ludhiana & amritsar

auntie is a character. she’s always happy when one of the family goes to visit her. and straight away, she is getting me to go shopping for new clothes as for sure i need some! with her driver and right-hand man prem to help, we scour some stores on mall road and it ends up with auntie buying a lot of stuff for herself, and me not finding anything i like. “i just need some plain t-shirts”, i keep telling the guys at the shop. “plain- as in no logos, no prints, nothing...” they don’t have plain t-shirts but still they try to get me to buy something. annoying.

i go to visit my cousin bally and her family. they have moved out of their last home and have built a new place on the outskirts of town, away from the maddening din of car horns and traffic. wow, i was surprised. a big place complete with swimming pool. the pool was already there with the small two storey house next to it.  around it, they built a massive four storey mansion. ok ok, mansion is a little exaggerated. their neighbour's house looks like a mansion though. the kids are big now and anna is soon off to university in the states.

i go to visit my relatives in the ‘pind’, the ancestral village of my parents. cousin ranjit and his family have also built a new house for themselves. but the water-buffalo were still there. ranjit was milking them as usual. some things don’t change. his son took me around the immediate surroundings for a quick tour of the village. we got to meet another auntie, their neighbours. my cousins there were half-jokingly and half-seriously trying to convince me to get an arranged marriage. what auntie had previously failed to do in two previous visits! we laughed a lot but i held my ground, and happy to finally get back to cousin ranjit’s place. before i left, i got to meet briefly some elder citizens of the clan, an uncle in his 80’s, and an aunties over 100! village life is definitely recommended for longevity!

one day, i prepared to go visit the golden temple in amritsar. at ludhiana junction station, getting a ticket was taking ages, and when the train eventually came, the announcements told of a long detour. problems on the track. i was going to get my ticket refunded when a policeman there, obviously noting the look of resignation on my face, asked me where i wanted to go. amritsar, i told him. "so take the next train and get off at beas. from there, you can get a local bus to amritsar." great. that’s what i did, it was too easy. and finding the way to the temple was no problem either.

holy and most sacred place of the sikhs. the guru harminder sahib, aka the golden temple. built by the fifth guru, guru ram das, the temple attracts pilgrims and visitors in their thousands every day. the main temple is surrounded by a moat. the akal takht temple makes up the surrounding buildings around the moat, with covered archways forming part of the walkway around the moat. a long causeway connects this walkway to the golden temple itself.

i took dinner there. ‘free kitchen’ read the sign. many sikhs volunteer do some ‘seva’ preparing and serving food seemingly non-stop throughout the day. temple food is always the same. chappatis and dahl, sometimes some sabhji and curd.

i sat in the archway and watched the people walk around. i took a lot of photos at different times of the day with its differing light. i joined the queue on the causeway to get to the golden temple itself.  i got to the place where the holy book was being read from. i saw how the guards pushed away one guy as he was kneeling and offering his respects to the guru granth sahib, the holy book and '11th guru'. apparently some big-wig had come and wanted to be seated in the ‘v.i.p.’ section. so much for all sikhs being equal. it was heavy-handed and unbecoming of sikhs. just as with all religions, the ones at the top seem to have lost the common touch. they care too much for the rituals and ‘sacred’ objects and seem to have forgotten the true essence at the core of the religion. that we are all one. wasn’t the first thing nanak uttered as he came out of his enlightenment trance “ek onkar”?

i remembered how the guards had manhandled me the first time i had come to visit the sacred place. i was with gavin, an english guy i met on the way in iran and we had cycled together in pakistan and over the border to amritsar. we were staying at the dorm room for foreigners. one day, two of them grabbed me by the arms and sat me on a chair until they got one of their ‘leaders’ to speak to me. i was outraged. he asked me for my passport and questioned me about who i was and what i was doing there. he told me that i could not stay in the foreigner section, that there was other accommodation available to me. i told him that i could choose to stay where i wanted seeing as i was a ‘foreigner’ myself. just at that moment, gavin had shown up and asked what was going on. after seeing him and realising that we were travelling together, the ‘leader’ relented and handed my passport back. but for sure he wasn’t happy about it. the guards left me alone. it had left a bad taste in my mouth. to think i had spent many hours every sunday when i was young doing my ‘seva’ for the community at our local temple. and whilst it was true that i had lapsed from the religion, there was no need to treat me in such a way.

fortunately, no such disrespect this time. but then i wasn’t going to be staying overnight with the ‘foreigners’. it seemed that many people were making their sleeping places under the archways, and i also made a place for myself. it was a little bit chilly and i didn’t get the best sleep as i didn’t bring anything with me. i waited for the procession of the holy book to be taken back from the akal takht to the golden temple. again i sat there, but there wasn’t much room, and people walking over my feet told me it was time to go. i waited for sunrise and had another meal there before i made my way to the bus station and the bus back to ludhiana.