Chapter Twelve

The train station at Varanasi was teeming. All around me, pilgrims in their multitudes were bursting from the confines of innumerable railway carriages, spilling out beneath the beehive-shaped, Nagar temple towers of the terminus’s theatrical exterior.

I was accompanied to the taxi stand by the usual rabble of rickshaw-wallahs, hotel touts-cum-pimps, cannabis sellers and beggars. It was no little relief to be able to finally slam the door of the old Ambassador and ignore the chorus of keenly knocking knuckles beyond the glass.

My driver, Vipin, was impressed by my efforts at “kitchen” Urdu and seemed to warm to me immediately. There was enough in common with his Hindi that we could maintain some semblance of an intelligible exchange. I had picked out a cheap hotel, down by the river, which promised a courtyard garden. Vipin, however, did not approve.

“No, no, Mister-sir!” he cried, suddenly revealing his English. “Most nasty place! Dirty, smoky hippies. No, no! Not nice for nice Mister-sir like you!”

Memories of dishonest drivers in Udaipur blew noisy horns in warning, but I dismissed them. I sensed that Vipin was different. When he suggested that he could take me to a private, friendly house near Asi Ghat, where rooms were clean and food was “most goodly tasty”, I happily agreed. When he drew up at the end of a dark lane, too narrow for cars, and pointed me towards an old and well-kept building facing the river, my heart sang.

An elderly woman and a plump child were undertaking morning puja at the family shrine to Hanuman, as I climbed the steep front steps. The woman bowed to me and graciously pointed towards the front door. I removed my shoes and entered.

The interior of the house was beautiful, every pillar finely carved, its decorated floors well polished. Windows were shaded by carved latticework and, at every turn, domestic shrines bore exquisite images of gods and consorts lovingly disfigured by generations of devotion.

A pot-bellied man dressed in pristine kurta pajama offered a courteous welcome, and a clean and airy room. It was perfect. When he led me out to my own balcony overlooking the river, I laughed with joyful astonishment. I had seen this view in my dreams. To my left, the vast, sweeping curve of the Ganges with its supernal bluff of temples, mosques and palaces. To my right, a misty Maharaja’s citadel, boat-moored mudflats and an infinite wilderness beyond.

It was hard to believe that I now stood in Varanasi, one of the world’s oldest inhabited cities. The Islamic and British rulers of India had called it Benares. Others still called it Anandavana, the Forest of Bliss. But most favoured of all remained its ancient epithet - the City of the Light of Liberation.

Kashi.

***

Jyothi and Jiwan clung to their mother as Bindra struggled to keep up with the pilgrim horde. Their companions had almost broken into a trot as they neared the banks of Ganga Ma, despite limps, senility and debilities.

“Kashi! Kashi!” Jiwan chuckled in triumph, beaming at every passer-by.

Jyothi was silent. He was intimidated by the crush of bodies and buildings. He had never seen so many people before.

“Stay close!” Bindra kept calling. “Stay close to me!” as on and on they hurried. Although to what, she could not say.

***

Having washed and changed my clothes after far too many days, I commenced my long-awaited initiatory stroll along the ghats, walking across great sweeps of steps and platforms that slipped beneath the surface of India’s most sacred river.

I found the sun much higher and hotter than I had anticipated. With my father’s warnings about sunstroke, my Grandmother’s tales of aunts wasting to hollow shells and cousins going mad in the noonday blaze, I moved away from the water’s edge. I made for the shadowed labyrinth of the old city and found myself entering another world.

The pucca mahal, the ancient heart of this City of Shiva, boasted one of the highest population densities on the planet. So tightly packed were the decaying, multi-balconied buildings at the centre of the antique metropolis, that I discovered there were no roads. There was also no sun, for centuries of rebuilding had plunged some of these dark thoroughfares a full six feet below the level of the houses. Many were too narrow to accommodate the meeting of even two pairs of broad shoulders, and yet I found many lanes to also be a gali, or market.

The mildly nauseating tang of rancid milk, the rows of terracotta bowls balanced on every available step and sill, announced the curd market. The shady routes blocked by herds of lethargic, foraging cows heralded the vegetable district, whilst the dominating pungency of jasmine indicated that a flower market was near. The turn of a crumbling corner and the stupefying explosion of butterfly brilliance that dazzled the mind and stole the breath, even amidst the deep shadows of the urban chasm in which it lay, declared that I had stumbled upon the quarter of the city’s renowned sari sellers.

It seemed that at every carefully negotiated step, yet another bellheralded, incense-clouded temple arose. The air rang with chanted tributes to the tiger-riding Durga. The sounding of conch shells to the supreme yogi, Shiva. The beating of drums for the all-consuming Kali. The desperate propitiations of the goddess of smallpox, Shitala, bringer of fevers. And everywhere I rested my ever-widening eyes, lingams ancient and new, deep within inner sanctums and suspended around dark throats.

All day I drifted, entranced. Not until dusk did I realise that I had eaten nothing and that the sun had gone.

I was making my way back to the boarding house when I came across a group of shaven-headed widows dressed in their emblematic thin, white saris. They had gathered along the water’s edge to light akash deep. I watched as they suspended their sky-lanterns on bamboo poles and muttered mantras to the waning day in hope that they might guide their departed husbands across the “river of rebirth”.

I lingered until all had finished their puja and had wandered back to the charity houses in which they awaited the lighting of their own pyres, before I approached the cluster of suspended lights. I looked to the mist of insects that billowed in the guttering glow of the akash deep, and placed my hand from heart to bamboo pole.

“For you, Priya,” I whispered.

And, for a single moment, dared to believe that she might hear.

***

Bindra had lost sight of the chattering crowds with whom they had shared their gruelling bus journey from distant Kakariguri. Every few, stumbling steps she looked down to ensure that both her sons were still beside her.

The streets here had grown so narrow and twisting that she had found herself disorientated. And all the time, Jyothi’s plaintive cry, “Where are we going, Ama? Where are we going?”

Bindra had seen no Hill faces since her arrival. There would be no one here to understand her tongue. No one to understand her entreaties for assistance or advice.

“Stay close!” was all that she could say. “Stay close to me!”

Pressing on through the warren of dark and bustling passageways, the narrow strip of distant blue above suddenly split asunder the fortress of blackening walls. All at once, Bindra’s eyes seemed to melt in the shimmering iridescence of mighty Ganga Ma. The choked lanes burst open onto vast, stepped ghats, pouring their chaos down stairs and platforms that tumbled into the waters, their foot-smoothed stones crowded with milling devotees and silent dead.

Stiff with rigor mortis and wrapped in cloth, a ceaseless stream of corpses was coursing through the congested lanes, around which Bindra was negotiating her sons. Bodies borne at unnerving speed on the shoulders of friends and family. Bodies balanced across planks and bicycles. And yet there were no tears, no wailing, for such sentimentality is only thought to prevent the knot of individual existence from unravelling back into the universe of which it is but one expression.

Such vibrant life and visible death colliding at the very brink of solid heaving earth and shining flowing water, afforded this place an extraordinary quality. The air was heavy with ash, every breath intoxicating with the sickly smeech of sandal, ghee-drenched wood, hair, flesh and bone. And yet, here there was a curious lucidity, an inexplicable clarity, in light, in act, in every thought.

“You see, Ama!” Jiwan announced, with a look of wide-eyed elation. “In this place, we are neither here nor there. Neither in this world nor the next!”

Bindra looked down at his face, shining brightly in the reflection of the water. She could find no words with which to respond.

She could only look down at him. Shining brightly.

***

I woke long before dawn and scurried down to the muddy banks of the river. I quickly found the low, narrow boat with its friendly oarsman whom I had met the previous evening. Sudeep’s family had been boatmen on the Ganges for generations. With his dashing smile, his gentle nature and insistence that I pay him only what I considered his service worth, I had confidently hired him.

Sunrise on the sweeping, four-mile stretch of Varanasi’s central riverfront was utterly astonishing. The city’s palaces and pillared pavilions, mansions and temples, domes and cupolas, minarets and shikharas rose as an immense, tiered precipice from the eighty or so ghats. Never before had I been so acutely aware of India as the world’s last remaining great, ancient civilisation. Whilst the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Mayans had risen and fallen, India’s millennia-old customs and practices survived intact. I had already found myself utterly enchanted by its wondrous, and at times terrible, beauty.

I watched in captivated astonishment as innumerable flowerbearing pilgrims gathered at the water’s edge, intensely employed in their oblatory ablutions. The air pulsated with mantras of consecration and liberation, mixed with the pounding of cloth against dhobis’ stones, the low of buffalo and the percussive pop of skulls bursting open in the flames.

Naked sadhus gathered for communal sadhana. Masseurs and barbers plied their trades beneath broad bamboo parasols. Zealous young cricketers hit driftwood “balls” with driftwood “bats” and muscular wrestlers practised their ancient garadi tradition, for which the city was so famous. Whilst, in the waters, pilgrims and locals of every age anointed then submerged themselves amidst all the debris of urban life, inestimable pujas and the recently departed.

Not until breakfast, back at the lodging house, did I see the newspaper. The day before, the crowded passenger train on which I had been travelling had tumbled to its terrible end. The neglected, Raj-built bridge that lay beyond Varanasi had given its last, tired ruckle and had collapsed into the river below.

As I scanned the sobering statistics and the front-page gore, I found myself smudging the newsprint at the thought of the smiling Sikh, the kindly businessman and the pox-marked Hindu, who had so generously and unknowingly shared with me their last breakfast.

***

The previous night, Bindra had led her boys well away from the oppressive crowds, to the quiet of a broad stretch of worn stone near Lalita Ghat. They had boiled rice and the last of their daal on a little fire built from the swathes of refuse that cluttered modern Kashi’s sacred heart.

Bindra woke at dawn. She placed her hand in blessing on the sleeping heads of her two sons and lay still to watch fishermen, pilgrims and tourists moving slowly on the dark waters.

As the sun began to rise above the distant trees on the far shore, she made her way down to the river’s edge to wash. No sooner had she entered the shallows than she caught her breath. She had heard Nepali. She scanned the ghat, but could see no one but a solitary, naked sadhu busy with his morning puja to Ganga Ma.

Again she heard a whisper of the cheery, chatty tones she knew so well. She looked up. High above the great river wall stood a wooden temple, shaded by a single spreading tree.

Bindra hurried back to the boys. They had only just begun to stir.

“Au! Au! Yaha hamro sathiharu cha!” she called with

excitement, “Come on! We have friends here!”

Together, they clambered a steep flight of stone steps until they reached the temple compound.

“Namaskar dajoo!” Bindra bowed in eager pranam to an elderly priest, who was sitting on the ground with two young novices. The man bowed in courteous return, indicating with a nod of his head that they were welcome to enter.

“Ke ramro!” Bindra declared, “How beautiful!” as she surveyed the highly decorated building that rose before them. She eagerly led her sons to the entrance steps of the temple, but the doors were closed. Bindra bowed in respect and touched the base of an ithyphallic image of Shiva by her side.

“Ama?” Jyothi was staring with curiosity at the stone murti. “Why is Lord Shiva’s laro sticking up?”

Bindra smiled. “Firstly, it tells us that this temple is of our Hill tradition.” Jyothi rocked his head from side to side in recognition. “But most importantly, his thankieko laro upright phallus indicates the unchanging stability of universal consciousness. The true power of continuous creation, ever-ready to express itself.”

Jyothi looked bemused.

“You’ll learn to understand in time,” Bindra assured him. Jiwan was already circumambulating the temple, so Bindra and Jyothi followed in their own clockwise route. When they caught up with Jiwan, he was staring at a graphic carving of explicit, erotic play.

“What are they doing, Ama?” he innocently asked.

“Exploring the limitless truth within themselves,” she smiled, her head sparkling with sweet, bright memories. “And the truth in us is the truth of the universe . . .”

A noise behind them caused Bindra to turn. It was the priest. He touched his heart and bowed towards her.

“Sister, you have wisdom,” he said with quiet respect.

Over his many years in Kashi, the old priest had encountered all manner of disease, despair and death. It had taught him to approach all life without fear or judgement. “Come and sit with me,” he offered in gentle invitation. “My students will prepare haajri. Share it with us.”

Bindra grinned in delight. He had used a colloquial word for the morning meal only heard in the Hills from which they had come.

***

The air was sweet with buttery ghee and fragrant sandalwood. The smoke from the pyre drifted across the Ganges and around family members overseeing the incineration of their loved one. A middleaged man approached the flames with a heavy stick. With a single blow, he struck the charcoaled head, splitting it in two.

“That is the eldest son,” a voice said to me in melodious English, “releasing the soul of his father.”

I turned to face a small, plump man, with a betel-nut-stained smile.

“It equally ensures the Aghori Babas don’t steal the skull as a begging bowl!” he grimaced theatrically. “There are many tantrikas around Manikarnika Ghat,” he explained, indicating for me to survey the soot-blackened buildings surrounding us. “They do sadhana, their active practice, on the cremation ground after dark.”

Ramesh was one of the “untouchable”, yet wealthy, dom caste, who oversaw every aspect of the funerary rites. He was eager to share with me the details of his work, for a hefty fee. I thanked him, but expressed my preference for undisturbed observance.

“I have my own farewells to give,” I offered in discreet explanation, unwilling to engage.

He nodded in apparent understanding, yet still he lingered by my side.

“You see my brothers sieving the smouldering ashes?” I did. “They are searching for jewellery or gold-based dentistry. Such finds will pay for the ritual incineration of the destitute.”

I was impressed, but still unwilling to hand over cash for this information. He was becoming agitated.

“I have been in a flim!” he announced, his forehead trenching in frustration at my unwillingness to hire him as a guide. “French foreigners made a flim about the Dom!” He seemed aggravated at my indifference to his celebrity. “I have been in a flim!” he shouted at me. “A movie flim!”

The overseers of the funeral pyre were staring up at us through the drifting smoke. I bade him farewell, ignoring his vehemently outstretched palm, and made my way towards a quiet length of riverfront, to sit alone at the water’s edge.

It was the permanent presence of death, exposed here as an inevitable, even essential reality of life, that had brought me to Varanasi. I had felt compelled to confront this certain end, that I might better comprehend the loss of those lives that had been integral to my own.

And yet, I had feared to face this perpetual truth, as though the grief from which I had attempted to escape might here consume my sanity. I had anticipated that the flaming pyres might too candidly expose the pointlessness of every thought and action, lay bare the futility of being. I had even feared that fires fed by smouldering flesh might finally scorch my own precarious hold on life.

Instead, I had witnessed an acquiescence to man’s inexorable end that had brought me unexpected comfort. In facing the inborn dread of death, I had found nothing left to fear. To my surprise, on these river ghats it had not been despair that I had revealed, but rather an affirmation that the vast ocean of life demanded more than just the dipping of a trepidatious toe. Its infinite depths were to be plunged into, its inestimable fathoms sounded, its boundless waters drunk.

The sudden ringing of a temple bell drew my gaze. A spreading tree and the sight of a carved wooden temple with a pagoda-style roof tempted me to seek out the steep steps that would lead me to its shade.

As I sheltered my eyes from the sun’s reflection on the river wall, a little boy peered over its top.

We smiled at one another. And waved.

***

“Do you know of the Aghori?” the priest asked in his eastern, Hill Nepali.

Jiwan did not.

“They’re an achara sect of wandering sadhus, who live an extreme tantric path. They seem to make great efforts to upset the Bahun, the orthodox Brahmin priests!” he chortled.

Jyothi had joined the young acolytes in their kitchen, to watch them scrub the cooking pots, in the hope of leftovers. Jiwan sat with his mother, captivated by their kind host’s talk.

“How do they upset the Bahun?” he asked with excited curiosity.

“Well,” the priest began, “as part of their chosen path to liberation, the Aghori Babas mindfully break all taboos. This they do in order to examine their attachment to the mistaken belief in a ‘self’ that is separate from all the same forces of creation and dissolution of which our limitless, multi-dimensional universe is an expression. You understand?”

Jiwan shook his head in puzzlement.

“Well, the Aghoris fearlessly provoke rejection and contempt in others, simply to test their own detachment from the notion of duality . . .” the priest attempted.

Jiwan sniffed his nose and pursed his lips.

“When I say duality, I mean all those judgements we make on the world and ourselves, according to our particular culture,” the priest persevered, in careful elaboration. “Like the idea of what is good and bad, or beautiful and ugly. The idea of what is spiritual and sensual, or clean and unclean. The idea of what is divine and mundane, or sacred and profane. You see? All those divisive limitations with which a society obsessively defines itself - and yet which are only determined according to its particular habits and sensibilities at any one point in its history.”

Jiwan rocked his head tentatively.

“The problem is,” the priest persisted, “that in dividing up every aspect of experience into ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, we lose all sight of the underlying, unifying truth - and thereby lose all sense of who and what we really are.”

Bindra smiled broadly. To see her son attentive to the teachings of their mountain tradition afforded her great comfort. She could almost believe they were home.

“So what do the Aghori Babas do to test themselves?” Jiwan pressed.

“Oh, well, they wear no clothes, of course,” the priest continued selectively, chuckling again at the thought of the extent of social defiance he had witnessed amongst these ash-caked sadhus, shouting foul abuse at passers-by and sexually stimulating themselves in public. “They also carry a skull - preferably that of a conservative Bahun - which they use as a food bowl and for collecting alms,” he added.

Jiwan’s eyes were wide.

At that moment, a group of excited, travel-worn Nepali pilgrims pressed up against the gate and rang the heavy temple bell to announce their readiness for puja. The priest beckoned them in, then turned back to Jiwan.

“You know, the Aghoris practise their sadhana below us, here, on the burning ghats. They have open lingam shrines dedicated to Shiva in his wrathful form - Shiva as Kaala Bhairava, whom we Nepalis call Bhairon.”

As Jiwan ran to have a look, the priest dropped his voice and turned to Bindra.

“However, bahini,” he almost whispered, “the reason I mention all this is that a well-known Aghori Baba has a clinic here. He’s a good man. He offers free medicine to those with . . . your trouble. One of my boys will take you to him tomorrow. I can promise he will help you.”

Bindra’s heart swelled with inexpressible relief. She stretched out her bound hands to touch the kind priest’s feet, then looked to share the news with her boys.

Jyothi was still collecting leftovers in the temple kitchen, from which he intended to assemble their evening meal.

Jiwan was peering over the top of the river wall to scan the ghats, in search of naked sadhus and fierce gods.

Down below a foreigner stood squinting.

Jiwan smiled at his strange, pink face. And waved.

***

By the time I had reached the gate of the little wooden temple, I found it clogged with pilgrims. I peered over their dark heads for a moment, but felt uneasy at my intrusion. I decided to return another day, so turned away and wandered into the comparative coolness of the bustling pucca mahal.

It was not until late afternoon that I returned to the river ghats, where prayerful pilgrims were still dipping in the dark waters. Washermen dhobis were still beating iridescent cloth on glistening stone, whilst bony buffalo and their keepers wallowed in the scumtopped shallows. Priests were still intoning Sanskrit slokas beneath bamboo parasols, whilst the continuous pyres billowed grey phantoms of cremation ash across us all.

As the stifling heat promised to ease, misshapen shadows began to emerge from alleyways and stairwells to sit against the river walls. The destitute and disabled, the diseased and disfigured. I felt unable to ignore them. I had clean sheets and a generous, home-cooked feast waiting for me at the far reach of Asi Ghat. This extraordinary city, suspended as it was between sky and earth, life and death, now forced me to dispel all reserve and caution. I determined to speak to as many of these wraith-like figures as I could on my slow journey back to the indulgent comforts of my guesthouse. Despite the deficiency of shared language, I resolved to learn something of their lives and sat with every one of them.

I met men who had turned to the wandering life of a sadhu due to elephantiasis of the scrotum, their taut and shiny, balloon-like swellings exposed to me beneath grimy longis. I met expressionless children with dead eyes, riddled with ringworm, their stomachs distended. Congenitally crippled bodies pulled on simple, wheeled boards by younger siblings. Blind women who rocked and nodded to their own eerie, nasal laments. Boy prostitutes with henna-dressed hair, who offered to drop to their knees and “sing” for me in the ruins of an abandoned palace, in exchange for a few coins.

And then a little woman with two malnourished boys, sitting on a ragged shawl, below the wooden temple. Her wounds drew swarms of black flies and sniffing, licking pye-dogs in their packs. Leprosy. She looked away as I crouched to speak to her. She seemed ashamed to look me in the face. Her state was appalling, the stench foul. As she understood that I was no threat to her sons, her eyes began to brighten. It was evident that she needed simple nursing care. However, as darkness fell and the small crowd that had gathered began to intimidate her children, a little money for good food and medicines was all that I could offer. She protested. So I left it with her smiling, waving sons.

The diya lamps were already lit when I eventually reached the guesthouse, the air already scented with dhup incense. I had missed the evening puja.

My hosts seemed relieved to see me home, and were quick to assert that an unofficial curfew for outsiders was advised. It was common for visitors, whether foreign tourist or domestic pilgrim, to become lost in the maze of the pucca mahal, they explained. Indeed, some who ventured out after dark, they wished to impress on me, were never seen again.

I tried to clear my head as I sat alone for dinner, taking care to savour every mouthful. I tried to clear my head as I made my way to bed, relishing each soft pillow and clean sheet.

I tried to clear my head all night long, struggling with myself to find one moment that felt like sleep.

***

Bindra had a bed again.

White washed walls, scrubbed floors, medicine. And not one dead god hanging above their heads.

They had either daal-bhat lentils and rice, or tarkari-roti vegetables and flatbreads, with good dahi curd, to ease their hunger, and sweet chiya tea to start the day. Jiwan and Jyothi were even permitted to sleep together on a cotton-stuffed bedroll, on the floor beside her. And no one beat them.

The Nepali priest encouraged the boys to visit the temple as often as they pleased. When Jiwan asked to be taught to read and write, he happily accepted such an enthusiastic pupil. Some days Jyothi would return from helping the novices in their chores with surplus food that had been donated in alms. It was thus that Bindra tasted mango, cucumber and okra for the first time in her life.

The smiling woman doctor told Bindra her wounds were in a poor condition. They would have to cut off fingers and toes to save her limbs from spreading infection.

Bindra did not mind.

The doctor had given her a large pack of silver-wrapped medicines for her to keep. And as she had talked, the kindly doctor had looked her in the eyes. Not once had she scribbled on her pad of paper.

***

It was with great regret that I had to take my leave of Varanasi.

At midnight, I took a taxi to the railway station. It was time, before my limited funds expired, to continue my journey eastwards to the jungle-clad foothills of Uncle Oscar’s Kanchenjunga, which lay some twelve hours away.

I woke as the train rattled through the Hindi-speaking state of Bihar, infamous as one of the most corrupt and lawless in all of India. Across the barren fields, small villages of grass huts crouched desiccating in the sun. I wiped the dust from my eyes and peered down into the dry Gandak River, where an army of women and children were busy breaking stones.

The bare living that could be scratched from rice-growing offered little sustenance to Bihar’s hungry population of eighty-four million. Many had simply turned to the more profitable professions of banditry and smuggling. I had already noticed that Bihar was frequently reported in the Indian newspapers for unceasing atrocities. For its notoriously undisciplined police and the systematic blinding of prisoners. For bride burnings and torture.

How incongruous this all seemed when it had been from Bihar’s city of Patna that the great king Ashoka had once ruled his peaceful and prosperous kingdom, and at Pawapuri that Mahavira, founder of the principal tenets of Jainism, had attained Nirvana. How incongruous, when it had been at Bihar’s Bodhgaya that a prince named Siddhartha had once sat beneath a Bo tree and found the “enlightenment” of Buddhahood.

At Baruni Junction, two men joined my compartment. Neither was willing to acknowledge me. I turned my attention, instead, to the platform, which was crowded with fried-peanut sellers offering their wares mixed with spices, chopped onion, green chilli and slices of lemon, served in paper cones made from gaudy magazine pages. There were vendors of salted cucumbers, juicy coconut slices, oranges, cashew biscuits and chewing tobacco. There were makers of omelettes, pakoras, puchkas and paan, whose younger siblings persistently flicked the air with water in a vain attempt to keep down dust and drive away flies.

Inside the train, chai and kaufi sellers scurried along the carriage corridors, each trying to out-cry their competitors. Fleshless boys with grass brushes vigorously swept the compartment floors in the hope of a few rupees, sending dirt and dead bugs billowing into the air, and robust cockroaches scurrying into corners.

My water supply was largely depleted and I had counted upon buying more at the station. However, out here, in this most desolate region which foreigners purposely avoided, amongst all these hawkers with such a variety of fare, there was not one vendor of bottled water. I was desperate.

Suddenly, a mendicant gang forced decaying limbs between the bars of my open window, the foul, chaotic stench of putrid flesh awakening in me an instinctive, animal alarm.

Leprosy!

With indescribable horror at the suppurating stumps thrust towards my face, I looked into the beseeching eyes that stared back at me. Defying all reason, I wanted to reach out and put my arms around them.

Instead, I fumbled to drop pathetically few coins into the tins that hung from scabby wrists. When I handed out the last of my bananas, my companions reprimanded me and shooed them all away.

As the train moved off, one of my fellow travellers donated his soap and signed for me to go and clean myself immediately. When I returned, I discovered the other man had not only removed his shoes to sit in my window seat, but was washing his own hands and face in the last two inches of my only drinking water.

Hair stiffened into sedge by scalding dust, mouth parched and lips cracked into a drought-crazed crust, I slumped into a corner. Despite the intensifying stench of stale sweat and stinking socks in the compartment, which seemed to cause the very air to curdle, I deepened my breath in an effort to exhale the memory of leprous wounds and extinguish the pleading eyes that still stared within my pounding head.

I looked down at my own firm, fully fingered hands to find that I was shivering with shock.

***

Bindra woke. She looked at the dim glow of the early dawn reflecting on the ceiling and smiled. She felt well today. Even her back was more comfortable to lie upon. She turned to peer at her boys, to mouth a blessing upon them for the new day ahead.

Only Jyothi lay sleeping on the bedroll.

Bindra sat up and awkwardly swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She was not yet permitted to walk. Not until the newly stitched stumps where toes had been were fully healed.

“E Jyothi!” she whispered, not wishing to disturb the others in her dormitory. He opened heavy and resistant eyes.

“Hajur?” he muttered respectfully, “Yes, Ama?”

“Where’s Jiwan-bhai?” she asked with urgency. “Where’s your brother?”

“Oh,” he yawned, scratching his head with one hand, his ear with the other. “He’s gone.”

“Gone where?” Bindra gasped.

“Jiwan-bhai has gone to the burning ghat, Ama,” he replied sleepily, “to become an Aghori.”