Puducherry. - 22 November 2008

My love affair with Puducherry was short lived. What a bizarre place. It’s not a specifically spiritual place and I think that makes a big difference. That might be why I’m not fond of Udaipur, now that I think of it. There were a couple of times I felt uneasy being alone. I was very grateful to have my traveling companion, Leslie, with me. He’s a delightful Buddhist Australian gentleman. We make good traveling companions. He’s lived in South Asia for a long time, is well traveled, a great conversationalist, is even more laid back than I am and we’re both good with spontaneous decisions.

It’s so sad, Mother Ocean is so polluted there :( You can see the garbage bobbing in the surf, out past the breakers. There is no beach, just huge, black sharp edged boulders making up a seawall. There is a tiny beach next to a pier where fishermen launch these ski/sled looking things that can’t even be called boats. They are basically three flattened logs with upturned front ends that have been lashed together. I have no idea how they stay on them out there in the rough sea, much less bring in huge nets full of fish.

Had a trippy group meditation experience at the Sri Aurobindo ashram playground my last night in the city. Leslie was done in from a busy day of cycling all over the city, so I went alone. The “playground” looked and felt like a prison yard. It was a rectangular yard with a sand surface, surrounded on all four sides by a three story building with balconies on all four sides. You had to have a special card given by the ashram or one of the guest houses to get in. Several hundred people were there, sitting on the sand at night. I was one of only a handful of Westerners. It was the anniversary of the day they laid Mother’s body in the ground after her Mahasamadhi. At 7:25pm they turned the lights off and we were all sitting in the dark. It was very surreal with white clouds zipping by overhead. It was very clear that once you were there, you could not stand up and leave.

After about five minutes of silence, a harmonium started playing somewhere behind me. It was playing something in a minor key and it was eerie and spooky. It sounded like something from a horror movie. My skin started crawling and I wanted out of there, fast! I started looking around and it was still very clear that no one would stand up in the middle of this, so I decided to go ahead and mediate and inquire what the fear was about. I could meditate for about 5 minutes or so and then I’d pop out of it. The music just kept on getting gloomier and weirder. I decided surrender was the best course of action, so I meditated again. At one point I looked around and wondered if Mother’s spirit was going to come floating by. The energy there was very strong.

The reason I went was because Leslie told me it was going to be music and singing, so I immediately though bhajan. Um, NO. No singing, just funeral dirges. All of a sudden, the music stopped and there was about 15 minutes of silence. I was so afraid that it would be like two hours or something. Abruptly, 30 minutes after the lights went off, they came back on and everyone stood up and left. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

One funny thing happened, just before it started. I suddenly started thinking of an email conversation I had had earlier that day about the combination for the lock on the luggage I sent home with a tour group mate. The combo is my birthday, so the number is 0723. The number 0723, 0723, 0723 kept ringing in my head, over and over in a sing-song voice. I looked at my watch and sure enough, it said 7:23. I had to laugh. Yes, Spirit has a sense of humour.

It was either extremely hot or pouring down rain while we were there. I didn’t know it was monsoon season in Tamil Nadu in November. We watched the filming of a Tamil movie just down from our guest house from the balcony of a restaurant. It was quite amusing. It’s amazing how low tech it was.

I spent most of my time there wondering where I was. There were no cows in the streets! The architecture looked like I was in New Orleans and the streets were wide and paved. There were sidewalks, but you couldn’t walk on them, because people parked their motorcycles and push bikes on them and they ended abruptly with deep chasms. (Push bike is a new term I learned that means bicycle. Bike means motorcycle here.) I was already chuckling at one point when I saw a buff Westerner heading into the Fitness Center when I rounded a corner and saw the Pizza Hut and dissolved into a fit of giggles.

It looked like it might be a Western city, but it is still decidedly India. I think the contrast made it seem even more harsh to me. It felt like it had so much potential to be something comfortable, but it was far from comfortable. There were bars and liquour/wine stores on almost every block, sometimes two or three per block. Internet access was virtually useless with antiquated machines and extremely slow bandwidth. Decent meals were very hard to come by. One night we were in what we thought was a restaurant which turned out to be a bar for the local men. Again, I was glad for Leslie’s company.

Walking was nerve wracking. The traffic is much more like Western cities, without the benefit of traffic signals of any kind. The police were everywhere and they were the worst for blaring their horns and driving right at me. I almost got hit by vehicles of all sorts, many times.

The Park Guest House we took rooms in, one of the Sri Aurobindo guest houses, was quite lovely. The garden was beautiful and fronted on the sea. We took our breakfasts in the canteen and watched the waves crashing into the seawall. There were many well landscaped areas to meditate in as well as a meditation room overlooking the sea. I could see the sea from my room and spent a lot of time in there, resting and meditating. It was at the southern end of the promenade, clean, quiet and a very good value. The ashram itself was a huge disappointment. Only the Samadhi where Sri Aurobindo and Mother are buried and a bookstore are open to the public. There is much more of their presence and energy in their guest houses than in the ashram.

We decided two nights were quite enough, so we planned to go spend some time on Auroville Beach, 8km north. I hired an auto rickshaw to drive us there that picked us up at 9am one morning. That’s when things started to get really interesting and is the subject for another post.