flickering pictures

While I get things up and running around here, I thought I’d post my India notes, scribbled and scrawled with love, inspiration and revelation during the five weeks I spent scurrying around India last year. I was thrilled with the feedback the first time I posted them, and they should give you an idea of the flavour I’ll be trying to create here. Sorry for the redundancy if you’ve already seen them on Facebook.

-mark

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10:44am Thursday, Jul 12

I have no idea what day it is, and I’m totally disoriented in terms of time. Crazy how much I depend on my Palmpilot to tell me the most basic of things, like “where do I need to be in an hour?” I finally broke down and bought a watch at least - I can’t be missing planes and things.

I booked my guest house in McLeod Ganj with two fellow travellers from the bus - a German yoga teacher named Oliver and Adi, an Israeli med student. The one from the peeing incident. Booking three rooms helped us negotiate a better price, and I’m grateful for the English-speaking company as we wander around town. Also Oliver has been in India since November - long enough to show us the ropes and get us acclimatised to the do’s and don’ts of backpacking through India. We’re staying on Bhagsu street, an impossibly steep road that leads to the top of McLeod Ganj proper. It’s hard enough to get up here empty-handed, and tourists especially tend to climb the last few hundred meters at a snail’s pace. Rickshaws, cars, bikes, motorcycles - all are out of the question up here, and I have no idea how food, furniture, building materials and other essentials are brought up. But here they are, in this village above a village - yet another testament to the incredible industriousness that built this country.

Last night before bed it was chess with Oliver over ginger-lemon-honey tea - the words said so fast here that the first few times I thought it was Hindi. I’m reasonably confident about my chess skill, but he demolishes me in the first game, and then tells me he plays almost every day, and has competed with the masters in Germany, the UK and Thailand. As a result, I don’t feel as bad when destroys me again in Game 2 - though slightly less humiliatingly this time. As we play, we look out at the mountains while smoke from the balcony wafts slowly away. When bedtime come, I pass out immediately - my first sleep of more than two hours since Saturday night in Montreal. I sleep for 12 hours, and could have slept 12 more.

I woke up this morning to Eric Clapton’s Unplugged album - the whole thing - blaring out from the Moondance restaurant just below the guest house. They have good taste here, except for a bit of Ricky Martin that I think was supposed to be for the tourists’ benefit. The music in the cafes is all either Indian, American or Israeli. After Indians, Israelis easily make up the largest group here - many are soldiers just finished their three yers of compulsory military service, and looking for a vacation in a place where no one will shoot at them.

I’m writing this from notes I scribbled here and there, mostly on the Moondance’s terrace. The food here looks ominous but tastes great, and though the chai is twice what it costs elsewhere, I can’t bring myself to complain about paying 30 cents instead of 15 for something that puts the 5$ brown water at Starbucks to shame. A waiter here lets me play his guitar - something I’ve sorely missed these past few days.

This terrace overlooks some of the higher peaks in the area, and if not for all the poisonous snakes flushed out of their holes by the rain, I’d love to head out for a bit of a climb. Monsoon season is a bad time for hiking here - but the fog effect it creates - essentially putting us at or above the cloudlne - is otherworldly, like something out of a King Arthur legend. I know I’m abusing adjectives in these notes, but this place makes me want to use all of them, every one I’ve ever seen or spoken in my life. If Neale Donald Walsch is right when he says Heaven and Hell are creations of man in *this* life, then this is one such heaven. If the people I love were here, I could stay a long, long time in this little guest house in the clouds, run by a mother and daughter that smile with their eyes and make wonderful tea. But this place is not heaven for everyone; I had thought the daughter was 12 or 14, but it is malnutrition or something else that has kept her so small - turns out she is 20 years old. She and her mother work from morning until night. It is crazy to know that I am rich beyond the wildest dreams of hundreds of millions of people in this country. How then can I get upset when someone tries to scam a few rupees out of me?

My two companions napped most of yesterday, but in spite of our harrowing bus ride I was too excited to sleep during the day. I wandered around a bit and learned that it would be impossible to see the Dalai Lama during his teachings, since space was limited and an enormous delegation of Taiwanese Buddihsts had reserved a big chunk of the space. I actually saw them later on - it’s hard to miss a few hundred Taiwanese people in matching red baseball caps wandering through an Indian town. Apparently though, tomorrow we can sit on the grounds of the Dalai Lama’s residence and hear his teachings via loudspeaker. Or rather, hear his translator. I’ve been told he will likely come out to say hello before and after the teaching, so I may catch a glimpse of him just the same.

Way down below, the main part of the town is bigger than I expected - street after narrow street filled with Tibetan handicrafts and Dalai Lama postcards for sale. Down the mountain a little further, the real town lurches along, very poor compared with the tourist trap merchants just up the way. These people have no postcards to sell - only what they can scrape together with hard labour. Still they seem impossibly rich compared with the urchins in Delhi, eating and living in garbage, sleeping nearly-naked on the sidewalk. In McLeod Ganj, though they are fewer, the beggars are just as in-your-face, following you for half a block or more. Some with no hands, others with no feet, pulling themselves along on a small wheeled plank and plastic sandals for hand protection. I fished at one point for some coins for a begging woman with a crying baby in her arms. She stopped me though, saying she didn’t want money but rather milk for her baby, pointing to a carton in a shop a few feet away. At first I was pleasantly surprised at this proof that she really was begging to feed her child. Turns out the milk was 400 rupees, or C$12 - obscenely overpriced by any standard. Scams like ths are everywhere - probably she gets a big cut of the proceeds. Likely the child still doesn’t eat, and the soya milk goes back onto the shelf for the next tourist as the first one walks away satisfied, thinking he’s done his good deed for the day. Later my German travelling companion tells me that the child is probably not even hers - that mothers rent their babies to beggars for effect. It is apparently also common for them to burn or otherwise wound the rent-a-babies to extract a few extra rupees from people like me. I don’t even know what to do with this information… This is India, I suppose. I’ll process it later…

I walk a little further up the road and drop my coins beside an old woman begging for change. She raises her hands in a gesture of thanks, and I smile until I realize that her hands are not hands, but rather stumps where hands should be. But her smile is radiant, genuine and full of gratitude. This is India too… I’ll process that later also….

It is a good thing to feel small every so often, to put things into perspective and knock you a few rungs down the ego ladder. This is a big part of why I came here, and if feeling small was the goal, mission accomplished. How can anyone look up at these mountains and feel conceit? Could anybody really elbow their way through the sea of flesh and sweat of Delhi and manage to keep their ego intact? This place makes you feel like the most insignificant of specks, and then rewards your newfound humility with beauty and feeling beyond anything in your usual scope. Or at least my usual scope.

I love writing about all this stuff. It forces me to mull things over and internalize this place as much as possible. I can’t take it with me when I leave, but I want to do the next best thing - remember its richness and make it part of me. It would be too easy to play the Western tourist, take pictures, go home, forget… I’m afraid some of these other tourists are doing this. Writing all this - I’m doing it as much to share it with you as I am to have a written record to remind myself later, when the honeymoon wears off and I’m again thinking about rent cheques and cleaning the litter box.

As I wrap up, the Internet shop’s owner is gone but her nephew - maybe six years old - sits beside me playing computer solitaire and making sure I don’t walk off with a monitor or something. Sorry about typos and things - Internet usage is charged by the minute, and anyways I don’t want to spend my short time in India proofreading my notes, so I’ll sign off. Take care guys - wish you were here. I think you’d love it.

Mark

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