A River Sutra

Gita Mehta is the author of two previous books,
Karma Cola
and
Raj.
She has written, produced, and directed a number of documentaries for American, British, and European television companies and has written for several publications. She is married, with one son, and divides her time among India, England, and the United States.

"With the terrifying beauty and power of devotion...Mehta gives us the jungle of India...timeless...seductive and convincing....
[A River Sutra]
is a book of extraordinary effects, piling one on another in a slowed timescape."

"Tales worthy of Chaucer and the Upanishads...the book, written with a beautiful ease and understatement, is an homage to the spoken word."

"In her enchanting new novel, Gita Mehta comes close to doing for the Narmada River what Mark Twain did for the Mississippi.... Mehta's prose is as hypnotically evocative as it is economical. Her characters defy stereotyping and are instantly engaging, sometimes surprising.
A River Sutra
runs swift, clear and warm from beginning to end."

"A lyrical series of interlocking stories that transport the reader to a contemporary India that is also the living present of myth. With precise, transparent language, the author [tells] stories weighted with implacable truth. She conveys a world that is spiritual, foreign, and entirely accessible.... Gita Mehta has used [the imaginative faculties] sublimely."

"The
Arabian Nights
is alive and well in a modern-day Scheherazade named Gita Mehta and a book called
A River Sutra.
...'Mehta's delicate prose elaborates and polishes her stories...with the seductiveness of a flute."

The Government still pays my wages but I no longer think of myself as a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats belong too much to the world, and I have fulfilled my worldly obligations. I am now a vanaprasthi, someone who has retired to the forest to reflect.

Of course, I was forced to modify tradition, having spent my childhood in Bombay and my career as a civil servant working only in cities. Although my desire to withdraw from the world grew more urgent as I aged, I knew I was simply not equipped to wander into the jungle and become a forest hermit, surviving on fruit and roots.

Then shortly after my wife passed away I learned of a vacant post at a Government rest house situated on the Narmada River. I had often stayed in such rest houses while touring the countryside on official business. Over time I had even developed an affection for these lonely sanctuaries built by the Moghul emperors across the great expanse of India to shelter the traveler and the pilgrim, a practice wisely maintained by subsequent administrations.

But the bungalow's proximity to the Narmada River was its particular attraction. The river is among our holiest pilgrimage sites, worshipped as the daughter of the god Shiva. During a tour of the area I had been further intrigued to discover the criminal offense of attempted suicide is often ignored if the offender is trying to kill himself in the waters of the Narmada.

To the great surprise of my colleagues, I applied for the humble position of manager of the Narmada rest house. At first they tried to dissuade me, convinced that grief over my wife's death had led to my aberrant request. Senior bureaucrats, they argued, should apply for higher office. Finding me adamant, they finally recommended me for the post and then forgot me.

For several years now, thanks to the recommendations of my former colleagues, this rest house situated halfway up a hill of the Vindhya Range has been my forest retreat.

It is a double-storeyed building constructed from copper-colored local stone, the upper floor comprising three spacious and self-contained suites which overlook the gardens, the ground floor occupied by a dining room and drawing room opening onto a wide veranda. Happily, the interiors retain their original mosaic tiles, having escaped the attentions of a British administrator who plastered the outside walls at the turn of the century, giving the exterior of the bungalow with its pillared portico and balustraded steps an air more Victorian than Moghul.

To one side of the gardens, hidden by mango trees, is a small cottage in which I live. On the other side, the gardens lead to a stone terrace overlooking the Narmada, which flows seven hundred feet below.

Spanning a mile from bank to bank, the river has become the object of my reflections.
A great aid to my meditations is the beauty of our location. Across the sweep of water, I can see fertile fields stretching for miles and miles into the southern horizon until they meet the gray shadows of the Satpura Hills. On this riverbank towering bamboo thickets and trees overgrown with wild jasmine and lantana creepers cover the hillsides, suspending the bungalow in jungle so dense I cannot see the town of Rudra, only nineteen kilometers away, where my clerk, Mr. Chagla, lives.
Poor Mr. Chagla must bicycle for over an hour to reach us, but as we are without a telephone his daily return to town is vital for organizing our supplies and attending to other business. Rudra has the nearest post office, as well as a doctor who presides over a small hospital and a branch police station with four constables.
Below Rudra, visible from our terrace at the bend of the river, sprawls the temple complex of Mahadeo. At sunset I often sit on the terrace with our bungalow guests to watch the distant figures of the pilgrims silhouetted against the brilliant crimsons of the evening sky descending the stone steps that lead from Mahadeo's many temples to the river's edge. With twilight, the water at Mahadeo starts flickering with tiny flames as if catching fire from the hundreds of clay lamps being floated downstream for the evening devotions.
My day usually begins on this terrace. I have formed the habit of rising before dawn to sit here in the dark with my face turned toward the river's source, an underground spring that surfaces four hundred kilometers to the east.
In the silence of the ebbing night I sometimes think I can hear the river's heartbeat pulsing under the ground before she reveals herself at last to the anchorites of Shiva deep in meditation around the holy tank at Amarkantak. I imagine the ascetics sitting in the darkness like myself, their naked bodies smeared in ash, their matted hair wound on top of their heads in imitation of their Ascetic god, witnessing the river's birth as they chant:

Then streaks of pale light send clouds of noisy birds into the sky, evoking crowds of pilgrims swarming through Amarkantak's temples for the morning worship.

By the time the red ball of the sun appears over the hills, the activity I have been imagining at the river's source becomes the reality of the rest house with the appearance of our gardeners, our sweepers, and the milkman.

After issuing instructions to the early staff, I leave the bungalow by the northern gate for my morning walk. Almost immediately I enter the jungle. Under the great trees glistening with dew —teak, peepul, silk cotton, mango, banyan—the mud path is still deserted, crossed only by bounding monkeys, leaping black buck, meandering wild boar as if the animals are glorying in their brief possession of the jungle. On my return in two hours I will be greeted on this path by sturdy tribal women from the nearby village of Vano collecting fuel for their cooking fires.

Our bungalow guards are hired from Vano village and enjoy a reputation for fierceness as descendants of the tribal races that held the Aryan invasion of India at bay for centuries in these hills. Indeed, the Vano village deity is a stone image of a half-woman with the full breasts of a fertility symbol but the torso of a coiled snake, because the tribals believe they once ruled a great snake kingdom until they were defeated by the gods of the Aryans. Saved from annihilation only by a divine personification of the Narmada River, the grateful tribals conferred on the river the gift of annulling the effects of snakebite, and I have often heard pilgrims who have never met a tribal reciting the invocation

Salutation in the morning and at night to thee, 0 Narmada!
Defend me from the serpent's poison.

The Vano villagers also believe their goddess cures madness, liberating those who are possessed.

Beyond the valley on the next range of hills is a Muslim village with a small mosque adjoining the tomb of Amir Rumi, a Sufi saint of the sixteenth century. My friend Tariq Mia is mullah of the village mosque, and most mornings I walk all the way to the village in order to chat with Tariq Mia, for the old man is the wisest of all my friends.

On my way to Tariq Mia I sometimes pause at the summit of our hill to enjoy the view. Between the eastern hills I can see foaming waterfalls where the river plummets through marble canyons into the valley below the rest house, and if I turn west I can watch the river broadening as it races toward the Arabian Sea to become seventeen kilometers wide at its delta.

A day seldom passes when I do not see whiterobed pilgrims walking on the riverbanks far below me. Many are like myself, quite elderly persons who have completed the first stages of life prescribed by our Hindu scriptures—the infant, the student, the householder—and who have now entered the stage of the vanaprasthi, to seek personal enlightenment.

I am always astonished at their endurance, since I know the Narmada pilgrimage to be an arduous affair that takes nearly two years to complete. At the mouth of the river on the Arabian Sea, the pilgrims must don white clothing out of respect for Shiva's asceticism before walking eight hundred kilometers to the river's source at Amarkantak. There they must cross to the opposite bank of the river and walk all the way back to the ocean, pausing only during the monsoon rains in some small temple town like Mahadeo, which has accommodated the legions of devout who have walked this route millennium upon millennium.

Then I remind myself that the purpose of the pilgrimage is endurance. Through their endurance the pilgrims hope to generate the heat, the tapas, that links men to the energy of the universe, as the Narmada River is thought to link mankind to the energy of Shiva.

It is said that Shiva, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds, was in an ascetic trance so strenuous that rivulets of perspiration began flowing from his body down the hills. The stream took on the form of a woman—the most dangerous of her kind: a beautiful virgin innocendy tempting even ascetics to pursue her, inflaming their lust by appearing at one moment as a lightly dancing girl, at another as a romantic dreamer, at yet another as a seductress loose-limbed with the lassitude of desire. Her inventive variations so amused Shiva that he named her Narmada, the Delightful One, blessing her with the words "You shall be forever holy, forever inexhaustible." Then he gave her in marriage to the ocean, Lord of Rivers, most lustrous of all her suitors.

Standing here on the escarpment of the hill, a light wind cooling my body after its exertions, I can see the river flowing to meet her bridegroom in all those variations that delighted the Ascetic while on her banks the pilgrims move slowly toward their destination. From this distance the white-robed men and women seem the spume of the river's waves, and as I watch them I wait to hear the sound of Tariq Mia's voice calling the faithful to prayer.

I do not wish to arrive before the old mullah has completed his priestly duties, so if I am early and have not yet heard the sound of "Allah-ho-Akbar!" echoing in the valley that separates us, I walk to a row of ancient Jain caves cut into the copper stone.

I never enter the caves, for fear of snakes, unable to believe that even the Narmada will protect me from a serpent's fangs. Instead I sit on a large boulder at one side peering into their darkness. The caves have been deserted for centuries, but I am always hopeful of encountering some passing Jain traveler who may have stopped here for a moment's worship.

Once I met two naked Jain mendicants, members of the Sky Clad sect whose rigorous penances include the denial of human shame. To my great disappointment they indicated by signs that they no longer even spoke. After smiling at them for half an hour I regretfully took my leave.

On another occasion I met a Jain monk from another sect who had only recendy renounced the world.

I remember the encounter well. It was winter and I was sitting on my boulder, the winter sun warming my face. In my hands was a bunch of bananas I had broken off a tree during my walk as a gift for Tariq Mia. I was about to peel one for myself when someone coughed behind me.

I turned to see a slender figure robed in white muslin standing at my side. Under his shaved head, his large eyes examined me with peculiar intensity. A muslin mask covered his mouth but I could hear him clearly when he asked, "If I continue on this road will I reach Mahadeo?"