Transience

| 4 MIN READ | About Pilgrims & Purpose

I am driving into downtown Prayagraj from the airport. The road is narrow. Every neighborhood resembles a previous era. Every shop, an ancestral heirloom passed down through generations.  

We arrive at our destination. A sprawling campus of tented accommodation. As I head towards my tent, I notice the walkway assembled with aluminium chequered plates. The tents have an attached toilet that has everything except a bathtub. I leave my bags and go stand on the front deck. We are near the rear fence. Beyond it is a strip of land and then the sprawling river. On the other side, a temple. On the left, rows of pontoon bridges set up by the Army. In the distance the blazing lights from the Kumbh Mela. I stand still and soak it in. It’s good to be here. I gaze up at the sky to try and spot the rare alignment between seven planets. It all looks the same.

I recheck maps. Our small blue dot is afloat in the middle of the river. I look around me again. This elaborate makeshift world has been conjured up on a floodplain that the rising river will swallow back in a few months.

Transience. This is what draws us all here to the Mahakumbh.

The tangible world is illusory because it is temporary. Everything we are and all that is around us, disappears. The intangible source is elusive and eternal. The one where all this arises from and returns to. It is also intimate, essential – there is nobody who does not know it, yet almost everyone has forgotten. At this holy confluence of rivers, we arrive to surrender all that we are not. To discard the impulse of separation and survival, and soak in what remains. 

Ironically, the sprawling Kumbh Mela site is dotted with a network of public announcement speakers. A continuous drone of announcements pour out. Descriptions of lost children, the sector where they were found, and where parents must come to collect them. I feel immersed in a 70s movie storyline.

Long queues wind out of shacks hosting healers with remedies for a wide range of ailments and astrologers who can foresee all we fear and how to escape or mitigate it. I ask the peanut vendor if they are legit. He says it’s hard to tell. This is a carnival of life – where the transcendent and transactional converge.

-x-

I grew up in a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar home. Avatars of Lord Vishnu provided the axis for our daily lives. My grandmother played the Suprabhatham on the living room LP player each morning. The sounds seeped into my pre-dawn consciousness and stirred me awake. I am far removed from my native origins, yet always felt rooted by the ancient quality in this song.

But what fascinated me most as a 6 year old boy, was that there existed a ‘God of Destruction’. What good was he for? The world is beautiful and worth preserving. Why does a God who destroys creation attract so much attention?

For two decades that question remained with me. On a cold December winter, I turn twenty-six and make a trip to the Nilgiri Hills. I am here because I am lost. The reasons which drive people to go about their daily lives sound incomplete. My maternal Uncle sends me here to spend a few weeks with his friends. They are social workers engaged in rehabilitating the local Adivasi communities. He feels being around grounded and selfless people would be helpful. I am at their cottage overlooking a stream. While moving through the Surya Namaskar, I hear the song Nirvana Shatakam for the first time. It reverberates with truths I intuitively know but have never paid attention to.   

All identities are imagined.

I am the empty space in which all unfolds.

In my silent heart – I am Shiva. The destroyer of delusions.      

-x-

On the last evening at the Mahakumbh, I attend a cultural event in a temple courtyard on the banks of the Arail Ghat. An American Sadhvi speaks about her first visit from California to Rishikesh in the 90s. She arrived with her childhood traumas and a PhD in Psychology from Stanford. Something drew her to remain. She healed and wrote a book about her journey from Hollywood to the Himalayas. It’s always the same story.

A boy next to me strikes up a conversation. We talk about the illusion of the individual self. All the speakers for tomorrow’s program stand up one by one and introduce themselves. One of them is an atheist, who arrived with circumspection for a previous Kumbh, but experienced a oneness with the imposing Ganga. The proverbial pot (kumbh) broke and dissolved into the river. We live in stories that don’t sustain, but resonate with something deeper that erases the illusion.

I return the next morning to listen to the first of a long lineup of speakers. His theme includes civilizational resilience, the lasting effects of European colonization on the Indian psyche and how culture and spirituality influence the inherent nature of a society. Spectators begin to congregate and wait for people to occupy the dais.

The speakers, seated in a separate area, get up and unexpectedly leave. The PM has arrived for the Mahakumbh and they have been called for an audience with him. The scheduled time for the program to begin was 45 minutes ago, but nothing happens. People sit and wait quietly, like it is an artform of its own. I have to leave for my flight soon so will probably miss the speech. Two women occupy the seats next to me. The younger one is an only child from a middle-class family . She started out at a Big 4 firm. Four years in, although the pay was golden, she quit because audit work felt meaningless. She prepared for the Indian Civil Services exam, considered amongst the most competitive screening processes in the world. She cleared this hurdle but skipped the subsequent interview because she sensed the same absence of intent in our bureaucracy. She is studying law now and wants to work in public policy. Her motivation is devoid of personal ambition but imbued with a wish to do something useful for her country. I feel moved by the clarity in her earnestness, one that eclipses the burden of more calculated choices. Her father joins us and I tell him how much of a blessing his daughter is.

I stop for lunch before hitching a bike ride to the airport. I casually exchange a ‘Har Har Mahadev’ with an old man leaving the restaurant. Our shared greeting gives rise to an anchoring lightness. It binds me to this land of Pilgrims. Always has, always will.