The Dasara Dance: A Glimpse of Travels Through India
By: Thomas Klepper

Preface:
I traveled to India as both a teacher’s assistant and a graduate student on an independent study of writing in the Himalayas in the fall of 2005. I was among a total of thirteen undergraduate students, two professors, and a yoga teacher. For three of the four months that we traveled we stayed in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim. Sikkim was a small Himalayan kingdom that was taken over by India in 1975. It borders Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and Bengal. India was a place I had only read about, heard about, and dreamt about. How can one prepare for such a journey? I read. I watched Hindi movies. I celebrated pujas at local Hindu temples. I studied Buddhism. I studied Hinduism. I studied Islam. I studied Indian history. I ate at Indian restaurants. I practiced yoga. I stopped eating meat. I meditated. In short, I did all that I could in order to prepare. Ultimately, none of it helped. The phantasmagoria of beauty and suffering, of wealth and poverty that is India cannot be approached but from within. The less I tried to understand India the more it seemed to dance around me, with me.
The following is an excerpt from an unpublished novel that I wrote about my travels through India. In this section I have been living in Gangtok, Sikkim for about a month. It was a rainy day in October.


The Dance of Dasara:
It was the day of Dasara. From Kerala down south, Mumbai to the west, Kolkata to the east, and all the way up there to Gangtok, Sikkim in the Great Himalayas the Hindus celebrated what R.K. Rai called “a day like Christmas,” but it wasn’t, it was the day that Ram killed the demon Ravana in his quest to retrieve Sita. I was sitting in a bar, the kind made up of booths with curtains. I drank a Dansberg Blue while I read from a biography of Machig Lapdron. R.K. Rai, one of the local guys who I drank with, spotted me from outside and then came in and sat down.
- You are coming with me, he said.
- If you say so.
- Today, he said, you will meet my fiancé, but first.
We ordered more beer. I spoke my best Nepali and he spoke his best English. He told me that Dasara was a day to celebrate and a day for family.
- Hurry, hurry, he said, we don’t have much time.
The wilds of the land around Gangtok had been off limits to us because we didn’t have the proper permits. From the guesthouse that I and the other students stayed in I gazed at the peaks and passes. That great expanse of land that is the Himalayas. R.K. Rai didn’t mind that I was without the proper paperwork. We got into his friends taxi, the kind that looks like a mini-minivan, and we were off. Soon Gangtok was behind us. After twenty minutes of bumping down the road we stopped and got out of the taxi, including the driver, and I figured that we had arrived. I ordered a paan, chewed it slow, and stood on the street corner. I watched the madness of the daily commerce. Shops, people, food stands, dogs, chai, paan, bananas, bottled water, taxis, and a construction worker who carted a great load of rocks all with the strength of his neck. R.K. Rai bought two cases of Hit Beer and went back to the taxi. We had not arrived, just a quick stop. We piled back in, I spat the paan from out the window and we hurried along the muddied road in a wild search for who-knows-what. R.K. Rai opened some beers and all of us drank. Eventually we made it down off of the hill, on top of which Gangtok was built, and onto the lowlands of rice patties and small villages. The road went from broken asphalt to mud. We came upon a slight decline where a smaller oncoming car was stuck. They reversed then drove forward up the grade until the tires spun freely and the car drifted back and forth. They repeated and again could not make it up. My first instinct was to get out and help them with a push, like we would do on the ranch roads back in California, but R.K. Rai didn’t like that.
- Wait, he said, they can do it on their own.
After a few more tries, the car made it. It veered towards us and nearly went off the embankment and then veered back, missing us by a few inches. We descended further down the road.
We came to a big turn with a large shoulder and pulled over. There was nothing in sight. I was scared. I could get robbed. I could be left behind. I could never make it back. I pulled out my pack of biris. I put one in my mouth. R.K. Rai pulled the pack from my hand and the biri from my mouth then threw them on the ground.
- You don’t smoke these.
- Why not?
- Not for you, bad smell. Hindu custom.
He turned and I picked the pack up from the ground.
- Come, follow us, and please, Hindu custom, leave the open beer here.
I left the beer on the side of the road and followed them up a narrow mud path, everything was wet from a recent downpour and the clouds were heavy with more. The leeches were all around. They wanted my blood. We walked through tall trees, low and high ferns, foliage, and through to a large clearing of bright green rice paddies. The rice was terraced. It imposed a kind of order upon the anarchy of the Himalayan land. We proceeded past terrace after terrace until we came upon a beautiful young lady, about the age of twenty, with large dark smiling eyes, and feet that moved with the grace of a goddess.
R.K. Rai stopped and smiled. This is my fiancé, he said.
We all said namascar and she gave us each a slight bow with hands together in front of her heart. We continued up the path and saw a man, about the age of eighty, with drink in hand, waving at us.
- And this will be my father-in-law.
The old man approached us and spoke to us in Nepali.
- He speaks English, said R.K. Rai.
- Oh, English, I used to be a teacher, my name is Salir, I used to teach English so I can speak to you in English, welcome to my home, you are always welcome here, please, please come inside.
We followed him through a flower garden and then into one of the small village abodes that were grouped together, presumably for the use of his extended family. The buildings all had a concrete floor, on top of which was built a wooden structure. The walls were thin and the roofs low. All was painted a khaki tan that stood out against the green of the rice. It was like the brown fields of dead grasses in the California summer preceded by the green of spring. This mans house looked like something dead amongst the living, like life had came, had blossomed, and had passed, an August surrounded by April.
We entered the house after taking off our shoes. The rain began falling. Inside, we were served by the youngest daughter of the family. She looked like she was sixteen years old, maybe eighteen. She smiled at me. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She carried with her a truth, a simple beauty, a hope for humanity. I thanked her when she brought me my chai, I wanted to say more to her, she spoke better English than any of the others, all the sweet words I wanted to spill into her ear, but all I could do was say thank you when I got my tea. I didn’t know where the line was, how much eye contact I could make, how many words I was allowed to say to her. Salir, the old man, approached me.
- Come, let me show you my flowers. I have beautiful garden.
I rose and followed him out the door. He led me to his garden where he had cultivated, with the green-thumb hand of a master, flowers that bloomed in the wrong time of year. They bloomed when they wanted to, not bound to the seasonal cycle.
- These, they are blooming, they shouldn’t be, but they are.
It was just another mystery; another stitch in the fabric of life, for life is full of stitches and mysteries.
-Come, he said, we cannot miss the festivities.
We were served some homemade Indian sweets that tasted better than the sweets in town. I quickly ate a second after my first. Then the beer was poured. I finished that quickly as well and proceeded to my second. Salir poured himself a tall glass of Old Monk Whiskey. All around me was intense conversation that I could not understand. After a few minutes Salir reached for his glass of whiskey. When he brought the cup up towards his mouth he froze in a mystical bewilderment. I looked away from Salir to see R.K. Rai looking at me.
- Someone is coming, said Salir.
He pointed to his glass.
- Don’t you see, there is someone coming, here, look.
He held the glass out for me to look. All I saw was cheap whiskey.
- It will be my lover, my new girlfriend, she is coming, she is coming to me.
- When is she coming?
- When? I don’t know, how am I, an old man, supposed to know such things? All I know is that she will be here, maybe even tomorrow.
I looked around at all of Salir’s family. They all looked at Salir. Their faces seemed between disappointment and embarrassment. There was a dark sadness to the whole thing and I immediately missed my own father who had passed away just a few months before I left for India. Even though this old man was crazy I knew he was telling the truth, to me, he was saying it to me. He looked from his glass around to the faces of the room.
- No more whiskey father.
- But she is coming, she is.
After a few moments of watching Salir lost in the depths of his prophetic whiskey he freed up his body in an ecstatic dance that carried with it what I understood to be the heritage of his past, his interpretation of the present, and an undying hope for the future.
- Turn the music on, said R.K. Rai, he’s dancing again.
When the music turned on we all joined in the dance, jumping from foot to foot, flailing arms in an ever so controlled madness, and clapping our hands, whenever possible, to that wild beat of Nepali music. Then Salir stopped dancing, but held his last pose and contorted his face just as the Kabuki actors of Japan. Terror. Frozen. Beauty. He kept his face and body in that maniacal posture. He then slowly rotated his body, still in pose, around for all of us to see. His face was an expression of the human soul. He was Michelangelo’s David stricken with fear. His face was the face of everyone. I was uncomfortable because his twisted look, his crossed eyes were the real truth, really real, free from Maya, a true Thangka of Samsara. Then, in one moment, the absolute disappeared from his face, he looked around, seemed confused, then again he moved his hands, then his arms, then started his wild dance on the village concrete floor. His dance was the dance of a god, of Vishnu, the spirits flowed from inside his own mind and out onto space, he created the world anew with each swipe of his arm and turn of his feet. Then he stopped.
- Have you seen my wife?
- No, I said.
- Look here, she is watching us.
In the corner of the room on the east side of the house was an old black and white photo of a lady who was not smiling.
- My wife, Sita.
He sat down on the bed. He cried. His family pulled the picture down and poured out his whiskey.
- He will have to rest up, said R.K. Rai.
Salir left the room. From inside I saw him sit on the porch and watch the rain falling on his flowers, his chickens, and his paddies of rice.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 25.11.2009

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