Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

Two days in Delhi, amazing grub, sights. At the hotel on CNN International I happen to see Charles Mulholland in an interview. He ends it by saying that a friend is taking him and his wife for a yachting vacation in the Virgin Islands. A wealthy and influential friend, no doubt. Cigar smoke, cognacs: So tell me, Charles, what are your long-term political ambitions?…

The train station. Black and nightmarish in the morning mist. Beggars by the legion, the homeless, the lame, the halt.

The wrong train, directions, the right train. The second-class car. Breakfast. Toast, tea, marmalade. A hot napkin. The Times of India, the Hindustan Times . Hindu matriarchs, blue-turbaned Sikhs, Muslim businessmen, Jain priests, Buddhists, students, hippies. Like a scene from Kim .

A delay. The moving train. The squalor of the suburbs, more beggars, shantytowns, muddy fields, an elephant, vultures, and the brown flat earth of the Ganges Valley all the way to the horizon.

The Ganges is not the longest river in India, certainly not the most beautiful. The continent takes its name from the Indus, so why is the Ganges the holy river of India?

Because the gods say so.

The Ganges begins as a gurgle on a mountaintop. Glacial peaks, permanent snow, spring flowers, yellow, red, blue. It’s a foot wide, this river. If you lay your body down across it, you can stop the flow, you can dam Mother Ganga.

From the mountaintop it moves on inexorably down onto the sienna plain, where everything becomes the color of mud. And down into the holy cities of Varanasi and Allahabad. The latter given that name by the Muslim conquerors who supposedly did not believe in that sort of thing.

Varanasi is the city of Lord Shiva. To die in Varanasi is a great thing. Shiva will look favorably upon you and your next incarnation will be a blessed one.

But holier still is the upstream city of Allahabad. The most sacred site in India. Indeed, when the world is destroyed, only one place will remain and that is Allahabad — Prayag, to give it its Hindu name.

Allahabad is sacred because it is the confluence of three holy rivers. The Ganges, of course, but also the Yamuna and the Saraswati.

The Yamuna is the second holy river of India. Mahatma Gandhi’s body was burned by this river. Three prime ministers also were cremated by its banks in sandalwood funeral pyres, their ashes drifting from the burning ghats into the sacred waters.

The Yamuna and the Ganges meet in Allahabad. An important place. The hometown of the Nehrus. The hometown of Victoria Patawasti’s family.

The train stops. I get off. I walk around, looking at fort ruins, at Jawaharlal Nehru’s house, at Victoria Patawasti’s house.

I visit her paternal grandparents, who are both alive. They have fourteen grandchildren, two of whom have been incarnated already into another form. I spend the day with them and I stay that night in their big turn-of-the-century mansion, exquisitely designed to take cooling breezes off the river.

We talk and we drink nimbu pani soda and we eat sweetmeats.

And Dr. Patawasti tells me the story about the Hidden River.

The river Saraswati flows only in Heaven or, say some, underground. It is the river of Paradise, of the gods, the Ganges and the Yamuna are only its earthly mirrors. They are imperfect. The Saraswati is perfection itself. But Vishnu so loved the world that he allowed the Saraswati to bend down to Earth at one place, at only one spot on the whole globe. At the point where the Ganges and the Yamuna meet. And if you bathe here, your sins are wiped away. Indeed, so sacred is the water that not only your sins but those of seven generations backward are wiped clean too.

“My sins will be wiped away?” I ask.

“Do not even think of bathing in that river,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, “you will catch cholera and die. The peasants defecate and throw their waste in these supposed holy waters. Industrial plants, tanneries, all pump their poisons into the rivers. Dead cows and buffalo are in this water. Why are there no fish? These rivers are toxic.”

“There are many fish,” Dr. Patawasti says. “Mark Twain said that the cholera bacillus cannot survive in the Ganges.”

“Say that to the thousands who catch cholera and typhoid every year,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, a furious look across her face.

“Still, my sins, and seven generations backward,” I say.

“The scriptures are far from clear on this,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, “if you ask me it’s a swindle to bring in tourists to the Kum Mela.”

“That is an outrageous thing to suggest,” Dr. Patawasti says.

Mrs. Dr. Patawasti looks at me seriously. Gray hair, thin, but more than a hint of her former beauty in the dark skin and pale eyes. What Victoria would have looked like at age seventy-five.

“Young man,” she says to me, “do not swim in the river, I beg you. And don’t you encourage him,” she says to her husband.

“I don’t know, all my sins,” I say again.

Mrs. Dr. Patawasti groans, Dr. Patawasti laughs….

Early morning. The family still asleep. A bicycle rickshaw. My shorts, sandals, T-shirt, a wide-brimmed hat.

Houses, dirty streets, dust. Children staring vacantly at me, others grinning, playing with a football.

The Ganges, brown and solemn. The Yamuna, yellow and sluggish.

The bank of the Ganges is littered with refuse. Newspaper, cans, rags, bits of old boats.

I pay the rickshaw man, look for a boatman.

People are washing their clothes, doing Puja.

I step over a dead dog.

The boatmen spot me, come racing over, and I find one I like.

We negotiate twenty rupees to row me out to the junction of the two rivers. To the point where the Saraswati comes down from Heaven and cleanses sins and past mistakes and makes a man anew.

He rows me out in a leaky boat, with mended oars and rowlocks made of hemp.

The head of a water buffalo floats by.

The boatman is named Ali. Thin, dark, nervous, dressed in a ragged white caftan.

We talk about the rivers and the legend of the Hidden River and Ali gives ambiguous and noncommittal answers. I suppose he’s seen many Westerners get rowed out here with the intention of bathing, take one look at the water, and then sensibly chicken out.

We stop at one of the many wooden pillars that are set into the river specifically for bathing pilgrims. We tie the boat. I strip. I lean over the side and dip my feet into the water. I lean on the edge of the boat. Ali leans on the other gunwale to prevent a capsize.

I let myself slip down the side of the rowboat and immerse myself up to my chest.

The water embraces me, and I let go the side of the boat.

I can feel the current from both rivers. The Ganges is warm, the Yamuna colder. It’s shallow. My feet touch the bottom and I walk along it.

Ali laughs delightedly.

A hundred feet to the right I can see another large animal carcass floating past. I dunk my head under. I come up, breathe, the sun is bright, the water glitters. Ali thinks this is hilarious.

I dunk my head under again.

And this time I know it’s the right place.

The Platte wasn’t it.

This is the right river.

I am here at last.

The water washes over me.

I open my eyes, it is hard to see. But my vision is perfect and I do understand, I understand the purpose of it all. To bring me here, on this day, at this time, now.

I see, and I am resolved. I have failed. I did not bring redemption, I did not bring justice down from heaven. I did not have Victoria’s killers put to rights. It has been a catalog of failure. As a son, as a policeman, as a man with a second chance, as a human being. I have let the guilty slip through my fingers, indeed enhanced their position. I have let my friends die. I have not done anything with this life.