One day Nanna said: I hear you muttering a mantra all the time, why don’t you teach me one? ‘It’s a Sadhu who gave it to me,’ explained Shiv, moved by the woman’s big heart. Sincerity is not given to everyone, you know. And she insisted — and she persisted. ‘Oh, son, give me that mantra of yours? Please, please.’ So Shiv went back to the Ganga ghat, after these many years, and of course there he was our Sadhu, as full of fun, of bhang and abuse. ‘Nice son of a widow, to leave me in the wedge, you donkey’s son,’ and he swished his trident towards Shiv. Shiv slipped and ran and laughed. And the Sadhu and Shiv pursued each other like boys, at the hoothooth game. Hoothoothu, hoothhoothu, hut! But Shiv was so agile, though now a man, for the Sadhu to catch. Even the monkeys on the railings scratched their bellies, and seemed to enjoy this spectacle. When the Sadhu was out of breath, he said: ‘Stay.’ And Shivlal stayed. He made the hookah and filled it with chillum, the Sadhu had never had a better smoke. You could see from Shiv’s fresh face that he had not forgotten his mantra. That works, you know.
The woman now came in search of Shiv. Whensoever anyone disappears in Benares you always find him or her with a Sadhu. And a good woman has quick intuition. Nanna found him with the Sadhu and said: ‘Little big brother, you’ve abandoned me.’ ‘No,’ said Shiv, ‘you wanted a mantra. I came in search of my Sadhu. He gave it to me. Take it from him.’ The Sadhu never said a word. He put his tongs in his burning fire, and looked at it several times, as if he were going to brand her. ‘A woman who sells her body,’ said the Sadhu, ‘is like the crow that lives on funerals. Both live on bodies. Woman do you see that pyre, there? That’s the end to this pus and bone booby, a booby doll,’ he said, and showed his own healthy body. ‘Maharaj,’ she begged and fell at his feet, ‘give me a mantra.’
‘Come on the fourth day of ashad. Fast three days before that. Come without having spoken to anyone. Come and we’ll see.’ And she was so grandly pleased she rushed to a sweetmeat shop, and bought back some pedas, and a few garlands from the flower sellers. The Sadhu tore the garland and threw the flowers into the river, giving away the pedas to the monkeys. He gave one piece of peda however to the woman, with a look of contempt and harshness, but she looked as if she’d been given royal gold. ‘Your trunk is where it is?’ she said, did Nanna to Shiv. ‘No one will touch it. But since you’ve gone the business is slack.’ The Sadhu said to Shiv: ‘Go and help her.’ And Shiv wondered at this. Shiv still wonders.
He went every morning to the Sadhu and cleaned the ghats and cooked the meals, and after his own bath and meal he went off to Nanna for the afternoons. The Pakistani refugees too came to Benares, and for some reason they always seem rich. When they came it was fun, they were so jolly.
The money in the steel trunk must have been big, big. ‘What will you do with all that money?’ Nanna asked Shiv once. Shiv laughed and said, ‘Oh, I’ll go back and buy my Uncle’s house, and his mills, and buy myself a wife.’ ‘Oh,’ says Nanna, ‘you will never leave your Nanna, as you’ll never leave your Sadhu.’ But when one talks of money Shivlal seemed so self-absorbed, as if he were calculating. But one day he took the trunk to the Ganga ghat. He left it under the tree, by the Sadhu, and did not care. And on Divali night when the lights were all ablaze, and all Benares looked as if the city were seen in a dream, he opened up the trunk and started tearing the notes one by one carefully, piling pieces on a side, as if he were tearing splinters from a firewood. The Sadhu coming back from his intestinal duties saw this. He too joined this festival. He took every note and blew at it as if to purify it, and tore it all into more pieces than had done Shiv. The Sadhu now went down to have a bath in the Ganges, and still Shiv was doing the job. The Sadhu joined him again. By now people had gathered round them. Who can do anything in Benares that all do not want to see? If no one sees, the monkeys are there to see, always. The monkeys too got intrigued. This young man is playing some trick (for you may not have heard the Benares monkeys know as much as you do of the smell of money).
Deliberately and silently the Sadhu and Shiv had torn all the notes except a few hundred-rupee ones. Someone fell upon them from the back and yet another, and another again. In the scuffle a young man was wounded, and many howled. And by the time the police had come the trunk had disappeared. But on that well-lit auspicious night Shiv and the Sadhu sat by Mother Ganga and threw each bit of paper one after the other into her waters. And the papers hissed as they entered the water, thus did Shiv celebrate his divali.
Few days later, Nanna came after her fasts. She was given the mantra. Shiv never goes to Gowalia Street any more. But he’s always so happy to see Nanna when she comes. Nanna is like a great big rock. Its beauty is that it is so firm. The more you look at it more you wonder at God’s patience in creation.
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Ranchoddoss Sunderdoss was a jeweller in Bombay. You can still see on Girgaum Road the yellow-painted shop-sign, discoloured, hung high, the shafts and wheels of a dilapidated brougham lying all about under the young pipal tree in the front yard, and a little shrine, juts out of the garden walls, for the passers-by to worship at the idol of Panduranga Vithala that Rukmabai a devotee had seen arise before her just there, and in almost transparent marble, with flute, chest-jewel and white cow — and this must have occurred at least two or three hundred years ago. Even now on every full-moon night women come to worship the deity, for it’s he that gave a baby boy to Rukmabai, so legends say, to this simple woman who could not go to Pandharpur on pilgrimage (her husband was too unbelieving and pice-miserly to let her go) — thus the little children’s clothes that hang all about the door — for God alone gives, who else would give, tell me? And many a lady in Bombay even now has a child only because of this Panduranga of the Girgaum Road.
Thus it was, the Sunderdoss family finally decided, and during the good Queen Victoria days, to build a small temple around the idol of Panduranga and organized regular kirtans in ashad — to be precise, on the rounded full-moon day of the month, to commemorate the vision the Lord gave to Rukmabai, this humble devotee. On that day the Sunderdoss family, for generations, have worn heirloom gold (sometimes even new-fashion jewellery), that the god not forget the merchants that do ‘give and take’ business behind his temple. And so good is our Panduranga, he never forgets his neighbourly worshippers, nor does he forget the owner of Krishnabai, the cow which is fed by the passer-by with a handful of green grass and for an anna. Since the marble cow would not eat the grass, this cow will in the name of the Lord, and many an office-goer husband returning from his toils would beat his cheeks before the deity, and offer the cow her anna worth of graze. And at festival times of course, you had more worshippers, and the grass-cutters had a gay time. They too prayed for a son, and some had more than a son given by Panduranga Vithala. Of what worth a woman’s womb that does not bear a toddling heir? And some middle-class women in gratitude even bought two headgears for the child, and hung one at the sanctuary, while the other was taken home for the coming baby. And every baby who wore this grew to be intelligent and wise, and often won the first prize at the Anglo-Marathi High School, off the Gowalia Tank. Sometimes, a kind father coming back from his office remembers his baby’s first birthday would be the next Friday or Tuesday, and he just enters the Sunderdoss shop (under the new signboard, encrusted with silver and in Marathi, Gujarati and English characters, right over the door: Sunderdoss & Sons, High Class Jewellers. Shop Founded in 1799) to buy something for this coming celebration. And one of Sunderdoss’ brothers, Bhagavandoss, the elder, Ramadoss the younger, or Ranchoddoss the in-between (all clad in muslin dhotis, their little caps still in velvet and filigree), would take you in, and seating you on the pillowed seats, show you every type of silver waistband — those with a serpent’s hood, those with the lionman’s head, or those with just in-turning screws. You could now buy the little silver tumblers or milk-feeders for the baby, also in silver, and in addition, a ruby nose-ring for your wife if you were so tempted. And around the first of the month the Sunderdosses took in one of their cousins, Madandoss, to help them — such the crowd.