India is a never ending adventure, every moment. I am in a private lounge at the Allahabad Train Station which is a small restaurant temporarily converted with comfortable chairs at 50 rupees per person during the Kumbh Mela. In the last hour, one of the sleepers could not be awakened by his family and was carried out by military personnel with his distraught wife/widow nearby. Then I went to the nearby Ladies’ Toilet room, heard a noise inside a stall, and opened the door to find a very large rat, about the size of a small cat, scampering around. I told the lounge personnel, they came and looked, and when I went back there was an upside down pail on top of the creature.
The train we are now on is comfortable and wonderful. The empty rolling fields passing by our train window contrast so sharply with the human density of the Kumbh Mela. It is hard to believe that 1/4 of the whole population of the U.S. was at the Mauni Anavasya festival on January 29. Although the death of 30 people may reflect poorly on the crowd-control procedures of the police on the ground, my perception is that they performed a Herculean task to keep the number so low. I think there was as good, if not better, management than could have been provided in the U.S. Here, they employed large numbers of unarmed police and a few soldiers with rifles. We would have had to call out the army or national guard to provide such a quantity of security.
I had the opportunity to experience the police in action when, at the end of our visit to the Akharas, I discovered I had been pick-pocketed and my phone was gone. I asked Bill to immediately go on his phone to “Find My” because we had shared our locations. And there was its location, very near us. But our guide refused to allow us to track it down saying we could be badly injured by the thieves and we should go to the police station. So, a long trek away, we made a report, it was properly stamped, and a plainclothes officer and a uniformed police officer went with Bill and our guide to track the phone down. I was asked to wait in the station and given the number of miles we had already walked, I was happy to sit and rest with a very nice young officer with whom I talked. In the corner of the same room sitting on the floor, were several men who had been apprehended for something or other and a teenage girl who was arrested for stealing a mobile phone. A plainclothes officer (I assume) several times went to talk to her to demand where the stolen phone was and he hit her hard a number of times with a ruler, sharply, but she would not speak. The phone was probably with the same fence that had my phone which, later in the day, I could see traveling by road in the direction of Varanasi to be trafficked in the small stalls and streets in that eternal city.
Bill and group returned to say that had not found it although they stopped and frisked several men who appeared to be in the location of the phone. But Bill said it was too crowded and noisy to pinpoint it and it was not possible to hear any sound from a phone. The police also assured me they had resources to electronically track It and they would let me know when they found it but I think that opportunity is now long gone. The officer showed me a stack of reports from people who had lost their phones in the last 2 days, including one from a French women who also lost her ID and credit cards. Fortunately, I had nothing in my phone case so I am only sad that I lost some very good photos I had taken of the holy men only a few short minutes before my phones disappearance.
During our walk back, we heard sirens and a great number of emergency vehicles passed us on the narrow road: ambulances, fire trucks, police cars. They were obviously throwing alll their resources onto this emergency to make sure it did not get out of control. We could see only a little possible smoke source but I read the next morning there was a small fire that had been almost immediately put out. The administration wanted no more problems in this Kumbh Mela.
We were to be picked up at our Kumbh Village Tent City by a car — they somehow managed to get permission for this purpose. Our pickup time was 2:30 am to head to the station for a 7:30 am train as the traffic was unknown but we reached by 4:30. That included a very roundabout route with many dead-end stops at police barricades to control traffic in the city. At the end, we were required to leave the car and walk, with another great throng of people, for about 2 miles to the train station.
We arrived into New Delhi on time and were taken to the elegant Havelli Dharmapura in Chandni Chowk area of Old Delhi with a rooftop view of the Jama Masjid.
Bill and I have a wonderful many-course dinner of local foods with a short Kathak dance performance on a balcony here which completes our immersion in North Indian Culture.
A last walk through the chaotic ever busy nearby markets of Chandni Chawk and we will drive out to visit a friend and then to the airport. I titled this post with the word “movement” and end these posts of this travel to Central North India with some photos of Chandni Chawk, taken by both Bill and myself, which are all about movement: moving goods, moving people, moving vehicles and moving along from one place to another. The Kumbh Mela was one stop along that movement of my life and is indelibly imprinted along with the other images of this journey.
