Passage to More Than India!

12/12/09 at Siem Reap, Cambodia POST for 12/4/09 at Delhi: Passage to More Than India!

We spent our last full day in India back at the Yatri Guesthouse. The owner, Sanjay Puri, clearly “made” our India trip. We had only planned 3 of the 14 days when we arrived in India (the tough days at Varanasi), and he listened to our wish list and got us a driver and car that took us safely to places worth seeing. In particular, the driver, Sunderpal Yaddo, is a wonderful person. A devout Hindu, he would visibly, but silently, pray as we passed any Hindu temple. He has the firm demeanor of his past military service in Kashmir with the Indian Army. He seemed to understand our discomfort with the public health danger represented by conditions in India. I assume that this was why, in part, he took us to the beautiful temple in Jaipur and sat with us—so we could see that Hinduism was something positive in his experience. Our experience with other drivers had been far less positive. Friday night we took his picture, failed in an attempt to have someone take all 4 of us with him and paid him. In addition to payment and tips—we added to his because he never made a pitch for a tip-- I gave him a Michigan quarter as a souvenir. I think I hope (probably foolishly) that he’ll see a big globe some day and recognize from the outline on the quarter, at the northern edge of “U.S.A.,” the precious Great Lakes that are my home on Earth and my calling to protect.

The last sentence sounds grandiose beyond belief! But, in fact, travel has tended to make me think to myself about who I am and what is most important to me. This is because I’m seeing people who have wildly differing ideas of what and who they are as human beings. It’s natural to respond to those different ideas with self-analysis and questioning.

Good travel requires boldness that borders on grandiosity. The traveler is nothing to the visited except possibly tourist money. Yet the traveler explores and questions and dares to make sense of what she sees in the best way she can, risking big mistakes and the scorn of observers. One of my favorite poets is the 19th century American Walt Whitman. He was full of big ideas expressed with great intensity. Back in September, on my way to look up something in Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” I found his “Passage to India.” This is not to be confused with the great 20th century novel of the same name. The poem was written to commemorate and celebrate two “world-shrinking” events in 1869: the completion of the Suez Canal, giving a much shorter route to India (and Indochina) from western Europe, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad uniting the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast of the U.S. I copied the concluding parts of the poem because I knew we were heading for India:

Passage to more than India!...
Passage, immediate passage! The blood burns in my veins! Away O soul! Hoist instantly the anchor!...
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?...
Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave soul! O farther farther sail! O daring joy, but safe!
Are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, farther sail!


We decided to treat ourselves to a good meal at the Bukhara restaurant, on the Yatri owner’s recommendation. (He also assured us that Bill Clinton had visited it and liked it.) Driving there, we passed again a sculpture we had seen on previous drives through Delhi. It was perched on a traffic island, and it celebrates Gandhi’s Salt March. (People may remember the superb dramatization of this anti-British political protest by Ben Kingsley in the movie, “Gandhi,” 15 or 20 years ago.) I decided to try to get a picture from the car, and succeeded in getting it all but Gandhi. A motorcyclist’s helmet blocked him.

The restaurant is in a 5 star hotel, the “Maurya Sheraton,” named in honor of the early Mauryan Empire. Hardcore readers of this blog will remember that the Mauryan Empire was ruled by Emperor Asoka, who visited Sarnath near Varanasi and built a stupa and the capital topped by the four lions that are the national symbol of India. The lobby of the hotel contains a striking sculpture of Asoka. I snapped a picture. Additionally, the ceiling of the lobby contained beautiful murals of Indian history, arranged in levels around a dome. They were frustratingly unattributed. I did not take pictures because it would have called attention to me. I have learned how nervous the Indians are about photography near anything except traditional tourist places. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai were focused on 5-star tourist hotels on “26/11.” So there was a mirror slid under our taxi as we drove up, and we had to walk through a metal detector to enter the hotel. Asoka was enough for me. I realize now that I had reasoned as the Sheraton owners must have: to better avoid being caught in the crossfire between Muslim and Hindu, best to go with Buddha!

Paul