Nine Lives(100)

“Your father really gave it to you,” said Kanai, shaking his head.

“For a while I just lay there, and then eventually I got up and went to the train station. I washed in the pump on the platform. I knew I would get into trouble, but I never thought it would be so bad. I now had to think what to do. I didn’t have a rupee in my pocket, my clothes were torn, it was November and there was a chill in the air. So I thought very deep and hard. As I was thinking a train puffed in, heading for Howrah, and I jumped on, without any particular plan, and eventually got off at Burdwan Junction. I sat for a long time on the platform in the dark. I knew I wanted to become a Baul, but how to get there? How could I feed myself?

“As I was sitting there another train came in, the Toofan Express, coming from Vrindavan, the home of Lord Krishna. It was now 11:30 p.m. As I sat there in the half-light of the platform, a small group of Bauls and sadhus got off the train, carrying musical instruments, and they settled down close to where I was sitting. One was a very old man—he must have been at least ninety. He saw me sitting there with blood on my clothes, and a black eye coming up, so he walked over, and said, ‘You’ve run away from home, haven’t you?’ He asked me to bring him some water, which I did. He then said, ‘You must be hungry.’ So he gave me a chapati from his tiffin, and shared his dal with me, and as we ate, I told him the whole story.

“He listened very carefully, and then told me I should catch the Toofan Express back to Vrindavan, and that if I went there, Lord Krishna would help me. At 2 a.m., the Express hooted that it was about to leave. He helped me on, and gave me a blanket, and handed me his most precious possession, his ektara. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Just play the ektara, and sing the name of Krishna, and you’ll be looked after.’

“So with that ektara in my hand, and still wearing my torn vest and shorts, I got on, and we headed off, away from Bengal. I didn’t eat again for four days—I didn’t know how to beg, couldn’t speak Hindi, couldn’t play the ektara. I only knew the two songs I had learned at Kenduli, and of those I only knew a couple of verses. But when I reached Vrindavan, I heard there was food available to poor pilgrims at the Govind Mandir: they were giving out rice pudding as lungar [alms]. So I ate bowl after bowl, until I was no longer hungry. Then I went down to the banks of the Yamuna River and said a prayer, asking for the strength to become a Baul and never to give up and go back home and submit to my father. With that prayer on my lips, I threw my sacred thread into the river.

“For me, that ended forever my identity as a Brahmin. That very day I changed my name. I had been Dev Kumar Bhattacharyya—any Bengali knows that that is a Brahmin name, with all the privileges that go with it. But a Baul has to name himself as a Das—a slave of the Lord—so I became simply Debdas Baul. The Brahmins had rejected me, so I rejected them, just as I rejected their whole horrible idea of caste and the divisions it creates. I wanted freedom from that whole system.

“Then I took the blanket the old Baul had given me, and cut it into an alkhalla. In that attire, with the ektara, I found that people would always give me a little change if I sang a Krishna bhajan. I was only fourteen, and knew nothing of the world. At first, I was sure I had made a mistake. But I was too proud to go back, and slowly I learned how to survive.

“I stayed in a room in a temple and would wander from shrine to shrine, from akhara to akhara, making friends with the other sadhus, and trying to learn the words of the songs they were singing. With money that pilgrims had given me, I bought a notebook, and I would jot down all the words of the songs I heard the Bauls and the sadhus singing on the ghats at Vrindavan. My mind was totally focused on becoming a Baul; for me at that stage, God was the song I was singing. I just wanted to find out what was in those songs, and how to decode their hidden meanings.

“After two years, I went back home, and tried to make peace with my family. As I entered, my mother was sitting there right in front of me, in the middle of the courtyard. She kept sitting there, looking at me as if I was a ghost. I greeted her, and from inside came the voice of my father asking, ‘Who is there?’ My mother said, ‘It is Debu.’ So my father came out and looked at me, amazed, without speaking. Then his face clouded over. ‘You’ve become a Baul,’ he said, firmly but not unkindly. ‘Now you must live with them. There is no place for a Baul in my house.’ Then my brother came back, and started threatening me with dire consequences if I didn’t leave. My mother and sister were crying, and I was crying inside, but I was too scared to cling to them, or even say goodbye. The whole scene lasted less than an hour, maybe less than that. I’ve never seen them again.