The concrete bench beneath my sweatpants was dirty and damp, but I didn’t mind. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the temple and I wanted to stay a bit longer. My fellow tour members trickled outside to bask in the sun, while I remained, submerged in a deep, enveloping silence. It was easier for me to contemplate my thoughts and feelings when I was alone.
What inspired me to come to India for this trip was an inexplicable, but strong feeling that India was a place where I belonged.
I realized the silence was internal when it was broken gently by women devotees leaving prasada and red and gold flower petals on the centuries old altar of this Hindu temple.
I didn’t feel the need to shut my eyes to continue this meditation of belonging. I felt safe. Suddenly a rat scurried past me in the small space between the bench where I was sitting and the outside wall on my right. I froze. As a girl, my mother would tell the neighbors how when Nicky saw a mouse her screams could wake the dead. I didn’t scream or jump up on the bench, I just sat there. Taking a breath in through my nose, I smelled the food on the altar. No wonder there were rats! Sadly, this realization did not calm my nerves and the sacred atmosphere, along with the silence, were now lost to me. I wondered where my friends had gone and I picked up my stuffed-to-the-gills navy backpack from the grimy bench beside me. Then I tiptoed through the same door my tour mates and the rat had used.
Later that evening, I asked Sharma, a friend of the tour leader who lived in India, what meaning he would make of a rat running by him when meditating in a temple. He looked puzzled and asked me to repeat the question. When I did, he shook his head and said, “There is no special meaning—sometimes rats run through my house.”
His answer was disappointing to me, as I had been fishing for a more supernatural response, one that would point to a carefully crafted story where everything made sense and had meaning. But the simplest answer to my question was that I had been immersed in one kind of belonging—to silence—and the rat had brought me into another belonging, reminding me that it was time to go.
IMAGE: The temple grounds and me in 1994.
