Asian Walkabout

A short man with well-muscled arms walks through piles of dirt and ash. The sun on his head is fierce. He pulls in hot, dry breaths through nostrils seared by years of working with fire.

He finds respite by ducking into an alleyway barely wide enough for a pregnant heifer. At the intersection of this alley and a worn stone walkway is the wood shop. The man stops in front of this ancient garage, a square-shaped hole where wood particles make stardust over piles of cords.

A shirtless shop assistant, his ribs begging for attention through thin skin, piles a six-piece cord on top of the man’s head. The logs are pale and nubby, not unlike the bones they will soon incinerate.

Below the shop, giant woodpiles as high as two men make a brown relief on ashen soil. Funeral workers, sweat dampening their checkered turbans, add and pull rhythmically from the pile. The wood clack-clacks like bones. Even the colors here, the India vermilions and canary golds, are muted by ash and dust.

This is Varanasi’s Manikarnika Burning Ghat, ancient, man-powered, and open 24 hours a day. Funeral workers chop wood and move bodies with unsmiling instinct, somber but uninvolved. They follow an age-old instruction manual as they complete the funeral ritual, dousing oiled, colorfully shrouded bodies in Ganga water, piling up logs just so, and burning the bodies from the middle outwards. When the body collapses in the middle, workers push the rest into the pyre with a pole.

We can smell the fires from our hotel room.

But Varanasi is not all death. On either side of the Burning Ghat, a long line of bathing ghats host a hive of activity.
Boys—young, fresh, full of mischief—swim out to our tourist boat. Fat men with furry backs and slick potbellies sidestroke like seals. Women take a holy plunge in delicate silk saris. Priests offer prayers, still as reeds on a mellow morning, eyes staring at the God inside. Freshly laundered saris in butterfly-wing colors make crisp squares on ancient steps.

Deeper inside the maze of the dark, ancient Old City, flocks of pilgrims make colorful rivers of alleyways. Red-faced monkeys scavenge from rooftops and panes. Bells and drums clamor for attention amidst throaty generators, monotone chanting, rumbling mopeds, and distressed cows.

Varanasi’s assault doesn’t end with sounds. Imagine endless dark alleyways smeared with cow dung, sandalwood burning in tiny shops, holy men squatting beneath moldy umbrellas. Clouds of flies, horned calluses on bare feet, heaps of marigolds, Kali’s skull-rimmed face, fires burning at intersections, hidden temples, clouds of bliss, endless chanting. Kids peering out of Alice-in-Wonderland doors and playing cricket in secret courtyards.

During the sweltering nights, men crowd the alleyways, high off bhang or booze or otherwise languishing in low lazy clusters. The temples stay lit, and aarti offerings surf the river’s current, beelining towards fulfillment.

We spent three days exploring this potent, paralyzing, mythical city. And it still, at times, feels like 567 B.C.
Next, we’re taking the train to Kolkata, from which we will fly to distant, exalted (and pressure-cooker hot) Thailand…

“Are you going to Holi?” We ask Suni, the friendliest, slightly bashful member of the group of six Nepalese guys working at the Oasis Café next to our tree-house hotel in Rishikesh.

He shakes his head. “No. They use chemicals, you know?” He screws up his face in disgust. “Ruins your clothes. Some of them don’t come out.”

“Oh,” we say, with big, naïve tourist eyes. I personally still want to be covered in Holi colors, fluorescent oranges, pine greens and 1980s shades of pink. I want to look like a psychedelic lizard, a subhuman species from the planet Magenta.

I don’t think Seth was as into looking like something out of a poorly-done Nickelodeon show.

Holi is an annual spring tradition in India and Nepal. Its name comes from the demoness Holika, who is ritually burned in bonfires the night before the holiday. According to the oft-creative Wikipedia, this "festival of colour is celebrated in all over the country with great festivity and joy. On this day, people...gather together in a common place where they play it with gay abandon." Which is to say, they gaily smear lead-based colored powders on one another's faces and clothes, making sure to douse tourists as much as possible. They also dance, squirt water on one another, and party for a good 20 hours before getting back to work.

It wasn’t bad. At first.

By the time we crossed the bridge, small brigades of Indian men had discovered us and done their best to douse us in powders and a mauve liquid that must have been made of lead-based spray paint. Hugging strangers is perfectly legitimate on Holi, so we both received heartfelt bear hugs after having our faces smeared with powder by wet hands. One old, fat man saw me and embraced me like I was his long-lost granddaughter. Several times. “Haaaappy Holi!” He kept exclaiming.

Soon, our look was complete. We were 100% Holi’d-out, parrots from an acid trip bearing human form, tourists-cum-canvases, the masterpieces of drunk Indian men and little kids with spray bottles. The mystery paint oozed up our noses and into our eyelids, causing a chemical stinging sensation. Concerned, we warded off revelers to wash off in the Ganga.

The powders came off easily. The Mauve Industrial Liquid did not, fading to the color of a Gorbachavian birthmark on our faces, necks and chests. A nice woman nearby passed us some black, foul-smelling soap. After we had both scrubbed it all over our faces, twice, someone informed us that it was laundry soap and would leave little cuts all over our skin.

Luckily, we came out of the experience relatively unscathed. Part of the left side of my hair is still pink. This is fine in India, where sheep, goats, and anything else unlucky enough to have white fur is also still looking pretty neon. I saw a man walk a pink dog down some steep stairs in Varanasi the other day. The same potent mauve liquid also clings to the fronts of rickshaws and third-class India Railways trains, baking to permanence in the driving sun.

Another year. Another Holi. And in 2 days, when we head to Bangkok, a few weeks of explaining that the pink hair isn’t a punk thing. It’s a Holi thing.

In a classroom in Dehradun, second-graders are chanting. It’s dim in there, with just enough natural light for the kids to see. 30 boys behind wooden desks focus intently on the chalkboard.

The youngest of them, a tiny boy of seven, is standing at the front of the room, his nose almost touching the chalkboard. He keeps messing up his pronunciation, making the rest of the classroom giggle. The teacher gently corrects the boy when he fudges the words.

After a few tries, the boy gets it right. When he does, the other students chant after him. Their firm, clear chants have a military quality to them, as though they were ROTC recruits. The teacher smiles and nods in encouragement.

The headmaster, who’s been waiting in the wings, walks up to us and explains what the chant means. They yell again, in unison:

“Where there is war, we make peace. Where there is stealing, we make charity.”

Three miles through town is the Institute for the Research of Meditation and Understanding. In the adjacent Mindrolling Monastery, nuns and monks spend hours observing the contents of their minds, practicing peace until it becomes natural.

A 60-foot-tall golden Buddha looms benevolently nearby. Miles of prayer flags strung between trees make gentle shadows on carefully arranged gardens. The grounds, like the Buddhist mind, absorb movement and sound.

The schoolboys across town continue their chants. They are here every day from 3 to 9pm. Like their older brethren in the monastery, these young monks are learning peace through self-mastery. They are hand-plucked from Nepal, China, India. The school, a charity, sends officials to find the poorest boys in the poorest villages and sends them to this school to become monks. Their heads are shaved; their uniforms maroon robes.

And so they begin their lifelong study of peace.

For Tibetan Buddhists, peace and freedom are a practice. We in the West often think of peace as a utopic ideal. It’s a nervous, nail-biting affair with one eye cast towards the heavens and the other distracted by a Blackberry. We hope and pray for peace to come, yet we often do not practice it. We don’t see peace as something that can be trained or learned. We feel hopeful for a peaceful outcome, but powerless to affect it.

Tibetans, who have in recent years become all too intimate with torture, displacement, and other forms of violence, continue their compassion studies in large colonies in India. Many of these colonies house large orphanages where children learn to sustain the culture of a land they may never see again.

You may have read about Tibet in the news lately. A series of protests on March 10, the 49th anniversary of Tibetan Uprising Day, have led to a martial law situation in Tibet. The Dalai Lama has threatened to step down as political leader of the Tibetan government in exile. Tibet claims that 100 Tibetans, mostly monks, have been shot in China—the Chinese claim the number is more like 16. Arrests have also occurred in Olympia, Greece, Canada, and around the world as protestors vie for media attention in time for the Beijing Olympics.

It doesn’t stop there. Nepal is closing Mt. Everest in early May—peak climbing season—because it doesn’t want anyone waving the Tibetan flag next to the Olympic torch, which will be hoisted up during that time. The Chinese aren’t allowing tourists into Tibet. They’ve prohibited journalists from entering the capital and sealed off all channels of communication to the outside world, save for a few stealthy blog posts or YouTube videos.

And somewhere just outside the Kangra district of India, a group of 50 Tibetans are sitting in an Indian jail for walking across state lines against police orders. Their purpose was, and remains, to walk from Dharamsala to Tibet. They’re on hunger strike until their release, when they plan to walk again.

We spent a little over a week with the hunger strikers in McLeod Ganj, home of the Tibetan government in exile. Back then—so much has happened since on the Tibet issue that is seems like a year ago—they were training and preparing for their long march.

We talked to them, took pictures, figured out what they were all about. We talked to ex-political prisoners, monks who walked across the Himalayas to get to India, a 70-year-old man prepared to walk to Tibet to die in his homeland. We talked to organizers and supporters, holy women and famous activists.

To make sense of it all, we are making a book. Its working title is “Marching Home.”

We’ll include excerpts and pictures from the book in future blog posts. Hopefully, you, too, can get acquainted with the amazing, proud, and very human Tibetans whose faces and struggles have, suddenly, become very public.

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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After lunch at the hotel, we decide to return to the park gate and explore the fort ruins there. Unlike many other tourists, we pass on the evening tiger safari. We figure it can’t get much better than our morning tiger sighting.
It does. This fort, which shares a name with the park, is an unassuming mass of red brick structures in various states of decay. Walk through a ragged entry door with worn-looking anti-elephant spikes and you arrive inside a vast patchwork of ruins, lakes, and temples. Wild brambles as well as mules, goats, monkeys, and low-flying peacocks give the place a strong sense of life. The premises’ overgrown paths and crumbling domes lend it a savory mystique that makes hours pass like honey.

We make the steep climb through the main door and encounter our first crowd of Hanuman langurs. Sun-baked mothers nurse infants and impassively supervise rambunctious youngsters. The monkeys are inert until a couple walks by with a plastic bag filled with flowers. Temple offerings.

When they smell the edibles, the monkeys synchronize faster than a SWAT team. Mommas strap babies to their bellies and emit larynx-cracking screeches. Thirty of them stampede up to the couple in a matter of seconds. The husband yells and brandishes a rock to scare them away. The monkeys readily ignore him and go for his plastic bag. He and his wife have to jog out of harm’s way.

After watching what might as well have been a live Discovery Channel episode, we explore the rest of the grounds, passing a lawn full of peacocks, a mosque, a Jain temple, and a Hindu temple dedicated to Ganesh. All along the way, we encounter Indian friends and families, many of whom want to take our picture. We stroll back at sunset and catch a couple of tourists and their guide gaping over the bastion walls. The monkey tribe is barking now, a low, guttural sound, and staring intently into the undergrowth below.

“They see a tiger,” says the tour guide, pointing down the fort wall. “This is their warning call. It must be right there.” We quicken our pace down. Dusk is just about to throw her veil on the park. The air on the ground is pregnant with anticipation. Our driver impatiently opens the back gate of our Jeep and lurches onto the one-lane road leading back to town. The road is hacked into a hillside, with the fort above and a massive lake below. Its tall, dense greenery is broken up only by barely-perceptible game trails.

We see nothing. Unbeknownst to us, the tiger, a stressed-out female, is looking at us at the same time we look for her. She’s feeling angry and has it out for humans. Lucky for us, she chooses to target two guys on the motorcycle behind us.

We turn our heads just in time to see a massive orange feline bounding from one of the fort-side game trails, a cloud of dust in her wake, swiping at them with a hooked paw. They swerve and almost fall off the bike when they realize they’ve just been ambushed by a tiger. She walks towards them and they leadfoot away, their faces pure alarm.
Once the motorcycle is gone, the tiger walks several distracted steps, her ears set close to her head and her tail flicking, and darts into the undergrowth opposite of where she emerged. I’m cowered in the center aisle of the open Jeep, ducking down in case she decides to go after us, too. Seth is bug-eyed, but has his camera poised and ready. By the time a gaggle of fellow tourists arrive in Jeeps and canters, she’s long gone.

We are lucky, indeed. Two tigers in one day! And one that almost attacked us. It doesn’t get much better than that. Unless, of course, you’re in Rishikesh with a German bakery. But I’ll get to that later.
**
Back home in the States, tigers are relegated to zoos, refuges, and Vegas acts. Nonetheless, I urge you to go see a tiger anywhere you can. If you live in Colorado’s Front Range, you can see healthy, relaxed rescued tigers at the Wild Animal Sanctuary. In California’s Bay Area, the Discovery Kingdom has a tiger exhibit where you can watch the big cats dive into water through a glass enclosure. I also know of tiger rescues in Indiana and South Carolina. The list of links below will tell you more.

Secondly, I urge you to check out one of the tiger conservation causes listed below. The people involved work against big money, big government, and big poachers to keep alive a mythical animal that could eat them whole. That’s passion, that’s courage.

As long as conservation is around, we’ll all be able to catch our own Jeep past trash-filled streets and marble temples, through blaring Hindi music, jingling camel trains, and miles of rocky desert, where tigers are still stalking spotted deer, swimming in clear water lakes, and swiping at the occasional human, reminding us that their endangerment is also our own.

Tiger Conservation Resources:

http://www.SiberTiger.com
http://www.tigertrustindia.com
http://www.indiatiger.org
http://www.tigerfdn.com