Dust, grime, decay, neglect have a way of settling on the soul. I am finding this out the hard way in the goodlands of U.P. Goodlands because Awadh, the region which Faizabad and Ayodhya represent, is quite different from the real badlands of East U.P, like Gorakhpur or Azamgarh, or West U.P, like Meerut or Saharanpur. And yet, for someone arrived from the gleaming metro of Chennai, where buildings, streets and neighbourhoods get regular makeovers with the steady inflow of capital, the visual landscape here is tough to get used to.
People live in dilapidated houses because they cannot earn enough money in this sluggish economy to do major repairs. Tin roofs and makeshift arrangements involving a few bricks here, a stone slab kept over some drain there, are common. My own present living arrangements consist of a large, long room with a tin roof, and a bedroom in the older portion of a sprawling house whose walls give off a seeping chill in the winter months.
Still, old buildings and non-aesthetic surroundings are not enough to damage the soul. What really does?
In late October 2009, I set off for the Chaudah Kosi Parikrama. This is a nearly 60 km circumambulation of Ayodhya, two days before the shorter Panch Kosi Parikrama, both annual rituals for thousands of pilgrims from nearby villages. I must admit to a certain dewy-eyed naivete when I started the parikrama. I had been to the Mahakumbh Mela in Allahabad in 2001, the Sinhasth Mela in Ujjain in 2004, to places like Thiruvannamalai and Tirupati regularly. This would be an opportunity to explore my faith and deepen it, I thought.
Instead, it was a stumbling across miles and miles of rural paths, plotted by some fiendish government officials who had decided to make life as miserable as possible for pilgrims, to extract the utmost mileage for an angry God. We set off in a heady fashion alongside the Sarayu river from Faizabad, reached Ayodhya and walked on in what was a night-long walk. I was hoping the journey would be enlivened by song and satsang, bhajan and shared accounts over cups of hot tea. What I found instead was an endlessly hurrying stream of most businesslike people, discussing the prices of essential commodities, as they hurried to complete this ritual. The Chaudah Kosi Parikrama, apart from its most unfair length, which covers Darshan Nagar more than it delivers proximity to Ayodhya, seemed to me quite bereft of the madness, the crazy love of the divine, that one encounters in places like Varanasi. This was a hurried procession of practical, tight-fisted, rural people.
And there were genuine dangers. We were miles away from hospitals. No one who had fallen sick or had a heart attack would have found any transport in the middle of the night to reach civilization. There was a huge build up of people in front of a railway crossing that made me fear a stampede or a mass mowing down by train (all things that have happened here in the past). The night air had just begun to turn cold with the approaching of winter. I rested in two places with my young companion, Lakshmi, on hay spread out to give some warmth. At one place, there was a pond right next to where we lay, and the chill crept out in silent waves, making it impossible for one farmer to continue. He had underestimated the cold and not worn or brought any warm clothing.
Anyway, a day later, I was not at all keen to take part in the Panch Kosi Parikrama, which local purists informed me, was a must after the Chaudah Kosi! Who makes all these stupid rules, I wondered. In other homes, women were getting ready to start their brisk 15 km or so walk around Faizabad and Ayodhya towns. "Why didn't you start with the smaller version?" many demanded, with an irritating practicality, to my refusal to accompany them. "This is a much nicer Parikrama - you can complete it all in the daytime," others cajoled. Thanks, but no thanks, I thought. The lack of any identifiable spiritual element in the Chaudah Kosi Parikrama had cured me of any desire for a repetition.
Besides, my legs were aching far too much!
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