Category: World Without Strangers

Zen Black, Zen White

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"This new bamboo shoot hangs over my neighbours wall
- hasn't yet learned about boundaries."    Satish Gupta
Whenever I land in Delhi, the first thing I do is go to Connaught Place and walk around until I find a newspaper wallah to buy a copy of the First City. It is a monthly magazine with listings of events and places to go, but nothing like the usual expat magazines you find in big Asian cities. More of an upmarket publication on culture and the arts for the people of Delhi, with some great columns and interviews. My favourite column is Satish Gupta’s Zen black, Zen white, a painting and a haiku (or sometimes a longer thought) perfectly arranged on a double page. Every time I get so excited to see what it is that I have to open the magazine as I hand over the money to check it out, and only then can I go to a cafe and read the rest.
Satish Gupta is an Indian painter, sculptor, writer and poet. While studying art in Paris in the 1970s, one day he walked into a second-hand bookshop opposite Notre Dame and came across a book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Since then, Zen philosophy has inspired his brush, pen and chisel. Now that I am back in Hungary, repacking the things I have accumulated over the last few years of travelling, I found my diary from 2003 with the above haiku and his ink painting of a bamboo. And it moved me just as much as it did seven years ago.

Waiting list

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“You’re on the waiting list,” I heard from the other side of the check-in counter. “What the hell?” I thought, I bought the ticket online and it wasn’t a discounted ticket. “What’s going on here?” So many things had gone wrong recently that I wasn’t entirely surprised. I walked through the gleaming corridors of Vienna Airport and entered the transit hall. I showed my ticket to a flight attendant who asked me to wait. I’m sitting in the transit hall, waiting. More and more people come in. It feels like time has stopped and the NOW has expanded into the past and the future, washing away memories and plans. It feels like I am always in transition and always on the move, waiting here and there to get somewhere without ever arriving at my destination. Always on a waiting list.

Face mapping in Hongkong

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Hong Kong. I was really tired after finishing a trip that started in Beijing two weeks ago, but I had to spend most of the day on the computer to finish the administration. In the evening I was desperate to get some fresh air and have some fun, so I went to Temple Street to find a face reader. The idea was inspired by a film I had recently seen called Chinese Box with Jeremy Irons and Gong Li, set during the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. I went straight up to the lady who was sitting exactly where the old man in my hotel told me would she would sit and asked her to read my face. She was happy to have a customer, but she didn’t want to draw. She said people just want to talk to her these days, they don’t want her to draw, so she’s out of practice. But I wanted to understand how she worked. She started with a lot of general compliments. “You are a very nice person. You always have a plan and you never let anyone stop you or distract you. And then she began to analyse my face, assigning certain ages and qualities to different parts. “Your ears are big and thick, which means that your parents loved you very much when you were a child. Your forehead is full, so you were very good at school. Your eyebrows are long, which means a good career. Your eyes are beautiful: you will do good business. Your nose is long and straight, between 40 and 50 you will make a lot of money. Upper lips mean the period between 50 and 60, you will do well, chin over 60. Over 60 you have to be careful with water. Especially if you have a bath. And your two moles are a bad sign, they make you spend a lot of money. You should get rid of them. The lines under your eyes show that your children will be great, they will always listen to you”. I made a face of disbelief, so she asked: “How old are you?” When I said 39, she was shocked. “I thought you were 34. But it doesn’t matter. Signs are signs.” “How many children do you think I will have?” I asked, just to take part. She became even more serious, checking my face and then my palm for a while. “Two boys and a girl.” “Wow!” “And your eyes are shining, which means you like to travel.” I couldn’t really deny it, so I just thanked her and left. After I had sat down to write my diary in an open-air restaurant, a huge crab passed under the table. The cook caught it just as it was heading for the road to freedom. I thought for a while about its chances of survival on the streets of Kowloon. Would it be able to leave the urban jungle and ever make it home? I thought about the crab, the prophecy, the parables, being trapped in reality, which is just a loop in the chain.

Jetleg in Delhi

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It has been raining all day, the damp winter chill creeping into my bones. I only landed in Delhi three hours ago. The best thing to do is watch TV in bed under the blanket, but when I turn it on it just hums and buzzes, the screen looks grey and misty like the weather outside, I try to press all the buttons on the remote but can’t get it to work. I try to set things up for the coming months, jotting down ideas and lists in my diary, but soon the power goes out and my little world goes black. I can’t remember seeing a window in the room, I must be right, I’m blinded by the darkness. I doze off into a dreamless sleep, as if I had fallen into a black hole. A long and dizzying fall. I don’t know how much time I spend in total hibernation, but I wake up to the sound of the generators starting up, as if an old film was about to start. The music rises slowly, after being unbearably out of tune for a while, then the rhythm settles, a melody builds, and even though the sound cracks and black lines and spots flicker on the old film, I recognise it, I’m here again. India 2004.

Malaria dream

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I arrived in Kolkata yesterday morning. On the train I read The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh, an exciting book about malaria, delirium and nightmares, coincidence and synchronicity. As I began my rounds of the city, I met an Italian woman, a personal disciple of Osho. She was a naturopath who gave me an interesting talk on Tantra and relationships and told me she was on her way to the Nicobar Islands to write a cookbook. Her first yoga teacher happened to be Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. I then went to Kalighat, the place where Sati’s finger fell on the earth, and found a picture of Kamaccha Devi on the road. In the afternoon I visited the Birla Art Academy and saw a market behind it where a Bengali painter sat with his scrolls and sang the Ramayana. He was exactly the kind of storyteller I had come to find. Then, on the metro, a man came up to me and said, “This is the fourth time I have seen you today.” It was true, I had seen him in different parts of the city. Kolkata has 12 million inhabitants. In the evening I read the Telegraph, the local newspaper, which proudly announced that India had been ranked 8th in a survey asking “How often do you have sex?”. The article went on to say that India did much better than Britain in this respect. And who came first? You won’t believe it: Hungary. It’s hard to imagine when I remember the gloomy faces on the streets of Budapest. Walking down Park Street this morning, a waiter from the restaurant where I ate last night stopped me and said I should visit Mother Theresa’s house, it was not far. I walked and walked, maybe for an hour, it felt like an endless walk in the heat, but I finally found it. It turned out that Mother Theresa’s beatification ceremony was taking place in Rome on Sunday, and a Sister of Charity showed me the room where she lived. Then, completely exhausted, I sat down in the Barrista Cafe where an old Bengali man came over to my table for a chat and told me his life story and how he met the Dalai Lama in 1959 when His Holiness arrived in India. Then I met a young Bengali in the Oxford bookshop where I went to buy a book by Tagore, who took me out for a drink and told me he was a fashion designer in Japan, just back on holiday, and he would take me around on his bicycle tomorrow to see some scroll painters and collect some Bengali patterns. Then I went to the library of the Asiatic Society to look for a book, but instead I found on the shelf the Acta Orientalia, the great Hungarian academic journal, with an article by Professor Wojtilla, my favourite Sanskrit teacher from university. These are just some of the events of the last two days. I don’t know what I’m doing here, it’s too fast, too random, too much for my brain. Maybe this is just a malaria dream.

 

Nature and imagination

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I am back in Banaras after a trip to Tibet, but my mind is still there, trying to relive the moments, the smells, the colours, the sounds. There is one image that comes to mind often these days, the moment we were about to reach Nyalam (a Tibetan village near the Nepalese border). From the endless plains of the rocky desert plateau, the road descended into a deep gorge with a river at the bottom. And the dry air of the Tibetan highlands suddenly gave way to the humid air of the Indian subcontinent.

And then I saw a tree, a sight that had been completely absent for days, and it brought tears to my eyes. And then there were many more trees. I was overwhelmed with joy, as if I had arrived home after a long journey. I was touched as I remembered the boy in Eric Valli’s Himalayan film, the little chieftain-to-be, seeing the first tree in his life. Many thoughts rushed through my mind, about trees I had seen before, the sacred trees of India, banyan and pipal trees, trees of worship. Then I thought I should capture this moment, I should be able to explain or describe in words or pictures what that first tree near Nyalam meant to me when I looked at it, but I could not put this overwhelming feeling into words. And today in Benares, sitting in my room reading, I found a piece of poetry by William Blake: ‘The tree that moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.Some see in nature all mockery and deformity… and some hardly see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. (Photos of the landscape before and after Nyalam)

Kala Bhairav

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BenaresThe rickshaw wallah was an old madman. First he wanted me to buy him a new pair of shoes, then he had various ideas about visiting shops, it was really hard to convince him that I was serious about crossing the whole city just to visit a temple. He entertained me all the way from Assi to Kotwali by doing all kinds of acrobatics on his bike, similar to a fake Hungarian wrangler on his horse on the Hortobagy performing for German tourists. We were on our way to Kal Peron, as he pronounced the name in his Bojhpuri dialect, the temple of Black Bhairav. After an arduous 45-minute ride, we reached a large junction and I thought we must be close. I jumped off the rickshaw, gave the man the money we had agreed on and hurried down a small lane. I was desperate to get away from the crowds, the noise, the traffic, the pollution. After a few steps, I found myself staring at a small shop selling garlands of little red roses, and a man behind the counter signalled the way. The temple of Kala Bhairav was there. At the entrance was a Puranic description: “This is Lord Bhairava of Varanasi, who destroys the terror of samsara. The very sight of him removes the sins of many lifetimes.” Around the shrine, people sold pictures of Bhairav and his cord, which protects against disease and evil spirits. It is made of twisted and braided black thread that can be tied around the wrist or neck. The temple servant offered to beat the ‘devil’ out of me, first by waving his stick in front of him and saying a prayer, then by beating my left shoulder with it. He said it would keep away sickness and physical pain. Kala Bhairav, the ‘Black Terror’, is widely known as the ‘Kotwal’, the police chief of Banaras. Shiva appointed Bhairava as the chief officer of justice in the holy city because Yama, the Lord of Death, was not allowed to enter Kashi, the place of liberation. Bhairava took over Yama’s duties and keeps a record of the deeds of the people of Kashi. Whoever lives in Varanasi and does not worship Bhairava accumulates a heap of sins that grows like the waxing moon. While all who die in Kashi are promised liberation, they must first experience, in an intensified time frame, all the results of their accumulated karma. This is called the punishment of Bhairava. This punishment is said to last a fraction of a second and to be a kind of time machine in which one experiences all the rewards and punishments that might otherwise be lived out over the course of many lifetimes. Pilgrims hope that by visiting Kashi Bhairava they can achieve freedom from sin and the fear of death. It reminds me of a beautiful short story by Jorge Luis Borges. I cannot remember the title, but I read it in a collection of his short stories called Secret Miracle. The story followed the rushing thoughts of a man about to be executed. From the moment the gun was fired until the bullet reached him. It was such a perfect portrayal of how all the events of someone’s life run through their mind in an instant, how those events speed up so much that they blow up our space and time limitations, and everything explodes and expands far beyond our physical limitations and dissolves into a timeless expanse. The experience of purgatory and purification. I wondered what it felt like. What it feels like to see all the joy and sorrow of our lives, and what it feels like to see the results of our actions, all the joy and sorrow of a failed future ‘zipped’ into a sudden impression.