Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (35 page)

The hotel. Pancakes from southern India. Delicious. All the food, in fact, incredible. And if you put a lot of spice on and don’t drink the water, you don’t get sick.

Two days in Delhi, amazing grub, sights. At the hotel on CNN International I happen to see Charles Mulholland in an interview. He ends it by saying that a friend is taking him and his wife for a yachting vacation in the Virgin Islands. A wealthy and influential friend, no doubt. Cigar smoke, cognacs: So tell me, Charles, what are your long-term political ambitions?…

The train station. Black and nightmarish in the morning mist. Beggars by the legion, the homeless, the lame, the halt.

The wrong train, directions, the right train. The second-class car. Breakfast. Toast, tea, marmalade. A hot napkin.
The Times of India,
the
Hindustan Times
. Hindu matriarchs, blue-turbaned Sikhs, Muslim businessmen, Jain priests, Buddhists, students, hippies. Like a scene from
Kim
.

A delay. The moving train. The squalor of the suburbs, more beggars, shantytowns, muddy fields, an elephant, vultures, and the brown flat earth of the Ganges Valley all the way to the horizon.

The Ganges is not the longest river in India, certainly not the most beautiful. The continent takes its name from the Indus, so why is the Ganges the holy river of India?

Because the gods say so.

The Ganges begins as a gurgle on a mountaintop. Glacial peaks, permanent snow, spring flowers, yellow, red, blue. It’s a foot wide, this river. If you lay your body down across it, you can stop the flow, you can dam Mother Ganga.

From the mountaintop it moves on inexorably down onto the sienna plain, where everything becomes the color of mud. And down into the holy cities of Varanasi and Allahabad. The latter given that name by the Muslim conquerors who supposedly did not believe in that sort of thing.

Varanasi is the city of Lord Shiva. To die in Varanasi is a great thing. Shiva will look favorably upon you and your next incarnation will be a blessed one.

But holier still is the upstream city of Allahabad. The most sacred site in India. Indeed, when the world is destroyed, only one place will remain and that is Allahabad—Prayag, to give it its Hindu name.

Allahabad is sacred because it is the confluence of three holy rivers. The Ganges, of course, but also the Yamuna and the Saraswati.

The Yamuna is the second holy river of India. Mahatma Gandhi’s body was burned by this river. Three prime ministers also were cremated by its banks in sandalwood funeral pyres, their ashes drifting from the burning ghats into the sacred waters.

The Yamuna and the Ganges meet in Allahabad. An important place. The hometown of the Nehrus. The hometown of Victoria Patawasti’s family.

The train stops. I get off. I walk around, looking at fort ruins, at Jawaharlal Nehru’s house, at Victoria Patawasti’s house.

I visit her paternal grandparents, who are both alive. They have fourteen grandchildren, two of whom have been incarnated already into another form. I spend the day with them and I stay that night in their big turn-of-the-century mansion, exquisitely designed to take cooling breezes off the river.

We talk and we drink nimbu pani soda and we eat sweetmeats.

And Dr. Patawasti tells me the story about the Hidden River.

The river Saraswati flows only in Heaven or, say some, underground. It is the river of Paradise, of the gods, the Ganges and the Yamuna are only its earthly mirrors. They are imperfect. The Saraswati is perfection itself. But Vishnu so loved the world that he allowed the Saraswati to bend down to Earth at one place, at only one spot on the whole globe. At the point where the Ganges and the Yamuna meet. And if you bathe here, your sins are wiped away. Indeed, so sacred is the water that not only your sins but those of seven generations backward are wiped clean too.

“My sins will be wiped away?” I ask.

“Do not even think of bathing in that river,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, “you will catch cholera and die. The peasants defecate and throw their waste in these supposed holy waters. Industrial plants, tanneries, all pump their poisons into the rivers. Dead cows and buffalo are in this water. Why are there no fish? These rivers are toxic.”

“There are many fish,” Dr. Patawasti says. “Mark Twain said that the cholera bacillus cannot survive in the Ganges.”

“Say that to the thousands who catch cholera and typhoid every year,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, a furious look across her face.

“Still, my sins, and seven generations backward,” I say.

“The scriptures are far from clear on this,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, “if you ask me it’s a swindle to bring in tourists to the Kum Mela.”

“That is an outrageous thing to suggest,” Dr. Patawasti says.

Mrs. Dr. Patawasti looks at me seriously. Gray hair, thin, but more than a hint of her former beauty in the dark skin and pale eyes. What Victoria would have looked like at age seventy-five.

“Young man,” she says to me, “do not swim in the river, I beg you. And don’t you encourage him,” she says to her husband.

“I don’t know, all my sins,” I say again.

Mrs. Dr. Patawasti groans, Dr. Patawasti laughs….

Early morning. The family still asleep. A bicycle rickshaw. My shorts, sandals, T-shirt, a wide-brimmed hat.

Houses, dirty streets, dust. Children staring vacantly at me, others grinning, playing with a football.

The Ganges, brown and solemn. The Yamuna, yellow and sluggish.

The bank of the Ganges is littered with refuse. Newspaper, cans, rags, bits of old boats.

I pay the rickshaw man, look for a boatman.

People are washing their clothes, doing Puja.

I step over a dead dog.

The boatmen spot me, come racing over, and I find one I like.

We negotiate twenty rupees to row me out to the junction of the two rivers. To the point where the Saraswati comes down from Heaven and cleanses sins and past mistakes and makes a man anew.

He rows me out in a leaky boat, with mended oars and rowlocks made of hemp.

The head of a water buffalo floats by.

The boatman is named Ali. Thin, dark, nervous, dressed in a ragged white caftan.

We talk about the rivers and the legend of the Hidden River and Ali gives ambiguous and noncommittal answers. I suppose he’s seen many Westerners get rowed out here with the intention of bathing, take one look at the water, and then sensibly chicken out.

We stop at one of the many wooden pillars that are set into the river specifically for bathing pilgrims. We tie the boat. I strip. I lean over the side and dip my feet into the water. I lean on the edge of the boat. Ali leans on the other gunwale to prevent a capsize.

I let myself slip down the side of the rowboat and immerse myself up to my chest.

The water embraces me, and I let go the side of the boat.

I can feel the current from both rivers. The Ganges is warm, the Yamuna colder. It’s shallow. My feet touch the bottom and I walk along it.

Ali laughs delightedly.

A hundred feet to the right I can see another large animal carcass floating past. I dunk my head under. I come up, breathe, the sun is bright, the water glitters. Ali thinks this is hilarious.

I dunk my head under again.

And this time I know it’s the right place.

The Platte wasn’t it.

This is the right river.

I am here at last.

The water washes over me.

I open my eyes, it is hard to see. But my vision is perfect and I do understand, I understand the purpose of it all. To bring me here, on this day, at this time, now.

I see, and I am resolved. I have failed. I did not bring redemption, I did not bring justice down from heaven. I did not have Victoria’s killers put to rights. It has been a catalog of failure. As a son, as a policeman, as a man with a second chance, as a human being. I have let the guilty slip through my fingers, indeed enhanced their position. I have let my friends die. I have not done anything with this life.

Take from me my sins.

And I see her.

Ma. She dies. Her cold fingers. Her fingertips. They let her die. His words of comfort, meaningless. All of it, meaningless. How stupid not to know that lesson. You can’t save her. No one can save her.

And I’m here.

At last.

This river of death. This continent of death. My feet stand on the mud. My sins have been ones of omission. I have let things happen. Sure, you could say that I saved Da, that he would have fallen apart if they had killed me, but it was cowardice. I was afraid. And I took the easy way out and let things happen. And to cap it all, I slandered John to save my neck again.

And now all I have to do is open my lungs. Open my lungs and let the river cleanse me.

And my body will writhe and my trachea will scream—water there instead of air—and my heart will beat but there will be no oxygen in the blood returning from my lungs. No place for the CO
₂
to be expelled. And my heart will beat; but it will eventually cease to work. My brain will soldier on for a minute, perhaps two, starved for oxygen, crying out for it, for air. And then it, too, will slow and the chemical reactions will cease and I will lose consciousness, perhaps seeing that white tunnel that people see when the neurons fire random images in the cortex.

I will float there and in another ten minutes the last of the electrical activity in my brain will stop forever. And I will be nothing. Appropriate, wasn’t it, the Hindu mystics who invented the concept of zero?

I reach down and grab the mud between my fingers.

The river flows and my smile widens and my mouth opens. Thick filthy water pouring over my tongue and into my throat.

I gag and force open my jaw with my fingers. I expel the last of the air and I breathe in.

The pain is terrible. Like an electric shock. My lungs howl and my body bucks against this terrible intrusion. I war against the pleading of my lungs and brain. I fight against the urge to surface.

And again I swallow.

I am coming to you.

Mum and Victoria, John.

That holy trinity of loss.

I am coming to you.

Even though I know what awaits is not you, not sleep, but annihilation. In this brown filthy water. Dirt on my teeth. Fire in my nostrils.

But I’m coming anyway.

This place, this is the time.

The river pours in.

Yes.

To you.

John.

Victoria.

Ma.

My hair.

A hand.

The sun.

A hand pulls me up out of the water by the hair.

A voice:

“You must not be fooling around in this water. You are catching dreadful things. Do not be believing stories about the purity of this water. It is foul. I am Muslim. I am above such superstition. This town is called Allahabad. There is no God but Allah. There is no God but Allah. There are no spirits. There is no magic water. There is no Hidden River.”

“No?” I sputter, coughing, puking, spitting the water from my mouth.

“No, come, I will pull you in.”

Before I can reply, his big hands tug me into the boat, and I cough and vomit water and gasp for air.

He looks stern, shakes his head.

“You are seeing what I am explaining?” he says with disgust.

“Uh—”

“Very dangerous, very dangerous, you are not seeing the dead cow?”

“No.”

I spit some more, cough. He wags his finger.

“So what do we do now?” I ask him after a while.

“You are sitting in the boat and drying off in the sunshine and I am rowing you to shore. No. We are not doing that. I am rowing you to hotel, where you are showering that filthy water off your body.
Insh’Allah,
you are unharmed.
Insh’Allah.
”

“Ok,” I say.

The ocher river. The yellow sky.

I lie back in the boat.

Ali looks at me and laughs at my foolishness.

He doesn’t know it, but he’s given me my life back. I lie there and I am at peace, lullabied by oars and the gentle harmonic motion of the boat, drifting on the golden waters of the Ganges, on the edge of sleep. Saved. Alive.

Ali is still talking:

“Those Hindus are crazy men. There is no vanishing river. The Saraswati was a real river long ago that dried up. They do not know their history. The Prophet, may his name be blessed, cured us of such pagan superstition. The Hindus see magic where there is no magic, they see—”

I sit up suddenly in the boat.

“What did you say?”

“I said that they are crazy men who—”

“No, no, about the Saraswati?” I ask.

“A real river. It dried up centuries ago.”

“Dried up. A drought, of course. That was why I survived the Platte. A drought. The creek. Pat tried to tell me it’s only two feet deep at the best of times. She wouldn’t know that. She despised the place, thought a river was a river. Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

Ali looks at me, uncomprehending.

“I am rowing you to shore,” he says.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I say excitedly.

* * *

The Patawastis were still asleep. Their twelve-year-old servant boy making tea. He ignored me when I grabbed the phone and dialed the international operator. I talked to her for a while and finally she gave me a number in Colorado. I dialed it, got through to the switchboard.

“I’ll put you through to his voice mail, ok?” the switchboard woman said.

“Ok,” I said.

“This is the voice mail of Detective David Redhorse. At the tone, please leave me a message and a number and I’ll get back to you.”

I spoke fast:

“Redhorse, you don’t know me, but I’ve got information. On June fifth, 1995, in Denver, on the night of that freak snowstorm, Victoria Patawasti was murdered. Her killer was Amber Mulholland, the wife of Charles Mulholland, who is running for Congress. Amber killed Victoria and walked the gun down to Cherry Creek and threw it in. Probably the closest part of the creek to Victoria’s building. Amber thought it would get washed down to the South Platte River. But there’s been a drought. She doesn’t know the city, doesn’t know Cherry Creek is only a couple of feet deep, and now it must be completely dry. It’s a special gun, a Beretta, with her initials on it. Do you see? The gun is still there. It’s got to be. El Niño’s brought freak weather. Snow in June. A bone-dry spring and summer. Look in the creek, not too far from Victoria’s building. Find the gun. The forensics will match. The gun dealer in Italy will tie it to Charles Mulholland. What else? Yes, motive. Amber killed Victoria because Victoria found out her husband was stealing millions from the charity to pay a blackmailer named Alan Houghton. He’s disappeared, but there might still be something in CAW’s computers. Anyway, the important thing is the gun, find the gun, find the gun, find the bloody gun.”