The crowd in Varanasi to watch the eclipse. Picture by Pabitra Das

Varanasi, July 21: It’s between the Gods and Nasa now, between unworldly power and very worldly prediction.

The clouds have held off, mere cotton puffs, no more, lumbering about in the blue skies overhead, but that’s only small solace.

As the Ganga turned to ribbons of gold and then fell ashen at twilight, a slow and surreptitious accumulation had begun to loom on the far banks from the sandstone ghats of Assi — a low, darkening castle of rain.

Varanasi will sleep uneasy tonight, tormented by Nasa’s prophecy of a celestial sunblock early tomorrow — everyday haze, or even monsoon rain, transiting overhead and stealing a facile march over the elaborate cosmic arrangements that are set to conjure the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century.

But then there are those who’ll go by faith rather than by factual forecast — if they don’t in Varanasi, where else?

Not far from BHU’s Saamne Ghat, where a bay of scientists — weathermen, astronomers, physicists, geologists, mathematicians — were setting up their sophisticated stations, stood Mahakaal Das, a self-anointed “muni”, surveying the skies and earth.

“Nothing will go wrong nothing, you watch,” he said, looking a little scornfully at the material men. “What do they know of anything? Ask them how Benaras was born and how it keeps going and they would not have a thing to say. Kal ki leela hogi aur sab dekhenge kyonki devtaaon ki leela hai. Badal chhat jaayenge aur subah subah andhera ho jaayega, kewal devta kar sakte hain yeh (Tomorrow’s act will be played out and all will watch because it is an act of the Gods. The clouds will scatter away and the morning will turn dark. Only the Gods can do that).”

So it’s on if you believe Muni Mahakaal. And if with all this, I am beginning to sound a bit like a match-eve weather report, it probably is just that.

There’s a big show on here tomorrow and the weather is critical to spectators who are flash-flooding Varanasi; they’ve come by cart and bus, by rail and by air, many even on foot, trickling in a single file from surrounding ruralia for their place in the bitten sun.

Call it astral or astrological, call it a consequence of lunar intervention, call it Rahu and Ketu’s pyrrhic smash-and-grab, the sky will become theatre tomorrow morning and pure black magic is promised.

Should there be rain, or even too much cloud, there’ll rise a clamour of cursing — the great rain robbery!

The town is in a tumult of expectation. The best seats are taken, or will be as the night progresses, as faithful and fanciful alike descend on the 108 or so ghats of Varanasi; 108 ghats, or so they claim — many of them are only mythic, many have been slowly devoured by the Ganga, many others are too precarious for the occasional visit to wade down.

There aren’t so many ghats, really speaking, and there are too many people choking this chaos like a score Mamata Banerjee rallies erupted at once. The odds are, however many ghats, you won’t see them tomorrow morning because they’ll have become a mill of mankind, seeking science, seeking salvation.

Mani Nath Mishra, a scholar of Sanskrit at the Kashi Vidypeeth, sounded splendidly confounded on what tomorrow must mean. “Evil and propitious at the same time” he ventured, amid the final rituals of his evening dip on the banks of Assi. “I suppose it is about turning an evil corner and emerging from it re-energised and pure, that is why you bathe in this river, it is what gives everything and eventually takes everything away, mighty and merciful. You bathe in the Ganga at a bad time and you are safe, purified.”

For tonight, though, even the Gods are taking due precautions against the portents whose penumbra has already been cast — at a little past five in the evening, wizened astrologers of the great riverbank told us, the countdown to impending impieties in the sky began to tick away.

Temple doors across Varanasi were shut at dusk, the Gods taken into protective custody of their earthly guardians. There were no aartis on the ghats tonight, and none of the daily evening ceremonies.

Do not disturb: the evil hour is already upon us and the Gods must confer ahead of tomorrow’s combat.

What a match it’s going to be. Keep watching, but keep your eyes well shielded. Nasa may be wrong about the clouds after all, and the Gods just right.

Or is it down to what Karia Ram, untouchable of caste and unlettered in science, pointed out very matter of factly to the bombastic Muni Mahakaal? “It’s more the direction of the wind than the Gods,” he retorted, “that will blow that big cloud away.”