Monthly Archive for February, 2010

Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.
—Mark Twain

After the escape from Paradise Beach, I traveled in short order a string of towns in southern Karnataka—Udupi, Mangalore, Madikeri, and Mysore—before crossing the Western Ghats via the hill station of Ooty. Herein are those travels covered.

Cat, Lola, and I left Gokarne on the 4:20 train to Udupi, two hours south of there on the coast of the Arabian Sea. I had spent that afternoon tracking down a used copy of Moby Dick and drinking lemon soda and eating mango ice cream at a chai shop on Car Street and met the girls at the bus station at 3. It was the first time Cat had taken a local train, and she enjoyed the experience of hospitable locals, an easy pace, and good scenery: the wide rivers and jungles of western Karnataka.

I sat next to a man with his head in his friend’s lap. Indian men have no scruples about affection, even holding hands on the beach. He sat up and fell asleep on the shoulder. The train passed across rivers as wide as lakes with fishing villages on the forested banks, and continued into a verdant green country that grew steadily dryer and rockier as we moved south. Chai wallahs with their samovars and beggars with their haversacks moved down the aisle, as did a solid-faced Indian man in drag, who clapped loudly in everyone’s faces.

This is a strange custom of India: it is said by some that if you pay these primped up sages they deliver a blessing, and by others that if you do not they apply a curse. The transvestite slapped the man next to me lightly in the face to wake him up off his friend’s shoulder but received nothing. Even the Indians seemed perturbed by him/her. It was the first time I had ever seen them perturbed by anything.

Three English backpackers in local garb and dreadlocks, named Georgia, Harry, and Charlie, disembarked the train with us, and we all split a taxi from the station into Udupi proper. Our cab driver’s name was Valerius and he asked me, priveleged by the length of my legs to sit next to him in the front, if I was Christian. “Are you reading the Bible?” he asked. I answered, evasively, “Not right now.” Undeterred, the Valerius asked, “But do you live with the word of God in your heart?” I asked him if he was Catholic, and he said, “No, not Catholic, Christian. I was Catholic but now I am only a follower of Jesus.” What strange things the Jesuits wrought!

The hot exhaustion of the day, the lateness of the night, and the apparent lack of accommodation in Udupi combined to put a sour temper on the Brits, especially Georgia, who became infuriated with the Indians and treated them horribly as we went from hotel to hotel asking for a place to lay our heads. “Yes I know it’s over there!” she cried,—“I heard you the first time. Hi, rooms? Do you have any rooms? Vacancy? No rooms? Eight hundred rupees! I don’t understand it, how can they all be full. I think they see tourists and they turn us away, they just don’t want us here.”

We all entertained theories on why all the hotels turned us away as we wandered the dark streets. Eventually we settled into Hotel Janarda, where our triple room had a television. It seemed very novel after so much time away from cable’s comforting glow, and we eagerly sat in front of a Jackie Chan movie and Michael Bay’s horrendous Armageddon, and continued to watch it as long as the power grid was working.

As for why the other hotels turned us away so contemptuously and unhelpfully, I cannot know—because we were foreigners or because they were truly full—but we found out later that Udupi is one of Hinduisms most sacred sites. Few travelers know about it or are attracted by the two inches it receives in Lonely Planet, and the Hindus want to keep it that way.

The following day we went to the Sri Krishna Temple complex that ran in a circuit around Shiva’s Anantheshwara Temple, with eight gates leading off from the circuit to the city. Three pagoda-chariots of different heights rested between the Anantheshwara and the Sri Krishna Temples, and there were other lesser used chariots tucked off in the corners, as well as an elephant with a hawkish mahout who would have made an excellent Nazi and may have enjoyed that profession more than his current one.

Now Anantheshwara looked like a long, low warehouse with upturned eaves, and the Sri Krishna Temple, entered through Dravidian-style gates—high, tiered, and overdecorated—contained a dozen shrines and halls of old stone and wood connected by courtyards with high tin roofs. Therein witness India’s propensity for contradictions, indescribable in the way that most of India is indescribable: ancient shrines with tin rooftops, cows and tourists, pop music and chanting, Krishna icons and comic books, weird looks and genuine hospitality, monks who will invite you for lunch and touts who give nothing away for free.

Hindus line up to experience darshan, a ritual of divine contact, in front of a little gold idol of Krishna, which to them is the god himself, just as to a good Catholic the Communion bread is literally the body of Christ. Krishna is seated on a soft pillow inside a dark room and could be viewed only at arm’s length through a sort of lattice screen carved with elephants and spirits, which the Hindus caress in the rapture of their darshan. Prayers spill from their mouths, and they look at their god and then turn away and float off into the rest of the temple.

This was all very strange, but the first temple we went into was a much smaller one, called the Chandreshwara Temple. The god sits in a shrine in the middle of the room. At night they take the god out in a little gold palanquin an walk it around the shrine in a procession. Priests bang or wail on their instruments, and the laity follow somberly behind. By day, however, another ceremony was taking place.

We heard music upstairs, and venturing there found a wedding underway. Manjula-Ganesh, said the banner at the end of the long, columned hallway, and on the stage under it sat the bride and groom in exotic and multi-hued costumes, across an unlit fire from their bare-chested rishi. The bride’s brother stood behind her, a strong, mustachioed Hindu in a red jacket and white turban, and other family members and dignitaries stood there as well, watching the rishi perform some rite. Lola and I took seats at the back, behind two hundred Indians, and Cat went up to take pictures.

A lone Christian, whose mother had been the bride’s neighbor and who did not know anyone at the Hindu wedding, came and sat by me and practiced his English. I asked Roshan about parts of the ceremony, but he was as clueless as me. “It is Hindu wedding,” he said. He asked me about my hobbies, told me he liked television, especially WWE wrestling, and knew a lot more about it than I did. He told me he was already thirty. “I must marry in the next two years, or it is the end of the world. Tell me, until how late will you roam about tonight?”

I treated the question as seriously as it was delivered. “I don’t know,” I said,—“I’ll roam about as long as there’s something worth doing.”

Some uncle of the bride invited Cat and the rest of us to lunch upstairs, though Lola, still feeling ill from some bad fish on Paradise Beach, went back to the hotel. Cat and I were among the second crowd to be seated at the long metal tables set out on the cement in the half-constructed third floor. Servants, shirtless and wearing orange dhotis, placed banana leaves before us, then went around with tins of rice, breads, curries, chutneys, and sweets—two dozen dishes, things I’d tried before and things only served at weddings, which kept falling onto our banana leaves until I thought I would burst.

Leaving the wedding with the crowd, we had to turn down offers of food at the Shri Krishna Temple and spent a long time sitting in the cool tranquility of the Anantheshwara Temple. I wondered at the gods and watched a young mother and daughter pray before an idol. The girl looked to her mother to know when to put her hands to her forehead and when to kneel and when to prostrate herself fully, but became bored with the whole thing before the ritual was concluded and had to be forced through it like a doll.

There was a festival that night. Around sunset, three musicians seated under the eves of the Sri Krishna Temple started a cacophony of noise with their drums and horns as Hindus piled inside to receive their evening pooja. There was a pool, one floor beneath ground level, off the back of the temple, with a shrine in the middle. Some Brahmin priests boarded a little raft tied to the ghats there and paddled it around. It had a generator on-board to power its floodlights and gaudy colored bulbs. Two bands circled the pool, one playing an imperial marching tune, the other trumpeting some Indian religious noise.

An hour passed, and then the Brahmins emerged carrying the little golden Krishna idol, which they bore up into the pagoda of one of the chariots. Hindus crowded up to pull two of the three great chariots around the temple circuit by long ropes. The surly mahout menaced with his stick the elephant god, who had earlier delivered a kiss to me, and who presently raised his trunk and trumpeted a salute as the chariots began to move.

The elephant and the mahout joined the procession, behind a band and some fire-bearers and devotees, which made its way to the wide lane on the other side of the circuit. The chariots stopped there, and the Hindus lit a lot of things on fire, and little kids in monkey suits danced around in the flames. Someone shot off cheap fireworks that exploded so close to the city that they showered the temples and the congregation in sparks. A few of the explosives failed to go off in the air, and landed, sputtering flames, amidst the crowd, who moved away tensely.

As the Hindus prepared to pull the chariots back to the Sri Krishna Temple, I moved into the crowd with the two long-haired Englanders, George and Charlie, that gathered around the two lines of rope. I heaved as much as I could in the little room allowed by such a mass of people, many of them only vaguely touching the rope to receive whatever blessing that conferred, and with great sweating effort and some chanting by the Brahmins we settled the chariots back where they belong.

Cat and I learned later that there is a festival in Udupi four nights a week, that it is among India’s holiest places, that all the goldsmiths in the alleys around the district buy donations of precious jewels and metals from the temples, which receive them from all across India, to turn into jewelry. Yet few foreigners know of it, and the Indians want it that way.

The two ladies with whom I shared my room did not know what to do or where to go the next day; we had left Gokarne in such a hurry and with no plans; and I, having decided to proceed down the coast to Mangalore that night, regardless of what the indecisive womenfolk decided to do next, I set off early the next morning. Something told me that it would be good to visit the fishing village of Malpe and the nearby St. Mary’s Island that the Bible recommended as a day trip.

Malpe: filthy streets, sewers like open sores, harbor so crowded with blue-painted fishing boats it seemed impossible for any of them to leave, docks lined with red fishing nets mended by a horde of Indians, and a boat across to the shallow atoll of St. Mary’s Island, itself almost capsized with Indian tourists and a Bollywood film crew, palm groves bisected by cobblestone paths, with strange crystalline formations of gray granite on the beaches, the shore lined with sea shells rather than sand, and the heat! I sat in the shade with my shirt off, licking a mango ice cream bar and waiting for the ferry back to the lee shore.

I returned to Udupi in the afternoon and went down to an ancient restaurant near the Krishna Temple, Mitra Samaj, a restaurant known for the excellence of its masala dhosa in the birthplace of the masala dhosa.

Now, the dhosa is a wondrous invention, better by far than the telephone or peanut butter—a sort of fried pancake, wrapped cylindrically around a ladled stew of potatoes and onion and masala curry, green in color, slightly spicy in flavor. Tear away a bit of the cylinder, but use only the right hand, the left is for dirty things and insults—tear away a bit, and use it like a plastic bag at a crime scene to pick up some potatoes and as much of that masala as you can get, dip it in the hot soup and the spicy white chutney, toss the soggy bundle in your mouth, and don’t bother to hide the evidence of your savoring it—it would be impossible!

I met Lola at the hotel, and we packed up our things. She had gone to see the AIDS Train that was in town for one day only, a surprisingly progressive champion that did not fall into the rut of “abstinence only,” but handed out free condoms and provided free phones so visitors could call their family in the country and let them know what a problem HIV had become in India. At the station across the street we got on the next bus heading south to Mangalore, and took a tuk-tuk to the Hotel Surya, where I had arranged to meet Cat, and saw the Welshwoman coming up toward the road as we arrived.

Cat did not know where to go next. She wanted to get away into rural India and be alone with her camera and her subjects and experience something spiritual like Udupi. Her baggage was in a locker at a train station, but she did not have a ticket. Lola and I would go to Madikeri and told her to come, but she had not decided either way when we went to get chai and samosas at a local place, then went up to the mall near the train station, browsed a Western bookstore, and ate at Pizza Hut. It was no small wonder that after all she decided to go off on her own and pursue whatever mystic quality she was looking for in India. Lola and I saw Zombieland at the mall’s cinema.

There was not much to see in Mangalore, though the nearby Jain temples and the exhibit of some Maharaja’s car collection are supposed to be very admirable. I had chosen Mangalore out of the Lonely Planet map for one reason only: the food, especially the spicy seafood, the deep-fried prawn koliwada and the fish in coconut curry. I enjoyed such treats the following day before Lola and I got on a bus up into the mountains of the Coorg region. The tiers of tea and spice plantations broke into the lush forests, and in the troughs between steep hills lay rice paddies, dry that time of year. Arriving in the uneven hill station of Madikeri after dark, we trooped around asking at hotels (the sun takes much of your bargaining power with it when it goes) and checked into the Paramount.

The next day, Lola lost her debit card to an overzealous ATM. It was a Sunday and in India, where horror stories circulated of malfunctioning cash machines and rude employees who cut up any devoured plastic, no matter how much its worth, and said, “If it’s not our bank, we can’t return it, that’s our policy.” The thousand incarnations of worry ran amok through Lola’s head—how would she pay for things? get a new card? explain this to her parents? survive? Though it was Sunday, the security grate was cracked open, looking in on a marble room that would have been familiar as a bank anywhere in the world, and into the crack of doom Lola cried, “Is anyone there? The machine ate my card, and I need help—please!”

The two Indians standing by a rack of sunglasses on the sidewalk reminded us that Sunday was a holiday. “I know,” said Lola, despairing, and she explained her situation before heading back toward the abyss. One of the Indians pointed to the other and said, “Manager.” Collecting herself, Lola turned to this one, who smiled broadly, and implored him to help, falling not quite so far as to her knees, but close. The manager said, “Let me see what I can do,” and went inside. He returned from the blackened bank a few minutes later with the card. Lola cried, “Thank you!” and almost hugged the man before remembering where she was, but the manager seemed rewarded enough by her rapturous expression.

A nearby tourist office, that some Swedes had recommended, arranged a trek for us that would depart for the hills and plantations the following morning, all things permitting, and stay out there overnight, returning on the second afternoon. Lola and I had that day for whatever we could find to occupy our time. The travel agent offered us a tour of a nearby enclave of Tibetan Buddhists and an elephant training camp, but we decided to make our own way to the sites.

The trip began on a local bus, an hour east on a winding road through dense fir forests, to Kushalnagar. Local buses in India work like this: instead of a sign on the front to say where the bus is headed, an Indian is hired to lean out the window and cry the name of the intended town—for example, “Mysoremysoremysore,”—and instead of a door sensor, an Indian is employed in the back to whistle with his fingers whenever all the passengers have boarded. The buses are the same width as buses anywhere, only five people are crammed across instead of four, two in a seat wide enough for one and three in the seat big enough to fit two. I could not figure how many more benches the Indians placed from front to back, but I can say that someone tall as I had a tough time of scraped knees taking a seat.

In Kushalnagar the forest subsided into rolling green plains, though the air was still cooler than the coastal flatlands. From Kushalnagar we hired a tuk-tuk a short way to Bykkopar, and then to a town just within the Tibetan enclave. Some Tibetans, exemplifying the humble charity and quietly gregarious spirit of most Buddhists, noticed our confusion and offered to let us ride in their tuk-tuk most of the way to the Golden Temple. The Buddhists are respectable not only for their amicability, but also for their absence of culinary taboos—we enjoyed beef dumplings and pork noodle soup at a Tibetan restaurant near the temple.

The Golden Temple itself, distinct from the Golden Temple of the Sikhs in Amritsar, was a newly constructed marble, like most of the enclave. Within the great tiered shrine, the top crowned with rays and towers, the great hall was painted with demons and Buddhas. Three gilded statues of Bodhisattvas, each thirty-feet high, sat in meditation at the far end. Buddhists chanted and played discordant prayer music in another shrine.

Our next stop: the Dubare Elephant Camp, 350 rupees away by tuk-tuk. Let us hitchhike! A cement tuk-tuk carried us to the bus station in Bykkopar, and we returned to Kushalnagar, took a private bus north, and walked the last mile to the camp through a palm forest and wide plantation fields.

The camp itself was across a wide, shallow stream, with many rocks and islands and willow trees with roots like whips. The ferryman informed us, as he took us across, that we only had fifteen minutes before the camp closed. We refused the entry price and watched a few of the lumbering beasts bathe, dragging chains from their heavy hoofs; then we hopped back across the rocks like little Mowglis, hitched to Kushalnagar with a nice old Indian couple from Jaipur, and in a jeep a ways further, and took a bus back to Madikeri.

At 8 in the morning Lola and I met our guide at the travel agency. Kirin Kumar, the agent’s cousin, was a simple, awkward, honest-faced Indian, an middle-aged and country-bred bachelor, who always seemed bewildered by the responsibility we trusted to him. Two Londoners, David and Beverley, would accompany us on the trek. They had well-fitted backpacks, Nalgene bottles, professional camera equipment, hiking boots, and wilderness shirts. I was wearing flip-flops and cotton shorts, and Lola had a pair of crocks, and we could not have been more prepared for adventure.

As a young gentleman-caller, David had lived with Beverley in a room of her parents house—no mean accommodation: the house had twenty rooms, and they had their own floor to themselves. Beverley’s mother sold the house and gave all the profits to her daughter, and the young couple spent it traveling. David proposed to her on the peak of a Himalayan mountain, looking up through the icy gale at Everest. They had been all over Southeast Asia and were reminded of it constantly. Anything they saw or heard drew forth some relevant anecdote about Sumatran volcanoes or Thai cockroaches.

With some of Beverley’s dowry David purchased increasingly expensive camera equipment, until he had a suite of cameras and lenses and tripods worth many thousands of dollars. He sold his pictures to stock photo agencies that paid him 50 cents every time one was downloaded. The pictures of animals were generally his best sellers. “I only take pictures of unique individuals,” said David,—“Unfortunately, there’s not many of them.”

Kirin led us on a local bus out to a town in the hills called Dhalibidoo. Six-hundred people lived there in homesteads spread in the forested hills surrounding a number of rice paddies, connected by raised footpaths and forest trails. Tethered cows trumped around the empty fields, and calves and piglets squealed in pens around the periphery. We left our things at the house of the Family Rai, where we would spend the night. The young couple had a young daughter named Hema, and the grandmother lived there, as well as a mut named Tony, chained up in the front. Though they used well-water and an outhouse, they also had satellite television and blasted old 90s hip-hop. Ah, India.

On that first day Kirin led us west toward the ridges, across the rice paddies of Dhalibidoo. Rice paddies in India’s breadbasket riverlands yield as many as four crops a year, but the mountainous farms grew only one, which had already been harvested. As we crossed the dry paddies, Kirin showed us touch-me-nots, small ferns that close up when you touch them, and pointed out butterflies and magtails and magpies.

David quoted the old English magpie rhyme: “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told; eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten for a time of joyous bliss.” We looked all over for a second magpie to secure our joy, but in vain!

We entered the forest and climbed up a short ridge and down into a gully where a small farmstead grew cardamon in the shade, then climbed back up two-hundred meters of a rib bone to the long bald spine of Mount Nishani that ran from north to south. Kirin pointed west into the deep valley, where a solitary house stood out among the forest, and the Mangalore Road cut through it on its way north.

“There is the deep jungle,” said the guide, conjuring all sorts of romantic images: the tiger hunts of the Maharajas, the vibrant hues of cobras, the intense green of the foliage, the sublime discord of insects and birds, predators and prey, caught up in a dense floral confluence under branches so thick the sun cannot penetrate but in dappled patterns and dim purple light. There lie ruined temples, black walls split with overgrowth, hiding secret caches of some king’s cursed gold. Ah, the imagination goes grinning wild! “We go there on longer treks,” added Kirin.

On our way up to one of Mount Nishani’s vertebrae, Kirin pointed out some tiger’s droppings near the ridge trail. “They sell it at zoos,” said David,—“If you put it in your backyard, the neighborhood cats won’t shit there. They can smell it.” A tiger had crossed Nishani a few years ago, said Kirin, and left tracks up and down the ridge. It massacred almost fifty cows, that feline Jack the Ripper, before returning to the jungle.

We saw another type of feces: Some cat had picked out and eaten the best coffee beans, and left a turd that looked like some kind of peanut candy. David said that in some parts of the world they made coffee from those choice beans. They call the expensive ordure crappuchino. In my head I began devising ways to market my own bowel matter. Perhaps if I eat only the choicest foods, the idiot rich will buy the digested remnants, too.

The trail scrambled back down the hill through old streambeds with mossy walls as high as my head, and then passed through fields of rusted sword ferns, and Kirin halted us for a break under a tall oak tree. I noticed a sort of seat up in the tree, made of sticks lashed between the branches for a bench and foot rest, and asked about it. Hunters would sit there, said Kirin, and wait for wild boars to come. It was a local custom there to eat pork meat at a certain time of year. Kirin himself, a good Hindu, enjoyed all kinds of meat except beef. This reminded Kirin of a story of his, which he proceeded to tell with many digressions into laughter:

“I very young, I climb coconut tree with my brother. I climb all the way up with knife in my teeth and no way to get down. [Laughing] He stands at the bottom and catches coconuts. I—I finish, and then, no way to get down. [Laughing] So I hold on as long as I can, and then just slide down. [Laughing and pantomiming a scream, his arms held out in a sort of bear hug around the imagined trunk] Big scratches all down my arms, chest, legs—I used a rope to climb next time.”

Soon we returned to the Rai household, and the old grandmother served us banana trunk curry, rice, chapati, and coffee. Lola and the Brits pent themselves up indoors, and I went and sat over the rice paddies to write and enjoy the wilderness. Too much time in cities had made me almost forget the lively sounds and clean smells of the forest. Long after dinner, when the family had gone to bed, I unleashed Tony and ran out with him into the misty moonlit paddies.

Kirin Kumar arrived an hour late the following day, with a taciturn Frenchman named Jay in tow. David and Beverley had left early that morning, just after breakfast, and Lola had commissioned me to catch one of the piglets from a nearby pen.

I crouched and waited behind a haystack for the snorting mob to come up. One or two saw me peering and returned my look with a dread they appeared to quickly forget as they turned back to their task, rutting around in the hay for food. In a flash I sallied out, and the piglets scattered like crows. The sow started a terrible noise from where she was tied up to a stake and all the children made for her. I caught one little piglet by the back under my hand, but he wormed out and scrabbled up through some bushes to the sow’s pen, where I wouldn’t dare venture.

We set off east rather than west, past coffee and pepper farms. Along one side of the trail was a path leading back through a thick forest to an ancient looking temple with an intricate dome. Kirin told us it was a sacred grove, a forest of the gods that no man was allowed to touch. On one day a year the villagers congregated before the temple for a celebration, and the priests went up that path and attended the temple’s god, and then everyone departed and no one was allowed in the grove for another year. Anyone caught trespassing was fined $20—and that’s ten day’s wages for most of India.

Kirin pointed out wild mango and jackfruit trees and took a nearly ripe pomelo, a sort of Indian grapefruit, from its tree to enjoy later. We took a main road, then followed the Madikeri River to a place with shallow rapids and rocks, and there relaxed during the hot noontime. Kirin cut up the pomelo, which was sweet if you took off the skin—what a metaphor! After the break, we scrabbled down into and back up from a creek’s ravine, then up and over another mountain, and returned to the Rai household without further incident. We had lunch, and Kirin led us off toward the main road and the post office, where we waited for the bus back.

On the trail to the main road, off to one side was a little clearing in the forest; at the center, a sort of table made from sticks, garlanded with flowers, with bottles and offerings underneath, and there was a pile of rocks in front of it. An old woman of Dhalibidoo had died two weeks before. Her family burned her three parts—legs, torso, and head—on that rocky grave, where they erected the shrine to her memory. They took her head and some of the other ash to the temple in the sacred grove for puja, then put it in the Madikeri River, which flows into the Cauvery, one of India’s seven sacred streams. In a month, the monsoon rains will come and wash the shrine away, and the old woman will be but photos and memories.

The bus to Mysore took five hours, and its length was compounded by my bitter contempt for one of the other passengers. I had been warned before about men like him, who stare interminably and, in their opinion inoffensively, at women, and had laughed at the stories. At first I laughed at him, too, sitting ahead of us on the bus and staring back over the low headrests straight at Lola with an unreadable, placid look.

I asked him if he was married, and the stargazer, a sour-looking man about forty, interrupted his observation to tell me in his little English that he was married and his family was in Chennai, a long way away. “Well what happens in Madikeri stays in Madikeri,” I said with a smile. He went back to staring at Lola. Reading my book, I put it right in between the two, and the man moved up and down and side to side to restore his field of view, not urgently, but as if I were getting in the way of some film or painting. Lola asked him to please, stop staring at her. The man bobbled his head and kept staring.

Now my big brother instincts took over and my blood started boiling. I told the man off and slapped him in the back of the head with War and Peace and flicked him there continually, trying to antagonize him into a real confrontation. He would just turn around and stare at me inquisitively, as if I were the rude one and he was doing something perfectly admissible. The man said something to me in Hindi. I told him I didn’t understand and asked him if he understood my middle finger, only realizing after that he was saying, “Kushalnagar,” the name of the town where he would disembark, as if to say, “I’m only staring to Kushalnagar, so take it easy young man.”

During this strife, the mustachioed ticket valet, who was sitting just across the aisle from us, said some words to our stargazer, and they conversed pleasantly for a bit. The valet sat back down and looked at me helplessly. Not long after, when the Indian woman sitting next to Lola started shouting at our watcher, the valet stood up and argued fiercely with her until she stopped complaining. I wasn’t going to start a fight on an Indian bus and get kicked off in the middle of nowhere, but in my hot-blooded state, I sorely wanted to. I stared daggers at him when he left, and he patted my arm and walked off.

In Mysore, the Youth Hostel was full of visiting teachers, so our tuk-tuk driver took us to his friend’s place, a seedy place called Vishnu Bhavan. For dinner I had spicy Hydrabadi masala chicken, and despite the appearance of a blood-bloated bed bug, I slept very fitfully and woke up at 8. In Mysore I continued my food tour of southern Karnataka. Lola and I walked through the opening bazaar and found a place called Indra Cafes Paras for breakfast. All the tables were full, and food continually cycled out from the kitchen. There is no waiting to pay the bill in India, no enjoying coffee and conversation—finish and leave, or the waiter will shout, “Jao, jao!”—Get, get! even if you haven’t paid yet.

To start I picked out bisibele bath, which was rice with a spicy chickpea and lentil gravy. There was uddina vada, a sort of fried doughnut with spinach inside, and idli rice balls, both served with the same chutney and spicy soup as the masala dhosa—and Indra served the dhosa as well, with masala potatoes or rava onion. They made deserts as well: milk treats called burfi, made with cashew, chocolate, coconut, or pistachio, and a sugary treat called gulag jamoon, a specialty of Mysore.

That day we visited the Mysore Palace of the Wodeyar Maharajas—the gilded cage that the British built for their gilded peacock princelings, in a beautiful Indo-Saracenic style. The emblem of the double-headed eagle and the elephant-horse-lion of the royal House of Wodeyar was everywhere. All along the marble walls ran a painted scene of a royal parade, soldiers and bands and caparisoned elephants, with the Maharaja himself riding in a golden howdah. In the garden outside there were high, tiered Dravidian temples, and courtyards and soda shops, and lines of Indian tourists.

A dealer of perfume and incense caught the two of us, sauntering back through the bazaar. We smelled his scented oils alongside a French couple from Marseilles who had been Couchsurfing. They told Lola, who was considering the offer of ten perfume bottles in a rosewood box, that she could mail it all home. “How many packages have you sent already?” I asked. “Five.” “Wow,” said the French,—“You’ve done better than us.” Eventually I got two bottles of something and a hundred incense sticks (sandalwood, jasmine, cinnamon, and rose), and Lola got eight bottles, incense, and coconut oil, for $16 total.

We ate dinner at a Tibetan restaurant, full of robed Buddhists watching the India-South Africa cricket game, had drinks at a hotel bar, and later that night, following an Indian’s recommendation, took a tuk-tuk to Planet X. It turned out not to be a night club but a sort of Chuck E. Cheese funtown that also served drinks. We rode the go karts.

Ooty was a crowded hill station in a hollow of the Niligri Hills of Tamil Nadu, between Mysore and the border of Kerala. The real name is Ootacamund or Udhagamandalam, but the Brits who built their summer homes there found it unpronounceable.

The road to Ooty swerved up along beautiful ridges and promontories, through dense forests and tiered tea plantations and vegetable farms, and tiger zones and tribal ones, and the bus broke down only once. We took an afternoon bus there from Mysore, after eating at Indra Cafe and visiting the train museum, and did not arrive until 6:30, when it was already getting cool. The whole place was cool, green, and wet, and I was happy to pull my sweatshirt out from the bottom of my bag.

Checking into the Green Valley Hotel on the lake and went to dinner and had drinks with a stout Irish lad named Ivan and his Brooklyn girlfriend Ger, talking about Thailand and the Indians. We had to leave the next day in order to get to Kochin for the Holi Festival, although I could have stayed in Ooty a while. It was crowded and dirty from Indian tourism, a city of old and poorly maintained colonial buildings, with an infill of ramshackle domiciles that appeared to use the solid British buildings as support.

I left early to walk around the next day, snacking at weird local places, and went up a hill and past the nursing school at the top, then past St. Stephen’s Church to the square the Indians call Charing Cross, and ended up at the Botanical Gardens. I spent a few hours reading there, where it smelled like potpourri, before walking back down toward the lake. On one side of that road stood the Shrine of Baby Jesus, and statues of Jesus and Mary peered out from niches on the facade.

Christianity is common in Kerala and the surrounding areas, though it is Christianity on Indian terms. Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are worshiped in the same manner as any Hindu god, by burning tapers and incense set in tall pagoda towers before icons, by hanging flower garlands on them, by prostrating oneself barefoot before them, and by individual prayer and communal music; and like the deities of the Hindu trinity, the Christian God appears in many aspects or incarnations, Baby Jesus being but one. In Alleppey in Kerala I later saw a statue of Jesus painted blue like Shiva or Krishna or one of the pagan gods.

Talking shit about a pretty sunset,
Blanketing opinions that I’ll probably regret soon.
I’ve changed my mind so much I can’t even trust it,
My mind changed me so much I can’t even trust myself .
—Modest Mouse

The taxi to Pernem left around 11. I got up in no hurry and packed my new bag, a North Face—or should we call it Norse Faith? It was made in Thailand and cost me $12 after heavy bargaining. The purchase was necessary: my canvas haversack from Varna was falling apart. A cobbler had sowed part of it back together in Aurangabad, but all the stitches came out again. The Norse Faith pack fit my things better, and I could lock the zippers.

I broke my fast on eggs and coffee with the four girls at their hostel’s diner, and met the Quebecois Lola and the Venetian Paula in the alley courtyard of Tom and my apartments. Cat and Tamara would spend another day in Goa and meet us in Hampi later. On the way to the train station I bought a harmonica that I had long considered in passing from a music store on the main road, and I practiced playing chords while we sat on the platform, awaiting a late train. A drunk Dane came up to us and tried to play the songs in his head on Tom’s guitar. He kept pawing at my knees and saying things he thought witty and laughing. Eventually he wandered off.

Tom identified the Dane as a schizophrenic addict, having seen them in the hospital where he was a nurse. He had dealt with a few problems in that career. Just before leaving, a small Korean woman with dementia came in and had to be sedated. “She was a tiny woman,” said Tom, “and we gave her enough sedatives for five people. We tied her in a chair with a belt, but she would worm her way out. We saw her in the hallway and said, ‘What are you doing here Houdini?’ and gave her more drugs. She kept calling me her grandson.”

Our train took us south through the small state of Goa to its colonial center of Old Goa. We negotiated with the tuk-tuk drivers for a long time, and eventually got into a van with a Nepalese driver who hated the mountains and who would wait for us an hour in Old Goa and then drive us to the capital at Panjim. Monstrous churches and merchants’ houses and gardens filled Old Goa, once big as London Town and today silent as a graveyard, and crowded with Indian tourists and pilgrims. Inside the Basilica of Born Jesus, I looked in vain for the remains of Francis Xavier, a famed missionary.

Xavier died on the way to China, and the Chinese buried him with lime to hasten his decomposition; but when his brothers uncovered the remains they found them miraculously intact. Poor Francis did not remain this way. His right arm was sent to the Pope in Rome, where it wrote his name on a piece of parchment. A Goan Catholic woman bit off his right toe. They only found her out because blood sprayed from the wound and left a trail leading from the church straight to the woman’s house.

The Sherpa hustled us impatiently into his van when we returned from sightseeing, and he took us to Panaji. We bought tickets for a night bus to Hampi, a twelve hour trip that left at 7:30. In the time remaining, I wanted to eat some of Goa’s famous cuisines. I asked most everyone we passed, and all of them said, “Hotel Regal. Yes, good food.” We took a table in the cramped restaurant, which advertised itself as having “No AC.”

I split dishes of spicy red chicken vindaloo, milder mutton xacuti, and paneer masala with Lola (Tom and Paula being tragically vegetarian and unable to enjoy such treats), eating the thick dishes with roti flatbread and spoons. We had Kingfisher beers with dinner and rolled a spliff in the parking lot of the bus station with the Mexican that Tom and I had met in Goa; Tom abstained but bought a pack of Valium for 30 rupees, and all this combined made the bus trip to Hampi more tolerable than it would have been otherwise: wedged into chairs under the sleeping berths and over the wheels, our knees at our chins, our window broken and boarded up with plywood, it was like being in a coffin, but what do we luminous beings care?

The bus disembarked a few kilometers from the Hampi Bazaar. A great swarm of tuk-tuks descended from the road as the bus pulled into a dirt courtyard, and they parked themselves all in a mass. The drivers screamed at the passengers as they emerged. Haggling for a tuk-tuk was a grand effort, and we had to wait until most of the other passengers were gone to get a good price. Tom went with Paula to a pharmacy to administer her last rabies shot after a monkey scratched her in the north. I went with Lola through the dusty, touristy Hampi Bazaar to the river crossing.

Mike, the Scotsman who gave Tom his guitar, told us about a bungalow camp in Hampi called Manju’s Place. It was across the shallow River Tungabhadra that passed through that strange landscape, with its forests and temples and rocky mounds. The only way to cross the river was by an overloaded motorboat that went between the ghats on the temple side to a landing on the northern bank, which cost 20 rupees with luggage. The attempted Hampi bridge had fallen into the water, so the closest one was 45 minutes upstream. Every once in a while, men would attempt to offer a cheaper crossing by hand-paddled basket boats, but the mafia always shut down these operations. They still went on in secret.

The northern bank was the calmer, quieter part of Hampi, called Virupapura Gaddi. A road led up a hill from the landing, and broke left past German bakeries and bike rental shops and hotels, on to other roads through strings of villages to the cold lake of the reservoir and the Monkey Temple on Anjenadri Hill. Take the road from the landing straight instead of left and it passed a few bungalow camps and went into the rice paddies, then curved around and arrived at Manju’s Place on a sort of island surrounded by paddies and banana plantations.

Manju was a heavyset and mustachioed Indian in a collared shirt and colored dhoti who prayed every night before the pictures of Shiva and six other gods in the corner of the gazebo that was the center of his camp. It was carpeted with bamboo mats and ringed by cushions and low tables where people usually sat—European climbers there for bouldering and Australian and American hippies lost in sloth. On one side was the kitchen and Manju’s house, and on the other were the thatched roof mud huts, containing beds and mosquito nets, shaded by the lines of palm trees. We booked huts and lounged about in the gazebo, sipping coconut and banana lassies and eating pizza. Our greatest concern was spending too much time there in happy relaxation.

Just north of Manju’s Place, across a plot of paddies, loomed one of the strange stone hills of Hampi. Long ago, glaciers rolled the boulders around as our hands do pebbles, then melted, and left great mounds of rounded stones, infused with India’s verdant vegetation. The countryside rolls and swells with these strange mountains as the sea does with waves, and in the troughs between the land melted into the gridwork glass of rice paddies, divided by earthen lines wide enough for a man to walk, that mirrored the palm trees and the strange rocky landscape. Man had made it even stranger by stacking great boulders in a way that seemed impossible. Gravity should have tumbled those structures, but it did not.

That night we hiked up past the boulderers, climbing walls in their pointed shoes, to the top to watch the sunset. Monkeys played on the rocks below. Across the rice paddies and jungle we could see a gash where the Tungabhadra would be, and on the other side the ghats and the eleven-storied Virupraksha Temple in Hampi Bazaar. The night noises began in the rice paddies, the oppressive concert of frogs and insects, and the delicate mosquitoes emerged to feast. It seemed a fine place.

The next day Lola found some badminton paddles, but we could not find the birdie. The seven-year-old son of Manju’s Nepalese servant told us it was in a tree on one of the lawns. I grabbed some branches and started shaking it. “Hey,” I said, “there are ants here. What? Hey, they’re biting me! Whoa!” The red ants clung to my hand by their mandibles, and I scraped my hand on the grass to get them off, then said, “I’m not doing that anymore.” Lola went up to shake the tree and then she screamed and said, “Ants, ants!” and made the same resolution as I. Then the smiling Nepalese boy produced the birdie from a nearby bush.

His name was Ankit, although for a while I was calling him Hanky. We played badminton and Frisbee, and then Ankit sat in the gazebo and drew pictures while I wrote and some climbers smoked a spliff. The stone got too hot to climb in the middle of the day. Tamara and Cat arrived safely that day from Goa, having had a much more pleasant experience on the night bus than we did. I played my harmonica with Tamara on her guitar, and then we watched the sunset and still had not seen anything of Hampi.

We all came to India for different reasons.

Tom was in India to discover and change himself, through yoga and meditation and self-denial. He abstained from India’s worst points, its attractive vices, and actively sought out its best, the beauty of its villages and its people. He carried a small bag and was an astute, outgoing traveler. But he missed his girlfriend Jessica. “You know what,” he said, “I’m just not enjoying it. I keep thinking, ‘If only she was here,’ and I’m not going to waste my time if I’m not enjoying myself.” He decided to cut his trip short—he would spend a week practicing yoga at the ashram north of Trivandrum, fly to Delhi or Kathmandu and spend two weeks in the north, and bring forward his return ticket with Etihad Airways. (“Jihad Airways?” asked Lola, and Tom replied, “Yes, one in ten are destined!”) He wrote out the reasons for leaving so he could make it clear that it was not Jessica’s fault, that there would be no resentment, and he explained his points to the circle of girls we had around us, who offered their cooing sympathy. Tom was already planning his next trip, with Jessica’s company included.

Tamara was nineteen and from a farm in the Black Forest, where her family raised horses and cattle, and she had left to Africa two months before, to Zanzibar and Tanzania, names she spoke with happy reminiscence, and the coastal countries around. She was a pretty, ebullient girl of middling height. The henna tattoo on her wrist said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish, stay free.” She wanted something different from life than the grind of work, and wanted to see different things in Africa and India. In April she would fly to New Zealand to work on sustainable farms, but she considered pushing her flight back to spend more time in India, and she considered postponing her return home until a full year had passed and it was summer in the Black Forest again. Maybe she would go to Canada and pick apples. Her future was a bright place of possibilities, and she was not worried.

Laurence, or Lola, the Moroccan Jew from Montreal, missed her huge, hugely supportive family, who dealt in real estate and imported furniture. She was used to their administration of her problems and even relied on it. They had been surprised when she bought the plane ticket and even more when she left. “Alright, you’ve proved your point,” said her sister. “Now come home.” But Lola felt no need to. She was alone in India, making her own way, getting over the breakup of a four-year relationship. His room became her walk-in closet, the place where she feels the greatest peace. This extroverted girl filled her backpack with cheap Indian bangles and jewelry and contemplated a visit to Kashmir to buy the cheapest pashmina shawls in the world. Haggling was in her blood.

Paula was seeking something—perhaps the challenging isolation of ten days of silence in a vipassana meditation course in Tamil Nadu. “I don’t marry causes,” she said, “I play with them.” She played with a Goth cause in college, where she studied Turkish without learning much of the language. For five years she taught Italian in Istanbul, and now she did not want to continue it. “Were the last five years a waste,” she wondered, “and what will I do now?” Paula’s mother was English but her city was Venice, and she was as cynical, curious, and classy as most Italians. She had a journal that she filled with weird newspaper clippings from the Hindustan Times, and when she got it in her mind to do something, she was rudely tenacious. She struggled to be different, to ask questions that others did not. She asked me, “Have you ever left a place, satisfied that you’ve seen everything?” and after I’d answered said, sullenly, “Me neither.”

Cat was a photographer from rocky Wales. The photos she took for her degree were published in a book by a non-profit organization. “A thousand were printed, if you want to track them down,” she said with that quintessential irony of the Isles. She told Tom, who was practicing with his Nikon, that the best pictures told stories, and she was always seeking the perfect angle to tell some of her own, which she hoped to put together in a book when she got home. This directed her towards many curious situations as she had to get to know people, often the simplest or strangest people, before asking them for a photograph, and she was outgoing in her pursuit of this. She planned on going off on her own to India’s rarely visited rural regions.

“And why am I here?” I wondered each time the soul-searchers I had surrounded myself with brought up the topic. I had to get to Tokyo so I could get home, but India was more than a road for me. I wanted adventures and trials and was afraid of changing too much.

We rented bikes from a place near the river and rode them on through the rice paddies and villages, with palm trees and great mountains of rounded stones in the green, bright country. Indians in colorful clothes waved at us from the mud pathways that gridded the paddies. The size of our party made it slow and segmented, but eventually we parked our bicycles at a store under Anjenadri Hill, the white of the Monkey Temple visible at its craggy peak.

Through the Temple of Angina Devi, mother of the monkey god Hanuman, and past the beggars, a white stairway cut its winding way up into the mountain. Monkeys jumped across it, from wall to wall, on their way to cool caves to wait out the hot afternoon sun. They were already full of the bananas that tourists paid them for a photo—the remains littered the stairway, sometimes entire bunches that had vanished under a simian swarm—but would still stop for another fruit if one were offered or visible. A few of the primates considered the way with sagacious boredom.

The stairway passed under a low rock ceiling and up out of a shallow cavern, scaling steeply to the peak. “Welcome,” said the man seated on a blanket there, alms before him. The Temple of Hanuman was a low, white adobe building with a red stupa on top. Prayer flags fluttered noisily in the steep wind, and ribbons wagged from the sacred tree in the uneven courtyard. The countryside stretched on and on: the winding Tungabhadra, the stoney mounds, the ruined fortress of the Anegondi.

I went inside the Temple, past a squatting sadhu in the anteroom, through the main hall, and into the shrine of the monkey god, where before the colorful idol of Hanuman a Malaysian priest blessed me with a red line on my forehead. Tom and I sat down on the flagstone in the anteroom next to the bearded sadhu, bare-chested in his dhoti and turban, squatting on a mat with a knapsack to his left and a metal tin on his right. They called him Maraji, which means great man. He had left Persia just after the Revolution and had been to many places since then, and the others joined our palaver.

“Why are you here?” asked Paula.

Maraji replied thoughtfully, “I am unusual. You ask these questions, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Where are you going?’ but you only hear a little, and not the most important parts, of someone’s life. If I only say a little, you’ll get the wrong idea about me.”

The thickly-bearded Babaji called his disciples in for lunch and had us invited to join. We sat in two lines on the floor of the main hall and ate rice and cabbage with our hands and drank the well water that the monks gave us. The Babaji reclined silently under a blanket on the couch at the room’s far end. His hair went down to his chest, and his bright eyes watched us.

Maraji talked to Tamara in German, having lived in Austria for years, and Tom and I started talking with a Malay who, when we asked him, said that he was from “here.” Hanuman, he said, was an exuberant, youthful spirit, an aspect of Shiva who “jumps and flies,” and so his priests were open to travelers and had a sense of humor. When the Malay was not talking to travelers, he meditated, trying “to realize God, to become God.” He would meditate on the divine while watching incense sticks burn, and he knew by this devotion the time it would take to burn sticks of certain compositions or brands.

The most interesting part of it was that the Malay lived in the temple for only a part of each year, and outside of there was a television executive in Singapore, producing movies and shows, wearing a suit, dealing with contacts, and loving the city, ever his home. “But cities are transient,” he said. “Here, it will be here forever. Here I am free, and here I will perish in my physical form.” The story of how he came here “is an epic on its own,” but the Malay was satisfied that he had discovered the light of belief. He told us, “You give up your body for Him, for your belief, and take what he gives you. It doesn’t matter how difficult it gets, because He is behind you.”

“In your opinion,” asked Tom, “is it possible to connect with God without believing the stories?”

The Malay replied, “There are in fact a million ways to realize God, as long as you do it in the right way.” He respected equally Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, and Hanuman as aspects of God, that the Hindus call Rama. I mentioned the similarities between many messiahs, and he said, “They aren’t similar, they are the same.” Just as the Singaporian TV executive in his business suit and mannerisms was the same as the Hindu sage in his dhoti, scarf around his neck, living on a mountaintop in Karnataka.

After lunch, Maraji and the Malay left us, and we went back down the mountain to our bikes. Cat had gone to a village and photographed the locals. Lola’s tires had deflated. Most of us rode on to the reservoir, up a steep incline since a great embankment retained the water. Tom, Tamara, and I found a rock with a sheer face fifteen feet high and jumped off it into the welcoming cold of the lake. We lay on the rock sunning ourselves and talking to the other travelers there. Lola and Cat arrived in a little basket boat, and Paula came as well. The Venetian wanted to jump, but her terror allowed her only to the edge of the cliff.

“It’s good for you,” said a Briton. “Experiences like this are a shock to the system. They get your adrenaline flowing for an instant. When you do something like jump off a cliff or go skydiving,” he explained, it resets your body’s adrenaline floor. “Otherwise crossing the street or going to work can trigger your shock and become terrifying. So doing reckless things makes you less stressed.”

Our group extended and divided itself on the way back to Manju’s Place. Tamara and I dropped off our bikes at the rental shop and walked back along the rice paddy road, then turned and went up the rocky mountain north of the bungalow camp, where I’d seen the sunset with the others two days before. I asked the German if she liked India, and she said she did and did not. “It is beautiful,” she said in her lyrically earnest accent, “but so ugly as well. I saw poverty in Africa, worse poverty there, but there vas not so much wealth there alongside it.”

India, like Man and like God, is so many things, such a multiplicity of contradictions, and also one. I agreed with Tamara and would say further that it is impossible to put a finger on India without devoting one’s life to its realization.

After dark, accompanied by a cold shower and a chicken fajita, I went with Tamara and Lola to the Tipi, down past the bakeries and bike shops on our side of the river. Some Brits told us there would be a party there, but really it was hard to distinguish from the gazebo at Manju’s Place. Stoners lounged around on cushions, sipping beers and fooling around with instruments. Eventually a band formed, based around a well-plucked Turkish dulcimer, with a guitarist, a drummer, and a flutist. Lola and I had Kingfisher beers, and Tamara, a German who hates beer, had a chai. She saw a chess board on one of the tables and challenged me to a match, and after I had beat her and Lola, a contemplative Spaniard with a thick beard approached.

The two girls took my flashlight and went back, but I stayed to finish the game. Before moving, the Spaniard, who was seated in the lotus position and was very stoned, would breath deeply, straighten his back, and close his eyes. He warned me off a few foolish moves, and then told me, “You know what a sectarian is? It is someone who sees only one sector of the world. You must open your mind to see more sectors. Turn the board around and look at it from my point of view. See what I plan to do.” But his mind was too open. He beat me and shook my hand, and I walked back to Manju’s in the moonless twilight.

Every morning at around 8 Laxmi the elephant goddess descends the steps of the ghat or landing, and is bathed in the waters of the Tungabhadra. The day after we visited the Monkey Temple, our group split up into separate parts. I left early to see the goddess bathe and met Tom at the riverbank where the ferry landed to take us across.

Great flocks of schoolchildren in their uniforms waited on the ghat, not for the arrival of the goddess as I originally guessed, but to brush their teeth in the river water under the guidance of their teachers. They rushed down in groups and splashed around in the shallows. Upstream, women washed themselves and their clothes, men defecated and dumped their trash, and two boys threw in a dog they had shot because it went crazy. They did not have enough money to burn the corpse. It would have cost $1.

We went to the road that ran along the top of the ghat for chai and idli. Paula was telling me about how stories lose their interest the more they are told, same as people and conversations the more familiar they become, and then I said, “Hey look,” and pointed to the great black thing lumbering down the stairs. “Oh my God,” the Venetian cried out, “an elephant!”

We followed Laxmi down to the river, where she weaved between the oblivious washing women. The beast was black with a mottled pink nose between two short trunks, a foot long each and shaped like dull knives. A golden bell hung round her neck, and the remnants of yesterday’s painted symbols clung to her flanks and ears.

With a hooked stick, the mahout riding on the elephant steered her into the Tungabhadra and submerged her fully, so that it was only the mahout in his turban riding above the current. He took the elephant back into the shallows and turned her on her side in the water. Some servants joined him with brushes to scrub the elephant’s flank, and then she rolled over so they could get the other. The hand-shaped end of her trunk stuck above the water like a periscope. Laxmi rose and washed herself with water from her trunk, and she yawned and hung her mouth open with pleasure as the servants scraped her hooves. She let the mahout back up onto her neck with a raised leg, and then, splashing water with her trunk, the elephant climbed back out and onto the stairway.

Tom, Paula, and I followed Laxmi and the mahout up to a street alongside the Virupraksha Temple, with a deep, empty pool between us and the eleven-storied tower. I went up and pet the hard and bristled leather of the beast’s nose, and Laxmi lifted her trunk towards my bag, looking for rupees or sweets. She must have been ten feet tall. She balanced the mahout’s hooked shaft in a fold of her trunk and sometimes used it to scratch her legs. It was strange being near something so gently humongous and so sacred as the elephant, an incarnation of Laxmi, wife of Ganesh and goddess of wealth.

The mahout, whose name was Raju, came out and told us that Laxmi was a good elephant. With buckets of dye, red and saffron and white, he painted the Om and the eyes of Shiva on Laxmi’s ridged face and on her trunk and ears, and he said she was 21-years-old and had spent her first ten years in a forest before being tamed. Laxmi considered us with wise, lively eyes and swung her trunk playfully or sucked on the tip with her curling mouth. For a coin she would give a kiss. For a ten rupee bill, Laxmi delivered an elephant blessing, laying her trunk in full on the pilgrim’s head. She tossed the money back to her master with the trunk that received it.

Tom went into the mahout’s house, Paula went off to find a newspaper to clip, and I wandered the long, dusty, crowded street of the Hampi Bazaar, which I loved for its hodgepodge and lively character, eating when I felt like it and enjoying the sunshine. I walked up to the temples on the rocky hill south of the Bazaar and played the celebrity amongst schoolchildren, then came down again into the packed noise.

Those who beg for scraps on the streets of India are a ubiquitous part of the country. Every Indian traveler has to come to terms with this poverty, and with a sense of helplessness in the face of it.

There are haggard, desperate-looking women, whose emaciated features and ragged, faded, immaculate saris say, “I will die proudly, if the Samaritan passing by is not a good heart, for that is God’s will.” From their seat on the sidewalk, they smile and hold up wrinkled hands. Their husbands or fathers are dead, and they have no skills but mothering. Some of them hold children, for whom they show an obvious and tragic affection, and they beg with a much more intense desperation.

The children look like monsters with frazzled hair and bare, dirty feet, and they pat their bellies and open their mouths like baby birds. Some carry little siblings in the crook of their arm. Some follow the rules of a Beggar King or Fagan and can only take alms of food, though they will take flowers or treats, too. These are the street urchins. Asking foreigners for one school pen or one rupee is second nature to most of India’s children, who are otherwise its friendliest and most earnest and affable inhabitants. Even the poorest will cry, “Hi! What’s your name?” and give their own with wild grins. They are very polite and wave goodbye.

The men begging in most places are sadhus, holy men worthy of respect, who have taken voluntary vows of poverty in their old age and live off what others put in their begging bowls, their only possessions. They wear orange robes or plain dhotis and cover themselves in ash and never cut their hair. In Hampi three of them wear costumed liveries in vibrant colors, dangling with apparati and ornaments, and they demand money for a photograph. The lazy begging men go to Bodghgaya or Dharamsala, and like statues of dead men they line the paths that the Buddhists walk. The good monks smile and put a coin into each of the hundred cups on their way to the shrine.

Our group did not remain separated for long. Around one I met Paula beneath the tall Virupraksha Temple. Tom rode by on a rented bike. He had just been down to the temples at the far end of the Bazaar, where a circle of sages invited him to join their chillum-smoking circle, and they prayed to Shiva as they smoked. A policeman arrived with an angry look, and Tom snuck out when he was not looking. He was still jittery with fear of Indian prison.

We went down the road to the first restaurant that was full of Indians and sat out front, talking to children. Within an hour, Lola and Cat and Tamara were also there eating with us, and the owner had invited us to learn how to cook Indian food the next day and was playing chess with Tommy.
After the Indian won he challenged Tamara, but he was busy with new customers so I took over and got very into it. All the others had left by the time Tamara and I finished our game. “I’ll have to keep traveling with you until I beat you,” said the German. We went down the road into the Virupraksha Temple.

In a courtyard of stone, the goddess of wealth was hard at work blessing the faithful and tossing their coins and bills back to Raju the mahout, who sat cross-legged in the corner behind her, the elephant’s benedictions enjoyed equally by Western pilgrims with their cameras and Hindus with their red dots and frightened children. Monkeys climbed all over the walls, and Hindus went to different altars in different parts of the complex to receive their pooja, a sort of blessing, by rubbing idols or painting themselves with dye or eating treats or washing the face in smoke and in rose water.

Finished with temples, we walked down to the ghat and the ferry landing. The last ferry left between 6 and 7, and after that, crossing the river became very expensive. Tamara suggested that we had enough time to visit the Mango Tree. We followed the river west on a cobblestone trail into the jungle.

I had first heard of the Mango Tree from a Belgian in Amman. He described it as a place downriver from the temples, a series of tiers under a huge old mango tree overlooking a jungle idyll and a perfect sunset, with good food—he ate all his meals there—and a swing hanging from the arbor. Going south from Bombay, I had asked people who came from Hampi about it and they said, “Yes, I went there, but I never noticed a swing.” It was with great satisfaction and relief that on entering I noticed a swing hung from the mango tree, which had been banned after too many children warred over it.

Tamara had a salad and I a pakota, a savory pie in a fried chapati. Well sated, we went back to the landing and took the ferry across. Fireflies glittered the undergrowth around the trail, and the frogs had begun their din. The gazebo at Manju’s Place was crowded with climbers and hippies and backpackers. I sat within the circle of tables and told stories of the sadhus.

“They are mendicant sages,” said I,—“wise men. When a Hindu turns fifty—okay, around fifty—when he retires, then,”—I corrected myself, responding to interruptions,—“after he’s raised a family, mastered a profession, and all that, he renounces everything and all his possessions except his clothes and a begging bowl and a water tin. He puts on an orange robe or a dhoti, and he stops cutting his hair, and he walks the country, begging for what he needs to survive. He is a sadhu. The sadhus devote their life to personal purification, to improve their karma. Some walk all the way to the holy city of Varanasi to die. If you die there, you escape the cycle of rebirth. They say the roads to Varanasi are lined with corpses and fires.

“Some sadhus do strange things,” I continued. “I heard of one sadhu who held his left hand on his head like this, until the hair had grown over it and it was fused to his scalp. He couldn’t move it at all. There is one who stares into the sun every morning. At first it was only for a while, but every day he would stare for longer and longer, until now he stares into the sun for twenty-five minutes every morning. No, he’s not blind. Apparently a little sunlight in the morning when it’s weak is good for you. My friend told me about a sadhu who drinks his urine every morning—”

“That’s common,” said Lola, adding that the president and several ministers also drink their piss.

“The sadhu says it’s very healthy for you,” I replied, “but I’ve never tried it. He persuaded a Frenchman to do it, at least. Who knows? Maybe it works.”

The next day we rented scooters and drove them all over the roads and temples south of the Hampi Bazaar. Tom had one of the skeletal vehicles and I another, and Tamara drove one with Paula, for despite her heritage the Italian had never learned to handle one.

I immediately took to it and began driving like a maniac without hands or with only one, swerving past tuk-tuks and herds of Sacred Cattle, honking at everyone I saw in the manner of the natives. My experiments climaxed in an attempt to drive the scooter as I would a motorcycle, leaning the bike into the curve and turning the handles away from it, which spilled me out in the dirt near the Elephant Stables. Tom, the nurse, took a look at the shallow cuts on my leg and said, “They’ll be alright.” But when would my pride recover?

We had driven through a dry, rocky, green country south of Hampi and ended up on dirt roads around the Elephant Stables and some old fort, where we parked in the shade of a tree and bought coconuts. The coconut-wallah chopped the caps off with a wickedly curved blade and put straws inside. Once the liquid was drunk, he cut them open so we could eat the crisp white meat. A policeman stopped our caravan as we tried to leave the stables, saying we had to pay for a ticket, but we argued with him for a long time. Eventually I started my engine and drove around him, which was what most Indians did when they saw a police roadblock and wanted to avoid paying baksheesh.

For a while we lost ourselves in the dirt roads trying to get back to the highway. We eventually found our way back to the Hampi Bazaar and settled down at the restaurant where we had lunch the day before. “I feel bad going to the same places over and over,” said Tom, “but once I find a good place, I don’t want to leave.” I agreed, and said, “I’m a creature of habit.”

Tom was not shaving for the whole of his trip, and his beard had got so long that he carried a comb around in his pocket for it. “I wish you guys could see me without my beard,” he remarked. We asked to see his passport photo, and he dug around in his bag for it—but it was not where it was supposed to be! A flood of fears. Where did I lose the document? Who has stolen it? How will I get home? Where can I stay without a passport? Tom left immediately to resolve his anxiety. Travelers carry only a few possessions and must know where those possessions are at all times, especially the essential and expensive ones. (Tom found the passport in an envelope with his tickets home, where he had left it after trying to change his departure.)

Tamara and I played another game of chess, and then the German went off to teach the Italian how to drive a scooter. (The scene was as follows: Tamara, sitting on a rock, reading her book, while Paula drives in circles about an empty dirt lot, shouting regularly, “How am I doing?” “Yah yah, gut gut,” said the German, until she got on the back of Paula’s bike for the drive home, and then she cried, “Slow down!”) I took my scooter and drove it down the dusty road of the Hampi Bazaar that ran down from the Virupraksha Temple to a mountainside at the far end.

The road ended into a long courtyard between two ruined colonnades that barely kept back the jungle. At the end of this stood a temple, and beyond that a long, uneven stairway that went up to a sort of gateway in the crook of the mountain: two raised platforms on either side of the trail, each supporting eight columns to hold up the flat roof.

A man was sitting there on the right platform, leaning against a pillar. He wore a checkered shirt, gray striped pants, and a black baseball cap, with a digital wristwatch and beaded bracelets on his wrists. The weariness and energy on his face made his age entirely indeterminable—somewhere between 25 and 40, I’d say. He held out his hand and we shook. Holding onto my hand, he sang a song about animals or something, and then patted the stone next to him and said, “Up here. No, no way,”—as I made to walk around behind the temple, instead urging me to jump up right there—“Up here. Yes good.” He grabbed at my hand, then stopped and said, “Shoes.” I took of my sandals and before he could say anything threw them in the dirt below. The stone would have been fine. (O India, was this the spiritual experience I was so ready to receive?)

Rabi Kumar, for that was the fortune teller’s name, smiled with rotten teeth and vibrant, penetrating eyes, and his words were sure and confidant. We spoke in a sort of pidgin English that the Reader may find a curiosity.

“How long in India?” he asked.

“Three month. Go to Kerala.”

“Three month good. India bigum.”

“Very big, India.”

“Let me see, let me see.”

He took my hand and studied the thumb very carefully and exclaimed, “Ah, eagle. Eagle, very good. Know eagle?” and with hand gestures he explained, “Snake, hsss, eagle comes, schwoot, snake, yah! Away! You are brave man! Strong man!”

After such flattery, I was ready to believe any fortune Rabi told me. Though not attired as a soothsayer, in paint and sagely robes, he held all the merry gravity the Reader expects from one with a magical trade. He looked at one line on my palm, asked me my age, and told me how old I would be when I died. Another crease, confirmed by some swirl on my scalp, told him my marital future, how many children I would have, and whether they would be sons or daughters. “Do I want to know all this,” I thought, “or isn’t it just rubbish?” Rabi told me of the future, but Reader, how can I tell thee? This business of fate should not be spoken of so indiscreetly.

“Money coming, money going. Coming, going. Always money. Ah! Black, black!” cried Rabi, seeing something on my palm and glancing from those lines to my face. “No wear any black! No good for you. Hmmm. Every morning, wake up, drinkum half bottle water. Good, full power. Give you power, okay? In night, cannot sleep, sleep no come, okay? Say, ‘Om nom shivaya, Om nom shivaya,’ say seven times and you sleep well. It’s good. Oh! You be careful of taxi.”

“Indian taxi?”

“No, Indian taxi good. America taxi. Taxi in street, you cross street, boosh, yah!” he clapped his hands, then pointed at me. “Three times taxi comes. Yellow and black. Three time, be careful. Trouble for you, I am telling, okay?”

“Yeah, it’s good, you know?”

I asked Rabi about the life expectancy he had foreseen for me, and he replied, “No, no years if no careful. Ahhh!” he exclaimed, seeing some scratches on my foot from my fall on the scooter,—“Whatum this? Careful, careful! You must be careful!”

Rabi told me, “You know mantra? Mantra good, much power.” He drew something on his hand like a necklace with a capsule and pointed to the capsule and said, “Put things in, good things, to power and protection, good luck. You want? Make two, one for wearem, one for home in America. Schwoot!” Rabi told me to return to the gateway the next day with some incense and some kind of explosive white powder that I did not know. “No worry,” he said, “I buy, you no understand. Incense, incense! Ten in morning!”

I shook his hand, got my shoes, and made to continue on up the road. “Monkey temple ahead,” said Rabi. “Give no money, only want alcohol.”

Beyond the gateway the road went on in coarse flagstone through cactus and scrub and the lonely rocks. The scenery grew more solitary and exotic the further I moved from the dusty Bazaar. I found the Hanuman shrine, a painting of the monkey god in a cave, and the two little old ladies in front asked me for baksheesh. The road went on until it came to the other side of the mountain and wound into a vale where there lay an abandoned temple compound, surrounded by the encroaching jungle. It was named Achyutaraya, and it resembled a fable of India.

I went back the next day as Rabi instructed. I arrived at ten and sat on the platform of the gateway where I’d met the fortune teller, who was not there yet. I took out a packet of incense and lit two and dug a hole in the hard dirt for them with my pocket knife and put them there so they looked like a smoking V. It seemed like the correct thing to do. Then I took out my harmonica and played a few melodies. Down below, past the long colonnades, the Bazaar looked clean and calm in the distance and the morning light.

After a while, when the incense had burned down a half an inch, I saw Rabi coming up the stairs. He climbed up onto the platform and sat across from me.

“Hi Jon.”

“Hi Rabi. Have mantras?”

“Slowly slowly. Fastly no good.”

“Shanti shanti,” I said.

“Shanti shanti” means “peace peace,” and is the same as the Greek’s “siga siga” and the Arabs’ “shway shway.” Slowly slowly, we must move. With methodical, sacral care, Rabi took a spool of thread and a small newspaper sachet from his shirt pocket. He unfolded the sachet carefully and showed me the two metal capsules inside, like steel painkillers, then carefully refolded it and put the package back in his shirt. He took the string and measured out four lengths of it, each a foot long, and cut it on the coal of the incense and tied the ends deftly so all four lengths ran side-by-side. He did this a second time and then set both lines aside.

Now he took out his cell phone and selected some chanting song from it, which played out hoarsely over the wind through the mountain. The fortune teller took one of the capsules from his pocket and loosened it and gave it to me to open. Inside, he put a line of ash from the incense sticks, and he closed it back up with a grin. He tied one of the strings to it by the middle of the line, so that there was a length of string, each of four threads, running out to either side, and then he tied together the four lines with seven knots, like a Norn weaving my inescapable fate into a thread. He wrapped the mantra up in this braid and waved it through the incense smoke and blew on it.

He did this with the second capsule as well, and wrapped it up in the same bit of newspaper and tied it up with a string. He told me what to do with it when I returned home, and told me not to tell anyone about the rite or it would be “trouble for you, I am telling, okay? Say to no one. Do not tell. Your mother, she will say, ‘What you do?’ Tell her, ‘Shanti shanti, mother,’” and he waved a calming gesture.

The first mantra, though, he tied around my neck. “It falls off,” he said, “no problem. Just throw. After seven weeks, you throw in sea, or in river, schwoot.”

The incense was nearly burned out by this time. Rabi put some of the last of its ash on my forehead. By some coincidence that lends credence to this rite, the ceremony concluded, the music stopped from Rabi’s cell phone, and the embers of the incense consumed themselves, the last of the smoke floating up in lonely, disintegrating plumes, at the very same instant. What had inspired me to light the incense without instruction, so that it timed things so perfectly? The fortune teller smiled and said, “You see?”

“Magic?” I asked.

“No magic!” he cried, offended. “No magic man! Only power!”

The fortune teller took another look at my palm and my scalp, as a doctor will habitually check over the pulse and pupils of a patient who comes in with a sore foot. He pointed out again the eagle and the age and marriage lines, then said, “You travelum. Have good mind, you. Parents no understand good mind. Shanti shanti, okay?”

Despite Rabi’s warnings, I showed my friends my new mantra and the bracelets that the fortune teller gave me, elastic bands with beads and wood. What harm could it cause, so long as I keep the important things secret? “Are those swastikas?” Lola asked of some of the charms on a bracelet. “That’s great.”

The four girls left that day. Paula would go to Bangalore, and from there to some vipassana retreat in Tamil Nadu, and Lola, Tamara, and Cat would take a night bus to Gokarne on the coast. Tom and I would go there the next day, shanti shanti. In the hot afternoon after they left we rented bikes and rode up to the reservoir to jump off the rock and swim, enjoy the cold water and hot sun and the company of a gang of Australian girls. When they arrived they had the rock to themselves, but the tuk-tuk driver who took them up there had called all his friends. Presently, six Indians in slacks and collared shirts watched them awkwardly from five feet away, took pictures with their cell phones and showed them to each other.

A few hippies, with a measure of ritual, passed around a chillum, a tube with a cloth filter on one end and embered herb on the other. They pressed the filtered bottom end to their foreheads before inhaling from it. Tom and I smoked and blasted off down the road on our rickety bikes. We stopped to consider the pretty sunset that worked its way down into the mountains across the reservoir, everything carmined, then steered down the steep hill of the embankment. Our bikes rattled as if they would fall apart. With all that incautious inertia, we sped around tuk-tuks and motorcycles and Sacred Cattle in the busy village marketplace, full of strange activity and blaring horns and people. Children gave us high fives and cheered as we passed.

O India, you deceiver, what are you, really? Are you kind or wicked? How do you treat your pilgrims, your penitents? Where will your roads take me?