It was a false alarm. The chest pain that kept the wife – and me – awake through the night was caused by her chronic gastric problem, not heart trouble. We must visit Tirupati immediately, she said after the doctor declared her fit the following day, in a tone that implied that the previous night’s travail was a mild reproof from Sri Venkateswara for not paying our respects despite having been in Bangalore for almost ten years now.
That happened because I am not religious, and visit a temple only if it is known for its architecture, and then preferably see it from the outside. And my wife has her own little problem. Acutely claustrophobic, she cannot stand in long queues where thousands of people jostle for hours down narrow and winding walkways with firm grills on either side that make you feel you are in a cage.
I readily agreed to go this time because I realised that the phenomenon that attracts nearly one lakh pilgrims every day to the hill town of Tirumala – near the bigger town of Tirupati – for darshan of the avatar of Vishnu had to be seen and understood, if for nothing else then as a sociological phenomenon, to get a grasp of what moves India beyond rationalist logic. I laid down only one condition: in Tiruptai, we must stay in a hotel with a view of the Tirumala hills so that appreciating nature’s beauty and respectfully looking at the god’s abode are rolled into one.
It becomes clear right from the first moment that Tirumala is special. It is India, yet not quite so. It is like making a day trip to a bit of heaven with a return ticket. India of the crowds is present in enormous measure but not the confusion and the dirt. And India of forests and scrubs is there but not the heat. (No wonder the sages decided to make Mount Kailash the abode of Shiva and Parvati.) The duality is evident right from the ornate gate at the entrance, a multi-lane toll plaza of a modern highway but the ornate multi-arch gateway tells you that you are entering the gated compound of a god.
The nearly 20-odd km ghat road is like a long driveway fringed by wild bushes and shrubs with overhanging branches in bloom, much like pennants on the way to a Buddhist monastery, part manmade garden, part natural forest. This is what India must have been in the beginning before Indians made it filthy and degraded it.
The little Lego temple town at the top maintains the duality. It is bustling India — cars, buses and endless rows of guest houses where pilgrims bathe before going for darshan, have prasadam and then return to their difficult lives, fortified by faith till the lord gives enough to come back on another pilgrimage. It is a predominantly humble, common folks’ India in a children’s toy town where everything runs perfectly. The clean roads are cleaned again and again by armies of sweepers and, try as I might, the only element I found missing was a toy train in the ornate parks — how is a toy town complete without that?
The endless serpentine queue, even of those who were paying Rs 300 for a quicker darshan, cured me of the desire to make myself a sociological guinea pig. But there was one chore I could not miss. I had promised my friend KBL that I would bring the prasadam for him and send it by courier to Delhi. However, the queue of those who wanted to buy extra prasadam (not what you got free with your darshan ticket) was almost as daunting as the one for the darshan. So at midday, we returned to Tirupati (the wife had made her round of lesser temples and paid obeisance to the lord from a distance), and I decided to come again early the following morning to perform my chore.
Going up to Tirumala at the crack of dawn was a different experience. As the hue of the wooded hillside became clear in the new light and we approached the top, a gentle mist enveloped the road, a leftover from the previous day’s rain. The toy town took on a fairy- tale look and the gentle bhajan from the public address system completed the feeling of heavenly peace. My mind went back to the similar hour three decades ago when I opened my eyes to see through the window a snow peak tinged with light gold, with the bells of the temple at Badrinath beckoning.
It took me 45 minutes in that early hour, when most other pilgrims still stood in their darshan queue, to get to the counter for extra prasadam. The counter clerk threw back at me most of the money I had proffered, saying prasadam was only worth Rs 200 a person. Then, after joining two more queues, one for a plastic carry bag for the huge laddus and another for laddus proper, I was out breathing the rain-washed early morning air again.
It was time to go back but I decided to sit on a culvert to collect my thoughts. You could surely have a deal with god, settle for a half or a quarter god, murmuring silently that given the long life that modern medicine promised, there was time for many more visits and transactions until he would command all of you. The interim deal done, I set out to go back. No, I did not go for a darshan. I did not need to. The spirit of the place was all around me, a peace so complete that you would almost stop breathing.
