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Sacred Waters A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture Stephen Alter Harcourt, $25, 368 pp.

A Review by Anita Mathias

Sacred Waters is a lovely, tranquil account of a spiritual journey undertaken by a third-generation missionary kid, born and raised in the Garwhal foothills of the Himalayas, where his parents and grandparents ran Woodstock, the American missionary boarding school. An atheist and a seeker now, Stephen Alter embarks on foot, over ten months, on the traditional Hindu pilgrimage, the Char Dham Yatra, to the four main sources of the Ganges, Yamnotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath in the high Himalayas, a path, according to popular Hindu belief, to moksha or salvation.

Alter’s fellow pilgrims are as diverse as those in The Canterbury Tales. Some are dressed in robes of saffron and ocher, others in jeans or loincloths. There are toddlers, feeble octogenarians walking while reading a prayer book, and even a pilgrim with a brass trumpet who is eager to serenade the company. Alter’s fluency in Hindi allows him to converse with the unusual people he meets: migrant Muslim dairymen, goatherds, grass cutters (gujjars), Nepalese watchmen guarding potato fields, villagers spinning wool as they walk along, an ascetic Dutch holy man (sadhu), a Belgian artist who shoots arrows into the landscape to photograph them later, rabid Hindu fundamentalists, the wildly popular film star Amitabh Bachan carried on the shoulders of Nepalese porters, women planting rice in paddies to the rhythm of a drum. He camps, “the roar of the Ganga as loud as a hurricane,” to listen to a sadhu blow away the darkness, chanting “om” on his conch shell, “clear, musical, like a trombone or a French horn.”

This dense, multilayered narrative especially fascinated me because I, too, went to boarding school in the Himalayas. Alter interweaves loving accounts of the unique, endangered flora and fauna with tales of swashbuckling figures from colonial history like Frederick Wilson (the inspiration for Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”), who built the first precarious bridges over Himalayan rivers, and the hunter and naturalist, Jim Corbett, still famous in my girlhood for his books on hunting man-eating leopards and tigers. Garhwal is called Dev Bhoomi, land of the gods, for “every snow peak and glacier, every confluence and village temple is invested with mythology.” Alter enriches the landscape for his readers by narrating the legends associated with each spot he visits, from the Vedas, the Puranas, and the great epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. At the same time he meets contemporary activists fighting the indiscriminate logging, motor roads, and dams that threaten the livelihood of the indigenous people, and, sadly, the mountains themselves.

Embarking on his journey as a traditional pilgrim on foot, renouncing tobacco, alcohol, sex, and meat, Alter leaves both maps and camera behind, believing the slow imprinting of experience on memory will be more effective than photographs. Detailed maps, though, would have helped readers track his progress, and photographs would certainly have enhanced his descriptions of historic temples and gorgeous vistas. Nevertheless, Sacred Waters is full of the serendipity and the peace of the wilderness. “I saw an egret flying low above the river, its white wings in sharp contrast to the gathering darkness. A peacock blundered out of a nearby tree, then glided into the valley, its long tail streaming behind it like an iridescent comet.” He wakes to find a multitude of moths cover his tent, “like delicate hand-block images pressed against the light”; he blunders into a black bear, shy barking deer, troops of rhesus and langur monkeys, and even a leopard.

The variety of Hindu worship is very much on display: a drive-by shrine to Hanuman, worshiped from the windows of a bus; a temple (nag mandir), where a cobra was worshiped; and darshan, or homage, paid at the high-altitude temples to the reclusive god Shiva. Alter is sarcastic about the lines of pilgrims five to six hours long. After walking 600 kilometers, they are efficiently herded through the sanctuary in mere seconds by venal, pushy pandits. Still, he provides sensitive and poetic descriptions of evening worship, the temple bells and the moaning of a conch, an oil lamp waved in front of the deities, while sadhus sing Sanskrit hymns, their voices harmonized into a moving tenor chorus. They then clap their hands in unison, and prostrate themselves in front of the idol, kissing the cold stone floor. A sadhu dances in rhythm with his prayers, his right hand holding an oil lamp, his left, a pair of tiny brass cymbals.

Alter, somewhat irritatingly, decries the motor roads, which provide the only way for those who lack his stamina, adventurousness, and leisure to enjoy the remote, beautiful, high mountains. He alerts us, however, to an alarmingly threatened Himalayas: landslides, precipitated by erosion and dynamiting for the motor roads, burying entire villages; and the destruction on a monumental scale of towns and hillsides to build the massive Tehri dam. Leopards are slaughtered for their skins; endangered musk deer for the six-ounce musk gland, used for perfume and medicine. Botanical poachers plunder rare herbs and flowers nearing extinction. Police are rarely seen and susceptible to bribes.

In a coda, our pilgrim visits the magical Valley of Flowers accidentally “discovered” by British mountaineers in 1931, though described in The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. In this natural wonder, like an alpine rock garden, “waterfalls spilled down cliffs, tiny springs seeped out of the ground, water so clear that it was invisible except for the wavering reflection of a profusion of flowers as in an ornate tapestry”–blue irises, primulas, dark purple lupine, fritillaria, delphinium, and columbine. Alter’s spiritual experience here is akin to Wordsworth’s pantheistic vision in his “Lines” composed near Tintern Abbey: “And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts… / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / …and the living air / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man….” This fascinating book concludes on an updraft
of tranquility. “The surrounding aura of sanctity made me bow my head. I was overcome with a sense of wonder and discovery. I felt completely at peace.” One believes him.

The Temptations of a Very Long Journey: Giving Up

Every now and then on a very long journey, one comes to a viewpoint. And gasps. The road rolls before one, endless. It seems so much simpler to turn back. And it is. It is.

In every important enterprise of my life, I have reached this point. At various points of discouragement, in my twenties, thirties, and now in my forties, I have wondered if I should give up writing.  When Jesus asked Peter if he too would leave him, Peter answered, “Lord, to whom should I go?” I feel like that with my writing. What would I do if I were not writing? I am as hard-wired to write as a bird to sing.

Last year, I decided I was going to gain proficiency in French. Why? Because I love languages in general, and French in particular. I have tried to learn French in the Alliance Francaise of Oxford. But there is a continual turn-over of teachers and pupils, and I keep being moved up one group before I have completed all the lessons in the previous stage. It’s never good to have shaky foundations. I have just been moved up again, and  less fluent than the two others. Do I give up, or work on my own to catch up?

Is the prize, fluency in another language, worth it? Yes, it is. And so I will continue. (And it may prevent middle-aged deterioration of brain cells, not that I ever give my overworked brain cells time enough to rest or rust.)

And being a Christian? I have fleetingly thought of abandoning that. But then, I say with Simon Peter. “To whom should I go? You have the words of eternal life!!”

Here’s a somewhat long but interesting post from Christianity Today.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/february5/5.40.html

You will see why the Gospel is truly “good news for the poor.” When there is neither money for a doctor, nor easy access to one, hope in and for a miracle is all people have.

No wonder, someone whose faith can work miracles can pack ever larger tents. I find the simple faith of the African people, which has been described by Heidi Baker and others, very moving.

Okay, we finally broke down and bought a nice new super-sized American refrigerator. When our last one broke down, we replaced it from one from Freecycle, which remarkably lasted almost 4 years. But it was much too small, we couldn’t find things, and things were always getting lost, forgotten, crushed, rancid. And so, as people do when they buy things they probably could have done without, we praised ourselves to ourselves for how much money we were saving by buying a big new fridge.

And so we bought a nice new shiny massive American refrigerator. And oh-uh, it is populated by two boxes of kulfi icecream, which formerly Roy would have stopped me buying saying there was no room in (the inn of our bodies) or the fridge, and lots of fruit, veggies, types of hummus, jams, dressings, sauces, which we were restrained about acquiring because of our tiny old fridge.

When the fridge arrived, Irene stepped into it, and beamed. And I hope as the months go on, we will all be beaming, and it won’t encourage us to gain extra weight or spend extra money, both of which we can ill-afford.

Fridge. When I went to America as a graduate student in the 80ies, everyone laughed when I said Fridge. Why? I asked baffled. “Only blacks say fridge,” my fellow students explained. “We say refrigerator.”

Blacks and English people, it appears. No one in Oxford says refrigerator!

Another popular word here “reckon” was similarly laughed at in my American graduate school as a hilly-billy word. I had acquired a bit of an English accent in my three years at Oxford, so I suppose these infelicities were particularly amusing in that accent.

I lived in America for 17 years. I now have an accent with traces of all my three countries. A world class accent, I suppose!

I recently took a Christian history class with Ken Barnes through Oxford University’s Continuing Ed. I enjoyed the lecture on Charles and John Wesley and the Holy Club. One of the things the “Holy Club,” (their derogatory nickname, a bit like today’s God Squad) did was to read the Bible together in the Koine Greek, Novum Testamentum Graece.

I took some classes in Classical Greek when I was at Oxford, and still retain enough to read Scripture in Koine Greek. I firmly believe it gives one much of the flavour and feel of the original which is lost in translation.

However, being patient and kind, not jealous or boastful, not arrogant or rude is no easier, whether you read the injunction in English, Greek, French or Hindi, and I have just read it in all my four loved languages!!