”We’re actually ghosts,” our guide had told us the night before, “because we perform our own last rites before we become sadhus.” Our guide left his home at 18 and never went back. Today he’s doubled those years without any visible regrets. It’s as if he’s found his people in the sadhu samaj. “For us,” he explained, “the past and the future both are dead. What we occupy is a strange country where the ‘nowness’ never ends. And this is your time to experience it… here in this ‘momentary heaven’.”

MAHARAJADHIRAJ writes on the Sadus and the Holy Dip at Allahabad

This year the Ardh Kumbh was in Allahabad. And we were there for the big dip on January 19th, the day of the Silent Moonless Night or Mauni Amavasya.The day when a million sins are washed away by a single dip.