The lure of Mecca
I was going to Mecca. And that's how I came to be in Mecca in that momentous December of 1975. I worked at the Hajj Research Centre for some five years. I took part in the Hajj itself for each of those five years, studying the comings and goings of Hajj pilgrims, and also those who would come for the year-round "lesser" pilgrimage that is known as Umra.
The rituals of Umra are a subset of the Hajj and can be performed at any time of year outside the designated Hajj season, which falls in the twelfth and final month of Islam's lunar calendar.
During those years I became intimately familiar with Mecca and its environs, I watched them change, almost never according to the ground plans and advice we devised at the Centre.
In those years, and since, I have travelled to and from Mecca many times, by various means to and from many places in the world. And still nothing quite prepares you for the experience. Nor is there anything I can compare to the very first time I entered the city of my heart's longing and found myself within the Sacred Mosque.
It was late afternoon. I went through the main gate, Bab al-Malik. I began to tremble as I walked through the cool shaded building upheld by innumerable archways and approached the final colonnade. The light beyond the shade rebuffed me. It was not daylight. It was some intensified glorious glow, a luminosity peculiar to this place, contained within the open plaza at the heart of the Mosque. The oxygen drained from my lungs.
"I am here." The thought reverberated through my body with each gulp for air. "I am here." The words struggled to emerge from my open mouth. My head was spinning, yet my eyes were focused on the Kaaba.
I stood in awe and wonder, reverence and astonishment, elation and perplexity; a profound sadness and an irresistible smile of infinite joy took possession of me simultaneously in a moment that seemed to last for ever.
I felt an urge to spread my arms and embrace everyone, enfold everyone in my exultation. And yet I was blissfully unaware of other people here in this place. It was me and the Kaaba. How could it be here? How can I be here? How can it be here before me? It was beyond imagination, beyond comprehension, more than reality.
It was the point at which there is only prayer. I was rooted in humility, standing stock-still before the sight of the Kaaba, humbled by the feelings overpowering me, struggling with all my might to take hold of the sensations I felt, to keep possession of every aspect of this experience.
The sight, the light - and gradually there was a smell. What was the odour of sanctity? It infused this atmosphere. I could identify the lingering grace notes of incense, mingled with a miasma of dust, the infinitesimal fine particles of airborne sand mixed with motes of woollen fluff stirred up by the throng of feet traversing a bed of carpets.
This melange blended with the effusions of human bodies. And there was something else.
Some edge, some sharp, acrid something. Suddenly a flight of pigeons took to the air in the open space before me. The beating of their wings startled me, jolting me back to time and place and a simple realization - the added ingredient was pigeon droppings. Out of slime we all came, the Qur'an says, and though we can ascend higher than angels the footprints of humanity remain in the mud.
So why should the odour of sanctity not include the savour of pigeon droppings? I needed no thought to know what must happen next.
Automatically I took my place, merging into the flow, becoming part of the stream of people moving ceaselessly around the Kaaba. One is required to complete seven circuits, round and round that point.
Counting was beyond me. I could have walked for ever. I had become one with my earliest image, one with the tide of history, with all those who had walked here before me, and one with myself.
"I am here." It is the pilgrim's phrase, "Lab-baik." "I am here." It is the only statement that makes sense, the only thing one can say in this place at any time. I have stood before the Kaaba many times since. I have seen it at all times of day and night in every season.
It is not true of course that there are actual sharply defined seasons in Mecca. There are enormous differences of temperature and changes in humidity, which can be experienced in a day as well as over the course of a year.
At the height of summer temperatures soar to well over 40 degrees Celsius. When the sun sets, the heat rapidly recedes and the nights can be chilled, even feel bitterly cold.
Summer nights begin by being as warm as a hot summer's day in northern Europe, and end with a dawn that has a distinct autumnal chill. The contrast between the intense heat of the day and the cold of late evening can make you reach for a woolly jumper or wrap up in a warm shawl.
Life in Mecca, however, is regulated, not by climate, but by the rituals and rhythms of the Islamic calendar. In Ramadan, the month of fasting for example, the city sleeps during daylight hours when fasting is observed, and awakes at evening and night, when fasting comes to an end.
During each Ramadan night, the Grand Mosque teems with pilgrims attending special prayers known as tarawih in which all of the Qur'an's 114 chapters are recited aloud over the course of the entire month. These days, tarawih prayers from Mecca can be watched by anyone with a TV or computer, but back then you had to be there to behold the experience.
Ramadan moves through the varying temperatures of the year, like the Hajj season.
The Islamic calendar, based on the Moon, is eleven days shorter than the Gregorian, so the fixed dates in the Islamic calendar move through the seasons in a stately progress.
The Hajj officially lasts for ten days in the month of Dhu al-Hijjah. However, many pilgrims arrive perhaps a month before and linger in the city for many more weeks afterwards. They have dreamed of coming to Mecca all their lives, and find it hard to say "Goodbye" to the city.
It takes time to acclimatize to the enormity of becoming a "Hajji", the honorific title for those who have made the pilgrimage.
Just as the pilgrims are transformed, so is the whole of Mecca during the Hajj. Its visual appearance and structural features are altered. What was essentially a small town is suddenly crowded with people everywhere, people in constant motion, in a hurry to be here and then there, and never a moment when everybody sleeps.
The Sacred Mosque is crowded at all hours of day and night. White becomes the predominant colour as pilgrims jostle in their enthusiasm and fervour to experience everything Mecca has to offer from the highest moment of their life to the ceaseless bustle of gathering mementoes. Bottles, even jerrycans of water from the eternal well of Zamzam are essential, as are dates, prayer beads, prayercarpets, copies of the Qur'an; anything to take home to share the blessing; things that no matter how ordinary will have special meaning for those back home because they actually come from Mecca.
There is never an end to people coming to Mecca; like the temperature the numbers just vary in intensity through the year. Nor is there any way to describe the utter diversity of colours and languages of this gathering of so many different people, rich and poor, the educated and sophisticated mingling seamlessly with simple rural peasants barely, if at all, able to read or write.
A world community with all its distinctiveness and differences subsumed in a common purpose and shared euphoria. The immensity of the experience is all that does not alter. To stand before the Kaaba is a moment beyond change. And yet, I watched Mecca, the city that surrounds it, change almost beyond recognition in the years I lived in Saudi Arabia.
By the time I left, the Sacred Mosque had been expanded, almost completely rebuilt, changed utterly from the image I carried in my heart from childhood. Perhaps it was this sense of the passing away of something I had always considered enduring, perhaps it was the hippie environmentalist in me - even some tinge of the romantic that made me determined to make my fifth Hajj the old-fashioned way, on foot.
The sense of detachment between ideal and reality that I had felt on my first Hajj had increased each year.
More people, more congestion, more exhaust fumes, more traffic and more lags of churning stasis. I wanted to know what it must have been like in the days before motorized transport. Certainly it ought to give me better insight into the experience of pilgrims of earlier centuries.
(Excerpted with permission from Bloomsbury India, the book is available for Rs 599)