On the Ganges

by George Black

  “His name was Shri Babu Baleshwar Prasad,” Mr. Agarwal said. “He established the printing works, but it was called the Belvedere Steam Press in that time. Here there was a steam press, run by coal, all the machines were here, and in the back, there was a store for the paper. The residential house was just a stone-throwing from here. Pioneer building was just adjacent to this. But it has been demolished since long time.

  “I was very enthusiastic to know from where our ancestors came, and I have collected data. There was a book published, in 1937, all history of Agarwals in India. All the history is there! My grandfather’s brother was treasurer to Kashi Naresh, the maharaja of Benares.”

  I asked him what he meant by “the residential house.”

  “Mr. Alexander Hill’s house. From him, my ancestors purchased this entire premises.”

  “I’d like to see the house,” I said. “I heard squatters were living there now.”

  “Where have you heard this?”

  “From a newspaper article, I think.”

  “Ah, newspapers. No, no, this is not true. It also was demolished. Squatters were never living there. After Partition, my grandfather was the owner of that house. He lived there actually, with his four sons and their families. It had fourteen, fifteen rooms. But then he was alone. His three daughters, all of them were married and gone. He was left there with his wife only. The house was very old, plaster was falling. So he opted to sell it to a property developer, who demolished it. Now the man has built these complexes, duplexes over there. Fourteen, fifteen families are living there. Come, let us walk and you will see.”

  The flower gardens and tree-lined avenues of Belvedere House had been swallowed up in modern Allahabad. Some of the houses the developer had built were ugly concrete cubes; others were ostentatious with new money. Some had engraved brass plaques on the gate giving the owner’s profession and qualifications.

  “These are apartments for doctors, engineers, government officials,” Mr. Agarwal said. “Even people from the business class are living here.”

  I imagined them in the blue-glass office buildings along M. G. Marg. I imagined their wives being driven to the Personality Maker Body Spa in time for their Pilates class.

  THE MOUSTACHE DANCER

  Despite its Raj-inflected history, modern Allahabad was a trying place for the non-Hindi speaker. The manager of the Harsh Ananda had promised to find me an English-speaking driver the next morning, but when I went to the desk, he gave an almost Gallic shrug, as if to say, Je suis désolé, monsieur. But perhaps young Utkarsh could be of assistance?

  Utkarsh Dwivedi, who said he was twenty and looked barely old enough to shave, had just come off duty at the front desk. He looked uncomfortable at being pressed into service, especially when I told him I wanted to visit a neighborhood called Mirganj. How long would that take in a taxi?

  “Only five minutes approx,” he said. “But we cannot go there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is a very bad place. I know this. I was born there.”

  “Bad in what way?”

  He looked at his shoes. “It is a red-light place.”

  This was embarrassing. I didn’t want him to misconstrue my reasons. What I wanted to see in Mirganj was the house where Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister after Independence, had been born. Utkarsh eventually agreed with some reluctance, but first he insisted on showing me the tourist sights of Allahabad, such as they are, even though I’d seen most of them the day before.

  We found a decrepit, rattling Ambassador taxi. As we slalomed through the traffic, I asked Utkarsh how long he had been in the hotel business.

  “Three or five years approx.”

  He indicated points of interest as we proceeded along M. G. Marg—the cathedral, the Big Bazaar Shopping Mall, the nineteenth-century public library with its riotous mix of Indo-Saracenic and Scottish baronial architecture, McDonald’s.

  “Now we will go to Chandra Shekhar Azad Park,” he said. “Today there will be a special celebration there.”

  * * *

  The park was a pleasant island of greenery and groomed walkways. Originally it was called Alfred Park, named to commemorate the visit in 1869 of Prince Alfred of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, second son of Queen Victoria. It was the venue for the All India Lawn Tennis Championship and the annual Flower and Dog Show. After Independence, it changed its name to honor Chandra Shekhar Azad, an anti-British revolutionary and leader of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. (Azad means “the free,” a name he gave himself during one of his numerous appearances before a judge.) The police cornered him in Alfred Park in 1931, and there was a shoot-out. A film called The Legend of Bhagat Singh features a highly colored reenactment of Chandra Shekhar’s death. He is pinned down behind a tree, bleeding from gunshots to the shoulder and leg, down to his final bullet. He scoops up a handful of Indian soil, lets it slip through his cupped palms with a mournful expression, raises his steepled hands to heaven, murmurs, “So much sacrifice,” and puts the gun to his head rather than allow himself to be captured. The tree is still there, and next to it is a commemorative plinth.

  There was an off-key racket of tubas, trumpets, and snare drums that grew louder as we walked in through the park gates. There were eight musicians, and nearby, eight soldiers lined up in an honor guard, dressed in khaki with scarlet shakos, black-and-red belts, and white puttees, carrying colonial-era Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles. A white Ambassador with a blue light on the roof drew up beside them, and a middle-aged man climbed out. “Chief of police of Allahabad,” Utkarsh whispered.

  An ancient man in a white dhoti, with a Nehru cap perched on his head, had been standing at full salute, or as much as his bent back allowed. When the brass band stopped, he raised a battered antique bugle to his lips, took a couple of shallow, labored breaths, and squeaked out a few notes. He showed me a photograph in a plastic slipcover that was pinned to his chest, next to a rusted badge with the tricolor flag of the Indian National Congress. The photograph showed him, a good deal younger, playing his bugle. The caption below it identified him as Bhagwat Prasad, a freedom fighter who had joined the struggle against the British in 1942, the year in which Gandhi issued his final call for independence and Subhash Chandra Bose formed the Indian National Army. So that made the old man ninety, at least.

  A man of curious appearance was busy shepherding a group of schoolchildren, more girls than boys, into tidy rows on the steps below the statue of Chandra Shekhar Azad, which was hung with marigolds and showed the hero in pensive mode, bare-chested and resting his chin in his hand. The man led the children in a chant. “His spirit has met with God; may God bless his soul.”

  When the ceremony ended, the man walked over to me briskly. He was barefoot, dressed in a bright red dhoti over black pants, a waistcoat with harlequin panels of shocking pink and silver-spangled purple silk, a flat cap with alternating bands of sky blue and gold, a shock of black hair with the texture of steel wool gathered in a bun, and a beard in which several birds could have nested comfortably. His eyes somehow managed to combine kindness, ferocity, and an ethereal remoteness.

  He presented me with a business card that was almost as eccentric as his appearance. It read:

  * * *

  R. K. TIWARI (DUKANJI)

  International Moustache Dancer • Gold Medalist

  India Book of World Records • Limca Book of World Records

  Guinness Book of World Records

  Shabash India—Zee T.V.—Civil Defense Allahabad

  * * *

  I wanted him to tell me more about these credentials, but there was no time; the children were calling him to duty, and to find out more about the International Moustache Dancer, I had to track down one of these books of records and do a little research.

  * * *

  Limca is what Indians call a “cold drink,” a lemon-and-lime–flavored fizzy soda produced by the Coca-Cola Company. It sponsors the local equivalent of the Guinness World Reco
rds, whose editors say that by far the largest number of submissions they receive, each requiring weeks of independent verification, comes from India. The Limca book “salutes the quest for excellence” and says it is aimed at an audience of “insatiable info-buffs and quizzers.”

  If the insatiable quizzer were to be asked the name of the person wearing the largest-ever mantle of bees, the correct answer would be K. P. Vinodan of Kerala, who once coaxed thirty-five thousand of the creatures to settle on his body for more than twenty-four hours while he stood by the roadside sipping liquids from a glass bottle. Other examples of excellence include the largest number of saliva bubbles blown without stopping (sixteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two over seven hours, by Asokan Chillikadan of Madhya Pradesh); the most slices cut from a single cucumber (one hundred and twenty thousand and sixty, by Professor S. Ramesh Babu of Bangalore); the greatest distance walked while balancing a full bottle of milk on one’s head (a hundred and four kilometers, almost sixty-five miles, by Milind Deshmukh of Pune). The resonantly named Yezdi F. Canteenwalla, also of Pune, had devoted thirty years of his life to the challenge of creating the largest-ever ball of rubber bands, using four hundred and twenty thousand of them to produce a bouncy sphere measuring twenty-one inches in diameter.

  There were so many mustache-related records that they could have taken up a chapter of their own. The longest ever recorded belonged to seventy-year-old Kalyan Ramji Saini of Rajasthan, a place of epic facial hair. It grew to more than ten feet and trailed on the ground for some distance behind him. By Limca’s account, the growth was quite accidental. After an eye operation, doctors had recommended that Mr. Saini refrain from wetting his face for three weeks. By the end of this dry spell, the prodigious mustache already reached thirty inches, more than waist-length in other words. The mustache of Naik T. Sudarsana Reddy, identified as a civilian driver from Hyderabad, was a more modest affair, not quite twenty inches, but his special skill was to use it to lift two empty cooking-gas cylinders weighing 35.4 kilos, or seventy-eight pounds.

  Eventually I found the entry for R. K. Tiwari. Oddly, Limca identified him as “Rajendra Kumar of Allahabad,” but it was clearly the same man. No mustache had ever achieved comparable celebrity or been put to greater public purpose. Tiwari’s mustache dance involved candles, four of them nestled symmetrically in his great black beard together with an equal number of unlit objects that resembled chopsticks. He could make the candles jump around in time to music (“any musical instrument in any rag and Dhun”), one at a time, in pairs, all four in unison. Later I found an obscure blog post, which he had perhaps created himself, that described the dance as “a marvelous technique rendles [sic] by the controlled movement of facial muscles with Yoga, the artistry in this dance is very subtle ang uniue [sic].” Zipping around on a scooter painted in rainbow stripes, the international mustache dancer had taken his act to the Cricket World Cup to bring good luck to the Indian team, to the International Yoga Festival at the Hotel Ganga Resort in Rishikesh, and to the huge crowds that assembled in Allahabad each year for the Magh Mela.

  Back at the park, the crowd was dispersing, Bhagwat Prasad squeezed out a few more notes, the Ambassador whisked away the chief of police.

  “Time to go to Mirganj,” I told Utkarsh.

  His eyes darted from side to side, looking for some deus ex machina that would spare us the ordeal of the red lights.

  “But you are wanting to see the home of Nehru. It is Anand Bhavan.”

  The taxi driver was holding the door of the Ambassador open for us.

  “Anand Bhavan,” Utkarsh told him. He turned to me and hazarded a smile. “You will see, it is beautiful. And it is stone-throwing distance only.”

  THE ABODE OF HAPPINESS

  Utkarsh was right, and he glowed when I told him so. The Anand Bhavan, the Abode of Happiness, was beautiful. It was a two-story building, set in immaculate gardens. The walls were cream, and the airy balcony that encircled the second floor was picked out in gray blue. Despite a pair of Mughal-style turrets, the overall effect was of an Englishman’s country estate, adapted to the heat of the North Indian plains.

  Motilal Nehru, the patriarch of the family dynasty, bought and remodeled the property in 1900, some years after moving from Kanpur to Allahabad to practice law at the high court. He was a deep-dyed anglophile who appeared before His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council in London, sent his son, Jawaharlal, there to be educated, hired English governesses, and insisted on using knives and forks at dinner. But like many upper-class Indians, he was prickly about whether anglophilia was enough to pay a man’s full price of admission to the colonial elite. In 1911, he was invited to attend a reception for the Imperial Durbar in the King-Emperor’s Camp. He wrote, “I have received the command of his Gracious Majesty King George V, Emperor of India, to be in attendance at Delhi … a funny way of inviting a gentleman.”

  This note was displayed in a dingy cabinet in the museum that occupies the second floor of the Anand Bhavan. Nearby was Motilal’s glass tumbler, spare buttons for his clothes, his earthenware foot warmer, and a miniature travel iron.

  By 1919, a year that changed the course of Indian history, Motilal had abandoned his legal practice and devoted himself full-time to politics. In February of that year, he started a newspaper in Allahabad, The Independent, “to wage war against autocracy.” It survived for two years before the British shut it down. In April, troops commanded by Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire without warning on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Jallianwalla Bagh, a public park in the Sikh city of Amritsar, killing 379 people and wounding more than 1,200. Dyer was rewarded with a vote of gratitude in the House of Lords and a bejeweled sword inscribed “Saviour of the Punjab.” In 1920, Gandhi founded the Non-Cooperation Movement to defy the “satanic” British. Motilal Nehru, who by now was chairman of the Indian National Congress, joined Gandhi’s movement and stopped wearing Western clothes.

  His twenty-nine-year-old son, Jawaharlal, went to Amritsar and collected spent cartridges from the Dyer massacre. I found these in another, larger case at the museum. Also on display were his tiny spinning wheel, a collection of shoes and waistcoats, an electric toaster, an electric razor, a cyclostyle machine that he used for cranking out anti-British pamphlets, a photograph of the Samadhi Buddha that he’d kept in his prison cell in Dehradun, his first driver’s license (issued in London), and a tennis racket in a canvas case. Farther along the balcony was a sign showing where Gandhi had worked when he visited the Anand Bhavan, and near that was the spartan bedroom of Jawaharlal’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. It had the air of a monastic cell, with a narrow, uncomfortable-looking single bed.

  * * *

  Across the freshly mowed lawn was a second mansion, a long, low, colonnaded building called the Swaraj Bhavan, the Abode of Self-Rule, which Congress used as its local headquarters. Part of it had been converted into a bookstore, and the assortment of books on offer might fairly have been described as eclectic.

  There were children’s cartoon histories of India and popular condensed editions of the Rāmāyaṇa. There were hagiographies of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Indira Gandhi. There was a copy of Mein Kamph [sic], with a photograph of Hitler on the cover.

  As in any other Indian bookstore, there were also a healthy number of titles devoted to self-improvement of one kind or another. You could buy Secrets of Mind Power, Seven Mantras to Excel in Exams, Memory Techniques for Science, How to Remain Ever Happy. The writings of Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, the owner of a company called Dynamic Memory, were especially well represented. His biography said that he, too, had made it into The Guinness Book of World Records, not for mustache dancing but for prodigious feats of memory, having demonstrated the ability to recall a list of fourteen randomly selected names and their accompanying birth dates, in the same order, in two minutes. That wasn’t all. Despite being born with a hole in his heart, Chowdhury also held the world record for the number of push-ups in one minute: 198.
It was noted that this made him the only man in history to hold a record in the categories of both mind and body.

  I picked up one of the volumes on Nehru and read the celebrated passage from his last will and testament, written in 1954, ten years before his death, in which he outlined his wishes for the disposal of his ashes. Most of them were to be scattered from an airplane, “over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India.” A small portion was to be set aside for immersion in the Ganges. He made it clear that this was not for religious reasons. It was because

  the Ganga … is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall; a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter, and a vast roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea’s power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.

  Half a million people came to see the immersion of Nehru’s ashes at the Sangam, where the Ganges meets the Yamuna. Several of them fell off an unstable platform in midstream and drowned.

  THE TRAFFIC IN MIRGANJ

  We entered Mirganj through the thicket of market stalls on Kamala Nehru Road, which eventually opened up onto a square that was dominated by one of the many eccentric Victorian clock towers that the British bestowed on India as emblems of home and civic dignity. The base of this one was painted Queen Anne red; it had a pair of wedding-cake balconies done up in powder blue and lemon yellow and a matching yellow onion dome that was topped with a spike like a Prussian pickelhaube.