Friday, September 29 Plane to Gujarat, Modhera Sun Temple, Rural Village

I took a rickshaw all the way to the airport for 80 Rs. You apparently need some type of boarding pass before you even check in for your flight, which involved a lot of begging to get through security. The flight to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on Air Sahara was delayed but a nice hour and a half ride. I got breakfast and good service, and the plane was clean. Except for the bathrooms, which were completely wet from people washing instead of using toilet paper, which obviously wasn’t being used. The view was bad; it was completely shrouded in gray smog around Delhi, which gave way to the southern Rajasthani mountains, and then lush if not flooded plains of eastern Gujarat. Gujarat is a non-touristy getaway, with many ancient trading outposts, marshes, and salt plains. Gujarat is a completely dry state. What this really means is that hotels serve alcohol to people with permits, and permits are given by hotels by showing a passport. But the funny part is, for an Indian the permit costs 220 Rs, and for foreigners it’s free. I guess they want to keep their people suppressed, but foreigners can do whatever they want. No wonder there are a large number of Gujaratis living in the Diaspora. Shah and Patel are Gujarati names, and because of the merchant class’s hard work, Gujarat is a wealthy Indian state. Now, Navratri (Festival of Nine Nights) is going on in Gujarat, which is devoted to the worship of Durga, the mother goddess. It leads to Dussehra, and at night markets are filled with food, rides, music, and garbas (all-night dances). Apparently in Gujarat the birth rate noticeably increases nine months from Navratri. When I landed in Ahmedabad it was hot. I took a rickhsaw across town to the bus stand. It’s actually sunny here, meaning the sky is light blue, not brown-gray like Delhi. It’s a really different area, with wide avenues, cars, rickshaws, billboards, and lots of nice office buildings. Buses took a whle to figure out because all the signage was in Gujarati. It looks like Hindi but without the line on top, and is similar, as is the spoken language. The bus felt like a massage chair and sounded like a jackhammer. We drove through the pleasant modernized city, then farm plains, and then to a dusty town. I transferred to a Jeep taxi (stuffed with 22 people), and they all laughed when I attempted to ride on top. The rickshaws all wanted 100 Rs for 1 km to the sun temple, so I walked through a dusty rural village (kids and idle adults all greeted me as I walked by). I had no food and all my luggage, and it was hot as hell. Silver streamers were set up around every Hindu temple for Navratri. The Modhera Sun Temple was nice but small; it’s basically Gujarat’s one tourist attraction. It has a big grass filled pool surrounded by sandstone steps and carvings of Hindu deities, kings, women, and worriers. The temple itself is intricately carved, but in need of restoration and an exterminator. Figures look like burn victims, and pigeons and vampire bats hanging from the ceiling covered the walls. Locals dind’t seem to notice-they said to each other, “Oh look, there’s some bats”, as if they were flies, and laughed at me when I ran out of the temple cursing. I caught the bus to a tiny station called Ballerchi (actually I just made that up, but who knows or cares). I had to wait for the bus, so I was taking pictures of myself by a cow with huge horns, and when I did it bucked me (luckily it missed, but I fell backward). A bunch of uniformed schoolboys laughed at me and came over to talk to me. None spoke English well, and this one guy named Vijay who was a lecturer in English in a nearby college, sat and talked to me. He wants to study Political Science in Delhi University, and he took a liking to me. Being an English teacher, his English was luckily good. At the bus stop there were literally fifty boys crowded around me because tourists never come here. He invited me to his house, so I went and it was in a small rural village surrounded by farmers on all sides. A kid gladly gave his seat up for me, and our stop was a little dirt road with a lake and water tower. The same 50 kids crowded around as we walked through the fields to the village. On the way, everyone stopped to stare, smile, or greet. Vijay told me I was the first foreigner to come to the village…ever. I was treated accordingly. I felt like it was First Contact and I’m a white explorer. Or like I was a celebrity who just broke up and the press was swarming. Either way, everyone was really friendly and let me do anything I wanted. The village was really old-fashioned. Cows and buffaloes were everywhere, there were no cars or paved roads, it was dusty, and houses had mud huts with thatched roofs. Some modern-day slums with tarp and tires also sat on the outskirts of the village. There were some small shrines in the middle of the squares, which were all streamered because of Navratri. I slept, then took a bucket bath while wearing a skirt-towel. They I was forced to wear his thong that they call underwear, and tight bellbottoms. Then I had simple peasant dinner of dal, roti, rice, and vegetables. There was no bottled water in this town, so I had to drink packaged water from a bag, which you break with your teeth and squeeze into your mouth. The whole time kids were watching me through the window. After some rest, everyone walked me out to garba, which was happening at four different places. The first place had eight people dancing around a lit-up shrine box while musicians were drumming and singing. I tried doing the dance, without much success, because I had a lot of pressure to perform, since everyone was watching me. At the second dance location, it was all girls, so I felt awkward dancing. All the girls looked good wearing their finest clothes. The third was a huge dance-about 75 people dancing in a huge circle, flattened by the narrow streets. Everyone laughed when I went to dance, and it took a while but finally I got it down. After five rounds, I was pretty good; you take two steps forward, clap, turn, take two steps back, clap, and repeat the sequence. Everyone was laughing and fighting to dance next to me. The musicians even stopped playing to talk to me, which was straight up out of a movie where the record player stops and it goes silent and motionless, everyone looking at me. Then they started worshipping Durga, the goddess, by putting a thali plate with candles, and waving it in a circular motion in front of the altar. They wanted me to watch, so they brought a chair and I watched, while everyone else watched me. The adults even yelled at the kids to move out of my line of sight. For tonight, I was royalty. Even though I’m not Hindu, they asked me to perform the fire ceremony, so I waved the plate around a couple times. I went to sleep in Vijay’s house while he read his book and went out for more garba (and apparently also take my camera and take over 100 pictures of him and his friends).