Located in the state of Gujarat in the west of India, Junagadh was a pilgrim town with a difference.
A few kilometres away, on top of a high ridge, were famous temples. But to reach the temples, the pilgrim had to climb stone steps: 10, 000 of them.
That was a lot of steps.
Mind you, I didn’t have a problem with the idea of ascending all those steps.
A pilgrimage, as far as I was concerned, wasn’t meant to be easy.
My conviction on this point emerged after previous visits to the famous pilgrim towns on the coast of Gujarat: Dwarka and Somnath.
In Dwarka and Somnath there were temples which were famous all over India and which every year were visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims – and it was in these sacred towns that I got to see the contemporary Hindu pilgrimage industry first hand. The pilgrims came in luxury coaches or cars, stayed in luxury hotels, dined out and bought souvenirs – and in between visited the temples which were in effect, a part of a corporate pilgrimage industry.
Vendors did a brisk trade selling trinkets and souvenirs and in the temples, the priests had thoughtfully installed ATM’s to facilitate the donation cash flow.
The spirit of consumerism loomed larger than any kind of spiritualism.
In the past, pilgrims who went to sacred towns like Dwarka and Somnath had to endure great hardships to get there. They walked there and more than a few of them would have perished on the way. The pilgrimmage wasn’t meant to be easy let alone a form of self indulgence.
Of course, climbing ten thousand steps wasn’t the same as experiencing the ancient pilgrim’s uncertain, primordial world, but it did at least put more emphasis on the notion of the pilgrimage involving physical effort; of the means of getting to the end destination being at least as important as the end destination itself.
And I can say also that Junagadh was a far more memorable journey than either Dwarka or Somnath…………
I didn’t get into Junagadh until late at night.
The bus station was in the centre of town. I got down and found a hotel in a nearby side street. It consisted of two floors of rooms at the top of an old three-story building; the reception desk was at the street level, next to some small shops and offices. Zombie-like, I filled in the endless number of forms which were required whenever one checked into a hotel in India, went to my room, had a shower and went to bed. I was exhausted.
On the following morning, sun streaming into my room together with the sound of the traffic and horns blaring, I decided to take it easy and tackle the pilgrim trail on the following day. I spent a day doing some sight- seeing. I got an auto rickshaw to an ancient fort; within its walls were the remains of a mosque and a palace.
Junagadh’s fort was a relic from a long past dominated by conflict. It boasted that it had seen 16 major battles during its 500-year long history. Standing on top of the old fort wall, I got a fine view of the journey I was to undertake on the following day: there were temples perched on top of a series of dry, yellow-brown hills, one after the other, each one slightly higher than the one before it.
The 10,000 steps – not visible from where I was standing – connected those temples.
On the following morning, I got off to an early start.
It was still dark when I left the hotel and went out onto eerily quiet streets to find an auto rickshaw. Some of the lamp posts worked and threw down a weak light. All of the stalls and shops were shuttered. Cows wandered around aimlessly, goggle eyed, like the ghosts of departed souls. In some places there were cows sleeping on their haunches and next to them, stray dogs lying curled up. At one place, under a street lamp, there was a man standing behind a little trolley selling biscuits and glasses of chi. There were a few men standing around, blankets drawn over them like ponchos, holding their glasses of chi with both hands.
I stopped and ordered a glass. No one said anything; the only sound to be heard was the roaring of the kerosene stove. In a few hours’ time, that same street would be bursting with people and traffic and dust and fumes: utter mayhem.
Whilst I was sipping my glass of tea, a loud yell came from somewhere behind me.
It was so sudden that I gulped my tea and burned the roof of my mouth.
The yell came again.
I looked around and saw an old man wrapped in a blanket, with a loose piece of cloth tied around his head, wandering passed as aimlessly as a cow. He was obviously not of sound mind (I often wondered what happened to old and poor people suffering from dementia in India).
He yelled out again and again.
When the men standing around the tea trolley answered his yell, I realised that it was a religious incantation which he had latched on to and was yelling out like a trained parrot. Perhaps in the confusion of his mind, he was beseeching the gods to restore him to sanity. But the yelling was jarring and it got on my nerves (not to mention my burned mouth).
After answering his yelling a couple of times, the tea drinkers ignored him.
He disappeared into the night and mercifully, his yelling faded away.
It was a strange start to the day.
And at the end of it, I would have lot more to worry about than my burned mouth.
Like my legs for example.
I got an auto-rickshaw out to the place where the steps began. It was only a few kilometres away, yet the trip seemed longer.
I began climbing the steps at 6 am; it was dark and unseasonably cold. There was no lighting. The only illumination came from the moon.
Many other people were also climbing the steps, but I couldn’t see them; they were voices in the dark unless they passed me, or I passed them.
The steps zig zagged back and forth up a steep slope. There were flights of steps and in between them, long sections of paved stones. It was a process of climbing steps and walking.
I had joined the pilgrims, but I couldn’t see them. They were like ghosts.
Then the sun rose and everthing came into view – and what a view!
Another nine and half thousand steps awaited me…..
