The Common Soul Shines: Mysore

Each morning I rise at 5.30am and get ready within a few minutes. It is still dark as I leave Door No. 1472, 7th Cross in the neighbourhood of Krishnamurtypuram, Mysore. It is one of the few quiet times of the day, for people in India are busy most hours, and God is everywhere, drawing prayers from all sides, all corners, all minutes. Some mornings the Muslim call to prayer wakes me first at 5am, other time the devotional chants are already underway at the nearest Hindu temple. 

I walk 5 minutes to reach my yoga shala, situated at No. 1317, 3rd Cross, passing the Shree Ladies Beauty Parlour and Surya Medicals on the way. This is usually a very quiet time of day, like I said, but there is a small tearoom already open, where the working men on scooters and motorbikes stop for a quick idli and hot chai. 

Upstairs the shala practice room is already getting warm and busy as the students from around the world stretch, meditate or say prayers.  From the rooftop one can see Chamundi Hill, the place where the goddess Chamundeswari slew the demon Mahishasura (after whom Mysore is named) in a battle that lasted for nine days and nights. These nine days came to be called Dussehra, which celebrates the victory of good over evil, as well the power of women more broadly.

The temple on Chamundi Hill - the original shrine dates to the 12th Century

Our teacher has already been up since 3am when he does his own meditation and practice before turning his attention to us. Each morning begins with an opening prayer chanted in Sanskrit as the clock strikes 6am:

Jeevamani Bharajath Phana
The common soul shines like an emerald on the head of the snake
Sahasra Vidruth Vishwambara
Which has one thousand heads and is all pervading
[and the prayer continues...]  

Mysore-style ashtanga yoga is not led but only supervised by the teacher -- each student must remember and implement the sequence of some 60 poses and their variations, in the correct order, preferably with no memory aides.  The students are at different levels, and several do apparently impossible contortions that I can only dream of.  Our teacher circulates the room to improve the students' positions, stand on them with his full body weight, or even pick them up and swing them around, sometimes shouting instructions across the room: 

"Hello!  HELLO!!"
"Head up. Head up! UP!! Eyes! Knee to floor! No, floor!! RELAX!!!"
"Tssst!"
 
Around 8am, as our vigorous practice is coming to an end, the fruit and vegetable sellers start to steer and ply their wares up the street. We know their voices and their individual hallmark cries by now, even though we don't know their faces.  Somewhere next door is the sound of running water and a woman beating her laundry with gusto.  Charcoal fumes drift in from nearby kitchen stoves.  The train horns blare in the distance, on their way to Bangalore. By the time we emerge, sweaty and stretched to the enth degree, life in the residential world of Krishnamurtypuram is all a-bustle.

If you take the first right at the construction site and turn left at New Globe Tailors, there is a one-room one-man laundry operation where you can drop off your laundry virtually around the clock. Just down the road is the Vijay Motor Driving School, as well as a printing press whose machines spin till late. Next door to the yoga shala is a classical dance teacher whose teenage students are busy preparing for their exams, still practising at 9.30pm at night.  Amidst all this, residents go about their daily lives, cows wander by and keep the road adorned with cowpats, and boys play cricket in the street in the afternoon. Collectors of alms come and go.   

People here, like elsewhere in India, are enterprising: homes often double up as business premises.   I pay 30 rand/USD $4 a night for my room at the home of a woman who must make a small fortune cooking delicious lunches and giving cookery lessons to word-of-mouth foreigners who appear in droves to sample her cuisine.  In the morning the small kitchen is by far the most crowded part of the house, comprising the three ladies preparing lunch (for up to 30 people), the domestic worker, two small children, the cat, and the two Czech yogis (my neighbours upstairs) who are cooking their customary sizeable pot of oats.

My simple room with the hardest bed in India is upstairs at the back, with shutter windows overlooking the Dr Ambedkar Park on one side, and into the courtyard on the other.  The courtyard has a small altar and the greenest-leaf-tree I've ever seen, and below the ladies of the house wash, clean, sort and dry, in the way that women do everywhere. It is cool and clean, if not messy. To reach the courtyard, and thus the toilet and bathroom (each of which has a blogpost-worth of damp individualities) requires descending a steep metal ladder which would avert even the most avid of night pee-ers.

Many of my meals have been had at the no-frills Hotel Mahesh Prasad Veg Restaurant, a fast-service diner situated next door to a chemicals shop. Mahesh Prasad has a cashier who prides himself on the speed at which he can return your change, and turns over 1000 customers a day. Now that's business for you. The menu is highly classified according to times and types, the full rationale for which I haven't yet figured out, but one's ordering has to be carefully done with these many timings in mind:

Tiffin Select 3.30pm - 7.30pm

Dosa            7.30am - 12 noon; 4.15pm - 6.30pm

Chat            5.30pm - 10pm

Chinese       5.30pm - 10pm

North Indian 7pm - 10pm

South Thali  12.30pm - 3.30pm

North Thali  7.30pm

The Mahesh kitchen, which you pass through on the way to the loo, is another world -  New York speed, Bombay heat and a lotta workers.  You can get take-aways at the 'Parcel Counter' where your food will be expertly wrapped in plastic and newspaper, secured neatly with string.

It's not all romance, of course.  At least one of the famous yoga schools that I enquired with in person was unwelcoming and exclusive, leaving me with the impression of being a bizarre mix of a business and a cult. The yogis (practisers of yoga) are often territorial and competitive about their teachers, affiliations and the correct way to teach/study; they remind me of rowers to the extent that they can talk about nothing besides...yoga.  There is not nearly as much humility as I was expecting.  And many of them prefer to stay in what I call the 'yoga cocoon', ie. only in the safe comforts of places frequented by foreigners, offering Western health food, smoothies and bountiful quantities of spirulina.  The local economy has adapted around these demands of course, particularly in the neighbourhood of Gokulam: the couple who sell silver jewellery, incense and spirulina from home; the man who sells overpriced rooftop lunches; various Ayurvedic masseuses; and best of all, the family of dentists who sell chocolate on the side (!) 

Today is the 9th day of Dussehra, with preparations and celebrations already well underway for tomorrow, the festival's apex. Today is celebrated with the worship of the implements and machines that are used in day to day life and which help people earn their livelihoods. This means that everything from bicycles to buses (including the computer I'm typing on right now) is decorated with banana leaves and yellow flower garlands. Till next time...

Earth and Water: September in Zimbabwe

The Gairesi cottages are only some 12 kilometres from the Mozambique border in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe. Near here, in 1975, the young Mugabe was smuggled across the border by Chief Tangwena and his people. I wonder who and where the Rhodesian patrols were. It is worth including this excerpt below from Edgar Tekere's autobiography which comments on the significant role of Tangwena's wife, the 'small woman', in facilitating the safe escape:   

"We stayed in the forest, looked after by Tangwena’s wife. It was misty with a light drizzle, and so she was able to light a fire to cook for us, without smoke being seen by our pursuers. Mbuya Tangwena called on us to join her in traditional prayers, and take snuff, as is the tradition in Zimbabwe. Tangwena was waiting for his wife to give the signal for us to move. She was a spirit medium, a host to Sekuru Dzeka Tangwena, her father-in-law. On the second day, at around seven in the evening, Mbuya Tangwena became possessed with the spirit, and instructed us to leave. She told Chief Tangwena to take us to Tangadza, another sub-chief of the Tangwena Dynasty, who was living on the Mozambican side of the border. She ordered her husband to take us by the most difficult path, at which he demurred, but the old lady told the great chief, “You just do it, or these people will be caught.” It was amusing to see him defer to this small woman."

We are staying in a quiet valley, just us and the caretakers here, and the rush of the Gairesi river below. The walking is idyllic and the water is crystal clear, strong enough to swim on the spot. Up on the hills there are scattered hamlets and homesteads, though not many. From there, nobody's business is private, because the landscape is open, ceding far and wide views, including of the paths by which the villagers get around in these parts. There are no other vehicles besides ours. Most people seem open and greet us in a friendly fashion. They have a good laugh when they see me going for a run. The caretaker here is confident and engaging. This morning she asked me about my work, and pushed a stray lock of hair back behind my ear in a sisterly fashion. It was a gesture that would never (or very seldom) happen in South Africa between (black and white) strangers. 

This morning we drove through the hills to The Waterfall, as it is known. On an old map I spotted markings for ruins and ancient terracing, so I went off to explore. In an open grassland, the dense thickets of trees are an archaeological giveaway: trees have taken root in the damp cracks between stones that were carefully walled here in the 18th and 19th century, perhaps earlier. They are thickly grown over with creepers and vines; it feels slightly eery being there in the midday shade. The Nyanga stone pits - now just sunken depressions in the earth - are well known by archaeologists. The effort that went into their building was significant. I found four pits in total, all in close proximity, and no doubt there were more. Significant research has been done on the pit structures, and though there is still debate about their function, cattle kraaling seems to be the best founded. 

I clambered up further. The hill proffered quintessential Zimbabwean scenes: isolated homes on rolling hills framed with spring msasa trees, their dark copper satin leaves so smooth and fine to touch that you wonder how they will survive the coming heat. And behind, the rocky granite debris with its lichen fields. From there one can see everything that would have needed to be seen: the scale of the clan's cattle wealth, or perhaps its dimunition in hard years; the approach of enemies or kin; beasts of prey, for lion are certain to have been many in those years; fire smoke on the horizon; and the coming storms. 

Our next stop was much further north in the country: Chitake springs near Mana Pools, for the annual wildlife game count - an activity with a primarily white subscriber base and apparently more social than scientific in nature. After a flurry of unpacking, repacking and food preparation in amidst Harare power cuts, led by my camping powerhouse mother, we set off for Chitake. Our 40+ degree campsite was on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking a thread of stream formed by the only springs in a 9 kilometre radius.  In true white Zimbabwean fashion, we combatted the heat with the indefatigable cooler-box-at-large (that is, several filled with ice, cold water, beers & Coke, which had to be shuffled from patch of shade to patch of shade in continuous fashion).

Chitake is well known now for being an 'extreme' wildlife experience, and it certainly lived up to expectations. The first night, after dinner, some 30 elephants came down in the almost-full moonlight, many of them babies or young with the first stubs of tusks. During the hours of sleep, all sorts of sounds of the wild: lion, elephants, hyena and then the bellowing of buffalo. Around 2am we emerged from our tents and, under the cover of darkness with the moon having sunk low, watched more than 40 buffalo nervously flocking around the water below. Quickly and with no warning, a group of 7 lions swept down the bank and across the sand. An extraordinary stampede up the steep bank opposite followed, the air so thickly drenched with fine dust and dung that we could see it even in the dim light. The fear and panic was pulpable. One lone animal was left behind, not knowing what to do. Yet it seems to have escaped, for moments later the lions had made their kill. We could not see it but the remainder of the night was filled with the sounds of meat being devoured and snarled over. By early morning the only sign of the carcass was a stretch of dark skin and a few tossed bones. This is nature in the raw. 

 

The next night, two lionesses passed the camp 20 metres away as I stepped out of the shower tent. Me and them. We saw each other but their intentions lay elsewhere. In the morning their spoor, and that of others, showed that they had passed several times along that same close-by track. The remainder of the weekend we were swept with wind and dust, a layer of Zambezi Valley earth deposited on our faces even during sleep.

Oh this earth, this water.