Alive.

I am alive. In spite of a nightmare bus journey last night - draughty, rickety, loud, long, dangerous (i.e 100 mph on the wrong side of the road) and to top it off, the cherry on the cake, uniquely squashed, cheek by jowl, next to a man with naughty, inquisitive finers. Rapture! Bliss! Joy that cannot be counted on ones fingers! But here i am, in one piece, girding my loins in preparation for some serious seeing of the sights in Ellora.

O thief, tell us of the beauty of Paradise.

I saw three crosses very different from one another
That on the right is alive and not dead
that on the left is dead and not alive
that in the middle makes me marvel
it is like one who wakes while he sleeps
it is like one who lives while he dies
it is like a son of man and he is God.*

After asking around - nobody had heard of the 'town' it was said to be 'near' (i was beginning to think it was some mythological place, like Tir-Na-Nog) i found it, Kurisumala Ashram (or rather it found me...)

It was certainly real, but very remote, hidden away high in the Western Ghats, away from phones and computers, this small community of twenty monks, with an attached dairy farm and nothing for miles but rolling rugged hills. So i stayed for one week, breathing, walking, reading, talking (surprisingly, for these were Trappist monks) to Brother Augustine in particular (he and i would 'take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies') I don't have the words for the beauty, save to say that itwas what the Celts called a 'thin place'- where the barriers between heaven and earth are broken down and eternity is made visible. A place where the air was luminous and cold, where ordinary people live out extraordinary lives of quietude method patience and constant prayer. Constant prayer.

'There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire, whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss. The things of time are in connivance with eternity. The shadows serve you. The beasts sing to you before they pass away. The solid hills shall vanish like a worn out garment. All things change and die, and disappear. Questions arrive, assume their actuality and disappear. In this hour i shall cease to ask them and silence shall be my answer. The world that your love created, that the heart has distorted and that my mind is always misinterpreting, shall cease to interfere with our voices.'
-Thomas Merton, from The Sign of Jonas.

And now i am back in the madness and the mayhem of The City, this time Bijapur, Karnataka (i am North-bound, these days) Here we have collosal Medeival Mosques and dust upon dust upon dirt upon people, smouldering piles of rubbish and for some reason lots of wild pigs, snuffling in the rubbish and lapping up filthy stagnant water and sleeping, whole families heaped together, like soft hairy pebbles. It feels good to be alone once again (i feel quite the intrepid explorer). There is a fresh sense of, if not danger, then something that requires guardedness. As a lone female gora (white foreigner) i am not exactly inconspicuous - there is that unbridled curiosity again, and the Eyes that Follow and the daily, hourly interrogation: "why you no husband? why you not want SONS?" I've decided that i make a lousy tourist. I trundled on my rickety old bike, by accident, deep the heart of the city, and found myself quite, quite lost, and when i did find the mosque that is home to four hairs from the Prophet's sacred beard, it cost 100 Rs (my food budget for the day) to get in. Considering that every square inch of the ancient place was covered in graffiti ("Pranjeet loves Sita") i don't know where all those rupees go. I will hit the road again tonight, for some more travailling. Next stop Ellora, Maharashtra.


*from the Syrian liturgy, based on the writings of Ephrem the Syrian, Deacon Monk of Nisibus, West Asia.

Happiness writes white when life is a beach.

For the past six days i have been living on a roof. It is a beautiful roof. A perfect roof. It has everything i need: a bed, a loo, a bucket, a tap and the nightsky. It also has a Serb, an American, an Australian and a Finn to keep me company. Life is a beach (again). And it is good. Too good. I am drifting on a wave of fuzzy shanti goodwill. I am all at sea in a soup of Nothingness. What do i do all day? I do Nothing. My days are spent doing Nothing to excess. My days are full of Nothingness - a surfeit of bliss, replete with zeros. And against the blue sky hovers a big black question-bird; a hybrid of Catholic guilt and warped Protestant work ethic.
What are you doing here? You are a traveller, not a tourist! Get yourself out of this tourist trap, this theatre of pretend India with its cardboard scenery, its Jeffery Archer novels, its blue skies and its sunsets. Travelling is meant to be difficult! (I have had long bus-rides worth of musing on the etymological roots of that word: travelling. To travel is to travail, is to work, is to labour, is to give birth to. Perhaps)

But i have been reading, and i will share with you a fraction of the goodstuff. The first is from the collected writings of Henry David Thoreau, the second from Isaiah 5 (the Bible) and the third from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.


The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves, nor one another, thus tenderly.

...

Woe to those who stay up late at night inflamed with wine. Never a thought for the works of Yahweh. That is why my people are in exile, for want of perception. That is why Sheol opens wide its throat and gapes with measureless jaw...woe to those whose might lies in wine imbibing, their heroism in mixing strong drinks.

...

Justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try and save them.

It takes a Village.

So i made it through another sojourn with the good people of Gomathimuthupuram. And what of my first Indian Christmas? Parts of it felt more Real - the rural setting, the poverty, the complete absence of consumerism; and parts less Real - the heat, the missing things (family, turkey...) Christmas day got off to a rousing start with the worst redition, ever, of Silent Night blasted from the church loudspeaker. At 3am. Honestly, for the love of Jesus, these Christians cannot do music. So i was up and swaddled in my best nylon sari ready for the 2 hour long church service at 3.30. Naturally, this put me in a sour mood, from which - amazingly - even vegetable biriani could not shake me. Or a phonecall to my family with their turkey and their brussel sprouts and their mince pies... The rest of the day was quiet. I got some washing done. I played with the kids. In the evening there was a fancy dress competition (one kid went as me...ha!)

Back to the bosom of my Indian family, complete with the compulsory tour of the endless extended family, where, on one such expedition i received a marriage proposal. From the mother of a man i am assured is too good looking and speaks pukka english. It was all pretty amusing, until i realised she was deadly serious, and tricky to get out of, in light of my complaint during lunch that Uncle Jacob had failed to arrange me a marriage with a nice Indian man, as promised. (I was joking, obviously, but i see now that you don't joke about these things)

Back to the undisguised curiosity of village folk, for whom i'm a bit of a celebrity. Every five steps i take there is a gaggle of women who tweak and tug at my sari, cackling a commentary to each other - 'she is too lean', 'her hair is too curly but good colour' (my Tamil is such that i can understand what they are saying but can't respond). When they have finished i will be bustled into another house with another band of women and their silent husbands and shy children, where i'll be handed a photo-album, baby or cup of chai, or all three at once. If i'm really lucky i'll be given a glass of milk, still warm from the cow's udder while the ghost of Mr. Pasteur hovers "you might want to boil that first...". But no i am to drink, as they eye me with a mixture of admiration and disapproval.

As 2006 breathed its last, i was to be found smoking a crafty cigarette while all were in church, remembering New Years Eves past. There was That Party last year, of glittering bohemian proportions, at Graham Greene's ramshackled, mouldy old mansion, and New Years Eve 1999 in that tiny ancient chapel on the cliff's edge in Dorset, with 14 people, many many candles, a song ('one more step around the world i go: from the old things to the new, keep me travelling along with you...), some fireworks, a fire that wouldn't quite light and thirteen year-old Katie who knew that she didn't have much longer to live.

I sit writing this in Trivandrum, Kerala. It was sad to say goodbye to people who seem to love and accept me so effortlessly and boundlessly, but it feels good to be free-range again. I have a full itinerary ahead of me, involving no less that three Ashrams (yes, i am succumbing to the spiritual tourism thing, but who wouldn't in this land with its smorgasboard of religion), a spell with Mother Theresa's clan and a visit from my very own mother. More to come.