A River Sutra (18 page)

The nine days that precede the night of Shiva were approaching, and the Naga Baba prepared to leave the jungle in search of a cremation ground.

He dismantled the leaf structure in which he had lived for a year, placing the thatched leaves and four poles between a tree's forking roots for some passing mendicant to construct a shelter. Then the Naga Baba took his iron trident wrapped in saffron cloth, his remaining stick of sandalwood, his skull bowl, and began to walk toward the nearest town.

Today the Naga Baba knew he would only need to walk thirty miles or so before he found a cremation ground. But in the early years of his austeri

Then he had always been exhausted, not knowing which roots and berries to look for in the jungle, or which plants could suppress thirst and hunger, or which yogic exercises slowed down the metabolism so a man could endure the extremes of heat and cold.

Now the Naga Baba was able to center his mind on his meditations no matter how severe his physical discomfort, so he did not notice the distance he was covering or the heat of the tarred road under his bare feet.

As he walked the Naga Baba thought about the harsh disciplines he had undergone to reach his present state.

He remembered the time his teacher had led him into the highest passes of the Himalayas and left him at a small stone temple cut into the mountain rock.

"If you are still alive after the winter," his teacher had said, "I will come for you."
The Naga Baba still could not bear to think of that winter—the hallucinations brought on by his solitary contemplations of death; the blizzards and the dwindling supplies of food that he had eaten raw because there was no wood to light a fire. The rodents dying in front of him as he meditated, their bodies frozen stiff by cold.
But at last the snows had melted. He had been overjoyed to see his teacher standing at the door of his temple, believing the worst of his ordeals was over.
He had not known his teacher would make him cross India on a journey so long the Naga Baba would forget what snow looked like by the time they reached the sand dimes and blowing tumbleweeds of the desert.
"You cannot be a Naga without overcoming human limitations," his teacher had said, leaving him again. "Learn to survive without water. If I find you here when I return, I will take you to our academy."
Now the prospect of sitting in the cremation ground without food or water for nine days no longer frightened the Naga Baba as it once had done. But he could see fear on the faces of the people crossing the road to avoid him. He knew his skin, gray under its daily application of ash, his matted hair falling to his waist in untidy knots, the human skull from which he ate and drank, were all terrifying reminders of death to ordinary people. He also knew they believed he possessed superhuman powers, the ability to levitate and to place irrevocable curses on any who displeased him.
The thought of their fear made the Naga Baba smile as he walked toward the funeral pyre still smoking on the banks of a small stream.
"Jai Shankar! Praise to Shiva!" a man shouted. It was the Dom who tended the funeral pyres, forced to live at the cremation ground because he was considered unclean.
The Naga Baba untied a corner of the saffron cloth covering his trident and took out a pinch of ash to smear in blessing on the Dom's forehead. To ordinary people the very shadow of the Dom was an evil omen, but to the Naga Baba the Dom was a kindred spirit, facing death daily as he did in his own meditations.
Then the Naga Baba cleared his mind of all distraction and prepared to meditate on the God of Death.
He went down to the stream to bathe. With the water still dripping from his body, he sat beside a funeral pyre where a body had just been cremated. The smell of smoldering wood and the acrid aroma of burned flesh was still strong in the summer night as he took handfuls of the charred wood from the pyre and crumbled it between his fingers, throwing out fragments of bone and flesh before rubbing the ash over his hair and body in the ascetic's bath that would increase the power of his meditations.
Crossing his legs in the lotus position, the Naga Baba placed his hands on his knees and began the chant he would continue for nine days and nine nights by that funeral pyre:

"Shiva-o-ham I that am Shiva Shiva-o-ham Shiva am I."

Throughout that time people came and looked at the Naga Baba. But they only did so from a distance and in the bright light of day. Among them were a few who could tell from his saffroncovered trident that he belonged to one of the great Naga academies renowned for the wars they had fought to defend their faith. They warned their children not to disturb him, and in whispers told each other of the time during the Indian Mutiny when twenty thousand Naga ascetics, naked, ash-covered with matted locks, had come down from their caves in the Himalayas to do battle with the red-coated Englishmen ambitious for empire.

But at night, as the moon waned and then gave no light at all, no one had the courage to approach the cremation ground where for nine nights the Naga Baba sat chanting by the funeral pyre.

Then at last it was the night of Shiva. On this night the Lord of Death became the death of death, and Shiva's acolytes broke their fasts by begging at the houses of those who were unclean, untouchable, or profane.
After smearing ash from the pyre onto his body, the Naga Baba went first to the house of the Dom. Every year the Naga Baba performed this ritual, and every year he heard the litany of cruelties endured by those society counted untouchable. Tonight was no different. The Dom complained bitterly about being an outcast as he poured water into the Naga Baba's bowl, but it did not prevent the ascetic from drinking two pitcherfuls of water to quench his thirst.
Wiping his mouth, the Naga Baba asked, "Can you direct me to where the lowest caste live?"
"Go past the mango plantations. You will find a sweeper colony on the outskirts of the town."
The Naga Baba set out for the colony, thinking about the people he had encountered in his long years as an ascetic.
At the academy he had learned the arts of a protector sadhu. He had been taught to wield his iron trident as a weapon. He had performed yogic contortions to gain a physical prowess far exceeding any wrestler's, hardened his hands and his feet so they could kill a man with a single blow, practiced mind control to disarm an opponent without touching him, and he was called a Naga. But when he encountered the suffering of ordinary people, he did nothing to protect them beyond placing a tilak of ash on their foreheads before moving on in search of solitude.
The sweepers were waiting in front of their colony with offerings of food. They knew how much the ascetic honored them by eating from their hands. When he marked their foreheads with ash, they touched his feet in gratitude, denied such blessing from the temples that they were forbidden to enter.
Now the Naga Baba had to beg alms from a third unclean house before he could return to the jungle. "Is there a brothel in this town?" "Of course, Baba."
"We will take you there."
The Naga Baba followed the sweepers through the narrow alleys behind their colony, observing how other people moved away from their approach and how the sweepers turned sideways to hide their faces, their whole stance one of shame. Angered by those who avoided his companions, the Naga Baba lifted his trident and roared, "om namo Shivaya! The name of God is Shiva, Lord of Death!" Men and women ran into their doorways, terrified they might be cursed by the naked man shouting at them, his matted hair swinging from side to side.
The Naga Baba was pleased to see the sweepers still laughing behind their hands as they took him into a brightly lit bazaar and pointed to the wooden door of the brothel, outlined in a string of colored electric bulbs.
Film music blared from the brothel's balcony as the Naga Baba pounded the door with his trident. At last the door was flung open by a sweating man with a black thread tied around his throat for luck, muscles bulging under his cotton jerkin.
The Naga Baba preferred his skull bowl. "Alms. On the night of Shiva."
"Get away!" the man shouted. "We feed no beggars here!"
The Naga Baba raised his hand. "I am an ascetic of Shiva. Do you dare to turn me away tonight?"
The man fell back as if some magnetic force were pushing against his chest, although he had not been touched. A fat woman appeared at the man's shoulder, her face framed by golden earrings rendered gimcrack under the colored lights above the doorway. She opened betel-stained lips in surprise when she saw the ascetic.
"Jai Shankar! Praise to Shiva!"
The earrings slapped against her rouged cheeks as she bent to touch the Naga Baba's feet, and the ascetic looked into the brothel. A child was cowering behind a plastic-covered sofa, her face twisted with pain as a man gripped her chin in one hand. With his other hand the man was lifting the child's small body to bring her lips closer to his own.
The Naga Baba lost sight of the child as the woman stood up, saying "I have some lovely pistachio sweetmeats, specially bought for the night of Shiva."
"I have already eaten."
"But you must accept something. You cannot leave my house without blessing me."
"Then I will accept that child as alms tonight."
"Of course, Baba." The woman wrested the child from the arms of the irate customer and carried the unresisting form to the ascetic. The child stood before the Naga Baba, her head hardly higher than his knee, staring down at the ground. The woman hit the back of the child's head. It was not a gentle blow.
"Touch his feet with your forehead, you fool." The child groveled obediently at the ascetic's feet and the woman asked with a knowing smirk, "Where shall I send my man to fetch her in the morning?"
"Do you give alms to the holy in expectation of having them returned?"
"But I paid five hundred rupees for her. It was a great charity I did her father. When I bought her there was no flesh on her at all. See how well I feed her, and still there is not enough of her to satisfy a man. Why not accept the sweets instead?"
The Naga Baba lifted his skull bowl to the woman's eyes, reversing it so she could put nothing in it.
"Then take her for the night, two nights even. If you still want to keep her so badly, come back in twelve or thirteen years. She won't be any good to me by then."
"If I leave your house empty-handed on the night of Shiva, if you refuse alms to the beloved of the Destroyer ... "
"Take her!" The woman shrank back into the brothel, intimidated by the ascetic's eyes still red from the smoke of the funeral pyres, his body and his matted locks still gray with the ashes of the dead. "And do not curse me later when you find what trouble she brings. She doesn't even have a name. Her own father calls her misfortune."
The ascetic smeared ash on the woman's forehead before bending down to take the child's hand. The small fingers were rigid in his palm as she followed him from the open doorway of the brothel into the street.
When they were clear of the bazaar, the Naga Baba let go of the child's hand. He did not help her when they had to cross a street or climb over the low wall enclosing the town's small railway station. He merely shortened his steps and walked more slowly, intoning in his deep voice, "Om namo Shivaya, Om namo Shivaya," knowing the endless repetition of the chant "The name of God is Shiva, Shiva is God's name" would calm the child's fears as his teacher's voice had once mesmerized him into walking distances he had not imagined possible.
They passed the last lamp post of the town, and the dim lights from the sweepers' colony. Still the Naga Baba did not stop, although the night of India was closing over their heads and the howling of hyenas grew so close he knew they had entered the forest.
Now the Naga Baba took the child's hand again and helped her over the roots breaking through the dark earth of the jungle, until they reached a banyan tree so ancient its many branches had already plunged new roots into the ground.
The Naga Baba circled the tree collecting grass to make a bed for the child. She followed close behind, frightened by the dark and the rustling of night animals.
"How long have you lived in the brothel?" the Naga Baba asked as he spread the grass on the ground between the rooted branches of the banyan, patting the grass down to give it the firmness of a mattress.
"At least two rainy seasons."
"We shall spend the next rainy season in Amarkantak. Now sleep."
The Naga Baba sat near the child, his eyes closed in meditation, his deep chanting a steady drone that gentled her terror until she slept. He had already decided not to return to the jungle where he had been living earlier. It was too close to the town, too close to the brothel owner who might change her mind and send her bazaar toughs to take the child back.
The next morning he husked a fallen coconut and split it in half with a single blow to make a bowl for the child. Then they began walking north, toward the Narmada.
The journey took many weeks. On the way the child looked for water snakes, learning where they swam the water was pure enough to drink. She watched the ascetic dig bulbs and tubers from the ground to roast over an open fire, and was surprised at how good they tasted and how they filled her stomach.
He taught her to drink fresh milk directly from the teats of wandering goats, and how to look for cattle markings. Together they collected pats of cow dung to be left in the sun to dry. The Naga Baba made a small fire and burned the dung so it would crumble between his fingers into ash that he smeared all over his body, an antiseptic and an insulation against heat and cold. When he rubbed the mixture on her arms she found mosquitoes never bit her.
Their days were not lonely. Always there were people to be encountered, shepherds or villagers foraging for firewood, who shouted to the Naga Baba, "Jai Shankar! Praise to Shiva!"
Sometimes they brought food for the ascetic and his small companion. The child watched the Naga Baba separate the food into four equal portions—one to be kept aside for the animals, one for any stranger who might need a meal, saving only the remaining two portions for themselves. As her new life became more real to her than her old, she told the Naga Baba about her father and three brothers who worked breaking stones by the roadside.
"I was never allowed to eat until everyone else