To sleep is better than to pray.
O my creature, you gave your life too soon. I have made your entry into Paradise unlawful.
A spring in Paradise.
O God, O God.
18.34
FURTHER down the Ganga, with pomp and practicality, other preparations were proceeding.
The great Shiva-linga was about the size that the priest’s mantras had said it would be, and in about the same position under the Ganga. But layers of sand and silt covered it. It was some days before it was finally exposed below the murky water, and some days more before it was hoisted up by winches to the first broad step of the cremation ghat above water-level. There it lay beside the Ganga in which it had rested for centuries, at first merely caked with clay and grit, then washed with water and milk and ghee till its black granitic mass glistened in the sun.
People came from far to gaze and to gape, to admire and to worship it. Old women came to do puja: to sing and to recite and to offer flowers and to smear the head of the hereditary pujari with sandalwood paste. It was a propitious combination: the linga of Shiva, and the river that had emerged from his hair.
The Raja of Marh had summoned historians and engineers and astrologers and priests, for preparations now had to be made for the journey of the linga up the grand steps of the cremation ghat, through the dense alleys of Old Brahmpur, into the open space of Chowk, and thence to its place of final, triumphal, re-consecrated rest: the sanctum of the completed temple.
The historians attempted to obtain information about the logistics of other, similar enterprises, such as, for example, the transfer of Ashoka’s pillar from near Ambala to Delhi by Firoz Shah – a Buddhist pillar moved by a Muslim king, reflected the Raja of Marh with bifurcated contempt. The engineers worked out that the cylinder of stone, twenty-five feet long, two feet in diameter, and weighing more than six tons, would require two hundred men to haul it safely up the steep steps of the ghat. (The Raja had forbidden the use of winches or pulleys for the unique and dramatic ceremony.) The astrologers calculated an auspicious time, and informed the Raja that if it was not done in a week, he would have to wait for another four months. And the newly appointed priests of the new Chandrachur Temple made plans for auspicious rituals along the route and a vast, festive reception at its destination, so close to where it had stood in the time of Aurangzeb.
The Muslims had tried through the Alamgiri Masjid Hifaazat Committee to obtain an injunction against the installation of the profane monolith behind the western wall, but to no avail. The Raja’s title to the land on which the temple stood, now transferred to a trust run by the Linga Rakshak Samiti and dominated by him, was legally clear.
Even among the Hindus, however, there were some who felt that the linga should be left near the cremation ghat – for that was where ten generations of pujaris had prayed to it in sorrow and destitution, and where it would remind worshippers not only of the generative force of Shiva Mahadeva but of his destructive power as well. The hereditary pujari, having prayed to the visible linga in a kind of ecstasy, now claimed that it had already found its proper home. It should be fixed on the low, broad step where it had chanced to rest, and where it had once again been seen and worshipped by the people – and as the Ganga rose or fell with the seasons, it too should appear to sink or rise.
But the Raja of Marh and the Linga Rakshak Samiti would not have it. The pujari had fulfilled his function as an informant. The linga had been found; it had been raised; it would be raised further still. It was not for one ragged, ecstatic pujari to obstruct enterprises of such great moment.
Rounded logs were brought to the site by barge and hauled up the steps of the ghat to form a track of four parallel rollers, ten feet across. A hundred and fifty feet above, where the track turned right from the broad steps into a narrower lane, logs were interlaid to create a gentle guiding curve. From here on, the linga would have to be carried diagonally, and it was necessary to work out an exact and elaborate drill to shift its position.
Long before birdsong on the appointed day, conches began to sound their pompous, plaintive, enchanted calls. The linga was bathed once more, and wrapped first in silk-cotton and then in jute matting. Over the thick brown jute huge ropes were attached, from which branched lesser ropes of varying length. Tens of thousands of marigold flowers were strewn on or stuck into the matting, and it was covered with rose-petals. The small drum, the damaru of Shiva, began to sound its high, mesmerizing beat, and the priests kept up a continuous chant that rose for hours through a loudspeaker above the undulating clamour of the crowd.
At noon, in the great heat of the day, the period of greatest austerities, two hundred barefooted, barebacked young initiates of a great Shaivite akhara, five each on either side of the rollers on each of twenty steps, straining forwards with the ropes biting into their shoulders, began to move the great linga. The logs creaked, the linga rolled slowly, uncomplainingly upwards, and from the chanting, singing, praying, chattering crowd rose a great gasp of awe.