A Suitable Boy(375)

‘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 loincloths, 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.

And indeed, before he could back away, a naked sadhu, his trident pointed straight at Dipankar’s heart, said to him in a low voice: ‘Go.’

‘But I just –’

‘Go.’ The naked man pointed the trident towards the part of the akhara from which Dipankar had come.

Dipankar turned and almost ran. His legs seemed to have lost all their strength. Finally, he arrived near the entrance of the akhara. He was coughing – the smoke had caught at his throat. He bent over, and pressed his hands to his stomach.

Suddenly he was pushed to the ground by the thrust of a silver mace. A procession was going past, and he was an obstacle. He looked up to see a dazzling flash of silks and brocades and embroidered shoes. And it was gone.

He was not hurt so much as winded and bewildered. He looked around, still sitting on the rough matting that covered the sandy ground of the akhara. He became aware after a while of a group of five or six sadhus a few feet away. They were sitting around a small ashy fire and smoking ganja. From time to time they looked at him and laughed in high-pitched voices.

‘I must go, I must go,’ said Dipankar to himself in Bengali, getting up.

‘No, no,’ said the sadhus in Hindi.

‘Yes,’ said Dipankar. ‘I must go. Om Namah Shivaya,’ he added hurriedly.

‘Put your right hand forward,’ one of them ordered him.

Dipankar, tremblingly, did so.

The sadhu smeared a little ash on his forehead, and placed some in his palm. ‘Now eat it,’ he commanded.