After three days in New Delhi, we returned to the airport and flew an hour north to Rishikesh. The plane was on the smaller side and served an in-flight meal according to religiously imposed dietary specifications - vegetarian, strict vegetarian, and more sub flavors, which I don’t recall. Mine was strict food avoidance, so I declined and hoped my meal would be reallocated to someone who could use the calories who also had the digestive fortitude to manage it.
As we had toured New Delhi, Aashish pointed out and named gods - murtis - depictions. He introduced the patron saint of our driver, seated squarely on the dash below the rearview and told us that in India, there are more than 33 million gods and goddesses whose worship holds the world together. I wondered who my fellow passengers were praying to.
Our arrival was a single-gate airport much higher in elevation than our departure - what Westerners refer to as the ‘foothills of the Himalayas.’ But this is just another way that we superimpose our way of knowing the world onto land where it doesn’t belong. The Himalayas have no foothills. They don’t begin gradually. They are angular and ever-present, having no beginning or end. We landed in a gentler, more fluid area, but I am a woman born in the Rockies and I know mountains. We were in them, above the range of mosquitos and yet still close enough to the equator that the terrain was warm and quasi jungle-y.
The smog remained intense, mixed with fog and humidity that is strange and noticeable to me.
We shared our flight with a person of religious significance who was greeted at the airport by a few dozen of his devotees. He was decked out with flower necklaces over a special carpet and whisked away into a very modern bus-like vehicle with most of the other passengers, and we were left, DJ and I, to locate cash and a snack and await our own vehicle.
It is remarkable to me that I can insert my debit card into a machine on the precise opposite pole of the earth from my origin, and that it can speak to a series of banks and offer me cash, but this is what we did. I had flagged in my memory that 500 rupees was about $7, so when the machine asked, I believe I withdrew about $50, which all came in large bills. So we took a large bill to the concession stand and purchased a bottle of water and some Pringles in order to diversify our stash o’ cash. Our trip occurred at the precise moment when India decided to change the printing of their currency, so you could not get rupees before. Normally, you simply go to a big bank in the States and swap out some cash for some other currency, but no one in the state of Colorado had new rupees before we left, and so I traveled with ZERO cash for four days.
Our car arrived and drove us the winding hour from the airport to the center, which wasn’t an ashram nor a retreat center, but something uniquely hybrid and up higher, outside of the main town.
The road was narrow - slightly wider than the car itself, and so with great regularity we would pull up onto the incline of the hill to allow another driver to pass us, which they did with precisely 1mm between cars and 2mm between their car and the unguarded cliff face. Again with the fine. Those 33 million gods and goddesses we learned about in Delhi were coming in handy.
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