Syd in India

October 5: Syd in India

I took the flight from New Delhi to Aurangabad this morning. I was early to the airport, and passed time reading the matrimonial ads in the India Times. I remember these from the 1996 trip to Mumbai and Hyderabad, and they haven't changed at all. Prospective grooms' families still list relentlessly the young men's academic and financial achievements, followed by the request that the bride be fair, tall, and accomplished. While we worry about the racial subtext in the American election, it's right there up front in those ads.

I was met by Tom the guide and the driver Ismail in Aurangabad just after noon, and we drove the two hours through Maharashtra corn fields and villages to Ajanta. The crops seemed healthy – just after the rainy season ended – but this was my first foray into rural India and it's still a shocker. Most farm homes look like cement garages, with two doorways and sometimes a window but often not: on a hot day like this, they looked dark and stifling. The better ones had rebar sticking up like hairpins on the roof; I couldn't figure why, but later Mamta told me it's in hopes of adding another story to the house if times get better.

A number of homes were huts made out of straw, and not even big ones. Women carried water on their heads from streams that were small and far between. Three wheeler trucks, bullock and bicycle carts were laden with huge loads – bales of hay or cotton, it seemed. The villages were in very poor shape, although thronged with people on this Sunday afternoon. The tiny stores 5 feet deep have canvas walls and very little to sell. Dust everywhere, and a humid 95 degrees – Jhabvala's title "Heat and Dust" surely fits.

A dozen years ago, I saw the dalit homeless settlements in the laundry quarter of Mumbai, where a sea of people lives under big blue garbage bags, but I think I must have imagined that to be a temporary situation for most and it didn't strike me the same way these huts do. Out from the blue plastic shelters came children in clean school uniforms – I thought that a few years later, when those children had their educations, they would move to real homes. The huts in the fields are permanent homes. If you wonder why people move to the slums in the cities, you see the choice clearly on the way to Ajanta from Aurangabad.

Ajanta Caves did not disappoint, after all the years of promising myself to get there to see them. You climb up to a horse-shaped stone mountain, where 32 caves have been cut at different levels above the river; originally, each was reached separately by long staircases from the river beds, but now they are strung together with the curving path and dozens of staircases.

Inside, they are exquisite – carved columns and statues of Buddha in the apses at far ends, walls covered with paintings of Buddha's life, river goddesses, bodhisattvas, all stunning. Much of the painting is faded or gone, but from what's left the splendor of the original effect is clear. One cave has perhaps half of its original murals intact and it just knocks you out.

At first the sheer size amazes you – these were cut from solid rock face by Buddhist monks starting 2,200 years ago, using nothing but hands, chisels and sticks. Apparently they would chisel a small hole, place a stick in it and wet the wood, which expanded and crumbled a tiny circle of cracks in the rock. They started from the top and worked downward.

Then it strikes you that the exquisite and detailed mural paintings must have been done by mere torchlight, and you're stunned all over again. Of course the caves are dimly illuminated now, but men stand outside some of them with big long mirrors, deflecting sunlight into them so you can see them better. (These men make their living from the 10 rupees – about 20 cents – that some visitors give them.) There's a theory that the recessed center portion of most of the caves was once filled with water, which would reflect sunlight similarly. You have to take your shoes off to walk inside – and beware those uneven floors.

Tom the guide, who's been doing this for quite awhile, knows exactly how much detail to share in each cave. I had just read the chapters on Buddhism in the book I brought as primer, thankfully. From his reaction, apparently I had fallen hardest for the same Ajanta Greatest Hits as all the rest of the tourists he's shepherded through...