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Holy chapattis and unholy garbage

by Diana Reynolds Roome

Editor's Note: Diana Reynolds Roome, a Mountain View resident and longtime contributor to the Voice, has been traveling in India and Nepal, retracing steps she took there many years ago and discovering much that has changed.

AMRITSAR, PUNJAB, India — If you think Highway 101 is pandemonium, just try the road from Delhi to Dharamsala. On this four-lane highway everyone looks eligible for arrest — including the cows.

Drivers seem to take delight in missing everyone else by a mere centimeter — including old men on wobbly bikes, tractors driving the wrong way, and whole families on scooters with the toddler squashed behind the handlebars, father clutching a briefcase and mother perched on the back with her sari floating in the updraft. The big difference is that even on major roads like this, often partly under construction and nearly always bumpy, people seldom get above 30 or 40 mph, which makes the whole procession look a bit like an overcrowded circus on the move.

As for the scene bordering the road, it looked much like a hundreds-of-miles-long rubbish dump with humans, dogs and buffaloes living wretchedly among it, all searching for some worthwhile find among the scraps. I felt disgustingly over privileged with my camera, Visa card and bottle of clean water.

The driver of our rattling old bus with flowered curtains honked relentlessly the entire way, in an attempt to speed up our long day's drive north. This is the accepted way of saying, "Move over, I'm coming through!" — and it seems to work. In fact, the most important part of the vehicle here may be the horn, and the gaudily painted trucks and buses sport large slogans on their backsides reading "Horn please!"

If drivers in America honked at every vehicle they passed, there'd be numerous instances of road rage. But anger just doesn't wash here — it's not part of the Indian spirit.

Leaving the relative peace of Dharamsala and traveling west into the Punjab, the drive is marginally saner. There's less garbage by the side of the road and more views of the rural farmland the Punjab is famous for. Sikh men sport brightly colored turbans and women wear their elegant traditional salwar-kameez — loose trousers with billowy tops and colorful scarves, often of embroidered silk. School girls wave, wearing neat uniforms and hair carefully braided in plaits down their backs. Here as everywhere else, women bent double at work in the fields or breaking rocks by the side of the road wear bright saris — as if in defiance of the drabness of their lives.

Our goal is the legendary city of Amritsar and its Golden Temple, built just over 400 years ago. We arrive at 9 p.m., in time to see the Sikh holy book, or Adi Grantha, before it is returned to the temple precincts for the night. The shrine, also known as Harimandir, is indeed a marvel, not just because of its staggering beauty — the delicate shrine, encased in gold leaf and lined with marble inlay, is reflected in a pool of holy water known as "the nectar of immortality" — but because it's alive with pilgrims from all over the world, who visit in a dynamic stream day and night.

The shrine is open on every side, denoting its welcome to everyone, wherever they come from and whatever their beliefs. There's a constant murmur of song as pilgrims line up on the bridge over the lake, and I can't resist humming along. The sound swells as we enter the shrine and I catch a glimpse of the Sikh holy book, displayed under a gorgeously embroidered orange canopy as a high priest wafts a peacock feather fan respectfully above it. As we leave, everyone gets a scoop of prasad, a sweet concoction that tastes of almonds, honey and spices — mmm.

Anyone who's really hungry can visit the vast outdoor court where volunteers feed as many as 35,000 people a day — a tradition of hospitality that goes back to the days of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. An aroma of baking bread emerges from a building in the compound surrounding the temple, and through a window we glimpse a machine churning out chapattis — hot, freshly baked flat breads, not unlike flour tortillas — by the hundreds.

No wonder the Sikhs are currently in a hot debate about naming the Golden Temple the eighth wonder of the world — ahead of the Taj Mahal.