From Ahmedabad to Mt. Abu, a hill station famous for its Jain temples. Bus ride = horrible. Hot and bumpy and, well , horrible. As the only westerner, I receive constant stares, well meaning but very disconcerting. Feel vaguely ill and subsist on water and ritz like crackers. Am wondering, as one does now and then while doing anything here, what the hell I am doing here. Exit the bus at Mt. Abu in searing heat (hill station is supposed to be cooler?) and walk a long kilometer ( a small defeat, to suddenly find oneself blithely spouting off in metric terms) to the Sri Ganesh hotel. Hot shower, a sort of banal assumption in the states = new lease on life in India. Oh, thank you Krsna/Siva/Brahma/Adonai/Allah for your prasad, this flowing water, this human ingenuity of electricity, this glorious cleanliness. I am refreshed, revived, reborn, and then gratefully asleep. Wandering through Mt. Abu that night, a place where the odd western backpacker is outnumbered twenty to one by Gujaratis and Rajasthanis beating the heat and walking hand and hand around a rather disgusting looking lake; plenty of beautiful but overpriced Rajasthani fabric in the shops to catch the eye, but I am mostly looking for a  restaurant that looks clean enough to be stomach safe. Sticking to overcooked food (Pau Bhaji - mmm) and avoiding all manner of rawness - juice, lassi, salad - gives a modicum of reassurance, as does my trusty bottle of grapefuit seed extract, which supposedly kills bad things in the food with a single drop (right). Kind of still wondering what Im doing there, but at least its not as hot out.

The next day the hotel owner's son takes us on a beautiful walk to a viewpoint that spreads the Rajasthani desert out before us endlessly, a sea of dusty fields with the occasional irrigated plot, a dried up river bed cutting the scene in two with a ribbon that recalls years of drought. Same son drives us to the Jain temples in the afternoon. Elaborate carvings everywhere and more murtis (icons) than you could possibly venerate. An excited temple-walla spends half an hour explaining to me in broken english (or in Hindi I can barely follow) that of the ten elephants we are looking at, only one has not required a replacement trunk and ears. I am duly impressed. More fascinating are the carvings he points out of Krsna, Parvati, Laxmi and other Hindu stalwarts that grace this Jain temple. Clearly religious exclusivism of the type we have come to take for granted in the hyper-sectarian western traditions did not have as much purchase in pre-modern India. After all, the more murtis = the more darsan = more blessings, so why be picky about God's obviously innumerable forms. I like Jain temples: they are effusive and exuberant in a Hindu sort of way yet crucially more refined, more delicate, more aesthetically coherent. The white marble could not be more reassuringly peaceful and enveloping - like the earth's purest expression of the Jain's strick adherence to principles of ahimsa (non-violence). Once again, the odd western tourist is lost amongst swarms of Indians, some Jain I guess but mostly not, taken through the temples at a brisk pace by Hindi speaking guides who do not even make a show of enthusiasm as they rattle off there endlessly repeated lines about the age of the temples, which aristocrat commissioned them, which Jain Thirtaka (enlightened being) is venerated within. Its classically brusque and busy Indian tourism, brings a smile ot my face though I can't understand the rapidly delivered Hindi riffs. That evening I walk to the mobbed sunset point and loop around through the woods back to the lake, catching a glimpse and then a wonderful photo of a tiny white shrine backlit by the setting sun. At which point questions about what the hell Im doing here, always lurking somewhere, dissolve into a visual summation of every reason why being here is such a phenomenal blessing, and palms together I am thanking the sky, the shrine, the unknown god inside of it, the unknown gods inside myself, the moment that like every moment is a universe unto itself, Blake's grain of sand caught blowing off the Rajasthani plains and into a sky of blues and pinks and quickly coming greys that, weightlessly, I can carry with me anywhere.

One more morning in Mt. Abu - another hike with Lalit, the wierdly brooding hotel owner's son. He insists I go, that it is a special place. I am sold. We arrive hours later at a lake that is at least fairly clean and unpolluted. I take a dip and try to stay out of the sun but by the time we return my sunburn is embarrasingly red. Being a stray random white guy is bad enough, being a stray random sunburned white guy with a goofy looking red face. . . Run quickly to the main meditation hall of the hilarious Brahma Kumaris sect (new age meditation cult with an appropriately eclectic mix of Indian type philosophies and the de rigeur guru who is not really a guru but whose picture is in a really huge frame at the center of the meditation hall).The meditation hall is really big and oppressively white, as are all the buildings and the clothes of all the devotees running about with their Brahma Kumaris smiles. This kind of stuff is not to be missed. Back in time for a quick lunch and another bus ride to Udaipur.