The Ghost Dip

On the Day of the Silent Moonless Night my friend Keshav and I walked and walked and walked on a road of sand and footprints and many bridges. A distance of about 6 kilometres. We walked bare-feet with about a million others. Strangers, whose paths we may have but touched tangentially at say a traffic intersection or a train station, became friends and confidants in this walk over sand, footprints and bridges.
Pic by Keshav C
Back-stories were told of how ordinary men committed acts of sizzling cruelty. One man said he'd run his jeep over a cop because he had slapped him for no reason. "I never looked back… just drove on and on and on… when I reached home I was new person already. Ready to drop everything," he explained. Another, Captain Baba, a veteran of three wars too drove on and on and dropped everything. Before the memories of his wars could drive him mad.

We walked with the sadhus. On a road especially barricaded for them. To separate them from the common folk. And on this road they danced and sang and performed their peculiar acrobatics. In a show of strength and fervour. To the birds above we may have seemed like a giant snake. Blackish and sprayed saffron, lazily slithering towards the river. Or rivers. We were headed to where three rivers--two visible and one imagined--meet. At the water's edge our snake split into its human parts--like a powder explosion--and entered the rivers' meeting point.

"We're actually ghosts," our guide had told us the night before, "because we perform our own last rites before we become sadhus." Our guide left his home at 18 and never went back. Today he's doubled those years without any visible regrets. It's as if he's found his people in the sadhu samaj. "For us," he explained, "the past and the future both are dead. What we occupy is a strange country where the 'nowness' never ends. And this is your time to experience it... here in this 'momentary heaven'."

The dip is a ritual, that happens every 12 years. Its smaller version happens every six and is called the Ardh Kumbh or the Half Urn. The story goes that drops from the celestial urn fell at a few places during a grabfest between the gods and the demons. There are four places in India that host the Kumbh and the Ardh Kumbh in their 12 and 6-year cycles. This year the Ardh Kumbh was in Allahabad. And we were there for the big dip on January 19th, the day of the Silent Moonless Night or Mauni Amavasya.

The day when a million sins are washed away by a single dip.