Notes from the Marudhar Express
Whatever quaint, contorted image you've held of India is defiled when the wheels of the Marudhar Express start rolling. It's the true Hindustani baptism.
My legs dangled out the doorless third-class carriage as I watched the orange sunset bathe a rural Rajasthan.
And, as the sea of Hindi merged into a pervasive, omnipresent hum around me, I reflected on hypocrisy.
I thought of the caste system I'd witnessed in northern India. The lingering rigidity of its oppression. The arrogance and delusion of some men I'd encountered in the streets.
These same men who believed they'd been granted a divine right to be the custodians of perhaps one of the most morally, spiritually, and scientifically advanced systems on earth, betrayed every vow they were morally and socially obliged to uphold.
They made me sick. The way they flicked their fat, rubied fingers at their brothers in the street like they were mosquitos, as they lived and died under tarpaulins between train tracks praying to the same Gods who'd handed them the laws of karma and the Vedas.
I was disgusted watching their big bellies sway into tinted private cars as they stepped over the emaciated bodies of their countrymen and into their air-conditioned houses built with the money meant for hospitals and train stations.
The way they'd clicked their fingers at waiters and let the inequity of a disgusting system flourish around them, while their arrogant sons were primed for parliament and their official salary remained untouched. All those slimy cowards. Weak, pathetic, immoral men who looked out onto the wretchedness in the streets from their balconies and acted like those people they met eyes with chose to live in squalor.
It repulsed me to watch them leering at the breasts of dark, slender young women in their saris. Dalit women they'd deemed beneath society, yet somehow clean enough to objectify as they pressed their power into their souls.
And then there was Rishikesh: a farce.
In those Gangic foothills, I sat at the feet of gurus swimming in more gold than CEOs.
"Masters" whose loving eyes were as vacant as disinterested teenage shop assistants.
People who felt superior and read books on the road to truth yet shielded away from the uncomfortable reality of what it means to live authentically amid the knowledge that we are both God and Devil.
Brave souls who spent mornings in various asanas and evenings preaching our unity at Satsang but who quivered in terror and disgust at the wretchedness in shop alcoves just a block away.
People floating through the streets in white linen, who couldn't bear to accept that they were capable of evil and that the world is riddled with beauty and ugliness.
People who neglected to understand that to live deeply, truly, is to love and to lose to rise and to fall endlessly in this soup of sorrows in the streets.
I met souls boasting to any willing ear of their grasping of the eternal, yet who'd forgotten what it once was to laugh at themselves, to laugh at the world, and mock our contradictions, strange habits, and the many subtle, puffed-up bragging’s of the human ego in all its cunning forms as it forges its way through this world.
The India I'd seen was a far cry from the poetic dreamscape of the Maharabarta or the Upanishads; it was filled with contradictions and hypocrisies. But then again, so was everywhere else.
I thought of the old days working at the Sacred Heart Mission, where I'd met more intelligent, erudite women washing up on our steps looking for clean underwear after a night turning tricks in the St Kilda streets, than tenured university professors, the golden geese of the intelligentsia, daily regurgitating their rote learned drivel to doe-eyed impressionable beauties behind paper certificates beautiful wax stamps and messianic egos.
I'd had more enlightening conversations about the human experience with street cleaners in broken English behind Melbourne nightclubs in back alleys performing their bhakti-yoga unknowingly as they collected the beer bottles and cigarettes mindlessly tossed aside by the sons of Barristers than the mala-clad devotees and veteran yoga teachers with studios in the chic suburbs of Paris who spent the European winters getting nailed by adventurous young men in Rishikesh.
Toothless, shit-stained couples in greater throws of joyous love in the gutters of filthy Delhi streets than honeymooners in Venice.
Don't get me wrong. Not everyone seated in the pews is a charlatan, not all those who cling to the cross in the hours of despair are to be mocked, and not every guru is fucking his disciples in the bathrooms of four-star Costa-Rican beach resorts.
There are people out there radiating authenticity, who live and breathe truth, integrity, and courage, and I've had the privilege of knowing a handful over the journey.
But too often we forget we’re human.
Too often we forget we’re allowed to laugh. To have a sense of humor. That even the holiest ideas can be mocked when people start to take life too seriously.
Too often we forget that the greatest people who've ever walked this earth still needed to defecate in the mornings.
Because I suppose what I want is for people who espouse an ideal, to live by it.
And those who arrogantly, ignorantly profess spiritual advancement to at the very least walk through the world in a manner that grants them the right to waver such inflated claims over their brothers and sisters.
Because I've experienced enough of life, tasted enough of this nectar of sin and pleasure, to understand that divinity lies within us.
That peace, happiness, and truth are our human birthright, not the prizes allotted to a worthy few.
And, as night fell over Hindustan and the Marudhar Express pushed on relentlessly through the subcontinent with more bodies hanging off it than in it, I came to accept that anywhere people strive for truth externally out in the constructed landscape of worship and projections, you can rest assured you’ll find hypocrisy.
