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| Geetanjali Krishna: Pilgrim's progress | |
| Geetanjali Krishna / New Delhi June 6, 2009, 0:40 IST | |
The other day, my driver reported for duty after a week’s vacation, looking utterly exhausted. Minutes after I gave him the car keys,
I found him slumped in his usual chair, dead to the world. I let him be for an hour or so, then woke him up worrying if he was quite well. One was supposed to return from a holiday full of beans, not snores, I remarked as he stretched unwillingly. “But not after a holiday as strenuous as mine,” he said, “not that you can really call a pilgrimage a holiday!”
It seemed that his 65-year-old father had long wanted to go to the Vaishno Devi shrine with his three sons and their families (all of whom had long migrated from their village home to the city). So he, along with 25 members of his family, boarded an ordinary bus to the base of the Vaishno Devi hill, a journey that took all of 15 hours in the heat of the May sun. “Our children are not used to the heat,” he said, “they’re used to coolers instead! To top it all our one-year-old developed acute diarrhoea halfway into the bus ride,” he said, “you can imagine how terrible the journey was!” Anyway, he said, his parents adjusted to the discomfort, saying that it was in the very spirit of a pilgrimage to suffer the rigours of the journey.
As the day progressed, his father’s plan got more ambitious: To avoid making the arduous 14-km trek to the shrine in the blistering heat of the day, he wanted to attempt the ascent in the middle of the night “And that too immediately after the bus journey,” said my driver, shuddering in reminiscence. Not only would this save them the cost of a hotel room for a night, his father said, it would also get them to the shrine early in the morning — the best time, apparently, to visit the goddess. So the family of 25, somewhat subdued but still dutiful, began walking up slowly around midnight.
“The walk up was quite beautiful, eerily peaceful — though there were others like us who were walking at that hour,” said my driver. The hills of Vaishno Devi were plagued by crippling forest fires: “Their flames, mercifully far from where we were, flickered in the shadows. The effect was quite out of this world,” he said. While women and children in their party were too tired to even look, his old parents were going strong. “My father seemed lost in prayer, while mother just kept on walking without stopping…” he said.
When they finally entered the shrine, the family got a few seconds in the inner sanctum before the serpentine queues behind them pushed against them. “My father, fresh as a daisy, said that this was too short a time to spend with the goddess, so we should all stay there another day,” said my driver. So the family camped obediently in a Dharamshala, 15 to a room. Another day spent standing in queue waiting for their second chance to visit the temple, and their holiday was almost over. “We walked down, took the next bus to Delhi, and slept like logs regardless of the heat, all the way home!” he said. Guess who stayed up to mind all their luggage… “I learnt,” said my driver, “that the true spirit of a pilgrimage lies in the hardship one endures en route… And also that having walked scores of miles a day and slept under the stars all their lives — my parents have the sort of strength and endurance that their urbanised offspring can’t dream of!”
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