Rock-solid faith

Random chance and a silly promise forced me to go to a specific place in India where I saw one of the most beautiful and impressive sights I've seen in the country.

Before I left Cambridge, I met up with a couple of friends in a local cafe to say goodbye. There was a bookshelf behind our table and on it, one of my friends, Sian, noticed a big travel photography book on India. I took it down to have a look. It was quite old with black & white photos but it still filled me with excitement. In my hands I held the country I would be spending the next four months discovering. Leafing through the pages, I was taken by a strange feeling of slightly uneasy detachment: in a few days I would start to see these places for real and in full colour. I was leaving home and all that was familiar little by little through a chain of bright but poignant farewells, but I still didn't feel any closer to India yet. I was floating in a limbo where I had almost discarded my life here but had, as yet, no concept of the life of travel that would replace it.

I was about to put the book back on the shelf when my other friend, Emma, said what I had been thinking: 'Just think, Bridge, you'll soon be seeing all those places for real.' And I was seized by a silly idea.

'I know,' I said, 'I'm going to open the book at a random page and wherever it falls, I will visit that place.' Sian and Emma liked the idea and, with eyes closed, I flicked through, then placed my finger between the fluttering pages. It fell on a place called Ajanta in the state of Maharashtra.

'Good choice, me!' I said, with a smile. 'It seems to be place where there are lots of Old Buddhist cave temples. Right that's one place I will definitely go to.' And so I did.

Without realising it, I'd chosen my random destination very well: the caves at Ajanta are a World Heritage Site and they are amazingly beautiful. There are 30 temples cut into the sheer rock face of a horseshoe-shaped river gorge. The 2nd century BC is when the site was started but they are so well-preserved that with some of them you might think they were finished only a few years ago.

I arrived at the place, in Middle of Nowhere-type countryside, surrounded by lonely, dry brown hills, dusted with a few sprinklings of villages. But, being a World Heritage Site, everybody knew about it - and was there! As I entered what would once have been a peaceful, secluded place, I had only my imagination to help me picture it, as the bullet-loud shouts and calls of swarms of schoolchildren ricocheted and bounced off the walls of the gorge. They passed me in a loud buzz of chatter, their voices sharpened and shrilled with the excitement of a day out.

The safety of being in a much great number than me on my own melted their shyness and roughened their impeccable manners so they stared frankly at me and other foreigners and egged each other on to dare to talk to me. The girls looked fresh in olive green salwar kameez. Each one had her long, gleaming, oil-black hair parted down the centre and braided into two neat plaits. Each plait was looped up and attached to the side of her head with a girlish white bow, like a papery butterfly caught in her hair. The boys wore neat olive green trousers and white shirts, oddly lilac-tinged from a whitening product that didn't quite do the job it was supposed to do.

The entrance to the caves was up a long flight of steps and porters lounged at the base of the climb, waiting for the rich, lazy, fat or infirm, who would pay them to carry them up the steps atop an ordinary kitchen chair, with frayed and fading seat cushion, lashed to two long poles. When I reached the top of the stairs, out of breath from the climb, I paused to watch in cringing fascination as an elderly, overweight Indian lady and her husband appeared slowly, noddingly over the horizon. Each was on one of the chairs, borne by four sweating, straining porters, their neck tendons standing out like tree roots above their orange hi-vis tabards.

The lady clutched a sturdy, matronly handbag Margaret Thatcher-style on her lap. Her sari was edged deeply with gold and heavy gold jewellery hung about her neck and ears, making her look like a down-on-her-luck Maharani on a threadbare DIY palanquin. As she ascended, trying to look regal or inconspicuous - I couldn't be sure which - like a true ruler, she avoided eye contact with everyone around her. She looked awkward and embarrassed at her hoisted journey. Aloft like a Goddess carried through the streets, I had the impression she'd somehow misplaced her adoring believers and was slightly perturbed by this. When the labouring porters brought her gently in to land, she hefted herself awkwardly off her humble throne and walked away with a heavy limp and without a backward glance or a word of thanks for their suffering.

Her husband followed sheepishly behind her, looking even more pained with mortification than her. His domed belly spilled over the straining band of his trousers and the sweat beaded his brow below the sparse wisps of hair that tufted his head. He too, struggled to get off his chair and displayed equal ignorance of his beleaguered porters.

Now I'd caught my breath I turned towards the gorge and the caves. A sheer cliff rose up on both sides of the river bed to form a narrow canyon and the river - at this time of year a dry mass of smooth pebbles and boulders - curved away to the left in a perfect horseshoe. On top of the cliffs wind-blown trees slanted to one side and dead, yellow-gold grass flowed back across the undulating hills as far as the eye could see. Mid-way down the face of the cliff I could see the exterior of a line of temples curving round the horseshoe bend, carved directly the vertical rock.

The skill of the stonemasons who carved them and achieved such beauty, complexity and stability is truly staggering. Each cave is different but each is supported by internal pillars and most have a carved shrine at the back with a towering sculpted image of Buddha inside. The temples vary in size from small rooms to large halls, sometimes two storeys high. The the pillars and other surfaces in many of the temples are sculpted with fine, intricate detail and the ceilings are sometimes carved with ribs and vaults. Inside some temples, the remains of finely detailed paintings of scenes from the life of Buddha and of daily life cover the ceilings and walls.

I wondered from cave to cave, feeling the cool, dark serenity of the rooms, still moving despite regular interruptions to my peaceful progress by the noisy schoolchildren, whose path through the temples seemed to closely follow my own. There was a soothing, mystical quality to those spaces, dark and empty but somehow filled with a lightness of feeling, a happy peace that was so much at odds with the stern, reverent, 'son't touch, don't speak' silence of churches back home.

But what I found most fascinating and awe-inspiring about the temples is their construction. Each is hewn and chipped out, chunk by enormous chunk, shard by infinitesimal shard from a wall of solid rock. Every roof, wall and floor; pillar, shrine and decoration is carved from one solid mass. Nothing is added or attached, there are no joins, pins, fixtures or fastenings: everything is in its place because it was carved there. And before it was there, there was only dense, solid, impenetrable rock. I cannot imagine low many years a single temple took to carve out, let alone 30 of them!

What vision those workers must have had to 'see' a finished temple in a vertical face of unforgiving rock; what dedication they must have possessed to consecrate their life's work to its construction; and above all, what deep faith they must have held to offer such endurance, patience and time to produce these wonders of architecture all for the worship of a God they couldn't see!

I can think of nothing I believe in strongly enough that would cause me to dedicate my entire life's work to the completion of something so grand in its honour. And I am humbled by this realisation. I was brought up in the Catholic faith, which I have long since discarded, more out of youthful laziness and the inevitable inconvenience of its strict precepts to the living of modern life, than out of a lack of faith in the existence of God. But religion is still a part of me, its shadow still haunts me and its pulse still runs through me, weak but alive. And I am still very much fascinated by religion in all its forms and the deep and powerful hold it has over people.

Faith has the ability to make believers undertake colossal challenges and make superhuman efforts that they would be unlikely to undergo in respect of their everyday life: How many people have spent their entire life planning and building the domestic dwelling of their dreams, knowing they may well die before it reaches completion? We don't do this, because a house is for this life, so we cannot conceive of taking the span of our time on Earth to finish it. It must be there for us to live in, as we live our life. Yet, how many great men have begun to build cathedrals, temples or other places of worship to the dedication of their God, knowing they will probably not live to see their dream complete? The answer is many, because, although such buildings are designed for daily worship for the masses, they are also a form of insurance for the afterlife. To build to the glory of God is a means to gain entrance into whichever Heaven or new life cycle your religion dictates. A beautiful, soaring cathedral, an elaborate mosque of the finest materials, a rich and vast temple: all these are meant to guarantee your place and your eternal peace in the next life. And which believer, with the vision and the means for such a project, could value the pleasure of his short earthly life as more important than the dedication of it to the protection and assurance of his eternal one? It is not too great a price to pay.

Such dedication is inspiring because it is so rare and this is why the temples at Ajanta moved me so much. They embody in a literally rock-solid way, the lengths and pains faith will make human beings go to. They are an expression of faith that survives thousands of years after the faith itself has lost much of its power and influence.

When I sat in that warm cafe nearly four months earlier, I hadn't know exactly what Ajanta had to offer, but I knew it was worth seeing. Throughout my travels in India, they have always been there in the back of my mind, and I nurtured this urge to fulfil my strange and light-hearted promise. I didn't know when I would see the caves, but I knew I would, I knew I had to. It became a mission that I knew I couldn't leave India without completing.

Maybe I built them up in my mind to such an extent that I had to find something Important or Moving about them when I finally saw them, to justify my desire and my decision to visit them. Or maybe it was the other way round: I was meant to visit them in order for me to discover their power and realise and wonder at the faith which is such a huge but intangible part of them. Whatever the case, I did truly find them moving. I hadn't known what to expect from Ajanta but it certainly wasn't this kind of revelation or realisation.