A new moon would soon signify the auspicious night of Shiva, so as I hastened my horse north of Nagpur, I at last made it to the northern half of India, on a pilgrimage towards the small village of Parsodi, where I would sleep the next four nights in an ashram. The bike would have some vacation from its rider, and I would be riding the spirit vehicle now, one that had carried me more than miles in this incarnation. Leaving the bypass and taking a peak at Saoner, the festivities had already begun to infect the locals, as loud dub speakers mounted on a battered jeep pumped out Hindi songs of devotion to Shiva. I could feel the vibrations over the rumble of my own motor. The Indians tolerance of high decibel music at all hours of the day and night thoroughly impressed me. It struck me that half of them were not deaf, for I was more than once privy to the violent intrusions of sound from temple megaphones, and lorry horns directly to my eardrums, shaking my temperament to its core.
The night of Shiva would be a 24 hour ceremony of lingam worship, fire rituals, pilgrimages, chanting, and worship, and it was a unique experience for me to go deeper into the Tantric right hand path tradition that stems from north eastern India. I arrived in the small village of Parsodi, and rode under a tunnel beneath a train line. The encampment of colored concrete houses, makeshift huts and the absence of shops felt more welcoming than the monotony of every other assembly of small towns that strung through Indians main road veins, clinging on for survival. Water buffalo were foraging through the communal piles of compost for any leftovers of a meals worth, a few kids chased bicycle tires, others were being given a bucket shower by their mothers on compacted dirt platforms. Chickens scratched and flocked in shady spots while they seemed to face no trouble from the feral dogs. Men sat on the stoops of their house doors looking at me on the bike as I road by as if I had asked their daughters hand in marriage. I asked a man walking with a cane where I could find the ashram, and he waved his hand in a flickering motion down a sandy trail that led through cotton plantation. Another man with skin resembling tree bark was struggling with a large dead tree branch trying to make a blockade in front of his field. He noticed me and quickly ran over with hands cupped in askance of a donation. I gave what coins I had to the beggar, which I kept for this purpose, and I didn’t mind not having them. Ten rupee notes were the smallest denomination I cared to carry. Next door to his field I found the ashram with an elaborate black iron gate reading Kailish Shiva on it. The guru was just arriving and I was ushered inside the ground which were a lot more elaborate than I suspected from the outside. I brought the bike around to the kitchen area and set it on the middle stand, where even it seemed to be thankful to have its gravity lifted from the heavy pull of the road.
Beside the main home was a flower garden, seemingly designed in the style of British botanists custom. Beyond this was a construction lot with various bags of industrial material, and an unfinished brick pathway leading to a three story white washed apartment style building. Centered in the lot was a large compound of fire pits surrounded by a low black marble wall adorned with steel swastikas. There were 64 small fire pits, and 9 large ones, some built as squares, hearts, circles, or triangles. I looked around the place a bit and was rather impressed by the accommodations. The washroom was made of marble and the showers were all in their own individual marble rooms. It gave the impression of walking into the rest rooms of a five star hotel, not bad for an ashram. The beds too were simple but very comfortable, with heavy red pullovers and pillows. I already looked forward to call it in for sleep to test them out.
The following three days here felt completely estranged from the biker road life I had become used to, and I practically forgot I had one after not riding anywhere, not even small trips out from my base to visit the area. I stayed with a few spiritual seekers from Europe, Australia, and Canada, so we were five altogether. Over the course of the next 72 hours, I would partake in the Shiva lingam rituals, a bizarre tantric rite in which mixtures of prepared herbal pastes were smeared over the depiction of Shiva’s penis and the vagina or yoni of the goddess carved out of black and white marble. Along with copious amounts of milk, curd, honey, sugar, oil, cow dung, water, ghee, cheese, and medicinal gruels, these were accompanied by mantras, then blessed with fire and prayers by the priest. This was done three times one day, followed by devotional prayers and recitements of hundreds of incantations by the Guru. I wore white for the first time in this trip and felt so vulnerable, it was soon spoiled by colored pigments and the various substances that we applied to the lingam. This was all new for me, and a weird way it was all quite beautiful. Locals from Saoner and the village came by for blessings from the temple, and to participate in the Shiva honoring, lots of Hindi was flying through the air, strange strains of bhajan music were playing and wafts of aromatic incense burned throughout the ashram and it was probably here more than anywhere so far in India that I really felt a visitor, and yet there was a familiarity in its alienness.
There was a tradition of fasting during the day and night of Shiva, but for Hindus this only meant a few dietary restrictions. So during my stay I partook in the fast and ate only of the foods that grew beneath the ground which were permitted in the fast. We ate tapioca, and potatoes, and each received one small banana which had been blessed called prasad. This was a special permission, though it grew on a tree, these particular bananas had been offered to the Gods and thus was accepted to eat. In the morning, a small below ground room inside the temple that held statues of the gods and another lingam was filled with water and bags of roses, so that the petals floated over the surface and the room could be seen from above as a kind of lake in miniature surrounding the floating idols. By night a large fire was emblazoned in the heart shaped pit, as we sat cross legged by its base offering coconut coir and broken shells into the flames while reciting the repetitive mantras for Shiva, which I had known and remembered from Vedic Brahmin spiritual traditions. These verse would start at 10:00pm and would not finish until the dawn. Pyramidal structures of geometrical sculptures called yantras were dressed with flowers that shone in the dark, and dripped with the oils, milk and yogurt that had been smeared already on Shivas godly proportions. Before leaving on the night of my last day at the ashram I received a special mantra for the goddess Saraswati, and was given instructions on how and went to chant it, for how long, and what to wear during the one hour I would do this. I wrote it all down in my journal and thought I would store it away for good measure when the appropriate timing might come when I would need this. The tantric immersion had parted my wallet like the sea, and pretty much drained it dry, so another trip to the ATM was in order. I watched so many rupees leave my hands with Gandi’s peaceful face on one side of the bill, only to replenish my travel budget with more notes bearing this Saint. All of Indials paper money has his face, and I had a thing with keeping them all facing in the same direction in the wallet, and separating heftier experiences like fuel and lodging from everyday expenses like street food. It was the little rituals that count.
In the morning before the labors of the resident service workers, me and the priest brewed sweet black coffee, and I sat on the roof listening to folk tunes from Appalachia and the East coast, missing my Canada a little bit. I wrote to friends back home, and promised myself to send out a few more postcards. This bit of nostalgia was the medicine I needed for a balm of sadness I had been going through from long travel in a foreign country. I had ideas of heading back into Tiger country over the border of Madya Pradesh and get into wilder territory and somewhere to plan out the remainder of this trip.
The German in the ashram had the same idea, so I offered him the back seat and we somehow managed to fit both of our packs onto the frame of the bike that was really earning its reputation for a load hauler, and road runner. We left in the hottest portion of the day but the hot winds I moved through as I held down the throttle were not so unbearable. Conversation seemed to help break up the monotony of the trip, and the landscape actually did become more jungley and rise higher as we moved through ghats which smoothed out onto plateaus. Vendors sold their bundles by the shoulders of the highway, bullock carts yoked to rickety wooden carts raced down gravel paths lead by stern men wearing head coverings, wayside temples caught the eye with splashes of colors, a giant pink Hanuman and tridents begged the attentions of pious Hindoos. I passed a giant banyan tree which was the final resting place of a Muslim saint. I had come to the conviction that experiencing a culture from the saddle of a motorbike was altogether a pretty surefire way to see it all and not be it all.
The skylines and straight strands of the prairies had disappeared and was replaced by rolling hills, proper trees, and cliffs jutting up from the land like crooked teeth. The hot and dry air sapped me, but I had by now become used to the long hauls and Indian climate. All the shilajit, honey, and chai I was taking probably did a great deal to increase my resilience and ability to endure uncomfortable physical called. It’s called homeostasis, and I’ve been able to transcend many previously thought boundaries, and actually found myself thriving in the grueling conditions longer than most men my age. It is also worth mentioning that except for thrice occasions when I have eaten fish, my diet has been completely vegetarian, and I find the lighter eating habits have given me a lot cleaner energy when I need it most on the road. The checkpoint gates through Madya Pradesh were like any other, huge green signs list out the exceptions of payment in descending order from the most ‘important’ people of India, down the line from the president and magistrate to the police and service force. No toll applies for higher ranking officials, and ironically enough, whether a foreigner, or low caste, while on a motorcycle one is directed to a special lane preserved to the left of the vehicle queue to pass through the gate unchecked and free of charge. I have passed through probably close to fifty of these checkpoints on the trip so far without so much as a waving hand, and owing to my anxiety at borders and frontiers, that was completely alright with me. In India I could have the same privilege as the president, all because of my flying machine.
North of Nagpur the landscape evolves with dry jungle, savannah type trees and parched ground poking with cactus, and aromatic flower bushes. I was spoiled for the array of views that presented themselves around every bend. The wind was warm but not too warm, a quickening of spirit within paced itself to the speed of the motorcycle like a wild animal that runs beside me. I stopped a couple times with the biggest smile on my face, feeling very free, unlimited and full of the world. To be totally engaged in the felt presence of the immediate experience, to have no questions, no answers, and to quiet the ego while the soul tunes in with high power. These portions of eternity happened when I was all the way alive, and I knew that my reasons for travel in this country had been justified. Drinking in the countryside with my eyes wide open, I thought to myself, if it all ended tomorrow, it was so so good.
Just south of Pachmari on a forest road, I came to a point where I could get no further. After fording a river, and driving past pilgrims carrying tridents and looking much more tired and exhausted than I was, the bike trail simply got narrower and rockier, until disappearing completely where it became a hiking path going up steep cliffs. The Himalayan had met its match, it was built like a gun, but it couldn’t fly, so I settled the difference and took a break to drink sugary coffee and eat handfuls of cashews and peanuts while my energy returned, before making a backtrack through a small encampment of tent towns, that looked like those I had seen gypsies living in, they were better than shanties, and even in their utter simplicity there seemed to eschew a sense of community. People with unique clothing and red colored hair crouched around small fires, while droves of others processed through the street. Though the only thing qualifying it as a street were the various stalls to both sides of the drive selling sweets, fast food, and lime water. The second time through the river went fine, and before long I was out of the forest and back on the asphalt while the shadows grew into shades, and the air chilled the evening. The backtracking tacked on another 90 minutes to the journey, and the last hour I rode in the darkness with weak lights on narrow winding roads with oncoming jeeps shining extremely bright halogens in my eyes, forcing me off the road many times, and disturbing the silence of the night with my almost constant horn trumpeting.
Fortunately I did not crash or drop the bike, and puttered into Pachmari around the dinner hour and supped well. Searching awhile in the dark in this new town for a hotel felt curious and exciting. I found lodging in the ‘New Hotel’ outside the main bazaar in the Satpura Tiger reserve. After some annoying C-forms to fill out, and submitting passport photos, while signing off on guest registries, I took a room down a long hall that resembles a barracks or a hangar. Metal cages lined the wall to prevent monkeys from causing terror inside. I had seen nothing of the place by day and would wake up to a whole new state, and I lay to sleep wondering what the people were like here, what foods were available, if anyone spoke English, and where I could lose myself on a hiking trail in the national park.
Western tourism was still in its early days here, and during the five nights I lodged in Pachmari I saw no other English speaking tourist. No one bothered me to come see their shop, no one pushed any drugs on me or called me baba, even the guides were reserved, and when they saw I had a dirt bike, they resolved to roping in the few Indian honeymoons in their jeep for safaris and back road rambles. I rode a horse for all but three minutes at the site of a gorge, a camel and I met in a field and exchanged stares while I became fascinated by this beast of burden, its protruding hump and odd hoofed feet with toenails, the way it walk so deliberately like a monk, and seemed to just get on with it all. Water buffaloes ate the shards of grass remaining on a small airstrip, and seemed easy in my presence.
The bliss of driving on backroads on a motorcycle devoid of any potholes, obstacles or traffic impart a sense of freedom that is hard to distill down to words. The wind in your face and the landscape morphing into new displays of beauty to catch one in awe, as if to say ‘look here, how about this?’ It is like riding a wild animal, getting high, or really good sex with a stranger. Maybe those are incomparable sensations in themselves, but they are moments that reach to the ineffable, that man had pursued for his entire existence, and which I taste now and then from the saddle of my bike when the conditions are just so.
I hiked to a white temple high on a peak, and met pilgrims on their way up the mountain carrying metal tridents over their shoulders. At the peak were a collection of thousands of tridents stacked against a gnarly tree, all painted in bright colors and fixed with various emblematic motifs. I had never seen so many deliberate symbols of Shiva in one place, and I remembered I had seen other folks in the lowlands shouldering their own giant forks in the village where I had turned the bike around. In a dark concrete house beside the temple, I was invited in by a baba, the way people respected him and touched his feet I figured he was probably the head priest here. Each temple had a pujari who would ordained the rituals and chant mantras to be broadcasted over the megaphone. I sat for lunch cross legged on the floor with some other devout saddhus wearing long dreadlocks and white fabric around their waist, hardly more adoring than a loin cloth. First came some black tea, then a mound of rice and chapattis, sambar and chutney then milk tea, then more rice, and more gravy until I was totally stuffed. I stashed a hundred rupees away into the baba’s money box, and made them goodbye in an awkward gesture of prayer. I was always unsure if my conduct was worth its virtue, or if it was all charades and foreign attraction.
One day I explored a complex of great caves that would shelter the sloth bears and tigers during the monsoon. Ancient 6000 year old petroglyphs were still stained on the wall for me to see, and I crawled on all fours through the tunnels of rock. I hoofed it down a trail for an entire afternoon, sipping the views like fine whiskey and really enjoying myself. These were the pivotal moments of my life that really mattered, full of fire and forgetful of any sorrows and struggles I have picked up in this current go round. I thought about how luck I was to have this calibre of freedom when others could not, and reminded myself never to take it for granted, to continue to always come back to these places where simplicity of lifestyle and access to nature are all I need. Later I descended about a thousand steps into the dank and moist jungle to the floor of a great chasm where life grew on life, and I half expected baloo of the jungle or alice of wonderland to come from behind a rock or descend from a tree. I had been alone for several hours and here my precious communion with solitude had brought me into the embrace of mother nature’s very own lap. A tall falls crushed down on a flat bed of stone next to a large cold and clear pool of pure mountain water. The grotto was shaded from the scorching sun, and hid me under its canvass from intrusions, so I stripped down to my birthday suit and plunged myself into one of the pools and embrace the wild baptism of this hidden sanctuary. The trek back up was better than a day in the gym, and gave me quite a workout, dusk was settling in soon, an army of Bolero jeeps were parked in the lot near the caves, and some of the women in the pickups smiled at me as I flurried past towards my bike. Maybe there was something in my pheromones that caught passion in the wind, but I noticed the Indian girls took especially long and intriguing glances at me, while they made friendly comments about my haircut, and follow me with their eyes as I walked in the bazaar.
Pachmari was also the perfect to take the motorcycle off the road and I found enough dirt to lead me into more remote terrain, where I found more ancient petroglyphs from earlier and more savage people than I was and ruins of a palace. I somehow ended up riding through a garbage dump far from the town, and became very nervous about all the broken glass strewn about. Cows rummaged through the heaps of junk, and an old man with a stack seemed to be sorter the stiles of waste into more ordinate piles. At the edge of the village I found a two wheeler maintenance station that housed many old dusty Hero hondas, army cargo bikes, and a vintage but broken down Indian chopper trying badly to be a Harley. I had a rattle under the gas tank, and the carbs were popping like kettle corn. It turned out to be nothing drastic, just some loose bolts on the silencer. My bike was overdue for a servicing and a deep clean though. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was carrying a pound of dirt under the carriage, and the the biked had a gravelly drone like a chain smoker, so I made a mental note to bring it Royal Enfield when I reached Varanasi and give it the deluxe treatment, before I continue touring the north.
At 5.30 am on a weekday I coasted away from Satpura after drinking a creamy water buffalo milk tea in the cold night air, what could be better. Four men sat on the curb wrapped in heavy blankets, and I added an extra layer and a scarf for the journey out of the highlands. Contradicting to what most think, India could be quite brisk after dark in some of the hill stations and the windchill of the early morning hours on the mountain passes cut through even my plaid hunter coat and riding jacket. I felt reluctance to leave but I could not afford the hotel fares for much longer, and I was crossing into the last six weeks of the journey with many coordinates in the north that pulled me magnetically towards them, I had to go. A crescent moon sat like a bowl of golden butter in the sky, the constellations mapped out ethereal roadways high above the tarred and graveled earth I moved upon. I was noticing some changes in the nightsky now as I moved ever further away from the equator and I stole precious seconds of my keen riders attention to gaze starwards for a drink of the heavens above, maybe if I paid more attention to their alignments I could have foretold the oncoming troubles that awaited me on the next leg of this motor pilgrimage.
the motorcycle mantras 