Part 20. Uttar Pradesh to Banares. An unexpected rest

 The next journey was a gruelling three days of buses and trains, heading up to the northern border of India near Nepal. I was feeling increasingly tired and found the lack of personal space and constant enquiries into reasons for travelling quite tiresome. We spent a couple of days at Indore and rested. Even visiting the local cinema and cafe resulted in having to fend off Hillary’s unwanted advances from Indian males of all ages and we were looking forward to some time on an ashram run by the Shri Ram Chandra mission, where an unusual teacher, coming from a Muslim background, ran a meditation centre. We had the address from mutual friends in the UK who had spent time there and had introduced us to ‘Sahaj Marg’ a more holistic form of Raj Yoga.

We arrived in Shahjahanpur , a classic rural Indian town, and made our way to the mission. We were welcomed unconditionally, fed and given a small basic room but with an en suite western toilet and shower. After a couple of days we were granted an audience with ‘Babuji’ as Shri Ram Chandra, the founder of the centre was affectionately known. We had seen him across the courtyard on occasions, sitting in a deck chair or cross legged on a mat, outside his own simple quarters. A truly exceptional man, a thinker and intellectual with calm knowing eyes. When you meet exceptional people, it’s almost impossible to describe them, they have a manner and a presence, a way of filling a room and being central to every place they inhabit and yet be ordinary and accessible in a way that only exceptional people can be. He had that ability to laugh knowingly at most of our questions and enquiries, in a way that I’ve only otherwise seen from Tibetan monks, you can see it in interviews with the Dalai Lama if you have no other experience of it. He said we could stay as long as we wanted and asked that we join in the daily meditation ‘sittings’ and talk to his brother and the staff who ran the centre about practical details. The next day I couldn’t get out of bed.
I had only moderate stomach pain but had started running a fever and simply was too tired to stand, I needed help to get to toilet and lost all appetite for food. The staff visited and said they would send a natural healer with herbs if I didn’t get better within 48 hours. It was a week before I was able to stand on my own and two weeks before I could eat a bit of yogurt and mashed rice. ‘Babuji’ came to see me every few days and eventually I asked for an allopathic (western style) doctor who said I had jaundice and needed more rest. I was probably there another week to ten days before the whites of my eyes turned yellow and I was deemed non infectious. We were completely taken with this man, his writings, his view of humanity his humility and his branch of meditation. I couldn’t say I was equally enamoured of his family and staff, who seemed to spend a lot of time squabbling about who was “second in command” and who should do what tasks around the place.
I was eating solid food again and we were running out of money so we took off to ensure we could fit in Benares and a trip up into Nepal before running out. The journey to Benares was exceptional because we had plenty of space around us everywhere we went, hardly anybody spoke to us and when we boarded a train the benches around us emptied, having yellow eyes seemed to have a number of advantages. I’m not sure if they were frightened of infection or if it simply added to the “evil cut throat look” that they ascribed to travelling hippies in the rural areas of the country.
In Benares we were happy to be tourists, visiting the smaller temples, enjoying the tabla and sitar music, witnessing funeral pyres and talking to Sadhu’s. I left Hillary at the hotel and visited the government Bhang shop which was licensed to sell grass to the holy men for their rituals and we tried Bhang Lassi in the nearby juice bar, just because it would have been a missed opportunity not to.






Photos courtesy of Ase Forder


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part 17. Back to Goa. Another brush with the law

Image
  The journey back to Goa was not without incident . Most states in India had prohibition, alcohol was not legal. I didn’t know this. It was one of those political facts (like the war between Greece and Turkey earlier) that I simply had no knowledge of. The bus stopped at each state border, passengers were checked, passports logged and everything moved on. Until we got about nine hours into our journey and they opened my rucksack to discover the whiskey. The state border police took us off the bus, searched all our luggage and clothing and put us in a small room close to where the bus had stopped. We heard the bus leave. None of the border police spoke English and eventually the equivalent of the town mayor came in to look at us. We sat with him at a table and chairs outside in a small enclosure, we could see the comings and goings of the rural village, it looked very poor with ramshackle huts and gardens, not neatly kept as we had been accustomed too but sparse and untidy, broken ...
Read more

Part 1 Leaving the UK

Image
  Photo Courtesy of Curt Gibbs  Prologue. I came across this photograph of a tea shop/ rest house up in the mountains of Afghanistan ( Bandi-Amir ) , that I stayed in in 1974 and have decided to do my winter reminiscence posts of 2018 on the Hippy Trail adventure, hitching to India through Europe, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan , India and Nepal 1974/75, trying to get the timeline right for a bigger piece of writing. Part 1 Leaving the UK The journey started in Wales , where my girlfriend Hilary had left me to go to Scotland with my friend Andrew. I had £500 in the bank and thought that if I spent less than £10 a week I could travel for a year. I had a crush on a girl who had taken a year out of Uni, studying law, to hang with the hippies in Wales and she had invited me to join her and some friends in a little village in central France where they had rented a ramshackle villa for the summer. I hitched down and spent a week with them, but soon realised that if my ...
Read more

Part 8. Into Central Afghanistan and the Bamian Buddhas

Image
  All the cheap beds in Afghanistan were simple wooden frames with woven tops, something like cane or wicker. Functional but needing some soft covering to stop you being marked by the woven pattern on any part of you that was exposed directly to it. It was hot both day and night in the city, my sleeping bag was too bulky so worked just as a mattress cover. We’d shared one to avoid paying for two rooms and were both heavily marked by the weave, I remember. It was easy to rise early during Ramadan, the call to prayer from the local mosque was accompanied by clattering from the resident family as they prepared food before the fasting began at sunrise. We walked across the city, having picked up the English girls travelling companion nearby and got to the bus station, if you could call it that. Basically, a huge empty area filled with trucks and busses parked in a seemingly random manner. A local lad showed us to the truck which would take us to Bamyan, another open pick up style truck...
Read more