HANGING ON AND LETTING GO
We are visiting several Indias on this trip. There is the urban India of middle and upper class Delhi with goods from all over the world for sale, there is the desert landscape of Gujurat where the indigenous tribal people live, there is Assi Ghat, a pilgrim center on the Ganges, and then there is Mussoorie, where we will go next, built by the British as an Himalayan retreat from the summer heat of the Indian plains. It was in this mountain retreat, for Western missionaries as well, where I was born and where I went to Woodstock School, an American boarding school that let us keep our American ways while still, temporarily, in India. Now Mussoorie is a cool retreat for middle class Indians.
We’ve stayed only a week or two in each of these places and each time we leave we feel both a sense of loss of the things that touch us intensely which we can’t hang on to and also the need to let go and move on. Photographs are both a way off responding and a way of hanging on. So in many ways this three month trip is a sentimental journey as we relive the places that have touched us over the years, not knowing, in my case, if this is a goodbye tour, because I won’t be back again, or if next year or the year after I will be back again. It is almost a haunted tour, haunted by memories of people and of good times from long ago going back to when I was nine and returning to India after the WWII years in the United States. What I am enduring, what anyone in their 80’s and on are enduring is that the good times are in the past and you can’t hang on to them.
But of course this, too, is one of the good times and it is in the present. I am writing this on Shiv Ratri at 9 in the morning. The owners of the parking lot below us have placed two very large black speakers that are blasting out some popular Indian music with a throbbing beat so loud that even with the windows closed on our porch our teeth rattle. This is the is the incomprensible present on Assi Ghat. Somehow this blasting music is part of the celebration of Shiv Ratri. In Gaudliya, at the Golden Temple a line of pilgrims a mile long or more is patiently lined up to enter the temple with their offerings. Out there somewhere young men are making their 100 km walk. I am eating Shika’s, the cook here, bhujia (pea and potato curry) and puris for the last time with a large pot of black tea. I am living in what will soon be the past, but is still the present, the present enhanced by memories of the past. So I just have to accept it as it is and enjoy it. After two days of a sour stomach and feeling numb, this present with all its cacophony is enough.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 