Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

by Home

  I'd come to Varanasi because there was nothing to keep me in London, and I stayed on for the same reason: because there was nothing to go home for.

  Darrell was on his way to a yoga class. I walked with him as far as Niranjani ghat, where I spotted the friendly-looking holy man I'd seen after the confrontation at the ATM. He was in the same spot, sitting in the shade of a mushroom parasol, looking out at the river.

  ‘Let me talk for a while with this philosopher,’ I said to Darrell, who hurried on. I'd said ‘talk,’ but since he had no English, I gave him fifty rupees just to look into his eyes. He was happy to oblige. We sat in the shade, cross-legged, facing each other. His head was framed by the brick red of the wall behind him – almost exactly the same red as thetilak on his forehead, so that it seemed as if a hole had been bored straight through his head. At first I felt a little self-conscious, but soon I got used to just gazing at his kind, brown eyes. He sat and stared. It wasn't like that childish game of not blinking – though he did seem possessed of an uncanny ability not to blink. There was nothing aggressive about it. We just looked. He looked like he wasn't seeing anything. I tried not to have any thoughts, tried just to look. I'm not sure what I was looking for, what I expected to see – that's why I was looking, to find out what I was looking for. What I didn't see was any affinity between us. He was in his world and I was in mine. My world-view would never be his and vice-versa. That was what we had in common. What distinguished us from each other was that he had no interest in mine – it meant nothing to him – whereas I was intensely curious about his. What was it like to be him? I wished we could have changed places, for a while at least. If I looked closely, I could see my own face reflected in the dilated pupils of his eyes. It was as if I was there, a little homunculus. And then, after a while, as I concentrated on it, so that little image of me came to fill my vision. I zoomed in on it so that instead of seeing his face, all I could see was my own, staring back at me as from a mirror. That was one way of seeing it. The other was that I was actually seeing what he was seeing and, contrary to what I'd originally thought, there was no real difference between the way I saw him and the way he saw me. He saw what I saw, a man in his mid-forties, grey-haired, thin-faced, the mouth set in an attitude of some glumness. The face was not unkind, but there was a rigidity about it, the same rigidity that I had noticed among other travellers of the same age. It was not a stupid face, that was obvious, but, equally obviously, once you moved beyond a narrow idea of intelligence, an abundance or lack thereof counted for nothing. The face I saw, the face that was my face, was full of something, trembling like a glass brimful of water, trembling like a whippet. Not out of fear, but out of the simple fact of being alive. To be a whippet was to tremble and to be me was to tremble like a glass full of water. What was it full of, this face, this face that was my face? I stared harder, straining to see, to know, and as I did this, so the face that I was seeing acquired a look of straining intensity. What the face was full of, I could see now, was yearning, desire, in this case a desire for knowledge, but it could quite easily have been a desire for chocolate or sex. This was the fundamental difference between myself and my new friend, the holy man. His face was free of desire. How had he got there? How had he managed that? Did he just happen to be that way? Unlikely. More likely it was a state he had acquired, worked his way towards through meditation, yoga, smoking charas or what-have-you. It seemed a great state to be in, to attain. But for the idea of desirelessness to take root, to set off in that direction, to try to free yourself of desire, surely that must manifest itself as a desire, a yearning, an urge. How, then, does desire transcend itself? As I was thinking this, so, without my intending it, my focus broadened. Having zoomed in on the pupil of my friend's eye, I zoomed out and the sight of my face, which had been full-frame, in tight close-up, receded and took its place as a single detail within the larger picture of his face. I saw his eyes and hair, thetilak on his forehead, thetilak that was the same red as the wall behind him. I saw his nose, his teeth and the gaps where his teeth were missing. He was smiling. I smiled back.

  That night a concert was held on the terrace of the Ganges View. It was a clear warm night, full of listening stars. The terrace was lit by candles, flickering in a breeze that was hardly there. An audience of perhaps thirty people had gathered to hear a middle-aged woman on violin, accompanied by a thin man with white hair and thick glasses on tabla. The tampura was played by a woman whose shy manner seemed perfectly adapted to her instrument. The violinist explained that they were going to play theraga Malkauns. I had heard it before, in several different versions, on my iPod, but I still did not know what made it theraga Malkauns rather than another, similar-soundingraga. The bits that I thought identified and fixed it in one performance were nowhere to be found – nowhere to be heard – on another.

  Night had fallen hours before, but the violin was dusk-laden, twilit. I knew that the violinist was exploring theraga , bringing it into being, could feel myself becoming gradually immersed in a geometry of sound, but I could not identify it. But I did, at least, have an inkling of why I couldn't. Melody depends on time. Played a little faster or slower, it remains recognisably itself. Whereas here the heart of theraga , the melody in which it had its origins, had been completely taken out of time. An entire dimension of listening had been removed. I began to lose myself in the infinitude of something I could not recognise or understand.

  This may have been music of the spirit, but there was no attempt to disguise the physical fact of how it was produced. In the midst of the most lyrical touches there was no fear of the rasp, the friction of the bow being drawn across the strings. It could be left behind, that rasp, at a moment's notice, but it never was, or not for long. Even as it soared free, it dug itself more deeply into the earth. The violin was as thick as the night lying over the river, indistinguishable from it. Every move forward was tugged backwards and yet, irresistibly, the music advanced and accelerated. A pulse was making itself felt. It was impossible to say when this pulse had started. I became aware of it – the return of time – only when it had been there for a while, as if it had been there, inaudibly, imperceptibly, even before it was there. The stars lay on the river. At first something had taken shape; now it was coming to life. There was a feeling of brooding accumulation and of subtle realisation: melody could be made more lovely if it was not left to be itself. By being forced to leave itself behind, it would become more than itself and, eventually, more purely itself. The pulse had become stronger than anything else, so strong that it was generating a need – for rhythm – it was incapable of satisfying.

  At that moment the tabla kicked in. You could feel the sense of relief spreading through the night. A flight of birds flitted past, quick shadows of themselves. In the unaccompaniedalap there was an immense yearning, a yearning, on the part of the violin, to achieve the incomparable sob of the sarangi. The fact that this was impossible had added greatly to the sense of longing, but that longing had been answered by the tabla, and the violin grew familiar again. For stretches now, there was a foot-stomping, shit-kicking, hillbilly quality to the music that was not at odds with the mood of meditation and transcendence. It was like discovering some universal template of music, extending from the Appalachians to the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The rasp, the squawk, grew more pronounced, but so too did the glide and swoop of melody, the abandoned melody that had never been left behind. The tabla was tying the beat in knots, more and more tangled, more and more intricate – and untying them just as quickly, faster and faster, but always with time to spare. At the heart of the gallop of the tabla was a gong, ringing out. I could not follow the rhythmic cycles, not consciously at any rate, but however far the violin and tabla strayed from each other, there was always a place they could return to and, at some level, I began to know where this place was, to recognise it, to know how it sounded, to expect it even if I did so only after it had once again been left behind. The darkness flowed over the river and into it. The river was da
rk. The sky over the river was as dark as the river, but did not move, unlike the river, which moved constantly. Darkness was hidden by darkness.

  Although I had looked at it every day, I had never crossed over to the other side of the Ganges. Then, one afternoon, I did. The boat nudged into the soft mud, directly opposite Jain ghat, and I stepped out. It was deserted, but not completely deserted; a few other tourists had also made the trip and were strolling around. What had looked appealing from a distance turned out to be abysmal up close. There was nothing remotely holy about it. For the most part, it was sandy and dry. In places it was like a boggy moon, with pools of brackish water, patches of moss and slime. At the edge of the water pretty wading birds picked at bubbles of scum-foam. By any normal standards, it was litter-strewn; there were crushed packets of cigarettes, squelchy plastic bags, the odd animal bone, brown fragments of pottery, an old sandal, a couple of broken, muddy Biros. Several dead kites lay in a pool of brown, greenish water. A dog came padding towards me, more hyena than dog. There was a strong sense of standing amid the aftermath of something, but of what? The aftermath of a rubbish dump, a dump where the best bits had been cherry-picked so that what remained was detritus – rubbish – even by the low standards of garbage: stuff that, even according to the Indian habit of maximum utility, could not be recycled and reused. There was nothing to do here, no point in staying.

  I wished I hadn't come. It had been possible, beforehand, to believe that this other shore was the place where souls came to rest. If this was the case, then eternity now seemed a polluted, defiled place. One would have been better off being reborn, having another punt on the roulette wheel of Samsara and hoping for an incarnation-upgrade next time around, for nothing, surely, could have been worse than ending up here.

  Especially if you died here and – as I had repeatedly been told – were reborn as a donkey. If that happened, would you know, even if only for the split-second in which the transmigration occurred, that you had been you in a previous life? Would any of you survive in this new incarnation or would you just be a memory-less donkey? If the latter then there was no need to worry about reincarnation. Lacking all consciousness of previous or future lives, you might as well never have been born before. If it had no idea of ever having been anything other than a donkey, then the donkey was oblivious to the fact that it was a donkey. So, through ignorance, the donkey had escaped from Samsara – though it probably didn't feel like it when it was dragging loads or being beaten with sticks and forced to do things against its will, when all it wanted to do was lie down in the soft mud, looking back towards Varanasi, thinking,Now that rings a bell…

  I started to feel sleepy. I thought about the perfect shots I had played at tennis and the games when I had made mistakes on key points and, as a result of those mistakes, had ended up losing the whole match. I thought of games I had played and the tens of thousands of pints of beer I had swilled and the hundreds of lines of cocaine I had snorted, and I realized that my life was flashing before my eyes, as we are told happens at the moment of your death. That's always taken as meaning your whole life unfolds before your eyes, and maybe there was a time when this was the case, but now, in the age of soundbites and highlights, a degree of selectivity is in order. You don't have to re-live every moment of your life, every detail of desire, temptation and surrender, all the hours and hours watching TV, waiting for buses, picking your nose. That's just padding. No, there are only a limited number of moments that count for anything, that make up and define a life. And one of these moments, I realized, was this one, the one when I realized that my life was … I jolted awake, suddenly afraid that I was on the brink of dying, that this had been my destiny, to die here and be reborn as a donkey, a donkey with a brain, a donkey troubled by a stubborn but inadequate inkling – not a memory, just a nagging doubt, really – of what it meant to be human.

  I got to my feet uncertainly, like a newborn foal. The other tourists had gone. I was alone on the far bank of the Ganges.

  I checked that the boatman was still here – he was – and walked for a while, looking back at Varanasi. As I did so, the feeling that it had been a mistake to come here gradually reversed itself. I was glad, now, that I had: it was a reminder that since this life – the one back on the other other side, over there in Varanasi, back in the world – was the only one you got, the only real crime or mistake was not to make the most of it. The idea of the afterlife or eternity was just what it was revealed to be here: rubbish. Rubbish that no one wanted, that no one could set any value by. What was here was the aftermath of life itself, what was left when your time was up.

  At Harishchandra ghat some kind of happening was in progress. A group of five drummers were thrashing out a hectic rhythm. A bunch of old guys were freaking out, alternating between dancing and fighting. It was a combination of Bum Fight and a festival for brain-damaged veterans of the trance scene. Did the music placate or incite them? Impossible to say. At one moment they were all leaping around, throwing themselves on the floor. Then, without provocation, they hurled themselves into each other and the whole thing turned into a brawl. There were no obvious alliances or sides – or, if there were alliances, they changed too swiftly for the neutral observer to keep track of them – but, at some point, a few of the other participants tried to break it all up. Wrestling turned to embracing. A man who, a few minutes earlier, had been fighting was now gyrating like a belly dancer, stroking an invisible phallus into a state of massively imagined engorgement. Then the music started again and it all kicked off again. Or the music stopped and it all kicked off again. Those who had tried to calm things down now became the instigators of a further round of hostilities. The longer I watched, the more difficult it became to detect any order, pattern, or loyalties. It was a little bit of mayhem that, while constantly threatening to get completely out of control, never quite did. Everyone involved was having a good time.

  I had to walk around the participants to get back to the Ganges View. As I did so, one of them came lurching back into me. On impulse I shoved him back into the mêlée. No one seemed bothered by this retaliation. At close range the banging of the drums was intense, hypnotic. I nodded my head for a bit and then began dancing. After a few minutes another guy bashed into me and I lurched back into someone else. I didn't let go completely, took care not to reel and lurch into the really crazy guys, but once you were in the midst of it, all this lurching and reeling was actually less dangerous than it seemed from the outside, to an onlooker. It was really just an open-air mosh pit, located – inappropriately to western sensibilities – ten yards from where a funeral was in progress.

  Shortly after making my trip to the other side, I did something else I'd intended doing for ages: I went into the temple at Kedar ghat. In the time since I had been in Varanasi, the pale blue stripes had faded to the white I'd originally taken them to be. I remembered how, on my first day here, Varanasi had looked like a decrepit seaside resort. With its pink and white horizontal steps and vertical stripes, Kedar was the epicentre of this impression: it seemed to have taken inspiration from a stick of rock and a deckchair. Such a possibility was not so far-fetched. Nothing if not accommodating, Hinduism could easily incorporate the idea that Shiva once spent a long weekend – about ten thousand years, say – in Brighton, before there were mods and rockers, when even the humblest B&B was the size of the Pavilion.

  The roof was rimmed with statues of the gods, bright and cheerful as garden gnomes. The sun was pounding down on the pink and white steps. It was the hottest day of the year so far, by far. Relative to how hot it would be two months from now, when it would be unbearably hot, it was not hot at all, but this did not make it feel any cooler. I walked up the pink and white steps towards the pink and white stripes of the temple, where horizontal became vertical. I took off my sandals and stepped inside. The darkness flickered with candles. Just being inside, out of the sun, was nice. Bells were being rung. My eyes adjusted, grew accustomed to the dark. The walls were painted the
same mauvey blue as the steps outside, before they faded. There was a Pollock-splatter of the same blue on the tiled floor, some yellow columns. The green and white tiles on the walls would not have been out of place in an old dairy.

  The temple was dedicated to Shiva – there he was, goldhatted, all blue and all-powerful – but this didn't mean the other gods and their consorts were excluded. On the contrary. They were all here; all different, all the same, all one. All for one and one for all. I walked clockwise round the temple. At the back, in what looked like a jail cell, a holy man with a knotted mane of white hair and beard mumbled words and tended a small flame as if it were a frail bird to be coaxed back to life. He was focused intensely on the flame and the words he was saying. It didn't sound like an incantation, or only like the vestiges of one at any rate, as if the words he'd used to get him to where he was now could only be dimly recalled and lacked the power to bring him back. Not that he had any desire to return. He spoke the words as if asleep, words that suggested that wakefulness was a kind of sleep and only those who slept deeply could awake to the dream of life. Completely oblivious to my presence – and, I suspect, to his own – he would have looked equally at home in a madhouse as a place of worship. He shuffled along in his cell, which was not a cell at all, any more than the universe itself is a cell. Bounded in a nutshell and a king of infinite space! A shame, in a way, thatHamlet had not been translated into Sanskrit – though it's quite possible that an audience of sixteenth-century Brahmins would have dismissed the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy as a lot of mumbo-jumbo on the grounds that being and not being were one and the same, that non-being was the highest form of being, that being was itself illusion. A boy was saying hello, asking ‘Where from?’ I smiled, said ‘Mars,’ and walked on. I wanted to be on my own but that idea made no sense either. Why be on my own when I could be giving someone money to tell me things I already knew? A dusty pole of sunlight poked in from the outside, illuminating a piece of Sanskrit written on a wall. The boy pointed at the light, which pointed at the sacred text like the finger of a slow reader moving across the page of a difficult book. I continued moving too and the boy tagged along, keeping fractionally ahead of me, thereby subtly suggesting that he was being employed to guide me. He named the various deities tucked into their little niches, many daubed with fresh vermilion or garlanded with flowers. A white marble Vishnu and a grey stone Vishnu lived next to each other, in adjacent petal-scattered shrines. I found myself momentarily outside, visiting a three-eyed Ganesh, tangerine-coloured, sunlit.