A Pair of Mismatching Slippers

 

It’s the second week of April and the heat is building up. A brief spell of rain in the morning allows a bit of reprieve from the oppressive heat during the travel. I reach Haridwar in the afternoon. The two-kilometre stretch of road from the railway and the bus stand, facing each other across the road, to Har ki Pauri is a busy thoroughfare. It’s a religiously busy world heavily laden with towering facades of dharamshalas, hotels, lodges, restaurants, pavement food stalls and shops full of religious souvenirs.

I am flatly denied shelter for the night. As per rule, the dharamshalas give rooms to families only. Even hotels and lodges have a big problem in giving rooms to solo travellers. Try to convince them and they will hide under the order of the local administration in this regard. There have been few suicides, of course. Solo travellers are assumed to be depressed souls looking for moksha here in this part. The final departure from holy places is believed to take one straightaway to heaven or even liberation. So the suspicion about the solo travellers isn’t completely groundless. People fear that these lost souls are tottering on the brink of committing suicide. A lot many people presume that Indians hardly venture out alone and be happy at the same time. It is firmly believed that the depressed souls set out to call it quits, especially at holy places like these where leaving one’s body near the holy river ensures a direct landing in heaven.

One lodge owner asks me to get him to talk to my family members to verify that their ward isn’t depressed and is in fact happy in going out alone. I try calling my brother, an IT professional, but he is caught in the rigmarole of software designing. The call having gone unanswered, the lodge owner looks more suspiciously at me. Most probably he thinks that I am just pretending to make a call. I am denied the accommodation and move on, only to face the same dilemma in the reception lobbies of many lodges in the locality. I try my best to appear the happiest soul on earth in order to allay their fears about harbouring a depressed soul who may culminate his journey in their room, thus unleashing a barrage of police inquiries at their place, resulting in loss of business in addition to getting bad name for the property, or maybe even a ghost stalking their place.

Practice makes a man perfect and after one hour of continuous smile and glint in the eyes, accompanied with energetic movement of limbs, I am able to win the trust of the owner of a less than modest accommodation. It is at the far end of a narrow and not-so-clean street, beyond the footfall of most of the visitors. It’s a depressive set up, the owner himself looking ill at ease with life. So here I’m able to impose my cheerfulness upon him. I beam with enthusiasm and light their gloomy, musty set-up with my exaggerated verve and energy.

I’m safe here because even a suicide seeker will look out for a better point than this suffering, sulking place. There is a risk that even a happy person may get depressed here. It’s evident they don’t get many guests so someone who has been turned out from at least fifteen places is welcome here finally.

After hitting the jackpot, I freshen up in the staid, sulking tiny bathroom and set out with a spring in my gait as the evening builds up.  Hundreds of pilgrims are walking to Har ki Pauri for the famed ritual of evening Ganga Arti.

On any normal day you can expect a big fair kind of festivity there. The steps along the shores are crowded with pilgrims. Bells chime, mantras vibrate, incense smoke take monopoly of the air, people bathe, huge butter lamps with dozens of burning wicks sway like fiery torches, devotees float leaf bowls containing flowers and oil lamps as an offering to the holy river. Armed commandos are looking every inch here and there. Faith is no longer free.

When so many people congregate at a place and surrender, this slaying of ego confirms the presence of some higher meaning to life than what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.

Finishing the famed Arti, people slowly disperse and move along the crowded bazaar. The restaurants are ready for dinner. And people surrender to the spicy aroma with even more fervour than they had shown during the prayers. Bhojan has a big role in sustaining bhajan.

The next morning has dull sunshine. I am relieved to see the morose owner of the place still alive and try to cheer him up. ‘All of us have to die one day,’ is all he can manage in response to all my efforts at being joyful. I leave for the bathing ghats with serious doubts whether I will find him alive or not after returning.

Bathing in the cool torrents at Har Ki Pauri is piously gratifying. The first thing that strikes you is that the people shed their insecurities, inhibitions and suspicions. Nudity is no longer a scandalous flashpoint. All are children in Mother Ganga’s lap. Everyone is seeking purification from their sins, so egos are rapidly melting, at least for the time being. All are feeling adventurous like playful children. Young, old, children, boys, girls, men and women shed their reserved routine, abandon their fears about appearances, body shapes and status and wallow in the holy waters like funny, naughty children. Nobody stands out. Everyone is yelling, speaking and shouting and still you don’t have a particular protagonist. This merging with something bigger gives a sense of ease and comfort, a kind of lightness that stands in glaring contrast to the tensioned heaviness that we carry usually while fighting our lone battles on the path of survival. Around you many loudspeakers blare with chanting of mantras. Many pandits are loitering around those sitting on the steps overlooking the bathing ghat. They offer their prayer services.

By degrees, little, little private spaces for which we fight so rabidly get pushed away from the centre stage of our egos. You are in public. The ownership of bodies and worldly things is gently shoved away. Your private space gets a dose of sunlight. The doors and windows are opened. You feel life and soothing sunshine.

After a long, adventurous and cascading journey through the Himalayas, testing its zeal to the limits, the Ganges surrenders to pause at the foothills, creating swirly pools for rejuvenating rest and poise for the humbled humanity at her feet. The holy waters symbolise the mother river’s ‘giving and forgiving nature’. The holy stream endlessly flows for the cause of humanity.

After youthful wilderness, it’s the beginning of taking responsibilities, moving slowly, meandering more purposefully. Flowing down south, flanked by tiny ridges on the east and west, it reaches a milestone, of coming of age, of becoming a mother from a careless, flirtatious girl.

The eastern ridges are more wooded. The western ones are under the pressure of human build-up.

Haridwar is majorly sprawled north to west along the river’s western bank. To the north, before the town begins, a sluice dam has been erected to tame mother Ganges, to help it bless the countless who throng its bathing ghats. That is the point from which the mighty river is saddled with the responsibilities of being an uncomplaining mother, the giver, at the cost of its own existence.

The sluices divert almost half of the waters westwards, leaving the debilitated main stream meandering over the greyish floodplain to the east. From the sluices, half of the water circuits back to join the original stream to the east, while the rest moves along a well-made broad canal along the city to its west. Of this canal, a further distributary runs along the extreme west bank, circuiting along bathing steps and little shrine temples, forming the most auspicious Har Ki Pauri.

The city lies rectangular, north to south along the well maintained canal, flanked on the west by low, sadly denuded ridges, on the highest of which stands Mansa Devi temple. Cable cars go to the temple. More arduous is the flight of stairs all the way to the top of the hill. Halfway to the steps, a tar road loops around to take your tiring steps to the destination in case you can no longer keep climbing the steps.

Cleansed by holy dips, as the sun is building up the arena for a bright noon, I am trekking to the holy temple of Ma Mansa Devi. An uneventful walk and then I see him. The mass of his right leg may come more than the whole of the rest of his body. The deformity seems a miracle of God, rather than a curse. He has a small face and frail torso. But his elephant leg can compete with a medium-sized tree’s trunk in girth. It’s bent at the knee and the further part twisted to protrude out a huge foot having massive toes. It’s beyond the measurement of humanly acceptable pain. God has His own mysterious ways of showing his omnipotence. Nothing seems impossible for Him.

A piece of cloth is spread out in front of the boy. His mountain of helplessness is bigger than the hill above. You cannot look into his eyes. You feel ashamed of all your cribbing born of routine problems. Your pride gets a jolt. While putting a coin on the cloth, you obviously bow down before him. There he stands, sits or crouches down like a God. Only God can punish His own self to take a form like this. He does it to pass on some messages possibly. An old man bows down with folded hands in front of the boy.

I walk to the sacred temple and pray for the better spirits of the lodge owner. Faith can move mountains. I walk into the small, musty, smelly lobby in the afternoon. He sees me coming and smiles. ‘Mother has listened to my prayers,’ I think.

‘You have two different slippers on your feet!’ he points. Both of us laugh. Throughout the day I have been walking around in a pair of green and red slippers. It’s a routine thing to go walking with mismatching slippers, or even no footwear at all, from the bathing ghats where hundreds of pairs are spread out and things get mixed up.

Well, even mother’s blessings need worldly cause to come into effect. Mismatching slippers, for example.