« Liberty, Egality, Fraternity.” That’s what I was taught as any French kid.
Travelling in the train from Gorakhpur, Nepal’s border to Rishikesh, India, I am once again reminded that the French propaganda is at least partly another kid’s story invented by well thinking intellectuals.
We are not born equal, far from it.
Instead, each of us comes with it’s own card deck. Each of us with it’s own reality, it’s own way of experiencing life, it’s own choices to make or lack of them (karma). Each reality is as true as the next until we are ready for another type of reality. Until someone or something shows us a better way. Until suffering forces us to try other ways, if such courage we have left to dare trying new realities.
“Most Indians think that the whole world is like India” says Bikash, as I mention something about an old Indian woman giving me the bad eye.
I think about that image for a minute, thinking how far apart realities can be. I expand the notion of India to millions of other people around the planet thinking that the world they know is the only world out there.
I think about my world. My world being a fuzzy kaleidoscope of memories from various corners of the planet, my mind printed with pages of stories from various physics and world mythologies. My ears echo music from centuries across the oceans. My eyes filled with a Maroccan desert in the Atlas mountains, San Fransisco junky streets, castles in France, years of programming web sites, months of TV, Danish winters, outer and inner space travels, Paris nights. My blood is made of subways, planes and buses going from one place to the next.
India being just one fragment in this adventure of what are a few lives already. India, being yet another memory added to my blanket of dreams.
A couple days waiting for the train in Gorakhpur, we take the time to walk to Gorakhnath, a beautiful temple filled with life size statues of many Gods, Saints and Gurus. Outside the temple the usual plastic toys and trinkets glitter in the night light. It seems that Gods enjoy Disney World.
"Om nama Shiva Om” repeats the mantra in Binod MP3. Binod left his Kathmandu with us, Binod is a musician, and as such he breathes and eats music, totally disinterested in most discussions.
"It reminds me of my grand ma. She used to listen to those mantras when she got up at 4 am, doing her pujas and morning yoga, after she checked on the cows” comments Bikash as the 3 of us share the sound coming out of the MP3, sitting at the open door of the train, between 2 wagons, watching the scenery pass by. The mantra reminds me of my stay under the Banyan tree, in Goa, the first time I heard the mantras for days after days. My grand mas never looked after cows, they never did pujas early in the morning, and they didn’t know anything about yoga.
Different realities.
Observing the fat lady across from my bunk, I think how my reality will never know the one of the woman sitting on the train across from me. Her wrists decorated with red glass bangles, her toes in metal rings, her feet died with red color. Her marriage around her neck, her gods in her eyes and a perfect tika for a third eye. Her sari wraps up around her fat, showing only the folds of stomach that dutifully carried a few kids. In her 50’s, she is half asleep in an uncomfortable position, in which my grand mas would have never been able to sit for even a minute. Her head bended over her cardboard baggage, her husband in the seat under, their 3 kids wrapped around them. All in a perfect silence, the kids never peep a word, as quite as a Hindu painting.
I think how little liberty this woman has. How many rules her life has to follow, between the laws of her gods, society and family pressure. Liberty might as well be a foreign word in her life. Yet, the woman wears a look of acceptance and deep peace on her face.
Liberty, if it even exists, happens only for a few rare beings. Most of us still being attached to such and such notions as being more or less true.
“It is not complicated. To obey, is like drinking or eating: nothing is better when you have not had it for a long time.” Says Hermine to the wolf when they meet for the first time in the Black Eagle bar.
I will never know the worries of this woman in the train, even if I’d stay in her country for a hundred years, for the simple reason that our realities are fundamentally very different ones.
I will never feel what she feels for the dozens of beggars who even on the train never stop their begging.The blind old man singing mantras, the transvestites, the juggling kids or the ones simply sweeping the floor with a pitiful look in their eyes and missing limbs.
So, I sit back, head on my rolled up sweater, Alexandra Ross in my ears, the purring of the 3 ceiling fans humming along the beat of the train going through this flat part of India. Bikash, Binod and I on the same train, enveloped in a different tune, each in a different reality.
“Solitude is independance, I had wished for it and got it after long years. She was cold oh! Yes, but she was quiet, wonderfully quiet and immensely like the silent and frozen space in which the stars turn.”
Together, we wake up for the morning chai call. “Chai, chai, chai”. Soon after, we get of the train to catch a bus for Rishikesh, the city of Sages and Saints. A city where even gods and the Beatles come down for a visit. Rishikesh is the starting point for millions of pilgrims on the journey to the Himalayan shrines up to Kedharnath, Badrinath, and Gangadwar, the place of birth of the Ganges.
Packed with Indian tourists, the usual hippies and spiritual seekers, the little mountain town is filled with babas and saddhus in orange lungis, painted faces and temples at each street corner, ashrams (places for learning) and dharamshalas (homes for the least fortunates). The gods are everywhere, on postcards, statues and walking in the streets.
" If you step in shit with your left foot, then it’s good luck » says Rony, a beautiful Israeli girl sitting next to me at Freedom Cafe, the most popular hang out place in Rishikesh.
"Oh, but not with the right feet?" I ask.
"Non, just the left foot".
The same day, for the first time in one year and a half in the lands of sacred cows, I step in cow dung. My right foot covered in brown, at least I am glad that I know it is not good luck.
“If you want to go to Heaven, you must first reach this Heavenly Hermitage (Swarg Ashram) which has been situated on the left bank of the Ganges just opposite to Shri Sivanand Ashram.” I read in the Indian tourist booklet about Rishikesh and Haridwar. Haridwar, 24 kilometers from Rishikesh, is the holy city in which the biggest gathering of humans takes place every 12 years for the Kumbha-Mela.
So, we went to Heaven, and had a cup of chai.
The Ganges, Mother of all rivers in India, most holy river for the Hindus, is a place for purification, offerings and prayers.
”The persons who merge to her sacred water are purified completely and then they should become fully purified.” Says my Indian guide booklet in it’s broken poetic English.
They say that if you bathe into it, you will attain moksha (liberation from this earthly plane). So, I went into the river, and I came back out.
Where millions see a sacred river coming from the heavens, I see a river, with it’s water flowing from the Himalayas, jumping on rocks and shining in the same sun that shines all over Earth. I do not know if I am now liberated from common life, but it was nice and cooling to dip in a river under the sun.
"While the faithful people of every tradition go on their pilgrimage with devotion and intense fervour, the saintly ones know that unless God is to be found within their own experience, such pilgrimage is useless."(Bro Ramon, Franciscan monk)
A few evenings hanging out at Freedom Cafe, hearing the travellers same conversations for the hundreds time, the same hedonistic hippie new age blabla in search of convenient half baked truth, youth naïve enthousiasm and dream pipes, and I get bored.
Rudy, a French man I met in Goa hands me Steppenwolf. I dive into Herman Hesse’s Europeen despair with joy and gratitude. In the words of the wolf I find a piece of happiness and rich company. I fall in love again, with yet another dead writer. The wolf gives me a space in which I can find some peace, just as his Siddharta once offered me. I take a break from my musician friends playing non stop music.
Even the wolf doesn’t know liberty. The wolf is attached to his suffering, like a bee on sugar. The wolf loves his suffering, the little taste of liberty he tastes can only be his doom.
"Most men do not want to swim before to know how to do it. They are born for the earth, not for the water! And naturally, they do not want to think: they are made for living, not for thinking! Yes, and the one who thinks; the one who makes it his principal concern can push far into this domain, he even changed earth for the water and one day he will drown.”
The wolf’s reality, even if I fully sympathize for it, is now a galaxy away from mine. His teenage like angst seems so masturbatory, black and white, so puerile and selfish. There are far too many beautiful greys to love.
Different reality, and that’s exactly what makes each of us the special person it is. Each one of us with our own angle on things, each with our part of truth.
One thing the French propaganda might be right about, is that we’re all brothers, a big family sharing the same reality dressed up in it’s billion rays of light.
Each with our part to play, each with our wolf, our human part and our thousand other faces.
Coming back from the Beatles Ashram, I step in a cow dung again, this time with the left foot. It’s the second time for the day.
”If it’s fresh, it’s good luck. If not fresh, no good luck.” laughs Binod.
I look at which foot was lucky or not. My right foot again is covered in very fresh goo.
I’ll take it for good luck, after all, in the morning I had stepped in with my left foot. In Heaven, all goo must be good luck, I think.
“We immortals, we do not like seriousness, we prefer joking. My young friend, I can reveal this to you, seriousness is born out of a over-estimation of time. Me too, once upon a time, I over estimated time’s value, that is why I wanted to reach a hundred years. But you see, in eternity, time does not exist, eternity is but one instant, just enough for a joke.”
So, we sit in Heaven, drinking chai, talking in mantras and playing music. In eternity, we sit and watch the river Holy Ganges pass…
3 weeks later, and I am back in France for a special event. 3 weeks of music, during which I even played didgeridoo with my friends in front of a big crowd. Music, seems to call me, after visuals and after the world of words, I start a new life.
We spend a day cooking a meal with Ram baba, a 67 year old yogi, living on the river Ganges bank, who does all the yoga positions with a smile on his ageless and wise face.
In Dehli, I finished Steppenwolf, missed my plane, and met with a couple friends.
I wake up in France where nothing changes, fashion designs new words to worry people, good food and good wine is always on the table.
See you in front of some good wine!
Quotes de Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf.
