River Town Chronicles by Leighton Hazlehurst Page B

area was once covered with jungle cascading down from the Himalayan foothills. One day, a woodsman was chopping down trees for fire wood. “All of a sudden, the woodsman struck a tree with his ax and water shot straight up out of the stump of the tree.” The sadhu looked me straight in the eyes to see if I understood what he was saying. “Samjee jii?” (do you understand?) He continued by explaining how the woodsman was frightened and swung his ax again and again until he had leveled the stump to the ground. But the next day, when he returned, he found that the stump had regenerated and stood straight up from the ground. For several more days he continued to swing his ax and level the stump only to discover that the stump reappeared the next morning. Finally, the frightened woodsman told his story to a rishi, a mendicant doing penance in the jungle. The rishi determined that what the woodsman witnessed was the work of the god Shiva. “That tree stump you tried to chop down was Shiva’s phallus and the water you saw was Shiva’s semen, which he uses to regenerate himself. The sadhu took me inside the Gauri Shankar Temple. “Look,” he said. There on the floor of the temple was the stump of a tree. “That is Shiva’s phallus, in the same place it has been since the beginning of time. Even attempts by Muslim armies failed to destroy it.” I made an offering at the temple, thanked the sadhu and returned home with new insights into the enigma of the name of River Town.
    The conversation with the sadhu made me aware of River Town as a sacred place. It is a deep layer that exists beneath the other layers of political and economic history that follow on top of it. Pools of water, tree stumps, monuments and shrines seem to provide the foundation for everything that came after the sacred origins of the town. As I became more familiar with this layer, I could see how pervasive it was. By the 1960s there were thirty six temples and shrines located in the merchant neighborhoods. They surrounded the inhabited world of River Town as persuasive, physical evidence of the sanctity of the town. People visited these places, I was told, for the purpose of darshan (meaning “to see, make known and visible”) and the attendants at these places, the darshaans (Brahmans, or preceptors, who make one “see”) use their mantras (sacred words) to illuminate the town with the sight of knowledge. All of this seemed worlds apart from the day to day business of the merchants and artisans of River Town, and yet it seemed to support and provide the sustenance for all of their activities.

E VIL S PIRITS

    T HE WINTER MONTHS brought on a flood of illnesses. Ram Swarup was complaining of ulcers and his teenage daughter, Saroj, complained of a buzzing noise and pain in her ears. She was nearly hysterical, covering her ears and running around the courtyard moaning. I asked Ram Swarup what was wrong with Saroj. He assured me nothing was wrong, but a real concern was reflected in his eyes. Saroj got worse that afternoon and lay on a charpoi moaning and crying out loud. I couldn’t stand seeing her suffer like this, and again approached Ram Swarup with the offer to take her to the hospital for treatment. “It wouldn’t do any good,” Ram Swarup answered. “This is just something that happens to young girls her age.” And then he added, “she has been visited by a bhut (an evil spirit).” I had recently heard about a girl in the merchant neighborhood who had died from the malevolent action of a bhut. “Let me take her to the doctor and get some medicine,” I said. “Maybe this will scare the bhut away.” Ram Swarup was not moved by my pleading, but bhabhi gave in to my insistence that Saroj see the doctor at the hospital where Pat had been treated. I hailed a rickshaw from the bazaar and Saroj and I made the trip to the hospital. The doctor looked in her ears