What I discovered inside Sunny Deol Ka Mandir
I set out again on a single lane highway that was the perfect bed of gravel. It was a long stretch too. I had learnt that if I stood on the pedals, my body didn’t take as bad a hammering. It was slow going, but the mental alertness this required broke the monotony of the heat. The heat was making me crack-brained. At a railway crossing was an interminable wait. I welcomed it. Traffic had swollen, everyone was cursing and raring to go, wondering about the extra-long stop — I relaxed, thankful for the extended unplanned break.
I struck up a conversation with the man next to me. When I told him I was going on a Bharat Darshan, he asked me whether it was a Mandir ka Darshan. I thought of all the temples that I had been sleeping and kneeling in, and told him he could think of it like that if he wanted to. He leaned over and told me that a few kilometres away was “Sunny Deol ka Mandir”. I was stunned. This was worth recording for the documentary. I asked him again if he was sure it was a temple dedicated to Sunny Deol. He nodded his head vigorously and said it was a very famous temple — great miracles took place there, presided over by a powerful murti (idol), and there was guaranteed to be a crowd of the faithful. I had to see it, he insisted. I wanted to be dead sure. I asked him whether he was sure it was Sunny Deol — the famous star — whose temple it was. He looked at me, grinned and said I could think of it that way if I wanted to.
At the end of the road, the temple came into sight. The grey cement of its facade hadn’t yet been painted. Scaffolding was tied together with ropes of thick coir. Men worked the facade, devotees queued on the floor. The temple was still being constructed and it was already a full house. People perched on the stone fence of the premises, several devotees were being tonsured, slippers milled like flocks of pigeons. People sat and prayed on the cemented floor of the temple yard, some knelt, others rolled their beads. Two steady streams of people waited patiently as they trickled to the deity before unravelling. I sat next to one of the newly tonsured devotees. “Ye Sunny Deol Ki Mandir hain? (Is this the Sunny Deol Temple?)” He nodded his head. I had seen so many different renditions of so many different Gods, I wanted to see how Sunny Deol was portrayed. “Murti kahaan hain? (Where is the idol?)”
The devotee pointed to an empty space where the two lines converged, “Right there,” he said.
“I can’t see anything.”
“You won’t see it. It’s a very small murti.” I was amazed. I had loved Ghayal as a child. I thought it was a tremendous way to portray Sunny Deol — in miniature. “It’s a very powerful murti, that’s why it’s so small, so that people have to kneel before it.” This was in keeping with my memory of Ghayal: everyone knelt before Sunny Deol. “The murti is so powerful, people don’t have the courage to look at its eyes. It’s also not good to look at it,” he counselled.
“Why?”
“If it looks back at you, then you’re ruined. You can look at it… and many people have looked at it, and it hasn’t looked back at them. But if it does look back at you, then it’s the end of you,” he cautioned. ‘That’s why it’s so small, so that even by mistake people don’t look at its eyes.’
Across the road lay another temple, more majestically fronted with superior carvings, painted and better-maintained than the Sunny Deol Mandir, but only a few devotees lingered there. I asked him why this was so.
“That’s Narasimha’s temple. Over here, people have a lot of belief in Sunny Deol. That’s why more people come here. Do you know how this temple was built?” I shook my head.
“All the devotees got together and contributed one rupee for the construction. That’s why it’s still being constructed.” I was stunned by the popularity Sunny Deol still wielded among the faithful. I was amazed by the fascination that Bollywood has for so many. I scanned the devotees. I expected to see shapely women with long flowing hair in tracks or tight kurtas or gleaming saris, and thick-wristed men with biceps bulging beneath T-shirts that hid flat boards. But it was the typical temple crowd you’re likely to see anywhere; wives and husbands, college kids and working folk, old people and children. “No matter,” I thought. There weren’t too many who came close to emulating the Gods they professed to believe in. “And this is Sunny’s day too, that’s why there’s such a big crowd,” a man said.
“What do you mean… Sunny’s day?” I asked.
“It’s Sunny day,” he averred, shrugging me of. I was confused. I took off my shoes and stood in one of the queues to pay my respects. More than anything, I wanted to see the idol — how had Sunny been rendered? Did he still ripple when shrunk or had they left a carving of him as a suckling child? I was delirious with the myriad possibilities. I peeped over heads and stood out of line to watch the devotees pray. I wanted to see how they worshipped Sunny Deol. Very reverentially it seemed — everyone knelt, bowed their backs, and touched their heads to the floor if they could. No one dared to look Sunny in the eye. I decided I was going to give him a frank stare full flush in the face. I tried to glimpse him but the bowed backs prevented me. The darshan was taking a long time; I felt foolish and went back to the devotee who had told me the story. “Are you sure that this is the same Sunny Deol?”
“Yes.”
“The film star?”
“Yes, yes.”
“The Bollywood actor who acted in Ghayal?” It was the devotee’s turn to look confused. And then he kept repeating as if he had been accused of telling a lie, “Sunny Deol ka mandir hain, Sunny Deo ka mandir hain, Shunny Deo ka mandir hain (It’s Sunny Deol’s temple. Sunny Deo’s temple, Shunny Deo’s temple).”
I couldn’t believe my idiocy, my gullibility, my Anglo-Indianness. I was a credulous fool. I rejoined the line vowing to stare Shani Dev in the face just as I would have stared at Sunny Deol, but when it was my turn to genuflect, I chickened out like everyone else. I merely touched my head to Shani’s feet and left for the chai stall across the road. The devotee followed and asked for a cup. I bought him samosas too. We sipped chai watching people crowd around an elephant walking across the road, its trunk was painted with coloured chalk. Business perked up at the chai stall. I rejoined the crew. I expected Achyu to find the Sunny Deol temple fiasco funny. His face darkened, “Shit man, we’re missing all the good stories.”
At Bandri, I had my first cold drink of the trip. The heat had dried out my mouth like the aftermath of a joint. I stretched righteously, slowly, painfully. ‘It was work,’ I thought — the work I had chosen — and I had six more days before I could bust up and drop out. The sun came down like a thousand hot ice picks. I was a sensualist no longer. The mind was playing tricks with the body. It was time to play tricks on the mind. I thought of the many wars, and what the forts and statues of Jhansi Ki Rani we cycled past spoke of. I imagined the infantry walking the roads in the dusty heat. The horses clip-clopping along, their armours clinking gently in unison with the hooves. There must have been elephants too. What were the thoughts of those men as they walked in the heat in full metal armour with their weapons in tow?
I pretended I was one of them and soldiered on. I was transformed into a messenger bearing urgent important news to the Rani regarding imminent danger, except I was a bicycling messenger and had to reach Jhansi in a day and a half. I thought of Rani waiting anxiously for the messenger she didn’t know. I imagined her relief when she saw the guards edging past the filigreed curtains billowing in the evening cool as they ushered me in. So happy and impressed would she be at my having cycled all the way from the southern ramparts of India to bring good tidings of the Maharaja of Mysore offering unstinting support for any adventure she might consider, a walk to the queen’s chambers with her leading me by the hand wouldn’t be out of order.
Then, I was a professional cyclist training for the Commonwealth Games. In 10 days, I’d be barrelling down the slow loping caressing curves of the Greater Noida Expressway, hammering on the pedals in the glittering North Indian plains heat. The sweat would be fizzing off my body, evaporating in a sizzle as soon as the drops fell — better to practise now in the heat. I ploughed through another 10km.
I thought about Gopi’s heroic mother toiling quietly through the day to make life smoother for her son. I thought of my own mother and her uncomplaining unerring toil as she went about the mundanity of life with grit and determination that made the very act of living with honour and dignity an enormous act of profound heroism. I watched people walk their cycles up a long interminable slope. All of them were dressed in everyday fashion, unlike me in a T-shirt, shorts, with my cushy running shoes beating out hopeless rhythms on a sun-boiled slope.
For a kilometre or so, all the cyclists walked. And then came the slow floating descent like we were all leaves in a mild breeze that promised to last forever. I made up my mind to not cycle back. There was no way I could go through the whole rigmarole again. These endless slopes I was floating down, was I mad to think of cycling back against it?
The flats arrived with a hundred gentle headwinds, each one blowing casually in my face, making me sluggish. Nautanki rolled unsteadily. The road was bad in patches, the passing wheels vomited flying dust. A carpet of urad dal waiting to be threshed occupied half the highway. A tractor wound round in circles at top speed separating grain from the husk. The heat, the husk, the dust, the dirt — everything began to tire me out. I was desperate for a stream. I hadn’t had a bath in two days. I was running out of clean clothes and cycling is high-friction activity. I was convinced a dip in a lake would do me good. The rushing waters would invigorate me.
The map had the Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary scattered across the NH26 at Gona. It was 35km away. I thought I might stop there. The evening would be beautiful in the wooded forests. In the gathering cool of the evening, army trucks loaded with personnel flew by in convoys. We assumed preparations were afoot for the 28th. We asked about sleeping in the open, everyone said it was a bad idea — ek sau chawalis had been imposed. Gona was at the southern tip of Uttar Pradesh. I had thought every forest I had cycled through was my last one in Madhya Pradesh. After four days in her belly, I was leaving her, with her rusted red and green Forest Department boards and her sky blue government school uniforms. She had it all — rolling hills, forests, man-made jungles, immaculate four-line highways, tremulous stretches of road, gushing rivers, slimy lakes, shushing streams — she was as beautiful as she was poor.
I had thought Andhra Pradesh, with her rocky hills and stocky trees, was beautiful, but Madhya Pradesh was a love affair to remember. At a bypass cresting a slope, I stopped for my last cup of chai in Madhya Pradesh. Hundreds of plastic tents had been erected in the fallow fields adjoining the road. People were massed at the edge of the highway. It seemed a mini exodus. Women fluttered in their brightly coloured saris, kids played, infants mewled, men sat around smoking. Achyu wanted me to ask a few questions. I was too tired to play anchor. I sat against the asbestos shed of a shack reading the sign painted on the highway “Sab Padhe toh Sab Badhe (If everyone studies, everyone will grow)”. I was cockeyed with fatigue but the sun had lost her sharpness and Gona was a few killometres away.
A long climb led us out of Madhya Pradesh. Ramshackle unmanned toll tax booths abounded. We wound around barricades of loose stones. My cross-border co-passengers were cattle going home. I stood on the pedals and mooed in their faces. As we crested the slope, a huge signboard spanning the highway announced: “Uttar Pradesh Aapka Swagat Karta Hain (Uttar Pradesh Welcomes You)”.
“And what a welcome!” I thought. I licked my lips at the prospect of coasting down such a delicious slope. I hunched over Nautanki as we ducked under our welcome banner and immediately the road went to pot; I had to pull gently on the breaks and weave to stay on the asphalted bits, it was the end of my free-flowing ride. I decided to spin to Gona, it was 4km away.
(Excerpted with permissions of Rupa Publications from Nautanki Diaries by Dominic Franks.)