All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (17 page)

After Dave had left, I took out my notepad and began to catch up on my notes. Manna was filling up now with the evening crowd, some of whom I recognised from the night before. The room we were in was floored with cow dung, in the traditional Indian fashion, on top of which lay mauve and lime silk cushions, squat wooden stools and two low tables glimmering under candlelight. People sipped clay cups of chai, fruit juice and lemon and ginger tea spicy enough to placate even the hardiest chillum-smoker’s sore throat. It was in stark contrast with the poverty outside and represented both the privilege and predicament of being a traveller moving on the strength of a foreign currency. People ordered green salads, couscous and real coffee, highly sought-after commodities for travellers keen for a taste of home.

To my right an English guy named Mike was continuing where Dave had left off, only this time, rather than boasting about his drug smuggling, the theme was a more common one for this particular locale, that of spiritual prowess. In Australia, I recalled, backpackers boasted about the biggest wave surfed, or the highest bridge dived off with a bungee rope. In India, predictably, such bragging is delivered in deadly solemn tones, and relates to how long one has meditated, or how outlandish a yoga posture one can sustain.

Around the table was Chris, an earnest young Californian from San Diego, Sue-Ellen from Vermont, Mike from Birmingham and an older couple, Ron and Lily from Switzerland. All of them, to varying degrees, were dressed in the accoutrements of New Age spirituality: kaftans, sacred crystals, amulets. Ron, a seventy-year-old Swiss chemist, wore Tibetan beads made of yak bone, which he claimed had belonged to an important lama. Together we seemed to represent a bizarre cross-section of Western life, but all of us were united by the feeling that there was something here, some truth or lesson to be found in India that would enrich our lives. Only Mike seemed intent on establishing himself as further down the path than anyone else, and I found my hackles rising at once.

‘I was lost before I met Papa-ji,’ Mike announced, referring to one of Ramana Maharshi’s most well-known disciples, who had died, apparently enlightened, in 1997. ‘Before then I’d travelled around most of India. Stayed in scores of ashrams. I met Ramesh Balsekar, Guru-mai, Shree-maa. But while I recognised their holiness, they weren’t the guru for me.’

‘But why do we even need a guru?’ said Lily, who had a soft, musical voice. ‘Can’t we get there by ourselves?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Chris, the Californian. ‘Most of the Eastern religions stress the need for a teacher. You wouldn’t try and hike through the mountains without a guide, would you? And the mind is a far more dangerous place . . .’

‘If you’d met Papa-ji, you would
know
why,’ said Mike. ‘I mean
one
minute in his presence took me further than ten years in India. “Wake up, you are already free!” he said to me. For a moment or two after he said that, I
was
free. I was pure consciousness. No ego!’

‘And then it came back?’ I said, without intentional irony.

He glared at me. ‘Sure. The ego came back, of course. But now, at least, I know what I’m searching for. I’ve tasted it . . .’

‘What about you?’ I asked Sue-Ellen, who was a middle-aged schoolteacher at a Vermont high school much of the time, but a keen traveller for the rest. She had brown ringlets and a soft, melancholic face. All this time she’d hardly said anything.

‘I’m not such an expert in all this stuff, Piers,’ she said quietly. ‘I mean I was forty before I even began on the path. But I just felt, you know, like there was something
missing
in my life. Everything was fine – I mean I wasn’t . . . real miserable, but I just felt . . . you know “is this
IT 
?” It wasn’t enough. And then I went to a Buddhist retreat one day, on the instigation of a friend, and I just saw a whole new level of existence. It was like my brain had only been tuned on to this one radio station for all these years and suddenly I saw that there were all these other ones . . . more subtle, harder to hear, but so much more beautiful. So then I came to India in my vacation – that was five years ago – and I’ve been meditating ever since. My friends think I’ve joined a cult or something. I started throwing a lot of my stuff away, just trying to be more aware of what I really need. And they look at me like I’ve become a Hare Krishna.’ She laughed. ‘But that’s OK.’

‘And why here? It’s not exactly on the backpacker trail.’

‘It was the funniest thing,’ she said. ‘I was in this bookshop in Montpelier, Vermont and I found a book about Ramana Maharshi. So I sat down and started reading it and, well, I just knew, then and there, that I had to come here. You’ve seen his face . . . Well, one look at it was all it took to make me want to come here.’

I patted my pocket, remembering the picture which the Wandering Swami had given me. I took it out, and Sue-Ellen and I gazed at the benevolent face for a time, smiling out at us from the past.

‘You know, when Sri Ramana died, Henri Cartier-Bresson happened to be staying at the ashram,’ she said, reaching for her journal. ‘He saw something quite incredible.’

She leafed through the pages thoughtfully, scanning her own girlish handwriting. Finally, she found the passage she was looking for:

It was a most astonishing experience,’ wrote Cartier-Bresson.

I was in the open space in front of my house, when my friends drew my attention to the sky, where I saw a vividly luminous shooting star with a luminous tail, unlike any shooting star I had before seen, coming from the South, moving slowly across the sky and, reaching the top of Arunachala, disappeared behind it. Because of its singularity we all guessed its import and immediately looked at our watches – it was 8.47 – and then raced to the Ashram only to find that our premonition had been only too sadly true: the Master had passed into mahanirvana at that very minute.

The Deepam Festival

The morning of the Deepam dawned fine and clear, with the South Indian sun rapidly searing off the haze. I’d been up since dawn, watching the light change on Mrs Vasikari’s porch. At sunrise, the grey sky purpled, then turned blood-orange, while a gathering of common babblers clustered at my feet to feed off crumbs of chapatti. Through binoculars I saw a white-breasted kingfisher come to rest on a nearby telephone wire, with the torso of what looked to be a cricket disappearing into its beak. Its plumage was the most iridescent shade of turquoise, and its musical call,
chake-ake-ake-ake-ake
, was the only sound I could hear. A tranquil start on what I knew might be anything but a tranquil day.

Soon after sunrise, Mrs Vasikari appeared, pink dressing-gowned and yawning, just in time to greet the boy who brought the buffalo milk in a small metal can. It was rich with cream and sloshed against the lid. I felt like a member of the family as she patted me gently on the shoulder. ‘I will make tea,’ she said. ‘Today, you will be needing much energy for the walk.’

What she referred to was the principal activity of the Deepam for the several hundred thousand-strong group of devotees who had now arrived: that of a fourteen-kilometre perambulation around Arunachala hill. During the walk, we would pass some 360 holy tanks,
mandapas
(pillared outdoor halls or pavilions for public rituals) and ashrams, as well as eight important Shiva
lingams
(squat, phallic shapes resembling worn river stones). More enticingly, as far as I was concerned, legend suggests that the walk burns off the karma of 10,000 births.

‘No, no. You should not be wearing those,’ said Mrs Vasikari, pointing to my boots in horror. ‘It is
much
more auspicious to be walking barefoot.’

‘Barefoot!’

‘I have done it too many times,’ she said with a casual wave of her hand. ‘When one has Bhagwan in one’s heart, blisters are impossible.’

As I considered the walk ahead of me, I realised that practices such as this – a form of pilgrimage – were far more common aspects of Hindu spiritual life than some of the more esoteric things I had seen. While Hinduism has numerous weird and wonderful subgroups, it’s largely a devotional religion in which everyone finds their own form of the divine and pours all their human energies into its worship. Most Hindus will perform a pilgrimage at one stage of their lives, following a journey to a supremely sacred place, or if following the advice of the Mahabharata (one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India), visiting a number of them. Hindus call this
tirthyatra
–
yatra
embodying the notion of travel,
tirtha
, as I had discovered in Varanasi, that of a meeting place between the human and non-human worlds.

As with Arunachala, many of these sites are linked to the landscape of India itself: rivers, caves, sacred groves. There are seven particularly holy rivers in India, seven holy cities, four
dhamas
, or dwelling places, of the gods. For those who make these sometimes arduous journeys, pilgrimage allows a temporary moving outside of family responsibilities and attachments, a useful social function. It may also be done with the ashes of a family member in tow, so that special merit may be gained for the departed soul.

Finally, there is something about making the journey with
others
that is important. With the expansion of public transport in the twentieth century, pilgrimage has even become one of the most popular forms of tourism in India, something to be done with family, both a temporal and a spiritual adventure in one. My part in today’s events would be to share in this, and to feel – perhaps for the first time – part of a multitude who were trying to unite with something larger than themselves. It seemed to me that this experience, which wasn’t esoteric at all, was a primal aspect of my journey.

After a quick breakfast of curds and honey, and reluctantly leaving my shoes behind, I strolled along the main causeway, quickly joining the enormous crowds that had already amassed. Although the pace was slow, the ground was pebbled with cow pats and sharp stones, and I quickly cursed my decision to go barefoot. Bhagwan or not, there were going to be blisters by the end of the day.

Nonetheless, the atmosphere was jubilant. As with many Indian religious festivals, the sacred element of the occasion was happily married with an air of fiesta. Everywhere, men, women and children walked side by side, laughing merrily with each other, catching up with old friends and stopping to buy snacks from the never-ending array of vendors who lined the sides of the road. (Food, as ever in Indian life, remains paramount in religious festivals.) Hindu chants blared from loudspeakers, while at certain way stations bullocks and goats were traded for fistfuls of rupees.

Mixed in with this inordinate mass, Saivite
sadhus
from all over India had come to join the throng. This was, in effect, an important work day for them, with Shiva himself in attendance. Many of them wore their hair long and flowing, in imitation of their deity, while others puffed small fragrant pipes. One terrifying individual wore sharp hooks through his flesh weighted with dried lemons, and I walked behind him for a time, transfixed by his slow, methodical steps and the empty stare of his eyes.

After several hours, I fell into discussion with a girl walking along side me. Neela, although Indian in appearance, wasn’t a national at all but a doctor from Los Angeles, completing her residency in Tamil Nadu. She’d been to India many times, visiting her grandparents in Bangalore, but somehow she’d never been out of the cities. ‘I’m actually kind of glad I ran into you,’ she confided, ‘because the locals have been looking at me like I’m some kind of freak-show. I should have dressed a bit more appropriately for the occasion.’

Wearing a fairly skimpy lycra tank top and designer jeans, she would have fitted in perfectly in a Mumbai nightclub, but was a fish out of water here. Although she spoke Kannada (one of the fourteen official languages of India), her knowledge of India was confined to an affluent corner of Bangalore, around which she was usually driven by her grandparents’ chauffeur. In Tiruvanammalai, a traditional South Indian pilgrimage town, modernity might have arrived in the form of satellite dishes and mobile phones – and even in the form of ragged-looking foreigners like myself – but to see an Indian woman dressed and speaking like an American was a shock too far. The young men stared at her with both astonishment and abject lust.

When I told her why I was here, it was her turn to look at me with surprise. ‘I’ve never been to a yoga class in my life,’ she told me. ‘We’re Hindus of course but only in the sense that most of my American friends are Christians – it’s a cultural thing. We celebrate
diwali
but that’s about it. To be honest, my parents are of that generation that were so proud to make it to the States that they’ve spent most of their lives trying to be American.’

‘But you’re here,’ I said. ‘What made you come to the Deepam on your own?’

‘I was curious,’ she said. ‘Actually it was my grandmother who told me I must promise to come to the Karthigai Deepam just once in my life. This year, I’ve been working in a clinic in Bangalore, so I figured now was as good a time as ever. I have to admit, though, this is a different world for me – I’m not sure where I fit in.’