by George Black
Kamala Nehru Road was named after Jawaharlal’s wife, but there was no monument, no sign of any kind in fact, to suggest that Jawaharlal himself had any connection to the neighborhood. I’d leafed through several of the biographies in the bookstore at Anand Bhavan, looking for references to his birthplace at 77 Mirganj, but found only euphemisms. One said that he had been born “in the old Indian part of the city in a lane which was said to be haunted.” Another mentioned “a house standing in a lane in one of Allahabad’s more congested localities.”
Although he had grown up in Mirganj himself, Utkarsh had no idea where this lane might be or whether the neighborhood had already been a red-light district at the time of Nehru’s birth in 1889. The idea of the house being in a lane at all was puzzling, since a tabletop model in the museum had shown it as a two-story house, plain in design, solid but not grand, built around a large courtyard with a partly covered roof terrace. An old, faded photograph showed it surrounded by open land. A section of the building had supposedly been demolished in 1931 in the name of urban improvement; the rest had been torn down in the 1970s.
There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Motilal Nehru had rented part of the house to a courtesan. In the swamps of conspiracy theory, where radical Hindu nationalist bloggers reviled Jawaharlal Nehru as a race traitor for wanting to create a multiconfessional state, this was the seed for all kinds of lurid rumors about life at 77 Mirganj. Motilal had come to Allahabad not as a lawyer but as a brothel keeper, importing Brahmin girls from Kashmir. He had fathered several children with prostitutes. Worse than that, he was secretly a Muslim himself, the son of a police official in Delhi who had concealed his true identity by adopting a Hindu name. One of Motilal’s customers was a Shi’a lawyer named Mubarak Ali, the original owner of the Anand Bhavan. He had not sold the house to Motilal, as commonly reported, but given it to him as a gift for personal services rendered and a way of bolstering his image of respectability. It was not Motilal who had sired India’s future prime minister, but this man Mubarak Ali, who then had his illegitimate son secretly circumcised, and had one of the prostitutes act as his wet nurse. So India’s first prime minister, by these frenzied accounts, was actually a closet Muslim, raised in lies and squalor.
* * *
Now that our trip to the “red-light place” could no longer be avoided, Utkarsh had loosened up a little. “This street was famous for sweets,” he said amiably. “Allahabad is a city of Brahmins, and the Brahmins always loved sweets.” Now it could have been any street in any city in North India, the usual crush of rickshaws and motorbikes, fruit and vegetable sellers and fried-food stalls, decaying plasterwork, and overhead tangles of electricity wires. The sidewalks were packed with men, and only men. I did a mental count of the first hundred people we passed. Ninety-nine were male; the only exception was a little girl of seven or eight hurrying along with some groceries in a plastic bag. Most of the men were in their late teens or twenties; they seemed to have not much to do but hang out around the food stalls and gawk at girls, not that there were any girls to gawk at.
According to the 2011 census, the state of Uttar Pradesh has two hundred million people. There are nine hundred and twelve women for every thousand men. In other words, UP had almost ten million surplus males. It was hard to escape the thought that, in a country with a long history of female infanticide, an ultrasound and an abortion were much less expensive than a dowry.
UP was notorious for what Indians call “Eve-teasing.” Two teenage girls, in separate recent incidents, had been doused in kerosene and set on fire for resisting their teasers. Another had been shot dead. I’d seen a small item in the newspapers a few days earlier about a company that was promoting a pistol small enough to fit into a girl’s handbag, a kind of Lady Derringer.
UP was also fending off newspaper headlines that referred to it as the rape capital of India, after two teenage cousins were found hanging from a mango tree in a village in the district of Badaun, halfway between Delhi and Lucknow. The girls’ bodies had been hastily buried on the banks of the Ganges, the spot marked by a red rag tied to a bamboo pole; by the time the police showed up to exhume them for DNA analysis, the monsoon was in full force, the river had burst its banks, and the graves were submerged under seven feet of water.
Five men from the village, members of a higher caste than the girls, who were dalits, had been accused of gang rape, and public officials were asked for comment. “Rape is a trivial incident, and it should not be blown out of proportion by the media,” said the chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh, the state’s highest-ranking civil servant. “Boys will be boys,” said the former chief minister of UP. “Sometimes they make mistakes.” “Rape?” said the CM of neighboring Madhya Pradesh. “Sometimes it’s right; sometimes it’s wrong.”
* * *
Utkarsh and I walked from one end of the street to the other and stopped at a stall where a man was scooping samosas out of a blackened iron vat of boiling oil. The afternoon was so hot that you could have fried them right on the sidewalk. We asked for directions to 77 Mirganj, and the man gestured toward the first alleyway on the left. We’d find the house a few yards in, where the alley made a right-angled turn.
It was impossible to relate the place to the photograph in the museum or to imagine that tearing down Nehru’s birthplace had had anything to do with urban improvement. The alleyway was claustrophobic, just wide enough for two motorbikes to pass, cluttered with garbage and hung with gold and silver tinsel. Pimps glared down at us from the upstairs windows. An open sewer drain ran along the front of the building, and the ground floor was painted a scabby robin’s-egg blue. A row of five doorways opened onto cramped inner rooms, each with its own metal concertina gate and a bare, hanging lightbulb. Half a dozen young women were squatting on the steps on low wooden stools. As we turned the corner, they scattered indoors like birds.
The girls at 77 Mirganj were almost certainly Nepali, said Ajeet Singh, whom I met later in Varanasi. Singh ran an organization called Guria, which means “doll.” Its purpose was to fight sex trafficking in UP through direct action—conducting undercover operations, staking out the railroad stations, facing down pimps and cops, raiding brothels. His first accomplishment was to clean up Varanasi’s notorious red-light district, Shivdaspur, which had once been home to a thousand prostitutes.
Singh was an exuberant man in his forties with a face full of gray stubble. He looked like the kind of favorite uncle who would enjoy dressing up as a clown at a kids’ party. People called him masterji. He said that he first sensed his mission in life when he went to a cousin’s wedding and watched a sex worker dancing all night to entertain an audience of men who kept up a barrage of catcalls and lewd suggestions. He approached the woman afterward and said he wanted to adopt her children and put them through school. When he took them home, his parents thought he had taken leave of his senses, which was hardly surprising, since he was seventeen at the time.
Singh introduced me to his wife, Manju. When they married, he refused to have a priest or any kind of religious mumbo jumbo at the ceremony. All he wanted was for the local prostitutes’ kids to entertain the guests with songs and dancing.
He was more than familiar with Mirganj. With the help of video that was shot clandestinely by informants disguised as street vendors, he had identified seventy girls who had been forced into prostitution with the connivance of the Allahabad police. Most of them had been kidnapped from their homes in Nepal. Some were only ten or twelve years old. There were entire villages in Nepal with no girls. Usually the traffickers, the didis, scooped them up in groups of four or more; three is considered an inauspicious number in Nepal. After crossing the border, the first stop was usually either Lucknow or Kanpur, where they were sold to “trainers,” kept in tiny rooms, raped, and burned with cigarettes until they were broken and ready to be shipped off to places like Sonagachi in Calcutta, Falkland Road in Bombay, MG Road in Delhi, and Mirganj. Before she was finally used up, a girl might be sold or ba
rtered half a dozen times or more.
Singh spent nine months assembling his case against the traffickers in Mirganj and finally persuaded the district magistrate to issue an order for the police to raid the brothels. The order came down first thing in the morning. “Wish we could help,” said the police, “but alas, we have limited manpower and a shortage of vehicles. Perhaps we could take care of the matter this evening? Or tomorrow morning?” They showed up at 6:00 P.M. in the end, grumbling, took a handful of girls into custody, and gave several of them straight back to the brothel owners. After an hour, they looked at their watches and said that unfortunately it was time to stop; they couldn’t work after seven without special permission. They did find time, however, to lock up Ajeet Singh in the Badshahi Mandi police station, a hop and a skip from the clock tower, where they threatened him with violence and trumped-up criminal charges.
Girls were not the only victims, Singh told me. Earlier that morning, in fact, volunteers from Guria had snatched a boy from traffickers at the Varanasi railway station. He was waiting to be reunited with his father and grandfather, who had just arrived from their village in Azamgarh district, seventy miles to the north. Singh went into the next room to fetch him. The boy was dressed all in white with a crocheted Muslim prayer cap. He had a deep, crescent-shaped scar that ran from his chin to his cheekbone, a smaller injury of some kind in the center of his forehead, and—as a friend said later when she saw a photograph—eyes that had seen too much. The men hugged him and wept.
“This is Abdul.” Singh beamed. “He says he’s nine.”
THE INVISIBLE RIVER
The more time I spent in Allahabad, the more blurred the edges became between myth and reality, truth and fraud, faith and science. Like Bishop Heber, who visited this “ruinous and desolate” place in 1824, and like Mark Twain, who came here in 1895 to witness the Kumbh Mela, I needed a pocket glossary. Like the word Ganga itself, names here had multiple layers of meaning, both physical and metaphysical.
Prayag: a place of sacrifice, the original Hindu name of the city before it was changed by Emperor Akbar.
Tirtha: a ford, a crossing place, a place of pilgrimage.
Tirtharaja, the king of all pilgrimage places—Allahabad.
Sangam: the confluence of two rivers, a place where the faithful can wash away their sins, the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna being the most sacred Sangam of them all.
Triveni Sangam: the meeting place not just of two rivers but of three, the third being the Saraswati, named for the beloved goddess of knowledge and wisdom, who is described in the Rig Veda as “the best of mothers, the best of rivers, the best of goddesses.”
Mela: a fair, festival, or gathering, secular or religious.
Kumbh: a pot or jug. During the epic struggle between the gods and demons over possession of a pot of the nectar of immortality, four drops were spilled. Each place where a drop fell became a sacred place of pilgrimage. One of the four was Allahabad.
Kumbh Mela: the greatest of all Hindu festivals, the largest human gathering on the planet, held at the Triveni Sangam at twelve-year intervals.
With these terms fixed in my mind, I took an auto-rickshaw to the confluence. The driver had a DVD player propped up on the dashboard, and he kept on eye on the movie as he drove through the crowded streets. A policeman wrapped in chains was spraying a crowd of diabolical enemies with machine-gun fire, while the disembodied head of a white-haired woman spoke to him from the clouds. Who was she? An arbiter of the battle? A tactical adviser? One of the more obscure goddesses? His mother? Or just a curious spectator? We reached Akbar’s monumental fort, whose walls and turrets stretch for a couple of hundred yards along the north bank of the Yamuna. I handed the driver his fifty rupees and climbed out. I never found out how the movie ended, though I had a feeling the policeman would probably come out on top.
The Ganges came in at a ninety-degree angle from the north, narrower and shallower than the Yamuna. But where was the Saraswati? The problem was that the river was invisible, and perhaps it had never existed outside of the scriptures. The sadhus had their theories, and the scientists had theirs. This being India, it was hard to separate the two, and the government was testing a hypothesis based in faith with the tools of archaeology, geomorphology, and satellite remote sensing.
One of the bathing areas in Allahabad is called Saraswati Ghat, but that did nothing to illuminate the riddle. The ghat was fully a mile upstream from the confluence, halfway between the fort and the handsome new suspension bridge over the Yamuna. It was a steeply stepped amphitheater backed by a dozen pinkish-purplish ornamental pillars that looked like upside-down flower petals on concrete stalks. The modernist design suggested a bandshell-cum-bus-station in Brasilia.
A long, inclined walkway led up to the gate of the fort. Kipling had loathed the place, after watching British soldiers pole away the dead bodies that bumped up against the walls during high water. Inside the fort was the Saraswati Koop, a deep well that some said was the source of the mythical river. The army, which still controlled the fort and used it as a munitions depot, had just announced plans to install video cameras, slanted mirrors, halogen lamps, and an LCD screen so that the faithful could see and worship the water at the bottom of the well. The minister in charge of rivers, a saffron-robed Hindu nationalist militant named Uma Bharti, declared that “Saraswati is not a myth” and ordered the testing and carbon dating of the water in the well to see if that might shed further light on the matter.
In fact, scientists from half a dozen government agencies had been studying the mystery of the Saraswati for more than thirty years and had even come to some tentative conclusions. Yes, the river had probably once existed. It had risen somewhere in the Himalayas. Perhaps near Mount Kailash, the abode of Shiva. Perhaps in a glacier near the source of the Yamuna, about twenty miles west of Gangotri. But five or six thousand years ago, somewhere in the lowlands, it had disappeared. Perhaps this was because of changes in the climate; perhaps it was the result of tectonic shifts. Its remaining flow might have been captured by the Sutlej, which continued westward until it met the Indus.
Searching for the likeliest paleochannel of the Saraswati, the Indian Space Research Organisation had settled on the present-day Ghaggar River, which flows only during the monsoon and dries up close to the Pakistan border in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan. Those details match an account in the Mahābhārata. Satellite imagery suggested that the Ghaggar/Saraswati might eventually have reached the Arabian Sea through the great salt flats and marshes known as the Rann of Kutch. All of which was fascinating, but the larger question remained: What did any of this have to do with the Triveni Sangam at Allahabad, which was more than six hundred miles away?
But perhaps, if you were a politician, the where didn’t matter in the end. It was enough that science and scripture should coincide. Even if the Saraswati were on the other side of India, or even in Pakistan, the faithful would still flock to Allahabad. A few months after I left the city, I checked to see if there was any update on the search for the invisible river. There was big news. In the watershed of the Ghaggar, near the small town of Mustafabad, a woman had come upon water gushing from a rock. Here finally was the true Saraswati, said the chief minister of Haryana state. Workers were digging out what they believed to be the channel, and water would be pumped into it from tube wells; worshippers were already congregating at the site. Prayag had lost its original name to the Mughal invaders, but now Mustafabad would be reclaimed for Hinduism. Henceforth it would be Saraswati Nagar. I watched a TV interview with the woman who had found the river. She was delighted at her newfound celebrity. In one of India’s endless ironies, she was a Muslim.
DESOLATE AND RUINOUS
I’d been sick. I was exhausted. It was hot. I had a fever that matched the outside temperature, over one hundred degrees. The afternoon air was heavy and gray with smog, and my grasp of Hindu cosmology was fraying at the edges. The more time I spent around the Sangam, the more it felt like
a low-grade acid trip.
In one of the courtyards of the fort, a flight of steps led down to the temple of Patalpuri. The name means “small city of the underworld.” It was like an air-raid shelter, a huge wine cellar, the catacombs of Paris, a dark version of Madame Tussaud’s. A long gallery lined with small statue niches opened up into a pillared labyrinth that Mark Twain called “subterranean ramifications stocked with shrines and idols.” Countless alcoves held life-size figures of gods. A priest or a temple tout sat in front of each of them, shaking metal plates full of small coins and ten-rupee notes in my face. Perhaps it was just the effects of a sleepless night, or the roiling in my gut, but none of the deities here seemed benign.
There was Shani Dev, the most feared of all the gods, elder brother of Lord Yama, god of death and the underworld; a single glance from Shani Dev was a curse, a perverse guarantee that you would commit as many sins as possible in life so that you could be redeemed in death.
There was Bhairava, a manifestation of Shiva sculpted in black with glaring eyes, whose name means “terrifying” and is synonymous with destruction. There was also Nag Vasuki, the cobra that Shiva wears coiled around his neck.
There was Narasimha, half-man, half-lion, the fourth avatar of Vishnu, who had eviscerated the murderous demon Hiranyakashipu with his powerful claws. Even though this made him a virtuous figure, there was still something unnerving about his image.
Above the temple was the Akshaya Vat, the “indestructible banyan tree,” which was sacred to Vishnu. A demon or goblin lived among its roots and branches. Lord Ram and Sita had once rested in its shade. Anyone who threw themselves off the tree to their death, no matter how greatly they have sinned in life, “shall receive a great reward in the future state and shall not be considered a suicide.”