Caves and Ashrams.

The Buddist caves of Ellora were pretty special (photos to follow). What was not so special were the 'friendly' tour guides - "i am just wery wery friendly ma'am! i ask no money! i do for good karma only!" (no, i don't need to come into another tiny dingy cave with a huge great lingam in it and i really don't need to hold your hand, or be kissed by you etc etc) I was reminded of the bit in A Passage to India, with the Malabar caves and their bizarre echo:


The crush and the smell she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued it had managed to murmur 'pathos, piety, courage - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value'. If one had spoken vileness in that place or quoted lofty poetry the comment would be the same 'ou boum'. If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and scandal in the world, past, present and to come, for all the misery men must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge or bluff it would amount to the same, the serpent would descend and return to the ceiling'


I then took what would have been a very comfortable, nay luxurious overnight bus (were it not for the itch factor (fleas? in the seats??) to Sevagram - to Gandhi's ashram. There i installed myself in the hut that was once inhabited by Bapu himself, but is now inhabited primarily by a family of rats. These were friendly rats, i felt - country rats. I settled myself into the daily routine of prayer, bread labour (preparing vegetables - organic, homegrown of course) or weeding, or cleaning grain, and talking to the other guests, and walking in the Maharashtran countryside.

And now, taking myself from the sublime to the mad, the bad and the downright dangerous, i am in Calcutta. And it is snowing. Well not really, but the fire we used to heat the water for the laundry was giving out big white flakes of ash and i thought, for a minute...My first morning at Prem Dam hospice found me washing poo and blood encrusted rags, in stages: scrape 'matter', cold rinse, hot wash, hot rinse and wringe. Stage one is obviously the most, er, distressing, and we squealed when, thinking we'd scraped the last we saw, sitting on the pile of washing a round turd, looking up at us like a toad. It sure was filthy work. The stuff we washed, by hand, we would have burnt or binned, like, straightaway at the Nightshelter. I cannot see why they don't invest in a washing machine. Apparently they could but don't, out of some principle or other. Well, enough of the schatology, bring on the eschatology! This place, Calcutta/ Kolkatta, is fast getting under my skin and infecting my blood (in a good way, not in a Malarial way...). More adventures of the fully not boring kind to follow!