Ahmedabad, Bath, and Beyond
this is fifth installment of my india journal from the winter of 2004
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Well, there’s been a slight lag here. Let’s just say I’ve been in transit, and collecting fantastic experiences along the way. I’ve written about fifty pages in my own journal, trying to recollect everything in the most vivid details possible.
Let’s see: overnight train to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the western state that makes up the kind of protuberance on the west coast of India. Got into the dusty, bustling city early on a day that marked a nexus of two religious occurrences: The national holiday for Diwali, and the end of Ramadan, which they call Ramzan. After checking my backpack at the train station holding room, I asked the autorickshaw driver to take me to the Sidi Shayaid Mosque in the middle of town, thinking that would be a great central location from which to explore the city. Little did I know that I was being dropped off at the largest Mosque in the city, and that it was the end of the last morning prayer before Ramzan was over.
Ahmedabad is a city with REALLY friendly folk– you might even say emotions run high for firang among it’s inhabitants. It was usually very positive. Never had I been so grabbed, patted, and been asked to shake hands and say my to so many people at one time. I felt positively presidential. It was there that I got a glimpse of possibilities for a friendly firang in a city not used to foreigners. “Do you want to see movie with us?” “Come eat at restaurant with my family,” and my personal fave, “Would you stand to take picture with my son?” The photo ops were flying down in A-town. Man, the requests kept coming, many of them simply offerings of good will.
The mosque scene offered a heightened version of this atmosphere. Compounded with the already too-good-to-true goodwill the citizens offered, the month of Ramadan, which of course is a time of self-betterment, reflection, generosity and aligning ones self with godly pursuits for Muslims , this was a bunch of men who were positively coming after me in groups, queuing up (I’ve only seen queuing in an orderly fashion twice on this trip– most of the time it is elbows akimbo) to shake my hand. I dropped the love bomb on them, taught to me by my friend Karim.
“Sala’amu alaikum,” I announced, which means “Peace be upon you.” I said to one startled young man. He immediately replied, “Walaikum as sala’am.” (and to you, peace as well). I was in the club.
This started the gift giving whoopee machine. The adults started whipping out the five rupee notes and laid them on me, one after another. Apparently it’s a Ramzan celebration ritual, since I saw them doing the same thing with small children later on in the day. I must have made fifty rupees in fifteen minutes, a king’s ransom in their pay scale. After all my bitching about the bloodsuckers out on the streets, here I was eating my words and accepting their gracious offerings.
Of course the supplicants, what seems to be the religious loophole for begging, were right there to skim off of my profits. I eventually gave it all back to the hangers- on as I entered and exited the mosque. So much for my get rich quick schemes.
A quiet man named Fahid stayed with me the whole time. He wasn’t looking for anything; he just wanted to hang and make me feel welcome. For me, it took a little getting used to –if you read my last entry, you would certainly understand my trepidation. He bid me farewell at a certain point, and I was left alone again, or a strange version of celebrity aloneness.
I walked through the winding narrow streets of the old city, observing the meat markets and sweets stands in the Muslim section of town. This Ramadan shindig was going to be a major throwdown, judging by the amount of chickens and goats they had ready for slaughter. Got blessed at a Hindu Temple that had a really weird likeness of a deity that looked like a pile of goldleaf mashed potatoes, and went to check out the brightly painted technically elephant in the middle of town, using the shade of it’s massive form.
Tiring of the visual feast, I set out to find internet access over on the modern side of town. I crossed the dusty Nehru bridge, and made my way up Ashram Road towards the Tourist Center. But wait, Tim, it’s a national holiday– you’re SOL on the WWW. I realized that my clever stopover plan was going to be a bust — no clothing market, no cuppa joe, no blogging, no nothin’. I thought to myself, “Well, what could possibly be open on a Hindu National Holiday besides movie theaters? ” Well, my clever readers, you’ve probably already figured it out– ashrams! And there I was on Ashram Road, thinking of one in particular that I had to see– one completely and utterly a part of the state and national identity. I’m speaking, of course, of Sabarmati ashram, otherwise known as Ghandi’s ashram.
Mahatma Gandhi was born in Gujarat, in the western coastal town of Porbandar, and after sojourns that had taken him to England and South Africa, he returned to India in 1897. Around 1919, he was elected the leader of the Indian National Congress party and he used this ashram as his political center during a fifteen year period, and never stopped returning there from time to time until his assassination. It was a place where significant ideas of his came to fruition, such as the guiding principles of his life, called Satyagraha, the most well-known of these tenants being non-violent protest. Needless to say, it is a revered place for both Indians and the world-wide peace community.
I walked into the welcoming courtyard (free admittance on the holiday, natch) after taking a noisy, dusty, hot autorickshaw ride, and found waiting for me a hushed oasis in the middle of the cacophonous city. There were people sitting in the lush gardens with their family, some people were napping in the shade provided by the palm fronds hanging overhead, others were sitting quietly and staring at the bronze statue of Gandhi sitting in the lotus position, a fresh garland of flowers ringing his expression of eternal meditation. The extensive pictorial history of his life was provided in the open-air museum, including his letter to Hitler in the research centre. The highlight had to be his room in the ashram preserved as he kept it, which was the apotheosis of his austerity and grace.
I reluctantly made my way back through the mazes of city street in the back of the autorickshaw. My evening train plans got sacked by a cancellation (more on travel plan snafus later), and based on a glowing recommendation by an Aussie who had just been there and my personal research on it, I instead changed my plans to head further south to the tiny coastal Shangri-La of Diu, a former Portuguese Port Town. I made my way down to the Hotel Roopalee down in the old town, had a hot water in a bucket bath, and crashed on my grimy little bed, needing to be up at 4:30 the next morning to take my second class coach down the coast.