An Indian Motorcycle Diary

From Motorcycle Diary

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On my third day in Pushkar, my Irish friend Niall and I decided to rent ourselves some motorbikes and do some exploring. By the way, I have firmly resolved one of these days to take a trip where I travel cross-country (or countries) solely by bike. Every time I have rented one on my travels so far it has resulted in some of the most memorable experiences of the entire trip. And this day was no exception.

We set our initial sights on some Shiva temples situated a few miles north of Pushkar. We checked our map and our compass, revved all 150 cubic centimeters of our 'hogs', and headed out into the scrubland. After an hour of riding on dirt roads through mud hut villages, past wizened goat herders and a lone desert rickshaw overflowing with passengers (all staring intently at us), we took a few more turns and found ourselves on the noisy thoroughfare of a busy city. What the...! This wasn't right. We discovered we were in Ajmer, a crowded hub 15km south of Pushkar. My natural, superior sense of navigation had failed us! Fortunately, it turned out there were actually a few interesting things to see in Ajmer, including a Jain temple that held a huge and incredibly detailed golden representation of the Jain universe. We also stumbled onto the massive Dargah Sharif, a tomb for a Sufi saint and one of the most sacred shrines in India for both Hindus and Muslims.

It was my first real encounter with Islamic India and I felt transported. There was a distinctly different atmosphere than the previous holy places I had been so far, most of them Hindi, and I spent a long time walking around the huge space inside the shrine (after going through metal-detectors, giving up my bag, and being patted down by imposing military police), which was filled with thousands of worshippers, separated by gender of course. The air in there was powerful: thick with the strange tonal and rhythmic prayers of the mullah and the devout, the heavy musk of burning incense, and the pungent scent of flowers from the many offerings. I felt out of place, and I'm sure I looked it, but surprisingly I didn't receive too many stares. I learned later that this was one Muslim place of worship that was open to all people, regardless of caste or creed.

Back outside, to exit the general area of the shrine, we had to slowly inch our motorbikes through a fantastically colorful and narrow bazaar jam-packed with people. It took us close to an hour until the crowd started to thin. At one point we passed a couple filthy butcher's stalls with the usual fly-encrusted meat being run by a few kids who couldnt've been more than 10 years old. After we got free we discovered Niall had a flat. We found a local tire shop where the mechanic worked some magic with a patch kit and a blow torch and somehow had us back on the road in minutes. Who needs AAA, anyways?

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We took another extended detour on our way back to Pushkar, but this time it was intentional: we wanted to stay off the main road. Soon after we left the city, we came across a very strange place...it felt almost like a modern suburb in the states, moderately nice block housing (nice by Indian standards at least)...but it was completely deserted, a real ghost town. Very weird vibes there. We left quickly, turning onto yet another dirt road that we were fairly sure would take us to the Shiva temples. On the way, we passed through several more tiny villages. At each one a pack of village children would run out to greet us, which made for some good photo-ops, but a few times we barely managed to escape the smiling mobs of outstretched hands and chants of "school pen! rupee! school pen! chocolate? school pen! which country?". One of their favorite tactics was to grab the back of our motorbikes and slide on their feet through the loose dirt. A few times this almost caused our bike's to tip over. They loved posing for pictures, and after the click they'd all go absolutely insane trying to grab it and look at each other on the screen. They were always confused and disappointed with my Nikon. So used to digital cameras, they could never understand why there was no picture display on the back. I took a liking to the kids from this one village in particular, and I promised them I would come back and bring chocolates the next day, but we never made it. Still feel a little guilty about this.



Finally, 8 hours after we had first set out, we pulled up to the temples; two tiny buildings set against a small rocky outcropping, guarded by a dozen wild peacocks(!). Extremely picturesque. Niall went off to get pictures of the sunset, and as I approached the temple, an old orange-robed sadhu (Indian holy man) bent over a stick came out to greet me with a warm smile. He invited me to sit down and drink chai with him. So we sat. And as the sun disappeared behind purple hills, this man told me in broken English the story of his life. His name was Daya. He had become an ascetic when he was 20, going into the forest and living on nothing but berries and leaves. He gave up his family, his friends, and his possessions to live "the baba life," he said. He told me he had been living at this temple, eating nothing but "patato and plant leaf" for 40 years. At one point he showed me his bedroom, situated on the roof of the temple. It was more like a cave; the ceiling was an overhanging rock and his bed was a concrete slab. A large pile of "patatos" filled up half of the space. Trying to understand how he could exist like this, I asked him "You don't get sick? You are strong?" and he laughed this amazing laugh that I can't describe and said "Strong? What is strong? God is strong!" pointing up to the sky.




An indescribable feeling came over me while I sat there and listened to Daya. His face, especially his enormous weathered smile, and his body, the way he moved...peace and love and calm literally emanated from this man. But his eyes...they were unbelievably intense and piercing, so much so that I found it took physical effort to break away from his gaze. After awhile we ran out of things to say and so we just sat there together for a long time, enjoying the silence punctuated every so often by a peacock sitting in a nearby fruit tree. Eventually Niall came back, and Daya invited us to stay for a dinner of...guess what...potatoes, but Niall was worried about going back in the dark so we made our apologies and said goodbye.

On the long, slow ride back to Pushkar, the hills surrounded us, looming dark shapes against the pale light of dusk. Along the way the stars began to come out. I yelled ahead to Niall to stop, and we turned off our lights and sat there on our bikes, appreciating the silence and the surreal brown and purple and dark blue landscape. Out of the dark walked an old man in a full length white dhoti carrying a large axe. He hardly registered our presence. I threw out a "Namaste" and he responded in kind without looking up, and then he was gone. A mile down the road we also encountered a middle-aged French guy walking next to a bicycle attached to a small cart with a cover. We stopped to make sure he was okay, because while an axe-wielding Indian might be a fairly typical sight out here, this was not. After using my flashlight to check some sort of injury on his foot, he said he was 'fine, thanks for asking, goodnight', and continued pushing his bike cart off into the blackness. Another Westerner embarking on his own personal journey in India. So it was a typical sight after all.

Back in Pushkar, I stared at the ceiling in my hotel room and tried to process the day's events. I couldn't. It all seemed too cinematic and epic to have actually happened. Larger than life. Before I came here, I had an idea of India in my head that had been illustrated by various movies and books and pictures. I expected the reality to be different somehow, but time and time again during my trip I found myself in a scene that could've been pulled straight out of a colorful Bollywood film, or a book about Western spiritual seekers exploring 'the Exotic Subcontinent'. Even now, after spending 2 months here, everything still seems larger than life. Sure, the intensity has faded a little...or rather, I think, my senses have adapted, numbing themselves in order to cope with the overload, like how your pupils dilate when exposed to bright light for a long time. But I still go to bed every night with a sense of disbelief that this place exists.