Notebook

Having just returned from a journey across India incorporating not only a visit to my birthplace in Landour, 6,000 feet up in the Himalayas, but also to the source (or one of the sources) of the Ganges, I cannot resist referring here to an extract from my novel "The Cause". In it Wilson, the elderly priest, is required to commit the ashes of his young Dravidian friend, Gopalan, to the sacred waters of the Ganges:

"It took several hours for Gopalan’s body to be reduced to ashes which could be committed to the river. Michael Wilson waited by the flames, hoping vainly that the memories would drain from him. Mourners brought other bodies to other pyres. They wept for the young and played joyous, rumbustious music for the old. A ghat attendant moved deftly between the fires, adding wood, collecting fees. Waist high in the Ganges, a few metres away, a boy with a basket sifted the water for gold sometimes cast in with the cremated remnants of the dead. Backwards and forwards the boy waded, his eyes unwaveringly fixed upon the murky depths. Wilson wondered distractedly about the effects of so many hours of wading on the Indian’s bony legs. He was very young. Eleven or twelve perhaps. At that age you were not afraid of many things: illness, suffering, separation, all those things that might yet come your way. There was an air of false invulnerability about him. The same sort of invulnerability Wilson had first identified in Gopalan. A small, trapped sob rose up noiselessly within him. He looked away. At last the ghat attendant presented Wilson with a bowl. He stared with strangely dispassionate interest at its contents and then at the Ganges. Together once he and Gopalan had been to Gangotri and on to Goumukh, the source of the great river, high up in the Himalayas. Gopalan had been surprised to discover that the Ganga emerged from beneath a great glacier thickly studded with loose rocks and earth, not as a puny trickle but as a mighty stream. He had been fascinated, almost mesmerized. They had spent the night beside the river, within earshot of a great fall just below its source. Gopalan had said afterwards that after a while that waterfall had begun to sound to him not like one fall but a hundred. The sound had pervaded his whole being. Thereafter he had felt an almost physical affinity with the river, as if the water somehow coursed through his own veins. Fr Michael Wilson raised the bowl above his head, then turned so that his back was against the softly stirring breeze. With an almost imperceptible jerk of his wrist he emptied the ashes into the air. Borne on a gentle wind, they hovered momentarily above the surface of the water and then disappeared into the onwards flowing stream. Gopalan was at last truly one with his river.

Wilson squatted alone on the riverbank and began the meditation with which for so many years, he and Gopalan had saluted the Word present in all the earth and all that was beyond: Om bhur bhuvas svah tat savitur varenyam... But the old man’s voice gave out and there was no one to take up the chant. Michael Wilson stood up and walked purposefully back up the steps, away from Varanasi, across the railway line to Kolkata, across the Varuna River and out into the open countryside."

The Ganges at Gangotri, some twelve kilometres from its actual source.   Photo by John Coo

 

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                                                                    Kathryn Spink