It’s been a while. Life in Wellington appeared to have stayed my restlessness. Here, at the end of the world, New Zealand was holding my gaze, at least for the moment.
But soon enough I was plotting a temporary escape. My gaze was wandering over the Tasman Sea and the Indian Ocean, to the seventh largest country the world. India had intrigued me for some time now, and hearing the multitude of stories from others only made the desire to see it for myself stronger.
It felt like a now or never moment. I had one month, which seemed like a short but not totally impossible window of time to try and experience at least some of a country home to a fifth of the world’s total population.
21 million of these people live in Mumbai, which, like many other of the world’s sprawling megacities, has the rich and poor living very much cheek by jowl. This is a country where 73% of the total wealth is owned by just 1% of the population, and the scale of this inequality becomes clear as your plane descends through the hazy Mumbai smog.
Just like Mumbai’s skyline, India is often described as everything, all at once. Cacophonous, centring, confronting and calming. Its sense of timelessness in its enduring religious devotion is matched by the urban pockets of modernity, living their own contradictions of inequality and possibility.
For now, I made my escape from Mumbai. I felt I owed the city a visit, but not just yet. So, I boarded my third and final plane to Goa. After a long, restoring sleep I woke shortly after sunrise. Cows lazed on the sand of Agonda beach while dogs roamed around, a few early morning swimmers emerged from the rolling waves. The sand was still cool from the previous night’s rain. I ate my first Indian breakfast, paratha with spicy pickles and curd. The paratha was hot to the touch and demanded a patience I did not possess.
Goa was a bubble. A beautiful, relaxing, peaceful bubble, but a bubble nonetheless. This was not why I had come, so it was time to go.
*
21 million of these people live in Mumbai, which, like many other of the world’s sprawling megacities, has the rich and poor living very much cheek by jowl. This is a country where 73% of the total wealth is owned by just 1% of the population, and the scale of this inequality becomes clear as your plane descends through the hazy Mumbai smog.
Just like Mumbai’s skyline, India is often described as everything, all at once. Cacophonous, centring, confronting and calming. Its sense of timelessness in its enduring religious devotion is matched by the urban pockets of modernity, living their own contradictions of inequality and possibility.
For now, I made my escape from Mumbai. I felt I owed the city a visit, but not just yet. So, I boarded my third and final plane to Goa. After a long, restoring sleep I woke shortly after sunrise. Cows lazed on the sand of Agonda beach while dogs roamed around, a few early morning swimmers emerged from the rolling waves. The sand was still cool from the previous night’s rain. I ate my first Indian breakfast, paratha with spicy pickles and curd. The paratha was hot to the touch and demanded a patience I did not possess.
Goa was a bubble. A beautiful, relaxing, peaceful bubble, but a bubble nonetheless. This was not why I had come, so it was time to go.
*
“Chai, chai, chai.”
The streets of Hospet were already bustling at 5am. The night bus stirred from its collective slumber and sipped at reviving, spicy, sweet tea. Rickshaw drivers handed out maps and urged travellers to remember them at the final stop, thirty minutes away.
Highway gave way to dusty road as we entered Hampi, 16 square miles of 15th and 16th century ruins described by UNESCO as an "austere, grandiose site" of the last great Hindu kingdom in south India, and at one point, the second largest known medieval city.
A long, hot afternoon exploring the site led me to countless temples, elephant stables and public baths. In Badami, we wandered around cave temples dating back to the 6th century, listening as the noise of the town drifted away the higher we climbed up the hillside, and into what felt like another world. One where the horn honking, selfie-taking present seemed to melt away into a sense of timelessness.
*
Another place where time often seems to stand still is the night bus.
I looked at my phone after the hundred thousandth speed bump of the night flew me up out of my bed and unceremoniously into the air, made all the worse by my accursed preference for sleeping on my side. Just an hour to go until we were due to arrive in Chennai and my skeletal system could rest easy again.
A four hour ride took us to Tiruvannamalai, home to the Arunachalesvara Temple and Arunchala Hill, where Shiva was said to have appeared as a column of fire to light up a world that been plunged into darkness. Later, the town became home to the Sri Ramana ashram, evident by the presence of a few westerners cycling around in linen clothes to drink tulsi tea and eat pumpernickel bread and momos at the German bakery come Nepalese cafe.
The waiting list for the ashram is often months long. In a shady compound devotees of Sri Ramana wander the grounds and browse the library of teachings. I sat in the grand hall as the nightly Vedaparayana, or Vedic chanting, took place. The hall was busy. Devotees chanted intensely as they walked around and around the Ramana’s shrine. I closed my eyes for a second and submitted myself to the rhythm of it. I felt, for the first time in the trip, a sense of tranquility and peace that was to be something of a feature of my time in India.
*
“It’s got to be around here somewhere. You hear it before you see it.” I reassured my dining companion for the twentieth time as we scurried across Madurai’s streets, which were heaving with lanes of honking, crawling evening traffic. I’d asked, mimed, hoped and dreamed. But perhaps we just weren’t going to get lucky this time.
Then, passing by the hectic bus station, there it was. The sound of happiness, drifting over on the night air.
Chop, chop, chop. Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Kothu parotta. If you wanted to know how to make Indian bread even better, try shredding it and frying it on a searingly hot iron griddle with egg, spices, curry leaves, vegetables and serving it with a spicy gravy. Have some meat with it if you are so inclined. Serve on a banana leaf with extra gravy on the side. Uncomplicated, pure bliss.
But the 20,000 people a day who visit Madurai are mostly here for the Meenakshi Temple, one of the most important religious sites in India. Each night, the image of Shiva is transported on a gilded palanquin in a candlelit evening ceremony across the temple grounds to spend the night with his wife, the goddess Meenakshi. Shiva is sent on his way with drumming, and offerings of sweetly scented flowers. The offerings are blessed and Shiva is transported into his wife’s chamber. Meenakshi’s nose ring is then removed, lest it cut her lover’s face in the passions of the night.
*
So far my time had mostly been spent exploring old India. But it was time for something new. So, I took an overnight bus from the hills of Tamil Nadu to Kerala for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale arts festival. Known as the Queen of the Arabian Sea, Kochi’s crumbling colonial architecture gives a clue to its past as an important spice trading centre. It was the first European colony in India, and the first of the princely states to join India willingly after independence in 1947.
The exhibition was both an international and national mix of installations, sculptures, audio visual pieces and photographs, and over half of the artists were women. A traveling bibliotheca of female writers and feminist thinkers, the Sister Library, was a particular highlight, as were the many thought-provoking pieces which explored India’s national identity, and whether indeed, there is one.
Bringing together this diverse multitude of voices, the curator’s note asked whether, in our modern, hyperconnected, talkative world, anyone was still actually listening. Like all good art should do, it certainly got me thinking (and perhaps doing a bit less talking).
*
Perhaps the incessant chatter of the world had got to me. A couple of days later, after a blissful Christmas in the middle of Kerala’s backwaters, drifting noiselessly along glassy lakes in the ethereal morning sun, I found myself pulling up in a tuktuk outside a yoga and meditation retreat in Varkala.
There, perched along the cliffs of the Indian Ocean, I spent three days, if not in silence, then certainly in a more verbally hushed place then I had been for a while. Still, tropical mornings were spent meditating in the cool, lush verdant gardens, listening to coconuts drop to the ground, opening my eyes rebelliously to watch the azure kingfishers perched in the trees.
During those couple of days, I didn’t learn to touch my toes behind my head. What I did learn was to how to pay more attention to my body and mind, and how to take life a little slower. To listen more. To be present. And for that I am grateful.
*
After a 30 hour, 1,500km train journey across four states, I arrived back where I had started, in Mumbai, and was immediately embraced by its fierce energy.
I spent my final days in India exploring this furious, beautiful, chaotic megacity, watching cricketers practice on the sprawling maidens and cycling through dawn streets. I found a good thali place and went there everyday, always stopping for a sitaphal fruit and chai on the way home. I turned 28 and felt blessed to be seeing in a new year in another corner of this beautiful planet.
*
I loved India. Even in those rare half hours when I didn’t. When I was hot, lost, tired or confused. Those moments were always healed by a friendly face and a warm smile, or an offer of a shared cone of roasted chickpeas on the bus.
As a traveller, India is wonderfully disarming in its demand to focus on the present. Tomorrow is another day. So be in the moment, talk less, listen and feel more.
The streets of Hospet were already bustling at 5am. The night bus stirred from its collective slumber and sipped at reviving, spicy, sweet tea. Rickshaw drivers handed out maps and urged travellers to remember them at the final stop, thirty minutes away.
Highway gave way to dusty road as we entered Hampi, 16 square miles of 15th and 16th century ruins described by UNESCO as an "austere, grandiose site" of the last great Hindu kingdom in south India, and at one point, the second largest known medieval city.
A long, hot afternoon exploring the site led me to countless temples, elephant stables and public baths. In Badami, we wandered around cave temples dating back to the 6th century, listening as the noise of the town drifted away the higher we climbed up the hillside, and into what felt like another world. One where the horn honking, selfie-taking present seemed to melt away into a sense of timelessness.
*
Another place where time often seems to stand still is the night bus.
I looked at my phone after the hundred thousandth speed bump of the night flew me up out of my bed and unceremoniously into the air, made all the worse by my accursed preference for sleeping on my side. Just an hour to go until we were due to arrive in Chennai and my skeletal system could rest easy again.
A four hour ride took us to Tiruvannamalai, home to the Arunachalesvara Temple and Arunchala Hill, where Shiva was said to have appeared as a column of fire to light up a world that been plunged into darkness. Later, the town became home to the Sri Ramana ashram, evident by the presence of a few westerners cycling around in linen clothes to drink tulsi tea and eat pumpernickel bread and momos at the German bakery come Nepalese cafe.
The waiting list for the ashram is often months long. In a shady compound devotees of Sri Ramana wander the grounds and browse the library of teachings. I sat in the grand hall as the nightly Vedaparayana, or Vedic chanting, took place. The hall was busy. Devotees chanted intensely as they walked around and around the Ramana’s shrine. I closed my eyes for a second and submitted myself to the rhythm of it. I felt, for the first time in the trip, a sense of tranquility and peace that was to be something of a feature of my time in India.
*
“It’s got to be around here somewhere. You hear it before you see it.” I reassured my dining companion for the twentieth time as we scurried across Madurai’s streets, which were heaving with lanes of honking, crawling evening traffic. I’d asked, mimed, hoped and dreamed. But perhaps we just weren’t going to get lucky this time.
Then, passing by the hectic bus station, there it was. The sound of happiness, drifting over on the night air.
Chop, chop, chop. Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Kothu parotta. If you wanted to know how to make Indian bread even better, try shredding it and frying it on a searingly hot iron griddle with egg, spices, curry leaves, vegetables and serving it with a spicy gravy. Have some meat with it if you are so inclined. Serve on a banana leaf with extra gravy on the side. Uncomplicated, pure bliss.
But the 20,000 people a day who visit Madurai are mostly here for the Meenakshi Temple, one of the most important religious sites in India. Each night, the image of Shiva is transported on a gilded palanquin in a candlelit evening ceremony across the temple grounds to spend the night with his wife, the goddess Meenakshi. Shiva is sent on his way with drumming, and offerings of sweetly scented flowers. The offerings are blessed and Shiva is transported into his wife’s chamber. Meenakshi’s nose ring is then removed, lest it cut her lover’s face in the passions of the night.
*
So far my time had mostly been spent exploring old India. But it was time for something new. So, I took an overnight bus from the hills of Tamil Nadu to Kerala for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale arts festival. Known as the Queen of the Arabian Sea, Kochi’s crumbling colonial architecture gives a clue to its past as an important spice trading centre. It was the first European colony in India, and the first of the princely states to join India willingly after independence in 1947.
Bringing together this diverse multitude of voices, the curator’s note asked whether, in our modern, hyperconnected, talkative world, anyone was still actually listening. Like all good art should do, it certainly got me thinking (and perhaps doing a bit less talking).
*
Perhaps the incessant chatter of the world had got to me. A couple of days later, after a blissful Christmas in the middle of Kerala’s backwaters, drifting noiselessly along glassy lakes in the ethereal morning sun, I found myself pulling up in a tuktuk outside a yoga and meditation retreat in Varkala.
There, perched along the cliffs of the Indian Ocean, I spent three days, if not in silence, then certainly in a more verbally hushed place then I had been for a while. Still, tropical mornings were spent meditating in the cool, lush verdant gardens, listening to coconuts drop to the ground, opening my eyes rebelliously to watch the azure kingfishers perched in the trees.
During those couple of days, I didn’t learn to touch my toes behind my head. What I did learn was to how to pay more attention to my body and mind, and how to take life a little slower. To listen more. To be present. And for that I am grateful.
*
After a 30 hour, 1,500km train journey across four states, I arrived back where I had started, in Mumbai, and was immediately embraced by its fierce energy.
I spent my final days in India exploring this furious, beautiful, chaotic megacity, watching cricketers practice on the sprawling maidens and cycling through dawn streets. I found a good thali place and went there everyday, always stopping for a sitaphal fruit and chai on the way home. I turned 28 and felt blessed to be seeing in a new year in another corner of this beautiful planet.
*
I loved India. Even in those rare half hours when I didn’t. When I was hot, lost, tired or confused. Those moments were always healed by a friendly face and a warm smile, or an offer of a shared cone of roasted chickpeas on the bus.
As a traveller, India is wonderfully disarming in its demand to focus on the present. Tomorrow is another day. So be in the moment, talk less, listen and feel more.
