Ayodhya: Get your feet dirty

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I arrived in Ayodhya at night. It was 9:30PM and I needed to find a hotel. Street lights are few and far between in Ayodhya and the blind walk through the city felt a bit dangerous. I was hoping to just find a hotel after a while and get a roon there. It was a bad plan. The first hotel didn’t accept foreigners, the second one was full. My chances started to look pretty grim. Then Anmul showed up. He parked his Hero Honda next to me and told me to jump onto it. He couldn’t speak English but understood “hotel”. The ride on the back of his motorcycle was pretty fun and very smooth. He took some nice turns and was good at passing cows and slow pedestrians. He kept asking me all these questions even though I kept saying “no Hindi”. It got a bit confusing when I had to explain to him that one hotel he brought me to was already full (It was the second one I tried earlier). The first hotel was full, the second accepted only pilgrims but the third one had a room. Anmul left me at the reception and disappeared on his metal steed. Cool guy.

The Ram Hotel is big: large hallways, people everywhere, high ceilings. It’s moderately clean but the openings in the wall for the fan and under the door have allowed a few critters to get in. At one point a cockroach jumped onto the leg of the clerk who took me to the room and he just brushed it off. Gulp! Thankfully, nothing apart from the occasional mosquitoes (Splat!) and a curious gecko have been spotted in the room since then.

A woke up late this morning after a good night’s sleep. I headed out onto the streets of Ayodhya at abouth 10AM. Ayodhya is famous as the birthplace of Rama and is therefore a holy city for Hindus. It’s a major pilgrimage destination but isn’t very touristy. Again, I had a little map I printed beforehand. Some guy in a blue shirt was intent on showing me around, speaking only Hindi. He was a pain to get rid of but “no guide” was enough. First I went to the imposing Hanuman Temple, which sticks out of the city underneath it with fortress-like walls and a tall dungeon-like vihara. The entrance to the temple can only be reached through a set of 40-odd steps one needs to climb barefoot. I wasn’t looking forward to it… People were buying sweets from the vendors spread around the entrance area: they all had brown balls of pure sugar tacked in pyramids behind glass counters. The sweets were offerings for the gods. The boxes ended up in the hands of beggars who used them as rupee collectors. There were beggars on each step, on both sides. Some were old, some were blind, some were handicapped, and some were all at once. I packed my shoes in my backpack and climbed.

The top of the temple is brightly-painted with gods, animals, flowers and various messages in Hindi. The sanctuary itself is only for Hindus but I could see the police making sure people didn’t take too long to give their sweets to the attendants and move on. It was a big crowd after all. There was a large and packed prayer hall. A bell would ring from time to time and people chanted altogether. The floor was sticky from water, sweets and flower petals.

On my way down, I wiped my feet while some guy kept staring at me from outside the shop I was sitting in. I was facing me, striking different poses but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a conversation. I already had 3 dull conversations in the temple itself. I bought a VCD with songs about Hanuman (should be entertaining!) to justify my staying in the shop and left.

There are lots of crap vendors everywhere: bracelets, toys, CDs and posters of hologram babies. I got to see a few nice bhavans or palaces/houses in the area before it got too hot. I was getting hungry too so I headed back to the hotel.

I had a chola bathura, two sodas and a nice nap before I decided to hit the streets again. At that moment, a truck load of soldiers walked into the hotel for some reason, climbing into the first floor. I don’t know what that was all about…

I headed for the Rama temple, the place where Rama himself was supposedly born. About 20 years ago, there used to be quite a lovely 16^th century mosque at that spot, built by the Mughal Emperor Babur. It was torn down by thousands of Hindu extremists who wanted the place to be rededicated as a temple to Rama. Some excavations “justified” their actions as idols were allegedly found under the mosque. Very sensitive material. As a result, Ayodhya is a city of cows, monkeys and policemen. They are everywhere, hanging out, looking authoritative. Visitng the temple for a foreigner is a bit of a hassle. Here’s how it went. First I checked in all my belongings except my passport and my wallet (there were lockers fortunately), then I got frisked a first time. A few meters after that, old wise men wrote all my passport details in a small notebook. I then got frisked a second time. I was escorted by a random dude who took me through a metal fenced walk way to the next security check where I was frisked again. Once more, the dude, the fence and the security check: frisked for the 4^th time. I was then taken to see the idol, which was standing under a tarp on top of a small hill, illuminated by neon and watched over by soldiers on all sides. That was it.

Walking up the main road, I ended up in a park with benches in the shade. Most importantly, there were monkeys. Lots of them. I sat down and filmed them as they were playing/fighting/eating. At one point, a man accompanied by one of those transvestites that bring good luck to a wedding came to talk to me. It was in Hindglish and the conversation didn’t get very far. The purple sari wearing transvestite said something to the guy in a deep voice and they left. There was an argument between a sadhu and the guy in charge of keeping the monkeys away (he was doing a bad job by the way).Once the argument was over, the guy kept throwing stones at the monkeys who inexorably came back…

Further up the road, there are the Ayodhya ghats. A small branch of the river comes into the city and ghats have been built around it to encourage people to do their bathing rituals. It was the dirtiest water I dhad ever seen. Garbage and feces was floating in the stagnant water and algae the kind that grows from trash and chemicals was growing all over. A small rowboat was navigating for some reason. They waved at me. There were more cows than people, which meant that the ground was covered in patches of semi-dry dung. The repugnant smell alone was enough to keep me away from exploring further. The visit was short. I walked back to the hotel and waited for the internet café to open.

I’m planning on watching the India cricket game in the lobby of the hotel tonight (there is no TV in my room unfortunately).

Daily nugget: I’ve been writing this update through three power cuts. The guy kept playing with the switches and I think a generator is involved. Thankfully, I had saved everything on Word

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