A Pilgrimage to Saint MiraBai’s Temple by Mira Dunham

            My entire life I've had problems with my name. No one can ever pronounce it correctly. I've had people calling me “Myra” for as long as I can remember. I am unsure if it is a result of this, but I hate that name and cringe every time I hear it. Not to mention, for children “Mira” can conveniently replace mirror in the rhyme from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose the fairest of them all?”
            Last year, as I was in Costa Rica, it was a feat every time I introduced myself. Mira means “look” in Spanish. Imagine this conversation, “Hi, what is your name?” “My name is look.” Yet I have always loved my name for its uniqueness and the story behind it.
            Coming to India I thought finally my name will not need an explanation each time I meet someone. On a train from Bombay to Bangalore I introduced myself to my first Indian friend. He had trouble understanding my name. Confused I asked, “But that is an Indian name, right?” He thought for a moment and told me a short story of Saint Mirabai. This was the first time in my life anyone (other than my parents) had told me the story rather than the other way around.
            One of my main missions in Indian was to visit the town of my namesake. As the legend goes, she once lived in the Amber fort, about 11 kilometers outside of Jaipur. I climbed the steep cobblestone street to reach the imposing sandstone fort perched on a sandy mountain.
            As soon as I arrived within the fortress walls, a group of hawkers swarmed me. A man carrying a handful of wooden Ganeshas and another handful of colorful papier-mâché puppets followed me repeating, “Puppet, madam?” Why would I want a big wooden Ganesha or a puppet that I have to carry around with me? I bought an orange juice instead, which as fate would have it, was spiced with floating dead ants.
            I enquired as to the whereabouts of the Krishna temple, which was not in the fort, but in the town down below. Obviously. As the story goes, Mirabai would leave the fort to pray at a Krishna temple of the common people, which was then considered incredibly taboo.
Feeling disgruntled, I too fled from the palace and into the village. The fort was not good enough for my namesake, and somehow it was not good enough for me either.
            After questioning several people who did not speak English, I finally found a kid-cum-tour guide who pointed me in the right direction to the temple. Up precipitous marble stairs and passed huge stone elephants, the temple had sat for over 500 years. This is the only tangible remaining artifact of Saint Mirabai’s devotional life to Krishna.
            I peeked into the darkness through the threshold to see someone dragging an old lady in Krishna colored rags off to the side. He plopped her with her crippled legs onto an old straw mat. I entered the sanctum just as an American woman with a wide brimmed hat and Gore-Tex khaki pants was leaving.
            A young Indian man in a tattered orange dhoti and a stained white shirt greeted me. He guided me to the altar where Krishna stands on one foot playing his flute next to one of his female devotees.
            The young holy man began to speak, but could only come out with stutters. He made a face like his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and was desperately struggling to unglue it. He managed to belt out the names of the Hindu deities carved into the walls, calling Ganesha his grandfather. He dotted my forehead with a turmeric bindi and went to attend the old woman.
            So there I stood, in the place of my namesake, the temple of a certain kind of personal pilgrimage. All of my issues with the ridicule of my name were because one girl decided to devote her life to worshipping Krishna in this little temple in a little valley surrounded by dusty stone walls crawling across the barren hills.