Epic of the Biddies of Trimbak

Epic of the Biddies of Trimbak

When I travelled to India in September 2008, travelling still involved a healthy amount of guesswork. There were no smartphones in your pocket telling you where to go next and no endless stream of photographs showing you exactly what to expect. There was a Lonely Planet guidebook with paper maps and a willingness to explore. Nasik seemed worth visiting, and the temple at nearby Trimbakeshwar was off limits to non-Hindus. So I found a taxi and went anyway.

Trimbakeshwar, usually shortened to Trimbak, is one of the twelve Jyotirlingas, the holiest temples dedicated to Shiva. It is also one of India’s most important centres for performing shraddha, ceremonies in memory of deceased relatives. Pilgrims travel from every corner of the country to worship, to pray and to honour their ancestors.

The temple itself was closed to me as a non-Hindu, but that hardly seemed a reason to turn back. Sometimes the most memorable part of a journey begins when someone tells you that you cannot go any further.

I wandered around the temple complex, as wanderers do, with no real destination in mind. Men dressed in spotless white cotton dhotis and shawls, many with freshly shaved heads, performed rituals at the source of the Godavari. The shallow, sacred waters were carpeted with flowers, leaves and offerings left by pilgrims. Smoke drifted lazily from smouldering piles of dried cow pats. Holy cows wandered wherever they pleased, seemingly oblivious to the people moving respectfully around them. There was colour, activity, prayer and devotion everywhere I looked. I understood almost none of it, but it fascinated me all the same.

Eventually, I found myself strolling through narrow streets. I arrived at the back of yet another small, unremarkable temple and continued past it. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed two women sitting on the front step, completely absorbed in conversation. They weren’t waiting for anyone. They weren’t watching the pilgrims. They were simply chatting, as though all the people in the world didn’t exist. This moment is the birth of the Epic of the Biddies of Trimbak.

Instinct took over. I smiled, raised the camera and gave what has become my universal head-wiggle question: May I? The older of the two barely broke stride. She looked at me and gave that wonderfully enigmatic Indian head wiggle, silently granting permission. There was no excitement, no self-consciousness and no posing for the foreigner. It felt as though this happened every day. Her companion had only just begun to realise what was happening when I pressed the shutter.

I have no idea what they were talking about. This Epic of the Biddies of Trimbak has bemused me for decades now. Then, somewhere along the way, Patrick Kavanagh’s Epic came back to me.

Like many Irish schoolchildren of my generation, I spent years wrestling with poems whose significance seemed to exist only in the teacher’s notes. Epic was one of them. I memorised it, regurgitated it in an exam and, I thought, promptly forgot it. Yet its underlying question about what is truly important, the local or the global, had apparently remained somewhere in the back of my mind.

Kavanagh wrote about two farmers arguing over “half a rood of rock” while Europe stood transfixed by the Munich Crisis, seemingly on the brink of war. He asks the obvious question: which was more important? The answer, of course, is both. One story doesn’t diminish the other. Their dispute was their world. His point wasn’t really about land. It was about perspective. Every life contains its own epic.

That was when the photograph became, in my mind, the Epic of the Biddies of Trimbak. I had wandered into someone else’s story without knowing how it began, what it meant or how it ended. Whatever those two women were discussing carried its own importance, measured by the people involved. Nothing happening elsewhere in the world could take that away from it.

The truth is, I haven’t a clue what the Epic of the Biddies of Trimbak was. Twenty years later, I’m still wondering what they were yapping about. If that doesn’t earn me a Nosy Cow badge, I don’t know what does. I’ve spent all this time inventing a conversation I’ll never hear. Whatever was unfolding between those two women, it was important enough to shut out the world around them as they sat for a while on the steps of a small temple.

Every now and then, I come across the photograph again. I smile, study their faces and wonder what became of them. Are they still alive? Would I recognise them today? Would they recognise me, the odd foreigner who interrupted the Epic of the Biddies of Trimbak all those years ago, and wonder what on earth he wanted?