A Suitable Boy, Page 99

  ‘So now, I’ll go and visit Sanaki Baba,’ said Mr Maitra, getting up.

  Sanaki Baba looked nonplussed.

  Mr Maitra frowned, and explained again: ‘On the other side of the Ganga.’

  ‘But I am Sanaki Baba,’ said Sanaki Baba.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Maitra, ‘I meant—what’s his name?’

  ‘Ramjap Baba.’

  ‘Yes, Ramjap Baba.’

  So Mr Maitra left, and after a while the pretty Pushpa showed Dipankar to some straw lying on the sandy ground in one of the tents: this was to be his bed for the next week. The nights were hot, so a single sheet would do.

  Pushpa went off to escort the Raja of Marh to Sanaki Baba’s tent.

  Dipankar sat down and began to read from Sri Aurobindo. But after an hour or so he became restless and decided to follow Sanaki Baba around.

  Sanaki Baba appeared to be very practical and caring—happy, bustling, and un-dictatorial. Dipankar looked at him carefully from time to time. His little eyebrows were sometimes knit in thought. He had the neck of a bull, dark curly hairs on his barrel-chest, and a compact paunch. His hair grew only in a forehead tuft and on the sides. His brown oval pate gleamed in the June sunlight. And sometimes, when he listened, his mouth opened in concentration. Whenever he saw Dipankar looking at him, he smiled back.

  Dipankar was also very taken with Pushpa and found himself blinking furiously whenever he spoke to her. But whenever she spoke to him it was in a very serious voice, and with a serious frown.

  From time to time the Raja of Marh would appear in Sanaki Baba’s encampment and roar with rage if Sanaki Baba was not in. Someone had told him of Dipankar’s special status, and occasionally during the sermons he would glare at him murderously.

  Dipankar felt that the Raja of Marh wanted to be loved, but found it hard to be lovable.

  11.10

  Dipankar sat in a boat on the Ganga.

  An old man, a brahmin, with a caste-mark on his forehead, kept up a loud commentary to the splash of the oars. He compared Brahmpur to Banaras, to the great confluence at Allahabad, to Hardwar, and to Sagar Island where the Ganga met the sea.

  ‘In Allahabad, the meeting of the blue waters of the Yamuna and the brown waters of the Ganga is like the meeting of Rama and Bharat,’ said the old man piously.

  ‘But what about the third river of the Triveni which meets them there?’ asked Dipankar. ‘What would you compare the river Saraswati to?’

  The old man looked at Dipankar, annoyed. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘From Calcutta,’ said Dipankar. He had asked the question innocently, and was sorry he had annoyed the man.

  ‘Hmmmh!’ snorted the old man.

  ‘And where are you from?’ asked Dipankar.

  ‘From Salimpur.’

  ‘Where is that?’ asked Dipankar.

  ‘It is in Rudhia District,’ said the old man. He was now bending down and examining his disfigured toenails.

  ‘And where is that?’ persisted Dipankar.

  The old man looked at Dipankar incredulously.

  ‘How far is it from here?’ asked Dipankar, seeing that the old man was not going to reply without further prompting.

  ‘It is seven rupees away,’ said the old man.

  ‘All right,’ yelled the boatman, ‘here we are. Now, good people, bathe your fill and pray for the good of all men, including myself.’

  But the old man would have none of it. ‘This is not the right spot,’ he shouted. ‘I have been here every year for twenty years and you cannot fool me. It is there.’ He pointed to a spot in the middle of the line of boats.

  ‘A policeman without a uniform,’ said the boatman in disgust. Reluctantly, he pulled on the oars a few more times, and took the boat to the indicated spot. Here there were quite a number of bathers already. The water was shallow, and it was possible to stand. The splashing and chanting of the bathers merged with the sound of a temple bell. Marigolds and rose petals floated in the muddy water, together with bits of soggy pamphlets, pieces of straw, the indigo-coloured wrapping of matchboxes, and empty packets made of stitched leaves.

  The old man stripped down to his lungi, revealing the holy thread that stretched from his left shoulder to his right hip. In an even louder voice than before he exhorted the pilgrims to bathe. ‘Hana lo, hana lo,’ he shouted, spoonerizing the syllables in his excitement. Dipankar stripped to his underwear and plunged in.

  The water did not look clean, but he stood around splashing himself for a minute or two. For some reason, this holiest of all spots did not attract him as much as the spot where the boatman had halted. There he had had the impulse to jump in. The old man, however, was transported with happy excitement. He squatted, ducking himself completely in the water, he cupped it in his hands and drank it, he pronounced ‘Hari Om’ as deeply and as often as he could. The other pilgrims were equally ecstatic. Men and women alike, they were delighting in the touch of the Ganga as babies delight in the touch of their mothers, and were shouting: ‘Ganga Mata ki jai!’

  ‘O Ganga! O Yamuna,’ cried the old man, cupping his hands towards the sun and reciting in Sanskrit—

  ‘O Ganga! O Yamuna!

  Godavari, Saraswati!

  Narmada, Indus, Kaveri,

  Be manifest in these waters.’

  On the way back, he said to Dipankar:

  ‘So you have had your first dip in the Ganga since you’ve come to Brahmpur!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dipankar, wondering how he could have known that.

  ‘I bathe here every day—five, six times a day,’ continued the old man rather boastfully. ‘This was only a short dip. I bathe day and night—sometimes for two hours at a time. Mother Ganga washes all your sins away.’

  ‘You must sin a lot,’ said Dipankar, some of his Chatterji acerbity rising to the surface.

  The old man looked shocked at this sacrilegious humour.

  ‘Don’t you all bathe at home?’ he asked Dipankar in scathing reproof.

  ‘Yes,’ laughed Dipankar. ‘But not for two hours at a time.’ He thought of Kuku’s tub and began smiling. ‘And not in the river.’

  ‘Don’t say “river”,’ said the old man sharply. ‘Say “Ganga” or “Ganga Mata”. It is not just a river.’

  Dipankar nodded. He was amazed to notice tears in the old man’s eyes.

  ‘From the ice cave of Gaumukh in the glacier to the ocean surrounding Sagar Island, I have travelled along Ganga Mata,’ said the old man. ‘I could close my eyes and know where I was.’

  ‘Because of the different languages they speak along the route?’ asked Dipankar humbly.

  ‘No! Because of the air in my nostrils. The thin piercing air of the glacier, the piny breeze of the gorges, the scent of Hardwar, the stench of Kanpur, the distinct fragrances of Prayag and Banaras . . . and so on down to the humid, salty air of the Sundarbans and Sagar.’

  He had closed his eyes and was summoning up his memories. His nostrils opened wider and a look of peace came over his irritable face.

  ‘Next year I will make the return journey,’ he said, ‘from Sagar in the delta up to the snows of the Himalaya and the great Gaumukh glacier and the open mouth of the ice cave once again, under the great peak of Shiva-linga . . . then I will have made a complete circuit, a complete parikrama of the Ganga . . . from ice to salt, from salt to ice. Next year, next year, through ice and salt my spirit will surely be preserved.’

  11.11

  The following day Dipankar noticed that there were a few perplexed-looking young foreigners in the audience—and wondered what they were making of all this. They probably couldn’t understand a word of the sermon or the bhajans. But the beautiful, slightly snub-nosed Pushpa soon came to their rescue.

  ‘Now,’ she said in English, ‘the idea is simply this: all we are gatting is surrandered to lotus feet of Lord.’

  The foreigners nodded vigorously and smiled.

  ‘Now I must mantion there will be maditation in Eng
lish by Baba himself,’ announced Pushpa.

  But Sanaki Baba was in no mood for meditation that day. He was chatting away on whatever took his fancy to the Professor and the young preacher, both of whom he had brought up on to the white-sheeted platform. Pushpa looked displeased.

  Perhaps sensing this, Sanaki Baba relented, and a very abbreviated meditation session began. He closed his eyes for a couple of minutes and told his audience to do the same. Then he said a long ‘Om’. Finally, in a confident, warm and peaceful voice, in atrociously accented English, pausing long between each phrase, he murmured:

  ‘The river of love, the river of bliss, the liver of right. . . . ‘Take in environment and supreme being through nostrils. . . .

  ‘Now you will feel anand and alok—blissness and lightness. Feel, do not think. . . .’

  Suddenly he got up and began to sing. Someone struck up the rhythm on the tabla, someone else began clashing small cymbals together. Then he began to dance. Seeing Dipankar he said: ‘Get up, Divyakar, get up and dance. And you, ladies, get up. Mataji, get up, get up,’ he said, dragging a reluctant old woman of sixty to her feet. Soon she was dancing away by herself. Other women began dancing. The foreigners began dancing, and danced with great gusto. Everyone was dancing, each by himself and all together—and smiling with joy and contentment. Even Dipankar, who hated dancing, was dancing to the sound of the cymbals and the tabla and the obsessively chanted name of Krishna, Krishna, Radha’s beloved, Krishna.

  The cymbals, tabla, and chanting stopped, and the dancing was over as suddenly as it had begun.

  Sanaki Baba was smiling benignantly all around and sweating.

  Pushpa had some announcements to make, but before she did so, she surveyed the audience and frowned with concentration. For a few seconds she gathered her thoughts. Then she told them rather reprovingly in English: ‘You have now dancing and sermon and sankirtan and maditation. And the love. But when you are in offices and factories, then what? Then Babaji is not with you in physical form. Then Babaji is with you, but not in physical form. So you must not become attached to the dancing and the practice. If you get attached, it is no use. You must have the saakshi bhaava, the feeling of witnessing, or else what is the use?’

  Clearly Pushpa was not entirely happy. She then announced the time of dinner and mentioned that Sanaki Baba would be speaking to a huge congregation at noon the next day. She provided clear instructions on how to get there.

  Dinner was simple but good: curds, vegetables, rice—and rasmalai for dessert. Dipankar managed to sit next to Pushpa. Everything she said seemed to him to be utterly charming and utterly true.

  ‘I used to be in teaching,’ she said to him in Hindi. ‘I was tied to so many things. But then this came, and Baba said to me, manage it all, and I felt as free as a bird. Young people are not stupid,’ she added seriously. ‘Most religious sadhus have destroyed religion. They like big funds, big followings, complete control. I am left free by Babaji. I have no boss. Even IAS officers, even Ministers have a boss. Even the Prime Minister has a boss. He must answer to the people.’

  Dipankar nodded his head in vigorous assent.

  All of a sudden he felt like renouncing everything—Sri Aurobindo, the Chatterji mansion, the possibility of a job in a bank, his hut under the laburnum tree, all the Chatterjis including Cuddles—and being free—free and boss-less as a bird.

  ‘How true,’ he said, looking at her wonderingly.

  11.12

  Postcard 1

  Dear Dada,

  I am writing to you from a tent near the Ganga, lying on a bed of straw. It’s hot here, and noisy, because you can always hear loudspeakers with bhajans and kirtans and other announcements and the whistles of the frequent trains, but I am at peace. I have found my Ideal, Dada. I had a sense on the train coming here that it would be in Brahmpur that I would discover who I truly was and the direction of my individual existence, and I even hoped that I might find my Ideal. But since the only girl I knew in Brahmpur was Lata, I was worried lest it was she who should turn out to be my Ideal. That is partly why I have so far avoided visiting her family, and have deferred meeting Savita and her husband till after the Pul Mela is over. But now I need not worry.

  Her name is Pushpa, and she is indeed a flower. But she is a serious person, so our pushpa-lila will consist of throwing ideas and feelings at each other, though I would like to sprinkle her with roses and jasmines. As Robi Babu says:

  . . . for me alone your love has been waiting

  Through worlds and ages awake and wandering,

  Is this true?

  That my voice, eyes, lips have brought you relief,

  In a trice, from the cycle of life after life,

  Is this true?

  That you read on my soft forehead infinite Truth,

  My ever-loving friend,

  Is this true?

  Just looking at her, listening to her is enough for me, though. I think I have gone beyond mere physical attraction. It is the Female Principle that I adore in her.

  Postcard 2

  A mouse is playing at my feet, and last night I was kept awake by it—and, of course, by my thoughts. But this is all the lila, the play of the Universe, and I have plunged into it with great happiness. I am afraid the first postcard disappeared quickly, so I’m continuing on another one of the two dozen self-addressed postcards that Ma insisted on my taking with me.

  Also, you must forgive my handwriting, which is bad. Pushpa has wonderful handwriting. I saw her write my name in the entry book in English, and she put a mystical full moon of a dot above my ‘i’.

  How are Ma and Baba and Meenakshi and Kuku and Tapan and Cuddles and yourself? I do not miss any of you as yet, and when I think of you, I try to think of you with a disinterested love. I do not even miss my thatched hut where I meditate—or ‘maditate’, as Pushpa, with her delightful accent and warm smile, puts it. She says we should be free—free as birds—and I have decided to travel after the Mela wherever my spirit takes me in order that I can truly discover the Entirety of

  Postcard 3

  my own soul and the Being of India. Just wandering around at the Pul Mela has helped me to realize that the Spiritual Source of India is not the Zero or Unity or Duality or even the Trinity, but Infinity itself. If I felt that she might agree, I would ask her to travel with me, but she is a devotee of Sanaki Baba, and has decided to devote her whole life to him.

  But I realize I haven’t told you who he is. He is the holy man, the baba in whose compound I am staying down here on the sands of the Ganga. Mr Maitra brought me to see him, and Sanaki Baba decided I should stay here. He is a man of great wisdom and sweetness and humour. Mr Maitra told him how unhappy and peace-less he felt, and Sanaki Baba provided him with some relief and told him that he would later explain to him how to meditate. When he left, Babaji turned to me and said: ‘Divyakar’—he likes to call me Divyakar sometimes for some reason—‘I crash into a table in the darkness, yet it is not the table that has hurt me but the lack of light. So, with old age, all these small things hurt, because the light of meditation is absent.’ ‘But meditation, Baba,’ I said, ‘is not easy. You make it sound as if it were easy.’ ‘Is sleep easy?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But not for an insomniac,’ he said. ‘And meditation is easy, but you must gain that ease again.’

  So I have decided to find that ease, and I have also decided that the bank of the Ganga is the place where I will find it.

  Yesterday I met an old man in a boat who said that he had gone all

  Postcard 4

  the way along the Ganga from Gaumukh to Sagar, and it set up a yearning in my heart to do the same. Maybe I will even grow my hair long, renounce everything and take sannyaas. Sanaki Baba was quite interested in the fact that Baba (how confusing all these ‘Babas’ are) is a High Court Judge, but he said on another occasion during a sermon that even those who live in great mansions turn to dust in the end, in which even donkeys roll. It brought things home to me in ev
ery sense. Tapan will take care of Cuddles in my absence, and if not him, someone else will. I remember one of our school songs at Jheel School: Robi Babu’s ‘Akla Cholo Ré’, which sounded absurd to me even then when it was shouted out by 400 voices. But now that I have decided to ‘travel alone’ myself, it has become a beacon to me, and I hum it all the time (though sometimes Pushpa tells me to stop).

  Everything is so much at peace here, there is none of the acrimony that religion sometimes causes, well, such as we saw that evening of the lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission. I have been thinking lately of showing Pushpa my scribblings on various spiritual subjects. If you should meet Hemangini, please tell her to type out my jottings on the Void in triplicate; carbon copies stain one’s fingers when one is reading them, and my handwriting is too much to ask Pushpa to read.

  Postcard 5

  One learns so much here every day, the horizons here are Infinite, and every day they expand. Over the whole of the Mela sands I can imagine the ‘Pul’ of pipal leaves, like a green rainbow spanning the Ganga from the ramp to the northern sands, carrying souls to the other side, and regenerating our polluted earth with its greenery. And when I bathe in the Ganga, which I do several times a day (don’t tell Ila Kaki, she’ll have a fit), then I feel a blessing flowing through my bones. Everyone chants, ‘Gange cha, Yamune cha aiva’, the mantra that Mrs Ganguly taught us to Ma’s annoyance, and I too chant it with the best of them!

  I remember, Dada, you once told me that the Ganga was a model for your novel, with its tributaries and distributaries and so on, but it now strikes me that the analogy is even more apt than you thought it at the time. For even if you now have to take on the additional burden of handling the family finances—since I won’t be able to help you at all—and even if it takes you a few more years to complete your novel, you can still think of the new flow of your life as a Brahmaputra, travelling apparently in a different direction, but which will, by strange courses yet unseen to us, surely merge with the broad Ganga of your imagination. At least I hope so, Dada. Of course I know how much your writing means to you, but what is a novel after all compared to the Quest for the Source?