Off the Road

I wasn't looking for it. Somewhere off the road from Udaipur, on the way back from Devigarh, the car stopped and I got out, and there it was — a Shiva temple, large enough to be a complex, old enough that no one was claiming it.

There were maybe four other people. No priest. No bell. No one selling flowers at the gate.

The shrines were empty. Not desecrated, not broken — just empty.

The pedestals were there. The doorways were there. The dvarapalas were still at their posts, still holding the doors. The carving on the lintel was so dense it looked like the stone was thinking.

But the gods — they left a few hundred years ago.

I stood in the courtyard for a long time. I kept waiting to feel sad about it, and the sadness didn't come. What came instead was the quiet.

Without idols, without aarti, without anyone to ring the bell — the temple was still holding its position. The structure remembered. The carving remembered more. A pose the stone had learned and would not put down.

The form, when the form is no longer needed.