The Waters Who Are Mothers

Before the sun was up, a priest walked down to the river with an empty jar.

He needed water for the day's worship, and in his time nobody simply took water. A river was not a thing. The poets of the Rigveda called the Waters goddesses, and they called them mothers. A man who came to fetch them spoke to them first.

So he stood on the bank and spoke.

"You come out of the middle of the great flood," he said, "and the sea is your chief. You wash everything clean and you never sleep. Indra the thunderer dug your channels. Goddesses, protect me here."

The river went on past him in the half dark. He knew there were more waters than this one. Some fall from heaven. Some are dug out of the earth. Some run free of their own accord. All of them are bright, and all of them hurry to the ocean. He named each kind, and after each he said the same words again.

"Goddesses, protect me here."

Then he lowered his voice.

"King Varuna walks in the midst of you. He looks down and sees which of us speaks the truth and which of us lies."

The old singers believed this. Varuna, the god who watches over right and wrong, moves among the Waters. Varuna and Soma and all the gods drink their strength from them. Fire himself once went into them.

The priest waded in to his knees and filled the jar.

"You are kind," he said. "Give us strength. Give us a share of your sweetest sap, the way mothers give who love their children."

One of the hymns holds a secret that the god Soma told its singer: every medicine there is lives inside the Waters. The priest remembered it now.

"Be full of healing for me," he said. "Keep my body from harm, so that I may go on seeing the sun for a long time."

There was one more thing to ask, and it was the hardest.

"Whatever wrong is in me, carry it away. Whatever evil I have done, if I have lied, if I have sworn to what was not true, Waters, take it far from me."

He did not say that he had done these things. He did not say that he had not. He stood in the current and let it pull at his legs.

Day was coming. The first rays touched the river. The poets say that the sun draws the Waters up to himself with those rays, and that Indra dug the path they run down again.

The priest lifted the jar to his shoulder. There is a wave in the Waters, the hymn says, sweeter than honey, and long ago the first worshippers made it Indra's own drink. The Child of the Waters, the swift one, guards that wave.

"Let us win that wave from you today," he said.

He poured a little melted butter into the river as a gift. Then he turned and carried the goddesses up the bank to the place of worship. They go by the paths of the gods, says the hymn, and they never break the laws of Indra.

The hymn did not stay in the book. Its words are still spoken, usually with wet hands.

In many homes the day begins with the prayer called sandhya. One step of it is named marjana. The worshipper dips a blade of kusha grass in water and sprinkles the drops over the body while reciting three verses. They are the first three verses of the old hymn to the Waters: you are kind, give us strength, give us your sap as loving mothers do. Some people call this step a bath made of mantras.

At Varanasi the river herself is worshipped every day. At dusk a row of priests stands at Dashashwamedh Ghat, beside the Ganga. Each one holds a lamp and moves it up and down in time with the singing, and so they offer light to the river. This is the Ganga arati.

Other rivers have their turn as well. Twelve rivers of India each have a festival called Pushkaram, and it comes to each river only once in twelve years, when the planet Jupiter enters the sign of the zodiac that belongs to that river. The Ganga has one, and the Narmada, the Yamuna, the Godavari, the Krishna and the Kaveri. In Tamil Nadu the Tamraparni is on the list. In Assam it is the Brahmaputra. For the first twelve days great crowds come to bathe, to give gifts and to remember their dead.

The festival has its own story, which is found in a book of astrology written in 1426. A Brahmin prayed to Shiva for a long time, and Shiva gave him a boon: he would be able to live in water and make the holy rivers pure. People called him Pushkara, the one who nourishes. When Brihaspati, who is the planet Jupiter, asked him, he agreed to enter each river in turn as Jupiter moved from sign to sign. A dip in the river at that time, people believe, washes away every wrong.