REENA SINGH recalls the holy dip she took at Prayagraj exactly 12 years ago. Back then, she felt she had emerged wiser, more peaceful, and rejuvenated, but did the feeling stay thereafter?
The Mahakumbh has drawn record crowds once again. It always does and is considered the largest spiritual gathering of all times. This year, several people around me set off for Prayagraj and have returned with some incredible tales. I naturally recalled the trip I had made 12 years ago to the same place.
It had all started as a weekend family lunch conversation in February 2013. A cousin had just returned from a three-day visit to the Mahakumbh—a most unlikely candidate for a Kumbh dip—and we were fascinated by details of her trip. Four of us just knew we had to go—strictly for the faith part, I told myself, although curiosity was a big pull factor, too. We explored the logistics and found flying an expensive proposition, so opted to drive down!
And so it was that my brother, his wife, and my nephew set off from Delhi on our 700-km journey to Allahabad some three weeks later, in my trusted car. We christened it our Baleno Express.
We were soon roaring down the Taj Expressway at 4 am—the drive was amazingly smooth on an equally amazingly pothole and rumbler-free road and by 1 pm, we were within sight of the holy city of Prayag. Our tented ashram camp that we were booked in was across the Naini bridge, so we stopped for lunch within the crowded city.
There had been almost no traffic down the highway, but inside Allahabad, we crawled along for a couple of hours till we finally reached the camp site. The city was full of police personnel deputed from Noida and Ghaziabad and surprisingly, they waved us through — politely and with a smile.
By now, we had driven 12 hours, but no headaches or bodyaches were reported from the four of us — we put it down to the power of Ganga Maiyya — and we were soon straddling the distance to the river bank to get into a boat that would take us bang into the centre of the sangam or confluence of three rivers for that special dip.
We had brought along tokens of gold, silver, eight gems, and sarees in special colours to offer to the river, besides our faith, of course, and the boatman soon had wind of our conversation. “Give it to me—we need to make our living out of Ganga Maiyya and all this,” he indicated amidst the flutter of the seagulls which hovered over the holy waters.
And so, he did everything to please us—“Aaoo, aaoo,” he sang out to the birds—and they responded as if on cue, swooping close overhead and into the water, wherever we threw the bird food (we had purchased some from another boatman in the middle of the rowing).
By this time, we had reached the platform, where boatloads of people disembark and go in for the spiritual dubki. We hobbled onto the platform—the boatman offered his hand gallantly—and he showed us how to step off it. I sat on the platform, and couldn’t find the river bed beneath my feet. “It’s deep here,” I shouted, scared now, for the first time. “No, no,” said the boatman, “It’s only up till here,” he indicated halfway up his waist which was submerged underwater. And so, with a prayer to Ganga Maiyya on my heart and on my lips, I did what I had never done before— jumped into the middle of this huge body of water.
It’s frightening when you first jump in. The water’s cold and the uncertainty, unnerving. As we held each other and got used to the water, we got down to the pilgrimage part of it—first offering our tokens to the river bed—the boatman yanked out a giant thali and placed it strategically right beneath our hands, so he safely netted in the offerings with a broad smile. That’s how it is done, so no surprises there.
We dipped the sarees into the water and handed them over to him.
He left us alone after that and it was now time for serious introspection, prayers, cleansing our thoughts, words and actions. And finally, time for the dubkis. I could barely manage a couple full ones and a few more token ones—I seemed to have notched up just a fraction of what the people around me were doing. There was a certain kind of thrill—not of adventure, but a blessed feeling all the same, that the universe had indeed conspired to bring us here, so many hundreds of kilometres away from our home (we had driven halfway to Kolkata), and given us this uplifting experience to get centred within.
“Thank You, Ganga Maiyya,” I had said back then, while concluding my piece. It was published in the newspaper I worked for then, The Speaking Tree and appeared online on their website as a blog as well.
But did that feeling of peace and the effect of the holy dip stay on? Twelve years later, I am not too sure, for human beings being what they are, they soon get bogged down by troubles, all manmade, within a matter of days and all spiritual resolves are quickly forgotten.
The path up the spiritual incline is long and hard and one has to constantly follow the straight and holy path with faith and determination, prayer and humility. Help us, Ganga Maiyya to flow smoothly along that path at all times….
Reena Singh has more than 39 years’ experience in senior editorial positions in The Times of India (TOI) and Genpact. She was Deputy Editor with TOI’s spiritual newspaper, The Speaking Tree, where she spent more than nine years.
Photo from Pixels by Pankaj Chauhan
Very beautifully expressed.
And the end of the article says it all… Thankyou.