India Travelogue, October 2008

Travelogue of India

(PART TWO)

By Susumu Takiguchi

CHAMUNDI HILL

Chamundesvari Temple was sitting on top of the famous Chamundi Hill which overlooked the town of Mysore in south India. This temple held the patron deity of the royal family and of Mysore which they presided over. For me it was the first Hindu temple to pay my proper visit. Not only inside, which was narrow and dark, but also the outside of the temple were jam-packed with devotees. The only comparison I could think of was the jam-packed commuter trains in rush-hour Tokyo where you were reduced to an existence much worse than a parcel or a potato sack.

Pushed and shoved, I managed a shortest non-believer's prayer at the altar, bowing and folding my hands to some of the oldest deities in the world. Still unaccustomed to Indian banknotes, I snatched a crumpled note from my secret pocket and placed it on the offertory receptacle which was overflowing with coins and notes. It was instantly obvious that I must have made a huge mistake by giving away one of the highest denominations because the man who I thought was fast asleep, crouching down beside the offertory box, suddenly raised his grinning head from the darkness, smiled at me and made all sorts of gestures of blessing me profusely. The loss of my forced composure and quite a bit of Rupees into the hungry offertory box was more than compensated for by his grinning mumbo-jumbo, a huge vermillion divine mark (tilak) he carefully smeared between my eyebrows and the holy water of doubtful hygiene given to me from a sacred silver spoon which I had to drink.

majinai mo arigataku uku tera no haru

all this mumbo-jumbo

yet I receive it gratefully…

Spring in the temple

I could not run the risk of hurting myself by walking barefooted when I had to take off my shoes to enter the shrine. So, now I ruined my best pair of socks. In Japan, people must take off their shoes when entering a house. At least they provide a pair of slippers for the guest. Japanese floors are squeaky clean or covered with pleasant tatami mats anyway. When the Americans occupied Japan after WWII one of the first things which happened was all those GIs trampling all over the place inside Japanese houses in dosoku (dirty shoes or boots) and painting delicate and fine Japanese walls of wabi, sabi taste in garish yellow or blue "…like back home".

The heat outside made me giddy into wondering how such a basic difference of social custom came about between East and West. I had become tired of this persistent cliché of dividing the world into East and West but different they really are! They are at least as different as men and women are different. However, as everything starts with Brahma and ends with Brahma in India so everything must start with India and probably end with India in the whole world. India has everything, East and West, as she is the mother of the most important and fundamental things in most of the later civilisations.

atsuki haru kutsu haki naosu gishiki kana

putting my shoes

back on in the spring heat…

now a ritual

MYSORE PALACE HOTEL

Compared with the squalor of the hilltop temple, the elegance and serenity of the luxurious hotel on the hillside were a welcome change, to use British understatement. What I really want to say is that I felt as if I stumbled across an oasis by some miracle upon a paradise on earth! The long taxi journey from Bangalore to Mysore was sheer hell and the contrast could not have been starker. The majestic hotel was so palatial that one did not need to ask its name. I remembered looking at a huge colour photographic view of it in an in-flight magazine of the nouveau rich private airline carrying me to Bangalore. The caption declared it was the very best of quintessential top-notch hotels converted from former maharajas' palaces. I was to have a big, leisurely and expensive lunch there. However, that was out of the question given my stomach condition, which banned even Western lunch or even a tiny Japanese dish. Instead, I went into a bar and had a leisurely drink of local beer. I had this huge bar entirely to myself.

kiga no mi ya mitsu wo nomu goto biiru nomu

thirsty and starved…

I drink beer as if

drinking nectar

The maharaja who used to own the present Palace Hotel was one of the six richest men in the world. Top figures in royalty, politics, commerce and industry, art or literature and entertainment, especially the film industry in all corners of the world were said to have been entertained here. Every guest, even a social climber, was treated like a royal and made to feel that he or she owned the palace. Everything about the place was luxurious and exuded quality in silence. However, there was not a slightest hint of vulgarity. The place was elegance itself. It beats London's Savoy Hotel by a long way. As I was leaving, I asked for a copy of the hotel brochure and confirmed that the cheapest room was something I could just about afford. I decided to come back here one day like a maharaja and enjoy a little bit of snobbism for a change. One small thing I came to realise as I was leaving was that I saw absolutely no other guest in the entire hotel. Perhaps it was a ghost hotel.

maharaja no shiro ni todoka-nu haru no chiri

spring dust

not reaching an old

maharaja's palace

PUNE

Pune looked rather barren from the sky with brown low hills and desert-like fields. However, as I was driven around after landing it turned out to be a pleasant and leafy place. The deceptive aerial view was all because it was the dry season. The more I saw of it and longer I stayed there the better I liked the city. The locals told me that Poona, as it was called (by the British) before they changed it back to its original Marathi name, was much better in the recent past and that the relentless industrialisation is bringing the same problems such as congestion and pollution to it as Bangalore, though it is still not as bad. There was something of Britishness and also of military order about the place, something proper and not chaotic, but that was not the reason why I liked it. I liked it because it had a similar atmosphere to that of Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, old, elegant, cultured and dignified.

army town,

along uncluttered streets

frangipani blossom

One of the many attractions of India is her plant kingdom. There are six seasons in India and I was there in their spring. However, this was also their 'dry' season until the monsoon came in about two months' time. I could not get used to the contradictory combination between the springness and dryness. I explained that contradiction to my Indian friends by singing 'April Love' but there seemed no contradiction in India which defies Western logic. There were few flowers blossoming when I arrived in India but towards the end of my short stay they did come out and blossom everywhere almost like an explosion rather than the more prosaic mushrooms. It was so sudden that I felt that they appeared literally out of the blue as I was having nothing but cloudless sky everyday. Apart from Bourgenbilia or wisteria, most of the impressive flowering trees were unknown to me.

like Sanskrit words

I try to learn the names of

Indian spring flowers

It was an early start the following morning. I was to be chauffeur-driven on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway to a famous mountain cave temple situated in North-West of Pune, about one third of the way to Mumbai (Bombay). Starting my whole journey of India on the Deccan Plateau, i.e. flat places, I was by then missing mountains. Therefore this motoring was a treat to me. Close to the cave, called Karle or Karla Caves, we stopped at the town of Lonavala which commanded the panoramic view of the Sahyadri ranges cascading down from the inland to the distant ocean. There was a single strange shape among the peaks. Later I learned that it was called Duke's Nose. One theory goes that it was named after the Iron Duke (Duke of Wellington) because of the uncanny resemblance of it to his famous and ample nose. Hikers and trekkers flock here. Called the jewel of the Sahyadri, the whole place was picturesque and I did a few quick sketches and took a lot of digital photos as references for the paintings I was planning to do of India.

Koshaku no hana nimo nitari haru no mine

spring sky…

the silhouetted peak resembling

a duke's nose

The mountain path was stony and hard to climb. The sun was beating me, which added to my struggle to reach the cave temple. Even the donkeys refused to proceed. Had it not been for the line of believers and devotees whose steady and religious steps took them continuously upwards, I would have abandoned the hardship long before. Life to us, I reflected, was a bit like this line of faith, with each of us believing or trying to believe in something, or anything, desperately and not falling out of the others. What, then, was a maverick, contrarian or rebel, I wanted to ask, meant to do who could not join such a line formed by the majority of people? Being a bit of all these, I had always felt that I did not belong to, was not part of, or different from, human race.

alienated, I move

with the row of people walking

to a sacred shrine

What came into my sight before anything else was a huge peepal (or Bodhi) tree. This was not only most appropriate but also a great surprise to me, almost some kind of enlightenment. It is said that Siddhartha Gautama sat under a peepal tree, meditated, came to enlightenment (Bodhi) and became an 'awakened' or 'enlightened' being (Buddha). I too would just as well sit under the tree in front of me as I was totally knackered after the arduous ascent and could do with a bit of rest.

gentle rustle…

spring breeze through

peepal leaves

Karla Caves were a complex of rock-cut cave shrines built by Buddhist monks around 3rd to 2nd century B.C. From outside they looked like an ancient fortress or cave houses. I went into the central hall which was the main part of the shrines. It was a long hall with extremely high ceiling. At the end was the stupa, hemispheric funerary mounds. On both sides the walls were lined with magnificent pillars and covered with intricate reliefs which showed high skills of the carvers. At the top of each pillar were statues of male and female in erotic positions and of animals. Buddhism came to Japan only in the 6th century. What I was looking at had been created 700 or 800 years before that. The positive and optimistic vibes coming from Karla Caves, especially from the erotic figures, were a puzzle to me as I grew up immersed with the teaching of negative and pessimistic views of Japanese Buddhism.

ancient temple

remains intact…

it's spring