18 Days in Inja
In November 2010, I took my husband of 18 months to India for 18 days to see some sights, meet some people and eat some food. We did. And then I felt like writing it down.
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On the Banks of the Ganges
Or the Day I Yelled at a FauxPriest
When you’re planning a trip to India in a constrained window of time you realize pretty quickly that you’re not going to see one fifth of what you wanted to see.
This is for a few reasons:
1)India stretches back in time so far it extends almost beyond it and so the expanse over which amazing things – both natural and manmade – have had a chance to dazzle the senses is higher than other places, and
2)Traversing the subcontinent is not nearly as straightforward as Google Maps might make it seem.
And so you pick and choose, in a matter that feels almost unfairly matter-of-fact:
Temple or palace? River or desert? Town or city?
It was under these circumstances that we found ourselves on the banks of the Ganges River, in Haridwar and Rishikesh, two of Hinduism’s spiritual hubs, tucked away in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.
Though there was no intentional pilgrimage thread running through our journey, going to India and not getting some taste of the rich, spiritual quintessence seemed irresponsible. What I’d not completely realized was that the rich, spiritual quintessence is closely guarded by a bevy of charlatans disguised as priests standing on the ready to exploit it.
Hindus believe Haridwar’s holiness traces back to the time before time began, when a drop of the nectar of immortality was spilled there. Geo-spiritually, it’s where the Ganges River first touches the plains of North India: bathing in the river here is equivalent to absolution.
The river itself is blue-green and cloudy, but not in an unclean way. Having just melted off a glacier, it’s also freezing. And it looks powerful and potent, like some kind of magical elixir you’d carry on horseback in a single vial. And, as if that’s not enough, every night at sunset the entire town gathers on the banks of the river and offers songful prayers to it, pushing small leaf baskets, filled with flowers and lit clay lamps into the river, till all you can see are small specks of yellow fire dancing on water amid pink and orange petals.
I saw these baskets and my inner-Hindu (not all that different from my outer-Hindu) was awakened; I wanted the full experience, and then I got it.
Minutes after I had the basket in hand, a FauxPriest summoned me to the banks of the river and led me through some super fast devotional in a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t realize that he was a private operator and momentarily forgot, in all the light and beauty and nature scape, that even if he hadn’t been, those affiliated with religious organizations tend to practice a spiritual commercialism designed to fleece the devotee up one side and down the other. FauxPriest finished, claimed that during the aforementioned devotional I promised (again, in a language I didn’t understand) to pay him 2,000 Indian Rupees, roughly $50 USD, for his services.
I refused. He got aggressive. My husband got more aggressive. I believe he invoked something called ‘The Law of Puja” which I’d never heard of before. And that calm that comes with doing something truly soothing was significantly rattled.
We went back to our hotel and fell asleep, exhausted, listening to current of the river pull itself ever forward.
A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time
Or What Is The Taj Mahal
I considered leaving my Taj Mahal entry blank: void of language, absent of photograph, and perfectly untainted by the transition of feelings into words, all of which were sure to fail the emotion of its gleaming, incomparable majesty. Saying nothing seemed a fitting and appropriate tribute to the first thing in my life that has left me utterly speechless.
[Also, once someone describes something with such exquisite language as “a teardrop on the cheek of time,” it’s fair to say that no one really needs to say anything on the subject ever again. Thank you, Rabindranath Tagore.]
We arrived just before dawn at the East Gate, drifted through the sandstone gateways like a sort of ethereal dream, and stood transfixed in the early morning light and mist which made the background and foreground almost interchangeable. And, at first, we couldn’t put our cameras down, nervously snapping picture after picture with shaking hands, even though any number of photographers have done it better, giddy like a teenagers face to face with a high school crush and having no idea what to say.
Lonely Planet India lists and dispels four myths about the Taj Mahal within the first three paragraphs of the Agra section: it was not built over a 10th century Hindu temple, there were never plans for a negative Taj Mahal to sit opposite it in granite, the king who ordered its construction did not also order for all workers to have their hands cut off after it was built, and the Taj Mahal is not sinking.
There is a fifth [unverified] claim about the king who ordered the construction of the Taj Mahal and the woman who was its inspiration: upon learning that his wife had died, Shah Jahan is said to have become so distressed his hair turned white overnight.
It seems an improbable thing, but when it ends with the Taj Mahal, a sort of architectural fairy tale made of marble and gemstones and history, you can’t help but want to believe it and believe in the kind of love that it transforms itself into beauty to stand the test of time.
“It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.”
Keith Bellows
The Places We’re From, The Places We Go (Agra)
By day 3 it became obvious to me that there are some things you can’t escape no matter how far you travel. In my case, the “where are you from, where are you really from” question that has dogged me my entire American life followed me to India courtesy of my sometimes trendy, always interracial marriage and a non-Indian husband who passes for a South Indian who just shaved his head as part of a ritualistic Hindu hair offering.
And so, on our way to the Taj Mahal….
Doorman at hotel: Where are you from?
Me: Washington, D.C.
Doorman: But, are you native Indian?
Me: Ummmm, kind of?
Doorman (trying again): Where are you from?
Me, feeling bad now that the doorman is trying to place me and I’m about to tell him I’m from India’s biggest melting pot city: Mumbai –
Doorman: Mmmmm….
Me: — but my grandparents are from Kerala.
Doorman: Aha! That’s what I thought. And your husband is…basically American?
Me, unable to see the end of this conversation if I introduce Mark’s Jamaican heritage: Yes, basically.
With that, we left for Agra.
By Fort 3 and Palace 4 later that week, we’d sort of hit our max for both but as our first of trip, the grandeur and magnificence of the Agra Fort, a 94-acre walled city which dates back to the 10th century from which Agra was governed, was as inspiring as it was imposing.
You couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like to live there (as a member of the royal family, naturally, not someone whose function it was to chisel and cart the slabs of sandstone that made up the 70 foot high walls), and what life was like at that time in history.
Standing at the walled perimeter of the Agra Fort and staring across the Yamuna River at the Taj Mahal, we thought a lot about what it means to leave a mark on the world, what defines a contribution, what defines a people.(It was that kind of Indian adventure.)
Obviously, Humera Usman felt the same way and decided one way to leave her mark on someone else’s was to write her name there.
Sigh.
Dancing with [Dead] Mughal Emperors
Or the Intersection of Dirty Hippies and Humayun’s Tomb
What struck me most about all the Mughal architecture we took in around Delhi was the way they used gateways and arches to frame an experience you were about to have with a building before it opened up to you in full.
It didn’t hurt, of course, that the arches were perfect; that structures constructed some 400 years ago, with points more than 1000 feet away from each other, seemed to line up so effortlessly it almost seemed accidental.
Other forms of amazingness were found in the lattice work on the windows, where 10 foot slabs of sandstone or marble, some 6 inches thick, were carved in whole with no separation.
In short, a whole lot of: how do you think they did that? [Note: This was particularly true for us at Humayun’s Tomb which was not only Day 2 of our trip in India, but Day 1 of our sightseeing jag.]
And so I am the first to admit that there is something to be said for the artistic inspiration that comes from beholding something truly beautiful, that there were moments where you saw things that made you want to rethink your place in the world.
There was nothing, however, that made me want to dance. The same cannot be said of the two dancer-types I captured in the photo below (being busted up by a seriously awesome Indian lady cop with a stick) who broke out into some kind of waltz on the terrace next to the main tomb:
At first, when they started their waltz, I thought there was about to be a flash mob. And though I’m not pro-flash mob or anything, there was some sort of weird intrigue in an of-the-momen” pop culture phenomenon taking place against the landscape of something so old it can claim to have inspired the Taj Mahal.
But, alas, the flash mob was not meant to be. Their waltz quickly turned into some kind of free movement -cum- interpretive dance. Eyeroll.
In conclusion: “No, you dirty hippies, you may not ballroom dance on the main mausoleum of Humayun’s Tomb.”
As not to be a total travel curmudgeon, here’s a picture of a seriously cute baby we also saw at Humayun’s tomb, clearly outfitted for Snowmaggedon 2010.
My grandfather, the family’s original wanderlust and documentarian, inspects our travel itinerary and deems it worthy.
