sunday

Easter.

My Easters have been strange and disjointed for years on end, always spent in transit. This one was no different.

We woke up to another day of driving, miserable rain, thwacking against the loose screen door that held out the moldy air. We tromped miserably up the uncovered stairs to the rooftop restaurant - breakfasted on fruit salad and pancakes that were really crepes, sipping hot tea and watching the rain beat down on the soaring temple outside. (how much rain had fallen there over the years, how much more could it take ...? more then us?)

However, the others were determined to see it all - why the hell else linger through a long train journey on sticky blue mats anyway - and the oppurtunistic rickshaw driver permanantly employed by Vicky's offered us a full-day rickshaw tour at a very reasonable price. We accepted - why the hell not - and piled squishily into the rickshaws, jetting out across the muddy ground to the temple complexes.

We went many places that day, but one that sticks out was the Underwater Temple, lurking in a marshy bit of ground, recently excavated or something. Standing water has permeated it, sloshing around the abandoned pillars and languid Shiva sculptures, and tourists shed their socks and sandals and wade on in, laughter reverberating through the corridors. I had met a sweet brown and white dog earlier at the rocks and she had followed us in the rickshaw, loping grimily behind our vehicle. We rejoined each other in the temple. I was in one of those states I get into sometime where I am punchdrunk on existence mostly, and I chased the dog round and round the temple, splashing through water-lily and clover. The dog and I watched the fish nip at the other tourists heels as they peered into the inner sanctum, peered at some unexpected crabs, ducked from the (non-vampiric) bats that inhabited the walls and corridors.

We ran into a pack of grinning Indian boys who took to me immediately. They were all wearing cowboy hats for some irrational reason - they were on vacation from Hyderabad - and they plopped a hat on my head and posed for pictures, my arm around the damp dog, smiling like an idiot for once for photos because I was so curiously happy.

(Aneesa has one of those - I hate photos of myself but I will take that one at least, keep it in my drawers, look at it again someday and hope the dog has lived a long and happy life, hope the cowboy hat boys did well in their glorious banking careers, hope that the fish have persisted against the dual threats of tourism and over-feeding - hope against hope, I guess. Maybe I will frame it. My hair was not however brushed.)

In any case, we piled back into the rickshaws and drove to the Lotus Temple and Elephant Stables, sitting on a ridge up against the hill. The Lotus Temple was a graceful pink pavilion, decked out like an elaborate doiley, and one could easily imagine beautiful women lounging upon it and eating fruit -

I was not particularly beautiful but I lounged there too, watching a group of women in brilliant saris pluck the grounds and tease each other. The umbrella I borrowed was dysfunctional and I fiddled with it futiley until one of the local workmen ambled over with his own umbrella, smiling ear to ear. "Mine doesn't work," I offered, abashed, and he took it from me and repaired it. "Can we trade?," I asked, and he laughed in my face. He knew a bad deal when I saw it, me and my forlorn umbrella. The dog and I and the umbrella looked out to the elephant stables - big as you might expect them to be - and watched green parakeets fight in the trees outside them.

We managed to split ourselves up into two groups, foolishly, which meant Lorraine, Chris and I spent a few disturbing hours trying to find out if the others had been sold into sex slavery. They had not been, but we did get to see the Ramayana Temple, full of stone carvings depicting every last event in that long and winding story - I cannot say I knew what it meant, but it was a graphic novel in building format and I suppose that is cool enough.

We broke for lunch at the Mango Tree, a tropical oasis of a restaurant - no other word for it. You stop your rickshaw at the gate and walk down a lovely path through swampy, neon-green grass and lazing banana trees, past the river full of tan rocks and edged by rice paddies, stray dogs chasing each other through the rushes. The restaurant itself is a relaxed collection of straw-grass huts and benches, and you sit down and watch the water go by, eating spicy vegetarian curries off waxy green leaves, sipping fresh squeezed fruit juices. Aneesa and I shared a thali, a South Indian mixed lunch of curries and rices and crisp hot papadums, putting away more food then we could ever have anticipated, tickling the bellies of the resident housecats. We could have stayed there for hours or days or years, but we could not be such bad and terrible tourists.

The tour continued - we saw the Queen's Bath, the luxurious pleasure chamber constructed for noblewomen, formally fed by spring water and deep as anything. It stands in an area that must once have been a lovely garden, and you can easily imagine lying there half-submerged in the fresh water and smelling the jasmine flowers, totally content in Having It Made. I do not know if such luxury is available in the modern era. (I shall have to make my future Thai drug lord husband build one - I will lounge in it with my pet black panthers and drink expensive wines, and snap my fingers when I desire snacks.)

We visited the statue of Narasimha next. It's breathtaking, no other word for it. You amble along a path through the trees and gasp, astonished when you come onto the idol, grinning luridly in the lotus position, big round eyes flashing through the banana leaves. Narasimha is ornately carved and delicate - it's a miracle the statue has lasted so long and so well - and you can sit and look at him for a long time, watching the chipmunks wiggled in and out of his gaping canine teeth. (There is also a mysterious and thoughtful Shiva lingam next door, supposedly commissioned by a very poor and very reverent woman, as the stories go and always will.)

Next: Vittala Temple, the crown jewel of Hampi, a big temple complex set up along the river. You come onto it with your rickshaw, driving past the seemingly endless site of the old bazaar, storefronts and carved columns of fanged creatures riding horses. The avenue ends at the temple, and you disembark and head in, marveling at the big elephant-drawn stone chariot that sits in the middle. (The wheels apparantly used to actually turn, and it is fun to imagine latter-day tourists from long ago spinning the wheels, daring each other like tourists do today, because there always will be and always should be tourists.)

It is difficult to describe how ornate this place is: the peach colored stone wrought over and through with imagery and religious figures and various other characters, fresh detail emerging from seemingly ever portion of the complex. It is an archetiectural marvel and endlessly nice to look at - one cannot help but think of Kublai Khan and interesting opium dreams when you regard it - for surely this is what we think of when we consider forbidden temples and lost monuments, remnants of some sort of unconsidered and faded Asian majesty. This is not a Western monument and I personally find it far better - no dour religiosity, no blood on the cross or plump and idiotic cupids - but writhing carved panthers and screaming horses and smug looking reclining gods - it is at least more to my personal aesthetic.

And the weather - the rain had cleared off and we were in that period of honey colored brilliant sunshine that comes after it pours, when the sunlight reflects left-over pools of water and even the stone shines a little with slickness and wet. The water left behind shallow little reflecting pools all over the temple, rendering the stone warm, and I watched them, rapt, positioning myself on top of a stone elephant. (This meant every Indian guy in the complex had to have a photo with me of course, but you pay the price.)

One feature of Indian ruins is trees: there was one ancient tree in the center of the complex, shedding quivering yellow flowers that dropped into the pools, rippling inevitably away. You cannot capture what is so beautiful about falling leaves in spring, I think. I will stop trying, but I would like you to try to imagine it if you are reading this, to recall falling leaves and try to transition them to this temple, to a deliciously crisp day in early spring in India - and maybe you will understand a little of how I felt.

The last part of it all was the Monkey Temple, positioned at the top of a slightly nerve-wracking hill - you could hear the rickshaw screaming for mercy all the way up it. You disembark and walk through a small crack in the rocks, and find yourself within a palatial and high walled temple grounds, harems of monkeys ebbing and flowing out from the carvings. I was tired by now (and my eye was acting up, growing moderately evil as it sometimes does) - so I sat beneath the temple walls and watched the monkeys fight over coconuts, watched the supposedly ascetic sadhu's (or holyl men) rearrange the satellite dish that rose out of their modest white-washed home next door. Apparently the others followed a sadhu into his cave and were blessed, but I was content to just sit - an old woman who seemed to know all the sadhu's well padded up behind me in her bare feet, nodded languidly, and sat down within the shaded walls of the temple to knit. We watched the sun begin to go down and the moist earth dry up. Dinner time then.

We went back to the Mango Tree - how could we not? The place was lit atmospherically by candles, and fire flies spun in and out of the leaves as we ate. The vegetable do-piyaza was especially delicious, shot through with the flavor of caramelized, blackened onions - but all the food was delicious, simple and fresh, arriving quickly. We had to leave at 8:30 so we could make our bus out of Hospet and back to Bangalore, but we stayed as long as we could. We were all feeling profoundly silly, doubtless owing to how lovely the day had turned out to be, and teased each other mercilessly over coffee. I made a few passes at errant fireflies but had no successful captures. (Why must I always catch things, obtain them? It's a sport to me, like some people play chess.)

We took the rickshaw back in the dark - poor Chris, we were leaving him beyond to continue his journey onward - but he came up to see us off. We re-emerged into grimy and muddy Hospet again, dodging cows and random rubbish fires. Our bus had not arrived yet, and to our horror, we learned it would have no bathroom. Accordingly we found some particularly scary looking hotel bathrooms (there was a gecko in mine; Lorraine found an especially horrifying cockroach.)

The bus arrived and we bought blankets off the clever and American-accented blanket merchant who magically appeared at the right time. He was moving to Nottingham to work, and he told me he loved Pamela Anderson and wanted to visit California. I believe he will go far.

The bus - I found my top bunk and spread out. Adam and Aneesa were in the far back, and Adam and some young Indian guys broke out their guitars and began playing. The Indian guys were all ardent Pink Floyd fans, and we spent a good few hours singing half-remembered rock songs off key and attempting not to fall off the bunks when the bus took a particularly vicious turn. I did not get much sleep that night, as I slid constantly around and thumped against the windows, but the day made up for it anyway.