I had trouble falling asleep that night. The dark village house was vulnerable to even the slightest bit of light. The silence was extreme. A bulb left on in the kitchen, an entrance light, even the rays of the moon, burst through the house, illuminating its low rafters and lumpy walls. The bed was hard, the linen coarse with use, the floral blanket unendurably heavy. Shivam, on the bed next to me, muttered about whether I could help him bring industry to the village, anything that could provide employment for the legion of idle young men; there was the cement plant, but that was not enough. His thoughts in nocturnal free fall, he said suddenly, “I hope you’ve spoken a little to my father. I don’t want him to think that I’ve come home believing myself to be some kind of big shot.” The remark made me realize that Shivam represented an enormous advance in his family’s prospects—he had gone to university, after all—and the desperation in his voice was that of a man who needed the hope and resources invested in him to amount to something. He needed to make good.
“My father,” he said, as we fell asleep, “wants nothing from this modernity, but the coming generation is moving very swiftly towards it.”
In the morning, we took steel vessels to the edge of a chickpea field to defecate. On the cement road that led out of the village, known as a dharar, was a steady stream of defecators. We passed an ancient bent-over woman with a plastic vessel—“the oldest person in the village,” Shivam said, adding, with that casual Indian disregard for time, “She must be at least a hundred and fifty by now”—and Karan Singh, who greeted us warmly. He was returning with his own steel vessel from the field, and I was struck by the intimacy of these morning rituals.
As we left the spiral confines of the village and approached the open road, we came upon different groups of people. A knot of low-caste laborers, with leathery dark skin and bright-colored clothes, warmed themselves by a straw fire in a steel tin. There were also some Muslims from Rajasthan. Shivam said, “They’re from Nagaur, but they have become of this place now, and you see, they live here. There is no problem. They feel safe.” What was important, I suspected, as with the low-caste people, was that they remained outside the Brahmin village. It was part of the idea of caste pollution being a “corporate” matter. The village was a living social organism, a unit, a manifestation of caste.
We walked for some time along a thinly tarred road with a red-earth margin. We came to a tall growth of weeds with pretty pink flowers whose interiors were deep purple. Shivam gestured to me to get off the road. We squatted down at a distance of some fifty yards from each other. The sky overhead was scalloped with morning clouds. A pinkish-silvery light gilded their edges. A thin haze lay over the earth, through which I could make out a distant line of trees. The serrated frond of a single palm rose up out of the dark wall of verdure, and religious music drifted across the chickpea field.
Afterward, Shivam said he wanted to take me to his father’s “pharmhouse,” pronouncing the p and taking a dig at Delhi’s opulent “farmhouses,” which had nothing to do with farming. On the way, a furry black-and-white puppy came up to him and gamboled for a while by his side. When we reached Shivam’s father’s field, where he had been that morning, moving the hose pipe from one part of it to another, Shivam led me down a dark ridge of earth separating two fields. On one side, the pipe spewed out a foamy pool of water. We knelt down beside it and washed our hands and vessels in the dark wet earth. A white-breasted bird with a long tail, marked orange and black, sat on a line. Shivam hummed a tune. We walked back through fields of stunted wheat, and Shivam lamented the lack of water, which had been a constant theme the night before. We stopped at the farmhouse, a small thatched hut in the middle of the fields with a single bulb and a string bed. Shivam’s father slept here for a few hours, in between moving the pipe.
“So, this is village life,” Shivam said, in a voice at once wistful and despairing. It was as if he wanted me to accept the poetic aspect of such a life, while at the same time acknowledging that it could not last. His shikha was unknotted; he wore a saffron-colored lungi; and contradictory and difficult as my emotions had been during this time in the village, it was hard to deny the grace and elegance of this Indian pastoral, hard not to feel the tragedy of the old order of things passing away, even as no new order was yet on the horizon.
The village held the institution of caste in place; it gave men security and sustenance, a place to which they could always return; it supported the world of ritual and belief; it cemented the connection to the land and was a bulwark against the dehumanizing anonymity of the city; most of all, the village allowed men to live as their forefathers had lived, free of the gaze of others.
The village was without age. Its buildings could return to the earth, yet the village, as an idea, would remain. The great majority of Indians could still shut their eyes and instantly be returned to that conglomeration of irregularly placed mud houses with whitewashed bases, set in the midst of the fields at a distance from the road and rail track. The village-born taxi driver in Bombay, having lived ten years in the city, might still, in reply to a question about whether he preferred the village or the city, say, “Gaon gaon hota hai,” “The village is the village after all.” Here was one attachment that every village-born Indian could understand.
THAT MORNING, AS WE MADE our way back to Benares, the country roads we traveled were crawling with pilgrims. Small open-backed Tempos whizzed past us, containing groups of women whose bright saris hung low over their faces. Occasionally a jolt would reveal a pair of lips painted a dark reddish silver, or a nose laden with jingling bits of gold. It was a day of festival. The night before, on our way into Domhai, we had stopped at a five-village fair. It was set on a steep riverbank, a bare, uneven escarpment leading down to the dark expanse of water. Young men in cheap polyester clothes hung on each other, chewing sugarcane. They threaded their way through stalls that sold everything from kitchen implements of wood and iron to flashing colored sparrows from China, bangles and toys, hair clips, and posters of the one Bollywood actress whose body still conformed to old Indian ideas of beauty. She was wide hipped and buxom, and beneath her image, large letters read POWER FULL SEXY.
The atmosphere of the village fair followed us into the next day.
Shivam and Mukesh, reconciled in their love of holy places, insisted we stop at the ashram of Anasuya at Chitrakoot. Anasuya was the wife of a famous sage, Atri, and a woman of great ascetic power herself. “Once when the world was utterly ravaged by drought for ten years,” Atri tells Ram of his illustrious wife in the epic, “it was Anasuya who created roots and fruit and caused the Jahnavi [another name for the Ganges] to flow, for the ascetic power she has acquired is awesome, and mortifications adorn her. She has practiced intense asceticism for ten thousand years, my son, and by her vows all obstacles have been removed.”
Ram and Sita are new exiles in the forest, and Ram, perhaps wanting his wife to have female companionship, instructs Sita to go speak to Anasuya, described as very old, her skin wrinkled and loose, her hair white with age, her body trembling like “a plantain tree in the wind.”
A moment of tenderness passes between the two women, one old and tested, the other young and about to undergo her terrible ordeal in the forest. Then Anasuya, as if familiarizing Sita with her new surroundings, offers her this description:
The majestic sun is setting, bringing on the gracious night. You can hear the twitter of the birds that by day range far and wide in search of food; now at twilight they are going to their roosts to sleep. And here, carrying their water pots, are the sages returning in a group, wet from their ablutions, their bark-cloth garments soaked with water. The seers have made their fire offerings … do you see the smoke, pearly as a dove’s neck, carried by the wind? Though their leaves are really sparse, the trees all about, even in the distance, seem to have grown dense; the horizons are all lost to view.
That was old India. The modern ashram of Anasuya, though still set deep within the forest, was reached by a crowd
ed thoroughfare. On either side there were little shops that sold everything from religious films to rosaries and Chinese toys. On that festival morning, the crush was prodigious. Groups of young wives in garish silks of lilac and orange, their faces painted and ears dripping with gold, trudged along the dirt street, carrying noisy infants on their hips. Poorer people, village folk, were in hard plastic sandals and loose dusty clothes. Groups of energetic thin men crowded close together. These were the temple-goers, and they were a great multitude, all moving in the direction of the sacred site. On one side flowed the river that Anasuya had summoned with her austerities. Beyond this enchanting emerald river lay the dense central-Indian forest.
As we neared the focus of the pilgrimage, we were met with scenes of total mayhem. The ashram, a white marble monstrosity, leered out at us from a rock face. The surrounding area was covered with white Styrofoam boxes. Cows ate from the boxes and ate the boxes themselves. The pilgrims fed nuts and fruits to a congress of monkeys—black-faced langur and red-bottomed rhesus macaque—while the monkeys snatched food from the hands of children. On the steps of the Mandakini River, a naked child was plashing about. A moment later, he threw himself into the river and was instantly transformed into a seasoned pilgrim. He parted the water with his hands, then folded them, then dunked himself. His parents looked indulgently on, proud at the show of zeal, and I recalled one Brahmin saying to me, “You see, unlike the Christians and Muslims, we don’t have to teach our children the religion. They just grow up knowing it.”
A moment later, when Shivam directed me to come inside the ashram, I balked. The ashram, with its dark openings and yellow-barred windows, from which people and monkeys were hanging, felt like one of those places that only faith could redeem, and I knew I had none. I did not want to enter its crowded spaces where religious feeling was at a fevered pitch. I made some excuse about not wanting to remove my shoes.
Shivam gave me a look of utter desperation. He had met me halfway in Khajuraho, and now I was refusing to meet him even part of the way. He gave me one last appealing look, then, disappointment turning to resignation, he vanished into the dark grottoed entrance of the ashram.
When he reappeared a moment later, he was a changed man. His contact with the divine had refreshed his patience. He took me down to the steps of the river to show me how it appeared magically from an opening in the stairs: “Look, the entire source for this river is from here.” Some older men nearby confirmed this. They said that when Anasuya had summoned the river, it had burst out of the rock in a thousand streams.
I wanted badly to leave, but Shivam insisted we pay our respects at the ancient temple of Anasuya. Certain temples had a miraculous quality for which they were famous, and the magical “proof ” of this temple was that only the truly devout were destined to look upon its idol. “So, if I leave without seeing it,” Shivam said, “I’ll feel I’ve done something bad, and that is why I am not deserving of darshana.”
So up we went. The small temple was on an elevation that overlooked the river, where a maelstrom of submerged trash had collected in a creek. The old stones of the temple were painted in thick coats of pink, and the tiny bug-eyed idol was burdened in fineries. As we made our way down, Shivam said, “I feel you didn’t give it a chance. I felt a great power from it.”
I was like someone who had been taken to a museum and, instead of looking at the paintings, had spent my entire time reading the instructions on the fire hydrant. I had not even tried to enter into the feeling, the bhava, which was no less a way of looking than aesthetic appreciation.
In the car, I mentioned the squalor of the site to Shivam, but even as I did, I knew I was only trying to explain away a deeper sense of unease.
At the next shrine, Kamtanath, we came off a cemented parking lot and into an open-air passage. On one side of this concourse were beggars and lepers; on the other, tiny recessed temples with tiles and crude statuary, the paint garish and bright. In the middle was a great spectacle of faith. One man, who looked as if he could have been a bank manager, was prostrating himself along this stretch of several hundred meters. He had a rock in one hand, which he set down at some distance from himself on the dusty floor. Then he lay down flat on the ground and wormed his large body up to the rock. On reaching it, he picked it up, set it again at some distance from himself, and repeated the prostration. Like this, on and on, bending and slithering, he was circumambulating the entire shrine.
“This,” Shivam said, “is bhava.” And he was right.
A few paces down, a family had laid their daughter, a polio victim, on a table covered in sacking. She had a pretty face with a little black mark on her forehead. The polio had curled her limbs. She lay flat on her back, her appendages like octopus arms, and her parents collected alms from the display of her pitiful form. On the floor next to her sat a line of women with frazzled faces and harassed white hair, some wearing bifocals with shattered lenses. The passing pilgrims threw coins and rice into their bowls. Faith mingled with poverty, incurable illness, and human degradation. It was as if bhava made people want to bare themselves before their maker. This willingness to be naked before God, which had once been part of the world of worship everywhere, could no longer be found in the West, or even in most parts of the Islamic world.
We carried on. Through an opening, I could see a deep ditch of black water where a concrete slab served as a bank of sorts and a family of hairy boar-like pigs chased each other, mucking about in the dark water.
The eye of faith was blind to all but the shrine. It was scarcely visible. A thick crowd, with arms outstretched, blocked the entrance. Incense wafted out from the bodies, and occasionally, when they readjusted themselves to get nearer the idol, I saw flashes of gold tinsel and red cloth through the gaps.
This time I could not go in, even if I wanted to, and Shivam did not ask. He vanished into the wall of bodies. When he got back in the car, he said, referring to my earlier excuse about catching an infection in my feet, “If you had faith, you would not have caught anything. The tens of thousands who come here are daily proof of this.”
We were due back in Benares that night. On the highway, the sky darkened. The fields of young wheat turned a deep sulky green. A scrawl of lightning raced across the sky, then thunder crackled. Rain at this time of year was bad for the crops. Shivam called home to make sure it was not raining there. It wasn’t. When he hung up, he said, “This again, you see, is the power of faith. So many people would have been praying for it not to rain that in the end it didn’t.”
Shivam’s mood was somber. Something had given way between us, a feeling of trust. I think that he had initially believed my skepticism to be part of the innocence of the uninitiated, and thus forgivable, but now he sensed it was a more sinister and deliberate form of holding out. He said, “Well, I’ve shown you all I have to show you, and now if you were to write something bad about us—about Hindu society—I suppose I would be very angry with you.
“There may be happiness, over there in the West; but there is not peace.”
The word he used was shanti: the peace of the abyss, the peace that passeth all understanding. Happiness and sorrow, sukha and duhkha, are part of life and cyclical, like the change of seasons. Those who possess shanti transcended the ravages of these temporal cycles. It would be incomprehensible to a Hindu to make the pursuit of happiness, sukha, the foundation of life. The peace Shivam referred to went much deeper than that. “You must remember,” he said, “that every child here grows up knowing that to be born means that you will die…”
The darkness of rain clouds graded into the darkness of night. We drove home in silence, but it was no longer so fraught. Our battles of understanding—or misunderstanding—were at an end. When Shivam grew tired, he put his head on my lap and went to sleep. The intimacy of the gesture made me think again of my distance from India, at times so great, at times so near as to be inseparable from myself.
Waking up, Shivam showed me YouTube videos on his smartpho
ne, which was a constant source of pain and delight to him: a Pakistani extremist declaiming against the “pagan Hindu faith, with its false gods and goddesses”; a white woman singing the Veda. Shivam seemed to like what he saw, but then he quickly checked himself: “It’s not right for a woman to recite the Veda. Only an initiated Brahmin has that right.”
Outside Allahabad we drove over the confluence of the three rivers. There had been ritual bathing here in the winter month of Magha since the time of the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago. As we drove over the two bridges that spanned the dark expanse of the confluence, I saw Shivam in silhouette fold his hands. Below was a vast encampment, the tented makeshift city of millions bathed in amber street light.
As we approached the outskirts of Benares, Shivam announced that he planned to go back to the village that night itself. The five-hour journey would stretch into eight on a bus. It made no sense, and he gave me no explanation. I put it down to one of the many things I would never understand about him. All I knew was that it was related to his connection to the land, to his ease among crowds, to the deified vision of this country that he carried in his head at all times.
A long time ago, in the context of a novel, I had imagined the temple-going Indian as one who knew his country through its holy places. He knew it from the mountains in the north where the rivers began, and where the rudraksh he wore around his neck came from. He knew the rivers when they broadened and the great temple cities, with their stone steps, that had been set along their banks. He knew the points where those rivers met other rivers and their confluences became part of the nationwide pilgrimages he would make several times in his lifetime. There is no other country, certainly not one so vast, where people are as acquainted with the distant reaches of the land as India, no other country where poor people travel more. They think nothing of jumping on a bus or train, for two or three days, to journey to the temple of Tirupati in the south, or Jagannath in the east. I had written of this imaginary temple-goer long before I met a man such as Shivam, and the reality now did not disprove what the imagination had conjured up.
The Twice-Born Page 22
