CHASING SHIVA
by Dianne Sharma-Winter
SEX AND CELIBACY finalist in the Huia Publishers Maori Awards in 2007
INDIA ON A G-STRING finalist in the 2007 Six Pack Awards
Desire is the beginning and the end of all stories.
Desire forms an island of sand in the ocean of consciousness.
Inside every grain of sand is a world.
The grains of sand float endlessly over the time and tide of man until one day they begin to coalesce and condense then spring into the myriad of forms that we experience as the whole world.
But we are dreaming.
Each and every major event of our pathetic little lives amounts to stuff all in the great play of Time.
The good news, I reckoned to myself, as I quaffed ridiculous amounts of smoked salmon and alcohol courtesy of Singapore Airlines (the last people to treat me with the oriental deference allotted to the mad, the rich or the saintly), is that for all our fussing and fighting we are a mere shadow of a dream. That kind of puts things into perspective, at least for me. Being a minor player in Gods dream has to be better than a hundred days of film festival since His Ultimate Play unfolds every day before our eyes. But if I thought that New Zealand was ready for my unplugged approach to spirituality, I was dreaming.
Plucked from one side of the looking glass, I find myself suddenly under the glare of inspection from my own kind in Auckland International Terminal. My previous negative evolutionary action (or karma) regarding transport kicks in with the customs officers in New Zealand. They take one look at me and turn me upside-down. My answers to their questions don’t help the situation; I look like a dangerously round peg trying to rattle her way into the square hole of respectability. My own personal fantasy of myself as Parvatti or Kim or any other literary hero began to unravel that moment. I didn’t think that quoting any literary giants at them was likely to help the situation as it had in Omkareshwar.
Even though we are only separated by the width of the clinical steel table, it may as well have been the southern ocean as they blew through my possessions shrieking questions at me like a jealous lover. Relieving me of a weird collection of leaves and stones and shells they mark my details in their Great Book of Time and let me go reluctantly.
‘A fine welcome home for a pilgrim,’ I mutter to myself as I wander out into arrivals, ‘obviously the person responsible for rearranging the cosmic props is suffering from jet lag.’
To move so suddenly from a world where God takes form quite naturally in the body of men and cows, monkeys and stones to a land where both man and beast live in fear of the knackers yard waiting for both of them at the end of the road, was obviously going to take some adjustment.
The first adjustment is made in the womb like tranquility of a deep bath with the miracle of hot water springing from the taps. Scraping the toughened skin from my feet with a horse rasp, I consider the new me emerging from the grime of six months on the road. The first emotion that bubbles to the surface of the choppy sea of my emotions is one of pure exalted giddy relief; thank God I have escaped that madness! Sliding under the water, I exhale all the tension, frustration and anger out in a bubble of underwater screams. When my lungs have freed the pent up tantrums of the last few months I sit up suddenly and shake my head wildly from side to side, splattering the walls with water.
‘Everything okay in there?’
The sudden knock revives my shell shock. I cower like a beaten animal in the scummy water; instinct takes over as I narrow my eyes against the threatened intrusion. Grabbing a razor, I growl soft and low and crouch ready to spring.
‘Dear?’
It’s Darlene, who has led me here with scent and candles, a thick fluffy towel and instructions to use all the hot water in the house if necessary to restore myself to a remnant of my former glory. Still, I struggle for a second with my jungle survival skills before I realise that I am safe. No wild contingent of lunatics is ever going to find me here!
‘Everything is fine, I am just fluxing.’ I try to keep my voice deliberately calm.
‘Can I read your journals while you’re in the bath?’
‘Help yourself, they are in my pack.’
As her footsteps disappear down the hall, I swill out the slop and run a fresh bath. That’ll give her a good laugh, I think.
A sense of humour and a finely tuned appreciation for the ridiculous are necessary companions on the rocky road of spiritual enlightenment. Since God is totally beyond the duality of opinion, a sense of humour can help to connect with the cosmic joke echoing beyond the tragedy of our lives.
Dressing, I remember one diamond hard hot afternoon at the temple when it seemed that the whole world was sleeping.
I was drawing the lunatic in my journal and thinking to myself that one day in the distant future I would make a point of trying to understand for myself what held me in the thrall of the naked and crazy Naga, Chandon Giri and his rabid regiment of raving lunatics. There were no doors to hold me there, nothing except my own stubborn determination to stay and to stay sane. And love. Love I was too stubborn to surrender to. Love had held me there because it was a story ready to be told.
‘One day,’ Chandon Giri had said that brilliantine afternoon, ‘God wrote in the Great Book that Chandon Giri Naga Baba and Dinah would meet.’
I had to agree with him. That we even met in the first place reeked of some kind of cosmic interference. God must have had a blimmin’ good chuckle when He cooked up this little three-act drama, I thought.
The image of Chandon Giri on the railway platform only a week ago, his eyes flooding with tears, pierces my heart suddenly like a needle.
‘Very funny, God.’ I wipe the steam from the mirror, muttering to myself.
Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I can hardly believe that I am doing just that, I can’t believe that I am not crouched under the tap in the secret garden in a town where the people greet the river at the start and end of the day. I can’t believe that I will walk out of this room and into another where everything is run buy the push of a button and there are no orange robed sadhu gossiping up a storm. I miss them already.
Ever since they turned me upside down at the customs hall, I don’t seem to know which way is up anymore.
#
‘Remember when we were kids and you wanted to run away?” Darlene pauses over a page in my journal.
‘It wasn’t running away, it was called ‘Hitting the Road’,’ I remind her. ‘We were looking for adventure.’
‘Hitting the Road? Hah! You got more than that when your dad got hold of you!’
‘That was thanks to you anyway,’ I defend our shared memory. ‘It was you that chickened out in the first place and told on us, you wimp!’
‘The whole family treated it like running away; they thought something dark had happened to us.’
‘I know, mum and dad were so careful questioning my reasons for wanting to run away,’ I laughed. ‘When I told them that I was just bored and wanted to hit the road, dad hit the roof! Hit the road, he yelled, I’ll show you hit the bloody road! I couldn’t sit down for a week!’
‘Well then, this urge to run away ...’
“Hit the Road,’ I insist.
‘Is buried deep within the festering pit of your subconscious.’ Darlene continues. ‘You have wanted to do this since we were seven.’
‘Yeah, I think it was Tom Sawyer who did it for me first.’
‘Walt Disney has a lot to answer to,’ Darlene mutters darkly.
‘I wonder where the hell I thought I was going,’ I asked my seven year old self.
Thirty-four years later, I still didn’t have a lot of answers.
When I tried to explain the months in India, my mouth would open on a void. All the colour and noise and insanity refused to be dismissed in a few brisk sentences, but to own a part in that drama placed me somehow outside of the feeling of belonging that I had longed for in the shifting shadows of the jungle.
‘Hmmm yes, monkeys curing migraines and being taken to the police station, climbing mountains and all that sounds all very exciting, but did you meet Anyone?’
‘I met lots of people, that’s what I just told you.’
‘Yes but did you, you know, meet anyone?’
‘Did I sleep with anyone you mean?’
‘Someone interesting was he?’
‘The only people I slept with were all certifiably mad which is as it should be.’
Scoring myself a genuine dyed in the dreadlocks Guru ji failed to impress the curious who only wanted to hear about my sex life.
The concept of the guru (dispeller of darkness) in the Indian tradition is not an isolated phenomenon but a generic part of the cultural milieu. Guru and student go together like horse and carriage; they are two parts of the same story.
Marpa, the great Yogi of Tibet, lead Milarepa in numerous trials before he granted him the teaching of the dharma. Similarly, Buddha made sure that his disciple the Venerable Channa suffered as his ego burned in the fires of discrimination. The Zen masters of Japan are renowned for issuing a good slap to their students at the precise cosmic moment, even the Catholic nuns who taught me as a child saw the pedagogy of cruelty as a necessary aid to learning.
We weren’t allowed to take the beatings personally; there was an unspoken understanding that they furthered our spiritual development. The beatings would serve to toughen us up if ever we were called upon to test our faith, they implied. Then issued us with graphic examples of how the faithful were tested. My personal favorite was the boy who crawled seventy miles through a blizzard in wartime to ring the bells for Mass. Apparently; he walked the first fifty miles in bare feet and eventually was forced to crawl the final lap when his feet were inevitably reduced to frozen slabs of shredded meat. This kind of hard-core endurance impressed me no end. I wondered if after Mass he got a beating from the nuns to help him on his way home but when I extrapolated this theory to my childhood guru, she banished me from the classroom.
The nuns were not interested in serious philosophical debate, the story was non negotiable. Banned to shiver outside in the winter frost as the first test of my endurance, I kicked at the wall and thought about it. There were a lot of holes in the nun’s version of the story. If God is all loving and all forgiving, I seriously doubted that He would have been even mildly annoyed to be one altar boy down that particular Sunday. God would have sent the poor kid some shoes and said ‘Go home you silly little bugger don’t you know that I am everywhere?’ I tapped on the window and asked the nun what she thought about that and she chased me with the cane all the way to The Mother Superiors office.
‘Throw away the oyster,’ says the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna speaking on the relationship between guru and disciple. ‘And take the pearl.’ Care nothing for the outer appearance of your guru; only take the teaching.
The nuns held something in common with Chandon Giri they both took that teaching to another level.
In the land of the mega makeover, we can type ‘Spiritual Salvation into a Google search on the Internet and get 14,400,000 leads in less than one second but slow enlightenment is something like the slow food movement currently sweeping the western world, it tastes better.
Until your life has been seasoned by the joys and pain of life, there is no basis for enquiry. You can’t just give up on life and whine about meditating in a cave as an alternative to participating just because life is hard and it hurts. Participation is required and is as non-negotiable as a nun but there is a glimmer of hope for those who endure.
Ordinary Hindus must work through all the four seasons or ashramas of life, or be considered no better than a coward who deserts the battlefield. The four stages represent periods of Preparation, Production, Service and Retirement. Once one reaches the stage of Service, or Vanaprasta (literally when the skin becomes wrinkled) one is encouraged to withdraw from worldly desires into semi retirement before the fourth and final stage of Sannyasi or full retirement from the world.
Having fulfilled my duties to society and run out of legitimate desires, I was left considering my own use by date. Well meaning people insisted that I was still young enough to have another relationship before gravity finally took over and sent me hurtling down the fast track to the land of lost hopes and broken dentures.
But it seemed almost a pathetic kind of vanity to me. My heart had had its full of romantic love, of hopeless arrangements with hopeless men, no one was ever going to come along and sweep me off my feet like Ajay had. Already my eyes had ‘turned towards the forest’, not so much in consideration of the approach of death but in order to explore the idea of waking from this dream of life before it ended.
Talking about death in a youth culture where everyone is desperate to hide the signs of ageing, where ‘mature’ is a dirty word unless it is applied to a ten-year-old girl singing star we are somehow deluded into believing that to be the worlds wrinkliest teenager is the coolest thing. Wisdom wins no accolades in a world where Botox is a girl’s best friend.
And then there is sex. Or lack of it.
Months or weeks or maybe even years may pass unnoticed by your sexual organs and it is not until you sit down one day and count back that you realise that you have been existing in a state of celibacy, it just sneaks up on you from behind. Choosing celibacy is another kettle of fish. More often than not it is an oath taken in the heat of the moment and not considered a lifestyle choice for the average red-blooded Maori woman.
It’s a terrible fact but true, like an alcoholic halted half way in reaching for a glass or a smoker about to light the cigarette that breaks the camels back; I hadn’t planned to end my days like a nun. This treacherous body still yearns to be touched, but I console myself with the thought that it is precisely giving into these desires which holds me on a plane of consciousness I long to outgrow. What to do?
I am beginning to think that sex is like anger, that you can’t deny or repress what is life’s own desire for itself but that the energy can be redirected, just as anger (once understood) can be directed into positive energy. Maybe I can plough my redundant sexual energy into creative effort instead of crumpled bed sheets and phones that never ring, into gardens that bloom all year and endless tins of baking from the kitchen, into paintings and babysitting and scrubbing the local tennis court with a toothbrush.
Which is where Koko finds me one day late winter.
‘What are you looking for down there?’
‘Kia ora Koko, I am not looking. I am cleaning.’
‘Is she scrubbing the tennis court, Sophie?’ He rattles her brace. Sophie the traitor barks in affirmative.
‘Yes, well enough of that,’ I throw the toothbrush into the bin. ‘Time for a nice cup of tea, eh?’
‘Girl, you scrubbing the tennis court with a toothbrush! A cup of tea ain’t gunna fix that!’
‘I think I have too much bloody energy for this world!’ I sit down beside him. ‘What the hell am I going to do? I am too young to be a saint or a sannyasi, a widow or a grandmother. I am too old to be a super model; my only social life revolves around my grandchildren and going to the odd funeral.’
‘Get a life.’ He chuckles.
‘What? And collect more karma? I am already freaking out about what I have collected so far!’
‘Maybe you should ask your Guru to teach you the Tantric arts,’ he teases.
‘Nah, he is a Naga sadhu. They don’t do sex, they just fight.’
‘Well, check it out. There must be someone to instruct you on the proper use of sexual energy over there in India. Tantra.’
“Well, that’s just the thing,” I say. ‘According to the Guru - Disciple relationship, you don’t go chopping and changing your Guru on a whim.”
“Looks like you’re stuck with the fighting Guru then.”
“I think I prefer the role of the lover.”
“You don’t have to be one thing or another, you know,” He offers me gently. “Just live your life. Love it. Leave the drama up to your Guru Ji.”
What separates the lover from the hunter? Both fix their unwavering desire upon their objective. Both become their quarry for all intents and purposes, they live and breathe and eat desirous of the ultimate outcome, union with the prey. The lover seeks dissolution while the hunter seeks absolution. Just as one nostril breathes in and the other out, just as the heart and the mind are joined within the earthen frame of our bodies, there are two paths streaming constantly to the Beloved. Both are chasing Shiva.
Within a year, after filling up on family and hot water and the smell of sunshine on the hair of my grandchildren, I head back to India for the next round.
#
New Delhi streets are so bare of traffic that I could skip along the middle lane without even causing a disturbance. It is Independence Day, the day when India awoke to her tryst with destiny and threw off the yoke of colonial oppression. No doubt the shattering masses are gathered to hear the Independence Day speech delivered by the current Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee from the ramparts of the famous Red Fort. A dull muted roar can be heard over the rooftop of the city from the direction of Old Delhi but here in the centre all is calm.
At the less famous Ringo Guest house in Connaught Lane, the tourists are all at a loss. This unforeseen holiday has disrupted their travel plans and they are not impressed by the historical import of the anniversary.
Something else that Indian and Maori have in common is a history of passive resistance against the British Imperialists. In fact, the Maori prophet Te Whiti-o -Rongomai launched the first campaign of passive resistance against the British invaders in 1879 when the Mahatma was still in short pants. We hold the Mahatma in great esteem since he managed to achieve what Te Whiti had set out to do sixty years previously and got the British off their land.
Among the usual weird collection of tourists lingering around the courtyard is an Australian woman, Sue who is en route to Manali to bail her drug addicted daughter out of jail. She is shows me the bargain jewels she picked up en route in Sri Lanka; the sale of which she hopes will recompense her daughter’s stay courtesy of the Indian Justice System.
Punkej is a foreign returned Indian man and Chris the Brit has arrived with me straight from the airport. Chris has limited time in India and is as keen as I am to get out of the city. Punkej is heading to Rishikesh, Chris is heading to Rishikesh and after listening into their conversation for a moment or two, I decide that I also am going to Rishikesh. Punkej has an air-conditioned car and will share expenses. Even if the road from the Capital city to the veritable Gateway to God is as rough and as crowded and uneven as any country track and marked with the passage of my grief, there is nothing more depressing than being in a city unless it is being alone in an empty city.
Haridwar is lit up like a princess at a party, seducing us to stop and make puja on the ghat with the first greedy pujari we spot. Across the river, a three- story statue of Shiva watches over the city of his lover Ganga, I think of my own mad pilgrimage only a year ago and wonder if I should make a courtesy call to the Akhara. I doubt that Chandon Giri would be there, but perhaps they could direct me to him? I look at my companions and decide against it.
We drive on to Rishikesh where I take a room at a guesthouse and settle on the balcony to watch the view. Chris and Punkej go out to drink whiskey leaving me to contemplate the rush and roar of Ganga Ma. A woman dressed in the robes of the ashram of Pune joins me on the balcony outside our rooms. She is in Rishikesh, she tells me, to sit in the hope of darshan with some Guru whose name I don’t quite catch. Every day she sits at the gates of the ashram where the guru is currently in meditation as an expression of her devotion. So far she has sat for fifteen days.
‘Pune is finished for me now, I am looking for a new Guru,’ she declares.
We begin a desultory conversation about the problems of being a woman alone in India and having to deal with all the pent up sexuality of millions of Indian men. When I confess that I am working on converting my own sexual energy into creative energy, she refers me to an Osho lecture and brings me the literature from her room.
‘Shiva gave Parvatti a meditation where she was to use her breasts as her middle eye, you want to try it.’
We agree in the end that celibacy comes from an emotional and spiritual state before it becomes a physical expression then wish each other good night and creep off to bed like nuns. I briefly imagine how it would be to literally walk down an Indian street with eyes painted exactly at nipple level. Just for luck, I meditate from my breasts and fall asleep.
At some point during the night, I wake and think;
‘What is this strange lump in my bed?’
Perhaps a dog had slipped in unheard to seek shelter from the monsoon? Poking the shape with taut fingers, I discern teeth then – in one horror movie moment that set the hair on the back of my neck on end – hair! Leaping for the light switch, the full glare of harsh fluorescence reveals a man in my bed. For some reason my mind is unable to deal with this reality and wants to focus instead on a story I read one cold Delhi winter when the papers reported that mangy street dogs were slipping into unoccupied hospital beds in the TB ward of a public hospital.
Slapping this particular mangy mutt to wake with my shoe, I scream at him to get the hell out. The intruder, playing for time, manages to look more stunned and confused than I. I recognise him to be the man assigned to sleep upstairs and guard the guests. Suddenly I see myself peeking out from behind his jungly eyes. A foreign woman travelling alone draws its own implications but I had arrived with two whiskey drinking men so obviously I was a woman of very loose morals. Obviously gagging for it. I scream and slap him some more while I think of what to do next.
Too late, I remember my trusty pocketknife which could slit a sleeping mans throat but alas! Before I can reach for it, he gathers his trousers and flees into the night.
I dress, covering my traitorous breasts. That’s the last time I ever try a bloody Osho meditation, I mutter to myself as my mind skitters around the room like a rat to find his point of entry - a half-hearted latching of the balcony door. Angry with myself for being so sloppy, I consider my choices - to make a fuss or to not make a fuss. The fact that I could choose not to make a fuss seemed to make the most sense, I could lock the door properly and get some sleep, leave without a fuss in the morning.
But there comes a point in the life of a lone woman travelling in India when the behavior of ignorant junglys reaches saturation level. I decide to fight back for myself and for every woman in India. Slamming down the stairs to alert the family, I begin yelling.
‘Call the police this white woman is gunna kill somebody!’
Indians like a bit of street theatre.
I bash on the door of the manager’s family. Lights click on and hurried movement is heard beyond.
‘O bhaisaab!’ I shout.
They reluctantly unlock the door.
A short interval while the story is related to the ten or so family members, who peer out from behind the door. I see the dilemma reflected in their eyes, after all the only right to moral outrage I can legitimately claim in these circumstances is an economic one, this is bad for business but the woman herself is not stainless. It’s a seesaw of righteousness until I claim the universal privilege of tears. I win. I am sent back to my room while a search is begun. I show my escort the knife.
‘If you don’t find him,’ I declare, ‘I will! Then I will slit his miserable throat!’
The escort flees down the stairs no doubt to warn them that this crazy woman has a knife. Eventually, after much excitement, the unrepentant Romeo is found hiding in the bushes and dragged back for a positive ID.
‘Madam, please tell if this is the man who was in your room.’
‘It is he.’
‘Madam, this man is saying that you went to his room.’
I am still walking towards the man when these words register, in a flash of rage I grab his ears and bring his lying nose down to my upraised knee. This is a very handy self-defense asana taught to me by my karate sensei, designed to break the nose of your attacker. My rage empowers me. I attack him like a madwoman. He is every ignorant Indian man who has ever tried to cop a grope or behaved with insulting prejudice towards me. The crowd is alarmed and urges me to stop. They hand me a hefty pole.
‘Madam, beat him with this stick.’
This is summary justice Indian style, and something to do while waiting for the police to attend such outrages. But my original fury has been exhausted so I hand him and the stick over to the sisterhood who proceed to beat him some more, while I walk a little distance away to throw up discreetly into the garden.
A day later, on the bus to Delhi I reason that even though I had missed the opportunity to slit that mans miserable throat and was suffering from bruised and aching hands as a result of the beating, at least justice was seen to have been done and that’s more than most women can hope for anywhere in the world, but most especially in India.
INDIA ON A G-STRING
When love happens the heart is a high altitude valley bursting with birdsong and alive with flowers offering their existence towards the sun, clear air forms a bubble of unbearable joy in the centre of your chest and the feeling is of hot ice.
When love happens and two flames leap together in the clear air, the Devi will arrange to have an opera singer singing Puccini on a street corner as you walk by hand in hand at midnight, people will smile spontaneously at you on a city street and a lone farang will stroll down an island beach in Thailand playing a saxophone beneath a blazing sunset.
Ajay sighs loudly, closing his eyes on the last few sobs of the sax.
“This is perfection,” he announces softly. “Can it get any better?”
My nose twitches, almost too perfect. “It’s almost spookily perfect, don’t you think?”
“Like a movie,” he agrees.
But he is not perturbed by the series of incredible co incidences that have fallen like flowers in our path; instead he surrenders easily into every gift that life offers without calculating the hidden cost. He rolls from the hammock slung beneath two coconut trees onto his feet.
“Our last day in paradise, I am going to take a photo of that sunset.”
“Take one with your heart,” I advise, “It will last longer.”
Already I am exhausted by his ability to squeeze as much as he can into a moment, he wants to fit the world into a postcard and send it to himself.
The last six weeks had spun by. The Department of Internal Affairs took the stance of suspicious bystander in our rush to tie the knot and granted a temporary stay of execution on his visa. I don’t think they were impressed with snaps of Darlene dressed as a fairy and a Thai language student as the witnesses to what they saw as a hastily convened marriage. In fact our giddy hysteria seemed to complicate matters in the hallowed halls of their hollow institution. In the absence of my in-laws, the Department of Immigration did a fine job of sniffing suspiciously around the union but Ajay’s family were an unknown quantity.
While his father had never lived in India, his mother had married from her family house in Delhi where numerous aunts, uncles and cousins still lived, to settle in London where Ajay describes their life as ‘colonial chickens home to roost.’ His parents were making the trip out to India at Christmas to meet their new daughter in law.
“Will your Delhi family be there to meet us at the airport?” I ask, crossing my fingers.
He snaps the shutter and looks up quickly, “Sod that. We aren’t going to see them until mum and dad get there at Christmas. I haven’t even told them we are coming, yet.”
“Thank God for that then!” I am not looking forward to being the biggest blight on the post-wedding season in Delhi. Even though the years and times have been kind to me, there was no escaping the fact that this rose had already bloomed and was fading fast.
“Yeah,” he laughs nervously,” We have that long to enjoy ourselves at least! Goa here we come!” He holds a slender finger to the air, “But first, a trip to the Cosmic Circus – Pushkar. Otherwise known as the centre of the world!”
As far as I was concerned, India was the centre of the world and everything else just radiated out in circles from there, Ajay held a less romantic world view. India was the Capital of Corruption, the Doyenne of the Double Standard, a place he only visited under the duress of family obligation. He and his brother had discovered Pushkar when their car broke down in Ajmer on a family to visit the shrine of the Sufi saint, Gharib Nawaz.
Bored in the seething city while the car was repaired, to kill a few hours they followed a group of foreign freaks to the bus stand and over Snake Hill where the oasis town of Pushkar was revealed, lying like a lotus in the desert. They went AWOL for a couple of weeks and caused a scandal in the Delhi branch of the family.
Since then he had carried a memory in his heart of a fairy tale village as round as the lake it encircled, scented by the rose fields growing in the outer ring with temple bells ringing into the surrounding desert.
“Sounds like a story book,” I sigh.
#
The flight route from Bangkok to Delhi tracks the course of Ganga Ma, who twists like a jewelled snake across the northern plains of India before suddenly diving off into the night, ceding ground to her sister Yamuna as we descend into Delhi.
We hit the ground running on a mission to find the drunkest taxi driver in the whole of Delhi, Ajay steers me past the hysterical shouts of the taxi and hotel touts to the darkest corner of the airport car park where we begin our search.
Luckily we are destined to meet; it doesn’t take long to locate him with his snores rattling the windows of his Ambassador car.
Quickly, we load ourselves into the back of the car before he even has a chance to struggle out of his alcoholic coma, thereby seizing the psychological advantage. Ajay then demands that he take us to our hotel with all the authority of a prime minister or a priest.
Long years of subservience to the caste system means that the man responds with blind obedience tinged with the grumbling reluctance of an old family servant. He mumbles a price, Ajay nods his acceptance regally and we drift off into the night.
Delhi unravels herself in the headlights as we swerve and toot and blast our way through the inferno of night into the city. Even at two in the morning, the stage is bustling with extras and stage managers as the set is rearranged into night-time contours. The cows doze on traffic islands impervious to the urban nightmare, the odd flare of light from a chai stall punctuates the night, a huddle of pre dawn rickshaw wallahs stud the view from my window between the endless rush of traffic.
The telltale squeal of two tyres connecting with the tarmac alerts us to the fact that the driver has gone to sleep at the wheel. His head lolls luxuriously.
Leaning forward Ajay pokes him in the neck to revive him.
A slight river of drool spills from the corner of the driver’s mouth, his sleep-swollen lids struggle against overwhelming gravity.
Ajay pokes him again. This time his head swings upward and he inhales suddenly in surprise. Blinking rapidly, he becomes aware that he is driving and deftly corrects a near fatal impact with the tail end of a Tata truck. Consciousness recovered, his eyes meet mine in the rear vision mirror. He prepares his mouth for speech, rolling each word around in his mouth before spitting them out to me in syllables.
“Madam. Your. Hotel.”
“Yes bhai? Our hotel what?” Ajay leans forward over the car seat, ready to wrest the wheel away from him but the effort of speech has overwhelmed his effort to communicate, the drivers head slumps forward again. Ajay pulls his ear. His head swings wildly as he struggles to regain lost ground, the blare of a horn at the window revitalises his reactions. We swerve and only slightly collide with a Maruiti van, the driver flares his horn again offers some insults and is gone. When we regain momentum he again attempts speech.
“Madam! Shir! Your hotel ish closhed.”
This, Ajay informs me, is the famous New Delhi Taxi wallah trick, usually administered with a lot more enthusiasm and hand gestures and accompanied by a hysterical cohort. Convincing you that your hotel has been burned to the ground, or otherwise rendered unavailable, unscrupulous taxi drivers sell you another room so far off the beaten track that you would never find your way back there with a policeman to demand your money back once you realised that you had been cheated.
“But it was open when I rang them from the airport.” I say, winking at Ajay.
The driver doesn’t respond because he has gone back to sleep again. Now I pull both his ears. He swerves awake pulling on the steering wheel as if it were a life rope. Again he begins his mantra.
“Madam, your hotel ishhh…”
Snore.
I pull his ear and Ajay pokes him in the neck. He swerves awake. Poking, pulling snoring and swerving in this manner we make our way into Connaught Circle. Once again on two wheels, we careen into the circle. Ajay pulls both ears hard.
“Bro! Wake up! We are arrived and good news! Our hotel is open!”
#
Bells peal out as we arrive in Pushkar in the early morning after a train from Delhi; it is the time of the morning puja. Circling around the back of the lake, to avoid the rush and ring of the market Ajay leads us straight to the Hanuman Guest House.
The sun is rising over the shoulder of the Aravelli Range, warm on our backs as we walk. Beside the dusty road are fields of roses, bells announce the passage of a camel loping his way to market pulling a balloon wheeled cart. Bright clouds of sari-clad birds of paradise sway inside, singing, chattering and glinting in the morning sun.
“Ram, Ram” calls Ajay. The women shriek and flap in sharp surprise before shouting “Ram, Ram” and “Ram Ram bhai!” In a tone of firm approval, their chuckles and comments fade with the bells into the sandy distance.
Seventy-two ghats lead down to the Pushkar Lake, giving it an appearance of a stadium. Pilgrims are washing and making puja for the souls of their departed while oxygen-starved fish are floating fatly on the surface. The entire lake is ringed by white washed buildings and circled with temples of all shapes and sizes. Turning down the dusty road towards the Hanuman temple, Ajay calls out in advance,
“Jai Sri Ram! Jai Jai Sri Hanuman!”
Three children poke their heads from the temple where they are conducting morning puja under the watchful eye of their father and run towards us, racing each other while shouting his name to alert their parents.
Clambering, pulling at his hand, chattering and shy all at once, they take turns to pull Ajay towards the house.
Where Khana stands, a dishcloth in his hands. He is dressed in the traditional white longi and t-shirt of the local Brahmin. Wearing white is a reminder that Brahmins are to remain unstained by the lowly cares and tasks of life. The perpetual filthy cloth in his hands signifies that, like his personal God Hanuman, he is in a constant state of service. He has the same barrel chest stance as Hanuman ji, the brave and loyal Monkey god of the Ramayana. I wonder if he has come to resemble his God in the same way that lovers begin to resemble each other over time and years of devotion.
His eyes, shining now with the simple joy of surprise and glad welcome, are dark and deep set, barely disguising the crafty knowing mind that leaps behind. His assessment of me is quick, deep and knowing, barely a glance but a glance that contained the whole world.
He and Ajay greet each other like brothers separated by war. Until that day, I had never seen the face of an adult man shining with so much simple happiness and love; his face is an open book. When he folds his hands in welcome to me, he concentrates every ounce of energy into that gesture and my heart opens to his like a flower.
“Madam,” He greets me, “This man, your husband is also my brother. He is my very good brother. Now you also are marrying and so you will be my Bhabi ji (Wife of my brother). Welcome, most welcome to my house.”
We are ushered in as the children scamper off to bring their Mother who greets Ajay shyly from behind her veil, eying me like the new girl at school while she makes chai.
But first we are invited to make darshan (audience) with Hanuman ji; Ajay winks and rolls his eyes at me.
“God stuff,” he stage whispers.
As I step over the threshold and enter the temple, for an instant I imagine that I am entering into the ‘cubby house’ of my childhood that my father patched together out of bits and pieces gleaned from the ever-expanding renovations that barely kept up with our family’s growth spurt.
With seven children bouncing off the fences and falling out of trees, the cubby house sat beside the sandpit in a quiet corner of the yard, giving the opportunity for more reflective play than my five brothers were into at the time. It was a place to hide all the small treasures of a child’s universe and the stage for many make believes.
Looking around from over my folded hands at Hanumans cubby house, I see that the murti (God infused object) is nothing more than a rock; painted orange with two eyes appointed in the centre of where I guessed was the head. Gold leaf paper overlays the paint work, offerings of fruit and flowers and incense are laid at the feet of the god. We make an offering after ringing the bell and walk around the dolls house three times. The oldest boy smears a puja mark on our brow, offers us water in which he has floated tulsi leaves.
We have arrived on the eve of the full moon of Teej, the festival of the married woman in Rajasthan. Khana seems to think that this is hugely significant but I am to learn that Khana sees Gods hand at work everywhere. His wife has been fasting all day and will go to the temple of Sarsavati, high on a hill overlooking Pushkar this night to offer her prayers for a long life for her husband.
Will I also go? He asks at her prodding.
My first cross cultural dilemma, I look at Ajay for guidance but he enjoying this hugely. His face gives no clues just a teasing smile.
What to do? The Maori in me wants to show respect and comply to the lore of the land but the hill looks bloody steep and the day is scorching hot, the feminist in me wants to scoff and say if you want a long life Ajay Sharma then you bloody well starve and make a prayer yourself, the catholic in me wants to rebel having had a lifetime of the ‘woman as martyr’ avatar, I haven’t heard from the blushing bride within me yet, so once again I go for honesty, which is not always the best policy.
“But I haven’t fasted today, already I had an omlette on the train!”
Ajay is frowning his eyebrows at me but it’s too late, Khana’s face seals shut. I have committed the first of a long line of gaffes. Brahmins are strict vegetarians. While a vegetarian in New Zealand is someone who maybe eats a bit of fish and chicken and the odd sausage roll, the same does not apply to the Brahmin diet where eggs, yeast and even garlic are excluded from the diet for religious reasons. In Pushkar and most holy towns in India, meat and alcohol and the lewd behaviour that inevitably results from such indulgences are banned.
With the women of Rajasthan off celebrating the marriage of Shiva and Parvatti the afternoon rolls out into the evening free of complicated social and religious obligations and the men are safe to indulge in a little bhang.
Bhang is the favoured intoxicant of Shiva. Leaves of the Ganja (cannabis) plant are boiled and ground to a paste with black peppercorns and either swallowed whole or mixed with water and lemon juice. The correct way to consume bhang is to lift your chin towards the sky, open your mouth and pour the entire contents of the glass down your throat in one gulp then slam the glass on the table and shout “Bholenath”, one of the many names of Shiva.
To further intensify the pleasure of the bhang, Ajay suggests a quick sprint around the lake. I am to learn that there is no such thing as a quick sprint around the lake in Pushkar, on a full moon festival or otherwise.
The narrow streets are jammed with pilgrims heading towards the only Brahma temple in India. We are swimming against the tide of humanity when suddenly the crowd parts as if they were the red sea and a donkey bursts through at full gallop braying madly. His eyes are rolling wildly as he hurtles obliviously through the throng, hell bent on either escape or arrival, I couldn’t tell. The crowd falls back into swarm position as effortlessly as water flowing around a rock as the donkey disappears into the distance. I felt a moment of pure empathy for the poor beast wishing that I too could bray madly through the streets of India clearing a passage wherever I went.
For some reason, this strikes me as hilariously funny and I begin to laugh, the kind of low personal kind of chuckle that usually passes in a flash but before I know it my laughter has rapidly climbed the scales to hysterical and tears are running down my face.
Ajay joins in but when I look at him, I see that I was right to be suspicious of him. He is far too beautiful to be true. No sooner has that thought registered, I realise that in fact the opposite is true, his face has morphed into that of Ravana, king of the malignant demons, right before my very eyes. Some people have that kind of beauty, the kind that can flip over into ugliness depending on the words coming out of their mouths or the mood they are in.
Fine time to discover I am married to an axe murderer, I think, when I am drugged to the eyeballs and in a foreign country. I bloody well knew he was a Bluebeard, in fact suspected it all along! Suddenly paranoid, I wonder how I can escape him now.
Assessing the situation only increases my paranoia. I struggle to think clearly while the street looms in and out of my face like a trick mirror at the fairground. I narrow my eyes and look at him again, perhaps he didn’t swallow his, I tell myself. He looks remarkably sane and untouched by this demon drug coursing through my veins like a lahar and making my eyeballs bulge dangerously out of my skull. I bet he only pretended to swallow his bhang so that he could have his wicked way with me.
But then I remember that we are married and he can have his wicked way with me and has been for some weeks now and then I start to laugh again.
Ajay meantime is staring at something across the street as if he were a secret agent in a cartoon. Approaching him, I notice that his eyes are also bulging like red golf balls.
“What are you looking at?” I hiccough through my laughter.
He turns, hunching into his shoulder like a madman. Putting his finger to his lips, he opens his mouth to speak but only maniacal laughter falls out. Our eyes widen in surprise, it’s like the cool aid acid test when you know you got the orange cup.
We fall against each other laughing uncontrollably. People bump into us like bumper cars, re-adjust their position and carry on. Someone spills a bag of rice at our feet and that sends us into hysterics for another ten minutes. Eventually, Ajay drags me to an empty doorway out of the flow of human traffic and carts and cows while we struggle to get our brains into gear. And where finally he is capable of speech. His eyes are now rounded in horror aimed over my shoulder. The hair at the base of my neck stands up on end.
“Ajay..”
“O my God. O my god, o my fucking God,” he mutters, eyes fixed on the spot behind me an expression of utter disbelief on his face. A chill runs down my spine from the centre of my scalp and dribbles from my toes, things are rapidly spiralling out of control.
“What is it? Tell me for Gods sakes! Are we in danger? Speak man!”
“Look over there without looking over there and tell me…. No! NO!” He shrieks. “You looked! O shit now we’re screwed!”
He covers his head with his shirt.
“Hide quick! He is going to come over to us!”
He cowers in the corner, turning his back to the street while he attempts to shove himself inside his shirt.
All I see is a cow in fancy dress heading straight towards us.
“Holy Cow!”
A cup full of coins is rattled under my nose so close I go cross-eyed for a moment; a man in a neon turban glowers at me menacingly.
Ajay is hunched over crying with laughter.
“Ajay! This is no time to loose the plot! We have a visitor! A holy cow!” I shriek at him in desperate attempt to get our ship back on course. But Ajay is pointing at the cow and sobbing. The sobs sound very close to pain. I think he might kill himself if he isn’t careful. Too much joy can’t be good for anyone. Already I have an ache in my face.
Meantime the turbaned one is waving a leg in my face. The leg seems to be attached to the neck of the Holy Cow. The leg is growing out of the neck of the cow.
“Holy Cow madam!” He insists, the leg as evidence. “You give money!”
Holding my head in my hands, I make run for it, closely followed by Ajay who is still howling.
You don’t run in the markets of Pushkar when it is a full moon and bhang runs in your vein. Hordes of snot nosed little beggar brats will follow you screaming and drawing attention to your mad flight. Unless, of course, you are a donkey. We scramble over the crowds and walk very smartly back to the guesthouse and spend the night on the rooftop counting stars and ducking the bats.
#
The temple sitting in the tiny Pushkar Lake pinpoints the centre of the world, the place where Brahma opened his eyes on the dream of Vishnu and by his thought created the world. Pilgrims circle the lake twice daily in a ritual called parikrama.
“All you have to do all day is to circle the centre, concentrating on Gods name,” Ajay scoffed, “and avoid the sharks.”
Pushkar Brahmin are the dedicated priests of Brahma, they demonstrate a passionate enthusiasm for people to share in the rites of their holy puja, roaming far and wide for potential supplicants. Every successful Pujari on the ghat employs a series of runners, touts and spies who lurk at bus stations and taxi stands, to meet the trains in Ajmer junction and tackle unwitting tourists to the ground.
“You must have Pushkar passport!” they will shout as they wrestle the unwilling or the unconvinced to the ground. They are possibly the only ‘priests’ in the world to literally shanghai people off the street, drag them kicking and screaming and force them to perform a religious ceremony before rubbing salt into the wounds of cultural exchange by demanding ridiculous amounts of money.
“If somebody comes up to you and gives you a flower, it’s not your perfume” warns Ajay. “It’s the first step of the heist!”
“Before you know it they have you down by the lake mumbling a lot of mumbo jumbo and asking you for five hundred dollars! One day they will be taking Visa.”
Ajay’s socialist leanings made it very difficult to accept any ritualised form of worship, real opium would be a better alternative to the suffering of the masses than religion, he argued. I like to keep an open mind on these matters. After all if Santa needs to park infinite armies of ‘helpers’ in department stores all over the world just to keep up with the Christmas rush, imagine how much help God needs!
“You just tell them that you stay here and will make a puja with us,” said Dev. “We’ll get around to it one day soon.”
Dev is the younger brother of Khana; it is his job to run the guesthouse side of the business under the sharp monkey eyes of the older brother. He and Ajay have begun to conspire together playfully against the older brother. Currently, they are conducting ‘Puja Wars’. When Khana is downstairs at the temple singing ‘Jai Ram Sri Ram Jai Jai Ram’, Dev will be turning up the stereo upstairs and be blasting ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ onto the street with Ajay’s encouragement.
Still, I like the idea of circling the centre calling out Gods name and not getting arrested or locked up in a mental ward or hassled about it afterwards.
“Parikrama,” said Dev. “It comes from when Shiva and Parvati wanted to decide on which son would be married first and set them a test. The first one to complete a circle of the world would win the right to be married first.
Ganesha, the elephant headed son of Shiva, did nothing. He lazed at the feet of his parents, scratched his fat belly, yawned and went to sleep.”
“Shiva had another son?” asked Ajay; leaning forward over the chess game they were playing. “I never heard this.”
“Kartikka, the God of War,” said Dev, “He was mothered by what you call the Pleiades and had six heads. Anyway he jumped straight onto his peacock and circled the universe. It took him many years and many wars to complete the challenge. When he returned there was his lazy little brother.”
”Sounds a bit like you bro,” laughs Ajay.
Khana and Dev are constantly battling for supremacy over the business of the guesthouse but the simple fact was that Dev spoke excellent English, some French and a little Italian while the more traditional Khana struggled along minimal English and a lot of mime. Khan thought that Dev spent far too much time hanging out with the tourists. The family had ensured that he was married at the age of sixteen when he began to work at the guesthouse to avoid any possible complications and kept a watchful eye on him all the same.
“And just like any big brother,” laughs Dev, his dark eyes flashing and his grin white and wide. “When he saw Ganesha ji lying there he shouted, ‘What! Have you done nothing all this time?’ Ganesha ji gets up and quickly runs around Shiva and Parvatti and claimed the prize.”
“Little cheat!” said Ajay.
“No, because he said my mother and father are the centre of the universe and the whole world so he won!”
The bells are ringing in the temple below marking the evening puja and Dev leaps up to raise the volume of the stereo. People fresh from their shower and carrying rose petals are beginning the evening parikrama.
“Lets do it,” I suggest to Ajay. “It sounds like a win win situation!”
There is some kind of magic that happens when you can pass a complete stranger on the street and greet them by shouting aloud one of the many names of God. In Pushkar and the rest of Rajasthan, the call is ‘Ram, Ram’. You shout it, they shout it back at you, the next person coming along greets you ‘Ram, Ram,’ and you chime back like a bell.
Bells rang in our hearts all over India. The Devi went to a lot of trouble arranging the wet painting of our honeymoon landscape. After the Divine Circus we joined the annual pilgrimage of pale western birds flying south for the summer to Goa and the crescent shaped slice of paradise that was Palolem. Where we wandered beneath coconut groves, sang songs in railway carriages, swung in hammocks and floated hand in hand in the ocean counting the stars at night and talked about Vishnu dreaming in the great cosmic ocean.
Meanwhile far out at sea, a wave had begun to gather.
#
“The only good thing that ever came out of the British occupation was the rail,” announced Ajay, his voice issuing out from beneath his left armpit where his head was jammed.
We had spent the last eighteen hours jammed into a bizarre yoga asana that involved dislocating our backs in at least three places to allow our knees to be inserted into our nostrils thus compacting ourselves enough to squeeze into the luggage rack of a railway carriage while the entire state of Bihar simmered with barely concealed hostility at us from below.
I thought his mind was drifting into that clear white space that lawyers call temporary insanity, but he made a rare kind of sense.
The Indian Railways is the one success story of the British who brought the rail to ease the passage of the spoils of their colonial rape to port, thereby opening up the entire apple tree island of India. The introduction of the rail liberated the masses in a way no agent for social reform has ever been able to achieve, the entire subcontinent has been on the move ever since.
I pulled my elbow from my mouth and crowed sarcastically, “You could be right, O light of my eyes; it is true then what they say in India. Husband is guru.”
I was nervous since I was to meet my in-laws in about thirty more hours of this preliminarily torture.
But I had to agree with him, Indian rail travel is the greatest living daily miracle with cosmic parallels to the story of Shiva, who swallows the poisons of the world. Just as Shiva is known as Mahakala, the great liberator, Indian Rail liberates the masses to the tune of ten million people daily, shifting them around the fourth largest rail route in the world, connecting seven thousand stations with eleven thousand trains.
It is also a big employer, having something like 1.6 million employees on its books and spawning millions of small business from bookstands to beggars, from prostitution to shoe shine. In fact, Indian trains are small cities in their own right and operate as such with all the strange conventions and bizarre happenings as any other small town. And like any new culture, it takes time to learn the etiquette.
Travelling unreserved is the particular nightmare of people desperate enough to jump the queue for those who simply must travel and damn the indignity. But to navigate such treacherous waters, one first requires the services of the Indian high priest of rail, the red shirted, muscled warrior known as the Porter.
Porters are a life rope connecting you to a possible seat on an already overbooked, overcrowded train. He beats a passage to a likely place, fending off catcalls and hysterical abuse with all the imperviousness of a god. Once the porter has cleared a space for you with his red rag, it is like the same to a bull while the carriage (loaded already to the gills with highly excitable people and pilgrims) erupts into violence.
The tip here is to bark and shriek and bear the slaps of everyone who will seek to dislodge you from your place, never giving even the slightest hint of surrender and to hold your ground until the train slides free of the station when instantly the crowd will turn like the tide and the rule of the open sea applies and the mood is completely changed.
Previous enmity will be stored with the luggage as people begin to settle in, lunches will be shared, babies coddled from mother to mother and life histories exchanged with all the fervour of opposing sides at a football match.
We lost our place in the instant it took our porter to disappear back into the howling mass of humanity outside the train. Within seconds of the red turbaned warriors departure, the Bihari, sensing our lily livered innocence had barked and snarled us up into the luggage rack where we snivelled and sulked and remained as motionless as dead blowflies on a windscreen for a night and half a day.
At some point in the journey, someone placed a small sick baby on top of my backpack where she lolled dangerously occasionally ejecting clear streams of projectile vomit, splattering anyone within a few feet of her. Waves of hostility mixed in with the sweet milk-rot scent of baby vomit washed over us all the way to Khandwar junction.
An unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere while we waited for god knows what for god knows how long until the situation got desperate and the Bihari rounded on us as a possible source of amusement.
According to the custom in Train World, the person with the most English is assigned to question the foreign freaks and translate back to the chattering masses. Mostly they take the truth with a pinch of salt and lie outrageously in order to confirm and serve their prejudices.
“You are Indian sir?” To Ajay.
Ajay speaks to the man in Hindi. The carriage shifts uncomfortably, they have already decided that we were the lowest type of budget backpacker on the subcontinent; their unkind remarks about Israeli have not gone unnoticed.
“Your good name?”
His name reveals his caste.
“From where you are coming?”
Even though Deep Vein Thrombosis hadn’t been invented then, I roll my eyes to keep my circulation happening. Besides, I had heard this all before.
Ajay describes the wondrous journey that has led him half way across the world to find and marry me (Mera kismet, my fate) before returning to his motherland for this honeymoon.
One hundred heads turn to inspect me under the light of this information. New brides in India are dressed for months after the event like the temporary goddesses that they are, there is a whole etiquette for passage from girl to married woman.
The centre parting of her glossy black hair will be smeared with red vermilion, the tilak between her eyes applied with ritual reverence every morning in remembrance of and in thanks for the good fortune of her husband, the mangal sutra (a symbol of devotion and integrity) will nestle around her downy throat proclaiming her married status, a diamond will twinkle in her ear and gold will spark from her nose ring. Her demure body will be tenderly wrapped in yards of silk, her hands hennaed with the red paste of celebration as are her feet which forever after will follow one or two demure steps behind her god like husband and modelling her behaviour on the stainless example set by Sita, centuries ago.
Whereas I bear a terrifying resemblance to none other than Kali, twisted into a bizarre posture straight out of the Karma Sutra, my eyes rolling like a beast being led to slaughter; I am the dark black Goddess who drips blood and wears skulls around her neck. Kali only knows what creatures lurk in the shockingly nude parting of my dread locked hair, which is in itself an insult to the good breeding of these gentle Bihari. My teeth are stained red with the paan we earlier ate for dinner, it is highly likely that some has dribbled innocently down my chin and collected around the carved bone of a dead whale around my neck.
Shifting my eyes nervously from their penetrating inspection I glance down at my vomit splattered Goa rave clothes that offer no protection from their hostile gaze, my very existence is an insult to their code of practise and long centuries of tradition.
While Ajay had been welcomed like the prodigal son everywhere we went in India, I was treated like the beggar bride or the invisible woman. I began to feel like the lead fart at somebody else’s grannies tea party. Life on the road had become a constant apology for corrupting this stainless Brahmin boy. A beggar girl gave the most succinct response to Ajay’s romantic little tale, spearing it with the poison arrow of truth.
“You might just as well have married one of us,” she said indicating her gang of ragged malcontents with sores on their legs.
Whereas the more civilised response all over India was to ask, after inspecting me under the harsh light of comparison, “Indian girl no good?” which literally translates as “Is this the best you could do?” in a disbelieving tone of voice that says without any shadow of a doubt that he could have done much better if only he had shopped at home.
I shrug my shoulders madly and waggle my head from side to side in an attempt to get my crochet blanket further over my head against their inspection and chase the tail of the dragon known as sleep. As I drift off, the questioning continues.
“Why don’t you buy your wife a new blanket? That one is full of holes.”
All the way to New Delhi junction, the wheels of the train beat to the eternal question, Indian girl no good, no good no good while I dreamed of a giant white vulture picking at the bones of the dead.
In Delhi, the skies open within minutes of leaving the railway station. We arrive at the family house soaked to the skin in our thin clothes and shivering like a couple of junkies.
Aditti, Ajay’s cousin sister, is the first to spot our wretched figures as we eject ourselves from the rickshaw. She calls down from the first floor window, the dog beside her barks insanely as it tries to hurl itself from the first floor window.
“Don’t do anything,” she shouts. “I will come!”
The rickshaw wallah takes one look at the house and triples the price that we already had spent fifteen minutes negotiating on in the rain.
By the time the aunt and cousin and house boy have appeared at the door falling over themselves in excitement (Aditti) and horror (Usha Aunty), Ajay has the rickshaw driver in a headlock and is wrestling him to the ground while I am offering encouraging words such as, “That will teach the filthy swine to try and cheat us! Yeah! Give him another one baby!”
We are grabbed and hurled into the house before any of the neighbours see us.
Usha Aunty takes one look at me dripping onto her carpet and picks up the telephone to summons every female relation this side of the Punjab. Within minutes, small cars and motorbikes scream and skid into the courtyard depositing a chattering army of women carrying silks and cosmetics and hangars loaded with clothes and heavy with jewellery.
I am stripped and sent to snivelling to the bathroom under guard of Aditti.
Aditti pauses as she turns on the hot water heater in preparation for my makeover, she is eighteen years old, eager for the world outside which remains relatively barred to her.
“I am so happy you are here,” she smiles simply and squeezes my hand. “A real live backpacker!”
“I will look more presentable after a wash,” I promise her, thinking of the army of aunties outside the door.
That was the last time I saw my clothes, in fact it was the last time I saw a version of myself that I recognised. Within the hour I was dressed in the red silk sari of a new bride, my scalp raw and bleeding from the vicious assault on my dreadlocks, bracelets on my wrists and lipstick covering my pan stained teeth.
I am ushered into the sitting room, tinkling and sparkling like an overblown Christmas fairy to take my place beside Ajay who has merely exchanged filthy black jeans for clean black jeans and a black Sabbath T shirt. I can see that he wants to laugh hysterically at my transformation but he agrees with the aunts that I look beautiful, teasing me with his eyes.
If looks could kill he would have spontaneously combusted on the spot.
#
“Every Indian story is the bloody same,” says Ajay when he spies me reading the Bhagavad-Gita, a gift to me from his mother.
The family have left us in the kind of domestic peace that you can’t fully appreciate until you have experienced the multi levelled conversational acoustics that occur in a Punjabi family house where the words and fractured conversations of three generations of family will skid and swarm and swerve around and over and underneath each other all at once and at three levels at once. The silence was deafening.
“Brothers are separated by some trouble making woman. If Sita had listened to Ram, Ravana would never have kidnapped her, if only Draupadi had held her poisonous tongue, the Pandavas and the Kauravas would never have begun to war,” Ajay flops down onto the bed, rolling to take my foot in his hand and stokes it gently. “It’s all the fault of you damn women.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?” my nose twitches. New Zealand Maori have a proverb that says, ‘For land and women men will die’ but I rather imagine our cultural interpretations differed as widely as the sea that separated our countries. Maori women hold equal status to men and matriarchal lines ran in my own blood. That didn’t win me any brownie points in Delhi where I was the wrong shape for the round hole with my weird edges and angles.
The strain of living between three cultures was beginning to show on both of us. Retrieving my foot, I get up to light a candle and begin to pace. Delhi is wrapped in the relentless smog of the coldest winter for one hundred years; our flight home is delayed and delayed again.
”I don’t know why you are reading that,” He sulks, picking up the Gita. “Ask yourself what happened to Sita in the end.”
“India is a pre-feminist state of affairs,” I murmur in agreement, massaging his shoulders. “Don’t worry, we will be home soon and this will all become stories.”
“South Pacific Paradise, he we come!” He sighs as my fingers dig into his shoulders. I kiss his ear and nuzzle his throat with my lips.
Click.
Sudden light floods into the room, blinding us.
“Problem?” Deepak Mama stands in the doorway, hand on the light switch.
“Namaskar Uncle ji, no. No problem.” Ajay, folds his hands together.
The light is going on. Off. On Off.
“But you turn this off?” Uncle’s eyebrows register scandal and horror as well as distaste with one shrug of his elegant eyebrow.
On. Off. On. Off.
“We wanted a candle, Uncle ji,” explains Ajay. “It’s more shanti (peaceful) this way.”
“Raju, Raju!” The houseboy is summoned.
“Come here Raju!” He roars as if the house were on fire.
The houseboy enters at a run. Seeing Uncle ji switching the light on and off, Raju also begins to switch the light on and off.
On and off.
Every switch is accompanied by a question in his eyes. Finally, he can bear the suspense no longer.
“Kya bhat hei?” (What is the problem?)
“The light is problem” Deepak Mama’s face is one that does not countenance any problems; they are a personal affront to his meticulous order.
Raju flicks the light switch.
On.
Off.
On.
Off
“No, the light was working. The light has always worked. We just wanted to light a candle.”
Deepak Mama who obviously knows better ignores Ajay’s babbling.
“Raju, take the globe and see what problem.”
Raju runs for a ladder. Manesh Uncle from upstairs arrives with his wife.
“What problem?” he demands.
“The light is problem,” says Deepak Mama, in a tone of voice that says its all the fault of the interloping foreigner.
Manesh Uncle turns the switch on and off.
Pinky Aunty pushes past her husband and tries the switch.
On.
Off.
On.
Off.
I am scared this might trigger on of us all into an epileptic fit.
Raju arrives with the ladder and great excitement ensures while the offending globe is removed and inspected by all the family members gathered.
They raise their questioning eyes to us for an explanation.
“We just wanted to light a candle,” we whine. “There is nothing wrong with the light.”
A hurried consultation between the family patriarchs, Raju is dispatched to the bazaar to get another globe. While we wait in the candlelight, Deepak Mama continues his brain washing campaign. His approach to the bare faced fact of my existence is to fire little gems of sacred Indian knowledge at me in random patterns either to re educate me or to point out the differences in our cultures whenever there is a lull in the conversation.
“Madam?”
“Ji?”
“Husband is god.”
“Hain, ji” I nod wisely.
“Mother, Father is God”
“Hain ji,” I agree without reservation.
Deepak Uncle and I had already gone head to head during what has become known as the G String Incident. The G String incident issued from the Wardrobe Wars in the same way that the Bhagavad-Gita became the absolute essence of the epic Ramayana.
When the aunties swung into damage control that rain soaked Delhi day, what became known as the Wardrobe Wars began in earnest. My hippie clothes were exposed as the cheap and nasty rags they were, I was forced to bribe the cleaning woman fifty rupees to retrieve my jeans from the incinerator. Fierce whispered negotiations took place between my sympathetic mother in law who negotiated valiantly on my behalf to have my status as an outsider recognised and tolerated by her traditional older brother in the hope that he would cut me a little slack.
I had strayed so far into the looking glass land of India that I was the exact opposite of how I was supposed to be. I had to stand in front of the mirror every day and remind myself that on the other side of this looking glass was a land where everything about me was as unremarkably normal as you would want your newest in law to be.
Eventually a compromise was reached. I could wear jeans inside the walls of the house but outside, I was to wear traditional Punjabi dress. This won a small victory for Aditti who pulled a pair of jeans out of hiding and started wearing them around the house in solidarity with me.
Even though their scrutiny of me was as penetrating as only an Indian is capable of, the aunts neglected to consider what lay beneath. But India has eyes and ears in every leaf of every tree and it wasn’t long before some nosey neighbour reported black lacy G-strings flying at half-mast from the rooftop.
The women of the house fled and hid their faces beneath their veils while Deepak Mama thundered at me, “There are innocent children in this house!”
And I quivered with suppressed laughter.
I doubted that the children were old enough to understand the symbolism of my lacy black G Strings flying like a flag in their traditional Brahmin faces, confirming in their minds that the real fact of our union was sexual and not at all dharmic as Ajay dared to suggest.
“You are laughing, Madam?” Deepak Mama is a study of shocked disbelief at my obvious lack of shame.
“Yes, I am laughing sir,” I splutter.
“Why are you laughing Madam?” he demands with a voice that came straight from a thundercloud.
“Because,” I splutter, “Because I can’t do a damn thing right!”
The words come out as a raucous howl; Ajay joined in and Deepak Mama had stormed out of our room. Small wonder that they call me Madam, even my name is inauspicious, dhayan being the Hindi world for witch.
“Husband is guru,” auto suggested Deepak Mama in the flickering candlelight.
While the light bulb drama has unfolded, Ajay’s brown eyes have held mine. Family dramas have become a silent movie, a background to our foreground. Something that happened outside of where we were swimming in each other’s eyes, where we told each other our own version of the story. Most often it’s a comedy because that’s another thing Indians and Maori have in common, we have learned how to laugh before our bruises have even faded. But it is what gets me into trouble with Deepak Mama all the time. My guru winks at me.
“Husband is gashooo!” I pretend to sneeze. Where’s that bloody houseboy?
Right on cue, from stage right Raju arrives back with another globe. With a rush of instructions from both uncles and Pinky Aunty, the globe is fitted. Everyone takes their turn with the on and off switch.
“Sabash!” declares Deepak Mama and blowing out our candle with a wave of his hand, they take their cue and the players depart the stage.
Two days later we also exited stage left and returned to New Zealand.
