The Adventures of Bindi Girl: (2012) (12 page)

Our luck is in! We spot a couple of weary Swedes making their exit. The Swedes stop to say hello. I notice they look a little sour when they tell us they were forced to shell out fifty rupees
each
to the angry Indian. We commiserate and they take their leave, but not without me noticing the gate they’ve exited through has been left slightly ajar—unlocked! And the greedy gatekeeper is nowhere around!

“Come on,
let’s go!
” I hiss, feeling like a female Tom Sawyer—up to no good but on an adventure, so who cares? Christine and I hustle through the iron gates quickly. I’m not sure whether to feel shameful or victorious. I know what the watchman is doing is totally illegal—demanding baksheesh at any old price he chooses—but I gotta hand it to him, he’s got quite the racket going.

Somehow, Christine and I slip past his watchful eye in one fortunate moment, and off we scurry into the ashram grounds. For the next half hour, we enjoy ourselves thoroughly, ambling through the ruins of stone meditation huts and underground meditation cells. That is, until a village laborer appears seemingly out of nowhere, walking out of the jungle wearing a huge afro of collected banana leaves on his head. The Indian approaches us, and it is clear he is encouraging us to get off the premises. He snarls and makes vicious faces, clawing the air with his hands, to indicate we are in danger if we go much further. “Tiger! Tiger!” he is saying. “Jungle tiger!” There are tigers afoot.

Tigers!?!
Christine is more than a little nervous now. “I’m not risking this, man. Did I tell you about the hippo attack in Africa?” Me, I’m feeling a bit ballsy since I’ve been here before, and I reassure her there are no tigers inside; surely they prefer the sanctity of the outlying jungle.

Yet, the sky is beginning to darken, making things quite spooky, so we make toward the exit. As we descend the pathway leading to the main gate, the angry Mafia Man spots us from his balcony and starts screaming at us, ferociously, in Hindi. He is pissed that we’ve somehow gotten past his watchful eye, and has absolutely no intention of letting us leave without a battle.

I scamper as fast as I can down the slippery, steep path. I want Christine to get a move on, too, but she’s dawdling behind, moving much slower than I, seemingly taking her time.
That’s why you got attacked by a hippo, girlfriend
,
I think.
Hurry up!
I can see about fifty feet ahead, the gate remains unlocked, but the man is swiftly making his way downstairs.

As I’m skidding along in my flip-flops, out of the corner of my eye, I see him grab a stick! A very BIG stick! “Run, Christine! Run!” I yell. But the man reaches the gate before we do. He’s got a key with which he intends to padlock us in. He wants to trap us. And he will NOT let us leave.

And then, I do something you’re never supposed to do in India:
I lose my cool.

I have no idea what comes over me. I suppose I should just pay him the gosh-darned $2.00 or whatever his price has just risen to, but I have lost my head and am now just plain
pissed
at the principle of the matter. I struggle with him at the gate, trying to prevent him from locking us in by grabbing the key out of his pudgy, sweaty hands. He makes lunging motions toward me with his big stick.

In the background, I hear Christine, the peace-loving Australian, trying to sweetly reason with the bully: “Please sir, let us out. You can’t lock us in here.” She is not helping things at all; everyone knows you can’t win with one teammate talking soft, and the other using physical force.

Meanwhile, I become more and more furious. It’s like a scene from one of the
Mahabharata
demon battles, as the ogre and I grapple with the big stick, each attempting to take ownership of the weapon. The insane part is that I’m not feeling one tiny bit afraid. Not at all.

OK, maybe a tiny bit—when it finally crosses my mind that he could have a knife.
Good goddess
, it flashes through my mind,
my mother would just FLIP if she knew what I was up to
. I tower over him in height, but he’s got me on girth. Somehow, I feel in my heart that if I really needed to violently defend myself, I could—I’ve got ample enough adrenalin running through my veins—but of course I don’t want it to get to this point.

He’s managed to get the gate locked with one hand, while menacing me with his stick in the other, and he’s put the key in his trouser pocket. We are held hostage.

He starts to pull away, and I do what I have learned instinctively and have never had to do before: I kick him between the legs. OOMPH, there it is.

Admittedly, it’s a half-baked shove of a kick, and I aim for the inner thigh instead of the groin because I don’t mean to harm him, just to insult him, really. Plus, I’m wearing flip-flops, and can’t do a great deal of damage without losing my balance.

But now, I see the REAL tiger that we were warned about. The man’s eyes are blazing, burning, burning bright. He begins to curse me and back away from me, calling me and my mother all sorts of names, brandishing his big baton. I climb up the side of the stone wall, which is now lined with monkeys—mamas and their nursing babies, watching the whole fiasco—and beg Christine to get up there with me, in order to leap over the edge.

“No way, I am
not
getting up there.” She’s having none of it, as the monkeys are more frightening to her than being locked in the ashram with the madman. So she continues with her technique: sweetly pleading with the man to let us out. “Please sir, you can’t lock us in here.”

Our captor looks upset, scared, nervous, and, frankly, defeated. I see that he has moved toward the gate once again, and as I am climbing back down from the high stone wall to see if we have a chance to be released, he opens the gate just slightly, and lets Christine—and only Christine—pass through to the sanctity of the other side.

As I make to dart after her, he shouts, “NAHI! No!” and promptly locks me back in.
Shit. Now what? Trapped behind the gates of the Beatles Ashram forever? What am I, some sort of Rock ‘n’ Roll Rapunzel?

I hoist myself to peer over the stone wall, and begin to plead with the babas gliding past on the other side, paying no mind to this worldly fiasco. “Baba? Help me, please? Om namah Shivaya!”
In the name of Shiva!
I call out, as the silent renunciates peacefully glance my way, watching the whole show as if there is nothing odd at all about such divine theater, and walk on by.

In fact, it works, this prayer to the peaceful ones, as my captor has some sort of revelation. Perhaps he doesn’t want to be shamed by the holy men for entrapment of a helpless tourist. Or perhaps he thinks
I
am the truly mad one, and
he
doesn’t want to be left alone with this crazy woman-banshee, an incarnation of the wrathful goddess Herself. Lord knows what I might be capable of.

The tiger has been pacified. He unlocks the gate. I step through. I am free.

Why was I fearless? Was it ego? Stupidity? Principle, perhaps? I’d like to think that this encounter with Maa Durga and the Tiger is showing me I can take care of myself, if and when I have to. And, if the more ferocious, terrifying form of Kali had to spring from my forehead, to level the monster, I could have handled it.

In fact, it seems that holding a mirror up to this man, by reflecting terror to him in a big way, evoked enough fear in him to make him back off.

Needless to say: lucky for me, lucky for the tiger.

Jai Maa Durga!

May the Divine Mother of the Universe bless you,
watch over you,
and free you from the chains of illusion.

I have often wanted to converse with these
babas
as they go through their daily lives and austerities on the banks of the Ganges; I’ve been quite cautionary as I am, after all, a woman traveling alone, and such situations require sensitivity. A handful of sadhus enjoy socializing with the Westerners while wintering in Rishikesh. Granted, they are rewarded with constantly flowing chai, chapati, and companionship—a good exchange for all concerned.

My fourth day in Rishikesh, sitting in a café, I came to know “Krishna Giri,” which literally translates as “Mountain of Krishna.” Krishna Giri Baba is a warm soul, generous and open. Not only that, but his time with travelers has granted him with sufficient English skills, and we have been able to have short, but infinitely useful conversations.

Upon introductions and chatter, I told him my American name was Erin, but that I was given the name Sapna, and he could use that if it were easier for him to remember. Krishna Giri frankly dug that my name was “dream.” While we chatted over chai, he absentmindedly played with his black hair like a little child, forming new dreadlocks with his fingers. Amused, I noticed that dangling down from his topknot and over his forehead, the long, squirrelly lock of hair naturally formed the shape of a cobra spouting from his crown.

The cobra-fountain triggered a thought:
Oooh, I should ask Krishna Giri about those snake dreams I’ve been having.
“Can I ask you about my snake dreams, Baba?”

“Snake dream?” he responded, shaken from his reverie. “Snake dream, big dream!” declared Krishna Giri. “Yes, yes! Go ahead!”

So, I took the opportunity to ask this goodhearted sadhu, steeped in the living schools of mystery and devotion, about a series of dreams I had involving snakes and cobras, which began during my first journey to India:

Big Dream #1 came to me four years ago, shortly after arriving to India the first time. I was in Dharamsala at the base of the Himalayas. In the dream, I encountered a large snake. The snake simply greeted me.

Big Dream #2 came to me a few months later, when I first landed in Rishikesh and greeted the river goddess Ganga. In the dream, a snake came to me, and bit me on the hand. At the time, I described my dream to my dear friend Max from the U.K., who was well informed about such symbols especially as relates to yogic philosophy. Max explained that it was quite auspicious to dream about snakes in general, but to be
bitten
by one in the dream was incredibly powerful, and that I was likely have a very strong spiritual awakening.

Big Dream #3 came to me six months ago, back home in San Francisco, during a period of many months of intense dream work. In this dream, a huge cobra engulfed my entire body as I was seated in a meditative, lotus position. The cobra rose up, up, up behind me until it completely covered my head with its massive hood. I felt all seven chakras in my body—root to crown, color by color—light up in the dream.

Upon hearing the much-simplified description of these three “Big Dreams,” Krishna Giri stopped mid-sip into the chai I had ordered for him, and stared straight into my eyes. “Yes!” he declared, his eyes exuding sincerity and importance. “Very good dream.” He instructed me to go within and let the dream tell me its message, not to ask others what it meant.

I explained that the dreams felt so powerful that I wasn’t sure where to begin: “Sometimes I feel like I need a guide to help me.” He responded that I already knew what the dreams mean (which is true), and that I already had the wisdom I needed to uncover more (which is also true). In fact, the dream itself was the carrier of the wisdom. “Dream has answer,” Krishna Giri said.

Krishna Giri continued his compact lesson. Often, teachings from sadhus and great sages are wonderful because they are short and sweet—maybe ten sentences at the most—ensuring the message lands easily and effectively on the listener. In choppy but fully-comprehensible English, he told me the tale of how, as a young man in his twenties, he lived quite a traditional life outside of Bombay as the son of a man in the Indian army.

“Always,” he explained, “I dream of running into mountains, again and again.” Finally, at age 28 (he is now 41), he took sadhu vows from his guru and ran straight to the mountains, high into the Himalayas, forever leaving all constraints of worldly life and burning his past in the
agni
(fire).

Once he heeded the dream, responded to the call, and entered the arms of his true mother (earth) and true father (sky), the dream never returned. “Once message received, dream finish!” declared Krishna Giri triumphantly. And with that, the sadhu’s supercharged mini-sermon was finished as well.

Ahh,
I thought,
he’s right!
I got the message, on more levels than one. Krishna Giri’s teaching reinforced the truth that dreams are a powerful form of guidance that mustn’t be ignored. If we’re still dreaming about something, there’s some juice there to be investigated.

Certainly, it confirmed that I have embodied the wonderful gift from the sacred cobra, the
Naga
. I was summoned back to India by the power of Kundalini Shakti, the coiled serpent goddess that lies dormant at the base of the spine. She called, and I returned. The goddess was awakened from Her dream.