Rustles at the Golden Temple

If one loses ingenuity, it is highly likely that one loses it in childhood. Just remember what our past times were? I bet they were the most ingenious one I had ever come up in life. Mostly a lonely child, I had to discover newer and newer ways to entertain myself. In those “good old times” television was not so much of an entertainment, let Doordarshan be my witness! At the same, for those who aspire to be serious while being ridiculous, I was often called in by an excruciating super ego to invent the reasons and causes and the great benefits available to mankind behind my inanities.

So one day, when I had tired myself of transferring entire weaver ant nests to close proximity of brown ants and relish their fight to death, I imagined myself to be a seismologist and ventured to find the effect of earthquakes on anthills. I soon rushed to a fireworks shop some seven kilometers away, bought tube like red fire crackers which comes in a bunch of forty or so tied up by a large knot and intended to be lit once and heard thirty times; I also bought half a dozen plastic straws. At home I unknotted each of those red fire crackers, dug with a pen tube a small somewhat narrow pits near an anthill, took the thread of the fire cracker through the straw and buried the fire cracker in the pit just deep enough that the thread can reach the surface through the straw. Next, I lit the thread. The cracker did burst, but surprise, the anthill didn’t register the seismic indulgence!

A similar ingenious pastime that too had to do with sound, fire and fury was to watch coconut shells catch fire in the triangular brick stove at home. Serendipity it definitely was, but unlike other scientific experiments that could be replicated, the coconut shell burning has much to do with luck. Remember how it caught my fascination that they erupt in several flames, each separate from the other, and they fuse for no reason, and they rustle and buzz and then fade and mute, and then again, out of nowhere, a crack, and then a high period of fire, a crescendo of rustles, and again the many odd flames as if lit from a lamp. My aunt used to watch me, stationed by the stove for hours, even as she warns me of the rice frothing out, of having exhausted the cooking schedule, of over using the shells and depleting the firewood stock and such; just as my cousins used to wonder, all of them from their safe distances of an elder age, the weirdness, the ridiculousness and the imbecility of reigning over a kingdom of ants.



All this was a necessary background to what I actually had to say. Which is that, I recently made a trip to Coorg, or more exactly Madikeri / Mercara. Thirty kilometers from there is the Golden Temple, in Kushalnagar, which is south India’s largest Tibetan settlement. When we reached the Golden Temple, it was some sort of a prayer time. No sooner than the prayer I don't actually know if it's something else, thanks to my ignorance of Buddhist practices) started and there was a coconut shell burning in my memories. The same pace, the same rustle, the unexplained lulls, the unprecedented highs, the beating of the drums at times louder swifter, at times as if on a retreat, a crescendo unexplained as a natural phenomena. The golden Temple has enough fire burning around it in furnaces, but this went beyond any of them in its persistent hums and periodic rustles. There is a lot to say about architecture, a lot to say about the history. But since I am capable of neither, if I ever I shall write about Golden Temple, I shall write about childhood memories and of curses and of exile and of dreams and of a place called home. I might also write, may be in the garb of a story teller from another age, of a people who trapped the winds of their homeland in a gilded metallic windchime