The Downside of Rishikesh

Naturally, in our mental Poland, we had to find a cloud for our silver lining. My Karnataka mobile phone, roaming in Uttaranchal on Idea Telecom, provided spotty service. There was always a signal, to be sure, but calls and SMS transmissions had periods, sometimes quite lengthy, of zero responsiveness.

From my second day, I enthusiastically signed up for the morning yoga class at the ashram. The young instructor was so limber, guiding us through the various assanas. However, as I soon discovered, he demonstrated rather than taught, and I ended up wth head, neck, shoulder and back pain. This led to a suspension of the lessons, daily massages, and finally, that reliable old remedy, Ben Gay, to provide satisfactory relief.

The biggest annoyance came daily around 5 o'clock in the evening, from no less than our very own Sant Sewa Ashram, in the form of a concert of devotional music, broadcast to the town by megaphone. Now, there's devotional music, and there's devotional music. It can be excellently soothing, enlightening and uplifting. Or, as in our case, it can be worse than Chinese water torture.

Percussion was an arrhythmic thump-thump on an old bongo. Melody was played by one, and sometimes two fingers on a hockey rink organ. And chanting was a severely off-key primal scream of a lead, accompanied by two screeching children on backing vocals. This went on for three inescapable hours.

All the while I had been conducting an internal debate as whether or not to immerse myself in the river. The upside would be the pilgrimage value of hundreds of generations of people having imbued the waters with their purest intentions. The downside was the possible ill effects that the questionalbe cleanliness of such waters would have on my health.

Daphna and I had taken what amounted to a 90 second motorboat ride in which the skipper intentionally side-crashed into the boat's own wake, soaking us with holy water. We were no worse for the wear. But on the evenings that we sat on our balconies, devotional chanting grating loud and proud in our eardrums, it occured to me to have myself thrown into the river after having donned concrete shoes.

On a more fortunate note, there were no mosquistoes. Less happily, there were hoardes of crickets, who very much liked to nestle in our curtains. They made noises that you actually got used to. And they didn't bite.

My teacher, Mr Omprakash Saach Deva, most impressed by my linguistic aptitude, helped my Hindi progress by leaps and bounds. Once getting verbs and word order more or less straight, daily lessons consisted of my narrating my favorite Bollywood movies, of course in simplified Hindi.

Downside notwithstanding, Rishikesh is an engaging and amazing place.