Bodh Gaya: A life of contrasts

As I wrote before (regarding Varanasi), past visitors to India often described it as a land of marked contrasts, at once beautiful and foul, spiritually enlightening and humanely heart-wrenching. The more time I spend in Bodh Gaya, the more I feel these extemes myself. Though it may just be the meanderings of my own heart: at times joyful and light, at others heavy with nostalgia and longing.

I learned today that 80% of the people of Bihar, the state I live in, are considered ‘villagers’, meaning that they live an essentially subsistence life in homes made of mud and grass, some having brick as support and cowdung-insulation. Reading A.L. Basham’s classic, “The Wonder that Was India” we see that this archetecture is essentially no different from that of India’s inhabitants three thousand years ago in the Indus valley (now Pakistan).

While I type away on my $1000 laptop, men thirty feet away stack bricks, two by two and four high (weighing 30-50 pounds in all) on a piece of cloth wrapped on their heads. They then carry them 50 yards or so and up three flights of stairs to the latest area of construction here at the vihar. There is a kind of beauty and peace in living in a place so lightly touched by the sands of time. And yet our romantic bubble is quickly burst as the sounds of the busy street peirce the monastery walls. Bodh Gaya is a tourist town, and giant buses now compete with noisy auto-rickshaws, tractors and motorcycles on the narrow, unmarked roads.

It used to be quieter, according to our program director. Back in the 70s it was just bicycle rickshaws and people on foot. The occasional jeep or bus would lumber through, but the roads were poor and bandit-ridden and Bodh Gaya was a destination for only the most committed travelers. Some time in the 70s the first auto-rickshaws arrived with their noise-and-air polluting 2-stroke engines. Today it is a constant caucophany of horns and engines; though at times the chirps of a bird, the playing of a singing bowl, the crowing of one of our roosters, or the washing of the vihar pots and pans can be heard, reminders that I’m not in London any more, but a land far, far away.

I try to write at the local internet café, but there it is even worse. Indians don’t seem to have that sense of ‘I keep quiet in my space and you keep quiet in yours’ that many Americans and more English tend to have in my experience. In this tiny café, which seats only 5 people, countless times an Indian would set his cell phone out, allowing it to ring in the loudest, most annoying ring-tone imaginable, and completely ignore it. If he (and it has always been men) does pick it up, he’ll procede to yell at the person on the other end as if he were trying to talk across the above-mentioned traffic. And if it’s not the noise there it is the mosquitoes, or the neighbors smoking us out with their coal stove, or the ‘mobile disco’ (a new feature this year) passing by, shaking the walls with its booming Indian techno.

Not all of India is like this, I am assured. Our Hindi teacher from Jaipur is every bit as rattled and annoyed. Other visitors and travelers likewise remark on the oddity that has become of Bodh Gaya in recent years. An oddity fueled, no doubt, by people like me.