APR-C-6
LAUNCH THE DHARAMSALA
MEDICAL MISSION,
MOVING OUT FROM THE HOTEL BAGSU
April 21, 2002
While others shopped, I actually spent a couple of unassisted hours in an Internet Café in MacLeod Gunj in going through my GWUMC account, and not only read and responded to my notes with which there were several urgent messages, but I may even have accomplished the viral disinfections of the WM/97 macro virus picked up from the Omni Business Center machine on my disc onto which I had stored the Apr-C-2 description of my unanticipated overnight in the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville. It was not easy, and took several goes at re-booting and “read only” and saving it to another format on another drive, but it finally came back disinfected after running it through their virus scan.
I then sent out the “attached” five chapters of the arrival story at the Dharamsala set-up point, toward which we proceed after lunch at the Hotel Bhagsu, which is at 32* 14.06 N, 076* 19.37 E, 258 miles almost due north of Delhi on bearing 168* I am sending out the first of my postcards and serial letters 2 and 3 from this Hotel, to which I will be returning in ten days’ time. After lunch today, we proceed to the Sherboling Monastery where we are setting up the clinic and the “pharmacy" from the stock of the four boxes that I had brought along so far from the stock standing in my vestibule for the last three weeks, to service the people of Dharamsala, whatever the Delhi Customs agents seem to think about the legality of importing freebies.
Things seem to be getting a lot further apart, and harder to find in the dusty heat of this end of the dry season early summer stultifying ride. Something was acting up in the brakes as we came down the mountain from MacLeod Gunj, and Santosh stopped multiple times to check the brakes. On one of these stops, we pulled into a service station and saw the attendant there, while I had spotted something else. There, in the hot haze of afternoon heat, a pyre was crackling with a high flying flame from a rick of logs built in a rectangle on the river bank between four iron posts. I recognized immediately what this most likely would be and wandered up the road to pass the site and carefully take a few photos from the shade. I then saw a Sudra, holy man in his saffron minimal garments and turban sitting at the sideof the fire, back from the intense heat, while waiting for the rick of burning logs to collapse into a bed of glowing coals. Between the fire and the low-water level river, lay an oblong package looking like a large Christmas package, wrapped up in sparkling tinsel paper, with bows around it. I was looking at a ghat, and was just at the right time for the funeral pyre to accept its package in the cremation of the dead body so that the ashes could be scattered into the stream. Only a short ways downstream were a few boys playing and a couple of women casually pounding clothes on rocks. At least further downstream yet in the Gangetic Plain, there is a population of very overfed turtles who subsist in these holy waters in picking up the morsels that are still of such a size to be nourishing—even cooked rare.
By the time that the pyre had burned down to coals and was ready for the minimum ceremony, the brakes had cooled and we went off again, with the driver still worried, as he pumped the brakes and stepped out on foot to inspect them again for heat or smoke. They sounded and worked as well as they always did with Santush coming down the mountain on his brake foot. So, I did not see the moment of emolation, but then the others did not even see what they were looking at directly.
So, I gave my little preliminary lecture on the culture of the Hindus and the Buddhists and some burial practices and what was called sacred. I explained that they had to have respect for items that seem like natural parts of the environment, but are sacred to these people. Like the “Red Right Returning" rules on leaving sacred objects on the left hand side of the object, exposing only one’s right hand side to it, ringing around any Mani Walls, Mani Stones or any object to be venerated and how respect should be paid to people, animals and objects they venerated.
Yoshi, in rather studious Japanese fashion, for example, using his digital still and movie cameras in taking pictures of the passing road scene, was puzzled, and finally asked “These signs I see everywhere regarding STD’s—what services are offered in those places?” To a medical student, STD will forever mean “Sexually Transmitted Disease,” whereas here it simply means “Standard Trunk Dialing”—or, as any hole in the wall kiosk is advertising “Pay Phone available.”
We arrived at Sherboling at dark with just enough light on the high range of the Dhaulidar in the surrounding ring of mountains to see their size behind the large monastery built in this pine-tree studded foothills retreat. Each of the pines seemed to be scored in a herringbone pattern with a conical collecting cup beneath the slashes through the bark for the collection of the resin dripping down---“turpentine” collection of pine pitch. The collection method looked exactly like the rubber tree tapping of the plantations I had seen in Mont Kitanglad in Mindanao a month ago.
We had dinner in the Guest House and I separated them into teams for the first clinic day tomorrow and gave a short orientation. The last of our student joiners came to the Guest Hose, having lagged a day behind us, coming in exhausted from the Chandrigarh train and pick up by Hem who went to get her by the other Mahindra jeep. She was so wiped out that she wanted to go straight to bed and ”crash” skipping dinner. Her name is Sabrina, an oriental senior medical student from UCI in Irvine California, going into a transitional year in Irvine and then seeking an emergency medicine residency.
I, too, am rather groggy. So much so that I could not stay awake to finish or spell check this chapter, and when I tried to do so, I would type in meaningless sentences, with a string of words not related, with odd ones stuck in here like “clarinet.” Even the Spell checker at random could not produce a better misty stream of consciousness on its own!