Everybuddha's talkin' at me

If I haven't written in too long, or if this blog entry isn't particularly interesting, the reason is that for about a week we've been treading (holy) water. It's the 1st January and I'm in Bodhgaya, the place where Siddhartha Guatama sat under his Bodhi tree and gained enlightenment, and centre of the Buddhist faith. The pervasively Buddhist atmosphere has, it has to be said, made for a sedate last few days of 2006. But let's begin at the beginning.

Christmas in Varanasi was unusual to say the least. For a start, a felt desperately ill for most of Christmas day. On Christmas eve we did indeed bobble uptown to the St. Mary's Catholic church, and it did not disappoint in providing the jarring juxtapositions I have come to expect from anything and everything in India. Set in a fold-away stable in the front yard was an incredibly tacky version of the nativity, featuring a Christ-doll and manger at least three times the size of the most imposing wise man. The tiny Mary doll looked distraught, as you would having just given birth to a nipper of those dimensions. I suppose he is the son of God, after all. 'Let us adore the Lord' buzzed a neon sign.

On our approach to the church, having already asked about nine million inhabitants of Varanasi to give our rickshaw-wallah a hand in finding the way, we spotted a big wheel - a fairground big wheel - and our hearts sank as we realised he must have misunderstood our requirements entirely. In fact, no, this is an Indian church at Christmas - a theme park, where the young and hip go to hang out and show their faces, regardless of faith. The church itself was even more alarming. Imagine the Royle Family attempting to out-do their neighbours in tacky Christmas decorations. You could hear the buzz of the neon flashing fairy-lights from outside the gates. Amusingly, the Indians seem to have got Western religious and commercial Christmas iconography entirely mixed-up - hence inside the building, in front of the altar no less, there was a montage featuring a certain very conspicuous and very unreligious figure climbing a chimney with a sack of toys on his back.

With a sense of disbelief, we approached the star-spangled steeple and removed our shoes, a Hindu custom which has been imbibed into Indo-Catholic religious ritual. For a Catholic merry-go-round I mean church, the nave was surprisingly bare, containing only a handful of statues and pictures of the 14 stations of the Crucifixion. Stoically, we resisted the urge to laugh out loud when the Indian-style carols commenced, complete with table drums and bhangra beat. But the service was in Hindi and involved a lot of standing up and sitting down on the floor, so we left after about half and hour.

A sidenote on the concept of respectfulness in India. While it is considered rude to bare the soles of ones feet to any religious figure or figurine, the Indians think nothing of standing up in the middle of hymn or address, marching down the aisle and - standing not five feet away from the altar - taking a facial close-up of the Bishop or turning around to video the entire congregation. This kind of behaviour is endemic throughout India. If there is an audience with some luminary or other, young and middle-aged men will crowd the podium taking photographs, quite happily obscuring the view of onlookers (who will look slightly pissed off but say nothing) until, at length, they are satisfied with their shot. The other day, we caught a man at a historical monument videorecording the informtation signs dotted around. It's the same thing with plastic litter, which any self-respecting Indian will throw onto the street or shove through a fence without a second throught. V.S. Naipal puts it well when he talks of India having grasped Western technologies without yet developing a social conscience or terms of usage in anything approaching a Western sense (though there is certainly such a thing as a moral consensus). Perhaps these odd protocols of right and wrong, however, aren't confined to new equipment. As we left, I caught a senior clergyman openly yawning in the corner of my eye.

Christmas morning, then, was spent in bed, feeling sorry for myself. I think I must have caught a chill as we veered lazily from street to street on Christmas Eve, looking for anyone who'd even heard of Jesus. I was partially revived by the stock of tropical fruit we devoured in honour of Hawtin family tradition - sorry Beeches, I hardly thought I could impose upon her our established rituals of crankiness, talking loudly at cross-purposes and arguments over the telly. I have, however, taught her New Market (God bless Granny Nell). As afternoon seeped away we struggled back to the Phulwari restaurant and then, feeling very Christmassy (nauseous), on to the Suchhi cinema - this time to endure only one half of an American z-list Streetfighter rip-off named 'Dead or Alive'. The 'star' was that well-known martial-arts expert, Holly Valance.

We ducked, then, the last half of the picture (they still have intermissions here, and a good idea too I think) and went instead to catch the great nodding-off from a boat on the Ganga. It was fascinating to watch the evening rituals - involving singing, the burning of incense and offerings of flowers - from the river itself, at which all of the religious adulation is directed. As darkness fell, we lit candles and set them down in the river, in little banana-leaf baskets with orange flowers. Side by side, they floated off into the night and were lost to view. The last part of the day was spent watching a fire-dance at the Phulwari, our new local.

On Boxing Day, we resolved to make it out early to Sarnath, the site of the Buddha's first sermon. We left the hotel at, er, 11:20am. To be honest, not much to impress here except a huge stupa, one of those great concrete nipples supposed to house remnants of some holy person or other (Not, I think, the Buddha in this case). Sat amid 26 yodelling Koreans at the Sita for what was a surprisingly relaxing evening meal, and then slipped away from the Ganga for the last time at Varanasi for the - halting, heartening - phone call from the family.

As I waited for the folks to stop getting the phone number wrong, I fell into deep conversation with Raj at the Yogi Lodge, the lover of Shakespeare, Milton et al. He told me the story of his life to date, a saddening tale which demonstrates - for all who need it - that the caste-system, despite having been officially abolished, still holds India in a vice-like grip. Jump back two years: Raj was a successful Taekwondo teacher and BA graduate, loved and respected by all in his locality. 'You could have asked for Raj, and people would know who you meant', he told me (not very impressive if you asked, for instance, his own mother, but you can guess his meaning). Things started to go wrong when he fell in love with one of his students, a member of a higher caste. Knowing of her family's disapproval, and fearing the worst as community disapproval tightened around them, the couple fled to Delhi to marry - on the 25th December, 2005. Outraged, her father filed a kidnap charge and Raj was arrested (it took, he says, almost all of his small but respectable savings pile to buy himself out of trouble). Deciding that he was defeated, Raj took steps to end the relationship but found he was not out of the woods yet - grief-stricken, the girl threatened to commit suicide in his home (automatic imprisonment for himself and all his family, under Indian law), and even (unsuccessfully) attempted to hang herself. And this was not all. Raj found that his old friends had deserted him, and his students had defected. He was forced to leave the area and give up his job, his reputation tarnished forever. This is what I referred to earlier as a definite 'moral consensus', much stronger than its English equivalent. In his way, Raj must be seen by many as the Mr. Wickham of Varanasi - and the world of courtships, marriages, gossip over here is still closer to Jane Austen's than our own.

From Varanasi to Bodhgaya on the early morning train, and here we have relaxed/languished ever since. When we arrived, smack-damn in the middle of the largest tourist influx of the year, expecting foolishly to walk into a meditation course, the place was overrun by Buddhist monks. The flow of saffron-coloured robes has slackened a bit, but I get the distinct impression that Bodhgaya must be pretty much like this year-round - there are now seven Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhist monks, for instance, in the internet cafe right now, all displaying the healthy love of gizmos and computer technology common to the people of Xanadu.

Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until Kolkata before I can give you a proper description of Bodhgaya - suffice to say, it's been a very different experience to the rest of India so far, probably because the Indians themselves are in the minority. Our train out of Bihar leaves at 9:50pm (Indian time, so add on half an hour or so), and we've still to eat and make the trek to Gaya station. Anyway, it's a chance for us everyone to have a breather. Happy New Year!