The Footstep Of U-God

As the bus from Delhi to Haridwar rumbled through a drizzly day on the aesthetically deprived industrial villages of the western end of the Ganges plain, I noticed that something was...different. For some reason I didn't want to punch the Indian person taking an uninvited nap on my shoulder right in the face. This, no doubt, was because I actually know and am traveling with the Indian in question: the curiously-named Girlface Buddha. Girlface is on vacation from her job for a while and has foolishly chosen to squander it helping me drive buffaloes to the ends of the Earth.

Our objective is to reach a number of the remote, highly sacred temples tucked hundreds of kilometers deep into the very core of the Himalayan mountains, where she will earn spiritual merit and I will earn the right to verbally abuse cows at altitudes so high they have to wear pressurizing capsules on their udders. Our first stop, naturally, was Haridwar, the gateway to the Himalayas. According to Hindu geography (which is practically a field in its own right), Haridwar is the city where the Ganges river definitively emerges from the mountains and pours into its civilization-sustaining course across the plains. They've more or less got this much right. Standing on an elevated point in Haridwar you look one way and there ain't no hills; look the other way and there are hills aplenty leading to a far-off crest of loftily-draped snow on the horizon.

Just a month ago, Haridwar hosted the Kumbh Mela festival, which is held here every twelve years. This is the Hindu festival to end all festivals; a fete of such collossal scope that pretty much every time it is held (it rotates every three years between four sacred riverside cities) it breaks its own record for being the largest gathering of human beings ever assembled. This ain't your grandmother's churhc Revival. We are talking about a mass of humanity practically guaranteed to reach into 8 figures, including thousands of India's most hardcore saddhus, who especially love these fairs and are also completely fucking insane. The most famous group are the Naga Saddhus, who are best known for being dreadlocked, ash-covered, and naked, but are also remarkable for how given they are to forming dancing, naked throngs in the streets. Even now Haridwar is still recuperating from the millions. Weeks later, many of the enormous tent cities are still standing and those that have been torn down leave a skeleton of winding wooden fences that must have demarcated the Queue From Hell.

Everything in Haridwar converges on the Hari-ki-pari ghat, the "Footstep of God", the precise stretch where Ganges makes its quantum leap from being a wild mountain river to being a a suitable watercourse to settle along and get flooded by annually. It's called the Footprint of God because Vishnu himself tromped mightily here, an event commemorated -following typical Hindu logic- by a colossal statue of Shiva. Here the Ganges is split artificially into a series of narrow but swift canals criss-crossed by slender man-made islands and a tangle of red steel bridges. It has the fascinatingly haphazard yet efficient appearance of a downtown designed in a burst of genius while playing SimCity drunk.("fffuck I forqgot to build annyy sewrers...fkuc it, it;s INdia.")

Though there are many ghats along the river, naturally everyone comes together on the Hari-ka-pari. The level of activity here is captivating. I spent hours wandering around the various islands scoping out the numerous somber rituals and delighted splashfights taking place among a fabulous array of obscure and uniquely-dressed peasant castes from all over the country. It culminated in a clamorous dusk ceremony where Ganga herself was worshiped by the swirling of torches and a proliferation of floating leaf-lamps being set adrift in the river. Absurd men in almost parodic blue uniforms goaded the gathered masses to chant and perform an Indianized (read: hilariously botched, misunderstood, and raucously uncoordinated) attempt at the Mexican Wave.

After catching up with Girlface for about the eight millionth time and checking on her progress at rendering obeisances to more deities than you can shake a giant stack of bells at, I began to think that departing from my time-proven practice of traveling rogue and alone might be crimping my style. Ghostface Buddha on the road, you may have noticed, is hardly a spokesman for the principle of compromise. When I found her she was, as I expected, holding a small packet of temple-blessed sugar balls for me to receive Lord Ganesh's gift of tooth decay with. I rarely ask Girlface what she's doing at these places anymore. When I do, I'll ask something like "Why are you putting a cloth on that bush?" and she'll merrily respond something completely unhelpful like "Oh! It's a sari for the tree!" However, I must admit I paid little attention to the offering she had procured because I spent the entire 3-mile walk back to our hotel fixated on her shuffling alongside me in a most appealingly Ganges-drenced sari. Verily, something about this trip is going to be...different.