The River Inside



The bus was almost there. I had been shaking in it for eleven hours on the potholed highway and wanted nothing more than to return home. I hadn’t slept all night because I was afraid of the decrepit bus breaking down but nothing like that happened. The August heat was bearable and the mountain air was fresh. I jumped off the bus when we arrived at the town center, stretched out my arms and back to shake off sleep. The address scribbled on the scrap of paper said,

Sant Seva Ashram Trust
108, Palahari Baba
Laxman Jhula, Rishikesh

The crumbling town was perched over the riverbanks and had not yet woken up. Pine and eucalyptus trees lined the edge of the bank where mountainous sloped into the sand. I was standing a few steps from the bus depot. A little boy with enormous eyes and scuffed skin brought a cup of cha to me in a terra cotta cup. I took it and walked towards the tea stand where the bus drivers were standing sipping their tea. One of them eyed me down. “Are you vacation by yourself?”
“No, not vacation.” I said. The boy collected our cups and deposited them into a wiry basket. He looked like my brother Saraa, when he was that age, small and lanky with large, soul-searching eyes.
I walked to the closest stall and asked where the ashram was. A woman with a crinkly face pointed to a clay building on the banks of the river. The ashram had a few workers scattered across the grounds. Two men in blue kurtas napped on cots in the courtyard and another crawled along the floor cleaning it with a crimson rag and bucket of water. An old man with wild, white hair was looking over the ledge at the river. I figured he must be the manager and so I asked about Saraa.
“Saraa?” he asked raising his eyebrow.
“Pencil-thin, in his late thirties. Probably in dirty dungarees and old t-shirts, most likely keeps to himself.”
“Oh yes, yes, I know him. He is on the banks in the mornings.” He pointed to a set of marble stairs, “Go that way.”
I climbed down and made my way through the sandy banks. I could see him sitting beside a small fire, boiling a pot of water. The air was misty and the current strong. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I last saw him. Who knew what he looked like or what kind of trouble he was in. For all I knew he could be selling marijuana from Manali to the tourists here. I had washed my hands of him years ago, left him to his fate, but now I needed his help and I hated him for it. I squeezed my hand into a fist and as I walked nearer I could see his figure clearly. His long and narrow face was covered in shadows and a heavy beard. He was wearing a faded brown kurta. “Saraa,” I said.
He looked up, blinked for a minute when he saw me and smiled. “Siddhartha? You finally showed up.”
“I thought it was time.”
“I can see you’re dressed for the occasion”, he said as he eyed me down, “Nice loafers.”
I felt the blood rush to my head but stayed calm. He always found a way to insult me in the first few minutes of conversation and after all these years that hadn’t changed. “I was on a business trip in Delhi. I left work early to see you. Came on that rickety overnight bus, that’s eleven hours. It’ll be another eleven and a train ride to Bombay so save the jokes for later. I just got here.”
“I didn’t ask you to, big brother. You can return just as quickly.”
“We’ll both return.” I fixed my eyes on him. “This time I’ll drag you by the neck.”
He laughed and looked at me with amusement. “All right then, have a seat. I’m just boiling some water.”
I looked down at the small blaze. He had made a fairly good fire with rocks to make a U-shape, criss-crossed the tinder and laid out some coals with a grill on top. The rucksack beside him was full of tin cups, pans and pots, clear pouches of lentils, rice, and salt. The kettle and a pot of lentils were already on the grill. I studied him for a few seconds. “You look horrible. I thought you’d be a skeleton by now.”
“I eat well”, he replied. He poured the water into a cup of coffee. “You want sugar?“
“Black, no sugar.” I took the hot cup in my hands. “How long has it been since I’ve seen you?”
“Six years.”
“Saraa, what are you doing man? You don’t write. You don’t call. You left a good job, good money to travel around solitary, aimlessly, a few months here a few months there.”
“I’m fine.”
“How are you getting by?”
“I do what I have to.”
“You’re leaving this nonsense, this non-life. You’re coming home with me.”
He took out a box of Wills from his pocket and put a cigarette in between his chapped lips. “So I can be a success like you?” He struck a match and lit it, then flicked the match away to inhale a lungful of smoke. “No thanks.”
“I’m not asking you Saraa.” He smoked his cigarette leisurely as if he didn’t have a care in the world. As if he did not care that we were losing the home that Baba had planned and built with his own hands so that he could give to his family what he never received. The house where we were both born and married, where Baba died and left the care of it to me and now because the deed had been misplaced, we could not fight to keep it, while property sharks hunted it down. I clenched the coffee cup. “You’re coming.”
“Aren’t we a little too old for this? You threaten to beat me up, I shake and shiver.
He pushed a plate of dal and rice towards me and took his plate. As we ate, I watched the green river sparkle in the sunlight. Jagged boulders, small and large stood like islands in the middle of the river and lavender sand sheathed the shore. Two men lay languidly on the sand. One was a dark, skinny village dweller. He wore a short cotton dhoti around his waist that revealed his matchstick legs and slept on his travel sack. The other man who sat beside him was covered in khadi cloth, hunched over with palms open waiting for alms. He was thin and had a white beard. Both looked lazy and useless. I wondered if Saraa did this to pass his days.
“How long?”
“How long what?” Saraa asked.
“How long have you been here?” I demanded.
“Two years.”
“What have you been doing?”
He squinted at me for a second and replied “Odd jobs. People pay me with food or with money sometimes. “Don’t need much.”
“No one understands what you are doing or what you are trying to prove.”
“No one has to.”
And no one did. Not our mother, not his friends, and certainly not me. Sometimes I tried to make sense of it all. How he had become this vagabond, traveling in desert heat and cold spells, with only one bag, year after year. I couldn’t understand how he stood the hardship. I lost track after a while and I didn’t care. The last letter Ma received from him was from Rishikesh. He had taken the last of his savings and come all the way to the Himalayas from Kerala, to watch the river rise up from the mountains, he had said. To Ma he wrote: Don’t worry about me, and please don’t look for me, I’m doing fine. He was sick to death of his corporate job and after his wife, Eva, died, he stopped going to work, stopped speaking to the rest of his family. He became a stranger who had once lived in the midst of a family, a bustling city, a life. We thought he had fallen into depression and was determined to live a life of emptiness.
“Is this the life you want for yourself? A life of isolation? No family. No friends. No security.”
“It’s what she would have wanted.”
“No, I don’t think so. She would have settled down.”
“How would you know?” he snapped angrily, “You didn’t know her!”
“I did know her. I knew her very well. She wanted children. You think you can gallivant around India like this with a family?”
“No one knew her, the way I knew her.” He hung his head low so that I wouldn’t see his eyes flooding. I waited until he let the emotion pass. “This is where we spent our wedding night,” he said. “It’s my clearest memory you know. Clearer than the wedding, clearer than the funeral. We could inhale the freshness from the Himalayas. There’s nothing like the air from these mountains, nothing. She had lit sandalwood incense and was reading Rumi on the bed. I thought her beauty was endless. I’ll never figure it out. How she died all of a sudden. She was so healthy, so damn alive.”
“It’s been years Saraa. People remarry. They move on.”
Saraa narrowed his eyes and looked out at the river. Then, he turned his eyes back to the fire. The orange yolk of sun slid across the sky ready to melt the mountain in gold. Clouds passed by quickly and a flock of birds resting in a eucalyptus tree, scattered across the yellow sky.
He told me he rarely spoke with anyone back home unless he had to, except for Ma. He wrote to her. She wrote to him, begging him to come home, to remarry, that her heart broke every day thinking about him. But he did not budge. Through letters, he learned I had been promoted from engineering to operations at Tata and that my two sons had been accepted into Bombay Scottish, only after we plotted our way in with donations. And here he was, removed from any sense of civilization that could help him.
“Do you know why I came all the way out here?” He took another cigarette from his box of Wills. “To watch the river. It’s a sickness with me.”
“Sick is right. Didn’t you get Ma’s letter? The one about losing our house? The whole building Saraa! Baba broke his back building it for us and now we’re going to lose it.”
He blew a plume of smoke into the cold air. I took him by the collar of his shirt. “Don’t you care about anyone except your self?” I said as I shook him.
“What do you want me to do Siddhartha?”
“Cut the shit. The last thing I need from you is a victim routine. You’ve pulled it off this long because your wife died. Well guess what? My wife’s sick too and we’re losing the house so you’d better come back with me and help.”
“Aparna’s sick?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” and as I said that my hands began to shake.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“I said change the subject!” I jerked my arm away so fast my coffee spilled across his shirt. “Just come home.”
Saraa stood up and dusted sand off of his pants. “Let’s go,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to go on a nature hike. I needed to ask him for money, but I couldn’t summon the words.
“Come.” He insisted.
We walked along the riverbank. The path rose and fell and wound around jagged brown boulders. As we climbed the rocks, the space beyond them widened and we emerged into a strong light. The bright air seemed to vibrate around us—every leaf, every vine radiated with heat—and the sound of the river rushed over us. The sound soon spread over us and as we reached the crook of the river, my gaze turned to a vast horizon beyond the silver water. The whole sky rang with the rush of waves whose echoes filled the space around me.
From east to west, the river flowed from mountain through town. Above, pilgrims walked across the jhula over the river from towards the temple. Together with the aroma of roasting coffee and cinnamon, laughing voices rose from the jhula. Then the sharp stamping of feet on wood. Farther in the distance, the eucalyptus trees rustled in the wind and above the river the silence was as vast as the sky. I leaned into the wind, speechless, unable to tear myself away from the void opening before me. Beside me, Saraa was motionless, his eyes fixed on the horizon, where the sky and river met in pure mist. Inside, I felt a knot tightened by years, habit, and worry; slowly loosen. There were black tents along the crescent shape of the riverbank, flapping in the breeze. I had not yet seen the men living in them, nothing was stirring in the tents, and yet my imagination traced them to where they could be at this moment. Homeless, cut-off from the world, they were wandering—scraping the land for food, trudging, possessing nothing and perhaps serving no one, poverty-stricken nomads of this kingdom. The thought filled me with melancholy and I closed my eyes, knowing that this kingdom had been promised to me and would never be mine again, except for this fleeting moment. When I opened my eyes again to the sky with its clouds drifting with confidence—as if they seemed to know why and where to go. The voices from the bridge fell silent and the clear brass sound of the temple bell rang through the air. The world had paused, no one would age or die or lose their home in this quiet breath of time. Everywhere life was suspended—except in my mind, where at the same moment, a mother and a wife were calling my name, wondering where I have gone.
“Don’t you want a house?” I asked him but he did not answer.
We walked for a while without talking. Saraa and I tramped a few miles it seemed, crossed long slivers of eucalyptus to where they reached their vanishing point, then we went another mile through wheatgrass and fern until the ground rounded up and formed a mound. The wind moved again and I heard the river raging down the gorge. When we sat on top of the hill I saw white foam surging through green plains. I stood completely still and listened to that lush sound, a sound I had never heard so close, a sound with a voice to it. A sound that made my chest rise and shoulders tighten with anticipation. It was a sound that made me feel separate from it and everything else, as if I were no importance in the grand plan.
“Do you hear it?” Saraa asked. He held his hand up to make me stand still and we both listened. “Do you hear its voice?”
“I do.”
“Do you know how a river starts? From a raincloud. That’s her soul. The wind pushes them from the ocean to the mountains and those rainclouds burst into a torrent of water sliding down mud paths creating what you see in front of you. And that process takes a few million years. I married the love of my life and now she’s gone. This is what I have now. ”
I crouched on the hill, pulling my knees under my chin, and ran my hands through the wheatgrass and thistle. I could hear geese, white birds in the sky, flying. They were wide and long and continuous, a white expanse of snow geese flying into the blue mountains ahead.
“Where are they going?” I said in a whisper.
“Home, for the summer.”
I could hear the geese echoing off the valley, their calls vanishing into the distance.
“So why here? This is the longest you’ve stayed in one place.”
“Because no one runs against time here. It’s as simple as waking to the light of morning and sleeping when the cold hits your bones.”
“And you’re happy with only that?”
“I sit here by the river on these rocks every day. I watch her as she spills across plains, past the fields of women who sing as they harvest. The dust frays my skin but I still sit. The river is always changing but right here, at this very spot, where she turns fat and muddy, the riverbank remains the same. I watch her as she spreads into deltas of reeds where waves are met by white caps and vanish into the night.” He stopped to light a cigarette. “Ganga’s soul rises as a billowing cloud from the ocean, white and fierce and rains hard onto these mountain paths and all the way to the sea.”
He paused at that point to give his words time to sink in. I thought about this, wondering why it was so difficult to believe that he could be happy. Loneliness follows some people their entire life, guiding and inspiring them to do courageous things. For others, it’s necessity.
I thought about our father and how much he would have loved this place. “I wish Baba was with us right now.”
“When I feel empty, I watch the river, watch life pass by. It’s a relief to know she’s going somewhere instinctively.” Saraa patted me on the arm and smiled.
“Come.”
We walked up the hill and through the forest when we reached the jhula, on the other side of the town. We scrambled down the hill to where the river was calmer but still spilling through the plains. Saraa began to roll up his pants and edge his way into the water. He crept forward and balanced himself by touching a boulder once in a while. He was much farther away from me now with his arms high in the air, his head lifted towards the sky. Then he looked at me and motioned for me to join him.
“Come on.”
I rolled up my pants, took off my shoes and socks and climbed in. The cool water swept over my shins and sucked at my calves. I held onto the large rocks to make sure I did not slip on the shoals shifting below the soles of my feet. I inched up to straighten my back and saw the great swathe of river in front of me, surrounding me, as I was knee-deep in it. I thought about Baba, in the small river at Nagpur, through which he would wade every day to get to work, sometimes with me on his shoulders. We were so poor then we couldn’t afford any other way. I wondered back then what would happen to us if he were to die crossing that river, who would work how he had worked to give us basic things like dal and rice but also during puja, the black toy train with silver rimmed-wheels that I still kept and shined every few months. I wondered even then, if he were to ever drown, who would take his place.
“You know Baba used to cross rivers?” I said to Saraa.
“I didn’t know that.”
“With me on his shoulders. He never slipped, never fell once.”
Baba had always said to me during those hard years before Saraa was born: to tighten your fists. Hold your back with pride. How to shake hands with a strong grip, how to carry your chin high, and step toward a man when he is falling so you can help him back up. And most important, to not lose hope, even when the current seemed to flow against you, because that was the secret he had said, “the secret that we all forget right before we bow down in defeat.”
The water rose and grew cold, and my fingers began numbing where I clenched the rock, and I let go and opened my fist to make the numbing stop, so I could feel the water and the wind when that moment came. The air around me hummed and I could feel the wind through my shirt, on my skin. I shuddered in the rush of air, my feet sank into river silt, and suddenly I felt myself falling straight down and landing with an awful sound. I stood up and stomped through the water, soaking wet. Saraa was still in the water, the air around him was full of white rising mist. He looked at me with a worried expression, the pitying look someone gives you when you have failed.
“Are you alright?” he yelled.
I wrung the water from my pants and put my socks and shoes back on, grumbling to myself, “Shouldn’t have come here.”
Saraa made his way over to me. “You know how many times I fell here to learn how to balance?” he laughed.
I said nothing.
“Sid?”
“I’m going back to the ashram.”

I locked the door to his room. Saraa had pitch a tent tonight and sat on the bank making a fire. I showered and settled in. The room was bare: an iron-railing made up the bedstand, two rickety teak tables flanked both sides of the bed, which was covered in a heavy layer of dust. The blue mosquito netting that hung from the ceiling was torn and smelled like mothballs. There was a pack of Wills on the window-sill sitting beside a copper ashtray. I peeled away the tin foil, plucked one out and opened the window to smoke it. The dark neck of the river at night was necklaced with temple lights. Outside it was wet, rain tambourined through the trees. Giant trees loomed over the ashram dripping slowly in a solemn, uneven chorus onto the wild eucalyptus leaves beneath. On the top floor of that ashram with dusk spreading, I felt the long tooth of loneliness beginning to bite and wondered how Saraa did this day after day. I watched his fire from the window, dwindling in the rain, and there seemed to be nothing left but the smoke and shadows, like a funeral pyre when it was done burning through the night.
From the pit of my stomach I felt a punch. I found myself remembering the day of Baba’s funeral when I lit the pyre with the ceremonial torch. Baba’s brothers and cousins, our uncles and friends stood there patiently, their white tunics flailing in the breeze as the flames consumed him. At the house, Ma was sitting on the edge of her bed, her hair was untidy and she was wearing a white sari. The house was full of people, but it was very quiet, the only sound being crows cawing on the balcony. Then I came inside the room, filled with incense and a thickness that could only come from pain and a deep sadness. The scent of sandalwood filled the air. I said to Ma, come, and she rose, and I walked with her a little. “Where’s Saraa?” she asked and I told her he was speaking with the guests but I lied. I had no idea where he was. Baba had been laid out and draped in a white sheet and people began surrounding his body. Saraa emerged from the blue door near the roof; his eyes were red and his cheeks stained with salt. He knelt next to Baba and gave out a high-pitched cry that crackled the air, then two men came forward, and they covered Baba’s face, other people lifted him up and took him through the door, through the iron gates as they clanged behind the men, and Saraa fell to his knees in front of everyone and I picked him up by the arms and held him, told him to be strong, that this would pass. To this day I could not forget the words he had uttered through tears and the pride that had surged through my veins, “You are still here, thank goodness for you Baba.”
I was eating a plate of dal and rice at the table when I heard a knock on the door. It was Saraa. He held a bottle of RC whiskey in his hand and his raincoat was drenched. He flung it on the floor.
“I brought this for you.”
“How did you get it?” I asked. “They don’t sell this stuff for miles.”
He brushed passed me and went to the mahogany dresser, rummaged through the drawers, throwing lighters, film cans and bandages over his shoulder. He wiped down the table with his sleeve and proceeded to write. With a final flick of his wrist, he finished and put down the pen.
“Here,” he handed me a check.
“What’s this?”
“I had more savings than you thought. I kept this for Ma. Just in case. I told her not to tell you.”
“Why Saraa? Why would you do that?”
“I wanted to be alone.” He sat at the table and poured whiskey into two glasses.
“You’re still coming back with me aren’t you?”
He handed the glass to me. “Yes, but I wanted you to have this first.” He clinked his glass to mine and glugged down the brown fire.
I tried handing it back to him but he pushed my hand that held the check towards my stomach and did not let me move it again. “Drink that and you’ll sleep well. You won’t even feel the mosquitoes.” He picked up his jacket and headed towards the door.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s my last night here, I‘m going to sleep in the tent. I’ll see you in the morning, it’s late.”
“You’re right,” I said. “What time is it?”
“Half past twelve.”
“We’ll have to catch the bus back to Delhi in the morning and buy you train tickets,” I said.
“Here’s an extra blanket.” He threw a patchwork quilt from the mahogany dresser onto the bed. “Good night Sid.”
“Good night Saraa.”
He shuffled down the marble steps and walked along the bank. I leaned out the window watching his silhouette glide over the white sand. My hands trembled against the glass. I felt ashamed that he was not disappointed in me but sympathetic. I looked at the check once more. It was enough to cover hospital costs, doctor visits, medicine, even a private nursing home. When I looked again at his tent, his flashlight was glowing, then he turned that off too and went to sleep. There was a gnawing at the base of my stomach as the rain beat down against the pane and a crackle of thunder startled me, making me realize I had been looking out the window at the river for some time now. I had become the sort of man I despised, a man who took away from another to make his own life bearable again. I peeled away the sheets and turned off the light.
*
The night was dark. A chill swept through the room. I lay in bed tossing through the night. When twilight came, I opened the door and went outside, it was the time between night and morning when nothing seems real. I walked barefoot from the terrace to the banks and along the winding path of the river. A circle of hawks rose from the pines and scythed the sky. I began to run, following the curve of the river, and I kept running, until I reached a point where the river grew wider and wilder. My heart was beating. I walked what felt like miles up the hills, criss-crossing through the mountain. To rest, and to see if Saraa had woken up and tried to follow, I sat on a rock at the edge of the river. I remained there a long while thinking about how I would be snatching him away from this kingdom. A light wind rattled the leaves and vines. Overhead a few bats reeled silently back and forth. I took a deep breath, then returned to the ashram, to my room. I left the check on the table and packed my things before Saraa could wake up and find me gone.
The bus was full of tourists as it fishtailed through the mountains on its way back to civilization. I slid deeper into the vinyl seat and as the bus wound around, sleep slowly took over me. I faintly heard the call of birds, leaves rustling in the wind; smelled the mustard fields between the valleys. I sunk further into the seat, falling deeper and deeper. In the distance I could hear the river flowing.