Geetanjali Krishna: A boatman's lonely dirge

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Floating down the Ganga in a rickety boat, watching the world stream by on Varanasi's famed ghats, Nefa the boatman sighed. He saw the American tourist couple he was ferrying laugh, take pictures of one another and embrace. To him they were an alien species, from another planet, perhaps.

Their laughing, carefree faces seemed to mock his poverty, his illiteracy and his very identity. He pulled himself up and decided to get a little friendly with them "" maybe if they wanted another boat ride tomorrow, they'd call him again.

"Please sir, on your right "" that's Banaras's famous Manikarnika Ghat. See, three, four funeral pyres!" said he in reasonably good English. These strange white people were unpredictable "" some looked at Varanasi's most photographed activity "" funerals "" with awe, some with amazement and some with disgust.

This particular couple thanked him politely for telling them, saying that they enjoyed the spectacle very much, and he again shook his head in amazement.

There was little about the river and the ghats of Varanasi that Nefa didn't know, and little that actually moved him. All the tourists he ferried asked the same old questions "" how deep is the river? How old are these ghats? And so on.

He'd answer their queries patiently, and also tell them about the buildings on the ghats, notable either for their architecture or ownership. But none of these gladdened his eye, for reasons he told us shortly after dropping off the American tourists.

"Making a living in Varanasi is not easy," said he, "especially for a poor man like myself. My family had a boat, and I thought my boat and I would support my family on the ghats. But the mafia-like boatman's union here decides who can and who can't ply his trade on the river here. So, in desperation, I was forced to rent a boat from an accredited member of the union and give him a half share of what I make!"

This made him rather bitter, as he barely made Rs 80-200 in a day, and sharing even that made things rather tough for his wife and seven daughters. He'd also had bad luck with the priests of temples at Dashahswamedh Ghat.

"A rich man I worked for gave us a room to stay on the Ghat, but the clannish priests there refused to let us live there in peace. So we had to vacate that place too," said he.

Imprisoned by his utter poverty, Nefa asserted his freedom only in one way "" he used his partial deafness to literally turn a deaf ear to anything he didn't want to hear. "I specially can't hear my wife's nagging, and customers who try and bring down my rates!" he chuckled.

But apart from that, his future is bleak. "I got my eldest daughter married this year, and had to take a loan of Rs 5,000 for it. With my meager income, I just don't know how I'll be able to repay it," said he somberly. His face fell further when he thought of his six other daughters who were still unmarried.

"Not before long," he said, "I'll just have to let go. I'll have no option but to do that. Maybe these troubles are God's way of testing me. But I know that there's no solution to the poverty that I've been cursed with!"

We mumbled some empty words, and gave him an extra large tip as we disembarked. That's all we could do, other than wonder whether we'd find Nefa the boatman when we visited Varanasi next.