There’s a blur of feet hurrying through ankle-deep mud.
Millions and millions of them. Some in plastic sandals, others in rubber boots, many others in cheap city shoes, or trainers, or flip-flops, or brogues. Tens of thousands more are barefoot, some limping, others running.
This sea of humanity is surging forward, relentless and unstoppable. Most of them have bundles on their heads. Each one is stuffed with rice and flour, pots and pans, blankets and bedrolls. Many have babies bundled on their backs or toddlers clutched tight to their chests. Eyes squinting into the bright winter sunlight, they are streaming in from all points of the compass towards the vast encampment.
A sense of frantic anticipation and complete exhilaration unites them. As it does so, the unending torrent of pilgrims sets eyes on the glinting waters. It is the point where their journey ends just as it begins.
This is the greatest gathering in human history, a multitude of one hundred million souls. They’ve come to the Sangam, the confluence point where the Subcontinent’s two holiest rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, converge, at Prayag, outside Allahabad in northern India.
Once every 144 years a Maha Kumbh Mela takes place, Hinduism’s vast ritualistic cleansing of souls. Translating as ‘The Great Festival of the Urn’, the last time it took place, Queen Victoria was on the British throne.
The India that usually makes the headlines is the one abundant with call centres and Rolls-Royce dealerships, and with skyscrapers that reach high above the landscapes of interminable urban sprawl. It’s the India of Bollywood Bling and of ubiquitous shopping malls, of ritzy brand names, and of the super-rich who can’t get enough of all the über-kitsch.
Dedicated to wealth creation, this newfangled India of the twenty-first century defies logic just as it exceeds expectation. It may be a realm that makes the Occidental world drool with envy, but it’s only a small fragment of what’s really going on.
Travel through the Indian Subcontinent and you quickly grasp that this is a land with its feet rooted firmly on the ground. The heads of the jet-set oligarchs may be in the clouds, but the majority of rank-and-file Indians have no doubt who they are, and where they’ve come from. Hailing from villages and small towns, the silent majority may aspire to gaining wealth, too, but what’s central to their lives is something that runs far deeper.
Faith.
And to most of them there’s almost nothing in the ancient spiritual machinery of Mother India quite so auspicious as the Kumbh Mela. An immense cosmic counterbalance, an Indian Woodstock devoted to peace and love, it’s the distilled essence of the subcontinent.
Pass a few days at the Mela’s world within a world and you can’t help but be sucked into it and swept along. As you learn to block out the ubiquitous hum of background noise, you begin to piece together the fragments that form the grand mosaic that is the Kumbh.
I first heard of it as a student backpacking around West Bengal twenty-five years ago. I was taking refuge from the monsoon under a railway bridge. Already sheltering there was a sadhu, who was travelling by foot. He was naked, covered in ash, with wizened limbs and an intense stare that has stuck in my mind ever since.
As the rain began to fall all the harder, he suddenly grabbed my arm.
‘I will not get there in time!’ he exclaimed anxiously.
‘Get where?’
‘To the Kumbh Mela!’
I asked him what it was.
‘It is the union of the sky, the sun and the moon,’ he said.
Unable to forget the holy man’s words, I’ve often wondered if he did make it in time. Had he missed it, there would have been a lengthy wait for the next one, not to mention a long walk home to West Bengal.
Entangled in the astrological sequence of auspicious timings, the Kumbh Mela is held in one of four cities in strict rotation once every three years – at Nasik, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Prayag, where this year’s festival was held. The locations of the melas are said to be points at which droplets of Amrit, the Elixir of Immortality, were spilt in antiquity by the celestial Garuda bird.
Once every twelve years a great Kumbh Mela takes place, when the propitious timing is amplified many thousands of times over. And, in keeping with the lunar cycles, every twelfth great Kumbh Mela is the ‘Maha’ – held ever 144 years.
Remembering the naked sadhu taking refuge with me under the railway bridge, and quite certain I wouldn’t be here for the next one, I pledged to journey to Allahabad myself, to attend the Maha Kumbh Mela.
As someone well-used to the grand scale of India, I assumed deep down that the festival would be nothing more than a whole lot of people whipped up into a spiritual frenzy. But the days and nights I spent there changed the way I view the Subcontinent, and even the way I regard my fellow Man. A primal human experience, it defied the complexities of contemporary life, while holding up a mirror to our collective souls.
Located a few miles away from Allahabad, most of the festival ground is more normally well underwater, beneath the sacred rivers. Organizers can never be quite sure how far the waters of the Ganges and the Yamuna are going to recede, and exactly which lands will be exposed.
Once the waters have retreated in late November, there’s a wait before the ground has drained and hardened. Last year the waters receded much later than usual, which meant that the vast tent city could only be constructed at the last moment.
The festival ground has to be seen to be believed. With a hundred million people traipsing through during the fifty-five-day Mela, it’s on a titanic scale. Covering almost five thousand acres, it’s divided and sub-divided into numerous sectors on a grid structure.
One of the great difficulties is that the site straddles the intersection of the mighty Ganges and the Yamuna. This leads to a complicated natural arrangement of sandbanks and uneven connection points. To link them all together, dozens of pontoon bridges are erected, each of them buoyed by a series of massive iron drums.
On the surface, the tent city resembles something out of a military campaign. In addition to the pontoons and the neat rows of khaki tents, the main thoroughfares are laid with iron sheets so that vehicles don’t get stuck in the mud. There’s electric street-lighting, too, which bathes the camp in an unnerving yellow glow through the hours of darkness. The lights are run by a series of mobile power stations, set up just for the Kumbh Mela.
But all this is just the tip of the logistical iceberg.
Dozens of police stations pepper the encampment, as do mobile field hospitals, fire stations and government offices. After all, in India, the wheels of bureaucracy die hard. And there are cafés, shrines, and trinket stalls by the thousand, as well as bandstands and rickety-looking fairground rides, and more than 35,000 portable loos.
Spend some time at the Maha Kumbh Mela and you quickly grasp that it’s not about mind-numbing statistics though. It’s about people, and about their utter belief in a system of devotion that forms an unwavering backbone to life from the cradle to the crematorium.
For those of us raised in the cynical nihilism of the West, it may be hard to understand how or why a family living in a village a thousand miles away from Allahabad would blow almost everything they have to bathe at this auspicious moment at the Sangam, the confluence. But, regarded through the eyes of the devout majority, it’s an affirmation of unshakeable belief. And central to that belief is the steadfast faith in a system that promises redemption in exchange for devotion.
If the figures are correct, and one in twelve of the entire Indian population passed through the Kumbh this year, then it reflects what this astonishing mass act of piety means to Hindus. They hastened to Allahabad from every corner of India – from each city, town, village and hamlet. They came from the tea plantations of Assam in the extreme north-east and from the desiccated deserts of Rajasthan, from the mountain stronghold of the Himalayas, and from the tranquil waterways of Kerala. They ventured, too, from the smog-filled urban sprawls of Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. And they came to be united all together but, more importantly, they came to be absolved of their sins.
I myself reached the Kumbh Mela at dusk on Valentine’s Day. Having taken a flight to Varanasi, and then driven through the lush countryside for several hours, I knew we were nearing because of a rumbling sound on the wind. We must have still been ten miles out of Allahabad, but I could feel the Kumbh in my bones.
Asking the driver to stop, I got down and listened.
What I heard was like one of those nature films where they stick a microphone into a colony of ants. A cross between frenzied movement, and what sounded like every conversation in the world overlaid on top of each other, it filled me with a primeval sense of fear and with curiosity as well.
We continued and, as we did so, we began to pass droves of people on foot. Most of them were laden with belongings piled on their heads. Processing forward through wind and light rain they marched with an extraordinary surety of movement. It was as if the Maha Kumbh Mela was somehow in their DNA, that to get there was programmed into them all – whatever the cost may have been.
When in India, foreigners have a way of asking questions for which there are no black-and-white answers. As soon as I arrived, I begged everyone I met to give me facts and figures, and to tell me when the Kumbh Mela began. No one seemed sure. One man told me, ‘It started ten million years ago.’ Another was less exact. He said: ‘It’s been going a long, long time, sir.’
The first known foreigner to have written his impressions was the 7th century Chinese monk Xuanzang. (Although some scholars have doubted whether he actually saw the Kumbh.)
The earliest known account in English was written by the celebrated American traveller and novelist, Mark Twain. He described his visit to the festival of 1894 in Following The Equator. Of it, he said: ‘It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint on such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining.’
I found myself wondering where Twain would have stayed on his visit more than a century ago. Fortunately for me, I was taken in at the lavish Laxmi Kutir Camp, in a prominent position above the main festival site. It was situated between a Hindu temple and a Muslim mosque – both of which strove to outdo the other in terms of noise and commotion through day and night.
The camp boasted tents with en-suite bathrooms, feather quilts, and hot water bottles. There were even chocolates on the pillows at night. Having settled in, I went over to the viewing terrace, and got my first real glimpse of the Kumbh.
Glowing canary yellow from all the thousands of improvised street-lamps, it was like nothing I had ever imagined. In the struggle to describe the spectacle it seems that only clichés are sufficient. It was like staring through a kaleidoscopic lens into the navel of the world, into a realm that defied both time and space. Humming, murmuring, and with whispers on the breeze, it was electrifying, empowering, and was more radiant in its sheer energy than anything I had ever seen.
After a couple of hours of trying to sleep in my prim tent, I got up. The vibrations from the plateau were calling me to come and join the fun. There was a sense of the Pied Piper about it, something so mesmerizing that I was quite unable to resist.
Clambering down steep steps cut into the rock, I climbed down to where tens of millions of ordinary Indians were camped. It was three AM but there were people everywhere. Some were washing or praying, many more were walking alone or with children in arms, all heading in the same direction – down to the Sangam.
Making my way through the unending landscape of tents, my eyes grew accustomed to the creamy yellow light. As for my ears, they were bombarded by the high-pitched chants from a thousand makeshift shrines. And, mounted on poles every hundred yards, were loudspeakers through which came continuous appeals of family members separated from their clans.
Following the hordes through mud, I stumbled forward in mist tinged with yellow light, over a series of pontoon bridges, down to the confluence. It was bizarre to think that for most of the year the land on which my feet were walking was the sacred riverbed. For the millions of pilgrims this was holy ground, the reason why a great many went barefoot.
The thing that sticks in your mind from the first moment you get there is the sense of goodwill. In the days I spent at the Kumbh Mela, I saw too many spontaneous acts of kindness to recall – a pilgrim pressing a folded bill into a blind beggar’s hand; a woman taking off her shoes and giving them to another who had lost hers in the mayhem; a little boy presenting his banana-leaf bowl of rice to a crippled old man on a cart.
Traversing a kind of beach, I finally got down to the actual waterline. Reinforced with sandbags, there was a flimsy wooden stockade screening the area off from a much larger expanse. On the other side of it there were literally millions of people surging into the water. Stripping off their outer garments, they were mesmerized by the auspiciousness of the moment.
The Mela began on 14th January at the Makar Sankranti, when the sun entered Capricorn, the day on which it’s said that light returns after its long southward journey. A Winter Solstice, it signals the start of fifty-five days of providence. And, during this festival time there are a series of extra-specially auspicious days. Believing their prayers will be amplified, pilgrims make sure they bathe at the Sangam then.
The day after my arrival was the second most favourable of all, the reason why so many had got down to the water early – keen to beat the rush. With an ocean of people stretching as far as the eye could see, there was the constant fear of stampede. Kumbh Melas are notorious for masses of innocent people being trampled underfoot. All it takes is for one person to freak out and to run. There is in us all a primal fear of crowds, and it’s triggered at such moments.
Like everyone else, I was tanked up with pure adrenalin, ready for fight or flight, and for the stampede. But, unlike the pilgrims, my purpose was not to enter the freezing waters of the confluence, but to watch.
As I stood there on the less crowded side of the stockade, a policeman on horseback hurtled down the beach. Wielding a latti, a long wooden stave, he herded others and me into the narrowest pinprick of land between the water, the stockade, and the countless ordinary folk on the other side.
All of a sudden I made out the muffled cries of what sounded like an army roaring into battle. Turning quickly, squinting through the yellowed light, I saw a sight of true terror, like something from Hollywood’s wildest fantasy.
Hundreds of naked men were making a beeline for the spot on which I was standing. Their bodies caked in ash, their hair matted in long twisted dreadlocks, some were waving swords, others tridents, or shields. More still were chanting or howling, faces contorted with macabre expressions, feet running in a crazed blur of movement.
Wave upon wave of them charged into the chill water, immersing themselves, before retreating hastily onto the beach. These nagas, holy men, are the revered mainstay of a tradition dedicated to prayer, solitude, and to relinquishing the trappings of conventional life. Their brotherhood, the Order of the Juna Akhara, meaning ‘Ancient Circle’, is a secretive monastic order of sadhus, yogis and ascetics.
Such is their reputation for spiritual leadership, they are given VIP pride of place at the Kumbh Mela. When not bathing down at the waterline, they spend their days smoking pipes stuffed with hashish in a special area reserved just for them.
Dedicated to receiving Moksha, liberation from continual reincarnation, sadhus (which simply means ‘good men’), criss-cross the Subcontinent most usually on foot, living lives of stark austerity. They are sworn to celibacy and shun material chattels, and spend a great deal of time crouched beside a smouldering sacred fire known as a dhuni. Rubbing the ash onto their naked skin, they pass the hours smoking, meditating, and receiving the veneration of ordinary people.
In the lanes of this VIP-area, I came across all manner of avatars and holy men. A few were practising acts of penance, their bodies contorted in strange positions, or their arms having been raised up in the air for decades.
It was there that I found Baba Rampuri.
Bespectacled, with sapphire eyes and with a great bush of teaselled greying beard, he was seated on a low dais. Uncharacteristically clean for a sadhu, with hair that fell in curls to his shoulders, his clothing was spotless too, a loose saffron shirt and pyjama-style trousers.
Baba Rampuri said he had been coming to Kumbh Melas since 1971, the year in which he moved to India from the United States. A throwback to the age of tie-dye and navel-contemplation, he oozed peace, love, and goodwill to all men.
We spent the afternoon together, and in that time Baba Rampuri lifted the veil into the world of the ordained sadhu. A mystical fraternity with roots in India’s ancient past, it’s a society that sits awkwardly with the feverish consumerism that clouds any experience of modern urban India.
Leaning back on his dais, Baba Rampuri looked as though he’d seen it all before – a writer crouching before him eager for a useable sound bite. Then he told me that he had read some of the books I’d written and I punched the air in my mind. His hands churning around him, he said:
‘No writer or photographer who’s ever come to the Kumbh Mela has ever had a financial or artistic success. None of them. Not a single one.’
I asked why.
Rampuri grinned, albeit a sarcastic grin, one that made me shift my crossed legs uneasily.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘you all tell it like it is, blinkered by the overwhelming seductive imagery. But you never tell the story behind the story. Here at the Kumbh there are a couple of worlds present at the same time. There’s the one that’s on the surface that intoxicates you, and the other that you hold in your heart.’
Rampuri Baba wagged a finger hard in my direction. ‘It’s not about me,’ he said, ‘but about the order of which I’m a small part. This institution has the ability to pass learning down through the time. I’ve devoted my life to the Ancient Circle of the Juna Akhara. And in that time I’ve seen that most foreigners miss the point. You all go on about how a pilgrimage like this is about nurturing the self. Well, it’s not about the self but the group experience!’
During our conversations, Baba Rampuri would take the chilam, the clay pipe, from a fellow American guru, wrap a handkerchief over the end to filter it, and draw hard. His sapphire eyes clouding over, he railed against the foreigners who came to the Kumbh Mela and missed it all because they were too busy peering through camera lenses, and as a result failed to see what was going on.
All of a sudden the American sadhu waved a finger in my direction.
‘We have to go and feed people now,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Ordinary people.’
‘How many ordinary people?’
Baba Rampuri pushed his rimless glasses up higher on his nose.
‘About five thousand,’ he said.
When I asked how he could afford it, the guru seemed a little despondent.
‘Every member of the Juna Akhara leaves the Mela penniless,’ he told me. ‘We always do. It costs us way more than a hundred thousand dollars. Such a great social responsibility goes along with it – in which feeding the masses is just one of the responsibilities.’
Before I took my leave of Baba Rampuri, he told me to check out his website and to follow him on Facebook. I did a double take.
‘You’re in cyberspace?’
Reaching for the chilam, the American grinned one last time.
‘Of course I am,’ he said.
Leaving Rampuri to feed a small fraction of the entire pilgrim population, I strolled through the makeshift lanes of the Juna Akhara. Taking in the dozens of holy men, some naked and others not, I felt as though I had reached the innermost layer of onion skin. This seemed to be the spiritual core of an entire religious system, in a land with many hundreds of millions of followers.
I got talking to a Gujarati couple from Ahmedabad who had been prostrating themselves before an elderly sadhu, who had supposedly taken a vow of silence back in 1962. The husband, Rajiv, told me that he worked ten hours a day in a call centre, and that he had brought his entire family to the Kumbh Mela to help balance the malevolent forces in the universe.
I asked what the naked naga would be able to do for them.
Rajiv touched a hand to his heart.
‘He has given us his love and his blessing,’ he said.
‘But why do you feel you need it?’ I asked cynically.
Rajiv’s wife, Mahdvi, broke in.
‘Because, it’s the counterbalance for the world that we all live in.’
‘And how is it – your world?’
Mahdvi shook her head glumly.
‘It’s a place of deadlines, stress, pollution, and without enough space – a place where you’re suspicious of strangers and where you forget to see the beauty.’
‘Which beauty?’
Rajiv held out his hands.
‘The beauty that’s all around us,’ he said.
Back up at the deluxe Laxmi Kutir camp, I took a hot shower, scoffed down a four-course dinner, and felt rather ashamed at myself for feeling the need to regroup in the lap of luxury. At the next table I met an Englishman called Ronnie who had come to the Kumbh to look for an old school pal. A big blustering bear of a man with broken veins speckled over his cheeks, he told me that he had been at Eton with Sir James Mallinson.
‘He’s down there somewhere,’ said Ronnie distantly. ‘Although I haven’t a clue where to start looking. He’s gone native, you see.’
I asked Ronnie what he meant.
‘Well, after Oxford, Jim became a sadhu, and he was given the name Jadish Das. He’s devoted his life to purifying himself.’
I asked Ronnie what his friend was like.
A little overcome with excitement, he exclaimed:
‘Jim’s a terrific chap – a real chum!’
For all its colour and curious traditions, the brotherhood of the Juna Akhara impressed me for the way it had remained on the rails. It may have been a beacon for eccentric Englishmen and for Californian ex-hippies, but there was something honourable about it. Most of all, I found myself appreciating what it hadn’t become – a big-business Disneyland of the Soul.
The same couldn’t be said for the dozens of godmen and godwomen who had set up temporary ashrams all over the Kumbh Mela. As the days passed, I couldn’t help but become preoccupied by the sleek well-oiled machinery of their high-flying guru businesses.
One afternoon I was making the long walk across the pontoons to the Sangam, when it began pouring with rain. Seeking shelter, I slipped into a giant canvas marquee in which a darshan, a meeting with a holy person, was taking place. Against the rhythmic drone of a tanpura, a woman dressed in a red turban was dispensing blessings to one and all.
Strangely, most of the followers were white Anglo-Saxon foreigners. Dressed identically in costumes of unblemished white, some had shaven heads, except for a Hare Krishna-style pigtail dangling from the back of the scalp. But they were not Hare Krishnas. They were instead zealous devotees of the Mauritius-born godwoman, Her Holiness Sai Maa.
Having jetted in for the Kumbh Mela from the community’s Temple of Consciousness Ashram, just south of Denver, most of them were American, with other followers hailing from Germany, France and Spain. Unified by their enthusiasm for neatly packaged mysticism, and by their blinding smiles, the devotees of Sai Maa stuck out a mile, as did the fraternity’s organization.
Awash with press packs, plush white vehicles, and printed schedules, with merchandising, photo ops and presence on social media sites, the godwoman’s set-up had to be appreciated for its slickness.
Having whispered that I was a journalist, I was instantly ushered past an office packed with computers and technicians, and welcomed into a pristine audience room decorated with bunches of plastic flowers. It was explained that Sai Maa took a vow of silence for four hours in the middle of each day, but that she was willing to break her vow and speak just to me.
Grunting thanks for the honour, I waited.
From time to time a blue-eyed devotee would shuffle in and out, blinding me with a smile. After I’d waited a little more, there was suddenly a sense of heightened anticipation, as though a VIP – or rather a god – was about to arrive.
A small door opened and the lady in the red turban wafted through.
I have met plenty of self-appointed godmen and godwomen in India before, but Sai Maa was different from all the rest. There was a sense that, despite the abundant trappings of the guru business, she was merely putting on a show. And the show was perfectly configured to be lapped up by the legions of Occidental devotees who were craving a figure such as herself.
All Sai Maa was doing was filling a niche.
Though struggling to speak at first, Her Holiness quickly found her voice. It was soft and mellifluous, gliding out through lips anointed in fuchsia-coloured gloss. During my audience, I learned that Sai Maa had moved from Mauritius to France at twenty-one, that she had sat on the City Council of Bordeaux, and that she still owned a château there. I learned, too, that she had two grown-up children. She had been quite late in becoming a self-styled god.
It became clear that there were big plans afoot in the Maa’s Temple of Consciousness movement. Construction was at that very moment taking place downriver on the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, to build an ashram in the shape of two intersecting hearts. Dedicated to Global Enlightenment, Sai Maa’s work was already reaching a worldwide following through cyberspace.
In the middle of my audience, a stream of American devotees filed in. With shaved heads bowed low, they prostrated themselves before their deity. Having kissed her feet, some of them snapped pictures with their phones. Almost as soon as they had come, the disciples were ushered out by an officious blue-eyed henchman from LA. I felt like congratulating him because he had understood the crux of the guru business – the art of limiting access.
Once the white-clad devotees were gone, Sai Maa babbled away in florid sound bites for a long while. I wondered how to break free and claw my way back to the glorious human stew of the Kumbh Mela a stone’s throw away outside. My break came when the godwoman’s BlackBerry began to buzz. Squinting at the display, Sai Maa took the call, chattering away in French.
Fifty yards from where the godwoman was sitting with scrubbed-clean devotees waiting at the door, a wizened old woman from Bihar was lying on the ground. She was weeping hysterically, her ragged clothing all covered in mud.
‘I lost my son in the crowd,’ she sobs, ‘and I don’t know how I will ever find him again.’
As I watched, a stall-keeper selling fried orange jalebis strode up and helped her from the ground. He pointed up to a loudspeaker that was blaring a distraught appeal.
‘You’re not the only one lost,’ he said tenderly. ‘I’ll take you to the place where you can speak on this thing, and it will find you your son.’ He handed her a bowl of hot jalebis and together they set off towards the setting sun.
The next morning I was taken to the scene of a fire. Faulty wiring had short-circuited, setting a Jeep alight, the petrol tank of which had exploded. Miraculously, only two people had been killed. The smouldering remains of dozens of tents and charred belongings had been heaped up in a great pile. Helped by his sons, a slightly built man was picking through it all, his expression forlorn.
‘We came all the way from Tamil Nadu,’ he said, ‘and we have lost everything we brought with us.’
I asked the man about his life. Like most of the people at the Kumbh Mela, he was from India’s rock-solid underbelly.
‘We are farmers,’ he said, ‘and we have a little land outside Chennai. We grow rice and have some buffalo as well. We have come here as an act of devotion, a devotion to the river. Of course we hope to be blessed in return, but the reason we are here is to give ourselves to the river.’
All of a sudden the sky darkened as though the end of the world had come. A sense of panic prevailed. Time was running out – before the deluge struck.
A young holy man wrapped in a saffron robe saw me standing in the makeshift street wondering what to do. Tugging at my wrist, he led me fast through the maze of uniform tents, as the wind whipped up once again. It was late morning but the sky was as dark as midnight. As the first raindrops gushed down, the young sadhu thrust me into his tent. His name was Hardwar, and his expression was so composed that I couldn’t take my eyes off his face.
We sat in silence listening to the rain. Behind him was a cluster of sadhus drawing quietly at their pipes. And, beside him, was a boy of fourteen with almond eyes and an orange turban wrapped tight around his head. Recently ordained into the order of the Juna Akhara, he was lying on his stomach playing a video game on his phone.
‘We will be leaving soon,’ said Hardwar, straining to make himself heard against the thunderous roar of rain, ‘down to Varanasi, where we will camp at the crematorium ghat. Our prayers here are almost done.’
I asked what the Kumbh Mela meant to him. Hardwar’s lips were touched with the faintest tinge of a smile. ‘It’s a mirror,’ he said, ‘in which is reflected the heavens, the universe and the world.’
As the rain flooded down outside, turning the dust into ankle-deep mud, I told Hardwar about Sai Maa and her jet-set devotees. He thought for a moment, then tapped me on the knee.
‘God descends to Earth and is always present at the Kumbh,’ he said softly, ‘but to find him you must search for the most unlikely person. In him or her is God.’
The downpour ended and I went back outside to wade through ankle-deep mud. As I struggled through it, I couldn’t help thinking of the farmer from Tamil Nadu, who had been a random victim of the fire. And my thoughts turned to the millions of farmers, like him, who rely on the Ganges for their lives.
I have heard it said that almost half a billion Indians depend on the waters of Mother Ganga for drinking water and for irrigating their crops. The Subcontinent may be urbanizing quickly, but millions spend their lives toiling away on the patchwork of tiny ancestral farms which lie in the Ganges’ path.
As a sacred waterway that is herself a goddess, Indians believe the Ganges cannot ever be defiled by the misdeeds of Man. She’s above pollution. It’s for this reason of course that people are quite happy to gulp down cups of her holy water, even though it’s dark grey with silt and grime. Indeed, having bathed at the Sangam, a great many pilgrims filled little containers with the Ganges’ hallowed water, to take home to family members and friends who were unable to make the journey to the Kumbh.
With such a colossal tide of humanity clustered on the same stretch of riverbank, local authorities have been increasingly worried about the environmental impact of the fifty-five-day event. Despite a mass of sandbags at the waterline, soil erosion has been considerable. But the real damage to India’s goddess-river has been in the pollution. Plastic bags may have been outlawed at the Kumbh Mela for the first time, but severe ecological damage was done if only by the mind-numbing amounts of raw sewage flowing into the sacred confluence.
After almost a week at the festival, I headed from my luxurious vantage point down to it one last time.
More people were arriving every moment.
Although I myself was exhausted from the crowds, the noise, the godmen and the wild hullabaloo, there was a sense of rebirth, as though the Kumbh Mela was reinventing itself for the newcomers.
I watched as an extended family stumbled down to the waterline, clutching a hotchpotch of belongings. So as not to be separated amid the hordes, they had tied a dark blue cord around them all.
Reaching the Sangam in time for dawn, the legions of ordinary souls were stripping off their garments and wading into the water. Almond-eyed Assamese were bathing there along with thickset Punjabis from the north, and with swarthy Tamils from the Bay of Bengal. There were Hindus from the Himalayas and from Calcutta, from the Great Thar Desert and from the vast Indian diaspora that spans the world.
With the pink blush of first light touching the rippling surface, I pondered how little it all could have changed in centuries. And that’s what made the Kumbh Mela so special to me – the sense that it was a circle of humanity linking us to our ancestors, to nature, and to our fellow men.
That night I took a taxi to the Allahabad railway station to take my train. The route was flooded and tens of thousands of pilgrims were wading through the overflowing sewers and conduits. With the traffic gridlocked for miles ahead, I abandoned the cab and joined everyone else on foot, my suitcase on my head.
Inside the station there were people everywhere. A great many were sprawled out on the platforms. Some were lying on carpets they had brought from home, others sharing their food with strangers, or in prayer. The atmosphere was convivial, a far cry from how it had been a few days before when a footbridge had collapsed. In the resulting stampede thirty-six pilgrims had been trampled to death.
The dark blue sleeper train to Delhi rolled in, iron wheels grinding against the tracks. All of a sudden there was a frenzy of commotion as the pilgrims threw themselves at the train.
As I wondered how I would ever get aboard, I saw out of the corner of my eye a familiar face. This time it was smiling – it was the face of the wizened old woman from Bihar, her son’s hand clasped tightly in her own.
The End