Bodhgaya again

I have to tell you, I keep getting attacks of: "My God, I really did it!!" Here I am, back in the place I was only last March, where I promised myself - "I shall return" - and by god - I did!! It is the strongest feeling I have ever had of really and truly living your dream (as opposed to dreaming your life, as I saw on a T-shirt not long ago).

It's been a while since I could get at a computer with nobody breathing down my neck, so now I have to bring you up to date about all kinds of things.

We shall start, chronologically, with Santosh. This is the cab driver who took me into Trivandrum (from the ashram) together with a few friends. The guys were sitting in the back, and I was up front with Santosh. By now, we all know that it is virtually impossible to meet people here without getting deep, DEEP into their personal lives, so nobody was surprised when he pulled out a photo album and proceeded to show me pictures of his recent wedding (yes, continuing to drive all the while).

It turns out that he married a girl from the US last March, and now they are waiting for him to get a visa so he can join her there. From what I understand, there are quite a few Indian men who dream of "making it" like this - a passport out of India, into the Great West. So, no surprise that Santosh's success was written up in three different local papers (which he also showed me). And now we get to the killer part: hearing about how happy I am in India, and that visas to India are only issued for 6 months a piece, Santosh very generously offered to arrange meetings for me with several of his matrimonial-minded friends, so that I could get an India visa (as the wife of an Indian), and they could get an American one. Too bad I was leaving the next day...

And leave I did, getting (once more) on the Kerala Express bound for Delhi. Experience has taught me that the AC (air-conditioned) cars are worth reserving - not necessarily for the air-conditioning (the weather is really nice during the winter) - but because these are the only cars that are closed (so your bags are safer; and you get no beggars, although the jokers that try to sell food and magazines still pester you), there is no dust on the bunk beds (you should have seen the layer on the top bunk in the non-AC car - a real cushion!!), and you get your meals and your sheets brought to you by the porters. You still have to pay for your meals separately, and I can tell you with complete authority that the meals served on the Jharkand Express are a lot better than the ones on the Kerala Express (but you pay more, so it evens out). Plus, the cockroaches in the AC cars are not much bigger than your thumb-nail, so it is relatively easy to settle down to a good night's sleep with them lurking in the corners of the windows and bunk-beds. Altogether a homey experience. So, we (cockroaches and all) reached Delhi, and I still don't like big cities.

Two days later, I was on a train to Bodhgaya, and here I am. Now I want to tell you about the bicycle-rickshaw ride from the station. It took two hours of my life, and it deserves mention.

The train actually does not stop in Bodhgaya, but rather in Gaya, another town that is about 15 kilometers north of Bodhgaya. When you get out of the train station (sometimes while you're still on the train, just trying to get out) - all the taxi and rickshaw people from miles around are trying to get you into their vehicle. This time, I chose the bicycle-rickshaw. This is the cheapest transportation option, but after seeing how these guys work, I think they should be getting the most money.

We started out through the market of Gaya. This is a typical Indian market-place (I should say North-Indian, because my friends from South India maintain that the south is cleaner). To begin with, pavement is un-heard of, but the roads aren't really dirt, because they are almost completely covered with cow-dung (from all the cows moping about, naturally) and all sorts of garbage (the piles can come up to your hips in some places). Then you've got your local yokels, either sitting in their shops, or just roaming the streets looking for something interesting to happen (such as a western-looking woman riding a bicycle-rickshaw). And lets not forget the rest of the traffic: cars, rickshaws, cows, rattling trucks, more cows, a few dogs, some dirty children (only partly naked) and the occasional ox-cart. Have I mentioned the water buffalos? And everyone is happy to see you. They will wave, call out, or just smile. It doesn't take much to see that these people have nothing, they probably live in the same shop where they work, on the dirt floors, with the openings in the mud-brick walls serving as windows. So why do I feel so at-home?

Then, we finally pulled out of town, and hit the country-side. May I remind you that all this is being done by a guy who is slowly pedaling me (no feather-weight) and my two (not too small) backpacks through the pot-holes and the ditches. And occasionally, we have to stop, because his left pedal keeps coming loose, and he has to get a rock from the road-side and bang it back into place.

Now, going through the country-side, things are a bit cleaner (because the concentration of the garbage is so much lower - there is more room to spread it around) (then again, most of the garbage is organic, coming from whatever is around you, so there isn't much to worry about). Still, we go through small concentrations of mud-brick houses, women sitting on their door-steps, picking through other women's hair (you do it outside so that the sunlight will show up the lice); and kids playing with a stick, or a beat-up old bicycle wheel. I have seen kids making a kite out of an old plastic bag - just watching their games can be occupation enough.

And now, every time we stop to fix the left pedal, the local kids come to talk to the foreign woman. A fourteen-year-old boy asked me if I was married. When I asked him the same thing back, he explained to me that he has to finish school and get a job first (everything has it's place and time, right?). Sometimes they don't wait for the rickshaw to stop - some of the local hot-rods come by on their motorcycles, and then they slow down to ride along-side, and ask "You are from?"

So now I know Siddhartha, who claims to have worked at the Root Institute (where I am currently staying, and Babaloo, who rode by on a bicycle when I was walking to the internet shop. Already, I have friends, now we just have to wait and see when the marriage-proposal will come...