Moonlight on the Ganga by Krulikowski Claire;

Author:Krulikowski, Claire; [Krulikowski Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Published: 2016-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

1.In the Indian caste system, Brahmins are the highest class and, traditionally, hold the place of priests and the intellectual class.

Cleansing Exposure

“… Join the ranks of the celestials who are pleased with you. Illusions have ended. Let the fever of your heart be dispelled. Here is the celestial river, sacred and sanctifying the three worlds. It is called the celestial Ganga. Plunging into it, you will attain your proper place.”

—the Mahabharata.

Patience was born here. It is a pattern. It is a pattern that allows time to not exist, or at least, to pass unnoticed. It fills the lungs with something other than oxygen so that breathing is not necessary because breathing takes time. It empties the mind of pre-patterned imagery of pasts and futures that create time born of other places. It births corpuscles of singular moments. I can sit here forever and yet be here only now.

The pattern of life here is much like the man I am watching on the rock.

He is squatting on a large, irregularly rounded river rock less than three feet across that is jutting up out of the powerful waters. This is a fast running section of the river, and even the water’s edge is pulled by the tide. I’ve a sense of how fast and wild it can be further out because on some days I’ve sat here and witnessed river-rafting crafts shoot rapids at breakneck speed and spout an occasional tourist up and out and into the drink. Yes, there are businesses in Rishikesh that cater even to the spirit of adventure!

I’d thought some overpowering need to pray had driven this brown-skinned man to roll up his pants leg, step into the water, and slowly, if unsteadily, make his way out to the rock. Now I see he is doing his laundry. The wad he’d been grasping in his hand is now unveiled to be a sheer white shirt, while the other hand holds a block of some sort.

He is the sole presence on the outcropping and secures his bared feet at an angle I wouldn’t have trusted, his every action focused upon what he is doing. Squatting, he dangles the shirt down and drenches it in the tumbling water. The shirt is lifted, drenched, lifted again, and finally splattered flat on a small section of the course rock between his feet. With the care and attention a carpenter might give an intricate carving, this man sets himself to the task of washing. The block I’d seen is obviously some type of laundry soap because he’s scrubbing it deliberately onto a section of the saturated shirt he’s spread open.

He scrubs and rubs. Another section the same. Next. Again. Again.

Now the shirt is beaten against the stone again and again. Clumped together, it’s mounded like bread dough, pounded and pounded and mounded again to be pounded again and again, then rinsed again in the water, flayed in the air and onto the rock, beaten over and over again against the rock. The man’s

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