Vrindaban Days: Memories of an Indian Holy Town

Chapter 1 - Indraprastha

"This transcendental land of Vrindaban is populated by goddesses of fortune, who manifest as milkmaids and love Krishna above everything. The trees here fulfill all desires, and the waters of immortality flow through land made of philosopher's stone. Here, all speech is song, all walking is dancing, and the flute is the Lord's constant companion. Cows flood the land with abundant milk, and everything is self-luminous, like the sun. Since every moment in Vrindaban is spent in loving service to Krishna, there is no past, present or future." [Brahma-samhita]

October 20, 1972 – As dawn brightens the horizon, the Boeing 747 circles New Delhi. The Indo-Gangetic plain spreads beneath us, and the misty earth assumes the shapes and colors of a land marked by man’s toil: a vast network of roads and buildings, and, on the city’s outskirts, the green and ocher patches of small farms. With seven thousand people per square mile, this is one of the world’s most densely populated areas. In the capital itself are some four million people, most now joined in the bonds of sleep.

This is a fertile country, though subject to periodic droughts. It’s parched by the sun in May and June and flooded by monsoons in July and August. During monsoons, great river systems carry silt from the Himalayas to fertilize the soil and feed India’s millions. These are the sacred rivers: the Ganges—flowing from the lotus feet of Vishnu and down the hair of Shiva—and the Jamuna, flowing past Indraprastha, Mathura, and Vrindaban, the abode of Krishna.

Ancient texts call this land Bharatavarsa, kingdom of Emperor Bharata. Empires have flourished here from time immemorial, composed of people as varied as the Pandavas and Kauravas, Dravidians and Aryans, Mauryans and Guptas, Muslims and British. Five thousand years ago, Lord Krishna, demigods, demons, and warriors chose it as their stage for both spiritual and military exploits. At that time, Delhi was named Indraprastha and was celebrated as the capital of Yudhisthira Maharaj. Lord Krishna Himself helped Yudhisthira regain his kingdom during the Battle of Kurukshetra, fought on the plains about ninety miles north of here. Lost across centuries now are those battlecries, the rattling of chariots, galloping of horses, and blowing of conchshells. No signs of any cataclysm have ever been unearthed at Kurukshetra, although tradition says that thirty million soldiers died there in 3138 B.C.

“At that time, Krishna, smiling, in the midst of both the armies, consoled the grief-stricken Arjuna.”

I can see Palam Airport’s blue lights, which disappear momentarily as our wings tilt. The plane descends onto the runway, its wheels bouncing lightly. The engines reverse and cabin lights flash on. “Please remain seated until the aircraft has come to a complete halt …”

I gather up my hand luggage—camera, film, shaving kit, notebooks, Bhagavad Gita, japa beads—and file out onto the portable staircase leading down to the terminal buses.

A hundred scents assail me, conjuring images of my first trip seven years ago: the smell of cow dung fires, of banyan, of wild date palm, mango, eucalyptus and margosa, of cardamom and turmeric; pungent smoke from fried chili and cumin sauce and bidi cigarets; car and bus fumes, and the peppermint smell of pan-betel nuts that stain the mouth red, whiffs of jasmine and henna incense, and nameless odors that evoke memories.

The bus shuttles us across the tarmac to the main terminal, where passports are stamped and visas checked by drowsy officials. Luggage from previous arrivals is thrown everywhere. Tired and irritable travelers search out their bags, shoving and shouting. The conveyor belt is stuck, and our luggage is thrown about by workers to whom nothing is fragile.

My duffel bag is tossed on one of the heaps, and I start pushing my way forward. I secure my bags, then stand helpless. It’s impossible for me to carry all my luggage.

Before me appears a round, dark face with big eyes outlined with kajal mascara. A piece of burlap is wrapped around the head, coolie-style. He places one small, grimy hand on my duffel bag.

“Porter, sahib? I carry?”

He’s about eighteen, short and wiry, dressed in a dhoti and wearing a T-shirt saying “I can be your super-everything.” With all his strength, he heaves the duffel bag onto his shoulder and then onto the burlap head-pad. There’s a sudden bond between us: out of 600 million Indians, he’s the first to speak to me.

He staggers a bit, then regains his balance. The dark eyes plead: “One dollar, sahib.” His forehead wrinkles under the load. His neck veins bulge.

“Oh no,” I say. “No American money.”

“One dollar, sahib,” the boy repeats, moving as if to set the bag down. But I know he won’t, after the struggle to lift it.

“Two rupees,” I insist. Despite the load, he manages to waggle his head from side to side in that typical Indian gesture of assent. We push our way to the customs counter, where a uniformed official asks what’s in the duffel bag. “Personal belongings,” I answer, and he motions for the coolie to pass on. Changing dollars at the Bank of India exchange counter is a slow process, involving quadruplicate forms. I finally get a fistful of rupees, then follow my coolie out of the terminal doors. A ten-foot fence protects me from a mob of shouting cabbies. “Right here, sir. I take you to good hotel close by. Twenty rupees only. Just see. Come. My taxi just here, sahib. Pay whatever you like. Best five-star hotel, sahib, air-condition, close by …

I’m too exhausted to haggle, and they know it. For me, instead of six a.m. Thursday, Delhi time, it’s six p.m. Wednesday night. It will take some days to reset my metabolism.

The airport has a taxi-booking counter which is supposed to keep foreigners from being cheated and prevent taxi drivers from killing one another to get to them. However, once again I find myself confronted with quadruplicate forms.

“Where do you want to go?” a chubby woman asks.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

“You must have a destination,” she says.

“I don’t know,” I repeat.

“You can’t book a taxi without some destination,” she insists.

“Connaught Place, then,” I say, naming Delhi’s commercial center.

“Best you go to Hotel Moti Mahal,” she says. “That’s near Connaught Circle. Twelve rupees.”

I pay, then hurry across the parking lot, following my coolie. He finds my assigned taxi, number 40002. A turbaned Sikh driver collects my booking receipt and begins to argue in Hindi with the coolie. All I can catch are the words “Moti Mahal.” My duffel bag is finally dumped in the trunk, and I offer the coolie his two rupees. This he declines, holding up five fingers.

“Five rupee,” he says.

I put four rupees into his shirt pocket and get in the cab. The coolie shouts, and the Sikh shouts back, defending me now that I’m his client. We drive away, and I look back to see the coolie counting his rupees and smiling.

Apart from the taxis coming in from the airport, the city’s streets are vacant. A few homeless families sleep on sidewalks, beside fences and gates, in open parks, on grass plots, in doorways, on traffic circles before the massive Parliament Building, at the feet of Victorian monuments, and beneath the sundial and surreal pinkish obelisks of the Jantar Mantar Observatory. Now, a few people begin to stir, their woolen blankets still wrapped around them despite the pleasant October morning. The comer pan, cigaret, and chai stands, always first to open, are still closed. My driver takes advantage of the scant traffic, running red lights joyfully.

“From which country you are coming, sir?” he asks. Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror. Even for a middle-aged Sikh, he’s a fatso. The hairnet covering his beard makes him look like a turbaned panda.

“U.S.A.,” I answer.

“You Essay,” he repeats. “America. Too much rich country, no?”

“India’s also a rich country,” I say.

“Yes,” he agrees, “but too much poor people. It is very, very hard to make the rupees, sir.”

I let the subject drop, and there’s a brief silence before he takes a different approach.

“You will be staying long in Delhi, sir?”

“No.”

“There is much sightseeing here, sir. Many tourists are also coming from your country. You have brought camera?” He’s noticed my handluggage. “I can show you places for snapshots—Red Fort, Qutab Minar, Lodi Gardens. If you rent taxi all day, I give you special price. Or two, three, four hours, as you like. Pay by hour whatever you want, sir.”

“I’m not sightseeing,” I say.

“Sir—” He turns around to look at me while dangerously maintaining the same speed. “I give you very, very best price. I can pick you up at nine?”

“No,” I tell him. “I’ve already seen everything.

He returns his attention to the road, reflects a moment, then looks at me again through the rearview mirror.

“Change dollars, sir?” he asks. “I give you eight to the dollar. Bank giving only seven.”

“No, thanks.”

“All right, then. Nine.”

“Not now.”

“Nine point two. That is very best price. Ask anyone. No one else will give you that price.”

“Later,” I say, avoiding his gaze.

“Sell anything, sir? Camera? Watch?”

“No.”

“You like to buy silk Banaras saris? Kashmiri rugs? Stones?”

“No.”

“Then what about good charas, sir?” he asks, needlessly whispering. “The very best hashish. It will send you into another world. Only twenty a tola.”

“I don’t smoke,” I say.

“Girls, then? I know very clean, regularly inspected Indian girls, sir. I will arrange everything.”

“No.”

“White Christian girl?”

“No.”

“Or two girls, sir, Kama-Sutra style?”

“I said no!” I shout, startling us both. What a welcome to the land of religion! Still, there’s no point in alienating him. “Sorry,” I say at length. “I’m very tired. Long plane ride. Just take me to the hotel to sleep.”

“Achha,” he says, giving up and minding his driving.

At Connaught Place, I spot familiar buildings: the Regal Cinema, Khadi Bhavan, American Express, Wenger’s Bakery. The colonnades of the inner circle support an arcade over numerous jewelry, sari, and curio shops, restaurants, airline offices, and banks. In a few hours, the buildings will be crowded, but now they appear desolate with their iron jalousies and gates drawn closed. Throughout the central park, the homeless now stir from beneath ragged blankets, gunnysacks, and even scraps of cardboard. Whole families, awakened by sunlight bursting suddenly over the buildings, wipe away the mucus of sleep. Later, they will petition foreigners for alms—a few paise for tea, rice, chapatis. We turn left onto Janpath, the principal radial road leading from the Circle down past the Air India and Government Tourist offices, and stop before the Hotel Moti Mahal. One look at the doorman’s glittering panache tells me that I’ll be staying elsewhere.

“Too expensive,” I tell the cabbie.

“How much do you want to pay?” he asks.

I hesitate. This is a tricky question. If I say one hundred rupees, he’ll take me to a forty-rupee hotel, inform the manager to charge me a hundred, and then pocket thirty for himself. Srila Prabhupada is always reminding us: “This world is simply a place of cheaters and cheated.”

“As little as possible,” I tell him.

“How much? Thirty? A hundred?”

“Whatever the hippies pay,” I say. Then, fearing a dormitory ridden with thieves and fleas, add, “But it must be clean and with attached bathroom.”

“Achha! Attached bathroom. I know good place, sir.”

He swirls the taxi around and heads back to Connaught Place, then cuts down a narrow lane between the Government Tourist and Air India offices. Modest signs announce the Ajanta Guest House and Janpath Guest House, all part of a massive three-story building. We stop opposite the Ajanta Guest House. I pound on the locked front door, and a muscular little Nepali appears.

“Rooms?” I ask.

His smile says yes. He takes my duffel bag out of the trunk, and I give the cabbie a generous five-rupee tip. Still, he stares with disappointment at the money. Before he begins to complain, I turn and follow the Nepali up a dark staircase.

The hotel manager has been sleeping on a bench behind his desk. He passes me the register to fill out: name, passport and visa numbers, date and place of issue, nationality, port of embarcation, address in home country, date of arrival in India, profession, purpose of visit, next destination, etc. I begin to get the strange feeling that the Indian government is attempting to trail me as I wend my way among 600 million people. I’m appalled. If they expected something sinister, why did they ever grant me a visa?

“Thirty rupees,” the manager says, not even glancing at what I’ve written. I inspect the room before paying. It’s as tight as a Manhattan YMCA cubicle, with barely space for me to stretch out, and only one window opening onto the street. At least the sheets are clean, and the bed is firm. There’s no hot-water tap, but the cold water works. The bathroom ceiling is hardly six feet high, spacious enough for the Nepali, but forcing me to bend over to enter. The Nepali points to the toilet and proudly says, “See! Western-style!” This means that the Ajanta Guest House caters to Westerners; otherwise, there would simply be a hole in the floor, where one is supposed to squat, Indian-style.

I hand over the thirty rupees, close and latch the door, take off my shoes and socks, and fall exhausted across the bed. Only eighty-five miles down river is Vrindaban and Srila Prabhupada. Soon I’ll be there, in the abode of Krishna. The last sound I remember is that of a flute and sitar playing morning ragas on a distant radio.

This excerpt is taken from the 1990 edition of Vrindaban Days: Memories of an Indian Holy Town (ISBN: 0-932215-20-3, Library of Congress Catalog No 88-90871), published by Palace Publishing.

About the author: –

Hayagriva Swami was born Howard Wheeler in 1940 in Pensacola, Florida, and was raised in the South. He attended the University of North Carolina, The New York School for Social Research (A.B., 1963), and New York University (M.A., 1964). Until 1971, he taught English at Ohio State University. In the 1960's and 1970's, as editor of Back to Godhead magazine, Bhagavad-gita As It Is The Nectar of Devotion, Srimad-Bhagavatam (30 volumes), Chaitanya-charitamrita (17 volumes), and many other books, he conferred extensively with His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada., and set a high literary standard for all ISKCON Press and Bhaktivedanta Book Trust publications.

His definitive editing of Bhagavad-gita As It Is helped earn it critical acclaim and fame as the most widely distributed Bhagavad-gita in history, with over 20 million copies in print. Traveling with Srila Prabhupada in America, Europe and India, he recorded hundreds of Prabhupada's lectures, and compiled them into small, popular booklets. In Back to Godhead magazine, his articles and essays proclaimed the braod cultural base of Krishna consciousness and served to link Vedic philosophy with Western transcendentalism, particularly in American literature. In 1968, he helped found the New Vrindaban Community in West Virginia, and until 1973 served as President of New Vrindaban.

In 1976, in Hawaii and Los Angeles, his conversations with Prabhupada formed the basis of a major work in comparative philosophy: Dialectic Spiritualism: A Vedic View of Western Philosophy. His intimate chronicle of Prabhupada's founding of the movement, The Hare Krishna Explosion, has been hailed as a classic of socio-religious history. In Vrindaban Days, he draws on his experiences from a dozen journeys to India over the past 22 years.

In March, 1989, he was bedridden with spinal cancer, and doctors gave him six months to live. He left this mortal world on August 31, 1989, while working on his last book, Die Before You Die, which is to be published posthumously.

Just before his death, Hayagriva Swami wrote: "I pray to Lord Krishna and Srila Prabhupada to always engage me in Their service. I pray that wherever I go — be it heaven or hell — that I never forget the lotus-eyed Lord of us all."