And, yes, the picture below is an actual shot of Birla Mandir during monsoon.
Our trip to Birla Mandir caused some more pain, this time with Liam. We had only been here about one week, and we decided to go to the place where we could see the city from on high. We decided to go to Birla Mandir, a large white marble Hindu temple on one of the highest points in Hyderabad.
We drove with Wajid. He seemed to care about us in addition to being a pretty diligent driver. We drove through the small streets in the section of the city directly below the temple. Byl and I had been there during our look-see visit in May, so we knew what to expect, but the boys had never been there. They were still not used to the sights and sounds of the city, so they all were responding in different ways to the amazing things we were driving by. Aidan and Jonah were in the back seat facing backwards playing a game to see who could count more goats than the other. This section of town made this a fun game - goats were everywhere. Some were foraging through the trash on the side of the street, while others marched in groups under the direction of a shepherd with a staff. Very ancient looking, these shepherds made us think of biblical images and reminded us how very far from home we were. Liam, on the other hand, was in the front seat just staring out of the window. His mind was growing. The age of thirteen was a unique one for us all, so we knew he was going through alot.
When we stopped at an intersection, the inevitable beggars came to the window, and since Liam was in the front seat, he got the majority of their attention. A few proceeded to notice that Byl was sitting right behind him, and they then migrated back to his window. But Liam was the first stop for almost all of them. He would simply look away.
As we drove, Byl lowered his window and gave one of them one hundred rupees, about two and half dollars. This must be a huge amount for these guys, because the recipient stared at it and yelled something to the others. All of a sudden, there was like five of them, and one was pounding on Liam's window, jumping up and down and laughing a little bit . Wajid beeped and waved over a police officer. The officer came over and started to hit the beggar in the head with the antennae of his walkie talkie. The guy bent over and scuttled away. Liam was shocked, as were we all. He turned to me and flashed me a look, basically one of fear. The traffic started moving again and we left that whole scene behind us, but Liam was kind of shaken up.
We could see the temple off in the distance, rising above the neighborhoods we were driving through. It was white and pretty big. As we turned the corner into the street below the temple, a police officer was there waving cars back. He needed us to turn around. Wajid rolled his window down and asked in Telugu what was going on (I think) and the officer responded that we simply needed to turn around and go up another way (I think). It's funny how much of a conversation you can follow when you don't know a word of a language.
We turned around and saw another way to go up, so we followed that road. We finally go within walking distance of the mandir and decided to get out and walk up. We got out of the car and started to walk. As happened so often, everyone in the area started staring at us.
“I hate this,” Liam said.
“What,” I asked.
“Everyone is staring at me. Haven’t they ever seen a white person before?”
“Just keep walking,” Byl said, having overheard Liam's comment. “Deal with it.”
Liam clicked his teeth, his way of saying, “Shut up, Dad.”
“Liam, they’re staring at all of us, just ignore it,” I said, hoping to avoid Liam and Byl getting into an argument here on the street.
We kept walking. Many of the people stared at us in passing, but some others pointed and whispered. Some of the young men laughed about something. It drove Liam crazy and he started to stare back in an exaggerated way, as if to say “I can stare, too!”
We arrived at the gate of the mandir and took our shoes off at the small shop at bottom where the sole business (no pun intended) was watching shoes. Our shoes were catalogued off and put in cubby holes. We walked barefoot toward the temple, and since it was monsoon season, it was cool and wet. Liam also seemed to fixate on all of the spit on the ground, so he was basically tip toe-ing up to the entrance of the temple. He kept making a sound in his throat like a hack, expressing his anguish in a new non-verbal way.
We got up to the entrance of the temple, and three guards were there. They were checking bags. They took my bag and gave it a search, what they were looking for I had no idea. We all stood there. People were coming down the steps and most people that walked past us gave us a curious glance and then kept going. But, inevitably, a few stopped and started to form the small audience around us that so often gathered. Liam was starting to get more testy with every passing minute.
We finally were found to be without weapons, or whatever it was that they were looking for. We started to walk up the steps. We were still not used to walking up the left side of steps (it is the same as the opposite traffic in India) so Byl and I started walking up the steps on the correct side, while all three boys started walking up into the people descending the stairs on the other side. Byl yelled out at them to come over to our side, which all three did in a pretty sloppy way, bumping into old women and everyone else on their side of the steps. Liam started saying, “Move!” to everyone around him. Just like the traffic in India, no one could seem to stop for anyone trying to cross, so the boys were trapped in a mass of people. They were pushing and jostling with the people in the crowd in a way that alarmed me. Finally, they made it over to where Byl and I were standing, on the other side of the wide stairs. Jonah and Aidan were laughing, but the experience made Liam even more angry than he already was. It wasn’t working out like we had hoped, but we could still go and have a nice walk in the temple and get a good view of the city.
We finally got to the top landing and followed the crowd. We assumed those people in the crowd knew where they were going. As we proceeded, most eyes were on us, some with relative disinterest, but others were fixated on us. A few people were starting to follow us. One asked Byl where we were from, and he responded “US”. They became more intrigued and a small group of boys started to follow us. They were about Liam’s age and they asked if we could have our picture taken with them. We said yes. This had happened before. It’s an odd phenomenon in India, but people ask to take their picture with foreigners, especially Americans. Something about the way we looked made us an irresistible addition to an Indian photo album. We stood at the edge of the temple with four Indian boys around us. I noticed out of the corner of my eyes that Liam was fuming. He was looking all around at the crowd milling throughout the temple. As soon as the picture was taken, we walked down the marble floor to the edge, where you had a great view of the city.
As we walked along to the temple grounds, we noticed how beautiful it was. The Birla family was one of the most wealthy in India, and this temple showed how much money they had. It was all white marble with beautiful columns and carvings of dancing Hindu gods and goddesses on every wall. It had various maze-like paths you could go through, and at one end there was a place where the Hindus walked in and prayed to a statue, all black with flowers on its neck. It was an impressive place. At one point, as we walked around, we noticed that there was a carving of Jesus teaching a crowd, and underneath this was the full text of the Beatitudes, which I thought was pretty neat. Byl gave the boys a brief speech about how this didn’t belong here or something like that. He was always a bit more uptight about these things than I was. I liked seeing it.
We walked along to the edge of the temple and got to the place where your view of Hyderabad was one of the most expansive that you could get. We stood there and a brown eagle flew by, almost close enough to touch. Aidan and Jonah were excited. Byl was staring off down into the city. In each direction there were different and unique things to see. Dirty, busy, amazing, with high hills here and there, all underneath grey monsoon clouds – our new home. We were all captivated for a few minutes, but it seemed like hours. All of a sudden, every mosque in the city started to wail, yelling out the afternoon call to prayer. It was at first just a few, but then a bunch of them started. And then more. Suddenly, you couldn’t hear anything except verses of Arabic being shouted throughout the city.
As we all stood there looking over the edge, I peaked over at Liam. He was actually facing backwards, back to the city. He was staring at the people staring at him. I walked over and asked how he was doing. His eyes were angry, and they had started to well up a little with tears. He was doing everything he could to hold them back. I hugged him and asked him to turn around to look at the city below. He did. I asked again, "How are you?”
“I hate it here,” he said, matter of factly.
I didn’t have a lot to say to him. If this was the case, it was what it was. And if it was going to change, it wasn’t going to happen in the next few minutes. I just rubbed his back and stood next to him.
“Is it the people staring at us,” I asked, knowing it was about that and a whole lot more.
“Yes, what’s wrong with them. They’re stupid, it’s like they’ve never seen someone like us before. I don’t stare at them. They’re idiots, and this place smells. I don’t want to be here and I hate Dad for bringing us. The people who beg at the car, they are disgusting. And the car sucks. Everything sucks here.”
“Honey, school will start soon and you’ll make friends and…”
“I had friends, Mom. I had Michael and Ben and other kids, and now I live HERE!” He held his hands out over Hyderabad. His voice was starting to get louder. I knew the number of people staring at us would only go up if he started to yell, and I knew Byl was going to get upset if Liam got much louder.
"Quiet, sweetheart. Liam, calm down.” He had started to turn around again, where there were some people staring at us. I knew we were getting into a pretty bad place, so I told him, “Liam, you have to stop. We’re all here together and we are all going to face the same things, so get yourself together.” I was talking through clenched teeth. If he was this upset, it always made me upset, too. And this move was my idea, after all. My frame of mind started to follow Liam's. I was pissed. We had come all this way and now he had to throw a fit. I wanted to scream.
Another eagle flew close by and Jonah screamed in amazement. Both Liam and I looked over at him. He was reaching up for the eagle. It looked like the eagle was almost close enough to scoop down and carry him away, it was really cool. We stood there and looked at him for a few seconds. "The eagles are coming, the eagles are coming!" he yelled with a British accent. I looked at Byl, puzzled. "Lord of the Rings," he said, smiling.
Aidan said, "It's during a battle scene." Aidan then shot a fake arrow from a fake bow into the air. He made great sound effects and somehow made a twang sound and a whoosh of an arrow all at once. I heard a laugh. I turned away from the three of them and looked back at Liam. He was laughing. He had a big smile on his face. I smiled, too.
We stood there for what seemed like an hour, just watching the eagles glide toward the temple and away from it. They would sweep down into the expanses of the city and back toward the temple and around the hills off in the distance. Who knew there would be this many eagles here? It was mesmerizing. We watched for a while longer, and then Liam asked if we could go. We did.
We turned around and walked back down to the base. After we got our shoes back and walked down the steps, Byl called Wajid on his mobile. As always, Wajid seemed to shoot out of nowhere with the van just moments after being called. He got out and held the door for Tara, always the gentleman.
"The mandir was good?" he asked.
"Yeah, very nice view," Byl replied.
I asked Liam, "Liam, how did you like it?"
"It was ok," he mumbled. That was about the best affirmation we could ever get out of him, so this was progress.
"Good," Wajid said.
We went back to the hotel.
I was upset that I kept thinking it, but my mind kept returning to this same sentence - I really hoped this would all work out.
