by George Black
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“In ’91, maybe sixteen, maybe thirty,” he said. By Uttar Pradesh standards, this obviously didn’t qualify as mass killing.
“It was Kali Puja this time, same sort of reason why riot took place, but this was worst outbreak. Again some people got overexcited in the procession, and it hurt the feelings when they were going through the Muslim areas. A lot of people were killed in the cinema halls. They were watching films; they didn’t know what was happening outside. Others were killed in the barbershops while they were getting shaved. But at present, there is no such type of action and reaction as in ’91. Processions now go along main roads. Same with Muslim procession of tazia in month of Muharram. This is proper.”
That left something I’d been a bit hesitant to bring up. Between 2006 and 2010, there were three bombings by radical Islamists in the city. The first had left twenty-eight people dead at a celebrated temple and the Cantonment railway station. The second had killed eleven, including four lawyers, outside the Varanasi Civil Court Building. In the third attack, a day after the anniversary of the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya, a bomb went off near Dasaswamedh Ghat during the nightly Ganga Aarti, killing a two-year-old girl.
“Were there no reprisals against your community?” I asked.
“No, no one blamed us or attacked us for this,” he said quietly. “There was no type of disturbance.”
The egg- and stone-throwers at the Kejriwal rally didn’t bother him. “One section of Mr. Modi’s party works on policy of provocation,” he said, “but they are not aware of the situation here in the time of Partition. Mostly Muslim people were downtrodden, they were poor farmers and weavers, they never support Pakistan, not a single Muslim from Varanasi is transferred to Pakistan. But this fact is not known to these people. They do not know their back history, or they are mentally prepared like that. Ignorance is the biggest blunder.”
Not that the Hindus had any monopoly on ignorance, he said with a sigh. “When Pakistan loses game of cricket, it is celebrated by them. But also, when India loses, some group of Muslims will celebrate by lighting the firecrackers. These things are not beneficial. But we aware them about it in the mosques.”
* * *
I had to admire Dr. Ansari’s equanimity when the election results came in a few weeks later. Modi was elected prime minister in a landslide. He trounced Kejriwal in Varanasi, and his party swept the board in Uttar Pradesh. Statewide, fifty-five Muslims ran for office; not a single one of them was elected.
The new prime minister’s victory celebration in Varanasi was a tour de force of stagecraft and media savvy. “The man is the master guru of the photo op,” said a disgruntled former cabinet minister from the Congress Party, whom I met later in New Delhi.
With camera crews in tow, Modi began by visiting the Golden Temple, where he sprinkled water from the Ganges on the shivling. From there, he proceeded through the alleys of the old city to the river and took his seat at Dasaswamedh Ghat for the aarti. Ganga is the goddess who cleanses all sins, and Modi promised that night that he would honor her by cleansing her in return, with a national campaign that he called Namami Gange: Obeisance to the Ganges.
GURU OF THE WORLD
The mayor of Varanasi, Ramgopal Mohley, was a member of Modi’s ruling party and a true believer, and I thought I’d ask him whether obeisance would be enough, since Indian governments had poured billions of dollars into cleaning up the tanneries of Kanpur and the sewers of Varanasi for the past thirty years with no discernible results. The first time I went to his office, he kept me waiting in an anteroom, where I twiddled my thumbs for half an hour while six men stood around a desk yelling at each other to the point where I thought ambulances might end up being called. Eventually the mayor emerged, ignored me, strode into the street surrounded by aides and petitioners and bodyguards, climbed into an SUV, and drove off.
The next day, when I tried again, he was all smiles, gold rings, and extravagant gestures. “Since our Independence, the engine of this country has been defunct,” he said, waving his arms in the air. “But Modi has put in the lubricant. Now we are in second gear. Next year it will be third gear!”
Yes, previous governments had failed, but there would be no more failures under Modi. “He is a devotee, he is determined. This is the reason! When Modiji won, he said, ‘Ma Ganga has called me!’ The second thing he said was that when Kashi, Benares, was guru of the nation, India was guru of the world.”
It was a little like listening to a North Korean official singing the praises of the Dear Leader.
I wondered what he thought of the minister who had been put in charge of the cleanup, the veteran BJP militant Uma Bharti. She was, to put it mildly, an arresting choice. As a child, Bharti had been regarded as a religious prodigy, leaving school after sixth grade with the intention of becoming a “spiritual missionary.” She was often referred to as a saddhvi, the female honorific equivalent of a sadhu, and like Modi himself, her involvement with the jagged edge of Hindu nationalism had begun when she joined the militant Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, as a teenager. Her incendiary speeches to the mobs in Ayodhya in 1992 had made her notorious. When a commission of inquiry later accused her of inciting violence, Bharti was defiant. “I am not apologetic at all,” she said. “I am willing to be hanged for my role.” Indeed, she went on, “It could be said that the demolition of Babri Masjid was a victory for the Hindu society.”
When Bharti was elected to parliament in 2014, she was still facing five serious criminal charges in the Uttar Pradesh courts, including rioting, unlawful assembly, and “statements intended to cause public mischief.” In a separate case before the Supreme Court, she stood charged with criminal conspiracy.
The mayor thumped his fist on the desk. “Everyone likes Umaji!”
Even the Muslims? I asked. Given her history, wouldn’t they be justified in feeling a little apprehensive?
“No, no, no!” He waved away the question and brought the conversation back to the river. “Modiji has made one ministry to be in charge under her. Everyone should listen to the orders of one person; then things will get done. If ten different people are giving opinions, things will not work. Look at the determination of Modi!”
It would happen today, it would happen tomorrow, it was happening already. The promises of progress tripped over each other in wild contradiction. “By next year, you will start seeing the cleanness, up to 20 percent!” he exclaimed. “In another year, you will start seeing the real cleaning. I am telling you now that next year, Ganga will be cleaned by 50 percent. In another three years, the river will be cleaned 70 percent.”
The ghats would be swept clean. You could never stop the faithful tossing flowers into the river, but now they would be collected by modern machines like oil-skimming booms and turned into incense. Garbage would be trucked to a new waste-to-energy plant, as the Canadians and Germans do. It was important to learn from such foreign examples.
“We went to Japan, both Modiji and I,” the mayor said. “Kyoto and Kashi, there are similarities. Kyoto is also a city of narrow lanes and temples. Under their lanes, there are three subway lines. Over the lanes, there are flyovers.”
Although, of course, he conceded, India was not Japan. Also, “Kyoto has three hundred and thirty temples, and here we have more like thirty-three thousand.” Thirty-three gods, or thirty-three million. The number seemed to have a magical significance.
“But come back, you will see some result in two years,” he said, looking at his watch. “Movement has started; it is like a revolution. Umaji has said if Ganga is not cleaned in three years’ time, she might do samadhi.” Webster defines the word as “a state of deep concentration resulting in union with or absorption into ultimate reality.” Sometimes, Pinku added later, it involved climbing into a ditch and burying yourself alive.
THE FIELD OF FULFILLMENT
After seeing it three times, I was tired of the Ganga Aarti. It was dusk. The seven young pri
ests had taken their places, each on his separate platform, preparing for the ceremony, which was as scrupulously choreographed as a production number by Busby Berkeley. They would chant hymns, blow conch shells, light incense, ring prayer bells, swing their heavy brass lamps in synchronized clockwise circles. All seven of them were drop-dead handsome, immaculately coiffed, dressed in identical cream-colored dhotis and kurtas. A flotilla of tourist boats had squeezed up against the river’s edge, and their camera flashes were popping like strobe lights. There were Israeli kids fresh from military service, Japanese tour groups in white face masks like a posse of surgeons on their way to the operating room, backpackers on extended spring break, stolid Americans of a certain age with serious-looking telephoto lenses, superannuated hippies with dreadlocks that Shiva himself might have envied, fresh from an afternoon at the Bowl of Compassion Café or the Salon de Thé Vishnu. Temple touts were circulating among the crowd on the steps, and a little girl of six or seven was hawking lamps, diyas, that would become a flotilla of tiny lights in the river when the ceremony was over. A young European woman with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a diaphanous yellow dress was sucking on a joint and gazing up at one of the sadhus in a kind of erotic trance.
Pinku gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “This is the Bollywood version of aarti,” he said. “If you want to see the real thing, you should go to the Shree Atma Veereshwar temple. Tell the priests I sent you.”
* * *
Finding the place was neither easy nor especially pleasant. It was tucked away in the dense labyrinth of alleyways known as the Siddha Kshetra, the Field of Fulfillment, and that meant negotiating the steep steps at Scindhia Ghat, which served as a de facto open-air toilet—human, canine, and bovine. Varanasi was experiencing one of its recurrent power cuts, and the only light along the ghats came from the funeral fires at Manikarnika. I had to pick my way around a good number of recumbent cows and piles of dung before I found the cramped doorway to the temple.
After Varanasi’s principal temple was torn down on the orders of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1669, Shree Atma Veereshwar served for many years as the city’s most important shrine. The worship of its shivling is said to be the equivalent of worshipping thirty million lingams in other places. It is believed to confer special blessings, notably the gift of a son to the childless.
The inner sanctum was a small, square room, with walls and pillars painted the color of blueberry yogurt. The floor was a black-and-white tile checkerboard, and the ceiling was bright yellow with a couple of fluorescent strip lights. A small electric fan barely stirred the humid air. The lingam itself, nestled in a silver-plated yoni, was enclosed in a sunken well surrounded by an ornate brass rail.
The chief priest, whose name was Munmun Maharaj, had already arrived. He was a tall, heavyset man in his thirties, with the three horizontal white stripes of the Shiva devotee daubed on his forehead and long, heavily oiled hair that was pulled back in a bun. He wore yellow-and-white robes, seamless and unstitched as a token of purity. He was already hard at work preparing the lingam for the ceremony. He cleaned it successively with water from the temple well, then with curd, then again with water, sluicing the liquid into a thin gray slop that the pious regard as charnamrit, nectar from the feet of the gods. After wiping down the lingam, he anointed it with sandalwood paste and attar of roses, shaping the mixture into waves and ripples like a pastry cook decorating a pie, then surrounded it with flowers, patterning them in tiger stripes intertwined with strips of tinsel, before finally placing a carmine rose and a sprig of leaves on top of the entire confection.
Three other priests joined him at intervals, filling the spaces around the lingam with candles, handbells, bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, boxes of sweets, sticks of incense, and ten-rupee bills. It was all very relaxed and businesslike. They chatted and laughed at each other’s jokes as they worked. It took a full hour before everything was ready, and by that time, about twenty worshippers had shown up, all male, each of them ringing a hanging bell once as he passed through the doorway. There was a straggle-bearded sadhu in saffron, a pilgrim in white robes with the sacred thread draped across his left shoulder, a cluster of men in nondescript work clothes, and a boy who might have been eleven or twelve wearing a T-shirt that said, “BE NICE OR I’LL SEND YOU TO SCHOOL.”
About half the men seemed to know all the Sanskrit verses by heart, and they joined in the rhythmic chanting as it intensified and the temple bells rang louder and faster. The room was growing hot and claustrophobic. I began to sweat, and I could feel Agnès shifting uncomfortably on the stone bench next to me. Suddenly she whispered that she needed a breath of air and slipped quietly out of the room.
Afterward, one of the priests, a stocky middle-aged man with a bristling black mustache, bore down on me.
“Come, we will talk,” he said. It was less an invitation than an order. He led me into an adjoining room and motioned me to squat on the stone floor. The other three priests joined us and formed a circle, munching on leftover sweets. It was not clear to me whether they spoke English.
“Why you have brought woman here?” the stocky priest demanded.
I told him that a friend had recommended that I come to the temple. He’d said it would be all right.
The priest nodded in recognition of Pinku’s name. But he was still suspicious. “But is it a bad day? If it is one of her three bad days, woman can pollute the temple.”
I told him that I honestly had no idea whether today was one of her three bad days; she was just a friend. But he seemed to have lost interest in the subject. Instead he began to mutter about the injustices that foreigners like me heaped on Hindus. “An American president can kill thousands of Mohammedans in Iraq,” he said, “and no one will show the finger to him.” But whenever a Hindu raised a hand in self-defense against a Muslim, the world raised an outcry.
The other priests were observing us with detached curiosity. One of them gave me a finger-size banana to eat. The temple felt like the wrong place to pursue this line of conversation. Perhaps we could meet later? He thought this was a fine idea. He told me that his name was Ravindra Sand and that I could find him at his home in the old city.
TWO BROTHERS
I stopped on the way to the priest’s house to buy a small courtesy gift at Rasvanti, the most famous confectionery shop in the city. India has a famously sweet tooth. Rasgulla, white balls of buffalo curd cheese and sugar. Deep-fried, neon-orange jalebi, scooped from vats of boiling oil, dripping with syrup. Creamy rasmalai, fragrant with pistachio. Rasvanti—Juicy Sweet—had become famous in the 1930s for its orange, white, and green creations, made in the colors of the Indian National Congress as a surreptitious protest against British rule. Men were sitting cross-legged on rush mats under a poster of Hanuman, grating coconut into large metal trays. The owner packed me up a box of lozenge-shaped green burfi, rich with cashews and ghee and garnished with silver leaf.
Ravindra wasn’t home, but his younger brother, Arvind, invited me to come in and wait. “Sit,” he said. “We will take tea, and then we will talk.”
Arvind was bouncing his six-month-old daughter on his knee. He told me that she had been born at an auspicious time, on the birthday of Lord Ram. Vedic researchers had traced the birth of the god back to January 10, 5114 BC, in the town of Ayodhya, although because of the vagaries of the lunar calendar, the date varied from year to year. This year it had fallen on March 28.
“Sands are one of the oldest families in Varanasi, you know,” he said. “We are Saraswat Brahmins, considered best Brahmins out of all categories.”
His wife poured the tea, laid out the usual plate of biscuits, and withdrew silently.
“Right now, I am thirty-nine years,” he went on. “I have always been in this custom and this religion. In America, people are not born with these things like Lord Ram in their blood. Except, of course, Christian fundamentalists brought up on Bible.”
I told him how I’d met Ravindra, and he said the Shree Atma V
eereshwar temple had been the focus of his brother’s emotional life for twenty years. His own had taken a less spiritual direction. He was the deputy general manager of the local office of an American pharmaceutical company, Abbott India, which had a reputation for driving its workers hard, sometimes to the point of suicide. Ravindra’s story was one of devotion and disappointment. He had craved a government job—for the salary, the prestige, the pension, the health insurance. Instead he was forced to toil as a humble school administrator. “He has potential above 80, 90 in any field,” Arvind said. “But what he is doing now is below, say, 40 percent. On religion he would score 60, 70 at least. I am more like 30, 40 on this. Now he is married, and he is having one child also. But he doesn’t want to be in this family life. He just wants to be spiritual, meditative. Even after fifty-five, after daughter’s marriage, he will go from this life, he will go for sanyas”—the path of renunciation.
Whatever the differences between the two brothers, they seemed as interchangeable as Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the matter of Muslims. I told Arvind what Ravindra had said to me at the temple, and he reacted so strongly that his little daughter startled in his lap. “That is very correct. I also have very strong opinions. All the Muslims, they are born in India, but they are not authentically with us. Why they are not changing their roots? Why they are not participating in my country, which is India? And why the terrorist is only the Mohammedan? This is what I feel, what all Indians think.”