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"What was about to happen was something I would have never imagined. I finished writing the text and held the paper up to get a better look...
Dressed in some warm clothes I left for my evening exploration. The pin was wrapped and taped around my right hand wrist and the compass was in my right hand, such that it pointed in the same direction as the suspended pin. As I went on the main road the needle was pointing to my 1 o'clock position. So I went walking forward along the road in the 12 o'clock direction.
As I walked a few hundred meters in the same direction, the compass gradually moved to my 3 o'clock position. On my right hand side was a small uphill track amidst some shanties. The narrow road was barely wide enough to allow me to pass. The road seemed to get narrower as I went ahead and soon I was forced to walk sideways like a crab.
The walkway was studded with colourful bottle caps, shards of glass, empty cigarette cartons and other such garbage. The smoke from chewing tobacco being roasted overwhelmed my nose and made my eyes water. Tiny droplets of water dripped from the wet clothes hung on nylon ropes on the rooftops and splashed on me. The sounds of women fighting, a murder of crows feasting on an unfortunate rat and the constant religious songs that were blaring on the loudspeakers were completely different to the silence that I am used to and like.
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Occasionally I checked the compass to confirm my bearing.
As I continued to make my way through the dense quartiere degradato I noticed the compass needles turning at a faster rate than usual. It could only mean that I was close to the target. Turning again in the direction of the compass I came upon a small, almost dilapidated structure. Its door lay straight ahead of me and the compass pointed square inside it, outside it was a board.
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I entered into the dimly lit room. A few seconds passed and my eyes adjusted to the darkness in the room. About ten-foot-tall frieze of stone was mounted against the wall. The most beautiful monolithic sculpture that I had ever seen, twelve forms of Lord Shiva carved in perfect symmetry. A stone frieze of this beauty in such a dilapidated building, clamped against the wall with rusted metal strips was a shame, I thought. A poojari was sitting on a floor stool beside the figure of Lord Shiva, dressed in an orange dhoti. He had a small brass vessel with Panchamrut as prasad. I sat on the floor close to the poojari and prayed for a while.
