Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  In heaven or the underworld?

  If Gopal is everywhere, where is hell?

  Heaven and hell are for the ignorant,

  not for those who know Hari.

  The fearful things that everyone fears,

  I don’t fear.

  I am not confused about sin and purity,

  heaven and hell.

  Kabir says, seekers, listen:

  Wherever you are

  is the entry point.

  _______________________________________

  This poem is from The Bijak of Kabir.

  2.

  The River

  Jerry Pinto

  Why am I here?

  It can’t be for salvation. I have been saved many times over. When I was fourteen and in the throes of an intense and highly personalized religious fervour, I received the Holy Eucharist in a state of grace on nine consecutive first Fridays of nine months. This, according to the visions granted to St Margaret Mary Alacoque, would be enough—if combined with a dedication to the Sacred Heart—to ensure that I would get into the Christian version of heaven.

  Later, I had washed away my sins at Rishikesh and at Varanasi, both on the river that is known as the Sansartarini, the saviour of the world. At Varanasi, I even had the assurance from the stereotypic panda that I was close to the possibility of never being reborn and that I could achieve forgiveness for the sins of my forefathers, seven generations removed. This seemed like a steal until I realized that Rs 7001 and a great deal of coconuts were involved.

  I had offered my prayers (and rage at line-breaking old ladies) at the shrine of Sai Baba at Shirdi in Maharashtra. I had even awoken betimes and walked the fourteen kilometres of the girivalam around the hill of Arunachala, not the abode of Shiva but Shiva himself. So long as salvation is to be achieved in terms of ritual or geography, I am quite safe. So why am I here at the Kumbh Mela?

  I am interested in Hinduism, it is true. Had it not been for the rise of Hindutva, I might have described myself as a Hindu Christian. I enjoy the mythology. I enjoy the reticulate venation of the stories. I like the imagery. I love the aarti when it is conducted with some attention to the dramaturgy. It helps, of course, that I am male and that I am an outsider. I am not implicated. I am not subordinate. I approach all these as artefacts, as culture to be consumed. I am not very different when it comes to my relationship with the appurtenances of the faith into which I was born.

  By the time I went to Allahabad, I had done all the background work. I knew the story of the amrit manthan—the churning of the ocean with an inverted mountain, turning on a snake, at the two ends of which the gods and the asuras worked in union to achieve immortality. When the pot (or kumbh) of amrit appeared, the gods nipped in and made off with it. Not unnaturally enraged, the asuras gave chase. For twelve days and twelve nights, the battle raged. Four drops of the nectar of immortality fell on to the earth: one at Nasik, one at Ujjain, one at Haridwar and one at Allahabad. And so four times in a cycle of twelve years, the Kumbh moves, from river to river, only once leaving the banks of the Ganga for the Godavari.

  I don’t think that is why I am here.

  ‘Nothing will prepare you for the Kumbh,’ a friend said discouragingly, but to most journalists, ah okay, most men, this is a lure. No one would ever have climbed a mountain had it not been for this desire to confront the place in your soul where the possibility of death in acute discomfort (trampling? drowning?) lies and mocks your masculinity.

  So here I am, prepared to be unprepared. And yet, Allahabad Station looks no different from any other station. Every inch of it is covered with human flesh, it is true, but of which Indian railway station might that not be said?

  At the hotel where we are staying, somewhere in the Civil Lines, it seems as if the Kumbh Mela has been called off. A few pink people in saffron robes stroll about the lobby but no more than might be seen on an ordinary day in a Pune hotel. What is going on? Where is the action?

  To reassure myself that I have arrived at the right place, I turn on the television set in my hotel room. A perky face begins the spiel we all know: ‘… millions of Indians … thousands of international tourists … largest gathering in the world … banks of the Ganga … holiest of holies … largest gathering in the world … Sonia Gandhi … additional security … largest gathering in the world …’

  In the background of the perky face run the images that have now become the visual clichés of the Kumbh. Sadhu smoking chillum. Sadhu offering oblation of river water unto Sun God. Thousands dipping themselves decorously into the murky water. Sadhus in procession. Flickering oil lamps. Possessed woman whipping her hair around with onlookers displaying embarrassment and pride and belief and disbelief. For that anonymous television station somewhere in Delhi, the Kumbh seems to have more reality than in Allahabad.

  It is time to go out and find the Kumbh.

  The first thing you notice is the dust. It is a fine yellow dust, and by the evening, it has coated your mouth, your tonsils, your oesophagus and your lungs. No one else seems to notice. They are all heading, single-minded, into the water.

  I join them, walking with the crowd. There is nothing to indicate that this is a sacred moment. It could just be a huge crowd of people, heading out for a bath. They are not singing, they are not chanting. They are here to bathe in the Holy Ganga and that is what they will do. I get to the edge of the water and discover that the bath is actually a bath. This is no ritualized immersion with a slow oblation towards the rising sun, the stuff of which the standard pictures are made. This is a get-clean-quick bath. There is enough froth in the water for a couple of wedding dresses. You can smell what chemical engineers think is jasmine and sandalwood and rose. Used soap wrappers float between the legs of the bathers. Immersion happens quickly and if there are prayers, they must be happening somewhere in between the underarm scrub and the pubic wash.

  I go back.

  The tea-seller grins at me.

  ‘Journalist?’ he asks.

  I don’t know how he knows. I don’t care. I want clean air again. But I am civil and since he is aching to tell me how he knows, I ask.

  ‘You have not had a bath. You must be a journalist.’

  The bathed and saved are returning, many still half-clad, to drink their cups of tea. Everyone asks me the same question. In an attempt to turn things round, I ask a shivering young man from Bihar whether he is leaving now that he has had his bath.

  ‘Leaving?’ He seems horrified. ‘Leaving? I have only bathed thrice.’

  I can’t see what benefit that would bring him but if you have travelled for six days, you might want to make full use of the river too.

  I return to the river at night. It is much the same, the dust refracting the light endlessly so nothing seems dark, nothing seems bright. A haze covers everything. Endless announcements require people to make their way to the Missing Persons Camp. Most are reunited by nightfall but often a thousand people sleep in the camp there, waiting for someone to notice that they have gone missing and come and get them. These include the Hindu women who won’t tell the camp conveners the names of their husbands, since they can’t even say their names out loud. When I pay the camp the mandatory visit, Ramanand Tiwari is trying to calm down a eunuch who has lost another eunuch.

  ‘I got down from the rickshaw,’ says the eunuch angrily, ‘and my friend was still in it and then the police kept shouting at him and the chap just drove away with my friend in it.’

  The camera crews buzz around the eunuch. It is a good story, it is.

  I go back to the river. I walk and walk and walk until there is a quiet patch and a darkness and a river rushing by, doing its thing, topping up the ground water, nurturing fish, cleaning our sins.

  This is what rivers do, I think, and there is some magic in it. A river is an unearned gift, what my faith would call grace.

  Then a sadhu turns up, ‘Har Har Gange! ’

  Ten rupees might earn me some more grace, I think. I give it to h
im and almost immediately I am besieged.

  I give up and go home and catch the action on the telly. This time the collector’s jeep is being dragged by a man of god who has it attached to his privates.

  Har Har Gange.

  ‘Are you completely insane?’ she sounds concerned.

  ‘Four million people can’t be wrong,’ I counter flippantly. There are times when you can only be flippant, when something has crept up on you. The river has worked its magic. I am convinced that I need to bathe in the river.

  ‘That is precisely what I am saying. Four million people in one patch of river. Can you imagine what you are going to pick up?’

  ‘Moksh comes at a price.’

  It seems odd, this notion of public bathing. So I have a bath in my hotel room. I am not going to soap my armpits in the river. I am going to go and dip myself in the river and then …

  This is the point at which everything breaks down. I don’t know whether I will take off my clothes or not. I don’t know how I will change into other clothes, whether I do or don’t. I haven’t packed a towel and I don’t have a bag big enough for the Turkish monsters the hotel provides. In Rishikesh and Varanasi, it was easy enough. Get to a quiet part of the river, undress, immerse, unimmerse, dress and you are through. In Allahabad, at the time of the Kumbh, there doesn’t seem much place where you can wash your sins away in something resembling privacy.

  At this point, had I not made known my intentions, I would simply have called it off. But sometimes just having told someone what you are going to do means you have to do it. This may be is what being masculine means. So I put everything I needed (including the soap) into a laundry bag and walked out of the hotel, into a rick, down to the river, and before I can wonder at what I am doing, walk straight into the river, sit down, lower my head once, twice, thrice, a ritual number, enough, enough.

  Then I walk straight out of it and walk dripping back to a rickshaw, back to the hotel and into a bath.

  I am again at the river.

  I have spent the day at Kausambi, sixty-three kilometres away from the city, where the ruins are only a few lines of stone against acres of flat land. A guide has offered me a medieval elephant head in dark stone, sublimely beautiful, for 10,000 rupees. Children no longer play marbles with heads of third-century sculpture; they simply sell them to you. When I return, I feel a little guilty. I should be at the river. I should be at the action. I should be looking out for the Naga Babas.

  But my spectator status does not satisfy me. I wish, as I lie in hotel room, that I could belong somewhere, that belonging could come easily. I wish to get off a bus and head to the river to bathe and then bathe again and again, to drink water from the river, to wash a feverish child in it in the simple expectation of its healing. I don’t think it is about wanting to be a Hindu. If I had been born a Hindu, I would have had the same questions and the same struggling to express the hope that there is something that will answer my whys. I think of the centurion, ‘Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’ I want it to be easy.

  Which I why I am at the river. The river might help.

  It doesn’t.

  I want to think sublime thoughts, but all that I can come up with are strange factoids that have clung to me. That you can even get rid of the sin of killing a Brahmin or a cow by bathing in the river. That somewhere in the Sangam, the faithful believe the Saraswati rises to meet the Ganga and the Yamuna. That one in every twelve people in the world live in its catchment area.

  It is cold tonight.

  It does not get warmer.

  It hasn’t.

  3.

  The Priest

  Arun Kolatkar

  An offering of heel and haunch

  on the cold altar of the culvert wall

  the priest waits.

  Is the bus a little late?

  The priest wonders.

  Will there be puran poli in his plate?

  With a quick intake of testicles

  at the touch of the rough cut, dew drenched stone

  he turns his head in the sun

  to look at the long road winding out of sight

  with the evenlessness

  of the fortune line on a dead man’s palm.

  The sun takes up the priest’s head

  and pats his cheek

  familiarly like the village barber.

  The bit of betel nut

  turning over and over on his tongue

  is a mantra.

  It works.

  The bus is no more just a thought in his head.

  It is now a dot in the distance

  and under his lazy lizard stare

  it begins to grow

  slowly like a wart upon his nose.

  With a thud and a bump

  the bus takes a pothole as it rattles past the priest

  and paints his eyeballs blue.

  The bus goes round in a circle.

  Stops inside the bus station and stands

  purring softly in front of the priest.

  A catgrin on its face

  and a live, ready to eat pilgrim

  held between its teeth.

  _______________________________________

  This poem is from Jejuri.

  4.

  Katha Upanishad

  (8–6 century bce)

  Translated by Eknath Easwaran

  Nachiketa, one of the world’s earliest, youngest and most intrepid pilgrims, makes his descent into the darkest recesses of the self where he confronts the God of Death with the question that plagues seekers to this very day.—Ed.

  Part One

  I

  Once, long ago, Vajashravasa gave away his possessions to gain religious merit. He had a son named Nachiketa who, though only a boy, was full of faith in the scriptures. Nachiketa thought when the offerings were made: ‘What merit can one obtain by giving away cows that are too old to give milk?’ To help his father understand this, Nachiketa said: ‘To whom will you offer me?’ He asked this again and again. ‘To death I give you!’ said his father in anger.

  The son thought: ‘I go, the first of many

  Who will die, in the midst of many who

  Are dying, on a mission to Yama. King of Death.

  See how it was with those who came before,

  How it will be with those who are living.

  Like corn mortals ripen and fall; like corn

  They come up again.’

  Nachiketa went to Yama’s abode, but the King of Death was not there. He waited three days. When Yama returned, he heard a voice say:

  ‘When a spiritual guest enters the house,

  Like a bright flame, he must be received well,

  With water to wash his feet. Far from wise

  Are those who are not hospitable

  To such a guest. They will lose all their hopes,

  The religious merit they have acquired,

  Their sons and their cattle.’

  Yama

  O spiritual guest, I grant you three boons

  To atone for the three inhospitable nights

  You have spent in my abode. Ask for three boons,

  One for each night.

  Nachiketa

  O King of Death, as the first of these boons

  Grant that my father’s anger be appeased.

  So he may recognize me when I return

  And receive me with love.

  Yama

  I grant that your father,

  The son of Uddalaka and Aruna,

  Will love you as in the past. When he sees you

  Released from the jaws of death, he will sleep

  Again with a mind at peace.

  Nachiketa

  There is no fear at all in heaven; for you

  Are not there, neither old age nor death.

  Passing beyond hunger and thirst and pain,

  All rejoice in the kingdom of heaven,

  You know the fire sacrifice that leads to heaven,

  O King of Death.
I have full faith

  In you and ask for instruction. Let this

  Be your second boon to me.

  Yama

  Yes, I do know, Nachiketa, and shall

  Teach you the fire sacrifice that leads

  To heaven and sustains the world, that knowledge

  Concealed in the heart. Now listen.

  The Narrator

  Then the King of Death taught Nachiketa how to perform the fire sacrifice, how to erect the altar for worshipping the Fire from which the universe evolves. When the boy repeated his instruction, the dread King of Death was well pleased and said:

  Yama

  Let me give you a special boon: this sacrifice

  Shall be called by your name, Nachiketa.

  Accept from me this many-hued chain too.

  Those who have thrice performed this sacrifice,

  Realized their unity with father,

  Mother, and teacher, and discharged the three duties

  Of studying the scriptures, ritual worship,

  And giving alms to those in need, rise above

  Birth and death. Knowing the god of fire who is

  Born of Brahman, they attain perfect peace.

  Those who carry out this triple duty

  Conscious of its full meaning will shake off

  The dread noose of death and transcend sorrow

  To enjoy the world of heaven.

  Thus have I granted you the second boon,

  Nachiketa, the secret of the fire

  That leads to heaven. It will have your name.

  Ask now, Nachiketa, for the third boon.

  Nachiketa

  When a person dies, there arises this doubt:

  ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’

  Say others. I want you to teach me the truth.

  This is my third boon.

  Yama

  This doubt haunted even the gods of old;

  For the secret of death is hard to know.

  Nachiketa, ask for some other boon

  And release me from my promise.

  Nachiketa

  This doubt haunted even the gods of old;