Haryana

Kurukshetra is the strangest pilgrimage site I visited in India, because what it commemorates is not a temple or a saint but a conversation, held, tradition says, on a battlefield, in the pause between two armies, when a warrior's nerve broke and his charioteer answered him. The Bhagavad Gita's seven hundred verses are located here, at Jyotisar, where an old banyan on the bank of a quiet channel is venerated as a descendant-witness of the tree beneath which Krishna spoke to Arjuna. I had expected spectacle. I found instead a modest ghat, the banyan behind railings, evening light, and a scatter of visitors of a very particular kind: not tour groups but individuals, a soldier in civils, a woman with a well-worn Gita of her own, an old farmer who touched the railing and stood a long time. The sound-and-light show retells the discourse after dark, but the site's real programme is the daytime silence, in which everyone present is privately re-asking Arjuna's question, what should I do, when every option costs?

and finding, as he did, that the field does not answer. The charioteer does, or nothing does. I sat by the water until the lamps came on, twenty-two years old, several thousand kilometres from home, and let the question have me for an hour. It is, I decided, the correct souvenir of Kurukshetra: you do not take anything from this field. You leave carrying your own case, better stated.