Better Than Fiction 2 by Lonely Planet

pilgrims, who came to him to receive a blessing, a dab of paint on their foreheads, and a packet wrapped in a leaf. They gave him money, then took the packets down the beach and threw them into the sea. When the stream of people slowed he would kneel and either make things out of sand or prepare more packets, small scoops of rice and spices wrapped in banana leaves.
    That evening our landlord explained that it was a puja , a ceremony. Pilgrims traveled to buy a packet of food from the sadhu , food that the dead were known to like. Then they threw the packet into the sea, where the dead would somehow find it – and be fed.
    By the second day we had developed a sort of relationship with the sadhu . When we got to the beach – on which, it seemed, he lived – he waved to us, and we waved back. Werewe disturbing him? We didn’t think so. Even if he didn’t speak English, we reasoned, he could make it clear if he wanted us to leave.
    Swami Sand Castle didn’t speak English. Late that afternoon, he walked off the job and came over to us, and motioned for us to follow him. He pointed toward the town. He tilted an imaginary tea cup toward his lips. He said, ‘Chai.’
    A cup of tea seemed simple enough. We’d go along and see where this went. We trailed Swami Sand Castle up the beach into the center of town and into a little hut. Maybe fifteen men sat on the floor or squatted at tiny tables drinking cups of the sweet milk tea that was boiling in a cauldron watched over by a sweating kid on a high stool up front. Every one of them looked up and stared at us, curious but not unfriendly. In pantomime, the sadhu made it clear that we would be buying him tea. He indicated the others: a round for the boys. Sure. This would still cost us next to nothing.
    This is where my memory stops. Did we drink our tea in silence? Did we try to communicate in a simple language that involved pointing to ourselves and saying words that neither side understood, and nodding as if we did? Howie remembers that everyone smiled a lot. I remember Swami Sand Castle thanking us, pressing his palms together, and saying goodbye. We went back to our house, and I suppose he went back to the beach, to wherever he came from.
    That evening, after dinner, Howie and I both got violently ill, first one of us, then the other; we took turns. When the landlord came to collect the tiffins, the metal containers in which he’d brought us dinner, he heard Howie retching in the bathroom. He asked me what was wrong, and though I felt sick myself, I told him the story of our day, all about the sadhu and the tea.
    Cluck cluck. Our landlord said we’d made a grave mistake. This sadhu was from a very low caste, not a harijan , an Untouchable, but almost. The tea house he took us to was patronized by people of the same and similar castes. It was very dirty, very unclean there. No wonder we got sick! I remember feeling the particular embarrassment of travelers who have made a stupid tourist mistake.
    Thanks to paregoric, an opium syrup one could get more easily those days, and which has a miraculously calming effect on the worst intestinal illness, we were able to get on the bus the next day and get out of town and go on to Trivandrum.
    Do I understand what happened in Varkala? I have more questions than answers. Now that all the resorts have been built, are pilgrims still coming for packets of food to throw into the sea? Who was Swami Sand Castle? Where did he come from and what did he believe? What was he doing with the sand and what did he think about it? Who did he think we were? Was he as curious about us as we were about him? Who were the people who came to him for food to feed their dead? Why did I tell our landlord about the sadhu and the tea? Why were we so ready to believe our landlord, that the cup of the tea from the low caste cafe was what made us sick? Couldn’t we just as likely have caught something from the yogurt and fruit the landlord brought or the vegetable