Sacred Waters , livre ebook

Stephen Alter

SACRED WATERS
A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Map
Sravan
I. Inquiry (Rishikesh-Yamnotri)
Footpaths and Motor Roads
Exile in the Forest
The Sons of Sagar
Lake of the Gods
Yamuna Devi
II. Experience (Yamnotri-Gangotri)
December
Lost Trails
Winter Solstice
Fire and Ice
III. Reflection (Gangotri-Kedarnath)
The Cow s Mouth
The Shape of a Stone
The Goddess and the Buffalo
Pathway to Paradise
IV. Transcendence (Kedarnath-Badrinath)
Vehicles of the Gods
Shiv s Navel
Chipko
The Realm of Vishnu
Soliloquy
Afterword
Bibliography
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
SACRED WATERS
Stephen Alter is the author of seven books of fiction and five books of non-fiction, most recently Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking. He has co-edited (with Wimal Dissanayake) The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories. As a writer-in-residence at MIT, he received both a Guggenheim and a Fulbright fellowship.
Stephen Alter now lives and writes in India.
Books by Stephen Alter
Renuka
Neglected Lives
Aranyani, Aripan and Other Stories
The Godchild
Silk and Steel
Amritsar to Lahore: Crossing the Border Between India and Pakistan
All the Way to Heaven: An American Boyhood in the Himalayas
Sacred Waters
Elephas Maximus: A Portrait of the Indian Elephant
Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking
The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories (co-edited)
For my brothers, Joseph and Andrew Alter
Praise for Sacred Waters
Alter s prose is lucid and even-paced . . . [his] erudition is a considerable draw, extending as it does beyond the region s mythology to its botany, geology and zoology as well as to the impact of road building, damming and tourism. - The New York Times Book Review
Sacred Waters is a lovely, tranquil account of a spiritual journey . . . Alter s fellow pilgrims are as diverse as those in The Canterbury Tales . . . [a] dense, multilayered narrative . . . this fascinating book concludes on an updraft of tranquility -Anita Mathias, Commonweal
Sacred Waters is a mellow, contemplative read . . . the lucid writing, the effective retelling of the myths and legends-and Alter s emotional and spiritual transformation . . . [will] keep readers absorbed - The Far Eastern Economic Review
The narrative whilst evoking a physical sense of India also conveys the complexities and dilemmas of characters living between cultures - Indian Express

Sravan
A MONTH OF WARM RAIN .
Season of fertility and germination.
Humid shadows beneath a mango tree. Its roots are littered with seeds, like hairy cocoons, their flesh sucked clean. Discarded peels lie rotting in the black mud. There are so many seeds it looks as if the tree must have spawned them all at once, shedding mangoes from its limbs in unison, ripe fruit cascading to the ground like heavy drops of rain.
I sit here, under the eaves of a temple roof, where I have taken shelter from a sudden downpour. A lone boy comes by, his bookbag dangling from one shoulder, blue shirt untucked, walking home from school in the rain. He stops beneath the tree, studying its dense canopy of leaves, then takes a stone and hurls it into the branches. Once. Twice. On the third try he knocks a mango to the ground and with the casual self-consciousness of youth, he turns around to see if anyone has observed his aim. The schoolboy does not know that I am watching him, half hidden behind a pillar that supports the temple roof. He steps forward, picks up the fallen mango, and bites at its green skin hungrily. Squeezing the juicy sweetness into his mouth the boy continues on his way toward home.
When the rain subsides I come out from under cover. The air feels cooler now, a fresh breeze skimming off the river. But beneath the mango tree the shadows are still heavy with unspent moisture. The decomposing peels emit a cloying, unhealthy fragrance. Mosquitoes swarm around my legs as I stare down at the carpet of mango seeds, strewn about like the eggs of a giant fly, waiting to hatch in the fecund soil. Some of the seeds have already split open, their fibrous hulls breaking apart. Inside I can see the bright new shapes of mango seedlings, their leaves unfolding like the wings of luminous green moths.
On my office wall is a map of Garhwal, printed by the Survey of India in the 1920s. It is a family heirloom, handed down to me from my parents and grandparents who used it when they hiked through these mountains, long before I was born. The paper is now yellowed and cracked, held together by a frayed cloth backing, the same kind of cotton gauze that is used for bandages. A year ago I had the map framed, wanting to preserve its abstract beauty, the faint contour lines like fingerprints, the weathered colors of an old man s skin. Stained and dogeared from having been carried in rucksacks, the map looks well used, some of the routes traced over in pencil or red ink, altitudes and destinations underlined. It reminds me of an antique parchment, documenting journeys taken years ago. Through the center of the map flows the Ganga, or Ganges, as it was labeled by British cartographers, a series of blue veins that converge in the creased folds of the Himalayas.
The four main sources of this river are located in Garhwal, or Uttarakhand as it is also known, a mountainous region of northern India that borders Tibet. Each year, monsoon storms deposit more than a hundred and fifty centimeters of rain on these precipitous slopes. The water runs into ravines and valleys. High-altitude lakes and springs spill over rocks and waterfalls. Snowfields and glaciers melt into ice-fed streams. Tributaries are formed and each confluence adds to the cumulative force of the river until it becomes a single current, cutting its way through a maze of ridges.
The map on my wall was printed before most of the motor roads were built in Garhwal. It depicts the walking trails as a network of lines that connect the scattered towns and villages, an intricate web of footpaths that cross the ridges and follow the valleys. Here in Uttarakhand there are no straight lines, no symmetrical patterns, no level ground. Just as streams and rivers carve their own circuitous route through the rugged terrain, these trails seem to follow a winding course that reaches back into the mountains, toward a secret and inaccessible point of origin.
JULY 28, 1999
The thirteenth day of Sravan in the year 1920 (Saka) or 2055 (Vikrami), according to the Hindu calendars. I have no idea whether or not this is an auspicious day to start my pilgrimage. Just after dawn I woke up to the drumming of rain on a corrugated tin roof. It continued until late afternoon, a steady shower that soaked my clothes before I had walked the first kilometer. I could have waited, postponing my departure until a drier moment, but it seemed appropriate to set off in the rain. My umbrella provided little protection, errant drops blowing in from all sides and the air saturated with moisture, humidity condensing on my skin.
In the colorful oleographs that decorate religious calendars, Ganga appears as a demure goddess streaming from the monsoon clouds. Daughter of Himavant, lord of the mountains, she is a celestial river that fell to earth. The fluid pleats of her purple sari blend into the brush strokes of a torrential storm that rains down upon the meditating figure of Shiv. For a thousand years Ganga flowed through the matted locks of his hair, forming countless tributaries. Most powerful of deities-creator and destroyer-Shiv absorbed the violent impact of Ganga s descent from heaven. In the form of a rishi, the blue-throated god remains impassive and undisturbed in his immortal meditation, seated cross-legged on a tiger skin, white snow peaks in the background.
At Hardwar, one of India s holiest cities, the Ganga passes through a gap in the Siwalik Hills. Named after the hair of Shiv (Shiv Alak), these crumbling ridges are all that remain of a primordial chain of mountains, older than the Himalayas. Compared to the higher peaks of Garhwal, thirty kilometers to the north, the Siwalik Hills are nothing more than a minor ripple in the landscape. Their summits have eroded over time until they are barely taller than the sal trees that forest these slopes. Worn down by centuries upon centuries of monsoon storms, the Siwaliks are a reminder of the tenuous provenance of nature.
Known as the gateway of the gods, Hardwar marks the point at which the Ganga enters the plains of northern India and sets its course for the sea. The river carries with it a rich lode of sediment washed down from the high Himalayas. Like the Siwalik Hills, these mountains are also in the process of being eroded by the Ganga, its current scouring away the soil.
During the month of Sravan, from late July to early August, which coincides with the monsoon, over a million pilgrims descend upon Hardwar. These kavar, as they are called, collect vessels of Gangajal (water from the Ganga) and carry them to a Shiv temple at Garh Mukteshwar, over a hundred kilometers downstream. Some of the more ambitious kavar walk all the way from Gaumukh Glacier above Gangotri, an added distance of three hundred kilometers. Traveling on foot, the kavar transport their bottles of Gangajal in a pair of wicker baskets, suspended from a bamboo yoke that rests upon their shoulders. The water is never allowed to touch the ground and the pilgrims travel for weeks, stopping at roadside shelters erected by pious benefactors along their route. Ultimately, when the kavar reach their destination, the Gangajal is presented as an offering to Shiv, a rite of worship that reenacts the myth of Ganga s descent to earth.
In recent years this pilgrimage has become so popular that most of the highway between Hardwar and Del