On the Ganges

by George Black

  * * *

  The sadhu in the cave seemed to be evading Pallavi’s question. Eventually he mumbled that his guru was dead. A cloud of ganja smoke drifted across the cave. He started praising Lord Ram again. My questions seemed to irritate him. I asked if he found visitors an inconvenience. He grunted. “I just sit in my corner and do my own thing. I sleep peaceful at night. I don’t like to chitchat with people.” He grew agitated when I told him about my conversation with the priests in Gangotri. “This is not a place you should come to play or enjoy yourself. You should come here for your penance. This is the realm of the gods. The celestial beings roam around here in the shape of the air and the sunlight.”

  Suddenly, the cave was illuminated. The light was only from two low-wattage bulbs, but the abruptness of it was dazzling. He giggled; this was his party trick. He was sitting behind the fire on a cement platform. His eyes were staring wide, his teeth were startlingly white, and he wore a manic grin. His beard was tumultuous. He breathed out a lungful of ganja.

  “Look at this!” he said. There were two long shelves filled with stainless-steel tableware. The lightbulbs hung from a wire that snaked across the wall, pilfering electricity from a tiny hydropower plant on the river. “Lots of people used to stay in this cave for a short time,” he said. “I’ve been here seven years and one month. I’ve improved the whole thing. Look at these walls! They used to leak, but I brought in cement and stone to seal the cracks. I like it here. I prefer to not be around other people.”

  The lights went out again, and the silence returned. The embers burned low.

  “What a phony,” Pallavi muttered. “Ninety percent of them are into drugs. They say it makes it easier for them to connect with their inner self. Such bullshit. He probably can’t afford his habit, just hangs around with the babas smoking theirs.”

  We took our leave, but he seemed to have forgotten all about us. As we walked away from the cave, the chant of Jai Ram Shri Ram started up again, a low, steady drone over the muffled roar of the river.

  THE RAJA OF HARSIL

  For Pranav, as for many Indian drivers, the most important instrument in any vehicle was the horn, and he had a deeply adversarial relationship with trucks and buses. These part company with Indian roads with some regularity, despite the best efforts of government sign painters, who leave their warnings inscribed at intervals on the roads into the Himalayas.

  BETTER TO BE MR. LATE THAN THE LATE MR.

  AFTER WHISKY, DRIVING RISKY

  ROAD IS HILLY, DON’T DRIVE SILLY

  On the way down the mountain from Gangotri, we overtook an ancient bus belching out black diesel smoke. We passed donkey trains carrying sacks of sand and gravel from the river and a woman who was stumbling along the side of the road, carrying a dead goat on her shoulders. We stopped to ask what had happened. The animal had fallen off a cliff, but no matter, she was taking it home for dinner. The bus drove past us in a black cloud. A little later, we passed it again. This game of leapfrog went on for some time. “Chutiya!” Pallavi snapped as the bus accelerated on a bend to overtake us again. She groped for an accurate translation. Total moron came close. Or maybe douchebag was better. (Pallavi was a decorous translator, another Indian friend told me later with some embarrassment; literally, it’s cunt.)

  “If you really want to insult someone, bhenchod is worse,” Pranav remarked from the driver’s seat. “Sisterfucker.”

  “Well, you can also say maderchod,” Pallavi said after a moment’s reflection. “That’s motherfucker.”

  They debated which was worse. Pranav voted for maderchod. His reasoning was that mothers were deserving of greater respect than sisters.

  We passed the bus again on a long downhill. Pallavi rolled down the window and yelled, “Maderchod!”

  Later that day, we learned that the bus had become one more traffic statistic. One of the signs said, “Safety on the Road Is Safe Tea at Home,” but this advice seemed to have been lost on the driver, who had pulled over for a bathroom stop but neglected to apply the parking brake. The bus slid into a ravine, although by Himalayan standards, the consequences were minor: six passengers were seriously injured; none died.

  * * *

  We crossed a deep gorge on a rattling bridge over a tributary of the Bhagirathi, the Jadh Ganga, and Pallavi pointed out some ancient, rotted pilings on the hillside far below us. These were the remnants of a wire-cable suspension bridge built by an English adventurer named Frederick Wilson, who settled here in the early 1840s. When he arrived in the Himalayas, he became known as Hulson Sahib. He was also referred to as the Raja of Harsil, a nearby village where he took up residence. There is some evidence that he was the model for Kipling’s story The Man Who Would Be King, which would make him the Sean Connery character in the movie version.

  Harsil means “Rock of the Gods,” a name supposedly bestowed on it by Lord Vishnu. It was nestled in a valley of astonishing beauty, where the Bhagirathi follows a sinuous path framed by steep forested slopes and vertiginous walls of rock and snow. One of the more risqué wet-sari scenes in Indian cinema was filmed here on the river for a movie called Ram Teri Ganga Maili.

  On the way down, we passed the twisted wreckage of an orange truck that was improbably pinioned on a tree stump halfway up the hillside, like a victim of Vlad the Impaler. A group of workers were standing around and scratching their heads about how to get it down. The passengers had been less fortunate than those on the bus. Four had died, Russian devotees of Hare Krishna, a cult that had flourished in the Soviet republics during the 1960s and 1970s when there was close cooperation between India and the USSR.

  Pallavi knew the story of the Raja of Harsil in some detail, having researched it for an English author who later published a gloriously lurid pseudo-biography of Wilson, filled with invented scenes and imagined dialogue.

  Wilson is described by one source as “a short, wiry, hard man” who stood about five feet seven inches tall. He was already a minor legend by the time he reached Harsil. He had worked his passage to Calcutta, joined the Queen’s Eleventh Light Dragoons, then walked all the way to the garrison town of Meerut, near Delhi, almost nine hundred miles in thirty days, and then reaching the Himalayas in another four. He was a ferocious hunter and angler and a taxidermist with a taste for ecocide. He caught a sixty-three-pound specimen of India’s great freshwater game fish, the mahseer. In one single season, he and his men shot 150 musk deer, musk selling at the time for thirty shillings an ounce on the London market. He liked to pick off exotic birds like the red-plumed pheasant, Satyr tragopan, and the iridescent, rainbow-colored monal, Lophophorus impejanus, and take them home to his workbench, where scissors, tweezers, and arsenical salts turned them into mementos for English naturalists and collectors.

  Wilson was also a horticultural pioneer with an eye for the economic possibilities of the valley. The villagers grew barley, buckwheat, and amaranth; he taught them to cultivate an exotic delicacy, the apple, and Harsil is still famous for its orchards.

  He paid close attention to the seasons of the river, which turned his mind to larger ambitions. When the monsoon began in July, he wrote, the Bhagirathi became “a large river rolling on an immense volume of muddy water, and rushing over the rapids with such impetuosity as to be for miles like a great cataract.” By December, it had shrunk to “a moderate-sized, clear, and by no means rapid mountain stream sleeping in glassy pools, and gently rippling over the shallows and rapids.” At the right time of year, Wilson decided, it would be perfect for floating logs, and the surrounding mountains were full of timber. The trees could be cut in winter and sent downriver in springtime.

  And there was always his boisterous love life to consider, because the Raja of Harsil is described as “a randy goat with a wandering eye,” which allowed free rein to his biographer’s imagination.

  Wilson had married a local girl from Mukhba, on the opposite side of the river, the winter home of the goddess Ganga. When she turned out to be infertile, he married her a
unt, who was fifteen and the daughter of a low-caste drummer who migrated seasonally back and forth between Mukhba and the Gangotri temple. He bought her from her husband, an abusive police constable, for sixty rupees and paid an additional tax that the local raja, hereditary ruler of the princely state of Tehri Garhwal, levied for adultery. But two teenage brides were not enough.

  The raja was a retiring septuagenarian Sanskrit scholar and poet named Sudarshan Shah. He was fervently pro-British. However, Lord Dalhousie, the governor-general of India at the time, had invented something called the doctrine of lapse, a threatening piece of legislation to the royal house because the raja’s wife, the Maharani Khaneti, was unable to bear children. She was also petite and large-breasted, according to Wilson’s biographer, and he lusted after her for five years until, one day in 1854, she arrived on his veranda disguised in a hooded riding cape, a tight-fitting jacket, a long pleated skirt, and leather riding boots. She asked him for twenty thousand rupees to open an academy for young ladies on a hillside overlooking the Ganges. Within minutes, the biographer says, the check was in her hands, her clothes were on the floor, and “she was on him like a panther. By the time they reached the settee, she had unbuttoned his trousers and wrapped her fingers around his throbbing cock.”

  The aging raja was oblivious to this hanky-panky, and in 1858, he granted Wilson a concession for the unlimited exploitation of timber on the banks of the Bhagirathi. There were chir pines everywhere, but the choicest logs came from the deodar cedars. The deodars—the “wood of God”—were majestic trees, some hundreds of years old and soaring as tall as two hundred and fifty feet, their average girth close to twenty. They were considered sacred. Their fragrant sawdust was used as incense. Their densely colored, pollen-laden catkins were used to anoint the forehead. In Hindu tradition, a deodar is sometimes planted as protection for a temple; to fell one is a grievous sin, and Wilson felled them by the tens of thousands. His men built wooden sluices and dynamited rocks that blocked the passage of the logs downriver. Before long, he had a thousand workers on his payroll, bringing the logic of a modern industrial economy to a valley that had known only subsistence farming, petty local trading, and temple donations. He became so powerful that he struck his own coinage, challenging the divine right of the raja to this monopoly. The face of the brass coins was stamped, “F. Wilson—Harsil—One Rupee.” They had a hole in the middle so that women could string them together as a necklace.

  Farther downstream, the officers of the Raj were busy. The Upper Ganges Canal was nearing completion, running three hundred and fifty miles from the gates of the mountains at Haridwar to Kanpur, in the heart of the Gangetic Plain. It had been designed for famine relief and for transportation, but it was also perfect for floating logs. What really made Wilson’s fortune, however, was the Indian railway, another idea from the fertile mind of Lord Dalhousie. Railways needed sleepers, seventeen hundred of them for every mile of track; sleepers were made of wood; and the wood came from Wilson. Deodar had the great virtue of being oily, easy to work, and termite-proof, and unlike pine, it didn’t require a coat of creosote to protect it from rot. By 1865, the railway stretched all the way from Calcutta to Delhi. By 1870, it covered sixty-four hundred miles, calling for more than ten million sleepers, and Wilson—Wilson & Sons by now—was supplying 80 percent of them.

  By the time he was done, the Raja of Harsil, who had set out from Calcutta thirty years earlier with nothing more than five rupees and a gun, was said to be the richest man in North India.

  Eventually his dalliance with the Maharani Khaneti came to an end, as such things will. But one day, on impulse, he decided to pay her one last visit. He burst into her chambers unannounced to find her entwined with another woman. Khaneti, the biographer writes, “bolted upright in bed, quickly drawing a cover over her lover’s bare rump while demanding an explanation for his rude intrusion. ‘I could have you flogged for this,’ she fumed.”

  But Wilson found the whole thing a great lark, not to mention arousing, so they had sex again instead. Whether the Maharani’s girlfriend joined them is not recorded.

  WINTER QUARTERS

  The idol of the goddess Ganga comes down the mountain on the first day of Diwali, the festival of lights, when the first snows begin to seal Gangotri off from the outside world. Borne on a palanquin and accompanied by handbells, drums, and red-uniformed bagpipers of the Garhwal Rifles, she crosses the Bhagirathi on the iron-girder bridge at Harsil and then winds her way uphill again to her winter home, a small white temple in the village of Mukhba.

  I reached Mukhba by an alarming apology for a road, nothing more than a thin scar blasted out of the mountainside between a vertical rock face and a steep scree slope that dropped away to the valley floor hundreds of feet below. The road ended at a small concrete structure that housed a pair of latrines. The village was a scattered collection of wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs and ornately carved eaves, the kind of houses you might find anywhere in the high Himalayas, from Tibet to Kashmir. A few had satellite dishes. The houses were linked to one another by a series of rough flagstone steps, and at the top of one flight, looking down on the temple, was the home of the village head, Anita Rana.

  It was chilly in the house, and she wore a scarf and a crocheted cardigan over her mustard-colored shalwar kameez. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and she had a tiny nose stud. We sat in her spartan living room and sipped strong black tea.

  She said that when she was a child, her father, who was a schoolteacher in Harsil, had slipped and fallen into the river and was swept away in the fierce currents. His body was never recovered. The family was left destitute. Anita was ten, the eldest of five children; the youngest was six months.

  She and her mother labored in the fields for an uncle. At fifteen, Anita went to Gangotri and opened a small puja store for pilgrims. She kept on working until she was well past the age when a woman was considered to be marriageable. She turned down one suitor after another; supporting her brothers’ education was the only thing that mattered to her.

  All three brothers eventually moved away, one to Delhi, one to Gujarat, and one to another Himalayan village. Anita never did marry. Now she was the elected head of the panchayat, the village council, a job that consumed all her waking hours. “People keep coming to me with one thing or another; I get no time to myself. Fencing, street lighting, problems at home. ‘My wall is falling down.’ But the thing they complain about most of all is that road you came in on.”

  * * *

  We walked down the steep steps to the temple. In the crystalline mountain air, you could see forever, across the sheer drop to Harsil to the terraced slopes and waterfalls on the opposite side of the valley and westward to snow peaks that rose to more than twenty thousand feet.

  “The goddess Ganga is everything for us,” Anita said, smiling. “This village is like her mother’s home, so when she is here, we treat her like a daughter. There’s a tradition here in the mountains that when the daughter leaves her mother’s house, we give her gifts and food for the journey, and then the food is distributed in her husband’s village. So in springtime, when they take Gangaji back to the temple in Gangotri, we send her off in exactly that way. Then, when she comes back on Diwali, everyone stays with her and cooks special dishes to celebrate her return.”

  She said the bagpipers of the Garhwal Rifles were a fairly recent innovation, a respectful gesture by the army, which has a base in Harsil. Before that, the goddess had been accompanied on her journey by musicians playing traditional brass horns and local drummers. Like the Brahmin priests of the Semwal family, the drummers, who belonged to the scheduled castes, or dalits, rotated seasonally between Gangotri and Mukhba.

  But the bagpipers also spoke to the valley’s long martial traditions. “Most people who settled here were soldiers who were being hounded by the British after the War of Independence in 1857,” she said. Many of them were from the state of Maharashtra on the west coast; Rana in fact was a Maharasht
ran name. Garhwalis were always considered to be ferocious warriors, comparable to the Gurkhas in the eyes of their British officers. More than a thousand men of the Garhwal Rifles died in the two world wars. In the second, they had fought in the Burma and Malaya campaigns; in the first, they served in Flanders, France, and Turkey and won two Victoria Crosses, Britain’s highest honor.

  We came to a large house with a heavily grained door of deodar cedar, built to withstand the snows. It had a large iron ring for a handle and looked like something from a medieval shipwreck. “Frederick Wilson built this house for his in-laws, the family of Gulabi, his second wife,” she said. “There’s another one higher up on the mountain. But they’ve started dismantling them. They’ll probably be gone within a few years.” The family were still temple drummers, as they had been in Wilson’s time. Supposedly, they still had a small collection of Wilsoniana inside, including one of his nine-foot crosscut saws. But the door was secured by a heavy padlock; no one was home.

  Nearby was a second small temple. Ganga, it turned out, was not the only deity people worshipped in Mukhba. There was also a local god named Sameshwar, who was believed to be an incarnation of Lord Shiva, taking on human form during his festival, the Selku Mela, which was held every September. There was the usual singing and dancing, but the most dedicated worshippers showed their gratitude to the god for his gifts by walking to the temple on knife or ax blades set into the ground. “No, they don’t get cut,” Anita said. “There is some divine intervention that protects them.”

  Local legend says that when the Raja of Harsil came to the Selku Mela in 1865, Sameshwar appeared in the form of a servant, denounced him for his plunder of the forests, and pronounced a curse on him. Your lineage will sink into oblivion. None of your sons will continue your race.