A Song of Many Rivers Read online

  After dinner, there are songs, and Gajadhar’s mother sings of the homesickness of those who are separated from their loved ones and their home in the hills. It is an old Garhwali folk-song:

  Oh, mountain-swift, you are from my father’s home;

  Speak, oh speak, in the courtyard of my parents,

  My mother will hear you; She will send my brother to fetch me.

  A grain of rice alone in the cooking pot

  Cries, ‘I wish I could get out!’

  Likewise I wonder:

  ‘Will I ever reach my father’s house?’

  The hookah is passed round and stories are told. Tales of ghosts and demons mingle with legends of ancient kings and heroes. It is almost midnight by the time the last guest has gone. Chakradhar approaches me as I am about to retire for the night.

  ‘Will you come again?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, I’ll come again,’ I reply. ‘If not next year, then the year after. How many years are left before you finish school?’ ‘Four’.

  ‘Four years. If you walk ten miles a day for four years, how many miles will that make?’

  ‘Four thousand and six hundred miles,’ says Chakradhar after a moment’s thought, ‘but we have two months’ holiday each year. That means I’ll walk about twelve thousand miles in four years.’

  The moon has not yet risen. Lanterns swing in the dark.

  The lanterns flit silently over the hillside and go out one by one. This Garhwali day, which is just like any other day in the hills, slips quietly into the silence of the mountains.

  I stretch myself out on my cot. Outside the small window the sky is brilliant with stars. As I close my eyes, someone brushes against the lime tree, brushing its leaves; and the fresh fragrance of lines comes to me on the night air, making the moment memorable for all time.

  Cold Beer at Chutmalpur

  Just outside the small market town of Chutmalpur (on the way back from Delhi) one is greeted by a large signboard with just two words on it: Cold Beer. The signboard is almost as large as the shop from which the cold beer is dispensed; but after a gruelling five-hour drive from Delhi, in the heat and dust of May, a glass of chilled beer is welcome—except, of course, to teetotallers who will find other fizzy ways to satiate their thirst.

  Chutmalpur is not the sort of place you’d choose to retire in. But it has its charms, not the least of which is its Sunday Market, when the varied produce of the rural interior finds its way on to the dusty pavements, and the air vibrates with noise, colour and odours. Carpets of red chillies, seasonal fruits, stacks of grain and vegetables, cheap toys for the children, bangles of lac, wooden artifacts, colourful underwear, sweets of every description, churan to go with them…

  ‘Lakar hajam, gather hajam!’ cries the churan-seller. Translated: Digest wood, digest stones! That is, if you partake of this particular digestive pill which, when I tried it, appeared to be one part hing (asafoetida) and one part gunpowder. Things are seldom what they seem to be. Passing through the small town of Purkazi, I noticed a sign-board which announced the availability of ‘Books’—just that. Intrigued, I stopped to find out more about this bookshop in the wilderness. Perhaps I’d find a rare tome to add to my library. Peeping in, I discovered that the dark interior was stacked from floor to ceiling with exercise books! Apparently the shop-owner was the supplier for the district.

  Rare books can be seen in Roorkee, in the University’s old library. Here, not many years ago, a First Folio Shakespeare turned up and was celebrated in the Indian Press as a priceless discovery. Perhaps it’s still there.

  Also in the library is a bust of Sir Proby Cautley, who conceived and built the Ganga Canal, which starts at Haridwar and passes through Roorkee on its way across the Doab. Hardly anyone today has heard of Cautley, and yet surely his achievement outstrips that of many Englishmen in India—soldiers and statesmen who became famous for doing all the wrong things.

  Cautley’s Canal

  Cautley came to India at the age of seventeen and joined the Bengal Artillery. In 1825, he assisted Captain Robert Smith, the engineer in charge of constructing the Eastern Yamuna Canal. By 1836 he was Superintendent-General of Canals. From the start, he worked towards his dream of building a Ganga Canal, and spent six months walking and riding through the jungles and countryside, taking each level and measurement himself, sitting up all night to transfer them to his maps. He was confident that a 500-kilometre canal was feasible. There were many objections and obstacles to his project, most of them financial, but Cautley persevered and eventually persuaded the East India Company to back him.

  Digging of the canal began in 1839. Cautley had to make his own bricks—millions of them—his own brick kiln, and his own mortar. A hundred thousand tonnes of lime went into the mortar, the other main ingredient of which was surkhi, made by grinding over-burnt bricks to a powder. To reinforce the mortar, ghur, ground lentils and jute fibres were added to it.

  Initially, opposition came from the priests in Haridwar, who felt that the waters of the holy Ganga would be imprisoned. Cautley pacified them by agreeing to leave a narrow gap in the dam through which the river water could flow unchecked. He won over the priests when he inaugurated his project with aarti, and the worship of Ganesh, God of Good Beginnings. He also undertook the repair of the sacred bathing ghats along the river. The canal banks were also to have their own ghats with steps leading down to the water.

  The headworks of the canal are at Haridwar, where the Ganga enters the plains after completing its majestic journey through the Himalayas. Below Haridwar, Cautley had to dig new courses for some of the mountain torrents that threatened the canal. He collected them into four steams and took them over the canal by means of four passages. Near Roorkee, the land fell away sharply and here Cautley had to build an aqueduct, a masonry bridge that carries the canal for half a kilometre across the Solani torrent—a unique engineering feat. At Roorkee, the canal is twenty-five metres higher than the parent river which flows almost parallel to it.

  Most of the excavation work on the canal was done mainly by the Oads, a gypsy tribe who were professional diggers for most of northwest India. They took great pride in their work. Though extremely poor, Cautley found them a happy and carefree lot who worked in a very organized manner.

  When the canal was formally opened on the 8 April 1854, its main channel was 348 miles long, its branches 306 and the distributaries over 3,000. Over 7,67,000 acres in 5,000 villages were irrigated. One of its main branches re-entered the Ganga at Kanpur; it also had branches to Fatehgarh, Bulandshahr and Aligarh.

  Cautley’s achievements did not end there. He was also actively involved in Dr Falconer’s fossil expedition in the Siwaliks. He presented to the British Museum an extensive collection of fossil mammalia—including hippopotamus and crocodile fossils, evidence that the region was once swampland or an inland sea. Other animal remains found here included the sabre-toothed tiger; Elephis ganesa, an elephant with a trunk ten-and-a-half feet long; a three-toed ancestor of the horse; the bones of a fossil ostrich; and the remains of giant cranes and tortoises. Exciting times, exciting finds.

  Nor did Cautley’s interests and activities end in fossil excavation. My copy of Surgeon General Balfour’s Cyclopedia of India (1873) lists a number of fascinating reports and papers by Cautley. He wrote on a submerged city, twenty feet underground, near Behut in the Doab; on the coal and lignite in the Himalayas; on gold washings in the Siwalik Hills, between the Jamuna and Sutlej rivers; on a new species of snake; on the mastodons of the Siwaliks; on the manufacture of tar; and on Panchukkis or corn mills.

  How did he find time for all this, I wonder. Most of his life was spent in tents, overseeing the canal work or digging up fossils. He had a house in Mussoorie (one of the first), but he could not have spent much time in it. It is today part of the Manav Bharti School, and there is still a plaque in the office stating that Cautley lived there. Perhaps he wrote some of his reports and expositions during brief sojourns in the hills. It is
said that his wife left him, unable to compete against the rival attractions of canals and fossils remains.

  I wonder, too, if there was any follow up on his reports of the submerged city—is it still there, waiting to be re-discovered—or his findings on gold washings in the Siwaliks. Should my royalties ever dry up, I might just wonder off into the Siwaliks, looking for ‘gold in them that hills’. Meanwhile, whenever I travel by road from Delhi to Haridwar, and pass over that placid canal at various places en-route, I think of the man who spent more than twenty years of his life in executing this magnificent project, and others equally demanding. And then, his work done, walking away from it all without thought of fame or fortune.

  A Jungle Princess

  From Roorkee separate roads lead to Haridwar, Saharanpur, Dehradun. And from the Saharanpur road you can branch off to Paonta Sahib, with its famous gurudwara glistening above the blue waters of the Yamuna. Still blue up here, but not so blue by the time it enters Delhi. Industrial affluents and human waste soon muddy the purest of rivers.

  From Paonta you can turn right to Herbertpur, a small township originally settled by an Anglo-Indian family early in the nineteenth century. As may be inferred by its name, Herbert was the scion of the family, but I have been unable to discover much about him. When I was a boy, the Carberry family owned much of the land around here, but by the time Independence came, only one of the family remained—Doreen, a sultry, dusky beauty who become known in Dehra as the ‘Jungle Princess’. Her husband had deserted her, but she had a small daughter who grew up on the land. Doreen’s income came from her mango and guava orchards, and she seemed quite happy living in this isolated rural area near the river. Occasionally she came into Dehra Dun, a bus ride of a couple of hours, and she would visit my mother, a childhood friend, and occasionally stay overnight.

  On one occasion we went to Doreen’s jungle home for a couple of days. I was just seven or eight years old. I remember Doreen’s daughter (about my age) teaching me to climb trees. I managed the guava tree quite well, but some of the others were too difficult for me.

  How did this jungle queen manage to live by herself in this remote area, where her house, orchard and fields were bordered by forest on one side and the river on the other?

  Well, she had her servants of course, and they were loyal to her. And she also possessed several guns, and could handle them very well. I saw her bring down a couple of pheasants with her twelve-bore spread shot. She had also killed a cattle-lifting tiger which had been troubling a nearby village, and a marauding leopard that had taken one of her dogs. So she was quite capable of taking care of herself. When I last saw her, some twenty-five years ago, she was in her seventies. I believe she sold her land and went to live elsewhere with her daughter, who by then had a family of her own.

  From the Pool to the Glacier

  1

  My Boyhood Pool

  It was going to rain. I could see the rain moving across the foothills, and I could smell it on the breeze. But instead of turning homewards I pushed my way through the leaves and brambles that grew across the forest path. I had heard the sound of running water at the bottom of the hill, and I was determined to find this hidden stream.

  I had to slide down a rock-face into a small ravine and there I found the stream running over a bed of shingle, I removed my shoes and started walking upstream. A large glossy black bird with a curved red beak hooted at me as I passed; and a Paradise Flycatcher—this one I couldn’t fail to recognize, with its long fan-tail beating the air-swooped across the stream. Water trickled down from the hillside, from amongst ferns and grasses and wild flowers; and the hills, rising steeply on either side, kept the ravine in shadow. The rocks were smooth, almost soft, and some of them were gray and some yellow. A small waterfall came down the rocks and formed a deep round pool of apple-green water.

  When I saw the pool I turned and ran home. I wanted to tell Anil and Kamal about it. It began to rain, but I didn’t stop to take shelter, I ran all the way home—through the sal forest, across the dry river-bed through the outskirts of the town.

  Though Anil usually chose the adventures we were to have, the pool was my own discovery, and I was proud of it.

  ‘We’ll call it Rusty’s Pool,’ said Kamal. ‘And remember, it’s a secret pool. No one else must know of it.’

  I think it was the pool that brought us together more than anything else.

  Kamal was the best swimmer. He dived off rocks and went gliding about under the water like a long golden fish. Anil had strong legs and arms, and he threshed about with much vigour but little skill. I could dive off a rock too, but I usually landed on my stomach.

  There were slim silver fish in the stream. At first we tried catching them with a line, but they soon learnt the art of taking the bait without being caught on the hook. Next, we tried a bedsheet (Anil had removed it from his mother’s laundry) which we stretched across one end of the stream; but the fish wouldn’t come anywhere near it. Eventually, Anil without telling us, procured a stick of gunpowder. And Kamal and I were startled out of an afternoon siesta by a flash across the water and a deafening explosion. Half the hillside tumbled into the pool, and Anil along with it. We got him out, along with a large supply of stunned fish which were too small for eating. Anil, however, didn’t want all his work to go to waste; so he roasted the fish over a fire and ate them himself.

  The effects of the explosion gave Anil another idea, which was to enlarge our pool by building a dam across one end. This he accomplished with our combined labour. But he had chosen a week when there had been heavy rain in the hills, and we had barely finished the dam when a torrent of water came rushing down the bed of the stream and burst our earthworks, flooding the ravine. Our clothes were carried away by the current, and we had to wait until it was night before creeping into town through the darkest alley-ways. Anil was spotted at a street corner, but he posed as a naked Sadhu and began calling for alms, and finally slipped in through the back door of his house without being recognized. I had to lend Kamal some of my clothes, and these, being on the small side, made him look odd and gangly. Our other activities at the pool included wrestling and buffalo-riding.

  We wrestled on a strip of sand that ran beside the stream. Anil had often attended wrestling akharas and was something of an expert. Kamal and I usually combined against him, and after five or ten minutes of furious unscientific struggle, we usually succeeded in flattening Anil into the sand. Kamal would sit on his head, and I would sit on his legs until he admitted defeat. There was no fun in taking him on singly, because he knew too many tricks for us.

  We rode on a couple of buffaloes that sometimes came to drink and wallow in the more muddy parts of the stream. Buffaloes are fine, sluggish creatures, always in search of a soft, slushy resting place. We would climb on their backs, and kick and yell and urge them forward; but on no occasion did we succeed in getting them to carry us anywhere. If they got tired of our antics, they would merely roll over on their backs, taking us with them into a bed of muddy water.

  Not that it mattered how muddy we got, because we had only to dive into the pool to get rid of it all. The buffaloes couldn’t get to the pool because of its narrow outlet and the slippery rocks.

  If it was possible for Anil and me to leave our homes at night, we would come to the pool for a swim by moonlight. We would often find Kamal there before us. He wasn’t afraid of the dark or the surrounding forest, where there were panthers and jungle cats. We bathed silently at night, because the stillness of the surrounding jungle seemed to discourage high spirits; but sometimes Kamal would sing—he had a clear, ringing voice—and we would float the red, long-fingered poinsettias downstream.

  The pool was to be our principal meeting place during the coming months. It was not that we couldn’t meet in town. But the pool was secret, known only to us, and it gave us a feeling of conspiracy and adventure to meet there after school. It was at the pool that we made our plans: it was at the pool that we first spoke of the
glacier; but several weeks and a few other exploits were to pass before the particular dream materialized.

  2

  Ghosts on the Verandah

  Anil’s mother’s memory was stored with an incredible amount of folklore, and she would sometimes astonish us with her stories of spirits and mischievous ghosts.

  One evening, when Anil’s father was out of town, and Kamal and I had been invited to stay the night at Anil’s upper-storey flat in the bazaar, his mother began to tell us about the various types of ghosts she had known. Melia, a servant-girl, having just taken a bath, came out on the verandah, with her hair loose.

  ‘My girl, you ought not to leave your hair loose like that,’ said Anil’s mother. ‘It is better to tie a knot in it.’

  ‘But I have not oiled it yet,’ said Mulia.

  ‘Never mind, but you should not leave your hair loose towards sunset. There are spirits called jinns who are attracted by long hair and pretty black eyes like yours. They may be tempted to carry you away!’

  ‘How dreadful!’ exclaimed Mulia, hurriedly tying a knot in her hair, and going indoors to be on the safe side.

  Kamal and I sat on a string cot, facing Anil’s mother, who sat on another cot. She was not much older than thirty-two, and had often been mistaken for Anil’s elder sister; she came from a village near Mathura, a part of the country famous for its gods and spirits and demons.

  ‘Can you see jinns, aunty-ji?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘There was an Urdu teacher in Mathura, whose pupils were about the same age as you. One of the boys was very good at his lessons. One day, while he sat at his desk in a corner of the classroom, the teacher asked him to fetch a book from the cupboard which stood at the far end of the room. The boy, who felt lazy that morning, didn’t move from his seat. He merely stretched out his hand, took the book from the cupboard, and handed it to the teacher. Everyone was astonished, because the boy’s arm had stretched about four yards before touching the book! They realized that he was a jinn; that was the reason for his being so good at games and exercises which required great agility.’