Monsoon Honeymoon: Part X: If There is a Heaven, It Might Look Like This. . .

Wednesday, June 26, Jaipur- Amritsar

Stress time.

After ten days touring the searingly hot Indo-Gangetic plain, where much of India's power and prosperity is concentrated in a plateau stretching from Pakistan to Kolkata, we were ready to beat a path north to the hill stations and cool air of the Himalayas.

We had booked a flight from Udaipur to Amritsar via Delhi to depart at 7:15 AM, and Leigh had booked a taxi to pick us up at 5:30 AM.  As I am my father's son, I would have booked a 5 AM taxi, but Leigh wasn't up for airport dead time.  Unfortunately, our taxi stood us up.  As the minutes ticked by, our stress levels rose accordingly.  At 5:45 AM I jogged through the dawn streets and hailed an auto rickshaw to come and wait with us.  By 6:00 AM we made the call and jumped in the auto rickshaw, whose driver assured us it would only take twenty five to thirty minutes to arrive at the airport.  Leigh and I were both stressed and angry, but what could we do?

Then the situation deteriorated.  Our driver stopped for gas.  He slowed down to talk on his mobile phone.  When he merged onto the highway, he maxed out at 35 mph, and struggled to climb hills.  Leigh and I avoided each other's eyes desperately as we imagined a day of lost airfare, missed connections, and general frustration.  45 minutes later, we arrived at the airport at 6:50 AM.  We dashed to the entry door, where two military officers demanded a paper print out of our electronic tickets.  Leigh neared meltdown mode, trying to show the reservation on her Iphone, but the officers were having none of it.

And then, serendipity happened.  An agent of AirIndia poked through a small window to tell us we would not miss our flight, which would depart on time at 7:45 AM.  Leigh had made a rare mistake, and we would make our flight.  Hooray!

Airborne, sleep interspersed with captivating views of the endless Indian countryside, and we recovered in a mere hour what had taken us days of overland travel to accomplish.  The Delhi domestic transfer terminal was a model for American airports, with full reclining seats and charging stations offering input adapters for most mobile devices.  Leigh took notes to forward to American airports

We landed in Amritsar by noon.  Just 30 miles from the Wagah Border with Pakistan, and some 60 miles from the mountain province of Himachal Pradesh, Amritsar is the central metropolis of the Punjab (Remember the stereotyped character in "Annie"?).  It is a hot, dusty, crowded, chaotic, and mostly unappealing city, devoid of the grandeur of Delhi, the diamond sights of Agra, or the cultural attractions of Rajasthan.  In other words, it is a real place, where people were busy going on about their lives.

However, there is one redeeming sight in Amritsar, one place so magnetically attractive that it alone merits a visit to this corner of the country: The Golden Temple of the Sikhs.  Still buzzing from my visit to the Sikh Temple in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, I couldn't wait to see the Sikh equivalent of St. Peter's Basilica or the Ka'aba in Mecca.

We checked in to the least interesting lodging of our entire stay in India so far- the Hong Kong Hotel- a commercial building of vertically stacked rooms with little charm or character, and an aggressive team of porters.  The streets around our hotel pulsed chaotically, and after a 30 minute search for food, I just gave up and decided to sleep and not eat instead of deal with grimy street chaos.  Leigh's attempts to stretch her legs were foiled by traffic madness, and she returned slightly miffed at being hemmed in.

We aimed to turn around our initial impressions of Amritsar with an evening visit to the Golden Temple and surrounding Old City.  An auto rickshaw carried us into the Old City, and we walked the remaining blocks.  Before the Golden Temple, we arrived at one of the most infamous landmarks in India, a place my Asian Studies teacher Mrs. Davis had taught me about 15 years ago as one of the eternal blights on the British Empire.

In 1919, a nascent rebellion was afoot amongst the Indian people.  After the Treaty of Versailles had redrawn colonial maps at the close of World War I, Indians were clamoring for more autonomy.  Protests followed the ethos of Mahatma Gandhi, who promoted peaceful, nonviolent resistance.  His ethic wasn't followed strictly, and as demonstrations began to claim a few British lives, regional officer Colonel Dyer was called in to quell unrest in the Punjab.  Walking into a peaceful gathering of thousands of Indians in a walled-brick courtyard in central Amritsar, Colonel Dyer ordered his armed soldiers to open fire on unarmed Indians, brutally massacring hundreds and hundreds of Indian boys and men, and maiming countless others.  It was one of the darkest chapters of British rule in India.

Today this place is a preserved courtyard and park, and a monument to what occurred here.  An eternal flame burns in memory, a carved obelisk stands imposingly in a grassy square, and a bottomless well reminds visitors of the bodies that were piled here as Indians dived in to escape bullets.  A small memorial museum commemorates the leading Indian freedom fighters, and even celebrates as heroic the life of the man who would assassinate Colonel Dyer years later in London.  This is a somber place.

We funneled back out into urban chaos and shuffled toward the Golden Temple.  I stopped briefly for a plain milky street lassi, an ill-advised choice that I would soon pay for.

We approached the entry of the Golden Temple.  This Temple is the holiest place in the Sikh religion, the Jerusalem, the Mecca, the Salt Lake City.  This is where the Sikh line of nine holy prophets established their base of operations and built their most sacred worshipping space.  The Sikhs are ubiquitous in the Punjab, with their telltale head-wrappings, metal bracelets, and groomed but unshaven facial hair.  All the men are named Singh to show equality, and in their sacred attire, they emanate an almost royal aura.

We removed our shoes, washed our feet, and walked the drawbridge into the Golden Temple.


Glory of glories.  Whatever Biblical, cultural, and Hollywood notions inform the visions of Paradise we all harbor, the Sikhs have construed one version of Elysian Fields in their Golden Temple.  An expansive open courtyard shines with the brilliance of white marble walkways, columns, domes, and arches.  Covered walkways provide shade to hundreds and thousands of faithful, as regally adorned Sikh men with scabbards patrol the periphery.  Inscribed on marble bricks are the names of Sikh soldiers who have passed on.  Filling the entire inner courtyard is a glistening lake of holy water.  The faithful descend into the water to swim, cleanse and purify.  Men bathed out in the open, while women entered covered structures over cordoned off pieces of the lake where they cleanse out of sight of men.  (Muslim squeamishness hasn't been totally eradicated from other Indian religions).

In the middle of the luminous lake is the coup de grace, the Golden Temple.  A three story mini-temple perched on an island connected by a white marble bridge to the periphery, this temple is gilded entirely in gold.  Inside are the holiest relics of Sikhism, including the giant-sized illuminated manuscript of the original Sikh Holy Book. Inside the temple Sikh priests sing, chant, and pray.  Leigh was dragging from heat and sickness, and the skepticism I respect about her had her questioning some of the blind obedience of the Sikh faithful, but I was romantically entranced by the spiritual aura of this place.

We queued up for thirty minutes in a tense crush of faithful awaiting entry into the Golden Temple.  Leigh was less than impressed with the disappearance of her personal space, and we both wished for the orderly lines of America.  We arrived inside to find eight white-clad bearded, turbaned men sitting in a circle singing the words of the Holy Book, as entranced faithful prostrated themselves, sang, or just clambered over each other.  We pushed up to the top floor, an open marble deck, to re-gain our personal space and reflect on all we were experiencing.

I'll never visit the Golden Temple again.  It's a sentiment I often felt in India.  In a world so big and a life so short, there is simply too much magic to experience to return constantly to the same sights.  As I walked away from the Golden Temple, I felt a pang of wistfulness and sadness at this thought.  I had brushed against a certain vision of Heaven, a certain spiritual pursuit of Glory.  It wasn't for me, but I had been a guest for two hours.  I won't ever forget it.

Outside the Temple, Leigh and I put a nail in the health coffin by drinking a lemon-lime salt soda cooled by tap-water ice cubes.  We violated the First Commandment of Indian travel: Don't drink the water.  We would both pay dearly for our insolence.  We drifted through crackling city streets for 45 minutes, until we arrived at Brother's Dhaba, a renowned eating house where we feasted on Punjabi Thali, which is a dim sum style mix of flavorful, spicy snacks.  We capped it off with a three ice-cream Sundae spectacular.

With the seeds of our digestive downfalls planted, we retired home to the hard mattress of the Hong Kong Hotel. . 

Namaste Amritsar. . .