However, as Irfan, Surender Reddy and I drove to the residential premises of the temple city, the action picked up.
Along the roads, there were a few large, hygienic night shelters—similar to Indian bus depots—providing nothing but a roof to pilgrims. Men and women slept on the floor here, with a bundle of clothes under their head as pillows.
Sprinkled across the temple hill town of Tirumala were modest yet clean rooms, crammed into a few dozen three-storey buildings, with shared toilets and freshly washed clothes hanging on strings outside common corridors. Residents, often neighbours just for a day, spoke a medley of languages, and planned their temple visits together. Irfan and I ate with the pilgrims that night, in a massive public dining facility that efficiently fed 5000 people every ten minutes.
A little farther away were the bungalows of a bevy of Indian billionaires. The Ambanis, Birlas, Mahindras, Jindals, Shiv Nadar, the Sannareddys of Sri Cement, Ramesh Chandra of Unitech, the Singhanias of Raymonds—they were all there. You could name any billionaire industrialist in India, and chances were they had a glistening home here at the feet of the lord. Each bungalow was distinct in design or in the display of expensive art inside, and unlike the crammed shelters and buildings for the masses, they seemed rather vacant. En route to our guesthouse, we stopped to visit Vijay Mallya’s bungalow. Irfan was excited—he said that Mallya’s bungalow was auspicious as it had the best view of the temple.
As I went to bed later and recounted the events of the day, I found it hard not to be dismayed and saddened at this glaring contrast in resources and status, even in the house of God.
While the dew was still fresh the next morning, Surender Reddy and I set off with Irfan at the wheel for a sighting of the lord.
Irfan drove us to the entry point. Ditching the quick VIP entry, we decided to take the scenic route through the long queues and pilgrim waiting rooms, a winding row of fully covered ‘compartments’, each entirely digitized for security and replete with provisions of food, fresh milk and water.
However, there was no way to ascertain the number of hours the journey would take. The TTD continuously adjusts the sequence of compartments according to the number of pilgrims in queue, adding more compartments to the route and opening up more waiting rooms as the numbers increase—so we were now, quite literally, at the lord’s mercy.
Before we embarked on the journey, Surender Reddy and I sat on the carpeted floor at the first entrance gate. We sipped glasses of hot milk offered free of cost by volunteers, and watched the pilgrims arriving in hordes every few minutes.
‘There, you can ask all of them your questions,’ Surender Reddy teased me, wearing his usual broad grin while pointing towards the newly arrived crowd.
‘Yes, depends on how long TTD keeps us waiting!’ I agreed.
Surender Reddy was almost right. I spoke to at least 120 pilgrims that day during a journey to the lord’s statue, which took us about six hours.
‘Is this your first time here?’ I asked a woman standing next to me in the compartment. She was accompanied by her husband and pre-teen daughter.
‘No, it’s my fourth,’ she said. ‘My husband is a devotee of Lord Balaji and he has been here more than twenty times. Since we got married, we come as a family as often as we can.’
‘Do you have a mannat to ask of the lord?’ I asked another girl in the crowd. She seemed to be in her early twenties and was accompanied by her mother.
‘Yes, to pass my chartered accountancy exam.’
‘And you? Do you have a specific wish as well?’ I asked the man behind me, who was evidently finding it a challenge to keep silent while waiting in the queue. He spoke and joked with everyone around him, his voice booming over everyone else’s.
‘I do!’ he declared. ‘I want a job at the World Bank!’
‘That is rather specific, no?’
‘Not at all. There is a technique to ask Lord Balaji for your wish. One has to be clear-headed and specific in the ask. And then it takes about thirty-five days for fruition. Lord Balaji needs that much time.’
‘How do you know?’
‘This is my fifth time here! Each time, all my wishes have come true. Last time, I wished for a job switch, and it happened! And before that, I had wished for a US visa . . .’
His testimonial of the lord’s miracles immediately became a popular subject among the crowd where we stood. Some exchanged notes about their own experiences with miracles, and took tips on how to make wishes come true.
However, the majority of those I spoke with came to Tirumala with no specific wish. Some told me it was a ‘divine call’. Many said simply seeing the lord gave them peace. Most pilgrims said they came because of devotion and not wishes.
One man explained, ‘But Lord Balaji knows everything. He probably even knows the wishes in my heart that my brain does not. So no need for me to ask Lord Balaji anything; he already knows.’
Faith to them meant devotion, an unquestioning and unconditional belief in something.
‘When we are up in the sky, travelling in something as dangerous as an airplane, we have faith in the pilot, don’t we?’ explained another pilgrim who was a professor of engineering from Karnataka. ‘It is that faith that keeps us calm all through the journey.’
It seemed that living with faith in God, a spouse, or even an airline pilot, made their lives simpler and perhaps happier. They abandoned questioning and relinquished doubts about the object of their faith. Their devotion to one central cause seemed to bring them unending stability—and
