The purpose of coming to Mathura was to see some temples. We stopped at some small place in the middle of nowhere which had two men inside. The younger one soon disappeared while the older one sat and glared at me. I gave him a smile at which point he glared even harder. I was thinking “I don’t like it here” when Mukesh said “Lets go. I don’t like the people here” So he booked the Meera Vadhav Ashram, where the hotel is part of a huge complex including a temple, school and hospital. It is dedicated to a female guru. There are long deserted corridors which make it feel like a cross between a prison and a hospital. The manageress is a very sweet young lady in a gold sari who comes gliding up to us whenever there is a problem. How does she always know when we have a problem. Watching us on CCTV? Spooky. The nicest thing about the Ashram was the small temple where the very jolly guardian put bindis on our foreheads and tied string bracelets on our wrists, mine on the right, Jennifers on the left. He then sang in a beautiful sonorous voice about the well-known East End gangster Harry Krishner.
On the third of August we went to see a temple but got there just as it was closing. We were told so by a pleasant official at the entrance and then, as we turned away, were screeched at by a lunatic with a maniacal gleam in his eye; “closed, closed, it closed” he bellowed triumphantly. In the evening we went to see the Prem Temple, completed in 2012 and made completely of gleaming white Italian marble, greatly inferior to the Taj Mahal, made of Indian marble. A very large and truly magnificent building. I cant say much about it because we weren’t allowed to take our cameras in.
On the 4th, we went back to the temple we missed out on the previous day. The screeching maniac was still there, glaring balefully at us but, as Mukesh had fixed us with a guide, we weren’t stopped. There were three temples close together. The first, the Govind Dao Temple, was of beautifully carved yellow sandstone, the second was somewhat ordinary and the third, Hanoman temple, was dark and gloomy in a sinister sort of way. It is dedicated to Hanoman the monkey God and was over-run by monkeys as well as people. Finally we went to see the Mathura Birla Mandir which Mukesh said was the birthplace of Shiva. A huge temple where you had to deposit your shoes at the entrance to the complex and then walk up a long street of cobblestones (very painful) and then climb three long flights of steps to reach a large room with not much in it. A site of historical significance but sod all else. Most of India’s temples appear to have been built in the past 50 years and are soulless and garish, with brightly-coloured statues of Gods, but bugger all else. We are still dreaming of the gorgeous ruins of 11th century temples at Khajuraho with their beautiful stone carvings.
Gandhi’s tomb
Model of Gandhi’s house
Gandhi’s asassination
Gandhi dead
Exhibits at the Gandhi museum
Massive statue outside a temple
A very nice restaurant on the road from Delhi to Mathura
Gandhi memorial
Temple at Vinraman
