Asian Walkabout

We’re living in a treehouse. The Ganges (Ganga) roars hundreds of feet below, through a glacial cleavage in the low Himalayas. We’re close to its source here, so the river is chilly and clean, with big, frothy rapids. Wedding cake temples line the Ganga’s banks. Red-faced monkeys, the smaller, scrappier cousins to the regal gray langurs at Ranthambore, sprint across cables on the footbridges connecting either side of town.

Rishikesh is a spiritual enclave especially renowned among Westerners. The Beatles wrote much of the White Album while staying at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram, located just down the street from us. Waifish yoga teachers and enlightened hippies stroll between innumerable temples, ashrams, yoga studios, and German bakeries. Rafts full of elated tourists tumble down rapids; renunciates in orange robes hike into the holy mountains to find God.

Rishikesh’s main perk is its pervasive sense of peace. Days waft by in fresh air and scented bliss. It’s what hip backpackers refer to as shanti (adj./noun, depending on context). As in, “it’s so shanti at this ashram,” or “that place just wasn’t shanti at all, you know?”

Hotel-wise, found the most shanti shanti in Rishikesh. Our room, which has pillars painted to resemble tree trunks, is located high up on an embankment aptly named the High Bank. We open our front door to a panoramic view of the Ganga’s snaking rapids every single day.

We’ve been here for three weeks, exploring states of increasingly deep relaxation fueled by periods of lounging on the river bank and multicourse breakfasts big enough sustain a Clydesdale. The process has proved that the Prozac people have it all backwards. All it takes to relieve tension is Nutella, brown rolls, a view, and a holy river with white sandy banks.

Once in a while, something surprising punctuates the serenity. Like the snake charmer who lives in the canyon next to our hotel. He showed up one day at the Swiss Cottage German Bakery, our favorite munching grounds, with two black cobras in a round box and a snake-charming flute with Deutsch Marks glued to the front.

The flute sounded like a Scottish bagpipe with a sinus infection. The snakes, upon hearing the flute, remained coiled. Bopal, the charmer, grabbed their heads to steer them out of the container. They reluctantly slithered towards the nearest source of darkness, often a woman’s purse or the space beneath her skirt, so that they could go back to sleep.

At this point, Bopal flicked the undersides of their heads to aggravate them into showing their hoods. They would show a little hood at first, splaying out just enough shape from the sides of their necks to make you suspect they might be real cobras. Bopal would continue to harry them until they jerked their necks back defensively, splayed out their patterned hoods in full glory, and looked for something to bite.

Thus, the snakes were charmed.

When asked whether the snakes were poisonous, Bopal said “No, no teeth.”
“Do you pull them out?”
“No.”
“So they have teeth.”
“Yes.”
“Do they bite?”
“No! No bite.”
“Do you take out the venom?”
“No venom! No teeth.”
“So you pulled out the teeth?”
“No!”
“So it has teeth?”
“Yes! No bite.”

The conversation went on like this for ten minutes. We brought in an interpreter and, another ten minutes later, had no further information, save for the fact that the snakes did not bite because they were under the influence of a special Shiva blessing. The snake peed on our neighbor’s purse after attempting to slither inside it, bringing us no closer to the truth.

The truth of Rishikesh itself, however, is clear. The Ganga’s whispers, 70-degree sunny days, and long hours reading on our balcony’s swinging chair spell out one thing: relaxation. Blissful, restful relaxation, the genuine kind that isn’t influenced by force or drugs. A rare jewel, indeed.

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