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The train crosses the Pamban bridge at sea level, above open water, with the Palk Strait visible on both sides, Sri Lanka theoretically visible to the southeast on a clear day, and the bridge itself doing what it was designed to do in 1914 which is carry you across the sea to an island that the subcontinent almost touches but does not quite. Ten minutes above the water. The bridge is one of India's oldest sea bridges and the crossing is among the more vertiginous experiences available on the standard railway network. Take the train. Not the bus. The bus crosses the road bridge and misses this. I arrived at Rameswaram at night, secured a room near the temple, set the alarm for 4 AM, and started at 4:30. The Spatika Linga darshan — the original sand Shivalinga made by Sita from the beach at this shore, installed by Rama, the presiding Jyotirlinga — is available for one hour each morning, from 5 to 6 AM, and requires advance booking through the temple website. I had booked it. Missin...

Fifteen kilometres from Dwarka on the Saurashtra coast, the land is flat and the sky is enormous and the Arabian Sea is everywhere in the peripheral vision and there is a temple compound with a 25-metre stone Shiva statue visible from the approach road that announces the destination before you arrive. The statue is very large. It is also, it must be said, the least interesting thing at Nageshwar. What is interesting at Nageshwar — what makes this the tenth Jyotirlinga in the circuit and not merely a coastal temple in the Gujarat tourism itinerary — is the underground sanctum. You descend. Steps take you below the ground to where the Shivalinga is. The descent is the defining physical experience of this shrine, the way the glacier defines Kedarnath or the forest defines Bhimashankar or the corridor defines Rameswaram. Below ground, in the dark, the stone. Swayambhu — self-manifested, not carved or installed. The lord of serpents in his underground chamber on the Saurashtra coast. The l...

The Godavari is 1,465 kilometres long. It is the second longest river in India, the longest in peninsular India, and it begins as a trickle at the foot of the Brahmagiri hill behind the Trimbakeshwar temple. I walked up the hill on the trail from the temple — seven kilometres, two to three hours ascending — and found the source as a small kund, a sacred tank, from which the river emerges. The scale of what begins here is entirely incommensurate with what you find when you arrive. This is, I think, the point. Trimbakeshwar is 28 kilometres from Nashik in the northern Western Ghats of Maharashtra, and it holds two facts that I find interesting in combination. The first is the Shivalinga — unique among the twelve Jyotirlingas in having three faces representing Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the Trimurti collapsed into a single stone form. The three-in-one is the theological signature of this shrine and the detail that the tradition uses to distinguish it from every other Jyotirlinga in the ci...

I began from Deoghar. Not this time — the first time. The first time I went to Baba Dham I was too young to understand why we were going. Someone in the family was ill, or a car had been bought, or a wedding was being planned — in Bihar, these are not separate categories. Joy and sorrow both travel the same road to Deoghar, to the Vaidyanath Jyotirlinga, where Lord Shiva receives whatever you bring him without asking why you brought it. My father drove. My mother carried whatever needed to be offered. I sat in the back and watched the road. That was my introduction to Shiva. Not theology. The road to Deoghar. I have been back several times since, each time with a different set of things to bring and the same road to bring them on. The road from Bihar to Deoghar is a specific road — flat in the Gangetic plain sections, rising onto the Chota Nagpur plateau as you approach Jharkhand, the landscape changing from the agricultural flatness of eastern Bihar to the rockier, drier, older geolo...

The Badrinath temple is painted saffron and gold and it stands at 3,133 metres in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand with the Neelkanth peak rising directly behind it at 6,596 metres and the Alaknanda river running fast and cold in front of it and the effect of this arrangement — the brightly painted human-made structure between the grey-white mountain and the fast river — is of something that insists on its own presence in a landscape that is trying to suggest the irrelevance of human scale. The insistence is the point. Badrinath is painted in colours that do not occur naturally in the alpine tundra above 3,000 metres. This is not an aesthetic failure. It is a statement. The god who meditates here — Vishnu in his Badri form, seated, the black stone image that Adi Shankaracharya retrieved from the Alaknanda river in the 8th century and reinstalled in the temple — meditates in the colours of the tropics at the altitude of the glacier. The incongruity is deliberate. Badrinath is the fo...

Varanasi does not perform its antiquity. This is the first thing to understand about it and also the hardest, because everything about the city is extraordinary and yet the city itself is entirely indifferent to being extraordinary. The ghats have been there since before the category of tourist existed. The burning at Manikarnika has not stopped for as long as anyone can establish. The Ganga bends north at this specific point — anomalous, against the logic of a river that flows generally southeast — and the tradition holds that Shiva bent it toward his city as an act of will, and the geography confirms the bend, and whether you take the divine explanation or the geological one the bend is there and the city built itself around it. I lived in Varanasi for a stretch of time that I have written about elsewhere and will not repeat here in detail. What I can say is that the city changes you in proportion to how long you stay and how honestly you engage with what it is actually doing rather ...