Delhi and the Sleeper Train

We went to Shantum’s house, introduced ourselves and sipped mango juice. It’s an Indian tradition to offer guests mango juice, as I discovered last year on the pilgrimage. Shantum led a short meditation first, because members of his regular sangha didn’t know about this group of foreigners, and so they showed up for meditation practice. Afterwards, Shantum talked to the group while his younger daughter climbed into his lap and sat there looking cute.
“If you come with too many expectations, you suffer. So you may as well just go with it,” Shantum said in his garden.

“In your introductions, you can be whoever you want, with whatever past you want,” Shantum said before we went around in a circle and introduced ourselves, like last year.

During our introductions, Premo Seth, Shantum’s dad, said that with such a wonderful family, “with such a son, and another son and a daughter, and with such grandchildren, I don’t need religion. I am content.” He certainly has a point: if it weren’t for certain nasty relatives, I wouldn’t have gotten as into Buddhism as I have. John Lennon had a point when he sang, “God is a concept by which we measure our own pain.” You might want to replace the word “god” with the word “religion.”

During the scrumptious dinner at the Seth house, I approached the circular table in the dining room, and it did not immediately sink in with me that the little old lady in the silk sari was the Leila Seth, Shantum’s mother and more importantly the first female high court judge in India. We had basmati rice and a variety of dishes. Gitu had requested of the cook that the dishes be colorful. I enjoyed an eggplant dish that was Leila Seth’s recipe, a yummy pumpkin dish, a yellow potato dish, a mostly green spinach and cottage cheese dish (paneer), a soupy sweet tomato dish, and green fried bread. I don’t know why the latter was green, but it tasted good anyway. Leila Seth explained the dishes to two other guests and me. On the side board was a pitcher and glasses of water. I took my dinner into the garden and had some interesting conversations, including the one about Etiel considering going to Tibet with me; she traveled from Israel to India and doesn’t have a return ticket.

Another conversation I had was with a white-haired guy named Gary (actually, there’s a lot of white hair in this group!) who has just been in Kathmandu. I knew that the king has stepped down recently and the Maoists have joined the government, but I was hoping things were better rather than worse, and I have to wonder after listening to Gary. Maoists who used to be terrorists are now garbage workers and in the army. The place is in chaos. People were marching to Thamel with sticks. On the streets of Kathmandu, you can see soldiers carrying machine guns. I said I’d be stopping in Kathmandu for about a day and a half, to and from Tibet, and Gary said, “This is not a good time to be in Kathmandu.” Great. Strangely, I didn’t feel scared but felt obligated, for dramatic reasons, to act a little alarmed. Maybe I should have felt genuinely scared. Maybe I’m crazy.

“Just take it as it comes,” Shantum said after talking about the sleeper train. I was getting mental images of the train we took last year, and that certainly is an appropriate way of looking at it.

When it came time to depart for the train station, we piled into a tour bus. It stopped on a dark street and assistants and porters—the kind who were red kurtas--unloaded luggage onto trolleys there at what to me looked like the side of a street, although technically we were just outside the train station. It was after dark, and I was simply sticking closely to the group. We walked the rest of the way to the station, to an area where buses are not allowed. I walked with Rachel, one of the English members of the group, and we nearly got lost because the group was a little too spread apart and people ahead of us went around a corner. But soon we were all gathered on the train platform, and Shantum was telling us all which train we had to climb on and where our individual bunks were located. We had to get onto Train A2, and my bunk was # 23. We would be riding the sleeper train overnight, just like on last year’s pilgrimage.

I reached my bunk and found a bundle of dirty laundry. Jamie was coming up behind me, and I said, “It looks like I get the dirty laundry!” and Jamie laughed. However, a skinny little guy who worked on the train wasn’t so amused, and as soon as I put the laundry bundle on the upper bunk, he hastily took it down. While I made my bed, Shantum was walking in the aisle and checking on us. He asked Gill (or maybe it was her sister) if she was there, because the curtain was pulled around her bunk. I heard an older woman with a British accent say, “Yes, I’m here, and I’m changing into my pyjamas, you naughty boy!” Suddenly I’d been transported into a British sitcom.

Shortly after the train started moving and we were waiting for the blankets and sheets, Shantum sat down next to me (I was on my bunk, cross-legged, writing in my journal) and I pulled my new red coat off the bunk across the aisle and onto mine.

“Is that yours?” Shantum asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I got it three months ago, when I read your brother’s book From Heaven Lake and realized what the Tibetan climate is like.”
“That coat isn’t warm enough for Tibet.”
“It is compared to the one I was going to wear, a lightweight wool frockcoat I made ten years ago.”
“Tibet’s very cold,” Shantum said.
“I’ll be wearing lots of layers,” I said.
Sheila, across the aisle, said, “You’re going to Tibet after this?”
“Yes, for one week. I’ll be there on Tibet Uprising Day! It could be ugly.”
“Tibet Uprising Day is much more interesting in Dharamsala than in Tibet, where the Chinese are watching,” Shantum said.
“Have you been to Tibet, Shantum?” Sheila asked. Sheila and Samaya are friends who came together from New Hampshire.
“Yes, I’ve been to northern Tibet, not Lhasa,” Shantum said, and he went on to explain that he went there illegally in 1981 and was in the same area that Vikram visited. But he didn’t speak a word of Chinese. The police stopped him and kicked him out. “It was illegal to be in that part of Tibet.”
Samaya made a comment about how bad Beijing is—actually Shantum said, “Beijing is smart,” referring to the government’s ruthless dealings with Tibet.
Samaya said, “You think they’re smart?”
“Ruthless,” Shantum said.
“Do they really think that will make them happy?” Samaya asked Shantum.
“That’s not my idea of smart,” Sheila said.
“Being cruel and torturing people isn’t my idea of smart,” I said.
“The Chinese are nasty,” Shantum said. Even a Zen Buddhism teacher can be blunt.

One guy came through with potato chips and “biscuits” (cookies, in American lingo), and another came through with a big cylindrical metal container full of chai, and with little white paper cups. I wasn’t enticed, but Etiel soon stood in the aisle with baggies containing a couple of enticing snacks. She offered me dried mango slices and dark chocolate chips, and although I had eaten heartily at the Seth house, I didn’t refuse and took very small portions of each. I took just a little bit.