Today was the day of our long journey home. I always think that one must be truly semi-detached if one can endure occasions such as these: firstly having to reach the airport in the searing Indian heat; the tedious three hour wait at the airport; being cooped up in a cramped seat for nine hours; tolerating the baby crying and trying to ignore your neighbour’s elbows and finally the last leg of the journey on the tube home.

If, at the end of all this one can retain their sanity then they are truly enlightened.

Just before evening prayer we went to Delhi’s oldest mosque, the Jama Masjid. Things weren’t helped by the fact that we were all tired and the heat was suffocating. The stones were too hot to walk on, but we still took off our shoes. However, everyone in the mosque was extraordinarily unfriendly! It was not as if there were many tourists there, but it was Ramadan and the men were lying about suffering, probably after hours without food or water, so I can’t blame them for their lack of welcome. I should say that when I went to the old mosque in Leh everyone was extraordinarily polite and welcoming.

The sheer weight of people, of colour and light was overwhelming in the Old Town. It struck me that if there is a God, how could he possibly keep and eye on so many people.

We visited Delhi’s Red Fort. This was the chamber of the Mughal’s built in the seventeenth century whilst they were in their prime and contains, amongst other things, the Peacock Throne, the symbol of the ruling powers. However, in the early eighteenth century the Mughal’s overreached themselves, their governors became warring factions and the stage was set for the gradual and uneasy domination by European empires.

At the other end of modern Indian history I visited the home of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India. India is an extraordinarily good example of putting all political movements, empires and religions in their place. They literally do come and go. Nehru was not religious but he recognised the great power of his people’s religious faith:

“How amazingly powerful was that faith which had for thousands of years brought them and their forbears from every corner of India to bathe in the holy Ganga?”

He could not escape the religious past and present of India, but he sought to build a secular state: of course he was right, as any attempt to impose a religious state is fraught with difficulty, as Pakistan proves.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first Governor General of Pakistan attempted to create a state in which Muslims could live together and feel safe, after its partitioning from Hindu India. But he made it clear that he wanted the government to be secular. Unfortunately his successors have found the task of creating a stable religious state particularly hard.

Today we went to mass at a local Catholic church. We were late as we didn’t know what time it started. The wooden church, more like a hall was packed, hot and characterless, but coming back to a Catholic church after three weeks felt like coming home. A great sense of peace and righteousness invaded me.

We took the mountain railway which snakes down 2000 metres from Shimla to Kalka. Shimla was the summer capital of the Raj and this railway was opened in 1903 so that the Viceroy and his entire government could escape the intense summer heat in Delhi. What a joy to travel on a slow moving train with all the doors and windows open allowing one to hang out of if they so wish. The whole thing was reminiscent of Kenneth More in the 1959 film the North West Frontier.

In comparison to the mountain railway, the cold, air conditioned express from Kalka to Delhi was positively boring. Arriving in Delhi’s main train station is a chaotic and boiling hot experience, even at 10pm. A mad ride through the town in an auto rickshaw was terrifying, but I am gradually getting used to them.

This was a day of rest. Whilst I soon tired of it, my youngest son spent about four hours in the swimming pool. The heat was suffocating, although nothing as bad as in Delhi. In the afternoon we wandered around the local smallish market town of Nalagarh. The colours, variety, and movement were breathtaking. There all kinds of people, from Muslim and Hindu holy man, jostling in the streets. A horse and cart pushing its way up the narrow street. Like many English I sometimes question the wave of immigration into my country. Here one can see India and Indians in an uninhibited way. By way of complete contrast on our return, we played croquet on the Maharajah’s lawn.

That night I went to the tiny Hindu shrine in the Fort’s garden. I was alone and, without embarrassment, I knelt down in the Hindu way and touched the earth with my head and acknowledged with courtesy the local God. Some sort of innate Anglo-Saxon sensibility against praying to idols stopped me from praying on as I would in a church. Yet the way the female Gods are dressed is reminiscent of the way the Virgin Mary is dressed in Catholic churches on her feast day.

I returned from the day to read Katherine Frank’s biography of Indira Gandhi, the first female Prime Minister of India assassinated by her own bodyguards in 1984. The book left me feeling very depressed. She had a fairly rough ride with the Indian people, demonstrated by the fact that she served two separate terms as Prime Minister. She also had to deal with, amongst other things, the war with Pakistan in 1971 and the incident at the most sacred Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple, which led to her assassination by two of her vengeful Sikh bodyguards.

Politics is very important and someone has to do it, but really it can be a very depressing job. I couldn’t help comparing my positive thoughts whilst reading Hesse’s Siddhartha in the previous three or four days to my intense depression in reading about the politics of India in the 1970s and 1980s. Politics I suppose is the real world. Philosophy and religion are a welcome escape.

I dreamt that I was giving a lecture to a group of evangelical Christians about the merits of Buddhism. I was … But the audience drifted off and I was left in the embarrassing position of talking to no one!

Today we took a taxi for half an hours drive out of Manali to Nagger where the International Roerich Memorial Trust is situated. The Trust is in memory of Nicolas Roerich who was born in Russia in 1874 but eventually settled in Nagger. He is still celebrated in his homeland as an influential cultural figure. His thoughts combined his native Russian Orthodoxy with an interest in Eastern Religion, even Pantheism. His paintings of the Himalayas are definitive and superb. His art is a great inspiration to me. My own skill is very limited, but I find the act of painting gives me intense pleasure.

During his time Roerich’s thoughts were very popular and garnered him numerous Nobel peace nominations. However he is now almost forgotten outside Russia and India, but his mountain-top traditional home and garden is still a haven of peace.

I took a rickshaw up to the Viskrit Temple, entered into the compound and dipped my toes into the boiling baths where young Hindus swim easily. I went to the Temple of Ram, a major figure in Indian history and the Hindu religion, and stood silently for some time trying to understand this strange religion. These tiny temples where people kneel before Gods and angels, deities that seem so remote to me, and a religion which is so alien to me thanks in part to its polytheistic nature.

In the morning we visited the Temple to the local God of the surrounding Himalayan Valleys, Hadimba. We stood in a long queue, ducking below the heavily carved lintel and looked upon the gifts of money offered by pilgrims who probably had very little themselves. And they offered this up to this tiny God of theirs, tiny in so large a building. When it came to our turn we received the red dot of the pilgrim on our foreheads.

Afterwards as I stood before the Temple of Ram and myself knelt, I began to understand the pilgrim’s devotion and material offerings.

A passage from Siddhartha struck me later that day. One can spend so much time seeking that one does not see the things around oneself. I took a walk around the village. As I walked it felt as though I was always seeking but was engulfed by the ugly jumble of modern cheap concrete hotels, by the Western hippies, seemingly so out of place, by the dust and by the excitement on the road. I was so busy seeking that I could not see the beauty of God.

At first I found Manali overwhelming so I sat quietly in an outside restaurant, ate an English breakfast and looked at the light coming through the pine trees. I was reading Hesse’s Siddhartha and was strangely moved by it.

Siddhartha, like the Buddha, first became an aesthete. He later seeks to join him as a follower, indeed his friend Govinda stays as a monk and pledges himself to Buddha. But what is interesting is that Siddhartha realises that however holy a man the Buddha is he must find his own way. He mustn’t rely on a teacher. He cannot just be a follower. The word Siddhartha, a compound of “siddha” and “artha” in Sanskrit means “the wealth of a fulfilled aim” and the protagonist’s journey of enlightenment attests to this.

I meditated a lot on this as I noticed the light through the pine trees at Manali. I too don’t just want to be a follower. Too many people grab and hold on to their first religious experience. Whilst it is unfair to label this as the easy option it is worth striving to lead through ones experiences and perhaps only then, one can enjoy the wealth of a fulfilled aim, as Siddhartha does. It came to me strongly that all religions are largely man made, embellishing the simple teachings of the founder.

We climbed up to the Rohtang Pass, just before Manali. The desert was left behind in pleasant hop-growing terraced country above Lelong. So the days of driving into dry high passes were over. A heavy mist hung over the entire mountain and soon a continuous monsoon downpour was upon us. The Indians love coming up to see the pass as one can view the remains of snow even in summer.

Given that for much of the pass the road is nothing more than a narrow winding track perhaps unsurprisingly there was a vast traffic jam of jeeps, lorries and buses trying to squeeze past not only each other but around the various obstacles which littered the road. We finally arrived in Manali to stay in a seedy hotel, but as I was so exhausted after the twelve hour drive I didn’t even notice nature of the surroundings.

This was the first day that there had been no time to visit a mosque or a temple and I felt it.

We take the ten hour drive on the Leh to Manali road, climbing to 5,000 metres above sea-level. The dirt track roads, plunging into ravines and with no safety barriers, are perilous and terrifying.

We stop and take a break in a round tent where we sip on chai and eat rice and dhal whilst reclining on couches, until the dusty hot wind blows though the single entrance.

That night we stay in Gispa in the Padmor lodge, which is overpriced in my opinion, and unfortunately I immediately have a row with the proprietor over the different prices charged for different people.

I wake in the middle of the night depressed with various things and feeling rather unwell. Despite being in the midst of countless mosques and Buddhist temples it is a prayer to the Virgin Mary that changes my mood. Buddhism is a lovely religion but it lacks the clear path of prayer to a heavenly intercession which Christianity offers.

Even as I say the prayer I had forgotten that today is the feast of the Assumption. I am in a far-away land where one sees no churches, only mosques and temples and where one can easily forget which day is Sunday. Regrettable, but perhaps understandable.

We drive out of Leh to a nearby village and walk up the road past the fields, the school and the scattered homes topped with thick flat thatched roofs.

Eventually we reach a small roadside temple. Here there is a revolving drum. The idea is that one spins the drum so that the prayers written inside it can take flight. On the outside of the drum is an inscription:

Exorcise evil,
Perfect good deeds,
Purify your mind

This is the essence of the teachings of the Buddha.

As we walk through the village we hear the old men and women chanting as they spin their hand-held prayer wheels. The refrain of the prayer is a follows:

O (pronounced with a long O….hmmm.) Om Man Ne Hum, Um Man Ne Hum

They repeat this refrain over and over again, but I cannot catch the rest of the prayer.

Later in the day I go to the market and buy myself a small prayer wheel, a little Buddha and some prayer flags. You are expected to haggle, but being the world’s worst shopper I happily settle for the asking price.