the first words sunil pathak said to me were: "this is a natural place," in an almost apologetic tone of voice, "walk a little way into the fields and do it somewhere near those trees." it was the middle of the night and i had woken up on a wooden bed in an unfamiliar farmhouse and needed to defecate. at that point i still wasn't sure who sunil pathak was; i mean if i was meant to meet him, if it really was me he had been expecting and ready to welcome. Jaya had left some simple directions at the rainbow gathering in parvati: "delhi to kolkata trainline, get down at dehri, 3 hours after varanasi. from dehri, take local train to kajrat navardih. village of chowkhandi is 3km from there" other than that, the only info i had was that there was some land available for a rainbow close to the river sone - a tributary of the ganges - and that there were trees and islands and it was beautiful.
and so getting off the train at kajrat navadih, the only words on my lips were "chowkhandi; nearby village?"
very soon i was surrounded by thirty or so children, young men and old men, and the school teacher was quickly summoned to attend to me. in broken english he told me that he was very glad to meet me and that sunil pathak was waiting to welcome me. darkness had already fallen, and at that moment a little packed bus was revving up across the railtracks. "take that bus, sir!" the crowd moved aside and allowed me to run to the already moving bus. inside an adolescent vacated a seat for me and an old man with crutches was instructed to take me to sunil pathak's house. by saying chowkhandi there were eager nods of recognition and talk of the temple there, where it was assumed i would be going. as long as i was going to chowkhandi i felt that i should be on the right path to the rainbow, but in the meantime i wasn't sure that the locals had not mistaken me for a wandering pilgrim, of whose arrival they had been in eager anticipation. before that night, i had never been the recipient of such deference. after 15 minutes i got off the bus with the man with the crutch, then stooped with him through a dark ally into a courtyard where a sheet covering a bed was smoothed down for me to sit on; i was given water to drink and offered pakoras, being fried that minute by women in the kitchen. then a women came with a bowl and washed my barefeet with her barehands. few words were exchanged. the man told me there was no electricity at the moment, and thus the candles. i remarked that the pakoras were very tasty. my probable mistaken identity was troubling me. soon we were outside again, following a concrete road through fields by torchlight, the man with the crutch hobbling along and followed by four or five children and me.
next morning, sunil pathak properly introduced himself. he apologised for not being able to welcome me the previous night, something his 15-year-old son shubham had done by showing me to an interior bed, asking if i wanted anything to eat: chapattis? rice? no? okay, take rest. i would spend quite a lot of time talking with shubham, who was very receptive, but also very sure of the things he knew. sunil told me that he was a member of a brahmin family, that he owned two acres of farmland and that he taught mathematics in the local government school. he said that everyone in the surrounding area knew of him and respected him and said that wherever i mentioned his name, there i would receive help and be treated with kindness. "even the dogs and the plants give me respect when i pass, because they know that i will never do them harm"
"come", he said, patting his motorbike seat, "i will show you your friends." it was only when i met ganesh baba, living across the fields next to the brick temple, that i realised that
this was the rainbow gathering. other than ganesh baba, from ukraine, and jaya, from england, no-one else had arrived yet. it was still a project-to-be, but in the meantime, sunil pathak was going to do his best to welcome any foreigner he came in contact with. in various cafes - or more properly tea houses (more correctly samosa sheds) - in various surrounding villages, sunil introduced me to all his friends. my little base of hindi started to jog along as i got used to talking about myself, and especially back on the farm, where i stayed for a week and where sunil's four brothers spoke no english. i could catch snippets in hindi of sunil explaining the appearance of the foreigner. "soon they will come from 120 countries" (a figure ganesh baba must have supplied him with) "we must be ready to welcome them all" he told the local men.
sunil pathak met ganesh baba at the kumba mela (massive religious festival) in february. it is obvious that they must have clicked straight away. both men have a direct personal way of engaging with people. both of their eyes are capable of becoming very soft and affectionate when they wish to communicate something tender (perhaps sunil's favourite topic was the heart, and the love which united us all.) his eyes often then harden, when he has moved onto some serious point which he emphasises with his eyes, before softening into a wide fatherly smile once again. verily, sunil pathak communicates with his eyes. his vision is to inaugurate a global community, starting in his local villages. he wishes to welcome foreigners to come and teach in local schools, teaching english or teaching computer skills, or at any rate teaching (as a product of contact with a foreigner) that we all belong to one global family, and that the apparent cultural differences are in fact minor details.
ganesh baba shares this vision; he tells me - as we are huddled on the back of sunil's motorbike - that he wants to start an evening school, teaching children music and painting and theatre. "we should only teach from the heart. children are the only ones we can change - all the adults will not change." he also has a project to install solar panals in schools. the government electricity supply is unpredictable and is always cut at some point in the day or night. "we do not give them to people's homes, they will only sell them . . . and we need to teach people the logical way to build houses - we need to build
down, only one floor above the ground, the rest of the house in the earth where it is cool and no work needs to be done on the exterior"
"what about flooding?" i say, "and what about the lack of natural light below the earth?"
"if they want light they come to the top floor" ganesh baba dismissively makes an attempt to be persuasive. over time i came to realise that he was actually off his rocker. i could only laugh when he unveiled his plans to ask the indian military for an old jet by which to take children on a tour of moscow and new york and paris and london, and what is your capital? - edinburgh. yes, edinburgh too, why not? "ah, you laugh..."
being in sunil pathak's company gave me an entirely new experience of india, which i hadn't known thus far. "this is rural india," sunil said, "this is real india. real india is not in delhi or bombay or any of the cities. the heart of india is in the villages. here no-one will disturb you; everyone wants to welcome you. they crowd round you only because they are curious"
the massive heart of india, stretching from pakistan to bhutan, from the himalaya to sri lanka.
sunil never ceased to let me know that he was at my service, with his motorbike, wherever i wanted to go, whatever i wanted to do, or if i just wanted to rest, i should always feel at ease. my presence at the retirement celebration of a 60-year-old man at a nearby village school was unexpected, but i was immediately ushered to a chair at the front, and garlanded with a garland of orange flowers. most people were seated cross-legged on the floor, and came up to the front to give a speech, after having taken some petals and sprinkled them by the candle and incense, and bowed before the little shrine. sunil asked me if i wanted to say something so i stood up and wished - here everyone saw me wondering what his name was; "rajiv" they called out - rajiv a happy retirement and i hoped that everyone continued to teach - and to learn - happily together in this school. all true learning and teaching comes from the heart," i finished, filled with the ideas that sunil had spoken about. i think my simple presence there, more than anything i might do or say, was meaningful to them. i mostly didn't understand anything of what anyone said, but my ears pricked up when i heard "scotland." rajiv himself gave a long speech and finished by mentioning me as "our guest from scotland." sunil later told me that rajiv had said that he had learned a great deal from two englishman at the beginning of his career and he felt that it was fitting today to have someone from scotland present at his retirement. afterwards everyone sat in another classroom and ate rice and chapattis and veg sauce and sweet rice from polystyrene plates and threw them in the courtyard outside. i placed mine on the ledge of a statue in the middle, but someone came and knocked it to the ground, indicating to me that the statue - of an old local landowner - should be respected.
when anybody asked after the purpose of my 8 month visit to india, it wasn't easy for me to find my own words that they would comprehend, and i usually assented to the suggestion that i was here to
ghumne - to roam about (an expression that indians love to use), to sight-see - which sounded rather lame. sunil offered an alternative: "you are a researcher," he said, "you are here to research and appreciate the cultural differences in india, with the aim of breaking down barriers and promoting global unity." when i told him that i found it difficult to respond when people asked me what precisely those differences were, sunil told me to just tell them that in the west there is modern thinking, whereas here there is old-fashioned thinking. "you are here to bring modern thinking to these people," he said.
sunil took me to the small government school where he teaches, where there are 8 classes and six teachers, sunil himself being one of the ones who leaves one class to do a task themselves while he is teaching in another. 8 bare classrooms, some filled with children sitting on the floor, books spread out in front of them. when i enter, one of the boys immediately stands up and performs a bold clapping rhythm - face full of ferocious concentration - which all his classmates repeat. a lot of classes are empty and there are a lot of children sitting outside or running around. they all brush my shoulder bag as they run past me. "sunil, you should be teaching instead of taking me places," i say. all sunil says is, "its okay, anil is taking my class"
i note my lack of desire to teach in such a school. if i did, it would be to present myself with a challenge. a big part of the school institution is teaching children to obey authority. the main message that i would give to anyone is to encourage the realization of their own autonomy. you are free. precisely to question conventional values and practices.
life in rural india is so bound by predetermined practices and rituals. it leaves no space for the question: what shall i do? one does what one is supposed to do. it provides a safe, secure experience. the first time i spoke to shubham he told me his family was of the brahmin caste;
sabse bara, he explained, the highest. later i asked him if he really thought it mattered what caste one belonged to and he said, "noooo." but i think he said that only because that is what he thought he should say to me. over the days i picked up some of the brahmin daily practices.
one of sunil's brothers - the retired one with the white hair and the smile - was brushing his teeth with a stick broken off the tree whose sap has antibacterial properties. i asked him if i could do the same and he assented then after a while i asked him again and he said, "but you have just eaten; first of all you wash, then you brush your teeth, then you are ready to have food." when going to the toilet in the field, the males use the string they always bear diagonally around their body - whose significance is unknown to me; i saw that it was also used to help wash the back - to loop around their right ear. it stays looped there until they have come back from the toilet and washed their hands. sunil's younger son came into the room once when i was in the nude intermediary state between changing legwear (indians don't really have a concept of personal space), i think that is why one of sunil's brothers emphasised to me one night that i should hold a towel around me before letting my trousers drop, and changing them. "never naked, never!"
i was pretty keen to go places without wearing chappals (sandals), and mostly did, but after a few days, another of sunil's brothers showed me how i should enter the room at night: (always wearing chappals outside during the day,) at night i wash them while wearing them at the handpump, then leave them by my bed, ready for the next day. indians are aware that foreigners are unaware of this 'correct way' of doing things. foreigners are casteless and in a category of their own. still, sunil often repeated the phrase he had learned from jaya: "think global, act local", meaning, fit in with your (social) surroundings, but remain aware of the big global picture. a pretty good dictum overall. however, i still wasn't sure to what degree i should mimic the behaviour of the people that surrounded me.
ganesh baba belonged to a category of his own. grey lush beard, dancing eyes, often sparkling with unusual energy, prone to going off on tangents and rambling monologues, often playing the grumpy baba, scolding people vociferously then winking at me; he was unique and he knew it. he always walked about shirtless and shoeless and i decided he would be the one i would imitate, despite people initially always suggesting that i put on my shirt when i went out. i liked ganesh baba's response when we were waiting to see a local politician - an old schoolmate of sunil's. a smartly dressed man came down the stairs, his eyes alighted on barechested ganesh baba and he promptly put forward the age old question: where are you from? ganesh, after a little hesitation, pointed to sunil and said, "he knows!" and promptly walked outside.
despite sunil's avowed support for 'modern thinking', his view of the role of women was very grounded in his own traditional context. throughout my stay at sunil's house, i never interacted with a woman once. women were only glimpsed from afar, leading the cows into the fields in the morning. they never appeared in the patio where the men sat chatting or washed or drank chai or ate food - cooked by the women in the kitchen. "for hindu husbands," sunil explained, "the wife is a goddess. and for the wife, the husband is a god. the woman looks after the house and the children, while the man provides everything for her. it is also a married man's duty - if he has a job or land - to look after everyone in the community; the one who has gives to those who do not have. marriage is a sacred bond. once husband and wife are united, they can never separate - never."
"yes, that's the ideal," i responded, "but what happens if husband and wife are no longer happy living together? is it not best then for each one to pursue their own path and thus restore happiness in their lives?" i was trying to provoke him, but he was adamant. marriage is sacred, infrangible.
"smoking and drinking alcohol is only for men," he stated catagorically once. "if you offer this to a woman here, she will not take it. she knows it is not for women"
i told him that if he wanted to welcome people from the west, he had to recognise that western women are liberated and there is the value that both men and women are free to choose their own path.
i became irritated one day with the whole indian rule-bound way of looking at the world. i had wanted to go into dehri by train to book a flight out of india.
sunil insisted that his brother take me there - 45km - on his motorbike. "no, what about the petrol...the train's going there anyway" (i wanted some time alone anyway) come come come, i take you. after about 10 km we got a puncture and that is the reason i found myself sitting under the shade of a roadside tree for about an hour talking with - which became listening to - sunil's brother, who was maybe called sunil anil. he spoke only a smattering of english. i often felt lost in a sea of hindi words, struggling to grasp onto some meaning. after i told him that he had to speak dhire dhire - slowly slowly - did i comprehend a thing or two. we developed a way of communicating whereby he would slowly enunciate each word, and finding an alternative way of saying the same thing if i still didn't understand.
he got talking about the uncleanliness of people from the west, who disrespect the sacred rite of marriage, eat meat, and make pornographic movies. this was the one who had impressed it upon me that i should under no account display the fact that i have a penis. he repeated a gesture of licking to show how people behaved in these pornographic movies, then looked at me with eyes which communicated the depravity of such a gesture. he enumerated the sacrosanct brahmin values. sex is only for procreation, not for enjoyment, and is solely confined to the marital relationship. killing any animal is disrespecting the life principle and thus eating meat is dirty. he was on a roll and i was growing irritated. the pashcim - the west in hindi - he spoke the word as if it were a synonym of all that is dirty and disrespectful. "you have cut down all the trees in the west," he continued, then motioning to the sprawling overarching tree we were sitting under, "for us trees are sacred, the fountain of life, home to the birds and providers of oxygen. they are not to be cut down"
ridiculous, i thought. i got up and made to urinate by the tree, partly in order to move away from him. "not here," he said, "this is where people sit. go on the other side of the road." i didn't go back to him in any hurry. my hindi was too limited to do any justice to any response i might want to give. after a while he beckoned me over, and now with a smile, said "kya hai?"
"you think i am dirty," i began. i had confessed to him that i eat meat occasionaly.
"noooo, you are not dirty," he said.
"you said people from the west were dirty"
"not everyone," he laughed, "of course not everyone"
"there are also hindus who eat meat," i said
"of course there are, yes. they are not brahmins."
he was in fact going back on his words, but i think that for a while i had been privy to the real repugnance inside him towards the west, which contradicted the secure brahmin structures that defined his being.
i was irritated with being with sexually repressed people who are obsessed with distinctions between cleanliness and dirtiness and no longer wanted the challenge of being a foreigner in india.
every night i saw the light of the temple at the top of the hill across the river and one day i made the trip across - about two hours to cross the river alone, employing two wooden boats, pushed by men with big bamboo canes, everyone getting out once or twice to walk across sandy bars while the boat slowly fought its passage upstream. at the temple i was welcomed by everybody and took part in the first puja (devotional chanting and music) where i really felt like able to be a part of. there was the big shiva temple at the top of the hill - whose lights i had seen from below - and, a little below, a temple dedicated to parvati - two temples representing both the male and female god principles. i watched the mother temple become decked with swaddling fabrics then was encouraged to come inside for the puja. one man played the bongo drums while other men took it in turns to lead the chants next to a microphone linked to a loudspeaker. everyone else sang along whole-heartedly to the chants they all seemed to know, or passed round cymbals or clapped their hands. the result was akin to a group of football fans, possessing more enthusiasm and capacity for the creation of cacophony than musical talent, but their whole-heartedness was evident and the earnest invocation of the hindu gods possessed a lot of power in itself.
the sandy banks of the river Sone were unfrequented in the morning and it was the perfect place to meditate or do river yoga in the silky sand brown gently caressing warm water.
