000 people came each day to wash away their sins.
I watched as a Sadhu (a wandering ascetic) approached and waded waist-deep into the gray-green waters. A small prayer floated from his lips before he submerged himself in the liquid landfill – a vast soup of floating garbage, wood, ashes, dead animals, candles, and flowers. Beneath the river, 30 large sewers discharged untold amounts of sewage, raising the water’s faecal coliform bacteria count to 1.5 million per 100 liters. Safe limits max-out around 500.
After his prayer, I watched the holy-man lift his hands, then cup a hefty dose of the squalid liquid to the back of his throat.
I cringed.
Moving again in a walking meditation, I was taking in the slow-stillness on the surface of the water when something drifted into my view. It appeared to be an empty gallon jug. As it drifted closer it began to take the shape of what I thought was a child’s toy – a life-like doll. Then, as I concentrated my focus, I could not believe my eyes.
It was an infant – dead and floating downstream.
“Dogs,” a man offered as he walked up. He shook his head, then walked away.
I stood for some time, staring long and hard at the child.
I was empty.
I felt no fear or dread. No excitement and even less curiosity. Perhaps, had I witnessed the tragedy in some context, had I seen the mother weeping on shore, it would have been different. But there was nothing. Just me, the river, the baby, and the silence. All of it coalescing into a cold-steel feeling of shame. Shame for my inability to feel, shame for my complete absence of compassion.
“This is not my land,” I whispered to myself. “This is not my world…”
I walked for a moment back upÂstream, lost in my shame, when I rounded a corner and was nearly bowled over by what seemed to be an angry mob.
I looked up to see a group of men running past, with a lavishly adorned cadaver atop their shoulders.
They carried it upon a bamboo stretcher as they shouted in Hindi, “Rama is the only true name of God!”
I followed the procession to a burning ghat, one of nearly 30 along the Ganges where people came to cremate their dead. A patchwork of raging fires dotted the banks, as if it had been freshly hit by a meteor storm. Considered to be the birth place of Shiva, Hindus have long believed that death or cremation here was a guarantee into heaven. In turn, people came from across the country here to die, and bodies and ashes were shipped from as far away as Australia and the United States.
I turned my attention toward those cremations.
A head fell from one of the fires, and a man with a bamboo stick reached for it and flicked it back in with the skill of a surgeon.
Meanwhile people watched, and children played.
I began to think.
We’d gotten it all wrong in the west.
Driven by our unified fears coiled around the unknown, death has become almost shameful back home.
Covered quickly with sheets, or hidden in boxes that are quickly whisked away, we whistle past the graveyard, hoping it won’t come calling for us.
And those who might observe the dead with a natural curiosity, (or, God forbid, a camera) are subjected to the deepest castigation. The dark fruit of aggression stemming from those irrational fears.
It’s silly and superstitious.
We all are born, and we all die, it is a natural part of life. Each inextricably linked to the other. Death is as natural as life.
I turned my attention back to the body burning before me.
There was a beauty in the blackened figure cradled in the orange-yellow tendrils of its bay-wood fire.
Smoke rose like prayers.
It reminded me of the beautiful lie. The ceaseless falsehood that if we just eat right, exercise, take a certain pill or believe a certain way, me might just live forever. It’s the lie that rips us off, stealing our awareness of impermanence, and with that, the sanctity of each precious moment – offering us endless tomorrows to procrastinate what we should practice today. The practice of those things that do live forever – like forgiveness and love.
Stepping back from the scene before me, something recognizable welled up inside me.
It was change.
Although I couldn’t put my finger on it, I knew instinctively that somehow, in some way, after being here, I would never be the same.
This snapshot of India, which I would add to the scrapbook of my life, held truths that I could not yet realize. Truths that, when recognized, would bring an expanded view of life, the world, its people, and my precious place within it.
I returned my gaze back out over the river Ganges that afternoon, when the first of those truths became crystal clear.
India had changed me forever.
Nepal – India
When: November 1-24, 2006
Where: Kathmandu, Daman, Hetauda, Lalband, Lahan, Damak; Siliguri, Varanasi
Mileage log: Mileage log: 12,040-12,410
Elevation: 2,970-200 ft.
Awesome photos of India, Rick!