35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

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EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
everything that ever was or would be happened simultaneously in
zones piled within each other, boxes within boxes, like a Chinese
puzzle.
The seat of my loose cotton trousers was beginning to feel like
sandpaper against my arse by the time we rode into Rankunda, a
dilapidated but still functioning temple complex dedicated to
Krishna. The point of this stop was partly to visit a deep well,
surrounded by palm trees whose fronds swayed listlessly in the kilndry
air. Our camels politely waited their turn to drink, while other
scruffy, rowdy beasts, who belonged to some traders who looked
more like bandits, jostled each other roughly to get at the murky
water hauled up by rope in big leather buckets. Enigmatic creatures,
camels really can survive, if necessary, like Christ, for forty days in
the blazing wilderness without a drink. I was having trouble lasting
forty minutes in the heat that now enveloped our bodies in a
suffocating shroud.
Wondering what sort of business a temple so far out here could
possibly get, I roamed its courtyard, where polished flagstones
reflected the heat like mirrors and burned my bare feet. An ancient
Brahmin with bottle-thick spectacles wandered in circles mumbling
his mantra, a set of withered testicles flopping outside his threadbare
loincloth like a money pouch.
‘Hare Krishna,’ I said, but he didn’t even hear it or see me.
Vultures squatted on the domed roof of a shrine, hunched and
ugly, waiting for death, which can come suddenly and unexpectedly
in deserts. The whole place felt as if it had been stranded, left behind
by time, which waits for no man and certainly hadn’t waited for that
old priest. Of course, the point of ritual is that it is action and inaction
at once – action outside time, thus timeless or meaningless,
depending on how you view it. According to Hindu scriptures, its
very lack of meaning is what gives it meaning – it is freed from
motivations of ego, and thus is pure, selfless devotion. God likes
that sort of thing.
Soon we were off again, threading our way now through patches
of thin cactus-like giant asparagus. Vegetation, when there was any,
was scant and scattered, mainly tropical thorns. The only flowering
plants in the area are shrubs and wild grasses that manage to survive