by Ryan Lobo
‘Ya, whatever, go to hell, then,’ says Ranjana, furious, and Iyer walks off to his room, where he packs.
‘Bloody moron! How is the other idiot doing?’ asks Jayachandra.
‘Sir, the whole town wants him back tomorrow,’ says The Lover.
‘What?’
‘He is a great hit, sir. He will definitely win, if he stands,’ says The Lover, a tiny smile playing at the corners of his mouth
‘What? Say that again?’
‘Sir, the people like him. He solved a dispute today! I mean, they really love him,’ says The Lover, enunciating his words.
Jayachandra stares at The Lover and motions him to another room.
When Iyer wakes, he goes for a walk down to the banks of the river. On the opposite bank, the tented city stretches out beyond the horizon. He exhales and inhales purposefully: inhaling the air, exhaling his hurt. It is inconceivable that he had succeeded in getting so far, that he had managed to remain alive, and that he had not disappeared yet. The opposite bank thrums with life; the Kumbh, numberless thousands, hundreds of thousands, have come to bathe at the confluence at this auspicious time. Officials and lifeguard boats patrol the chaos as thousands of gulls circle above, mindless of the prayers below.
Iyer walks towards the river and undresses by its edge, folding his clothes and placing them on a rock. He can see the sadhus milling about on the other bank, dusting themselves with holy ash and draping marigolds over their bodies, preparing for their sacred bath.
Dressed only in a loincloth, Iyer walks into the shallows and looks down at the water by his feet. A school of tiny fish dart around his feet as they sink into the mud. When Iyer stops thinking, he is taken by wonder at the world of plants, fish, water and silence. It fills him like a vibration travelling through the marrow of his bones. Tingling with it, he steps into the brown water, wading to where the water is waist-deep and immersing himself in the river, chanting between immersions:
Om Namashivaya Namaha
Om Namashivaya Namaha
Om Namashivaya Namaha.
Iyer loses himself in meditation, staying beneath the surface for as long as he can, the sense of being underwater a balm, the little fish around him a miracle.
When Iyer rises for the third time, he hears a scream. It’s not just any scream, it’s a familiar sound; he’s heard it many times before. He’s often been the reason behind it. It’s Bencho.
27
On the peach satin bedspread, Bencho is holding up his arms to fend off blows to his most painful places. The Lover and another goon are on top of him, punching and pulling.
‘You are impersonating a government servant. The penalty for that is severe,’ the goon says.
‘What …’ Bencho gasps, in shock.
‘How much have you raised for your campaign? Where is my share?’ The Lover says, kicking him in the ribs.
‘I have not taken any money, sir! You paid everyone. You had the money!’ he says, ‘I didn’t have any. I didn’t take any.’
‘Liar! Robber.’
The goon drags him down the corridor, taking care to kick and slap him at every opportunity, past a large bronze Nataraja that seems to turn its head to look. Bencho breaks away and runs a little way down, but they catch up with him and hit him again for trying to run away. The sounds of drums and chanting echo over the water and into the house. The Kumbh Mela is in full swing, tents lining the banks and sadhus blowing on conches, singing their praises to Lord Shiva. Om Nama Shivaya booms over the water, the vibrations resonating in their chests.
‘No, please,’ Bencho cries as he’s dragged out onto the sand, his nose bleeding, and pitched over the embankment wall. Rolling down the slope, he comes to a stop near Trishala, who has been tied to a tree by the river.
The Lover slides down the embankment after him and starts again. Bencho is no match for him, and focuses only on avoiding serious harm by protecting his head and groin as far as he can.
Sobbing, Bencho tries to escape by crawling into the water, but The Lover follows him. The flunkey joins in and wades into the river too, tearing Bencho’s shirt, jamming his face into the slush so that his mouth fills with mud. When their arms tire, they use their feet on him.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Bencho asks, feeling as if he’s going to pass out.
‘You owe me an apology for your rudeness, but for now, my dear, I’ll be content with just one eye. You can choose which one.’
Bencho screams, but is held firmly in place by the goon.
‘Which one?’ The Lover grins and moves the tip of the blade of his dagger from eyeball to eyeball, breaking the skin under one eye and then the next, making it look as if Bencho is crying tears of blood.
‘Which testicle shall I smash, and which one shall you keep?’ comes a voice from the top of the embankment. Iyer, freshly bathed and naked but for a loincloth, stands there holding his staff.
‘Come closer, I cannot hear you,’ The Lover says, smiling. The goon moves towards him, but The Lover stops him and releases Bencho, who promptly collapses.
‘I see you,’ Iyer says, seeing scales growing over The Lover’s face.
‘Come, old man. Let’s see who you are, my dear.’
While he speaks, Iyer sees his skin turn grey, and spikes rise from his skin like a swamp-creature loaded with venom.
Iyer steps off the embankment wall. A shining iron shield lies in the sand and Iyer picks it up, fitting it to his arm. The Lover watches, bemused, watching Iyer slip his arm through the handle of a broken plastic bucket. Iyer twirls his staff and feels the earth beneath his feet, the sand between his toes. He inhales fresh air, feeling it enter his lungs. From the corner of his eye, he sees Bencho stumbling to safety.
The Lover feints with the knife and rushes forward, holding the blade close to his torso while swinging away with his other arm. Iyer waits at the top of the slope and parries the blade away with his staff. He swings back at The Lover, who falls to his knees, allowing the staff to pass over his head while slashing at Iyer, who leaps out of the way. Simultaneously, he uses the staff like a battering ram, smashing it into The Lover’s face and knocking him off his feet as he slides down the embankment.
Bencho, moving with difficulty, has taken Trishala a short distance up the slope, where he slaps her on the rump, sending her away for the time being. Breathing deeply, he tries to calm down a little, trying to stop himself shaking. He sees another man join them on the ghat; they are more flunkies of Jayachandra’s, and Bencho knows there is an endless supply of them. They are not attacking Iyer yet, merely standing around him. The Lover is on the ground, dazed by Iyer’s attack.
‘Hit him, sir, hit him,’ shouts Bencho, half turning to flee, but Iyer waits for The Lover to recover before striking again.
‘HIT HIM!’ Bencho shouts.
The Lover rises, smiling, spitting out a tooth. He looks for his knife and finds it shining in the black sand. Crouching like an animal, he rushes forward, grabbing a handful of sand at the last second and throwing it at Iyer’s eyes. Stabbing wildly, The Lover connects with the bucket, the blade going through it and getting stuck. Iyer rips the knife away and is himself pushed down into the sand.
Wiping the sand from his eyes, Iyer is back in his earthly avatar. The scales have disappeared; The Lover is human. Iyer tries to rise but cannot, dazed by the scuffle. Bencho turns tail and runs.
We live in a weak light. But darkness was here before. And it will come again.
The Lover grabs Iyer around the neck in a headlock and brings the knife to his throat, the blade cold against his skin.
28
Iyer feels the skin on his neck stinging. There is no pain. He feels vaguely disconnected from his predicament, as if there is a goat being slaughtered elsewhere. Slowly, The Lover exerts more pressure, teasing the blade over his skin, his lips parted, savouring the moment. The sun shining in his eyes awakens Iyer, and he feels the beginnings of shock. A shadow falls over the scene. Bencho seems to fly overh
ead. How can this be? Iyer wonders.
Your true form.
Bencho lands atop The Lover with his full weight, having leapt off the embankment, smashing him into the sand. Bencho kicks him on the jaw for good measure. The flunkies advance. Bencho knocks one on the jaw with Iyer’s staff, and the other backs off.
Gasping, spitting out sand, The Lover raises himself onto his hands and looks for his dagger, as Iyer tries to reach his staff. He finds his dagger just as Iyer swings the staff into The Lover’s crotch with all his strength. It connects, with the sound of an axe hitting wood, and The Lover crumples into a foetal position on the sand.
A conch blows.
They hear the Naga sadhus prepare to charge the river at the exact auspicious time, ten thousand of them chanting the name of God.
‘Om Namashivaya Namaha,’ roars the crowd, making the hairs on Iyer’s arm stand up.
The Lover tries to move, his face contorted, but falls back down again. The conch blows again, and the sadhus roll over the embankment, waving banners and swords, resplendent in marigolds and armed with trishuls.
Om Namashivaya Namaha.
Iyer and Bencho begin to run. They run to the end of the private ghat and climb over the wall into the common area, amongst the immense crowd beyond the walls. Immediately overwhelmed by the size of it, carried like flotsam by its momentum, they are separated. Iyer is forced into the confluence, which is shallow for hundreds of yards, all the way to the centre.
Long-haired and almost naked, Iyer is indistinguishable from the ecstatic bathing sadhus that surround him, praying and chanting. He limps through the crowds chanting the names of the gods.
Feeling faint, he sits in the water as the faithful immerse themselves, eyes closed, mantras on their lips, water dripping off their beards. An old ascetic is helped into the water, and hobbles to a spot next to Iyer. He immerses himself, helped by a younger sadhu, and then bursts into tears for reasons he cannot understand. He prays and gives thanks and prays again, the river wrapping around his waist.
Again and again I seek comfort from you.
‘Om Namashivaya Namaha,’ he says, grateful tears streaming down his face.
Iyer lowers himself further into the coolness and immerses himself, hearing nothing but the sounds of the river. He touches the earth beneath the water with his hands and lowers his forehead to the riverbed, holding his breath as his head goes beneath the surface, letting his skull sink into the black soil, brought down from the tops of mountains that were once the bottom of the sea.
29
The suit of armour is securely packed in its cardboard box. Krishna had planned to meet Iyer at Jayachandra’s house later that day, before making the return journey, hopefully with Iyer in tow, if his plan went well. But when he’d tried Bencho in the morning, all he got was his devotional ringtone till it cut out without an answer.
The Tempo Traveller takes ten hours to reach Allahabad from Varanasi. Khanolkar had made it wait for two days to make the journey profitable, and half the neighbourhood had piled into it, paying Khanolkar enough to recover the fare twice over. The driver, a thin boy with yellow eyes and brown teeth, was to drive the Tempo all the way to the Kumbh Mela.
Bags are loaded onto the roof of the Tempo and tied down. Everything is delayed by Mala, who climbs in at the last minute without paying Khanolkar. When he tries to remove her, she says she will put such a frightful curse on him that he will regret this moment for the rest of his life. Something in her eyes makes Khanolkar override his lack of generosity; he lets her in and even gets Damayanti to accompany her, in case Mala hurts herself and curses Khanolkar anyway. When the overloaded Tempo eventually starts moving, Khanolkar takes the pillion seat, berating the driver for going over speed breakers too fast and lecturing the pilgrims on the importance of the day and his contribution to their journey.
‘Makar Sankranti marks the arrival of spring, and it is also regarded as the time for new beginnings and new endeavours. It marks the end of the inauspicious phase, which begins around mid-December. Mala Madam, stop putting your head out of the window – a bus will take it off. Put it back in. OK fine, leave it out. We will not even stop to collect it if it goes.’ Krishna plugs in his earphones and listens to music on his phone.
Delayed by checkpoints searching for terrorists, they reach Allahabad at seven in the morning. The Tempo stops close to the river, near the innumerable tents stretched out on the dry bits of the riverbed. Come the monsoon, all this would be under water, the refuse of millions removed by a single season.
The little group pours out of the Tempo, stretching and unfolding their limbs after the cramped journey, then stands still for a few minutes, awed by the spectacle. Khanolkar takes this opportunity to read from his cell phone in a schoolteacher’s voice, ‘“Kumbh Mela is a mass Hindu pilgrimage of faith in which Hindus gather to bathe in the sacred Ganges. It is considered to be the largest peaceful gathering in the world, where between sixty to a hundred million people visit the river. It is held every third year at one of the four places by rotation.”’
Ignoring him, the group gathers their belongings close – sixty million attendees also means a good few thieves – and treks towards the water, negotiating the crowds, Krishna’s cardboard box is conspicuously bulkier than everyone else’s bundles of clothes and tiffins.
‘“The name Kumbh Mela comes from the Hindi ‘Kumbha’, meaning ‘a pitcher’, and ‘Mela’, meaning ‘fair’ in Sanskrit. The pilgrimage is held for about one and a half months at each of these four places, where it is believed that drops of nectar fell from the Kumbh carried by gods after the sea was churned,”’ Khanolkar says, though no one can hear a thing now.
The auspicious side to bathe on is across the river, and Khanolkar haggles over a boat, settling on an exorbitant price. The demented Mala seizes control of the bow.
‘“Bathing in these rivers is thought to cleanse one of all sins. This is where Brahma, the Creator of this Universe, attended a sacrificial ritual …”’
Wrapped against the cold, they make their journey across the Ganges towards the other bank, even Khanolkar struck silent by the throbbing intensity of the chanting coming across the water in waves. Krishna feels as if he’s near tears, but doesn’t know why. They head towards the spotlights on the bank, silent and bathed in yellow light, awed by the atmosphere.
The quay is being manned by security guards holding Sten guns, helping people on and off boats and shouting at anyone being disorderly. Together they bathe, leaving Mala and Khanolkar to mind the bags. Holding hands, they immerse themselves, offering up prayers and doing the necessary rituals with little oil lamps and flowers. After bathing, they retreat towards the walls of the Allahabad fort, which plunges into the river on one side. There they change and open tiffins to eat while the sun dries their wet clothes. Krishna has brought his good camera with him, because this is too amazing to just use his phone’s camera. He wants to post it all on Facebook later, and hopes his American friends will see how astonishing it is.
A very old man and his wife walk towards the river cautiously, supported by knobbed bamboo canes, their belongings in a gunnysack carried by the man over his shoulders, though not without difficulty. They walk so slowly that it seems they’ll never reach it. But they keep going through the crowds, stopping and standing perfectly still whenever a ruckus breaks out near them, and then carrying on again. Krishna takes a picture of them, and of a man dunking a screaming child into the water. There are so many pictures to take that his finger is beginning to hurt from clicking the shutter, and he hasn’t even started on the ascetics yet. He trains the camera on a group of sadhus further down the river, when he thinks he sees a familiar figure.
30
Iyer still feels dazed, his ears ringing with prayers as a group of sadhus surround him. The memory and adrenaline of his fight with The Lover are still so fresh on his mind that even the dazzling sky seems too much to absorb. A narrow jetty stretches for hundreds of metres, from the bank
to where the rivers meet. The authorities have released just enough water from the dam to allow for safe bathing; the centre is waist-deep. The shallow, fast-flowing Ganges meets the deep-green Yamuna and somewhere in the middle, the invisible Saraswati flows into them.
I will swim in the Saraswati.
Making it to the centre, he looks around for Bencho, who can’t be seen in the multitude. He feels a frisson of anxiety, wondering how he is going to make it back to Kashi; he can hardly go back to Jayachandra’s and ask for a lift now. Still, these are small things, he thinks, in the grander scheme of things. A way will come to him.
Iyer sits down in the water with only his head protruding from it. He leans backwards and floats on his back, his hair floating loose about his head like a halo. Some bathers mistake him for a Himalayan rishi and throw marigolds at him, one woman telling her friends, ‘He has floated for his whole life,’ with great confidence. Conversations filter across to him, and he makes out snippets about real estate and the cost of food as thousands of brown-headed gulls wheel and circle above.
One old man, in a sea of beings, unworried about the cost of living.
Iyer laughs.
It would be so easy to sink down into the alluvium, so easy to disappear, to unite with the river, and that, too, at such an auspicious time.
And no one would miss him except maybe Bencho.
A gull shits on his forehead, interrupting the reverie, and Iyer sits up, scrubbing the excrement off furiously. Cupping water in his hands, he splashes it over his face, and over his neck and chest too, just in case.
‘Sir,’ he hears, ‘sir, sir.’ It is Bencho, making his way towards him in the water. ‘Sir, I have found you.’ Reaching Iyer, he bursts noisily into tears, his whole body still jangling with pain from his earlier beating, and – the shock of that subsiding – the end of his promising political career.