Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 T H E L AW 06and milk sweets I bought from one of the stalls farther down the alleyway,which had piles of exotic-looking sweets in a variety of colours.Beyond them were stalls selling cloth, stalls selling toys, and even stallsselling travelling trunks. Everything that could be bought in a city bazaarwas there. I supposed that it all must travel from fair to fair around thecountryside serving the country people.There were none of the game booths and rides we have at fairs in theWest, but what I did find, at the end of an alleyway that brought me backto the main entrance and the Ashokan column, were two marquees, thecanvas doorway of each flanked by men dressed in colourful costumeswith white greasepaint faces. Each pair was dressed as man and womanand was calling out to people to come into the marquees. There musthave been a play inside—I could hear the voices of actors and laughter.Although I wanted to go in, I thought better of it. Ajahn Sucitto hadlooked slightly disapproving of me going round the fair in the first place.Instead I collected the young man, left Ajahn Sucitto to rest at thetemple, and went off to have another go at repairing his sleeping mat. Ihad tried to fix his mat several times using glue and patches bought frombicycle repair stalls, but each time the patches had come unstuck. Theglue was for rubber and the mat was nylon. They might work for onenight, but by the next the mat was again slowly deflating, leaving AjahnSucitto lying on hard ground by morning. He was resigned to it—it fittedhis view of the world as an innately unsatisfactory place—but I wasdetermined to fix it.I had suggested before we left England that an inflatable mat wouldbe a liability, but it had been given by another monk specifically for thejourney and so he wanted to bring it. Inflatable mats are meant fordomestic camp sites and not for sleeping outdoors in India, where it wassoon punctured by thorns.I showed the lad the mat, and he suggested that we take it to a shoerepairman. They are everywhere in India, ready to polish shoes, torepair them, or to repair anything else made of leather or canvas;1 2 5