After a lunch of yellow dal fry and roti, I walked down to the river Ganga and, placing my shoes and socks upon the sandy bank, I entered the holy waters. How nice and tranquil it was. I sat on the rocks of the bank with some Indian guys who kept getting me to shout “motherfucker” in Hindi. I had a suspicion they were lying to me about what I was saying, and it was thanks to my remembrance of Vishal telling me about this particular swearword in Gwalior that I finally realised I was shouting something heinous. They weren’t too happy when I refused to scream anymore obscenities.
I waded deeper into the Ganga but never so deep that the water came above my waist. I wanted to swim into the middle of the water but everyone around me said it was dangerous, and I couldn’t see anyone else doing it so I reluctantly stayed in the shallows.
Much later I went running. Weirdly, there wasn’t really anywhere to run. No sidewalks or paths that weren’t already home to a herd of cows… But I was restless… it had been too long… I had to run somewhere… I ran over Ram Setu bridge and off into the back lanes of town on the other side. I was running up a particularly dark and quiet lane which I was very grateful for, when my name rang out in the dark. It was Sumit – one of the kind employees from the Baba Poshtel who I’d had a brilliant time with chatting about books. He was sitting on a bench nearby and was surprised to see me still in Rishikesh. And I indeed, was very surprised to bump into him so unexpectedly.
I stopped and sat down next to him and he told me about the magic of Kasar Devi – a village believed to have been built upon what is known as the van allen belt, endowing it with a strange cosmic energy like that of Stonehenge and Michu Pichu.
The village is named after its temple, dedicated to Kasar Devi: The Goddess of Power…
I was grateful for the chat with Sumit and felt guilty about fleeing his hostel. The truth is that while the staff at Poshtel were incredible, the place was just too busy and had too few toilets. What can you do?
But now I sat and listened to Sumit talk about these sacred and mystical places in the Himalayas and wondered if I’d ever get round to visiting all of them… or even any of them. Sumit asked me how I was finding Rishikesh. How was I finding my travels in India? They had been amazing of course, but Sumit seemed to guess what I was thinking, that something was missing….
