A River Sutra Read online

  GITA MEHTA

  a river sutra

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  1

  2 The Monk’s Story

  3

  4 The Teacher’s Story

  5

  6

  7 The Executive’s Story

  8

  9

  10 The Courtesan’s Story

  11

  12

  13 The Musician’s Story

  14

  15 The Minstrel’s Story

  16 The Song of the Narmada

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A RIVER SUTRA

  Gita Mehta is an award-winning documentary film-maker and author. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages and have appeared on many international bestseller lists. She lives in London, NewYork and India.

  Praise for the Book

  ‘Superb, profound, apparently effortless storytelling’—Independent on Sunday

  ‘The simplicity of the plots makes it difficult to express the joy one has in reading them. I have a feeling, indeed a hope, that A River Sutra becomes a classic’—Daily Telegraph

  ‘Life-enhancing gem of a book’—Observer

  ‘Exquisitely wrought parables of human frailty’—Sunday Telegraph

  ‘What [the protagonist] learns is: “The human heart has only one secret. The capacity to love.” Gita Mehta has understood something about that capacity, and conveys her understanding in a way that makes you privileged to be let into the secret’—Sunday Times

  ‘Evokes the . . . sense that things are richer and more meaningful than they seem, that life is both clear and mysterious, that the beauty and horror of this world is irreducible and inexplicable’ —Washington Post

  ‘The simplicity of Mehta’s writing complements the novel’s profound concerns. It moves like a spinning wheel . . . turning for days afterward, assuaging your doubts, questioning your certainties’ —Los Angeles Times

  ‘Full of heart-stopping moments and surprises, a mesmerizing novel by a writer of prodigious gifts’—Miami Herald

  ‘A seminal book’—Illustrated Weekly of India

  ‘Deft and delightful’—Publishers Weekly

  ‘The compelling prose of A River Sutra flows as swiftly as the sacred stream’—New Statesman

  ‘Reminding one of Kipling in its universality, of R.K. Narayan in the observation of rural types and locales, of V.S. Naipaul in its intense evocation of spirit of place, A River Sutra is at once an elegant and enchanting—and enchanted—book’—Scotsman

  Listen, O brother.

  Man is the greatest truth.

  Nothing beyond.

  LOVE SONGS OF CHANDIDAS

  Introduction

  It seems both incorrect and somehow conservative to talk of form and content as separate from each other, especially so late in the gam e, but the standout formal properties of Gita Mehta’s second novel, A River Sutra, first published twenty-five years ago, deserve an essay all to themselves. Rather than following the usual template of a novel, with its unified plot and subplots, a sustained cast of characters, and a legible narrative arc from the beginning to the end, it chooses to be a suite of stories, one following the other, all loosely connected to a frame with characters coming in, playing their part and then disappearing. The tenuous connection to the frame itself is interesting: the narrator provides one cohering principle for the book but is too shadowy, too much of an interlocutor, or even a (mostly) passive hearer, to be called the protagonist. And yet there is development of this character, subtly, unexpectedly making its appearance towards the end of the novel, where the distance between the frame and the subsumed stories is dissolved.

  The form Mehta has chosen to use—‘reactivate’ would be a better term—for A River Sutra is much older than the novel itself: it is a compendium of stories told to one listener (or several). This form is actually one of the oldest: the Mahabharata, for example, is full of inset tales, with accretions accumulating over time (the Mahabharata is a special case, too, in that it is also a text that is self-conscious about the process whereby it comes into being. The epic is marked throughout with self-referential attention to its own narration, to the issues of its various framings). Later European forms cleaving to a more or less similar model are Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. All these texts follow a basic pattern: a frame and a succession of heterogeneous stories within this frame.

  A River Sutra is a folder or portfolio crammed with stories and anecdotes—folklore, legends, myths, narrated stories proliferate throughout this slim novel. The frame is, on first acquaintance, simple. An unnamed middle-aged senior (and powerful) bureaucrat, tired of work, retires to run a government rest house on the banks of the Narmada. He thinks of this stage of his life as the vanaprastha, the ancient Indian tradition of retiring to a forest to live like a hermit and contemplate spiritual matters following the end of the phase of fulfilling worldly obligations. In his walks around the beautiful setting—lovingly and evocatively depicted by Mehta—and in his life as the manager of a guest house, he comes in contact with a number of people who tell him stories. Mehta is ingenious about how these encounters come about so as to keep the connection with the frame as seamless and credible as possible. There is a diamond trader who has become a Jain monk, renouncing extraordinary wealth for a life of extreme poverty and hardship. There is a music teacher who is given charge of a poor blind boy with an ethereal voice and a preternatural musical talent. A courtesan comes our narrator’s way while searching for her daughter, who has been abducted by the most infamous bandit in the Vindhyas. Another chapter, which I can only call a story of erotic possession and subsequent exorcism, centres on a high-flying city executive who has a mysterious relationship with a tribal woman. There is the story of an ascetic, a Naga sanyasi, who saves a child from prostitution and brings her up in caves and jungles, teaching her how to become a traditional Narmada minstrel who sings of the great river. This final story will be of particular relevance to the spiritual education of our narrator and will also contain a twist that will have a bearing on the novel’s structure, particularly on the relationship between the frame and the inset tales. With the exception of this final story, most of the inset narratives have tragic, and often shocking, ends.

  Through all this runs the great Narmada itself—another character in the novel, one could argue—like a bright thread that holds everything together, returning us to the original meaning of the word ‘sutra’. The poetry of the title’s metaphor is a pleasing conceit, and the river is lovingly, beautifully described in the variety of the terrains through which it runs, in the multiplicity of forms and aspects it assumes through the seasons, even through the course of one day, in its presence in legends, myths, folklore, music, the cultural forms it has inspired, in its centrality to the different quests on which the people in the novel (and not just the named characters) have embarked. All of life is here it seems, around and near it.

  This brings us to thinking about the spiritual heart of the book—the word ‘spiritual’ here is not to be confused with or seen as congruent with the term ‘religious’. The Narmada is a holy river, Mehta never lets us forget, but she also reminds us of the profane that goes hand in hand with the spiritual—‘narmada’ in Sanskrit means ‘whore’ and the legend of the river’s origin, and how Shiva came to name it, is a story of lust and erotic desire. The spiritual quest that our narrator undertakes in the novel ends with the lesson that renunciation is not the way to attaining spiritual wisdom, rather the re-inscription, if you will, of the self in the meshes of the world. It is this question that provides the book wi
th its dynamo: how must one live in the world? Much of the book distils an India that had long congealed into Orientalist cliché: spirituality, pilgrimage, temples, mysticism, stories of the deeds of gods and goddesses, legends and myths. But the appropriation of a lived—and living—way of life by cultures and fashions that flatten and thin it out and debase it should not make us take our eyes off the complexities of the originary culture. Mehta herself is all too aware of the Exotic Spiritual India Industry—she wrote about it with hilarious and profound astringency in Karma Cola fifteen years before this novel. What A River Sutra gives us instead is the seething mess that is life, and in putting matters of the soul—a worldly matter, after all— at the centre of her novel, she pays homage to its irreducible counterpart in Indian life.

  Boston

  2018

  Neel Mukherjee

  I

  The Government still pays my wages but I no longer think of myself as a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats belong too much to the world, and I have fulfilled my worldly obligations. I am now a vanaprasthi, someone who has retired to the forest to reflect.

  Of course, I was forced to modify tradition, having spent my childhood in Bombay and my career as a civil servant working only in cities. Although my desire to withdraw from the world grew more urgent as I aged, I knew I was simply not equipped to wander into the jungle and become a forest hermit, surviving on fruit and roots.

  Then shortly after my wife passed away I learned of a vacant post at a Government rest house situated on the Narmada River. I had often stayed in such rest houses while touring the countryside on official business. Over time I had even developed an affection for these lonely sanctuaries built by the Moghul emperors across the great expanse of India to shelter the traveler and the pilgrim, a practice wisely maintained by subsequent administrations.

  But the bungalow’s proximity to the Narmada River was its particular attraction. The river is among our holiest pilgrimage sites, worshipped as the daughter of the god Shiva. During a tour of the area I had been further intrigued to discover the criminal offense of attempted suicide is often ignored if the offender is trying to kill himself in the waters of the Narmada.

  To the great surprise of my colleagues, I applied for the humble position of manager of the Narmada rest house. At first they tried to dissuade me, convinced that grief over my wife’s death had led to my aberrant request. Senior bureaucrats, they argued, should apply for higher office. Finding me adamant, they finally recommended me for the post and then forgot me.

  For several years now, thanks to the recommendations of my former colleagues, this rest house situated halfway up a hill of the Vindhya Range has been my forest retreat.

  It is a double-storeyed building constructed from copper-colored local stone, the upper floor comprising three spacious and self-contained suites which overlook the gardens, the ground floor occupied by a dining room and drawing room opening onto a wide veranda. Happily, the interiors retain their original mosaic tiles, having escaped the attentions of a British administrator who plastered the outside walls at the turn of the century, giving the exterior of the bungalow with its pillared portico and balustraded steps an air more Victorian than Moghul.

  To one side of the gardens, hidden by mango trees, is a small cottage in which I live. On the other side, the gardens lead to a stone terrace overlooking the Narmada, which flows seven hundred feet below.

  Spanning a mile from bank to bank, the river has become the object of my reflections.

  A great aid to my meditations is the beauty of our location. Across the sweep of water, I can see fertile fields stretching for miles and miles into the southern horizon until they meet the gray shadows of the Satpura Hills. On this riverbank towering bamboo thickets and trees overgrown with wild jasmine and lantana creepers cover the hillsides, suspending the bungalow in jungle so dense I cannot see the town of Rudra, only nineteen kilometers away, where my clerk, Mr. Chagla, lives.

  Poor Mr. Chagla must bicycle for over an hour to reach us, but as we are without a telephone his daily return to town is vital for organizing our supplies and attending to other business. Rudra has the nearest post office, as well as a doctor who presides over a small hospital and a branch police station with four constables.

  Below Rudra, visible from our terrace at the bend of the river, sprawls the temple complex of Mahadeo. At sunset I often sit on the terrace with our bungalow guests to watch the distant figures of the pilgrims silhouetted against the brilliant crimsons of the evening sky descending the stone steps that lead from Mahadeo’s many temples to the river’s edge. With twilight, the water at Mahadeo starts flickering with tiny flames as if catching fire from the hundreds of clay lamps being floated downstream for the evening devotions.

  My day usually begins on this terrace. I have formed the habit of rising before dawn to sit here in the dark with my face turned toward the river’s source, an underground spring that surfaces four hundred kilometers to the east.

  In the silence of the ebbing night I sometimes think I can hear the river’s heartbeat pulsing under the ground before she reveals herself at last to the anchorites of Shiva deep in meditation around the holy tank at Amarkantak. I imagine the ascetics sitting in the darkness like myself, their naked bodies smeared in ash, their matted hair wound on top of their heads in imitation of their Ascetic god, witnessing the river’s birth as they chant:

  “Shiva-o-ham, Shiva-o-ham,

  I that am Shiva, Shiva am I.”

  Then streaks of pale light send clouds of noisy birds into the sky, evoking crowds of pilgrims swarming through Amarkantak’s temples for the morning worship.

  By the time the red ball of the sun appears over the hills, the activity I have been imagining at the river’s source becomes the reality of the rest house with the appearance of our gardeners, our sweepers, and the milkman.

  After issuing instructions to the early staff, I leave the bungalow by the northern gate for my morning walk. Almost immediately I enter the jungle. Under the great trees glistening with dew—teak, peepul, silk cotton, mango, banyan—the mud path is still deserted, crossed only by bounding monkeys, leaping black buck, meandering wild boar as if the animals are glorying in their brief possession of the jungle. On my return in two hours I will be greeted on this path by sturdy tribal women from the nearby village of Vano collecting fuel for their cooking fires.

  Our bungalow guards are hired from Vano village and enjoy a reputation for fierceness as descendants of the tribal races that held the Aryan invasion of India at bay for centuries in these hills. Indeed, the Vano village deity is a stone image of a half-woman with the full breasts of a fertility symbol but the torso of a coiled snake, because the tribals believe they once ruled a great snake kingdom until they were defeated by the gods of the Aryans. Saved from annihilation only by a divine personification of the Narmada River, the grateful tribals conferred on the river the gift of annulling the effects of snakebite, and I have often heard pilgrims who have never met a tribal reciting the invocation

  Salutation in the morning and at night to thee, O Narmada!

  Defend me from the serpent’s poison.

  The Vano villagers also believe their goddess cures madness, liberating those who are possessed.

  Beyond the valley on the next range of hills is a Muslim village with a small mosque adjoining the tomb of Amir Rumi, a Sufi saint of the sixteenth century. My friend Tariq Mia is mullah of the village mosque, and most mornings I walk all the way to the village in order to chat with Tariq Mia, for the old man is the wisest of all my friends.

  On my way to Tariq Mia I sometimes pause at the summit of our hill to enjoy the view. Between the eastern hills I can see foaming waterfalls where the river plummets through marble canyons into the valley below the rest house, and if I turn west I can watch the river broadening as it races toward the Arabian Sea to become seventeen kilometers wide at its delta.

  A day seldom passes when I do not see whiterobed pilgrims walking on the riverbanks far be
low me. Many are like myself, quite elderly persons who have completed the first stages of life prescribed by our Hindu scriptures—the infant, the student, the householder— and who have now entered the stage of the vanaprasthi, to seek personal enlightenment.

  I am always astonished at their endurance, since I know the Narmada pilgrimage to be an arduous affair that takes nearly two years to complete. At the mouth of the river on the Arabian Sea, the pilgrims must don white clothing out of respect for Shiva’s asceticism before walking eight hundred kilometers to the river’s source at Amarkantak. There they must cross to the opposite bank of the river and walk all the way back to the ocean, pausing only during the monsoon rains in some small temple town like Mahadeo, which has accommodated the legions of devout who have walked this route millennium upon millennium.

  Then I remind myself that the purpose of the pilgrimage is endurance. Through their endurance the pilgrims hope to generate the heat, the tapas, that links men to the energy of the universe, as the Narmada River is thought to link mankind to the energy of Shiva.

  It is said that Shiva, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds, was in an ascetic trance so strenuous that rivulets of perspiration began flowing from his body down the hills. The stream took on the form of a woman—the most dangerous of her kind: a beautiful virgin innocently tempting even ascetics to pursue her, inflaming their lust by appearing at one moment as a lightly dancing girl, at another as a romantic dreamer, at yet another as a seductress loose-limbed with the lassitude of desire. Her inventive variations so amused Shiva that he named her Narmada, the Delightful One, blessing her with the words “You shall be forever holy, forever inexhaustible.” Then he gave her in marriage to the ocean, Lord of Rivers, most lustrous of all her suitors.