Back of Beyond

by David Yeadon

  It’s very hot. A white dust hangs in a cloud over the site, giving a haloed, mystic feeling. I’ve been walking for almost an hour now from the cordoned-off entrance to the Sangam. Actually, walking is not quite the word, more like half-carried, half-trampled by a thick mélange of humanity filling the hundred-foot-wide “corridors” between the tents and the fenced encampments of the sadhus, the gurus, the sanyasins, and the swamis. Each encampment has its own ceremonial entrance made up of rickety scaffoldings and tied bamboo poles topped with painted symbols, logos, and depictions of Hindu deities. A vast supermarket of salvation specialists. Hundreds of them from all over India, each surrounded by his own faithful disciples and followers. The women in their bright saris feverishly cook and clean outside the square tents, while the men, bearded, ascetic, and clad in dhotis or dark robes, gather in hunched groups around their chosen wise man to listen and debate and nod and sleep and listen again.

  And the crowd churns on. Once in it’s almost impossible to break free without the risk of being squashed to a sweaty pulp by a million shoeless and sandaled feet. I’m not even sure where we’re going but I’m part of the flow, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

  “Are you understanding the significance, sir, of this event, sir?”

  A young man in long white robes links his arm in mine and smiles brightly into my dust-smeared face.

  I don’t really feel like talking (I’m far too busy trying not to trip on the pebbly track), and I mumble something about having read an article in The Times of India.

  The youth smiles sympathetically.

  “Ah the Times, sir. That is a good paper. But I think it is possible that you don’t understand everything, sir. It is a very long history.”

  “Yes,” I mumble again. “Yes, I suppose it is.” Everything in India has a long history.

  “The spiritual tradition, sir, of tirthayatra, the bathing at sacred river crossings, can be traced back to the Vedic period of our history, sir, about 1500 B.C. There are quite a few important bathing places, sir, but here—the Triveni Sangam—is the most important. And the Kembh Mela is the most famous holy festival—and this one”—he pauses for drama—“this one, today, is the most important for one hundred forty-four years due to the astral signs, sir, which are the same as when Jayanta dropped the liquid of the Amrit Kumbh, sir, on this very place.”

  He looked closely to see what impact this startling information had made on me. His eyes gleamed; he was obviously very excited and I felt it only fair to let him continue.

  “The Amrit Kumbh. I haven’t heard of that.”

  A great grin cleaved his hairless jaw. “Ah, sir. That is why everyone is here, sir. All these people. They say fifteen million. Maybe many more. How can one know, sir?”

  That was one of the reasons I’d come. It was a substantial detour from my route to Rajasthan and the remote western regions of India. But I wanted to see what it was like to be among such an incomprehensibly large crowd of believers, all converging for the simple act of bathing in the Ganges. I wanted to feel the force, the power of such numbers. So many people all sharing the same purpose, all here at substantial cost and inconvenience and discomfort, all of one mind and spiritual intent—surely something miraculous would happen with all this centered energy. A river might stop flowing, apparitions might appear, the skies might turn black, and a god might descend….

  My informant smiled again. “I am your friend, sir. I do not want money, sir. Just to be your friend.”

  I’d met many of these so-called “friends” throughout India but this one seemed to be less grabby than most. He hadn’t even asked the ritual string of questions yet—country of origin, qualifications, profession, salary, wife, children, address—“in case I should ever be fortunate enough to visit your country”—and the old clincher, “I collect foreign coins, sir; if you happen to have any…”

  “Sir, are you hearing me, sir?” My friend looked hurt. He had been talking.

  “I’m sorry I missed that…”

  “Yes, sir, it is very difficult. Too many people. Too much commotion, I think. But nevertheless I was saying to you about the Kumbh, sir. The Kumbh means a jar, sir, a thing for holding liquids. And according to my religion, sir, there was a time, many many many long times ago, when our gods were all very tired and weak and the great Brahma told them to make a special ‘liquid of life’ to help them become strong again, but they used the bad spirits to help them and the bad spirits wanted to keep the liquid in the Amrit Kumbh—in the special jar, sir.”

  I nodded, trying to focus on his words, still nervous about being pulped on the rough track.

  “But then, sir, then Jayanta, a young god, sir, flew toward heaven with the jar and was chased by all the bad spirits, and as he flew he split drops of the special liquid at four places on earth—in India, sir. Now at each one of these places, in turn, they hold a festival of life, sir, every three years, a different place every three years, and on the twelfth year they come here, sir, for the purna, the most important kumbh and, as I have told you, this one now, today, is the very special one because of the astrological signs, sir.”

  “That’s quite a story.”

  “Yes, sir. It is a very famous story. All Indian people know about this. It is good for you to know this too, I think.”

  “Yes, it is. Thank you.”

  “You want to meet sadhu?”

  “A wise man?”

  “Yes. Very famous sadhu, sir. You can see his sign.”

  He pointed to one of a line of camp entrances, this one was painted a garish red, topped with a triangular pediment on which was painted numerous ferocious Hindu gods.

  “Come, sir, we go and see sadhu.”

  Somehow he tugged me sideways out of the churning crowd and through the entrance. It felt wonderful just to pause on soft sandy ground and not have to move.

  “Wait here, sir. I will find out where the sadhu is, sir.”

  A few yards away the crowd serpentined on, sheened in dust haze, down the long slope to the Ganges herself, gleaming soft silver in the sun. There were police everywhere and other more military types bristling with guns and grenades. Apparently previous melas here have produced outbursts of “cultural divisiveness” (a Times euphemism for outright revolution) in which scores lost their lives. Also fires, drownings (the Ganges is not always a tolerant mother), and anarchistic outbursts from students of the Allahabad universities. It was obvious in the amazing organization of this tent city of millions and the sternfaced wariness of the guards that the government was determined to make this particular one a model mela.

  I could see the black superstructures of the pontoon bridges across the river, smothered in pilgrims. The smoke from thousands of cooking fires rose to mingle with the dust haze. I could smell the hot oil in which the chapatis and papadums and samosas and a dozen other varieties of deep-fried delights were being prepared and sold.

  Near the entrance to the sadhu’s compound, an old man in a large pink turban used a tamed canary to pick fortune cards at random from a line of little boxes set in the ground. A group of spectators stood solemnly and silently as he read the fortune text to a client, another equally old man who fingered a string of black beads and tugged nervously at his long gray beard. He didn’t seem at all happy with the reading. The fortune-teller took his coins, shrugged, and gestured to the canary, which had nimbly hopped back into its cage and closed its own cage door. The crowd snickered, pleased it wasn’t their fortune that had just been read. The old man painfully pulled himself to his feet, grumbled at the reader, and was swallowed up in the slithering crowd.

  “He is over here, sir.”

  My friend had returned, bright-eyed and smiling again. We walked between the rows of tents toward the center of the compound where a large green canvas awning stretched over a low painted platform.

  It was cool and dark under the awning. A score of men sat in a circle around a central dias. They all had long beards and were dressed in laye
rs of crumpled cotton robes, black and gray. They shuffled around a bit to make room for us. I felt self-conscious in my jeans and checked shirt and pushed the bulging camera bag behind me. Cameras seemed out of place here, like laughter at a funeral. And it felt funereal. Everyone looked very glum except for the sadhu himself, a tiny, virtually naked man with spindly ribs and arms seemingly devoid of muscles. His matted black hair tumbled in sticky tresses over his shoulders. Offerings of rice and fruit and books and brass vases and painted pendants lay all around his feet, but he seemed oblivious of everything and everyone. His eyes were closed. His face was turned upward, his mouth curved in a half smile, and his hands rested limply in his lap.

  It was very quiet.

  “They say he has not spoken for six hours,” my friend whispered.

  “And they’ve been sitting here all this time?” There was something almost sculptural in this hunched bunch of devotees.

  “I think so.”

  So we sat. And sat. And sat some more. My legs had gone numb but no one moved, so I tried not to fidget.

  “What do you think they’re waiting for?” I finally asked my friend.

  “Something,” he whispered mysteriously. Then he giggled softly. “Anything.”

  More sitting. Now my arms were numb too. I was hungry and hot and thirsty. And bored.

  “I think I’m ready,” I whispered. I’d never make a guru lover. A bit of meditation once in a while is all right, but I suffer from an overactive brain and an underdeveloped sense of patience.

  “Yes. We’ll try another one.” Even my friend seemed perplexed by all the silence.

  “They usually talk more,” he explained as we rejoined the throng. “He was one of the silent ones.”

  As the heat and dust rose together and the crowds grew thicker, silence became hard to find. This was a strange affair—part carnival, part religious revival, part showcase for the nation’s cream-of-the-crop gurus. A high-hype commercialized religious romp—or something else?

  My Kathmandu friend had lent me one of his religious books, a delightful nineteenth-century account of an English Victorian woman’s wanderings with a swami in the Himalayan foothills. I sat with my new friend in the shade of an empty canvas tent as the crowds milled by and read a few fragments of Sister Nivedita’s (her Indian name, given her by the swami) truth-seeking experiences:

  So beautiful have been the days of this year. I have seen a love that would be one with the humblest and most ignorant, seeing the world for a moment through his eyes. I have laughed at the colossal caprice of genius; I have warmed myself by heroic fires and have been present at the awakening of a holy child…my companions and I played with God and knew it…the scales fell from our eyes and we saw that all indeed are one and we are condemned no more. We worship neither pain nor pleasure. We seek through either to come to that which transcends them both…only in India is the religious life perfectly conscious and fully developed.

  I looked up. Among the crowds were the occasional Western faces, the faces of seekers, coming to the mela to find answers to all the mysteries, coming to find comfort, coming to “play with God,” coming to experience the “perfectly conscious religious life.”

  Singing, chanting, dancing and discordant sitar sounds exploded from a score of pavilions. Babies rolled in the sand while sari-clad mothers washed and polished huge copper rice cauldrons at the water taps; ancient hermitlike men displayed themselves in the most contorted positions in little tents with hand-painted signs nailed to bamboo posts: “Guru Ashanti has sat in this same position without moving for eight years.” “Rastan Jastafari eats only wild seeds and drinks one glass of goat’s milk every 8 days to the honor of Shiva.” A fairground of fakirs! There were men with necklaces of cobras and pythons; a troupe of dancing monkeys playing brass cymbals; more fortune-tellers with their little trained birds; peanut vendors; samosa stands, reeking of boiling oil; groups of gurus huddled together deep in gossip (“So what’s new in the enlightenment business, Sam?” “How’s your new ashram going, Jack?” “Harry, can I borrow your cave up on Annapurna for a couple of years?”)

  There were special compounds for Tamils, for Tibetan refugees, for Nepalese pilgrims from the high Dolpo region of the Himalayas, for ascetic members of the Jain religion, and a hundred other far more obscure sects.

  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon a scuffle occurred near the river. A bronzed Swedish cameraman had just had his expensive video camera smashed into bits of twisted metal and broken computer chips by a crowd of irate Bengali tribesmen. Generally everyone seemed to tolerate cameras and tape recorders but this unfortunate individual had broken some taboo of propriety and now stood towering head and shoulders above his antagonists, gazing at his ruined machine in disbelief. The police arrived, then the army, and together they formed a flying wedge to rescue him, while the shouting, cursing, and spitting roared all around them.

  “You have to be very careful,” my friend whispered. “You never know what can happen here.”

  A few minutes later there was another commotion on the far bank. Thousands of dhoti-clad bathers were running around, shouting and pointing at the fast-flowing river. Loudspeakers were urging calm and I could see another phalanx of police and soldiers scurrying down the dusty slope to the water where they stood helplessly gazing at the water. Stories spread like a brush-fire through the tent city. Someone had been lost in the river. An old woman, a young child, a famous sadhu—someone—had stepped beyond the cordoned-off section of shallow water into the main flow of the current, eddied with whorls and churning froth. He, or she, had been caught in the undertow and had vanished. People strained to spot the body. But mother Ganges swirled on, India’s eternal stream of life and death, filled with the ashes of cremated bodies, bestowing fertility on the flat lands, rampaging over them in furious floods, swirling and whirling its way from the glaciers of the high Himalayas to the silty estuaries of the Indian Ocean. Omnipresent, indifferent, endless.

  My friend had to leave (suitably rewarded with rupees and two rain-stained copies of Newsweek “to improve my English”). I sat on a bluff overlooking the merger of the two rivers. The sun sank, an enormous orange globe squashing into the horizon, purpling the dust haze, gilding the bodies of the bathers.

  The moon rose, big, fat, and silver in a Maxfield Parrish evening sky. There were thousands of people by the river now. The bathing increased but everything seemed to be in slow motion. I watched one old man, almost naked, progress through the careful rituals of washing. He was hardly visible through the throng and yet he acted as if he were the only person there by the river, unaware of everything but the slow steady rhythms of his cleansing. After washing every part of his body he began to clean his small brass pitcher, slowly rubbing it with sand, polishing the battered metal with a flattened twig, buffing its rough surface with a wet cloth, until it gleamed in the moonlight. Then he disappeared and other bodies took his place by the river.

  I sensed timelessness and began to feel the power of this strange gathering. Each person performed the rituals in his or her own way and yet from a distance there seemed to be a mystical unity among all of them, all these souls as one soul, cleansing, reviving, touching eternity in the flow of the wide black river, linking with the infinity, becoming part of the whole of which we are all a part.

  I made my way slowly to the river and knelt down. For a moment there was no me left in me. The river, the people, the movements, the night breeze, the moon, life, death, all became as one continuum. A smooth, seamless totality. An experience beyond experience. A knowingness beyond knowledge.

  I washed my face and arms and let the water fall back to the flowing river where it was carried away into the night.

  14. INDIA—THE RANN OF KUTCH

  A Long Journey into Nowhereness

  Close your eyes and imagine the utter emptiness. A white nothingness—a brilliant, frost-colored land—flat as an iced lake, burning the eyes with its whiteness. Not a bump, not a shrub, not a
bird, not a breeze. Nothing but white in every direction, horizon after horizon, on and on for over two hundred miles east to west, and almost one hundred miles north to south.

  This is the Rann of Kutch (or Kachchh), the largest area of nothingness on the planet; uninhabited, the ultimate physical barrier, separating India from Pakistan along its far western border. Only camels can cross these wastes, and at terrible cost. During the monsoon seasons it’s a shallow salt marsh, carrying the seasonal rivers of Rajasthan slowly out to the Arabian Sea, just south of the great Indus delta of Pakistan. Then for months it’s a treacherous quagmire of molasses mud under a brittle salt skin. Periods of safe crossing are minimal. Occasional piles of bleached bones attest to the terrors of this place. Tales of survivors, reluctantly told, are unrelieved litanies of human (and animal) distress. There is life out here—herds of wild asses the size of large dogs and vast flocks of flamingoes encamped in mud-nest “cities”—but very hard to find.

  “It is a strange place.” An old man in one of the baked-mud villages on the southern edge of the Rann had finally agreed to talk about the place through a local interpreter.

  “I crossed the Rann many times when I was a young man. Now the only people you will find on it are people carrying drugs or guns. The army tries to stop this trade”—he flung out his small, cracked hands—“but what can they do? The Rann is so vast, the army cannot always use their trucks or their jeeps. They get stuck in the mud, even in the dry season. You can never trust the Rann. Every year it is different. It is very hard to know which way is safe for a crossing. One year”—he paused and studied the endless horizon—“many years ago, I lost my brother and eight camels. He was not so experienced as I was and we had a disagreement. I told him we had to go the long way because the monsoon had been late and the mud was not dry. But he was in a hurry. His family was very poor…” The old man smiled sadly, “We are all poor but he wanted to buy land and build his own house…he was in a hurry.”