Bangalore · Old Airport Road

The second walk was longer than the first, and stranger.

We began on Old Airport Road just as the light was going. Two small murtis (Vitthal and Rukmini, still in the marigold and red roses from the morning), a few of us in white, and a pair of cymbals one of us had brought without telling anyone.

The road did not behave like the trees of the first walk. It was a road of shopfronts and signage. A DBS branch, a small grocer, an auto stand. The noise was the noise of a city that does not pause. We thought, briefly, that the singing would be swallowed.

The footpath became a stage

It did not get swallowed. The opposite, in fact.

A woman on the footpath turned, and lifted her arms, and danced. Not theatrically. Not even for us. She lifted her arms toward the murtis as if she had been waiting for an excuse. A young woman beside her struck the cymbals and joined the kirtan as if she had always known the tune.

We stayed in front of the bank for a long minute. The traffic light cycled. A scooter slowed. The night shift at the shutter behind us looked out, then bowed, then went back to counting boxes. No one performed for anyone. Everyone just remembered, for a minute, what the evening was.

The gate, and what was inside

Further down the road, the procession came to a gate flanked by two tall painted flames: a small neighbourhood shrine off the main road, easy to miss in daylight. We sang under the flames. The anchor stood at the threshold with the murtis raised at the chest, and the song carried inside.

The temple was a small thing. A clock with a slow second hand. A lion at the door. Bells we did not see being rung but heard answer back. A plate of aarti came around. A woman in lavender pressed her palms together so tightly that her ring went pale. The garlands on the murtis were heavier now. Passers-by had added their own marigolds at the door.

We stayed inside long enough for the city to notice we had gone, and then we walked back out into it.

What I am beginning to see

The street is not the place we walk through on the way to the temple. The street is the temple.

The first walk taught us that the city is ready. The second walk taught us that the shopfronts are ready. The people who work inside them. The people who buy from them. The lit signs and the rolled-down shutters. There is no aesthetic in this Walking Temple that excludes commerce or noise or asphalt. The aesthetic, if there is one, is welcome.

Jai Shri Ram. Jai Vitthal. Jai Rukmini.