Narrative Record

Bhola Prasad Tiwari, 67, a retired toll-keeper who had spent thirty-one years collecting fees at the old Shivala crossing on the Varuna river east of Varanasi, gave his account to this investigator in the winter of 2003, sitting on the steps of a dharmashala whose name he declined to provide. He described an encounter from the monsoon of 1987, when the Varuna had flooded its lower banks and the crossing had been temporarily abandoned — he had stayed behind alone to watch the equipment, sleeping under a tarpaulin stretched between two peepul trees. Sometime in the third week of Shravan, when the rains were still heavy and the river was carrying debris from upstream, he woke to find a figure seated on the stone marker at the edge of the crossing, very large, very still, dressed in what Tiwari described as "cloth that had no colour, like water at night." The figure asked him, in a voice he said was neither loud nor soft but simply present, how much he had collected that day. Tiwari told him. The figure nodded once and was not there the following moment. Nothing was missing from the lockbox in the morning.

◆ Contextual Analysis

The Varuna, called Varna in older Brahmanical texts, marks the northern boundary of the Kashi kshetra as defined in the Kashi Khanda of the Skanda Purana, and the crossings along its lower course have been associated with boundary guardianship in local oral tradition for as long as any informant in the district can recall. Yaksha belief in the Gangetic plain clusters persistently around precisely these threshold sites — river crossings, forest edges at the margins of cultivated land, the base of large trees — and the monsoon months of Ashadh and Shravan, when boundaries between settled and unsettled ground become literally fluid, appear with disproportionate frequency in accounts from this corridor. The toll-post itself, a site of transaction and passage, fits the older Yaksha function documented in the Arthashastra and in the yaksha-stuti passages of the Mahabharata with uncomfortable precision.

◆ Investigator Notes

Tiwari's account is corroborated in one significant detail: the flooding of the Varuna crossing in the monsoon of 1987 was confirmed by the Varanasi district flood register, and a retired colleague at the Nagar Nigam office recalled the Shivala crossing being unstaffed for approximately three weeks that season. The specific question — "how much did you collect today" — does not appear in any standard yaksha narrative I have encountered in four decades of fieldwork, and its very mundanity is either a mark of authentic recall or an exceptionally well-constructed fabrication; Tiwari struck me as a man with no particular investment in being believed. Two other accounts from the Varuna corridor, one collected by Hazarilal Sharma of the Kashi Vidyapith in 1961 and one in my own notes from Sarnath in 1994, describe a similar figure at a similar site, though neither involves direct speech.