Each morning we eat breakfast at one of the many rooftop restaurants in Udaipur. Latte and croissants are sometimes available there. Today we were perched high above the buildings between the City Palace and the Jagdish Temple.
Usman was our tuk-tuk driver today. He picked us up at 2:30 and took us to the Monsoon Palace, set on a mountaintop high above Udaipur and offering breathtaking views. It was here that Roger Moore’s helicopter landed in the James Bond movie ‘Octopussy.’ Osman brought us to his family’s miniature painting shop and we were shown the intricacies of this traditional art medium of the Mugal style. The drivers know the secrets of the city and when I told Osman of my friend Mike’s love of monkeys he took us to a temple where a family of Hanuman monkeys lived. They are quite friendly as people feed them Gluco biscuits (“the most popular biscuit in the world”). Before the sun set I wanted to meet one of my goals for this trip and see if I could find a temple that Jonathan and I hung out at 30 years ago. It was a very significant place in my memory and I thought that I might still be able to locate it. Things have changed radically in the ensuing years and very little is recognizable other than the main monuments. The place is much more crowded, sprawling and touristed. They are even building an international airport here. Nobody was able to identify where my little temple might be and we were given a couple of leads that did not pan out. Down towards the lake from Sunset Point, however, the road began to look familiar and we hugged the lakeside until the water dried up. I remembered the temple being in a secluded corner of the lake, and as we followed the now dried-up lake bed I saw a small abandoned building back in the woods.
We walked through the now overgrown bramble until we came to a deep well with a concrete wall behind it and perched atop was the old temple in a state of disrepair but still with some of the old relics around. Looking inside through the metal gates brought back a thousand memories of times around the holy fire grates with saddhus (Indian renunciates, holy men) chanting, ringing bells and being drawn up into the ecstatic atmosphere.
At sunset we went within the City Palace walls to a fine restaurant, the Sunset Terrace, set right across from the Lake Palace. We had a gourmet light dinner with bansari (flute) and tabla (drums) being played in the classical form next to us, in the shadow of the largest palace in India, surrounded by mountains in the gently cooling twilight. It truly doesn’t get much better than this!
Here is one of the stories from my memoirs from the time that I was last in Udaipur with my friend Jonathan. It talks about a saddhu named Bhagwan Giri who adopted us when we were young seekers open to anything. He showed us many things for which I am very grateful. The temple in this story is the one that I re-discovered today.
ON BEING A GENTLEMAN
One day Bhagwan Giri told us that he was going to take us to meet his own guru, who lived in a small temple down by the lake. As we approached by the deserted roadside, the mild-mannered Bhagwan called out a loud greeting, as if to announce our arrival: “Hare Haar!” The call was immediately responded to, as if by echo. We were greeted outside the temple by a group of men surrounding a timeless, stick-thin, white-haired-and-bearded guru, dressed in black robes. His eyes told stories from ancient times and his body seemed to float across the floor. Soon he was showing us impossible rajah yoga postures, all performed with a beneficent smile and an unwavering dignity.
Our own Bhagwan told us that he served this great old guru as a disciple and a general errand-runner. Jonathan and I were enthralled by the stories and by the atmosphere surrounding the old man. The events of the past weeks since our arrival in India had seemed synchronous, beyond coincidence. We felt as though we were being led by a force greater than us along an invisible but undeniable path. Both of us harbored ambitions to be seen as holier-than-the-average-tourist. We hoped that there would be such an honor bestowed upon us, at the will and insightful knowing of a great sage, somewhere along the way. I imagined that one day the guru’s guru would look deep into my eyes and recognize a brother-spirit; that he would utter the words that I had been expecting, “I have been waiting for you, now I will teach you the deeper knowledge that you will need on your path.”
One day when we came upon the older guru’s temple he was offering chapatis to a school of fish which apparently would visit him at feeding time. On another occasion, this amazing, charismatic man was feeding a group of wild red monkeys who surrounded him, waiting patiently for their food. These were the same unruly monkeys that we had previously seen unashamedly stealing bags from passers-by and causing all kinds of clatter and confusion near the bazaar and around the temple of Hanuman the monkey god.
At night we would go to the sage’s temple and sit amongst an alert and attentive group of disciples who crowded into the small room to sit around a central fire and to partake in ‘darshan,’ a process which can only be understood in Western terms as an osmotic transferring of energy from a greater source to a lesser vessel. In this case the disciples were able to benefit from the presence of a great spirit in their midst in the form of their teacher. This old man would sit majestically, straight-backed and poised, on a deerskin. In the firelight the swami exuded an other-worldliness, an unfathomable wisdom that drew all around into his web of enlightenment. The guru mostly remained motionless. However, on occasion, he would hang on to a chain suspended from the ceiling and swing to a distant corner of his temple; perhaps to impart a secret word of advice to one of his disciples; or perhaps to share with them some bread, the same communion that had earlier been accepted by the fish and the monkeys.
He would tell stories from the great Hindu epics. These stories were graciously translated by the indomitable Park-Ranger-wallah, a nightly regular at the one-roomed temple, and the only English-speaking member of the group. The stories rambled and interwove. I suspected that the venerable Park-Ranger would edit and extrapolate, or perhaps make up his own versions to fit the questions we had about the inconsistencies that we perceived with our Westerner Science-is-everything, linear thinking minds. On one occasion the indefatigable Park-Ranger was explaining the inter-relationships between the main characters of the Ramayana, when our own Bhagwan Giri’s eyes glazed over. He began to point back and forth between Jonathan and myself, repeating the names: “Rama, Luxman; Luxman, Rama...” It seemed that he was trying to bestow Indian names upon us. And these, the names of a major god and his courageous brother. This would be it! An indication that we were truly on the disciple’s journey; at last we could cast off our histories and go forward into a life of spiritual discipline, renunciation and, god-help-us, celibacy.
As Bhagwan and the dauntless Park-Ranger attempted to iron out the ‘small print’ in this celestial contract, Jonathan and I sat in our straightest semi-lotus posture, waiting excitedly with a great vulnerability to the life changes that were, in all certainty, upon us. At that very moment from beyond the fire grate, there came a small shadow which spread to loom large upon us, as the Great Guru swung across the room to appear, eyes ablaze, and inches from my own. He glanced around at our little party of four in the corner. Then looking directly into my eyes and pointing a long skinny finger at me, shrieked, “You!!” My heart practically stopped. This WAS it then!
“You!” (his second English word was the same as his first). “You are no sanyassin.” My heart fell deep into a lost canyon. It was NOT to be. I was not on the path after all. A mere imposter. Another Westerner more concerned with the materialism of spirituality. And then the final cut. “You...a gentleman.” He laughed an eerie laugh and swung back to his spot, continuing as if nothing had happened, and yet I had been devastated, cut to the quick, discovered for what I was. In India a ‘gentleman’ would be equated with all that was evil and greedy: the Raj, the stiff upper lipped Englishmen who felt it their duty to show the little wogs the ‘true meaning of class.’ I limped away that night, one of the walking wounded, demoralized.
In the years that have passed since that incident took place, I have come to discover a little more of ‘what I am.’ It is indeed a spiritual path to travel toward the goal of truly being a gentle man. Like all other paths there has been sorrow and joy, comfort and struggle. It’s probably not for me to judge how far along that particular road I may have come, but one way or another, the truth was spoken that night.
Next stop was Ahar, the site of over 300 cenotaphs of the maharajas of Mewar. It was here that three large black-faced languor monkeys ran past us being warned off by a pack of dogs who seemed to be protecting the monuments but were probably more interested in defending their territory. We saw a memorial to Pratap Singh and his superhorse Chetak. We visited the Garden of the Maids-of Honor, Sahliyon-Ki-Bari and were taken to the obligatory craft emporium, Royal Arts and Crafts. We have enjoyed the colorful traditional saris, kurta, and salwa kameez worn by many people. We have been sorry to see many of the traditions seeming to disappear as young people especially are increasingly influenced by Western values and this is reflected in their clothing choices also. In order to bring about a little balance, we bought some made-to-measure traditional clothes which were delivered to our room later that night.
