71

Five:
India

A boy of about eight is riding an adult-sized women’s bicycle. The seat is far too high for him, so he hovers as he rides, bottom angled out over the left side of the bike. His left foot works the left pedal while his right leg extends between the bars to push the right pedal. I watch from the garden where I sit, on an agricultural ashram I am visiting several miles outside of Bangalore. The dirt road he travels becomes a bridge of sorts, a mud dike elevated between two shallow bodies of water. The sun is behind him, and I squint watching his silhouette framed and reframed against the unforgiving midday light. I am holding my breath, convinced he will topple at any second. But this lopsided contraption, boy and bike in baffling harmony, perseveres. It shouldn’t work. He is heavily weighted on the left side, and his arms barely reach the handles. But somehow it does. As he approaches, strains of a hugely popular Bollywood hit waft toward me over the heat’s assault. He is whistling.

India. Nothing in this subcontinent of over a billion seems to work. Buses break down with near-clockwork regularity, trains leave dependably late or occasionally early. Post offices lack stamps. Gas stations run out of gas. You pay for one thing and get something else entirely—and invariably delivered with great pride. Tradition tussles with modernity, democracy wrestles with caste, Indian-produced Thumbs-Up dukes it out with global goliath Coca-Cola. The Hindus despise or endure the Muslims. The Muslims—a largely moderate minority of 130 million—struggle at coexistence. Meanwhile Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, and even a few Jews busily carve out their own customized niches.

72

India. This is the country that gave the world Gandhi’s enduring legacy of nonviolent satyagraha, yet that today possesses an array of nuclear weapons. A nation where subsistence farmers drink pesticide in protest against Monsanto’s onslaught of genetically modified crops. Where a gay pride movement takes its halting first steps—in Mumbai men dance together bare-chested at India’s first gay club, in Calcutta they march—while sodomy remains a crime punishable by life imprisonment. Where some of the most visionary thinkers of the global justice movement bump up against some of the most foulmouthed nationalists on the planet. Where millennia of ayurvedic wisdom rubs shoulders with generic HIV drugs. Where infanticide is illegal but the aborting of female fetuses and the killing of female newborns have only worsened over the past two decades—and consistently go unprosecuted. Child brides, tech moguls, lepers, Bollywood stars, untouchables, wandering ascetics: all call India home.

Somehow, despite the vast contradictions, despite corruption, entrenched religious and caste divides, and antidemocratic transnational corporate colonialism—despite, in short, that it really shouldn’t work, India works. Often badly, and invariably in the least efficient, most unpredictable way possible, but it works. The world’s biggest democracy endures. The lopsided contraption trundles on, every part of it occupied by a veritable sea of humanity—hanging from the spokes, hammering at the handlebars, jogging atop the wheels, upside-down on the seat, hollering at the driver… and whistling all the while.

I’ve never seen a place like this. India defies both my sensibilities and my common sense at almost every turn. India unsettles countless notions that I hadn’t even realized were notions, that I had simply assumed to be givens of the human condition. Wrong, I learn, and wrong again. Take privacy, for example. I’d always assumed privacy was a natural right, falling somewhere in the broad vicinity of the pursuit of happiness. But not in India. In India, five people share a single room and seem content. After four months in India I still am not used to it. I still get peeved over late buses, staring men, the heat and pollution. But I also am still amazed and delighted. After South Africa, the U.S., and Israel, I fall for India, and somewhere inside me it too becomes home.

73

At the end of November 2001, I take a bus from Nepal through to Haridwar in the northern Indian province of Uttaranchal. Haridwar is a sacred city, a major pilgrimage destination for Hindus, and the promise of exotic ritual and devotion draws me. It is while on the bus, watching the bedlam that is India unfold anew before my eyes, that I start to ease into it. There is a stumbling buoyancy to the chaos on the streets and in the markets, a giddiness to the devotion that infiltrates every aspect of life, with its Shiva-brand toothpastes and Ganesh crockery. From behind my ramparts, I hold up a small white flag. I give in to India. I stop battling her and begin moving with her, hanging on to her hips as she gyrates and wheels.

Haridwar: literally, “Gateway to God.” According to Hindus, Haridwar is one of the seven holiest places in India, and it squats on the banks of that most holy of holy rivers, the Ganges. Along with 300,000 ardent pilgrims, I unwittingly arrive just in time for Kartik Purnima, Haridwar’s biggest annual festival. All of the $2 hotel rooms are filled. The only room I can find, after my thirty-one-hour bus journey, costs $6.50, double anywhere I’ve stayed thus far. But it does have a television. I have been away from home going on two months, and am missing everyone and everything. I watch Top Gun and Dirty Dancing on Indian cable and indulge in a tearful bout of nostalgia. Generally, what I miss of the U.S. lies at its margins: at the unmani-cured edges of a society of such wealth and relative freedom blossom the radical visions of alternative communities and underground cultures. I miss the progressive politics and enthusiastic cultural miscellany of San Francisco. I miss reading poetry in cafés, cooking dinner with friends, making music, dancing outdoors at festivals. But now even the nails-on-chalkboard American commercial voice-overs make me cry. Eventually I drag myself out of bed to observe the festivities.

Hindus believe that bathing in the Ganges at Haridwar washes away a soul’s sins and gains one entry to heaven. On Kartik Purnima the ritual is even more sacred, as it commemorates the day that Shiva destroyed the insidious demon Tripura-Sur and made the world safe again. Conveniently, it also celebrates the birthday of Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism. I step out of my hotel to a scene of utter pandemonium. Alongside the river are a number of ghats, or stairways leading down to a landing. Har Ki Pairi ghat, just beyond my hotel, marks the point where the Ganges leaves the Himalayas. Vishnu’s footprint is set into one of the stones in its walls, and it is believed that the Ganges flows in its purest form here. Har Ki Pairi is the focal point of the revelry in Haridwar. I watch with awe from the top of the stairs, too intimidated to descend. Hordes of people line the river as far as I can see. They mill about in an unhurried anarchy that appears to possess its own mysterious order. At the edge of the Ganges, women in petticoats and salwar kameez dunk underwater, giggling at each other and avoiding male eyes. The men venture in further. Dressed only in their underwear, they are holding hands, splashing about, bellowing to each other in delight. Directly below me, a family is offering puja on the steps. The women are arranging marigold heads and lighting incense, laying out small sweet oranges and nuts. One of the men, a child in his arms, glances up and catches sight of me.

“Come down!” he yells, beckoning energetically. I smile at him, shaking my head slightly. The entire circle around him looks up to the source of this new diversion.

“Join us!” calls one of the women. “You must come down!” orders another. They all begin shouting encouragement to me. I am outnumbered. I step slowly down the stairs. As if through some greater design, the masses part fluidly to let me and the other descenders pass. Most of them ignore me, intent upon the day’s demands. But some of the men break off as if struck dumb at the sight, fixing me with The Stare. I scowl back menacingly. When I reach the family at the bottom of the stairs, they greet me like a long-lost cousin. “Please, please, welcome to India,” says the man, shoving his child into my arms in a no-holds-barred gesture of goodwill. “Welcome to our wonderful country, welcome to Haridwar.” He has a swath of gray scarf wrapped around his head and shoulders, a struggling suggestion of mustache, and buckteeth that look about ready to take off.

“Thank you, thank you so much.” I struggle to settle the wriggling child on my hip. She beams up at me from kohl-rimmed eyes.

75

“What is your good name?”

“Oh. I’m Marisa. Nice to meet you.”

“Welcome, Marisha, welcome.” He takes my hand and shakes it vigorously. The women smile at me and resume preparing puja, leaving him in charge of formalities.

“Which country is suffering from the loss of you?”

“America.” I don’t always say America. Anti-U.S. sentiment is on the rise here. I met an Australian woman who told me a Swedish backpacker was attacked at a railway station for being an American. Blond hair and blue eyes spoke louder than his passport, apparently.

“Ah, America. America great country.” He smiles indulgently, then frowns thoughtfully, shakes a finger at me. “But too much power America. Now going to war in Afghanistan. India, we must be restraint. We have terrorism for fifty years, but we do not attack Pakistan. But America gets one taste, runs to war.” I am alternately nodding and shaking my head through this fiery monologue.

“Well, certainly war is not—”

“Are you traveling alone?” He is looking behind me now, up the steps of the ghat, searching for a partner.

“Yes.” At this all the women look up. The entire circle stares at me in kindly distress.

“No husband?”

“No.” Now the faces have transformed to total incomprehension. “Well, um, what I mean is —” They are hanging on my every word, so anxious to relate that I can’t resist. This is one mammoth cultural rift that I’m simply not up to crossing right now. “What I mean to say is no husband right now. My husband is coming. He’s meeting me later.”

The faces collapse into smiles. “Oh, yes, yes.” They are laughing with relief, loving me again, offering me syrupy gulab jamun in pink tupperware.

Haridwar lies off the backpackers’ circuit, and I do not come across another westerner all day. I spend the afternoon wandering through the frenzy, photographing it, basking in it. I come across a child receiving his first ritual head-shaving; he bawls inconsolably as his mother holds him down and the barber drags the razor doggedly across his scalp. I come across Shivaite sadhus, dreadlocked ascetics sitting cross-legged and glowering, clad only in loincloths and smeared in ash. They are abundantly armed with charas, or hashish, and zealously bless each bowl in the name of Shiva before imbibing. I come across a man with no arms, using felt pens clutched between his toes to produce elaborate and stylized depictions of the river-haired goddess of the Ganges. And I come across beggars and lepers and snake charmers and cripples and more beggars.

76

The devout and the mercenary: both find a home at Har Ki Pairi. While some come to earn points in heaven, others show up to reap the harvest of the point-earners’ piety. I have seen beggars so far, but never this many. Here, there is an elongated line of them, a jagged, yawning queue of the importuning and beseeching.

“One rupee! Madam, one rupee!”

A dish is thrust at me, knocks against my wrist. I look down to eyes that are accusatory, that prey righteously upon my guilt. You have so much, say those eyes, in a face engraved and congealed by a life I can barely guess at. I have nothing. Ease your conscience. When I give it is so often motivated by guilt, and received out of a mercenary foreknowledge of that guilt. I am left feeling guiltier—for not giving more, for giving to one and not others, for giving when it is guilt, not compassion, that prompts me. For the life with which I have somehow been blessed. An old and familiar guilt, this one, tenacious as white roots in the black loam of Africa. Who am I, anyway, to judge, or to choose, or to allocate? I am suddenly furious with myself and with her. I hand her five rupees and the entire line begins clamoring stridently. Children with faultlessly cast expressions of woe, lepers wielding fingerless hands, the ancient and the emaciated, cripples pointing to their missing leg, eyes, arm. I quell the urge to scream or run. I have seen poverty: in rural Zimbabwe the children’s bellies were swollen with hunger, the mothers indolent with despair, eyes glazed over and impenetrably bleak. But poverty in India assumes its unique proportions through the physical distortion of so many of its victims. Poverty here is frequently grotesque. Initially I find it unbearable. I toss some coins and look away. Later, I get used to it. Warped limbs and faces settle into the commonplace amid the bright wash of chattering Hindi, the reassurance of sunlight. And at some point I realize, with no little astonishment, that the beggars here are not necessarily miserable. In the U.S. the very poor are generally unhappy. There is an abiding sense of shame aligned with poverty, an implicit assignment of blame. Here the poor accept their poverty with the equanimity of those to whom karma has doled out certain apportionments. Not the best, maybe, but who can guess at divine will? Who to challenge the diktat of the universe?

77

“One rupee, one rupee,” they clamor. I cannot give to all of them, so I give to a few. The others eye me savagely and grumble, but ten seconds later they are chatting companionably with their neighbor, sucking vigorously at their betel leaf paan and whiling away the day in wait for the next possible benefactor.

Karma, I am frequently instructed. Our choices and actions in past lives determine our circumstances today. Complaining is senseless: all plagues—and blessings—are attributed to karma. Karma, however, mysteriously shifts in application when it comes to political and communal tensions. “Pakistanis are selfish and proud,” Umesh, a young man I meet in Delhi, tells me. “I hate them so much.” Excuse me, and what of karma? Isn’t it possible that Pakistanis are Pakistanis only because the universe assigned them to a chunk of land further north? Won’t karma take care of it all? No, I am told. They are Muslims. And “Muslims want to make the world Muslim. They create terrorism.” That, apparently, is the karma of Muslims.

“Muslims are uneducated and fanatic,” says Manoj, owner of a handicrafts shop in Jaipur. “Now they all think Bin Laden is God.” Many of the Hindus I speak with are in vociferous agreement. “Muslims have a lifestyle of their own,” Krishna, a retired engineer from Delhi, informs me. “They’ll never give it up. Their leaders want them to fight, so they tell them Islam is in danger and they all follow like idiots.” I am stunned at the prejudice I encounter among even the most educated Hindus when the topic turns to Muslims. In every social and economic survey, India’s Muslims rank just above the Dalits. In 1995 a series of urban bombings in Mumbai, far and away India’s most westernized and metropolitan city, was presumed the work of Islamic fundamentalists. Enraged gangs of Hindus responded by rampaging through Mumbai’s Muslim neighborhoods, killing and looting at random—with the police purportedly turning a blind eye.

78

Tensions between India’s Hindus and Muslims have been at a rolling boil since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. In what was the largest migration in human history, an estimated thirteen to seventeen million refugees crossed borders in the hope of locating safety within their religious communities. Massive communal violence on both sides of the border killed half a million. The famously indecisive king of Kashmir vacillated up until the last minute, but finally decided that despite its majority Muslim population, the mythically lovely territory should go to India. Roughly thirty thousand lives have since been lost over Kashmir. Pakistan maintains that Kashmir, due to its Muslim majority, should be part of Pakistan. India will have nothing of that. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism— funded by Islamabad, the Indian government insists, while Pakistan claims its support is only moral—erupts with regularity along the Line of Control dividing Kashmir. For India’s Hindus, embittered by the climbing death toll, there is little difference between the Taliban and Islamabad. Or, for that matter, between a Pakistani and an Indian Muslim. A Muslim is a Muslim is a Muslim. “In their inner circle, every Muslim agrees with Bin Laden,” says Krishna.

Among Hindus, there is the sense that 9/11 at last forced the U.S. to face facts. “I’m happy that Osama bombed America,” says Ravi, a bookstore owner from Pushkar. “It opened the world’s eyes to terror.” But as the U.S. brawls in Afghanistan and cozies up to Pakistan, all the while urging restraint on the part of India, resentment mounts among Indians over the implicit hypocrisy of a “global war against terror.” “The American government is controlling the whole world,” says Manoj. “It’s not fair. They have a war against terror, but they are being selfish. Why can’t we solve our problem? Why does India need American permission?” If the U.S. can bomb the nation that houses the perpetrators of its terror, runs this line of logic, then why can’t India do the same? In the months following 9/11, Islamic fundamentalists wage a string of guerrilla attacks in Kashmir. India responds by hammering Pakistani army positions along the Line of Control with artillery fire. “[T]here is a limit to the patience of the people of India,” warns Prime Minister Vajpayee in a letter to Bush. Because Pakistan is providing the U.S. with access to its military bases, the U.S. will not censure Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri separatist groups, which maddens India. On December 13, a group of gunmen attacks the Indian parliament in Delhi, killing twelve and injuring twenty-two. While Pakistan denies involvement, India is not convinced. Over the next few weeks, India deploys half of its army of one million along the border with Pakistan, as well as nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

79

During my time in India, I write a series of articles focusing on the connections between the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Indo-Pakistani relations, and Hindu-Muslim tensions within India. At the end of December, I am in Ahmedabad, working on a piece on Hindu-Muslim relations. Ahmedabad is not a major tourist destination. It is large, congested, and noxiously polluted; I am there mostly for the article, and because I want to visit Gandhi’s ashram, Sabarmati. But Ahmedabad wins me over. The largest city in the northwestern province of Gujarat, which was conquered in 1299 by invading Muslims, Ahmedabad is home to numerous beautiful old mosques. The city retains its distinctly Muslim flavor, even though only 14 percent of its residents are Muslim. Ahmedabad was also home to Gandhi and satyagraha, the nonviolent resistance movement that swept India and eventually won it independence.

I meet Abdul Bakr while I am wandering as unobtrusively as possible through a residential neighborhood in the old city. It is an unmistakably middle-class locale, with tidy apartment blocks and tiny plots of yard sporting shrubbery and the odd swing set. As soon as Bakr spies me, he scurries over to introduce himself.

“Hello, hello! How are you?” He holds out a hand, smiling warmly. I like him instantly. The man exudes goodwill from each pore.

“May I introduce myself? Abdul Bakr, civil servant in the bumbling bureaucracy of the great state of Gujarat.” He shakes my hand robustly, his smile stretching impossibly wider. “And what might be your good name?”

“Marisa Handler, itinerant journalist, at your service.”

80

“A journalist! Very exciting indeed! What, if I may be so bold, are you writing about?” Bakr is rangy and slightly hunched. He wears a pressed, button-down striped shirt. His hair is thick, neatly combed; his ears veer out into the world at right angles, as if striving to heed the wisdom of children and the more diminutive species.

“By all means, be bold. I’m writing right now about Hindu-Muslim relations in India.”

“Indeed, this is a worthy topic.” Bakr’s smile retracts suddenly. I think of a snail, of the way its sensitive antennae venture out delicately, then draw back abruptly. “Certainly Hindus and Muslims have a difficult history here. This no one can deny.” He sighs, moved now, brow furrowed and eyes liquid, and I wait, fascinated by the streaming play of emotions on this lucid face. “Let us sit and talk.” He gestures to a bench in a scrupulously neat yard behind me, then to the building adjacent to it. “This is where I live.” He takes my elbow and escorts me over. “Please, sit.” I ask his permission to record our conversation for my article. “But of course, of course.” I pull out my notebook and a pen, and wait for him to resume.

“Well, I am a Muslim.” He smiles, a little wistful. “Indian first, I say, Muslim second. Although many Hindus do not consider us real Indians.” The smile evaporates. “To my great sadness, we are often treated like second-class citizens. There are times, even, when I do not feel safe.” Now he looks away, and I do too, for the pain on his face is so transparent that it pierces me, stirring something deep, something kin. “But in this neighborhood”—his eyes back to me, now, sparking up—“we live together jointly and happily.” The smile reappears, unvanquished. “Ravi!” He calls eagerly, beckoning to someone behind me. I turn as a plump, bespectacled man approaches us from the apartment building.

“Ravi Parasha, my good neighbor, I am delighted to present Miss Marisha Handler, my journalist friend.” Ravi smiles until his eyes vanish altogether, shakes my hand. “Tell me, Ravi,” resumes Bakr, “are you not a Hindu?”

“Yes, I am Hindu.”

“And I am Muslim, correct?”

“You are a Muslim.”

“Are we friends?”

81

“Of course.” Ravi’s bald head bobs energetically from side to side in the Indian version of a nod. “We are dear friends.”

“That, precisely, is my point. You see, Marisha”—turning to face me, finger raised instructively—“we have lived together as neighbors for eight years. When I was in Delhi and my child Nazima broke her wrist, Ravi went with Nazima and my wife to the hospital. Tell me, are we not living proof that Hindus and Muslims can get along?” He looks to Ravi and to me, daring us to challenge him. We both nod vigorously. “Thank you, Ravi.” Ravi shakes my hand again and heads off, dismissed.

“So you see, my friend,” Bakr continues triumphant, “I worship Allah, I go by the words of Muhammad, and I believe that truly practicing my Islam means practicing its teachings with every person I know, no matter whether Muslim or Hindu.”

“I understand.” I keep my eyes down, on my notepad, so that he will not see the tears welling up. I have happened upon a kindred spirit. I want to drop my pen, laugh, tell him that he is an inspiration to me. I do not want to push this sensitive man. I want to ask him why different people have such different versions of God. I want to talk philosophy and metaphysics, tell him what I believe. But I remind myself that I have a job to do here. My role right now is not to speak—or rather, it is to speak only insofar as to engage the voices of others. My role here is to listen. To render those voices as faithfully as I can, so that readers will know what it means when they choose to speak. So that I will know, when I speak. So instead I ask Bakr if he thinks there is going to be a war with Pakistan.

He shakes his head decisively. “We don’t believe in war in India.” This is a sentiment I hear from everyone I talk with. Hindus often follow it up with but we have been pushed to the limit and have no choice.

I point out that half the army and a handful of nuclear weapons are marshaled along the border.

“We don’t have proof that these attacks were ordered by Pakistan. We don’t know that Pakistan was directly involved.” Now Bakr is tired, flat out of patience with these callow chiefs and their reckless games. “War is a last resort. The leaders should sit at a table and talk.” His rejoinder is typical of the Muslim response to the standoff with Pakistan. Krishna, the engineer from Delhi, told me that Hindus are pacifists by nature, Muslims militant fundamentalists. But in my interviews, it is generally the Muslims who provide the closest thing to a united—albeit largely ignored—voice of dissent against war.

82

“Perhaps it is simply an excuse.” Bakr is thoughtful now, one elongated forefinger massaging his hairline. “Kashmir. Pakistan. All of it. Simply an excuse to let out our frustration, our loathing. Tension between Hindus and Muslims goes back a long time, you know, even before Partition. It is old, a comfortable hatred. Most Indians are very poor, living lives that are often brutal.” He shakes his head, face flaccid with distress. “Who better to blame than the people your grandparents blamed? And theirs before them?”

I think of South Africa and Jerusalem, of how ordinary hatred can be. How routine and habitual, until enough people say no. Or else until it explodes.

When the interview is over Bakr takes me into his home, introduces me to his wife Iman and to Nazima, who is pigtailed and hides behind her mother, shy and saucer-eyed. We drink chai and make small talk. When I leave they press sweets upon me and tell me that I must come back someday to visit them with my family.

I go to Sabarmati, Gandhi’s ashram, Bakr’s words ringing in my head. Gandhi was opposed to Partition, to division along religious lines. After India declared independence, as communal tensions flared into mass slaughter, Gandhi dropped politics altogether to focus entirely on Hindu-Muslim relations, devoting body and soul to the pursuit of unity. He went to Calcutta and Delhi, fasting until the riots subsided. In Delhi, twelve days after peace settled over the city, Nathuram Godse stepped in front of Gandhi and fired three shots. The Mahatma, the great soul, was assassinated by a Hindu extremist enraged at his “appeasement” of the Muslims. An old hatred exploded, and the world grieved.

I walk about the grounds of the ashram, marveling over the life of this extraordinary man. Gandhi needed no arms to free his country; his primary weapon was his steadfast faith in the essential goodness of human nature. This is a faith I have come to share, but it tends to fall flat every time I pick up a newspaper. I wonder at this, at the tremendous power carried by a conviction most of our politicians—most everybody—would laugh off as naive. Gandhi wrote his Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13 in 1919, five years after returning to India from South Africa, where apartheid had provided fertile ground for the seedlings of nonviolent resistance. The struggle for Indian independence was taking its first shaky steps. “Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat,” wrote the Mahatma, “for it is momentary.”

83

En route to my hotel in downtown Ahmedabad I take a detour into one of the city’s many mosques. It is early afternoon, and the place is virtually deserted. I wander around, thumbing through my guidebook, absentmindedly admiring the ornately carved domes and ceilings. In the sanctuary I pause. Only one man is praying. He sits cross-legged on a mat, clad entirely in white, his back to me. From the elaborately wrought latticework above, shafts of light cascade directly onto the small plot he has staked out. For a minute I am motionless, transfixed at the sight. He is silent, head nodding in staccato rhythms of devotion. I think of Bakr and his Islam. I imagine the room filled, emptying, filling again, as reliable a cycle as the moon tugging at the tides, over and over through the centuries. How many men, how many times, what inconceivable range of grievances, petitions, joys? What cumulative force of the heart? I think of the Kotel, Boudhanath, Notre-Dame, the magnificent viscera of dozens of Hindu temples I have visited—of the clasped hands and closed eyes, the clutched texts and tokens, the lips moving with all the will of a marionette—of every bit I have devoured, greedily, like a connoisseur of zeal, like a practiced pickpocket of the believing. What does he know that I do not? What does this air, what do these walls know? And suddenly I see him turning, and looking at me, with ferocious concentration. For a breath’s eon those startlingly green eyes bore into mine, and something is exchanged. I have been pilfering, hoping no one would notice, but now he sees, accepts, hands it to me, and I am dizzy with the measure of it. Take, say those eyes. There is no need to steal from your own garden.

84

I am in Rishikesh when I decide it’s well-nigh time to tend that garden.

Traveling alone in the subcontinent has taught me a great deal. I have learned that fear doesn’t have to stop me. It is often with me— yapping shrilly, nipping at my heels—but what lies beyond it is more profound, and I can choose to listen to that. I am still not sure what I am seeking here. Truth, I think, of some kind. But while my course may be meandering and often confused, it somehow seems to be bearing fruit. I realize at some point along the way that I am happy. Traveling alone gives me confidence, the confidence to discover and listen to what I really want. What I have at times thought I wanted, what most other Americans seem to want, always left me feeling barren and groundless. India teaches me that striking out on my own is fertile. And still I sense there is more.

Rishikesh is a thriving hub for seekers. The Beatles came here to study transcendental meditation with the Maharishi, and throngs of the questing hopeful have since followed. The town is crawling with shaven, saffron-robed westerners, and it is aclutter with western delights— specifically of the gastronomical variety—in which I indulge voraciously after long weeks of curry. Rishikesh is a haven for expatriates, and, like other such havens, it strikes me as awash in irony. Refugees of western society—with its grinding materialism, its ambition and consumerism—come here to live out their fantasy alternative lifestyles. Yet it is the same unjust global socioeconomic system they typically despise that enables them to live out their ideals here— on the backs of a brown underclass. And moreover (familiar guilt kicking in my chest) that enables me to travel for rhapsodic months at a stretch.

Philosophical concerns aside, I am grateful when I reach Rishikesh. I am in desperate need of a reprieve. In the past couple of weeks, I have begun to feel that things are happening around me, rather than to me. They are happening around me in a gummy glaze of hammering pandemonium. Lately, India has stuffed my senses and then some.

I check into one of Rishikesh’s many ashrams and head out to locate a meditation retreat. Before leaving for Nepal, I did my first full day of meditation at Spirit Rock, a Buddhist insight meditation center north of San Francisco. The day proved to be roughly a hand’s breadth from hell. Every “sit” I was positively trampled by some new horror: rage, grief, and fear each flooded me in merciless succession. Meanwhile those around me, to all appearances, passed the day in blissful tranquility. I seethed with loathing, plotted petty vengeances. It was a torturous experience, but it alerted me that I was onto something. Since then I have been meditating intermittently. I come to Rishikesh hoping to find myself a retreat.

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But everything here is yoga, yoga, yoga. Hatha, Kundalini, Tantra, Bhakti, Raja, pranayama, asanas. Yoga this, yoga that, yoga here, yoga there. I like yoga, but I need something rather more intensive to penetrate this fog. I come across a single flyer for an ongoing insight meditation retreat, which sounds about right, but there’s no phone number. Just an address: Phoolchatty ashram, a few miles north of Rishikesh. Well then. It doesn’t take much to defeat me right now. I return somewhat dejectedly to my ashram.

Over the next couple of days I dabble in the local recreational opportunities. I chant “Shiva om” and “Hari rama” with an energetic circle of the dreadlocked, pierced, and tribal-tattooed in our ashram’s temple. I attend a yoga class and can’t stop giggling as the muscled teacher proudly removes his shirt to demonstrate something impossible, as the Australian girl next to me farts away shamelessly, as we close the session with a meditation and I realize that the notion of me trying to stop thinking is in itself hysterical. I go for a lengthy stroll along the banks of the Ganges with a Spanish friend, and we happen upon the hut of a sadhu. We are invited to enter, and we sit in the dim space sharing a chillum of charas with a convivial circle of loin-clothed ascetics. We discuss Rumi, the Internet, the nature of life and death, and each of them takes a turn trying on my oversized black sunglasses.

I am soaking up the sun in the ashram garden one afternoon, recovering from the strenuous exertions of backpacker life—sleep, eat, loll about, yoga, eat some more, loll—when I overhear an English guy talking about the retreat at Phoolchatty. He has his backpack on and is about to head over there. I perk up. Really? Does he know more details?

“Yes, I went up to visit. The teachers seem to know what they’re on about, and it’s a beautiful place, really peaceful. You should go.”

“Is there a format? I mean, what are they doing?”

“It’s your typical silent retreat. Sitting meditation, walking meditation, interviews with teachers.”

“Silent?”

“Yes, most of the time.”

“I see.” Days of silence with complete strangers? Actually I don’t see, can hardly imagine that at all, am aghast at the very idea. But the “peaceful” part lures. I pack my bag, bid adieu to the yogis, and hunt down a taxi.

I spend ten days at Phoolchatty, and these ten days change my life. For months I have had recurring dreams of massive tidal waves. In my dreams I keep running, panicking, running. At Phoolchatty I become still, and the waves break over me in relentless succession. I sit in the meditation hall and I watch my breath and I watch myself and I am astounded at all I see. For many years I have wondered what to believe in, whether there is anything to believe in. Ten days of silence, practicing awareness, and I somehow relocate what I always knew. The unmanageable love for my classmates in Standard 4P. For the strangers, now, sitting next to me. The bursting wonder at the world around me, at the sky, the river, the intricately patterned minutiae of any given patch of earth. The exotic foreignness and the intimate familiarity of it all: a new face, a rose, my own breath, my hands, my thoughts. My heart. It is a wrenching time, as well, because I see heinous chunks of myself which I have thus far kept hidden. I see how hard I drive myself— to be good, to achieve, to win attention, to figure things out. I see how I am constantly judging and punishing myself for perceived failures. I sit on a rock at the edge of the Ganges and howl. “Give it all space,” says Jaya, one of the teachers. “Be very gentle.” Later, much to my astonishment, I glimpse what I can only call my fundamental goodness. Except it isn’t mine. It belongs, as I had suspected, to all of us. Indeed it is bigger than all of us.

I sit on the sandy shore of the river and meditate on the sinewy currents, on the constant pummel and give of the water, and every now and then I release, for a rapturous blink, enough to feel it. And then I know, although I will spend most of my time forgetting: there is no such thing as separation.

87

I have been rambling about the world looking for something I couldn’t identify. Something more. And here it is. Within, without, with all.

“All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family,” said Gandhi, the Mahatma, the great soul, “and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul.” The meaning of our interconnection, I see at Phoolchatty, leads directly to ethical action. It dawns on me that social justice work is not simply a compassionate response; it is a logical response, a natural response—the only response, really. In harming each other we hurt ourselves. And in running from the ways we are hurt, we harm others. “As human beings,” said Gandhi, “our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the atomic age—as in being able to remake ourselves.” Yes, I think. That’s it. As the Mahatma maintained, remaking ourselves— our views, choices, actions—is how we remake the world. In that case, I wonder, what should I do? Should I sit in meditation until I remotely embody my ideals, or should I work, flawed as I am, to ease the suffering of others?

As usual, I chew over this with angst while continuing on my way, hoping life will answer what I cannot intellectually resolve. My time at Phoolchatty does, however, show me that change is possible. In holding everything that comes up during my meditations with gentle awareness, as much as I am capable, I start to see a shift in myself, subtle transformations in how I perceive and react to the world. Old patterns begin to release their grip on me, rusted gears creaking apart just a few millimeters.

But this doesn’t come cheap. Holding some of the fear, grief, and anger that I’ve spent a goodly proportion of my life running from— and that I have thus, in many ways, allowed to govern me—is perhaps the hardest thing I’ve ever done. No wonder we believe it is easier to push away what we do not want to see in ourselves. Perhaps that’s why we construct systems that divide us, I think, as I sit on the ashram’s rooftop one evening near the end of my stay at Phoolchatty. I am surveying the valley beneath as the sun sets, suffusing all with an apocalyptic blush. We project the undesirable within us outward, onto an “other”; we build walls, put the “other” behind them, aim our arsenals over them. Yet this kind of security, like any material security, is an illusion. I can still step out my front door and get run over by a bus. Moreover, it is an illusion that breeds further fragmentation. In separating ourselves from the “other,” we not only sow conflict, we also cut ourselves off from what lies within—and close ourselves to the possibility that this may teach and even transform us.

88

While I am discovering what the world’s wisdom traditions have maintained for millennia—that separation is ultimately not real, that it is fueled by our own fear—the planet continues to fracture further into discord. The U.S. is rapidly isolating itself, busily striving to remake the world according to its ends. And Gandhi’s beloved India is watching with envy and resentment from the sidelines, watching as the earth shifts beneath it, and an old fissure, an old hatred, ruptures anew.

I am in Delhi at the beginning of March 2002, about to catch a plane out of India, when all hell breaks loose in Gujarat. Since January, India and Pakistan have taken small, steady steps away from the precipice, but Hindu-Muslim tensions within India have been amply stoked by the conflict. The violence is rooted in Ayodhya, a small town in the northern province of Uttar Pradesh. From 1528 until 1992, Ayodhya was home to the Babri mosque. This mosque was situated on the same spot that some Hindus maintain was the birthplace of Ram, one of their most revered deities, and thus it became a flash-point for Hindu-Muslim tensions. In 1984 Hindu nationalist extremists formed a committee to “liberate” the site by building a temple where the mosque stood. On December 6, 1992, as the police looked on, a crowd of Hindus demolished the Babri mosque using whatever they could—shovels, pickaxes, their bare hands. Anti-Muslim riots followed, which prompted violence all across India. Over the following days, two thousand people were killed, most of them Muslims.

In 1998 the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power as the dominant force in India’s coalition government. Prominent leaders vowed to build a Ram temple on the disputed site. In February 2002 hundreds of Hindu volunteers headed to Ayodhya to begin construction of the temple. On February 27 a train filled with Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya to Gujarat was set on fire, allegedly by Muslim insurgents (an official forensic investigation would later reveal that the fire was started inside the train, not outside where a Muslim mob had gathered). Fifty-eight were killed. On February 28 Hindu gangs began wreaking their revenge.

89

Over the next few days, two thousand Muslims were slaughtered, mostly in Ahmedabad. Shouting Jai Shri Ram, Praise Lord Ram, hundreds of young men rampaged through the streets, pouring kerosene on Muslims and burning them alive. Children were not spared. Women were stripped and gang-raped, then hacked and burned to death. Muslim homes and shops were looted and burned down. One hundred eighty mosques were destroyed. According to eyewitness accounts, the police either turned their backs or actively facilitated the carnage, directing rioters to Muslim homes and businesses and even joining them. An estimated thirty thousand were left homeless and seriously injured in Ahmedabad alone.

The official response, when it finally came, was abysmally inadequate. According to all independent reports, the government either stood by as the nightmare unfolded or actively colluded in it. Gujarati Chief Minister Narendra Modi, a nationalist extremist, called the riots a “natural response” to the train incident and praised Gujarat’s fifty million Hindus for their “remarkable restraint in the face of grave provocation.” Later, both Muslims and Hindus would accuse the BJP state and national governments of exploiting the violence for political advantage.

I am sitting in the courtyard of my hotel in Delhi when I first read the headlines. It is March 3, the morning of my last day in India. I am eating yogurt with granola and honey and musing blissfully over all those beloved to me whose faces I cannot wait to see. It is a comfortable hotel; on my last days, I have finally conceded to pay an astronomical five dollars for a room. The walls of the courtyard are lined with potted plants and tourist posters. Parakeets twitter sociably from a spacious cage. Backpackers are laughing and talking in an assortment of languages, a harmonious medley of accents. “Can you believe it? In the middle of a busy intersection, two cows, and everyone bloody well driving around them, barely even a hoot…” I pick up the Times of India from the newspaper table.

90

Riots. Bloodshed. Gujarat.

“And then he says, ‘Listen, I like you, but I met this girl in Dharamsala and we kind of decided to meet up again in Delhi.’ And it’s not like I was really even into him, but—”

Rape. Mutilation. The death toll at four hundred and rising.

“I was thinking I’d get my mother one of those tapestry things, you know the kind with the hand-sewn beadwork, but I’ve already collected so much, and as for trusting the Indian postal system—”

Hindu gangs. Jai Shri Ram. Kerosene.

Muslims. Burned alive. Ahmedabad.

Muslims. Ahmedabad.

Ahmedabad.

Abdul Bakr is sitting across from me now, talking to me about his Islam. About his country and his neighbor Ravi and old hatred. His hands are moving gracefully as he speaks, not fast enough to follow his expressions, though, not fast enough to trace the fluid topography of his face. Nazima is next to him, hanging on to his knee, staring up, just beginning to be scared. Iman has her back to me. She is bustling, busy with the food, the chai, the washing. I watch them as I cry, softly, into my breakfast. Now they are leaving me, but still Iman keeps working, Nazima keeps staring, mouth slowly dropping open, and Bakr keeps talking, face alight with an abrupt joy and ears bent to the ground, to the ground.