I was born in Allahabad, grew up in Rishikesh and so my association with Ganga has been quite long. My parents moved to Rishikesh, in the early sixties, when I was just a toddler. It was pretty much a one horse town, then. My mother told me that she cried when she first came there.There were monkeys all around and coexisting peacefully with them was a major challenge of our daily life.They snatched away clothes from our washing line and we had to think up innovative ways of getting them back.The temperature dipped below zero in winter.The only source of entertainment was a rickety cinema hall, where movies released, not days or months but years after releasing in other parts of India. No wonder, my young mother despaired.
I have an early memory of sadhus celebrating Durga puja in one of the numerous ashrams there.They were doing the dhunuchi naach(dancing while holding clay pots with smouldering fire in both hands) to the beat of dhaak and I danced along with them.The bhashan(immersion of the Durga idol) was done in Muni-ki-reti,which was then just a sandy stretch with shacks, along the banks of Ganga. The Himalayan foothills ,the trees, and the beat of the dhakis in the swiftly falling darkness at twilight created an ethereal and deeply melancholic atmosphere as we bid farewell to the Mother.
We later shifted to Virbhadra, a few kilometres away from Rishikesh. My parents worked in IDPL, a public sector unit which manufactured antibiotics.It was plagued with all the illls which generally plague PSUs and has shut shop long ago. The Ganga flowed nearby, in all its pristine glory. An ancient Shiva temple graced its banks. Shiva is said to have started his Tandava from this spot.The temple had murals of Daksha yagya on its walls. A mela was held there on every Shivaratri. A few steps away, was a picturesque Swiss cottage,where Mira Behn, an associate of Gandhiji(originally Madeline Slade,an English woman), lived for some years.It was one of our favourite haunts. The area was overgrown with bhang plants and we heard stories about people losing their mental balance after consuming the bhang leaves. Snakes abounded, including the poisonous varieties like king cobra but in all the twenty years I lived there, there was never an incident of anyone being bitten.
We had the opportunity to meet many sadhus and holy men but somehow I was never very impressed by them. Shivananda Ashram had many highly qualified doctors from different parts of India, who had retired from worldly life and were doing charitable service. I had gone there once when Sri Anandamayi ma had come. Devotees, from all over the world, thronged in hundreds. She seemed oblivious to her surroundings. She was in samadhi, though I could not understand that, then. A group of her devotees were in charge and issuing statements on her behalf like 'Ma has said that no one should leave without eating' and so on. Eyes open,unblinking and unfocused, she sat still, amidst all the commotion around her.
In 1972, Alaknanda (a tributary of Ganga) flooded and the Ganga at Rishikesh was swamped with sand.Thousands of fish choked to death.The water-in-take point for our colony was filled with sand and our taps ran dry. So, schools and factory shut down and every man, woman and child was called upon to do 'shram daan' (voluntary labour). Off we went with buckets and spades, formed long human chains and threw out the sand. I was thirteen and this was heady stuff for me.Many film units came there, to shoot scenes on Ganga. As there were no decent hotels then, they were put up in our colony guest house. Big and small Bollywood stars would descend on us and our placid flow of life would suddenly be churned up. Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Rekha, Manoj Kumar and Rishi Kapoor were some of the notables.The presence of the film people was somewhat incongruous in those environs. Bachchan would zip around our narrow colony streets in a white PremierPadmini. Because of their erratic schedules, damage to property by fans and because some of them decamped without paying their phone bills(those were the days of booking trunk calls), this practice was discontinued in 1976.
Familiarity breeds contempt and so I always wondered why hordes of tourists descended on Rishikesh throughout the year.I shifted base after my marriage in 1982. After decades of living in big, crowded metros,now I sometimes long to go back. The fear, that the Rishikesh of my memories no longer exists, holds me back.A precious gift, Rishikesh has given me is that from a very early age, I have seen and met many people there, whose lives were off the beaten track. Good or bad, right or wrong, is a matter of opinion, but they had the courage to break the mould.
