Wandering North India and the Omnipresent Spectre of Drew Thomases

Hello all.

So I've been here over a month now, and have exactly four posts up to date. Not the best track record, but hopefully you're still tuned in. If you are, read on.

Just as Robert Smith once crooned, Jaipur has been hot, hot, hot, but we've been making due and we recently acquired a new/used swamp cooler to try and dampen (literally) the blow of the nighttime heat. It's been helping, surely, and the Indian summer is nothing to understate, but I've been getting reports from back home (Texas) that the temperature has been comparable to within 5 degrees or so most days. Ouch. It's been between 110 and 115 here most days, so do the math.

A quick note before I launch into the day's events. Little does he know, but Jaipur and indeed large swaths of Rajasthan are host to the lingering spectre of Drew Thomases. Thomases, or "Munchwallah" as he is affectionately known locally, is a grad student from Columbia who lived with me at the Raj Garden flat last summer, the same flat I currently inhabit once again. Drew stayed on and did the year long Hindi program in Jaipur after the rest of us went home last year. He has since returned to the States. I began to notice early on this summer a large number of queries as to Drew's whereabouts, especially in Raja Park, our old (and my current) stomping ground. Not surprising; Raja Park is a fairly small place and Drew is a noticeble guy, especially with the mustache ('munch' in Hindi; hence, 'munchawallah', the mustachioed one). So no big deal. But I hopped a rickshaw in the Old City the other day, completely randomly, and the driver asked me if I knew Drew. "Sure," I said, "I lived with him." Strange, but still Jaipur, isn't the biggest town in India. Then it happened again, same situation: a random rickshawwallah in another part of town asks me, of all people, if I know Drew. Now I'm starting to wonder, am I being tailed here? What's happening? Then April and I went to Pushkar, and this was the doozy, someone in a town 200 kilometers away from our own asked me if I knew Drew. Cue Twilight Zone theme song. But that's not all.

So we tried to get wireless internet hooked up in the apartment, so we called an Airtel representative, he came out, I filled out the forms, dropped the deposit and the first months rent, and he split. Then the hook-up guy didn't show for two days, and we called, maybe about some oversight or something. The original guy came back over and started explainging in Hindi that one Drew Thomases (and company) "forgot" to pay their last wireless bill, and as such the Airtel people can't hook up wireless in the apartment again until somebody pays up the (rather large) difference. We all arued for a while, but nothing doing, so we requested a refund for the 2000 rupees we paid ($50 or so), which of course before we paid, we weren't informed about this little problem. Now, a refund check is supposedly in the mail from Delhi, and the ghost of Drew Thomases has begun, poltergeist-like, to physically affect the world he left behind. Anyhow.

That being said, things go pretty well. April took off for France yesterday, and I was certainly sad to see her go. She's performing in the south of France all week, in Biarritz, with her dance troupe. Lucky. I wish her well, though, and miss her very much.

So I decided also to do some traveling, and last night I jumped a bus northwards towards the Himalayas. I won't quite get to the snow caps due to time constraints, but I landed here in the foothills, in Haridwar, which is a really great little town. The bus ride ran about 15 hours or so, but it wasn't so bad. Haridwar is a particularly holy city within the Hindu cosmology, and one of the holiest places along the Ganga (Ganges) for living relatives to bring the ashes of their deceased loved ones to deposit into the river, which in Hinduism is considered a living goddess that sustains the life of the land. It's especially popular with people from my neck of the woods (Rajasthan) due to proximity, but people from all over are constantly coming and going into the city. Every night, there is a large aarti ceremony in which people line up along the ghaats (steps into the river) and put lighted lamps into the swift current. Songs are sung and music is played, and all in all it's a beautiful experience. I went to the ceremony tonight, did my puja and recited in Sanskrit with a Brahmin priest, dropped flowers into the river and splashed the cool water onto my face and hair. There were so, so many people there, it was overwhelming and beautiful and popping with life. I had the priest recite a shloka for long life for my wife-to-be and any offspring that may come our way, and I went down and put my hands and feet into the river and blessed the prayer beads I had bought at a rickety little road-side stand and for a moment even my sturdily non-denominational tendencies were thrown. The Ganges is a little muddy here, having come down out of the mountains and hit the plains, but it runs fast and cool is impressive to say the least, and the spirit is infectious and I danced and sang with people I didn't know and under the massive, three-story tall statue of Shiva we made merry as he silently looked out towards the vast expanse of the Himalayas, to all those innumerable cave-dwelling sadhus and rishis and babas that keep the land holy and safe by power of their asceticism and devotion to this holiest of rivers. Coming into town by bus this afternoon, we passed a line of pilgrims walking from the town that quite literally stretched for over 40 miles in an unbroken mass of people, dressed in orange, walking in the summer heat. It must have been thousands and thousands of bodies, walking in unison, and I was glad to be here at this point on the surface of the earth, at this point in time.

Tomorrow night I leave for Benares, (Varanasi, Kashi) also known as the City of Light and the holiest city of the Hindu geography. Although I've studied the place for some years, I've never been able to get away from my studies long enough to warrant a trip while I was here, so I'm quite excited. More from the banks of the Ganga to come.