River Town Chronicles by Leighton Hazlehurst Page A

end. The only excitement during her confinement had been a cobra that slithered through the drain in the floor one day and explored the surrounding area beneath her bed. Her screams brought the chowkidar (watchman), who stuffed the cobra into a large sack and removed it from the room. My guess is that he probably let the snake loose in the field next to the hospital.
    There was no lab at the hospital to check a sample of Pat’s blood to see if she was free from the inflammation of her liver caused by the hepatitis, so I boarded a train and took a sample of her blood to a larger hospital in a neighboring state. The results confirmed that the inflammation had subsided, and she was finally able to leave the hospital and return home.
    I made arrangements for us to get out of River Town for a couple of weeks so Pat could recuperate in Delhi. As soon as she was ready to travel, we loaded the kids and a suitcase on the bus for a five hour bus trip to Delhi, where we all looked forward to a hot shower, three meals a day and some relaxation. This sounded good from a distance, but after a few days in Delhi, we were bored and anxious to return to River Town. Despite the perils of living there, the human bonds we established in the town were much more rewarding than the conveniences of life in Delhi. The anonymity, the exhaust fumes, the traffic, the noise, the haggling and chaos that takes place in a crowded city in India was not that enjoyable. Worst of all, Tim followed me to the market one day without my knowledge, and was struck down by a scooter rickshaw as he tried to cross the street. In an act of kindness, the scooter driver stopped, picked up Tim in his arms and carried him unconscious to the lawn in front of Fonseca’s, where he quickly regained consciousness. Soon after that, Pat said she had had enough of Delhi and begged to return to River Town, to what seemed to us now to be our normal life there.

A S ACRED P LACE

    T HE WINTER MONTHS of November, December, January and part of February were bitterly cold in River Town. Wind swept down off the Himalayan foothills and onto the Plains, spreading a blanket of cold air over everything. Inside the house people huddled together and outside they wrapped wool blankets around their shoulders and scarves around their heads. At night, we piled on the razaaiis (cotton quilts) to keep warm. A cold night was measured by how many razaaiis were needed to stay warm. During the morning, bathing under the hand pump or with a bucket of cold water was almost unbearable.
    Life moved more slowly during the winter, and people’s thoughts seemed to grow more contemplative and spiritual in the broadest sense, for almost everything in River Town had some spiritual element attached to it. Take, for example, the name “River Town.” I puzzled over the name for months. I circumambulated the town, scoured the countryside surrounding the town but never saw a river, or even a stream! Why the name “River Town”? Where was the river? When I would ask this question, people would shrug their shoulders. Eventually, I was referred to a sadhu (holy man) perched next to a small shrine on the outskirts of town. When I asked him where the river was, he pointed to the ground. “The river flows underground. You can’t see it, but you can feel it,” he assured me. He pointed to a large, stagnant pool of water that, he said, was connected by an underground channel to the sacred Ganges River. “You can’t see it with the naked eye, or from your house in the bazaar, because the river flows underground.” I knew that if I was going to learn anything more about the sacred dimensions of River Town, I would have to suspend the urge to resist the unknowable and let myself go with the current to see where it would lead me.
    I followed the sadhu to the western edge of town, to the Gauri Shankar Mandir, a temple dedicated to the god Shiva. The sadhu told me the story of how the