“I have been more lucky,” said Manisha. “When my husband was dying he told my daughters that I was in Tarapith. Someone from my village had seen me here, and reported back. So after his death, the girls came to the burning ground looking for me. ‘Have you seen a woman whose skin is flecked with white?’ they asked. A sadhu pointed out my hut and my daughters came and touched my feet. It had been over twenty years. When I left them they were children. Now they were all middle-aged women, two of them with children of their own.
“It was a very tense moment. We looked at each other for a moment, then we all embraced, and burst into tears. They told me that my husband was now dead, so then and there I broke my bangles. The youngest one, the only one who is unmarried, decided to move to Tarapith, along with my mother. Now they both stay in the town, and we see each other every day. She was here this morning.”
Manisha looked at Tapan. “Tapan Sadhu has come to love my daughters and is like a father for them.” She paused. “I know it is not exactly like every family, but in this burning ground, in this place of sorrow, we have found new hope.”
From behind us there were more cries of “Jai Tara!” as sacrificial flames streaked up across the burning ghat. The woody noise of a bansuri flute could be heard drifting through the trees from the tarpaulins of an encampment of sadhus. The two elderly Tantrics exchanged a shy glance.
“When I look at her feet,” said Tapan Sadhu, “I am happy. What I see in Ma Tara, I see in her.”
“He found a live Tara in Tarapith,” said Manisha. “Now Tapan Sadhu looks after us. He is as strong as Tara Ma.”
“As long as you are in my protection, no one will harm you.”
“And by the grace of Ma, I have my daughters back. I thought I had lost them forever.”
“Things have worked out for us all.”
“I never imagined it would be possible to see them again,” said Manisha. “People think that we who live in the burning ground are crazy. But you get here what you cannot find anywhere else: pure human beings.”
“When she first came to me,” said Tapan Sadhu, “I thought: look at this girl, how vulnerable she is, all on her own. Only later did I begin to realise what a gift she was.”
“You were sent a woman who understands your calling.”
“Some people here protested when we got together,” said Tapan. “But we didn’t listen.”
“This is the will of Tara,” said Manisha. “Everyone must accept it.”
“She gives us what we need.”
“My only wish now,” said Manisha, “is to finish my days in the arms of Tara, and that she takes me in a good way, with all the proper rites.”
Mr. Basu had now brought the goat he had earlier tethered to a tree, and was looking expectantly at Tapan.
“Come,” said Tapan. “Enough talking. This is the night of Tara. We should be praying, not chatting.”
“It is true,” said Manisha. “It is late now—the time Ma comes. It is time to get ready for our sacrifice.”
The Song of the Blind Minstrel
On the feast of Makar Sakranti, the new moon night on which the sun passes through the winter solstice, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, a great gathering takes places on the banks of the Ajoy River in West Bengal.
Around the middle of January, several thousand saffron-clad wandering minstrels, or Bauls—the word means simply “mad” or “possessed” in Bengali—begin to gather at Kenduli, in the flat floodplains near Tagore’s old home of Shantiniketan. As they have done on this site for at least 500 years, the Bauls wander the huge campsite, greeting old friends, smoking ganja and exchanging gossip. Then, as the night draws in, they gather around their fires, and begin the singing and dancing that will carry on until dawn.
You approach the festival through green wetlands, past bullocks ploughing the rich mud of the rice paddy. Reed-thatched or tin-topped Bengali cottages are surrounded by clumps of young green bamboo and groves of giant banyans, through which evening clouds of parakeets whirr and screech. As you near the Baul monastery of Tamalatala, which acts as the focus of the festival, the stream of pilgrims slowly thickens along the roadsides. Bengali villagers herding their goats and ducks along the high embankments give way to lines of lean, dark, wiry men with matted hair and straggling beards. Some travel in groups of two or three; others travel alone, carrying hand drums or the Bauls’ simple single-stringed instrument, the ektara.
Throughout their 500-year history, the Bauls of Bengal have refused to conform to the conventions of caste-conscious Bengali society. Subversive and seductive, wild and abandoned, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings on breathing techniques, sex, asceticism, philosophy and mystical devotion. They have also amassed a treasury of beautifully melancholic and often enigmatic teaching songs which help map out their path to inner vision.