It's Good To Be Here

Here we are, nine days into India, and less than three weeks into our journey. This is the first, or

“catching our breath-sleeping immensely-intestinal re-organization-nothing to do and nowhere to go-slowing it all way down-getting our bearings” stage of things. It's good to be here. Did I say nothing to do? My mistake. There's actually quite a lot going on. And in fact there has been since leaving New Mexico.

A week in St. Louis with our old and dear friend Paula. Let me say just a little about Paula, in order to assist you in acquiring a sense of our experience. Paula, now our age of course, started out as the oldest of 12 children way back when. There's a lot more that could be said about all that, but I'll leave it there.

That fact alone should make it easy to conjure up a picture of a person in charge, whether by temperament or by necessity, or both. Paula never stops moving. She picked us up at the airport and took us directly to her band rehearsal. She plays a huge hung-by-a-strap-over-the-neck bass drum with Joia, a sorta Brazilian beat street band that's been going on around St. Louis for decades, and they were rehearsing for a big gig coming up in a few days. She's the mother of four, and now has two beautiful grandsons by way of her oldest, daughter Mehra: Alex and Avery, ages 4 and 2. She works full time as a mobile/visiting home care nurse to the housebound poor, and does private healing work using Barbara Brennan's training and other modalities; she lives in an integrated and hence relatively undesirable neighborhood in north St. Louis, and has an African American sorta boyfriend about whom she's trying to decide how she really feels and with whom what she may or may not really want.

She took a few days off work to be with us, and we spent the week pretty much moving along with her.

We met and spent a couple of days with boyfriend Charles, had a brief brunch reunion with old (as in “childhood” or early adult) friends of Nancy's who now live in Louisville, KY and drove up for the occasion, ate Thai food at a nice little restaurant in ”The Loop”, a hip street in the University district, I got to play a little dumbek on that street with a sweet and wonderful immigrant musician from Kazakhstan, we listened to a rockin', honkin' New Orleans style brass band also on said street, amongst whose members was a kid whose horn was bigger than he was – I kid you not, visited with Alex and Avery and Mehra and her current partner John, a real FBI guy, and Paula's other children Anya (and her med school partner and boyfriend Chris) and Evan, a fledgling-maybe-but can't quite decide psychotherapist, walked along the Mississippi near Paula's house, and ate lots of her literally award winning mushroom barley soup. For starters.

We also rented a car and drove out to Fort Madison, Iowa , about half way between St. Louis and Ames, Iowa where they live, to meet a dear dharma friend of Nancy's, Maura, and her husband Nick, also a newish dharma guy. Maura has been to India/Sherabling with Nancy, and I had never met either of them. Wonderful, salt of the earth Midwesterners, as generous and accommodating as can be, and a delight to meet and spend a few hours with, and walk around an old brick and Victorian neighborhood of Fort Madison with, and share some meals with before driving back to St. Louis the next day. We actually had adjoining hotel rooms. Now how cool is that?

So by the time we got to Delhi about 24 hours after leaving St. Louis, at about 9PM local time, we were pretty fried, but also of course wired, and we were picked up by our pre-arranged hotel driver in his ancient, clunking, rattling, gear grinding, one step up from an auto rickshaw vehicle and taken through the dense pollution of the city to our back alley wholly-Indian-on the old hippie trail hotel, where we were greeted with bottles of cold water and the proper registration routine, and escorted by lift to our new, if temporary quarters. Large king sized Indian bed, shag-a-delic sixties rug and pillows, bathroom with shower and accompanying floor squeegee, and Western style toilet (a necessity, I'm afraid, for my much older knees than when I was happy to use an Indian style squat toilet 35 years ago). Comfortable enough, and within the budget travel requirements we have set for ourselves. The staff were all very helpful and kind and available, including Prem, and Muju who made all of our train arrangements for the coming legs of our journey to Bodhgaya and Varanasi and back to Delhi, and we enjoyed our two night stay. We'll be returning to The Cottage Ganga Inn twice more, I think, enroute first to Bodhgaya after leaving Sherabling, and then again enroute out of Delhi to Bangkok.

(SIDE NOTE ABOUT EFFICIENT BUDGET LONG TERM TRAVEL

We didn't plan our route well, and so we will be backtracking – a budget travel venial sin - from Bodhgaya to Varanasi to Delhi, instead of the more logical, and considerably less expensive route, heading consistently east from Delhi to Varanasi to Bodhgaya and then flying to Bangkok out of Kolkata. This oversight will cost us time, which is not a real issue since we have plenty of that, but more significantly to us, probably 400 dollars more than it would have or should have. (Nancy insists that this is a non-issue, since she imagines that there is a good reason to be returning to Delhi. We shall see.) That point aside, this kind of error repeated over the long term makes for a possibly shorter and definitely more expensive trip. On the other side of this unassailable truth is the equally salient reality that, for example, a couple of nights ago we fed six people – three rambunctious little people, and three hungry adults – for about six and a half dollars at the local Stupa Guest House restaurant. Relativity hard at work.)

While we were in Delhi we were visited by Nancy's friend Jiya and her adorable 4year old daughter Alija. Jiya is the wife of Nancy's other friend and helper in India, Arun, who arranges transportation, cell phones and other routine matters for her on her multiple visits. But wait! Indian drama! Or is it soap opera in real life?

Arun and Jiya are now living apart because Arun's Muslim mother doesn't like her son's Nepali wife, and she, Jiya, is tired of being disrespected, and I guess Arun is obligated toward mom in the scheme of things. Oh no! The same ethnic/class bullshit all over the world. She now works as a housekeeper for a rich family and is able to live at their home with daughter Alija. Stay tuned for the next episode of the endless all too human melodrama. Wherever you go, people are people, after all.

A quick and easy flight from Delhi to Dharamshala, and an enlightening and comfortable taxi/van (official “tourist vehicle”) ride captained by Sanjay, a friend and colleague of Arun, also pre-arranged for pick-up and transport to Sherabling. Enlightening in the following way: I learned something about how drivers navigate the much-too-narrow but two lane winding mountain back roads and rural “highways” of northern India, including the routine and frequent use of horn honking to accomplish several things. To let both pedestrians, of which there are many, and other drivers, of which there are also many, both oncoming and in front, know that you are there, that you want them to move over or move more quickly out of your way, or that you are coming around a blind curve in their direction, or that you are about to pass. Sanjay is clearly a happy honker, and loves to use his horn somewhat relentlessly, and one might say aggressively. He doesn't like to be delayed, or obstructed, and has no hesitation about letting walkers and other drivers know this. At first I didn't know what to make of all this honking, but it soon became clear what the mores are, and how this system of communication embodies and pays obeisance to the primal social Darwinism of might makes right. That is, the bigger the vehicle, the more rights naturally and automatically seem to accrue to it, and the more aggressively its pilot is allowed to honk. Passage between vehicles, or next to walkers, is measured in centimeters rather than feet, and the skill required to navigate these relatively microscopic distances is considerable. Best to sit back and relax, and enjoy the ride. These people actually know what they're doing, and are good at it to boot.

Delivered safely and soundly to the Palpung Institute,

the teaching facility and hotel at Sherabling Monastic Seat of the Twelfth Kentin Tai Situpa, colloquially, respectfully and affectionately referred to as Situ Rinpoche. We met Lundup at the front desk, and Nancy ran quickly upstairs to the third marble staired and marble floored level to confirm that a room which she had previously liked was empty and available. Lundup, like almost everyone else around here, except for the Indian workers, is a monk. Most of the time, it seems, the monks who tend to the Institute have little to do since there is almost no one staying here, and no teachings happening at the moment, and there is a lot of hangin' out going on, people occupying themselves routinely with their 3G smartphones, doing what people everywhere do in this way. Also though, monks are assigned to different functions as needed, such as manning the front desk of the hotel, or organizing clean up details in which perhaps dozens participate on a monthly basis, walking through the forest picking up trash. All are friendly and helpful, and for the most part things appear to run loosely and, I suppose, smoothly. Of course, there may be the “when the cat's away.............” phenomenon at work as well, since Rinpoche is currently gone from his seat, in Delhi as it turns out, and is due back in the next few days, no one seems to know precisely when.

So we are comfortably settled into room 310 of the Institute. A much more modern facility than the Cottage Ganga Inn, certainly. The neighborhood ravens provide a frequent, insistent sonic background. The sky and the mountains and some of the eight stupas are visible from our window. We rest, we walk from here to there through the woods and down the road, we eat twice a day at the restaurant, we visit Amma and Acca, an almost ancient couple that Nancy first met here and who adopted each other 36 years ago.

They feed us breakfast of fried egg and chapati (roti) and milk tea if we go in the morning, or tea and “biscuits” if we go in the afternoon. Amma is deaf, and for all practical purposes blind with cataracts, although this does not seem to get in her way very much, or too much temper her edgy-sweet demeanor. She spends a good bit of her time spinning her prayer wheel and fingering her mala and muttering whatever mantras she mutters, dozing at times in the midst of these endeavors, leaning precariously to one side til you would think she'd simply keel over, but she does not. Instead she regains her posture and continues on with her long established practices, eyes closed or open, watching her cable informed big screen TV full of Indian soap operas, like very old women all over the world perhaps. (These Indian shows are populated, exclusively, and frighteningly, by the whitest skinned Indians you could ever imagine seeing. Are they all dipped in white wash? Not a dark skinned Indian to be seen anywhere).

Acca, toothless and wrinkled and richly darkish mocha brown colored, does the cooking and the serving, and most of the limited talking, such as it is, with Nancy, as the two of them, after all these years, still stumble through their respectively paltry abilities in the others' language, yet somehow, for the most part, manage to make themselves reasonably well understood to each other. The two of them now live in their tiny apartments – they each have one, Nancy tells me – one room, with little kitchen alcove, and toilet, in the Old Age Care Center on the monastery grounds. They each hobble around, bent over, with bad knees and hips and legs, the infirmities of being very old, and the effects of an early life of hard physical labor working on the highways of India, and they grimace with the pain they are in, yet allow no effort, with us in any case, to be attended to. They attend to us. We stay for a half hour and leave, with the promise to visit again tomorrow. Nancy goes every day, while I have settled into less frequent attendance, in part because I don't want to eat egg every day, and in part because I don't wish to intrude upon relationships begun long ago in a very different time at Sherabling.

Another of the places we roam to through the woods is the Canteen, a small snack shop cum minimal restaurant frequented by monks on break between classes, or pujas, or other monkly engagements, and located very close to the main monastery buildings themselves. Here we buy liters of water (“normal water”, as opposed, I suspect, to sparkling water), biscuits, an occasional plate or bowl of chow mein or thukpa, a traditional(?) noodle soup, and sit a while watching the older monks play with and tease the little monks, or argue with each other, about what I can only speculate, and the style of which, while loud and aggressive sounding, never becomes hostile, or concerning to an outside observer.

We did have an appropriately dramatic travel adventure a couple of nights ago. Nancy's digestion has been a bit troublesome – mine has too, some, but I'm sure it has been a simple adjustment, and nothing pathological – and she wanted to visit the Tibetan Medicine clinic here on the grounds, which we both did. Her complaint being largely digestive, mine being more about exhaustion. We were seen by the doctor who read our pulses Tibetan style, asked a question or two, and prescribed some herbs/pills/patents.

One of the risks of travel to foreign lands is, of course, not being able to understand the language. In most cases this might be a challenge to simply live with and learn to accommodate one way or another. When it comes to medical situations however the risks are amplified. Somewhere in the communication about how exactly to take the horse pills the doctor had prescribed there was a gap in understanding. In any case, Nancy didn't understand that these pills were to be crushed into small pieces before swallowing, and she dutifully set about to swallow the thing whole. But alas, the mass seemed to get stuck in her throat, and while there was never any danger of not being able to breathe, she was in severe discomfort and began to panic and tighten up. We walked from the Institute through the woods to the Medical clinic, and fortunately, the Western medicine practitioner was home. He was however just taking his dinner, and so we were instructed to sit and wait. After a few minutes of waiting his assistant returned to inquire as to whether Nancy was indeed having any trouble breathing. Assured that she was not, we were again left to wait for the doctor to finish his dinner.

In the end, the doctor was calm and reassuring, had a deep look into the darkness of Nancy's throat, firmly palpated her neck and throat, looking to feel any possible stuck pill there, thrust a wide flat stainless steel instrument into this darkness while Nancy gagged, and watched while Nancy drank a glassful of water. Her success at being able to drink and swallow convinced heir doctor that the offending pill had slid down to where it was intended to be, and that all was well. A bit of soreness in the esophegus, a mild tranquilizer to help relaxation and sleep, and we were sent on our way. At no cost I might add.

Of course we made a donation into the “THANK” box at the dispensary window.

Fitful sleep despite the tranquilizer, still some fear and discomfort upon awakening, but within a short time everything was resolved and back in order. THANK indeed!

Another of Nancy's friends at Sherabling is Tsultrim, maybe 45 years old, former monk, former guest house manager, former thanka painter, and now working on the sewing of a huge component of what will become a 300 foot tall banner which will be draped, only on some very special occasion, down the slope of a mountain some 24 hours drive from Sherabling. There are four or five people working on this one component. This one happens to contain the likeness of His Eminence Tai Situpa, and is perhaps 25 feet long by 20 feet wide. The principle section, we're told, will contain the likeness of Guru Rinpoche, he who is credited with bringing Buddhism from India to Tibet, and will be 6 or 7 times the size of the Situ component.

In addition to working on this piece of art, Tsultrim takes care of his sister's 5 year old daughter Nawang,

while sister and her husband are somewhere else in India earning their living. Nawang is a bright, boundlessly energetic, artistically creative munchkin of a child with the tall slim build of a ballerina, and it was she and two tag along 4 year old little monk-lets, along with Tsultrim, who joined us last night for dinner. Tsultrim and Nawang live on the grounds of the monastery in a tiny one room apartment along a corridor of such rooms in an old, typically Indian run down concrete building for the poor. In this fashion they are taken care of by the institution, provided with work, food, school and lodging. In addition to which, at least for Tsultrim, he gets to be in service to Situ Rinpoche and to the Dharma.

Today Nancy is having a day of silence, and so I am sitting at the restaurant, having just finished breakfast, writing this. The weather has been glorious. Perfect, really. Not hot, not cold yet, although the intimations of coldness are in the air; two afternoons of very heavy rain, otherwise sunny and mountain bright. It is rumored that His Holiness Karmapa will be in the neighborhood tomorrow, at the school further up the mountain, and that the public is welcome to stop in. We'd be hiking down and up to the school, along a path that Nancy thinks she knows. She will certainly go. I will probably go. I clearly do not share Nancy's dedication to Tibetan Buddhism, to Situ Rinpoche, to the Karmapa, or to much of any formal involvement in religion, but HEY!, here I am, at Sherabling, and there will be a bona fide HIS HOLINESS in the area. How could I not go?