October 17 was my last day in Amritsar. The night before I had got to talking with a big guy with a beard and turban as we sat next to each other at the edge of the pool at the Golden Temple. He was from Birmingham (England, not Alabama) and told me he had become more interested in his religion in just the last year, and had let his hair grow, started wearing a turban and stopped eating meat and drinking alcohol (as Sikhs are required to do). I mentioned my interest in going to the Sikh temple in Anandpur Sahib and he invited me to go there with him and to his father's village relatively nearby. We met again the next day at 11, and again at 3 after his friends had arrived from the village (Mohanwala). He is a very nice guy, and quite interesting. His name is Sundip Singh Khalk, but goes by the nickname Kaka. He works in IT for Volvo, but also plays the dhol, the traditional two-sided Punjabi drum, about two feet long, in a Bhangra band. Bhangra music has become very popular in India and in the Indian diaspora over the last 20-30 years. His seven piece band plays all over Britain, and has toured in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He, his two friends and I walked aroung the pool and met his mother and grandmother at the west end, near the causeway. His mother immigrated to the UK in 1973 (Kaka was born there; he's 29) but his grandmother (his father's mother) still lives in Mohanwala, along with a daughter-in-law. All her sons have immigrated, to the UK, US, Canada and Australia. One daughter remains in India.
The seven of us left about 4 in a car they had brought from Mohanwala, and I had a comfortable ride across the flat, agricultural plains of the Punjab. We headed east on a very good divided highway and reached the city of Jalandhar a little before 6. Along the way we saw lots of effigies of Ravana, the evil king of the Ramayana, to be burnt after sunset on that last day of Dussehra. In Jalandhar we stopped at a McDonald's for dinner and had McVeggies (vegetable burgers), fries and cokes, plus ice cream sundaes for desert. McChickens and a Chicken Maharaja were also on the menu. No beef or pork. From Jalandhar we continued eastward in the dark, through Phagwara and Banga and reached Mohanwala, just a few miles outside the city of Garshankar, about 7:30. They have a big, comfortable house in a walled compound. We settled in and had a second dinner of delicious cauliflower, dhal and chappatis before going to bed. It was warm in Mohanwala, which is at about the same altitude as Amritsar, but cooler than Amritsrar.
I got up the next morning about 7:30 and walked around. The sky was very hazy. The house is at the edge of the village, with fields beyond. They have a humped-back bull, which Kaka told me his father (who lives in the UK; Kaka was making a week or so long visit to India with his mother) races, two cows, a calf and a very hairy goat. Wheat was the main crop nearby, but other crops, including cauliflower, were also grown nearly. A pile of corn was in the courtyard drying. Only the grandmother and her widowed daughter-in-law now live in the house, along with a boy of about 12 from Bihar (a poor state in northeast India) who does chores. I asked Kaka where his parents were and he said probably working nearby. With his two friends we took motorcycles around the village and into Garshankar to look around. After, Kaka and I walked to a small Hindu temple, dedicated to the son of Shiva and brother of Ganesh (I can't remember his name), that his father has built. Kaka told me the local people often worship several religions, not making much distinction, and his father has a special particularity for this Hindu god. We talked to the temple caretaker who told us there is a big cobra living in a pit behind the temple. Fortunately, we didn't see it. Apparently, it stays underground for the most part except for during the winter. Kaka told me his grandmother was bitten in the hand by a cobra when she was pregnant years ago.
We had a late breakfast, about 10:30, of delicious homemade cauliflower paranthas and curd, and then Kaka and I and his two friends drove to Phagwara, about an hour away, because Kaka wanted to buy a tailor-made traditional suit for his performances in the band. We spent more than two hours in the shop, while Kaka looked at materials and talked to the clerks. After he was measured and made the purchase, the shop served us a late lunch, with delicious food. We also stopped at a little music shop as Kaka wanted to by some drumsticks. The dhol is played with a curved wooden drumstick at one end and a thin, flexible bamboo drumstick at the other end. Kaka tried out several bamboo drumsticks on a drum at the shop, and then bought maybe 20-30 of them. We picked up another friend of his in Phagwara and then drove back to Mohanwala, arriving after dark and had another delicious dinner.
The next morning about 8 all of us (a driver, Kaka, his mother, grandmother and aunt, and his three friends and I piled into the car and headed to Anandpur Sahib, about an hour to the east. The three friends and I were jammed together in the far back seat, so it wasn't comfortable. In Anandpur Sahib we visited a gleaming white temple situatated on the spot where the last guru started the Khalsa, the Sikh community of leaders. It was much less decorated, and much less crowded, than the Golden Temple, but we were able to sit inside for a while and listen to the soothing music played by the three musicians sitting next to the holy book. That was very nice. Afterward, we all had a communal breakfast in the langar, the free dining hall that all Sikh temples have. Sitting on the floor, we had dhal and chappatis and a delicious sweet the size of a chicken egg.
We next visited a nearby temple with a reconstructed fort on top and a well, built during a siege by the Mughals, below. South of town we visited a couple of other temples and then made an uncomfortable three and a half hour drive across the plains to get to a place south of the big city of Luddhiana. It was very uncomfortable squeezed into the back seat of that car, maybe the most uncomfortable ride I've had in India, which is saying a lot. We ran into a lot of traffic passing through Luddhiana, too. But at last we arrived and met with a man Kaka admires and who apparently in part helped set him on the path to becoming an observant Sikh. He was a very nice old man, with a long white beard and dressed all in white: white socks, long white smock, and white turban, but a less ornate one than the usual Sikh turban. I later asked Kaka if he was a guru or swami or fakir, and he said fakir, so we'll go with fakir. We first met him in a small room, with the fakir (they called him Baba Ji) seated in a chair, the women on a sofa and we men on the floor. He served us Cokes. He seemed quite a jovial guy, very friendly. He asked about my travels and invited me to visit him again in December when he holds a month-long meditation session. He then took us to a larger dining room and helped his very nice daughter serve us a delicious dinner. Afterward, we looked at some water buffalo outside his compound with some unusually curved horns, curving circularly in towards their heads. He bid us goodbye about 5:30 after an almost two hour visit. We drove home, mostly in the dark, as it gets dark about 6. Fortunately, only three of us were in the back, so it was more comfortable, or rather less uncomfortable, than in the afternoon. Indians do have an affinity for stuffing as many people as they can into a vehicle.
Back in Mohanwala, I watched Kaka's aunt milk the cows, and then let the calf feed from her mother, which the calf did voraciously. Kaka's aunt then put some of the milk in a pot onto an outdoor fire to boil. Later, she served me some of that rich, fresh, hot milk with sugar added and it was delicious.
I got up about 7:30 the next morning and walked around the fields a bit. It was very hazy, almost foggy, with the rising sun an orange ball in the east. I spent the morning around the house, watching the activity and hanging out with Kaka and his friends. A little striped squirrel kept creaping into the courtyard to eat at the drying corn. Green parrots and other birds flew by. There are quite a few large fancy houses in the village. Apparently, it is the style for expatriates to send money back to build up their ancestral homes, even if no one lives in them anymore, to display their success. I watched the women cutting up cauliflower and rolling out dough to make cauliflower chappatis, which we had for breakfast about 10:30. After that, I bid them good-bye and Kaka and his friends took me into Garshankar to catch a bus for Chandigarh. They really were kind to me. We ran into a demonstration in town protesting electicity rates by blocking the road, so we had to make a diversion. I caught a bus about noon and, traveling over good roads, made it to Chandigarh in a little less than three hours.
Chandigarh is a new city, built in the 1950's under plans by the Swiss architect LeCorbusier. After partition in 1947, the old capital of the Punjab, Lahore, was in Pakistan, so the part of the Punjab in India (maybe one-third of the former Punjab) needed a capital. Since then, the Indian portion of the Punjab has been divided into three states, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh serves as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana. LeCorbusier apparently had great affection for straight lines, rectangles and concrete. The city is laid out in a series of rectangular sectors (Sector 1, 2, etc.) with wide avenues separating the sectors, with traffic circles at the avenue junctions. I arrived at the bus station in Sector 43 and got a bus to the central city bus station in Sector 17 and then got a hotel in the adjacent Sector 22.
After a bite to eat I went to the tourist office to get written permission to visit the LeCorbusier-designed government buildings, the Secretariat and the High Court Building. I then took an autorickshaw along the wide avenues, past lots of trees and parks and even a municipal rose garden, to the High Court at the eastern end of the city. I needed to get additional permission from the Protocol Office of the High Court and that took some time, but I arrived at tea time and they gave me tea and sweets. The building itself was pretty ugly, concrete with lots of straight lines creating both rectangles and squares, and with concrete ramps connecting the floors. Nearby is a sculpture of an large open hand designed by LeCorbusier and the Secretariat and the Legislative Building.
From the High Court I walked a short distance to the Nek Chand Rock Garden, designed and created by a road inspector who had immigrated from Pakistan after partition. He fashioned the garden and the sculptures in it out of rocks and trash, principally discarded porceline, it seems. It is a sort of maze, quite large and interesting. I spent about an hour in it, as it got dark. Unfortunately, the most interesting part, with hundrreds of figures made principally out of porceline, was at the end, as it was getting quite dark.
I left on a bus for Dehra Dun the next morning at about 10. It took us about half an hour just to get out of Chandigarh and then we proceded generally east through hills and flatter areas until we reached Dehra Dun about 2:45. Dehra Dun was an army encampment started by the British and is now a big city and the capital of the new state of Uttarakhand, created in 2000 out of the mountainous portion of Uttar Pradesh. I took a relatively large (8 seater) sort of autorickshaw, called a vikram, from the bus station to the bus station in town specifically for the hill station of Mussoorie and after a longer than expected wait left on a crowded bus at 5 for Mussoorie. We climbed from about 2300 feet at Dehra Dun to 6500 at Mussoorie, with some good views both back towards Dehra Dun and up to Mussoorie on its long ridge. We arrived about 6:30, a half hour after it turned dark. I got a hotel and looked around. It felt cold at this elevation. Mussoorie was founded by the British in the 1820's and is called the "Queen of the Hill Stations." It is the hill station closest to Delhi. I walked along the almost traffic-less Mall, filled with Indian tourists, and in places had great views of the lights of Dehra Dun, more than 4000 feet below.
The next morning (today) I got out about 7:30. It was clear and sunny and not too chilly. It warmed up in the sun. I walked along the mostly deserted Mall and up to Gun Hill, about 400 feet and 20 minutes above the Mall, where they used to shoot off a cannon during British times. You can see the snow covered range of the Himalayas to the north from here, but they were fairly indistinct in the haze. Dehra Dun, to the south, was completely hidden by the haze. I spent the morning walking along the almost level Mall, running almost a mile and a half, and visited a couple of 19th century buildings now hotels. Both had been houses of British army officers and later were owned by maharajas. One, formerly owned by the Maharaja of Kasmanda, is quite beautifully situated and has tiger and leopard skins on the walls along the central staircase, along with the stuffed heads of deer, very big water buffalo and a rhinoceros from Chitwan in Nepal, killed in 1952. On other walls are old photos of the maharaja, his family, his palaces and his automobiles, the latter from the 1920's, I think. There were also photos of other maharajas, a photo of the Viceroy (whose attire included spats and a pith helmet) meeting with Indian royalty in 1919 (the Begum of Bhopal was completely covered, from head to toe), and a print of Wellington meeting Blucher after the battle of Waterloo. There was a nice restaurant and beautiful gardens, including a croquet lawn.
From the western end of the Mall, I took the again almost level Camel's Back Road, with few vehicles, that runs along the northern side of the ridge for about two miles to the eastern end of the Mall. The snow-covered Himalayas were now completely hidden by clouds, but there were nice views down the wooded slopes. It was quite a nice walk and I met a couple from Delhi who were friendly and interesting. I didn't manage to find, however, the rock shaped like a camel. I had lunch and then walked a bit east towards Landour but turned back because of the traffic. Too much of the incessant horn blowing that Indian drivers always engage in to warn pedestrians and other vehicles of their approach. It isn't as easy to get out into the forest here as it was in Dalhousie. I did see a few monkeys, but not as many as in Dalhousie. I have seen lots of monkeys here in India, particularly in the mountains and hills between Srinigar and Jammu. One area, close to Jammu, had hundreds of them along the roadside, along with signs saying not to feed the monkeys. I suppose they were there in part because people are feeding them.
I took another walk along the Mall in the late afternoon, but the sun disappeared behind clouds between 4 and 4:30. About 5:30 it began to rain and rain hard, and got very cold. The town lost electricity about 7 for half an hour or so. The rain stopped and there was a noisy and colorful procession on the Mall about 8, with lots of musicians with uniforms and western instruments (sousaphones and other horns) and dancers and people in the costumes of gods or princes and princeseses or demons. I don't know what it was all about, but as usual it was noisy and colorful. It was windy and cold, but the dancers seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves.
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