NEW DELHI, INDIA—Transported in plastic bags or clasped between hands, the birds arrive 30 to 40 a day. In the summer, they are often dehydrated; in the winter, they suffer from pneumonia. Whether wounded by a passing auto-rickshaw or a whirling ceiling fan, the injured fowls arrive at the Charity Birds Hospital inside the Digambara Jain Temple compound, seeking a remedy for everything from pigeon pox to the common cold. One thing is for sure at this, the only hospital of its kind: The patients never admit themselves.

The Charity Birds Hospital located inside the Jain Temple. (Amanda Millner-Fairbanks)

Opposite the historic Red Fort and situated amidst the noise and chaos of Chandi Chowk, a bazaar in the old quarter of the capital city, the three-story hospital, founded in 1929, treats nearly 30,000 birds each year. The birds are first held in the intensive care unit and eventually transferred to the general ward, where they regain wing power and eventually take flight.

Fed a vegetarian diet of bread and cheese, treatments are free of cost and funded by Jain donations. The hospital separates its vegetarian patients from their non-vegetarian counterparts. Carnivorous predators such as eagles, hawks and falcons are housed exclusively on the first floor. Every Saturday, a section of the roof is opened and the recovered birds fly away. The hospital follows a central tenet of Jainism—a commitment toward enabling the freedom of all living beings, no matter how small or insignificant. And once the birds are admitted, they are never returned to their owners for fear of likely confinement.

“People bring the birds here, Jain or not,” explains veterinarian Dr. Vijay Kumar, who has worked at the hospital for nine years and while not a Jain himself, quickly mentions that he is a vegetarian. One of India’s smallest religious communities who comprise approximately one percent of India’s one billion people, Jains are, first and foremost, vegetarian.

“Just like us, a pigeon will never eat another animal. Even if it is very hungry,” says manager Sri Kamal Kishore Jain, as he describes the folk-art mural in the hospital’s second-floor entrance. It's shows a scene from a famous Jain and Buddhist tale: A king whose hand and foot have been cut off is pictured next to a scale that balances his bleeding foot and hand on one side and a bird on the other. The mural reads: “Brave and merciful king put pieces of his own flesh and finally his whole life in exchange to save a pigeon from prey of hawk.”

Walking barefoot through the bird hospital, two words come immediately to mind: bird flu. The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi warns on its website: “Currently, direct contact with infected poultry, or surfaces and objects contaminated by their feces, is presently considered the main route of human infection.” In response to a question about whether children should visit zoos, the website warns: “Yes, but it is recommended that they do not visit the aviary sections.”

Dr. Kumar assures, “Since the bird flu we’ve taken extra precautions and care with migratory birds. No poultry.” After the outbreak of the avian H5N1 influenza virus in mid-February in Navapur, a city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, the government ordered the culling of hundreds of thousands of birds.

Some expected the Jains, a small, but often wealthy minority group, to publicly oppose the cullings. While they have yet to galvanize their voices, the issue personifies the group’s struggle to gain a steady, political foothold in India. As millions of birds are being slaughtered worldwide to squelch a possible epidemic, some Jains are contemplating how or if to voice their dissent.

“If a human being is suffering from HIV or AIDS, would you kill them?” asks Vinod Daryapurkar, creator of Jainworld.com, one of the most comprehensive websites on Jainism. “If you wouldn’t kill humans, why would you kill the birds?” As a Jain, Daryapurkar does not distinguish between animals and birds. He views both as living, equal beings. “A lot of people talk of compassion and then go and eat animals,” Daryapurkar explains, “The compassion is false.”

Many Jains attempt to manage their lives in a way that causes the least amount of harm to others. When asked whether the Jain community might organize a public response, Daryapurkar says, “The Jain community is small, tiny. Our sphere of influence is very limited.”

Anne Monius, professor of South Asian religions at the Harvard Divinity School, who specializes in the religious traditions of India, mentions the fact that religiously- organized social movements are relatively new in India. “Jains have not responded perhaps because of their deep commitment to the idea that our own human condition can only be cured by one person at a time.” Monius further articulated that historically, Jains needed to establish themselves as a separate, specifically not Hindu community.

“Now to be not Hindu is to invite the kind of unwanted political attention by the BJP,” she explains, referring to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the powerful Hindu nationalist party. “By not putting themselves out there, the Jains are trying hard to melt into the Hindu woodwork and not backpedaling on 150 years of trying to differentiate themselves.”

Dr. Dilip Mukhtyar, former chairman and current trustee of the Jain Temple in Elmhurst, Queens, questions why, if only a handful of birds are infected, hundreds of thousands are sacrificed. “Suppose tomorrow one cow got sick, would you kill 100,000 cows next week?” Mukhtyar advocates for more humane ways of dealing with the possible epidemic and questions to what extent the current practices will actually be effective.

A Jain lobby, according to Mukhtyar, was not effective in their recent opposition to Indian slaughterhouses. “They weren’t that successful,” he says, “Because the people who were running the slaughterhouses were more concerned by the profits.”

Spiritual leader Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanuji, who is the founder of the Jain Meditation International Center in Manhattan, considers the cullings emblematic of a larger problem. “Inconvenience bothers us more than the injustice we do to others,” Chitrabhanuji said last week in New York at a talk aimed at Jain youth, “What you give to the world, it is going to come back sooner or later.” When the issue of the bird flu came up, Chitrabhanuji questioned, “And now you are warned about the disease, but why do you eat them?” he paused and then smiled. “Their vibrations may just eat you some time.”

Toward the end of the evening, Chitrabhanuji handed out a series of cartoon advertisements promoting vegetarianism. Included was a chicken saying, “The one thing I hate is to end up on your plate.”

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When traveling on an overnight train, follow these rules: Make sure to wake your bunkmate if you go to the bathroom, stow your suitcase with zippers facing inward, and avoid prolonged eye contact with strange men.

On our third and final train ride, from Agra to Varanasi, we passed the seven hours sleeping in paired bunks, one piled on top of the other. Tired and weary, we boarded the train around midnight and fell quickly to sleep. Morning broke and soon the singsong repetition of “vegetable cutlet” from a vendor walking through the aisle reminded us of where we were and lulled us back to sleep. Finally Sree Sreenivasan woke his tribe of 14 children with smiles and cookies. A few students sipped sweet chai tea as our train pulled into our penultimate destination: the city of Varanasi.

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Approximately 300 km southeast of Delhi, Varanasi is on the western bank of the Ganges River. Called Ganga in Hindi, the river is often known as the Ganges, the name it was given by the British. It is the locus of city life and impossible to miss; the maze-like streets lead directly to it. Our hotel, the Palace on Ganges, sits above the water.

Varanasi is one of the oldest living cities in the world, and is for Hindus what Mecca is for Muslims. The Ganges is the pathway to eternity, where daily ablutions are performed and souls washed clean in the same water where most residents wash their laundry and brush their teeth.

Hindus believe those who are cremated and released into the waters of the Ganges will attain salvation and liberation from the karmic cycle of death and rebirth. The ghats—or steps that lead down to the ritual bathing areas—are the holiest places on the waterfront. It is here that pilgrims disrobe at daybreak and light candles at nightfall. Tourists pass by in throngs of row boats, snapping pictures and disrupting the quiet.

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Tara Devi watches worshipers' shoes while they pray. When the bomb exploded, she hid behind a tree. (Aili McConnon)

On March 7, the day we departed New York for India, Varanasi was struck by bomb blasts at the train station and a temple, with another explosive device diffused in a nearby residential area. Some students were nervous about going at all. “Is this the place where the bombing took place?” questioned ArunaViswanatha first thing Friday morning, as we made our way through the Sankat Mochan Temple, site of the most recent bombing and among the most sacred of the thousands of temples in the city. Viswanatha, whose family is Hindu, spoke of feeling disconnected as we wove through crowds of worshipers and many in our group whose foreheads were also dotted with orange kumnkumn powder. “I think it would be more poignant if I weren’t with all of you,” she said, “It
almost detracts from it. I can’t feel it.”

Because the temple visit was the most newsworthy of any religious site we visited during the two week trip, questions were plentiful and translators in demand. “By the grace of Hanuman,” said our guide, Sameer Mathur, “Just a few people died.” Hanuman, known as the monkey god, is one of the most popular gods in Hinduism and the one to which the temple is dedicated. The bomb exploded shortly after six o’clock in the evening of Tuesday, March 7, while nearly a dozen couples were waiting to be married in the temple’s courtyard.

Since the blast occurred during wedding season and Tuesdays and Saturdays are the most heavily attended by worshipers, many think the bombing date was timed to wreak the most havoc. Several militant Islamic groups have been mentioned in connection with the blasts but investigators have yet to turn up any conclusive proof.

Ari Paul asked whether both Hindus and Muslims came to help following the bombing. Mathur responded that “we weren’t asking who was Hindu and who was Muslim” as the injured were removed on improvised stretchers made of blankets. Though Varanasi’s majority population is Hindu, approximately twenty 15 to 20 percent are Muslim. A week and a half after the bomb blasts, the city is calm and attendance at the temple is back to normal.

Raju, who does not have a surname, sells trinkets across from the courtyard where the bomb went off. He remarked that little had changed since and he returned to work the very next day. “They believed in God then,” he said, his shirt still pink from recent Holi celebrations, “They believe in it now.”

Tara Devi, who looks after worshipers’ shoes while they pray, has worked at the temple for decades. She hid behind a tree when the blast went off. “Of course I was scared,” she said, “But now there is so much security that we’re not scared. We’re a little nervous and anxious and are always looking for bags and boxes or anything strange.” Since the bombing, dozens of police officers now secure the temple and two metal detectors are installed at its entrance.

Walking out of the gates, Stacey Samuel remarked, “I would think that like elsewhere, people would abandon the temple out of fear, but I’m most impressed that instead they’ve come in greater numbers.” Carolyn Slutsky chimed in, amazed by how “even at 11:30 in the morning, tons and tons of people are being devout.”

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Later in the afternoon we met with Professor Veer Bhadra Mishra, who was named by Time magazine as one of the heroes for the planet. He taught hydraulic engineering at Benares Hindu University and now oversees the Swatcha Ganga Campaign, dedicated to cleaning the polluted river.

Talk quickly turned to the bombings, since Mishra is also mahant, or high priest, of the Sankat Mochan Temple. He considered it God’s grace that the bombings had not escalated into a larger problem. “We were there to tell people that we are to be calm,” said Mishra, “The temple was calm. The city was also calm.” Concern turned to reporters, who have flooded the city since the blasts went off. “The media makes a scripted story,” he said, “And then they start finding actors for their story.”

As we made our way via auto rickshaws to a vegetarian feast, Erik Wander remarked, “It was the best sit-down we’ve had yet.”

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Families gather for weekly worship at the Jain Temple in Queens. The men are draped in tangerine cloth; the women are festooned in saris of magenta and turquoise. Small children dance in circles, knocking into each other as their fathers bathe each idol in boiled water and their mothers chant and sway in time to the tambourine beat.

The children scuttle across the hall for Paathshala—religious study for Jains—with their teacher, Shilpa Pandya, while their parents practice pooja until lunchtime.

“What are the kinds of worldly beings?” Pandya asks her students, who number nearly two dozen, assembled around a large conference table.

An eager student jolts his hand into the air, excitedly waving it back and forth. “There are five,” he explains proudly, “One, two, three, four and five sense organisms.”

During the week, Pandya, 20, studies economics and south Asian studies at Columbia University and commutes home each evening to her family on Staten Island. On Sundays, she teaches Paathshala at the Jain Temple on 43-11 Ithaca St. in Elmhurst. A new program of instruction that formally began last fall, Pandya reasons if the temple can draw in the kids, entire families will follow. Weekly lessons typically focus on their reasons for ahimsa, or non-violence: All living beings possess consciousness; consuming or harming them in any way is forbidden.

“Open your reader and let’s review,” says Pandya, referring to the pink Jainism reader made of photocopied pages bound by three staples, “Turn to page six and let’s take turns reading it aloud together.”

The voices alternate: “One sense organisms have only one touch sense: plants, earth, water and fire; Two sense organisms have touch and taste senses: worms, shells; Three sense organisms have touch, taste and smell senses: ants, snails; Four sense organisms have touch, taste, smell and vision: butterflies, bees. Five sense organisms have touch, taste, smell, vision and sound: birds, animals, humans.”

“Do all living beings feel pain? All souls feel pain,” Pandya says, answering her own question, “Are humans always five-sense organisms?”

The question lingers in the air. “But what about if you’re deaf?” wonders 10-year-old Abhishek Sambaria.

“If you’re deaf, you still have ears,” Pandya explains, “They just don’t work.”
“Butterflies don’t have ears,” says Aneri Doshi, eight, practically falling out of her chair, “They feel pain even though they don’t have ears.”

“What about non-living things? Let’s review that,” offers Pandya.

Reading from the book, Sambaria says: “Non-living things do not have consciousness. They do not have sense organs.” Pictured below the text is a picture of a yellow Porsche, tennis racket and table.

“A dead person is not living,” yells out Doshi, still fidgety.

“It hurts when you pull out your hair because the root is alive but the bottom of your hair doesn’t hurt when you get a haircut because it’s non-living,” says Pandya, “It’s dead. Or diamonds that are living when they’re inside and attached to the earth, but not after they’re mined.”

Looking confused, Doshi wonders, “How come in India they shave their heads?”

“It’s cultural,” explains their teacher.

Unsatisfied, she persists, “I think it’s weird.”

Lining up the students to assemble for aarti, commensuration of the pooja, Pandya reminds them: “Next week’s homework is true and false questions. Tell me if things are living or non-living.”

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