Of all the countries I'm visiting on this trip, I had the most preconceptions about India.
There were the scary ones, with high profile news stories leading me to the conclusion that every Indian man would be out to attack me, and people raising eyebrows at my choosing to come here at all ("Alone? Why?!"). And there were the idealised ones, the assurances that I'd find it magical, seductive and life changing. Waiting in Kathmandu airport, reading The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - a novel about a group of British pensioners who can't afford their retirement at home and move to Bangalore - I couldn't predict which kind of traveller I'd be; one "who would surrender to [India's] allure" or one "who would be baffled and distressed".
On my first day in Delhi, armed with my best '**** off and leave me alone' face, perfected in three years as a Londoner, I steeled myself for the onslaught of the streets. It was disconcerting at first that, like Evelyn in the novel, I found that "always, everywhere, eyes were upon [me] - people wanting to serve [me],to sell [me] something, people simply wanting to accompany [me] in a desire to be helpful." But though it could be "somewhat wearing", it was never threatening.
It's off-season for tourists, so my tour group was just me and two Canadian girls. As we moved out of Delhi into less touristy areas, we attracted a fair amount of attention. It was like being a celebrity followed by very polite and complimentary paparazzi. Everywhere we went, so many people seemed genuinely pleased to see us. After the evening worship ceremony at the ghat in Haridwar, the old lady sitting behind me took my arm and thanked me profusely, for what I still have no idea. When our guide and I crashed the graduation party of a group of Allahabad anaesthesiologists in our hotel, I was welcomed with open arms and installed in the centre of the dance floor. When a group of men turned up at our campsite, staring at us ominously and muttering in Hindi, it turned out that they'd just been daring each other to speak to the white girls, and all the one brave soul who did had to say for himself was "Have a nice day!".
Our tour took us down the the Ganges river, hitting some of the holiest spots in the country on the way. For the first few days, I wasn't getting the spiritual vibe. Our first stop was Rishikesh, yoga central, filled with spacy-looking, unwashed Westerners in silly trousers. In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Evelyn's daughter Theresa is one of these pilgrims, travelling from one ashram to another for the spiritual "high", trying to "find the love that had so far eluded her" by visiting the "Hugging Mother" swami (rather than her own mother just a few miles away). At the beautiful evening aarti ceremony by the river, I found myself judging the white people meditating in Indian dress, wondering why they couldn't find this kind of spiritual contentment in their own context, their own communities. I wondered if it was true that Westerners always "romanticise" India, taking "what we want from it" then getting "the hell out".
From Rishikesh we took the train to Agra, and I ticked a key point off my travel bucket list: the Taj Mahal. After an overnight train to Allahabad, we drove back to the Ganges for a leisurely two day sailing trip. When I woke up after a night's camping on the river bank, and paddled in the Ganges at dawn, drinking a cup of chai tea, I started to feel the spirituality of India getting under my skin.
Life of Pi, Yann Martel's novel about an Indian boy who survives a shipwreck in a lifeboat with a tiger, makes the bold claim to be "a story that will make you believe in God". I started reading it in our next destination: Varanasi, the burning city, home of the largest Hindu university (which made me think of it as the Oxford of India) and second on Pi's list of cities to visit before he dies. Martel's hypnotically rhythmic description of Pi's Hinduism describes the overwhelming "sense impressions" of being in Varanasi, and helped me begin to understand the underlying pulse of Hinduism for the first time:
"I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one's arrival to God... because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of aarti lamps circling in the darkness... because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word - faith."
Pi's easy acceptance of being a Christian, a Muslim and a Hindu simultaneously made me take a fresh look at the "sweaty, chatty Son" of my Christianity and consider some questions I hadn't really thought about before. The juxtaposition of dead bodies burning by the Ganges with children swimming just a few metres further up and hundreds of people worshipping a few metres further down made me wonder whether our horror and sanitisation of death is really the best response. I don't believe in Fortune or Karma, but maybe Western culture's metanarrative of unimpeded ascent and insatiable progress (surely formed in part by our Christian history) doesn't account for the random cruelty of life, and the fact that not everyone has the resources and good luck to be successful. I don't believe that desire is the root of all suffering, but walking around Mahabodhi temple, built in the place where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment, I thought about the amount of pain the gap between what we want and reality causes, and how much it might be eased if we did live fully in the moment.
As Alain de Botton has put it, the most boring question you can ask of a religion is "Is it true?". I'm not converting to a different faith any time soon, but maybe there is room in our understanding of life for more than one story. Maybe the story with the animals is the better story. In India, I started to see that everything can have "a trace of the divine in it" and "anything can be holy".
Then I spent nine hours in a station waiting for a train that never appeared. And sat on the platform with a beggar whose foot was so infected that it was swarming with flies and people were giving him money to make him go away. That seems to be the paradox of India: being reminded of the great potential of the spiritual world, where your heart soars and you think anything could be possible. And being brought back to earth with a bump, because the trains don't run on time, and for all the spiritual glory, a poor man can't get his foot fixed.
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Martel, Yann, Life of Pi (2001)
Moggach, Deborah, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2004)
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