Scooby Doo* and the Mystery of the Anasakti Ashram

Scooby Doo wasn't actually with us on the trip, and I can't confidently say that he would have been much of a help. While he's led his posse of eager cartoon characters through dark forests and past evil creatures of the night, our mission was fairly high on the impossible-o-meter.

Christina had handed us a sheet of paper, a long checklist of everything she hoped Andrew, Lizzie and I would find in the village of Kausani.

"Are we really supposed to find all these things?"

She looked at me, her lips curling up at the edges, the way she does when she's amused. She likes it when we figure things out ourselves. Experiential learning. Get used to it.

Here's something you should know about Kausani: they're not used to tourists here. You can "Namaste" all you want, wear your traditional Indian suits, modestly look away from males, and pretend not to watch, enthralled, as an elderly man guides his cow along the road, but your blonde hair still screams, "I'm so completely different from you!"

As we made the several-kilometer trek down to the village, we tried to decide what we'd get first. Tea lamps? An Indian Flag sticker? Three handprints from the local children? When all you can confidently say in Hindi is "I am not married," the possibility of communicating your need for an Indian tongue cleaner is severely limited. We decided to start with "A pamphlet from the Anasakti Ashram."
When we came to a fork in the road, we went to the right, heading uphill on a winding path to the Ashram. Finally, we found a plain white stone building, several stories high. A sign on the front told us we were very welcome to the Anasakti Ashram, and we began the ascent up several flights of stairs.

Each stair, carved into the stone, was short. Not one was parallel to the ground, and as we climbed higher and higher, trying to keep our balance on the steps, we felt more and more like visitors to some strange location Dr. Seuss might have written about. I half expected to find the Onceler from The Lorax waiting for us at the top. When we did reach the summit of our treacherous climb, we found, not the Onceler, but a middle-aged man doing some kind of squatting meditation, looking out over the mountains. We had stumbled up onto the landing rather loudly and ungracefully, and I felt painfully out of place as his head turned slowly to face us. Behind him, a group of men were engaged in some sort of worship inside a room. A sign above the door said that everyone was required to be "present at prayer."
"We should... um... pamphlets?" I whispered, and turned to see that my companions really didn't know how to handle the situation either.

I looked back at the man, his eyes round as he watched us. I looked down at Christina's sheet. "Talk to people: make some friends!" the instructions reminded me. I looked back at the man. Back at the sheet. The man. His eyes seemed to be burning into me, branding a big "O" for "outsider" on my forehead.

"Let's go upstairs," I said.

Again, we climbed. Finally we came out onto some sort of balcony. There was a high podium covered in Hindi writing, and in the corner, a group of men in simple brown robes. They noticed our arrival, then turned back to their conversation, keeping one eye on our movements.

There are some places in the world that want people to come visit, places that encourage travelers to peak their heads in and poke around for a bit. Those are the kinds of places that take the time to write up pamphlets. But after experiencing the energy of our surroundings, we were very sure that the Anasakti Ashram was not one of those places.

In the end, we decided to take a picture of a posting of the Ashram's rules. We kept the camera low, expecting some holy man to see us with our camera and kick us out. Then we kicked ourselves out, hurrying back down the steps (as safely as possible) and back toward the village.

By then, any chance we might have thought we had of finding everything on the list was pretty much shot. “Neem” for example, does not grow in Kausani, and it was therefore useless to ask for. Nobody had any Coriander seeds, and after a few awkward attempts, Andrew stopped pursuing the Indian tongue cleaner.


In high school, I was so used to getting an assignment, and completing the task. Everything was doable. But Kausani was totally new to me. Some things were available. Some were not. Later, Genevieve would tell me that this was India. If I expected to be able to do everything completely, all the time, I’d go crazy.
We bought some vitamin C from the pharmacy, a package of bindis, a bottle of apricot oil, some postcards of the Himalaya Mountains, and a prickly green vegetable we didn’t recognize. We asked a friendly shopkeeper to tell us about Ravi Shankar, the Rig Veda, and the Prime Minister of India. We even found some things that weren’t on the list. Andrew and I bought matching hats (we’re basically bhaaii-bahan, after all), and I got a beautiful notebook painted with powdered rice made by women artists from Kumaon.

So what if the Anasakti Ashram didn't have pamphlets? By the time we made it back to the Chevron Ecolodge, our legs were tired, and our bag was full enough. Experiential learning. We're still getting used to it.


*By "Scooby Doo," I of course mean "the adventurous and open-minded BYPies, specifically Shaina, Lizzie, and Andrew because Joe was sick, and Chhaya's still recovering from surgery." But unless you're Sufjan Stevens, some things are too long to turn into a title.