in-sanity: A day full of wonders...

Wow! What a day! Don't even know where to start. My head is spinning with today's experiences. Interview with the Lama, photographer to 37 baby monks and a Hindu cremation. Add on my modes of transport: micro and tempo and a random encounter with a Nepali woman who lived in Cyprus for 4 years. I am completely overexcited! Electricity is off again and I am sitting here in pitch black wondering where to start and what to leave out and still do justice to the day.

Interview with a Lama

We were an hour late for the Lama. My western sensibilities were firing on all cylinders and I was mortified. The Lama was nonplussed. Lama Jamyang is a rotund man in his 50s with scalloped lips and sparkling brown eyes underlining his burgundy woolly hat. Accompanying him was Palden, a youn .

.monk who greeted us at reception.

At the beginning of the interview I was awestruck. My mind kept hyperventilating, disbelieving that I was actually sitting cross-legged in the temple, ghee lamps casting flickering shadows and illuminating the beautiful green coloured wall paintings, whilst I was interviewing a Lama about Death. I had to harshly mentally pinch myself to focus.

Lama Jamyang started by the key tenement of Budhism. You do good in this life, both in action and in intention and through karma merit you are reborn in auspicious circumstances.You do bad and you are born in misery and quite likely not even as a human. He talked about the different types of being, one of which, the Hungry Ghosts fascinated me. These beings, mostly unseen to us humans, were greedy misers in their human lives and now they exists as ghosts that suffer perpetual hunger. They either can't get food despite their extreme hunger or when they get it they are unable to eat it. Their throat is as thin as a horse hair and their belly enormous. A hungry ghost's misery can only end once its specific term, which is based on its karma, has been fulfilled.

Flippantly I am pondering that on some days I seem to exist in the hungry ghost realm…except that my throat accommodates large quantities that my belly can't fit!

The Lama was talking of the "mind" a lot. I asked him where is his mind is located in his body. He unhesitatingly pointed to his chest. I told him that in the West we point to our heads. We concluded that “mind” in Buddhism is more or less the equivalent of the soul. This led us to the stages that we go through after death. Here's what he said:

The first 3 days after you die you are unconscious and completely unaware of anything. "Hmm...no shit Sherlock, you are dead!". Thankfully I kept my mouth shut and found out that that your consciousness returns after the 3 days. A period of bewilderment, sadness, confusion, fear and loss follows. At this stage you stll have a “mind body’ that enables you to use all your senses as if you are alive. But alas, you find that whilst you can talk to people and can touch, taste and smell, no one can see or hear you. You discover that you cast no shadow in the sun and leave no footprints in the sand. Eventually you realise that you are dead.

At that point some signs appear to you. One of them is a six coloured rainbow. Each colour corresponds to a different level of existence: Gods, Human, Hungry Ghosts,Animals. Hell... Your choice of colour determines your next incarnation and your choice of colour is highly dependent on your karma, the merit you built in this life.

Note to readers: Better choose to see the mixed colour, being the human one, or you might find yourselves in an undesirable situation.

In the 49 days that it takes for the dead to be reincarnated, we can help them by making puja. Puja is prayers and offerings. Some of these prayers are instructions to the dead on how to find their way and make the right choices. Some are prayers to absolve and cleanse and help the soul along. Not an altogether alien concept in the Greek Orthodox religion either.

Half an hour into the interview I knew more about Buddhist beliefs on death but still had no stories. On a personal level I was intrigued and wanted to know more about Buddhist death beliefs and practices. But I also wanted stories. My assignment here is to record oral histories and as any self-respecting, task-focused, neurotic person can understand, re-writing the principles of Buddhism does not fulfill my task.

Forty minutes in and my inability to form better questions that would unlock the stories the Lama must have inside him was beginning to frustrate me. And I could sense his puzzlement at my repeating questions such as: " So, do you have any hungry ghosts stories to tell me?". Way to go with all my years of interviewing experience! At that point the temple keeper wanted to shut up shop for the day and I was unceremoniously dismissed with the promise of another appointment tomorrow.

Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows...

Photographer to baby monks

Trying not to allow my disappointment to get the better of me and wondering what to do with the rest of my day, I walked with Mingmar to the stupa. As we turned the corner I caught sight of the tail end of a row of tiny figures in burgundy robes entering the stupa grounds. We rushed to see them and found ourselves following a long line of baby monks. They walked a single file in descending height order and ranged from 5 to 15 years of age. Like a groupie, I doggedly followed them asking for their teacher's permission to take photos. This burly man would have been at home in any Hollywood movie as the sports coach. Encouraging, cajoling and bullying, he kept them circumnavigating the stupa, reminding them to hold their hands in prayer and telling them when to stop in time to avoid collisions . He told us that the baby monks were ordained just this morning and they were on their way to a monastery in Benares (Varanasi) tonight.

I trailed behind them like an overexcited poodle, taking photos and watching their 3 teachers kindly re-arranging their continually dishevelled robes and showing them how and when to bow to the ground. In straight lines, facing the mighty stupa, some of the littlest ones had furrowed eyebrows, trembling lips and big liquid eyes ready to spill down their cheeks. Their freshly shaved heads, their inability to keep their cloaks wrapped around them in the proper way and their clear bewilderment made me want to hug each and every one of them and tell them that it- will- be -ok.

I am not sure how I wormed my way into being their photographer. There were certainly other foreigners around with big lens cameras. Yet, the teachers asked me if I could take photos of the baby monks. Overjoyed I asked the baby monks to stand in front of the stupa one by one. I was feeling a little self conscious and marginally ridiculous with my tiny portable Cannon, compared to the seriously professional big phallic lenses of some of the tourists. After the first couple of photos I realised that I was snapping against the sun. I was dismayed! I changed the angle I was shooting from, went down on my knees pretending I knew exactly what I was doing and... the good sun obliged by hiding behind a cloud! Phew! Emboldened, I imagined how a good photographer would behave and focusing on the baby monks, I got through 37 individual photos and a number of group ones on the steps on the stupa, in the process shooing away politely or bullying anyone who got in the way, whilst the big- lens wallas looked on perplexed. I was the baby monks official photographer!

When we were done with the photo shoot, I rushed to a photo shop nearby and bargained the man into a small discount in the name of Buddhism. Shameless I know. Soon I had 100 photo prints which I handed to the baby monk’s teachers for the baby monks' s families.

May their journey to Benares and their new life be auspicious and blessed.

At the ghats

Mingmar and I went to Pashupatinath, the sacred Hindu temple and its burning ghats. The heavy barbecue stench alerted us to the fact that there were many cremations in process from some distance away.

We took a walk around and watched the fires burning and obliged paying 100 rupees to the photo-saddhus, the pretend holy men that pose for hapless tourists at the exchange of some dosh. Eventually we focused on a family preparing to cremate their beloved father, husband and brother.

Mingmar gasped when the cloth covering the body fell to reveal the head of a middle aged man. She said that she'sd never seen a Hindu cremation before. I unkindly said: "Well that's lucky then, we are sitting though all of it".

The body was covered by a cloth with writing on it. Soon it was piled with layers of silk scarves, followed by garlands of marigold. The women covered their heads in whilte scarves and wailed a universal sound of grief and despair. A little further, a pile of wood logs and water -soaked reed matting was neatly waiting for the corpse.

In the meantime, another family brought another corpse which was left on the ghat covered in a yellow cloth waiting for its turn.

The wind was bringing over heavy wafts of smoke saturated with molecules from the burning dead. The water was laden with floating debris from the pyres and ghat urchins were wading around the river banks looking for the money that relatives put on the corpses and in the clay pots that they float down the river.

The first body was moved onto the wood and people circled around it, washing their hands over it with water from a sacred fountain on the ghat. The women moved away, dragging with them the dead man's wife whose feet refuse to obey the tradition of leaving the men to complete the cremation.

Surreally, through all this mayhem, a little girl in a dirty frilly pink dress and a skipping rope, kept appearing out of nowhere along the ghat, oblivious to the dead bodies and the grief. Thinking of my talk with the Lama earlier in the morning and doubting my eyes, I took photos of her to make sure that she was indeed real.

The tempo

Another mode of transport today. The tempo! A tin truck-like tricycle, that like the micro, collects people off the street, packs them in sardine-like and deposits them off wherever they need to. Advantage of the tempo: no maniacally shouting, door-jerking conductor. Disadvantage: a tendency of the vehicle to lean over the side with the most passengers, making it even more precarious than I imagined at first sight.

A small world

On my way home (amazing how in two days, a concrete floor, cold, dishevelled house can become home) in the micro a woman asked me where I come from. I said Greece, too tired to try and explain what and where Cyprus is. "Greece? Like near Cyprus?” came the response that floored me into attention. Amazingly, this Nepali woman in a random micro in Kathmandu, spent 4 years in Limassol working for a Cypriot family. She kept saying random Greek words ranging from stafili (grapes) to ti kanis mana mou (how are you my dear) and laughing hysterically.