The overcast sky, the wild wind and the long road seemed akin to a
visual metaphor of the storm that had raged inside my mind since few days. It was nine in the morning and I was in IIT Guwahati, driving past a middle-aged woman, with dark and sturdy calves smeared in mud, bent over a bed of frail-looking yellow flowers that lined the campus
road, plucking weeds and dropping them into the bamboo basket strapped on her
back. Leaving behind a large, tree-lined pond and the morning rush of students cycling
to their classes, I was soon out of the IIT campus.
My jethai (my mother’s
elder sister) had accompanied me, but we drove in a secretly grateful companionable
silence. The road was empty apart from a herd of goats that sat authoritatively
right in the middle of it. I rolled down the windows to let the cold wind beat against
my face and course their way throw my curls. Just as I was about to turn left
on the Amingaon road, a huge Buddha statue with yellow robes and indigo hair
caught my eye. It was set atop a hill a few hundred yards away on the opposite side. Why hadn’t I ever
noticed it earlier despite taking this road umpteen times?
On an impulse, I turned right and towards the immense statue
of Buddha that sat here in the middle of nowhere, so far away from the city. I
stopped near three tiny temples which I had misjudged as the path uphill to the
statue. We got out of the car anyway at the insistence of the priest who had
come out on seeing us. I was hesitant as the only thing religious about me is
that I religiously avoided any place of worship thronging with crowds and commercialized rituals. But here
we were the only visitors (don’t want to use the word devotees).
The priest told us that this was the Jaiguru Ganesh Mandir. My
jethai was more pious than me and did the rounds of the Ganesha temple (where the idol was carved into the slope of hill that formed one of the
temple walls), the Shiva temple and the Lakshmi temple.
I just stood there
soaking in the quietness and serenity and watched the tiny shed next to a
tree with red blossoms, a lone dove perched up on the dome of the Lakshmi temple and large boulders and trees that surrounded the temple. The priest wasn’t judgmental or inquisitive
of my avoidance of worship, and came forward smilingly to hand me a sacred flower. I smiled back in acceptance. He
directed us the way to the Buddha statue which we were told was located in the Assam
Buddha Vihar.
Barely a hundred meters away, we drove uphill into a narrow path. On seeing two old cars covered with dust and grime and half-hidden in
the bushes, I wondered if they were abandoned by their
owners who couldn’t find any way to reverse and drive down the narrow
curves of the path we were on. Chuckling at that possibility of my own car, I parked it
and walked up the stone steps into what I assumed was a Buddhist
monastery.
In her late sixties now, my jethai
wasn’t keen on climbing too many stairs. We reached the verandah of what I
still assumed to be a monastery and hence was on the lookout for meditating monks when a
woman dressed in a baggy yellow kurta welcomed us with a cheery ‘namaste, please come in’. She dragged out a plastic chair for my jethai to sit in, and showed me the path
further uphill to the ‘Bada wala Buddha,
Big Buddha’. I walked on alone just as I heard the woman tell my jethai "I thought I was a tall woman, but you are even taller than me". The trail was relatively short
and populated with bushes, boulders and red beetles.
The giant torso of the Buddha loomed
into view soon enough. Even though it wasn’t as large as the one I had seen in the
Tawang monastery, it still cast an imposing figure. There was a view-point that
looked out into lush paddy fields, groves of coconut trees swaying in the brisk
wind and the distant river. A pale sun shone through the clouds. If I had drove up
alone and if I had a book with me, I would have stayed there the entire day.
