I had left from my hometown in Calcutta for Bodhgaya and
Dashrath Manjhi Road hoping it to be a soul-satisfying 2 day trip. I arrived at
Gaya at 6:00 in the morning. After bargaining with different rickshaw walas for
30 mins where they’d try to squeeze in more money after you got in, I finally found one that seemed to be reliable
and headed off first to Dashrath Manjhi Road.
As you approach the historic site, you can feel the echoes
of chisel and hammer hitting rock as one man labored to cut a way out of a
freaking mountain! It’s as if you can hear his screams of agony, pain, and
triumph as he kept hitting hammer after hammer to carve out the mountain. It
appears as if the locals have taken it upon themselves to keep alive the
legacy. En route you can see many half-cut mountains. You quickly understand
that this is because a lot of stone mining is being done in the vicinity. This
one time you do not feel bad for the scars being inflicted upon Mother Nature.
After all, Gehlaur has little use and no respect for mountains. And it’s a
spectacle to see man overcoming mountains. Very fittingly in the heart of Bihar
which is supposed to be nourished by the streams of Ganga. This is no place for
mountains. And so the legacy lives on. A gate and a huge poster adorn the
starting of the 110m road. 110m. Sounds almost insignificant in front of modern
day technology. Yet in the absence of this road Gehlaur was a slave to the
mountain. The road is not flat. It goes uphill to where the highest point of
the cross section of the mountain would have been, and then comes down again
towards Gehlaur. However, I could not see any signs of civilization for as far
as I could see at the other end. I guess Gehlaur was not right next to the
mountain itself but a little far away. Wikipedia tells me that the road
reduced the distance between Gehlaur and the nearest town with a doctor from 55
km to 15 km. Only 110m did that! the question in the movie comes to me. When
faced with a difficult task, you can ask yourself, ‘is this more difficult than cutting down a mountain?’
Once you see it for yourself, the movie stops being fiction
and becomes real. And I guess that’s all it’s about. So I walked along the road
for a bit till I heard a hissing noise. Again taking cue from the movie, I imagined
a snake. And that was my cue to get out of there. So I made way to Bodhgaya.
The road to Bodhgaya would take me through Gaya once again.
I arrived at Bodhgaya around 9:30. The first place I went to
was the Great Buddha Statue, advertised as 80’ tall while actually being only
70’ tall. I want to point out how casually I used the word “only” here. As if
70’ or 80’ would make any difference or the statue any less imposing. Bodhgaya
is a myriad of temples and eateries. Soon I’d checked into the hotel (Hotel Sakura, nice and clean with proximity
to most stuff – recommended), seen half-an-episode of “Two Broke Girls”,
taken a bath, spread out my things in the room, and seen enough Buddhist
temples to grow bored of them. By 11:30 I knew I was headed towards the
Mahabodhi temple, home of the Bodhi tree.
By 12:00, I was inside the Mahabodhi temple. I saw the Bodhi
Tree. I think I might have liked to write beneath it but I also know that I’m
not a guy who’d sit under a tree and write. I prefer rooms with tables. No
matter if it was the most famous and holiest tree in the world, I was not
enticed. I decided to leave early and go back to my family. Ironically, that
seemed to be the right thing to do at that time. Maybe because Bodhgaya turned
out to be a pretty boring city. Or maybe because it’s very small. There’s a lot
of walking involved but the roads aren’t that good. The food turned out to be
bad. Also, I guess there was a spot of a companion that I missed by my side.
Despite that, as I left the city, I felt energetic. As if
something had grown clear within me. As if I’d found my answers within even
though I lost the ability to articulate them. Did the teachings of Buddha
really have any effect on me due to the place? Or due to my journey? Maybe
we’re not supposed to find out.
