Guest post by KAVERI GILL

There is no point living in India if one cannot make spontaneous journeys, of all kinds and in all directions, for there is scarcely another country in which one can move so seamlessly and rapidly between such different worlds, both literal and metaphorical. It is the great charm of not residing in the bosom of the capitalised, industrialised west, with its clockwork uniform comforts. So when the serendipitous sighting of a photo of Ajmer Sharif, all lit up for Urs – celebrating the death anniversary of Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti, in this case – prompted a yearning to be there, I decided for once to ignore the rational self with all its programmed misgivings, and just go.

A quick mental search for a last minute wing mate threw up the name of Asgar Ali, who works as a clerk in the Planning Commission and had been part of the data gathering team for a public health study I had conducted, in which connection we had last visited district Ajmer and the dargah together in 2009. He had since experienced a personal tragedy of significant proportions. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge in my life, too. We could both do with some quiet contemplation time, a stepping back from the daily grind and lightning pace of a metropolitan city. 

Train journeys in India are special, despite all that has not been done to maintain this marvel of a network left by the Brits. They are also the best way to see the country. But being on the waitlist on the morning of the journey did not augur well for an upcoming adventure. We risked a penalty fare by getting on the train anyway, shifting seats continually as passengers embarked and disembarked at various stops along the way. Indians perfect the art of “adjusting” from childhood, it being considered churlish not to do so in all sorts of spheres. I discovered a little bit of hypocrisy in myself, feeling peeved as I do when there is scant regard for seats and people almost squeeze into one’s lap in the Delhi Metro, but now feeling rather jolly to have others inconvenience themselves for us!

We chugged along, scenes of people defecating in the open, belying all sorts of claims about the success of the total sanitation campaign, slowly giving way to the soothing landscape of Rajasthani countryside, with its gentle hillocks and clustered shrubs. Sadly, there is no tiger jumping out of every – or any – bush, as routinely depicted in miniature paintings from the region. But it is still magical. Especially when listening to Mukhtiyar Ali’s Nit Kahir Manga from the inspired Kabir (Project) in Rajasthan CD: “Yaar Farid, yaar Farid, mera yaar milla deh, Nahin tah sooli chadna manzoor hain.”

Ajmer railway station was a heat haze, with a carpet of supine bodies, in deeper contemplation or more likely, in drowsy slumber. Another swarm of bodies was emerging from trains. All were in the city for Urs festivities at the dargah. A scooter ferried us straight to a ghee-laden sumptuous thali at Rasoi, topped by a soporific lassi matched only by the ones on offer in eateries surrounding the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Not certain a pilgrim’s progress ought to be consumed by such earthly delights, but as Khwaja Sahib is known to be particularly kind and forgiving, we weren’t too worried. Foregoing the lure of an afternoon nap, there was only time to drop off luggage and change into one’s Sunday best, before heading to the dargah.

It being the penultimate evening of Urs celebrations, a large crowd was expected. The scooter dropped us at a police chaunki, from which began a slow march through a warren of narrow gallis in the old city. Open drains on either side carried fetid sewage, just one feature of many that struck one as illustrative of two decades of India’s glorious growth having left little imprint – if any – on large swathes of small town and rural countryside. People from all walks of life, from beggars and the disabled, to the well-heeled and well-off, rubbed up alongside each other in increasingly narrow files as we approached the imposing front entrance of the dargah. A push and a surge from the crowd, and one found oneself deposited inside, quite miraculously.

I located a khadim, who was to take us into the inner sanctum of Khawaja Sahib’s mazaar to chadao a chadar, from a special entrance reserved only for them. Ali and I selected our respective offerings, from the many stalls inside the serene compound, piled high with baskets of rose petals and decorated with malas in all colours, shiny beads twinkling in the late afternoon sun. We weaved our way through old banyan trees that pepper the central courtyard, gingerly avoiding stepping on narrow gravestones as we did so. And then we stepped through beautiful marble lattice doors, tied with red threads of mysterious mannats fluttering in the gentle breeze.

Ajmer Sharif is a destination for so many: the wealthy and the deprived; the joyful and the desperate; the thankful and the desirous; seekers and non-seekers; Muslims and non-Muslims; believers and even non-believers; Indians and others; there could even be a Marxist djinn or two! If binaries exist only in interdependent duality with each other, this place is for beings and parts of beings that are beyond categories, truly, like its magnanimous resident Sufi and the mystical philosophy he propounded. In a country where given axes of identity – of religion, caste, ethnicity, gender and so on – increasingly define individuals and communities, stiflingly so, and their cynical use in political power games threaten its very foundations, it represents a refreshing escape and a beguiling possibility.

On this evening, the last in which anyone could enter the inner sanctum sanctorum before the actual day of Urs, the throng of people wishing to pay obeisance was breath-taking. I took a deep breath, before plunging into a crush that I was sure might result in a small byline somewhere, about a stampede resulting in a few hundreds meeting their maker prematurely! Cords cut into some parts of me, another part of my anatomy got pinched, while I tried with iron resolve to keep the chadar on my head and the roses in my hands. Something had to give, so it was the flowers.  But an inexorable wave of people pushed me into the silver-framed chamber, and literally onto my knees, for kadambosi and hazari at the heart of the shrine.  An eerie symmetry, for a belief that maintains the heart of a person is the abode of God. If spontaneous tears fell, they were bought on by the energy of the place, indefinable yet so real.

Stepping out and into the small latticed courtyards flanking the chamber on either side, I settled down in silence alongside men and women intensely absorbed in their prayers and their thoughts, as dusk fell. After maghrib, people suddenly became animated once more, mingling and throwing rose water with great gusto at the many darwazas.  The hot air quickly became suffused with the perfume, the fragrance rising from the heated marble underfoot in sultry waves. Soon, a perfect quarter-moon rose in a dark night sky. It was time for sama, the devotional qawaali singing that has come to define dargahs for many, and a powerful rendition of the profound poetry of Bulleh Shah, Sultan Bahu, Shah Hussain, Muhammad Qadiri, and other Sufi mystics. Smell and sound, two of the most potent senses, were fully engaged in transporting and rousing one to another world.

Near midnight, we reluctantly made our way out of the dargah. One would scarcely know the time from the carnival atmosphere in the old city, lit up like it was broad daylight. Huge kadhais of local delicacies steaming away, son halwa freshly prepared and disappearing just as fast. Little shops with their wares of clothes and keepsakes appealingly displayed. The last of the chadars being sent by Hyderabad and other princely states of old, crushed purple velvet and silky green taffeta, with the world and the moon and stars embossed on them in gota-patti, so large they were being ferried through the narrow gallies by twenty to thirty men. Accompanied by drum-beats and much fanfare, the procession would stop to be admired every so often, with passersby touching and kissing the chadar’s corners in respect.

The next day, the chatti or 6th day in the month of Rajab by the Islamic calendar, is the day of Urs, when Khawaja Sahib actually became one with his Beloved. Lakhs of people thronged the central courtyard, so there was hardly standing room. I engaged in conversation with my neighbours and answered mundane queries about who I was, where I came from, how I found myself in Ajmer Sharif. I was told by each one, “aapko Baba ka bulaya aaya, ise liye aap yahan ho”. The certitude with which this statement was delivered was as though I had actually received a gilt-bossed invitation in the mail! As a rational academic who struggles with such absolute belief, I could only marvel at it. It is a trite observation to state that such surrender to a larger deterministic pattern accounts for acceptance of a dire lot by many in India, but there could be some truth in it after all.

Khadims from afar, Pakistan and other neighbouring countries, joined the numerous khadims of Ajmer Sharif, each sending a tokri of rose petals into the mazaar, the only offerings allowed in on this day. These appeared to be moving in stately procession and disappearing into the grand chandeliered portico guarding the central shrine of their own accord, perched as they were on the heads of bearers swallowed by the crowd. Around noon, a sea of humanity rose as one for Qul, special prayers that mark the conclusion of Urs. In unison, duahs were offered, to Khawaja Sahib, to Ali and Hassan and Hussein. Near silence, followed by a rising cadence of a recitation, then a lull, a liturgy, punctuated by another wave of collective prayer, and so it went. And then it was over.  People turned to greet each other with offerings of mithai, I got a chadar of my own from the khadim and it was time to leave.

At the Ajmer railway station, from a reri selling broadsheets, magazines and a collection of books that tell their own story of what Indians like to read on train journeys, I picked up a gem of a hardcopy. It was the third edition, published by a local press, of The Mystical Philosophy of Khwaja Moinuddin Hasan Chishti, by Hazrat Dr. Zahurul Hassan Sharib, Gudri Shah Baba IV, who received a doctorate in political science before he turned to the path. As we pulled out of the junction, I came to a spread of a map, which resembled those in in-flight magazines, except this one listed the places that Khwaja Sahib visited in his lifetime (1135 – 1229 A.D.). The lyrical magical names of Falooja, Tabriz, Gail, Hamadan, Isfahan, Oosh, Badhakhshan, Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, Khurasan, Sewistan, Memna, Herat, Chist, Subzawar, Ghazni, Multan leapt off the page, as I contemplated the vastness of the journeys he made, and dreamt of places afar and worlds unseen.

I was physically returning to Delhi but the interior was elsewhere.

(Kaveri Gill lives in Delhi and is the happier for it.)