INDIA - MADHYA PRADESH - MAHESHWAR

Richie and I left Mandu for Maheshwar in Vishwas Jaiswal’s tiny and rickety LPG-powered red Maruti hatchback - the same car and driver that had delivered me to the town of Dhar five years previously. Vishwas had then been a body-building bachelor and had regaled me with ribald stories of how foreign women flung themselves at him.


“Yes, many western girls are saying Oh Vishwas, oh handsome, very strong, yes Vishwas please take me in your taxi, and I am asking, Where going? and they are saying, No problem Vishwas just please going with you any places, ha, ha!” He had added charitably that “Swedish girls very good for poking.”


Now married with two children, Vishwas is no longer poking Swedes. His preposterous skintight nylon trousers and garish polyester shirt have been replaced by much more sensible and comfortable attire; he’s gained a paunch and some extra chins; and he has allowed his clipped Errol Flynn moustache to spread into a much more luxuriant model. All these are sure signs of matrimony in the Indian male, although, to be fair, merely being over twenty years old is also a fairly good indicator.

Leaving Mandu

Vishwas didn’t remember me from 2006, despite my having paid half of his fare with duty-free cigarettes, but he gracefully pretended otherwise. He did, however, recall the massive thunderstorm that hit Mandu on a sultry Diwali that year, and talking about the past seemed to embolden him. Once out on the road some of his old swagger returned. Cranking up the Bollywood hits, he drove at insane speeds over the half-finished roads, and performed a slick manoeuvre through a petrol station courtyard to avoid the new highway’s toll booth.


 ***

Maheshwar ghat

Having been mentioned in the Mahabharata, the riverside town of Maheshwar possesses an ample supply of temples, and its strategic position during the rise to local dominance during the 18th century of the prestigious Holkar dynasty (particularly under the long reign of the much-venerated philosopher Queen Ahilyabai) has left it with an extensive fort palace and a series of impressive ghats along the Narmada.


***


Spending time in places like Maheshwar is one of the main reasons I travel in India. Small and remote enough so as not to attract many western tourists, yet ancient and significant enough to possess cultural and architectural clout, it’s a laid-back town where the pace is pretty slow and there’s not much to do other than amble around soaking up the atmosphere and mingling with the local folks.

Maheshwar

Vishwas dropped us at Laboo’s Café, a quaint guesthouse whose accommodation occupies the former guards’ quarters in the main gate of the town fort. Despite the absence of other guests the owner wasn’t receptive to my attempts at haggling, but I didn’t mind. There were good views from the battlements and the courtyard was shaded by a huge bougainvillea.

Our room at Laboo's.

Maheshwar backstreets.

Maheshwar

Our room’s thick walls ensured a relatively cool and quiet night’s sleep, despite both the whining of an ancient pedestal fan, which we figured to be older than both of us combined, and the unbelievably deafening fanfare of a perambulating pickup truck that aggressively advertised a new “Technical eSchool” on the outskirts of town.

Maheshwar

During our short stay in Maheshwar we spent a lot of time down on the ghats. With their universal societal importance as the sites of essential trade, washing, and fishing, and their specific religious significance to the Hindus, these massive stone steps down to the water play a central role in any Indian riverside town.

Maheshwar ghat

Anyone who has stood on the ghats at Varanasi and watched the filthy Ganges oozing past in its sickly froth can appreciate just how uninviting a dip in an Indian river can seem. According to legend, the Ganges herself became so polluted that she assumed the form of a cow and came to bathe in the Narmada to be cleansed.

Maheshwar ghat

Although I’m no riverine goddess, I’m certainly a fat cow, and on yet another extremely hot day the Narmada seemed pretty clean to me, so I jumped in, swam out and splashed around.


It’s a pretty special experience to float on the lazy current of a warm Indian river as the evening cacophany of sounds and aromas drift across from the ghats and the sandstone palace turns pink in the sunset. Perhaps it didn’t cleanse my sins, but it certainly washed away the memory of years sitting in an office cubicle staring into a screen.

***


In an attempt to describe how I felt, I would say that it seemed as though my personal sphere of perception was abruptly exposed as almost childishly myopic. Its borders were revealed as being arbitrarily self-imposed and with a breathtaking immediacy they dissolved from my conscious mind. A multiplicity of opaque possibilities unfolded, along with a wonderful feeling of infinite communal opportunity. Past, present and future were enriched by a certainty of ineffable promise that remained just beyond my full comprehension.

This was undoubtedly a spiritual experience, one of many I’ve encountered in my life, only some of which were induced by psychoactive substances. Many things make travel addictive, but this sublime feeling must be one of the main active ingredients, and I'm always chasing the next hit.


*** 

For atheists, spiritualism is a semantically loaded concept and, predictably, we tend to have a greater consensus on a negative definition than a positive one: spirituality does not require the divine. Rather it implies an empathic awareness of the connections between individuals, communities, nature and the cosmos - a unity that is not a priori unknowable, but merely seems so because the moment of experience is so transient.

Swimming in the Narmada

My own dry definition of spiritualism is a temporary segue into objectivity of the subjective consciousness - which is itself ultimately reducible to neurochemistry. Perhaps it’s sad to believe that the fleeting splendour of spiritual experience will one day be defined by patterns of synaptic firings, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could induce objective empathy in the human mind? Think of the misery and suffering that could be avoided. We might even be able to make communism work.


***


Sadly, on emerging clumsily from the river and standing to dry in the breeze, realism, subjectivity and their attendant neuroses fell back upon me like a bag of hammers. Never have I felt more out of place. In the company of a multitude of skinny Indian boys, all smiles and ribs and knees and elbows, I felt like a hirsute albino zeppelin that had been rendered temporarily buoyant only by the cash stuffed within my ample folds.

Thankfully I had swum with another Irishman who shared my bloated blancheur - not Richie, who refused the experience, no doubt concerned (rightly) about leptospirosis or Crohn’s disease - but Jimmy, a wandering carpenter with an improbable blonde quiff and handlebar moustache, whose Aussie visa had expired and who was heading back, very slowly and unwillingly, to an uncertain future in Ireland.


And so we three retired to drink shot glasses of scalding spicy tea from the Narmada ghat’s chai-wallah, and to ooh and aah over his adorable little boy, as the sun set and the bats began to flap over the darkening river.

Chai-wallah's son