Holy dips at India's giant Hindu festival come with challenge

by Arunabh SAIKIA

For pilgrims at the largest gathering of humanity, ritual bathing in India's holy rivers includes a key challenge -- finding your family and clothes after the chilly dip.

Millions of people are expected to attend the Kumbh Mela festival in northern India, a six-week-long Hindu celebration of prayer and bathing that began before dawn on Monday.

Each morning, densely-packed crowds of men, women and children undress side-by-side in the foggy pre-dawn gloom along the wide floodplains around the confluences of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.

Sushila, a housewife in her sixties, who had travelled more than 500 kilometers (300 miles) from Bihar state, roamed the crowds in despair in wet clothes, looking for her daughter.

"I know she is somewhere close by," she said, peering through the tight-packed crowds, where a constant stream of pilgrims came to bathe. "I just can't see her".

The line of bathers stretches for several kilometers (miles), with the crowds surging forward to dunk their heads beneath the cold grey waters.

Devotees believe the dip brings them salvation.

But with many people without a phone -- or leaving it while they bathe with a friend they then lost -- finding your companions afterwards is a tough task.

The sheer size of the crowds is so great that even a single distracted moment can cause you to lose track of your fellow travelers.

Organizers boast that they are expecting a mind-boggling 400 million people to take part before its conclusion on February 26.

Loudspeakers mounted on poles boom repeatedly with desperate pleas of people searching for those with whom they had left their dry clothes.

An old man broke down on the microphone lamenting that he had nothing to wear -- urging his son to immediately meet him at the lost and found centre.

- 'Scared' -

Organizing authorities issued a phone app boasting "multilingual AI voice assistance", but that is of no use to those without phones at all.

A network of "Lost and Found" centers are set up for pilgrims to reunite with their families, offering blankets to the pilgrims who arrive wet, shivering and nearly naked.

Temperatures before dawn hover around 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit).

Shyama, aged 60, who uses only one name, said her companion from her same farming village disappeared in the crowd. She has not been traced for over a day.

"I think she has left me and gone," said a distressed Shyama, her eyes welling up with tears, as she waited at a shelter for lost people.

"I have no money, know no one here, how will I ever go back home?"

Maiku Lal tracked down his wife Makhana after hours of searching, finally hearing her location broadcast over the loudspeakers.

"She scared us so much," said Lal, sporting a wide smile and holding his wife's hand.

Sandhya Sarkar, 45, said being lost in a strange place where she did not speak the local language made her regret her decision to come from her village in West Bengal, around 700 kilometers away.

"I would have never come had I known the fair was this crowded," she said. "My family must be going mad looking for me. It is a nightmare."

But many said that the effort to bathe in the holy waters was worth it.

"I felt tremendous peace -- despite the crowds," said Gopal Devi Shanti Gujjar, who had come from the western state of Rajasthan.

© Agence France-Presse