Republic Day

Maybe a pilgrimage journey always involves a maze. For us our journey began with the security maze of SF, then British, then India security. We tried to imagine what it would be like if the first security guards blessed us on our way—and we wished each other safe passage. As we are able, we look at all the weary travelers with compassion. We’re all in this together.

We’re glad that we’ve booked a room ahead in Delhi with a small hotel that has someone after customs with a sign with our names. We arrived to our rooms and slept. The next day we had the energy and excitement for visiting sites. We began at the Bahai House of Worship, a vast white lotus building where all remove shoes and sit in silence. Files of students in school uniforms came in and sat quietly. Outside the building they greeted us with “Hello” and “Namaste.”

We visited both the Indira Gandhi Museum (formerly her home and where she was assassinated) and the Mahatma Gandhi memorial at the place where he too was killed. In what reminds us of the stations of the cross, you can walk his last steps, reading his words like “There’s nothing new about truth. Truth is as old as the hills.”

We traveled to Agra through a wild scene of pedestrians, goat herds, rickshaws, bicycles, pushcarts, three wheel auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, trucks with colorful painted decorations and sparkling tinsel, burros with heavy loads, camel drawn carts, ox-drawn carts, tractor-drawn wagons, monkeys, dogs, sacred cows, buses loaded with people, and more. Though the roads are sometimes two lane and marked as such, the traffic creates three and four and more lanes. All the vehicles with horns sound them. The roads are lined with trash; the pollution and smog are extreme, and we know our traveling here by plane and motored vehicles and our going through several bottles of water a day add to it all.

When we stop in highly congested areas, people selling beads, chess sets, bangles tap on the windows and don’t let up until traffic moves again. Agra is a crowded, dirty city. At the Taj Mahal women and men line up separately to be searched. Unlike Barbara’s memory of thirty-five years ago and unlike all the photographs, the Taj Mahal rises up in its magnificence through the smoky haze.

On the way to Jaipur we visited the palace of Akbar who acknowledged the truths of all religions. The architecture includes Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian symbols. In Jaipur we walked around the city and the bazaars. The market is full of colors, piles of red spice and yellow spices, beautiful round purple eggplants, piles of red rose petals and marigolds, painted elephants, dirt, dust, dung, urine, sweat, open sewers, stench, smiles, bright saris, tredle sewing machines, sculptures, shrines. Most people when we nod and smile, nod and smile in return. We are trying to keep before ourselves the worth and dignity of each person and to have our way of being acknowledge that. People are doing their best to make a living, offering rides, selling, begging, and the moments of connection that aren’t about money are worth everything.

When we stay in a grungy room we notice our discomfort, and when we stay in a nicer room we notice our discomfort as we think of the thousands of people we passed during the day who are living with so little. Our list of gratitude is ever growing. We are reminded of the story of Sidhartha who left his palace and saw suffering, old age, and death. We saw a funeral procession with a little band and a body wrapped in a cloth and covered with flowers.

While we travel we know our lives depend upon so many others – their driving, their growing, carting, and preparing our food, their hand washing and cleaning, their hand labor that made the roads and the sacred sites.

Each day involves the human tasks of cleaning up, washing out clothes, finding a place to dry them, finding food, finding the way to and from places.

In Ajmer we visited the great mosque dedicated to a Sufi saint. We made our way up the narrow alley packed with everything, all the stalls, vats of boiling milk, vats of boiling oil, food being prepared and eliminated, swine eating out of the sewers. In a rush of people, our heads covered, we entered the mosque, a cleric placed a prayer shawl over us and offered prayers for our safety as people tossed floods of red rose petals on the saints tomb.

Later we visited a Jain site and saw a two story golden diorama depicting the Jain concept of the ancient world in miniature – a golden city, flying peacocks, elephant gondolas, sparkling with mirrors and precious stones.

In Pushkar, with its thousand temples and lake with ghats, we visited the Sikh temple where we received a blessing of sweets, saw a Hindu temple with statues of gods surrounded by swirling colored lights, another wedding cake-looking temple where we were blessed with a lump of sugar, a temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey general. Late in the night there was a Hanuman celebration with music and chanting.

At Pushkar Lake we visited the Brahma temple. A holy student directed us through. It was January 20^th and he told us his sadhu, holy teacher, said his first puja, prayers, that morning for Obama. After visiting the temple he took us to a Brahmin priest on a ghat at the lake. We sat cross-legged and repeated the prayers in both Sanskrit and English. We ritually washed our hands, eye lids, noses, ears, and lips. We held plates of red spices, yellow spices, rice, marigolds—and wasps. The priest dipped his fingers in these elements and blessed us with third eyes and tied red and yellow threads around our wrists. We walked to the water and offered the elements to the lake with prayers for the world, for peace, and for Obama. He asked us the number in our family. We said it depended upon how you count. As we repeated his words we added to the prayers for family “and all our relations,” and we thought of all of you.

That night in Udaipur we got a room with a television and watched the inauguration on BBC International. From Udaipur we traveled to Mt. Abu, a site sacred to the Jains and where the Brahma Kumaris have their spiritual center. The mountains are beautiful, the skies blue, the lake lovely. Currently we are reading aloud Suketu Mehta’s /Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found/. We have a daily practices book from which we read at breakfast, and we share with each other our separate journal entries. We are enjoying one another, and we are remembering and sharing our dreams and seeing how through them we are trying to understand our experiences here in India. We are ever grateful for your love and support and truly offer ours to you.

Love,
Barbara and Bill