Pilgrimage to Vindhyachal

On Thursday, when we five, Christian and Martine, Krishna, Roxanne and I



were together in Benares, we rented a taxi and went to Vindhyachal for a day. Our intention was to visit the central temple first, and then each of the three outlying ones that form an equilateral triangle around it.

Luckily for us, Krishna's family makes a yearly pilgrimage there, so he'd known the pandit of the central temple since childhood. We were warmly welcomed and served tea, and we had the privilege of using the pandit's immaculate toilet, a real rarity in that part of the world. Then, as we sat comfortably in his three-sided sitting room that opens onto the pathway to the temple, we were suddenly joined by seven gentlemen who looked like college professors to me. Since we were already seated in the sofa and chairs, they pulled up some of those plastic garden chairs you see everywhere in India. Then, without saying a word, they began to chant. The chant filled the space and resonanted so deeply that I felt like it rearranged my cells somehow or jiggled my molecules. Then, as abruptly as they came, they left.

The pandit explained that they were Brahmins who came once a week. We were most fortunate to have been there at just that moment. The Brahmins had recited a vedic hymn to peace .

Visits to the three temples on the vertices of the triangle followed. At Kalikoh, the monkeys interested me most.

At the next temple, it was Roxanne's friend, Dinesh Baba, one of the Aghori babas she interviewed for her dissertation.



I thought the last temple, Tarapeeth, had the best Nandi, the white bull who guards Shiva's temples.


And here is the mahant of Tarapeeth:

Really, the day at Vindhyachal deserves three or four entries. I didn't even mention the Hanuman Baba!