(God-appaloosa Part Two: Twenty Eight Days Later and) Bhimashankar

The truth is, I did not get to celebrate Eid al-Fitr much, the celebration of the first day after Ramadan. God-appaloosa Part Two: Twenty Eight Days Later was not very exciting.
Last Saturday I went to a professor's apartment for my Independent Study Project, which is on Muslims in India. He is a self-proclaimed secular Muslim. He works in a non-profit focusing on literacy and education for Muslims. Professor Tamboli lives in an apartment similar to the one I live in, and when I got there, they were eating biscuits with tea. His wife was a lawyer but now works at home. He served me a hot, milky, and sweet soup with small rice noodles and nuts. We talked about Islam in India and the Muslim community. He was a very informative and great person to talk to, but because of his secular nature, offered only a scholarly perspective on Muslims in India. His wife offered me food, and I should have said no. Unfortunately, I did not want to offend and said yes. I ended up being the only person eating and I could only eat about half because I knew that I would eat with my family for Ganpati, the ten-day festival for Ganesh that began on that same day. So I awkwardly ate some lamb and rice while some of his friends showed up to visit. I stayed for about ten more minutes and then realized it was my time to go.

But that was last weekend. This weekend began on Friday (as most do) when the literature students (about 13 of us) went to a book release for our professor, R. Raj Rao. His publisher is Penguin, and the book is called "Hostel Room 131." I have not read it, but it is about a romance story between two male students at Engineering College. Along with Raj was a prince from Gujarat and a friend of his. The prince became famous when he came out of the closet several years ago. He was on Oprah in 2007 and now works as a gay rights activist. Afterwards, we ran into him at dinner with a friend of his.

Saturday morning began with Yom Kippur services. I met my friend Alayna there and the first thing I noticed when I got there was that everybody was wearing white. I, of course, was wearing my red and white striped button-down, not my all-white. Alayna was wearing a blue shirt. Oops. There were very nice and colorful rugs on the marble floor, apparently for a sitting service later in the afternoon, but they honestly should stay.
They really tied the room together.

We went straight to the bus station and sat for two hours and questioned every person we could where the bus to Bhimashankar was. Finally, our mostly-yellow bus, adorned with many other colors as most buses here are, arrived. Three hours passed slowly as we drove through the lush, verdant Maharastran countryside. Around dusk we finally arrived at Bhimashankar. But we could not tell what time of day it was because of the fog. For some reason, the town seemed eerie. A one-road town with shops and restaurants, Bhimashankar is a local religious and eco-tourist site. It has a large temple for Shiva, which we visited that night. Walking down the some two-hundred dark foggy stairs, most of it not lit up, we passed by more shops. The temple is mostly black on the outside, with rounded stair-like stone pedals escalating into a pinnacle. The layout was similar to the temple I went to in Ellora, but because it was not a festival, it was not very crowded. We went inside and looked at others saying prayers to the statue of the many-headed Shiva without removing their shirts or wetting their hands with milk. We received kumku (bindi in Hindi, "marks between the eyes" in English) and walked a bit more, and then left. Temples seems more familiar now and I am beginning to understand why some call Hinduism a way of life. They are everywhere and everywhere they are majestic in their own way. They cannot be equated to churches or synagogues because anywhere there is an idol can be a temple. In a backyard, in a bedroom, right next to the supermarket, in the biggest intersection in Pune, in the middle of a forest, in a bookstore, temples are omnipresent; depending on who the god is and who owns the temple and how big the temple is, different people worship in it.

I broke the fast that night with whatever we could read on the Marathi menu, which as usual was delicious. We awoke the next morning in our rented out room (I wouldn't call where we stayed a hostel but rather, a room that some guy rents out to tourists) to people talking over the TV early in the morning, and it sounded like they were in our room. People fought and we fought the urge to wake up until nine. We got some deep fried lentils and potatoes for breakfast (breakfast total: under 50 cents), and then went off to find a guide, which one of the ACM program coordinators said was necessary. We found the guy in the blue shirt who spoke English and we asked him about a guide. His friend, Vilas became our guide and friend.

Vilas was a tall skinny man who walked fast and climbed with agility. While trekking, he wore a black rain jacket the whole time and never drank water, except once. We first went to a waterfall. On the way there, right outside the town, the garbage took over the walking path. Gradually, as we got further into the woods, the garbage waned and the forest got thicker. The waterfall was nice and there was a Hindu statue and a carving in the rock of the harmony of man and woman right next to the falls. Another temple.

Then we trekked "height" as Vilas put it. You must understand, Vilas' English was about as strong as our Marathi. Sentences throughout the day were usually one verb in English and then the rest in Marathi, which I usually just repeated back to him and nodded, pretending to understand. As we got higher, a stream that probably became the waterfall passed us by. Vilas called it "original" and "fresh" and made the gesture for drinking. I drank some after he did and it was crisp and clean and certainly better than the plastic flavor of bottled water. We trekked further up and saw some Shekroo climbing in the trees. They had yellow-ish bodies and black faces and long tails and generally were more skittish than the monkeys at Daulatabad. But they had a great place to call home. The lush rolling hills of the valley in the Western Ghats smelled wet and sweet but sometimes like cow poop. The height was apparently 5,000 feet up, and when we got to the top, it was all fog. As if floating right outside an airplane window, the highest point in Bhimashankar was surreal. The cliff followed a standard plot of a novel and we were at the climax. There was not much falling action and we could faintly see the epilogue but I don't know how high up we were. What I do know is that I could make out the house but certainly not a person or an individual tree. After sitting on the highest point on the ridge for twenty quiet minutes, unable to see any view, we began our descent.

Eventually we figured out that Vilas invited us to his house for lunch, and we graciously accepted. After all, we had nothing else to do. His village was half an hour away by bus. On the way, I borrowed Jasper's iPod and we listened to some American music. First was the Band, which Vilas did not like. Next was the Beach Boys, which as Alayna put it: "How can you not like the Beach Boys?" Then a bit of the Boss, but I switched to Michael Jackson when he said his name. "He dead now," said Vilas.
"Ho ho, very sad." I don't think he knew what sad meant as we listened to Billie Jean.

He asked if we were "Veg/non-Veg?" and I said two of us were non-Veg, Jasper being Veg. At the bus stop/convenience store/hang out, Vilas got a live chicken from the owner and we paid for it (120 rupees, or like $2.50). I was really happy he let us pay for it, the least we could do. He carried the chicken by its bound feet upside-down a kilometer to his coral green house. We were not in a tourist town-- this was Grade-A, cream of the crop, bona fide rural India. I was just smiling and laughing the whole time.
His house did not have electricity or running water and the only thing that seemed to run on batteries was the sole clock in the living room/bedroom. One of the other rooms was the kitchen and the other was what seemed to be a storage/multi-purpose room. It was the middle room and had no outside doors to it so it was dark. He beheaded the chicken in a metal bucket, plucked the feathers, and cut it up in front of us while his one-year-old naked son watched us with big eyes and a straight face. He could walk but could not yet speak. His wife began preparations for dinner. Soon his two other boys came back from playing. One was ten and the other six. When finished with the chicken, Vilas showed us the water hole next to his house and his temple fifty feet from his house. The water hole came from a natural spring he showed us (no need for a well). They got water from that and cleaned clothes in the pond. That was the water we drank, straight from the horses' mouth. The temple was rainbow-colored straight out of Willy Wonka's factory and had a simply carved steeple. His idol was a red stone woman, but the inside was locked so we did not go in. Vilas and the three of us climbed the tree next to it and sat for a while, taking in everything. Soon it was just Jasper, Alayna, and I sitting in the tree wondering how we had gotten so lucky to be here.

Soon our language barrier grew larger because our brains were not functioning at full capacity. The boys played with my America deck of cards (thank you Aunt Jenny!) and they wrote numbers in both English and Marathi with our pens on my pocket-sheets of paper. Conversation revolved around the boys who showed us their English books. We talked a bit about government and how he and his wife voted last year, a bit about family members' names, languages the children spoke, and of course, the occasional misunderstanding. The boys listened to the iPod and took pictures on Jasper's camera. The baby boy played with the camera, mostly just pressing buttons and enjoying the noises it made.

After two hours or so lunch was ready. We ate the chicken in a really spicy red broth with chapatis and onions. The very fresh chicken was quite bony and we had to pick at it to get the meat. Due to the lack of meat, we put the raw onions in the broth and grabbed at them with our piece of chapati to get the flavor. I was quite hungry and, from a combination of many factors, ate a bit quickly. He told me I could slow down, and I felt a bit embarrassed. Soon bhat was served after the chapatis were finished to soak up the broth. It was an amazing meal and for dessert we had a handful of sugar.

After we finished we went to the bus and we said goodbye to the family. We gave the little boys our pens and I gave them my notebook (after taking out the notes I had written). I think they still have about half of my deck of cards.

We waited at the bus stop/convenience store/hang out for a while, surrounded by men staring at us while we sat in plastic chairs and waited. We were tired and ready to go back. We gave Vilas the money for being our guide that day (at this point I had almost forgotten), and after missing one bus, we caught the next.

We stood for the first hour on the bus back because there were no open seats. When I did get to sit, I fell asleep, only to wake up in the outskirts of Pune.