CHAPTER 16:
LOOSEN YOUR BONE, WILMA
You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it.
And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.
—Kris Kristofferson; singer, songwriter, actor, Rhodes scholar, still
super hot for an old guy
Several years ago I went on a life-changing trip to India. In case you haven’t
witnessed it yourself, India is heaving with life, a swarming blur of vibrant
colors, honking cars, wandering cows, packed trains, endless slums, elaborate
palaces, ancient temples, and sweet smelling incense. It’s literally full to the
brim with humanity, chatting and chanting, and sitting on top of you while you
struggle for space on an overbooked train. Your only options are 1.) Go with
the flow and get to know your neighbor or 2.) Grow a big, fat stress-related
tumor. The thing that made perhaps the biggest impression on me there was
how nearly everyone I met went for option number one.
In India, some people will spoon you on a bus if you fall asleep next to
them, roll down their windows to chat with you in a traffic jam, stare
unblinkingly at your non-Indian-ness, help you if you’re lost, insist you get in
their family photos at historical monuments, invite you in for tea, burp, fart,
and laugh in your face—it’s totally annoying. And sweet. And makes me think
they clearly know something important that I’ve long forgotten (and that I
suspect most of the world has forgotten, too). I didn’t have to darken the
doorway of an ashram or stick a red dot on my forehead or partake in any of
the other thousands of spiritual options the country is famous for offering—
who needs them? As far as I’m concerned, you can learn pretty much
everything you need to know about spirituality and life by taking a twelve-
hour bus ride through India during wedding season.
When I bought my ticket on the Super Deluxe Express bus to Delhi from
Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, I was told I was paying a wise four hundred
rupees extra for the luxury of a five-hour nonstop ride, as opposed to the ten
hours and countless stops of the local bus. I was so extremely exhausted from
the three sleepless days I’d spent whooping it up at a camel festival in the
desert that the thought of hunkering down on the Super Deluxe and sleeping
all the way to Delhi sounded good to me. But what I got instead was a seat
next to Mr. Friendly, a middle-aged man who spoke three words of English,
and who insisted on chatting me up even though I was doing what I thought
was a very convincing job of fake sleeping, and a very real job of having no
freakin’ idea what he was saying.
The bus left an hour late due to massive confusion and overbooking and
took almost two hours to get out of town thanks to the fact that it was
November, peak wedding season. Weddings in India traditionally involve a
ceremony that lasts for days, stretches for miles, welcomes anyone caught in
the crossfire and includes a parade through the streets complete with horses,
marching band, explosives, a car with a loudspeaker blaring Indian music and
important wedding announcements, and a bunch of guys carrying what look
like table lamps on their heads. My bus ended up getting trapped in wedding
festivities pretty much every ten minutes, which meant that everyone on the
bus,
every time we stopped, skipped off to join the party.
When we finally did get out of town, we kept pulling over to let random
people on and off (in the middle of nowhere), have some tea, a smoke, a chat,
maybe light a fire in the brush in a ditch or strap giant burlap sacks full of
something large and bulbous to the roof. At some point this guy got on who
was standing by the side of the road in the darkness. We scooped him up
without coming to a full stop and he took his place at the front of the bus,
standing right next to my seat, and immediately began hollering at everyone in
Hindi. My bus mates responded by cheering, chanting, and sitting in silence,
while I responded by seeing if I couldn’t find another seat farther away from
his mouth. I got up and joined the group of people sitting on rickety benches
around the bus driver who was in this “room” behind a wall of glass. The
people huddling around him made room for me and suddenly I felt like I was
watching an action movie on a screen the size of a giant bus windshield. We
were careening through the narrow dirt streets of tiny villages, Bollywood
music crackling over the radio, while people, goats, and monkeys leaped out of
the way, slowing down only for the almighty, holy cow. Then all of a sudden,
in some tiny nowhere village, he pulls over yet again. More chai perhaps?
Maybe he’s going to go visit a friend? Has to pee? Wants to take a walk for an
hour while we all sit there? The driver waves for me to follow and gets off, as
does everyone on the bus. It turns out that Mr. Yell in My Ear was some sort of
holy man who was just warming up the crowd for a tour of the temples in this
small, gorgeous village called Vrindavan. It is, I learned, the place where
Krishna met his wife Radha and where they built hundreds of temples in their
honor.
So, for the next two hours I found myself wandering through countless
temples, gaily tossing flowers onto shrines, holding hands and skipping in a
circle around a statue of Krishna, solemnly chanting, praying and clapping,
and all I could think was how homicidal a bus of New Yorkers on the express
bus from New York to DC would be in a similar situation. Meanwhile, not one
person on the bus was expecting this, and not one person complained, even
though when we finally got back on the bus it was well past the time we were
supposed to be arriving in Delhi and we were still a good five hours away.
Instead, they all thanked, and tipped, the holy man and spent the rest of the
ride merrily chatting away with one another. After that we stopped at a
roadside restaurant for dinner, then another pee break, then I was waking up
the family I was staying with in Delhi at 3 a.m. They, of course, acted like it
was the middle of the afternoon and insisted I share a cup of tea.
Here’s what India taught me about tapping into the Mother Lode:
•
Talk to strangers, we’re all family on this planet.
• Expect,
and enjoy, the unexpected.
• Find the humor.
• Join the party.
• Live in the moment.
• Time spent enjoying yourself is never time wasted.
