What do you do at 40,000 ft above the sea level when served with stale, stinking bread and omelette for a non-veg breakfast and putrid yoghurt as dessert, above the deserts of Pakistan on board a Middle Eastern carrier that preserves the best steak for onward connecting flight to the farthest West, where the flock of the faithful is forever headed?
Go for a swig of beer to wash down the foul taste lingering in your mouth, I suppose.
And boy, am I surprised at being served an original Turkish pilsner for asking from a country that's lately rediscovered and reinterpreted the strong arm of Etrugrul under strongman Erdogan?
And it's not just settled at that!
The spirited steward is liberal with a bottle of red from the land of Rumi, at lunch. For what's Rumi if not love dissolved in the spirit of wine?
On the outside, Turkey is still very much a land of the free spirited, liberated by Mustafa Kemal a good century ago, though it's common to walk past a well-dressed man in pinstripes with his well-draped harem of three or four in light absorbing black sacks and a brood of chatterboxes at the dazzling duty free at the Ataturk global terminal.
Yet nobody quite bets on how the winds of change will finally sweep, and when, through the country in the vortex of a violent maelstrom, tom-tomming it's invasive and invaded past like the rest both north and south of the Black Sea and the desert-mountains further down under.
Which turns my attention to the peace-loving Tibetan lama, legs crossed in lotus posture, in half meditation, on the seat right next to me.
"You don't mind the spirit, Master?" I asked the lama, mindful of the vegetarian fare and orange juice that he had first asked for, and then, dumped into the rubbish bag just like me for obviously the same stinking, lingering reason.
"It's your body. Why should I mind what you put into it," the lama's soul-emptying voice drifted into my ears, his half open - half shut eyes staring into the emptiness of the blank seatback screen ahead of him.
It wasn't long before the lama's gaze turned towards me, as I provoked him to prise open the secrets of the Buddha with my unrelenting questions.
"There's no difference between Hinduism and Buddhism, these nomenclatures were coined by the British," I held out.
"Yes, that's pretty true, except that the Buddha had no place for violence. That's what set us apart," the monk insisted.
"Yet the Buddha went on to proselytise with his faith of compassion only at the behest of Brahma and Indra after attaining nirvana under the Bodhi tree," he informed.
"But the Buddha didn't believe in god, did he?" I asked.
"That was one of the questions he never answered," the good old lama replied.
"Still, the Buddhists worship our gods?"
"Yes, we do. Brahma and Saraswati. Even Indra and Ganesh and Tara."
What about Shiva?
"Shiva might have been a Tibetan. He was from Kailash in the Mansarovar region, which was always a part of Tibet. We call him Wangchuk."
I couldn't ignore the subtle undertone of the Free Tibet movement against the political domination of China and the philosophical stranglehold of India on a nomadic mountainous people in remote wilderness.
"And Rama?" I asked, mindful of the Jai Shree Ram rant back home in India.
"Rama was not really god. He was king. Though, like the Buddha, he too might have been a Bodhisattva," the good monk opined.
"And there is a Bodhisattva in each one of us. We can raise ourselves to states of divinity by our doings," he added.
"Who then are the gods? I asked.
"The gods are the spirits. They are the subtle elements.They are the unformed. They are the formless. They are all around us.They are in us. They pervade everywhere. And yet, they are different from us."
They are the senses. I wonder in silence: the breath, the sight, the sound, the taste, the touch. And above them all, The Mind.
"So, who are we?" I asked.
"We are the coming together of the elements," the lama replied.
The senses coming together. That's who we are.
Which is why, in many ways, we must be superior to the gods.
"Yes, you can say that. We can experience the complete experience that the elements individually can't. You can fully experience the whole thing only when you are in form. The formless can never experience the whole without manifesting in the form."
The lama had revealed his Big Secret.
"I above all else," I tell myself drowning my spirit in another sip of the Turkish red that the steward had generously offered.
"You don't mind the spirit, Master?" I had asked the lama not so long ago.
"When you get back home, start sipping warm water. That will ease your cough and soothe your spirit..." the master winked, before closing his eyes in meditation, as we touched down on the tarmac.
The flight had been delayed, and the monk was running late for his connecting flight to Vienna, barely minutes for takeoff from Istanbul. He had an appointment to keep. The monk and medicine man had to administer ancient Tibetan tonics to modern Austrian bodies craving for succor.
It's your body. It's about what you put into it.
Simple.
And then, in a flutter, I lost the monk in the crowd surging towards the aerobridge, never to see him again.
ps: at the audience hall of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, is a large tchintamani rug. The word tchintamani is derived from Sanskrit chintamani and is identified with Buddha's lips.
The Spirit pervades us all.
Back to Essays