“I’m going to Jerusalem for ten days,” said my friend Radha in the middle of an Iyengar saapaad.

“What !---When?”

We had a common interest. I was prepared to bet that she hadn’t told anyone else in that crowded hall about her travel plans.

“Next week.”

For years I’d poured over maps in atlases, in Bibles [with question marks over the probable sites of the Sermon on the Mount and other milestones in Christ’s biography] and memorized pictures in books about Jerusalem. The room where Jesus probably washed the disciples’feet; the passage leading down into what was probably the tomb of Lazarus; a street discovered at ancient Capernaum; and my favourite – a black and white plate of the fine paving immediately round the Temple enclosure which is, even today, exactly as it was during the time of Herod the Great.

More than a probability--- Christ surely walked on it.

Meanwhile her son was trying to move Radha down the queue away from the feast-tables. “I’ll go to the Mt of Olives… Golgotha… ” the sparkle in her eyes matched her growing smile:
“Ah !”

We were both thinking of the same person: the man who had proved that a king could enter a great city seated on a donkey. My mind unfurled with images and quotations.

“Will you get me a pebble from near the Jordan?”

“I don’t know if I can go to the river just like that…”

“Well…alright, alright….from anywhere in Judaea then,” I said desperately.

“Why …er….a pebble?”

And Jesus went about all Galillee, teaching in their synagogues….

“Who knows…he may have stepped on it.”

We both laughed at my hope and folly.

“Of course. I’m sure I can slip a stone into my luggage.”

Cana-Capernaum-Bethsaida-Korazin-Bethany…

Great multitudes followed him from Galillee, and from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judaea….

“Anything else? You want water from the Sea of Galillee?”

He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters…

“No….but thanks….thanks a lot…”

Really.

What did I hope to possess if I hadn’t grasped the simple messages he had left behind?
As against the immense economic power of the Temple was the troublesome mendicant-guru who had spoken of a kingdom but hadn’t owned anything. Nor had he written anything save something on the ground which no one had bothered to read or understand. Certainly we have no record of what it was. Yet, the effectiveness of Christ and the ineffectivenss of the Temple authorities was so frightening that the Romans and the Jewish religious leaders had sunk their differences to move against him.

Even so. Though the most valuable things are also the most ineffable, the human mind longs for something tangible; surely it was one of the reasons he had appeared to many people in the land of his ministry and death.

Perhaps he appears at some time to anyone who sets foot on the road to Emmaus. So I suppose it was all right to ask for that pebble from Jerusalem or anywhere near it.