‘The Ganges is an absolutely filthy river,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay. ‘I hope you don’t propose to bathe in it… Oh, do stop blinking, Dipankar, it ruins my concentration.’
‘If I bathe,’ said Dipankar, ‘I’ll wash away not only my own sins but those of six generations above me. That might even include you, Ila Kaki.’
‘God forbid,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay.
Turning to Lata, Dipankar said: ‘You should come too, Lata. After all, you’re from Brahmpur.’
‘I’m not really from Brahmpur,’ said Lata, with a glance at Dr Ila Chattopadhyay.
‘Where are you from, then?’ asked Dipankar.
‘Nowhere now,’ said Lata.
‘Anyway,’ continued Dipankar earnestly, ‘I think I’ve convinced your mother to come.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Lata, smiling at the thought of Mrs Rupa Mehra and Dipankar guiding each other through the Pul Mela crowds and the labyrinths of time and causality. ‘She won’t be in Brahmpur at the time. But where will you live in Brahmpur?’
‘On the sands – I’ll find a place in someone’s tent,’ said Dipankar optimistically.
‘Don’t you know anyone in Brahmpur?’
‘No. Well, Savita, of course. And there’s an old Mr Maitra who’s related to us somehow, whom I met once as a child.’
‘You must look up Savita and her husband when you get there,’ said Lata. ‘I’ll write and tell Pran you’ll be coming. You can always stay with them if the sand runs out. And it’s useful anyway to have an address and phone number in a strange town.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dipankar. ‘Oh, there’s a lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission tonight on Popular Religion and its Philosophical Dimensions. Why don’t you come? It’s bound to cover the Pul Mela.’
‘Really, Dipankar, you are more of an idiot than I thought,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay to her nephew. ‘Why am I wasting my time on you? Don’t you waste your time on him either,’ she advised Lata. ‘I’m going to talk to Amit. Where is he?’
Amit was in the garden. He had been forced by the children to show them the frog-spawn in the lily pond.
7.35
THE hall was almost full. There must have been about two hundred people, though Lata noticed that there were only about five women. The lecture, which was in English, started on time, at seven o’clock. Professor Dutta-Ray (who had a bad cough) introduced the speaker, informing the audience of the young luminary’s biography and credentials, and continuing for a few minutes to speculate about what he would say.
The young speaker stood up. He did not look at all like someone who had been, as the professor had stated, a sadhu for five years. He had a round, anxious face. He was wearing a well-starched kurta and dhoti, and there were two pens in the pocket of his kurta. He did not speak about Popular Religion and its Philosophical Dimensions, though he did mention the Pul Mela once, elliptically, as ‘this great concourse that will be assembling on the banks of the Ganga to lave itself in the light of the full moon’. For the most part he treated the patient audience to a speech of exceptional banality. He soared and veered over a vast terrain, and assumed that his droppings would make an intelligible pattern.
Every few sentences, he stretched his arms out in a gentle, all-inclusive gesture as if he were a bird spreading its wings.
Dipankar looked rapt, Amit bored, Lata perplexed.
The speaker was now in full flight: ‘Humanity must be made incarnate in the present… shatter the horizons of the mind… the challenge is interior… birth is a remarkable thing… the bird feels the vast quivering of the leaf… a certain relation of sacrality can be maintained between the popular and the philosophical… an open-ended mind through which life can flow, through which one can hear the birdsong, the impulse of space-time.’
Finally, an hour down the line, he came to the Great Question: ‘Can humanity even tell where a newer inspiration will emerge? Can we penetrate those great darknesses within ourselves where symbols are born? I say that our rites, call them popular if you will, do penetrate this darkness. The alternative is the death of the mind, and not “re-death” or punarmrityu, which is the first reference to “re-birth” in our scriptures, but ultimate death, the death of ignorance. Let me then emphasize to you all’ – he stretched his arms out towards the audience – ‘that, let objectors say what they will, it is only by preserving the ancient forms of sacrality, however perverse, however superstitious they may seem to the philosophical eye, that we can maintain our elementality, our ethos, our evolution, our very essence.’ He sat down.