ISSUE 39

Red rock, scrubland, sand and rubble. Nothing seems to change in this bleak forty-five-kilometre stretch, my everyday route for almost sixty years now. There are omens everywhere indicating slow endings. The wind scatters these auguries with a careless hand and they dissolve into the harsh cries of the peacocks. The white-backed vultures turn up on as if on cue when the ribby cattle sicken and die. Hope is becoming a scarce commodity.

The village is no longer a place for the young. The lads wander away to big cities in search of jobs and wives. The young women walk all day to collect water and firewood. I stop for a minute or two to admire the gleam of silver on their tired ankles. Peering through the brilliantly coloured veils that swallow up their faces, they still look for me. The matrons of the clan gather here when the monsoon rains come reluctantly to this desert land. Pouring milk from little copper pots over the black rocks that I had once polished with my swift hands, they call out to me, ‘O Arvari! Where are you hiding? Isn’t it time to come back to us?’ My state of disembodiment is difficult to explain when I am forced to crawl on my belly searching for my lifeblood among the sand voids.

One of the old women, Sachi, remembers me from her childhood days. As a child she would splash water  at me with her cupped hands while the noisy Sarus cranes  who had come to nest insisted on keeping us company. It was good fun. These days she goes around telling people of the village the story behind my disappearance. Sachi is skilled at weaving a crazy quilt of stories in which myth and reality mix like colours on an artist’s palette.

Today’s thread has been teased out of the Ramayana. ‘The day King Dasaratha died…’ she began in a voice as loud as a bell. The women around her willingly lend their ears and perched on the black rocks all around me in anticipation of the story of the curse. Sachi’s voice deepens as she talks about how the King’s son, the mighty Rama, was not available at that critical moment to perform the last rites. ‘Rama had disappeared into the forest to fight with the demon, so had the valiant Lakshmana. So gentle Sita took it upon herself to perform her father-in-law’s last rites.’ One of Sachi’s friends coughed loudly as if to register her protest and said, ‘But Sachi Maasi, I have heard that Sita performed the last rites in Gaya on the banks of the sacred Ganga. We are in Alwar and this is Arwari and not the Ganga.’

Sachi retorted, ‘Mother of Annu, don’t you know that all rivers are sisters of the Ganga? Why are you so het up about facts? Is it not possible that Ram and Sita came all the way to Alwar to see our beautiful land? The Ramayan tells us that they wandered joyfully to many corners of our huge country when they were exiled!’

She continued with renewed zeal, ‘When Rama came back after the forest vigil, he was displeased that his cremation rights had been usurped by Sita. He wanted to make sure that she had performed them well. So he demanded that Sita produce a witness who could vouch for her. Sita pointed to Arvari. But the river grew faint when the broad-chested Rama hurled questions in a voice like the Vajra thunderbolt. Arvari bent her head low and mumbled, ‘I didn’t notice Sita at all my Lord! I was too engrossed in my thoughts. So I cannot comment on the efficacy with which the final rites were performed. So saying, Arvari abandoned Sita, the daughter of the Earth.

Sita’s anger knew no bounds. There was a smouldering fire in her eyes, not unlike the one she had lit the pyre with a few hours ago. Thrusting her hand into the waters, Sita drew the waters with cupped hands and slowly intoned the curse flinging the droplets back into the river. ‘Those who refuse to bear witness deserve to disappear from the face of the earth!’

Sachi got a bit dramatic at this point. ‘Everything in the world of nature quaked at these words of Sita. In fact, things got so out of hand that Rama was forced to set aside his anger and calm her down. He reasoned with her, ‘If a river disappears, so will its people. Please revoke your curse Sita!’ Sita shook her head and said, ‘Water has memory. My words writ in water will not go in vain!’

A gloomy silence descended on the throng of listeners. After some time one of the women plucked up the courage to suggest that people of exceptional merit can lift curses. ‘The story is not over yet!’ said Sachi, and continued, ‘Rama, the merciful, assured the river that she would be reborn. A water shaman would play midwife to her second birth.’

The women clapped in relief on hearing this. This cock and bull story brings a smile back on my lips. I have a keen memory and don’t ever remember being cursed by the gods.

However, there is a collective curse in the air. Sachi, her friends and every other thing here in this village have only arrived midway in this story, which began long ago. It began when the first dam in the state was built a hundred kilometres away to mark the coming of age of a rapidly developing nation. Sand began to disappear silently from pits dug overnight in riverbeds to feed the construction behemoths that were cropping up everywhere. The tipping point emerged when sludge from the mines started getting dumped on the fertile soil of the land and the neighbouring hills were stripped clean of the babool and salai trees. The area was finally declared a ‘dark zone’ when I rasped and sunk low into the bowels of the earth looking for my element.

When the bird song faded away, the women went home leaving me to my meditations on time that holds the key to earth’s myriad histories and destinies. I mull over the idea of a curse that the women of the village so powerfully invoked through the Ramayana story and wonder what the antidote could be. The word comes to me magically – ‘flourishing.’ As the twilight fades, I dream of the water shaman. He transforms into a boar with glittering eyes and gleaming white tusks. Diving into a sea of sand and rocks, he dredges the earth up and hauls her out, balancing her on his gleaming white tusks. As a familiar wetness envelops my body, the white-collar Sarus cranes return.

The young man and his friends were a week old in the village. Drawn to reports of neoplasia proliferation and acute stomach ailments among the elderly population, they decided to pitch camp in that area for a fortnight or two. However, there were initial hiccups. The young man, an Ayurveda practitioner, was told off by his first octogenarian patient, ‘Your medicines will not help us. Give us clean water if you can!’

Wanting to understand the situation the young man said, ‘Show us the river in your village, Baba! We will see what we can do!’ The old man guffawed saying, ‘How can I show you a river that has taken flight?’

Not wanting to give up so quickly, the young man and his friends decided to examine the parched riverbed and fathom its groundwater flow paths.

‘Hey guys, look! Hunger stones!’ cried Varun, the youngest in the group, an engineering graduate who had chosen volunteer work over a job with a top engineering firm.

The group gathered round to watch Varun scrapping away sand and debris from a black rock that had dates and inscriptions etched on it. ‘Dude, do you understand Mewati?’ he asks the young man who nods and excitedly announces, ‘The inscription says, “When you see me, weep!” The river stopped being perennial from 1930 or so. That explains the story of hunger and hardship that someone has carved on the stone.’

Four more stones emerged and the stories were more or less the same. The whole group came under the spell of a strange melancholia. Arnav, the optimist, broke the silence saying, ‘Folks! We are in a wounded land! What do we do now?’

Everybody in the group turned to the young man for advice but he gestured to them to leave him alone. He had grown very silent for he could hear the river calling out to him. Like a child tugging at his sleeve to get attention.

He perched on a shiny black rock and tried to understand. Not far away, an old woman was strewing bright marigolds on the sand and speaking to the river, ‘O Arvari, will you come back with the rains?’ The young man heard the river whisper a faint ‘yes’.

Varun hailed the old woman saying, ‘O Maasi, can you tell us something about these rocks?’ The old woman was delighted at the opportunity. Pointing to the stones she said, ‘Son, these are stones that were used to record low water levels from the time of Raja Mangal Singh. Believe me, no one could see the entire stone in those days. The river would flow abundantly through the year. We don’t understand what happened to it during the last sixty years. There was a great drought when the river disappeared. Two farming families committed suicide because they could not afford to pay off their debts. Our poet went mad because his sweetheart was from one of those families. He took to engraving love poems and laments on these stones. He would hurl curses at the river for killing his sweetheart. Those were terrible days and we are reliving them today!’

The young man appeared to have heard only a fragment of the old woman’s story. ‘Why didn’t the river run dry during King Mangal Singh’s times?’

Pursing her lips, the old woman said, ‘In those days … why even until my grandmother’s times … they used to build johads out of mud and rocks. Half-moon shaped, they would catch and store water for our cattle and the water slowly seeped into the earth during the summer months. There were many johads near the source of the river and they were all connected. The river never went dry even during the most scorching summer. That is why our people considered them to be sacred. Every newborn and newly-wed would be taken to the johad to be blessed by the deity dwelling inside. Then the white men came and built their big dams. We imitated them and lost our water. We fell under a curse.’

The young man wanted to know if there was anyone who could build a johad. The old woman took him to a local artisan who remembered the tradition. He said there was an old johad buried somewhere in the slope of the hills. When they found it, the village headman suggested that they build a temple for the water deity after completing the restoration work. Monsoons lashed the village the day the deity was installed. The young man declared that it was an auspicious omen and spoke energetically about building more johads. ‘I will knock at the doors of the world for money,’ he said the community. And you give your support, your labour and money, if you can!’ The seventy villages connected by the river welcomed the young man who was named ‘Johad Baba’. He had grown a beard and didn’t have time for anything except building mud crescents, two hundred and thirty-eight in ten years.

He didn’t think of the river at all. For a full decade his life energies were poured into catching every droplet of the monsoon water, damming every monsoon stream and allowing the water to percolate underground. The hillsides came alive with trees and birdsong.

In the meantime, the river was getting ready to be reborn. She surprised the community with brief appearances that started growing lengthier and lengthier till she became a perennial presence girdling the seventy-odd villages with her emerald waters.

A jubilant cry of ‘Our mother has been reborn as a child!’ rent the sky as the villagers made pilgrimages to the river, anointing her with milk and honey.

One night after the crowds had left, the river called out to Johad Baba. Lying on a flat black rock, lulled by the sound of gently flowing water and the serene starlight, he had a dream. From the matted locks of a mighty mountain burst open a frothy, clear quartz river who divided herself into many streams. Leaping forward like the unbridled wind, she cleansed the buried bones of ancestors, drank deep the poison of toxic lands and greened the tired earth with alluvial ease.

Lapping gently against his feet the river said, ‘Johad Baba, You seem to be dreaming of the celestial Ganga, the crossing point of the earth and the sky! But I am Arvari, the daughter of Alwar and your very own!’