flickering pictures

I’ve been posting my notes from India, scribbled and scrawled all around the country last summer, while I get things up and running around here. Now that things are humming nicely, I’m spending less time fixing things, leaving me more time to post tasty content. But although I’m not quite so desperate for filler anymore, some of you actually seem to like these, so I’ll keep posting them sporadically until they’re all up. If you like, you can keep track of them on a brand spanking new dispatches page.

Thanks for reading!
-mark

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Continued from #13.

Switching gears again — India is a natural place to talk about spirituality and all that. It’s actually kind of inescapable here. I was chatting with Mally, who mentioned in passing that to her God is like the rainbow and all the religions of man are just colours in her/his/its spectrum. I thought that was a beautiful way to put it. So I was really surprised when, in Rakesh’s Harmony Bookshop the next day, while waiting to talk to the owner, I picked up a book at random (on Islam, of all things) and read this poem on the first page, by someone named G. Matheson. It’s beautiful and spiritual without being religious, and I loved it.

“Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all,
Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold;
Rend each man’ s temple’s veil, and bid it fall,
That we may know that Thou hast been of old.

“Gather us in; we worship only Thee;
In varied names we stretch a common hand,
In diverse forms a common soul we see;
In many ships we seek one spirit-land.

“Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow light,
Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven;
Thou art the fullness of our partial sight,
We are not perfect till we find the seven.”

I copied it into my notebook, and googled it just now. Turns out there’s more:

“Thine is the mystic life great India craves,
Thine is the Parsi’s purifying beam;
Thine is the Buddhist’s rest from tossing waves,
Thine is the empire of vast China’s dream.

“Thine is the Roman’s strength without his pride,
Thine is the Greek’s glad world without its slaves;
Thine is Judea’s law, with love beside,
Truth that enlightens, charity that saves.

“Some seek a Father in the heavens above,
Some ask a human image to adore;
Some crave a spirit vast as life and love,
Within Thy mansions we have all and more.”

Wow - I wish I had written that. The book was one of a series by Duncan Greenlees, one for each religion, that highlights a variety of faiths and seeks common ground between them. I bought the book and will look for the others in the series - maybe Rakesh can help me. It’s no coincidence that my new friend runs a bookshop.

Last night, Rakesh invites me to supper with some of his friends — I arrive a few minutes early, and choose a table in the middle of the restaurant, beside the one with the monkey chained to it. A waiter warns me not to sit too close, as apparently he can get a little… rowdy. The question of why a restaurant owner would put a rowdy monkey close enough to his tables to terrorize his guests is a pointless one - once again, this is India…

[Ed. Note: The mystery was solved a few days later. Apparently a customer had brought his monkey to dinner, chained him to the table, and then just left, leaving a very angry monkey and a very confused restaurant owner wondering what to do next. Afraid of the thing, the owner just left him there, tossing food scraps his way. I wonder if he’s still there today…]

Rakesh and Veney arrive, and introduce me to their friends — an Indian Hindi teacher, his Japanese student and an American grad student working on a dissertation about pressure tactics used by industry groups on governments. She entertains us with a slideshow from a trip to Egypt, on a shiny stainless steel IMac that zaps anyone who touches it. Very few outlets are grounded in India. :)

For all the moaning I’ve done about about wanting a gin tonic, no sooner do I sit down than Jolie, the American, pulls a family-sized bottle of Beefeater out of her purse, and Rakesh miraculously produces a can of tonic water from somewhere. I’m beside myself. The can doesn’t last long, but when we run out of tonic, well, there’s still lots of gin. We order some of the best pizza I’ve ever had — in India no less — and I forget myself, accepting several mouthfuls of communal salad. This is a big no-no in India — veggies being washed with tap water, which is the biggest culprit when it comes to traveller’s diarrhea. The damage already being done — I fully expect to be sick to my stomach later tonight — I may as well have a great evening for now. I discover the nana, a drink made of lime juice and mint with a taste I can’t place — something like the smell of a lily — but it’s delicious. Especially with two shots of gin in it.

Leaving the restaurant, I end up chatting with Anand, an Indian from Saskatoon. We chat for maybe an hour with Manuji, the night watchman at my hotel, who tells us that he has seen people possessed by Shiva himself, speaking like demons and throwing twenty men around with impossible strength. He says boods — ghosts — often follow him through Varanasi’s narrow streets at night, and that his only defence is to catch the tail of one of the many sacred cows in the streets. He says his baba, or teacher, used magic to avert his rabies following a dogbite, cured his jaundice and healed his many snakebites — actually extracting a black liquid “poison” from Rakosh’s leg days after the bite. He says a conventional doctor wanted to charge him 700 rupees per shot, for 14 shots, following the dogbite — a ludicrous 9800 rupees or $300 altogether, and a fee completely out of reach for the vast majority of Indians. But his baba had him drink a certain potion, blew on the wound three times, and all was well. I generally head into things with a healthy bit of skepticism, but if these things are happening anywhere in the world, if there’s anywhere steeped in enough mysticism and magic, then Benares is the place. And frankly I think I’d be as crazy to say it’s impossible as I would be to insist that it must be true.

During our conversation, we attract the attention of the mad bull that Veney warned me about a couple of nights before — he’s loping down the street, heading straight for us, and limping heavily in the rear. He’s hurt and he’s pissed. We skirt around a bicycle rickshaw, hiding behind a ridiculous defence that the bull could toss 20 feet with a flick of his horns, and the driver is as anxious as we are… The bull turns as though to charge, and as the three of us collectively crap our pants he seems to get a kick out of it and just lopes away, as if satisfied with his little display of supremacy. I’m certainly convinced.

Today I wandered around the huge campus of Benares Hindu University, a well-respected school that offers a much better education than its ramshackle colonial appearance would suggest. I spent most of the afternoon at the university’s library and in its huge Shiva temple - but it’s suppertime and I’ve already written more than I wanted for one day. Probably more than you wanted too. So enough for one day!

Take care!
Mark

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