Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Temple daily. The statue was set in pure silver, and was bathed by
devotees with more than five gallons of milk each morning.
The juglike base of most
lingams
is called a
yoni
: the male force is
considered passive, inactive, without the presence of
shakti
, the
feminine force. The classical lingam is egg-shaped; it is said to derive
from the shape formed when two circles bisect, an image of the
spiritual world merging with the realm of matter. This was the object
I had watched Sai Baba give oral birth to.
'Today
very
holy day, sahib,' the rickshaw wallah informed me,
mopping his brow as we creaked to a halt near two thousand other
early risers already thronging around the main ghat.
'Really? Why?'
'Varanasi city of Siva-god,' he explained. 'Today special day sacred
to this Siva. All peoples taking the holy bath in Ganga this day.
Does sahib understand Siva-god?'
I nodded and thanked him. The street teemed with stick figures
like my driver: calf muscles like Popeye's forearms, brows
prematurely furrowed, and faces hollow from pedalling giant tricycles
with sofas mounted on the carts behind their saddles all day long.
Most often pedalled through half the night, as well.
Lounging on the sofa could be three crapulent four-hundred-
pounders, or an entire family, perhaps several office rickshaw-
poolers. I once counted twelve children being taken to school,
crammed in like sheep being trucked off to an abattoir.
It was brutally hard labour for the lone straining figure thrusting
his full standing weight against the pedals, particularly in the searing
dog days of summer. I had never heard these men complain. They
were unfailingly cheerful, and very often seemed to have the egoless
humility of saints.
From dawn to dusk the Indian labourers broke their backs, in
fields and waterlogged paddies, knee-deep in the mud of building
sites, or on the blistering hardtop of roads blurred with dust and tar
fumes. At twenty-five they were old men, used up, drained,
consumed like spent matches, their wrecked backs goosenecked,
the light gone from their pained and wondering eyes. By thirty
they were dead, many having worked for twenty-five of those thirty
brief years. Yet they were proud men and women; the work that
