Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  It was a dark lane, lit by a single, dim street light. Dogs sat next to open gutters, while half-naked children played in the side alleys. It was perhaps the depressing nature of her surroundings that led Rani—always the optimist, always the survivor—to talk up the positive side of her career.

  “We still have many privileges,” she said as we approached her house on foot, since the lanes were too narrow here for the car. “If a buffalo has a calf, the first milk after the birth is brought to the devadasis to say thank you to the goddess. During the festival of Yellamma, the people bring five new saris to us as gifts. Each full moon we are called to the houses of Brahmins and they feed us. They touch our feet and pray to us because they believe we are the incarnation of the goddess.”

  “Still this goes on?” I asked, thinking of the attitude of the Brahmins at the temple.

  “Still,” said Rani. “When we are called for pujas like this, we feel very proud.

  “There are so many things like this,” she continued. “When a child is born, they make a cap for the baby from one of our old saris. They hope then that the love of Yellamma will be on that child. If a girl is getting married, they take a piece of coral from us devadasis and they put it in the girl’s mangalsutra [wedding necklace]. If they do this, they believe the woman will experience long life and never suffer widowhood.

  “Also,” she continued, “unlike other women, we can inherit our father’s property. No one ever dares curse us. And when we die, the Brahmins give us a special cremation ceremony.”

  We stepped over a dog, sleeping, half in, half out of an open sewer.

  “You see, we are not like the ordinary whores,” said Rani, as we finally approached her house. “We have some dignity. We don’t pick people up from the side of roads. We don’t go behind bushes or anything like that. We spend time with our clients and talk to them. We are always decently dressed—always wear good silk saris. Never t-shirts or those miniskirts the women wear in Bombay.”

  We had arrived at her door now. Outside, suspended on the wall of the house, was a small cubby-hole stall selling cigarettes and paan. Here sat Rani Bai’s younger sister, squatting down and handing out individual beedis and cigarettes to passers-by. The sisters greeted each other, and I was formally introduced. As Rani led the way in, she continued:

  “You see, we live together as a community and this gives us some protection. If any client tries to burn us with a cigarette, or tries to force himself on us without wearing a condom, we can shout and everyone comes running.”

  Inside, in contrast to the street, everything was immaculately clean. The space inside was divided in two by a large cupboard which almost touched the shack’s roof. The front half of the room was dominated by the large bed where Rani plied her trade. To one side, on a shelf, were several calendar pictures of the goddess. At the back half of the room was a second bed—the one Rani slept in. Here were all her beautifully clean pots and pans, stacked neatly in racks, and below was her kerosene burner for cooking. Above all these, on a cupboard, were a large mirror and Rani’s family photos: pictures of her son and her old boyfriend—a handsome man with a Bollywood-film-star moustache and dark glasses. Beside that were small, passport-sized shots of her two dead daughters. Both were pretty girls, shot smiling when they were around twelve or thirteen, full of youth and hope.

  Rani took the photos from my hand and replaced them on the cupboard. Then she led me back to the front half of the room and indicated that I should sit on the bed. Perhaps prompted by the association, I asked her whether her auspicious status made any difference to her clients when they came to be entertained here.

  “No,” she said. “There is no devotional feeling in bed. Fucking is fucking. There I am just another woman. Just another whore.”

  “And do you feel safe from the disease here?” I asked. “Are you confident that the condoms can protect you?”

  “No,” she said. “There is always fear. We know that even if you persuade all your clients to wear a condom, one broken one can infect us. And once we are infected there is no cure. We will die—if not today, then tomorrow.”

  She paused. “You see, I know what it’s like. I watched both my daughters die, as well as at least six of my friends. I nursed many of them. Some lost their hair. Some had skin diseases. Some just became very, very thin and wasted away. One or two of the most beautiful girls became so repulsive that even I did not want to touch them.”

  She shivered, almost imperceptibly. “Of course we feel very scared,” she said. “But we must continue this work if we are to eat. We have a lot of misery to bear. But that is our tradition. That is our karma. We try to show our happy side to the clients to keep attracting them, and put all our efforts into doing a good job.”

  “So do you have any hopes for the future?”

  “I am saving,” she said. “As I told you, I have bought a little land, and one day I hope if I can get some more buffaloes and a few goats, maybe I can save enough to retire there and live by selling the milk and curds. Yellamma will look after me.”

  “You know that?”

  “Of course. If it wasn’t for her, how could an illiterate woman like me earn Rs 2,000 in a day? Yellamma is a very practical goddess. I feel she is very near. She is with us in good times and bad.”

  We parted soon after, and I drove back to Belgaum. Later, I asked one of the project managers of the NGO working with the devadasis about AIDS and how their families reacted to infection.

  “It’s terrible,” she said. “The families are happy to live off them and use the money they earn. But as soon as they become infected, or at least become bedridden and sick, they are just dumped in a ditch—sometimes literally. Just abandoned. We had a case before Christmas with one girl. She was taken to a private hospital in Bijapur after she had complained of severe headaches. The hospital ran some tests and found she was HIV-positive and on top of that had a brain tumour. She began treatment, but her family checked her out because of the expense and took her home. When we tried to find her, the family gave several conflicting accounts of where she was—different family members said she was in different hospitals. In fact, she had been taken home, thrown in a corner and left to starve to death. We found her in a semi-comatose state, completely untended by the same family members she had been supporting for years. She wasn’t even being given water. We took her straight back to the hospital ourselves, but it was too late. She died two weeks later.”

  “Then it’s a good job Rani will be retiring before too long,” I said.

  “That is what she told you?”

  “She said she would get some land and some buffaloes and try to make a living from that.”

  “Rani Bai?”

  “Yes.”

  “I shouldn’t really be telling you this,” she said. “But Rani is infected—she’s been HIV-positive for eighteen months now. I’ve seen the tests.”

  “Does she know this?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s not full-blown AIDS, at least not yet. The medicines can delay the onset of the worst symptoms. But they can’t cure her.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Either way, it’s highly unlikely she’ll ever retire to that farm,” she said. “It’s the same as her daughters. It’s too late to save her.”

  The Singer of Epics

  The landscape, as we neared Pabusar, was a white, sun-leached expanse of dry desert plains, spiky acacia bushes and wind-blown camel thorn. The emptiness was broken only by the odd cowherd in a yellow turban, patiently leading his beasts through the dust, and by a long, slow convoy of nomads in camel carts, pursued by a rearguard of barking dogs.

  Once, as we turned off the main Jaipur–Bikaner highway, we passed a group of Rabari women, in saris of bright primary colours, resting in the narrow shade of a single, gnarled desert tree; abandoned road-building equipment lay scattered all around them. A little later, we saw a group of three Jain nuns in white robes, with masks over their faces, pushing a fourth in a white wh
eelchair through the open desert as the heatwaves shimmered and slurred around them. Though it was winter, it was still very hot, and a hot, dry wind blew in from the scrub and through the open car window, furring our mouths and setting our teeth on edge, and gritting the seats of the car.

  With me as we drove through this bleak land was my friend Mohan Bhopa, and his wife, Batasi (which means “Sugar Ball”). Mohan Bhopa was a tall, wiry, dark-skinned man of about sixty, with a bristling grey handlebar moustache and a mischievous, skulllike grin. He wore a long red robe and a tightly tied red turban. Batasi was somewhat younger than he, a silent, rugged desert woman of fifty who had lived all her life in the wilderness. As we drove, she kept almost all her face shrouded in a high-peaked red veil.

  Mohan was a bard and a village shaman; but rarer and more intriguing still, he and Batasi, though both completely illiterate, were two of the last hereditary singers of a great Rajasthani medieval poem, The Epic of Pabuji. This 600-year-old poem is a fabulous tale of heroism and honour, struggle and loss, and finally, martyrdom and vengeance. Over time, it seems to have grown from a local saga about the heroic doings of a reiver-chieftain protecting his cattle to the epic story of a semi-divine warrior and incarnate god, Pabu, who died protecting a goddess’s magnificent herds against demonic rustlers. The cow kidnappers are led by the wicked Jindrav Khinchi, whom Pabuji defeats and kills. Pabuji also protects the honour of his women from another villain, a barbaric, cow-murdering Muslim plunderer named Mirza Khan Patan, and wins a great victory over Ravana, the ten-headed Demon King of Lanka, from whom he steals a herd of camels as a wedding gift for his favourite niece.

  When this 4,000-line courtly poem is recited from beginning to end—which rarely happens these days—it takes a full five nights of eight-hour, dusk-till-dawn performances to unfold. Depending on the number of chai breaks, bhajans (devotional hymns), Hindi film songs and other diversions added into the programme, it can on occasion take much longer. But the performance is not looked upon as just a form of entertainment. It is also a religious ritual invoking Pabuji as a living deity and asking for his protection against ill-fortune.

  The epic is always performed in front of a phad, a long narrative painting made on a strip of cloth, which serves as both an illustration of the highlights of the story and a portable temple of Pabuji the god. India has many other traditions of legends, stories and epics being told by wandering picture-showmen; but in none of the other traditions have the pictures been elevated to the status of an incarnate murti, equivalent in holiness to an image in a temple. The audience is primarily made up of the traditionally nomadic and camel-herding Rabari caste, for whom Pabuji is the principal deity; but other castes also attend the performances, especially the Rajputs of Pabu’s own warrior caste.

  As we drove through the seemingly empty desert landscape, Mohan pointed out features invisible to the untutored eye of an outsider: here, he said, on this side, where now there were just a few stumps, stood until recently an ancient oran, or sacred grove. It was holy to Pabu’s ally and friend, the Rajasthani snake deity Gogaji, who also has an oral poem and a living cult in his memory. For centuries no one had dared to touch the oran, said Mohan, believing that anyone who stole the wood would be struck down by the snakes guarding it. But three or four years ago, loggers had come, chopped down all the trees and carted away the wood to Jaipur: “If people are no longer bothered by the threats of Goga’s snake bites,” he said, “how will they fear the anger of Pabu?”

  I asked if there were still any orans left sacred to Pabu.

  “Yes,” he said. “There is one close to our village. So far we’ve been able to guard the trees. People only pick the fallen wood for cremations. But who knows for how long it will be safe in times like these?”

  Mohan went on to tell a story of how the Bishnoi caste, who believe in a very strict ethic of non-violence to all forms of nature, had managed to preserve their khejri trees from loggers sent by the Maharaja of Jodhpur. They had hugged the trees, he said, even as the maharaja’s axe men were felling them. Three hundred had died before the order was finally cancelled, and people still gathered every year to commemorate their sacrifice. I asked how long ago this had taken place.

  “Oh, not so long ago,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “About 320 years back.”

  I had known Mohan and Batasi for about five years when I set off with them that morning from Jaipur. We had just done an event about the Pabuji epic to a conference, and were now heading in the direction of their village of Pabusar, which lay deep in the desert towards Bikaner.

  Soon after I had first met the couple, in 2004, I wrote a long New Yorker article on Mohan, and after the piece was published, Mohan and I performed together at various festivals; but in all the time I had known and worked with him, I had never yet visited his home. Pabusar, he told me, was a small oasis of green in the dry desert, and was named after the hero of his epic; indeed the village supply of sweet water was believed to have appeared thanks to Pabuji’s miraculous intervention. Now it was the tenth day of the full moon, the day of Pabu, when his power was at its height and he was unable to refuse any devotee. This time the epic was to be recited not in part but in full, at my request, and I was looking forward to seeing Mohan perform it.

  On the lonely, potholed single-track road to Pabusar, the last leg of the journey, we began to meet other pilgrims who were coming to celebrate the modest village festivities which marked the day of Pabu. Some of the pilgrims were on foot: lonely figures trudging through the immensity of the desert in the white midnight. Other villagers rode together in tractors, pulling trailers full of women in deep-blue saris. Occasionally, we would pass through a village sheltering in the lee of a crumbling high-walled fortress, where we would see other pilgrims taking their rest in the shade of the wells that lay beside the temples. As we drove on, the settlements grew poorer and the road increasingly overrun with drifting sand. The fields of dew-watered millet grew rarer and more arid, and the camel thorn closed in. Dry weeds heeled and twisted in the desert wind.

  In the end, although the drive from Jaipur was less than 120 miles, it took nearly the entire day. The roads grew almost impassable with sand, and without four-wheel drive we slipped and slalomed our way, two or three times having to push the car up modest hillocks, using sackcloth to give the wheels traction.

  When we finally reached Pabusar, it was nearly sunset. The goats were being led home for the night, and the shadows of the milkweed bushes around the village were lengthening. It was the pruning season, and a few goatherds had climbed up the khejri trees to chop fodder for their goats, camels and cows. On the edge of the village I saw a lone woman in a yellow sari beating a kikkur tree with a long stick—not some Rajasthani folk ritual, as I had instantly assumed, but, Mohan assured me, merely an elderly goatherd trying to get the seed pods to drop for her hungry, bleating kids.

  The village of Pabusar—Pabu’s Well—was, like the roads around it, half-buried by drifting sand, and fenced around on all sides by drythorn bushes. We abandoned the car in a final sand-drift only a few hundred yards from Mohan’s house, and walked the last stretch. Around the white shrine-temple to Pabu, beside a small water tank, a large crowd was already beginning to gather for Mohan’s night performance of the epic. A brightly coloured shamiana tent had been erected next to it, and to one side a generator was chugging away like an old tractor. The farmers were in a relaxed mood, squatting in turbaned groups, sipping chai and smoking beedis and playing cards. Their cows had been given their fodder, and, crucially for herders in a desert land, they had also been given water—the key episode and the climactic moment in the Pabuji epic:

  O Pabuji, the cows’ little calves are weeping,

  The cows’ little calves are calling out to Pabuji.

  O Pabuji, may your name remain immortal in the land;

  O Pabuji, may your brave warriors remain immortal!

  Outside Mohanji’s small but newly built concrete house—a mark of some status
in a poor village of conical thatched mud huts like Pabusar—Mahavir, his eldest son, was waiting for us impatiently. In his hands he held the furled phad. Another of Mohan’s sons, Shrawan, whom I had met several times before, was also standing by, holding his dholak drum.

  We had been expected earlier in the afternoon and the two boys, who were worried that we would miss the evening performance, spoke in an agitated manner to their father. But Mohan just smiled and led me over to his pump, where we washed. We gulped down a glass of hot masala chai, handed to us by a daughter-in-law. Then, reverently picking up the phad, Mohan led the way to the small Pabu shrine that he had built in his compound. There he gave thanks for his safe journey and asked the blessings of the deity for the performance. Then, without waiting for dinner, we headed off, through the sandy lanes, on the short walk to the tent where he was to perform.

  The temple was a simple village affair, but newly built in marble. It had a single image chamber containing an ancient hero stone showing the mounted Pabuji in profile, sword held high. The temple, tank, well and village of Pabusar were all inexorably linked, explained Mohan. One night, during a great drought, Pabu had come in a dream to one of the poets of the Charan caste in the area. He told the man to follow the footprints from his door, through the sand, to a distant shallow valley where, said Pabu, you will find a stone. Take that stone as your marker, continued the god, and dig down thirty hands deep and there you will find an inexhaustible supply of the sweetest water in all the Shekhawati. This hero stone was the stone in the dream, said Mohan. Once it had been built into the parapet of the well, but now, since the new temple had come up, it was worshipped as a murti.

  While he talked, Mohan placed two bamboo poles in the ground and unfurled the phad from right to left. It was like a wonderful Shekhawati fresco transferred to textile: a great vibrant, chaotic seventeen-foot-long panorama of medieval Rajasthan: women, horses, peacocks, carts, archers, battles, washer-men and fishermen, kings and queens, huge grey elephants and herds of white cows and buff camels, many-armed demons, fish-tailed wonder-creatures and blue-skinned gods, all arranged around the central outsized figure of Pabuji, his magnificent black mare, Kesar Kalami, and his four great companions and brothers-in-arms.