Sonepur Mela, Buddhist Bihar & Amritsar

Met at the airport and driven to your hotel; your room is booked from the night before, so it is ready whenever your flight lands. The rest of the day is for resting. If you arrive early and want to stretch your legs, the Lodhi Garden, where the tombs of the Sayyid and Lodi sultans stand among the lawns, is a short drive away.

Up before sunrise for a boat on the Ganga, rowed slowly past the ghats as the city wakes: pilgrims wading in to bathe, priests under their umbrellas, the smoke of the first fires at Manikarnika. Back for breakfast, then east over the Karmanasa river into Bihar, along the Grand Trunk Road that Sher Shah rebuilt in the sixteenth century.

Sasaram was his town. Sher Shah Suri was the Afghan who drove the Mughal emperor Humayun out of India in 1540 and ruled until his death in 1545, and Sher Shah Suri’s tomb stands in the middle of an artificial lake: an octagon of red sandstone rising in three storeys to a great dome, about 37 metres high. It was finished three months after he died, the largest mausoleum in India at the time. Walk out to it in the late afternoon, when the stone turns warm.

East along the Grand Trunk Road, then south to Bodh Gaya, the village where, some two and a half thousand years ago, the prince Siddhartha sat beneath a pipal tree and became the Buddha. It is the holiest place in the Buddhist world, and almost every Buddhist country has built a temple or a monastery here, each in its own style.

In the afternoon, walk between them with your guide: the gilded, steep-roofed Thai temple, the Japanese Indosan Nipponji, the Bhutanese and Tibetan monasteries with their painted halls and prayer wheels, and the Great Buddha Statue, a seated figure some 25 metres high, consecrated by the Dalai Lama in 1989. At dusk the lamps are lit and the chanting carries across the village.

North-east through the rice fields, where November is harvest time, to Pawapuri, one of the holiest places of the Jains. Here, by Jain tradition, Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara, gave his final teaching and attained nirvana, on the night Jains still mark with lamps at Diwali.

The Jal Mandir stands where he was cremated: a white marble temple in the middle of a lotus tank, reached along a stone causeway. The story goes that so many of his followers took a pinch of earth from the pyre that the hollow they left filled with water and became the tank. Walk out at sunset. The fish in the tank are sacred and never caught, and in winter it fills with migrating birds.

Nalanda was the most famous of the monastic universities of ancient India, founded in the fifth century AD, where thousands of monks studied Buddhist philosophy, logic, grammar and medicine, and where the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang spent years in the seventh century. It was sacked at the end of the twelfth century and never recovered. What remains, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016, is a long line of red-brick monasteries, their cells set round open courtyards, and the great stepped stupa of Sariputta, ringed by votive stupas.

Then north to Patna, the old Pataliputra, capital of the Mauryan emperors Chandragupta and Ashoka, strung out for miles along the south bank of the Ganga. At dusk, the Golghar: a granary shaped like a beehive, which the British built in 1786 after the famine of 1770, with stairs curling round the outside to a view over the river.

Before dawn the crowds walk down to the confluence of the Gandak and the Ganga to bathe on Kartik Purnima, the full moon of the month of Kartik and one of the holiest days of the Hindu year. Then up to the Harihar Nath temple, where Vishnu and Shiva are worshipped together as Harihar; the place is called Harihar Kshetra after it. Local tradition sets here the story of Gajendra, the king of the elephants, seized by a crocodile in the river and saved when he called on Vishnu.

The Sonepur Mela opens today and runs for about a month. Walk the horse lines, where horses are ridden up and down for buyers, and the cattle grounds, then lose yourself in the bazaar, which sells almost anything a village household might need, from blankets and brass pots to farm tools and furniture. The fair was once famous for its elephant market; trading in elephants is now illegal under India’s wildlife laws.

Back across the river to Patna airport for the flight west to Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs. In the late afternoon, cover your head, leave your shoes and wash your feet, and walk into the Golden Temple, the Harmandir Sahib, its gilded sanctum set in the middle of the Amrit Sarovar, the pool of nectar that gives the city its name. The hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib are sung without a break from before dawn until late at night.

Then eat at the langar, the free kitchen run by volunteers, where tens of thousands of people of every faith sit in rows on the floor each day to share the same meal of dal, rotis and rice. Stay into the evening for the Palki Sahib, when the holy book is carried in procession to the Akal Takht for the night.

A morning flight back to Delhi, and an afternoon in Shahjahanabad, the walled city Shah Jahan built in the seventeenth century. Start at the Jama Masjid, whose steps look out over the rooftops of the old city, then go down into the lanes on foot and by cycle rickshaw.

Chandni Chowk was the emperor’s grand avenue. Off it run the specialist bazaars: Dariba Kalan for silver, Kinari Bazaar for wedding trimmings and tinsel, and Khari Baoli, the spice market, where sacks of chillies, turmeric and dried fruit are loaded on to handcarts and the air makes you sneeze. Stop for parathas or jalebis, and finish with tea as the shops light up.