When we foreigners think of India we think of North India. I know it’s a generalization but I’m going to just stick to it. I was a tourist for two weeks, not knowing more than a speck of Hindi, trying to not speak Marathi like a boyfriend trying to not tell his girlfriend he is breaking up with her because she is freaking crazy. I felt that mixture of comfort and confusion that one gets the first time traveling to California or Chicago—I think that means I really like Pune. I know I missed it on the trip.
I love the trains. I think I already said that. But we went by train from Mumbai to Jaipur and it was thirty pleasant hours. We played lots of Euchre.
I decided not to take a blanket from my Aai because I did not want to lose/dirty it. Instead I took my bath towel I had been using as a blanket. Not beach towel, bath. Observe the difference in size next time you go to the bathroom at the beach. And I was cold on the train. Still a little damp from the previous day’s shower, my bath towel covered my legs and feet like a rain tarp, while I relied upon my hoodie for upper body warmth. It was not optimal.
That night on the train as I curled up under my wee-sized blanket while my arms began to tingle, I could not help but hear the chaiwalas (tea vendors) rush by our compartment all through the night. Their voices are distinct, and anybody who goes on the train recognizes their nasal, monotonous, croak that invades your ears like a certain crocodile’s despised ticking clock. While trying to sleep it invades, but during the day it is a welcome, if demented, bird call for any thirsty train-traveler in need of milky, sugary warmth.
Other walas sell various deep-fried snacks or crunchy delights like behl, a mixture of Chex-Mix like crunchies, onions, tomatoes, cilantro, and a masala. Freaking great. Most Indians seemed to have brought their own packed lunches in stacked circular tins, which I am told keep the food warm quite well.
We went through Gujarat, a flatter, yet equally verdant version of Maharashtra. To be honest I was a bit afraid of leaving Maharashtra, especially leaving Marathi, which by this point has become a bit of a security blanket (or towel considering my proficiency). I sat on the floor near the train door looking out, dangling my feet outside the train, clutching my flip-flops to my feet with my toes so they would not fly off. Rajasthan, especially as we got closer to Jaipur, was a desert. With bushy, green shrubs dotting a pale, dry earth, I began to think of my American expectations of India and the Wes Anderson movie The Darjeeling Limited. I saw vast pastures trimmed with rows of trees below miniature mountains that usually had a little temple on top. I had trouble reading.
We arrived in Jaipur and the first thing I noticed was that they have big rickshaws to accommodate tourists’ luggage. Maybe that’s because walas wait outside the train station as voraciously as stockbrokers on the trading floor. Our hotel was outside the old Pink City, as Jaipur is nicknamed; it was close to the brand-new movie theatre that resembled one of Kansas City’s curling irons that decorate the skyline.
Our hotel was newly remodeled and more expensive than what we all wanted to spend. Really we ended up spending a lot of money in Jaipur. It’s no wonder it is part of Indian tourisms’ Golden Triangle (Delhi and Agra the other points). The first thing we did was go to the city. It was painted for the visiting Mughal prince to resemble more northern rocks. I can’t remember beyond that, but I do remember thinking that, not to be an ingrate or anything, it wasn’t that pink. Really more red-brown, and even that color was only on the facades of some of the streets in the old city. It was not the sea of pink I had imagined. Nevertheless, Jaipur is a very charming metropolis, a tourist and shopping must-see in India.
(Perhaps that is why North India is so touristy, there are about eight cities that are ‘must-sees’: Jaipur, Varanasi, Agra, Delhi, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Shimla, and Amritsar.)
We saw gigantic sun-dials and various sun-based scientific measuring machines that I did not understand but knew were really cool, if only for their aesthetics. We saw a palace in Jaipur that was more of a wall—it looked like an earth-toned painting of a city on a mountain—with rows of arches and small windows. The top floor had a viewing gallery for the royal harem that was modestly cloaked in the Islamic fashion with ornate granite micro-windows that from the outside looked like an impenetrable wall.
The next day we went with Hani to the Amber Fort, met Mike, and rode an elephant. Hani and Lucky were our rickshaw walas for the day. Hani called himself Tikki-Tikki-Boom-Boom, Aisha Shakira, me Brad Pitt, and Sam either Prince Charles or Madonna. Sam was his favorite. Hani was a smooth talker, a real schmoozer, a fluent English speaker with a bold and friendly sense of humor and an I’ll-take-care-of-you sensibility. He made us feel comfortable and made us feel like we were saving money, which we probably were not. I called him Aamir Khan because Tikki-Tikki-Boom-Boom seemed weird.
First he took us to the Amber Fort, which occupied our morning. I think I remembered seeing it briefly in a movie once and I had one of those moments. Those moments that amaze me that I am in India, which regenerate me to the fact that I am far from home. Whereas otherwise I could just be in a weird city in the States, being in front of a colossal, Mughal fort whose tan turrets and intrepid walls makes me remember how much lava is between me and Kansas City. I explored it mostly at my own pace, exploring the complex with curiosity and wonder. And curiosity not just toward the countless Mughal archways, the elegant, gemmed-encrusted rooms (only a few), the steep and mysterious stairs, and familiar modest look-outs with granite windows—the people watching was magnificent! The surplus of foreigners—especially when Jurisprudence told me he saw a Royals hat on a fat, obnoxious American—made me giddy for ironic and for nostalgic purposes. And even the Indian tourists were a delight to watch: groups of adolescents running down the echoing hallways screaming like monkeys, young couples pulling their toddlers around to the next photo-opp, and that one old barefoot woman who seemed to have thrown her walker off the fort’s walls judging by her arched back so that she could walk the Amber Fort’s stairs without bother, one at a time.
At the base of the fort we met an American, traveling all alone, a young guy with curly black hair covered by a baseball cap with a shamrock on it and a black t-shirt with Nepali writing circling the ever-present Om. His name was Mike Chalfan (M.O.T.T., and I guessed it right away) and he was quiet. He had just finished the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan—two years, three months of attempting to teach English in a remote, mountainous village, living with a host family. The nearest phone reception was an hour away along with Internet and the single nearest Peace Corps volunteer. The national dish of Kyrgyzstan—he tells us—is lamb fat atop cold noodles and intestines. Otherwise it was buckwheat and anti-septic vodka, every day. He was one of nineteen who finished the two years, and there were sixty-four in the beginning.
Needless to say it makes my study abroad experience seem as familiar as high school. So it was Halloween and we invited him to celebrate with us that night at a Hookah bar. I think the candy and mundane conversation about American culture warmed his spirits a little. Or at least that’s what I wanted for him, he looked disillusioned.
After the Amber Fort we rode an elephant. But more exciting thing was petting and feeding the baby elephant who had vegetable-based, neon paints on his face. I felt kind of important riding the big guy, like Prince Ali, Fabulous He, Ali Ababwa. Except in a rural village in India, not “Saudi Arabia.”
We then went to a textile factory and shop where I bought an awesome blanket! But then I lost it later. I ended up losing a lot of this trip: that blanket, my sunglasses, my camera!, and I think something else.
The next day Madonna, Aamir Khan, and I went to the monkey temple. Climbing up the hill on a zig-zagging road, Sam and I stopped frequently to give one of the hundreds of monkeys on this hill a roasted peanut. It is considered good luck when a small, soft, and precise hand grabs a peanut from your comparably fat and clumsy fingers. Atop the hill was a temple not for a monkey god but for the sun god. A woman living there gave us the schpeal on the temple—older than Jaipur and overlooking the smoggy city—along with string bracelets and yellow bindi. She was pretty.
That day we left Jaipur by train, all of us feeling sour after paying the hotel bill. We stopped in Delhi to change trains, then Kalka. Delhi was really crowded and hectic and Kalka was like musical trains because the operators kept telling us to move. It was not ideal. Finally, after about fourteen hours of travel, half of which on a toy train, we arrived in Shimla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh. Shimla was a British getaway and is now a city on a mountainside, bustling with shopping and restaurants. The air was thinner and colder and we could see a few snow-capped peaks in the far, far distance. We climbed to the top of the Shimla peak, at parts at forty-five degree inclines, where there was a temple for Hanuman, the monkey god. Rightly so, Shimla has more of them than Macalester does squirrels. Or at least they make their presence quite well known, climbing and jumping through neighborhoods and running down streets and eating scraps and fighting dogs. The temple was identifiable from the bottom of the mountain because an orange statue of Hanuman stood above the tree line like I imagine Paul Bunyan did. At the top, monkeys galore.
We ate at a Tibetan hole-in-the-wall below a homeopathy doctors’ office near the Anglican church in Shimla. It had a green sign and a black metal fence reminding me of Ireland (again, I don’t know what I’m talking about) that encircled its one-table patio. The inside, right next to the kitchen/stall, had two plastic tables. The cook prepared Momo’s (Tibetan veg. dumplings), noodles, and a noodle soup. It was my favorite meal on the trip, well perhaps a close second.
We spent the rest of our day and a half in Shimla just walking/trekking around the town, seeing an old British lodge, and trying to buy bus tickets to Aut, our next stop. Getting to Aut was an adventure: you see, in our rush to make our early bus, we got on the wrong one at the hectic and convoluted bus station at Shimla. We had to get off when the operator checked our tickets ten minutes into the ride, go back to the bus station, and wait for the next bus. I almost lost the new tickets twice, and I was ornery.
Finally, we arrived in Aut that night. A friend of our program coordinator, Anju, picked us up. His name is Raju, a resident of Banjar, about an hour from Aut and about twenty minutes from where we were staying. Anju comes here every year because she loves it and I understand why. It was completely isolated, only the Om Shanti hotel and its staff (and the owner’s blonde puppy, Juice), the small town up the road, an old German with a mullet and big earrings, and us. The Om Shanti has about five rooms for rent and is situated in the Kullu Valley between two mountains. We sat by the babbling brook (yes, babbling) and read, ate delicious hotel food, nearly froze to death at night under our two thick comfortors, got lost hiking, and gazed. The valley got dark by about four, the shadow of the mountain chilling the thin air. We even celebrated Diwali there with the staff, drinking cheap whisky and vodka around a campfire while lighting off fireworks a little too close to our hands. It reminded me of the Fourth.
But the best part was the overnight trip we took. The hotel owner is named Lallit and he also takes his guests on treks. He is from the valley, born and raised, and learned English from tourists and his degree in Tourism Studies. He took us to Jaloori Pass, a town of seven buildings atop a ridge. We took a day hike to Ragupur Fort. At the top of the mountain frozen snow hid in the perpetual shadows of autumn. Come winter it will be covered. The fort was above the tree line where the peak was tan with soft grass and little red shrubs. We could see them: five mountains away, yet seemingly edible, the snow-capped Himalayas.
The top of most mountains provokes awe among us humble humans. But these puppies, these kings of the jungle, these white teeth of God were not a piece of the pie—they were the pie. They were amazing only if everything else considered amazing were ordinary. Even the foggy foothills around us and behind us stumped my vocabulary. I had another I-can’t-believe-I’m-here, and we all sat in isolated silence, on our own little peaks, mesmerized as if gazing Earth from the moon. None of us brought our cameras.
We then hiked back through the deciduous, mossy forest to the Pass where we picked up our backpacks and cameras (I bought a cheap film camera in Shimla) and ate lunch—chapattis, boiled eggs (at 3,200 meters!), and cabbage bhaji. We then trekked to our campsite the other direction on the ridge. A black furry dog name Willard followed us to our campsite after Jurisprudence fed it chapatti. The campsite was beside a pond and the remains of a massive rockslide, and near a small circular lake for the goddess of ghee (highly concentrated butter). Lallit and two staff from the hotel set up our dinner and our tents. Self-reliance seemed foreign. They cooked exquisite meals (more boiled eggs!) while we ate around a roaring campfire. We played more Euchre that night in the tent.
The next day Lallit took us grappling down a forty-meter rock face in the valley after we had hiked back. I went first and had to remember to keep leaning back against my instinct to cling to the wall. We met a math professor from the University of Banjar who invited us in for tea next to the grappling rock. He was such a math professor, if you know what I mean.
We left Om Shanti the next night and I was pretty sad to leave. Had I known what we were going to next was like I would have been sadder.
Our bumpy bus dropped us off at the Dharamshala airport at 1:30 am with two taxis. We were delusional after the stressful taxi to Aut, the awkward and long bus ride, and this was the cherry on top. Sam and I were in the taxi with a Japanese tourist named Makoto (?) who worked at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Nagoya. Then the taxi driver put on Enrique Inglesias as we sat waiting for the next bus for “cooking supplies” to take with us. I think Sam and I guffawed for about seven straight sleep-deprived minutes while Makoto and the driver didn’t get the joke and clucked awkwardly. We arrived in McCleodganj, our actual destination, at about three. McCleodganj is where the Dalai Llama and many Tibetan refugees stay, right next to Dharamshala. It is also about a popular tourist destination. In between Jimmy’s Italian kitchen and various coffee shops stood a large Buddhist temple that seemed much more Middle Kingdom Confucian, imperial Great Wall-esque than the Sub continental, poly-limbed deity, elephantine Hinduism I had grown accustomed to. We went to another Buddhist temple, passing by all sorts of white people: yippies, hippies, an emo kid or two, dorky backpackers with high socks inside clear white sandals, and adventurists. I couldn’t help but feel like if a Subaru in San Francisco with a Free Tibet bumper sticker had a Motherland like Russian-Americans do, it would be McCleodganj. Nevertheless, the town was pretty neat. Monks clad with shaved heads in red robes walked the streets in Converse high tops, Merrells, Doc Martins, and even work shoes that looked steel-toed. Inside the Buddhist temple we went to we saw sitting monks watch partners that would ceremonially smack the air until their hand met the other in a violent crack. I didn’t know what the purpose of it was but I can assume it was Buddhist. The entire temple had an aesthetic influence of Chinese simplicity. Large golden gods in glass cases stood in front of wallpaper with fractal patterns of various deities. I spun the Mantra wheels outside the temple like any good tourist should (for good luck, of course), bought a prayer flag set, and called it a day.
That night we met some Westerners living in McCleodganj, most of whom had no time frame as to when they were leaving. They were all very nice and not as stupid or annoying as I had imagined they would be. We had drinks on the roof of the Beer Bar, as it was called, and then danced on its dance floor downstairs.
We left the next day, fine with me, to Amritsar.
On the train we descended back into the plains, into what is known as the breadbasket of India, the Punjab. We met a Portuguese man on our public bus named Choit (with a ch as in challah). He had a fully stuffed backpack, sleeping bag, and all, and another for the day. Choit arrived in India last week and immediately went to McCleodganj. So I would consider the day we met him as his first day in India. Sam and I talked to him on the bus about caste, food, manners, history, religion, language, and the interconnectivity of it all like good liberal arts students. He was voracious for information and we were eager to deliver our knowledge like loquacious professors, so we got along quite well. Anyway, when we arrived in Amritsar, he did not know where to go so he came with us to our hotel. He ended up being number six for the following twenty-four hours. Luckily for him, he had lived in London for two years and was fluent in English but had the occasional Portuguese bend, especially when talking about home. He used a lot of hand sanitizer.
That night we went to the Golden Temple. It is a massive complex, and to enter it one must remove their shoes, wear a head covering (tourists can buy a handkerchief outside it for Rs. 10), wash their hands, and submerge their feet in a shallow bath perpendicular to the walkway, and. No tobacco or alcohol allowed inside or even in the three-kilometer radius of it, for that matter. It is the Mecca, the Western Wall, the Vatican, for Sikhs. If the Golden Temple is the Western Wall, then Amritsar is Jerusalem and the Punjab is Israel.
Entering the complex through a white marble gateway, the complex is surrounded by that same pure marble. On each four entrances are magnificent, circular towers that most gudhwaras (Sikh temples) have that are emblematic to Sikh architecture. Sikhism believes that all religions are equal, and it sought to bridge the Hindu-Muslim gap. The domes do that alone. The marble walls provided the crust for the sprawled, placid square pond and the Golden Temple itself. In the middle of the pond, connected by a grand bridge, the Temple itself is pure 22 carat gold, inside and out. About the size of a two-story cabin, the epicenter of Sikh worship provokes awe and pristine glory. We went inside.
Waiting in line, I noticed the gold, electric fans keeping us cool while we waited below the golden railings. In fact, everything that was not gold was white marble. Inside the Temple it was crowded. What I had thought was recorded music playing from the, you guessed it, golden speakers was actually live. The musicians were playing golden instruments while women and men equally (another important facet of Sikhism: gender equality) sat and listened. The golden railings prevented the visitors, most of who dropped to their knees and bowed with their entire body, from joining the cross-legged audience. The inner walls were golden with some indigo velvet trimmings, only to further accentuate the gold’s intricate designs. The center of worship was a golden sword in golden sheath. The music continued to play and pilgrims continued to file in and offer prayer and a few rupees while I was asked to keep the line moving, out.
The next day we went back for lungar, a cafeteria-style meal provided for free by the Temple, and any Sikh gudhwara, this one is just the most famous. We were immediately given our silver tray, bowl and spoon upon entering. We walked upstairs while waiting to enter because we came during the lunch rush. When we did enter the cafeteria, a brown, three-story building just inside the complex, we sat upon hemp carpets stretching from end to end with rows of people. Servers immediately walked the rows and dished out chapattis, then dal (lentils), then pani (water), then bhat (rice), then the bhaji du jour. Everybody ate immediately, savoring the philosophy of the food, like a romanticized communist cafeteria. The entire dining experience took about fifteen minutes. It was my favorite meal.
We went to another gudhwara close by, smaller and more serene. At the Golden Temple, especially during the day, there are currents of people circling, taking photos, praying, reading signs; however, at this gudhwara, it was quite peaceful. The temple was off to the side of the square pond and smaller, and the walkway around the pond was nearly empty. I understood why walking around that pond could be meditative.
We went to what was called the Hindu Golden Temple in the guidebook after getting lost in the bustling city of Amritsar. It was the exact same in every way except smaller and there were Hindu idols in the pond and inside the temple. I couldn’t help but resent it a little.
We took a taxi to the Indo-Pakistani border to watch a special ceremony at sunset. On either side of the border crowds of people (both sides gender separated) sat on concrete bleachers chanting nationalistic cheers. Soldiers on either side performed lung-capacity contests, leg kicking contests, death-stare contests, and most importantly, marching contests. Both sides’ soldiers had rooster-like ornamentation atop the mens’ hats. India was brown and red, Pakistan, green and black (with capes!). While it seemed confrontational and competitive like a cricket match between the two, it also seemed to be a sign of cooling tensions. They shook hands and lowered their flags together, and even though everybody was patriotic, I could not help but feel a certain playfulness to it. And I was happy to see Pakistan, if only a bit.
That night I stayed at the Golden Temple, another service provided for free. I stayed in the isolated foreigner’s section with beds, cupboards for storage, and a shower, while pilgrims slept on mats in an open-air plaza. “We would get killed” said one American girl staying there, “…if we did not have this. I mean I am sad that we don’t get to bridge the cultural gap, but it’s a necessary evil.” I really didn’t like her. She was in India making a movie about “Eastern spirituality” on her year off from NYU. And when she says Eastern spirituality, she means Tibetan Buddhism—she knew nothing about Sikhism or Hinduism (or Islam!), and really didn’t seem interested in knowing.
That was my biggest problem with many of the Westerners we met: they had an agenda in coming to India, and many of them did not even try to learn anything new, only to fulfill and reinforce their largely false perceptions of India (such as Buddhism, which is virtually non-existent in India), perceptions they would carry back with them to espouse as “what India is like.” If I have learned anything from my time in Pune, it is that that phrase does not exist. If one stays up North, in must-see places (The Purell Syndrome [see Goa entry]), then one can see the India imagined by Western dreamers and reinforced by Western tourists. While I was really happy to see these amazing places, I am also incredibly grateful to be seeing so much more.
On our way back to Pune, we stopped in Delhi for twenty-four hours. Worn out, we were too tired to go to the Red Fort or anywhere else. Instead we had breakfast in bed, then went to see the latest Bollywood comedy: Golmaal 3. We took the brand new Delhi light rail—clean, frenzied, and efficient (and a section reserved for ladies only!). The movie seemed to be about the conflict between two competing groups of friends/siblings (it was in Hindi and a lot of it was guesswork), only to be forced together as a family when somebody’s mother married the uncle of the rival siblings/friends. Lots of slapstick, lots of funny faces adding up to an easy film you could laugh at on mute, or in our case, in an unknown language. I liked the movie and it made me think of my five friends with whom I had traveled on this trip—Sam, Alayna, Aisha, Jurisprudence, and I. We were a varied group who pushed and pulled each other, but were willing to make concessions because we just liked each other too much to fight. I couldn’t have had a better group to travel with.
