The Age of Kali (10 page)

Kanaklatha said she had got up at four thirty, as she did every day. She had bathed and dressed her Krishna idol, spent an hour in prayer before it, then performed her ablutions at the
ghat
. Then from six until ten she chanted her mantras at the
ashram
. After that, a day of begging in the bazaars of Vrindavan stretched ahead.

‘I stay with my mother,’ said Kanaklatha. ‘She is ninety-five. My father died when I was sixteen and she came here then. We have to pay a hundred rupees [£2] rent a month. It is my main worry in life. Now I’m two months in arrears. Every day I ask
Govinda to help us make ends meet. I know he will look after us.’

‘How can you believe that after all you’ve been through?’

‘If Govinda doesn’t look after us who will?’ said Kanaklatha. ‘If I didn’t believe in him how could I stay alive?’

The widow looked straight at me: ‘All I want is to serve him,’ she insisted. ‘Whatever we eat and drink is his gift. Without him we would have nothing. The way he wants things to be, that is how they are.’

‘Come,’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘Come and see my image of Govinda. He is so beautiful.’

Without waiting to see if I would follow, the old lady hobbled away along the street at a surprising pace. She led me through a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, past roadside shrines and brightly-lit temples, until eventually we reached a small courtyard house near the
ghats
. There, on the floor of a cramped, dark, airless room, lay Kanaklatha’s mother. She was shaven-headed and smeared with ash like her daughter, but she was toothless and shrunken, lying curled up like an embryo on a thin cotton sheet. Around her were scattered a few pots and pans. Kanaklatha squatted on the floor beside her and gently stroked her head.

‘My mother was a strong woman,’ she said. ‘But she had a haemorrhage two years ago and after that she just withered away. Now she just lies on this bed. If I could afford to give her just one glass of fruit juice she would be better than she is. I want her to die without pain, but I am consumed by the thought that if something bad happens we could not afford medical treatment.’

‘It is all fate.’ It was the mother speaking. ‘When we were young we never imagined this would be our end.’

‘We were a landowning family,’ explained Kanaklatha. ‘Now we have to beg to survive. Even now I’m full of shame when I beg, thinking I am from a good family. It is the same with all the widows. Our usefulness is past. We are all rejects. This is our
karma.’

‘Only Govinda knows our pain and misery,’ said her mother. ‘No one else could understand.’

‘Yet compared to some of the others …’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Some of the other widows. At least we are together. But many women I know were thrown out of their houses by their own children. When their sons discover that they are begging on the streets of Vrindavan they are forbidden from writing to their grandchildren.

‘We haven’t committed a crime,’ said the old lady. ‘Why should we go through all this?’

‘Sometimes I think even
sati
would have been preferable to the life of a widow,’ said Kanaklatha. ‘At the time, burning on my husband’s pyre seemed horrible. But after living through so much pain and misery, I wonder whether
sati
would not have been the better option. Now all I want is to serve Govinda and my mother, and spend the rest of the time in prayer. Here, come inside, see my little Krishna.’

Kanaklatha indicated that I should step over her mother. She pointed to the end of her tiny room. There, raised up on a wooden bench beside a small paraffin stove stood a pair of small brass idols of Krishna, each dressed in saffron dolls’ clothes. One figure showed Krishna as a child; the other as a youth, dancing with a flute in his hands.

‘Look at his beauty!’ said Kanaklatha. ‘Every day I bathe him and change his clothes and give him food. Krishna is my protector. He cannot resist the entreaties of any woman.’

She walked over to the shrine and bowed her head before the images.

‘Sometimes when I am asleep he comes to me,’ she said. ‘I tell him my sorrows and he tells me how to cope. But the moment I awake, he disappears …’

That evening, in a nearby temple, I met Kanaklatha’s landlord, a Brahmin priest named Pundit Krishna Gopal Shukla.

‘If those women die tomorrow,’ he said, spitting on the floor, ‘I will have to bear the expense of cremation. It should be the
ashram
’s responsibility. They get so much money from pilgrims. I do so much for these widows already. I rent them a room. I even give them free water.’

According to Shukla, the widows’
ashrams
in Vrindavan were increasingly set up by Delhi businessmen as a means to launder black money. They would give donations to their
ashrams
and receive receipts stating that they had given much larger amounts, which would be written off against tax. As far as the
ashram
owners were concerned, the widows were just a means to a financial end, a quick route to a clever tax dodge.

There was no doubting the very considerable funds the
ashrams
of Vrindavan receive. One medium-sized one attracted donations by undertaking to erect an inscribed marble plaque recording the name of any devotee who gave at least two thousand rupees (£40), and promising that the widows would sing
bhajans
for the donor ‘for the next seven generations’. The resulting plaques covered not only every wall in the hangar-sized building, but also its floor and ceiling. Many of the donors turned out to be British Hindus: next to plaques recording donations from Agra, Varanasi and Calcutta were a number from rather less exotic centres of Hindu culture such as Southall, Northolt and Leicester.

‘They treat the old women very badly,’ said Shukla. ‘They show them no respect. They give them less than the minimum on which they can survive. Some of the
ashrams
even demand a down-payment from the widows when they first arrive. They say it is to cover the cost of their cremation, but after a death they simply put the woman’s body in a sack and throw it in the Jumna.’

Shukla walked with me along the
parikrama
, through the crowded streets of the town. As we walked, we passed long lines of widows, all shaven-headed and with begging-bowls stretched towards us.

‘My family have been priests in Vrindavan for many generations,’ said Shukla as we walked. ‘The town used to be very beautiful. But now it has expanded and become very dirty and polluted. Before, people came here and they found peace. Now they just find corruption and mental pollution.’

I asked the priest about the stories that appeared occasionally in the Indian press claiming that the
ashram
managers were in the habit of taking beautiful teenage widows as concubines, or selling them at ten thousand rupees (£200) a time.

‘It happens,’ he said. ‘Many of the
ashrams
are now run by criminal elements. Even some of the
sadhus
are involved. They lure young girls in, then sell them to local landowners. When the landowners are finished with them, they can sell them to the brothels in Delhi. They pay the police off, so they don’t intervene.’

What Shukla said was confirmed by local women’s groups: ‘Go to the villages around Vrindavan,’ said Kamala Ghosh, ‘and you’ll see that all the landowners have little widows as mistresses. When they tire of them the widows are sold to whorehouses in Delhi and Bombay. And we have had widows here as young as ten.’ Among those I talked to in Vrindavan, there was agreement that nothing was being done to save the widows from such exploitation, least of all by the police.

Shukla and I were now standing outside the Shri Bhagwan Bhajan
ashram
, the biggest of them all, where I had met Kanaklatha that morning. A prayer shift had just finished and the street was full of tired old women in white saris. On the steps of the
ashram
sat a fat man in white homespun who Shukla pointed out as one of the managers. I asked him about the allegations, but the fat man simply shrugged.

‘The widows come here because they love Krishna,’ he said. ‘After they sing we give them some rice and two rupees. That is our duty. But we are not their keepers. What they do when they go is their business.’

Inside, the
ashram
consisted of two vast halls. On the floor of each squatted about a thousand widows in their identical white
saris. Most of them seemed to be in their fifties or sixties, but there was a thin scattering of much younger women, while around the edge of the hall, leaning against the walls, or occasionally completely prostrate on the ground, were a number of much older women. Some of them were clearly mentally disturbed, letting out high-pitched shrieks like wounded birds, while others compulsively combed their hair or brushed away imaginary flies. The windows of the two halls were shuttered, and the only light came from a pair of naked bulbs suspended from the centre of the ceiling, leaving the edges of the rooms in a deep, Dickensian darkness. The whole establishment stank of urine and dirty linen.

Then a woman stood up in the centre of each room and began clashing cymbals; from another place a bell started to ring. A new shift was beginning. A cantor started up the chant, answered by two thousand widows singing as one, on and on, faster and faster:
‘Hare Ram, Hare Krishna, Hare Ram, Hare Krishna …’

This form of devotion was the invention of the great sixteenth-century Bengali sage Shri Krishna Chaitanya, an Orpheus-like figure believed by his followers to be an incarnation of Krishna. After Chaitanya’s wife died from a snake bite, the sage became a wanderer, travelling to all the sites connected with the life of Krishna, building many new temples and rescuing others from decay, particularly Vrindavan, whose shrines and temples had become overgrown and ruined.

Chaitanya’s devotion to Krishna was of a deeply emotional kind, and his contemporary biography, the
Chaitanya Charit Amrita
, is filled with accounts of him falling in to mystical raptures, ‘breaking in to song, dancing, weeping, climbing up trees, running to and fro like a madman and calling out the name of Radha and Krishna’. He encouraged his followers to come together and chant devotional songs called
kirtans
which, sung with a rising tempo and accompanied by the ringing of cymbals and bells, were supposed to lift the devotee in to a mystical rapture. In Chaitanya’s own time there are many accounts of thousands of devotees caught up in the mesmeric beat, falling in to a state of trance, dancing and jumping as
if in a frenzy, carried away in torrents of religious hysteria. So unruly and ecstatic did many of Chaitanya’s prayer gatherings become that the Moghul governor of the area tried to ban his cult, and to arrest its leader for disrupting public order. According to the
Chaitanya Charit Amrita
, even the wild beasts were affected by his
kirtans
:

Yet anything less ecstatic than the singing of today’s widows in Vrindavan would be hard to imagine. At the back, the madwomen are shrieking. In the foreground, the exhausted old widows struggle to keep up with the cantor’s pitch, many nodding asleep until given a poke by one of the
ashram
managers walking up and down the aisles with a stick. It is difficult to think of a sorrier or more pathetic sight. Vrindavan, Krishna’s earthly paradise, is today a place of such profound sadness and distress that it almost defies description.

At the end of the shift, as darkness was beginning to fall outside, a pair of Brahmin priests walked in to the hall and began to perform the
arti
. Taking a burning charcoal splint, they revolved the flame in front of the idol of Krishna which stood at the centre of the room. As they did so the widows let out an unearthly ululation: an eerie, high-pitched wailing noise. Bringing their hands together in the gesture of supplication, they all bowed before the idol as the priests closed the temple doors for the night. Then slowly the women began to file outside.

‘This is not life,’ said one old woman who came up to me out of the
shadows, begging for a rupee. ‘We all died the day our husbands died. How can anyone describe our pain? Our hearts are all on fire with sorrow. Now we just wait for the day when all this will end.’

GWALIOR, MADHYA PRADESH
,
1993

The Inspector General of Police had thick tufts of black hair growing out of his earlobes; his sunglasses glinted in the bright winter sunlight. He looked out over the dusty airstrip towards the heavily armed guards lining the perimeter fence. Facing them, at the end of the strip, a group of local dignitaries sat waiting in the shade of a tarpaulin. The IG looked up in to the sky, down at his watch, and then felt at his hips for the reassuring hilt of his carbine.