The Kumbh MelaThe sangam at Allahabad

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

An autorickshaw driver cruises over to me as I leave my guesthouse and takes me aboard. He knows immediately where I want to go. There is only one place any tourist wants to go in Allahabad.

"Sangam? " he says, already making his way there, no time wasted. Of course, I am an awkward customer, pride myself on it. I want the fort. But the sangam is close enough.

It is the point where two of India's greatest rivers meet, the muddy shallow Ganges and the clearer, deeper, wonderfully green Yamuna. The mythical Saraswati, River of Enlightenment, is also supposed to surface here, making the sangam, or confluence, that much more auspicious.

I am in Allahabad at the wrong time from a tourist point of view, although right times are invariably the worst if you are searching for the real, out-of-season look of a place. For two weeks every year, during the festival of Magh Mela, the city becomes a centre of great pilgrimage, as thousand upon thousand of the Hindu faithful arrive to bathe in the soul-cleansing waters of its river at this most auspicious of times. Even more impressive is the Kumbh Mela, held here every twelve years, which is by far the world's largest pilgrimage. During the last one, some 70 million people waded into the river to wash away the sins of a lifetime. Even outside of festival times, however, Allahabad draws large numbers of visitors. It is a popular misconception that most tourists in India are foreigners, whereas in fact, for all its millions of needy and impoverished citizens, the country has a burgeoning middle class aspiring to tourist pursuits, as well as a moneyed class many of whom, getting large chunks of their income in the form of bribes, are forced to dispose of it invisibly, by travelling. Domestic tourists number in the hundreds of millions annually, compared to only a few million foreign visitors, or a ratio of around a hundred-to-one, not a bad rule of thumb although it varies widely from place to place. In somewhere such as Allahabad, which is on the tourist map purely as a site of great religious significance to Hindus, the ratio is more like thousands-to-one.

I spend several minutes gazing down at the river from the middle of the road that slopes gently towards the muddy shore, ignoring my autorickshaw man's calls for me to follow him down to the riverside. Boats are moored there, ready to ferry tourists out to the sangam. There are a fair number of boats out on the water already, congregating at the dirty swell where the rivers so silently and majestically collide. It is certainly a fine sight, though one which, in the absence of faith, I don't feel the need to see at close hand.

"Only twenty five rupees," my autorickshaw man is saying. The price has already dropped from forty. A boatman climbs the hill towards us, exchanges a word or two with the autorickshaw man, says, "Twenty rupees." They seem to mistake my reluctance for a ploy to lower the price, can't understand that it is genuine. The way I turn my back on them and start away must seem all part of the game.

I get a second and more objective look at the sangam as I am leaving the city, from the Shashtri Bridge over the Ganges. It is far more pleasing seen from there, a meeting of waters so colossal that it needs distance to give definition to it.