The great pre-India pilgrimage

This time next week, I will be in India, likely enjoying thai chaadam with (dare I hoe) paruppu thogayal and veggies on the side. And I expect to be doing a circuit of temples while I’m there. The small middle-of-the-road Vinayakar kovil in Gandhinagar; the Padmanabha Swami temple almost next door to it ;and others that my mother will no doubt take me to.

But it looks like my pilgrimage has started off early. In the last couple of weeks I have been to two temples and one kutcheri, practically filling my cultural quota for several months. The Delaware Mahalakshmi temple and the Pittsburgh Sri Venkateswara temple. And the concert was by TM Krishna, in nearby Blue Bell, and I must say, it was brilliant. He has an amazing voice, and the range of notes that he hits, apparently effortlessly, is stunning. It was a long concert – 3 and a half hours, but I (shocking myself) managed to sit through the whole thing (more credit to the singer, I think, than any musical inclination on my part).

Of course, during the long journeys to these temples(5 hours to Pittbutgh!) I occupied myself with some of the second hand books I had acquired at various garage and library sales. I got done with the mysterious and slightly supernatural ‘Mistress of Spices’ by Chitra Divakaruni, and the very suspenseful and extremely supernatural (not to mention ghoulish- a good buildup to the X-Files movie coming out next month) ‘This Historian’ by Elisabeth Kostova.

‘The Mistress of Spices’ was a little sad, and little sweet, a little Rushdie-esque I thought, maybe a lighter version of Rushdie.

‘The Historian’ on the other hand was a decidedly heavier version of Dracula, with much of the myth of Dracula mixed with a lot of historical references. The settings in Eastern Europe come alive in each word, the spooky beauty, the sense of being a step behind (or is it in front of?) the monster through a beautiful maze builds in a crescendo.

Some time ago, I also found myself in unhappy circumstances (into the details of which I will not go), sitting and drowning my sorrows in Barnes and Noble, over Diana Wynn Jones’s ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’. The book (not about a dog, as I had for some reason expected), a lightly written fantasy, with a toehold (but an important one, to the plot) in the real world, successfully lifted my out of the doldrums, so that I was later able to appreciate Ann Taylor Loft’s collection that had just come out.

Anyway, I now have to pick a book to carry on the plane. I wish now, that I had saved ‘The Historian’ for that. At 650 pages it would have lasted me the whole way layovers and all. Now I have to depend on the In-flight entertainment, of which I have no expectation (what are the chances they’ll be playing ‘Sex and the City’?)