A River Sutra

by Gita Mehta

  But the Naga Baba was already lifting her out of the river. Ignoring the child’s tears, he began to burn his stick of sandalwood so that it gave off a musky sweet smell in the jungle. He crumbled the sandalwood between his fingers until it disintegrated, then drew three streaks of ash across the child’s forehead.

  “There,” he said with satisfaction. “Now we can go home.”

  He led the child past the ancient trees that lined the riverbank, holding the jasmine and lantana creepers to one side so she could precede him down the path. Together they circled the tumbling shadows of a giant bamboo thicket and clambered down the rocks leading to the waterfall.

  As they entered the cave beneath the plunging river the ascetic sang,

  “Turtles and river dolphins find refuge in your waters

  Alighting herons play upon your tranquil surface.

  Fish and crocodiles are gathered in your embrace.

  O holy Narmada.”

  That summer the child and the Naga Baba lived in the cave behind the waterfalls. The ascetic taught the child to read and write, and at night he sang to her of the Narmada. Over the months the child heard the songs so often she asked to learn them herself.

  Only when she had fallen asleep did the Naga Baba begin his own meditations, so that sometimes in her dreams she heard his deep voice chanting

  “Shiva-o-ham

  I that am Shiva

  Shiva-o-ham

  Shiva am I.”

  When the season of rains came, the Naga Baba and the child moved from the cave into the hut they had built on the riverbank from plaited banana leaves and bamboo poles.

  Often the monsoons storms were so heavy the swollen waters of the river flooded their banks, swirling around the tree trunks and the bamboo thickets until they flowed right into the hut, as if trying to embrace the child learning to recite the river’s praises.

  16

  The Song of the Narmada

  “Is that when you met the Naga Baba?” I asked.

  A group of scholars peered into the veranda and Tariq Mia sighed, waving them in the direction of the mosque. “It must be late, little brother. I have to join my students.”

  He tried to stand up but his legs wouldn’t support him, stiff from sitting too long.

  “Is that when you met them?” I repeated, helping him to his feet.

  “Yes, they lived on this riverbank for nearly three years. Each time I saw Uma she knew more songs about the river. When she grew older the Naga Baba encouraged her to sing at temple festivals, so they were always traveling from temple to temple.”

  The old mullah released my hands and stretched his limbs gingerly. “She told me she was being called a singer-saint when I last met her. But that time she came alone. The Naga Baba had left her to follow the next stage of his enlightenment.”

  We walked slowly to the bridge, his fingers resting on my arm with a pressure so light it was as if he had already discarded his frail body.

  As we crossed the marble platform in front of the mosque, Tariq Mia remarked, “I didn’t think the Naga Baba would ever leave Uma. She was more than a child to him. She was the fruit of his austerity.”

  I asked what he meant. Tariq Mia paused at the bridge, staring into the water, his narrow face thrown into shadow by the flame tree above his head spraying its bright feathers of red and orange petals against the green fruit of a nearby banana tree.

  “Maybe it’s only an old man’s foolishness, little brother. But if the Narmada was born from Shiva’s penance, then surely Uma was born of the Naga Baba’s penance. Tell me, what higher enlightenment could he acquire by leaving her?”

  “Shall I try and find them for you? No one is staying at the bungalow. I have plenty of free time.”

  The old mullah’s thin arms embraced me. “Such people are like water flowing water through our lives, little brother. We learn something from the encounter, then they are gone. We never find them again.”

  I stood on the bridge watching Tariq Mia walk toward the mosque where his students were waiting for him. He did not turn to wave good-bye. His eyes were fixed on the marble platform beneath his feet.

  THE SMELL OF vegetation rose from the earth as I followed the mud path through the trees back to the bungalow.

  The jungle was seething with activity. Parakeets and cuckoos, wood pigeons and mynahs shrieked and cawed as they built their nests before the heat of summer seared the forest. Even deer and wild boar were crossing the path undisturbed by any tribal women collecting firewood.

  I was wondering where the women were this morning when I heard shouting and the sound of engines coming from the direction of the bungalow. I sprinted down the mud path, fearing an accident.

  As I reached the bend I saw a group of Vano village women unloading crates from three jeeps parked in a line outside the rest house.

  Mr. Chagla was standing by the jeeps, ticking off items on an inventory. Behind him Dr. Mitra was waving his lanky arms at a tall man following two girls dressed in trousers into the bungalow grounds.

  “Ah, there you are!” Dr. Mitra shouted when he saw me. “Shankar, Shankar, hang on. I want you to meet your host.”

  The man turned. His cropped hair was almost military in its exactness, his spare frame marred only by a protruding belly, its roundness more befitting a trader than someone Dr. Mitra was introducing as Professor V. V. Shankar, the foremost archaeological authority on the Narmada in the country.

  “Forgive the suddenness of our arrival,” Professor Shankar said in a deep voice, shaking my hand. “We are conducting an archaeological dig forty kilometers from here. Dr. Mitra suggested I live here and use your rest house as our headquarters.”

  He nodded at the two girls behind him. “These are my assistants, Sheela and Asha. They will be living at the camp.”

  A man with a mustache leaned over the balcony above us. Another man, his cherubic features suggesting he was hardly out of his teens, shouted over the first man’s shoulder, “We’ve finally got the field telephone working, Professor! Old Murli wants a word with you. Some peasant’s got his cattle wandering all over the site.”

  “I’ll be right up, Naresh. You, Anil, start organizing the library.” Professor Shankar pushed past the girls and ran down the garden, calling back to us, “It must be an emergency if my old guide Murli wants my advice.”

  I watched the activity around me in astonishment. Mr. Chagla was urging the village women into the bungalow. As they trooped past me I read the stenciled markings on the wooden crates balanced on their heads: Microscopes, Chemicals, Research Slides, Photographic Equipment, Reference Books. Behind us the two girls were dragging more crates from the jeeps.

  Dr. Mitra laughed at my dazed expression. “Oh, come on, it’s not going to be as bad as all that. You’re only going to have Shankar staying here. He’s a good chap. We’re old friends, you know. The rest of them will be forty kilometers away. Come on, let’s get out of here before we are run over.”

  He took my elbow between his bony fingers and led me through the crowded garden into the drawing room as if he were leading a patient with a migraine into a darkened chamber.

  “But who is this Professor Shankar?” I demanded as the archaeologist’s deep voice shouting into his field telephone echoed down the stairs. “Does he work for the government?”

  “Not now. He used to head the Archaeological Department for this whole part of the country until he got so fed up with red tape he resigned from government service.”

  Dr. Mitra unfolded his long frame into an armchair. “After Shankar resigned no one heard from him for absolute ages. Then three years ago he resurfaced with a remarkable book, The Narmada Survey. Apparently he had been researching it all that time. Anyway the book made a huge splash in archaeological circles, and he was invited to become chairman of the Indian Preservation Trust. The trust is financing this dig.”

  The door opened. One of Professor Shankar’s assistants entered, breezily brushing her thick short hair away from
her eyes. “Sorry for the interruption. Could you organize a quick lunch? We promised our guide we would set up camp before nightfall.”

  I shrugged helplessly at Dr. Mitra, who rolled his eyes in sympathy as I went to look for Mr. Chagla.

  By the time we filed into the dining room I could see the cook and Mr. Chagla had been inspired by the unexpected challenge to produce an enormous meal.

  The expedition members pulled their chairs up to the table and helped themselves unselfconsciously from the dishes spread before them, craning past the bearers coming in with hot breads and rice to argue with each other about the dig.

  There was an energy at the table that brought back memories of my own days as a government officer when we were working to meet the deadline for the next budget.

  “Will we get a book as good as The Narmada Survey out of this dig, Professor?” the assistant with the mustache asked. Without waiting for a reply he announced, “Professor Shankar worships the Narmada, you know. That’s why he’s such an expert on it.”

  “Rubbish,” Professor Shankar admonished him. “I love this river. But worship is too strong a word.”

  “Why?” Dr. Mitra argued. “After all, the Narmada is the holiest river in India, as our host would be the first to tell us.”

  Professor Shankar glanced up and I was conscious of being assessed by the fierce intelligence in the black eyes behind the thick spectacles.

  “I’m afraid I only care for the river’s immortality, not its holiness,” he said dryly.

  “What do you mean by immortality?” I asked, embarrassed that everyone was looking at me.

  Professor Shankar took off his heavy spectacles and wiped them carefully with a handkerchief, revealing indentations on either side of his nose. “Well, the Narmada is what we call a degrading river. It has a very fast current, which erodes the riverbed, cutting deeper and deeper into the rock. But the Narmada has never changed its course. What we are seeing today is the same river that was seen by the people who lived here a hundred thousand years ago. To me such a sustained record of human presence in the same place—that is immortality.”

  Dr. Mitra shook his head. “Unchangeability perhaps, but surely not immortality ?”

  “No, no. Mitra. I mean immortality in its most literal sense. So much so, the Hindu calendar is different on either bank of the Narmada. Just think. Thousands of years ago the sage Vyasa dictated the Mahabharata on this riverbank. Then in our own century this region provided the setting for Kipling’s Jungle Book. In between countless other men have left their mark on the river.”

  An assistant grimaced at her fellow scholars. “For instance, Kalidasa. His poem The Cloud Messenger and his great play Shakuntala both describe the hills behind this rest house.”

  I could see the conversation was a familiar game to the professor’s assistants as the other girl said, “Then twelve hundred years ago Shankaracharya composed a poem to the river.”

  “What about all the poems Rupmati and Baz Bahadur wrote when the Narmada appeared to them as a spring from under a tamarind tree not so far from here?” asked one of the men.

  Professor Shankar laughed and pushed his chair back. “Precisely. Providing archaeologists with too much work to be wasting time like this.”

  He took a handkerchief out of his pocket. Wiping the perspiration from his closely cropped hair, he led Dr. Mitra and his assistants from the dining room. A moment later the drivers gunned their engines. With a roar of acceleration the convoy bounced down the mud road toward the archaeological site.

  An oppressive silence descended on the rest house when they were gone, and an air of being left behind seemed to infuse the dining room. Even the bearers were moving lethargically as they cleared the table.

  Mr. Chagla gave me a dejected glance. “They brought so much life, no, sir? So much life, so much—”

  “Better get in some supplies, Chagla,” I interrupted impatiently. “You saw how much they ate.”

  WITHIN A WEEK the routine of the rest house was dominated by the archaeologists. They now occupied the entire first floor of the bungalow. Professor Shankar lived in one suite. The others had been turned into a laboratory, a library, and a communications room containing the field telephone and charts.

  Every morning Mr. Chagla personally supervised the cleaning of the rooms, worried that an overconscientious servant might sweep away a fragment of the distant past, thinking it to be only a broken piece of stone or a clod of mud.

  I no longer visited Tariq Mia’s village, in case my services should suddenly be required at the rest house. Even so, I usually found the professor gone to the site before I returned from my morning walk. But one or more of his assistants would arrive during the morning and disappear into the laboratory, where they would work all day. Or they would shout into the field telephone asking Professor Shankar for instructions, their voices loud through the open windows above the garden. At lunchtime their high spirits and keen appetites filled the dining room with boisterous energy.

  Then at five o’clock the bungalow emptied as the assistants left for their camp. Mr. Chagla made a last inspection of the suites before mounting his bicycle to return to Rudra, and I was left to enjoy the tranquility of the deserted rest house for a few hours until Professor Shankar came back from the site and joined me on the terrace in the evenings.

  Sometimes we sat together in silence watching the distant silhouettes of the pilgrims floating their lamps on the water at Mahadeo, moving like ants up and down the temple steps.

  Sometimes, sipping at a glass of watermelon juice, Professor Shankar would talk about the river.

  Once I asked him why he did not think the river was sacred. His reply was so derisive I never repeated the question.

  “Mere mythology! A waste of time! If anything is sacred about this river, it is the individual experiences of the human beings who have lived here.”

  Professor Shankar pointed into the darkness. “Look to your left. Where the waterfalls are. When I was researching my book I discovered some cave drawings in that area. Our datings of the rock samples prove they are from the Stone Age. So they must be among the oldest evidence of human life in India. Lower down the same cliff we are finding implements from successive ages—Neolithic, Iron, Bronze.”

  He picked up his glass and drained it. “This river is an unbroken record of the human race. That is why I am here. Now tell me why you are here.”

  I knew my answer would sound foolish, but I still said, “I have retired from the world.”

  “What were you doing before you retired?”

  “I was a bureaucrat. Quite senior, as a matter of fact.”

  He waited for me to continue but I could not bring myself to tell him of the privileges of my previous life: the army of waiting clerks, the specially reserved train compartments, the supplicants. Or how often I had seen my colleagues succumb to corruption and how, each time, my urge to leave the world had grown stronger.

  “You have chosen the wrong place to flee the world, my friend,” Professor Shankar said at last, getting up to leave the terrace. “Too many lives converge on these banks.”

  I nodded agreement although the archaeologist was already moving across the dark lawn toward the lights of the veranda. I was thinking of the people I had encountered since I had come to the rest house, and Tariq Mia’s observation that they were like water flowing through lives to teach us something. Perhaps the old mullah was right. Perhaps destiny had brought me to the banks of the Narmada to understand the world. Suddenly, for the first time since the archaeologists had arrived, I recalled Tariq Mia’s tale about the Naga Baba and his charge.

  “Professor Shankar!” I called after the archaeologist. He turned expectantly. “I still know so little about the river. If you meet any river minstrels, could you send them to me?”

  He took out his handkerchief and rubbed his head, the sound of cloth on his short hair distinct in the night. “I suppose I could ask my old guide to look out for them.”

>   “Wouldn’t you enjoy listening to a Narmada minstrel?”

  He waved dismissively at me from the bungalow veranda. “Not I, my friend. Minstrels sing about gods and goddesses. I am a man, and only understand songs about other men. The rest I leave to you.”

  He took off his spectacles and looked at his watch. “By the way, tomorrow I am taking my assistants to a site farther up river. We’ll set up camp at the dig itself, so count on us being gone for a week. I expect you’ll enjoy having a little peace again.”

  TO MY SURPRISE Professor Shankar’s prediction proved wrong. I had also thought I would enjoy my solitude when the archaeologists were gone, despite my pleasure at the presence of the trousered girls, or the two young men always smoking cigarettes, whose activity enlivened the bungalow with the restless energy of the city.

  I even gave Mr. Chagla the week off.

  I had not suspected that I would feel so lonely while they were away. I found I missed the noisy lunches with the young archaeologists and their infectious enthusiasm when describing the progress of their excavations. I found I missed Professor Shankar and the pleasure of talking to a companion who shared my own background of government service.

  Sitting on the terrace, meditating in the darkness before dawn, I admitted to myself that I envied the archaeologists for still belonging to a world that I had given up.

  Now that I had the leisure I no longer had the inclination to visit Tariq Mia. I did not want to sit with the mullah of a small village that seemed frozen in time, untouched by the events of a larger world. With some alarm I realized I was becoming accustomed to that other rhythm the archaeologists had brought into the rest house, the rhythm of my previous life.