Gangothri

A work in progress

Chapter 3 Gangothri

Neela Gangothri Bose sat in his garden in a state of deep contemplation. His white beard waved in the breeze. The wail of peacocks reached his ears and produced a sad melancholy in him.

His compassion for the human condition knew no bounds. He hailed from an illustrious Brahmin family, who have for generations, guided the people of Nanda Puram, in North Eastern India, on the headwaters of the river Ganges.

Neela practiced a form of Yoga, referred to as Gambiratattwa. In it, he made contact with the qualities of the heart, where it was engaged as an instrument to direct and channel his impulses naturally to where they want to go. In such a practice, the aspirant is able to reorder his experiences from the past into a new form and scheme of life.

The presiding emotion in these matters is the love one feels for all created nature, where the interests of each impulse is brought into coherence and congruency with another and creates a union of common purpose of all impulses in the human mind and body.

He ran a hotel for tourists who come to Srinagar in search of peace and enlightenment. He loved to sit and talk to them about what they seek in their lives and in the process, Neela managed to come to understand a little of himself.

As a child in Nanda Puram, Neela lived as an associate of the mountains, the valleys, rivers and trees. He recalled how his father was an elder in the village they lived with another 100 households. His best friend was Kozinsky, a fair boy with ruby cheeks whose father ran the butcher shop in the village.

Together, the two boys roamed the woods and the streams in search of birds, fish, fruits and berries. Kozinsky was two years older than him and always treated Neela as a younger brother. Neela didn't mind, especially since Kozinsky was bigger for his age. He was a strong lad and many a time would come to Neela's defense in a fight with the other children.

Kozinsky's people were reported to be the original residents in the place, going back several thousand years into the past. Neela's ancestors were reported to have migrated here some centuries before from the Indus valley area. This was obviously after the fall of the Vedic civilization.

In the Ganges, Neela's folks had begun a new scheme of faith in association with the residents there. However, for some curious reason the villages have got into a fight with each other from generation to generation, that is a hallmark of their relations in the place.

Neela and Kozinsky were quite a pair in everybody's eyes. To the villages, it represented the form of the relationship they shared with each other. Neela represented the individual self and Kozinsky represented the physical nature of the environment. It was a matching pair and it seemed the most natural experience of the life the villagers lived.

When the boys were about 13 years of age, calamity struck. A strange new illness had descended on the village, causing the people to be blurry eyed, slurry of speech and given to sudden bouts of vomiting.

In past times, the village shaman would have advised the slaughter of a cow and the removal of all goats in the area, to be taken to pasture grounds away from the village. However, when he was consulted on this occasion, he informed them that any continuing effort based on past remedies would not produce any results. There had to be something new.

At first he had advised that newly weds in the area be separated from each other for a period of one year, before they are allowed to live together. However, that did not show much of an improvement.

The shaman was sitting in meditation by the river when Neela and Kozinsky happened before him.

He had called to the boys. They approached him.

“How's your father doing?” he asked Kozinsky.

“He's in bed. He can't walk,” Kozinsky replied.

“How's your mother?”

Neela immediately surged to prevent his friend answering the question. In all the time they had been friends, Kozinsky was clear in his demeanor that he won't tolerate any references to his mother.

Kozinsky looked away, but Neela rushed to answer, “ She's fine. She's not feeling sick.”

The response peaked the shaman's interest in the two boys. He frowned for a moment and then quickly asked,

“What did she cook for lunch today?” he asked.

Again Kozinsky simply looked at his toes and didn't reply. Neela jumped in,

“Fish,” he declared, having caught the scent of fish gravy in Kozinsky's breath.

The shaman had a curious look in his eyes. Superstition aside, the shaman's father had always taught him how humans, by the engagement of the mind, produced the most incredible responses to their own viral condition. It was important to detect clearly just how much influence the two boys were creating in the perceptions of the villagers. It was after all a small village.

A week later the parents of the two boys were summoned to the headman's cottage.

The headman's words poured out easily and the parents were not without some understanding of what that meant.

“We have to break down the mahimorata in the mind of the villagers,” he had said. “The shaman has been following the two boys around for the past week and he is certain that they bring a bridge to the opposite sensations of the people. This bridge must be destroyed.”

“What's to happen with the boys?” Kozinsky's father asked between coughs. His condition was the worst in the village.

“Your boy must leave the family and go live with them,” he said to Kozinsky's father, pointing as he spoke at Neela's parents.”

“What about Neela?” his father asked.

“Neela has to leave the village. Do you have any relations living in India?”

“None,” Neela's father replied. “I have a sister in Srinagar.”

“Send him there. Do not let him return.”

The headman had turned to look at the shaman.

“As god is my witness,” the shaman had responded.

Neela looked across at Peter, sitting at the bench before him, in the garden.

“That is how I came to be here,” he said.

Peter had begun a trek into the headwaters of the Ganges. He had stopped overnight at Srinagar. It had been his intention to travel to Nanda Puram to study the early development of faith schemes which thereafter grow into a full fledged faith in the plains of the south. It steers itself along the route of society's advancements and the need for survival.

“Were the people healed?” Peter asked.

“I don't know,” Neela responded. “If you are traveling there, you can find out for yourself.”

Reviews

[Shep]

Great chapter full of insite. And held my intrest to continue on as I waite to read about your version of vampires. Moving on.