February 20, 1993: Somewhere in Southern India

I haven't slept for the past 28 hours. Or to be more precise, I haven't slept in a horizontal position for the past 28 hours. Last night around 7 pm we started gathering in front of the stage. All the non-Indians, a disproportionate number of which are French or German, started filling in the area in front of the stage, while the Indian people stayed at the back. I don't recall anyone enforcing this seating apartheid. Maybe it's an unspoken rule. Many of the Europeans I've met here own something similar to time shares at the Ashram, and maybe with that comes certain perks. If so, I was enjoying perks by association. There weren't any chairs; everyone sat on the ground, and we were packed in like proverbial sardines. After ten hours the profuse sweat of 3000 or so people produced an olfactory event that wasn't part of the official proceedings. We smelled like a Kafkaesque can of sardines.

But I'm jumping ahead. Between 7 pm and 5 am, in addition to sweating profusely and starting to hallucinate from fatigue, heat and an electrolyte imbalance, we were treated to several performances. First there was someone from the movie industry (not Bollywood, this was obviously its poorer cousin), who showed us how he produced various sound effects. This included using a saw and a piece of wire to simulate the sound of a violin (not a Stradivarius, but its poorer cousin), and rattling a thin sheet of tin while playing scratchy background music to produce the sound of a thunderstorm (not an August thunderstorm that causes the mighty oak to shiver in its roots, but its poorer cousin). This went on for close to two hours. If he had been on The Gong Show he would have lasted perhaps ten seconds. Then there was some Indian dancing, then devotional chanting which sounded more like an Indian version of Led Zeppelin.

During the prenatal show the Swami's aides went around asking people to donate handkerchiefs. Finally, at around 5 am, the Swami was accompanied on stage by a gaggle of attendants. He was kind of doubled over (maybe thirded over) and moaning. Occasionally he would look up and bravely smile. He kept wiping his mouth with the donated hankerchiefs, after which he would throw them, rather contemptuously I thought, on the stage. (Being the skeptic that I am, I went up on stage afterwards and inspected the hankerchiefs. The spots on them looked too pink to me to be real blood, but perhaps divine beings have different blood chemistry than humans.) The Swami's interpreter, a kindly looking man who is a judge from Sri Lanka, told the crowd that the Swami was going through this horrendously painful process for us, that by martyring himself all those present would have their problems solved. The woman beside me told me that watching a lingam birthing would wipe out all one's bad karma and ensure 2500 years of good fortune. No wonder the ceremony had attracted such a crowd.

After a protracted period of the Swami moaning in pain and the crowd going into a frenzy of clapping every time the interpreter announced how all this was being done for our benefit, the Swami pulled a hankerchief from his sleeve, wiped his forehead and his mouth, then started doing what a cat does when it's about to spit up a hairball. Then out from the Swami's mouth came a little round thing that looked like a marble. It seemed most unphallic-like to me, but the crowd went wild. This was repeated five more times, each lingam birth preceded by the Swami pulling a hankerchief from his sleeve and wiping his forehead and his mouth. The Swami, who had had a veritable litter of linga, was then helped off the stage, looking like he could barely walk. People were completely buzzed, exclaiming over the miracle they had just witnessed. I kept my mouth shut. The crowd might have turned ugly if anyone had expressed doubts about what had taken place. Sleep deprivation combined with sensory overload and the need to believe in 2500 years of good fortune can cause people to do strange things.

I left the ashram the following day. Before departing, there was a ceremony where two people renounced the worldly life and entered the priesthood. They had to drink a mixture of cow's milk, curd, ghee, urine and feces to purify themselves.

I've decided the religious life just isn't for me.

February 19, 1993: Somewhere in Southern India

I've finally made it to the Swami Pemananda Ashram for the linga-birthing ceremony. Last night I slept outside, sharing a mosquito net under the stars with another woman. Apparently there were more than stars overhead, for she told me the next morning that she had seen a UFO. On overhearing this, another woman remarked “there are lots of them around here.” I must be looking at the wrong part of the sky. Teri told me that she's been aboard a UFO, and that a club exists where other people who have been so privileged meet to discuss their experiences. She asked me if I had seen the UFO that passed overhead about ten minutes ago. No, I must have been looking at the wrong part of the sky again. There was some static from the loudspeaker. Those are the aliens sending signals, she said.

I did see something weird here though. This morning a guy rolled his eyeballs back into his head during meditation. He kept his eyes half-open and you could only see the whites of them. It looked like an awesome special effect from a horror movie.

Nobody seems to find it strange that we're here to witness a man birthing phallic symbols of the god Shiva through his mouth. The mother-to-be (the Swami) put in an appearance this morning. He looks like a fat Diana Ross, with a very chubby but pretty face. He gave birth to his first lingum when he was 17. He didn't know what it was, and it disappeared down the toilet. (I'm just as confused. Obviously, these linga are prone to emerge from whatever bodily orifice happens to be handy.) He also gives Sai Baba a run for his money, by materializing robes out of ether, gold statues out of flowers, and yes, that act that is so ubiquitous amongst India sages, Rolex watches out of ashes.

Why I don't consider -16 degrees (Celsius) to be too much of a hardship

Last Thursday, for the first time since I moved here in 1993, I went skating on Lake Ontario. A meteorological trinity has created divine skating conditions this month: there's no snow, we've had lots of cold days and nights, and last week - just to uphold weather's reputation for being contrary - it rained, which, when the temperature dropped again, created a smooth surface of ice. I skated way way out, almost to the shore of Wolfe Island, now covered in windmills. Or are they ferocious giants? (I'm inspired to make another attempt at reading Don Quixote!) I skated past a side of the Kingston Penitentiary that I have never seen, and that the inmates will likely never see. (I'm free!) I skated over fish entombed in the thick ice. (I'm alive!) I skated past the opulent backyards of waterfront houses. (I don't have to sell my first born to pay my property taxes!) I skated towards dusk, towards the wind in the willows, towards the water treatment plant, towards nowhere. (I don't have a plan!)

Actually, I do have a plan. When hell freezes over, I'll going to be there with my skates.

The cold

At 6:40 am it was -16 degrees and the wind chill was -26. Whenever I'm tempted to complain about the cold I do, but I also think of the months of -60 and -70 degree temperatures that John Hornby endured on his crazy trips to the Arctic in the early 1900s. I call them crazy, because while I can maybe understand someone undergoing severe but temporary hardship to get a first-hand look at that description-defying Northern landscape, I can't understand why someone would willingly go back a second time. And a third time. And a fourth time...

It wasn't just the cold. The lifestyle was brutal. Leg-hold traps, kicking dogs, punching dogs, killing dogs, Inuit starving, having to eat animals that were mangy and diseased to survive. On his last trip to the North, Hornby took his young cousin with him. (Wikipedia says Edgar Christian was 18 years old, but I thought I remember reading in The Legend of John Hornby that he was in his early twenties. Young anyways.) Along the way another young man wordlessly joined them. John Hornby had spent one winter in the Arctic without taking masses of supplies with him, so perhaps he felt invincible. He didn't seem to be in a hurry to get to where they planned to spend the winter, and because of that, they missed the caribou migration. BIG MISTAKE #1. BIG MISTAKE #2 was not taking any dogs with them. He had decided not to because dogs require too much food, but on the other hand, they can also be a source of food, or transport. So when the three men ran out of food, they had no way out.

Edgar Christian kept a journal, but he was not a poetic man. Maybe he preferred not to romanticize the North. There was no going down in a last blaze of glorious psychelic lights. There was no prescient howling of wolves. There was no philosophical discussion on the meaning of life. There was no soul-searching or soul-finding.

What there was was sickness. The need to go out and hunt in -70 degree temperatures, with no insulating layer of fat left on the body. The disappointment and growing desperation of not catching anything. Frostbite. The occasional small animal, itself diseased and starving, to provide enough sustenance for a few more days of misery. John Hornby finally facing reality and writing his will. The laconic young man remaining laconic until the bitter end. Edgar wrapping John and the other man in blankets and stacking them outside the cabin, a cord of corpses. Edgar waiting for the fire to go out, and the embers to cool. Edgar putting his journal and John Hornby's will in the stove (where, presumably, they would have some protection from the elements, since cabins in the North didn't seem to last all that long). Edgar wrapping himself in a red Hudson's Bay blanket, and lying down for eternal sleep on the bed made by John Hornby.

And always the cold. That bitter brutal cold.