Eric Newby - Slowly Down the Ganges

This place was the scene of an ill-conceived sacrifice to Vishnu offered by Daksha, a son of Brahma, to which Siva, Daksha’s son-in-law, was not invited. Uma the mountain goddess, Siva’s wife, was so enraged by this slight that she urged her husband to assert himself, which he did, producing a monster called Vira-Bhadra from his mouth. Vira-Bhadra had a thousand heads, eyes and limbs which swung a thousand clubs. As if this was not enough he carried a fiery bow and battle-axe, had a vast mouth that dripped blood and was clothed in the skin of what must have been a very large tiger. When Vira-Bhadra went into action the mountains tottered, the earth trembled, the wind howled and the seas were whipped to foam. What followed was like a Saturday night brawl in a saloon. Indra, the god of the air, was trampled underfoot; Yarna, the god of the dead, had his staff broken; Saraswati, the river goddess and goddess of learning, and the Matris, the divine mothers, had their noses removed; Pushan the nourisher, multiplier and protector of cattle and possessions – also the patron of conjurers—had his teeth rammed down his throat; Mitra, the ruler of the day, had his eyes pulled out; Chandra, the moon, was beaten; the hands of Vahni, the fire god, were cut off; Bhrigu, one of the great sages, had his beard pulled out; the Brahmans were pelted with stones; the sons of Brahma, the Prajapatis, were soundly beaten; innumerable demi-gods were skewered with swords and arrows, and Daksha’s head was cut off and thrown on to the fire. At the same time Sati consumed herself by spontaneous combustion. When these pyrotechnic efforts had subsided and with it Siva’s rage, he restored everyone to life, even Daksha who emerged as good as new except that he had the head of a goat, his own having been burnt up. Only Sati was beyond recall.

It was pleasant by the river at Daksheshwara. In a quiet valley behind the town, in a grove of dusty mango trees there was a small temple with several outbuildings, skeleton structures without walls in which the iron tridents of the sadhus stood, the three prongs of which symbolise bodily, worldly and heavenly suffering, planted in the still warm ashes of the fires of the previous night. It was as if the occupants had just fled.

Higher up the valley, where it narrowed between sandstone cliffs, a small stream came purling down. On one side protruding from the cliff was a wooden construction with walls of wire mesh. Reluctantly, because it seemed a gross infringement of privacy, we crowded at the entrance. Inside there was a sadhu, a youngish man with a brown beard. He was preparing vegetables and putting them into a pot. His only visible possessions were a stone pillow, a pile of sacred books and a drinking vessel made from a huge black sea shell. ‘He is the Moni Babar,’ said our friend. ‘He never speaks.’ The sadhu looked at us for a moment with his great brown eyes before resuming his task and feeling ashamed and flattened we went away.

We spent the nights at Hardwar in a dharmsala on the river front, downstream from the great ghat. It was a rest-house for poor pilgrims, now, with the onset of winter, almost deserted. Originally, we had intended to stay in one of the hotels above the sacred ghat but although we were prepared for discomfort, the place was so repulsive that we all three shrank from it, leaving the proprietor genuinely perplexed. It was a labyrinth whose emptiness only accentuated the all-pervading air of decay. The walls of the corridors were covered with eruptions of dark green lichen, and the sheets on the beds bore the impress of former occupants. To me it was reminiscent of another, similar hotel, seen years before on the shores of the Bosphorus. It seemed to set at nothing all the pious works of purification we had witnessed and the efforts of the municipal authorities to make Hardwar a clean place, which on the whole it is.

Late each night we hammered on the huge carved double-doors, with the words Dharmsala Bhata Bhawan-Der Ismail Khan inscribed above them, the name of a pious family from Der Ismail Khan, a town west of the Indus in the former North-West Frontier Province, who had endowed it originally; until a small, sleepy boy of ten or eleven, who seemed to be in sole charge, opened them up and led us into the main court. The courtyard had cells on three sides of it for the accommodation of pilgrims and at the far end a pink-washed, fretted archway led down to a bathing ghat at the water’s edge. Dark staircases led to other levels with more cells and to a platform which overlooked the river, furnished with rows of lavatories open to the sky. Up these stairs we lurched behind the small boy who, although he had a lantern, was always a flight ahead, bruising ourselves on the sharp angles where the stairs took a turn to the left and right. The two dimly-lit rooms which we occupied were bare except for a pair or charpoys – beds which were nothing more than a couple of wooden frames with a mattress of woven string. They were simple but they were clean.

In spite of the simplicity of the arrangements at the dharmsala, we contrived to make a shambles of them with open trunks and unstrapped bedding rolls, their contents half-disgorged, over all of which hung a stench of kerosene which boded ill for life in the more restricted space of a rowing-boat; but to us it seemed like paradise, and we blessed the Bhata Bhawan family of Der Ismail Khan and all their descendants for ever, for their beneficence and the kindness of the warden of the dharmsala who allowed us to stay there – for, although we were not bona fide pilgrims, it was completely without charge.

I was too tired and too excited to sleep much. Both nights I went out on to the platform above the river. It was very cold and clear and the moon was in the last quarter. It shone down on the waters which poured down past the ghat, like molten metal on an inclined plane. On either side of the dharmsala, so close that I felt that I could almost touch them, spires and pyramids of shrines and temples rose gleaming in the moonlight. On the other side of the gorge through which the river flowed, the continuation of the Siwalik Hills rose in a dark wall. The only sounds apart from the rushing noise of the river, were those made by the night-watchmen in the narrow streets far below, alternately groaning, and blowing their whistles, as if to prove to themselves that they still existed, for no one else was about. In one cell of the dharmsala, behind a window of red glass, a light still burned. I, too, wondered whether I existed, standing here on a roof-top on the banks of the Ganges, as incongruous as a Hindu on a pier on the south coast of England in the dead season, to which the dharmsala bore a remarkable resemblance.

On the first night before he went to bed, G. said that he must have a ritual bathe the next morning.

‘We can bathe, here from dharmsala,’ he said. ‘If you wish to come I am bathing at five-thirty.’

It was impossible to sleep after five a.m. anyway because of the sounds made by the other guests who already, at this early hour, were clearing their throats and wringing their noses out in preparation for another day. There were not many of them, but they made up for their weakness in numbers by an incredible volume of sounds that resembled massed bands of double bass and trombones with an occasional terrifying eruption of noise that obliterated all the others, the sort of noise small boys make when pretending to cut one another’s throats.

When I went to his room at five-thirty, G. had finished clearing his passages. He was doing his Yogic exercises, alternately sucking in huge gouts of air and then releasing them with a hissing noise like a gaggle of angry geese. Together we went down the staircase, across the court and under the archway to the ghat. The moon was down and it was very dark. All one could hear, standing on the steps, was the deep sighing of the river rushing past. It was bitterly cold. For some moments neither of us spoke.