… and thus, she woke up with a start, the sounds of “jaldi, jaldi, niklo niklo” (‘quickly, quickly, get out, get out’) ringing wildly in her ears, visions of being forcibly ushered out of two of the holiest temples in India dancing before her eyes, and in their wake, bringing forth a deluge of tears of laughter that emptied her of the last vestiges of existential angst, which she had been struggling to evict for many years …

… just twenty-four hours earlier, her bearing had been an altogether different one, bent double by a cumbersome paradox of anxiety ridden hope for, and feeble faith in some kind of spiritual release, as she went about trying to furnish herself with the demeanor of subservience and piety she thought fitting of the journey ahead; little did she know then, that Hindu rituals are wholly dismissive, if not downright disdainful of the very notion of etiquette, their purveyors perfectly cognizant of the transactional relationship between object of devotion and devotee.

Besides, the sheer volume of both made imposing any form of discipline an impossible feat; as author Geoff Dyer put it so aptly in his novel, ’Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi’,

“Hinduism is the Disney of World Religions”,

… which is, perhaps, what most precisely depicts the real restorative power of this polytheistic religion, for above all it is playful and thereby elicits a ‘bearable’ lightness of being.

She had been invited on part one of a pilgrimage known as the ‘Chota Char Dham’, comprising the temples of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Yamunotri and Gangotri, to which millions of Hindus trek by foot every year to perform what is called ‘darshan’ – a sighting of the deities – in the hope of qualifying for ‘Moksha’, that which is defined by the English dictionary as “a transcendent state attained as a result of being released from the cycle of rebirth”.

Needless to say, she and her privileged party of four were far more expectant of the instant gratification that is advanced by being liberated from the experiential sufferings of life, their itinerary commensurately divested of any physical effort or other type of self-sacrifice.

In proportion to their poor stamina for Godly pursuits, part one was composed of a visit to only two of the four temples, those located at Badrinath and Kedarnath, and it was by private helicopter that they leisurely pilgrimaged through the majestic Himalayan mountain range, both sense of purpose and significance of destination altogether absent from their minds, until the moment they found themselves deposited in the middle of a virtual construction site, any and all hope for emancipation by atmospheric diffusion alone, brutally dashed at the overwhelming sight of the surrounding detritus and droves of human beings noisily scrambling for salvation.

Even the fast-track Darshan service that came as part of their VIP Pilgrimage kit, could not save them entirely from the chaos and cacophony that unfailingly chaperone each and every Hindu custom and ceremony. While their guide managed to successfully manoeuvre them to the front of the endless queue of people, many of whom had been standing in line for several hours, he was unable to persuade the ‘gatekeepers’ to permit them a dignified entry and benefit of extra time to be able to behold the deity; quite the contrary, they were treated with an even greater degree of contempt than the others, who, at the very least, had subjected themselves to some amount of self-flagellation that made them eligible for deliverance.

But when she expressed her despondency to her companions, about feeling unworthy of redemption in the absence of any display of martyrdom, they laughed out loud, for the concept of guilt, they proudly informed her, has neither place nor relevance in the Hindu way of life…

… As Gurudeva once said,

“Hinduism is such a joyous religion, freed of all the mental encumbrances that are prevalent in the various Western faiths. It is freed of the notion of a vengeful God. It is freed of the notion of eternal suffering. It is freed from the notion of original sin. It is freed from the notion of a single spiritual path, a One Way.”