the inevitability of suffering

He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate--Kim

Chapter 4 (2003)

It was very cold on the road to another train station I hoped would take me to Darjeeling. My wool blanket flapped helplessly during the taxi ride and all efforts to bundle up left me absurdly exposed to frigid air. In the struggle I saw Varanasi away from the old city had lost all  its color.  Even the bright morning sun could do nothing with a land shrouded in a thick blue haze.  The Ganga chai blues also reappeared, and on the edge of tension I was once more on a treacherous road in the backseat of the three-wheeler driven by the same driver who I tipped generously for taking me to Saranath and back yesterday. 

He didn’t fail me this time and here I sat in the second class waiting area, along with a few others who appeared as if they were used to waiting long periods of time.  One woman across the room stared at me as if she’d never seen a white man with a tattering beard and baseball cap eat two cashew cookies that within minutes hurt his stomach.  Maybe she eyed the bottle of water next to me; it must have looked pretty darn good to a thirsty woman who sat on a bench and didn’t know when she’d need to stand up again. 

I had been in India for a week and saw only one instance of the poverty I feared.  From my cold window seat of life being poor is, in the United States, a relative perception.  Everyone and everything looked poor but I knew the owner of the Ganga Fuji Home and Restaurant was anything but.  On the road through the blue slum everyone wore cheap plastic sandals or nothing, except for the men in green who were armed with nightsticks and revolvers.  All fourteen sitting in second class were barefoot.

Yesterday I walked around Varanasi’s commercial center, and saw a woman lying on the side of the road, bent up in positions you’d see in hospitals and nursing homes in the states.  She had a hand on her stomach and her mouth was ajar; her knees bent slightly, feet curled inward.  Her eyes fixed on anyone who dared a glance at this shell of a body. When I didn’t slow down, my conscience spun into overdrive, why am I not stopping?  Why isn’t anyone stopping?  What has suffering and poverty done to the minds of the people here?  Is it religious apathy?  Has there been an overwhelming sigh and acceptance to pain and suffering, all of it leading to death of this present life and of the inevitability of returning here for a better go at it?  Maybe it’s a caste thing not to help someone in need and I didn’t know enough to understand a legitimate reason for not stopping to help. I hoped and murmured a prayer that there were some Samaritans in the land of Thomas and the Buddha to help this soul. 

For the moment though, and on occasion for the next 36 hours, I wondered if I should have helped the dying woman with terror and defeat in her eyes.  It was an awful four seconds but an awakening to the reality there’s always someone around and in the corners of this country where someone needs help.  It can be overwhelming if you let it get to you; and to think I hadn’t even been to Calcutta, the epicenter and black hole of suffering.  I came to reconciliation and justified my non response response because it wasn’t my time to stop.  I gave the woman and the boy with the plastic green toy on a string a 100-rupee note when I finally left the steps of the Assi Ghat, not stopping to tell her how to spend it, and I didn’t look in her eyes.  On the north coast of Bali I gave a nice woman who had five kids and little else some paper, pencils, erasers and pencil sharpeners after an hour massage on the beach. I also purchased a bottle of coconut oil she made and left it somewhere.  There is no way anyone on earth can help everyone in need, and there should be no guilt in saying no to the majority who have their hands out if one can be charitable with at least one person everyday.  Jesus and the Buddha said people are going to suffer whether they believe or not in the messages of good news and joy.  If I give my change to a beggar on a street corner in Seattle or in an alley Delhi I have, for the briefest moment in time, reduced a need and alleviated emotional distress, perhaps for the both of us.

After an hour of waiting there was no absence of the traveling homeless who was always a shadow’s reach.  Four feet in front me an old woman reclined on a plastic bag half full of clothes, and looked back at me like it was her assignment to make sure I stayed put.  A big, glassy and gray moon of a marble orb stared at me, never blinking, never moving, fixed in perpetual disarray.  The woman’s gray socks barely stayed on her bare gray feet, giving her string-bean legs a dried-up snaky look.  She had a bottle of water on her left side, and leaned on it mindlessly.  Families and boxes waited patiently for their time to move.  I kept moving, from the platform to the second-class waiting room, where I considered a camp out if the 4506 didn’t show up soon. I started having big doubts about this leg of the trip that was going to take a bite out of the scheduled Calcutta plan I drew up, which I also started having doubts about going to as well, and I wasn’t sure why. 

Some things are not meant to be.  The feeling of doubt that grew while I waited in the cold room with the patient travelers was an instinct too loud to ignore.  And it wasn’t the fact that that train to Darjeeling came and went and I didn’t know it had come and gone two hours ago. I acted on the assumption the trains are either right on time or they’re late, and never early.  The train left platform one, instead of platform two, information I was pretty sure I had squared away.  I went back to the ticket window and the man said ‘you failed to hear the switch on the public address system’.  I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hindi and if the announcement had carried a simultaneous alert in English, it was garbled in electronic noise. 

At the hotel Surya, north of Varanasai’s main train station, I sipped masala tea in a grassy green and flowery courtyard with other wayward tourists, while I waited for another train, this one bound for Delhi. 

It took a lifetime to get the courage up for a close and personal encounter with India.  It was going to take a little more of it to get to Calcutta.  My reading of City of Joy helped me get a mental edge on what to expect upon arrival, but from what I’d seen and what I wanted to do now was taking me in a different direction and that was fine with me. 

The road between this morning’s station and the afternoon one revealed itself once the early hour blanket of thermo-filth lifted.  An afternoon of sunny mud in three shades of gray and black starkly contrasted with the garden I rested in only a few meters away.  Even the light where I sat had a balmy effect while I sipped tea and chewed on hot roti, eaten with the help of Carl, the curious chipmunk who was not afraid to climb up the table and join me.  The Nepali waiter came over to shoo Carl but I stopped him before he came too close.  In hindsight the loss of time and money from the aborted east-bound trip seemed irrelevant, perhaps because I still had time to travel and I didn’t want to go somewhere my conscience felt was not the time to do so.   Five days in a holy Hindu city by the holy river my conscience knows no words other than what the present time presents itself day by day. 

I was assigned to a berth with five westerners on the Shiv-Ganga to Delhi.  I assumed this would be an opportunity to be more engaged in entertainment and thought-provoking discourse than slumbering with five quiet South Koreans. The fact I did not have the cherished upper perch berth to look at everything more comfortably also put me right in the mix with the Aussie and UK travelers.

It was a challenge to write with the native tongue’s unique and sometimes indecipherable accents all around me.  The presence of the chai men, however was a nice distraction and a good mood setter; adorned in red, vigorously selling their chai, chai, chai garum, chai, chai, chai garum.  I sat amazed at their hard work and determined resolve to sell as much chai as possible in one of the world’s most cramped spaces on earth.  I assumed the more they sold the more they earned, no doubt like the vendor who sells hot dogs in a spacious ballpark. 

 I enjoy good conversation that is equally distributed. To my right three well-dressed Indian men in various pieces of leather, dress shirts and slightly wadded-up looking trousers conversed casually.  In the berth of all things western it is not lost on anyone we were all strangers, but chemistry, shared experience and a common tongue are key ingredients for sustainable and positive communication, but the most important of the three is just being able to get along.  That would be chemistry.  

Another man joined the threesome to my right.  They were definitely not as poor as the masses that lived in Benares.  I was glad to see at least a different fabric of economy represented in person on this trip.  The chai men in red, meanwhile, maintained an endless amount of zeal for seven hours. 

1)      The Australian man who was going to work for the Red Cross as a translator in Kashmir speaks fluent Sanskrit and Hindu.  An affable fellow and twenty years my younger, we shared with each other late in the night; he didn’t speak much when the air time was occupied by others.

2)      An English couple, one from Surrey, near Leatherhead.  A nice pair, both read hardback John King novels and and only conversed with each other. 

3)      An English fella and his girlfriend from sunny San Sebastian occupied the top berths; he wanted to remind me how to get them and I wasn’t interested in hearing because I was only glad to be on the train.  What was interesting enough to tune into was his story told to the other westerners about his girlfriend’s passport and bag, stolen on a train three days ago.  When I said I was American he made an incredibly feeble attempt to lambaste the states, but I’d have none of it.  All of his angry rhetoric, stereotypical accusations, and general ignorance of Americans,  I believe, was deflected and handled in a very tasteful and adult-like manner that would have made George Washington proud:  watch your words, pay attention to your tone, and stop assuming ‘you Americans’ is inclusive of all Americans, especially if you don’t even know any, and since I am the first Yank you’ve ever talked to, I’d recommend a trip to the big country before you blather on about that which you don’t know.  Oh yeah, and you’re a schmuck for blaming your girlfriend for your travel delays.  Ok, maybe our first president didn’t know Yiddish.