Shri Mata Vaishno Devi

Too much happened to me in India, and to be honest a lot of it is very much what always happens to me in India: dust, heat, noise, culture shock, a few bright and burning moments of clarity, dust, heat, noise. So I'm going to write about the only thing that really mattered: my time on yatra, pilgrimage, up to the top of a mountain at Vaishno Devi. The pilgrimage starts at at Katra, which is a tiny town about fifty kilometres from Jammu, which is itself a not-very-big town in southern Kashmir, and from here, you climb up for fourteen kilometres to the mandir, and, naturally, fourteen kilometres back down again. At the highest point, you're nearly seven thousand feet above sea level. It's a long, hard trek.

We started out at about eleven on a cloudy, warm morning, and it was all very normal to begin with. Equipped with my pilgrim's red headband, sandals (chappal) and bamboo stick (laati), I set out, but the first kilometre or so is unremarkable, with stalls either side selling bits 'n' bobs and people watching cricket on creaky old televisions, people collecting water in buckets, monkeys vaulting over the awnings. We paused to eat pav bhaji, which I generally love; it was so hot it burned my fingers, but I remember thinking, this is like any other place.

While I was under the awning eating breakfast one-handed, my twelve-year-old cousin Shivani gave me a nudge and whispered, "In England, have you ever ridden a horse?"

"Not much in England," I whispered back. "Lots in other places. Why?"

She led me out, pointed in the direction of clopping sounds and said, "Pooooooooony."

Shortly afterwards she and I were lifted out of the crush, comfortable on our very own ponies. Actually, they're meant for the very young and the very old to travel on; whole families go on this journey, as indeed mine was doing, and for this reason I insisted we only stay on horseback for the next couple of kilometres. But I appreciated it, then - I was up out of the crowd, not stumbling for my feet every few minutes, and could enjoy the view. My ghora-walla (poor guy; I don't know how else to refer to him) seemed to like me, or in any case he happily piled two blankets and a bag of chapattis on my saddle to save him carrying them, and thus laden, we started upwards. I was above the level of the guard rails on the track, of course, and had a few moments where there was only empty air between me and a sheer drop of many thousands of feet to the valley below. I ended up shutting my eyes a lot.

We'd been on the horses for about twenty minutes when the sky suddenly got a lot darker, and the ghora-walla suddenly stopped himself, me, and the pony (whose name was Kajal, I found out; she was beautiful, decked out in bells and fresh flowers and bright colours threaded through her mane) under one of the last awnings before a climbing curve to the next stage of the track. And then it started to rain.

Oh, you see, this is the hard part. I should say that until then the heat, dust and humidity had been suffocating, and I will say that. We'd driven for hours in that, and I'd been travelling for three straight days at this stage anyway. I should say that my hair and skin were achingly, painfully dry, because that will happen in that kind of intense heat. And I guess you could also make mention that over and over in Hinduism, you find the theme of water as sacred, water from Ganga, yes, but all water held up as sacred and sweet, and say that all these things together constitute the experience, but then that isn't it. All I know, I guess, is that I was sitting on a flower-bedecked pony under an awning looking down into a valley filling with fog, and the water was in my hair and my eyes and clothes and it was coming in torrents from the sky, running rust-red from the dust, and people were laughing and dancing and drenching themselves in it as it were, and indeed it was, holy. And then there was me, laughing with head and hands to the sky,

After that the sun came out again, shone through the raindrops on the leaves, and my eyes stayed open, even at the cliff-edges. I never saw the idea of the yatra the same way after that - somehow or other, it had become something different. The temperature dropped steadily, dipping below thirty degrees even in the sunlight, and I started to enjoy myself. At Adhkwari, five kilometres from Katra, I scrambled off my horse and bid goodbye to the ghora-walla, who gave her a nosebag and they headed cheerfully down. I bought some Nescafé pre-mix coffee (if I boycotted Nestlé in India, I would die of dehydration), waited for a few of my friends and relations to catch up, and carried on climbing.

The journey from here was steeper and quieter - the path splits into two, so you only get half the volume of people - and we had risen into the clouds, which deadened everything. I thought it was fog at first, before realising it was raining beneath me, and trees across the mountains faded disconcertingly in and out of sight. Every few minutes we walked past a sign warning of us of landslides and other natural disasters. Of course the signs were in Hindi, and my mum was helping me with them, nodding encouragingly while I read out loud, and I was just stumbling on "apaaath stithi" (seriously, even in English, how often do you use the phrase "perilous circumstances"?) when a pack of children started to point and giggle. Having tolerated this for some time by then, I said, as cheerfully as I could muster, "dhimaag thik nahin hain" (lit., "my head isn't right") and although my mother was horrified, I quite enjoyed my newfound mental retardation all the rest of the way. For the first time since I'd arrived in India, I was walking through cool, calm and quiet, and I'd lost my shoes, and it was perfect. The next batch of kids were far more agreeable, chanting in the traditional way to take their minds off how much their feet hurt. These chants tend to be call-and-response audience participation numbers, and their very charismatic small leader looked at me and said, "Didi bhole..."

"Jai mata di!" I yelled into the fog. I wanted it to last forever.

( okay, this is getting reeeeeeeeally long )

And I guess, after that, after I've climbed twenty-nine kilometres in my bare feet, there remains the question of why I did this, and how. The thing is, I don't know if I believe. No, I supposd that because I don't know, I don't believe. I'm an agnostic. But Hinduism isn't a simple way of life, and that's what it is - it's not a religion, and you don't choose not to observe. By birth, I'm a Brahmin Hindu, and if I cast that off, I cast off who I am. Like my parents, I don't let books touch my feet. I keep my desk clean. I believe in the power of the written word. Unconsciously or not, I've become what I was supposed to become. So I don't know if I believe, but in the meantime I can be a secular Hindu with no trouble at all.

The superstition runs that if you make up your mind to visit Vaishno Devi, then Mata tests you: puts obstacles in your journey to test your devotion. It's just a superstition, of course. My journey started from here, this kitchen I'm sitting in, and from here it was uneventful, flights were only averagely delayed, and we arrived in Delhi without trouble. From Kalka, off the train, we had too many people and too much luggage, and on the night climb into the mountains, came within inches of skittering off the edge and down the drop. (I woke up to the sound of screaming.) On the long journey north, we were supposed to take ten hours and took fourteen, the roads were baking hot, we were reduced to driving through fields in the Punjab. Near the Jammu border, we paused in a nondescript town and I woke up, again, to the sound of screaming - a truck rammed us three times from behind and we were stuck in the humid dark for hours waiting for the police. My grandmother started to get ill. Mani was worse, and had to be carried, miserable and feeling ill, up all the way up. (On the way down, she walked: fourteen km, after a twelve-hour day, two days of illness and no food. I was amazed, but my aunts were calm: "Bhagwan [God] gave Mani shakti.")

So I don't know. I don't know. I'm glad I went. And thanks for reading.