<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Cold from the Himalayas, if not pure, the Ganges, it is said, contains amrit, the nectar of immortality. Amrit is a very powerful draw.  Material Souls to Seek Salvation by the Ganga By N. Vidyasagar, Business Times Bureau New Delhi--The biggest stars of showbiz are expected to visit the Mahakumbh in Allahabad later this month. The premium guest list includes Madonna, Sharon Stone, Pierce Brosnan, Demi Moore, and Richard Gere. British tour operator Cox &amp;amp;amp; Kings concermed the visit of Hollywood stars but refused to reveal names on security grounds. &amp;quot;We are bringing in more than six hundred premium guests to the Kumbh from around the world,&amp;quot; Indranil Pramanik in the development department of Cox &amp;amp;amp; Kings told The Times of India.  The man who died for a living had dragged himself, or had been dumped by some assistant, near one of the pontoon bridges crossing the sand flats on the wide, premonsoon shores of the Ganges, and there he had set up shop on a wretched scrap of blanket. This meant that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims passed him on their way to the river to perform their ritual bathing to cleanse their souls. Yet no one seemed to notice him. True, a few rupee coins had been tossed onto the blanket, maybe fifty cents&amp;#039; worth. The look I gave him was brief, the sort granted to those apparitions that boat up out of the blankness of dyspeptic insomnia and jolt you awake. The man who died for a living had a bloody hole in his face where his nose should&amp;#039;ve been. A bluish foam bubbled from his purple lips. He looked all-over scorched, with patchy hair and peeling skin. Blind and leprous, he&amp;#039;d propped himself up on one elbow in the classic pose of prostration, his other arm raised, petitioning the heavens. Amid the greatest crowd of people ever assembled in the history of humankind--local officials put the figure at seventy mil- lion over the six-week course of the Mahakumbhmela; others estimated more--the man who died for a living was dying alone.  I hurried past. In my pockets I had one last hundred-rupee bill left over after paying the sadhus, the Hindu holy men, for various performances. One jolly, bald-headed Baba, a grinning Telly Savalas, danced with a lemon balanced on his head. His companions in blue silk robes carried pikes. &amp;quot;Money,&amp;quot; one of them finally said, when merely standing subtly in my way with his weapon at port arms hadn&amp;#039;t worked. Next, after Mike made inquiries, we watched a young naga (&amp;quot;naked&amp;quot;) sadhu, his skin dusted blue with ashes, dreadlocks piled in a beehive atop his head, casually stretch his penis back between his legs and knot it around his Bronze Age trident, symbolic of Shiva. Then another naga nimbly hopped onto his back, bare feet on the weapon&amp;#039;s shaft, radically elongating the first naga&amp;#039;s unit until it stretched down to his knees--Ta-da!  Whatever the performance was worth, my American friends, Mike and Micki, and I had apparently underpaid. &amp;quot;The headman is very angry; he says you must leave at once,&amp;quot; a volunteer interpreter informed us. So we beat a hasty retreat from the camp, which Mike and Micki called &amp;quot;Naga Town,&amp;quot; and rejoined the thousands drifting toward the river.  Just beyond the man who died for a living, I was ambushed by twin boys--I think they were twins--about four or five years old, who held up tin beggars&amp;#039; cups. Curly heads, smudged faces. Cute kids. Trick or treat. I stopped, made eye contact with the boys (bloody amateur), and reached into my pocket. A man selling dutes quickly angled over to make a pitch; a postcard vendor drifted in. I knew that the slightest attention toward those two would release a torrent of enthusiastic persuasion. A small crowd began to gather around me--a Westerner in cash-dispensing posture. I dropped my last hundred-rupee note into one boy&amp;#039;s cup and signed that the two were to share. &amp;quot;Fifty each,&amp;quot; I said. Generous. Extravagant, really. But the tot with the hundred rupees began to slip away. I pointed after the feeing kid, as if to say to the other, &amp;quot;Hey, he&amp;#039;s getting away with your money!&amp;quot; and the little curly-haired mendicant with the smudged face gave chase. I saw him catch his partner and be roughly elbowed away. He came trotting back to me, cup raised, wondering aloud, in rapid-fire Hindi, where was his one hundred rupees. I thought he had an excellent case against me. Behind us I heard the man who died for a living wailing like a dog being burned alive. Time for me to be moving along. Up ahead, Mike was bulling through the Kumbh crowd with his heavy cameras slung over his shoulders. At six feet six, Mike towered over the Hindu faithful who surged all around us in brightly colored dhotis and diapers and saris or just plain starkers, all hurrying along on skinny bird legs. Mike and his wife, Micki, fiftyish early retirees from Orlando, had invested well and were just cruising the world photographing and videotaping everything. I&amp;#039;d met them that morning at breakfast, attracted by Micki&amp;#039;s friendly aura and Mike&amp;#039;s forthright Americanness. He asked if I&amp;#039;d just come from the world, and if I had any news about the stock market. I didn&amp;#039;t, but wondered just how important the stock market could be to him. &amp;quot;Let me tell you,&amp;quot; Mike said. On the way to the Cox &amp;amp;amp; Kings camp on the Allahabad highway, their driver had turned down a little side road to show them a very old temple. It wasn&amp;#039;t very impressive from the outside--not particularly big or well decorated--but it was what was going on inside that was amazing. The sheer religious fervor! He said it had been like a rugby scrum, the congregation crawling all over one another to get to the idol. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s kind of how we feel about the stock market,&amp;quot; Mike said. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve been lucky,&amp;quot; Micki stage-whispered to me. Now I saw the big guy working his way back toward me, shrugging. There was apparently nothing ahead of particular photographic interest. He saw the beggar boy tapping at my elbow and observed, &amp;quot;He must detect some weakness in you.&amp;quot; Mike had told me about being pursued at the Taj Mahal by a leper on a handcart, a slow- motion chase that lasted a half hour, resulting in Mike giving the guy five American. &amp;quot;Hey, you seen Micki?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m right here,&amp;quot; Micki said, and then she gasped and grabbed my arm. &amp;quot;Oh, God! That man just died!&amp;quot; The Mahakumbhmela, the great Hindu festival of river bathing, dates back millennia, beyond the Vedas and the Upanishads, probably back to the original riverine culture at the dawn of awareness and language. Water! someone finally said. Love it! Pure, fresh from the Himalayas. Sky and river were married; sensuous Saraswati, goddess of wisdom, lived in the blue Yamuna River, and Shiva, with his hard-on, gargantuan in power, filling the sky, came down into the muddy brown Ganges. People multiplied under the union, for sky and river were good together. Amrit, the nectar of immortality, was in the water, it was said. And in a.d. 2001, great crowds of millions mobbed the riverbanks and got in the water to praise it. On particularly auspicious days, dawn processions of thousands of sadhus in great juggernaut carts drawn by tractors (until recently, by elephants) led millions of Hindu pilgrims from all over the Indian subcontinent to the temple steps at the river. Some of these sadhus, down from the Himalayan caves, hadn&amp;#039;t slept in years. Some had held an arm overhead till it withered. Or two. Their fingernails grew in wild spirals on gnarled fence-post limbs. Some traveled very far, advancing by throwing themselves down, rising, then throwing themselves down again. Some did tricks with their dicks. Why these austerities and contrarieties? To show contempt for the body and for &amp;quot;reality,&amp;quot; to stoke the faith, the inner fire, for this event. To kick-start the gods. At their appointed time, they charged the river, shaking their weaponry and roaring, letting the gods hear it. Three dunks and they were out of there, for here came everybody else, the tidal surge of aroused believers. In the ensuing rush to the river, people were trampled to death or drowned or separated from their families forever, but never too many, and all who bathed were blessed. Mahakumbhmelas happen only once every 144 years, and so this was the first Kumbh where Western photographers shot po-mo photos of sadhus posed in front of studio backgrounds hugging big briar bushes to their naked fresh. It was the first with Internet buzz, celebrity rumors, auguries of world significance. Thousands of Western tourists were expected. Many might come to bathe, and a percentage of those would actually go through with it after seeing the condition of the Ganges. Mike and Micki weren&amp;#039;t bathers. Carey and Claudia Turnbull of Long Island were, potentially. They met thirty years ago at a small, hip private college. Claudia studied organic farming. Carey taught TM for years, then became a very successful energy broker. He wore the wire-rimmed glasses of the perennially youthful student, had bright blue eyes, shocking white hair, and the untroubled pink brow of a devoted meditator. Since moving to the Hamptons, Claudia&amp;#039;s interests had expanded to include the equestrian art of dressage. The sweetness of the former flower child still shined through sophistication, along with the maternal steel of a mother of teenagers. Both were devotees of Indian philosophy, and this was their first trip to India. They were definitely thinking about bathing. The Turnbulls and I had been on the same fight from Delhi and convoyed two cars from Varanasi to Allahabad, and we&amp;#039;d shared culture shock. Our drivers were stoic middle-aged road warriors who might&amp;#039;ve driven calmly had it been their karma to be driving elsewhere. But the law of the road here was, Pass every obstacle as soon as possible, with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the horn. And there was never an end to the obstructions. The whole history of transportation was on the move to the Kumbh. A Mardi Gras of pedestrians. A  China of bikes and rickshaws. Camels and oxcarts and failed futuristic Eastern-bloc cars, all vying for the two lanes, with an endless stream of heavy trucks trumping all. Twenty centuries of T. rex couldn&amp;#039;t have terrorized the countryside more thoroughly than those trucks, manufactured by the firm Tata, blasting past, their grilles gaudily painted to resemble Hindu gods, horns blazing--Taa! Taa!--stirring the dust of the exhausted soil and soaking it with fumes. The great Gangetic plain at dusk was gaslit Halloween colors, miles upon miles of rows and rows of little shops selling swigs of tea and tiny plastic forehead decorations costing less money than we could conceive of. In the patches between towns, six-foot-tall beehive-shaped mounds of dung dominated the desiccated landscape, as if at any moment you might hear a high-pitched shrilling and see a giant ant waving its antennae above the huts. But science wasn&amp;#039;t needed here to announce something new to this earth, namely everything all at once--the industrial age atop the cow-dung age, all five thousand years of history and every blow showing. The Turnbulls and I were both clients of Cox &amp;amp;amp; Kings, the venerable outletters based in London, and had similarly been sheltered in Delhi by that company&amp;#039;s thorough attentiveness. It was fucking great, don&amp;#039;t get me wrong. I wasn&amp;#039;t merely assisted at every turn but cheered on, rooted for. All the Third World hassles smoothed away, India for Idiots. And I was rooting for them, too, for the clever and able aides like Bharat, my guide in Delhi, who showed me the beautiful stone carvings at Qutab Minar, an ancient temple site, and explained that all the Hindu statues were missing their noses because the Mogul conquerors had been too exhausted to break off anything else. Even Bharat&amp;#039;s personal favorite, Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, had no trunk. &amp;quot;The long trunk is wisdom,&amp;quot; Bharat said, stroking the broken stone. At red lights, beggar women worked the traffic. I&amp;#039;d been advised by my travel brochure not to support public begging but to contribute to a reputable charity and to carry simple toys or puzzles for children. I was reaching into my pocket for a rubber ball when the light changed and the woman who had been making hand motions at the mouth of the infant on her hip had to dodge the onrushing cars to make it back to the median. &amp;quot;The ball won&amp;#039;t help,&amp;quot; Bharat had said. &amp;quot;Adopt the child. Educate it. See that it has a career. By this means only may karma be improved.&amp;quot; At the outskirts of Allahabad we struck a bottleneck, soldiers in military vehicles weaving through a caravan of camels and pilgrims on foot. A half hour later, our cars were cleared to prod through the crowded cobbled streets of town, down to the river, where we turned south onto the main Kumbh road. The pilgrims on that newly ploughed temporary thoroughfare parted reluctantly at bumper point, many turning to glare, or gape, or send some haunting message through the mental telepathy of pa-thos: We&amp;#039;re alive; it&amp;#039;s India. Bearded brother, mother, grandfather, great-great-great grandmother walking bent in half, and the driver shifting her with his horn. Here was everybody who had ever lived. It was like being caught up in Armageddon with the resurrected dead, in the last two cars on earth, honking through a gantlet of hard times and lean, malnourished limbs, breaking through at last to the Cox &amp;amp;amp; Kings camp, gasping: &amp;quot;Ah, thank God! It&amp;#039;s the rich again!&amp;quot; There, in the compound, on good high ground, land a good commander would&amp;#039;ve seized, you were safe. You could think; you had space to contemplate. You could pick a promontory and look out over the Kumbh, both banks of the Ganges lit up to the horizon. A battlefield haze of dung and sandalwood smoke hung over everything. Neon swastikas flashed on and off, and pinwheels whirled above the canvas cities and the countless Stone Age campsites. Fervent prayers sputtered from hundreds of competing PA systems, and underlying it all was the constant din of a million muttered mantras, shouted imprecations, laughter and lamentations dunning the naked sky, wringing the teats of eternity, begging for amrit, the nectar of immortality. I wondered if Madonna was here already. A week earlier, the sadhus had staged a sit-in against the so-called luxury camp. Formidable opposition, you&amp;#039;d think, considering the sadhus&amp;#039; ability to sit. But the holy men had been mollified by a VIP tour, a little show of respect. See, Cox &amp;amp;amp; Kings had erected a little open-sided temple with its Shiva lingam, the smooth, upright phallic stone that set a pious tone. True, there were push toilets and showers in the tents for the Westerners--no big deal, not the saloon the mystics had perhaps been fearing. Alcohol and meat were strictly forbidden. It was just a nice camp, all right? With a couple of armed guards at the entrance, like what you&amp;#039;d expect on an expensive African safari. It offered the upper-class faithful, well-heeled seekers, trust-fund hippies, the idle, monied curious, and a few stragglers a ringside seat at the ancient bout between the credulity of men and the obstinate nullity of the gods, as well as a fighting chance against airborne infectious diseases. Could tea be had by a weary traveler at that chill hour, past suppertime? It could. I followed a raked gravel path lit with candles in little clay pots--a pretty touch--to the dining tent for refreshments and to look for famous people. None of &amp;#039;em had showed yet. Turning in, I wore just about everything I&amp;#039;d brought and pulled the down cover on the camp bed over my head and was awakened anyway at about 4:00 a.m., that auspicious moment when a mad hairsplitter would say that night has just begun to ease its obscuring ass off mankind, that very first slim crack of dawn. The mantra-fying was intensifying, as if the whole Kumbh were trying to lift off: Gimme amrit, gimme gimme amrit, gimme gimme gimme amrit, gimme the shit, dammit, gimme amrit! I staggered through the tent maps and stood kicking the cold turf around a guttering campare until real light. At indubitable dawn, a French couple came out and stood nearby, wrapped romantically in cloaks, gazing down at the expanse of smoldering Kumbh-scape. I sidled up and asked what was good. What had they liked so far? &amp;quot;Now is good,&amp;quot; the Frenchman said. &amp;quot;When everyone is just up is interesting time, though maybe it is a bit too incredible, the reality.&amp;quot; The sleepy guards were wrapped in shawls like shepherds, with heavy shotguns for staffs. Metal junkyard walls made a narrow alleyway down to the Kumbh main street, already busy with troops of robed monks marching by, each with his metal meal bucket. They were members of a sect that did everything in unison. Brigades of them swept down the main street, swinging wide around obstacles like the legs of a saffron-colored caterpillar. I took the first dirt road that led down toward the river. The place was on the scope of Spartacus&amp;#039;s army. A hundred thousand campers were waking up, going through their ablutions as best they could in the cold, wet dirt--coughing, hawking, spitting, blowing their noses--the Hindu obsession with cleanliness tested under impossible conditions. It had been a hard, cold night for camping, and everyone in this poor sector looked perfectly miserable. The road turned sandy and churned. There, a hundred yards distant across a beach, was the Ganges, silver in the mist, and the beautiful Sangam steps at Allahabad and the Muslim fort hard by. Admiring the view from the beach were thousands of pilgrims squatting. Oh, excuse me. I looked down at my feet. There was a little twist a yard away. Another just beyond it. I was standing in a pointillist landscape of poop! Holy shit! Back at camp, I saw the Turnbulls at breakfast in the dining tent. The noise wasn&amp;#039;t helping Claudia with her jet lag. She, too, had been awakened by the din at 4:00 a.m. &amp;quot;I woke up in like this panic, wondering what the hell I&amp;#039;d gotten myself into,&amp;quot; she said. The Turnbulls were debating bathing in the Ganges but stayed at the camp and rested most of the first day, while I accompanied Mike and Micki in a hired jeep to Naga Town and saw a bit of the epic ten-hour Ramayana sung by a turbaned tenor, costumed dancers accompanying him onstage. Holy men, some as young as two years old, sat on thrones in ornate pavilions and gave out ritual blessings to coin-paying throngs. I met a young Hindu in Western casual attire who said, &amp;quot;I think the reason you are here is for the nudity, to put it on the Internet.&amp;quot; Got it in one guess, I congratulated him. Overcoming his prejudices, he became our interpreter with the nagas, the &amp;quot;Cock Babas,&amp;quot; as Mike called them, who were puffing cigarettes like Irish priests, red-eyed from the chillums they stoked with tobacco and hashish. They wanted money to buy a cooking log for their campare, our interpreter told us. We could see it was sputtering out. We settled down on rugs with them, and they served us tea, and it was then that they got angry and threw us out. Next day, the Turnbulls had the idea to take a river trip, and perhaps to bathe. Yes, a river trip would be delightful. Carey hired Manoj, a dapper and amiable freelance guide who spoke some English and could smooth our way. Manoj found a boat at the riverside and negotiated for two boatmen to row and drag us canal-style upcurrent in their heavy twenty-foot boat. They held umbrellas to shield us from the sun. First we crossed the wide Ganges and visited some friends of the Turnbulls who were living in an ashram outside Allahabad, right in the midst of the Kumbh. The friends came out to the gate, all four old pals, positive, energetic American men in robes. They had bathed in the Ganges earlier in the day and had been approached by TV people. &amp;quot;We were more interested in doing our thing than talking to the press,&amp;quot; one said. &amp;quot;But if I were telling the story, I wouldn&amp;#039;t focus on sensible phenomena--what you see, or smell. Because a lot of what you see isn&amp;#039;t pretty. And a lot of it stinks. No, I&amp;#039;d focus on how it feels, how it feels to be in India.&amp;quot; It was a perfectly beautiful afternoon to be on the Ganges, back in the boat, the oarsman straining with still-youthful arms, his partner on the dune up ahead, the rope taut over his shoulder. Carey, I could tell, was going in. He had the look of someone on a high dive doing all the right things mentally to jump. Claudia and I saw a corpse bobbing against a buoy, tangled in the ropes. We decided not to mention it to Carey.  Where the Yamuna meets the Ganges, a potilla of boats had clustered on the V-shaped shoals. Here the mood was festive, families having their ritual bath with flowers and prayers and the anointing of the body with blessed unguents, marking the foreheads of the just-bathed with sandalwood and burnt umber. Even the gaily colored crowd on the Sangam steps, and for miles along the river&amp;#039;s edge, looked, from this distance, blessed and safe, saved. Manoj said he had secured permission to cross the deck of the boat next to us, and Carey, stripped to his skivvies, climbed over and into knee-deep water. &amp;quot;Very cold,&amp;quot; he announced, hugging himself and slogging out to join a dozen other bathers in deeper water. He held his nose. &amp;quot;Here goes!&amp;quot; Claudia wasn&amp;#039;t going in. Nope, nope. She&amp;#039;d decided. She was meeting her daughter here and would be in India for a month. She couldn&amp;#039;t get sick. Carey at least would be back in New York where he could see his doctor. &amp;quot;How about you?&amp;quot; Claudia asked me. &amp;quot;Me?&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;No, I don&amp;#039;t really believe.&amp;quot; In fact, since she asked, I never felt more dismayed by the religious urge of mankind. What I felt like doing was rushing home and pressure-washing my deck. Then maybe finding some small soluble local problem and bitching till it was fixed. Because it looked to me that we were all in terrible trouble. I know it&amp;#039;s tough in other places, too, but here--a billion people, religious conflict, environmental degradation, the nuke.  &amp;quot;I believe the planet could crack open right here,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;I mean, it looks as if it&amp;#039;s going to.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You think so?&amp;quot; Claudia said. &amp;quot;Oh, I don&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; I said. Because I didn&amp;#039;t really know anything. I was too newly arrived in India, too whiplashed, to be at all fair. Because the next day Claudia did bathe, to considerable fanfare, a Western woman overcoming her fear. And because the man who died for a living, after he had collapsed on his blanket, his chest heaving once and then sinking with an enormous groan, a real death rattle, after he lay still--it seemed like several minutes--all eyes on him, Mike&amp;#039;s, Micki&amp;#039;s, mine, the fute salesman&amp;#039;s, the postcard vendor&amp;#039;s, all except those of the beggar boy, young Smudge, whose were fixed to mine while he continued to plead or curse at me, tugging at my sleeve, after all that, the man who died for a living sat up. He reached out and patted the coins on the blanket and drew himself upright with sudden dignity and grace, like an athlete, a gymnast of disaster, and carried on. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1275/esq0501-may-restindia-rev/>