The Lost Generation

by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

  ‘As long as a woman has a husband, she has esteem in the village,’ says Feroja, one of the three rudaalis at the mourning. ‘With him gone, she has to cover her face from strangers, keep away from pujas and be the unlucky one who caused her husband’s death.’

  We saunter back to the home of Feroja and Madami—her husband’s brother’s wife. They live together with Feroja’s thirteen-year-old son, Bakoo. Both Feroja’s and Madami’s spouses died young in the same year due to an unexplained disease. Feroja lifts her veil as we walk an isolated path to her home. She looks to be in her early thirties—a worn woman, her fingers like twines, her feet cracked and hard—feet that have walked hundreds of miles through the desert to visit nearby villages for funerals. I suppose the old refugees travelling through borders must have looked much like Feroja.

  These women took to becoming rudaalis about twelve years ago. Before that they travelled with their husbands, singing around the region for alms. ‘We sang our way all over the desert. We sang about the river, the trees and sand dunes. We hunted in the desert, ate what we hunted and went from village to village. Wherever we went, we left a trail of music in our wake,’ Feroja says wistfully, spinning her fingers around her head, virtually wrapping the whole world in a web of songs. ‘And at last I think they felt exhausted. Both were young but they died the same year. We became signs of ill omen everywhere we went after that. Two widows whose ill luck killed their husbands. So we finally came back to our village and Bharauni bai introduced us to this work. She gave us her old black odhnis. Black symbolizes death. The favourite colour of the god of death, Yama,’ she adds, tucking her odhni between her teeth to stop it from sliding off her head. ‘Even Bharauni bai is dead now. Everyone dies. We knew we’d always get work in this profession.’ The rest of the time, they live more or less conventional lives: help the villagers with odd chores such as making cow-dung cakes for lighting kitchen fires, chopping wood and cleaning homes.

  The chorus of peacocks that had earlier filled the village had ceased and been replaced by the sound of the night insects, a steady humming background. A breeze is coming up. All the dogs in the village bark and then fall silent.

  Feroja and Madami’s home is a one-room tenement, a few minutes from the stone miners’ homes where our car is parked. Large chunks of rocks lie around her hut. ‘One day, my son will grow up and make pukka walls with cow dung, mud and straw.’ They had recently acquired a chakki, which she shows us proudly. ‘Before this, we had to buy ground wheat for rotis. It was expensive. Now we just buy the grains. We also grind wheat for our neighbours,’ she says. ‘They give us four rupees for five kilos of wheat.’

  ‘How much do you earn from mourning for a death?’ I ask her as she lights a fire while Madami flattens out the dough between her palms to make rotis.

  ‘When we mourn at landlords’ homes, they give us two hundred rupees for twelve days. But money is given only when rich people die. The rest just give us some coins. Sometimes, they give us only food—oil, atta, a bag of onions. Old odhnis and cholis too. For children’s deaths, we don’t charge anything. Sometimes, I wish they gave us milk or buttermilk. My son has never tasted milk,’ Feroja laments. ‘Oh, actually there was this one time when a far-off neighbour’s goat wandered to our home. We milked her and had three glasses of milk that day,’ she says, giggling, her face lighting up for a few moments.

  ‘Did someone teach you how to cry for the mourning?’

  ‘Nobody taught us,’ chimes in Madami, a few years older than Feroja. ‘We tell the widow stories of her husband, his smile and his eyes. We bring her sorrow to the surface, relieving her heart for a few hours at least.’

  And she speaks from experience. Ten years ago, soon after their husbands died, Madami lost her fifteen-year-old son to dehydration, and his sister soon followed suit. She died at eighteen.

  A heavy oil lamp hanging from the entrance is the only source of light for the women, casting great wondrous shadows on the walls. With every gust of wind that blows into the hut, bouquets of light and people are displaced in the room.

  ‘Sometimes I think of my children when I want to cry and other times of my husband. He was a wretched man and slept around with randis. But at least he gave me respect in society,’ Madami says, her voice hoarse from all the wailing earlier in the day.

  ‘And when we can’t cry, we use the bark of aak leaves. They can make your eyes burn and water enough to make an oasis in the registan’ she croaks, pulling out a small jar of aak which she keeps in a fabric purse stitched to the inseam of her ghaghra. ‘We used to cry for a lot more days until a few years ago. Relatives who received the information via post arrived late and we were summoned to cry for them. But these days, mobile phones have taken over and messages are delivered instantly. So the mourning period is just twelve days. There are fewer rudaalis too. They exist only here in the villages in Marwar. The rest of them want more sophistication. Quiet funerals . . .’ Madami says, her voice trailing away.

  ‘People die a lot less often, too, these days,’ adds Feroja, clicking her tongue, peeling the onion, but her eyes remain dry. ‘They have started calling musicians these days, from Jaisalmer, for the mourning. I heard about it from a randi who came from the next village,’ she tells Madami, who clucks her tongue in disapproval too. ‘They can never console people like us. You need to feel things in here,’ she says, placing a hand on her heart.

  Aren’t they worried that they will be displaced by these contemporary practices?

  ‘Why, no, not at all. These singers can’t fill their eyes and make tears well enough, can they?’ Feroja says, fixing a plate for her son with a thick, dry roti, two raw onions and some salt. She calls out to him, ‘Aye Bakoodaa.’ He comes running in, ravenously attacking his plate of food.

  ‘There are only fifteen or twenty deaths in this village of eight hundred people. So many doctors come from cities nowadays . . . Also, we can no longer go to other villages. We don’t understand the desert as well,’ Feroja says with a weary grimace.

  ‘Bharauni bai could,’ she adds after pause. ‘One must forever be learning, picking up signs and watching the clouds in the day and the stars in the night, the trail left by a bichhoo or the dacoits. To tell where she is, where others are, which tree is good to sleep under in the night, and which one has poisonous air . . .’

  3

  THE GENEALOGISTS OF HARIDWAR

  The labyrinth of winding streets and alleyways stretches into long, bustling markets, each side flanked by vendors who sell all kinds of wares—from locks and bus tickets to bhajan books and trinkets. Packed in between are sweet-lassi shops, dinky, box-shaped occurrences amongst hundreds of similar-looking spaces on both sides of the busy road that leads to the ghats—all perched on columns a few feet above their own putrid garbage. A rat surprises me by its sudden appearance; but it seems annoyed as well, flashing me a proprietorial scowl and then scuttling away before getting stamped flat by a swarm of humanity busily making its way to the temples, pandits and ghats.

  Facing the long expanse of these streets, one thinks about the brevity of life, where even death becomes a commodity to be produced and reproduced for sale by its tradesmen—flower sellers, wood sellers trading wood for cremations, pandits, barbers, Aghoris, Mahapatras and the boatmen who carry the corpses.

  An anxious-looking couple scan the street for a familiar landmark, searching for someone who can guide them out of here, perhaps wondering, Where have we arrived?—an inquiry that may pertain to his surroundings but becomes an experiential one.

  We are in Haridwar—one of the holiest places in the world for Hindus—which, in one guise, is a kind of magnificent crematorium and, in other ways, is the address for temples, influential gurus and millions of their followers. And through this home of the divine and the dead flows the Ganges with its long stretches of smooth banks, one among seven1 of the most revered locations in Hinduism, where one can attain moksha after death.

  At the break of dawn Hindus thro
ng the riverside, their bare feet planted on the soaked steps, calling on Goddess Ganga. Their prayers are perfectly juxtaposed with the long-drawn cry from the conch shells and the bells echoing from the temples.

  At dusk, banks like that of Chandi Ghat will turn into funeral pyres as saffron-silk-wrapped corpses, brought in by devotees from all over India, will be cremated, their ashes fed to the holy Ganges so as to free their souls from the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth. And in this whirlwind of a town, between death and dirt, a few other professions live on.

  I seek a yatrawal lounging by a lassi shop—the one who guides pilgrims and arranges hotel and travel bookings in this holy city for a few coins. His work is a cross between geography and geometry—charting the smoothest and shortest route between the chaotic ghats. He leads the way out of the street, through lanes that can barely allow a cat to squeeze through, trespassing the private backyards of homes. After a whole hour, the streets open on to the non-motorable Kusha Ghat—a riverbank with steps leading down to the water.

  A footbridge runs over the piers, just above the waters where people bathe. A family tumbles out of a few hand-pulled rickshaws. The people are from Lucknow, one can tell from their smooth Urdu-laced accent. Leaving their bags at the banks, they step down into the cold river, immersing the children along with themselves. With one arm clutching their babies, the women of the family make their way into the water, dexterously slithering in and out of their saris and blouses. The yatrawal guides us only till the end of this ghat, eager to cater to the big family from Lucknow. ‘I heard from a coolie at the train station that they wanted to stay overnight in Haridwar. Hotels are hard to get in the tourist season so I might as well chalk up a good commission for finding them decent rooms,’ he tells me, sniggering, and saunters towards them, pointing us in the direction of our destination. A row of trees obscure the narrow passage leading up to it—their aerial roots turned into multiple trunks over hundreds of years of its existence, the trees that have seen it all.

  ‘Mahendra Kumarji Panda kahan milenge?’ I ask a sadhu with a long, grey chimerical beard, sipping chai at a counter in the passageway.

  ‘Hmm,’ he says eyeing my Dictaphone and diary with a look synonymous with other working men in Haridwar—a controlled smile that is swift and sharp, absorbing it all. He assumes a crouching position and says, ‘I can see lot of negative field in your aura—sucking all your energy out.’ Perhaps he is referring to my dark circles. ‘I can summon the ghosts of your ancestors to remedy this, if you want. It won’t cost much.’

  He insists, ‘Try, it will help you understand your past life.’ I look at him warily, taking in the faux leopard-skin skirt tied around his waist, his dreadlocks and his ash-smeared face. When he starts chanting indistinct words, I furiously shake my head.

  ‘No?’ He sighs and then says, ‘Okay. Can you see that peepul tree? Mahendra sits in a room below it.’

  Haridwar is a pilgrimage site for Hindus to cremate their kinfolk and meet the Pandas2—priests who double up as genealogists. They are in charge of the family register, of updating the family’s genealogical tree with details of marriages, births and deaths, and so on.

  The Pandas also arrange religious ceremonies for their clients and solemnize certain life-cycle rituals such as death ceremonies. The reason for their existence has to do with the Hindu belief that the family is everlasting and comprehensive and that each Hindu must look out for his ancestors and perform ceremonies for their journey after death to heaven.

  In the spiderweb of little roads, Mahendra Kumar Panda, dressed in a white kurta, sits within a tube-light-lit box of a room on a mattress. He is a rotund, serious old man in his mid-sixties, with a vermillion tilak seen somewhere between the wrinkles on his forehead. Mathri bai from Bikaner has come to make offerings in memory of her dead husband. The grey eyes in her dull and time-worn face fill with tears. ‘I can now die peacefully,’ she says, sighing heavily as the Panda pockets a thick wad of cash.

  For six years, Mathri bai had essentially walled herself in her hut after her husband passed away. This frail white-sari-draped widowed woman denied herself the joys of watching her grandchildren grow, of the everyday sun, all because her financial status did not let her perform the customary last rites for her husband in Haridwar. The travel was expensive and her family Panda had to be offered a donation worthy of her family’s high-caste social background. So for those six years, she was absorbed in a religious reverie of pujas and bhajans within the four walls of her room while her thoughts circled around a sin so horrific that she was convinced she would go to hell for it.

  Mathri bai finally took a loan from her younger sister to reach Haridwar, and once inside the alley, she was able to locate her family Panda amongst the thousand such men—so well networked are these men. The moment she entered the road, strangers barraged her with the mandatory questions asked of anyone who wants to search for a Panda in Haridwar.

  ‘Which village did your ancestors belong to?’

  ‘What is your husband’s gotra [clan]?’

  Once she answered the questions, the strangers pointed out Mahendra Kumar’s office amidst the other Pandas’ chambers.

  On one wall of the room, alongside fat lizards, dust-ridden, garlanded black-and-white portraits of two stern-looking moustachioed men hang. ‘My father, Sitaramji Panda, and his father, Ramnathji Panda,’ Mahendera says, looking up at his ancestors; their watchful eyes seem to be shrewdly scrutinizing his, bestowing a latent chill to the otherwise balmy room. Mahendra grunts at them, as if admonishing them for prying, and then settles deeper into the mattress, firmly asserting his place in his ancestors’ room.

  ‘These genealogical registers have been with our family for many generations,’ he reveals, his gravelly voice thick with indignation. ‘You’ll find us and our like in most pilgrimage places like Kashi, Varanasi, Gaya, but Haridwar continues to remain the most comprehensive and well-preserved repository,’ he proudly adds, his large, soft-looking stomach moving in tandem with his speech.

  The loss of roots of families, like the extinction of a species, is irrevocable. Sometimes, genealogical documentation was undertaken to maintain a sense of community within the religious threshold and at other times for the purposes of research; different record-keeping methods have been used across the world. But barring a few, most have been victims of one disaster or the other. More than half the citizens of London died in the Great Plague,3 but most of their death records maintained by the parish were destroyed in the Great Fire of London the following year. Dr Lo Hsiang-lin, a renowned researcher in the Hakka language and culture, had built up an invaluable collection of Chinese-clan genealogies, but had to leave them behind when he fled to Hong Kong during the Communist coup. These priceless documents were later thought to have been used by grocers as wrapping paper.4

  Considering that more than 90 per cent of this world has slipped into an absolute torpor, with identities having been lost, and no particular written proof by which we might hope to find the names of everybody who has ever lived, this record-keeping method of the Pandas becomes a critical treasure trove of information—of recent human history, migratory patterns and even cultural evolution.

  Over time, these dynastic records have also become a particularly important way of sorting out all the inheritance squabbles that arise for wealth and power in India. Mahendra Panda himself has issued affidavits with an oath commissioner’s stamp to solve legal disputes of his jajman, or customers. ‘I have been dragged to court a number of times,’ he says, pausing, turning to produce a few stamped papers, his belly jiggling wildly in response to the movement. Dropping his voice to a hoarse whisper, he adds, ‘People come from all parts of the world looking for their ancestral Panda—either to have them as witness in some property dispute, to attest to someone’s actual last name, or to establish relationships between brothers, fathers and cousins. A few years ago,’ he recalls, ‘cousins from this particular family were fighting over property. Now, because t
he family was devout and were regulars here, I not only helped in issuing an affidavit but also went to court, all the way near Delhi, as a witness. That’s the power Pandas have.’ He shrugs, tossing the stamped papers aside with a contrived nonchalance, ineffectively trying to cloak the pride prospering on his bulbous nose. ‘The court recognizes us as official geologists!’

  ‘You mean genealogist?’ I respond.

  ‘Yes, yes . . . that thing,’ he says, waving his hand dismissively. ‘These books have been passed on to me and my brother from our nanaji. It’s a responsibility we have. He didn’t have any sons, only four daughters. So he distributed all the books amongst us,’ he says.

  ‘So this is a man’s job?’

  ‘Absolutely. Women can’t enter this profession because they are not the legal heirs of these registers. These are only passed on to male legal heirs like sons and grandsons.’ He scoffs, surprised that I would ask a question with such an obvious answer.

  ‘Suniye, these books are an everyday livelihood for us, our cash cows. Over time, they can also be traded and sold. Such is their value that they can also be used as collateral against loans. So a man with no male lineage will pass it on to a male family member through his daughter, but never to the daughter herself.’ His Brahmin head shakes in disapproval, a small tuft of hair tied into a tail wagging along with his head. And then, with a brittle smile, he crows, ‘You know, as they say, a laughing Brahmin, a female Panda and a coughing thief are all destroyers of their race.’

  He calls out to his young help, a matchstick-thin teen who left his village a few years ago to find clerical work, but in vain. The Panda finally came to his rescue and offered him food and a small pay for odd jobs. He stands, now, outside the door with his hips slanted against the wall and, as part of his instructions, casually shoots the breeze with prospective customers about his employer’s glorious, connate connection with Goddess Ganga and the powerful mantras he gives his customers. All this with a smile plastered on his lips that completely belies his grudging trudge into the office soon after.