Thresholds and Pilgrimages
On yoga training (sort of), amoebic dysentery (probably) and crying in the aeroplane (undoubtedly)...
The driver picks me up at dawn. Walking to the pickup point, I photograph the last cow of the trip, sitting in front of the temple grounds, where Ysaline, Karolina and I saw her last night, picking the flowers off the string of the garlands we got for graduation and feeding them to her.
When I find the car, I tell the driver I couldn’t get to an ATM—there are none here in Laxman Jhula—and we’ll have to stop at one if he wants me to pay in cash. We drive through the national park, seeing no leopards or elephants but passing two peacocks foraging by the roadside, then another two, and soon after, two plain brown peahens with modest tails.
Finally, we leave the bubble that is Rishikesh, where they tell the story of Shiva teaching Parvati the secrets of yoga while being spied on by an eavesdropping fish as if it happened just yesterday on that rock over there. It is also full of Hindu pilgrims and holy men, and lost souls looking for spiritual thrill-seeking against a backdrop of ordinary Indians getting on with ordinary lives.
I went knowing I was letting myself in for this strange melange and that somewhere in the middle of this, there were people from various walks of life here to learn yoga. Nothing fancy. Nothing woo woo. Just people learning stuff close to stuff’s source.
We drive past people squatting at roadsides, making cow-dung fires. There is a stand selling Coca-Cola, and Bollywood stars pose on billboards drinking bottles of Bisleri. We speed past Punjab National Bank, even though we are not in the Punjab.
After a few hours, we stop at a Dhaba1 and have breakfast — mixed paratha2; please hold the chilli; I have had Delhi Belly. It’s better now, but I still want to go easy. Thank you. No mango lassi. Can I pay by card? OK, great.
The paratha comes with a small stick of white ghee, and I cautiously put some chutney on it. I am the only European here, and nobody bats an eyelid. Half the clientele are wealthy Delhi kids on road trips, and I am touched by how soft and affectionate they are with each other. I eat my paratha, knowing it’ll be my last meal on Indian soil, whilst a Sikh family arrives at the table beside me, the father’s proud turban gleaming faded turquoise.
I go to the counter, and one card reader crashes while processing the payment. Someone goes looking for another one. I look at my watch, and we are still making good time. The roads are clear. It’s the festival Navaratri3 and, for reasons I only dimly understand, this means things are quiet.
The second card reader works, and we set off, the road signs slowly give way to Delhi. We arrive on its outskirts, pass through its tree-lined streets, and finally get to the airport.
When we arrive, the driver points to the two ATMs. I go to one of them:
“We are unable to process this transaction at this time. Please try again later.”
I go to the other one:
“Your transaction could not be processed. We apologise for the inconvenience”.
I take the receipts to the driver. He beckons me back into the car, saying there is another ATM further along the way. That also doesn’t work. I sit in the passenger seat and tell him I will do a bank transfer. Without saying a word, he starts driving out of the airport. I ask him where we are going, and he brushes me off.
We are now past the drop-off time. He will drive me around Delhi until a working ATM is found.
I phone his boss:
“Excuse me, your driver is driving me away from the airport. You need to tell him to take me back immediately. Please give me some bank details and we’ll do a transfer. No, there are no ATMs in Laxman Jhula. You’re based there; you should know that. Yes, we drove past a bunch of ATMs. No, he didn’t stop. OK, right, whatever. If I’m later than 12:10 at the airport, you won’t get a single rupee from me.”
The driver’s phone rings, and a heated exchange happens in Hindi. The driver does a U-turn and rattles back to the airport at full speed. He practically throws my bags out onto the tarmac after me at 12:09.
As I go through the airport, a security attendant checks my passport and asks what I was doing in India.
“I was in Rishikesh for a Yoga Teacher Training.”
“Is Rishikesh beautiful?”
“It is very beautiful.”
“Look at my belly. I don’t do enough yoga.” He gestures to the roundness of his belly, how distant his days of army boot camp seem to him now.
“Do Ashtanga Vinyasa, my friend. You’ll look like a warrior in no time.” I half echo the words of Deepak, our yogic drill sergeant.
He smiles at me and gives me my passport. We both know he probably won’t take up Ashtanga Vinyasa, but who knows...
I make it to my gate just in time and feel the stress of the ATM fiasco slowly subside. Nobody knows whether to queue like we’re in a British post office or a Rugby Scrum, but we board, and the plane fills up. As I take my seat, I see that the aircraft doesn’t have physical blinds but buttons that somehow dim and undim the windows. I wonder for a few seconds how this works, then realise I have too little idea about these things, and decide to undim my window to catch the last sight of the Indian sun before I fly to England.
I wanted to extend my trip to make a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya, where the Buddha became enlightened, to touch the trunk of the Bodhi tree. After being rehydrated with an IV drip in a hospital while our whole group got a gastrointestinal infection, I decided to curtail the trip instead. I planned to spend three nights in town before leaving, but imagined being alone and still sick, and all I wanted was to go home. In the end, whatever was plaguing us cleared up (mostly) by the time the course finished.
Home has become a relative concept. A few weeks ago, it meant my nest with Clémentine near Hernalser Hauptstrasse, but now the thought of living in Vienna is a memory, a chapter now closed. But the London chapter hasn’t started. I begin wondering what the hell I’m doing, going back to London, whether I’ll be able to make a life there. Clémentine dreams of finding land and a stonehouse in the south of France, build a dance studio there, and make it a place where friends and community can meet, exchange and learn together. Why don’t we just go for that?! Why wait? What’s all this nonsense about retraining in something or the other?
The plane begins pulling out of the terminal, and they play the Air India safety announcement video. It has classical and folk dancers—Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Odissi—gesturing instructions with semi-classical mudras about stowing your tray table during takeoff and landing, not smoking in the toilets, where to find your life vest and putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others. The soundtrack has unmistakably classical Indian instrumentation, which eventually segues into the Air India melody.
As we taxi out, seeing these dances and hearing the melody, I begin to sob. I must look like a nostalgic train wreck, a white-boy Indophile who is more lost than all the Kundalini and Kirtan junkies put together. I try to contain it a little, to not blubber too profusely onto my neighbour’s lap.
Home has become a relative term. For the last four weeks, “home” has been room B2 in Pyramid Yogashala, sharing with Ignatio, my Mexican roommate from Cancun. A few days after telling me some classic Mexican expletives, I sit on the end of my bed thinking and then say, in an expletive kind of way, “Los cojenes del perro!”
He cracks up. “Who taught you that?”
“I made it up.”
A few days later, we rush to be on time for our morning class.
“Las pajamas del gato! Nachito, we’re late!”
The next day, he sidles up to me in a lunch break and turns his head quietly to me as if to share a secret.
“Los huevos del diablo!”
Back and forth this goes, “Ombligo del burro!“, “La madre de las berenjenas!“, “La papaya de mi hermana”, “Barba de mi abuela!”
On Wednesdays, some classes are replaced with a cultural excursion. One day, we went to the Mouni Baba cave, where a Yogi sat in silence for years and slowly carved the cave out of the rock face by hand. On my birthday, we went to a Ganga Arthi - a fire ceremony at dusk honouring the gods and the river herself. After the solemn Vedic prayers and the offering of fire, incense, flower petals and water, the Vedic chants, the preserve of the priesthood, gave way to universal devotional songs. The crowd went full mosh pit, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think that Krishna was an avatar of Kurt Cobain.
On our way out, we see a smug-looking Shiva sitting on a tiger skin on a rock that’s supposed to be Mount Kailash. He’s wearing glam-rock eyeliner, and from a certain angle, I can’t help but think of Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Alongside the sweating and stretching (with Rupal and Deepak), our days are filled with classes in Mantra singing, Philosophy, meditation (“Really, these classes should be called ‘Internal Yoga’!” says our teacher), alignment and adjustment (also with Deepak), teaching methodology (because we still can’t get enough of Deepak), ayurveda and anatomy. I prod my teachers, “Didn’t Patanjali borrow that from Buddhism?” and get reminded that Siddhartha Gautama was an incarnation of Vishnu and that Patanjali is thousands of years older than the Buddha, predating even Rama! The scholar in me wants to argue back, but I remember that I am here to learn yoga as it is taught in India, not to fight with my teachers about the dates of Vyāsa’s commentaries on the Yoga Sutra or the fact that stylistically, the Yoga Sutras are obviously post-Upanishadic4.
I feel the continuity of the world in which the Buddha was born and died, which he partly embraced and partly rejected. Vedic pujas5 are beautiful, and it is obvious how much of Buddhist ritual directly comes from it — there are always flowers, songs, bells, fire, incense, water, and ghee, and at the end, you are given sweets. The vibe is, “Don’t worry about understanding, just open your heart and eat the laddoo6”. At the same time, the Buddha rejected the final authority of the Vedas along with the need for the priesthood, saying to his followers: You have all that you need to lead a spiritual existence, whoever and wherever you are. The laddoo is nice, but it’s not necessary.
Sometimes, life gives us laddoos, and sometimes, clearly, it doesn’t.
As I have said elsewhere, though my practice is undisciplined, I neither formally belong to any particular Buddhist lineage nor desire monkhood; it is still my path. Being in India, I realised that, as Buddhists, we are part of the Indian spiritual diaspora. There is a sense of half-belonging, but only half. Buddhism, unlike Hinduism, was explicitly Universalist in outlook and didn’t mind travelling.
As the plane finds itself comfortably above the clouds, I flick through the catalogue of films on board. Do I want to watch a Bollywood film or a BBC drama about an aged, partly demented Sherlock Holmes? Mumbai or Baker Street? I make one decision, quickly change my mind, and then realise the quality of the headphones is so dire that there is not much point in trying to catch any dialogue anyway.
As we glide west, my mind is filled with Deepak again - this time not his goofy jokes about having three wives and two sets of twins, not his classics (“It’s easy for you. You can do it. You’re strong. You’re warriors!” whilst hanging out in Ashtavrakasana7), but the closing mantra of his classes, which he sang every day like a lullaby after nearly destroying our bodies.
Swasti prajābhyaḥ paripālayantām
Nyāyena mārgēṇa mahīm mahīśāḥ
Gobrāhmaṇēbhyaḥ śubham astu nityam
Lokāḥ samastāḥ sukhino bhavantu
sukhino bhavantu
suuuukhinooo… bhavaaaantuuuuu…8
I did my 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training at Pyramid Yogshala in Laxman Jhula, Rishikesh. If you want to get close to the roots of yoga, I can only recommend it! It is traditional without being rigidly so. It’s also family-run, and you feel it.
Note on Transliterations:
For the scholars amongst you, please forgive my Sankrit and Hindi transliterations. They are inconsistent, and sometimes I have favoured readability for English-speaking audiences, and sometimes I have fallen into other habits.
Roadside diner.
Stuffed, pan-fried flatbread.
A nine-night Hindu Goddess festival.
Don’t worry about what any of this means!
A puja is an offering, often using fire, flowers, incense, ghee, bells and chanting. Think: multisensory devotional poetry.
An Indian sweet, often given to participants at ceremonies. Think of it as a much tastier, much less guilt-ridden version of Holy Communion.
Eight-angle pose. A form of yogic body-origami.
This mantra means something like:
May there be well-being for all people;
May the rulers govern the world with justice;
May the sacred cow and the learned Brahmins be treated with respect;
May all beings in all worlds be happy.
May all beings in all worlds be happy.
May all beings in all worlds be happy.
sounds like a lovely and transformative adventure!