We left Allahabad on the last day of the year to travel down the river to Mirzapur. It was only fifty-five miles by train but more like ninety by the river.
At first it had seemed impossible to find a boat. With the Mela getting under way this was the only season of the year when the boatmen could count on making any money, and those we spoke to were reluctant to take us. There was said to be a rather well-off sadhu who possessed a motor-boat, but it seemed so improbable that we were not surprised when both he and his craft failed to materialise. It was only when we finally decided that we would have to go by train that the Manager of the Mela, an exceptionally calm and efficient man who was also an Assistant Magistrate, managed to find two men who would take us to Mirzapur for ninety rupees. They were Mallahs, a caste whose members by tradition always worked as boatmen when not engaged in crime.
Their boat was the smallest we had so far used. It was also the most elegant. It was a typical Allahabad boat of the sort used for conveying well-hipped pilgrims down the Jumna to the Sangam. It had white cushions for the passengers to sit on and a canopy stretched over iron hoops to protect them from the sun. It was eighteen feet long, had a beam of three feet six, and drew about six inches of water unladen. Its hull was built from tin sheeting fastened on to a wooden frame and it was painted light blue and white with a yellow and black band round the gunwales. It stood very high out of the water and with its square stern it was rather like a miniature junk; but a junk built for an Edwardian gentleman. Even the two boatmen, Bag Nath and Hira Lal, with their rather droopy moustaches, had a faintly Edwardian air about them, although Bag Nath had to some extent modernised himself with a crew-cut. By the time the trunks and the bedding rolls were stowed aboard there was very little room for the four of us.
We set off from the landing-place by the Fort in the early afternoon and shot down into the Ganges. It was full of rips and whirlpools, bubbling and erupting.
We went down at a terrific rate. This was what we had imagined in our ignorance that travelling on the Ganges would be like all the time, when we had first arrived at Hardwar and seen the water rushing down past the Dharmsala of Der Ismael Khan on its way to the Ganges Canal. Behind us the Fort was already sinking into the distance; to the left was Old Jhusi, with its ramparts half-hidden by its arcadian groves of trees and with its solitary flag flying over the tomb of Sheikh Taqi. The right bank was thirty feet high, and as the level of the river fell day by day, it had left a succession of horizontal scours on the face of it. Along these little paths which were rather like sheep runs men were plodding upstream towing twenty-foot boats up the last couple of miles to Allahabad, bent double with the pieces of bamboo clasped to their chests to which the ropes were attached.
Navigation was difficult; with so much luggage there was only room in the boat for one person to row at a time and the baggage was badly stowed anyway. Having asked to row I found it impossible in this strong current to stop the boat turning round so that at times we found ourselves descending the river stern first. There was nothing wrong with the oars; although they were only made from a couple of bamboo poles with two pieces of packing case for blades, they were beautifully balanced. It would not have mattered if the river had not been so full of fish traps. They were open-ended triangles and quadrilaterals of staked nets, some of them more than two hundred yards long; and with the stream running at some six knots it would be difficult to get out of one of these enclosures if we once got into it. Finally Bag Nath, the man with the crew-cut, became sufficiently apprehensive to put a steering oar over the stern and thenceforward the boat was more or less under control.
According to Bag Nath and Hira Lal these traps were for catching Hilsa, a fish which I had always thought only lived in estuaries, which they said were ‘bahut achchha’, very good fish, and for some time they expatiated on how delicious they were. It was little consolation to us who had so far not tasted one single fish while on the Ganges.
At this late hour of the afternoon, there were no fishermen to be seen, and the site of their operations was deserted; and when finally we did meet some fishermen who were lying on a sandbank and the boatmen asked them for fish, they simply laughed and said, as all the other fishermen we had so far met had said, that all the fish had gone to Calcutta, and made expressive gestures with their hands, indicative of nothingness.
But it was good to be back on the river. The sun shone on it from a cloudless sky and there was a gentle breeze from the north which only fell away towards evening. And the river was as it had always been, except that it was more powerful, and there were many more boats either being tracked up the bank or else running down under sails that were like old bedsheets, with almost more holes than material in them. Some of the boats were going down together in pairs with one square sail set on a yard that was lashed to the masts of both vessels, and below, on deck, the crews shared an equally communal tobacco pipe between them. There were jackals on the bank and corpses in the river, very white, with their legs extended and one of them had a crow walking up and down it, like a captain pacing the bridge, but these macabre details were as nothing compared with the splendour of the yellow river swirling down under the huge sky eight hundred and eighty miles west-north-west of the Bay of Bengal.
Just before sunset we entered one of those reaches in which there was nothing in sight but sand and the banks receded on either side until they were a faint line in the distance.
Here we came down abreast of some country boats belonging to the Ganga and Brahmaputra Water Transport Board. The crews had been building bandals in the river to close the offtakes from the main channel. Bandals are an ingenious and simple arrangement for concentrating the flow of water into the main stream so that it can scour the bottom and keep it deep and open. They are also a very ancient arrangement. A series of parallel lines of bamboos are driven into the bed of the river just above the mouth of a large backwater, each succeeding one a little further downstream at an angle of about thirty degrees to the current. Each bandal is about fifty feet long and the bamboo piles of which they are composed are a foot apart. Each of these uprights is supported by another pole which is driven in at an angle on the downstream side and lashed to the top of it. Bamboo mats are then placed on the upstream side of the obstruction and tied to it so that they hang down into the river to a depth of three feet below the surface. As the flow of current into the backwater is held up by the mats, it creates a slack behind the bandals in which the river sheds its silt, eventually forming a shoal, sealing it off completely.
The sun set in a low haze and the sky above it turned a dull orange; but high overhead it still continued to radiate long streamers of purple light eastwards against the dark blue sky in which the evening star shone brilliantly and alone. It was an improbable effect, but it soon faded away and then it was dark.
Above us the bandal builders crouched on the bank and looked down into the boat while the four of us strove by the light of a couple of lanterns to get the food trunk out of the bottom of the boat in which it had firmly embedded itself. It was like trying to get a coffin out of a grave. Even when we finally succeeded in lifting it they still watched on, entranced. It made rum drinking even more difficult than usual. We were looking forward to a good drink and we intended to give one to the boatmen too, as it was New Year’s Eve; but it was impossible before such an audience. Later, when their interest was exhausted, we drank rum together and ate a chicken and potatoes laced with chillies; and at nine o’clock we all went to bed, stretched out under the canopy on the makeshift deck, the first time since we had been on the river that we had slept with a roof over our heads.
There seemed little point in trying to stay awake until twelve o’clock in order to see the New Year in. We had had our little celebration. Besides we were in India where it was not even New Year’s Eve which according to the reformed Indian Calendar, falls on the 30th Phalguna, our 20th March, and is called Mahavisuva (Year-Ending Day). Even if we wanted to think of our loved ones, Indian Standard Time was five and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time which would mean thinking about them and engaging in celebrations at half past five in the morning. And far out from shore in the Ganges it seemed ever more absurd. On the Ganges one year, a century or even a thousand years was much as another; the only difference was in the seasons – and here on the sands in the middle of it they were only indicated by the level of the water and the power of the sun and the rain.
At five o’clock awful spitting noises from the bank announced the beginning of another day, and Bag Nath and Hira Lal changed their sleeping position from one lying alongside one another head to toe to a more intimate arrangement in which they were head to head and back to back, a difficult operation which they accomplished with awful groanings and thrashing of limbs. We were both wide awake now and it seemed that the dawn would never come. When it did, we staggered up the bank with our soap-boxes and towels and found that it had been worth waiting for. The moon was still up in the west and the freezing wind which poured over the sands gave them a clear, clean look, as if the world had been suddenly reborn. Big skeins of geese were going overhead. These feelings of rebirth were not shared by the bandal builders who sat huddled together in the mouth of their grass hut with their teeth chattering. The river was like ice, so cold that it seemed impossible that one could ever heat it sufficiently to make tea, and when the water finally did boil and we were just about to put the tea in the pot, the boatmen suddenly pushed off without any warning and we were on our way.
At eight we passed Sirsa away on the right bank, but all we saw of it were a few temples, and we never saw the place where another river, the Tons, entered the Ganges at all. The Ganges now embarked on a series of vast bends first to the north and then to the south; augmented by the Tons it was bigger than ever, in some places more than five hundred yards wide. Turtles shaped like carving dishes surfaced close to the boat and big fish rose which the boatmen called Sur. Apart from an occasional ferry we saw scarcely any boats at all. In some places the banks were low and green with fields of rice and barley sloping gently up from the shore. Instead of being built of mud as they had been previously, the village houses were mostly of brick. The farms were substantial two-storeyed places with tiled roofs like farms in the Lombard plain, but here they were surrounded by acacia, nim and pipal trees and interspersed by dense, tall grass and plantations of bamboos which sometimes sprouted up through the tops of the trees like flagpoles. In other places the banks rose above the river in steep cliffs that were so corroded by the weather, that it was difficult to know whether they were earth or stone. At a place called Lachagir the cliffs were full of caves which the boatmen said were inhabited by sadhus; and close to them on the shore, there was a brick well-shaft from which the surrounding earth had been washed away so that it stood alone like a tower. Above it, on top of the cliff, there was a ruined fort. Once this had been a port of call for steamers of the India General Steam Navigation Company. ‘Here,’ wrote the author of the District Gazetteer, mysteriously, ‘according to tradition stood the lac palace of Dur-Yodhana,21 in which the Pandava brethren, had the plot succeeded, were to be burned to death.’
All through the day we took an hour each in turn at the oars, and as it grew hotter the sweat poured off us while Wanda fed us sweets and fruit and bidis as the spirit moved her.
At one o’clock we were at the bottom of the first big bend of the river and here we anchored in shoal water in the middle and did what we had longed to do, jumped into it. While the boatmen performed their pujas, sprinkling the boat and themselves with water, we washed ourselves in privacy, hidden under the stern. Afterwards in the time it took us to eat a tin of sardines, some bread and marmalade and a couple of papayas they cooked themselves some chapatis and then we were off again. These men were more like fugitives than boatmen.
Immediately afterwards we saw two crocodiles lying out on a sandbank. One was very large, disguised as a gnarled old tree trunk; the other was smaller with a snout as finely pointed as an expensive American fountain pen. The big one disappeared immediately, the other waited until we were abreast of it before it slid into the water.
‘I wouldn’t have bathed if I had known there were coccodriles,’22 Wanda said.
A whole school of dolphins escorted us into the next reach to the north. On the left, on the long peninsula formed by the big bend made by the river, fields of rice, wheat and mustard extended to the water’s edge. There were huge mango trees and tall, plumed grass in which the wind sighed, with the sound of a distant sea. The women walking on the shore, having washed and dried their saris, let them flutter behind them in the strong wind that was blowing from the north. But it was only here where the river watered the fields that this country, the north-western part of the district of Mirzapur, had such an air of fertility. Inland, north of the Grand Trunk Road from Allahabad to Banaras, there were waterless saline wastes in which nothing could grow and which looked, according to the Gazetteer, as if they were covered with hoar-frost. This country was called Bhadohi and once it had been part of the domain of a mysterious and civilised race called Bhars which had been finally submerged in the Aryan invasion of the Ganges Valley. The remains of their water tanks, always aligned in a different direction from that which was customary among the Hindus, and some dilapidated forts are to be seen in this region still.
To the right, on the outward bend of the river, there were steep cliffs which glowed as if they were red hot in the afternoon sun. All this reach of the river was full of birds which, apart from the morning and evening flights of geese and duck, had been strangely absent since we left Allahabad. Flocks of lapwings scurried along the shore leaving their footprints in the mud and calling apprehensively to one another; dark brown crag martins dipped about the cliffs and in the shallows spoonbills were raking the bottom with their long black and yellow bills. There were other kinds too, but it required more knowledge than either of us possessed to identify them. The boatmen were not much help. Every time I asked them about some particular species all they said was ‘chota chiriya’ which meant ‘little bird’, at the same time flapping their arms and making chee-cheeing noises.
We were now in the district of Mirzapur and the boatmen said that we would arrive at the city the following afternoon. Gradually we crawled up to the top of the last long bend towards the north. It was a hard slog in the teeth of the wind and I was glad that I had learned to scull and knew how to ‘feather’, an accomplishment which the boatmen regarded with a certain amount of awe. By the time we succeeded in turning it the sun was setting. Here, on the edge of a mudbank, a bandal boat was moored and Hira Lal, who was at the helm, steered us in towards it. Obviously he intended to spend the night there.
Apart from the proximity of the bandal boat, it was a horrible place, especially for us. It lacked every amenity: a bank on which to stand while washing; cover for even the simplest needs and, what was worse, it was necessary to plough through a couple of hundred yards of mud in order to reach any kind of shore. I said that we would continue. I was reluctant to go against the boatmen, for I knew that they liked to camp with people they knew and trusted, but this was too much. Nevertheless I knew that it was a mistake to go against the custom of the country, but this was something that I and my countrymen had never learned, and, it seemed, never would. They were very displeased.
Soon it was quite dark and we had to feel our way down through the shoals using an oar as a sounding pole. Now when I suggested that they should stop, both boatmen ignored me and Hira Lal who was at the oars redoubled his efforts.
‘You shouldn’t have told them to go on,’ Wanda said. I could have murdered her.
They went on and on for more than an hour. There was thick mist over the river now and it was as cold as hell. Every few minutes we went aground. Finally I had to beg them to stop and when they did it was at a place which was also separated from the shore by an expanse of stinking mud. It was exactly the same sort of place that they had wanted to camp at originally, only this time there was a village on the bank above the beach, and like all the other boatmen they detested villages.
‘This is a bad place,’ they said, reproachfully.
We made camp and cooked our various foods by the light of the kerosene lanterns without speaking to one another. The village on the bank above us was as silent and dark as the tomb; not even a dog barked in it. Finally, under the influence of hot rum and lime the boatmen thawed; but all they would say was that this was a bad place. It was impossible not to agree with them.
On the other side of the river a wedding was being celebrated and the sound of trumpets and drums floated across to us clearly. A month previously we would have asked the boatmen to take us across to it, but we had had enough for one day. While we were washing up, five men came down the bank from the village and lit an enormous brushwood fire. They carried on a conversation for five minutes and then disappeared as abruptly as they had come without looking in our direction at all. What on earth were they up to? Was this their way of having an evening out?
The previous night we had slept with the side curtains brailed up. Here, because none of us wanted to be in full view of the village and because it was draughty, we lowered them. It was a mistake. Soon the atmosphere was like a Turkish bath, with the smells of dung, chillies, paraffin and dirty blankets thrown in for good measure. Worst of all, both of us found ourselves under the necessity of going ashore, not once but several times during the night. Inside, under the canopy, the boat was not only smelly but black as pitch and these repeated journeys were nightmare ones. First we stepped on the supine bodies of the boatmen who seemed impervious to these needs but who, each time we trod on them started up with the intention of defending themselves. Then we lowered ourselves down into the cold clammy mud which reached half way to our knees.
It was no use wearing shoes because when we returned to the boat they would have been so muddy that there would have been nowhere to put them; and it was equally difficult with bare feet as the boat had so much freeboard that it was impossible to hang over the side to wash them without falling in, unless one was a giant. The only solution was to bring back a kettle of water, stick one’s feet under the canopy and pour it over them. It was a ridiculous arrangement for, as Wanda said when she returned after one of these sorties with her teeth chattering and with long grey stockings of mud on her legs which one kettleful of water was insufficient to remove, ‘If it wasn’t for the boatmen we could do it from the boat – and they are fast asleep.’
The boatmen were so anxious to leave that when we woke the next morning we found ourselves in mid-stream and already under way. It was only a quarter to six and the sky over the village was just beginning to grow red. There seemed little point in getting up, so we lit the stove and stayed in our bedding rolls.
There was no wind and the water was like oil. Over it terns and swallows were flying low and from the mudflats clouds of ringed plovers rose and wheeled uttering melancholy whistling sounds, alarmed by the boatmen who were chanting their pujas. The sun rose at a quarter to seven and with it went the mysterious beauty of the early morning. We stopped on a sandbank to wash. The sand was covered with delicate white shells which were like tiny translucent fingernails and little conical ones with horizontal rings round them.
There were villages on the left bank now. At a place called Ferojpur, where there was a landing place with a big flight of stone steps, women with baskets on their heads were carrying sand up from three high-sterned country boats. There were others down at the water’s edge washing pots in the river whose clothes were so discoloured that they were almost indistinguishable from the bank behind them.
Now to the north and south, the bank receded again and the river became immensely wide. To the north there was sand as far as one could see from the level of the boat; to the south was an outcrop of the Vindhyan hills, a rather barren-looking sandstone escarpment on which grew a few solitary bushy-topped trees. We were about eight miles to the east of Mirzapur.
The river took us down to a place on the right bank where there was a village on a cliff and a small island off-shore piled high with slabs of stone on the top of which there were a couple of columns about seven feet long, one still standing, the other on its side.
‘This is Bindhachal, and here is the Mandir of Vindhya-Vasini-Devi, Mahayama Durga, and we are going to do a puja,’ Bag Nath said, as he steered the boat in past the island towards the shore where there was an impressive-looking ghat. He was not asking us. It was a statement.
The ghat looked as if it had been subjected to an artillery bombardment. Massive masonry buttresses had been overthrown by the flood waters and lay in the river. The water, which must have risen to an extraordinary height, had swept over the top of the embankment which was equally solidly constructed, tearing stones from their foundations and hurling them about in disorder. Nevertheless it was a cheerful place. Hordes of small children were swimming in the river, elderly holy men dozed in the sun, and half a dozen barbers at the water’s edge were shaving the heads of those who were about to set off for the temple of Mahayama Durga.
While the boatmen were away we ate a tin of sardines which had something wrong with it. The sardines were not actually rotten but they had a very curious taste. By the time we had discussed them and savoured them rather like a couple of amateurs discussing a bottle of claret (but how infinitely less disgusting it is to discuss a wine that has gone off than a sardine) and because we were hungry, we had eaten the lot. I was sufficiently apprehensive about these sardines to record the fact that we had eaten them in a notebook, so that if we did get ptomaine poisoning there would be some information for a doctor to go on if we were already unconscious; and when the boatmen returned from their puja, which they did in a surprisingly short time, with shaven top-knots, glowing red tilak marks on their foreheads, smelling of sweet oil and with garlands of marigolds round their necks, and suggested that we, too, might like to visit the Goddess of Destruction, it seemed appropriate to do so.
The temple was in the centre of the village, and was approached by a narrow lane. The shops surrounding it displayed heaps of brilliant coloured powders for making the tilak mark and others for reddening the soles of the feet, ingenuous clay statues and cheap cotton scarves. The way into it was through an open-sided court slightly raised above the road and approached by steps. It was filled with pandas; drums and bells sounded.
Vindhya-Vasini-Devi was undoubtedly very old. The way to her shrine was through a low entrance. She was enclosed in a brass or gilded cage, and the walls were of silver carved in low relief. There was a feeling of terrible constriction in this narrow cell. She had a tiny shrunken black head with the staring eyes of a madwoman, the whites of which were made from silver plates. Her beak-like nose had a jewelled ring inserted in one nostril; white flowers hung down like hair from her head and without them she would have been bald. Her little black foot rested on a black rat and round her neck there were swags of marigolds. She was a horrid-looking little thing. We stood barefooted in a slush compounded of Ganges water, mud, squashed flowers and gouts of red liquid which might have been blood but probably wasn’t. But not for long. There were crowds of prospective worshippers behind us and we were only there on sufferance; soon the pressure became intolerable and we popped out into the covered court like a couple of corks.
Vindhya-Vasini-Devi had another name. She was also known as Bhagwan Bhowani, the Black Mother; and it was to her, until Sleeman23 destroyed them, that the Thugs used to come from all over India, usually in the autumn after the rains, to offer her a share of what they had taken from their victims after strangling them with the ruhmal, the square knotted cloth. And when they themselves were finally hunted down they died on the gallows with the triumphant cry on their lips ‘Jai Vindhyachal,’ after adjusting the nooses round their own necks which they did with practised hands.
Having come so far it seemed a pity to go back and we pressed on at the head of a considerable procession until we reached the main road: to the left just beyond the village there was a river bed crossed by a castellated and loopholed bridge, in the middle of which stood a mad-looking sadhu ringing a bell; to the right there was a temple by the side of the road in which the body of the god was hidden behind a red cloth; its face was a huge amorphous thing of clay and there was only the faintest indication of a mouth. Although it was impressive it was nothing compared with that of Vindhya-Vasini and after seeing it we went back to the ghat where we found the boatmen fast asleep. They looked as if they were dead, an illusion that was enhanced by the garlands of marigolds which they wore, and we woke them with difficulty. Their efforts of the last couple of days and the emotional excitement of the puja had knocked the stuffing out of them. Drooping over the oars, half asleep, they paddled the boat down the last few miles to Mirzapur.
Here, on the western outskirts of the city, the river bank was more substantial than the constructions which stood on it. The ancient houses of the merchants, who until the middle of the last century had conducted their business with conspicuous success, now hung precariously over the river in an extremity of decay. In one place what must have been a noble flight of stone steps had led down to the water but under the assault of the river, it had collapsed and now it was nothing more than a great heap of cut stones on which laundrymen were beating their clients’ clothes to pieces.
In half an hour we reached the bridge of boats on which a one-way system operated, controlled by bells. It was packed with bullock-carts which came thundering down on to it through a steep and narrow cutting in an endless stream on their way back to the country districts north of the river. Upstream of it half a dozen vessels were unloading bricks which emaciated-looking men were carrying away up the bank on their heads, and we nosed our own boat in amongst them until it grounded. The journey was over and we had nowhere to go. ‘Sahib,’ Hira Lal said. ‘We will take you further down the river to Kashi [Banaras]. We can do this and still return in time for the Mela.’
It was a temptation. We knew no one at Mirzapur. Admittedly someone in the High Commissioner’s Office in New Delhi had given us the name of the Manager of a carpet factory at Mirzapur who, he said, had a bungalow in which customers sometimes stayed, but we had no idea how to get in touch with him, nor were we confident that he would be pleased if we suddenly appeared unannounced and asked if we could use his firm’s bungalow. But, having finally got to Mirzapur, it seemed silly to pass it by.
With little hope of finding one and feeling slightly ridiculous, I set off up the bank in search of a telephone. A little way inland I came to some old buildings picturesquely situated in a grove of trees. This place had once been an indigo factory and some of the vats in which the preparation had been made were still there. Now it was the office of a carpet manufactory and the manager, a kindly, middle-aged Indian, at once sent some of his men to help with the luggage.
While they toiled up the bank with it I sat in the boat writing letters of recommendation for the boatmen. Then I paid them the ninety rupees which had been agreed upon plus an extra ten rupees as a present. We were sorry to leave them and they, who so far had shown no emotion of any kind, did so now. The last we saw of them was rigging a bamboo mast to tow the boat upstream.