Hampi
Perhaps this is where the India of our collective imagination and an unimaginable India meet. A mix of African bush, Jurassic granite, banana palms and terraced rice paddies create a fabric of precarious cultivation and timeless ecology. There is a river which draws an uncertain line through all of this, and that is where the elephant gets its bath alongside families doing their ablutions and laundry every morning at sunrise.
The sun is bright, and blinds throughout the day, never any smaller than your fist at arms length, it rises full strength while the stars and moon still struggle to shine. The roads are dusty and narrow, sloping down into irrigation canals along family farms. The small villages, outside of the tourist center, feel much further than the few kilometers that separate them from the bus depot full of tour buses and souvenirs. In town, like most along the travelling track, rickshaw drivers promise good deals and a generous friend with a guesthouse, shop-owners spit their broken stream of English, everybody is a tour guide. Flies attempt to land in the corner of your mouths, at the edge of eyes, buzz just behind your ear.
Ruins are scattered throughout the town and beyond, one cannot walk up over a small hill without seeing the crooked temples rising up out of rice paddies or tucked into the shadows of rock quarries and boulder pile mountains. Some especially old structures, although nothing about their appearance seems to distinguish them from the other stone and mud buildings, are flagged by rusty sign posts with equal parts Hindi/English which explain the imprecise fines imposed on those who would dare desecrate, offend or defile these hewn relics.
Pilgrims still visit the hindu temples, especially the larger and better preserved ones, and they bring drums and castanets and cymbals which echo in the open halls. Men dance in circles while women sit and point and laugh, and monkeys jump from column to statue to stone frieze. Orange and red and yellow pigment is rubbed on the temple’s gods and on the pilgrims faces alike. It feels like a celebration, certainly, but the activity is serious and even efficient as trains of bare feet rush from bus to temple and from idol to idol with bows and devotional whispers.
