Cycling trip to Bitthur

Last Sunday (1st July '07) Debjit and I went on a cycling trip to Bitthur. While the places we visited weren't many and neither were they spectacular, it was the trip itself that was the highlight. Dotting the road towards the later part of the excursion was an interminable row of huts, cattle, cow dung heaps, and simple people who looked untouched by timeor technological developements; if one leaves aside the ubiquitous Coca-Cola boards that seem bent upon reaching the remotest corners of the earth. Untouched by time, they really were, because one will come across many buildings dating back to the British times, and still surviving. Walls made of small, almost flat bricks. Arched doorways and grilled windows, with open sewers on either side of the road (I did not really like the latter), Banyan trees sprouting out of cracks in walls, ragged children playing in the streets, old men with cataract clouded eyes peering into nothingness through their thick glasses, doors with those simple chain type latches I used to see in my grand-parents villages when I'd visit them in my childhood. At some places I could almost imagine some revolutionaries during the British Raj being chased by the police and taking refuge in one of these derelict houses. A far cry from the India of today, and untouched by almost sixty years of social changes. We first went to a ghat where people were bathing in the river and others were selling flowers on the ghats, while religious souvenirs of many kinds were on sale in the temple complexes outside. Well, then when we went to Dhruv-ka-tila, an old temple priest showed us a stone which floats in water. It was more of a brick, seemed to be fashioned inside a kiln, but when I took it in my hands I found that it was as light as alabaster. The preist said that it dated back to the time of Ram, when he built the bridge of stones across the ocean to find his wife Sita. He also showed us the 'm' of 'Ram' on the brick, which he would have us believe was proof of its antiquity. We didn't argue, because we had no interest in wrecking his beliefs or his self-evident faith with our modern outlooks coming from young IIT students. He's been probably thinking along these lines ever since he was born and 'modern', 'scientific' thought has no right to wreck the pillars of faith on which his old life rests. We offered our obeisances to the idols in his temple and took prasad from him. There is a steep slope of steps leading to the river and the river, I get the feeling, becomes abruptly deep a few feet away from the bank. Maybe this is the reason people don't bathe here. But the view from the bottom of the steps, with our naked feet being caressed by the cold river water, was fascinating. In that wide open expanse and solitude, it was as close as I've come to feeling free. The hues of the sky, the shades of the daylight, the million glittering little mirrors shimmering on the water's reflecting the sunlight, the alternating phases of brightness or mellowness as the clouds periodically swept across the sun, the giant electric poles conveying the wires from one bank to the other, the sound of eternity being whispered by the river and the wind; it was as if the sun, earth, clouds, skies, all of them were invloved in a complex interplay of light and shade in a game of colossal proportions. Of course we knew the game wouldn't last long, and soon the the sun would dominate and it would become unbearably hot as it ascended the massive dome. So as a last spot we went over to a temple which supposedly is the birth-place of Luv and Kush, the children of Ram and Sita. This was the Valmiki Ashram. Debjit told me that this is not the only place in India that makes such a claim. It was interesting in that there was a tower which served as a vantage point from where we tried to trace our routes leading to our present positions, and also that of Dhruv-ka-tila with the giant electric poles serving as land marks. It was decidedly becoming sunnier, and after making floral offerings to the idols in the temple (which we'd bought from a woman selling these from a wicker basket, sitting on the steps outside the temple) we went back to our cycles to head back to the campus. I tried to photograph a sleepy looking chameleon basking on a wall outside, but it scrambled away hurriedly before I could get close enough. Obviously it wasn't all that sleepy!

However I slept like a log for the rest of the day when we got back.