Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  “He had his lathi with him, and he began beating me with it. My father joined in, using his wooden slippers. For nearly an hour they both beat me—it seemed like much longer, at that age things hurt more—until eventually the neighbours had to come and separate us. Then they kicked me out of the courtyard into the street. I sat there shuddering with tears, hurting both inside and out. There were welts all over my back, my shorts were torn and my shirt was covered in blood.”

  “Your father really gave it to you,” said Kanai, shaking his head.

  “For a while I just lay there, and then eventually I got up and went to the train station. I washed in the pump on the platform. I knew I would get into trouble, but I never thought it would be so bad. I now had to think what to do. I didn’t have a rupee in my pocket, my clothes were torn, it was November and there was a chill in the air. So I thought very deep and hard. As I was thinking a train puffed in, heading for Howrah, and I jumped on, without any particular plan, and eventually got off at Burdwan Junction. I sat for a long time on the platform in the dark. I knew I wanted to become a Baul, but how to get there? How could I feed myself?

  “As I was sitting there another train came in, the Toofan Express, coming from Vrindavan, the home of Lord Krishna. It was now 11:30 p.m. As I sat there in the half-light of the platform, a small group of Bauls and sadhus got off the train, carrying musical instruments, and they settled down close to where I was sitting. One was a very old man—he must have been at least ninety. He saw me sitting there with blood on my clothes, and a black eye coming up, so he walked over, and said, ‘You’ve run away from home, haven’t you?’ He asked me to bring him some water, which I did. He then said, ‘You must be hungry.’ So he gave me a chapati from his tiffin, and shared his dal with me, and as we ate, I told him the whole story.

  “He listened very carefully, and then told me I should catch the Toofan Express back to Vrindavan, and that if I went there, Lord Krishna would help me. At 2 a.m., the Express hooted that it was about to leave. He helped me on, and gave me a blanket, and handed me his most precious possession, his ektara. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Just play the ektara, and sing the name of Krishna, and you’ll be looked after.’

  “So with that ektara in my hand, and still wearing my torn vest and shorts, I got on, and we headed off, away from Bengal. I didn’t eat again for four days—I didn’t know how to beg, couldn’t speak Hindi, couldn’t play the ektara. I only knew the two songs I had learned at Kenduli, and of those I only knew a couple of verses. But when I reached Vrindavan, I heard there was food available to poor pilgrims at the Govind Mandir: they were giving out rice pudding as lungar [alms]. So I ate bowl after bowl, until I was no longer hungry. Then I went down to the banks of the Yamuna River and said a prayer, asking for the strength to become a Baul and never to give up and go back home and submit to my father. With that prayer on my lips, I threw my sacred thread into the river.

  “For me, that ended forever my identity as a Brahmin. That very day I changed my name. I had been Dev Kumar Bhattacharyya—any Bengali knows that that is a Brahmin name, with all the privileges that go with it. But a Baul has to name himself as a Das—a slave of the Lord—so I became simply Debdas Baul. The Brahmins had rejected me, so I rejected them, just as I rejected their whole horrible idea of caste and the divisions it creates. I wanted freedom from that whole system.

  “Then I took the blanket the old Baul had given me, and cut it into an alkhalla. In that attire, with the ektara, I found that people would always give me a little change if I sang a Krishna bhajan. I was only fourteen, and knew nothing of the world. At first, I was sure I had made a mistake. But I was too proud to go back, and slowly I learned how to survive.

  “I stayed in a room in a temple and would wander from shrine to shrine, from akhara to akhara, making friends with the other sadhus, and trying to learn the words of the songs they were singing. With money that pilgrims had given me, I bought a notebook, and I would jot down all the words of the songs I heard the Bauls and the sadhus singing on the ghats at Vrindavan. My mind was totally focused on becoming a Baul; for me at that stage, God was the song I was singing. I just wanted to find out what was in those songs, and how to decode their hidden meanings.

  “After two years, I went back home, and tried to make peace with my family. As I entered, my mother was sitting there right in front of me, in the middle of the courtyard. She kept sitting there, looking at me as if I was a ghost. I greeted her, and from inside came the voice of my father asking, ‘Who is there?’ My mother said, ‘It is Debu.’ So my father came out and looked at me, amazed, without speaking. Then his face clouded over. ‘You’ve become a Baul,’ he said, firmly but not unkindly. ‘Now you must live with them. There is no place for a Baul in my house.’ Then my brother came back, and started threatening me with dire consequences if I didn’t leave. My mother and sister were crying, and I was crying inside, but I was too scared to cling to them, or even say goodbye. The whole scene lasted less than an hour, maybe less than that. I’ve never seen them again.

  “Just as I had two years earlier, I walked the road to the rail way station, and again I boarded the first train that came in. I was miserable—it was one of the lowest points in my life. The train pulled out, and I sat gazing out of the window, feeling as if I might as well just throw myself out of the train into the river. But then something remarkable happened. After a few minutes, I heard some singing further down the train. It was Paban, and his brother and his father, and with them, in a different carriage, was Sudhir Das, the Baul who had taken me to Kenduli, and with him was Kanai.

  “I had known Paban’s family since I was a boy, as they lived in the next village, and they were very surprised to see me living like a Baul and wearing the alkhalla. But they embraced me, and looked after me, and Kanai began to teach me songs. We began to sing together on the trains and to sleep on the platforms of stations. We were perpetually on the move—from train to train, festival to festival. I was very happy, partly because I was back in Bengal—the Bengalis understand our ways and love our songs—and partly because I really liked the freedom of this life. But mainly I was happy because Kanai and the others recognised me as another Baul, and made me their friend and companion. I forgot the pain of being rejected by my family and immersed myself in the family of the Bauls, and the kinship of their songs. Kanai and I were together from this time.

  “There was only one time when I left him for an extended period. This was when I became obsessed with trying to live without food, like the saints and yogis in the old stories. These saints controlled all their desires and so never ate: they lived on air alone. I wanted to find out if it was still possible to do this. So I went off on my own, and found a bel—a wood apple tree—in a forest near a pond: we believe these trees are very auspicious. I sat there in a loincloth and meditated for two years, eating less and less until I stopped eating altogether, taking a vow that no food was to pass my lips until I reached my goal, and achieved Enlightenment. I don’t know how I lived. I had matted dreadlocks down to my knees, and sat there not eating, not smoking, and drinking nothing but water. I focused inwards, conserving my energies. I sat there like that through two monsoons and two cold winters.”

  “I used to visit him,” said Kanai. “The villagers knew where he was, and would lead me to him through the forest. They called him ‘Bel-talar Babaji’–the sadhu who sits under a wood apple tree. He was very thin and very weak. He hardly moved or talked—only very short sentences. I was very anxious that he wouldn’t survive, and it pained me that he wouldn’t eat. I brought him food, but he refused to eat it. He was very determined.”

  “I don’t know what I attained with this penance,” said Debdas, “but I know my mind was at peace as never before. My hair was matted, but the knots of my heart were untied. After a certain point, I stopped feeling hunger. I was at the end of desire, beyond the senses. It was then that I started hallucinating. I was no longer living inside my body—I was somewhere outsid
e of myself, in a state of ecstasy and rapture. I have never felt anything like it, before or since.

  “Then one cold starry night, around the time of Makar Sakranti, I felt suddenly lost, as if my mind had finally detached itself from my body—like a bird flying high. It was Kanai who brought me back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was unaware of it, but there had been a terrible storm. Kanai had a premonition that I was in trouble, and came over from Tarapith to see if I was all right. He arrived early in the morning with a group of villagers, and found me up to my neck in a pool of mud, fast asleep. They all thought I was dead—and I suppose I almost was. Kanai brought me back to his house in Tarapith, and nursed me back to health.”

  “The blind man saved the man who could see,” said Kanai, chuckling to himself. “Sometimes the mad and sightless can understand things better, and more clearly, than the sane and the sighted.”

  “The blind are never deceived by appearances,” said Debdas.

  “Maybe,” said Kanai, “it is only those of us who have no eyes that can see through the lure of maya, and glimpse reality for what it is.”

  For five days I followed Kanai and Debdas around the Kenduli mela, as Debdas held Kanai’s hand and guided him.

  All over the huge campsite, at all hours of the day and night, you could see groups of musicians breaking into song. Sometimes this was part of a formal concert: the Bengal State Government had put up a small stage in honour of Kenduli’s celebrated court poet Joydeb, the twelfth-century author of the great Sanskrit poem on the loves of Krishna, the Gita Govinda, and each night different Baul groups competed to sing the poem. Usually, however, the music was spontaneous. Groups of Bauls began singing around a campfire and were soon joined by old friends not seen since the last festival.

  The Bauls were always happy to talk about their lives and songs and beliefs, but were not prepared to discuss in public the esoteric sexual practices which each guru teaches to his pupils when he considers they are ready. These folk Tantric practices of the Bauls, or sadhana, are closely guarded secrets, but embrace control of breathing and orgasm in elaborately ritualised sexual rites. Sometimes this involves sex with menstruating women, which in their songs they call “the full moon at the new moon.” Occasionally this is combined with the ingestion of a drink compounded of semen, blood and bodily fluids—so making a firm Tantric statement about flouting established norms and taboos.

  Kanai talked briefly to me about the Bauls’ sexual yoga, “drinking nectar from the moon,” explaining it as a way of awakening and controlling the latent erotic energies from the base of your body and bringing them to the fore. His words were explained to me by another new arrival at the festival: the Delhi-based writer on religion Bhaskar Bhattacharyya, who had once lived for an extended period with Kanai in Tarapith, and who had researched the customs of the Bauls as deeply as anyone.

  The Bauls, explained Bhaskar, seek to channel the mysteries of sexuality and the sexual urge—the most powerful emotional force in the human body—as a way of reaching and revealing the divinity of the inner self. “They use it as a sort of booster rocket,” he explained. “Just as a rocket uses huge amounts of energy to blast out of the field of gravity, so the Bauls use their Tantric sexual yoga as a powerhouse to drive the mind out of the gravity of everyday life, to make sex not so much enjoyable as something approaching a divine experience. Yet the sex is useless if it is not performed with love, and even then sex is just the beginning of a long journey. It’s how you learn to use it, how you learn to control it, that is the real art.”

  For the Bauls, these sexual exotica are part of a much wider set of yogic practices which aim to make the sacred physiology of the body supple and coordinated with itself, using the mastery of breathing, meditation, posture and exercises as a way of charging and taming energies and drives, and perfecting the body in order to transform it. “For the Bauls, the body is the chariot that can take you up into the sky, towards the sun,” as Bhaskar put it.

  For this reason, marriage is very important for the Bauls, and to be a fully initiated Baul you have to have a partner with whom you can perform Tantric sadhana. Debdas had in fact been married twice. His first wife was Radha Rani, the daughter of his guru, Sudhir Das, the Baul who had first taken him to Kenduli. Aged eighteen, he was staying in Sudhir Das’s akhara when he caught a fever.

  “I was almost unconscious and Radha Rani tended me,” Debdas told me. “She was a beauty and a wonderful singer. The trap was laid: it was like a football match with only one goalpost. Whatever happened, happened. I was so ill that I was hardly aware of what was going on.”

  “Ha!” said Kanai from across the room.

  “I was snared,” said Debdas. “Completely in love.”

  “He was like an intoxicated elephant,” said Kanai.

  “Ah—she was wonderful,” continued Debdas. “I wanted to team up with her and travel Bengal with her, singing. But in the end we were only together two years. Our love soured. Things built up, and one day the bomb burst. I just walked out. By then we had a six-month-old baby. In life, happiness and sorrow go hand in hand. Sorrow is part of life. We have to find the happiness that lies beside it.”

  I asked how he had met his current wife.

  “Several years later I joined the akhara of Ramananda Das Goswami,” said Debdas. “After a while I asked him to give me both musical and spiritual direction, and to teach me Tantric sadhana. I wanted to learn how to close the mouth of the snake and boil the milk of bliss [to make love without ejaculating]. My guru replied, ‘You are asking for water, do you have a container?’ He meant did I have a woman. I replied that I was single. So he said, ‘There is a girl with us, Hari Dasi, why don’t you marry her and I will teach you both?’ I agreed, and Hari Dasi and I have been together ever since. She has enriched me in many ways, and been my route to our secret practices. I can’t tell you about our sadhana together—this can only be shared with initiated Bauls who have taken diksha—but I can tell you it transformed my life.”

  Kanai came to marriage later than Debdas, and it was Manisha Ma who brought him together with his wife. When Debdas was at the akhara of Ramananda Das Goswami, Kanai spent the monsoon breaks in the cremation ground of Tarapith.

  “My friends in the burning ground got together and decided it was about time I was married,” said Kanai. “Arati, who became my khepi, had been married before, but her husband had fallen from a tree and had been totally disabled. He used to come to the cremation ground in a little cart and take care of the shoes at the entrance. After he died, Arati took over his job, and would sit by the entrance with her young son, all alone in the world. Manisha Ma said to her that she was very young, and needed a protector: why didn’t she tie up with Kanai? All the sadhus thought it was a good idea, so my mother came and met her, and liked her. She wanted me looked after and settled before she died, so she said to Arati, ‘Look after my son—he may be blind, but he’s a good boy.’

  “According to the Hindu shastras you marry only once, and Arati had already been married. So the purohit did what is usual in such cases: he married me to a banana tree, and then I put sindhoor on Arati’s forehead.

  “I was completely innocent when I was married. How could I know how to make the frog dance before the serpent? I can’t see! For this reason, my guru Gyananand had advised me to concentrate on singing, and not try to get involved in Tantric sadhana. So in these matters Arati was my guru.

  “Nothing happened the first night. My education took place a week later in the new home the sadhus had helped me rent. She was a good teacher, and we now have four children. I owe this happiness to Manisha and the other sadhus of Tarapith: without them I would never have reached this plain of life. I tell you—there is such a lot of love in that place.”

  On the last day of the Kenduli festival, I went for a walk with Kanai through the Baul encampment. The festival-goers were beginning to strike their tents and head off back on the road. Everywhere canvas
awnings were being folded up and loaded on to bullock carts.

  Only two old people seemed to be sitting still. Near the Kenduli cremation ground, I came across a Baul couple who were old friends of Kanai. Both were sitting cross-legged on the projecting ledge of a small roadside temple. Subhol Kapa and his wife, Lalita, were old but were still singing Baul songs to anyone who cared to stop and listen to them. They hailed Kanai, and he introduced us.

  “I am eighty-three,” said Subhol, “and Lalita is seventy. Our age prevents us walking the roads like we used to. But we can still dance and sing, and listen to the other Bauls. Lalita is a good singer—much better than I. These days I am so sick, but when I sing or listen to Lalita it makes me forget my illness.”

  “It’s true,” said Lalita. “When I sing I forget everything else. Often I don’t sing for anyone, just for myself, for my soul. I could not live without this life. I need to dance and to sing. I feel ecstatic when I sing.”

  “It is enough for me too,” said Kanai. “I need nothing else.”

  “Song helps you transcend the material life,” said Subhol. “It takes you to a different spiritual level.”

  “When a Baul sings he gets so carried away he starts dancing,” said Kanai. “The happiness and joy that comes with the music helps you find God inside yourself.”

  “The songs of the Bauls are my companions in my old age,” said Subhol. “We sing together, or with other Bauls like Debdas, Paban and Kanai if they come here. But when I am alone I take up my dubki, and sing to myself to keep myself company.”

  “Did you both used to wander the roads together?” I asked.