A Suitable Boy(372)

‘O Ganga! O Yamuna,’ cried the old man, cupping his hands towards the sun and reciting in Sanskrit –

‘O Ganga! O Yamuna!

Godavari, Saraswati!

Narmada, Indus, Kaveri,

Be manifest in these waters.’



On the way back, he said to Dipankar: ‘So you have had your first dip in the Ganga since you’ve come to Brahmpur!’

‘Yes,’ said Dipankar, wondering how he could have known that.

‘I bathe here every day – five, six times a day,’ continued the old man rather boastfully. ‘This was only a short dip. I bathe day and night – sometimes for two hours at a time. Mother Ganga washes all your sins away.’

‘You must sin a lot,’ said Dipankar, some of his Chatterji acerbity rising to the surface.

The old man looked shocked at this sacrilegious humour. ‘Don’t you all bathe at home?’ he asked Dipankar in scathing reproof.

‘Yes,’ laughed Dipankar. ‘But not for two hours at a time.’ He thought of Kuku’s tub and began smiling. ‘And not in the river.’

‘Don’t say “river”,’ said the old man sharply. ‘Say “Ganga” or “Ganga Mata”. It is not just a river.’

Dipankar nodded. He was amazed to notice tears in the old man’s eyes.

‘From the ice cave of Gaumukh in the glacier to the ocean surrounding Sagar Island, I have travelled along Ganga Mata,’ said the old man. ‘I could close my eyes and know where I was.’

‘Because of the different languages they speak along the route?’ asked Dipankar humbly.

‘No! Because of the air in my nostrils. The thin piercing air of the glacier, the piny breeze of the gorges, the scent of Hardwar, the stench of Kanpur, the distinct fragrances of Prayag and Banaras and so on down to the humid, salty air of the Sundarbans and Sagar.’

He had closed his eyes and was summoning up his memories. His nostrils opened wider and a look of peace came over his irritable face.

‘Next year I will make the return journey,’ he said, ‘from Sagar in the delta up to the snows of the Himalaya and the great Gaumukh glacier and the open mouth of the ice cave once again, under the great peak of Shiva-linga… then I will have made a complete circuit, a complete parikrama of the Ganga… from ice to salt, from salt to ice. Next year, next year, through ice and salt my spirit will surely be preserved.’





11.11


THE FOLLOWING DAY Dipankar noticed that there were a few perplexed-looking young foreigners in the audience – and wondered what they were making of all this. They probably couldn’t understand a word of the sermon or the bhajans. But the beautiful, slightly snub-nosed Pushpa soon came to their rescue.

‘Now,’ she said in English, ‘the idea is simply this: all we are gatting is surrandered to lotus feet of Lord.’

The foreigners nodded vigorously and smiled.

‘Now I must mantion there will be maditation in English by Baba himself,’ announced Pushpa.

But Sanaki Baba was in no mood for meditation that day. He was chatting away on whatever took his fancy to the Professor and the young preacher, both of whom he had brought up onto the white-sheeted platform. Pushpa looked displeased.

Perhaps sensing this, Sanaki Baba relented, and a very abbreviated meditation session began. He closed his eyes for a couple of minutes and told his audience to do the same. Then he said a long ‘Om’. Finally, in a confident, warm and peaceful voice, in atrociously accented English, pausing long between each phrase, he murmured:

‘The river of love, the river of bliss, the liver of right…

‘Take in environment and supreme being through nostrils…

‘Now you will feel anand and alok – blissness and lightness. Feel, do not think…’

Suddenly he got up and began to sing. Someone struck up the rhythm on the tabla, someone else began clashing small cymbals together. Then he began to dance. Seeing Dipankar he said: ‘Get up, Divyakar, get up and dance. And you, ladies, get up. Mataji, get up, get up,’ he said, dragging a reluctant old woman of sixty to her feet. Soon she was dancing away by herself. Other women began dancing. The foreigners began dancing, and danced with great gusto. Everyone was dancing, each by himself and all together – and smiling with joy and contentment. Even Dipankar, who hated dancing, was dancing to the sound of the cymbals and the tabla and the obsessively chanted name of Krishna, Krishna, Radha’s beloved, Krishna.

The cymbals, tabla, and chanting stopped, and the dancing was over as suddenly as it had begun.

Sanaki Baba was smiling benignantly all around and sweating.

Pushpa had some announcements to make, but before she did so, she surveyed the audience and frowned with concentration. For a few seconds she gathered her thoughts. Then she told them rather reprovingly in English: ‘You have now dancing and sermon and sankirtan and maditation. And the love. But when you are in offices and factories, then what? Then Babaji is not with you in physical form. Then Babaji is with you, but not in physical form. So you must not become attached to the dancing and the practice. If you get attached, it is no use. You must have the saakshi bhaava, the feeling of witnessing, or else what is the use?’