In the Shadow of Crows

by David Charles Manners

  Such vibrant life and visible death colliding at the very brink of solid heaving earth and shining flowing water, afforded this place an extraordinary quality. The air was heavy with ash, every breath intoxicating with the sickly smeech of sandal, ghee-drenched wood, hair, flesh and bone. And yet, here there was a curious lucidity, an inexplicable clarity, in light, in act, in every thought.

  “You see, Ama!” Jiwan announced, with a look of wide-eyed elation. “In this place, we are neither here nor there. Neither in this world nor the next!”

  Bindra looked down at his face, shining brightly in the reflection of the water. She could find no words with which to respond.

  She could only look down at him. Shining brightly.

  ***

  I woke long before dawn and scurried down to the muddy banks of the river. I quickly found the low, narrow boat with its friendly oarsman whom I had met the previous evening. Sudeep’s family had been boatmen on the Ganges for generations. With his dashing smile, his gentle nature and insistence that I pay him only what I considered his service worth, I had confidently hired him.

  Sunrise on the sweeping, four-mile stretch of Varanasi’s central riverfront was utterly astonishing. The city’s palaces and pillared pavilions, mansions and temples, domes and cupolas, minarets and shikharas rose as an immense, tiered precipice from the eighty or so ghats. Never before had I been so acutely aware of India as the world’s last remaining great, ancient civilisation. Whilst the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Mayans had risen and fallen, India’s millennia-old customs and practices survived intact. I had already found myself utterly enchanted by its wondrous, and at times terrible, beauty.

  I watched in captivated astonishment as innumerable flowerbearing pilgrims gathered at the water’s edge, intensely employed in their oblatory ablutions. The air pulsated with mantras of consecration and liberation, mixed with the pounding of cloth against dhobis’ stones, the low of buffalo and the percussive pop of skulls bursting open in the flames.

  Naked sadhus gathered for communal sadhana. Masseurs and barbers plied their trades beneath broad bamboo parasols. Zealous young cricketers hit driftwood “balls” with driftwood “bats” and muscular wrestlers practised their ancient garadi tradition, for which the city was so famous. Whilst, in the waters, pilgrims and locals of every age anointed then submerged themselves amidst all the debris of urban life, inestimable pujas and the recently departed.

  Not until breakfast, back at the lodging house, did I see the newspaper. The day before, the crowded passenger train on which I had been travelling had tumbled to its terrible end. The neglected, Raj-built bridge that lay beyond Varanasi had given its last, tired ruckle and had collapsed into the river below.

  As I scanned the sobering statistics and the front-page gore, I found myself smudging the newsprint at the thought of the smiling Sikh, the kindly businessman and the pox-marked Hindu, who had so generously and unknowingly shared with me their last breakfast.

  ***

  The previous night, Bindra had led her boys well away from the oppressive crowds, to the quiet of a broad stretch of worn stone near Lalita Ghat. They had boiled rice and the last of their daal on a little fire built from the swathes of refuse that cluttered modern Kashi’s sacred heart.

  Bindra woke at dawn. She placed her hand in blessing on the sleeping heads of her two sons and lay still to watch fishermen, pilgrims and tourists moving slowly on the dark waters.

  As the sun began to rise above the distant trees on the far shore, she made her way down to the river’s edge to wash. No sooner had she entered the shallows than she caught her breath. She had heard Nepali. She scanned the ghat, but could see no one but a solitary, naked sadhu busy with his morning puja to Ganga Ma.

  Again she heard a whisper of the cheery, chatty tones she knew so well. She looked up. High above the great river wall stood a wooden temple, shaded by a single spreading tree.

  Bindra hurried back to the boys. They had only just begun to stir.

  “Au! Au! Yaha hamro sathiharu cha!” she called with

  excitement, “Come on! We have friends here!”

  Together, they clambered a steep flight of stone steps until they reached the temple compound.

  “Namaskar dajoo!” Bindra bowed in eager pranam to an elderly priest, who was sitting on the ground with two young novices. The man bowed in courteous return, indicating with a nod of his head that they were welcome to enter.

  “Ke ramro!” Bindra declared, “How beautiful!” as she surveyed the highly decorated building that rose before them. She eagerly led her sons to the entrance steps of the temple, but the doors were closed. Bindra bowed in respect and touched the base of an ithyphallic image of Shiva by her side.

  “Ama?” Jyothi was staring with curiosity at the stone murti. “Why is Lord Shiva’s laro sticking up?”

  Bindra smiled. “Firstly, it tells us that this temple is of our Hill tradition.” Jyothi rocked his head from side to side in recognition. “But most importantly, his thankieko laro upright phallus indicates the unchanging stability of universal consciousness. The true power of continuous creation, ever-ready to express itself.”

  Jyothi looked bemused.

  “You’ll learn to understand in time,” Bindra assured him. Jiwan was already circumambulating the temple, so Bindra and Jyothi followed in their own clockwise route. When they caught up with Jiwan, he was staring at a graphic carving of explicit, erotic play.

  “What are they doing, Ama?” he innocently asked.

  “Exploring the limitless truth within themselves,” she smiled, her head sparkling with sweet, bright memories. “And the truth in us is the truth of the universe . . .”

  A noise behind them caused Bindra to turn. It was the priest. He touched his heart and bowed towards her.

  “Sister, you have wisdom,” he said with quiet respect.

  Over his many years in Kashi, the old priest had encountered all manner of disease, despair and death. It had taught him to approach all life without fear or judgement. “Come and sit with me,” he offered in gentle invitation. “My students will prepare haajri. Share it with us.”

  Bindra grinned in delight. He had used a colloquial word for the morning meal only heard in the Hills from which they had come.

  ***

  The air was sweet with buttery ghee and fragrant sandalwood. The smoke from the pyre drifted across the Ganges and around family members overseeing the incineration of their loved one. A middleaged man approached the flames with a heavy stick. With a single blow, he struck the charcoaled head, splitting it in two.

  “That is the eldest son,” a voice said to me in melodious English, “releasing the soul of his father.”

  I turned to face a small, plump man, with a betel-nut-stained smile.

  “It equally ensures the Aghori Babas don’t steal the skull as a begging bowl!” he grimaced theatrically. “There are many tantrikas around Manikarnika Ghat,” he explained, indicating for me to survey the soot-blackened buildings surrounding us. “They do sadhana, their active practice, on the cremation ground after dark.”

  Ramesh was one of the “untouchable”, yet wealthy, dom caste, who oversaw every aspect of the funerary rites. He was eager to share with me the details of his work, for a hefty fee. I thanked him, but expressed my preference for undisturbed observance.

  “I have my own farewells to give,” I offered in discreet explanation, unwilling to engage.

  He nodded in apparent understanding, yet still he lingered by my side.

  “You see my brothers sieving the smouldering ashes?” I did. “They are searching for jewellery or gold-based dentistry. Such finds will pay for the ritual incineration of the destitute.”

  I was impressed, but still unwilling to hand over cash for this information. He was becoming agitated.

  “I h
ave been in a flim!” he announced, his forehead trenching in frustration at my unwillingness to hire him as a guide. “French foreigners made a flim about the Dom!” He seemed aggravated at my indifference to his celebrity. “I have been in a flim!” he shouted at me. “A movie flim!”

  The overseers of the funeral pyre were staring up at us through the drifting smoke. I bade him farewell, ignoring his vehemently outstretched palm, and made my way towards a quiet length of riverfront, to sit alone at the water’s edge.

  It was the permanent presence of death, exposed here as an inevitable, even essential reality of life, that had brought me to Varanasi. I had felt compelled to confront this certain end, that I might better comprehend the loss of those lives that had been integral to my own.

  And yet, I had feared to face this perpetual truth, as though the grief from which I had attempted to escape might here consume my sanity. I had anticipated that the flaming pyres might too candidly expose the pointlessness of every thought and action, lay bare the futility of being. I had even feared that fires fed by smouldering flesh might finally scorch my own precarious hold on life.

  Instead, I had witnessed an acquiescence to man’s inexorable end that had brought me unexpected comfort. In facing the inborn dread of death, I had found nothing left to fear. To my surprise, on these river ghats it had not been despair that I had revealed, but rather an affirmation that the vast ocean of life demanded more than just the dipping of a trepidatious toe. Its infinite depths were to be plunged into, its inestimable fathoms sounded, its boundless waters drunk.

  The sudden ringing of a temple bell drew my gaze. A spreading tree and the sight of a carved wooden temple with a pagoda-style roof tempted me to seek out the steep steps that would lead me to its shade.

  As I sheltered my eyes from the sun’s reflection on the river wall, a little boy peered over its top.

  We smiled at one another. And waved.

  ***

  “Do you know of the Aghori?” the priest asked in his eastern, Hill Nepali.

  Jiwan did not.

  “They’re an achara sect of wandering sadhus, who live an extreme tantric path. They seem to make great efforts to upset the Bahun, the orthodox Brahmin priests!” he chortled.

  Jyothi had joined the young acolytes in their kitchen, to watch them scrub the cooking pots, in the hope of leftovers. Jiwan sat with his mother, captivated by their kind host’s talk.

  “How do they upset the Bahun?” he asked with excited curiosity.

  “Well,” the priest began, “as part of their chosen path to liberation, the Aghori Babas mindfully break all taboos. This they do in order to examine their attachment to the mistaken belief in a ‘self’ that is separate from all the same forces of creation and dissolution of which our limitless, multi-dimensional universe is an expression. You understand?”

  Jiwan shook his head in puzzlement.

  “Well, the Aghoris fearlessly provoke rejection and contempt in others, simply to test their own detachment from the notion of duality . . .” the priest attempted.

  Jiwan sniffed his nose and pursed his lips.

  “When I say duality, I mean all those judgements we make on the world and ourselves, according to our particular culture,” the priest persevered, in careful elaboration. “Like the idea of what is good and bad, or beautiful and ugly. The idea of what is spiritual and sensual, or clean and unclean. The idea of what is divine and mundane, or sacred and profane. You see? All those divisive limitations with which a society obsessively defines itself - and yet which are only determined according to its particular habits and sensibilities at any one point in its history.”

  Jiwan rocked his head tentatively.

  “The problem is,” the priest persisted, “that in dividing up every aspect of experience into ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, we lose all sight of the underlying, unifying truth - and thereby lose all sense of who and what we really are.”

  Bindra smiled broadly. To see her son attentive to the teachings of their mountain tradition afforded her great comfort. She could almost believe they were home.

  “So what do the Aghori Babas do to test themselves?” Jiwan pressed.

  “Oh, well, they wear no clothes, of course,” the priest continued selectively, chuckling again at the thought of the extent of social defiance he had witnessed amongst these ash-caked sadhus, shouting foul abuse at passers-by and sexually stimulating themselves in public. “They also carry a skull - preferably that of a conservative Bahun - which they use as a food bowl and for collecting alms,” he added.

  Jiwan’s eyes were wide.

  At that moment, a group of excited, travel-worn Nepali pilgrims pressed up against the gate and rang the heavy temple bell to announce their readiness for puja. The priest beckoned them in, then turned back to Jiwan.

  “You know, the Aghoris practise their sadhana below us, here, on the burning ghats. They have open lingam shrines dedicated to Shiva in his wrathful form - Shiva as Kaala Bhairava, whom we Nepalis call Bhairon.”

  As Jiwan ran to have a look, the priest dropped his voice and turned to Bindra.

  “However, bahini,” he almost whispered, “the reason I mention all this is that a well-known Aghori Baba has a clinic here. He’s a good man. He offers free medicine to those with . . . your trouble. One of my boys will take you to him tomorrow. I can promise he will help you.”

  Bindra’s heart swelled with inexpressible relief. She stretched out her bound hands to touch the kind priest’s feet, then looked to share the news with her boys.

  Jyothi was still collecting leftovers in the temple kitchen, from which he intended to assemble their evening meal.

  Jiwan was peering over the top of the river wall to scan the ghats, in search of naked sadhus and fierce gods.

  Down below a foreigner stood squinting.

  Jiwan smiled at his strange, pink face. And waved.

  ***

  By the time I had reached the gate of the little wooden temple, I found it clogged with pilgrims. I peered over their dark heads for a moment, but felt uneasy at my intrusion. I decided to return another day, so turned away and wandered into the comparative coolness of the bustling pucca mahal.

  It was not until late afternoon that I returned to the river ghats, where prayerful pilgrims were still dipping in the dark waters. Washermen dhobis were still beating iridescent cloth on glistening stone, whilst bony buffalo and their keepers wallowed in the scumtopped shallows. Priests were still intoning Sanskrit slokas beneath bamboo parasols, whilst the continuous pyres billowed grey phantoms of cremation ash across us all.

  As the stifling heat promised to ease, misshapen shadows began to emerge from alleyways and stairwells to sit against the river walls. The destitute and disabled, the diseased and disfigured. I felt unable to ignore them. I had clean sheets and a generous, home-cooked feast waiting for me at the far reach of Asi Ghat. This extraordinary city, suspended as it was between sky and earth, life and death, now forced me to dispel all reserve and caution. I determined to speak to as many of these wraith-like figures as I could on my slow journey back to the indulgent comforts of my guesthouse. Despite the deficiency of shared language, I resolved to learn something of their lives and sat with every one of them.

  I met men who had turned to the wandering life of a sadhu due to elephantiasis of the scrotum, their taut and shiny, balloon-like swellings exposed to me beneath grimy longis. I met expressionless children with dead eyes, riddled with ringworm, their stomachs distended. Congenitally crippled bodies pulled on simple, wheeled boards by younger siblings. Blind women who rocked and nodded to their own eerie, nasal laments. Boy prostitutes with henna-dressed hair, who offered to drop to their knees and “sing” for me in the ruins of an abandoned palace, in exchange for a few coins.

  And then a little woman with two ma
lnourished boys, sitting on a ragged shawl, below the wooden temple. Her wounds drew swarms of black flies and sniffing, licking pye-dogs in their packs. Leprosy. She looked away as I crouched to speak to her. She seemed ashamed to look me in the face. Her state was appalling, the stench foul. As she understood that I was no threat to her sons, her eyes began to brighten. It was evident that she needed simple nursing care. However, as darkness fell and the small crowd that had gathered began to intimidate her children, a little money for good food and medicines was all that I could offer. She protested. So I left it with her smiling, waving sons.

  The diya lamps were already lit when I eventually reached the guesthouse, the air already scented with dhup incense. I had missed the evening puja.

  My hosts seemed relieved to see me home, and were quick to assert that an unofficial curfew for outsiders was advised. It was common for visitors, whether foreign tourist or domestic pilgrim, to become lost in the maze of the pucca mahal, they explained. Indeed, some who ventured out after dark, they wished to impress on me, were never seen again.

  I tried to clear my head as I sat alone for dinner, taking care to savour every mouthful. I tried to clear my head as I made my way to bed, relishing each soft pillow and clean sheet.

  I tried to clear my head all night long, struggling with myself to find one moment that felt like sleep.

  ***

  Bindra had a bed again.

  White washed walls, scrubbed floors, medicine. And not one dead god hanging above their heads.

  They had either daal-bhat lentils and rice, or tarkari-roti vegetables and flatbreads, with good dahi curd, to ease their hunger, and sweet chiya tea to start the day. Jiwan and Jyothi were even permitted to sleep together on a cotton-stuffed bedroll, on the floor beside her. And no one beat them.

  The Nepali priest encouraged the boys to visit the temple as often as they pleased. When Jiwan asked to be taught to read and write, he happily accepted such an enthusiastic pupil. Some days Jyothi would return from helping the novices in their chores with surplus food that had been donated in alms. It was thus that Bindra tasted mango, cucumber and okra for the first time in her life.