ERIC NEWBY

Slowly Down the Ganges

Dedication

To Wanda – my fellow boatwoman

Epigraph

‘The Ganga has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilisation, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the Himalayas, snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below where my life and work have been cast.’

Jawaharlal Nehru

‘Here I asked repeatedly, and received a different account … Perhaps these particulars vary in different instances. At all events it is a proof how hard it is to gain, in this country, accurate information as to facts which seem most obvious to the senses.’

Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India Reginald Heber, D.D., Lord Bishop of Calcutta

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Long ago on the Ganges

2 The first sight of the river

3 Life at Hardwar

4 Down the Ganges

5 Through the Bhabar

6 The way to the Balawali Bridge

7 A short halt at a railway station

8 An encounter with a bridgekeeper

9 Terra firma

10 A journey through Uttar Pradesh

11 A place in the country

12 From a carriage window

13 Remembrance of things past

14 Slow boat to Kanpur

15 Christmas at Kanpur

16 The Ganges at Prayag

17 The way to Mirzapur

18 The fort at Chunar

19 A stay at Banaras

20 The day of Makara Sankranti

21 From Patna to Bankipore and back

22 Cooking a Baffat

23 The islands at Colganj

24 Into the Bhagirathi

25 Arrival at Calcutta

26 Down to the sea

Plates

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Footnotes

Maps

The course of the Ganges

From Hardwar to Bijnor

From Calcutta to Diamond Harbour

List of Illustrations

Stuck fast on the Upper Ganges, south of Hardwar

Newby carrying oars

Wedding at a village near the bridge at Raoli

Ram Baba, Lalta Prasad and Jagdish – our boatmen south of Fatehgarh, on the sands with a fire of stolen dung

Early morning

Between Allahabad and Mirzapur, with Bag Nath and Hira Lal

Bullock-cart from the ferry at Araul to Araul Mankapur

Devotee performing his morning puja

Mendicant child on the great sandbank at Allahabad

A bhur at Dinapore

Beggars on the way from Akbar’s embankment to the Sangam at the confluence of the Jumna and the Ganges at Allahabad

Dawn at the Sangam

A cremation at Banaras

Outside the post office at Banaras

A goddess

Wanda outside the Victoria Jubilee Club at Bankipore

The Ganges at Sultanganj – the embarkation point for the island of Jahngira

Arrival at Calcutta

Introduction

This is the story of a twelve-hundred-mile journey down the Ganges from the place where it enters the Plains of India to the Sandheads, forty miles offshore in the Bay of Bengal, made by two Europeans in the winter of 1963–4. It is not an heroic story such as that of Franklin and his companions chewing leather on the banks of the Coppermine River but having got there (it is difficult to envy Franklin); of Ives seeing for the first time the great canyon of the Colorado; of Garnier reaching the headwaters of the Yangtze; or of Bailey and Morshead travelling sixteen hundred miles on foot through the gorges of the Tsangpo. We were born too late for such feats, even if we had had the courage and determination to perform them. We were even prevented from emulating the painter James Fraser’s long journey to the sources of the Bhagirathi Ganges – one which is made by numerous pilgrims – by the coming of the snow and our own meagre resources. It is not a book about India today; neither is it concerned with politics or economics. It is certainly not erudite, as must be obvious to anyone who has the patience to read it. It is about the river as we found it.

In most standard works of reference the Ganges does not even rate an entry in the tables which list the great rivers of the world, for it is only 1,500 miles long from its source in the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. The Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi/Missouri are all more than two and a half times as long as the Ganges. The Irtysh and the Yangtze are both twice as long. The Congo, the Yellow River, the Mackenzie, the Niger, the Danube, the Euphrates, the Brahmaputra and the Indus, to name only a few, are all longer. But, all the same, it is a great river.

It is great because, to millions of Hindus, it is the most sacred, most venerated river on earth. For them it is Ganga Ma – Mother Ganges. To bathe in it is to wash away guilt. To drink the water, having bathed in it, and to carry it away in bottles for those who have not had the good fortune to make the pilgrimage to it is meritorious. To be cremated on its banks, having died there, and to have one’s ashes cast on its waters, is the wish of every Hindu. Even to ejaculate ‘Ganga, Ganga’, at the distance of 100 leagues from the river may atone for the sins committed during three previous lives.

In almost any bazaar in India one can buy a little, oblong paperback book. It is rather like a book of tickets for some Eastern tram service. It contains two works, bound up together. They are the Gangastottara-sata-namavali and the Ganga-sabasra-namastotra. They enumerate the 108 and the 1,000 names of the Ganges, all printed metrically and in columns so that they can be chanted devotionally; but unless one is an expert in Sanskrit, as was Colonel Pickering in Pygmalion, it is impossible to understand them. She is The Pure, The Eternal, The Light Amid the Darkness, The Cow Which Gives Much Milk, The Liberator, The Destroyer of Poverty and Sorrow, The Creator of Happiness, to give only a few of her names.¹

The Ganges was not always so highly regarded. When the Aryan invaders first entered India they were more impressed by the Indus. It was only later that they gave Ganga the highest position, as Sursari, River of the Gods – perhaps because they had found out what European scientists discovered later: that its water has remarkable properties. Bottled, it will keep for at least a year. At its confluence with the River Jumna which, particularly at the time of the great fair which takes place there every January, contains dangerous numbers of coli, the Ganges itself is said to be free of them. At Banaras thousands drink the water every day at bathing places which are close to the outfalls of appalling open drains. They appear to survive. The presence of large numbers of decomposing corpses seems to have no adverse effect on it. (Before setting off we were advised that when we wanted to make tea sedimentation could be accelerated by stirring it with a stick of alum; but we never did this.) Taken on board sailing ships in the Hooghly at Calcutta it is said to have outlasted all other waters. In spite of this many Hindus have reservations about how far downriver they are prepared to drink it. Some say as far as Dhulian, near the place where the Ganges under the name of the Bhagirathi and later the Hooghly, takes off for Calcutta. The inhabitants of Soron, on the Upper Ganges far north of cities like Allahabad and Banaras, believe that this is the last point at which the water is really good because, they say, no sewage has yet entered it. (At Soron there is a large tank, reputed to be fed by the Ganges, the waters of which have the peculiar property of dissolving the bones of the dead within three days of their being deposited in it.)

It is certainly responsible for more good than evil. Even cholera, one of the great killers, does not go down the river. It is born in the stagnant waters of the Delta in Bengal and ascends it carried by pilgrims who visit the sacred places in hundreds of thousands every year. The great nineteenth-century epidemics started in Bengal, spread to Hardwar, one of the holiest places of all on the Upper Ganges; then north-west into the Punjab and from there overland into Afghanistan, Persia, Russia and finally into Western Europe. Even today the seasonal rise in the incidence of cholera coincides with the great religious fairs which take place on the banks of the river.

The Ganges first sees the light of day when it emerges from an ice cave above Gangotri, 13,800 feet up in the Garhwal Himalayas. Hindus believe that it was from this cave that Ganga, the daughter of King Himavat and the nymph, Mena, was persuaded to come down to earth by Bhagiratha, a descendant of King Sagar, in order to redeem from hell the souls of the sixty thousand sons of the king who had been reduced to ashes by a holy man whom they had slighted.

There is some dispute between the devotees of Siva and Vishnu, the two principal sects of Hindus, as to which god assisted at the birth of Ganga. Vishnuvites believe that she rose from the big toe of Vishnu’s left foot, Sivites say that to break her fall on earth Siva allowed her to flow through his hair, which can still be seen hanging in the form of icicles from the roof of the cave.

At Hardwar, with twelve hundred miles of its course still to run to its nearest outlet to the sea it has already fallen 12,800 feet and here, only 1,000 feet above the sea, it begins to irrigate the land with the aid of wells and canals, and to give electric power. On its way to the sea it passes through three states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. In them live 150,000,000 people, almost a third of the entire population of India. Of these nearly half live in Uttar Pradesh. There are 69,000 villages in Uttar Pradesh with populations of less than 500 and in this state more than eighty per cent of the cultivated holdings are of less than five acres (some are as little as half an acre). For much of its course the Ganges is not a navigable river in the real sense of the word, although, in spite of the fact that millions of cubic feet of water are drawn off from it, its strength is constantly renewed by the rivers that flow into it. It is in the 600-mile stretch between Allahabad and Rajmahal that it really gathers strength. At Rajmahal, in full flood, it goes down at 1,000,800 cubic feet a second which is greater than the maximum discharge of the Mississippi (the Thames at Staines discharges at 6,600 feet a second in full flood). Fortunately it brings down with it vast quantities of silt which it deposits free of charge for a season before sweeping it further downstream. A Victorian engineer, Sir Charles Lyell, estimated that 335,000,000 tons of silt were discharged each year at Ghazipur on the Middle Ganges. ‘Nearly the weight of sixty replicas of the Great Pyramid.’ A useless comparison. ‘It is scarcely possible,’ he goes on, ‘to present any picture to the mind which will convey an adequate conception to the mind of the mighty scale of this operation, so tranquilly and almost insensibly carried out by the Ganges.’ Whether some smallholder in Bihar, watching his half-acre slipping noisily into the water and his family being swept downstream on top of a haystack would regard the operation as being either tranquil or insensible is open to question. No one knows for certain the depth of the alluvial silt in the Delta.

Like the black sheep of the family sent to Australia, the Ganges is always trying to straighten itself out. It sets its current strongly against one bank, undercutting it and leaving sluggish water on the other shore on which new deposits are made, until it finally breaks through and begins the whole process afresh. The Gangetic Plain is riddled with old, dead watercourses that the Ganges has forgotten about. At Kasimbazar in Bengal, where one of the first British trading stations was established in 1658, there is a flight of steps from which it is said that Warren Hastings used to come ashore. Only the river has gone, leaving a few pools choked with water hyacinth. The once illustrious city of Kanauj on the Upper Ganges is now so far from the actual stream that, passing it in a boat in the dry season, one does not realise that it is there at all. Rajmahal, once the capital of Bengal, was left high and dry, three miles from it, in 1863. Later, in the seventies, it was seven miles from it. Now the Ganges has returned. Too late, the city is moribund. The Bhagirathi, the short, eighty-mile stretch which connects it with the Hooghly, is more or less dry for eight months of the year. Power-vessels bound for Calcutta have to make a 400-mile detour through East Pakistan to reach the port which is itself always in danger of suffering the same fate as Rajmahal. Four hundred miles out in the Bay of Bengal the sea is discoloured by the silt brought down by it. The Ganges justifies the one hundred and second name given it in the Gangastottara-satanamavali – ‘Roaming About Rose-Apple-Tree Island’, which is India.

Note: All diacritical marks which correctly should appear in Indian names have been omitted in this book.

Gangastottara-sata-namavali

(The 108 names of the Ganges)

1 Ganga | Ganges
2 Visnu-padabja-sambhuta | Born from the lotus-like foot of Vishnu
3 Hara-vallabha | Dear to Hara (Siva)
4 Himacalendra-tanaya | Daughter of the Lord of Himalaya
5 Giri-mandala-gamini | Flowing through the mountain-country
6 Tarakarati-janani | Mother of [the demon] Taraka’s enemy (i.e. Kartikeya)
7 Sagaratmaja-tarika | Liberator of the [60,000] sons of Sagara (who had been burnt to ashes by the angry glance of the sage Kapila)
8 Sarasvati-samayukta | Joined to [the river] Sarasvati (said to have flowed underground and joined the Ganges at Allahabad)
9 Sughosa | Melodious (or: Noisy)
10 Sindhu-gamini | Flowing to the ocean
11 Bhagirathi | Pertaining to the saint Bhagiratha (whose prayers brought the Ganges down from Heaven)
12 Bhagyavati | Happy, fortunate
13 Bhagiratha-rathanuga | Following the chariot of Bhagiratha (who led the Ganges down to Hell to purify the ashes of Sagara’s sons)
14 Trivikrama-padoddhuta | Falling from the foot of Vishnu
15 Triloka-patha-gamini | Flowing through the three worlds (i.e. Heaven, earth and the atmosphere or lower regions)
16 Ksira-subhra | White as milk
17 Bahu-ksira | [A cow] which gives much milk
18 Ksira-vrksa-samakula | Abounding in [the four] ‘milk-trees’ (i.e. Nyagrodha (Banyan), Udumbara (glomer ous fig-tree), Asvattha (holy fig-tree), and Madhuka (Bassia Latifolia))
19 Trilocana-jata-vasini | Dwelling in the matted locks of Siva
20 Rna-traya-vimocini | Releasing from the Three Debts, viz. (1) Brahma-carya (study of the Vedas) to the rishis, (2) sacrifice and worship to the gods, and (3) procreation of a son, to the Manes
21 Tripurari-siras-cuda | The tuft on the head of the enemy of Tripura (Siva). (Tripura was a triple fortification, built in the sky, air and earth of gold, silver and iron respectively, by Maya for the Asuras, and burnt by Siva)
22 Jahnavi | Pertaining to Jahnu (who drank up the Ganges in a rage after it had flooded his sacrificial ground, but relented, and allowed it to flow from his ear)
23 Nata-bhiti-hrt | Carrying away fear
24 Avyaya | Imperishable
25 Nayanananda-dayini | Affording delight to the eye
26 Naga-putrika | Daughter of the mountain
27 Niranjana | Not painted with collyrium (i.e. colourless)
28 Nitya-suddha | Eternally pure
29 Nira-jala-pariskrta | Adorned with a net of water
30 Savitri | Stimulator
31 Salila-vasa | Dwelling in water
32 Sagarambusa-medhini | Swelling the waters of the ocean
33 Ramya | Delightful
34 Bindu-saras | River made of water-drops
35 Avyakta | Unmanifest, unevolved
36 Vrndaraka-samasrita | Resort of the eminent
37 Uma-sapatni | Having the same husband (i.e. Siva) as Uma (Parvati)
38 Subhrangi | Having beautiful limbs (or body)
39 Srimati | Beautiful, auspicious, illustrious, etc.
40 Dhavalambara | Having a dazzling white garment
41 Akhandala-vana-vasa | Having Siva as a forest-dweller (hermit)
42 Khandendu-krta-sekhara | Having the crescent moon as a crest
43 Amrtakara-salila | Whose water is a mine of nectar
44 Lila-lamghita-parvata | Leaping over mountains in sport
45 Virinci-kalasa-vasa | Dwelling in the water-pot of Brahma (or Vishnu, or Siva)
46 Triveni | Triple-braided (i.e. consisting of the waters of three rivers: Ganges, Yamuna and Sarasvati)
47 Trigunatmika | Possessing the three gunas
48 Sangataghaugha-samani | Destroying the mass of sins of Sangata
49 Sankha-dundubhi-nisvana | Making a noise like a conch-shell and drum
50 Bhiti-hrt | Carrying away fear
51 Bhagya-janani | Creating happiness
52 Bhinna-brahmanda-darpini | Taking pride in the broken egg of Brahma
53 Nandini | Happy
54 Sighra-ga | Swift-flowing
55 Siddha | Perfect, holy
56 Saranya | Yielding shelter, help or protection
57 Sasi-sekhara | Moon-crested
58 Sankari | Belonging to Sankara (Siva)
59 Saphari-purna | Full of fish (esp. Cyprinus Saphore – a kind of bright little fish that glistens when darting about in shallow water – or carp)
60 Bharga-murdha-krtalaya | Having Bharga’s (Siva’s) head as an abode
61 Bhava-priya | Dear to Bhava (Siva)
62 Satya-sandha-priya | Dear to the faithful
63 Hamsa-svarupini | Embodied in the forms of swans
64 Bhagiratha-suta | Daughter of Bhagiratha
65 Ananta | Eternal
66 Sarac-candra-nibhanana | Resembling the autumn moon
67 Om-kara-rupini | Having the appearance of the sacred syllable Om
68 Atula | Peerless
69 Krida-kallola-karini | Sportively billowing
70 Svarga-sopana-sarani | Flowing like a staircase to Heaven
71 Sarva-deva-svarupini | Embodied in the pantheon
72 Ambhah-prada | Bestowing water
73 Duhkha-hantri | Destroying sorrow
74 Santi-santana-karini | Bringing about the continuance of peace
75 Daridrya-hantri | Destroyer of poverty
76 Siva-da | Bestowing happiness
77 Samsara-visa-nasini | Destroying the poison of illusion
78 Prayaga-nilaya | Having Prayaga (Allahabad) as an abode
79 Sita | ‘Furrow’. Name of the eastern branch of the four mythical branches into which the heavenly Ganges is supposed to divide after falling on Mount Meru
80 Tapa-traya-vimocini | Releasing from the Three Afflictions
81 Saranagata-dinarta-paritrana | Protector of the sick and suffering who come to you for refuge
82 Sumukti-da | Giving complete [spiritual] emancipation
83 Siddhi-yoga-nisevita | Resorted to (for the acquisition of success or magic powers)
84 Papa-hantri | Destroyer of sin
85 Pavanangi | Having a pure body
86 Parabrahma-svarupini | Embodiment of the Supreme Spirit
87 Puma | Full
88 Puratana | Ancient
89 Punya | Auspicious
90 Punya-da | Bestowing merit
91 Punya-vahini | Possessing (or producing) merit
92 Pulomajarcita | Worshipped by Indrani (wife of Indra)
93 Puta | Pure
94 Puta-tribhuvana | Purifier of the Three Worlds
95 Japa | Muttering, whispering
96 Jangama | Moving, alive
97 Jangamadhara | Support or substratum of what lives or moves
98 Jala-rupa | Consisting of water
99 Jagad-d-hita | Friend or benefactor of what lives or moves
100 Jahnu-putri | Daughter of Jahnu
101 Jagan-matr | Mother of what lives or moves
102 Jambu-dvipa-viharini | Roaming about (or delighting in) Rose-apple-tree Island (India)
103 Bhava-patni | Wife of Bhava (Siva)
104 Bhisma-matr | Mother of Bhisma
105 Siddha | Holy
106 Ramya | Delightful, beautiful
107 Uma-kara-kamala-sanjata | Born from the lotus which created Uma (Parvati) (presumably a poetic way of saying that they were sisters)
108 Ajnana-timira-bhanu | A light amid the darkness of ignorance

CHAPTER ONE Long ago on the Ganges

Gange Cha Yamune Chaiva

Godavarai Saraswati

Narmade Sindhu Kaveri

Jale Asmin Sannidhim Kuru

(O Holy Mother Ganges! O Yamuna! O Godavari! Saraswati! O Narmada! Sindhu! Kaveri! May you all be pleased to be manifest in these waters with which I shall purify myself!)

Prayer to the Seven Sacred Rivers recited by

every devout Hindu at the time of taking his bath

I love rivers. I was born on the banks of the Thames and, like my father before me, I had spent a great deal of time both on it and in it. I enjoy visiting their sources: Thames Head, in a green meadow in the Cotswolds; the river Po corning out from under a heap of boulders among the debris left by picnickers by Monte Viso; the Isonzo bubbling up over clean sand in a deep cleft in the rock in the Julian Alps; the Danube (or one of its sources) emerging in baroque splendour in a palace garden at Donaueschingen. I like exploring them. I like the way in which they grow deeper and wider and dirtier but always, however dirty they become, managing to retain some of the beauty with which they were born.

For me the most memorable river of all was the Ganges. I had not seen it for more than twenty years since the time when, as a young officer, I had spent six months on its banks at a remote military station some fifty miles from Kanpur.

I arrived there in March, at the start of the hottest season. That summer in the Indian Plain is something which I can never forget, and yet it is something which I find difficult to believe that I ever experienced. I remember a sky like an inverted brass bowl overhead and the earth like an overcooked omelette beneath it.

Through this desiccated landscape the Ganges flowed, not more than a couple of hundred yards wide. It was a disagreeable shade of green and in it floated imperfectly cremated corpses and an occasional crocodile.

All through March and April it was terribly hot but during the second week of May the weather began to change for the better. There were two light showers of rain, the first harbingers of the monsoon, and the midday temperature sometimes fell as low as a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

On 20th May I was standing on the parade ground where I had been teaching recruits to do up their boots. All that day the sky had been overcast. All afternoon it had been very quiet. At four o’clock the recruits were dismissed and they were clumping off to their tents in their great, newly-tied boots when suddenly they began to utter moaning sounds, break their ranks and run for their lives. I wondered if it was another Indian Mutiny.

It was only a dust storm. It came roaring across the plain as black and solid-looking as a cliff. I took one look at it, got on my bicycle and fled.

I reached my bungalow at the same time as the sandstorm and locked the door on it. Outside it was as black as night, the electric light cables snapped, trees were uprooted and a large marquee complete with flailing guy ropes and tent pegs whistled past on the wind. There was a terrible roaring sound. It lasted half an hour, then the wind died away as quickly as it had come, by which time the floor of the bungalow was ankle-deep in sand – one of the windows had been broken by the wind. It was succeeded by a violent rainstorm with thunder and lightning.

When it was all over I put on some old clothes and a pair of gumboots and went down a sunken lane to the river, churning my way through the mud.

At the foot of this lane which was thickly overshadowed by trees, there was a shrine dedicated to the god Siva. There was no temple, just a lingam, a black stone on a plinth at the foot of a pipal tree on which offerings of sweets and marigolds were scattered. Although I went there almost every day and I never saw anyone else, the offerings were always fresh. Buried in the heart of the tree itself, which had grown round it, there was a block of stone with a frieze of figures carved on it. It was a place with a feeling of great antiquity and the magic beauty of a sacred grove in a painting by Claude.

But on this particular day I had come because I wanted to see what had happened to the river as a result of the storm.

The water was no longer green and sluggish. It had been churned until it was the colour of milky coffee and it had spread up over the low-lying bank to the north and was flowing strongly. Overhead, apart from a few egg-shaped clouds which floated across it at regular intervals, the sky was clear and blue. Beyond the swollen river the sand flats on the opposite shore extended as far as the eye could see, to a distant skyline dotted with trees which I had never noticed. Everything in this landscape was brilliant and distinct. It was like the springtime of the world.

Downstream a herd of water-buffaloes was swimming the river. Men and boys were crossing with them, perched on the backs of half a dozen beasts out on the flanks of the main body. They were shouting and laughing to one another and making encouraging noises to the animals which breasted the stream powerfully but slowly. Then they came lumbering out of the water and thundered up into the combe where I was standing, their flanks all glistening, and as they went by the riders waved their sticks at me and shouted that the hot weather was nearly over. Then they all disappeared up the hill, and I was alone by the river. There was something about it, the ability it had shown to change in the space of an hour, to expand and stretch away to distant horizons, to the existence of which I had not even given a thought, that made me long to follow it on and on until it reached the sea. The next day I went on leave to the Hills, and when I came back the rains had come in earnest and the Ganges was itself like a vast, inland sea. A few weeks more and I was sent to the Middle East. Twenty-two years passed before I saw it again.

CHAPTER TWO The first sight of the river

How magnificent she is when she flows in the valley Rishikesh! She has a blue colour like that of the ocean. The water is extremely clear and sweet. Rich people from the plains get water from Rishikesh. It is taken in big copper vessels to far-off places in India.

Sri Swami Sivananda: Mother Ganges; Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy, 1962

Together with Wanda, my wife, I went out on to one of the platforms of the temple. Upstream towards Rishikesh, the river wound between sand and shingle, sometimes hidden from view amongst groves of trees from which long, horizontal bands of mist were slowly rising. Immediately below was the Har-ki-Pairi Ghat with its ludicrous clock tower and, just upriver from it, the barrage at Bhimgoda that channelled the water from the mainstream into the canal reducing the river below it to a trickle among stones that were the colour of old bones. This attenuated stream was the Ganges, the river that we hoped to travel down until we reached the sea. To the south of the Hardwar Gorge, here, at its narrowest, not more than a mile wide, it wound away, a narrow ribbon, reach after reach of it until it was swallowed up in the haze of the vast plain that stretched through all points of the compass from east of south to the extreme west.

Now, for the first time, I realised the magnitude of the journey that lay before us; but I had none of the feelings of the explorer. This was no uncharted river. Millions lived on its banks, regarding it as an essential adjunct without which their existence would be unthinkable, if not impossible; bathing in it; drinking it; washing their clothes in it; pouring it on to their fields; dying by it; being taken into its bosom by it and being borne away.

Even if we succeeded in reaching the end of the river this was no great feat. None of the uncommunicable pleasure that came to the first explorers to look on the great rivers of the earth, the tales of which had meant so much in my youth, would be ours, could ever be. Perhaps it was better so. I had waited many years to make this journey, since as a young man, I sat on the banks of the Ganges at Fatehgarh, and watched the herd of water-buffalo crossing the river. Whatever satisfaction I derived from it and whatever profit I might find, would probably be of the spirit, perhaps uncommunicable to others. Bells sounded and cymbals clashed in the temple. G., our companion, emerged from it, mollified and subdued by his devotions, and together the three of us went down the path to an eggless breakfast at the railway station.

We had arrived at Hardwar from Delhi, at half past six the previous morning when it was still dark. We were extremely cold – the train had been unheated and the window had remained open despite our efforts to close it. With a retinue of porters that we were already beginning to regard as inevitable, we moved off towards the waiting-room where we were to meet an agent from Shell who had been allocated the unenviable task of helping us to find a boat capable of taking us down twelve hundred miles of the Ganges to the sea.

He had not yet arrived. Soon the light of a grey dawn began to seep in under the roof of the station. It revealed a religious bookstall on which the proprietor was already beginning to set out his stock, and numbers of red-behinded monkeys which, like the cows at the station at Delhi the night before but without the religious sanction which allows cows in Hindu India to do what they like, were taking liberties with passengers’ baggage.

I bought a guide book from the bookseller. ‘Caution’, it said. ‘Hardwar is a dry area, therefore do not keep with you, any intoxicative article along with meat, eggs, etc. Wine, Bhang, Charas, Ganja, Opium, etc., are not allowed here! Those who are addicted to such habits can obtain from Lahksar, Rooorkee, or Dehradun, meat and aggs from Jwalapur (Pick-pockets theives and gamblers). Take every possible care of your valueables from theives and pickpockets; here you will find them on every step.’

With the dawn came breakfast: porridge, tea and toast, brought by a sad-looking waiter in a grimy white uniform and a head-cloth that had seen better days. He was the archetype of all the waiters on all the railway stations on which we were to breakfast. On the walls, prominently displayed, were notices warning visitors that in the sacred area of Hardwar – which included the station – neither fish, nor fowl nor eggs would be served.

Some time later the man from Shell appeared, together with a colleague. They had already tried to find a boat for us but without success. ‘If we are to do so,’ they said, ‘we should set out instantly.’ We were just getting into their motor car when G., who was going to accompany us on the first part of the journey and who was of high caste, announced that he had not yet performed his ritual ablutions. He disappeared into the station retiring-room for half an hour while the rest of the party waited in the cold, Wanda and I with ill-concealed impatience; the men from Shell with Oriental stoicism. What did Oriental stoicism conceal, I wondered – thoughts of roasting over slow fires, impalements and decapitations?

I looked into their eyes, seeking the answer, but in vain. At this moment I formed a high opinion of them that subsequent experience was to enhance rather than diminish; a circumstance which, in India, where the inhabitants tire rapidly of the visitor and the converse is equally true, is contrary to the general rule.

In a silence provoked by exasperation we set off to visit the Irrigation Engineer, whose house was by the headworks of the Upper Ganges Canal, to ask for the loan of a boat. He was away on tour, but we were told that there was a contractor, the master of a temporary bridge over the river, who was reputed to have a boat and we set off in search of him.

The contractor lived in an ancient suburb to the south of the town called Kankhal. It was a pleasant place with grass growing on the verges of the side streets, in which holy men were taking their constitutionals carrying baggy umbrellas. It was a brilliant morning and the air was as invigorating as anything from an oxygen cylinder. Our spirits rose.

His office was on the ground floor of a small building. The room was sparsely furnished with a large divan which was covered with a clean white sheet. The windows, which were glassless, were fitted with shutters, and the light that filtered through them into the room gave it the appearance of being filled with water. The five of us squatted untidily on the divan which was awfully hard, and I tried to detect some sign of interest or compassion in the flinty eye of the contractor who addressed himself, without any of the customary enquiries about one’s health and strength, exclusively to the men from Shell. He was a Brahman. He wore a little white cap, a high-buttoned jacket of village homespun with a stand-up collar and a dhoti. Normally a dhoti looks rather ludicrous when worn with socks, suspenders and brown shoes; but there was nothing comical about this man of iron. He did not offer us tea.

‘He says he has a boat that he will sell you.’

‘We don’t want to buy a boat. We want to hire one.’

‘He says he will sell you a boat.’

It was obvious that no good would come of pursuing this particular line any further.

‘Yih kisti achcha hai?’ Even after a lapse of more than twenty years I was determined to speak the language, however deplorably.

‘Is it a good boat?’

So far as the contractor was concerned I might not have been there at all.

‘He says that it is the only boat in Hardwar. He is indifferent to whether you take it or not. He also says that if you do not wish to have his boat why have you come to ask him for it? He is a villain.’

‘Can we see it?’

‘He says that you can see the boat but as there is only one he asks why it is necessary for you to see it. However, if you wish to do so he will accompany you. It is at his bridge.’

‘We don’t have to thank him, do we?’

‘It is unnecessary.’

The bridge was at a place called Chandi Ghat,* some little way downstream from the town. As we drove over the embankment built by the British on the right bank, we had our first view of the Ganges.

It was a bit of a shock. It was December, the dry season, and the river which in the rains would have been a mile wide now ran sluggishly through a wasteland of sand and stones. Although it was already so far from its source, it was no more than 70 yards wide. Most of the water was being drawn into the Upper Ganges Canal which takes off just below Hardwar.

It was a wooden bridge supported on piers of rough dry stone, and the roadway across it was covered with coarse grass. Bullock-carts with huge wooden wheels were creaking over it, towards us, loaded with bamboo from the jungle on the east bank and the drivers sat high up in the front of their vehicles like ships’ figureheads.

Moving across the bridge in the opposite direction were hill people on their way up to Garhwal, carrying pack frames with enormous loads lashed to them. With their snub noses and slant eyes they were as different from the bullock-cart drivers, who were from the river bank, as visitors from outer space. Upstream from the bridge a number of flat-bottomed country craft, like small barges, were moored to the bank. Nowhere was the water more than two feet deep. Of the boat that we had come to see there was no sign.

At this moment a number of men arrived at the water’s edge pushing a hand-cart on which there was a dead cow covered with a red cloth. They began to off-load it, intending to dump it in the river. Now, for the first time since we had met him, the contractor showed signs of emotion. It was obvious that if they succeeded in getting away with this ill-conceived burial the cow would remain stranded there, a source of embarrassment, until the end of June when the monsoon would come and wash it away and the bridge with it. He rushed to head them off. Soon the air was rent by angry cries and an interminable wrangle began.

‘You are Brahman. This is a sacred animal. She must go to Ganga!’

‘I am Brahman but you must take your sacred animal somewhere else!’

While we were waiting for the dispute to end, we sat on a log outside the bridgekeeper’s hut which was made of reeds, and looked upstream. To the right, over the river, the jungle that once had teemed with wild animals – tigers, leopards, herds of elephants, sloth bear, wolves, nilgai, antelope, black buck and the terrible wild dog – jungle in which the Indian lion survived until the beginning of the nineteenth century – and which was still well stocked with poisonous snakes, cobras and karait – broke at the foot of the hills in a green hazy sea; while far to the north, seen through the deep trench that the Ganges had dug for itself through the foothills on its way to the plains in which we now found ourselves marooned, an impressive, snow-covered peak rose, shining in the sun.

I asked what it was.

‘It is called Triyugi.’

‘What is Triyugi?’

‘Triyugi is from Treta Yuga.’

‘What is Treta Yuga?’

‘It is one part of Yuga.’

‘What is Yuga?’

‘Yuga is one age of the world. There are four Yugas and each is named after one god. There is Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dwapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga. Age is preceded by period not light, not dark, called Sandhya and after it a further period called Sandhyansa, also not dark, not light. Each is equal to one-tenth of Yuga. Treta Yuga is three thousand years but with not so light, not so dark period, three thousand six hundred years. In Treta Yuga Ganga is most sacred. Altogether Yugas are twelve thousand years.’

‘Twelve thousand years isn’t all that long. The Ice Age was before that.’

‘Yes, but one year of god’s life in Yuga is three hundred and sixty years of man. Whole period is called Maba-Yuga. There are four million three hundred and twenty thousand years in Maha-Yuga.’

‘That’s still not very long.’

‘Ah, but two thousand Maha-Yugas make Kalpa and in Kalpa I am counting eight billion, six hundred and forty million years and Kalpa is only one day and one night of Brahma. After one day of life of Brahma world is consumed, except for wise men, gods and elements. Next day he recreates world and so on for hundred years until he too expires. His daughter is Sandhya, of the not light, not dark period, and with her he has much intercourse and in this way is father of all men.’

‘How long is that?’

‘I am not counting that number of years.’

On the far side of the river, lying on its side on the stones, there was a rusty tin boat. It was sixteen feet long, and the bottom was as full of holes as a colander. It was like a lifeboat thrown up on the shore, the harbinger of a greater disaster. The thought of travelling 1,200 miles down the river in such a craft would have been laughable if any other boat had been available.

‘The contractor says that he will sell you his boat for fifteen hundred rupees.’ This was more than a hundred pounds.*

‘What about the boats upstream?’

‘They only draw one foot but they are too broad and too heavy. Further down the river is very difficult, besides they cannot pass under this bridge.’

‘But you can see the daylight through this one.’

‘The contractor says that he will have it repaired; otherwise, he says you can have one built.’

‘How much will that cost?’

‘About three thousand rupees.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘About a month, perhaps more. It is difficult to say. He is not a friendly man.’

For what seemed hours they haggled with him while he looked with far-away flinty eyes at the disconsolate little party of cowburiers, now specks on the shingle downstream. Finally, due to their pertinacity it was agreed that we should hire the boat to take us as far as Garhmuktesar, a place 100 miles downriver. This, together with the hire of boatmen and a lorry to send the boat back again (apparently it was impossible to travel upstream by boat), would come to more than 500 rupees. If each hundred miles of the journey was going to cost the equivalent of forty pounds in boat hire, we would be penniless long before we reached Calcutta. The alternatives were to buy the boat, abandon the first part of the journey, or walk it – all three were unthinkable.

CHAPTER THREE Life at Hardwar

For very long time only yogies, holy sages, Richies and munies used to live here for meditation, in order to please almighty, for his mercy for sinners and also for the prosperity of human peace. It is assumed that God was instructing these good men from time to time and was showing light for their guidance. In the past the sages from all parts of the world used to assemble here on certain astronomical stages for the announcement of such directions from Gods side. In fact it was Bradcasting Station of God’s orders for General Public and rulers of the time. These occasions were celebrated at Kumbh Fastival especially held in Basakh or April at the interval of Twelve years. Thus wis real fact of fame of Hardwar. Although now people performe every thing like that but it is for forme actuality.

A Tourist’s Guide to Hardwar Rishikesh

At Hardwara the capital of Siba the Ganges flowed amongst large rocks with a pretty full current.

Thomas Coryate to Chaplain Terry:

A Voyage to East India, 1655

To dispel the memory of this exasperating encounter, we decided to bathe at the sacred ghat. Even G., scarcely dry from his ritual ablutions at the railway station, decided to accompany us; for Hardwar is one of the founts of Hinduism, and one of the seven great places of pilgrimage of Hindu India and the Har-ki-Pairi Ghat is particularly sacred because the footprint of Vishnu is preserved there.

The ghat was at the head of an artificial cut – a remarkable work of nineteenth-century engineering – which diverts the Ganges from its course into the Upper Ganges Canal. Here the stream ran very strongly, compressed between the shore and a small artificial island in the middle of which there was a municipal clock tower presented by an Indian motor manufacturer that looked rather odd at this place where the Ganges enters the plains of India. ‘Tower clock installed by Swadeshi Electrical Clock Mfg. Co.’ said a notice. This was the principal bathing-place. Above it, almost deserted at this late hour and at this season of the year, loomed tier upon tier of meretricious buildings, some of them partly obscured by advertisement hoardings. They included an unspeakable hotel and the palace of the Maharaja of Kashmir. Above these constructions rose the hills of the Siwalik range, uncultivated, almost completely uninhabited, dotted with sal⁴ trees, and topped by a white temple, gay with flags.

Down where we were on the waterfront, limbless beggars moved like crabs across the stones; on the offshore island which was joined to the land by a pair of ornamental bridges, non-ritual bathers, intent only on getting clean, soaped themselves all over before lowering themselves into the stream; men wearing head-cloths swept downriver on tiny rafts of brushwood supported by hollow gourds; large, silvery cows excreted sacred excrement, contributing their mite to the sanctity of the place; while on the river front the nais, the barbers, regarded by the orthodox as indispensable but unclean, were still engaged in ritual hair-cutting under their lean-to sheds of corrugated iron, shaving heads, nostrils and ears, preparing their customers for the bath. The wind was still cold; it bore the smell of burning dung, mingled with the scent of flowers, sandalwood and other unidentifiable odours. Everything was bathed in a brilliant, eleven o’clock light. It was an exciting, pleasant scene.

Reluctantly, because it seemed unlikely that we would ever see them again, we gave up our sandals to an attendant at the entrance to the bathing-place, who filed them away out of sight in what resembled the cloakroom of a decrepit opera house, and went down the steps to the sacred pools past touts and well-fed custodians who were squatting on platforms under huge umbrellas which were straining in the wind, and which threatened to lift them and their platforms into the air and dump them in the river. All three of us were wearing the costume of the country; Wanda and myself in the fond hope of diminishing the interest of the inhabitants in us. For G., there was no need of such subterfuge; he was one of them already.

These men were called Pandas. Pandas are debased Brahmans, and other Brahmans consider them to be of low status. Most of them are rich; many are almost illiterate. They perform various functions. Male bathers usually deposit their belongings with them while they bathe, a necessary precaution for anyone who wishes to leave the ghat with any clothes at all. They supply anointing oils, powdered sandalwood and a kind of clay of a pale yellow colour, said to be obtainable only from a tank at Somnath in Gujarat in which some of the 16,000 wives of Krishna drowned themselves after his death. This they grind on damp stones to make a paste with which they make the tilak, the mark on the forehead which is reputed to cool the bather’s brain, if it has not already been frozen solid.

Pandas also inscribe the vital statistics of their clients’ lives in great books: the date of birth, the day of the week, the star under which they were born; the sign of the Zodiac, the hour, and if it is known, the precise second, so that, when the need arises, an accurate horoscope can be cast without delay. For a consideration, which is always exorbitant, they perform the ceremonial worship called the Ganga-Puja. Some of them were engaged in it now; droning on in Sanskrit while the celebrant shivered on the steps: ‘Jambu-Dwipe Bharate Varshe Uttarakhande Pavitra-Ganga-Teera …’ (‘In Jambu-Dwipe,⁵ in the northern part of Bharata-Varsha,⁶ by the side of Holy Ganges …’ and so on.)

There were two temples at the water’s edge. Both had the curious, pyramidical towers characteristic of Hindu temple architecture. They looked like shaggy caps, the edible fungi that one finds on waste land in England.

The temple on the bank was dedicated to Vishnu and his wife; the other, which stood in the water, to the river. Here the bathers offered small, green, boat-shaped baskets made from stitched leaves, filled with marigolds, rose petals and white sweets which tasted like Edinburgh Rock, placing them carefully in the water. The Ganges whirled them round for a bit in the lee of the temple until one by one they upset and their contents were carried swiftly away.

We dabbled our feet in the water; it was dreadfully cold.

‘Embrace it! Only good can come of it,’ croaked an elderly holy man. He told us that until the previous year he had been a guard on the Metre Gauge Railway. Now having discharged his commitments to his family he had left them and the world to pursue his own salvation. Unlike His Holiness Sri Swami Sivananda who, according to G., had attained Union with the Godhead on 14th July 1963 and is buried upstream at Rishikesh, his salvation will come later after a succession of rebirths.

‘I am going to die by Ganga,’ he said.

There are thousands of old men like him in India. The majority generate no great spiritual force, but they at least receive a little respect. It is a pity that the climate is against such a scheme in Britain. It is better than waiting for the end on a street corner.

The Swami Sivananda at Rishikesh was a remarkable man who could have made his mark in other fields. He was not only interested in his own salvation as his biography shows:

On the 17.2.47 Swamiji saw some printed pamphlets of the society (The Divine Life Society) being thrown in the Ganges by some inmate of the Ashram.

Swamiji: ‘Om Nijabodhaji, I saw the printed pamphlets being thrown into the Ganges. We are sending several parcels daily of books and medicines to several people, why can’t you see that each packet from here carries at least one pamphlet?’

Secretary: ‘Yes, Swamiji, I shall see to it.’

Here is one more instance in which Swamiji corrects his disciples. In December ’46 the winter in Rishikesh was very severe. On 11.12.46 Swamiji saw me taking a hot-water bath in the bathroom attached to the Ashram. After two or three days, when I happened to be in the League-hall, Swamiji began thus and spoke to a by-stander.

Swamiji: ‘People from far and wide come to Rishikesh to have Ganges bath but the Ashramites here who live on the very brink of the Ganges have recourse to hot-water baths and thus lose a fine opportunity given them by God.’

This talk settled me. I took the hint and began to take the bath regularly in the Ganges itself. This habit has invigorated me a good deal and put splendid and clean ideas into my mind and I had a healthy time of it. Here is another instance in which Swamiji corrects his disciples. It was on 17.8.46 when Swamiji saw that I was using a toothbrush to clean my teeth in the Ganges. After five days when Swamiji and myself were both climbing up the steps leading to the Bhajan Hall, Swamiji began: ‘Om, Swagyan, there is tooth-powder called “Sadhu’s” tooth-powder in our league for sale to the public; it is highly efficacious and when used twice daily will relieve anyone of Pyorreah etc.’ This I took as a hint to me to discard the use of toothpaste which is costly and old-fashioned … Swamiji knows the nature of ignorance.⁷

Whatever else this old man generated he was an extraordinary figure. It was the fifth of December; winter had set in and the wind was blowing straight off the Himalayas. He was wearing a leather helmet that made him look like the wizened pilot of an early flying-machine, and he carried a pair of bedroom slippers. Everything he had – his helmet, the cloths in which he was wrapped, his quilt, the sack in which he presumably kept his other possessions – were all dyed the uniform dark yellow, bordering on orange, the colour of the sadhus. This dye is made from a special mud which has the unusual property of keeping the wearer warm as well as holy-looking; a property which it shares with cow-dung ash.

‘Embrace it! Only good can come of it!’ he repeated. To tell the truth he was becoming a bit of a bore. He had bathed already, long before first light, and he was too full of beans, like some old man at the Serpentine. The only way to escape from him was to go in ourselves.

It was so cold that it was like stepping into a fire. The water was very clear and remembering that no harm could come of it I drank some and it tasted good, while great speckled fish called mahseer, anything up to thirty pounds in weight, made insolent by over-feeding, nipped me. It was necessary to keep moving. I wondered how G. was getting on. He was standing in the slack water in the lee of the temple of Lakshmi-Ganga, completely immobile, with only his upturned face showing above the surface. A little upstream Wanda, having emerged from the ladies’ bathing establishment, which was a cross between an Edwardian boathouse and a lock-up garage, in the dim recesses of which modest ladies were splashing unseen, was having trouble with her sari. She looked like someone handling a spinnaker in a strong breeze; finally it unwound completely and she was left up to her knees in water ‘the cynosure’, as Milton wrote, ‘of neighbouring eyes’, like a freshly peeled plum. In order to disassociate myself from her, I went on foot up to the top end of the island and dived in there. The water was quite shallow, but the bottom was lined with stone-flags which were slippery with weed. The current lifted me high out of the water, and bore me down in a series of surges past a large smooth rock in mid-stream; past the ladies’ establishment with its admonitory notice in Hindi – ‘Non-violence is the Greatest Duty. Where there is Religion there is Victory’ – to which Wanda was now retreating in disorder; down into the main pool where G. still floated in the shadows of the temple; under the lower of the two bridges, in the shade of which a young Vishnuvite sadhu smeared with cow-dung, his hair a beehive of mud, was sleeping off the effects of a dose of hemp. Here I grabbed one of the chains that hung down from the arch, the bather’s last chance of stopping before being swept into deep water and the headworks of the Upper Ganges Canal several miles downstream.

This bathing ghat has frequently been the scene of heavy losses of life. In 1760 two rival sects of sadhus fought a pitched battle here in which nearly 2,000 perished. In 1795 Sikh pilgrims killed 500 of the religious mendicants called Goshains. Until 1820 it was only 34 feet wide at the top and there were only 39 steps. In that year 430 pilgrims and a number of sepoys were crushed to death on them, after which the ghat was enlarged. In April or May, at the beginning of the Hindu year and on the birthday of Ganga herself, as many as 400,000 persons gathered there at the fair called Dikhanti for the bathing, and as it was considered a good thing to be the first to enter the water as soon as the propitious moment arrived, it is a wonder that there were not more casualties. Every twelfth year when the planet Jupiter is in Aquarius (Kumbh) – a particularly auspicious time – the number of pilgrims increases vastly. In 1796 and again in 1808 onlookers supposed to be reliable estimated that two million attended. In 1904 the number had fallen to 150,000; but at the Kumbh Mela of 1962 on April 13th, the principal day, two million people are said to have bathed.

Later as we crouched together on the lowest step, dripping and very cold (all three of us had forgotten to bring a towel), a young, evil-looking panda began, unasked, to recite the Ganga-Puja over our heads, having first ascertained our names. ‘Vede Aham Erric Nubi Vona Nubi Pavitre Ganga Mataram … Aradhanam Kalpayami Tharpanam Kalpayami Ganga Mataram Maduyam … Ayurarogya Sampat Samrithim Kuru …’ The-am endings, Mataram Maduyam Aradhanam Tharpanam imparted a mysterious quality to it. This is what it sounded like.

‘Give me what you please,’ he said, unasked when he had finished, lowering his eyes like a bashful girl.

‘Give him 10 naye paise,’ G. said.

‘What, for three of us?’

‘We did not ask for Puja. These pandas are rotten fellows.’

We had already paid an exorbitant amount to a particularly venal old man in order to see the footprint of Vishnu. He had veiled it completely when we approached, and had refused to uncover it until we gave him what he asked. It was a singularly unconvincing carving; one that might have been produced by a monumental mason in South London, rather than the footprint of a being capable of striding through the seven regions of the Hindu Universe in three steps. As an American shoe manufacturer, whom we met later on the waterfront at Banaras, said, when confronted with a similar pair of footprints:

‘If that’s Vishnu’s footprints, then he’s got fallen arches.’

‘What’s this?’ said the panda when I gave him the ten naye paise. ‘Give me ten rupees.’ His voice rose to a shriek.

‘You should be ashamed to be panda,’ said G., severely. ‘A strong young man like you.’

Together with a kinsman of one of the men from Shell, we visited such a large number of temples that eventually it became a test of sheer endurance for all of us, including the guide. He was a man of strikingly handsome appearance and unusual attainments.

‘I am Samudrika,’ he said when we were sitting drinking tea, exhausted. ‘I am, therefore, able to know what you are thinking. I have been watching you and I know many things about you. Think of your favourite flower,’ he said.

I thought of my unfavourite flowers, bronze wallflowers in a municipal bed; decided that this was unsporting and concentrated on roses. He handed me a piece of paper on which he had written the word ‘rose’. The performance of such a feat was more impressive here, at the foot of the Himalayas, than it would have seemed in Wimbledon. ‘Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six you were very poor,’ he said. ‘You are still poor but you would like to be an extravagant man. When you are angry it is not for long, but when your wife is angry she seethes like a pot. You will be always together.’

‘It sounds like a death sentence,’ Wanda said. She was not pleased with the way he used his talents. I asked him if he was a Sivite or a Vishnuvite.

‘I am a worshipper of Sakti – female energy of Siva,’ he said. ‘It is a very intellectual worship.’

That night I looked up Sakti worship in a book called Bhattacharya’s Hindu Castes and Sects. According to Bhattacharya, if he was a Sakti worshipper he must either be a Dakshinachari or a Bamachari, a Sakta of the right or the left hand, or a Kowl, an extreme Sakta. If he was a Dakshinachari, a right-handed one, then his devotions would be comparatively conventional; if he was a Bamachari, a left-handed Sakta, then he might possibly use wine as an offering to the female organ of generation. A Kowl would engage, according to the book, in ceremonies of ‘a beastly character’. The next day when I asked him which of the three he was, he only smiled.

Hardwar was swarming with sadhus. The Namadaris, the followers of Vishnu, had mud-packed cones of hair like the young man asleep under the bridge. On their foreheads they wore three vertical stripes, the centre one blood red, the outer ones of white clay. They carried iron rods and little braziers of hot coals for kindling incense, and they wore long Chanel-like necklaces of black nuts. The Sivites also wore long necklaces of rudraksha seeds and their arms and foreheads were smeared with burned cow-dung. Some carried gongs; others carried conch-shells which they blew into, making a disagreeable high-pitched noise. Both sects handled this multiplicity of gear with the same assurance as an experienced party-goer who, equipped with wrap, handbag, cigarette-holder, lighter, vodka and tomato juice, still manages to take the offered canapé.

The female sadhus were less remarkable. They were mostly grey-haired, beardless, stout, and school-marmy. And there were American girls wearing holier-than-thou expressions and an elegant parody of the sadhus’ uniform, made from re-embroidered saffron silk organza, who were down for a day’s shopping from one of the Ashrams at Rishikesh, with their Retina cameras at the ready.

In the temple of Gangadwara three priests were chanting Vedas before a stone lingam. They continued hour after hour, taking it in turns. Siva had been discovered in bed with his wife Durga by Brahma, Vishnu and other gods. He had been so drunk that he had not thought it necessary to stop. The majority, all except Vishnu and a few of the broader-minded, thought them nasty and brutish and said so. Siva and Durga died of shame in the position in which they were discovered; but before they expired Siva expressed the wish that mankind should worship the act manifest in the form which he now took to himself, the lingam. ‘All who worship me,’ he said, ‘in the form of lingam will attain the objects of their desire and a place in Kailasa!’ Kailasa is the paradise of Siva, a 22,000-foot mountain in the Himalayas, north of the Manasa Lake in Tibet. Death for a Tibetan on the shore of the Manasa Sarowar is as meritorious as that on the banks of the Ganges for a Hindu.

‘What is the water for?’

‘Water to cool organ, because it is passionate,’ said one of the men from Shell.

‘Water is in memory of water Siva had poured down his throat after drinking poison that would have destroyed the world,’ said G.

Our friend who had conducted us round the temples and who knew that I liked roses said nothing. Only Siva knew what he was thinking, but I was convinced that if he had chosen to do so he would have been the nearest of the lot to interpreting correctly the significance of the water and the lingam – perhaps there was no significance at all. In Hinduism, as in most other religions, there is a remarkable lack of unanimity amongst the devotees.

The temple of Daksheshwara at Kankhal, into which we were conducted by a boy with no roof to his mouth, was under repair, and the spire was enclosed in bamboo scaffolding. A sadhu sat outside on the river front under an enormous pipal tree and on the bank of what was now, at this season, a backwater of the Ganges, elderly pilgrims were having the Ganga-Puja recited over their shaven heads.

This place was the scene of an ill-conceived sacrifice to Vishnu offered by Daksha, a son of Brahma, to which Siva, Daksha’s son-in-law, was not invited. Uma the mountain goddess, Siva’s wife, was so enraged by this slight that she urged her husband to assert himself, which he did, producing a monster called Vira-Bhadra from his mouth. Vira-Bhadra had a thousand heads, eyes and limbs which swung a thousand clubs. As if this was not enough he carried a fiery bow and battle-axe, had a vast mouth that dripped blood and was clothed in the skin of what must have been a very large tiger. When Vira-Bhadra went into action the mountains tottered, the earth trembled, the wind howled and the seas were whipped to foam. What followed was like a Saturday night brawl in a saloon. Indra, the god of the air, was trampled underfoot; Yarna, the god of the dead, had his staff broken; Saraswati, the river goddess and goddess of learning, and the Matris, the divine mothers, had their noses removed; Pushan the nourisher, multiplier and protector of cattle and possessions – also the patron of conjurers—had his teeth rammed down his throat; Mitra, the ruler of the day, had his eyes pulled out; Chandra, the moon, was beaten; the hands of Vahni, the fire god, were cut off; Bhrigu, one of the great sages, had his beard pulled out; the Brahmans were pelted with stones; the sons of Brahma, the Prajapatis, were soundly beaten; innumerable demi-gods were skewered with swords and arrows, and Daksha’s head was cut off and thrown on to the fire. At the same time Sati consumed herself by spontaneous combustion. When these pyrotechnic efforts had subsided and with it Siva’s rage, he restored everyone to life, even Daksha who emerged as good as new except that he had the head of a goat, his own having been burnt up. Only Sati was beyond recall.

It was pleasant by the river at Daksheshwara. In a quiet valley behind the town, in a grove of dusty mango trees there was a small temple with several outbuildings, skeleton structures without walls in which the iron tridents of the sadhus stood, the three prongs of which symbolise bodily, worldly and heavenly suffering, planted in the still warm ashes of the fires of the previous night. It was as if the occupants had just fled.

Higher up the valley, where it narrowed between sandstone cliffs, a small stream came purling down. On one side protruding from the cliff was a wooden construction with walls of wire mesh. Reluctantly, because it seemed a gross infringement of privacy, we crowded at the entrance. Inside there was a sadhu, a youngish man with a brown beard. He was preparing vegetables and putting them into a pot. His only visible possessions were a stone pillow, a pile of sacred books and a drinking vessel made from a huge black sea shell. ‘He is the Moni Babar,’ said our friend. ‘He never speaks.’ The sadhu looked at us for a moment with his great brown eyes before resuming his task and feeling ashamed and flattened we went away.

We spent the nights at Hardwar in a dharmsala on the river front, downstream from the great ghat. It was a rest-house for poor pilgrims, now, with the onset of winter, almost deserted. Originally, we had intended to stay in one of the hotels above the sacred ghat but although we were prepared for discomfort, the place was so repulsive that we all three shrank from it, leaving the proprietor genuinely perplexed. It was a labyrinth whose emptiness only accentuated the all-pervading air of decay. The walls of the corridors were covered with eruptions of dark green lichen, and the sheets on the beds bore the impress of former occupants. To me it was reminiscent of another, similar hotel, seen years before on the shores of the Bosphorus. It seemed to set at nothing all the pious works of purification we had witnessed and the efforts of the municipal authorities to make Hardwar a clean place, which on the whole it is.

Late each night we hammered on the huge carved double-doors, with the words Dharmsala Bhata Bhawan-Der Ismail Khan inscribed above them, the name of a pious family from Der Ismail Khan, a town west of the Indus in the former North-West Frontier Province, who had endowed it originally; until a small, sleepy boy of ten or eleven, who seemed to be in sole charge, opened them up and led us into the main court. The courtyard had cells on three sides of it for the accommodation of pilgrims and at the far end a pink-washed, fretted archway led down to a bathing ghat at the water’s edge. Dark staircases led to other levels with more cells and to a platform which overlooked the river, furnished with rows of lavatories open to the sky. Up these stairs we lurched behind the small boy who, although he had a lantern, was always a flight ahead, bruising ourselves on the sharp angles where the stairs took a turn to the left and right. The two dimly-lit rooms which we occupied were bare except for a pair or charpoys – beds which were nothing more than a couple of wooden frames with a mattress of woven string. They were simple but they were clean.

In spite of the simplicity of the arrangements at the dharmsala, we contrived to make a shambles of them with open trunks and unstrapped bedding rolls, their contents half-disgorged, over all of which hung a stench of kerosene which boded ill for life in the more restricted space of a rowing-boat; but to us it seemed like paradise, and we blessed the Bhata Bhawan family of Der Ismail Khan and all their descendants for ever, for their beneficence and the kindness of the warden of the dharmsala who allowed us to stay there – for, although we were not bona fide pilgrims, it was completely without charge.

I was too tired and too excited to sleep much. Both nights I went out on to the platform above the river. It was very cold and clear and the moon was in the last quarter. It shone down on the waters which poured down past the ghat, like molten metal on an inclined plane. On either side of the dharmsala, so close that I felt that I could almost touch them, spires and pyramids of shrines and temples rose gleaming in the moonlight. On the other side of the gorge through which the river flowed, the continuation of the Siwalik Hills rose in a dark wall. The only sounds apart from the rushing noise of the river, were those made by the night-watchmen in the narrow streets far below, alternately groaning, and blowing their whistles, as if to prove to themselves that they still existed, for no one else was about. In one cell of the dharmsala, behind a window of red glass, a light still burned. I, too, wondered whether I existed, standing here on a roof-top on the banks of the Ganges, as incongruous as a Hindu on a pier on the south coast of England in the dead season, to which the dharmsala bore a remarkable resemblance.

On the first night before he went to bed, G. said that he must have a ritual bathe the next morning.

‘We can bathe, here from dharmsala,’ he said. ‘If you wish to come I am bathing at five-thirty.’

It was impossible to sleep after five a.m. anyway because of the sounds made by the other guests who already, at this early hour, were clearing their throats and wringing their noses out in preparation for another day. There were not many of them, but they made up for their weakness in numbers by an incredible volume of sounds that resembled massed bands of double bass and trombones with an occasional terrifying eruption of noise that obliterated all the others, the sort of noise small boys make when pretending to cut one another’s throats.

When I went to his room at five-thirty, G. had finished clearing his passages. He was doing his Yogic exercises, alternately sucking in huge gouts of air and then releasing them with a hissing noise like a gaggle of angry geese. Together we went down the staircase, across the court and under the archway to the ghat. The moon was down and it was very dark. All one could hear, standing on the steps, was the deep sighing of the river rushing past. It was bitterly cold. For some moments neither of us spoke.

‘I think,’ G. said at last, ‘that at this moment I am not bathing. In such circumstances there can be danger to health.’

Silently we crept up the stairs and back to bed.

When we rose again at seven, it was still very cold and we peeped round the front gate as apprehensively as mice. Wanda had decided to come with us. The sun had risen some ten minutes earlier but the streets were still in shadow and the wind whistled down them, raising little eddies of dust on the cobble-stones. The only other people who were up were two cha-wallahs, sitting by their smoking tea-engines on either side of the gateway, and we each drank a cup. It was hot, weak and milky and tasted of nutmegs. Then we set off up the road. It was a street of dharmsalas. Some of the more ancient ones with eyeless windows, protected by rusty iron gratings and doors bolted and barred and locked with corroded padlocks, seemed as if they were closed for ever, and one could imagine the interiors with room after shuttered room in which skeleton pilgrims slept for ever on charpoys of worm-eaten wood and rotting string; others dating back to the twenties were painted in faded blues. With their elephantine pilasters and heavy lintels they resembled the exhibition buildings at Wembley which I remembered as a child; while some, more modern still, were painted an indigestible sang de boeuf.

We groped our way through the bazaar, at this hour as dark as the grave. Most of the shops were still bolted and barred. Only the food merchants were preparing for opening time, heaping up great mounds of sugar and rice which glowed luminously through the murk. Then, suddenly, we emerged from the darkness on to the waterfront and into the light of the sun that was shooting up across the river, blinding the Sivite sadhus who squatted, coated in ashes, in the alcoves below the temple of Gangadwara, still warming themselves before the smouldering tree-trunks with which they had seen the night through. Here we turned inland, away from the river, and began to climb a steep path at the back of the town which led to the temple of Manasa-Devi.

At the temple, nearly 2,000 feet up, the air was gelid. G. asked the priest to recite the Lalita-sahasra-nama, the thousand names of Vishnu.⁸

‘I do not know the Lalita-sahasra-nama’, the priest said, equably and went back to his own protracted devotions.

‘It’s disgraceful,’ G. said. ‘He ought to know it. It’s like priest in Church of England not knowing the Lord’s Prayer.’

CHAPTER FOUR Down the Ganges

From the hills to Sookerthal on the Ganges, the navigation is restricted entirely to rafts of timber and to the passage of boats which, being built in the valley of Deyra, are with some difficulty and great danger floated, empty down the rapids.

Col. Sir T. Proby Cautley: The Ganges Canal, Vol. 1

A list of suggestive articles which are needed on the journey is given here but the pilgrims may have all or some of them as desired and needed.

Religious

Japalma

Agarbattis

Camphor

Dhup Powder

Kumkuma

Sandalwood Powder

Wicks soaked in ghee and kundi

Asanam

Bhagavad Gita or any religious book for daily use

Bhajan Songs or Namavali

Sri Ramakoti Book

Cloths

Rugs, Blanket

Muffler

Dhavali or Silk Dhoti

Dhoties 2

Shirts 4

Baniyans 2

Uppar clothe 3

Towels 3

Waterproff cloth (2 yards)

Rotten cloth (pieces 4)

Coupeens 2

Cloth bag for money to keep round waist

Bedding

Mosquito Curtain

Medicines

Amrutanjan

Smelling Salt

Vaseline bottle

J & J De Chane’s

Medical Service set with its guide book

Homeopathic Box & a guide Booh

Diarrhoea Pills

Dysentery Pills

Indigestion Pills

Malaria Pills

Boric Powder

Cotton

Cloth (Plaster)

Bandage cloth

Aspro Tablets

Purgative chacklets

Tooth powder or paste

Utensiles

Canvas bucket

Cooker

Oven

One set of stainless steel vessels

Ladle

Spoons – 3

Fraid pan

Tiffin Carrier

Tumbler

Glass

Miscellaneous

Looking Glass and comb

Soaps for bath and wash

Nails of all sizes

Locks 2

Cloth bags for food stuffs

Pen knife

Small gunny bag for coal

Wrist Watch

Umbrella

Hand stick

Visiting Cards

List of departed souls and their Gotras

Hand bags 2

Note book

White Papers

Fountain pen and pencil

Candles

Needles and thread

Railway Guide

Pilgrim’s Travel Guide

A small hand axe

Good Camera with flash

Movie (Cene) Camera

Tongue Cleaner

Suit case or hand jip bag

Lock and chain

Pandari bag to carry things on shoulder

Safety pins

Change for Rs. 10 00

Setuvu from Rameswaram

Ganges from Allahabad

Haridwar or Gangottari

Rail and Road Maps

Battery light with spare Batteries

Thermos Flask

Hurricane Lamp

Match box

Calendar both Telugu and English

News Papers

Ink bottles

Postage stamps and cards

from A Pilgrim’s Travel Guide

At six-fifteen the following morning we were at the bridge, ready to embark. A bitter wind was blowing and against a pink sky flights of teal and mallard were rocketing upstream towards the Hardwar gorge.

The boat was moored ready for us alongside one of the piers of the bridge on the upstream side and the current was grinding it against the stones, emphasising its tinniness. It was as full of holes as it had ever been and there were eight inches of water in the bottom. Because of its lightness it had somehow achieved a balance between floating and foundering; but if any further weight was imposed on it, it would certainly scuttle itself.

Of the crew whom we had interviewed the previous day, a pair of terrible ruffians with mops of greasy hair, there was no sign. We had told them to be ready to leave at six and we had arrived at a quarter past, hoping to start within an hour or so, this being the custom of the country, but now it was evident it did not matter at what time they arrived; there would be no sailing in this boat today or any other day.

We were prey to all the violent, unworthy emotions that have consumed visitors to India from time immemorial: impotent rage; the desire that Timur Leng, the terrible Tatar, knew and was able to gratify, to make hecatombs and raise great towers of skulls (he made a sanguinary detour to the banks of the Ganges in the Year of the Hare, 1399, and entered Hardwar and sacked it sometime at the end of January that year); but for us there was no such way to vent our spleen, except by allowing it to evaporate. For the inhabitants of India have a simple genius for concocting exasperating situations which, however long he may have lived in the country and however much he may have anticipated them, burst on the victim each time with pristine force. One of the prerequisites of real exasperation is that there should be no one to vent one’s anger on, and there was no one. The wind whistled through the reed walls of the bridge-builder’s hut but there were no dormant figures inside it to rouse from sleep and galvanise into activity. We were alone on the river bank under a vast sky.

It was at this moment that G. announced that the Executive Engineer of the Irrigation Works, who had been away on our first morning in Hardwar, had come back.

‘He has returned from Tour,’ he said. ‘Now he is giving us his boat. But first we are speaking with Assistant Engineer. He is feeling kindly towards us.’

The Assistant Engineer lived in a bungalow that was almost completely shrouded in bougainvillaea. It was difficult to imagine why he should be feeling well-disposed towards us. After an interval he appeared in a dressing-gown. The patience of Indian officials in the face of requests that must appear to them to be either lunatic or frivolous has to be experienced to be credible. What we were doing in this instance was the equivalent in Britain of waking a fairly senior officer of the Metropolitan Water Board at a quarter to seven on a winter’s morning, in order to ask him to wake a yet more senior official and request the loan of a boat from one of the reservoirs in order to go down to Southend.

‘I think Executive Engineer is lending you one boat,’ he said, when we explained the situation to him and he called the Executive Engineer on his telephone. The conversation was very brief.

‘He is not lending you his boat,’ he said.

‘We must now visit Executive Engineer,’ G. said.

‘But he’s just said he isn’t going to lend it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the Assistant Engineer. ‘Now you must visit him. He is lending you his boat.’

The Executive Engineer, who was in even greater déshabillé than his assistant, lived in a vast building close by the headworks of the canal.

‘I have no boat,’ he said without preamble.

‘You have two boats.’

‘I am needing two boats. I have no boat that I can spare.’

We showed him a letter from the Prime Minister. In Delhi it had had all the magic of a pre-war British passport. ‘We, Edward Frederick Lindley, Viscount Halifax, Baron Irwin, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, a Member of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire etc., etc., etc., His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Request and require …’ Here, in the sticks, the impact was visibly diminished.

‘You must go to Delhi,’ he said, brightening momentarily. ‘The Prime Minister is in Delhi.’

‘We have just come from Delhi. He is in good health. We spent some time with him.’ This last tossed in carelessly.

‘Then you must go to Roorkee. At Roorkee there is Army Bridging Unit. They have many boats. It is only thirty miles.’

For what seemed ages the fruitless conversation butted backwards and forwards.

Finally, Wanda had a brilliant idea. She has developed a great capacity for overcoming disaster. Not that she has ever been without it.

‘You have two boats,’ she said. ‘It is obvious from what you say that you must be having two boats’ (effortlessly she slipped into the vernacular). ‘There is a boat in the river by the bridge which although unsuitable for a long journey is excellent for your canal. Lend us your boat and if you need two boats during the next two days use that one.’

Only in India could such an illogical argument have had any chance of acceptance. The boat that Wanda was offering the Executive Engineer was not even hers to offer. I tried to picture the scene in which the Executive Engineer tried to borrow the Contractor’s boat, and having succeeded, watched it sink in the canal. But suddenly he capitulated. Perhaps because he was even more alarmed by G.’s suggestion that he should close down the Upper Ganges Canal and divert its waters into the river, thereby allowing us to rush headlong downstream in a boat of really large draught.

The boat had most probably been built in the time of the British. Perhaps the prototype had been designed in a moment of nostalgia by an engineer who was an exiled rowing man. It was a five-oared skiff fitted with swivel rowlocks. It resembled what used to be known as a ran-dan, only in a ran-dan bow and stroke have oars and two uses sculls, and this was even larger. A few rare examples of ran-dan are or were employed until recently at the two Universities for conveying dons about their occasions and they are still used on the Thames by swan-uppers; but instead of being built of varnished mahogany this boat was constructed from mild steel plate put together with rivets. It was twenty-five feet long, had a five-foot beam and to show its official status it was painted battleship grey. Loaded it drew eighteen inches; and it needed thirty-two men to lift it.

We set off down the Ganges at two o’clock in the afternoon. It was 6th December, my forty-fourth birthday. Our immediate destination was the Balawali Bridge, twenty-five miles as the crow flies from Hardwar, a journey which we believed would take two days. The boat was deep-loaded, so deeply and with such a quantity of gear that only three of the five oarsmen’s benches could be occupied. Besides the six occupants (we had recruited two more boatmen and the Irrigation Engineer had sent one of his own men to ensure that his boat was not misused) there was the now augmented luggage, plus further purchases we had made in the bazaar at Hardwar; sacks of chilli powder and vegetables; namdars – blankets made from a sort of coarse felt; teapots, kettles, hurricane lamps and reed mats. I had even bought an immense bamboo pole from a specialist shop in the bazaar as a defence against dacoits (robbers) whose supposed whereabouts were indicated on some rather depressing maps which G. had annotated with this and similar information, in the same way as mediaeval cartographers had inscribed ‘Here be dragons’ on the blank expanses of their productions. G. himself had made an even more eccentric purchase from the same establishment – two officer’s swagger-canes about a foot and a half long which now, as he stood in the middle of the boat directing its final trimming with them, made him look like an old-fashioned sailor semaphoring. Our bills were paid. We had left a hundred rupees for a lorry-man to come to collect the boat downstream. Prudently we had put this into the hands of the men from Shell who by this time, together with the one who had told me that I had liked roses, were the only people we trusted. We had paid the thirty-two men who had come tottering barefooted across a mile of hot shingle with the boat upside over their heads all the way from the canal to the Ganges; we had shaken hands with everybody – some, whom we had never seen before, had wept; and for the second time in two days we had advanced money to boatmen for them to buy provisions for the journey (we never saw the first two boatmen again). We were ready to go.

As we crouched low in the boat while the current took us under the bridge, an old bridge-builder who was wearing spectacles as large as the headlamps of a Rolls Royce, dropped sacred sweets on us as a provision for the journey. His tears wetted our heads. The boatmen put their oars in the rowlocks and rowed off smartly. We were off.

Two hundred yards below the bridge and some twelve hundred miles from the Bay of Bengal the boat grounded in sixteen inches of water. This was no shoal. There was no question of being in the wrong channel. At this point the uniform depth of the river was sixteen inches. I looked upstream to the bridge but all those who had been waving and weeping had studiously turned their backs. The boatmen uttered despairing cries for assistance but the men at the bridge bent to their tasks with unwonted diligence. As far as they were concerned we had passed out of their lives. We might never have existed.

We all got out, including Wanda, who was wearing an ingenious Muslim outfit which consisted of peg-top trousers of white lawn and a hieratical-looking shift. She simply took off her trousers and joined us, still apparently fully dressed, in the water.

The bottom of the river was full of rocks the size of twenty-four-pound cannon balls which were covered with a thin slime of green weed. The water was absolutely clear. It frothed and bubbled about our calves. Fifty yards below the place where we had gone aground, the shallows terminated in a waterfall down which the river cascaded. We began to dig a passage towards it with our hands, lifting the great slimy stones and plonking them down on either side of the boat. Under them were more stones of equal size and even greater slipperiness.

It is difficult to describe the emotions that one feels when one is aground on a twelve-hundred-mile boat journey within hailing distance of one’s point of departure. It is an experience that has fallen to the lot of some blue-water sailors who have grounded when setting off to sail round the world. But about them there was something of tragedy which derived from the grandeur of the design. To be stranded in a river sixteen inches deep is simply ludicrous.

At the head of the fall to which we finally succeeded in dragging the boat, it became stuck with its forepart hanging over the drop. It would go neither backwards nor forwards, but suddenly as we redoubled our efforts it overbalanced and began to go downhill at a tremendous rate with everyone sprawling over the gunwales, vainly trying to get aboard.

The only one who succeeded was Karam Chand, the chief boatman, the young man who had been lent to us by the Executive Engineer, to ensure that he got his boat back in one piece – at this moment it seemed a faint hope. Fortunately he managed to take the tiller, otherwise it would have broached-to and probably capsized. The rest of us were half in and half out of the boat.

It was like descending an escalator on one’s back. The noise made by the boat as it bounced from boulder to boulder was terrifying. Finally it plopped into a deep pool, watched by a little band of country people who stood high above us on a concrete spur, part of the out-works of the canal.

It was a lovely day. Overhead, infinitely remote in a pale blue sky, streamers of cirrus were being blown to tatters in a wind that was coming off the deserts of Central Asia. On the left, a small solitary white temple winked in the sunlight. Below it there were terraces and silvery-looking cliffs of sandstone and at the foot of them where the jungle broke in a green sea the light shimmered and danced in a haze of heat. On the river itself the wind tore at the surface of the water, throwing up little arcs of spray which formed rainbows against the sun. There was the pleasing sound of rushing water as the Ganges poured down eagerly over the stones in innumerable small rivulets on its journey towards the Bay of Bengal. It was travelling much faster than we were. It had taken us three-quarters of an hour to cover three hundred yards.

In the next hour we covered eight hundred yards. The pool in which the boat floated, apparently undamaged, opened out and seemed to give promise of becoming a navigable reach. Ahead of us a man came down to the shore from the jungle, picking his way delicately among the stones. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and its whiteness gave him the appearance of being disembodied. Only his dark head and spindly limbs showed. On his back he carried a raft made from orange-coloured gourds. He placed it in the river, spread-eagled himself on top of it and began to paddle some distance downstream and set off towards the right bank which was invisible from where we were deep in the bed of the river. The sight of this man gave us hopes that we might be coming to deep water, but they were vain ones. Soon the grumbling, bumping noises began again and once more we were aground and over the side, pushing the boat, slithering from rock to rock, watched by cows which stood at the water’s edge, sticking out their thick, pink tongues at us and lowing derisively.

We excavated another channel, a hundred yards long, and another of fifty; both were followed by rapids. By now there was a lot of water in the bottom of the boat but there was so much gear on board that it was impossible to tell whether the hull was holed or not. To the right a mile or so away, the spires of the Temple of Daksheshwara, the scene of Siva’s godly brawl in the suburbs of Hardwar, rose against the evening sun, mocking us with their nearness. It was four o’clock.

The next hour was a duplication of what had gone before, except that the rocks on which we slipped and slithered grew larger and more difficult to lift and more painful to stand on. At five we rumbled down into a deliciously calm stretch of water in which the stream ran sluggishly. Here a bridge was being built, a twin of the one upstream. A country boat was crossing piled high with shisham wood from the jungle, and on top of it were perched the woodcutters themselves, bundles of off-white rags, more like scarecrows than human beings. This was the Shishamwallah⁹ ferry. This reach was succeeded by a brutal stretch of shoal water in which the stones stuck up like fangs and which ended in a waterfall over which the boat hung, immovable, threatening to break in two. By the time we had negotiated this obstacle the sun was setting and it was time to make camp. I was in favour of stopping, as one place seemed as good as another, but an insane urge to press on seized the rest of the party. ‘If we are to reach the Balawali Bridge in two days it is necessary to go on,’ G. said, and when Karam Chand added his voice it was useless to argue. Perhaps they were goaded by the sight of the Temple of Daksheshwara which, by some cruel twist of the river, seemed far closer than it had an hour and a half previously.

The sky was now a brilliant saffron. On the stony shore, trees that had been brought down by the river in flood and stripped of their bark on the way, gleamed in the last of the light which was draining away rapidly. Myriads of winged insects swarmed about the boat, attracted by the light of the torches that were being wielded improvidently as we flashed them into the water searching for a navigable channel. As instruments of navigation our eyes were now useless to us; the water reflected the last light in the sky and its depth could only be determined with the aid of torches and poles or simply by getting out and standing in it.

Now the boat became immovably stuck. It was as if it were glued to the bottom. With infinite difficulty, swearing in a variety of languages, we unloaded the luggage piece by piece: the huge tin trunks, the great bouncy bedding rolls, the stove and the cans of kerosene, together with the boatmen’s modest gear, and started to drag the boat to the head of the next fall, leaving Wanda to guard the luggage alone on the foreshore, with only a torch to defend herself from the beasts of the jungle which here loomed above her like the Wild Wood.

The rapid was more than four hundred yards long, and the last we saw of her as we shot downhill was a despairing figure dressed in a jungle hat, a leaving present from a Major-General in Delhi, and a bathing costume, scrabbling for warm clothes in one of the tin trunks, haloed by a swarm of insects that had been attracted to her by the light of the torch.

There was a further interminably long delay while we returned upstream on foot to make a portage of the luggage. While we were lugging the trunks over the stones I wondered how much more of this treatment the boat could stand without being irreparably damaged. The thought of being marooned here, almost within sight of the place from which we had set off, with a piece of Indian Government property with its bottom torn out, which had been lent to us under duress, was more than I could bear to contemplate.

It was now quite dark and very cold. Shivering, we poled across to the right side of the stream, for we were all unanimous about not wanting to sleep on the edge of the jungle, and edged the boat in as close as possible to the shore. The water was so shallow that there was still a gap of several yards between the boat and the beach when it finally grounded and the unloading of the gear we needed for the night was a miserable, cold business. By good fortune there were two small patches of sand among the stones and on these we made our camp. The boatmen disappeared, in order, so they said, to look for firewood. I would not have been surprised if they had not returned. But they did, dragging with them one of the barkless trees. Soon a big fire was going and we made strong, sweet tea for everyone.

Now Wanda began to cook rice, watched by the boatmen who squatted round the fire smoking the vile cigarettes called bidis and sipping tea from a pannikin. They seemed to be in no hurry to prepare their evening meal.

Finally, embarrassed by their unblinking gaze, she asked G. when they were proposing to start cooking.

‘They are not eating,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘They are not eating because they have no food.’

‘But they were given money to buy it. You gave it to them.’

‘They are saying that there was no time to buy it.’

‘Well, what are they going to do?’

‘Now they are awaiting your instructions.’

‘Can’t they get some from a village?’

‘Now I am asking them.’

An animated conversation ensued.

‘They have never been so far from their homes before. If there is a village they do not know it. They know nothing. It is difficult for me to understand these fellows,’ G. said.

We were in a fix, really the last of a succession of fixes, but the overcoming of insuperable difficulties is, of course, one of the unspoken reasons for travelling in remote places. Nevertheless it was a bore. We had anticipated living simply, and purposely we had brought with us simple things, for there is nothing more disagreeable than eating copiously in the presence of people to whom a square meal is an unknown pleasure. Now the whole lot of us were faced with the possibility of being without any food at all if the journey to the Balawali Bridge was unduly prolonged, for this was the nearest point at which we could be certain of getting any. We had bought what seemed a lot of rice in Hardwar, but not enough to feed everyone. We had chilli powder, sugar, tea, biscuits, a few tins of sardines and some Indian tinned meats. I was determined that we should not have recourse to the tinned meats unless we were forced to. Although there are numerous secret cow-eaters and a host of overt pig-eaters in India, the mere possession of tinned beef and bacon was enough to label us as cannibals so far as the Hindus were concerned, and as unmitigatedly filthy persons to any orthodox Muslim. To tell the truth, I was far less worried about the stigma that attached to its consumption than I was about the possible indignities to which it might have been subjected in the course of its preparation. Both beef and pork, according to the labels on the tins, emanated from the same factory. It was difficult to imagine any Indian sufficiently debased to can beef and bacon indiscriminately; it was equally difficult to imagine Hindus and Muslims both working under the same roof, each, in one another’s eyes, committing sacrilege. Did they, I wondered, have separate production lines or did they spit ritually in each tin before sealing it, in order to square themselves with their respective gods? But these were useless speculations. The boatmen had worked well, all three of them. There was nothing to do but give them food and hope that something would turn up.

Among our stores was a bottle of Indian whisky and a bottle of rum, which we had procured from Jawalapur, the place which the guide book referred to as being infested with thieves and pickpockets. It seemed as good a moment as any for a drink, but with only two bottles between three of us, in a land be-devilled by prohibition, either partial or complete according to where one found oneself, and no prospect of being able to buy any more, I jibbed at sharing it with the boatmen.

‘We don’t have to give them drinks as well, do we?’

‘Certainly not,’ G. said. ‘These men are not drinking. It is against their religion.’

A special journey had had to be made by bicycle ricksha in order to buy these two bottles. Because it was outside the sacred area, two miles away on the banks of the Ganges Canal, Jawalapur was the place of pilgrimage for those in search of forbidden pleasures. This was the rendezvous of secret drinkers, eaters of fish and fowl, eggs and meat; while across the canal in a sad area of mud-filled lanes and mean brick buildings were the stews to which the pandas came to stretch themselves after long hours of squatting on their wooden platforms, puja-chanting, casting horoscopes and making the tilak marks on the foreheads of the faithful.

The place was a great hive of whores. It was late afternoon when we arrived and they were just beginning to stir after the long sleep of the day. Bleary-eyed, the older ones leaned against the door posts in narrow alleys choked with sewage, babies at their slack breasts, while bigger daughters still too young to be broken to the trade, wearing frilly western dresses and with their hair in red ribbons, peeped round their skirts; others, younger women, crouched in doorways that were so low that they were more like entrances to a rock tomb than to a brothel, smoking cigarettes, and one could imagine the clients, emerging in the early dawn, half stupefied with hemp, hurting themselves dreadfully. Some were as stern and forbidding as the Goddess of Destruction herself, with long thin downturned mouths. Some had the broken-looking snub noses and the slightly bulbous foreheads that seem to be universally esteemed by men. All were heavily bangled; jewels shone in their noses, their eyes were set in black rings of shadow that proclaimed an intense fatigue. One needed courage to lie with women like this, to put out of mind the awful smells in the lanes; to banish the thought of their mothers and grandmothers who hovered behind them, too old for further service and an earnest of what they themselves would one day become, and of their husbands/keepers/fathers, whatever they were, still snoring, stretched out on charpoys under the washing that hung lifelessly in the airless courts, but they were in no real mood for business, and those that were offered their services without enthusiasm. In a little while they would begin to prepare themselves for the night’s work, but this was their quiet hour and they were making the most of it.

Wanda put on a lot more rice to cook, gave Karam Chand a wooden spoon and left him in charge of it. Then the three of us paddled out to the boat. Hidden from view behind the open lid of one of the trunks, as surreptitiously as any panda, we drank whisky that had been distilled with the aid of Scottish technicians, using Indian ingredients and Indian water.

At dinner we ate a mountain of boiled rice, heaped with chilli powder. In addition the three of us shared a tin of sardines and some slices of rather nasty cut loaf. We had difficulty with the sardines as there was no opener. Later, as we crouched round a gigantic fire that the boatmen had kindled I had the first real opportunity of observing them as individuals. Karam Chand, their leader, was about twenty years old. He was thin and intelligent-looking. He had shown himself an excellent navigator when there had been any water to navigate. The other two had more primitive countenances which, in the case of the elder one, Bhosla, verged on brutality. Jagannath, the youngest, was more animated. From time to time our eyes met, and I wondered what their feelings were, these men who had never left their native place, embarked on a crazy journey with no avowed purpose and now marooned with three foreigners (for them G. was as foreign as any of us) on a bank of stones in the middle of the Ganges. My heart, made mellow by whisky, warmed to them.

While the three of us were drinking more tea and smoking Trichinopoly cheroots, two men appeared and stood at the edge of the fire. They had been overtaken by night while in the jungle, they said, and had come to recruit their spirits by the fire before setting off for their village which was a couple of miles to the west. We gave them tea and cigarettes and, after ascertaining that we were outside the sacred area of Hardwar, ordered a dozen eggs from them to be delivered early the next morning.

We slept close to the fire cocooned in our bedding rolls, buoyed up by the rubber mattresses which we had cursed because they were so cumbersome. Before we went to bed, shamed by the inadequate coverings that the boatmen had brought with them, we gave each of them one of the blankets we had bought in the bazaar; but they were not in the mood for sleep and they remained hour after hour droning on about new masters while I lay listening to the sound of goods trains concertina-ing in the sidings at Hardwar and the water rippling over the pebbles. Overhead the sky was a great blanket filled with innumerable holes through which shone innumerable stars. To the north the lights of the town loomed above the mist that hung low over the plain.

At six o’clock the next morning the sky to the east began to glow. Soon it was fierce red. It was as if someone was stoking a furnace. Against it the Siwalik Hills undulated away to the east-south-east as far as the eye could see, like a giant switchback. Flight after flight of duck streamed up the river towards the north. Across the water the stranded trees were like sea monsters hauled out on the shore.

Then the sun rose over the Plains. Three spotted deer came out of the jungle which was still in deep shadow and crossed the river towards us, while a fourth emerged from a belt of long grass that fringed one of the tree-clad islands a quarter of a mile downstream. Seeing us it remained motionless until we got up to look at it. Then it took fright and went off together with the others. The nearness of the temples on either side of the Ganges gorge showed us how far we had really come. One of the two men whom we had met the previous evening arrived with the eggs but it was too late. We had already eaten our breakfast.

CHAPTER FIVE Through the Bhabar

For a considerable distance below Hardwar the bed of the Ganges is composed of boulders … The stream has a far from stable course …

District Gazetteer of the United Provinces, Vol. III, Saharanpur;

Allahabad, 1909

We set off at nine o’clock. It was hopelessly late but it is always like this at the beginning of a journey. Even when we had bailed the boat dry, and carried out an anxious inspection of the plates and rivets and loaded it up again, there never seemed to be a quorum for the actual departure. Apart from some dents that showed through on the inside as large, ominous swellings, the hull seemed sound enough. Whether or not it was capable of enduring another day of similar battering was another matter.

Although at this point the Ganges was about seventy feet wide, it was still not more than twenty inches deep; but the pebbles which were covered with weed of a greenish-bronze colour seemed smaller and, foolishly, thinking that they would soon vanish altogether, we congratulated ourselves on having done so well.

As soon as we set off we went aground. This was a bad patch. There were three rapids one above the other, each preceded by its own dreary shoal through which we manhandled the boat swearing monotonously. Half way down the third rapid, a fast exciting ride, we hit a large rock head on; the stern reared in the air, a bedding roll went over the side and was rescued by Jagannath as it started to go downstream; the boat broached-to; the gunwales went under and it began to fill with water. We slithered out, righted it, pulled the head round and went down the rest of the way with our stomachs on the gunwales and our feet dragging on the bottom; ending up as we always did in a deep, calm pool of cold water; this time in the lee of an island under a high steep bank of silt and sand to the edge of which a number of stunted trees clung by the last of their roots.

We were in the tract called the Bhabar (the porous place). Here the torrents from the Siwaliks lost their steepness and flattened out, depositing the rocks and boulders which had been making life such hell for us ever since we set off. All the time, on its passage through the Bhabar, the Ganges, already enfeebled by the loss of the vast quantities of water that were drawn from it into the Upper Ganges Canal, was being deprived of even more of its strength as a proportion of it sank into the dry limestone and percolated away. Somewhere further downstream, the water would emerge again to give fresh impetus to the river, but we needed it here and now. With the onset of winter and the dry season the water coming down from the Himalayas was diminishing rapidly. Each day the level of the river fell an inch or more. In a week’s time there would be no water at all in some stretches we had passed through. We were engaged in a race with a dying river which threatened to leave us high and dry, a race which we might have lost without knowing it.

At the end of a short reach in which we were able to use the oars, we went aground in a place where the stream divided itself into three parts. All were equally uninviting. They all began with waterfalls; none gave any indication of which was the principal one, or, whether it bore any relation to the others. It was a problem that from now on was to be with us constantly.

For the purpose of navigation the map was useless. The scale was a quarter inch to the mile. The original survey had been made in 1917 by the Survey of India, and it had been published in 1924 with corrections up to 1950 but only so far as roads, railways, tramways, canals, car tracks and tube wells were concerned. ‘The course of the Ganges River is liable to continual change owing to the shifting of the river bed,’ a note on the map stated. Because of the fighting with China the Indian Defence Regulations were so stringent that it was impossible to buy a large-scale map of any kind in India – I had brought this one with me from England. We could scarcely be accused of being unprepared but for all we knew the right hand channel might be the Banganga, another river altogether. There was no way of knowing. The jungle on the left bank which up to now had extended to the water’s edge had receded and was invisible as was the bank itself; the right bank was equally so. We were somewhere in the middle.

The Banganga is really a backwater of the Ganges; it is said that in ancient times it may have been its bed. Completely unfordable in the rains, it takes off from the parent stream about four miles south of Kankhal on the right bank – we were still not more than four miles from the temple of Daksheshwara – and from this point meanders inconsequentially through the Khadir, the lowland of Saharanpur, in which the principal crop is unirrigated wheat, and through wastes of sand, savannahs of tall grass and marshland before rejoining the Ganges some thirty miles downstream, in the district of Muzaffarnagar, during which it covers at least three times this distance. If we ended up in the Banganga, which at this season must have already reached a point nearing extinction, it would take more than the thirty-two men whom we had employed at Hardwar to carry the boat from the canal to the Ganges to put us on our way again.

The Ganges Canal was the brain-child of Captain Proby Cautley of the Bengal Engineers. He was convinced that it was possible to get water out of the Ganges and into the Doab,¹⁰ the land between the Jumna and the Ganges, an immense area which suffered from frequent and terrible famines. He made his first survey in 1836.

Every kind of difficulty had to be overcome: orders and counter-orders came from the authorities, civil and military, in bewildering succession. One moment it was to be an irrigation canal, next for navigation only. Then it was not to be built at all; notwithstanding the fact that the East Jumna Canal which had originally been built by the Mughals in the eighteenth century had been extremely successful in combating famine in the country which it passed through. It was said that earthquakes would destroy the viaducts, that miasmas would hang over the irrigated land, that malaria would become rife and that the navigation of the Ganges would be affected. (The last objection was the only one that proved to be right.)

The builders laboured under the most fearful difficulties. Rain destroyed the brick kilns and the unbaked bricks along the whole line of works. Often the wooden pins which marked the alignments on which the excavations had to be made were knocked down by cattle or else stolen by the local inhabitants. There were also the problems of working so far from the base at Calcutta, 1,000 miles away. There was no railway in those days. It was found, for instance, that the steam engine which had to be sent to them at Roorkee had been manufactured the wrong way round for the building into which it was intended to fit.

Nevertheless, twelve years after its commencement the Ganges was finally admitted into the canal at Hardwar in April 1854. It was still some time before it was finally finished but when it was it watered the whole tract between the Jumna and the Ganges, bestriding it like a colossus extending to Etawah on the Jumna, and to Kanpur on the Ganges 350 miles downstream. By the eighties it had been extended as far as Allahabad and the irrigation of the Doab was complete. Its completion marked the end of serious famine in the region.

There was only one person to ask the way from, an old man sitting alone on the shingle, but he was not very helpful. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ he said. ‘Nor have I heard of the Banganga.’

It was Karam Chand who discovered the proper channel; rather he divined which was the correct one.

‘Sahib,’ he said. ‘This is the way of Ganga.’ None of us believed him; but fortunately we decided to take his advice.

Once more we started our miserable excavations and once more, having reached the head of the fall, we tipped over it and roared downhill watched by the old man, the solitary spectator, who had moved down to the foot of it and was squatting there, happily anticipating disaster, in much the same way as an inhabitant of an outer suburb who takes his ease on a bench at a dangerous corner on a warm August afternoon.

But this was only the beginning. At the bottom there was yet another fork. Here, however, the choice was a simple one. A prolonged reconnaissance showed that the two streams joined again a mile lower down. It was only a question of which was the least disagreeable. The one on the right had four separate waterfalls; the one on the left had three. The difficulty lay in the approaches. There was not enough water in either to float a cork, let alone a twenty-five-foot boat, drawing eighteen inches of water, and it lay on the stones as incongruous as a rowing-boat on a gravel drive after a sharp shower of rain.

Far away to the right, four men appeared and began to fish using weighted nets. G. set off to interview them. We saw him flourishing one of his swagger-sticks at them; then we saw them turn their backs on him and take up their nets and make off.

‘These men are not knowing anything,’ he said when he returned. ‘And, what is more, they are not helping us.’

‘You might have got some fish,’ I said – tempers were becoming frayed.

‘They were catching fish,’ G. said sadly. ‘They were catching Rahu but they were not giving me any.’

The boatmen set off in search of a village, a temporary place inhabited only during the dry season, which the fishermen had told G. existed not far off, where they hoped to buy food and get help. We waited for them to return and time, which we were in the process of learning to disregard, ceased to have any meaning at all. A black and white pied kingfisher with a beak shaped like the pick of an ice-axe and equally deadly, hovered motionless over what little water there was. Occasionally it hurled itself into it with its wings tight against its body, emerging with something which might have been a small fish or a tadpole which it walloped savagely on a stone in order to make it more digestible, before swallowing it. High overhead bar-headed geese flew purposefully in long, undulating ribbons wing-tip-to-wing-tip on their way to some distant feeding-ground.

Eventually the boatmen returned. Although they had phrased it differently the villagers had given the same reply to their requests for assistance that the fishermen had given to G.

‘We spoke to them for some time,’ said Karam Chand. ‘Huzoor, all that they would say was that their work was not with water.’

Both he and the others had also failed to get any food; whether by accident or design it was impossible to say.

We removed all the baggage from the boat and stripped it of everything we could; the rudder, the oars, the bottom gratings, and the stretchers. Without all these things it was still immovable. Our only hope lay in recruiting extra help but there was no one to give it.

We started to carry the gear a mile downstream to the place where the falls ended, through wastes of sand and stones that were now so hot that it was impossible to remain standing on them barefooted without dancing up and down. Bent under the weight of tin chests, oars and gratings, with hurricane lanterns held improbably in the crooks of our arms, we resembled the survivors of a shipwreck on the coast of Namaqualand, all except Wanda who, wearing a bathing costume of Helanca yarn, high wellington boots and her General’s hat on top of which she balanced a tin full of kerosene, was a fantastic figure, more like a drum-majorette in some Middle Western town than a memsahib on a serious excursion, and the boatmen regarded her with awe.

Suddenly, by the kind of miracle which all true travellers regard as inevitable and almost unworthy of remark, three men appeared. They were on their way to cut wood in the jungle, but when we asked them for help they said, as the others had, that their work was not with water. Nevertheless we pressed them into our service at a colossal wage of two rupees a head and although they were poor, emaciated, gentle creatures, with their unwilling help the boat began to move over the stones, making a noise like an old tram.

But it was only for a short while. At first the air resounded with encouraging cries. ‘Challo!’ (Oh, move!); ‘Shabash!’ (Well done!); ‘Aur thora!’ (A little more!) but in the face of the almost overwhelming difficulty of the operation, the noises soon died away and our efforts were concerted by a succession of unintelligible grunts. I could think of nothing but my bare feet, which, as I pressed them down on one rounded stone after another, felt as if they had been bastinadoed. I only possessed two pairs of shoes, one for social occasions and one for walking. The size and shape of my feet made it certain that, unless I was able to remain in one place long enough to have them made-to-measure, I would never find another pair however long I remained in India. I was very reluctant to ruin my shoes by using them underwater, but in the course of the next hour I was forced to put them on, for it took an hour to get the boat to the top of the fall. Even then it was not just a question of leaping into it or holding the gunwales and careering down as it had been previously. The water was too shallow. It was not until the boat was part way down the second rapid that it suddenly floated. It now gained such a momentum that it shot right through a large pool, over the top of the third fall and down it into a beautiful open reach. We had managed to transport some of the gear from the boat this far, but the rest was spread out in small dumps over a mile of beach, dropped at the whim of whoever had been carrying it, and while Wanda boiled the kettle for tea we went back to retrieve it.

We drank our tea and set off again. We were very tired. It was a beautiful river; but it was destroying us. Almost at once we heard the sound of more rapids. To our diseased imaginations they sounded like the Victoria Falls. We were hungry now. It was three o’clock. Since breakfast, a thin meal, we had eaten nothing except some hot, white radishes that Wanda had produced artfully from a mysterious-looking bag. Now she began to cook in a space which she cleared for herself in the bottom of the boat and when we finally came to the next rapids she refused to be off-loaded and separated from the stove. ‘If I stop cooking now we’ll never eat,’ she mumbled doggedly.

But this time there was no need for any of us to get out. There was a superabundance of water in these rapids and we went down at a terrific rate, clasping the seething cooking pots as if they were sacred relics. Safe at last we stopped to eat alongside an island that rose steeply out of the river. The water had cut away the banks, exposing stratas of smooth oval stones embedded layer on layer in the silt, like the flint wall of an old English house. The island was thickly wooded with shisham trees whose trunks and lower branches were closely wrapped with band upon band of coarse grass brought down by the flood waters and bleached white by the sun. It gave them a strange surrealistic appearance as if they had been bandaged. It was a sinister place; even the sandbanks in the river which had now begun to supplant the shingle seemed to float on its surface, and although I tried to rid myself of the image they reminded me of the bodies of long-dead, bloated animals that had lost their hair.

We set off again at four, and immediately, conforming to a ritual to which we had long become accustomed, came to another fall. These were the longest, most hazardous rapids we had so far encountered; but fortunately we did not know this. With the last dreary portage behind us we had hoped that we had turned the corner, crossed the high pass. Certainly the character of the river was changing. Boulders had become stones and now, where previously there had been shingle on the bottom of the river, there was sand with chips of mica in it that glittered in the afternoon sun.

There was no difficulty about entering these rapids. The top end was like the mouth of a large funnel. Into it the water was being sucked with a singularly powerful motion which gave the surface an oily appearance. For a moment the boat remained almost stationary at the top; the next moment it was thundering downhill. There was barely time to ship the oars. The channel was not more than a dozen feet from side to side, but in it the current was running between steep banks of gravel which accentuated the feeling of speed. As we went down a cloud of small white birds enveloped the boat uttering indignant cries. It was terrifying but at the same time it was wonderful. It was as I had always imagined the descent of the Cresta Run on a bob sleigh. High in the stern, Karam Chand was grasping the tiller with both hands and uttering cries of exultation. The two boatmen, Bhosla and Jagannath, were leaning on the bedding rolls ecstatically chanting something that sounded like a triumphal hymn. Wanda, as devoted as the boy on the burning deck, was grimly trying to finish the washing-up. G. was in the bows, at look-out. It was a superfluous office. We swept on. We were all set for a spectacular disaster.

It came. The water ahead was curling back on itself. Under it there was something dark. G. uttered a despairing cry of warning, but it was too late. There was a tremendous crash as we hit the rock and everyone was thrown forward on their faces. Cooking pots erupted from the bottom of the boat. It reared in the air; Jagannath, the young boatman with the moustache, shot clean out of it, presumably into the water. At this moment, irrationally, Wanda could be heard asking to be put ashore. It was like an old print of a whale-boat with a whale surfacing underneath it. But there was no time to worry about Jagannath, even if we had wanted to. The bows came down again on the water with a resounding smack and now we were approaching the bottom of the fall at an appalling rate. At the bottom there was a bend so sharp that it gave the impression of being a dead end. It was, in fact, a right-angled bend with a twelve-foot-high bank of sand and shingle across the bottom of it, but there was nothing anyone could do about avoiding it. Karam Chand had as much chance of turning the head of the boat from its course as the driver of an express train who sees the gates of a level crossing closed against him. The boat simply ignored his efforts at the helm. It cut straight across the right angle of the turn and buried its head with enormous force in the sand and shingle which exploded about our heads like shrapnel. For the second time we were thrown on our faces, then the current took hold of the stern and slewed the boat round so that it lay across it, with its starboard under water. For a moment I thought it was going to capsize, but the bows broke loose from the bank and it began to gather way and shot stern first into deep, comparatively still water. We had made it, and so had Jagannath who came limping down the bank towards us. In one hand he carried an aluminium saucepan. Through the bottom of the boat two stiff jets of water were rising like an ornamental fountain.

We put in to the shore and unloaded everything, and Karam Chand caulked the two holes in the bottom – the shock of hitting the rock had started two rivets. So far as we could ascertain, apart from the boat being full of sand and stones, this was the extent of the damage. It was a remarkable testimonial to the men who had built it. It was more like a battleship than a rowing-boat.

High on a sandbank above the pool in which we now floated, a solitary figure was crouched over a small fire in front of a grass hut. It was like one of those constructions that harbour beings, part human, part animal, part vegetable, in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Although the exciting events of the last few minutes must have been abundantly visible, whoever it was gave no sign of being aware of our existence. ‘Sadhu,’ said the boatman. ‘Mahatma Ji.’ And uttered a prayer as we went down past his dwelling.

It was five o’clock; time to stop. Slowly we paddled a few hundred yards down a quiet reach, looking for a place to camp. On the left bank the trees on the outer edges of the jungle loomed redly, illuminated by the setting sun. No one wanted to camp on the left bank.

As we dawdled, four ragged-looking men loaded with wood came out of the shadow of the trees and down the beach towards us at a quick lope. ‘Oho!’ they shouted. ‘Thou with the boat. We have many kos to travel before night. Take us over!’

We ferried them over, one at a time because of their heavy loads. They came to gather fuel every day in the dry season, they said. At other times the river was a great sea, miles wide. Their village was far away on the right bank. If what they said was true then a great part of each working day must have been taken up in this way collecting wood. According to them there were two more rapids below this place and then one came to a village. They did not know its name. These men were full of fears: of other men, of the beasts of the jungle, of evil omens and portents of disaster that on many occasions made them turn back and pass the day in the shelter of their houses; but most of all they were afraid of being in the jungle with night coming on. To us their fears seemed perfectly legitimate ones.

We chose a camping-place on the foreshore of what seemed at first to be the right bank of the river (a place as sandy as the previous night’s had been stony), but was really one of a series of islands overgrown with grass and shisham trees a few feet higher than the dried-out bed of the river. As the light failed the long bands of wind-blown cloud that all afternoon had floated high in a pale sky turned first to bronze and then a leaden colour, all except the ragged edges which were tinged a daring shade of pink. The sky itself became darker and more opaque until it was a deep navy in which the evening star shone brilliantly and alone. To the west, over the line of false shore, the long, plumed grass waved in the dying wind, black against the last conflagration of a rather vulgar sunset. It was a memorable scene.

With the light gone from the sky, squadrons of Pteropodidae, fruit bats, began to pass silently overhead in horrible, undulating flight on their way to ravage some fruit garden. We counted them in dozens, then in hundreds and finally, when we reached four figures, we lost patience and gave up. In the morning, just before first light, they returned and later we found one dead on the shore. Perhaps the excesses of the night had been too much for it. Close-to it was even more loathsome than it had been in flight. It had a shrunken foxy head with long upstanding ears, in each of which there was an additional lobe of skin the shape of a small willow leaf, probably some kind of extra navigation aid. In death the mouth gaped displaying long indrawn teeth, deeply grooved to assist it in its orgies of fruit eating. Its wings had a span of more than four feet which, when the membranes were extended on their elongated, rib-like fingers, were like some ghastly surrealistic umbrella made of flesh and bone. The only member that was free from the membrane that embraced the three fingers, was the thumb which was split into two parts, each of which was furnished with a sharp claw.

While the boatmen were banking up a great fire we set off to see the sadhu. ‘He is very holy man,’ G. said as we lurched through the deep sand. ‘We must profit by meeting him. Now he is telling us many things.’ He was entranced at the prospect but I was oppressed by the thought of meeting yet another sadhu, most probably under a vow of perpetual silence, who would do nothing but stare at us until we went away.

Fortunately, the sadhu was not a sadhu at all, but an emaciated old man planted in the sand by God knows what authority to scare off poachers from the jungle on the opposite bank. It was difficult to see how he could do this as he was on the wrong side of the river and there was no means of crossing. He lived here, alone in his grass hut, all through the dry season from October to March. Now he was squatting outside it over a fire that was so minute that it barely gave off any heat at all, with a dish of water-chestnuts before him that looked as old and shrivelled as he was.

‘Yours is the only boat I have seen,’ he said when he had recovered from the rather extravagant greeting that G. had given him while still under the impression that he was a holy man, at the same time politely offering us the water-chestnuts of which there were only three. ‘Here I am very solitary but I have four sons and a wife in my village. It is a long way off and there is little to eat there, only gram.’¹¹

‘She must be a difficult wife; otherwise no man would live alone in such a wilderness,’ Jagannath said, unkindly, when this conversation was reported to him. It was more probable that the old man remained there because he was very poor and fit for nothing else. We gave him some rice and chillies but he scarcely looked at them.

‘It is sufficient that you have come to visit me,’ he said. ‘Once there were many wild animals, but now there are many poachers. Few of the true hunting people, the real shikar log, come here any more.’

‘Well, if there are poachers why don’t you report them to the authorities?’

‘Huzoor,’ he said, simply, ‘how can you report a poacher to himself?’

It was a comfortable camp. We lay in the sand with all our goods and chattels heaped about us, like the defenders of Rorke’s Drift in a reproduction that hung in one of the corridors at school. There was a big fire. Dinner was rice and the awful tinned sausages that we were now forced to broach, thanks to the improvidence of the boatmen. It was fearfully cold. By eight o’clock we were all tucked up in bed, like naughty children. Genuinely afraid that the boatmen might die of exposure, we gave them two more blankets.

A fish leapt in the river and sank once again with a dull plop.

Bhosla was supposed to be the expert on fishes, but as he was not a forthcoming sort of man the process of finding out what sort of fish it was was a tedious one.

‘Mauli hai?’

‘Nahin!’

‘Kotha hai?’

‘Nahin!’

‘Rahu hai? Tengena hai? Lachi hai? Saunl hai? Gaunch hai?’

‘Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! Nahin!’

‘Blast! Bam hai?’

‘Hai!’

‘Elephants come here in the rains,’ Karam Chand said helpfully, sensing my exasperation.

Sometime in the dark watches after midnight he woke me. He was in a state of alarm.

‘SAHIB! Tarch hai?’

After some fumbling I found it in the bottom of my bedding roll.

‘Ek nilgai bahut nazdik hai,’ he said. In the beam of the torch two brilliant eyes regarded us unwinkingly.

Three parts asleep, unwilling to do so, but because Karam Chand wanted it we blundered about in the sand looking for the nilgai, the blue cow, a most inoffensive but destructive animal held sacred by the Hindus for its imagined relationship with the domestic cow – which, not unnaturally, had vanished. As a result I could not sleep any more.

At four it was fearfully cold. In spite of wearing skiing under-wear, a woollen shirt made from a piece of sixty-year-old Welsh flannel that had been one of my father’s bequests to me, a fisherman’s jersey, thick whipcord trousers, and being rolled in two thick blankets inside a bedding roll, I was frozen. I had read somewhere that the more clothes one wears the colder one feels, but this was no time to start stripping. Karam Chand, Bhosla and Jagannath had the felt blankets we had given them at Hardwar, the two extra blankets we had issued to them before we went to bed, a thin piece of carpet and a miserable quilt – and they wore cotton clothes; nevertheless they all three slept soundly.

At five the fruit bats began to go over. The men continued to sleep like logs.

‘They must be used to cold,’ I said to Wanda, who lay in bed with her teeth chattering.

‘They must be,’ she said picturesquely, ‘otherwise they’d bloody well be dead.’

It seemed as if the dawn would never come. The moon, a pale hemisphere, was churning its way through a sea of cirrus that was moving away, high over Garhwal. There was no wind and the river between the shoals was like sheets of black glass. At about six the sky to the east became faintly red; then it began to flame and the moon was extinguished; clouds of unidentifiable birds flew high overhead; a jackal skulked along the far shore and, knowing itself watched, went up the bank and into the trees; mist rose from the wet grass on the islands on which the shisham trees stood, wrapped like precious objects in their bandages of dead grass. Frozen stiff and full of sand we waited for the kettle to boil. It was only the second day of our voyage but the stubble on G.’s chin was beginning to sprout prodigiously.

The old man appeared, picking his way towards us through the sand on his painfully thin legs like a ragged heron. On one of his shins there was a deep, festering sore which Wanda had insisted needed attention. He had filled it with sump oil from a motor bus and underneath it was all rotten. ‘The nearest village is Bhagmalpur,’ he said as she probed about in the huge cavity, watched enviously by the boatmen who wished that they, too, could attract some sympathy and be the centre of attention. ‘It is a place of little consequence, but it is my village,’ he added, deprecatingly. The only place on the map of the area in which we found ourselves that had a name at all was Bhogpur.

‘Bhogpur is two kos from Bhagmalpur,’ he said.

If Bhogpur was two kos from Bhagmalpur then it might be possible to make a reasonable guess at our position. It depended on what he meant by a kos.

‘There are seventy rassis in one kos,’ Karam Chand said.

‘There are twelve hundred laggis in one kos,’ said Bhosla in a sudden garrulous outburst.

‘There are three thousand six hundred gaj in one kos,’ said Jagannath, the youngest boatman.

‘Now I am telling you,’ said G. ‘If one kos is three thousand six hundred gaj, there are two miles and eighty yards in one kos.’ If this was so, then we had not travelled more than five miles since the previous morning.¹²

We left the old man standing on the bank with a parting gift of boracic lint, penicillin powder and biscuits, and carried the gear two hundred yards downstream to a place where the shoal ended; here we loaded the boat. It was now a quarter to eight. What the boatmen called Zirrea, small ringed plovers, compact little birds with neat scarves of black feathers round their necks and yellow legs, rose from the shingle in which they had been pecking, almost invisible, and wheeled over us, uttering despairing cries while a pair of orange-coloured Brahminy duck watched us warily from the shallows on the far side of the river.

In slow succession we dug our way through the sixteenth shoal and descended the sixteenth rapid and so on through the eighteenth and nineteenth, up to twenty-one. It would be tedious to enumerate them all but as we proceeded downstream, literally step by step, I made a note of them. It seemed unlikely that I would pass this way again and I knew that if I kept no record, for the rest of my life I would suspect that my memories of the Ganges below Hardwar were the figments of a disordered imagination.

Even when we had completed our excavations there were only nine inches of water over the twenty-first shoal, but by rare good fortune, four men appeared and without being asked helped us to work the boat through to the accompaniment of a lot of ‘challo’ing and ‘shabash’ing while all the time covertly regarding Wanda who was a remarkable figure in red woollen skiing under-wear rolled up to the knees: for the sun had temporarily vanished behind some clouds and it was unusually cool.

‘You are by Bhogpur,’ they said; but it was little comfort to us. We had thought ourselves by Bhogpur two and a half hours ago, and it was now a quarter past ten.

As we came to the head of the rapid a line of bullock-carts came out of the jungle on the left bank and began to rumble down over the foreshore towards the very place through which we had just hauled the boat. There were so many of them and we were so unused to traffic of any kind, that we decided to watch them cross. There was no need to anchor, we simply stopped pushing.

As the leading bullocks entered the water, possibly because it was cold or because the stones with the water running over had a different feeling, they halted. The driver did not lash them. He simply waited perched high in the bows of his cart until they had become accustomed to the new element. The carts were piled high with grass. They were of the kind called chhakra, the heavier sort of bullock-cart, but not the heaviest. They were as simple as a jeep and yet, in their own way, as complicated; machines that could go anywhere; the despair of western economists because of their maddening slowness, the destruction which they wreak on unmetalled roads, and their great weight, grossly disproportionate both to their capacity and to the pulling power of the undernourished beasts which draw them.

Nose to tail with squeaking wheels and the groaning of stressed timbers, the carts lumbered across the river and, as they went, the drivers exhorted their beasts: ‘Mera achcha beta!’ (My good son!) ‘Aur thora!’ (A little more!) ‘Jor se cballo!’ (Get on with it!) Soon they disappeared behind one of the islands on the other bank and once more we were alone. For the first time we noticed that the Siwalik Hills to the east of the Hardwar gap were invisible. The river was running to the south and parting company with the whole range.

Now we entered a reach that was perhaps a mile long and a hundred yards wide down which we paddled until we came to an open expanse of shingle on the left bank which extended inland towards the forest. ‘This is our village,’ said the leader of the four men who had been helping us. ‘It is by the Rawasan Nala,’ and when he invited us to visit it, although Karam Chand and the boatmen were reluctant to stop, the thought of our food box with its diminished contents hardened our hearts, and we forced them to go ashore with us.

Leaving Jagannath to guard the boat we set off across the shingle which was covered with dry, silvery mud, shooing our unwilling little force before us in the direction of the village which was hidden behind a thick bed of reeds and tall grass. After a quarter of a mile we came to an inlet of brackish water full of frog spawn, the bottom of which consisted of thick, glutinous mud into which we sank up to our knees. On the far bank thousands of hairy caterpillars were exercising in the sun. Here a young man and an old woman were making a grass rope, using a flat stone with a hook on it and a piece of bamboo with three holes in it through which the strands passed. The entrance to the village from the river side was by a narrow path that wound through the grass which was very high. From beyond this plantation came the sounds of activity; the clinking of chains and weird snatches of song, and I had a feeling of pleasurable expectation which turned to terror as a horde of savage curs with sharp, brown teeth came pouring down to meet us. There was no question of saying ‘Good dog,’ or extending a friendly hand to beasts like these, and we laid about us with our bamboos with a will until they turned tail and vanished.

The village was in the form of a rough rectangle. It consisted of about forty mud huts with thatched roofs which sagged under the weight of the orange-coloured gourds which grew profusely on them and whose broad-leaved tendrils and yellow flowers seemed to bind them to the earth. In front of each house there was a platform of well-swept dried mud on which the female inhabitants were squatting until the moment when we came into view when they took to their feet and retreated indoors uttering little cries of alarm and mock modesty.

The place was divided down the middle by a straggling path on either side of which emaciated cattle were hobbled in rough pens made from the branches of trees. At the north end was a larger, open-fronted building with a space in front of it, the meeting place of the elders of the village council. It was furnished with a couple of kulphidar, communal pipes with clay bowls and jointed wood stems, which helped them in their deliberations. Everywhere, on the uneven but smooth surfaced ground that had been moulded by the passage of innumerable bare feet, lay the simple machinery of village life: the wooden ploughs which have to be light enough for the cultivator to carry them on his shoulders to the fields; mattocks with iron heads bent at a sharp angle to the hafts; harrows that were nothing more than flattened logs; sowing baskets made of slips of woven bamboo; bigger baskets for feeding cattle; small, wooden-handled reaping sickles; a potter’s wheel and broken potsherds (‘The potter sleeps secure for no one will steal clay,’ Karam Chand said, sententiously); open-ended sieves, that looked like dustpans, made from reeds; a grinding mill, the kind that is worked by two women, one of whom turns the upper stone while the other pours in the grain; a cast-iron chaff-cutting machine with a flywheel; filled water pots sweating moisture; ropes and chains and halters and small children with black-painted eyes; all together in the thin dust. Above the village a solitary great shisham tree that had given shade to the village longer than anyone could remember was dying now. Its branches were filled with vultures. For the most part they remained motionless but from time to time they raised themselves, turning arrogant heads to show off their profiles and flapped their great wings, displaying white back feathers as dingy-looking as an old vest.

Through a gap in what was otherwise an almost continuous wall of houses I could see the fields of wheat and gram that lapped the village on three sides like a sea in which men and women, bent double, were weeding and loosening the soil around the young plants with wooden-handled knives. This was the Rabi, the crop that had been sown in November. All through the winter, from December to February, it would be weeded and watered, and sometimes between the middle of March and the middle of April the harvest would take place. From April to mid-May the villagers would thresh it – first it would be trodden out by six bullocks yoked together moving round and round a central post; then it would be winnowed and a cake of cow dung placed on top of the heaped grain to avert the evil eye. In June or July, after the monsoon rains had begun, the Kharif crop would be sown – rice, maize and millets; and in early October there would be the harvest and then the land would be ploughed and the Rabi would be sown once more. Another important crop, not here but in irrigated land, was sugar cane, now more important than cotton. The land in which it was to be planted might need as many as twenty ploughings before it was ready to receive it, lots of manure and constant weeding. This was the cycle in the State of Uttar Pradesh in the Ganges Plain. Floods, drought, blight, pestilence, the incursion of wild animals into the standing crops, any of these might destroy them and often did. They might fail from lack of fertilisers or the land might fail from excessive cropping; or because the subdivision of the property between all the sons made it impossible to farm it economically. This was the law of inheritance carried to the ultimate limits of absurdity; by it the individual holding might be reduced to the size of the back yard of a slum property. But whatever happened to it this was the cycle and had been for two thousand years.

The other crops were mustard and tobacco. At one time, as the result of the efforts of two British officers, tobacco grown in the forests of Bhogpur, a town somewhere to the south-east, had been so esteemed that, mixed with Latakia and Manila leaf, it had been sold in tins, but this like so many other ventures had eventually come to nothing. In the fields round about the village, stood the machans, rickety constructions in which watchmen sat at night to scare off wild animals, principally wild pig and nilgai that would play havoc with any crop if they succeeded in entering it. Armed with a pot containing a smudge of fire they passed the hours of darkness groaning apprehensively and calling to their neighbours in other machans in order to keep up their spirits.

The Headman, an old-looking man but probably not more than fifty, spoke with nostalgia of the days when the British were still in India.

‘Your honour,’ he said, ‘this village is often flooded and at such times we are in great misery. We have asked the Government to provide us with an embankment. That was more than a year ago and so far nothing has happened. In the time of the Raj such a thing would not have been allowed. A Sahib would have come on his horse and quite soon all would have been well.’

‘I wonder,’ G. said, ‘why they did not ask the Sahib for an embankment when he was coming here on his horse.’

In the circumstances this did not seem to be a good time to produce Mr Nehru’s letter which asked for assistance on our behalf, rather than proffering it. Instead we bought some potatoes and some stunted eggs for the boatmen, and the Headman gave us a bunch of green bananas. This was the extent of our shopping, for this was all they had to offer us. The Headman was genuinely sorry to see us go, as were the other inhabitants and we left watched by the women. They were wraith-like, swaying figures dressed in the lugri, the poor woman’s version of the sari, and wrapped overall in yet another sheet called the chadar. There are some 450,000 villages in India similar to this, all with less than 500 inhabitants, all with similar problems. Who can know what it is like to live one’s life in a village such as this with its 300 inhabitants and its 5,000 bighas¹³ of land, except those who are born there and live in it all their days? Not even the most assiduous anthropologist or the most devoted social worker. The windowless front that this village presented to the world seemed to be a symbol of the inhabitants: turned in upon themselves by its very layout, as if in a hall of mirrors; still, in spite of legislation, inhibited by consideration of caste; still, in spite of legislation, the victims of moneylenders paying off their never-to-be-discharged debts at an interest of anything up to 25 per cent; desiccated by the summer sun; ploughing through a Passchendaele of mud in the rainy season; creeping into the fields to put out a black pot to ward off the evil eye. Poor ignorant people, living on a knife-edge between survival and disaster.

CHAPTER SIX The way to the Balawali Bridge

The river is not navigable until it reaches the vicinity of Nagal in pargana Najibabad.

District Gazetteer of the United Provinces, Vol. XIV, Bijnor; Allahabad, 1908

Back in the boat I began to feel better. The weather was fine and warm, like a beautiful summer’s day in England; the sort of day I remembered, or thought I remembered, as being commonplace when I was a child and now only half-believed had ever been. To the north the Siwalik Hills had reappeared once more, wrapped in a haze which gave them an agreeable air of distance. Behind them rose a cluster of snow peaks, while downstream and far below the level at which we were, the jungle on our left extended eastwards to the foot of the mountains like a great green rug.

In spite of all the difficulties everyone, including Bhosla, whose lugubrious appearance and taciturn manner concealed and belied an optimistic nature, was in good spirits. I myself had not felt so well for years. Hard exercise and short commons, as my father would have called them, and minimal quantities of alcohol were all conspiring to do me good. Even my feet, now that I had decided to sacrifice one of my two pairs of shoes to the river, no longer hurt. It was fortunate that this was so, as we were now faced with the task of digging yet another channel for the boat, this time thirty yards long, to the head of the next fall, down which we plunged into a deep pool of green water in which the bottom could only be dimly seem. Here we let the boat drift aimlessly while we each ate half an orange, a surprise treat which Wanda produced from her useful bag.

The next rapid, the twenty-seventh since leaving Hardwar, was a long narrow race between banks eight feet high, two vertical slices of silt marked with long scourings, one below the other, the lower ones not yet dry, a reminder if we needed any that the water level was sinking fast. ‘Much more than two inches a day,’ said G., gloomily. But whatever was happening to the water level, the appearance of the river bed itself was changing too. Westwards it broadened out in huge expanses of sand and shingle. There was a feeling of great loneliness in this place, borne out by the map which gave no indication of any settlement or habitation.

We entered a wide lagoon in which there was no perceptible current and went aground in it. By now our sense of well-being had deserted us and we felt weak and disinclined to face new difficulties, for it was now one o’clock and so far we had had little to eat. Languidly gnawing giant white radishes, we splashed ashore and set off, each on a different course, to try and find a usable channel, leaving Wanda to curry rice and potatoes for the boatmen.

After twenty minutes during which the only living thing I saw was a crab too small to be worth eating, we reassembled. All reports were bad: the lagoon ended in a trickle of water with a short fall to the next reach; somewhere in the centre there was another, longer fall, but it was almost as feeble as the first; far over to the right there was a third that was deeper than the others, but very long. This was the one that Karam Chand favoured. After a good deal of wrangling and a frugal lunch – a tin of sardines, three cream crackers, two sweet biscuits and jam and a mug of tea – not much of a meal on which to push a boat through India (for that is what we seemed to be doing) – we decided to try it. We unloaded the boat, leaving Wanda to guard the gear, and pushed it back the way we had come and round a promontory to the head of the fall.

After all the business of lightening the boat it was enraging to find ourselves making an easy descent in ghostly silence by a narrow sluice-like run with a sandy bottom. It was a journey of only half a mile, but by the time we had carried everything down from the lagoon to the boat, we had each covered four times the distance.

The whole operation had taken nearly three hours; but it seemed worth it. Before us stretched what appeared to be the longest, most inviting reach we had so far encountered. There were no sandbanks and there was no sign of any rapids. To me, in one of those moments of insane optimism which no amount of experience was capable of shattering, it seemed that we might, with a little luck, reach the Balawali Bridge by nightfall; but no sooner had I expressed this hope than we were grounded again – this time in quicksands which quivered underfoot in a particularly horrible manner, as if one was walking on a blancmange.

At four-thirty we came to a place where four men were sitting marooned in mid-stream on four grass rafts on which they had been attempting to float downstream to their village which was somewhere near a place called Nagal on the way to Balawali Bridge. As we came abreast of them they appealed to us to take them aboard. ‘We, too, are watermen,’ they said. This was an admission so rare in our experience on the Upper Ganges, where everyone we had met had hastened to dissociate himself from it, that we would have taken them with us if for no other reason.

It was unfortunate that we chose this moment to run aground ourselves and we now found ourselves in the ridiculous position of having to ask the raftsmen for help before we could help them. These men were in a terrible state. They were wet and shivering and dressed in nothing but sodden loin-cloths that were mere vestiges of clothing. Now they abandoned their rafts and joined us in the boat, wrapping themselves from head to toe in long damp sheets, more like corpses exhumed from the tomb than living beings. ‘We have come from the jungle, northwards of the Rawasan Nala,’ they said. ‘For two days we have eaten nothing.’

We gave them sugar and sweets, all that we could lay our hands on without unloading the boat; but their pleasure was short-lived. We were now approaching the fifteenth rapid of the day, the twenty-ninth of the journey, a particularly frightening one, and the boatmen, whose sympathy for the newcomers was of a less demonstrative order than our own, made them disembark and stagger along the bank for half a mile on foot, while we descended the long run of water in comparative comfort.

The long day was drawing to a close – far too rapidly for my liking – although I had had more than enough of it. We would never reach the bridge, that was certain; what seemed equally certain was that we would not even reach Nagal before nightfall. Already the plumed grasses and sugar cane on the islands to the west were silhouetted against the sun which was sinking at an unseemly rate and deep in the bed of the river we were already in cold shadow.

As the boat entered the thirty-first rapid down which it careered silently, rocking from bow to stern on the powerful stream, we had a respite from the oars and now for the first time we had the feeling of being carried on the bosom of a great river. This was what I had imagined that the descent of the Ganges would be like.

The sun had gone now and for those who were not at the oars the air was very cold; but in spite of everything it was a lovely time and I felt strangely contented rowing like mad down this long reach, stripped to the waist, with the wild duck rising in hundreds and the Sarus Cranes, tall grey birds, standing in the water on long, bare, red legs, trumpeting to one another; while in the afterglow sky and water became blood-red and a long line of cliffs to the east which were now closing with the left bank of the river were the colour of canyons at sunset in the National Geographic Magazine. It was very calm and very impressive, but when we asked the raftsmen how far it was to Nagal – ‘Wuh kitni dur hai?’ – they said it was ‘Bahut dur’ (very far), and wrapped themselves closer still in their wet rags. These men were remarkably vague about their whereabouts. All they seemed to know was that their village was somewhere near Nagal, a small market town of 2,000 inhabitants, which lay somewhere to the east of the Ganges.

Now we went aground in the last of the light. Nine men and one woman hopelessly lost in a maze of shoals; blundering about in the darkness probing for a channel with bamboo poles; at one moment up to our waists in water, the next with it barely covering our calves. When eventually we did find a way it led through quicksands in which it was impossible to let go of the side of the boat for an instant for fear of disappearing for ever; attempting to move the boat in these circumstances, with no solid substance underfoot, was rather like pedalling a unicycle in a circus.

As we went slowly on, Karam Chand interrogated the raftsmen about the whereabouts of their village. ‘Three miles,’ they said at first, and then much later, ‘Two miles’, from which distance, however far we travelled, they refused to be dislodged. Finally, even Karam Chand became exasperated. ‘It is my opinion,’ he said, ‘that their village is nowhere near Nagal at all.’

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