The Drowning Phads of Pushtar

Rajasthani singers can still recite
epics longer than Homer and
the Bible combined. One old bhopa
started learning them at age four,
his father pressing twenty lines
into his memory each day,
nursing the tale with buffalo milk.
The epics are sung in eight-hour
nightly performances which can
go on for weeks. A courtyard
is cleared, lamps hung from the
arches amid swirling boughs
of bougainvillaea, thin white
mattresses set on the ground
and the phad unscrolled between
two poles, a 17-foot tapestry
which backgrounds the reading
of each epic, depicting the tale’s
particulars — robust men pairing
off with demurring maids,
horses and cattle and battlements,
kings and queens and blue-
skinned gods, peacocks and
tigers, forests which melt
into oceanic fish-mounts.
At the center of it all was
the hero of the narrative, a
man so brave that to
hear his tale was to
burn the ground around it.
His soul the singers poured
out like well-water, devoted
to praising his account
like lovers subjects and priests.
The phads are carried round
India by the bhopas as they
circulate the songs, bringing
the spirit of each god to the
people through the tale,
painting in the minds of
the audience a bridge to
heaven’s wildest ways.
Each phad is passed on to a
singer’s child when he grows
too old or ill to perform.
If the fabric of it fades
or gets torn, the scroll is “cooled”
of its fire in the holy lake
of Pushkar and never used again.
The bhopas are fast disappearing
with their songs, ebbing back
to the most conservative
provinces in India. The written
record has just begun; most
of the songs will probably not
be saved, swimming back
with their phads down the waters of
Pushkar. Of those lost epics
there is only a bare surficial
gleam with silence far below
-- what passes in an old man’s eyes
whose mouth no longer flows
words of what soul knows.