SRI MATA HINGLAJ

"Presently I was on the banks of the Hingol River, Sri Mata Hinglaj is where one part of goddess Durga is buried; for the latter, it is the last resting place of Bibi Nani and Hinglaj too is one delightful little spot on a subsidiary stream of the Hingol River. Palm and mulberry trees grow here and birds sing in an otherwise arid setting. When the goddess Durga died her body parts fell in various locations on earth. One consecrated this remote and desolate gorge and the temple that the believers raised was to become one of the most celebrated in the entire subcontinent. Her festival in January was once the object of her followers from all over the Indian subcontinent; now only the few remaining Hindus in Pakistan come. Long before her another goddess was worshipped here, The temple of Nania or Nani or Durga lies just off the great east-west coastal highway that has been in use from the time humans first started living in cities some ten thousand years ago. That was when trade began and caravans would have tarried at the staging post on the Hingol River which carried a plentiful supply of water in an otherwise barren land. The temple of Nania was at hand in the nearby gorge, wild and desolate and just the place that gods prefer as their abode. Here the devout would have hastened to seek her benediction before rejoining the caravans for the long journey ahead, The Temple of Durga in a narrow side valley of the Hingol River gorge was still there after, as the Maharaj would have me believe, two million years. To be fair with him, the rock overhang under which the temple is situated would have been used as a shelter by our proto-human ancestors since that early period. Surely some of the sooty blackness on the roof of the overhang would go back to about one hundred and thirty thousand years when our Homo erectus ancestors first began to use fire... " — And me on the other hand I was just there to see this beautiful place called Nani Mandir in Balochistan.