Simon and I set off early Thursday morning for Jaipur after a couple days recalibrating back in Delhi following the trip to up Dharamshala. We spent two days sightseeing and two nights luxuriating at the charming Khandela Haveli in Bani Park before heading to Agra, by way of Fatehpur Sikri, prior to sunrise Saturday morning. By sundown, we'd braved all the crowds, snapped our obligatory photos in front of the Taj Mahal, and safely reached Delhi via the trusty Yamuna Expressway. Absolutely exhausted, we climbed the stairs to the flat only to find my landlords already in the apartment--but that's a story for another time.
Sunday we rested and packed. Simon finally had a chance to meet my roommate, Kyle, who had made his way back from Bikaner while we were traveling, over happy hour drinks on the rooftop of Summer House Cafe. We gorged on tandoori momos one last time, then Harpal (our driver from the Jaipur-Agra trip) arrived around midnight and drove us out to the airport under cover of darkness. I tagged along, as Simon did me the enormous favor of hauling a couple rather large pieces of my luggage back to SFO in anticipation of the impending return to California. Indira Gandhi International is a happening place in the wee hours of the morning, but from what I gather he made it out of there in one piece. No major crises or health problems to report. We sure packed a lot into sixteen days, and what a joy it was to share so many experiences with him here in India this month.
I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.
Sipping coffee in Delhi this morning after four nights on the road. A beautiful, sobering trip up through Amritsar and on to Dharamshala. After settling in at the Hotel Exotic Thursday afternoon, we paid our respects at the relatively new Partition Museum just a few minutes walking from both our hotel and the Golden Temple. The Golden Temple, a Sikh pilgrimage site, is the city's main tourist attraction, but the Partition history also runs deep. Amritsar is a mere 17.4 miles from the India-Pakistan border and just 29 miles from Lahore, Pakistan--once a major cultural and literary center of pre-Partition India. Images at the museum show overcrowded trains running between the two cities in the weeks and months after the British withdrew, leaving a hastily drawn border and unimaginable chaos in their wake. Some of those overcrowded trains arrived without any living passengers aboard as rioting and communal violence proliferated in fractured Panjab. I'll spare you more dark history here, but I'd highly recommend a visit to the museum to anyone passing through Amritsar. The history is hard to stomach, but the exhibits are beautifully pieced together.
From the Partition Museum, we proceeded down the street to the Golden Temple just as the sun was setting. I've seen a lot of monuments, mandirs, and pilgrimage sites in North India, but the Golden Temple is truly without equal. It's beyond words, so I won't even try. We perambulated clockwise around the man-made pool, pausing to take in the sights and sounds with a nearly full gibbous cresting over the horizon. Live kirtan and chanted recitation pumped through the sound system as thousands of tourists and pilgrims milled around the complex. We opted not to enter the temple that night, due to the size of the crowd, but returned Friday morning and waited in line for an hour in the morning sun to glimpse the interior. The best surprise--beyond the awe-inspiring workmanship--was seeing the musicians playing inside the temple. With the music being broadcast professionally through the entire complex it had been hard to tell where the musicians were actually located. After waiting in line and sweating with thousands of Sikhs (there were numerous fans, at least), we finally caught a glimpse. Hiding in plain sight.
(Simon gets a photo credit for this one)
On Friday, the drive up to Dharamshala took longer than expected given a choreographed exchange of vehicles and drivers somewhere shy of Pathankot and the sorry state of roads heading up into Himachal Pradesh. They were at least passable, though we did get stuck for a few minutes ascending from Dharamshala to McLeod Ganj and had to wait for a bulldozer to grade and repack the road so we could pass through. Although Dharamshala proper is considerably larger than McLeod Ganj, it seems to me McLeod Ganj is what most people are referring to when they speak of Dharamshala. McLeod Ganj, a smaller village up the mountain from the main city, is home to the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, the Dalai Lama Temple, and the bulk of the Tibetan refugee population.
From our base at Heaven's View BnB we enjoyed a weekend of cool weather, occasional rain showers, abundant momos, excessive cappuccinos, numerous hikes up to the central bazaar, and yes, breathtaking mountain views. Saturday morning, on our first descent back down Temple Road, we stopped off to pay our respects, and take shelter from a quick cloudburst, at the Dalai Lama Temple. It felt quiet and empty compared with the bustling Golden Temple, though it sounds like the place really fills up when His Holiness is in town.
Everything is a hill in McLeod Ganj, and the climbing really piles up after awhile. Saturday we enthusiastically ascended the kilometer trek from our hotel to the market on three separate occasions. The second of those took us more than three kilometers up to Bhagsunag Waterfall, where we ordered masala chai and a hookah at Shiva Cafe, a hip little hideout tucked away above the falls. By Sunday evening we'd had entirely enough walking and resorted to hiring taxis to and from town. The locals seem to mostly use motorbikes, which they coast quietly down the mountain in neutral.
Following our final Dharamshala breakfast and one last round of cappuccinos at The Other Space, we set off for Delhi. To maximize time spent in the mountains and rest time on this end, we opted to squeeze the ride back to Amritsar and the six-hour express train to Delhi into a single day. Some thirteen hours travel time had elapsed as our auto from the train station dropped us in Hauz Khas last night, but everything unfolded without a hitch.
Today and tomorrow we rest and catch up on work, laundry, and practice. We'll probably sneak over to Humayun's Tomb this afternoon for a spell, and possibly visit the Gandhi Museum at some point tomorrow. I'm doing what I can to cram a week's worth of business into roughly 48 hours. Then off to Jaipur early Thursday morning with Si while Allie holds down the fort in Delhi. No rest for the weary.
Thus far I haven't made good on my intentions to share much of my own musical/practice journey since arriving in Delhi back in February. I chalk this up to a byproduct of relentless perfectionism, and the fact that I only starting playing pakhawaj back in April, but I'm renewing the intention to share more.
Last night, Shashi Kant Pathak (one of my three pakhawaj teachers) arrived in Hauz Khas with a sarangiya named Rajesh, who he works with at Kathak Kendra. It was my first time playing with sarangi, or live lehera accompaniment of any kind for that matter. An incredible experience all around. Allie snapped a few clips from the session so I'll share one here. Low light, grainy quality, all that... Who cares.
Enjoy!
As the two largest of India's five megacities of ten million plus, Mumbai and Delhi enjoy a rivalry somewhat reminiscent of that between New York and Los Angeles. Both are major cultural centers, but their differences are significant enough to fuel their respective claims to supremacy. Mumbai, a former colonial port spilling off the Maharashtrian coast and into the choppy Arabian Sea, is home to the massive Hindi-language film industry (Bollywood) and serves as the nerve center of Indian finance. Landlocked Delhi, the national capital, houses countless government institutions and somehow makes Mumbai, a sprawling metropolis of some twenty million souls, feel small by contrast. The New York-Los Angeles comparison breaks down pretty quickly--this is India after all. Even the largest cities in the United States can't compete with the sheer scale of either.
Before last weekend, I'd visited Mumbai just once, arriving by train from Goa in the middle of the night and making my way by cab directly into the heart South Mumbai, the oldest part of the city. I'd wandered around sightseeing for a couple days before catching a flight to Kolkata to round out my post-language program travels back in 2017. Allie, for all of her prior trips to North India and all her love of Bollywood, had never been, which provided the impetus for our weekend getaway. We each have friends who have been doing research there this year, and the quick flight down from Delhi, along with free lodging, made it a relatively easy excursion.
Despite my concern about making it out of the unfamiliar airport and through Friday rush hour, we easily booked a car and found our way to Andheri West, where my friend Janaki (not Indian, despite the name) has been living this summer. Janaki and I first met in an introductory Hindi class at UW-Madison in 2016, then both travelled to Jaipur to continue our studies in 2017. That summer we spent a lot of time together within a small nucleus of friends, but until this summer I hadn't seen her since. Janaki is working on a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan and had just been settling into eighteen months of field research in Shimla when covid hit in early 2020. The pandemic completely derailed her project, which she has since reinvented, and this year AIIS allowed her to resume her grant to carry out research for a new multi-site project on tarot readers and various occult divination practices that brought her to Mumbai. Although all three of us resided in Jaipur simultaneously for Hindi study in 2017, Allie and Janaki had never met. I had a feeling they would enjoy each other's company and that proved to be the case.
Friday evening we stayed in, chatting at length over chai and some vegetarian fare provided earlier that afternoon by Janaki's cook. Towards the end of the night, after showing off the various tarot decks she had collected in Mumbai, Janaki did readings for both of us. She's quite skilled at it, though I have little by way of comparison, and without offering any overtly predictive advice, helped us both wrestle with looming questions we had posed for the readings.
Before bed we said our goodbyes to Janaki, who sleeps later than we do, and set alarms for seven to ensure we'd reach the airport with plenty of time to spare. The return trip to Delhi somehow went even more smoothly than the outbound leg, and we were back in Hauz Khas and ready for a nap by around two.
Once we were up and moving, Allie and I walked the hundred meters or so to our corner cafe, ordered sandwiches and espresso drinks, and sat for awhile settling back into the familiar surroundings. At one point Allie, who thoroughly enjoyed her first trip to Mumbai, looked up at me and said, "It feels good to be back in Delhi." I was somewhat taken aback, for until now I've always gotten the impression that Delhi's distinctive vibrational frequency was a bit too much for her, but I knew exactly what she meant. After visiting her in Lucknow, I'd said more or less the same upon my return. She acted like I was crazy every time I explained how once you adapt to Delhi something in you fundamentally changes. A love for Delhi is hard to explain to someone who hasn't felt it, but once you've felt it nothing quite compares. Nowhere else can fill or break your heart in quite the same way, for better and for worse. Not even dear Mumbai, with all its filmi glamour, its infinite skylines, and its delicious coastal breezes.
