Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

by Home

  Continuing my policy of doing whatever everyone else was doing, I left Manikarnika and joined the boatloads of tourists for the daily ceremony at Dashaswamedh ghat. We were joined, in turn, by kids selling the little candle-coracles that looked so nice as they drifted by. They were all selling the same thing and all saying the same thing:

  ‘Five rupees. Father, mother, sister, brother. Good karma.’

  I bought a couple, lit them and watched them wobble and float away. They were lovely, and it was lovely, at first, being on the crowded water in the faded light, waiting for things to begin. Almost as soon as it began, though, the ceremony became disappointing. You didn't have to be a particularly discerning tourist to see that this was an exhausted pageant, drummed up for tourists, ason et lumière with a cast of hundreds. Any significance it was supposed to have had been drained, possibly a long time ago or maybe just yesterday, or even now, right before our eyes. The event had bled itself white, but each night it had to bleed afresh, which only made it seem more stale and bloodless. It was like trying to glimpse, in a performance ofThe Mousetrap , the ravaged majesty ofMacbeth. The air was frantic with bugs, dense with harshly amplified chanting, the sound of conches and the clamour of bells. I left before the end, before it had even got going.

  I was back at the river before dawn the next day, just as the sky turned grey. It was a lot colder than I expected. Icy. But not cold enough to deter the hundreds of people who had come to bathe in the Ganges. Right on time, the red sun boiled up through the river mist. The world, having disappeared overnight, was coming into existence again. The far bank remained vague, a greyness without substance: formless, qualityless.

  Together with other tourists from the Taj, I was on a boat, drifting along the river as people bathed, said prayers, offeredpuja. I say ‘drifting,’ but we were actually going upstream, rowed by a boatman who had to work hard to keep us moving. The effort kept him warm. He'd taken off his sweater and was wearing a short-sleeved red shirt. The rest of us were all in anoraks or swathed in blankets. Wrapped in our blankets we gawped at the skinny, shivering, near-naked Indians, some of them quite fat, men and women, young and old, bathing in the freezing river. We assumed it was freezing, coming from the Himalayas, though none of us touched it to find out. The only thing we wanted on our hands was the anti-bacterial handwash that we all carried. There were four of us from the Taj – the more adventurous of the guests, in that we had come down to the ghats without a guide. We had with us just our warm clothes, cameras and a driver waiting. Jean and Paul were a Canadian couple, in their fifties, open-minded as an expanse of snow. Mary was a Dutchwoman, in her late thirties, nice enough but exuding a loneliness doomed to exacerbate and extend itself indefinitely. The expression ‘She's not my type’ had a kind of universal applicability: she was not anyone's type. She'd been told that dolphins lived in the Ganges and could occasionally be seen.

  ‘That seems hard to believe,’ I said. It was a negative thing to say, but it was not intended negatively, and it was not the last word on the subject anyway because Jean had heard the same thing from someone who had actually seen them.

  The walls and windows of the riverside palaces loomed and blazed anciently in the horizontal light. The fact that the light is horizontal does not mean that the buildings are ancient. The light is horizontal, but the buildings are not ancient. The light is ancient, the buildings are not. None of them is older than the eighteenth century. The history of Varanasi is the history of how it gets razed to the ground and rebuilt, razed to the ground and rebuilt. No sooner has it been rebuilt than it looks like it's on its last legs. Every atom of the air is saturated by history that isn't even history, myth, so a temple built today looks, overnight, as if it's been there since the dawn of time.Every morning is the dawn of time , I wrote in my notebook.Every day is the whole of time.

  Most of the ghats had their names painted in faded, bright letters: Chousatti ghat. Ranamahal ghat. Munshi ghat – where some kind of film or pop video was being made. The brightness of the sun wasn't bright enough. Extra lights were brought in to make the scene blaze whitely. Kshameshwar ghat, with a faded yellow temple standing unfilmed in front of it, looked dull by comparison. A sign, also yellow, at Chauki ghat, read: ‘Ganga is the life-line of Indian culture.’ The temple at Kedar ghat was painted in pink and white vertical stripes; the steps leading down to the river were horizontal bands of pink and white: Op Art of a kind. The edge of the temple roof was crowded with gods painted the colour of toys, jostling for position, looking out at us as we gazed, admiringly, at them. Dhobis were in the river up to their thighs, thwacking sheets and clothes on rocks, beating them into a state of submissive cleanliness. Ten yards upstream was Harishchandra ghat, the other cremation ground. Much less of a spectacle than the one at Manikarnika. Not many people. A few dogs picking through the ashes. With only one fire burning, Harishchandra's identifying feature was a square yellow and black structure. It resembled a squat lifeguard's tower but, like everything else, it was a shrine or temple or both.

  ‘I've got to say,’ said Paul, ‘if it'd been up to me, I'd have done it the other way round. Put the cremation site downstream from the laundrette.’

  ‘Me too,’ I laughed. But I was also remembering the philosopher who asked, rhetorically, ‘Where did logic come from?’ From illogic, of course. In this sense, illogic was upstream from logic. We were heading upstream.

  A boat sidled up alongside our boat. The man was selling those little candle dishes that I'd seen floating down the river the night before.

  ‘Good karma,’ he assured us, but no one in our boat wanted any karma, good or bad. A man of uncertain age was in the river up to his shoulders, praying, oblivious to the cold. Next to him a white-haired man was washing himself thoroughly, using a polythene bag as a flannel. We rowed past the UP Pollution Control Boat. No longer part of the solution, it was rusting away into the river, becoming part of the problem. Behind it, on the steps of Jain ghat, was a mustard-brown temple that was not doing any business at all; behind that, a pale blue structure that looked like the exterior of a municipal Lido.

  The other members of our expedition were taking the boat back to Dashaswamedh. I got out at Assi, the last of the ghats on the city's curving riverfront. Most of the other ghats were made of concrete steps, but Assi was just a bare mud bank sloping down to the river. Spotting me walk up this slope, a man hurried over to ask if I wanted a boat.

  ‘I've just got off a boat,’ I said. Even as I said this, I realized the irrelevance of my response. All that mattered was that I was not on a boat at the precise moment the question was posed. I was therefore available, a potential boat-taker. No calculation had been made as to the chances of the offer of a boat being taken up; the important thing was to lodge the offer before anyone else was able to. Sound-wise, the clamour of bells from a temple competed with Indian pop music being played over a sound system pushed beyond limits that were yet to be absolutely established.

  The sun was warm now. A goat jogged by, white except for the feet and legs, which made it look as if it were wearing dainty black socks. There was a little row of shops and a guest house with families of beggars sitting outside, still cold from the night. The air smelled of wood smoke.

  It was only eleven but, having been up since the dawn of time, I was in need of lunch. I ordered daal and rice at a place with moulded red chairs on a terrace overlooking the river. The opposite bank was no longer quite as insubstantial as it had appeared earlier. A few other people arrived, one of whom sat at the table next to mine. He was in his early thirties, hair cut army-short. His arms were tanned, roped with muscle. He was wearing a navy WKCR T-shirt, faded jeans and aviator shades. Below the shades, on his right cheekbone, was a U-shaped scar. All of this, together with his bright smile, gave him the look of an actor playing the part of someone who had begun undercover work for the CIA. We said hi, asked each other the usual stuff: where we were from, where else in India we'd been. He ordered the same as me, the da
al and rice that had arrived at the table after he sat down. I washed my hands carefully with anti-bacterial handwash, said I hadn't been anywhere else, had come straight to Varanasi from London.

  ‘Jumped right in the deep end, huh?’ An American could probably have placed his accent, but to me he sounded simply American. He was originally from a small town in Illinois, but now lived in Oakland. He'd been in Chennai for the music season, during which time there were seventy concerts a day of south Indian classical music. It was amazing, he said. After a fortnight he felt like he didn't want to hear another note of music for the rest of his life. I asked which musicians he'd seen. He mentioned a lot of names I'd not heard of, and one or two that I had. I'd listened to quite a few musicians who'd been influenced by Indian music but, for me, ‘Indian’ was a vaguely defined part of the broader, much-derided classification of ‘World Music’ Eager to impress, I ran through the few names I did know: Shankar, Talvin Singh, Trilok Gurtu … I said I'd seen Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan play at the Hackney Empire in 1990. I mentioned Ry Cooder and the record he'd done with an Indian guy whose name I couldn't remember.

  ‘V. M. Bhatt,’ he said, not showing off, just helping out. ‘And I'm Darrell, by the way.’ After we'd shaken hands, a waiter brought his lunch and we both sat there, spooning up our daal in companionable silence. I liked him. There was a steadiness about him.

  When I'd finished eating, Darrell pulled a thick history of India from his bag, asked if I'd read it. I glanced through the battered pages, he continued eating.

  ‘No, I haven't,’ I said. ‘How is it?’

  ‘I'm finding it a struggle. The only thing that's keeping me going is the phrase “Indo-Gangetic Plain.” I just love that phrase.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘It's just… It's one of the great place names.’

  ‘It makes you really want to go there, doesn't it? To the Indo-Gangetic Plain.’

  ‘D'you think we're actually in it, even as we speak?’

  ‘You mean we're having a conversation about the Indo-Gangetic Plain in the Indo-Gangetic Plain? How cool is that?’

  ‘Thing is, I'm not sure exactly where it is. It's so big, it's difficult to say where it ends.’

  ‘Or begins.’

  ‘It's everywhere.’

  ‘It's nowhere.’

  ‘It's … ’

  ‘The Indo-Gangetic Plain.’

  From that moment on, I knew we were going to become friends.

  After lunch we walked to a bookshop where, as well as books, lots of classical music CDs – sitar, sarangi, and vocal – were on sale. Darrell flicked through a copy of Allen Ginsberg'sIndian Journals. There were several pages of photographs, including one of the bearded, bespectacled poet on a mouldy balcony in Varanasi, shaking hands with a nimble monkey, betraying no signs of speciesism (Ginsberg, I mean; the monkey approached the human with evident wariness).

  ‘You like Ginsberg?’ Darrell asked.

  ‘To be honest, I've always thought of him as a bit of a tosser.’ Like a wise monkey, I should perhaps have kept my opinion to myself, but Darrell bought the book anyway.

  Next door to the bookshop was a travel agency, where Darrell had to make arrangements for train tickets. He was planning on being away from Varanasi for a few weeks, after which he was going to return for a longer stay, at the Ganges View.

  ‘A friend in London recommended that hotel,’ I said.

  ‘It's super nice,’ he said. ‘Right along from here.’

  We said goodbye outside the bookshop. Given how little time we'd spent in each other's company, I was surprised to feel so disappointed that he was going away. I said I hoped I saw him again, before he left.

  ‘Bound to,’ he said. ‘It's a small town. Or at least the tourist bit is. The Ganges View is just a few doors down. Go take a look.’

  We said goodbye again and I walked up the steps to the Ganges View. From what Anand had said, I expected a Maharajah's converted palace, or a boutique version of the Taj Mahal, but it looked like quite a homely place. The man at the desk was so gentle he seemed reluctant to speak, as if to utter words was an expression of violent intent – or, more basically, to risk a red explosion of thepaan he was chewing. He consulted a piece of paper the size of a desktop, which can have made sense to no one but him. From the way he scrutinised it, I wasn't sure it made sense even to him. It had been arranged, sensibly enough, with room numbers along the top and dates down the side, but within this simple grid everything had been rubbed or crossed out and written over. There were two ways of looking at him looking at it: like a fortune-teller trying to discern the future from the random patterns of tea leaves in a cup or like an archaeologist confronted with some palimpsest in which the mysteries of an extinct civilization might be deciphered.

  ‘We have room from Tuesday,’ he said.

  ‘Tuesday,’ I repeated. I lost my bearings for a moment and had to ask what day it was today.

  ‘Today is Saturday.’

  That's right. Today was Saturday and Tuesday was the day I was due to fly back to Delhi, and from there to London. I asked if I could see the room. He said that although a room would be free, he did not yet know which room. Then he gestured to me to go inside, to take a look. On the first floor was a warm terrace, rimmed with potted flowers, large, with a view of the river. The opposite shore had acquired further definition, some kind of shape. A middle-aged couple was eating lunch. Right next door were the brown stupas of a couple of temples. A couple of parrots, green as limes, were sitting on a telephone wire. Everything was part of a couple, but that was fine.

  I peeked in a room, went back down the stairs and said I would take it. This was not strictly true. I intended flying back to London as planned, but my ticket was changeable and it is always a good feeling, keeping one's options open. He wrote my name in the column – if I had understood things correctly – for Room 9, even though this did not mean I would definitely be in Room 9. I said I would see him on Tuesday and he nodded, Indian-style, by shaking his head.

  I walked back along the ghats I'd passed earlier, on the boat. It was like strolling along the seafront at Hove, but there was more to see. A dog chewed what I thought was a chunk of wood but was actually the head of another dog, or maybe a fox. The dhobis had finished bashing their laundry. At several ghats the steps were covered in drying saris, the size of bright carpets on stairs. Whether they were cleaner now than before they were washed was difficult to say. Being damp, the dust clung to them. People kept asking me if I wanted a boat and I kept saying no. The man I'd seen from the boat was still there, praying, tranced out in the Ganges. He could have been there for weeks, years, even.

  I was trying – partly for my own sake, partly as research for the article I had to write – to get a rough idea of the sequence of the ghats, what each looked like, what went on at which. Mahanirvani was easy: it jutted out in a large concrete apron and was the place where buffalo roamed. They mooched around rather than roamed and a boy whose job it was sometimes gave them a thwack with a stick. Being water buffalo, the proximity of the river was a big plus. They took it in turns to kneel in it, or sit, and there were some cows too. Probably they did not even know there was such a thing as grass. As far as they were concerned, this was the prairie, only inedible. It wasn't a prairie, though, it was a cricket pitch and a skinny boy was stationed on the boundary, in amongst the cattle, to stop the ball flying into the Ganges for a six. The ball was a tennis ball, mud-brown and soggy, and the kid bowling looked like he meant it, but the kid batting meant it even more, and there was quite a wait while the ball was fished from the river by the kid who was meant to have stopped this happening. The whole scene was a persuasive essay on the decline of cricket in England.

  Some of the buildings faced outwards, enjoying the view. The one at Dandi ghat had its back turned to the river, like the outside of a football stadium whose team, recently relegated, played in orange and pale blue. The palace behind Karnataka State ghat had the tragic grandeur of a disused bing
o hall. The sense, on this stretch of the ghats, of hard times – of mass entertainment and faded glory – extended to Harishchandra, the cremation ground with the yellow and black lifeguard's tower. A couple of fires were smouldering and the golden trash of shroud and marigold at the water's edge appeared to have been there an age. The water looked left behind, lifeless.

  I passed Kedar ghat, the temple with the pink and white stripes. The white stripes were actually pale blue, it turned out. The offers of boats had not stopped all the time I was walking.