The puppy sits on that ash and dung-heap and cries. Its one eye is sore. Flies do not leave him in peace. So, he cries for his mother. The donkey, above him, finding no cucumber scrap to chew shakes its head to wave off its flies, and tries to suck the puppy’s ears. But the donkey’s flies prefer the larger ear. And somewhere there a child’s undershirt lies in flowery rags. Whose child might it have been? How tenderly its mother must have pressed him to her rounded breasts. The rag is a sign that in life’s finality nothing matters. The fact that you live at all is the miracle.
For, in Benares the living are the miracle. They can walk on their bamboo legs, their lathis and their turbans proving their strength — in Benares men even talk. Whence did they get their strength? For their silent moving mass is like those toppled palaces, their own platform self-sustaining above Ganga’s rubble — a tree shoots from that ruin to prove life’s insistence, but by the next flood the platform will also fall to the depths from which no one will ever retrieve its stones. The maharajas have all gone, anyway, you must remember. Empires have fallen thus. Indeed all of structures’ destiny is decay and disappearance. The fact of existence is just this — action and reaction. Action and reaction again. Why should one be born? Why should one sorrow? The turrets and carvings of Benares architecture seem to name life as real, yet only death appears to shine here as true meaning.
Son, has death meaning? No, death is an empty event. It’s like the yowl of a crow, the son of a barren woman. Can life die, that is the question? The Ganga answers: Man, you think you die. Burn yourself on my banks and know that what flows cannot but unflow. Death is a superstition, like the flies that sit on the baby’s rags, and find nothing there. Is the donkey’s bray a song? How can you, who have a name, die? If the Ganga cannot grow dry one will never know death. Hence is she, the Mother of compassion.
Man is mortal is the grandest fib man ever invented. Foolish is man in trying to believe in such a lie. When knowledge, as Ganga, as jnana-ganga, flows, death is dissolved into truth. She is, as Sri Shankara said: She is nija bodha rupa, she, the form of Consciousness pure.
I do not know why I came here. Raja is a name given to the nameless, as wave is for water, as sound a name given to volute silence. Why then should I be here? How could I be here? Where is the here, where I am? A point is no space. Nor do a series of points make space, as a series of perceptions make not an object. The object is not in seeing but in perceivingness. There is no here, Lord, there is no space, no movement, therefore I am the Ganga that flowing flows not. For where ends the flow? Nowhere. Where there is no end there is no beginning. Anything that is non-existent at the beginning and also at the end, does not exist in the middle either, says the Great Gaudapada Acharya. He was, as you know, the Guru of the Guru of Sri Shankara himself. Thus, you fool, realize; the Ganga never flows.
How simple is the truth if only we listen to ourselves. But we prefer to listen to the crows on the Ganga ghat, to the chatter of Brahmins at the funerals (and in our temples) and to the ekka drivers (who frighten you with talks of death and taxation) and to those dead to death, the sadhus. The fact of the fact is simple. One cannot go to the Ganges. One cannot go to the ‘I’. For if you dare have a deep look on the Ganges evenings, and see the Ganga unflowing, then you know there is no Ganga. Water is just water. So, O Mother Ganga, please be gracious, and — flow.
Notes
1. Raja Rao, The Policeman and the Rose: Stories. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. xiv.
2. Raja Rao, The Chessmaster and His Moves. New Delhi: Vision Books, 1988, p. 1.
3. R. Parthasarathy, ‘The Future World Is Being Made in America: An Interview with Raja Rao’, Span (September 1977): 30.
4. Braj B. Kachru, The Indianization of English: The English Language in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
5. Raja Rao, Kanthapura. London: Allen and Unwin, 1938. Reprinted 1963, New York: New Directions. Subsequent citations from the American edition are indicated in the text parenthetically by page number.
6. Raja Rao, The Serpent and the Rope. London: John Murray, 1960. Subsequent citations from this edition are indicated in the text parenthetically by page number.
7. I have not been able to trace the source of this quotation.
8. Chāndogya Upaniṣad, VI.8.7, in The Principal Upaniṣads, ed. & trans. S. Radhakrishnan. London: Allen and Unwin, 1953, p. 458.
9. Raja Rao, ‘The Writer and the Word’, The Literary Criterion 7.1 (Winter 1965): 231.
10. Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 67–104.
11. Janet Powers Gemmill, ‘The Transcreation of Spoken Kannada in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, Literature East and West 18.2–4 (1974): 191–202.
12. Gemmill, ‘The Transcreation of Spoken Kannada in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, p. 194.
13. C.D. Narasimhaiah, ‘Indian Writing in English: An Introduction,’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 5 (1968): 14.
14. Quoted in M.K. Naik, Raja Rao. Twayne World Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1972, p. 106.
15. Louis Dumont and David Pocock, ‘On the Different Aspects or Levels in Hinduism,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology 3 (July 1959): 45.
16. Bhavabhuti, Rama’s Later History (Uttararāmacarita), part 1: Introduction and Translation by Shripad Krishna Belvalkar. Harvard Oriental Series, 21. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1915, p. 39.
17. Raja Rao, The Cat and Shakespeare. New York: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 8–10. Subsequent citations from this edition are indicated in the text parenthetically by page number.
18. Arthur Avalon, ed. Kulacūḍāmaṇi Nigama, with an introduction and translation by A.K. Maitra. Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1956, ch. 1, verses 25–26.
19. Raja Rao, The Policeman and the Rose: Stories. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 88. Subsequent citations from this edition are indicated in the text parenthetically by page number.
20. Rabindranath Tagore, Stories from Tagore. New York: Macmillan, 1918, p. 122. Subsequent citations from this edition are indicated in the text parenthetically by page number.
21. Integral Yoga Institute, ed. Dictionary of Sanskrit Names. Yogaville, Buckingham, VA: Integral Yoga Publications, 1989, p. 57.
22. Sushil Kumar De, ed., and Rev. V. Raghavan, The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa, 3rd ed. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982, verse 11.