Now, the little parrots of Bhim can people the Benares high trees with such sacred namings and songs. The Bhim parrots have one virtue. They never steal. They never learn cinema songs. You can make them take the name of Ram and this they will repeat with delight. And many a zamindar’s wife has carried a Bhim parrot from Benares — and in fine-worked Muradabadi bell-metal cages — to Calcutta or Agra and some have carried them even to Rajasthan. The truth about these parrots is also that they die quickly if they go to the wrong house — a blackmarketeer or an unprofessional prostitute, a bribe-loving police officer or a British Official’s dancing and drinking wife. One good English lady even took a Bhim parrot to England and he came again and again in her dream and said, ‘Send me back home, send me back home,’ and some Indian coming back is said to have brought back the parrot, and let him fly off on the Dasi Lane Ghat. Nobody saw this but it is rumoured the vultures fell on him immediately — such the smell of the evil-touched among birds — anyway he died in Benares, did the London-returned parrot, and this makes it better for rebirth. Who knows, he may have been among the later litters of Bhim and Rupvati.
When Bhim stands on his one leg, the other strictly drawn to his belly-downs, all the world can see that the sparrow and the madhu-bird, and even a vulture or two will come and sit on the other branches, and if by chance you hear a sharp voice or cry, it’s because some unwanted rascal has tried to sneak in near this assembly, and the vultures will not have him do so.
The vulture Krodha is a tame old thing, too tame and too old except to catch a fish here and there, or peck at the remains of a carcass. Krodha was seen by man at least since the last twenty years — so people say, since a year or two after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. He came, did Krodha, to the Dasi Ghat, an unknown as it were, for he appeared, truth to speak, from nowhere. The Dasi Ghat has few corpses to offer you, while the Muslim weavers’ quarters on the other side are so full of hide and flesh and fish. Why then here among pilgrims and potters and grave shaven widows? Some vultures do carry off babies, that is true, and Dasi Ghat was no better than any. And of course in the Bindu house and Rati mansion and the Bishembhar Palace (of the Rajas of Bhume) you have so many puling little things. You flop down, catch, and rise and rush off to the Ramnagar bank of the river. But Krodha is a hard taskmaster on himself. He would rather carry a lamb or a cock than a human baby. He felt this way since he saw a baby carried off and it cried so much and beat its hands so fiercely, that five of them had to come and finish off the baby. And human flesh anyway does not taste as good, as say, goose flesh.
Now Krodha has many problems. He has an itch in the neck and a very acute pain on the bend of the back. He took mustard shoots from the fields to cure himself, and even fasted for three or four days, but nothing lessened his pain. However, coming here one day by accident — he was chasing a fish, and he was swooping down, when he saw Bhim. He brought back the fish and ate him on the neem tree. The itch in the neck somehow stopped for a moment. He came again and again, and the pain only stopped when Bhim was standing on his one solitary leg. Usually when Krodha came, the other birds, sparrows and madhu-birds, rushed away in fear. But little by little they too began to have assurance of themselves. The fact is Krodha is too crude to know of the Siddha. Everybody cannot know the Siddha, and even among the potters only a few can hear that mantra-like humming of the nights. Hum. . Hum. . Hum. You think sound can be heard because you’ve ears. I tell you, you can only hear what your ears hear, there are so many many sounds in Benares that your ears cannot even smell of, leave alone see. A sound is like this. It can be thick, or thin, low, minor, or even minion. At each level you have a special ear to hear, that is, if you can hear. If you eat too much onion or carcass or butcher’s scrap or steal the manes’ offerings from crows or the grain — gifts from cows or peck into gutters like some low birds do, you are out of your circle.
In fact there are two definite circuits in Benares — the outer and the inner. The inner is so clear. It passes from the Dufferin bridge past the main post-office, and skirting the Hindu High School, runs straight down to the kutcheries by the Brahma Bazar Road, and from then on, meandering, you could reach the University campus city — those to the right belong to one caste, to the left the other. To the left you have the weavers, the untouchables, the hide-sellers, the prostitute houses (of the poor and the accidental), and to the right you have the rajas, the concubines, the pilgrims, and the temples — and the river. The vultures of the right do not eat with the vultures of the left — there are strict rules not only about eating but about mating. You have on the right the vultures born life after life, feeding on the fishes, the thrown-off meats of pilgrims, and even a good carcass or two. It depends on whose it is. But on the left you must eat all sorts of things, and even share a buffalo with crows or a host of curs. The vulture’s cry to the left is like a policeman’s whistle, sharp and one-noted, but the vultures of the right have long-drawn notes, as if they were gentlemen accustomed to wait on zamindars. And the two provinces are so clearly drawn that the two types of vultures — the vultures of the left and the vultures of the right — never invade each other’s domains. That’s the law. And the vultures, you may know, are great obeyers of the law.
This is not always so true of the sparrows. These tiny commonplace populace of Benares are so mixed up in their mediocrities that they eat anywhere, and they mate anywhere, and in fact they peck at any grain, funeral grain, or pilgrim-leavings. They however marry only from the sparrows of the ghat sides, exception being made to those of Ramnagar, on the other bank. For reasons of bird-laws the Ramnagar side is counted as holy. The sparrows too follow the pilgrims sometimes when they make their sixty-league circumbulation of Benares. They go in groups and return by evening to their nests on the Dasi Ghat or the Hanuman Ghat side. The peculiarity however of the the Benares sparrows is this: they are fearless. Commonplace they may be but proud they are. The story goes that once when Sri Rama was crossing the Ganges a sparrow stood on a side, and swore allegiance of all the sparrows to the Lord.
‘Howso?’ asked Sri Rama, the fount of compassion. ‘Howso, Bhagirathi?’ for that was the name of the sparrow. ‘Because,’ said the sparrow, ‘once one of our race was born in Janaka’s kingdom. Great was the peace and luxury in the land of Devi Sita’s father. The sages were honoured and you only heard the murmur of mantras come out from every housetop. And when Janaki the holy one went to the river to bathe, and her housemaids were all busy arranging her clothes on the bank, Sita Devi was so enchanted with the waters she went swimming. Now on the other side of the river was a Rakshasha spirit whose deepest desire was to have cast an eye on Sita Devi bathing for once, and thus Sita would not be Sri Rama’s spouse, and there would therefore be no Ramayana. When this monster rose on his bloody bed all the sparrows were frightened, and we on this side did perform an act simple. We flew in wide formations, swinging ourselves like a large swap of song which comes back on itself, and the longer Sita Devi stayed in the waters the greater the number of sparrows that joined us on this sky-curtaining flight. So Sita Devi when she saw this called me, Bhagirathi, and said: “Bird, what festival of yours is this?” “O none, Princess, but that ogre there has decided there would be no Ramayana, that is, if he could just sight you, as you take your bath, so Sri Rama would not wed you. We know the Lord is born to liberate man from evil. We have woven, a net of illusion for the ogre not to see you. Lady, we know you’re the daughter of the earth and the Mother of mankind. Devi, we are but humble protectors of the Queen-born-of the-furrow,” said I. ‘So,’ continued Bhagirathi coming forward, ‘Lord, she gave us this sign on our forehead. You can see it’s the kumkum from her brows, our iris, the iris of her honey-vermillion hue.’