Journey to Rishikesh

Sunset on the Ganga

I left Rhotak, where I'd been visiting the school where Tansy is working, early in the morning, on the rarest of rare beasts, an almost empty train to Haridwar. The only other person in my compartment was a young microbiologist who told me that:

"In India, when a doctor orders a test from the pathologist, the pathologist has to pay half the fee to the doctor. So the doctor always orders several tests that the patient does not need, just so that he can profit. Ideally," he told me, "I would like to set up my own lab where I only perform necessary tests, so that poor people can save a lot of money."

How he was going to avoid the doctor ordering unnecessary tests I really didn't know, but a far more pressing problem was how he was going to raise the money to build the lab in the first place.

During the three hour journey to his destination we chatted happily, the conversation covering environmental degradation, the evil Mr Modi stirring up hatred between Muslim and Hindu, out of control population expansion in India and his concern for his little two year old daughter, in a country where girls were never safe. 

"I want to send her out of India," he told me.

"And your wife?" I asked him.

"She can't work, although she is a dentist by profession, because our child is two."

"She must be bored and frustrated."

"And my mother interferes with the child care, bosses my wife around all the time."

" It must be very hard for her."

"Yes. It's the Indian custom that the son looks after his mother. It's hard for his wife. Sometimes when my wife is really fed up I send her home to her parents for a break, or I take her away somewhere, leaving my mother behind."

After he left, a loud family of Sikhs, all shouting at the same time, got into the compartment. I retreated to the top bunk.

We arrived in Haridwar at four in the afternoon. For once I allowed a porter to carry my big suitcase on his head, up the staircase and over the platforms. By the time we left the station touts were circling round us like a swarm of mosquitoes, offering rickshaws to Laxman Jhula for 500 rupees. I laughed at them. My porter proudly carrying my suitcase on his head, despite the fact that we were now on flat ground and the suitcase had wheels, continued walking beside me out of the station, ignoring my suggestions that he put the suitcase down. He smiled as I fended off the touts, now grown into a bigger, fiercer band of snapping crocodiles, all in agreement that rickshaws to Laxman Jhula cost five hundred rupees. 

"No way," I countered "shared rickshaw."

"No shared rickshaw," they chorused.

Eventually I persuaded the porter to put the suitcase down, pulling it behind me out into the main road, where the contest of words continued:

"Shared rickshaw."

"No shared rickshaw."

Until a shared rickshaw drew up, squeezed me and my suitcase in, leaving the touts still shouting

"More comfortable rickshaw," pointing to an empty one, as I left.

It was a long walk down hill from the rickshaw stand in Laxman Jhula, Rishikesh, on bumpy, twisting roads. Just as I reached the point where I needed to start looking for my hotel, Angelica called out. She had booked me a room in a hotel at the end of a narrow allay, which I might never have found if we had not met.

The day ended happily in Little Buddha cafe surrounded by friends.

Next day Angelica and I walked up the steep hill through the forest until we were looking down on Rishikesh from above. 

Back to Smelly Dehli

I caught the night train from Jodhpur to what I thought was Delhi central to arrive at six thirty in the morning. Luckily it arrived at seven. I dragged my big bag off the train and joined the crowd heading for the exit like a sheep. I must be at the back of the station, I thought. I don't recognise anything. Confusingly the sign on the station platform said Delhi Junction.
"Is this New Delhi," I asked an Indian passenger.
"No," he said "it's Old Delhi."
The next task was to find the left luggage - called the cloakroom in Indian stations, which was down a hidden passageway behind one of the platforms. One has to fill out a form stating name, address (in UK), date, ticket PNR number, passport number, mobile phone number, visa number, colour of one's cat (I added the last one in), padlock one's suitcase and lift it up onto a counter, behind which the cloakroom attendant stands, ready to store it, numbered and ticketed, on one of the large number of shelves in the cloakroom. I indicated that I couldn't lift it. The cloakroom attendant left the cloakroom by a side door, came round to get my suitcase, then, instead of taking it inside through the side door, he lifted it up onto the counter, walked back round through the side door and lifted it down from the counter.

I joined the throng of passengers leaving the station, struggling through the hooting rickshaws and taxis and made my way along the road to where I thought the metro was, missed it, asked a passing man, who pointed it out to me. More helpful people pointed me in the right direction to catch the metro on the various lines I needed to take to get to Rama Krishna Ashram Marg, gateway to Parharh Ganj, by which time it was eight o'clock.

Parharh Ganj was mostly asleep, cafes, restaurants and shops shuttered, piles of rubbish on the sides of the dusty streets, the odd wandering cow (all of whom are banished during the days in Delhi and only appear at night).

I made my way to Ajay's restaurant, where, like Alice's Restaurant, you can get anything you want: gluten free muesli, yak cheese, peanut butter, tahini, honey, brown bread, tropical fruit salad, omelette, bacon (!!!), sausage, jam.... in a cavernous space under a hotel with no windows to the outside world (a blessing in disguise in this part of Delhi), an Aladdin's cave of clothes shops, shelves full of jams, spices and herbs, and tables full of breakfasting tourists.

World Sacred Spirit Festival

www.worldsacredspiritfestival.org
I described this Sufi music festival, held in the Mehrangarh Fort, in detail last year, so I won't bore my friends with another long description.

Mehrangarh Fort

On the last night there was a wonderful Indian contemporary dance performance choreographed by Astad Deboo and Guru Seityaban Singh with the Drummers of Shree Shree Nat Sinkirtan. The drummers were from Manipur, on the border with Burma and they were dancers and acrobats as well as drummers. I loved the slow, tai chi like movements of the drummers without their drums, the bird like hand movements of Astad Deboo, the wonderful acrobatic leaping drummers with their drums, the ever changing soundscape, the lighting: I loved everything about the performance. 

The Last Nomads of Kutchch

French tourist in a chai shop

At breakfast in the city guest house one meets all sorts of people, the current contingent hailing mostly from France and Japan, who sit in little huddles, speaking in their respective languages. But there's always a sprinkling of people from other countries, such as Austria, Switzerland, Greece, even a few British. On this particular morning there was a British Indian woman, Sonum Sumaria, who was making a documentary about the last nomads of Kutchch.

"The Fakirani Jat tribe," she told me, "are still nomadic. "There are only sixty families left, who travel with their camels during the day. They live on camel milk, selling the surplus to buy millet, which is the only other thing they eat. The camels graze on a multitude of different herbs, so their milk is very nutritious. The tribe sleep on the ground at night, beside their camels, under the stars."

"Do you travel with them?"
"Yes," she said "I have to run ahead of them in order to film them walking towards me. I take my sound technician and an interpreter. We go back to a hotel to sleep at night though.
(I'm sure she speaks Hindi, but these tribes speak Kutchch, a completely different language.)
"The children start to look after the camels when they are six years old. They have a lot of fun playing and never go to school. School would not be of any use to them as long as they continue with their nomadic life. But things are getting more and more difficult for them as their tribal lands are less protected and more and more people are buying parts of it for agriculture, where they can no longer go. Of course, before Partition they could travel from one part of the desert when it became too dry to another part where there was better vegetation. But now they cannot cross the border."

Hopefully she will show the film at SOAS in London. She told me about another film she made about the RSS (far right Hindu party who are virulently anti-muslim). Under Prime Minister Modi the RSS has gained status and popularity, a very worrying trend. Sonum told me that since Modi came to power the RSS have been visiting the villages of Kutchch twice a week, villages where Hindus and Muslims have lived together peacefully for hundreds of years; to hold meetings for the young Hindus, inspiring anti-Muslim hatred in them. She has made a documentary about this too.

These are not the Fakirani Jat camels, but rather camels employed to transport tourists (almost all Indian tourists) the short distance from an expensive tent city into the salt desert. We travelled to the salt desert and were horrified by the Disneyland atmosphere that surrounded the tent city, where people pay a hundred and twenty pounds a night to stay in a tent.

Bhuj

One house in Bhuj that survived the earthquake

The city of Bhuj, jewel of Gujerat, built in 1510, with its beautiful stone houses, delicately carved doorways and window surrounds, its palaces, mosques and temples, surrounded by high city walls with magnificent city gates, was blasted to rubble by the earthquake in 2001, killing 2000 people and destroying 1.2 million homes. The houses were rebuilt along the same narrow streets, but in plain concrete, without decoration, forming the same intricate maze as before. Parts of the city walls survived, together with the Aina Mahal, a rather dark palace with dark wooden ceilings and pillars, a place designed for night time pleasures in the central chamber which had an ingenious system of cooling fountains.

Lakhpatji was one of the princes of Bhuj during the eighteenth century. His father sent him to Delhi to attend a darbar (meeting) of the Kutchch ruling family with the ruling Mughals, at the imperial court. In those days princes travelled with camels piled high with enormous tents, carpets and wall hangings, kitchen equipment and many servants. When he arrived Lakhpatji ordered his servants to set up his tent then hired musicians and dancers to entertain his guests in the nighttime, after the serious discussions with the Mughal rulers were over. He entertained lavishly and word went around that the best entertainment was to be enjoyed in his tent. From time to time he sang softly and sweetly, entrancing some of the female musicians who decided to travel with him to Kutchch. In 1752, after his father died he was enthroned as the Raj. He built a palace inspired by the Mughal style he had seen in Delhi and invited many musicians and artists to the Kutchch court.

Bhuj is the capital of Kutchch, the wild west desert region of India, where tribal pastoralists roamed for centuries up until recently, when they settled in villages of round houses with conical thatched roofs. Traditionally the tribal women spent years embroidering clothes for their weddings, wearing all their wealth on their backs. In recent years an enormous industry has grown up around the traditional tribal weaving, dying, block printing and embroidery of Kutchch and the little shops in Bhuj overflow with colourful textiles, old and new. You can buy every kind of textile here, from vegetable dyed block printed cotton to factory made brilliant synthetic prints. Tribal women walk in the streets, their long skirts swishing around them, wearing an infinite variety of embroidered clothes with sparkling mirrors, jingling anklets and backless churlies, covered by the floor length scarves they drape over their heads. They crowd into the shops selling synthetic materials, sitting cross legged on the floor as the shopkeeper throws roll after roll of material in front of them. I spend hours in the shops selling old embroideries, taking them to my tailor to incorporate into new clothes, which he does with wonderful skill.

City Guest House
City guest House is in the centre of Bhuj, one of those places where travellers congregate  every morning at a long breakfast table in a courtyard surrounded by three levels of rooms in long rows with balconies. There is nothing beautiful about the place. The concrete building is strictly utilitarian with wooden doors and barred windows, brown tiled floors, the fourth wall of the courtyard bordered by a high concrete wall painted dirty yellow. The tables are covered in plastic tablecloths, usually covered in crumbs. But the conviviality makes up for the dull setting. New people from all over the world arrive every day. Some stay a day, a week, some for months. The rooms are cheap and clean. A fat rickshaw walla joins the throng every day and tries his best to inveigle tourists into making trips in his over priced rickshaw. I do my best to persuade people to catch buses or share taxis. The day before yesterday I organised a taxi for five people to visit the white Rann (the salt desert), a trip that turned out to be rather like visiting an Indian version of Disneyland.


The Rann of Kutchch
As we drew nearer to the White Rann tent cities sprang up on either side of the road.
"Five thousand rupees a night to stay in a tent here (sixty pounds)," our driver said, pointing right, then:
"Six thousand rupees a night for a tent here (seventy pounds)," pointing left, and so on, until we came to the last tent city of all:
"Ten thousand rupees a night to stay here (a hundred and twenty pounds)," he said; "one thousand and fifty tents." There was an ugly wall along the side of the road and flashy stalls selling packaged junk food on the other side of the road. We groaned, horrified. The car drew into an asphalt parking lot, full of cars, camels pulling trailers, horse and carts and masses of Indian middle class people, all wearing jeans and teeshirts.

An asphalt causeway led out into the salt desert, where hundreds of Indian tourists were standing, sitting, taking photos of each other, all waiting for the sun to set. Rows of camels waited patiently to ferry the tourists back to the tent city. After sunset people piled onto the camel trailers, whooping and shouting as their camels raced back along the causeway.