Amritsar: a homecoming

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Until my weekend in Amritsar, although I'd seen some amazing things nothing had equaled the mountain views and the valley just outside my house here - the scenery and the sunsets...

We left for Amritsar in Punjab State on Friday afternoon, driving past the usual eclectic scenery: terraced fields dotted with brightly coloured figures, temples, shrines and a bizarre umbrella-covered totem-pole type of construction.
For the first night I stayed in the cheapest hotel listed in the Lonely Planet guide with five others from my group. The rest thought our decision to go for a budget option mad, opting for a far pricier hotel just down the road. It was, considering the price, surprisingly good. In fact, as we were being shown around there were constant whispers of “stop saying you can’t believe how good it is, they’ll try and charge us more!” The only discomfort was the fact it was right off a main road, as were most of the hotels there, meaning that throughout the night you could hear a cacophony of horns from passing lorries . I don’t sleep all that much anyway, and really appreciate being able to watch the sunrises here. My room was right at the top of the hotel, through some doors that looked like they lead to a boiler room or storage space, so I spent the early hours wandering around the roof terraces and plant-filled courtyard with a wrought-iron spiral staircase. I watched the sun rise over the roof tops, looking out across a railway line, a water tank and distant temple spire silhouetted against the clouds and rising sun.

On Saturday morning we visited the Ram Bagh - what was supposed to be a sort of museum/stately home surrounded by a park, but was actually a bit of a building site and still under construction. Our course lead us to the Ranjit Singh panorama - a truly bizarre experience, and the first example of the way what often seems historical in the guide book is actually often surprisingly modern. I’d envisaged a large scale, epic war painting so was slightly taken-aback by the gaudy colours and plastic figures enacting a story explained on lightboxes covered in text. The highlight of this was definitely the figures wearing pointy elf shoes and elfin hats, looking a bit like Indian wizards - definitely my kind of character…There were also strange diorama, all a rather disarming experience.
Next was the Mata Temple, described as a ‘cave’ temple attributed to a 20th century saint and the second instance of something I expected to be historical turning out to be shockingly modern. This Hindu fertility shrine was filled with bright screen-print type images of this old woman, in one of which she was winking quite scarily. She’s quite a popular figure round India, as is some weird guy with an afro whose picture is everywhere but no-one has been able to explain quite exactly what he does yet…
Back to the Mata temple, it was like some sort of fairground maze. You entered through the main hall where a group of women were playing music and some of the main shrines were placed. Following through was a labyrinth of walkways - caged-in enclosures leading up the exterior, then mirrored corridors and more shrines, a papier-mache cave with an artificial stream running through it which you had to wade along, and a tunneled in section where you had to crawl…
I was given orange bindi paint and coconut by the always welcoming people at the temple. When I first visited the temples I was really concerned about making some kind of faux-pas with regards to the food offerings, and breathed a sigh of relief I hadn’t given in to the temptation of the dried fruit and nut packages (intended for the gods rather than as healthy snacks) on they way up. But I’ve now come to realize that it’s a much more relaxed attitude - the religious places of worship are welcoming to all and its fine to eat the sweets and fruits for (or from?) the gods at the temples. When I asked Padam, my project executive, about the offerings left out at the shrines built in to the courtyards of almost every home, he explained that if the monkeys or children don’t eat the sweets within a few days then its fine for the adults to finish them off.
For lunch we headed back to the hotel, but were accosted in the street by a group of people who were eating free food being cooked on the road side, dished out from enormous metal ‘cauldrons’ for want of a better word into tiny leaf-bowls. It wasn’t entirely clear as to whether it was an operation to feed the homeless/poor, but everyone was so enthusiastic for us to join them that is was impossible to say no.

Next was a trip to Attari, a place on the Pakistan border where there is a daily border crossing ceremony. In light of recent events it may sound concerning that I was at the Pakistan border, but it is quite a distance from where I am staying and because Himachal is so rural and there aren’t any other foreigners where I’m staying I can assure you there’s nothing to worry about. Everyone queued outside some big metal gates for ages until finally we were let through and all streamed down to some stadium-like stands where everyone was seated, foreigners being placed all in one stand along with soldiers for some reason. We had to show our passports, which resulted in quite a funny situation where one guy in our group didn’t have his and was refused entry to the same stand as us because they thought he was Indian (not entirely unfounded as he is Iranian and almost got away with Indian entry prices on one of our weekend excursions)…
There were big crowds to see the ceremony on both sides of the border, which began with people from the crowd running to the gate and back with flags. Music was being played, and people in the crowd were dancing and enjoying themselves, especially all the students there on a school trip. Each side had a sort of chanting ceremony where they shouted short slogans about their country in turn, competing in noise levels, before the soldiers came out and performed a series of calls and then marches to the gate involving a complex sequence of impossibly high kicks. The actually crossing itself was simply a brief opening of the gates where the soldiers lowered and the raised the flags, meeting half-way between the two countries.

In the evening we headed to the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine. It is almost as if you could divide my life into pre- and post- Golden Temple. It really is one of the most amazing and beautiful places I have ever been lucky enough to visit. (please excuse my excessive use of the word amazing, I really need a thesaurus or something) We were all a bit frazzled when we arrived, and just wanted to find out room, having booked a dorm in the foreigners’ accommodation in the Golden Temple complex. When we first asked round the group if anyone wanted to come ad stay at the Golden Temple, most people thought it was crazy to willingly go somewhere where there wouldn’t be hot showers or any such luxuries that you can get at a hotel. The chance to sleep in pilgrim dorms and meet other travelers, and also to stay so close to the Golden Temple itself, however, far outweighed any comfort values for me. There was a bit of a hitch in that when we eventually tracked down the right place they were full and had no recollection of our twice-confirmed booking. We were on the brink of going back to our hotel when our drivers came and told us they’d sorted us a place in a free tourists section of the pilgrim dorms. Like a very basic hostel, the foreigners’ area wasn’t the cleanest place but full of travelers with the most wonderful stories to tell. As it is with travelling, I met someone from just outside Oxford, who’d been travelling around the world by motorbike, as well as a guy who’d come across from Europe by car only to fail to get it across the Mongolian border, selling its parts to the border guards in order to fund his travel across the border…
We managed to secure places in little side rooms each containing three beds and cupboards you could lock, dumped our bags and headed out to the Temple.
Now comes the bit I am reluctant to write about, simply because I really don’t think I can ever convey just how it felt, and also because it is probably all I will talk about when I get back….
So, the Golden Temple. Its was a really surreal experience - instantly calming and relaxing. I went inside the Golden Temple itself, crossing the surrounding pool on a marble walkway. The reflection of the temple in the water broke into shimmering golden ripples as fish moved beneath the surface, and all around were surfaces of pure white marble. In the darkness, everything seemed illuminated. Although it was late at night, Sikhism’s holiest shrine was a hive of activity, people cleaning and polishing everywhere. Up at the top of the temple I was told that every night it is washed with milk. There were many genuinely friendly people interested to know where I was from and about my travels in India, a good opportunity to talk about independence for women to travel without their families and go to university and such like, but also some persistent characters asking about marriage…my friend and I decided that every time someone mentioned marriage we should pull a really unattractive face, possibly extending this to all the photos people wanted to take, an immature response but really the only way to make the situation amusing for ourselves. Since ‘the marriage face’ has really given me a good laugh, often causing near accidents when around cliff- or water- edges. It can be a bit disarming to feel all alone, encapsulated in some alternate reality with the temple only to turn around to find an Indian right at your shoulder, within breathing distance, almost touching…
To add another dimension to the unreal experience, the birds were asleep in the trees as pilgrims bathed in the holy water by moonlight. There were even ‘cardigans’ for women to ‘dip’ behind as I was told by one very pedantic Indian guy who (unsurprisingly) adopted our pedantic fellow-volunteer and kept correcting me whenever I talked about people swimming…according to Lonely Planet, these ‘cardigans’ - marble carved walls behind which women can ‘dip’ in private, are actually called Jats.
At around midnight I paid a visit to the temple’s 24-hour food hall, which feeds 40,000 pilgrims a day (and has an automated chapatti machine?!), where all are given food regardless of caste or creed. The food was simple, dished out from steel buckets along the lines of pilgrims seated on mats. The kitchen, with the constant flow of people, was filled with incessant clanging as cartloads of utensils were washed and re-distributed. On mats just outside the eating hall women were seated in circles, peeling piles of vegetables for the next meal. Awesome to get down with all the pilgrims for my meal rather than visiting some expensive restaurant serving Western food.
Back at the pilgrim dorms, the Indian people were all sleeping just on mats in an open courtyard, covered in brightly patterned blankets. It felt a bit bad to be separated from everyone else, but at the same time it would have been impossible to get any sleep with the attention you attract by being foreign. I didn’t get a lot of sleep anyway, the noise of people coming and going never ceasing. I wandered in and out during the night, probably looking a bit dazed and lost…There was an unexplained rush at around three a.m. which drew me out of bed to see what all the commotion was about…so I can truly say that I followed the guide book’s advice to see the temple at all different times of day to the word.
The morning was yet another entirely overwhelming experience, walking along the garlanded walkway to see the temple glistening in the sun, passing generations of men in turbans with piercing blue eyes set deep in their dark, sun-toughened skin. I really admire turbans, they have such an air of wisdom and worldliness. All the sikh and traditional dress really added to the dimension of another reality. It’s really surreal to think that when people are wearing all the traditional clothing they aren’t that much different from those generations ago. A link to the past in such a timeless place. It feels like some sort of separate, spiritual dimension where everything stops or slows down.
After dropping by the kitchen for morning chai, I checked out the various buildings on the temple complex, containing holy artifacts and someone reading from the scriptures. I spent a while sitting in the sun as part of a crowd listening to live music that was being played by the waterside.
Just behind the Golden Temple was the Jalianwala Bagh - the park where 2,000 Indians were killed or wounded when the British opened fire on them in 1919. It was a really peaceful place, covered walkways surrounded by plants, and a new monument (yet another semi-building site, seems like everything here is in a permanent state of construction). The bullet marks were visible in the walls, and you could see the well into which many people jumped to avoid the bullets. There was a small martyrs’ museum where there were oil paintings and the stories of key figures, not a lot in itself but the stories really embodied the way one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
I bid my last farewell to the temple, never wanting to leave the place with which I instantly felt such a strong connection. The spirituality of the place was so alive, and it felt like I was returning rather going for the first time, as a foreigner of a different religion. I stood by the water, arms outstretched, trying to take it in as much as possible. I’d done my bit, met other travelers and heard their stories before passing on my own, and it was time for us to head to The Silver Temple, a Hindu temple and our last stop in Amritsar.

The Silver Temple was simply described as the Hindu version of the Golden Temple, something I presumed related to its significance within the religion and size rather than actual appearance. I was therefore rather taken aback to arrive quite literally at a Hindu version of the Golden Temple. Called the Silver Temple because of the engraved doors (a Hindu version of Ghiberti’s Golden doors in Florence) it was another golden-roofed temple set in a large pool of water surrounded by marble walkways. Granted it was slightly smaller, and Hindu deities were dotted around the pool and inside the temple itself. A really bizarre and unexpected experience.
On the journey back home our driver decided to really put his foot down on the winding, unlit mountain roads, taking it at 80, meaning that there was a lot of movement as we veered about the car, but a fittingly eventful end to such a life-changing weekend. Meeting the travelers in the pilgrim dorms and feeling such a strong connection with this sacred and mystical place has really given me the desire to travel more. Don’t be surprised if I never come back…

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