Greetings from Bodhgaya

It's been a while, and you may be wondering what happened to me, or maybe just relieved to finally get some quiet from my e-mails. But here I am again, still moving around in India.

I last wrote from Mussoorie, and I know you will all be pleased and proud to know that - given enough time and a patient audience - I can now read and write Hindi, and even express a few simple thoughts (such as "I am learning Hindi and I need much practice", and "Hindi is a very difficult language").

I finally gave up Mussoorie, despite it's extreme beauty and cool climate, because of it's (equally) extreme cost, and because I felt it was time to start being productive, one way or another. So here I am, back in Bodhgaya, back at Root Institute. And the internet is so much better here, too.

The population of Root Institute now consists of about seven dogs, two chickens, eight goats, and a (very) few assorted people. Somebody told me there is a rabbit somewhere, but I haven't seen it. Oh, yes, and a tribe of (huge) ants, who have set up housekeeping in the drainpipe of my shower. Imagine my delight to find my new friends crawling up my legs every time I take a shower.

Life at Root Institute hasn't changed much since I left last March, except that there aren't many (Stewart left just today, so you can change that to ANY) guests, only staff workers and hospital patients. It seems that this year, I'll be working less in the guest's reception office, and more in the local clinic, which suits me fine. I spent last Tuesday counting medicines in the filing cabinet that is used as a medicine store-room, and yesterday I went out with the Mobile Clinic, which was an experience to remember.

We started out at around 9 AM, loading up the jeep with a few aluminum suitcases, containing the medicines (most of them homeopathic) and medical equipment. Then we sat down to wait for the doctor, who, it turned out, had decided not to come that day and didn't really see any reason for advance notice of the fact. We finally arranged for a different doctor to meet us at the intersection, and piled into the jeep - the nurse, compounder (pharmacist in our language), driver and me, the token White Person. The nurse held the first-aid kit in her lap, and I got to hold on to the box of speculums(?). We spent an hour or so bouncing around on the dirt road between the fields, stopping only to have a word with some guys that were evidently fishing in the ditch alongside the road (with my advanced Hindi skills, I gathered that the doctor wanted to see about getting some fish for his dinner).

We finally wound up beside a one-room, one-windowed building in a small village, and unloaded. The "Women's Clinic" suitcases went inside the room (together with the assorted farming equipment that was already there, and a couple of drums that were evidently left there from the last time they had a puja); the doctor set up his office at a dilapidated plastic table on the veranda outside the building. We spread a straw mat on the wooden bed-frame next to the doctor's table, and Sushil (the compounder) arranged his four suitcases around him, sitting cross-legged on the mat. Manju, the nurse, pulled out her files of the women, and started to interview them at the other side of Sushil's pharmacy.

The people are all from the village (or whatever houses in the fields that surround the village) - all coming barefoot with naked and half-naked children, with little slips of paper containing diagnoses and prescriptions from the last visit. They squat by the table, after giving the doctor their little slips of paper, and wait for him to give them his WORD. Once the doctor has checked them and written a new prescription, Sushil pulls out a little plastic bottle with sugar pills, shakes a few drops of homeopathic solution from one of the tens of bottles he has (they all have labels with numbers, but I still don't know how he keeps track of them, there are so many), or a few pills from one of the bags, and hands it to the patient, with an explanation of how and when to take it.

Meanwhile, Manju and I are checking the women. The room inside has a couple of wooden tables, and Manju spreads a cover over one of them, which transforms it into a gynecologist’s chair. I get to hold the flashlight while she does the internal checks (electricity? don't be ridiculous). She takes a long time talking with each woman, and occasionally gives them iron tablets or vitamin B complex. One of them women asked me how many children I have, and I actually understood her, and answered in Hindi (I'm so proud). I understand that the women's clinic has been cut down lately, because it's harvest season so the women stopped coming.

We broke off for lunch, sitting on the floor of the ashram next-door and eating with our hands the potato curry and roti-bread that Root Institute's cooks provided for us, and watching the drizzling rain that started cooling the afternoon air. Then it was back to the patiently waiting patients for another hour or two, and then back into the jeep for another bounce around the field roads. We stopped along the way a couple of times, because yesterday was a sister-brother festival (someone told me that every Indian week - 7 days - has 8 festivals) - and Manju wanted to pick some rushes from the ponds along the road for the rituals coming that evening (she has two brothers). For a full day of doing nothing but watching other people, I was pretty tired.

Tomorrow I'm doing stock-taking again, and I get to see Rajesh, the little boy (about two or three years old, I think) who has a completely deformed body from the bone-TB that attacked him. He has a brace on his back, and he can now walk (last year he couldn't even stand up). He doesn't talk yet, but he does quite a good "uuuhhhh, uuuhhhh" whenever he sees me, and his mother has taught him to put his hands up in "Namaste" for greeting people.

So much for this time. It's nice to be doing something that might possibly help someone else, after a month of luxuriating at a hotel and getting Hindi pounded into my head four or five hours a day.

Life at the ashram, from hindsight

Today is Saturday, and school's out!! So here I am, at the altitude of 2000 meters, watching the mist billow up and down the mountains. The few hours per week that we have sunshine, you can see that the view from here is spectacular, but most of the time we can't see beyond the trees that grow on the mountainside - which still has it's interesting points, considering the monkeys that (literally) bounce around on the branches. Remember the trees, with their 15 or more different varieties of fungus and ferns? There's a huge one just outside the veranda where we have our breakfast, and sometimes a langour tribe comes to have their breakfast with us.

Langours are medium-sized monkeys (the big one that crossed the road in front of me yesterday was about the size of a ten-year-old), with (misleadingly) sweet, round black faces framed by the silver-grey fur that covers the rest of their bodies. They sit around on this huge tree, picking ferns off it's hairy trunk and munching them. Whenever they are around, the three dogs that belong to Andy (a British kid that decided to stay in India a couple of years ago) - cluster around the tree, looking up with the intent, hungry gaze of true predators, breaking off only to gallop around the house, if they see one of the monkeys heading in that direction. It would strike fear in the heart of any monkey-lover, if it weren't so hilarious - considering the fact that the langours are more dangerous to the dogs than vice-versa. These monkeys are evidently quite vicious, they particularly like to swipe at the eyes of the dogs, and they have the fingernails to take an eye out if they hit their target. The chances of one of these experts, who go hopping from branch to branch like a school-girl playing hopscotch - just toppling off the tree into the waiting mouths of these mongrels - is ridiculous enough to make the whole scene a comedy.

Anyway, I promised to write a bit about how things go at the Sivananda Kutir ashram in Uttar Kashi, remember? I started writing this when I was still there, and now I have the time to finish and send it, so - like it or not - here it is.

I think I've already waxed long and enthusiastic, about the beautiful natural surroundings, so I won't go into the gushing river rushing, the trees, mountains, birds, butterflies and other assorted flora and fauna, even though they are still there, and they are still beautiful. (All except the big hairy caterpillar that was on the wall of my dorm a few days ago - maybe not so big - but still very hairy, and very much a caterpillar. Interesting how some caterpillars look hairy and others look furry.) (Then there was that huge bug trying to climb out of the drainage pipe last week, which really gave me the heebie-jeebie creeps. It looked like a sophisticated cockroach, but it was about as big as two of my fingers put together. Later, watching a butterfly flutter by, I had the opportunity to contemplate the thought that they - the bug and the buttterfly - were both about the same size, probably from related families, and my reaction to each was exactly opposite, just because I liked the coloring and the shape on one of them better than the other. Like they keep telling us - it's all in the mind.)

On the other hand, I haven't told you much about the devotees, or the ashram itself. To begin with, most of the ashram life is outdoors. We do have a main hall, where the morning and evening chants go on (but the windows leak when it rains), and we do actually get to sleep indoors, which is nice.

But morning and evening, we sit on the floor in The Great Outdoors (there is a roof, but no walls), and - yes - eat with our hands. When it rains, we move closer to the (single) wall, but there isn't any space indoors for eating purposes. There are three dormitory buildings, each with three or four rooms, and two of them even have bathrooms and SHOWERS that have WATER HEATERS (isn't that a luxury?) All of the doors, to the rooms or office, and some of the toilets, open straight out to the Great Outdoors, so you want to be careful when it rains.

The ashram comes complete with its own live-in devotee, a woman who looks like she's about two hundred years old, who was here (devoted to some other swami) when the Sivananda organization bought the place. And speaking of devotees and other assorted folk of spirit, this would be a good time to mention the saddhus along the road. Every time you go out to the main road (which leads all the way up to the glacier that is the source of the Ganges) - you see them, men wearing an orange rag wrapped around their hips, maybe another one draped over their shoulders, their beards and hair usually grown very long - but you can't see that because it's all tangled up in dread-locks around their heads, which they have wrapped in another orange rag. (Orange is the color of fire, which symbolizes burning all desire, which goes along with renunciation.) They go trudging along the road, either in sandals or barefoot, carrying everything they own, which is usually a little bundle consisting of a thin blanket and a few other rags, the occasional walking stick, and a small aluminum pail with a lid, which they use to beg for food. They walk for miles and miles, eat what they can where-ever they can find it, and plop down where-ever they happen to be, come night-fall. Our ashram gives them a meal when they show up here, and lets them sleep on the veranda where we eat. In the morning, they roll up their blankets, wash their face in the holy Ganga, and leave, trudging on to their next stop. Some of them are young, but most of them are old men, very likely men who once had a family and/or a job and a home, and renounced it all for the spiritual life, which is a very honored custom in India. The word "saddhu" comes from "sadhana", which means spiritual practice, and these guys (some of them, at least) are not just bumming around, they are devoting the remainder of their lives to spiritual practice (however they understand that to be), hoping to achieve god-realization in this life-time, or at least come closer to it.

As for us less devoted, more grounded folk (by comparison, of course) - we confine our spiritual practice to staying in one place and getting up at the crack of dawn to meditate, chant, and practice hatha yoga before even sniffing breakfast. After breakfast (which is also lunch, so there's a good chance I will have lost a few kilos next time anybody sees me) - the guests get to clean up the ashram while I get to sit in the office answering telephone calls or going into town to get the ashram e-mail (a Herculean effort in it's own).

It's eight long, hot (or wet, depending on the monsoon) kilometers to the nearest internet cafe (which explains why you haven't been hearing from me). The town of Uttar Kashi is just a little larger, but not quite as geared to western tourists as Bodhgaya was.

So there are only two (that's right - 2, one plus one) internet cafes here. And one of them has such a slow connection, that it takes half an hour for it to tell you that it cannot access the "Yahoo!" mail site. The other one is just a little better, but both have the same number of power cuts, in which everything and anything you wrote just goes down the tubes.

All this is assuming you get to Uttar Kashi at all, which isn't guaranteed, considering the traffic around here. The jeeps and busses (one per hour) that fly by don't usually stop, because they are full by the time they reach our part of the road. The jeeps, which are built for ten passengers, don't even start their engines before there are fourteen or fifteen people inside, sitting on each other's laps. And then you're crammed between somebody's 30-liter milk can and somebody else's goat (I counted no less than six goats coming off of the bus one day, and you couldn't see more than two or three when we were moving, because they were crammed under the seats - no room in the aisles, because of all the people).

Speaking of the monsoon, we've had a few such experiences since I've been here, and I now understand what the difference is between monsoon and just plain rain. Monsoon is simply a shortened version of Noah's flood. It takes about 30 seconds for the lawn outside my room to become totally flooded (and believe me - there is no drainage problem there, it all goes straight into the Ganga), and people cannot go out into it, unless they can swim standing up. On the other hand, it is perfect for cooling the air down to a temperature that I like, so who's complaining?

In the afternoon, we get another round of hatha yoga (which yours truly usually leads, practicing my teaching skills), then dinner, then more meditation and chanting. Besides answering phone calls, teaching and practicing yoga, and fiddling around in the meditation hall (set the cushions out for sitting on, and then gather them back up after we're done), I do whatever is necessary whenever it is necessary – checking guests in and out, handing out and taking back mattresses and bedsheets, and general all-around stuff. It's basically a very simple life, and very much based on routine. The only problem I have with it is the chanting, which is supposed to develop the devotional side of the spirit, and only succeeds in developing tiredness in me. I seem to be devoid in devotion, and I don't think that chanting is going to change that. But for a limited period of time, it's fine, considering the benefits I'm getting from living here.

So now, you know how things are here, in spiritual India (as opposed to hot India, where people are dying from the heat, or various other sides of this huge country, where the only guarantee you have is that – no matter what you think is going to happen, you will probably be surprised).

As you can see, I wrote this when I was still there, but it's still the same, and it was still great, even though I escaped from the chanting.

Mussoorie

Here I am, out of the ashram (from where it was more or less impossible to communicate). I will write more about the ashram in a while, but I want to tell you about the last day or two before the impressions disappear from my mind.

There just happened to be a car at the ashram on the day I decided to leave, so I hopped a ride with it - to Mussoorie. Mussoorie, at 2000 meters altitude, is called "the queen of the hill-stations" around here (especially by Mussoorians). Would you belive it, here we are, July-August, at the height of monsoon, and everybody wears some kind of jacket or sweater. My kind of weather.

But first about the road. Driving along the mountain ridge that is part of the foothills of the Himalayas, you get to see scraps of cloud in between the tree-trunks on the mountain-side (when the fog clears up enough to see anything). It looks like bits of cushion-stuffing that got scattered around by the family dog. And, believe it or not, I got to see a rainbow by looking DOWN at it, because it was inside a valley, just under the road.

Arriving in town, nobody knew anything about the hotel I was looking for, or the "world-famous" language school next to it. We finally drove back out of town, straight up the mountain, and found the Dev Dar Woods Hotel, in the middle of a forest, at a slant of about 60 degrees (mountain-side).

The hotel is in a building that evidently belonged to somebody British during the Mandate era, so I found myself stepping out of the car, straight into the 19th century, complete with drawing rooms, sitting rooms and verandas, and a ceiling high enough for a second story to be built right inside. The effect is completed by the fact that everybody else at the hotel (all seven of them) are also studying Hindi at the Landour Language School, so it's a whole parlour scene every meal, straight out of one of Kipling's stories. You just have to ignore the fact that four of them speak Italian most of the time, which doesn't really spoil the British effect, because the manners are still 19th century British.

The climate here is more dripping than pouring - we live in a constant fog, punctuated only by occasional drizzles. This, of course, has it's effect on the forest, and the trees - besides their own foliage and the obligatory vines and creepers - support any number of moss and fungus, so you can see some five, six or more different kinds of leaves on each tree. And I'm not talking about your common garden-variety of moss, that looks like a thin green carpet or a coat of paint on the tree (although we have that as well) - we're talking here about full-blown fungus, with long, broad leaves (longer than the tree's original), or the delicate kind of leaf that is divided and sub-divided into tens and tens of little leaflets, arranged artfully in a pattern bigger than your hand, all growing straight out of the tree-trunk. From my bathroom window, I saw a monkey sitting and peering at me through the hairy trees (you show me yours and I'll show you mine).

The Landour Language School has been located in the Kellogg Memorial Church (services every Sunday 10:00 AM, everyone welcome) since 1905 (the school has evidently been around, located elsewhere, at least 50 years more than that). Lessons are held in various rooms of the church, and my first lesson was in the belfry. You go into the church and climb up the stairs to the balcony, where you can look down at the altar and imagine yourself in one of those movies where the kids drop an egg onto the fat lady from the choir. Then you look around and find another set of a few very steep stairs, and you climb up to where only the bats (and your Hindi teacher) stay. And you join the bats in the belfry (God!! I've always wanted to say that!!) and say Namaste (Shalom in Hindi).

I really and truly am living in a time/space warp here. We get waffles for breakfast, and discuss Ayurvedic rejuvenating treatments that involve shutting the patient up in a room with no direct sunlight for three months. And for the first time since I've been in India, the drain-pipe from my bathroom sink does NOT lead to a hole in the floor!

I'm off to another Hindi lesson now, so I'll write more later.

Running around

The thing you most want to hold on tightly to, when you're in India, is the ability to let things go. I arrived at "my" ashram, all ready and set to sign on as part of the staff, only to be told: "but we thought you were only coming in June!" Turns out there was a course going on, which they forgot to tell me about when I last called (in March) to tell them I was coming (in May) - with the result that there was no room for me. "Go away and come back next month" - they told me, only in a nice way.

After the initial disappointment, I packed back up and took a taxi to Rishikesh. We've been to Rishikesh before, the Mecca of Yoga, where the late George Harrison found his Maharishi, where men dress up like big orange monkeys for the benefit of the tourists (and their pocket change), and where I found another ashram that promised two daily sessions of yoga, and two more of meditation. Turns out that Rishikesh is very, VERY hot in May. I tried to tough it out for a week, but finally gave up - lying sweating in my bed at night was something I could do back during the Yoga Teacher's Training Course in Kerala, when I had lots of interesting things to do and people to see (or vice versa) - but I wasn't really in the mood for it this time.

So I hopped a jeep for Gangotri.

Gangotri is considered one of the four sources of the sacred river Ganges (Mata Ganga to us Hindus), and as such is one of the four pilgrimage sites during high season, when all the devout Hindus want to fill up plastic bottles with holy water to take home and bless themselves with. Guess when high season is? Yup! The merry month of May. The reason for this is that, just like the other three holy sites, Gangotri is high up in the Himalayas, where the snow likes to stick around until way into April - so before May it's physically impossible to climb up the narrow winding road (you might remember a few of us tried last April, and had to turn back, losing part of the road along the way, where it washed out just after we passed over it). Somewhere around mid-June, the monsoon starts, and then you can wash away off the montain-side if you're not careful. So May is the time, and the place was crawling with pilgrims (Indian) and trekkers (foreign).

The reason for the trekkers is that the REAL source of the Ganges (or one quarter thereof) is a glacier, which used to be in Gangotri, but has receded about eighteen kilometers (probably due to global warming), to a place call Gomukh (which, literally translated, means "cow's mouth", because that's what it supposedly looks like) - and the only way you can get there is to walk (I didn't).

Gangotri is not much more than a few hotels and ashrams (on one side of the bridge) and a few hotels and shops (on the other side). The hotels and shops are doing great business now, and the only place I could find to stay was a little room with a great view and no electricity (I'm not sure about the electricity in any of the other hotels, either). I hadn't really planned on getting here, so I left my shoes and warm clothes at the ashram - which meant that the cold weather forced me to get on the first bus back to Uttar Kashi the next morning. But the trip was worth it - the mountains, trees and waterfalls along the way are enough to take your breath away. You get a sense of exhilaration just going up the road, coming closer and closer to the snow-capped peaks, and watching the streams that pour into the Ganges from aaaaaaaaaallllllllllllll the way up there.

Tired of running around, I checked into Hotel Ganga Putra, which is a ten-minute walk away from "my" ashram, and arrived at an arrangement with them that I would come in just for the yoga classes until my "slot" was available for me to come and stay. The arrangement has it's advantages - a private room (which I couldn't even dream about at the ashram), with a huge picture window opposite the green mountain across the river, and a BIG water heater all my very own, so I can have lllllloooooooonnnnnnnnnngggggggggg hot showers - and it's disadvantages (I have to pay for it all).

The river rushes endlessly by, and you can hear it no matter where you are - in the room, on the road, and in the yoga classes. When I was here last April, it was still relatively dry and you could walk across it at certain points, but it's getting constantly bigger and fuller now. Today the yoga instructor had to speak extra loud, so that we could hear her over the river's roar. I expect it will get even more so after the monsoon hits us. I've spent a sum total of more than ten months in India so far, but I haven't seen the monsoon yet (unless you count the tail end of last October in Kerala, when my glasses kept fogging up and I couldn't see where I was going), and I'm especially looking forward to watching the Ganges grow when it happens here.

So, it's a mixture between letting go - enjoying the advantages of my current situation - and occasional let-downs, when I feel lonely and frustrated. Either way, in a couple of weeks, this unexpected chapter will be over, and then we will be on our way towards more unexpected adventures, the only difference being that the unexpected will be expected (does that make any sense?)

India - Round Three

Just in case you thought this saga was over - no, it's not.

Our story begins with (yet another) strike in the holy land of Israel. After a few weeks of visiting family in Israel, my plane was scheduled to take off for (the holy land of) India on Wednesday, April 30th. Being a Royal Jordanian flight, I was scheduled to make a transit stop at Amman, Jordan. Wouldn't you know it, but on Monday, April 28th, the high holy priest of the Histadrut declared that he was going to call a strike and bring the whole country to a stand-still on - you guessed it - Wednesday. Sparing you the upset stomach and worry and finger-nail-biting - at 12:30 noontime on Wednesday, I got a call from Royal Jordanian, telling me to be at the (totally empty and not-functioning) airport at 2 PM - we were going to take a bus to Amman!

So I ended up with a free tour of eastern Jordan, and I got to see what the Allenby border-crossing point looks like, too. After that, the plane trip to Delhi seemed quite common and mundane. The only diversion was the group of noisy young Israelis sitting close-by (who were evidently on their way to the traditional Israeli-Indian Experience of drugs, dope and dancing - did you know that the Indian inhabitants of Goa hate Israel and Israelis because of this?), passing a huge whiskey bottle between them, laughing and comparing hotel rates with and without TV's. There are very many and different Indias, it seems, and they are worlds apart, even though they are geographically in the same country. The only time I see a TV in India is in Delhi, on my way in or out of the country. Most of the cities I visit have a law prohibiting sale of alcohol, and the really big mind-trip in all of them is meditation, which you do without the benefit of drugs.

We landed in Delhi at 5 AM as scheduled, and my friend, who was supposed to meet me at the airport, wasn't there (reminding me, yet again, that this is India). We had agreed before, by e-mail, that he would meet me at the airport and take me to a hotel to stay one night, and then help me get a train to Rishikesh on my way to the ashram at Uttar Kashi, which was my real destination. (By the way, just to keep the suspense from getting any higher - I am now writing you from the ashram, so now you know I got there and everything is OK.) He had overslept and arrived a little later.

Now for the next part, it would help if you would bear in mind that you are dealing here with a person who never was exceptionally sane to begin with, and it's been downhill for the past few years. We had some tea and we did get as far as the hotel that he booked for me, but at that point I had already decided that I couldn't wait any longer to get where I was going, so I stayed in the car while he went in to cancel the room at the hotel.

And then we drove - all the 400 kilometers and 12 hours to Uttar Kashi.

Most of the time I slept in the back, while he talked in the front with his cousin who came along for the ride. The heat in Delhi was unbearable, but as we progressed farther north, and more importantly, closer to the Himalayas, the weather got cooler, and we could see that it had rained.

The rain also explained the landslides that stopped us. We stopped in Rishikesh for lunch, and then moved on, only to be stopped a few hours farther by a road-block where part of the mountain decided that life would be better further down. The cars stood in a line and waited for the mountain to stop moving. Actually, it was a little land-slide - more rocks and dust than mud. At some point, it more or less calmed down, a few trucks decided that it was time to move, and we moved behind them. The paved(?) road had miraculously turned into a gravel path, and when we finished bumping along it - we hit the cows. No, we didn't literally hit them, but the long, long line of them must have stretched out over several kilometers. Now, you must remember that the roads anywhere in India, but especially in the mountains, are barely wide enough for one car, and in this case, they have slopes on either side, going either up or down, but either way - steep. So we became intimately acquainted with the cattle, their backsides and their keepers. Welcome to India.

After 12 hours, we finally reached Uttar Kashi - almost. There was another landslide just before the town, and this one was big and serious enough that we couldn't pass it. So my friend dropped me off at a hotel that was conveniently located just before the landslide, and set off to drive the whole 400 kilometers back to Delhi. Don't ask me why he considered it unnecessary to rest before he did that, it's beyond me.

The next morning (today), the road into town was still closed. I think I was the only guest at this particular hotel (how many loonies are there, after all...). After hearing where I wanted to go, the guy at the reception offered to take me on his motor-bike. So I mounted my backpack on my back, and we piled up onto his bike. Less than 100 meters out on the road I fell off, when the mud from some road-works made the bike tilt to one side, and the weight of my backpack took me with it. I've been on motorbikes before, as you may know, but it seems that the rules of balance are different when your back weighs more than the rest of you. After that, I got the hang of it, and - excepting a gravelly part where we agreed it would be better for all concerned if I got off and walked a few meters - the rest of the ride was fine.

Now, this is the exceptional thing: when we got there, I asked him what the bill was - for the hotel stay, the room service, and the ride altogether. He said 430 rupees, and I pulled out a 500 bill, fully prepared to give him the lot in return for being so helpful. He said he had no change. Those of you who have been in India know full well that this is the standard line for people who want to get as much as possible, and expect us foreigners to say, as I did, "That's all right, you can keep the change". But not this guy. He wouldn't let it go, and suggested we ask the other people at the ashram if they had change. In the end we did find the change, and he went on his way.

So here I am at the ashram. Rather, right now I am in Uttar Kashi town, which is 8 kilometers from the ashram, because there is no internet at the ashram, and I wanted to let you know that all is well on this never-ending saga. At the moment there are no phones at the ashram either, and it turns out that - even though I did take my cellphone with me this time - there is no reception here either. Probably because we are on the banks of the river Ganges (Mother Ganges to us Hindus), and the great Himalayas go straight up on either side of the river, blocking off any radio-waves. Did you know that Uttar Kashi is home to the Nehru School for Mountain-Climbing? According to the Lonely Planet guide-book, the first woman to climb the Everest studied here.

Kathmandu

Here I am, in Kathmandu, roof-top of the world. I have been thinking about all kinds of witty remarks to write about this place - it's a great place to be, more fun than India, which is a lot poorer, dirtier and generally worse off.

But I haven't really been in the mood for witty sayings lately, because of everything that's going on between Bush and Iraq. I've been trying to ignore news in general ever since I got to India, but it's getting increasingly harder to do that, and now I've completely broken down and resorted to watching CNN at least once every day, just to make sure that the entire world hasn't blown up yet. You do get the feeling here, that something like this could happen without you noticing it...

I'm staying in Thamel, the tourist village of Kathmandu. This must be the average Westerner's dream of the exotic east. It makes me think of what San Francisco must have been like in the late sixties. I'm staying at Hotel Changjiang, which is just opposite Hotel California (yes, just like the song), and where the only television speaks nothing but Chinese. And to round out the '60's effect, there is Alice's Restaurant just up the road, where they serve (just like all the other restaurants and cafes here) "Set Breakfast", which is your typical American breakfast of eggs, toast & coffee (you pay extra for the OJ, sausages, ham & bacon). Just so you understand, the locals would never eat this stuff.

As you walk down the streets, you get various '60's songs wafting out of the many music shops, together with "Om Mane Padme Hum" meditation tunes. It is some three or four (or five or more) solid blocks of nothing but tourist shops - but the atmosphere isn't so much touristy as laid-back - shall I say "hippie" atmosphere? Besides the ethnic arts & crafts shops, jewelery stores (unbelievably large rocks, they have), music shops, trekkers' supply stores (don't forget how close we are to Everest), book stores, thanka shops (thankas are Tibetan devotional wall hangings, and incredibly beautiful), internet cafes, restaurants, hotels, etc.; you have men, women & children peddling Nepalese embroidered bags, flutes, fiddles & board games on the street. Every once in a while, a man will saunter past you, muttering "hash, grass", in hopes that you will stop and ask him for some. Just about every shopkeeper you pass will try to "Excuse me, madam" into their shop, so you have to get used to not answering them at all (otherwise you will be doing nothing but trying to shake off all the would-be merchants).

The first thing that hit me when we arrived here was not just that the pavement of the street connects all the way up to the sidewalk, but that there is a pavement at all, and a sidewalk!! Not just heaps of dirt & dust connecting with cow-manure. (You have to remember that I came here straight from Bihar, where - if symbols really reflected truth - the state emblem would be the cow-pie, and the state "bird" would be the mosquito.) I spent the first couple of days telling my traveling companion: "Look - there's nobody pissing in the streets!!", "Listen - nobody's honking their horns!!". I have since graduated to being a spoilt brat, sending the waiter back to fry me some new eggs, because the ones he brought had hard yellows, and not runny, the way I like them. Amazing how quickly a person can adapt, isn't it? The waiters here all greet you like their best friend whenever you are anywhere near their restaurants, and they always serve you with their right hand, touching their right elbow with their left hand in a gesture of respect or some such thing. I'm not sure I really like all this servility (is this the word I want?), but you can't escape the fact that it is extremely comfortable. I think I'll survive.

Now that I think about it, I never wrote you about the overnight visit I made to the home of a friend in Bihar, about a month ago. (This has nothing to do with Kathmandu, but I really want to tell you about it, and it is an interesting contrast.) We hired a car and drove off, if you can call that amount of bumping in and out of potholes "driving". As a matter of fact, the driver often chose to drive on the dirt side-of-the-road, because that bit actually had less holes, and was smoother riding. At some point, we departed the "paved road" (jokingly called so because you could see little bits of pavement here and there in between the potholes and dirt) - and continued driving on a "dirt road" (called so because they didn't even try to pretend it was paved), which actually looked more like a goat path (and probably was). This road leads to the mountains, and continues alongside the mountains, until it goes over a ditch and into the village.

Now, the only difference between the village and the road leading up to it, is that - along the road, the mud and the dirt stay at ground level, while in the village, they get to rise - more or less vertically - into forming walls that hold up the grass roofs. We drove past several of these mud houses, and finally stopped when we reached another ditch that the car could not get through (even with the physical help of the many village children who were crowding around). So we took our bags, locked the car, and proceeded on foot, surrounded by any number of children, brown with both their natural coloring and with dust.

At some point, I saw what must have been a menagerie (if that is the word I want), because it was half open, with a couple of wooden poles instead of one of the walls, a pile of straw at one end, and a cow (or was it a water-buffalo?) inside, complete with all the accompanying muck and smell. This is where we turned in. The far wall had an opening in it. This led to a small room, with another opening (don't talk about doors, just openings) - which led to a courtyard, surrounded by several small rooms.

A few years ago, I took a tour-guide course, in which I learned, among other things, about the kind of house that the pre-biblical inhabitants of Israel lived in. They built a series of rooms (out of mud and cow-dung) in a square around a courtyard. The rooms were small (about half the size of a typical Israeli bedroom, which isn't too big to begin with), with no windows, and most of the (extended) family's life was led in the courtyard, where the cooking was done. If you want to see exactly how life was led back then, I can show you the villages where it's done now.

We sat down in the family courtyard, and most of the village's children (and a large number of the adults) crowded in, and stood staring at the white-skinned lady. Two or three of them knew a couple of words in English, so I got "hello"ed quite a lot. Then Raju's mother set out some food on the table made of a few old and splintering wood planks. Not only did we sit on the same table as we were eating (using our right hands as cutlery), but Raju's mother, like so many people who prefer to sit on their haunches, perched like a bird with her feet on the table's edge, watching us.

Later, Raju's sister took me walking through the fields, and gave me a ring from her finger and the earrings off her ears. She wouldn't take them back, and there was no way I could explain to her that I wouldn't wear them, because her english was limited to "Hello" and "OK".

After sundown, all the women crowded in the courtyard, pounding a small drum and singing, because it was the wedding night of a young girl who was in one of the rooms, waiting for her new husband. He was scheduled to appear sometime in the early morning hours, and snatch his new bride away to their new home. I must admit that I was too tired to stay up and watch this happen, so I went into the room where Raju was born, and lay down on the cot they saved for me. The cot is a wooden frame, with ropes tied to it, making a hammock, and if you're lucky - a blanket on the hammock as a cushion.

When I climbed in, my foot touched something soft and warm, and I started, but it was only a couple of the household children who had crept in under the blanket. Raju's mother moved them into the bed next to me, where they joined a few more kids, and then sat down to look at me some more (they never did get tired of looking at me, and I didn't do any parlor tricks or anything). Another one of the little girls of the family climbed into bed with me, and that is how we slept, wakened occasionally by the mother and baby who were sleeping on the floor next to us.

The number of people living in this little conglomerate of a home can be measured by the fact that all of us - some 6 or 7 people – were sleeping in one room (remember the size of it?), and there were about 3 or 4 rooms like this around the courtyard, all with a similar number of inhabitants. It took more than a week for all the insect bites and assorted rashes that I accumulated in that one night, to calm down.

This village (like so many others in Bihar) has no school, which brings to mind another interesting point. Most tea-shops have small children working in them. Someone mentioned to me that it was outrageous that these children weren't in school, but at that time, my thoughts were that these children were lucky to have a place to stay, and a relatively sure source of food and clothing.

As you can see, I'm still obsessed with the poverty in Bihar, even when I'm ordering waiters around in Kathmandu. And - believe it or not – I can't wait to get back there. Somebody should do a study...

Kalachakra

Well, the Dalai Lama has come and gone, and we mortals are still here in Bodhgaya, which is slowly warming up. I've been told that the locals have a delightful 42 or 43 degrees (celsius, which is around 107 or 108 fahrenheit) to look forward to, and you can safely bet that I won't be here to enjoy it with them. We're still hectic down at Root Institute, because the high holy resident lama is giving a course and yours truly is looking after a hundred and fifty people, give or take a few tens, who have come to hear what he has to say. But today the rest of the guys at the office more or less kicked me out, and told me not to come back before evening, so here I am, at the computer (yet again), telling you about it all.

I did actually attend one of the sessions with the Dalai Lama himself. The whole commotion here was about the Kalachakra teachings, and I have to admit (although I am really and truly ashamed to say this) that I still don't know exactly what that is. The word Kalachakra means wheel of time, or something to that effect, and the teachings have something to do with the meaning of existence (which is what the whole Buddhist philosophy is about anyway), but I'm still just as hazy about the exact explanation as I was before. Maybe when I finally get it, I'll be an enlightened being...

So we all got our little green cards saying that we were entitled to enter the Kalachakra grounds, and we pushed (or got pushed) in together with the thousands of Tibetans that have been streaming into town (and are streaming out, now that His Holiness has gone). I've been told that there were a hundred thousand or more people here. The Kalachakra grounds are a big dusty empty lot, right next to where my road-boy friends (and about a hundred of their compatriots) set up their little restaurant. They built some kind of fancy (temporary) house in the middle and set up a bunch of bamboo poles and stretched plastic sheets over them, so that we common folk would have shade while we sat on the ground and listened. There was an area for foreigners and an area for Tibetans. Maybe part of the reason I like being in India so much is the preferential treatment you get in a lot of places just because your skin is white (I hope not). His Holiness the DL speaks in Tibetan and there are "on-line" translators speaking quietly into microphones that transmit to the FM radios which we all have. The first day, we managed to get the french translation and the chinese translation perfectly, but the english translation, which was supposed to be on a frequency between those two - just wasn't there (the next day was better).

While you're sitting there, if you look towards the Tibetan side, you see these long white silk sashes floating into the air. It looks like a school of dolphins, every few minutes another one gracefully jumps forward into the air and streams back down onto the sea of people sitting there. The Tibetan form of devotion and respect is offering these sashes, and if HH isn't right there to accept it, then he can get it airmail. Halfway thru the teachings, a huge group of monks got up and walked over to the edge of the grounds, returning with huge teapots. After they finished handing out tea (who would have believed that they could quietly serve tea to a hundred thousand people by just walking around with big pots) - they handed out money to the monks. It's really weird to see a monk with a wad of hundred rupee notes walking around handing them out to other monks. Everyone just sits quietly, and everyone gets what’s coming to him. And no-one complains. Amazing.

After it's all over, the crush of people getting out is enormous. You don't really have to push to get out, you just have to position yourself among all those monks (who evidently were only taught about patience when you're sitting down) in such a way that you can just coast along on their waves to get out. I wasn't terribly interested in getting back there afterwards (what can I say, I'm chicken when it comes to big crowds of people).

Since then, I've been holed up at our office, checking people in and out, and hearing complaints about leaky faucets and burned-out water heaters. All kinds of things happen here, including a girl who freaked out (just before the Kalachakra events started), declared that she was enlightened, and started to sing and dance around the main temple. Turned out she had a mental history, (as do we all, only hers was documented) and we only just barely managed to convince her to return home and get treatment. She just wrote us this morning, thanking the people here who took care of her, realizing that she could have got herself killed if we had let her do all she wanted to. So it's not a boring place to be.

I plan to stay here at least one more month, I just like being here, and anyone who can explain to me why - certainly has information that I don't have. I think I would pay solid gold (if I had it) for a hot shower that didn't turn lukewarm after a minute and a half, or ice-cold after three minutes. A clean, dry toilet would also be appreciated. And yet, I am already making plans to come back next winter...

In any event, you guys can enjoy your hot showers for me...