My fifteen hour single day trip to Hampi was memorable. Having taken an overnight bus from Bangalore, located over three hundred kilometres away, I reached Kamalapur, the nearest town from Hampi, at around five thirty in the morning, and then walked the remaining five kilometres to the ruins of this abandoned city.
In that hour long walk which commenced in complete darkness and concluded inside a small café for breakfast, I could notice the gradual emergence of certain thoughts in my head, catalysed and notably reinforced by the combined beauty of the twilight of the orange moon on one side of the road and the rising sun on the other, and the few small Protected monuments that dotted the road along the way.
By the time I had ordered my first cup of coffee, these thoughts had taken a concrete form. In fact, they form a recurring theme and arise whenever I travel, especially to places with historical, architectural, archaeological or natural beauty – how do I connect with this place?
I remember a sentence once uttered by my English teacher when we were reading Ode to the West Wind. She said the poet “…felt one with nature…”.
What a beautiful sentence.
When do you feel one with something? What does the phrase even mean?
You feel one with something when you perceive no difference between yourself and that other entity. When the duality of your existence as opposed to that of the other, of the segmentation of your thoughts between “I” and “not I” blurs out and eventually dissolves. You feel you know everything you wanted to know about that entity. Lest these words get lost in the streams of abstraction, let me retrace my steps and start again.
When I visited Hampi, I was visiting the ruins of a city that, at its zenith, was among the most prosperous cities in the world. When it was built over five centuries ago, and in the decades that followed, it was the home of thousands of people, who lived and ate and traded and prospered within the city and its surrounding areas.
As I sat on the stairs of one of these temples, I was physically touching a piece of rock on which other people had walked five hundred years back, which were carried by labourers and sculpted into their present shapes. Who knows, maybe a few cells of one of those labourers were still attached to these stones – as a subtle reminder that time never really passes? As both he and I exist in this moment, at this place, separated merely by a filter of consciousness?
Even today it is possible to find certain places in Hampi where, if you were to stand, you wouldn’t know which year you were living in. And this is the case with almost every historical place. They stand as a testament not so much to the gradual withering away of the glory of the past, as to the absurdity of the present.
The Virupaksha temple is the main shrine in all of Hampi. It is situated very close to the Tungabhadra river on its South bank. Having explored the other side of the river, known for its cafes and the natural beauty of the mountains adorned with huge boulders, it was my turn to experience the architectural, historical and mythological side of Hampi.
As I passed through the temple’s main entrance, crossing from the natural to the human element, my eyes ventured off to the left and planted themselves.
An elephant. Feeding itself sugarcanes and surrounded by a few people.
I spent all the time I had kept for exploring this particular temple, with this beautiful pachyderm. Thrice I offered it a piece of sugarcane and thrice were my offerings irreverently but playfully thrown up into the air. To the elephant’s credit though, I was allowed to pet and caress its trunk.
So I travelled two thousand kilometres to experience a place, and ended up not seeing the main shrine because I got involved with something I could possibly do even in the city I live in? What just happened?
On an objective scale, it could be argued that I probably didn’t plan my time properly. But everything cannot be measured on a scale of objectivity. There are subjective tendencies and feelings that each of us has.
When I am trying to connect with a place, I let my unconscious take over. I try not to analyse my actions or ask why I am choosing a particular alternative over the other. I just go with the flow, believing that this tendency to “flow” a certain way is driven by certain factors at work within my brain – which is trying to make sense of the place, absorb it all in, and build up some edifice that may reflect the place inside my awareness as coherently as could be expected.
I could have spent hours just sitting beside the elephant and observing it – observing how it was periodically turning towards me and looking me straight into the eye; how it was breaking the sugarcanes into two by twisting them between its mouth and the inside of the upper part of its trunk; how it smashed coconuts into the ground in order to break them and then tried to stretch its trunk and pick up those pieces that had bounced off just a little out of its reach; its hard textured skin and its greying hair; the cool wind that hit my face whenever it flapped its ears and on and on and on.
I do not think that it is simply the paucity of time that prevents us from connecting with the places we travel. Even if we had enough time, there is a certain disposition that is needed to “feel one with nature” – the “nature” of any place, including the human aspect. You need to capture the soul of the place and then see how the visible components reflect that soul, what stories they are trying to tell, and how they are linked with each other. This is no easy task and I can clearly understand what people are getting at when they say “…a lifetime is short to explore [any particular place]…”.
I always return from a trip with that inevitable sense of incompleteness, of having left something in the middle, of not having given it as much time as I wanted or needed to. Maybe this sense of loss at moving away from a place that could have given me so much more, acts as a kind of emotional bookmark which keeps reminding me about the place and what all I have left behind, thus keeping alive that yearning to return to it sometime later? Isn’t travelling, after all, at some level, also a journey where you try to find yourself? When you forget the outside world and sit staring at something for hours, in the hope that a sudden epiphany will answer your questions, that you will find what you have been seeking, and that you will know who you are and what you are meant to be and meant to do?
Those serene moments of silence, in the hope of feeling one with that place, and then finding yourself in that unity.