We did a good 10 km hike at last! This was to a village called Kakara downstream the Ganga, up to the ashram of Durwasa, about which I had written in an earlier post. It was a great morning and we enjoyed walking a lot. With the autumn coolness and the Sunday there was also the feeling that we were going “off the beaten track.” In fact almost nothing can be obtained about this place from Google, and when this post goes on line, this will be one of the very few places that will do that job!
We set off pretty early in the morning—at five—and as the four of us walked under the almost full moon, I began wondering about who Durwasa was. It so happens that I hardly know of any of the mythology behind that name. I did not remember if he appears in the Ramayana or the Mahabharata or in any of the other stories. The only thing someone remembered was that the person was short tempered. Later in the day each of us was handed a booklet that contained a Sanskrit composition of eight stanzas by one Mahadev Prasad Goswami, which claimed to tell the story that “lies scattered in several books like the Bhagavata, etc.” I couldn’t gather much though, other than that he was intelligent and strong and was associated with one Raja Nahush and another, Sudyumna, and also with Krishna and other Yadavas, and used to live “four kosa” to the East of the Triveni in Prayag. (I really don’t know how much a “kosa” is, but the ashram is about 18 km away from Allahabad now.)
We walked till Nibi along our usual route through the Mahua groves (venue for this glorious sunrise!) and continued walking along the main street in the village to Chhibaiyya. This is a much densely populated town that lines this road. Kakara lies just beyond Chhibaiyya and the Durwasa ashram is at its edge, close to the Ganga. (See the route on Google maps; make sure you see the hybrid version.)
The place includes one Shiva temple, a defunct dharamshala (pilgrims’ lodge) and a Sanskrit school run by monks of the Giri order. People have further set up a primary school and an intermediate college near the temple. We couldn’t really gauge how old the structures could be but nothing apart from the idols looked more than fifty years old. The temple has a small corridor around a sanctum sanctorum of the size of a small room. Beside the corridor, in the alcoves in the wall, were kept around fifty idols. The biggest was that of the sage, with eyes convincingly indicating a short temper. A steady stream of old men and women of all ages kept passing in and out of the temple as we sat admiring the place. Outside the temple, which is connected by the dharamshala to the school, is a yajnashala with some fascinating stuff. The walls of the chamber had about eleven chaupais written on them. All of them were composed by one Ramsundar Das of the ashram about thirty years ago and—we didn’t notice this before a student of the school pointed it out—all of them were complete palindromes! Here is an example:
न तन तरन रस, सरन रतन तन ।
न छन तजत रत, तरत जतन छन ।
I found this unbelievable! The children also took us into their school, where I noticed rooms with labels “Modern section,” “Ayurveda section” and “Books section.” Their teacher looked at us hesitatingly from inside. He had arranged the booklets on Durwasa for us after we told him we were students too. We were then made to climb a floor higher, where their head swami—who presently was at Satna at a similar school—sat. And then on the roof of the building, from where we could see the whole village on one side and a huge desert near the Ganga on the other.
I wanted to go to the desert but we didn’t have much time; the walking alone had taken more than three hours. Instead we took a six seater to Hanumanganj, on NH2 and then took another to Chak, near our own Jhunsi.
