But almost as soon as the first rays of light swept away the creeping mists, the flat earth began to warm. Something about the place, as if it couldn’t help itself, generating tapas, the fire within. Birds called, fluttered into gardens and pecked at plump worms, vibrant flowers. Winter hadn’t managed to ward off the blossoms.
In the hotel garden, the colors seemed to waken first, to pulse and radiate into the neatly manicured square of space. A diligent groundskeeper had trimmed the hedges within an inch of their lives, but the bougainvillea was allowed to grow wild, unheeded. Fuchsia blooms weighted the unwieldy branches, bending them toward the close-cropped grass. And marigolds. The pert yellow heads grew in tidy rows of bushy green plants, low to the ground.
The only thing detracting from the view of the garden was a squat, dirty Ambassador parked on the walkway, as if the driver were drunk when he parked and somehow mistook the cobbled path for the parking lot.
image from www.horizonsunlimited.com
The heat was coming to Khajuraho. It hadn’t wholly arrived, but the sense of it hung in the air—an intensity to the sun warming the fields of mustard in the countryside, the villages baking, waking from a short winter slumber.
Dev knew that part of February—the welcome warmth, but also the warning of the long summer, he found himself dreading the sweltering trips ahead. Whole days when the road swam in front of his eyes. Weeks on end of praying that his next group of tourists would want to head north toward Rishikesh, or at least to the hill stations, but knowing, at the same time, that these places would be crowded with Indians and foreigners a like, all trying to escape the heat.
He wondered about the mysterious land of Philadelphia, wondered if it, too, sweltered in the summer, wondered if the summer lasted so long, only to be quenched by the fierce monsoon. No, his mother had told him that the sons of her friends, the cab drivers and waiters gone to America, reported no monsoon rains. Just pleasant showers in the spring and fall, welcome heat in the summer and crisp winters with fairy-tale snow-falls.
Dev couldn’t help but wonder if they were embellishing to make their lot seem better. No place could be so idyllic as America was reported to be. Homesick Indians trying to make the best of the oceans and time zones separating them from their homes. As if any land mass could erase karma and provide any immigrant who scraped together the airfare a life of perfect weather and bountiful employment. But still, Dev found himself letting his mind wander in that direction. West.
Ami, meanwhile, was shopping. She’d agreed to a temple tour but first wanted a new skirt to wear. That was the deal she’d made. So while Dev sipped chai and daydreamed, she walked to the market and gave herself to the hands of the hawkers.
“I need a tailor,” she announced, confident that someone would understand her words. By necessity of work they’d understand. And sure enough, out of the gaggle of boys surrounding her, trying to sell her post cards and pornographic key chains, a scrawny teenager stepped forward and offered the magic words:
“My uncle is having a shop. You like nice dresses?”
“Yes,” she said, pushing through the mob of peddlers and following the youth in his ratty shorts and dirty bare feet. He led her around a corner, along a street of shops just opening for business, and presented her to a portly man still finishing his breakfast. He looked unprepared to do business, samosa crumbs scattered over his ample stomach. He was wearing only a t-shirt and sarong, but he immediately stood and bowed toward Ami.
“Yes, what do you like?” he demanded, though not unkindly.
“A skirt,” she said.
“Like a nice village skirt?” He pointed to several wide garments hanging on the wall, and Ami tried to picture herself clothed in the many yards of fabric.
“No, I was thinking something slimmer. A wrap-around.”
The man looked perplexed until Ami held a length of cloth to her waist and demonstrated wrapping it.
“Okay, okay. No problem. One hour only, you can come back.” She agreed, picking out a decorative patterned fabric, hoping it would look good as a skirt. And then she walked out of the shop, checking her watch, wondering why it was that she suddenly felt inadequate in her usual cloths, her jeans and t-shirts, her now-dingy and hopelessly wrinkled kameezes.
She breakfasted in a small café, ordering egg-fry-toast-butter-jam, the jam a neon pink concoction that tasted too tropical to be strawberry. She ordered a cup of coffee, which must have been instant, but came heavily sweetened and thick with cream. And then she wandered aimlessly along the water, just past the Kama Sutra temples, watching the life that was already awake and going about the business of washing clothes, dishes and children in the placid lake.
She felt herself alone, but not really alone, as if her boundaries had dissolved somewhat and she was hard-pressed to say exactly where she ended and the rest of the world began. And the more she thought of it, the more she found it hard to say exactly what had happened—was she simply fading into the surroundings, or was she drawing the outside in to her, incorporating her environment into her very being? As if I even have an environment, she laughed to herself. Nothing but the motion of travel, the road, and Dev.
And Dev, she thought. And then closed off the idea and retraced her steps toward the tailor shop.
image from www.salutsunderland.typepad.com
In the bright, hard-edged light of late morning, sun pouring almost straight down, Dev eased the Ambassador along a rutted road. He rolled the window down and rested his arm on the sill, glancing from side to side through his sunglasses. Young children ran along the car, shouting, bare feet padding against the ground. They ran all full of joy and excitement, as if they’d been expecting him, but of course they hadn’t.
He recognized the place, the shabby exterior, smoothed his already impeccable hair down with his palm and turned to Ami. “Would you like some souvenirs?” he asked. It was his job to ask, and he was doing his job.
She rolled her eyes. Western girls did that. He knew the expression but chose to ignore it, dropping his gaze instead to the new skirt she was wearing. Pretty. A paisley block-print design cut from a tablecloth, the fabric wrapped around her hips and tied at the waist with a wide band.
“Do you really expect me to go shopping now?” she asked. “Here?” She gestured vaguely at the small village, the humble buildings, the children in tattered clothing and bare feet.
“Just looking,” he said, knowing the words sounded trite. A line she’d heard so many times in the last couple weeks. He tried again. “There are some very nice antiques. Rare. Maybe you are enjoying a look?”
She shrugged. “Fine. Are you coming?”
“I am waiting here. Thirty minutes.”
Ami didn’t bother to disguise her irritation as she slid out of the car. Dev watched as she walked in the direction of the house he’d pointed out and before she’d reached the front door, a bowed old man was waiting for her.
She followed him in to the dark room, her countenance changed from irritated to polite. After all, it wasn’t the old man’s fault that Dev still insisted on treating her like a tourist. A meal ticket. She smoothed her skirt as she walked, the new fabric still stiff and standing obstinately out from her legs in a bell shape.
The old man led her to the inner sanctum of the house which turned out not to be a house at all, but a store. A few small windows carved into the stout walls let in enough light to see the relics spread out on makeshift tables. Icons. Carvings. Wood blocks for printing. She tried to understand the place, tried to make sense of what she was seeing as the man led her in a circumambulation, passing object after object into her hands. Was this contraband? Relics stolen from temples and housed here in the interim until wealthy dealers came to ferret them away to museums and private collections? Or were they, perhaps, this man’s estate—remnants of a family of artisans now being sold off to support his retirement? Or was it just the Indian equivalent of an antique shop, dusty treasures there for the finding. She lifted a brass bell, surprised by the weight of it, surprised by how much she did want to bring something home with her. But what? What to choose?
And then a car-load of Germans wedged their way into the low room and the proprietor moved to help them, to pass objects into their hands, and Ami let herself back into the blinding light of the street. She closed her eyes, letting the light come to her slowly, and then looked around. The children were climbing on a crumbling section of wall, apparently playing follow-the-leader with a goat that had ascended the highest bit of rock. One little boy, naked from the waist down, arched his back and peed into the air, laughing as his urine splashed the ground far below. Ami laughed, too, looked around, caught Dev’s eye and saw that he wore a mischievous grin.
image from www.sights-and-culture.com
India doesn’t reside in the cities, because all cities share a soul, everywhere in the world. Delhi, Bombay, London, Philadelphia. While the difference is apparent, the essence is the same. But as soon as the tourist steps out of the crush of buildings, of crowds, of traffic, she finds herself somewhere altogether different. Unique.
The flavor of the place comes through in the rural areas, away from the palaces, the gem shops, the postcard hawkers. There is no postcard to capture the colors of the fields at a certain time of day, or the fleeting vision of a girl in a green sari, a pink bougainvillea bloom tucked behind her ear.
While there are plenty of souvenirs for the temples, no nick-knack exists that holds the true experience of silence in the sanctuary, the moment of facing self, the singular event of darshan—meeting God.
And even the non-believer meets God in the temple; and if not in the temple then at the ghats, near the river; and if not there, then in the eyes of the sadhus, the children, the innocents; and if not there, then in the warm rain, the rush of fields toward a lush green nowhere.
Even the non-believer meets God, because God waits at every corner, in every hall, behind each hand-made shrine and in every garden.
And the believers find God in everything, in each stone, in each lake and pond, in each crumbling temple, sandstone turned black with age.
Hard to find God in the confusion of the cities, but in the small towns, the villages, the sprawling countryside. Fields turn bright green with the end of winter. Curving streams, palm trees, small green parrots. There’s an unspoken language of peace, a Braille of silence spanning space.
Women cook lunch over open flame, children run to call men from the field. Everything in its place. This is peace. Priests, white robed and serene, conduct noon prayers to crowds of pigeons. Laborers crouch on the roadside, sweat-soaked, attuned to the rhythms of their hearts, the flow of blood through their veins. This is peace.
There’s not enough countryside to hold her, the tourist who finally makes it to this edge. She knows the world ends here, just beyond her line of vision. She knows the horizon is a myth, placed there to soften the blow that she must retrace her footsteps, find her way back to the dark city she came from. She must get back in the car, must drive toward the towering buildings, the cold gloom, the silence in which there is no peace.
She wants this space, the expansive feeling in her chest, the greens and yellows, the river, the palms, the parrots. She wants what she can’t even name, wants to exist in this warmth, wants to believe in the mirage of it. That this place won’t bake to brown in the summer, won’t wither, won’t lose its lush form. The lucid dream of it. The unquenchable longing.
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