Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

So I have decided to find that ease, and I have also decided that the bank of the Ganga is the place where I will find it.

Yesterday I met an old man in a boat who said that he had gone all

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the way along the Ganga from Gaumukh to Sagar, and it set up a yearning in my heart to do the same. Maybe I will even grow my hair long, renounce everything and take sannyaas. Sanaki Baba was quite interested in the fact that Baba (how confusing all these ‘Babas’ are) is a High Court Judge, but he said on another occasion during a sermon that even those who live in great mansions turn to dust in the end, in which even donkeys roll. It brought things home to me in every sense. Tapan will take care of Cuddles in my absence, and if not him, someone else will. I remember one of our school songs at Jheel School: Robi Babu’s ‘Akla Cholo Ré’, which sounded absurd to me even then when it was shouted out by 400 voices. But now that I have decided to ‘travel alone’ myself, it has become a beacon to me, and I hum it all the time (though sometimes Pushpa tells me to stop).

Everything is so much at peace here, there is none of the acrimony that religion sometimes causes, well, such as we saw that evening of the lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission. I have been thinking lately of showing Pushpa my scribblings on various spiritual subjects. If you should meet Hemangini, please tell her to type out my jottings on the Void in triplicate; carbon copies stain one’s fingers when one is reading them, and my handwriting is too much to ask Pushpa to read.

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One learns so much here every day, the horizons here are Infinite, and every day they expand. Over the whole of the Mela sands I can imagine the ‘Pul’ of pipal leaves, like a green rainbow spanning the Ganga from the ramp to the northern sands, carrying souls to the other side, and regenerating our polluted earth with its greenery. And when I bathe in the Ganga, which I do several times a day (don’t tell Ila Kaki, she’ll have a fit), then I feel a blessing flowing through my bones. Everyone chants, ‘Gange cha, Yamune cha aiva’, the mantra that Mrs Ganguly taught us to Ma’s annoyance, and I too chant it with the best of them!

I remember, Dada, you once told me that the Ganga was a model for your novel, with its tributaries and distributaries and so on, but it now strikes me that the analogy is even more apt than you thought it at the time. For even if you now have to take on the additional burden of handling the family finances — since I won’t be able to help you at all — and even if it takes you a few more years to complete your novel, you can still think of the new flow of your life as a Brahmaputra, travelling apparently in a different direction, but which will, by strange courses yet unseen to us, surely merge with the broad Ganga of your imagination. At least I hope so, Dada. Of course I know how much your writing means to you, but what is a novel after all compared to the Quest for the Source?

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Now I have filled up a whole stack of postcards, and I can’t decide how to send them. Because if I post them separately at the post office here — they even have a Pul Mela post office! The administrative arrangements are quite amazing — they will arrive in random order, and I am afraid that will cause confusion. As it is, they look confusing with their mixture of Bengali and English, and my handwriting is worse than usual because I have nothing to rest the postcards on except my Sri Aurobindo. And I am afraid of causing you disquiet by the direction I have decided to take, or, rather, have decided I cannot take. Please try to understand, Dada. Perhaps you can take over for a year or two at home, and then maybe I will come back and relieve you. But of course this may not be my final answer because I am learning new things every day. As Sanaki Baba says, ‘Divyakar, this is a watershed in your life.’ And you have no idea how charming Pushpa is when she says: ‘The Vibrations of the true feelings will always reach the Point of Focus.’ So perhaps, having written all this, I don’t need to send it after all. Anyway, I’ll decide about all this later in the day — or maybe it will be decided for me.

Peace and Love to all, and blessings from the Baba. Please reassure Ma that I am well.

Keep smiling!

Dipankar

Darkness had come over the sands. The city of tents shone with thousands of lights and cooking fires. Dipankar tried to persuade Pushpa to show him a little of the Mela.

‘What do I know of all that world?’ she insisted. ‘This camp of Baba is my world. You go, Dipankar,’ she said, almost tenderly. ‘Go to the world — to the lights that attract and fascinate.’

This was a dramatic way of putting it, thought Dipankar. Anyway, it was his second night at the Pul Mela, and he wanted to see what it was like. He walked along, pushed here or there by the crowds, or pulled here or there by his curiosity or instinct. He passed a row of stalls — just about to close for the night — where handloom cloth, bangles, trinkets, vermilion powder, flossy candy, sweets, rations, and holy books were being sold. He passed groups of pilgrims lying down on their blankets and clothes or cooking their evening meal before smoky, improvised fires embedded in the sand. He saw a procession of five naked ash-smeared sadhus — carrying their tridents — wandering down to the Ganga to bathe. He joined a large crowd that was watching a religious play about the life of Krishna in a tent close to the handloom stalls. A lively white puppy rushed out at him from nowhere, and snapped playfully at his pyjamas; it wagged its tail and tried to bite his heel. While not vicious like Cuddles, it appeared to be equally persistent. The more Dipankar whirled around to avoid it, the more the puppy seemed to enjoy the game. Finally two sadhus, noticing what was going on, threw clods of sand at the puppy and it ran off.

The night was warm. The moon was a little over half full. Dipankar walked along, not quite knowing where he was going. He did not cross the Ganga, but wandered along the south bank for a long time.

Large areas of the Pul Mela sands were demarcated for various sects or orders of sadhus. Some of these large groups, known as akharas, were famous for their tightly knit, militant organization. It was sadhus from these akharas who formed the most striking part of the traditional procession that took place each year at the Pul Mela on the grand bathing day after the full moon. The various akharas vied with each other for proximity to the Ganga, for precedence in the procession, and in the splendour of their display. They sometimes became violent.

Dipankar chanced to wander through an open gate into the huge covered area that marked one such akhara. He felt a palpable sense of tension. But other people, clearly not sadhus themselves, were wandering in and out, and he decided to remain.

This was the akhara of a Shaivite order. The sadhus sat in groups at dull fires that stretched in a line deep into the smoky recesses of the akhara. Tridents were stuck into the ground beside them, sometimes wound around with garlands of marigolds, sometimes crowned with the small drum associated with Lord Shiva. The sadhus were smoking from clay pipes which they passed around from hand to hand, and the smell of marijuana was thick in the air. As Dipankar wandered deeper and deeper through the akhara, he suddenly stopped short. At the far end of the akhara, in a pall of the thickest smoke, several hundred young men, wearing nothing but short white loin-cloths, their heads shaven, sat around huge iron pots like bees around a row of hives. Dipankar did not know what was going on, but a sense of fear and awe seized him — as if he had come upon a rite of initiation, to view which meant danger to the curious outsider.