Eagalic Music

 At 9 a.m. the heat is already oppressive. The Bodh Gaya mosquitoes have found a hole into our netting and hang bloated from the inside of the white curtain, their bodies glutted with fresh blood. Perhaps the blood is not mine, though, as I can’t remember being disturbed in my sleep.

This morning I feel the weight of the heat oppressing me. The air seems difficult to breathe and yet this is not the hottest part of the year. Little wonder that the Lodge is nearly empty.

Writing in my journal I muse on the purpose of our journey:

“The feeling of not being connected to any specific tradition leaves one at sea. Sure, I can be an artist here in no-man’s land (this land of the Intrepid Tourist, depending on your point of view) but where is the captive audience? And there’s no sense thinking of myself as an artist explorer, since every tourist with a plane ticket has gone this route before me and probably much further into the mountains than I’ll ever reach. So where are we exactly and of what possible interest could our location be to others?”

“Aha! A ray of light. Is not our position only relative to the position of others? And have I not often gauged my own “location” in my meetings with other travelers on the road? On the road to where is beside the point. It’s just that, from my point of view, being on the road, being fully present here is the whole goal and object, not some specific or even undetermined destination outwardly. And so the trip to Nepal could also be a trip to Disneyland, depending on the point of view.”

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The day begins on an off note. We rise too late and I am grumbling because Karen won’t get up. I bathe and dress the children, order coffee, swallow my grouchiness, take a cup in to Karen and write a little in my journal. I have a head cold that is causing me further discomfort and am becoming edgy and irritable with everyone. Finally it is mutually agreed that I go off by myself for a little walk. I head towards the Gelugpa Tibetan Temple, the one we visited the other day and it is still locked!

As I am turning away, I see Karen and the girls coming toward me in a bicycle rickshaw. Both our moods have improved and Karen suggests that I wait with the girls while she checks around the back to see if anyone is there.

Soon she is waving from the front gate, for me to go around the back and as I start around the side of the temple I am met by a monk who explains in fairly good English that the temple is closed because the maintenance staff are on strike!

We all walk up to the road together and it becomes clear that he is not a Buddhist, but a monk of the Ramakrishna Order in Calcutta and I immediately suggest he come to meet our hotel manager who belongs to the Ramakrishna Mission. However, there is some confusion in our schedules, we part company and the proposed meeting never happens. more…

This morning we purchase train tickets for Ghaya, the jumping off point for Bodh Gaya, our destination.  This is the site where, as legend has it, Lord Buddha attained the state of enlightenment while sitting under the “Bo” tree.  We  return to our hotel to pack and once again our makeshift altar is bedecked with flowers and incense, the room scrupulously cleansed.  I express regret that we have to leave so soon but our journey calls us.  Karen has the hotel staff pack us a lunch of rice and chapatis for the train and we depart in style, ready for all contingencies.

We arrive in Gaya at 10 p.m. an hour behind schedule and take a bicycle rickshaw to what has been described as a good hotel. Children and luggage piled on the seat we walk through the filthy squalor of the streets toward our destination. We are shocked that this city looks so slum-like, even after dark. 

To our dismay the hotel is full and so we continue on down the line visiting various smaller, seedier-looking hotels and getting into arguments and even a shouting match with a hotel owner and with our rickshaw driver, who seems to be in league with the hoteliers. Tempers worn thin, we finally resolve to return to the railway station where we fall in with a band of intrepid travelers like ourselves, also heading to the same destination, who have run into the same problems this evening. Together, we resolve to rent a taxi and travel to Bodh Gaya this very night. more…

As usual, buying train tickets takes nearly a full day but at the end of it we have four, first class, air-conditioned coach, train tickets to Varanasi. Expensive tickets to be sure, but we are all feeling out-of-sorts and rather unwell in the past 24 hours. We can’t face up to another grueling journey and we want to pamper ourselves.

Varanasi, or as it was formerly known, Benares, is one of the most legendary of the holy cities of India. The line in Yoganada’s autobiography , “We entrained for Benares…” leaps into my mind as I am holding the tickets. New Delhi has been a wonderful introduction but now we are finally heading for the “heart ” of India, home of sadhus, holy men and the Great Mother Ganges. If there is to be a spiritual revelation for us, it is surely to be found there.

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I spend the rest of the day floating around with the family, taking tea, reading, resting, digesting everything that has happened the day before. Later in the day, despite my previous resolve, I start on the exercises given to me by Ali Moosa but only after first promising myself to do them just once a day, not five times and to conclude each meditation with my own informal one.

I notice that Karen has rubbed coconut oil into Nika’s hair which has given it a bedraggled, greasy look and my mind leaps from this thought to the image of a young sadhu I noticed in the streets several times during the past few days. I had seen him again a few evenings ago having tea with a middle-aged Swedish lady in the coffee shop at the Janpath Hotel. For a sadhu he was extremely well-dressed, in a long Indian-style coat that somehow offset the oily look of his long, black, shoulder-length hair which might have seemed unkempt but for the look of his clothes.

Karen and I remarked that he was speaking English to the lady and that it would be interesting to talk to him. We felt the opportunity however, would not arise.

After a long afternoon nap, I wake and begin to read the paperback copy of the Sri Aurobindo biography that we’d picked up second hand and which had been silently beckoning to me. After this, we go out for a ride on a bicycle rickshaw through the darkening streets up to Connaught Circle.
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