The servers in the restaurant bring us tall white plastic pitchers full of tea, and we had some misunderstanding as to what chai really is. In America, Indian spiced tea with milk is called “chai.” A server stood by Val with a white pitcher and asked, “Masala chai?” She wanted what Americans call chai, and was under the impression that there wasn’t any and that they would be bringing it soon. Valerie explained that “masala” means “spiced,” so what the server was offering was indeed the type of chai Val and several others wanted. “Chai,” simply means “tea.” Once Valerie cleared that up, several of us pushed our cups toward the white pitcher containing masala chai.
2
The Patna Museum is a gorgeous building, and the British founded it in 1917. It’s yellow trimmed with red and has elaborately decorated towers and cupolas. I gawked and gawked at it and admired ancient stone gate leading to the gardens, where I saw what I thought were chipmunks with squirrel tails. Old cannons, not exactly a symbol of the Buddha or nonviolence, and a statue of an Englishman stand out on the lawn, as a reminder of the British Empire.
The Patna Museum is a gorgeous building, and the British founded it in 1917. It’s yellow trimmed with red and has elaborately decorated towers, cupolas, and arched windows. I admired an ancient stone gate leading to the gardens, where I saw what I thought were chipmunks with squirrel tails. As a disconcerting reminder of the British Empire, old cannons, not exactly a symbol of the Buddha or nonviolence, stand out on the lawn, as does a statue of an Englishman.
On the museum’s grounds, we sauntered up a path and I gawked till my eyes should have popped out, as I have ever since I got off the plane in Delhi. The group stopped in front of a gathering of schoolboys in navy blue uniforms, with whom Shantum and Gail engaged in conversation. They were all about twelve years old and were studying at an academy. Gail told them about her job as a teacher: she teaches high school boys who have personality problems and are violent. When she described the kind of kids she teaches, my jaw dropped slightly at the thought of a classroom with such students. At least some of the boys in front of us knit their brows and stared at Gail with big eyes and with their mouths slightly open, as though they were concerned for her safety.
The Patna Museum contains mostly Buddhist and Hindu art. Shantum explained that the English are more interested in history than are the Indians, who like me are more into mythology. He said, “Indians really believe in goddesses with six arms and in a boy with an elephant’s head.” Mythology is real to them. I’m into mythology, but I consider it metaphorical. I believe that all deities are metaphors, archetypes, and role models.
The English did archeological digs, and they found amazing things, as this museum proves. At the front of a large gallery stood a slightly larger than life Yakshi or tree goddess made of stone in the third century BCE, and Shantum explained that she had been found face down in the mud and was used as a board for cleaning laundry. That was quite an amazing find. I should dig through my closets in search of ancient statuary.
The museum inside has plain white plaster walls, high ceilings, and dark wood window frames and doors. To me it looks very much like Western architecture of the early twentieth century, despite the distinctly Indian façade. It seems bare compared to the many pristine or flashy museums I have visited. Upstairs, men who worked at the museum (and apparently only men worked at the museum) unlocked a padlocked gate in front of a pair of very tall, dark brown wooden double doors. Over these doors hung a white plaque, that looked as old as the museum, printed with the words “Buddhist Relic Gallery.”
The staff members opened the doors, and a guy handed us tickets as we crossed the threshold. I looked down at the ticket; it was a light green square with a lot of Indian script on it, and I thought it would be great to paste into my journal. By the time we all occupied the relic gallery, I started walking straight across the room toward a large prominent display case, but the ticket taker became loud and argumentative, demanding that we return all the tickets now that we were in the gallery. Shantum translated the gist of it for us, so we all returned the tickets, and the annoying worker was shut out of the room. His behavior at the threshold of the relic gallery struck me as petty and inappropriate given that here we were in the presence of a couple of the Buddha’s bones, a sort of temple. I wanted a different atmosphere.
I crossed the room, and in the center of the wall facing the double doors, I stood before a glass display case containing a little model stupa. In the center of it stood a small black pedestal, on top of which perched a little round sandstone container, not much bigger than a golf ball. The container and the lid together formed a ball, with a tiny knob on top. Valerie asked me what this was, and I explained that it contained some of the Buddha’s ashes. She gasped and said, “Incredible!”
The noisy ticket taker left with our tickets, and the room became quiet, but I still felt jarring, negative vibes in the air because of his behavior. I had moved away from the display case to look at pictures on the walls, when Shantum came to stand mutely by the case containing the relic and smiled patiently, perhaps concentrating on his breath after the unpleasant encounter with the argumentative museum staff member.
Shantum, faintly smiling, pressed his palms together and bowed, and the room became dead silent, in striking contrast with the squabbling man’s talk a moment before. Looking at Shantum calmed me and brought a slight smile to my lips, as the negative vibes dispersed. In seconds, I shifted from agitation to peacefulness and happiness. Shantum explained that the little white container in the display case houses a couple of the Buddha’s bones, which have crumbled to dust. He held a couple fingers on his wrist while saying, “The Buddha was a real person like us and here is a part of him, and you can think of that as a part of you.”
Shantum asked us to sit down, and we moved to seats along the far edges of the room. I sat on an arched, gothic-revival carved wooden bench in the far left corner. The furniture in this room appeared to be left over from the Victorian era, but in India that’s practically new. Shantum tapped a singing bowl. I closed my eyes, breathed, and thought about the Buddha and the relic, or perhaps felt about them, particularly what Shantum had just said.
I held my hands palms up in a meditation pose, and without touching my thumbs together. Instead of wrist bones, I thought about my own two little finger bones in my right hand. I began shaking slightly and my eyes stung with the beginning of tears, much like the reaction I sometimes have when thinking or talking about ghosts. The awareness that these finger bones in my own hand were the same as the finger bones in the Buddha’s hand combined with an electric current running through me.
Meanwhile I stayed mindful of my breathing in and out. I had not expected a weird emotional reaction, and because I was self-conscious, I tried not to cry. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying, as silly and trivial as that was compared to the relic. Fortunately, I did not feel like crying for more than a few seconds. As I sat mindfully breathing, I became too aware of faint traffic honking outside a door to my left, and the magic ended as quickly as it began.
Shantum tapped the singing bowl, it rang, and we opened our eyes. Because of a light shining down directly onto the reliquary or casket, across the room the casket looked like a glow of light, like a star. Our teacher began a discussion in which someone criticized the light glowing directly onto the relic, and Shantum said, “Sometimes curators are impressed with what looks like a great design rather than concerned with preservation.” What a pity, I thought; the reliquary could become damaged because of a designer who wanted to show off.
A very short drive from the museum, the bus stopped and parked on the street. Shantum informed us that we would be eating lunch there, at the Orchid Restaurant. We looked out the window and across the street at what looked like a big shopping center, a vast white block of a building with numerous different-colored signs and a fairly long flight of concrete steps leading up to the entrance. Someone asked if it was hygienically a safe place to eat, since the brochure for the pilgrimage stresses this.
When we stepped out of the bus, we came face to face with gawking locals at little shops lining the streets, and we gawked back at them. There was a barber, a pastry shop, and a fabric store with bright pink shiny sari fabric in the front window. Bikes and motorcycles were parked at the edge of the street.
Jagdish led us safely across the street, despite all the traffic, especially rickshaws coming through. In the center was a meridian where several of us paused and waited for him to help us across the next two lanes of traffic. Clearly India doesn’t have pedestrian crossings. But we got safely across, thanks to Jagdish.
We climbed the stairs to the building, and I followed our group through large front doors leading to a whitewashed courtyard with a staircase that wrapped around and around. The whole staircase was white, and I could see various businesses on each floor as I wound past. We went up four flights into a narrow hallway with a dark patterned carpet and a black metal stair railing. A doorman smilingly waved us through a glass door into a little restaurant with a long buffet table in the center of the room and a water cooler off to the side. We sat down at two long tables and were delighted when a platter of oranges landed amid us.
Valerie, who wore a light yellow striped cotton kurta that she’d purchased at Gandhi’s house, talked about the ashram she and Dean had stayed at for two and a half days before they joined with the pilgrimage. She described it as very relaxing and minimalist, a very sparsely furnished place, and she had healed from exhaustion and stress. However, she thought we should have spent the night in Delhi instead of flying off to Patna at night and getting so exhausted, and she had already told Shantum this. She said she was back to feeling exhausted and after this pilgrimage would like to spend more time at the retreat where she spent only two and a half days. She described a type of personality that requires a lot of quiet time, and she pointed out that all three of us—Valerie, Jennifer, and I—are that personality type. I can certainly see it: I tend to crave solitude as if it were dark chocolate, particularly when I’m in Kansas.
With the oranges, we had bowls of tomato soup containing soggy croutons, and afterwards we lined up at a buffet table and helped ourselves to basmati rice and various curry dishes. I thought the food was scrumptious, even the soggy croutons. At some point in our lunchtime conversation, Valerie mentioned quite a disturbing experience she had at the Patna Museum. A guy who worked there took her by the hand and seemed friendly, but it struck her as weird that he took her by the hand and started leading her to a gallery in a far corner of the building. She got rather suspicious, pulled her hand away, and left him.
“That’s scary,” I said.
Jennifer said, “You probably didn’t have anything to worry about, but it’s better to be safe.” I didn’t know what to think, since I didn’t expect Indian men to be touchy feely, unless they think that Western women are a bunch of sluts. No doubt I’m more paranoid than Jennifer; I thought it was a really good thing that Valerie broke free of this guy. Maybe he was harmless, but it sounded creepy to me.
“Did you see that?” Valerie said later, while we were eating. “There’s a Hindu woman who’s completely covered with a black cloth. There’s just a slit for her eyes.”
“Oh, that means she’s Muslim,” I said, feeling a bit knowledgeable for a change.
“Really? I’ve never seen that,” Valerie said.
“Women in Saudi Arabia wear those black burquas,” I said, and I finally got a glimpse of the woman Valerie was referring to, before she went through a door. Still, I was surprised to see that in India. I knew the country has Muslims, but I would have expected Indian Muslim women to just wear a scarf over their heads and otherwise dress like other Indian women; I thought that was normal in Pakistan. But of course, some Muslims are more conservative than others, like practitioners of any other organized religion.
As we wound down the staircase again, Feroza, who lives in England, said, “We have places like this back home, but they’re dirty. They’re covered with graffiti and litter. This is nice and clean.” I pictured the whitewashed stairway with graffiti on the walls, litter on the steps, and the stench of urine on the landings.
On the bus, Shantum said, “Eighty percent of diseases in India are caused by unclean water.” I’m so glad the cost of the pilgrimage included plenty of bottled water. Jagdish handed us each a bottle today. Certainly, some things about India aren’t as clean as England.
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