by George Black
That was how the story was told by Fanny Parkes in her book Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque. Parkes, who was Welsh by birth, was the wife of a minor official of the East India Company and the most engaging of all the travel writers of the period. She arrived in Allahabad from Calcutta in 1832 and lived in India for twenty-four years. She had a genuine fascination with Hinduism and at the same time a sharp eye for the chicanery of its priests. She saw right through the myth of “the Holy Achibut,” as she called it. It was impossible to see the tree, she wrote, because access to it had been bricked up by the British commandant of the fort. A priest took her into a room and pointed to the ceiling. “Do you not see the branch of the tree has cracked the roof in three places?” he asked. “I certainly saw three cracks, but whether from a tree or ivy I cannot say; not a leaf was visible,” Parkes wrote sardonically.
From the “Achibut Room,” she went to the Patalpuri temple, where she saw the same tree I had seen, its base “covered with oil, ghee, boiled rice, and flowers.” A fake, she decided. “The resident Hindoos of Prag [Prayag], who know the trick the Brahmans have played, do not pooja the false Achibut.”
* * *
A little to the north of the fort was the Bade Hanuman temple. With his crown and his bulb-headed club, Lord Hanuman, who led his monkey army against the demon king Ravan in the Rāmāyaṇa, is the embodiment of faith, loyalty, heroism, and physical strength. The Bade Hanuman had his own unique legend. A wealthy trader from the city of Kannauj, on the left bank of the Ganges, north of Kanpur, had made a huge stone statue of the god, hoping to be blessed with a son, a constant theme in Hindu worship. I didn’t recall ever hearing of a shrine where people prayed for the birth of a daughter. He brought the statue to the Sangam, where it sank into the sand and remained buried. Later, a visiting holy man tried to stick his trishula—the trident of Shiva—in the ground, but it struck some hard object. When he dug down to see what it was, he found the statue. Men tried to stand it upright, but it was too heavy. So a shrine was built around it, which became the Bade Hanuman temple.
I went inside to see the statue, which lay flat in a recessed well decorated with small blue tiles. The figure was colossal, more than twice the size of a man. But it was so laden with offerings of flowers and fruit that all that was visible of the body were two staring, disembodied eyes, so black that they looked rimmed with kohl. Here at the Sangam, even the admirable Hanuman, conqueror of evil, seemed a weird and baleful presence. Each year, when the monsoon broke and the rivers rose, India’s only horizontal Hanuman was submerged under several feet of water.
I hurried to get out of the temple, feeling claustrophobic. Outside, a teenaged street vendor was selling plastic masks of Hanuman and Spider-Man.
* * *
But all I accomplished was to trade claustrophobia for agoraphobia. Not in the sense of a fear of crowds, or the contrary sense of a fear of open spaces, but somehow, strangely, of both. The whole identity of the Sangam revolved around the presence of crowds, crowds of unimaginable size, but today it was all but deserted. Nowhere could have felt lonelier. In the fact of their absence, I found it, as Bishop Heber had written, a “desolate and ruinous” place.
The pilgrims converge on these sandy flats each year in January and February, in the month of Magh, the eleventh in the Hindu calendar. The Magh Mela lasts for six weeks, becoming a city within a city. On the most auspicious day, when the sky is moonless and the most devout observe a vow of silence, as many as ten million people may bathe at the Sangam—eight times the population of Allahabad. Every twelve years, at the Kumbh Mela, the numbers may be three times as large, thirty million bathers in a single day, led by competing factions of naked and armed naga sadhus. When crowding turns to chaos, there are stampedes. The worst of these disasters was in 1954, when eight hundred died.
The Kumbh Mela has also become big business. The most recent one, in 2013, had been the subject of a study in the International Journal of Management. Revenues in excess of $2 billion; six hundred and thirty-five thousand temporary jobs created; three hundred and fifty-five miles of water pipelines laid, and five hundred miles of electrical wiring, to service the great tent city, which stretched over twenty square miles; thirty-five thousand public toilets; eighteen pontoon bridges across the Ganges and the Yamuna; thirty thousand police on duty and a hundred and twenty ambulances on call around the clock. Wi-Fi services courtesy of Coca-Cola India. Headsets with built-in devotional music from Vodafone. GPS-enabled apps that allowed pilgrims to locate their temporary ashrams, their sleeping quarters, and their spiritual leaders. There were luxury tents for VIPs and foreign tourists at $200 a night, with tiled bathrooms and buffet breakfasts.
But these were just the modern refinements. In the popular imagination, the festival goes back to a time before recorded history, when the four drops of nectar fell from the heavens. Or perhaps not, according to Western scholars who have studied the administrative records of the colonial period. An Australian historian, Kama Maclean, has concluded that while worshippers may always have converged on Allahabad in the month of Magh, the first Kumbh Mela in its present form, with its organized processions of sadhus, had been celebrated in 1870. For the British administrators of the city, it was a matter of public order. They wanted to avoid any repetition of the shenanigans at the great melas in Haridwar, where warring bands of sadhus had battled for spiritual dominance and control of the lucrative annual market in elephants, camels, horses, and luxury goods. Maclean quotes Mountstuart Elphinstone, the lieutenant governor of Bombay, on the notorious Haridwar Mela of 1760, where “an affray, or rather a battle, took place between the Nagas of Shiva and those of Vishnu in which it was stated on the spot that 18,000 persons were left dead on the field.” At Allahabad, formalizing the role of the sadhus was a way of allowing a more rational division of influence and profit.
Now the crowds and the chaos seemed as imaginary as the Saraswati. Nowhere in the world could have felt emptier or more cheerless. Hundreds of empty boats were drawn up in the mud, hung with prayer flags. A handful of bathers were filling plastic flasks of gangajal, and a few boatloads of worshippers were lined up along a rope that stretched from shore to shore, marking the line of demarcation between the Ganges and the Yamuna.
I walked a mile back to the rickshaw stand, along a rough track grooved into the sand. To the west, the sun was setting behind the suspension bridge. Two boys were trying in a half-hearted way to launch kites in the stagnant evening air. They kept at it, failure after failure. There was nothing else for them to do.
By the time I reached the parking area, it was fully dark. There was noise again, drivers drumming up business, a repetitive pulse of bells, drums, and chanting from a small nearby temple, like the hammering of an alarm clock that no one would turn off.
Six of us crowded sweatily into a three-wheeler. A chaos of insects around the headlights. In the front, by the driver, another man sat with one thigh splayed across my lap. The vehicle stalled. We jumped out and pushed. The engine coughed and caught. We piled in again. A naked naga sadhu, the only one I saw all day, beetled over to us. He was rail thin, a walking anatomy lesson, no more than five feet tall with tangled hair that fell to his waist, a beard that reached to the sternum, his penis swinging like a pendulum, and a necklace of bones around his neck. He banged on the side of the auto-rickshaw with his staff, rattled the bones in my face, and spat on the ground, as if my presence at the Sangam was an affront to the natural order of the universe.
ARMPIT OF THE UNIVERSE
No one could understand why I insisted on going to Gorakhpur. I’d be robbed or shot, or if that didn’t happen, I’d probably be bitten by a mosquito and die of Japanese encephalitis. Or I’d just be so bored and disgusted by the place that I would wonder what in God’s name had possessed me to go there. But despite their advice, I hopscotched around the towns and villages of the Gangetic Plain, sometimes by rail and sometimes by road, and in the end, the road took me to Gorakhpur.
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A city of seven hundred thousand souls on the main road from Varanasi to the Nepal border, Gorakhpur was famous for gang wars, famous for human trafficking, famous for being the home of the first Indian politician to be elected to parliament while in prison, famous for having the world’s longest railway platform (eight-tenths of a mile), famous for its corrupted heart. In his novel The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan described Gorakhpur as “one of the armpits of the universe,” and though I hadn’t yet read his novel when I went there, I couldn’t have put it better.
A friend and I traveled to Gorakhpur at night, a tedious four-hour drive across the darkened plains. Each time the driver punched his horn, we took bets on whether we could count to ten before he did it again. It usually happened at a count of seven or eight, even though the divided state highway was empty and lightless black except for a stretch of a couple of miles where, for unfathomable reasons of their own, the big trucks came barreling straight at us on full beam on the wrong side of the concrete median barrier.
Gorakhpur was not well provided with places to sleep. The Clarks Grand (“contemporary Hotel with all modern Facilities”) was a $140-a-night slum, with cockroaches in the bathroom, stained carpets, cigarette burns on the furniture, slovenly staff, and no food in the “all-day dining venue.” When I complained to the manager, he gave me a genial smile and a head wobble and said, “As long as customer is happy.” I said, “But I’m not.”
The Wi-Fi in my room flickered on and off, but the signal was just strong enough for me to read a bit more about the reasons for Gorakhpur’s fame. I learned that the city was the hub of Purvanchal, an area that people called the Badlands of Uttar Pradesh; it was sometimes referred to as the Chicago of the East or, more obscurely, the Slice of Sicily. It owed much of this celebrity to a hit man named Shri Prakash Shukla, alias Ashok Singh, who had hired himself out to settle scores for rival politicians jostling for lucrative public works contracts like highway construction and railway upgrades. The politicians themselves drove around behind smoked glass with phalanxes of bodyguards armed with AK-47s, finding hideouts for Shukla/Singh after the police finally yawned, scratched their bellies, summoned up the energy for a manhunt, and gunned him down in what Indians call an “encounter killing” near Delhi. All this had happened a long time ago, but Gorakhpur’s reputation trailed it like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail.
* * *
The next morning, I came upon a group of a dozen men sitting cross-legged on a white sheet on a traffic island in the center of the city under a statue of Gandhi holding an umbrella. They had hung a gigantic red banner behind them denouncing corruption in the municipal electricity department and comparing their struggle to Gandhi’s call for swaraj, self-rule. No one seemed to be paying much attention to them, being focused more on navigating the ambient scrum of rickshaws and motorbikes and wandering water buffalo.
The face of the man on the poster, with his glasses, buck teeth, and four days of black stubble, clearly belonged to the man sitting at the center of the group. I asked him who he was. He said his name was Jata Shanker Tripathi, and he spent a lot of his time protesting one thing and another, not just corruption and electricity. He also operated a toll-free hotline to report incidents of trafficking of Nepali girls, like those who had fluttered away like birds in the alleyway in Mirganj. For this work, on a trip to the United States, Tripathi said he had been awarded the prestigious title of “Arkansas Visitor.” Today he was leading a weeklong sit-down protest at the government’s failure to deal with the latest epidemic of Japanese encephalitis.
Gorakhpur was where the disease, which is closely related to West Nile Virus, was first detected in the 1970s. People here called it brain fever, he said. It causes brutal headaches and vomiting. It can lead to confusion, seizures, and hallucinations; to partial paralysis, inflammation of the heart and kidneys. If you survived an attack, it might be with permanent brain damage. The epidemics happened whenever the monsoon was unusually severe, as it had been this year. The surrounding countryside was flat and boggy, and the fields were still full of water more than a month after the rains ended. In these conditions, the Culex tritaeniorhynchus mosquito was in its element. But you could have said the same thing about much of Asia, where the disease was endemic. With Gorakhpur, it felt as if the explanation was karmic as well as topographic.
At least five hundred people had died so far this year, Tripathi said, and as usual, most of the victims were children. But those were just the figures from the central hospital in Gorakhpur, and who could trust numbers from the government? Out in the villages, who knew? “It doesn’t happen in the cleaner and more prosperous households,” he said. “It’s in villages with open drains and standing water, villages of the scheduled castes.”
He pulled out an iPhone from the pocket of his white kurta and swiped through some photographs that showed four small children sprawled out across a single metal-framed bed in a grimy room at the central hospital. Bare electrical wires trailed across the wall, and there were bars across the windows.
“We are making three demands to the government,” he said. “One, declare a national disaster. Two, build a new hospital with four hundred beds to deal with future outbreaks. And three, fund a scientific research center to find out more about the disease.” Those were his demands, but his expression said, Dream on. “Doctors in Gorakhpur are a very careless body. They just say, ‘We have no powers, we can’t make any recommendations.’” Like everyone else, the doctors fed at the trough of corruption. Just two days before our conversation, the local press had carried reports of an investigation into the recent murders of three senior health department officials in Lucknow. Were they personally involved in the corruption? Did they cross the wrong politician? Were they about to name names? Tripathi shrugged and showed his buck teeth. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.
THE VIEW FROM THE TRAIN
Back at Lucknow Junction, I waited for my train to Varanasi. Even though there were packs of monkeys and rats playing hide-and-seek along the tracks, there was a chaotic kind of efficiency about the railway station. Train times were listed on bright LED displays. Over the loudspeakers, a clear female voice whose received pronunciation would not have disgraced the BBC in the 1950s, announced delays. “For your kind attention, please. The Shramjeevi Express, scheduled to depart at 8:30, will now depart at 10:15. The inconvenience is deeply regretted.” My own train, the Kashi Vishwanath Express, named for the most important temple in Varanasi, was on schedule, though that was no guarantee it would arrive on time.
I found my reservation confirmed on a long dot-matrix printout that hung from a noticeboard like an old-fashioned galley proof. Indian trains offer twelve classes, from 1AC down to UR/GEN—unreserved general, which is as bare-bones as the name suggests. And there is always the option of riding on the roof. I had booked 2AC as usual, where each compartment has four berths, two up, two down. There were additional berths along the corridor, laid out in pairs and hung with curtains for privacy. The “AC” part failed the truth-in-advertising test because there was only a small whirring fan to cool the compartment. Next to it was a little string pouch where you could store your bottle of water. An attendant came around distributing threadbare gray sheets and scratchy brown blankets.
I slept until dawn. We were behind schedule, still a couple of hours short of Varanasi. I alternated between reading Mark Twain’s account of his travels and staring out across the endless monotony of Uttar Pradesh under its permanent haze of black carbon from the mud stoves and dung fires. At the tiny halts along the way, people were asleep on the platforms with their cooking utensils spread out around them and sheets pulled over their heads. On a brick building by the trackside, someone had whitewashed the word ABANDONED.
North India was “one vast farm—one almost interminable stretch of field with mud fences between,” Twain wrote. He wondered at the rivers that meandered across the plains. “Curious rivers they are; low shores a dizzy distance apart, wi
th nothing between but an enormous acreage of sand-flats with sluggish little veins of water dribbling around amongst them; Saharas of sand, smallpox-pitted with footprints.”
Bikes and motorbikes waited at crossing barriers; schoolchildren lined up behind them, dressed in neat blue-and-white uniforms and carrying small backpacks; women washed their saris in brown pools and laid them out to dry along the tracks; men urinated against a wall with torn posters showing candidates from past elections and a painted sign that said, “NOT URIN HERE.” Pigs, dogs, goats, and cows explored the possibilities of piles of garbage. Here and there the landscape was broken up by clumps of neem and peepul and banyan trees.
I didn’t have the compartment to myself. Outside in the corridor, a man, a woman, and a boy of five or six had been chatting on one of the lower berths when I boarded. When they were done, the man had settled into the bunk across from mine and pulled a sheet over himself without looking at me. I guessed he was in his late thirties, jowly and thick-lipped, with a fierce black mustache. The compartment filled with the heavy scent of hair oil, turmeric, aftershave, sweat, attar of roses.
As the sun rose higher, the train jolted along at a steady twenty miles an hour, and his sleeping form jogged back and forward in time with its rhythm. I stared out of the window some more. Prayer flags waved over the pink pyramids of small temples. Elaborate cement pillars stood inexplicably in the middle of a field. The remains of something, or the abandoned start of something.
The movements of my traveling companion seemed suddenly out of sync with the rhythm of the wheels on the track. There was a rapid, regular back-and-forth of his hand beneath the blanket, and his breathing grew faster. He began to pant audibly, then let out a single long groan, scrabbled around under the sheet at his midsection for a few seconds, then rolled over onto his side and within a couple of minutes was snoring loudly again.