Experience 13: Wash dishes for 200,000 pilgrims at the Golden Temple
by Christa Larwood
It was a scorching day in the northern Indian city of Amritsar and the paved marble of the compound encircling the Golden Temple glowed white-hot in the sun. Thousands of devotees – their shoes respectfully removed – tiptoed hastily across the stonework and crowded onto a makeshift path of wet sackcloth to avoid cooked feet.
The Golden Temple is an intricately decorated festival of gilt domes and towers that seems to float on the surface of a calm, reflective pond. Known as Harmandir Sahib, or ‘the Abode of God’, this is the holiest site for Sikhs across the world. In a constant stream, pilgrims approached the water’s edge and dipped hands, faces and whole bodies into the ‘sacred nectar’ of the pond – the men out in the open, carefully avoiding immersion of their brightly coloured turbans, the women bathing discreetly behind canvas sheets.
Despite the heat and the crowds, all was calm, with most people sitting in cross-legged reverence by the pond or in the cool shade of the compound’s covered breezeways.
Just a few hundred feet away, however, the ambience could scarcely have been less serene. At the Golden Temple’s pilgrim centre – an open-sided warehouse of a building just steps from the temple gates – the air was filled with the sounds of shouted orders, sharp metallic clangs, the splashing of water and the happy, raucous cacophony of conversation.
By ancient holy decree, no pilgrim to the Golden Temple will leave with an empty stomach, and these vast kitchens churn out vat-loads of free lentil dal and mountains of chapattis for visitors numbering from 20,000 to a staggering 200,000 each day.
Pilgrims and visitors are encouraged to engage in ‘seva’ or ‘selfless service’ while there, and so it is in this spirit that I found myself mucking in with hundreds of other volunteers – not with the preparation of the food but, more fittingly for someone of my questionable culinary talents, with the washing up.
Dozens of rectangular tubs the length of minibuses were surrounded by women – and a scattering of men – all elbow-deep in soapy water and scrubbing furiously. I squeezed into a space just slightly narrower than my shoulders and got to work. Chin-high stacks of tin plates, cups and spoons clattered nearby, landing with face-drenching impacts in the water, and a scrum of hands descended to grab each item in a friendly underwater battle for purchase. I scrubbed, rinsed, shrieked, laughed and tried to chat in sudsy sign-language with my grinning companions.
It was stinking hot, loud and crowded, and I was drenched with sweat and spattered with lentils, but I emerged after a couple of hours with an unaccountable sense of happiness. I returned to the serenity of the Golden Temple compound with a lightness of step that wasn’t just due to the hot marble underfoot – and with the certain knowledge that I won’t enjoy doing the washing up quite as much ever again.
