I have diarrhea again and have for about twelve hours. I feel dehydrated because I did not drink much last night. I miss gatorade because electrol powder has a salty taste. I am not sure if gatorade is as good but I thirst for it.
More about the Kumba Mela – while waiting at the train station to go to Varanasi I stood near the ticket taker at the entrance to the platform. He was in a Western suit and with him was a police officer in that military-style uniform.
All sorts of people come through, of course, but then this wee man came through. He was about eighty pounds, wearing thin blue and white robes, barefoot, and whatever possessions he had must have been stored in the folds of his wrapping as he had no pack. He was carrying a bamboo flute.
He stepped gingerly through the pass after pausing longer than necessary subsequent to the ticket checker’s approval, but when he passed the officer he took a signal to step aside. The officer towered above him and said nothing, and his face was blank as to the nature of the obstruction.
The little man, who had a curly mustache, began to play a peppy melody on his flute and he stepped in time a bit. He continued for a half-minute then stopped abruptly. The officer, after contemplating for a few moments past the song’s completion, nodded without expression. The little fellow went on his way.
On the train I met a devotee of Amma from Atlanta, Georgia. I felt an unexpected relief at hearing an American accent and my first thought was that it would be nice to make friends with this woman. She was about 35 and wore runner kit though I doubted any athleticism or even yoga training – it was hiking fashion for her. She started talking more with less positive response from Omar and I, and quickly realized that she was a typical Georgia religious looney.
She said she had been following Amma for three years and would continue to do so for the rest of her life. Amma goes around Europe and America nearly yearly, I know, and girl accompanied her through these trips as well as through ashram life in India. She said she only goes to the US to work for money to support following Amma, and that now she was living with a “boyfriend” native Indian in his home with his family and had been since she met him about two weeks ago. Her boyfriend, she said, hardly speaks English and she could not speak any Hindi. “I am good at languages like French and Portuguese and Spanish because I have spent so much time in Europe, but I cannot learn any Hindi!”
She told me that Amma sleeps fifteen minutes a day, eats nothing but soup broth and coconut mulk, administers her work in lotus position eighteen hours a day without moving, performs healings – spiritual more but physical often, exercises bilocation, and upon meeting her for the first time most people cry.
I normally eat this sort of talk but I was not in the mood. Anyway if I want more of this it would not be hard to find.