your bridge home
Tales of the Gods
They were four thousand miles from the Ganga and were never going back. So they looked at a crater lake in the mountains, and recognised her.
There is a lake in the mountains of Mauritius, in an old volcanic crater, a long way up from the sugar estates.
It is called Ganga Talao, the lake of the Ganga, and getting to why is the whole story.
From 1834, ships began arriving at what is now the Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis, carrying indentured workers from India to the sugar plantations. Over the following decades, several hundred thousand people landed there.
Most never went back. That was understood fairly early on by the people themselves, whatever the paperwork said.
So they were on an island in the Indian Ocean, some four thousand miles from the Gangetic plain, holding a tradition in which an enormous amount, the rites for the dead above all, assumes a river that was now unreachable.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.