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Camera Obscura February 4, 2013

artist’s rendering

Morning found us in the Virupaksha temple, following an elephant.  He’d been let in to the temple to celebrate Makar Sankranthi, and was making his obeisances to the god.  After a time, he retreated into the back of the courtyard, and disappeared from view.  We watched for a moment, and then decided to hop a few pilgrim guiderails and follow him.  To accept science requires a certain degree of belief in natural law: that phenomena are mostly linear, and small changes in initial conditions will at least typically come out in the wash.  So, it is an article of faith for me that, despite our complete inability to find this elephant in any part of the temple, the fact that the temple had only two gates large enough for an elephant, and the intrinsic difficulty of misplacing an elephant, he really was in there somewhere.

At any rate, we proceeded into the back of the temple, where we found a dark room with a bright square of morning sunlight, cleft by a hanging, tapering shadow, tipped with little horns.  Knowing that things look like the shadows they cast, I searched vainly and repeatedly for some pendant stone, with the all too familiar persistence which comes of refusing to believe the brute fact of failure or to search for its modus tollens implications, but merely assuming that there must have been some small, unnoticed mistake, and trying again.  Slowly, it dawned on me that the it was not coming from inside the room at all, and that moreover the horns on the tip were tremendously familiar (see the temple Gopuram illustrated above).

At any rate, the mid-morning sun found us walking along the edge of banana fields, a young rottweiler joining us for the trip, and by turns leading the way.  At the road, we left him with a few young women he seemed to know, and struck out past a colonnaded temple, past a few hundred men washing their bodies, and women washing their hair, and around the bend in the river pictured above, where we found a shady temple up in the rocks, and my friend fell asleep.

False color – original obliterated by a low resolution black and white scan

While he napped, I took in the temple, the throngs of bathers, the bend in the river, and eventually the image on the boulder in front of me, Vishnu fast asleep on Shesha.  My pen was of little use in sketching the scene from my hillside temple (see above), but was also interrupted first by an adventurous little boy, and later by a few bored young men.  Fortunately, it was of far more use in answering the question ‘where are you from?’, which is hard enough on my best days, and harder still when my language collides with the sheer irrelevance of knowing where countries with only two crore of inhabitants are to be found.

Eventually, my friend got up, and we made our way further along the river, past the ruins of an immense causeway, up along a gently sloping smooth stone expanse.  There was a coconut-laden autorickshaw trying to push-start up this stone, and I joined a group of young men trying to get it up to speed along the weather-beaten stone.  Scrabbling for traction on the smooth stone, hoping that the driver would hit the brakes if he started to slip backwards, brought a perversely pleasant mixture of pride, dull fear, and irritation.  This is perhaps not how the wise take their leisure.

artist’s rendering

From there, we made our way up a hillside, piling our backpacks as a step-ladder to negotiate the last smooth stone face, and taking in the improbable boulders, scatted across the hilltop.  My friend set up in the shade of one of them to write a few letters, and I in the bright sunlight to try to capture the incredible plain below.  I suppose it’s the glaciers that leave these outcroppings far above the surrounding plains, but the combination of the land and the river below, the hills in the distance, and the scattered temples the Vijanagara empire had left behind, some ruined and some still in use, was majestic.  To capture the burning sun, the magnificent view, and the moment of deciding what to sunburn, as your clothes can’t cover everything, might be beyond anyone’s capacity to sketch.  Perhaps if you’ve felt it (the great wall is recommended for this purpose, but any impromptu ridge-hike in summer would probably do), you will remember.  As for my sketch, I got as far as this:

When we saw a few men and a boy making their way up the rocks towards us.  A pair of central London used-clothing dealers would later suggest to me that these low hills are in fact filled with brigands, but as it was we helped what seemed to be a family up the last purchaseless slope, and they mostly settled in to talk to my friend about his experience of America, while one, a drawing teacher by trade, set out show me how to draw the scene (see first drawing), before eventually realizing the scale of what I wanted to do, and the fact that I didn’t have a pencil, and adopting an air of good-natured resignation.  Eventually, we made our way back down the slope together, and the family gave us first sweet pancakes like flattened PBJ, then puffed rice, and finally dry roti with some sort of curry powder for flavor and water to mix it with.  Immensely satisfied, we parted ways, they seemingly headed back home, we to some world heritage temple which we were by then too tired from walking and climbing in full sunlight for hours to care too much about one way or another.

They say Hampi has a meditative and tranquil air about it, the deserted capital of a vanished empire both a monument of human potential, and memento mori.  They evidently don’t happen to choose to be there for the Makar Sankranthi, when (whether or not one believes the estimate that the city once again holds the half million souls it once accustomed) it teems with bathers, hair washers and temple-visitors: families, groups of men on vacation, american tourist delegations and an airport-style oversized electric golf-cart full of catholic nuns.

Perhaps, in another lifetime, I would sit on the top of that hill for hours, drink in the hills, the meandering river, the scores of stone buildings laid down twenty generations since.  Perhaps the wind and the sun would be like the hills above Termas de Cauquenes, or the Wadi Qelt, never too much further than the closing of my eyes.  But, I have another image in its place, no less sharp, no less distinct, and autographed to boot!