Slowly Down the Ganges. Eric Newby

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СКАЧАТЬ three days, when I happened to be in the League-hall, Swamiji began thus and spoke to a by-stander.

      Swamiji: ‘People from far and wide come to Rishikesh to have Ganges bath but the Ashramites here who live on the very brink of the Ganges have recourse to hot-water baths and thus lose a fine opportunity given them by God.’

      This talk settled me. I took the hint and began to take the bath regularly in the Ganges itself. This habit has invigorated me a good deal and put splendid and clean ideas into my mind and I had a healthy time of it. Here is another instance in which Swamiji corrects his disciples. It was on 17.8.46 when Swamiji saw that I was using a toothbrush to clean my teeth in the Ganges. After five days when Swamiji and myself were both climbing up the steps leading to the Bhajan Hall, Swamiji began: ‘Om, Swagyan, there is tooth-powder called “Sadhu’s” tooth-powder in our league for sale to the public; it is highly efficacious and when used twice daily will relieve anyone of Pyorreah etc.’ This I took as a hint to me to discard the use of toothpaste which is costly and old-fashioned … Swamiji knows the nature of ignorance.⁷

      Whatever else this old man generated he was an extraordinary figure. It was the fifth of December; winter had set in and the wind was blowing straight off the Himalayas. He was wearing a leather helmet that made him look like the wizened pilot of an early flying-machine, and he carried a pair of bedroom slippers. Everything he had – his helmet, the cloths in which he was wrapped, his quilt, the sack in which he presumably kept his other possessions – were all dyed the uniform dark yellow, bordering on orange, the colour of the sadhus. This dye is made from a special mud which has the unusual property of keeping the wearer warm as well as holy-looking; a property which it shares with cow-dung ash.

      ‘Embrace it! Only good can come of it!’ he repeated. To tell the truth he was becoming a bit of a bore. He had bathed already, long before first light, and he was too full of beans, like some old man at the Serpentine. The only way to escape from him was to go in ourselves.

      It was so cold that it was like stepping into a fire. The water was very clear and remembering that no harm could come of it I drank some and it tasted good, while great speckled fish called mahseer, anything up to thirty pounds in weight, made insolent by over-feeding, nipped me. It was necessary to keep moving. I wondered how G. was getting on. He was standing in the slack water in the lee of the temple of Lakshmi-Ganga, completely immobile, with only his upturned face showing above the surface. A little upstream Wanda, having emerged from the ladies’ bathing establishment, which was a cross between an Edwardian boathouse and a lock-up garage, in the dim recesses of which modest ladies were splashing unseen, was having trouble with her sari. She looked like someone handling a spinnaker in a strong breeze; finally it unwound completely and she was left up to her knees in water ‘the cynosure’, as Milton wrote, ‘of neighbouring eyes’, like a freshly peeled plum. In order to disassociate myself from her, I went on foot up to the top end of the island and dived in there. The water was quite shallow, but the bottom was lined with stone-flags which were slippery with weed. The current lifted me high out of the water, and bore me down in a series of surges past a large smooth rock in mid-stream; past the ladies’ establishment with its admonitory notice in Hindi – ‘Non-violence is the Greatest Duty. Where there is Religion there is Victory’ – to which Wanda was now retreating in disorder; down into the main pool where G. still floated in the shadows of the temple; under the lower of the two bridges, in the shade of which a young Vishnuvite sadhu smeared with cow-dung, his hair a beehive of mud, was sleeping off the effects of a dose of hemp. Here I grabbed one of the chains that hung down from the arch, the bather’s last chance of stopping before being swept into deep water and the headworks of the Upper Ganges Canal several miles downstream.

      This bathing ghat has frequently been the scene of heavy losses of life. In 1760 two rival sects of sadhus fought a pitched battle here in which nearly 2,000 perished. In 1795 Sikh pilgrims killed 500 of the religious mendicants called Goshains. Until 1820 it was only 34 feet wide at the top and there were only 39 steps. In that year 430 pilgrims and a number of sepoys were crushed to death on them, after which the ghat was enlarged. In April or May, at the beginning of the Hindu year and on the birthday of Ganga herself, as many as 400,000 persons gathered there at the fair called Dikhanti for the bathing, and as it was considered a good thing to be the first to enter the water as soon as the propitious moment arrived, it is a wonder that there were not more casualties. Every twelfth year when the planet Jupiter is in Aquarius (Kumbh) – a particularly auspicious time – the number of pilgrims increases vastly. In 1796 and again in 1808 onlookers supposed to be reliable estimated that two million attended. In 1904 the number had fallen to 150,000; but at the Kumbh Mela of 1962 on April 13th, the principal day, two million people are said to have bathed.

      Later as we crouched together on the lowest step, dripping and very cold (all three of us had forgotten to bring a towel), a young, evil-looking panda began, unasked, to recite the Ganga-Puja over our heads, having first ascertained our names. ‘Vede Aham Erric Nubi Vona Nubi Pavitre Ganga Mataram … Aradhanam Kalpayami Tharpanam Kalpayami Ganga Mataram Maduyam … Ayurarogya Sampat Samrithim Kuru …’ The-am endings, Mataram Maduyam Aradhanam Tharpanam imparted a mysterious quality to it. This is what it sounded like.

      ‘Give me what you please,’ he said, unasked when he had finished, lowering his eyes like a bashful girl.

      ‘Give him 10 naye paise,’ G. said.

      ‘What, for three of us?’

      ‘We did not ask for Puja. These pandas are rotten fellows.’

      We had already paid an exorbitant amount to a particularly venal old man in order to see the footprint of Vishnu. He had veiled it completely when we approached, and had refused to uncover it until we gave him what he asked. It was a singularly unconvincing carving; one that might have been produced by a monumental mason in South London, rather than the footprint of a being capable of striding through the seven regions of the Hindu Universe in three steps. As an American shoe manufacturer, whom we met later on the waterfront at Banaras, said, when confronted with a similar pair of footprints:

      ‘If that’s Vishnu’s footprints, then he’s got fallen arches.’

      ‘What’s this?’ said the panda when I gave him the ten naye paise. ‘Give me ten rupees.’ His voice rose to a shriek.

      ‘You should be ashamed to be panda,’ said G., severely. ‘A strong young man like you.’

      Together with a kinsman of one of the men from Shell, we visited such a large number of temples that eventually it became a test of sheer endurance for all of us, including the guide. He was a man of strikingly handsome appearance and unusual attainments.

      ‘I am Samudrika,’ he said when we were sitting drinking tea, exhausted. ‘I am, therefore, able to know what you are thinking. I have been watching you and I know many things about you. Think of your favourite flower,’ he said.

      I thought of my unfavourite flowers, bronze wallflowers in a municipal bed; decided that this was unsporting and concentrated on roses. He handed me a piece of paper on which he had written the word ‘rose’. The performance of such a feat was more impressive here, at the foot of the Himalayas, than it would have seemed in Wimbledon. ‘Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six you were very poor,’ he said. ‘You are still poor but you would like to be an extravagant man. When you are angry it is not for long, but when your wife is angry she seethes like a pot. You will be always together.’

      ‘It sounds like a death sentence,’ Wanda said. She was not pleased with the way he used his talents. I asked him if he was a Sivite or a Vishnuvite.

      ‘I am a worshipper of Sakti – female energy of Siva,’ he said. ‘It is a very intellectual worship.’

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