On the Ganges

by George Black

  The Maharishi asked John why he was leaving. John replied, “If you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.”

  Later, though, when Johnny Carson asked him about the incident on The Tonight Show, his tone had softened. “We made a mistake,” he said. “He’s human like the rest of us.”

  THE HAPPY ESCAPEE

  Brij Mehra was about to turn eighty. Spondylitis had left him bent at the waist at a ninety-degree angle, and he lived in an ashram just up the hill from the Maharishi’s with a teenage boy named Naveen and a dog who spent two hours humping my leg. “He’s all right, he loves affection, he’s quite happy, except when his season is on,” Mehra said.

  There were nineteenth-century paintings and engravings on the wall, some of European scenes and others of Calcutta and Ghazipur, a town fifty miles downstream from Varanasi that had been the center of the opium trade in the days of the East India Company. Brij Mehra dabbled in painting himself, and he wrote short stories that were set in Rishikesh and Swargashram, though he had no particular interest in publishing them. “Somebody said self-publish, but I hate that idea. It doesn’t do much for my ego.”

  We sat drinking green tea, which he assured me was organic, and gave me one of his stories to read. It was called “Happy Escapee.” This was the gist of it.

  There was a man named Jim, who lived in suburban Virginia. He had everything he wanted in life: a loving wife, a wonderful family, great friends, and a good job with an engineering company. One day he was sent to India to explore a possible contract to build turbines for the new dams on the upper Ganges. He came to Rishikesh and walked across the footbridge to Swargashram, having heard about the visit of the famous Beatles.

  That night he received an email from his boss. He’d been fired.

  Wandering the streets of Rishikesh in shock, Jim ran into an apparently deranged man with ragged clothes, long hair, and a straggly beard. The man pointed a finger at Jim and said, “Beware the Ides of March.” A shopkeeper told Jim that the man was from a wealthy family in Mumbai. His name was Rajesh, and he had the ability to see into the future because he had the third eye.

  Jim went back to his hotel, opened his laptop, and found a second email. This one was from his wife. She had decided to leave him and run off with their next-door neighbor.

  The next day, Jim tracked the madman down in an ashram, where he also met a swami dressed in spotless white who had a passing knowledge of Shakespeare. “What should I do now?” Jim asked. The swami smiled. “Get up, brush the dust off you, and rejoin the world. Do the creatures of the world sit and contemplate their failures? Ants and bees never stop trying, so why should you? Remember, when feeling frustrated and fretful by small cares, to look at the sky and the stars. It is then one realizes how insignificant we are and how minuscule our troubles really are.”

  Humbler and wiser, Jim headed home on the next available plane. He was astonished to find his wife and children waiting for him at Dulles Airport. She had made a dreadful mistake; all was forgiven. The boss had called with the offer of a new job. Jim’s story had a happy ending.

  Most of the stories we tell are in some way autobiographical. The only material differences in this case were that Brij Mehra was Indian, not American, and that he hadn’t gone back to his wife and family. He had stayed on in Swargashram, the ashram of heaven.

  GOOD VIBRATIONS

  As befitted the son of a traditional anglophile family from Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan, Brij Mehra was sent away to be educated at St. Joseph’s College, in the old British hill station of Nainital. The school was founded by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, and its motto was Certa Bonum Certamen—Fight the Good Fight. From there he went on to Delhi University, a degree in commerce, and a career with Air India. Successive transfers took him to Bombay, Calcutta, Australia, and the United States.

  “When I got to New York, I stayed in a hotel near Grand Central Station. I had to find Park Avenue. I asked a nice gentleman, ‘Do you know where is Park Avenue?’ and he said yes and walked away. And there is New York for you.”

  I tried to mount a defense of the city, saying how kind people were to lost-looking visitors on the subway, but he was having none of it.

  “As soon as I went to Los Angeles, my neighbor said, ‘I’m Bob, welcome to California,’ and that transformed the whole thing for me. I had a very colorful visit in California. I was there for five years. I met Mary Pickford. Does that name ring a bell?”

  He befriended an elegant socialite-philanthropist named Nancy Cooke de Herrera, who had spent time at the Maharishi’s ashram with the Beatles. “She was the only American I ever knew who had urine therapy. You drink your own urine in the morning, and it changes your complete life. When I saw this lady, it looked like about ten years of her life were taken away. I met her later when she was eighty-five years, ninety. She looked about seventy, sixty even. One’s own urine! Not cow urine!”

  We sipped our organic green tea.

  “Naveen!” he called. The boy was in the kitchen. “Naveen! Naveen!” He set his cup down with a sigh. “I’m trying to teach him English.”

  Naveen appeared.

  “Tell the gentleman where is your village.”

  Naveen looked at the floor and murmured, “Gauchar.”

  “It’s on the Alaknanda, district of Chamoli,” the old man said. “Gau means ‘cow.’ Char means ‘grazing.’”

  He got up and fetched a picture of the place to show me. It was more town than village, in a green valley surrounded by conical mountains. The Alaknanda was one of the two main branches of the upper Ganges.

  “Imagine, he left this to come here. He was learning English and Sanskrit, but they didn’t give him enough time. So I gave him a room here.”

  I asked him to tell me more about Air India.

  “Well, I was in charge of cargo, and I did a great transformation of the company. You know that India is one of the original countries accepted by the United Nations to grow legal opium for medical use. It used to go by sea, in hermetically sealed containers with lots of security. So I went to the opium factory in Ghazipur, which was the second most important place in British India.”

  The British East India Company opened the factory in 1820. It occupied a forty-five-acre site on the banks of the Ganges, where it packed the drug for easy shipment downriver to Calcutta, hundreds of jars at a time. For twenty years, Ghazipur was the driver of the opium wars with China and the means of engineering the helpless addiction of millions of Chinese. When Kipling visited in 1888, it was still “an opium mint as it were, whence issue the precious cakes that are to replenish the coffers of the Indian government.”

  “I met the commissioner of Ghazipur and had a nice chat with him, and I said, ‘We’ll send it by air,’” Mehra went on. “And Air India immediately got a huge, massive business. I went to Boots the Chemist in Nottingham, McFarlane’s in Glasgow, and they were very grateful to get it this way. This was in the early sixties. The factory was still very archaic. There was a famous monkey there who used to come and drink the water that drained from the opium. The commissioner said, ‘We took the monkey and sent him away, a hundred kilometers away. But he came back, because he’d become a drug addict.’”

  After he retired from Air India, Mehra went to work for Bajaj, which manufactures motorcycles, scooters, and three-wheelers. “They sent me to a country called Belize, and I had the agency for all of Central America. Have you heard of Belize?”

  I said I had. Not only that, but I’d been astonished to see Bajaj auto-rickshaws scooting around the mountain towns of northern Nicaragua.

  “That’s because of me!” he exclaimed.

  He’d come to Rishikesh in the year 2000, plagued already by the spondylitis. Someone told him there was a doctor here who might not be able to cure the condition but could at least ease the pain of it.

  “But also I said, the hell with the chasing of money. This isn’t the answer. And an Australian lady who came here said as soon as you step he
re to Rishikesh, you get peace, because for hundreds of years there have been mantras going on here, and it’s the vibration of all the mantras.”

  He pointed at the floor of his house. “The very land you are sitting on here, this land next to the river, the vibrations are coming out at this moment. All this land is owned by the Swargashram Trust, which was started in the fond memory of a swami who was known as Kali Kambliwale, which means ‘the saint with a black blanket.’ I was one of the earliest persons who came to Swargashram to live permanently. Then a European writer moved in next door with his wife about five or six years later. She was from Peshawar, like my family. He had a sister who was a remarkable woman. She married a Muslim from North Africa. She ate a ham sandwich on the day he died.”

  The dog was after my leg again. It was a large dog, not the kind you could kick away.

  “All this land was bought up by the trust, about five hundred acres, and they control all building. Except they couldn’t do anything about this dog, who always wants erection.

  “Now lots of foreigners come here, of course. There’s something about this place. Stay here for a while and you will get it. Some of them come for two or three weeks. We learn to ignore them. Then there are the Indian nouveaux riches. They come here because it’s a holiday. But mainly it’s Australians, Americans, French, Canadians, Netherlands. It’s very cosmopolitan. Chinese have started coming also. Russians. Many Israelis.”

  This seemed to be an awkward subject, and he petted the annoying dog for a minute until it finally quieted down and curled up at his feet.

  “Israelis unfortunately have picked up a very bad reputation all over India. The reason is that the ones who come here are barely out of that forced fighting, that military duty with the Israeli Defense Forces. It leaves a tremendous impact. They look upon the world as their enemy. So they behave in a very uncultured manner. They’re very heavy on drugs. Not just marijuana. Heroin, everything. But the regular foreigners are sincere, they are here for yoga and teaching and the vibrations.”

  I wanted to know how you could actually know that a place had these vibrations, since I was something of a rationalist and not the kind to feel them myself.

  “Okay, this is a true story. Did you see that coffee shop by the ATM? The big banyan tree there? Go and have a look at it. There was a young man, he was about twenty-one. He’s in China now. One day, as he took a curve there, he got possessed. We all thought it was a big joke. He went down, and suddenly for twenty-four hours, this person possessed him. This person said, ‘Look, I don’t want to trouble anybody. I just want to meet my girlfriend.’ The story was that a young couple from Moradabad had committed suicide here, by this tree. And the body of the boy was still here. It’s in one of the stories I wrote. I’ll send it along.”

  * * *

  No matter how many foreigners came, they would never change India, he said. “India is a tremendous mystery.”

  I couldn’t disagree with this.

  “It’s very irritating and extreme, but it’s wonderful once you get used to it. You’ll find Indians very hypocritical but at the same time very sincere. It’s very difficult to fathom what an Indian is. But eventually the crux of an Indian is right inside. You must realize that five thousand, seven thousand years of civilization have gone into the genes.”

  Outside, another wave of orange-shirted Shiva devotees was surging past the house in a cacophony of chants and whistles and drums and music and motorbike horns and the hammering of the rain.

  “I find it hard to imagine how you can find peace here,” I said. And some of the foreigners who claimed to be in tune with the vibrations here could also be consumed by anger. Think of Allen Ginsberg. “Peace and flower power incarnate,” one critic said of him. Yet, “America—Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”

  He smiled. “The question of what is peaceful is a relative question. You can be in the middle of Manhattan, honking away and everything, and you can be peaceful. Peaceful is here, inside.” He touched a hand to his chest. That is what this place gives you. How to ignore all this. You must have the capacity to ignore. Look, evolution is taking place. Nothing is static. Animals will die, plants will die, new plants will come up. This earth is only a short time for us here. I am not the master of this world. I can only be the master of myself. I have to coexist with the good and the bad and the evil and the right and the temptations. All is part and parcel.”

  FROM OCEAN TO SKY

  If you were one of the first two men (and the first Westerner) to conquer Everest, what were you supposed to do as an encore? Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, spent a long time pondering the question. In 1958, five years after scaling the world’s highest mountain, he reached the South Pole. In 1968, he and a group of companions took two jet boats 250 miles up the Sun Kosi River in Nepal. Five years after that, he settled on his next adventure: a similar ascent of the Ganges, “upstream against the current as far as we could go.” It would be a mixture of cultural education and adrenaline rush, and when they hit the mountains “there would be all the action we could desire or handle.” More than they could handle, as it turned out.

  The trip took four years of elaborate planning and complex negotiations, and the timing was tricky. Leave toward the end of the monsoon, his Indian friends advised, when there would be enough water in the river for all fifteen hundred miles to be navigable. Hillary agreed.

  He assembled a party of nineteen in three jet boats, including a documentary film crew. As cultural and religious adviser he took along Jim Wilson, who had lived for two years in Varanasi and written a doctoral thesis on Hindu religion and philosophy. A man with a titanic mess of a beard, he might easily have been taken for a sadhu. They left Gangasagar on August 24, 1977, with the Hooghly running high and the rains beginning to taper off.

  * * *

  Hillary read up on the creation myth of the river goddess. At Gangasagar, the expedition was blessed with a puja at the small temple that honors Kapila, the sage who had incinerated the sixty thousand sons of King Sagara. The priest thumbed a vermilion tilak on the forehead of each of the adventurers. Hillary thought he looked like Merlin the Magician. The boats had a little difficulty in the booming surf.

  In the tangled channels of the Sundarbans, they saw two Bengal tigers, a male and a female, prowling the shoreline at the edge of the mangrove forest.

  Hillary disagreed with Kipling’s description of Calcutta as “packed and pestilential.” He found the city an endless fascination, although the journalists were tiresome. Tell us about the tigers, Sir Edmund. Tell us about Everest. He was offended when one of them reported that Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who had reached the summit with him, had complained that “[my] friend has forgotten me” and “was fiddling with boats instead of running after the mountains.”

  In Patna, capital of the depressing state of Bihar, Hillary stopped for “a quiet beer” at the Bankipore Club, but found himself besieged by autograph hunters. Otherwise, the boats zipped through the bleak monotony of Bihar, where there was little to detain the visitor. At full throttle, they could hit more than forty miles per hour.

  They spent three days in Varanasi and were awestruck, as everybody is. Hillary quoted the Bengali sage Ramakrishna: “As well try to draw a map of the universe as attempt to describe Varanasi in words.” He abandoned Western dress; one of the other mountaineers in the group started referring to him as “Hillary in drag.” Another member of the party was bitten by a monkey. A little girl on Dasaswamedh Ghat asked if they were the men who had been to the moon.

  At Mirzapur, forty miles farther on, “a cluster of houses on top of an eroded bank 60 feet high” and a famous center of carpet-making, they met a yogi who dressed in yellow silk shorts patterned with stars and moons and who possessed extraordinary abilities that demonstrated the power of hatha-yoga. He could stop his heartbeat at will. He could stick a six-foot iron bar against the bone of his eye socket, ram the other end into the ground, and bend it double. Most impressive of all,
he could stop a jet boat revved to full power by pulling on a rope looped around his chest. He was sixty-eight years old, or so he said.

  In Allahabad, Hillary was invited to dinner with dignitaries from Indian Oil and the Rotary Club, and the expedition got its first packet of mail. Mike Gill, its deputy leader, had a letter from one of his children. “Dear Daddy,” it said. “When Mummy tells me to go and do a pee, the pee always comes. Why is she always right?”

  In Kanpur, they heard tales of the mutiny of 1857, which Indians call the First War of Independence.

  Approaching Haridwar, they encountered their first fast water. They pressed on in driving rain, drenched and frozen to the bone.

  Reaching Rishikesh, they admired the beauty of the river as it emerged from its gorge and took note of the large number of ashrams. In his journal, one of the mountaineers mentioned the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his ability to separate rich foreigners from their money. “Crafty old bugger,” he wrote. More ominously, they received the news that two experienced canoeists, members of a Czech expedition, had drowned in the fierce headwaters of the river, which was where Hillary and his companions were headed next.

  * * *

  The big decision came when they reached Devprayag, where I had first set foot in the Ganges on one of my earliest trips to India. A prayag is the sacred confluence of two rivers. The holiest of them all is at Allahabad, where the Yamuna joins the Ganges, and Prayag, in fact, was the original name of the city.

  The Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda combine at Devprayag to form the main stem of the Ganges, merging at a steep triangular flight of steps. A pilgrim could stand at the bottom with the left foot in emerald water and the right in blue. A priest beckoned me over, with a gesture that meant, take off your shoes and roll up your trouser legs. We stood together knee-deep in the water. I repeated the Sanskrit phrases he recited, undoubtedly making gibberish of them. He smeared the tilak on my forehead, then motioned me to stoop down and scoop up a handful of water and bring it to my lips. Then he leaned over and whispered, in serviceable English, “For this part you can pretend.”