Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

by Home

  As we laboured along Shivala road, I saw Isobel, wearing a faded yellow T-shirt and jeans, about to cross the street as the rickshaw bore down on her. She looked up, startled. I waved, smiled – ‘Careful!’ – and she smiled and stepped back. It was the first time I had seen her on her own and the first time we had acknowledged each other's existence. In Hinduism karma builds up and unfolds over several lifetimes, but in my speeded-up, occidental mind it was impossible to regard this accidental encounter as a sign of anything other than instant karmic payback. Two days ago – or half an hour earlier – I had been so at odds with the world that such a meeting could never have happened. Even if it had, I would only have grunted at her; if she'd noticed me at all, she'd have seen only a scowling familiar face bearing down on her from the orientalist perch of his rickshaw. But now, with my equanimity regained, I was a nice, smiling person obviously concerned for her safety.

  We arrived back at Assi ghat. As I climbed off, the rickshaw driver tapped me on the leg and angled his foot back so that his sandal flipped down, revealing the sole of his foot. There was a raw hole in the arch of his foot, as if he had been crucified, except the hole was not bloody. It was white-ish, an ulcer of some kind, presumably. I gave him a hundred rupees, for which he showed no gratitude – and who can blame him? For someone whose job involved pedalling all day long, pressing down on his foot, this was a terrible affliction. But not a whole lot worse – quite a bit better, in fact – than some of the other ailments, injuries and illnesses afflicting people here. The amount of pain, discomfort and agony people were able routinely to bear without complaint, without any expectation of getting better (let alone cured), without hope even of the quantity of pain being lessened, was immense. Did this mean that it wasn't pain, wasn't anguish? Perhaps in the west our capacity for pain had been heightened as it had become more avoidable. Anguish was the expectation that whatever was ailing us could be reduced and treated. Anguish was the outrage that the expected outcome wasn't achieved immediately. Anguish was the delay in getting the right treatment, waiting for the medicine to kick in. Anguish was waiting.

  And here in India we westerners rarely had to wait for anything. We moaned about the constant pestering, the constant offers of ‘boat’ and ‘rickshaw,’ but when we wanted a boat or rickshaw we expected someone to be there, providing a boat or rickshaw immediately, at rock-bottom prices. Accustomed, at home, to the dismal wait for a bus, here we were slightly put out if we had to wait more than a minute. At some level, the poorest backpacker enjoyed the privileges and perks of the Raj.

  I walked for a while along the ghats. A boy ran up alongside me.

  ‘School pen,’ he said. I smiled, continued walking. ‘School pen,’ he said again. ‘School pen.’ As it happened, I did have a pen with me, a high-quality roller-ball pen from London. I gave it to the boy, who ran off quickly. A holy man was sitting by the river, in the shade of a mushroom umbrella, looking at me nicely.

  I came to the ‘I LOVE MY INDIA’ sign, was happy to see it.

  Laline said, ‘What are you reading?’

  I was on the terrace and had not heard her approach. She was barefoot, wearing very faded jeans and a T-shirt that looked white and clean-smelling. I held up the book:Women in Love , an old Penguin edition.

  ‘Strange choice.’

  ‘I only started it because someone left it in the hotel. But there's a lot of Lawrence here in Varanasi: the river of dissolution, the Ship of Death … ’ I ran out of steam. Lal pulled up a chair and sat down next to me, waited. Her toenails were painted pink and she had a silver ring on her little toe.

  ‘That's only two things.’

  ‘I know, but two can be a lot. In certain circumstances,one can be a lot.’

  ‘And zero, sir, can be everything,’ she said, Indian-wise. ‘Actually, to qualify as “a lot,” you need a minimum of three.’

  ‘You're right, of course.’

  ‘So, did Lawrence come to India?’

  ‘Sri Lanka. Ceylon. Which he hated. And he sort of inferred India from Sri Lanka. But it's a shame he didn't spend time here. It would have been a source of irritation, obviously. In terms of caste, he'd have seen himself as an Untouchable Brahmin. He'd have claimed that Gandhi advocated nonviolence because he secretly wanted to smash people's heads in with a hammer.’

  ‘Especially Nehru's?’

  ‘Exactly He got ill everywhere, but he could have got iller here than everywhere else combined. And he'd probably have written an Indian novel. In about eight weeks. Full of inaccuracy and wild speculation, but right in all sorts of strangely prophetic ways. He'd have seen that one day tandoori chicken would become the English national dish, that his hometown, Eastwood, would have several restaurants with the word Mahal in them.’

  Laline had ordered tea. Kamal brought a pot on a gleaming tray and set it on the table. I put down my book and went inside to get a banana. Since getting a stomach upset, I had taken to eating mainly bananas.

  ‘You're living like a monkey,’ said Laline when I sat down again. ‘Next, you'll be stealing bananas from people's plates. Creating a commotion.’

  ‘One day, if I'm just an orange blob, would you still recognize me then?’ I said.

  ‘If you're just an orange blob? No, of course not. But I don't think that's going to happen. You're one of those men who get skinnier and skinnier. And you're not orange. You're kind of off-white, pinkish. You should put some sun cream on.’

  ‘You are denying the god in me,’ I said. ‘Bingo! That's a sort of Lawrentian idea: denying the god in yourself or someone else. I've got the three I needed to qualify as a lot.’

  ‘It sounds a bit general to me, but I'll let it go.’

  Darrell appeared on the terrace and Lal waved him over.

  ‘Just in time,’ she said. ‘I was getting an interminable lecture onSeven Pillows of Wisdom. And you wouldn't believe what he just said. He called Ganga a river of dissolution.’

  ‘Did he tell you how he pissed in it?’

  ‘No!’ said Lal. ‘Blasphemer! Evil-doer!’

  Darrell drew up a chair and sat with us. There were three of us now: enough to be a lot. Like Lal, he was wearing a white T-shirt. He didn't kiss her, but now that he was here, I saw that she had the glow of a woman in love. Darrell didn't glow in that way – men don't, especially men like him. But something else about him had become more pronounced (in an infinitely discreet way): the certainty that he could be relied upon, that she was not making a mistake. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the fact that he and Laline had become involved had no effect on their relationship with me.

  ‘How's your tummy?’ Darrell asked.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You know what they say. Whatever doesn't kill me makes me weaker.’

  For a few days we were joined by Sayoko, a young Japanese woman. She was eating dinner at a table on her own and Darrell asked if she wanted to join us. She spoke very little English and so, when she had sat down at our table, he began speaking to her in Japanese – which, even by his standards, was pretty cool. Sayoko and I couldn't say much to each other, but she was easy to be around. Her way of being in the world was unlike anyone else's I had encountered. Having worked in London, in journalism, often interviewing artists, I had pretty well accepted that the sole point of existence – especially for artists, but among journalists too – was to make a mark, a splash, to draw attention to oneself. Sayoko was the opposite. She moved through the world as though the idea was to have a minimum impact upon it. Like a skilful driver, she negotiated her passage through things without collisions or near-misses. In the context of Varanasi the comparison made no sense, but to be in her company was to be reminded of how relaxing it was not to be honking your horn and constantly expecting a crash, not to have your attention strained to breaking point. I wondered, naturally, if this quality was unique to her or if there was something distinctly Japanese about it.

  There were a lot of Japanese in Varanasi, both the slightly idiotic-looking groups who
photographed everything in sight and obeyed their tour leader unquestioningly, as if he were the Emperor, and the younger trance types, sometimes dread-locked and often wearing interesting T-shirts. Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first fire sermon, was one of the attractions for them. It was only six or seven miles north of the city and I don't know why I never got round to going. I should have gone with Sayoko. She was a Buddhist and went there on her own one day. She didn't ask me if I wanted to go, but there was no reason not to go, and it's not like I was averse to the idea or uninterested.

  Sayoko was with us only a short time. We walked along the ghats a couple of times, had pancakes and coffee at the Lotus Lounge. On the way there we saw two dead rats, lying side by side on the promenade, the implication being that the Ganges was too filthy even for them. Once we were at the Lotus Lounge, we didn't speak. We'd hardly spoken before, on the way there, but while we were walking, seeing dead rats and stuff, it didn't matter. It didn't matter once we were there either, waiting for our coffees and pancakes, but it was a new thing for me, sitting silently with someone, unable to speak, communicating only at the vibe level.

  I barely got to know her and then she was gone, to Bodhgaya. I told her about the change, the ten per cent commission, but I'm not sure she understood. I was sad when she left, which was strange because, once she had gone, it was as if she had never been here.

  An exhibition opened at the Kriti gallery: photographs by Dayanita Singh. We – Darrell, Laline and I – went to the opening along with Shashank and a few other guests from the Ganges View. Decorated in the international art style of plain white walls, the gallery would not have been out of place in London or New York. (This was it: the modernity found everywhere else in twenty-first century Indiawas here in Varanasi after all!) Although the opening was quite crowded, it was very different to equivalent events in either city: there wasn't any free booze – or even a pay bar – so, once I'd eaten a few samosas and looked, in vain, for Isobel, there was nothing to do except concentrate on the art.

  The pictures were not big, about the size of LP covers, arranged in a single row around the gallery, and hung with Indian visitors in mind (I had to stoop slightly to look at them). They were black and white, but had none of the torsion, the psychological malaise and shock of Ackerman's Varanasi pictures. There were people in some of them, others were of empty rooms. Reflections. Shelves of things. The forecourt of a building at dusk. Cracked paving stones that refused to offer any sign of being a path. Light reflected in a swimming pool so that it looked like a tennis court under water. Gloves hanging on a rack. A death mask in a bell jar. Two white jackets, the sort worn by Nehru, hung up in some kind of display case.

  The absence of people was not a universal principle. People were there or not there, there in some pictures and not there in others. A hand-out said that all the photographs had been taken in India, but there were no individual captions, nothing to tell you where anywhere was, or what anything was, or when it had been. There were just these pictures of places, pictures of places that were in these photographs. There was nothing to help you get your bearings and then, after a while, once you accepted the idea, you realized that you didn't need these things that you so often relied on, that there were no bearings to get. A given picture had no explicit or narrative connection with the one next to it, but their adjacency implied an order that enhanced the effect of both.

  A curving row of cinema seats, or seats in a concert auditorium, gleaming slightly. From the seats' point of view, the cinema was always packed, even when empty; it didn't make any difference what was playing, or even if anything was playing. Windows in a tower. Light coming through windows. Without the pictures, until they were taken, you might have thought there was nothing in these places to see. Being photographed left them as they were, unchanged, altered. Did the idea ofdarshan come into play here? Was there a form ofdarshan in which there was nothing to be seen?

  In the visitors' book on the desk someone had written out three lines of what I presumed was Hindi. I showed them to Laline, who read the lines out loud. They were from a poem by Faiz, she said, a Pakistani poet. Faiz had written in Urdu, but whoever had written the lines here had translated them into Hindi. Moving her finger along the pattern of flowing script, she translated them again, hesitantly, into English.

  ‘“All that will remain is Allah's name,

  He who is absent but present too,

  He who is the seer as well as the seen.”’

  I stared at the incomprehensible pattern of words, letting their revealed meaning sink back into them. Lal said, ‘It might have been better without the first line.’

  ‘In this context, yes, we could have done without the context,’ I said. ‘But I like the rhyme: “remain” and “name.” Or near-rhyme, at any rate.’

  People did not stay long at the opening – as with dinners at the Ganges View, the lack of booze was a powerful disincentive to linger. Once the gallery had thinned out, it was possible to see all the photographs at once – captioned now, by Faiz – arranged around the white room in a single line. A receding hallway, the wet floor reflecting doors and windows. A tower with surrounding sky. A grid of lights under water, like something that was a reflection of itself.

  Two musicians came to stay at the hotel: a tabla player and a French guitarist. The guitarist was studying Hindustani music in Kolkata and his guitar had been modified by the addition of sympathetic strings, which gave it an Indian sound. The tabla player was Indian, from Mumbai, but lived mainly in Europe, in Germany. They did not know each other, but after dinner they jammed together on the small enclosed terrace at the very top of the hotel. It wasn't a public performance, but anyone from the hotel who wanted to could sit and watch.

  Even if you listened intensely, it was impossible not to feel excluded from the little cocoon the musicians wove for themselves. Watching them play was like watching two lovers, attentive and responsive to each other's every move, and oblivious to everyone else. While they were playing they had ears and eyes only for each other, and when they were not playing they were not interested in anything, or only interested in talking about music. It was difficult not to envy their absorption. For years I'd earned my living as a journalist, even though I hated writing. When I had a piece to write, there was nothing – nothing – that I would not rather have been doing instead: tennis, television, drinking, washing up, having a bath, reading the paper, even just staring into space. Anything was preferable. Perhaps it would have been different if I'd done my ‘own’ writing – whatever that meant – but I doubt it. It would still have been writing, something to be put off and avoided. Whereas all these two wanted was to play music. I'd hear them in their rooms, practising separately, going over stuff they'd hit upon together the night before or preparing some kind of structure they could improvise around later that evening. I wished there'd been something in my life like that. Convinced that there must have been, I tried to remember what it was. It took a long time to accept that the reason I was having such trouble remembering was because there really wasn't anything to remember. Tennis came closest, except by the time I got serious about it there was a limit to how much my body could take: three times a week, tops. If I played more than that, I got injured. What else? Going to parties, drinking, drug-taking. Drugs were certainly something I'd always looked forward to but, as with tennis, I was conscious that if I did them too much I'd get physically or psychologically injured. Besides, taking drugs hardly constituted a vocation, or not for me at any rate; it was just a leisure activity, a hobby, not something I could earn a living from. Perhaps the nearest I'd got to sustainable, all-consuming enjoyment was the life I was leading here, doing nothing. And it was sustainable, or could easily become so. By renting out my flat in London, I could continue like this indefinitely.

  During my first weeks in Varanasi I'd checked email constantly, kept up to date with work-related stuff back in London. (By the time I read my piece about Varanasi on theTelegraph website, I'd b
egun to take as normal things that had once made me feel like a package tourist from Mars.) Since then I'd let things slide, had failed to respond to various offers of work. Nothing was so urgent that it could not wait, and if you waited long enough then that which had been urgent became – by virtue of its urgency – irrelevant. Gradually the reciprocal momentum of email diminished, faded, petered out completely. The only thing I still kept up with was the football, possibly because there was no point in doing so. Without access to the games – without seeing the highlights on TV – they were irrelevant, might as well never have been played. The scores might just as well have been invented. (So what if Chelsea lost eight-nil to Watford?) But I still found it difficult to let it go, especially now that the European Championship had, allegedly, resumed. I didn't support a particular team, but I missed the support of football. It wasn't just the games themselves; it was the whole structure that football lent to one's life, the shared belief system, the stories and controversies that reinforced it.