The Odyssey of Blog Posts

 Nikki and Marielle on a boat for the aarti in Varanasi

I am struggling to update the blog because our lives in India have significantly changed since our last post. Nikki, the lovely mother of the equally lovely Marielle, came to see us in Dehra Dun and then whisked us away on what will be a two-week tour of northern India. Thus far we have stayed in Delhi, Varanasi, and Jaipur. Up until this point, our experiences in India have had a lot of depth but little breadth; our lives were mainly confined to our work at the school and occasional visits to Swami Veda Barati's ashram in Rishikesh. Now we're going on a whirlwind tour of a huge range of cities, cultures and history.

Nikki arrived in Dehra Dun last Wednesday. We showed her around our main haunts (Lakshmi Devi Academy, Chhaya Café in the mountains, and the Bollywood theatre) for two and a half days before boarding a plane to Delhi. The school's art teacher gave us each parting gifts on our last visit: Nikki was given a painting of the lovers/gods Radhe and Krishna, Marielle was given a watercolor rendition of ancient paintings found in the Ajanta Cave, and I was given an ink drawing of Meerabai. Meerabai, for reference, was a lady of questionable sanity who decided that she was literally married to a bust of Krishna. She spent her entire life prancing around his statue and showering him with marigolds. Now she is a saint. I'm still hoping that there was no deeper meaning to our correlating gifts. 

In Delhi, we stayed at an urban bed and breakfast run by two devastatingly handsome/married Frenchmen. Our room was entirely pink in keeping with the theme of Jaipur (Jodhpur room was blue, Cochin room was white and gold, Gujarat room was orange, Bollywood room was a weird mix of glitz and Bodhgaya room was green). The complimentary pink bathrobes, homemade iced tea with crêpes and Ayurvedic beauty supplies were a great source of comfort in my days of "le heartbreak."

Our first day in Delhi, we went to the Qutub Minar Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It contains the Qtub Minar, which is both the tallest brick minaret in the world and a monument to the end of Hindu rule/the beginning of Islamic rule in Northern India in the 12th century. Along with the minaret, there were many mosques, madrasas or schools, tombs, an iron pillar from 402-ish C.E, that does not rust, and an unfinished tower by some guy whose dreams of building a minaret even bigger than the first one were decidedly abandoned by his successors. I was especially intrigued by the fact that the Muslim conquerors knocked down all of the Hindu and Jain temples only to hire local (Hindu) builders and artisans to erect their monuments using the same materials, meaning that the Persian architecture still contained a stunning amount of original Hindu and Jain art.

After touring the Qutub Minar complex, we went to the Russian Science and Cultural Center to watch a professional dance troupe from Moscow take on traditional Indian dance. We went through a gallery of Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh/Nicholas Roerich's art, much of which was informed by his perceived links between India and Russia.   

The next day, we went to the Red Fort in "old Delhi," which is notably more busy, narrow and congested than the part of Delhi designed by the Brits. What most amused me most was that the maharaja had a marble trellis from which he would wave to his followers every morning at a set hour to assure everyone that he was still alive. Nikki especially liked that, without the modern-day amenities of television and the internets, the Maharaja resorted to entertaining himself with a nightly lights show in the pool, complemented by 300 pretty dancing girls.

We then went to the Jama Masjib Mosque, which is the largest mosque in India and can hold 25,000 worshippers at a time. The mosque faced the largest spice market in Delhi, which was so full of chilies that everyone (not just the tourists) was coughing and sneezing. We visited a spice shop that let us taste dried melon seeds, masala for chai, cinnamon bark, and anise. We then went to the Gurudwara (Sikh temple) Bangla Sahib, where Marielle was happy to see that, instead of worshipping gods or idols, they worship the "living truth," or a book written by the first and only ten gurus of Sikhism. A Sikh belief is that the best way to attain humility is to serve food to others, so the temple housed an enormous kitchen (or langar) run on volunteer donations and work that feeds 20,000 people daily. We helped bake chapatis, or wheat flatbread grilled on metal griddle-like tawas. The day ended with a visit to the Lotus Temple, which is a modern temple for the Bahá'í faith. All Bahá'í temples are surrounded by nine pools of water, so being inside the soaring glass, marble and metal building was like, as Marielle put it, stepping into a glass of water.

After two and a half packed days in Delhi, it was time to visit the holy city of Benares, or Varanasi. Varanasi is the oldest living city in the world, having been inhabited for 5,000 years. The city seems mainly uninterested in riding the economic wave that has turned many urban points throughout India into fast-paced, achievement oriented hubs of business and education. Every night the 7,500 steps representing the Hindu gods are filled with worshippers who pray through hymns as the sun goes down in a tradition called the aarti. Worshippers also light candles placed on a bed of marigolds and set their wishes sail down the Ganges in a boat of leaves. The sun rises over women doing their laundry, men and children taking baths, pilgrims boating and brahmins chanting over the holy waters. Our guide told us that every stage of life can be found along the Ganges, from babies' first holy baths to the funeral pyres that cremate the dead all hours of the day.

In addition to watching the sunset and sunrise, we visited the Bharat Mata (Mother India) Temple, inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1936. The Bharat Mata temple is the only official temple in India to worship the personification of India and the mother goddess. Instead of busts of deities, the temple is dominated by a marble carving of India's geography. We toured the Benares Hindu University containing a large temple to Vishnu, and the site of Saarnath, where Buddha gave his first sermons. We  also visited a brocade workshop where masters worked silk designs so complicated that a day's work would yield less than an inch of completed fabric.

In Varanasi we stayed at a hotel that was once used by the Maharaja as a summer cottage. It was surrounded by a mango orchard and organic gardens, which are shared by a friendly horse named Munna and twenty-five antisocial peacocks. Marielle and I discovered on our last night there that, if I sing a high soprano aria in the bathing pool, all of the fruitbats from the orchard would come and flap around our heads. We also discovered that Varanasi is a wonderful place for cheese devotees; the best two cheeses we tried were the fresh mozzarella di bufalo made by an Italian expatriate in the high Himalayas, and an organic yak cheese made by Tibetan farmers.

We are now staying in Jaipur, which is famously known as the "Pink City." We secretly refer to it as the "City of Lies," as the old city is a decidedly more orangey brown color. This is very disappointing. We will stay in Jaipur for two more days before going to Deogarth, Udaipur, and lastly Delhi again to fly to cooler climates.   

We are now going to swim in a pool. Namaste, ciao ciao, ferme linge!