Tales of the Open Road

by Ruskin Bond

  Flowers on the Ganga

  RISHIKESH, 1961

  ‘Ganga mai ki jai!’ (Glory to Mother Ganga!)

  Everyone raised the cry as the Hardwar bus moved out of Meerut. Most of the passengers, including Kamal and I, were going to take darshan of Mother Ganga. But while many were bound for Hardwar, we were going to Rishikesh, a more secluded templetown, situated on the banks of the Ganga at the point where the river emerges from the mountains and, hemmed in no longer by rocks and trees, stretches itself across the plains of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, flowing past great cities like Kanpur, Allahabad, Benares and Patna, and into Bengal.

  Just next to us sat a well-built woman with three small children. The eldest, a boy of about six, took a fancy to Kamal, and was soon lolling about on his knees. In front of us, obliterating the view, sat a stout lala and his devoted wife. Lalaji proved to be an impatient and ill-tempered man. He quarrelled with the conductor, the driver and the ticket-seller. In order to travel in comfort he had reserved three front seats, but was unwilling to pay toll on the third seat which, he insisted, would only be occupied by his and his wife’s feet. They gave in to him eventually. An urchin who inadvertently touched the sleeve of his kurta received a stinging slap. But he became more tolerant as time went on, and once, when engaged in an argument with a passenger at the other end of the bus, favoured me with a smile.

  The countryside was monotonous up to Roorkee. Then the road took us along the Ganga canal, and Kamal sat up and began to look at things. We changed buses at Hardwar, and got into a very old and wheezy contraption which surprised us by going much faster than the government roadways bus. Probably the driver was trying to make up for time lost in stopping every five minutes to pick up some acquaintance on the road. We stopped for ten minutes at the Sat Narain temple, once famous for the tiger that used to visit it every evening. Rattling through the Motichur forest block, we saw two elephants—tame ones, possibly—and a variety of monkeys.

  We left the bus at Rishikesh and went in search of my friend Jhardari, with whom we were to stay. He lived at Muni-ki-Reti, two miles upstream, where the wealthier ashrams were situated. His rooms, adjoining Swami Sivananda’s Ashram, were on the right-hand bank of the Ganga.

  Jhardhari was away, on a routine trip to Devprayag. As Secretary of the Tehri-Garhwal Motor Mazdoor Sangh Workers’ Union, he has to travel all over the district to keep in touch with the men who drive the trucks and buses on the dangerous hill roads. The buses are privately owned; the government only nationalizes those services that use first-class roads. The state is very cautious about taking over the responsibility of transporting people to remote hill towns like Tehri and Pipalkoti, where pilgrims on the way to Gangotri or Badrinath must start their journey on foot. The motor roads in the interior are narrow, precipitous and unmetalled. To mention this is not to condemn them. Till a few years ago many of these regions had no roads at all. And Garhwalis are excellent drivers—many have experience of Army trucks—and serious accidents are uncommon.

  Jhardhari’s room-mate made us at home, and prepared hot, strong tea. Garhwalis drink more tea than Englishmen, and seldom take water. We were to become accustomed to drinking tea at almost hourly intervals.

  One of the first things we did was to dip ourselves in the river. The water was icy cold, and it was impossible to stay in for more than ten minutes. Shivering, we climbed on to the bathing steps to dry ourselves. Our clothes felt hot against our bodies.

  Down at the Rishikesh bathing ghat, hundreds of people would be dipping themselves in the sacred waters; but at Muni-ki-reti (which is in Tehri-Garhwal district, while the town of Rishikesh is in Dehra Dun district) there were only a few people by the river—a few pilgrims from Bengal, Andhra and Madras; disciples from Swami Sivananda’s Ashram; and a number of boys who work in the area.

  Logs were always floating downstream, and boys would get across them, lying flat on their stomachs and paddling the planks through the water. Two of the more daring youths paddled their logs right across the river, to the temples on the opposite bank. They were good swimmers, but had they been parted from their floats they would have been carried away by the current and quite possibly drowned.

  We walked down to Rishikesh in the evening, and saw over a hundred sadhus emerging from an ashram where they were given their evening meal. In their saffron robes, they flooded the dusty road, talking animatedly amongst themselves. Many of them were young men, probably novices. One was a strapping youth of about twenty, a Hercules gracefully wearing the robe of renunciation.

  They looked well-fed and contented. Most of them spoke a little English. What had brought them to Rishikesh, I wondered, to live as recluses and ascetics? Personal tragedy, the stress of modern city life, or the failure of material pursuits … Or did the career of a religious mendicant hold out profitable prospects? Later on I was told that some of the novitiates should really have been in prison. But perhaps the rigours of their monastic existence rid them of early criminal tendencies; and if that was so, then surely ashrams were better places for them than jails.

  Little shacks lined the river banks and though few people bathed late in the evening, hundreds were beside the water. Offerings of flowers in little leaf boats went sailing downstream. They were lighted by wicks dipped in oil, and went bobbing up and down on the water, sometimes for a considerable distance, until they were upset by rocks or inquisitive fish. Kamal sent an offering downstream, and requested Mother Ganga to grant him success as an artist. His boat, though, did not go very far. It came between the legs of a bather, an enormous Amazonian woman, and disappeared beneath her.

  Undeterred, Kamal fed little balls of flour to the fish. They were huge, completely tame, and came to the bank in shoals to be fed by the bathers. Sometimes they fought amongst themselves, and a few of them were a raw pink where they had been savagely bitten.

  That night we slept in the open, on a wide ledge above the riverbed. The lights from the temples and ashrams on the opposite bank reflected gently on the water. There was a human quietness everywhere. The sounds were of the river—the distant roar of the rapids, the nearby lapping of water on the bathing steps.

  We bathed again in the river, as the sun came up over the mountain known as Manikoot Parbat. There is an unbroken ridge along the top of this mountain, stretching all the way to the snows of Badrinath, some two hundred miles away. Only a few hermits live on the mountain. It belongs to the elephants who sometimes visit the river in herds, to bathe and drink.

  Jhardhari had returned, looking quite fresh after a 150-mile bus journey; and he offered to take us up to Narindernagar, a little town on a hilltop, which, though smaller and less central than Tehri, is the capital of the district. The former Maharaja had preferred it to the less congenial valley-town of Tehri on the banks of the Bhagirathi; and Narindernagar became the Maharaja’s summer capital.

  The buses were all full, and we had to travel up separately, one to each bus. First Kamal, then I, and last of all Jhardhari.

  Narindernagar is only ten miles from Rishikesh, but it is also two thousand feet higher, and the bus has to climb a dizzy, winding road on which there can be no two-way traffic. But the buses go faster than their counterparts in the plains. With speedometers conveniently out of order, buses and trucks come downhill at a speed of thirty to thirty-five miles an hour. But, as I have said before, Garhwalis are very good drivers. Along the main highways of the Punjab are the wrecks of numerous trucks, some jammed up against trees, others in head-on collisions. But in the hills there is no driving at night, and the drivers prefer smoking bidis to drinking rum or country liquor. Mechanical failure is usually the cause of the few accidents that do occur.

  From Narindernagar we went on for another eight miles, and eventually got down at Agra-khal, a pass in the mountains at a height of about five thousand feet. The motor road, soon becoming kaccha, continues to Tehri and Dharasu, and from the latter, pilgrims must proceed on foot to the shrines and temples of Gangotri.

>   After eating some hot puris, we walked back to Narindernagar, leaving the main road, and hiking through a forest of oak and pine. Kamal, who was seeing real mountains for the first time, was very excited and asked me innumerable questions about plants and streams and trees and rocks. He chattered away until Jhardhari said something flattering about his many and varied interests, and this embarrassed Kamal so much that he stopped talking altogether. I enjoyed the shade of the gnarled, untidy oaks, and the soft, slippery carpet of pine needles.

  But after the forest there was bare hillside; the sun was scorching hot, and we had soon emptied the water bottle. So we rejoined the main road and stopped a truck going down to Rishikesh.

  It was the first time Kamal and I had sat in the back of a truck travelling at speed down a mountain. It was impossible to anchor oneself on the floor. A kindly sadhu, also at the back, placed his blanket on a tyre and invited us to share it with him; but at every hairpin bend the tyre slid violently about the floor and we were pitched off it. Kamal and I clung to each other to avoid being thrown against the sides of the truck; Jhardhari hung on to an iron bar; we were all feeling quite sick. Only the sadhu appeared unperturbed. He retained his seat on the tyre, even when it went skidding from one end of the truck to the other.

  When we reached Rishikesh we went straight to the river. Never had Mother Ganga’s waters been so refreshing. The giddiness disappeared. Then we lay down on the sand, and Kamal, like the sleepy giant Kumbhakarna in the Ramayana, did not come to life until it was time to eat.

  We slept well that night. In the morning we would go to Lachhman Jhula and, passing the suspension bridge, walk a little way up Manikoot Parbat.

  As the sun rose, turning the river to gold, we climbed into the boat that took pilgrims across to the temples on the other bank. The oarsmen sat in the prow, straining against the current, and the people in the boat raised the same ageless cry: ‘Ganga mai ki jai!’

  Climbing ashore, we passed through groves of mango trees, planted by rich pilgrims for the benefit of the sadhus. Then, leaving behind Lachhman Jhula, we walked along the pilgrim route to Badrinath until we came to a dharamshala called Garur Chatti. Here we drank the inevitable but welcome tea, and set off up the hillside in search of a waterfall Jhardhari had told us about.

  It did not take us long to reach the waterfall. Set amidst rocks and ferns, it fell about thirty feet onto a platform of smooth yellow rocks and pebbles. Here it formed a small pool, about waist deep, into which we leapt without hesitation. The water wasn’t as cold as the Ganga’s, and we could splash about for as long as we liked, while the waterfall sprayed down on our heads. The water was very clear and fresh, though it had a slightly bitter taste, evidence, I suppose, of a strong mineral content.

  Further down the stream we found a lot of old bones, which Kamal insisted were the remains of a tiger’s kill; indeed, they might have been, tigers having been seen on the mountain. But no tiger troubled us; only a band of langurs, swinging from tree to tree, seemed resentful of our presence and urged us to leave.

  This we did at our leisure and, after more tea at Garur Chatti, and a visit to a small temple, where the courtyard floor was so hot to our bare feet that we had to skip about in agony, we trudged back to Muni-ki-Reti.

  It was our last night sleeping beside the Ganga, and we rested with our chins in our hands, watching the river move silently past us, surging onward, India’s lifeblood, inexorable and irresistible.

  They say that if the Ganga ran dry, all life in India would cease. But, nourished by the eternal snows, it is the one river that can never run dry. As long as the mountains stand, the Ganga will flow to the sea, and millions will come to pay homage to its holy waters.

  HARDWAR, 1963

  Flowers floating down the river: yellow and scarlet cannas, roses, jasmine, hibiscus. They are placed in boats made of broad leaves, then consigned to the waters with a prayer. The strong current carries them swiftly downstream, and they bob about on the water for fifty, sometimes a hundred yards, before being submerged in the river. Do the prayers sink too, or do they reach the hearts of the many gods who have favoured Hardwar—‘Door of Hari, or Vishnu’—these several hundred years?

  The river issues through a gorge in the mountains with a low booming sound. It does not break its banks until it levels out over the flat plains of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It is fast and muddy; but this does not deter thousands from descending the steps of the bathing-ghats, and plunging into the cold, snow-fed waters. For the Ganga washes away all sin.

  Says the Mahabharata: ‘To repeat her name brings purity, to see her secures prosperity, to bathe in or drink her waters saves seven generations of our race … There is no place of pilgrimage like the Ganga, no god like Vishnu …’

  Almost every child knows the story of how the Ganga descended from heaven. For a thousand years King Sagara’s great grandson stood with his hands upraised, praying for water to enable him to make the funeral oblations for the ashes of his 60,000 grand-uncles. Almost all the gods were involved in the affair. Finally, when the waters of the Ganga were released from heaven and the river reached the earth, the prince mounted his chariot and drove towards the spot where the ashes of his kinsmen lay. Wherever he went, the Ganga meekly followed. Gods, nymphs, demons, giants, sages, and great snakes, all joined in the procession, and as the river followed in the footsteps of the prince, the whole multitude of created beings bathed in her sacred waters and washed away their sins.

  The multitude that followed the prince could be the same multitude that throngs the riverfront today. I see no one who is not delighted at the prospect of entering the water. ‘Ganga mai ki jai!’ The cry goes up mostly from the older people who have come here, many for the last time, to make their peace with the gods. Only their ashes will make the trip again.

  It is a big crowd, although this is just an ordinary day of the week and not an occasion of special religious significance. Every day is a good day for bathing in the Ganga. But at the time of major festivals, such as Baisakhi, elaborate arrangements have to be made, including special trains and police reinforcements, to take care of the great influx of pilgrims. The number of pilgrims at the Baisakhi festival usually exceeds 1,00,000. During the Kumbh Mela, held every twelve years, there may be as many as 5,00,000 present on the great bathing-day. This is ten times the normal population of Hardwar. And when one realizes that the town is bounded by the steep Siwalik hills on one side and the river on the other, and has one main street leading to the riverfront, it is not surprising that in the past large numbers of people were crushed to death in stampedes at the narrow entrance to the ghats.

  Fortunately the main street is a broad and pleasant thoroughfare. Although Hardwar is ancient (the Chinese traveller, Hiuen Tsang, records a visit made in the seventh century), little remains of earlier settlements. There are only two or three old temples. But the present buildings—tall, balconized structures put up in the 1920s and 1930s—have a certain old-world charm. Even new houses follow the same pattern. This isn’t conscious planning; it is simply that Hardwar is a conservative town and clings to its traditions.

  Most of the buildings along the road are dharamsalas. The road is shaded by tall old peepul and banyan trees. In some places the trees reach right across the street to touch the roofs of the three-storey buildings on the other side. At several places I find small peepul saplings growing out of the walls of buildings. One young peepul has sprung up in the fork of an adult kadam tree and will probably throttle it in time. No one fells the sacred peepul. It is better that walls should crumble or kadam trees wither. At least this guarantees the survival of one species of tree in a world where forests are rapidly disappearing.

  To fell a peepul is to invite trouble; for the tree is the abode of spirits, and the man who cuts so much as a branch is likely to be pursued by all the spirits he had disturbed.

  Peepuls live for hundreds of years, and Hardwar’s oldest trees must have been here before the present town reached mat
urity. Some will be as old as the eleventh-century Mayadevi temple, which is probably the oldest temple in Hardwar. On a sultry day there can be no pleasanter spot than the shade of a peepul tree; the leaves are perpetually in motion, even when there is no breeze, and spin around in currents of their own making. It is no wonder that the man who plants a peepul is blessed by generations of Hindus to come.

  While I stand beneath one of these giant trees, a devout and elderly man approaches with a watering-can, and, circling the tree, waters the soil around the base of the trunk. I move out of the way of his sprinkler watching the ritual in some surprise. It has been raining steadily for some days, and the tree should have no need of water.

  ‘Why are you watering it?’ I ask.

  ‘Why does one water anything?’ asks the old man. ‘So that it may grow and flourish, of course.’

  ‘But it’s been raining almost every day.’

  ‘Rain is something else,’ he says. ‘I am not responsible for the rain. This is water from the Ganga, and I have fetched it myself. That makes a lot of difference.’

  I cannot argue. He waters the tree with love; and his love for the tree, as much as rain-water or river-water, is what makes it flourish.

  Leaving the main street, I enter the bazaar.

  The Hardwar bazaar is a long, narrow, winding street, probably the oldest part of the town, and free of all vehicular traffic. The road is no more than four yards wide. The small shops are spilling over with sweets, pickles, bead-necklaces, sacred texts, ritual designs, festival images, and pictures of the gods in vibrant colours. There is something in these naive, gaudy prints that acts as a transformer, making the more abstract Hindu philosophies comprehensible to anxious farmer or acquisitive taxi driver.