Devout Hindus all over the country offer ‘jal’ (water) at Shiva temples, particularly in the monsoon month of Sawan. In the early 1970’s, the practice of carrying Gangajal for long distances was, however, peculiar to Bihar. The main Kanwar Yatra was performed by carrying water from the river Ganga at Sultanganj, in Bhagalpur district, to Baidyanath Dham temple in Deoghar, a hundred kilometres away. As part of my training as a police officer, I was deputed to Sultanganj to handle arrangements for the fortnight-long yatra. The road snaking through the town had to be kept clear for traffic, crowds at the ghats had to be kept moving; and drowning mishaps were to be prevented. These were not easy tasks with just the handful of constables available and willy nilly I spent a lot of time at the ghats.
One afternoon, I saw a bundle of clothes floating past the ghat steps and, while I watched, a hand waved from that bundle. I rushed into the river fully clothed, without even taking my boots off. I grabbed the bundle and dragged it ashore, only to discover that there was an old woman swaddled in those clothes. I stretched the supine form on the ground and carried out resuscitation exercises in the best fashion as prescribed by the St. John Ambulance Association and the Royal Life Saving Society. Fortunately, I did not need to do any of that mouth-to-mouth stuff as the old woman sputtered to consciousness soon enough and sat up with surprising energy.
By then, a goodly crowd of a hundred or more onlookers had gathered and a collective cheer went up when the woman came to life. Cries of ‘Bol Bam’ and ‘Har Har Mahadev’ rent the air. I felt every inch a hero, even as I presented a sorry sight, with water dripping from my sodden uniform and my waterlogged boots squirting Gangajal with every step. But I was ever so happy that I had saved a human life and I fleetingly prayed to Lord Shiva to get me a medal awarded for it.
We learnt later that the old woman had fallen into the river more than ten kilometres upstream from Sultanganj. The air trapped in her clothes provided sufficient buoyancy to prevent her from drowning and she had been floating along serenely, confident that she was on her way to meet her Maker. Quite rudely, I had disrupted her heavenward journey. Instead of being grateful, the woman was understandably angry, and she cursed me for saving her life. She kept shouting obscenities for a long time because the old crone believed that Ganga Maiyya herself had come to conduct her to Baikunth Dham. Furthermore, she declared that she would never attain salvation because she had been now defiled by the touch of a paraya mard – a stranger – that too one belonging to the low caste of the police. The volley of spells and curses hurled by her totally unnerved the life-saving hero within me. I prayed to Lord Shiva to protect me from evil and, if He were so inclined, keep the medal for Himself in exchange!