In the morning Dawa told us he would take us to Naggar – the small town that we’d picked out in the Kullu Valley for our next stop, but he wanted to stop in Jagatsukh on the way which is where Raj had a house that he offered to us. It was somewhat of a surprise to see Dawa, Raj, and Babaji packed up and heading out to the car. They were all going to stay at Raj’s house in Jagatsukh and they wanted us to stay there with them, which was not at all what we had in mind. We told Dawa that we’d take a look at the place but we would most likely want to head on to Naggar. As interesting as this crew was, we really wanted to make our way toward Nepal and still have some time to check out a few more places in India on the way. I was also surprised to see Babaji up and walking around. I didn’t see him stand up once the night before and it was my understanding that he generally doesn’t stand up or walk around unless absolutely necessary.
In about a half hour we arrived in Jagatsukh at Raj’s vacant home. There were two floors, the first of which could be for Fern and me, and the second floor would be where Dawa, Raj, and Babaji would sleep. There was also a kitchen on the second floor. It seemed as though nobody had been in the place for a while. It was comfortable enough but we didn’t really want to stay in Jagatsukh and sitting around on the floor all day listening to Babaji carry on and on wasn’t exactly what we wanted either. Another factor was that the previous evening we had talked a decent amount about how much I like food and cooking. Babaji and company were hoping that I would cook for them. It wasn’t stated how long they were planning to stay there but the thought of cooking for five people in a foreign country and a foreign kitchen with limited familiarity of the local ingredients was a bit intimidating for one night and sounded downright awful for multiple days. I wouldn’t be able to get ingredients for the types of things that I’m used to cooking at home and I don’t have a lot of experience cooking Indian food. A little, but not enough to make me feel like I could impress three Indians. The kitchen was also very poorly equipped to handle this quantity of food. Two propane burners, a couple of small sauce pans, a pressure cooker, and a medium size frying pan.
Dawa really wanted us to stay so Fern and I went off on our own to discuss it. There was nothing for us to do here except sit in the room upstairs all day. Maybe we could go for a walk or something. We didn’t like being stuck somewhere, relying on Dawa for transportation and having to revolve our activities and plans around these three people who basically were going to sit on the floor all day. I firmly told Dawa that we would like to go on to Naggar but it was like he didn’t even hear me. Of course we wanted to stay, we just didn’t realize it yet. Fern and I talked about it some more. She had been trying to think of a way to show our gratitude for his generosity – a gift, or something we could do for him, and it occurred to her that if we stayed a night there it would make him happy. He drove us all this way, gave us a free place to stay, and fed us. It was all we could do. So we told him we would stay one night but we needed to go the next day and he seemed satisfied.
So we sat. Everyone sat on the floor upstairs and in arc radiating around Babaji. He would ramble on sometimes in his usual way, occasionally giving instructions to Dawa or Raj. Once he sat down on his mattress I didn’t see him get up again for the rest of the day. He had the TV on almost the whole time and seemed obsessed with it, the way a child watches cartoons on a Saturday morning. He, however, couldn’t keep his eyes off the news, which was largely about the conflict with Pakistan in Kashmir. He would channel surf sometimes, lingering on a flashy movie or other program. Indian television is overly dramatic to an extreme – very colorful and high energy. Babaji would get sucked into ridiculous action sequences and pretty girls on the screen and then flip to something new. Fern and I would chat with Dawa and Raj until Babaji got bored with the television and then he would go into guru mode and try to lay some knowledge on us.
Here is something he might say. I just made it up because I don’t remember many of his exact words but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear him say this:
Honey
Honey bee
One two three
Honey is money
Wealth, richness
Bee is to be, to exist, to cause to exist, create
One two three
Three eyes – right eye, left eye, third eye (and he points to his forehead)
To eat honey is to create wealth
True wealth in your true self
Open the third eye.
…and everyone looks deep in thought, nodding their heads.
At one point he was talking about the importance of opening the third eye – awakening a larger awareness. At a pause in his diatribe I asked him “How does a person learn to open the third eye?” He looked at me with raised eyebrows and a gentle smile and nodded. His expression said “yes, that is the key.” He did not actually answer my question at all. Questioning the master is apparently not how this works. Listen.
In the afternoon Dawa and Raj asked me what I would need for making dinner. It was just assumed that I was cooking for the group which was a little annoying at first but after I thought about it I decided to just go for it. It would be an interesting challenge. I wasn’t quite sure how I would do it, but I could figure something out. And it would give me something to do to keep me busy. Things vary so much from region to region in India that I had no idea what they would have at the little produce shop. We’re not talking about a western style supermarket here. I listed off some vegetables and suggested chicken too. The kitchen already had a decent collection of Indian spices, rice, ghee, and some other ingredients that I could make use of. Babaji had also given me a small bottle which he said was a preparation made from mountain herbs and seeds that he’d collected. It was actually just some store bought asafoetida, a fairly common Indian seasoning, and it said so right on the bottle. After about a half hour they returned from the market with a huge pile of vegetables – cauliflower, okra, onions, tomatoes, garlic, and a whole chicken hacked into small chunks – bones and all. How was I going to cook all this? There were no pans even close to large enough to contain all of this. Without much of a plan I went to work chopping everything up as Fern brought me glasses of whiskey and soda from the living room bartender – Babaji.
Raj asked me if I needed any help so I suggested he cook some rice in the pressure cooker. Pressure cookers are everywhere in India and it seems like they use them as the primary cooking vessel much of the time but I have very little experience using one. If he could cook the rice and set it aside while I chopped everything then it would free up the two burners for me to use later. It gave Raj and I a little bonding time which was nice. He told me about his family and his businesses and how he came to know Babaji. He didn’t explicitly tell me these things but I got the feeling that deep down he was a little lonely and depressed since he didn’t have a wife and family. Making lots of money wasn’t making him happy. Big surprise. Devoting himself to Babaji gave him something meaningful to put his energy into. As we talked my cooking plan came together.
In a small saucepan I started slowly sautéing a bunch of onions in a nice quantity of ghee, letting them get soft and caramelized, and then adding spices, ginger, and garlic. I was shooting for something like a curry sauce. Things were smelling pretty good. Eventually some water and my old friend besan (chick pea flour) to thicken it up a little. Oh, and a little extra ghee – the key to making anything better. While I let that simmer I cooked each vegetable and the chicken separately in the frying pan and dumped it all in a large metal serving platter. The curry sauce got poured over the rest of the ingredients. We set it all out on the floor with Raj’s nice high sided bronze plates and everyone sat in a circle around it. Now for the big test. Everyone served themselves (except Babaji who must be served by one of his servants) and dug in. Looks of pleasant surprise. Success! Everyone gobbled it up and went for seconds and thirds. Halfway through the meal Raj’s brother showed up and we invited him to join us. He took a bite of the curry and a puzzled look came over his face. He asked “what kind of curry is this?” Raj said something in Hindi which I interpreted as “the white guy made it.” Everyone smiled and Raj’s brother went for it, looking very satisfied. Babaji and Dawa don’t consider it to be very healthy to eat large meals but they both ate far more than I expected and I couldn’t help but notice, as Dawa was complaining that he ate too much, that he was scraping every little bit of sauce out of his plate with his finger and licking it clean. I felt a huge sense of relief. Initially I was very nervous about this whole ordeal – a feeling a little bit like stage fright, but it all turned out just fine.
Throughout the evening we talked and I learned a few more things about Babaji from Raj and Dawa. They believed that he was well over 100 years old and might never die because he had transcended this ordinary physical world and lived in another plane of existence altogether. I asked several times but nobody knew where he came from. I also asked how he learned the skills and knowledge that he had, if he had a guru that he learned from, and I got a vague explanation that amounted to this – he received his knowledge directly from god, or some other spiritual entity. We heard about how he spent 12 years meditating alone in a cave eating nothing but snow and mountain grasses (he really loved his mountain grasses). Dawa told us about how Babaji would sometimes come to Keylong for the winter and stay at his home. He would sit and meditate outside in a compartment near where the cow lived the entire time, never getting up to relieve himself. For someone who had transcended the physical world he sure did focus a lot of attention on the television, and strangely, Fern’s iPhone. He spent a long time trying to convince Fern to sell him her iPhone. He wanted to trade her his Samsung smartphone and add in some extra cash. While Fern and Babaji discussed their phones he pulled up his Facebook profile and showed her a bunch of photos of large-breasted women in bikinis who were his Facebook friends. Babaji was like a child in many ways and an old schizophrenic in others. If anything, he was certainly unique.
The next morning I told Dawa that we needed to get to Naggar and find a place to stay there. He acknowledged that but made no motion to leave. Fern and I packed up our bags and got ready to go to help get the point across. I asked if there were local buses we could take. Suddenly Raj and Dawa disappeared to get some ingredients for a special biryani dish that Babaji, of all people, wanted to make for lunch with us. Were they deliberately stalling? Fern and I were starting to feel trapped and it was getting frustrating. We waited for a while, had Babaji’s delicious biryani for lunch and finally got Dawa out to the car to leave. Raj came along too for the 20 minute or so journey to Naggar. As much as we did genuinely like these people that we’d been spending so much time with, it felt refreshing to think that soon we’d be in control of our own activities.
When we got to Naggar we told Dawa that he could let us out anywhere and we would walk around and find a place. I had a couple of hotel names written down that I got off the internet as a starting point. He wanted to make sure we got a good deal though so he took us to a place that was owned by a friend of Raj’s and Raj negotiated on our behalf. It was definitely a good deal price-wise but it was a tiny room and they didn’t have internet at the hotel. I was looking for a decent internet connection to do some badly needed research about the route we would take through India to get to Nepal. In fact I had explained this to Dawa and Raj many times as it was one of the reasons we wanted to go to Naggar and get a hotel instead of staying at Raj’s place longer. I guess they only heard what they wanted to hear. We thanked Raj and Dawa for their help and told them we could take it from there. Nope. Dawa insisted on driving us to wherever it was we were going. After checking out a couple of places we finally found the perfect hotel and Dawa and Raj came up to aid in the negotiation and to say goodbye. It felt like we had been through a lot with Dawa and tears were shed.
The new place was exactly what we needed. It was clean, spacious, and it had a nice hot shower – all things that we’d been missing for a while. There was plenty of space for Fern to do yoga and me to exercise. There was a balcony with a beautiful view and big bright windows. There was only one other person at the hotel who happened to be from Portland and we had a great time hanging out with him. What are the chances? A town of maybe a few hundred people that almost nobody has heard of in Himachal Pradesh, India during the off season in a hotel that’s away from the touristy part of town and the one other traveler around is from Portland? We had a surprising amount in common.
It was our initial intention to do some hikes into the mountains but we actually just relaxed for about 10 days and made use of the internet. To our surprise, Dawa showed up at our door the next day and stopped by several more times, which we weren’t really expecting but it was nice. Now I understood why he wanted to take us to our hotel so bad – so he knew exactly what hotel and which room we were in. He would just hang out for a few minutes and he continued telling Fern how special she was to him and giving her big hugs. I wondered if he might have damaged relationships with his own children and it felt good for him to experience a warm fatherly connection with Fern. He told us about his plans to go on a road trip with Babaji during the winter which I found entertaining and he also mentioned that he might bring Babaji out to do a last healing treatment for Fern. That might not be so bad, as long as he didn’t expect us to be his servants.
Well, that never happened but on our last day before we were leaving Dawa showed up with a change of plans. Previously he had said he wanted to go get some tea with us at a nice scenic spot which sounded nice but he showed up much later than usual and I was off buying bus tickets for our exit trip the next day. He told Fern that Babaji wanted to do a final treatment for her and give her some herbs (maybe some personally collected mountain grasses and seeds?) and Dawa was to bring us back to Jagatsukh. They got in his car and drove through town looking for me and when they finally found me Dawa said he needed to take us back and I simply said no. We needed to pack and look for a place to stay the next day and figure out some more details about our route. If Dawa took us back to Jagatsukh there was no telling how long we’d be gone but I was certain it would be longer than Fern and I wanted. Fern felt the same way but Dawa doesn’t take no for an answer sometimes. I still needed to finish up my transaction with the bus ticket agent and I suggested they go back to the hotel where we could hang out for a little while when I returned.
A switch must have flipped inside Dawa when I said no to him because he drove Fern back to the hotel, dropped her off, and immediately left. No hug. No more “You are my daughter, I’ll always be with you.” I didn’t get to say goodbye to him at all. He was gone and we never heard from him again. His reaction really surprised Fern and I. Maybe he just wasn’t accustomed to hearing the word “no” or maybe his inability to fulfill Babaji’s wishes caused some sort of short circuit in his brain. Maybe he saw it as us rejecting Babaji, Dawa’s personal savior, and protectively took offense. I thought that we had a pretty strong connection with Dawa and one little word should not be enough to destroy that but I guess he felt differently. It was all over and we had a lot of strange memories to think about as we took our bus back to Delhi the next day.
jim@snorkelbandits.com