Bangalore · Old Airport Road

We began quietly, under the old trees. Twelve or so of us, in white, with two small murtis (Vitthal and Rukmini) garlanded that morning at home. We had not sent out an invitation. We had only agreed to walk.

The pace was slower than Bangalore's. At first that made us self-conscious; the city does not usually slow for anyone. But after a few minutes the singing settled us, and the slowness began to feel like the point.

What the street did

We had expected to be ignored. We were prepared to be ignored. Instead, a strange thing happened at almost every intersection.

A young woman on a scooter stopped and folded her hands while the light was still green.

An auto-rickshaw driver pulled to the side of the road, stepped out of his vehicle, and bowed, just once, deeply, before getting back in.

A man in office clothes saw us from across the street and crossed three lanes of traffic, on foot, between moving cars, to touch the edge of the wooden platform and then walk away without saying a word.

A shopkeeper came out of his shop holding a child, and lifted the child's small hand in namaste.

A family on the footpath, walking the other direction, all stopped together as if they had practised.

We had not asked for any of this. None of it was performed for us. It was performed, if that is the word, for God. We were only walking. They were the ones who remembered.

What I understood

The world is not as far from God as we sometimes fear.

The world is busy, but busyness is not refusal. Busyness is the forgetting. And forgetting, it turns out, wants very little in order to lift. A garlanded form passing through an evening street. A song repeated softly. A small band of people who look, for once, like they have nothing to sell.

I had thought of the walking as something we were doing for devotion. On this walk, I understood that the walking is also a quiet gift to the street, a permission slip for the hundreds of strangers who were, in fact, ready all along.

What next

We will walk again next week, and the week after. Other cities have already asked. I will not rush this. The form is simple enough that it can grow on its own, if we stay out of its way.

Jai Shri Ram. Jai Vitthal. Jai Rukmini.