by Home
The next day I made another new friend – or at least had another conversation. A long flight of blue and white steps near Shivala ghat led up to the Mother Rytasha Bookshop and Café. At the top, sitting on one of two white chairs, was Andre Agassi. Not Agassi as he is now (or was a few years ago, at the time of his retirement): shaven-headed, loveable; a duck-waddle Buddha with a two-fisted backhand. This was Agassi in his rebelliously marketable early twenties: long hair, earring, baseball cap, unshaven. I sat down on the other seat, unsure if he worked here or was simply a customer. A bit of both, it turned out. His friend Chandra ran the place and he came by and hung out and helped. He sounded American, his name was Ashwin, and the resemblance to Agassi – I could not help mentioning it – was not entirely fanciful. Like Agassi, he was of Persian descent.
‘But you're American?’
‘In this incarnation.’
‘How about previous ones? Do you know where you were from in them?’
‘From God.’
‘Sticking, for a moment, to this incarnation, where are you from in America?’
Ashwin was from California, had been in Varanasi four weeks. Right now he was just back from volunteering at one of Mother Rytasha's eye camps in Bangladesh, where inexpensive operations for cataracts and other easily curable conditions were performed. I had not heard of Mother Rytasha, so he fetched me an illustrated book about her. She had pale skin and looked like her nose had been worked on by the same surgeon who'd done Michael Jackson's. It was impossible to say how old she was. Obviously, she was a force for good. All of the money she raised went entirely on doing work for the poor. Ashwin had met her in Santa Fe, where she was doing some work on the rich, fund-raising. He had gone with all the usual scepticism, but when he had seen her, he had felt this emanation from her of pure love. Even so, he was not convinced. He went away. Then, later in the day, he came across her again. She was sitting with friends in a park, under a tree, and once again she had looked at him and he had felt her love – not love for him, love for everyone, for the world, just love – filling his heart. Through his love for her, he had found God.
‘Which particular god?’ I asked. I did not mean to sound cynical, but we were in India, there were lots to choose from, and some kind of clarification seemed essential. He pressed his hands together and raised his eyes to the … heavens, I suppose you would call them.
‘The god of love,’ he said. It was a good, non-sectarian answer. I couldn't fault it, but at some level I did fault it of course. He told me more about Mother Rytasha and the things she did, all of which – there was no doubt on this score either – made the world a better place. Even so, there was something about the blissed-out look in Ashwin's eyes that made me think of heavy doses of Prozac or Zoloft. The love he was full of – genuine, absolute, unconditional, commendable, life-enhancing – was all that stood between him and the nervous breakdown that, like the night in Ackerman's pictures, lay in wait. The love would keep it at bay but, eventually, would leave him more susceptible to it. Part of me even hoped I might be here to see it happen.
Still, it had been nice drinking a Coke and hearing him talk. We shook hands, said we'd see each other around.
I checked out of the Taj and into the Ganges View. I called the airline, cancelled my existing booking and got confirmed on another notional flight to London a couple of weeks from now. I was in no hurry to leave Varanasi, but I was glad to be changing hotels. The excitement and noise of the daily journey to and from the ghats had become a chore – a commute – and I had grown bored with the sanitized comfort of the Taj. I was so happy to be at the Ganges View that I spent the whole of the first day on the terrace, ordering lunch and drinks, reading. Or trying to.
I'd bought a pile of books on Hinduism from the Harmony bookshop – the shop I'd been to with Darrell – but found it difficult to concentrate on them. However hard I tried, I could not keep track of who was who and what was what. It was impossible to tell if the person in one part of a story was the same one in another part, a few pages later. Everyone was an avatar of everyone else. No one was just themselves. Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna – they were all each other. It was like a world in which Thor, instead of banging his hammer and turning back into frail Don Blake, was re-ignited as the Human Torch (who was also Doctor Doom) or – even more bafflingly – into a guest star from a rival mythological system: the Green Lantern, say, or Lois Lane. (A surprising oversight on the part of Marvel that the super-heroic potential of Hinduism was so under-utilized.) Even when they were not each other, they were always turning themselves into something else to punish a rival or get themselves out of a jam. Since their powers were unlimited, the jams in which they found themselves could never generate much suspense. The names were essential – nothing was more important than the names – but they were infinitely flexible, shared. Another problem was that the epic antics of these gods – all those yarns about eggs the size of planets, drops of water forming great lakes, the blink of an eye shutting out the sun, errands lasting tens of thousands of years – were exactly the kind of things I'd always had trouble reading. After a fling with Gabriel García Márquez, I'd come to detest even a hint of magic realism in fiction. As soon as I came to a passage in a novel where the trees started talking to each other, I gave up on the spot. Compared with what went on in the Hindu myths, trees talking to each other seemed like scrupulous reporting, documentary. This was magic realism without any vestige of the real. Maybe you had to absorb it all as a kid, and just get lost in the fabulousness of theMahabharata or theRamayana , and then, as a result of that early exposure, your brain would be configured or formatted in such a way that it all made a kind of sense that was simultaneously allegorical and literal, fantastic and believable. For me, obviously, that possibility was long passed.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself, though, because I did learn a few things. Most of the books had glossaries, and although I didn't understand all of the terms, it was good to see where things like Shakti (the group formed by John McLaughlin, Shankar and Zakir Hussain in the 1970s), Rasa (the restaurant in Stoke Newington), Samsara (as in ‘Escape from,’ the trance club) or Surya (as in Surya Samudra, the resort in Kerala) derived their names.
Thanks to Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, notions of karma and dharma had become common currency, but words likemoksha, bhakti androcana were new to me. Terms like these didn't lend themselves to straightforward translation because they were ideas that did not have an equivalent in our limited western consciousness. One concept that did make sense wasdarshan: the act of divine seeing, of revelation. This was what Hindus went to the temple for: to see their god, to have him or her revealed to them. The more attention paid to a god, the more it was looked at, the greater its power, the more easily it could be seen. You went to see your god and, in doing so, you contributed to its visibility; the aura emanating from it derived in part from the power bestowed on it.
It was an easy idea to grasp because of its secular equivalent, the worship of celebrity. The more celebrities were photographed, the stronger their aura of celebrity became. I'd once seen David Beckham step off a coach at La Manga in Spain. Obviously, I'd seen photographs of him before and now the cumulative effect of having seen all those photographs was making itself felt. The flash of camera lights made him radiant, glossy, divine. I saw him in all his Beckhamness and Beckhamitude. Someone who had not seen the thousands of pictures, who was not familiar with the changes of hairstyle, the viral spread of tattoos (including the misspelt bit of Hindi on his forearm), would not have seen him in this way. But maybe the point of view of that hypothetical and implausible onlooker – the person who didn't know they were seeing David Beckham – was more revelatory, at the very least, more interesting, than that of the rest of us who understood exactly who and what we were seeing. Here in Varanasi, the ill-informed tourist did not see the same city that the thousands of pilgrims saw, the pilgrims who came here and the ones who lived here. But this was not to say that the visitor was
not capable of his own form ofdarshan. Even if I didn't know what I was looking at, I could still see. And if ever somewhere was designed with the eye in mind – there was probably a Sanskrit term meaning exactly eye-in-mind – then Varanasi was that place.
Next morning there was nothing to see. The river, the ghats, even the sky, had disappeared. A dense fog obliterated everything except a few vague details: the blurred shape of the temple next door, dark figures moving in the street below. I dressed and went down to the ghats, heard people coughing before I saw them, a few feet away. Boat rides were still being offered even though, with nothing to see, there was no point in taking one. Then I did see something: a boat, emerging from the haze as if returning from the realm of the dead or the undead. There were two passengers, swathed in grey blankets. After a while they drifted away again and merged silently into the larger, greyer blanket of fog. There were a few squares of colour – the yellow of a sign, the blue of a wall – but infinitely subdued and dampened, shadows of their usual selves.
The mist cleared, unnoticed, before midday, making the afternoon seem even brighter than usual. A kingfisher appeared on the wall of the Ganges View terrace, eager to be seen, to re-exist. The sky, when I went out again, was busy with kites. At Munshi ghat I noticed a small blue shrine, the size of an emergency phone on the side of a motorway. In the middle of the shrine, where the phone would have been, was an orange blob, a worn blur of a shape. Within the general roundness, it was possible to make out the lump of a body and the smaller lump of a head, but more rounded, less defined than a Henry Moore version of an Indian god. Who was it? Ganesh? It could have been any of them. There was not even a residue of definition, but this did not suggest that its power had been diminished or had shrunk; the sense was that its essence had become more concentrated. The feeling was not of erosion or diminution, but of withdrawal. The god, whoever it was, had retreated into itself. By reducing itself almost to nothing, by coming so close to that which could not be identified as itself, it had became more nakedly itself. I felt sure of this, even though I did not know who or what I was seeing.
‘Who is that?’ I asked a boy.
‘Hanuman,’ he replied instantly. Because he recognized the monkey god (because he couldsee that it was him?) or because he knew that this is what the blob was, because he knew that this blue shrine was the place – one of the places – where Hanuman lived? The questions were irrelevant. They were the same. This orange, blurry blob was Hanuman.
‘Very powerful god,’ the boy added. The fact that his identity was not in doubt, that the boy had not hesitated to say his name, was proof of that.
I took a boat home. Kites flew over the city, like embers floating over a bonfire.
The fog reappeared the following morning, and the morning after that. In addition to the fog, temperatures had plummeted throughout northern India. Newspapers were full of reports about freezing temperatures – ‘as the mercury plummeted … ’ – and travel disruption. Flights were cancelled and there were severe ‘delayments’ to all destinations. Trains from Delhi arrived in Varanasi ten hours late. Kite-flying was adversely affected.
Once the fog had gone – after the initial novelty had worn off, I was glad to see the back of it – the volume of kites in the sky increased daily. There were kite strings everywhere. In their thin, resilient way, they had tied up the entire city. The oars of boats were wrapped in them. It was impossible to walk more than a couple of steps without becoming tangled in them. They flailed from every tree and dangled from every telegraph pole like broken wires.
I saw many of the same people, the same kite-flying kids, the same hustlers, the same boatmen. Older, more affluent-looking tourists stayed only a few days before moving on to Agra or Kerala. I rarely saw any of them two days running. The backpackers stayed longer, and the longer they stayed the more closely they conformed to an international standard of scruffiness. Quite a few had dreadlocks anyway, some – like Ashwin, whom I bumped into a couple of times – opted for turbans that had started out as sarongs. The women wore shawls to protect themselves from the daytime sun and the evening chill, and also as a concession to local standards of modesty. Most of these travellers were in their twenties, here for enlightenment, yoga, charas-smoking, spiritual growth, liberation. They were apprentice seekers, and in Varanasi there were dozens – probably hundreds, possibly thousands – of gurus and guides to help them bust out of the prison of the ego or get fast-tracked to enlightenment or wherever else they wanted to go. Most would return home several pounds lighter (the weight and the currency), but otherwise vastly enriched by the experience; some would go seriously off the rails – Varanasi's reputation for sending people nuts rivalled its reputation for making them ill – and a few, in time, would turn into versions of the older guys who were here, guys my age, many of whom looked like they'd done a decade or more in Goa. They often had the slightly hardened look of men accustomed to spending evenings on their own, readingMr Nice or selections from Gurdjieff. Like me, they were often to be found on the terrace of the Lotus Lounge, eating excellent pancakes, drinking cappuccinos (the best in Varanasi) or chai. We nodded at each other but, like blacks at an otherwise all-white cocktail party, tacitly avoided forming any kind of alliance because that would have exacerbated our mutual status as age-outcastes. Not that the young people were unfriendly – they were just young. Even that is not right; it's not that I felt they were young so much as I thought how old I must appear from their point of view. In their shoes, I would not have paid any attention to a man of my age. I'd have been concentrating all my energies on persuading the young girls in their T-shirts and shawls that there was no danger of my standards of modesty being offended by any behaviour, however licentious.
These young people may not have been here for sex, but they were certainly here for death. They were as keen to see corpses being burned at Manikarnika ghat as the next person – me, for example. I'd never seen a dead body before, but in Varanasi the procession of death was endless. I got used to seeing mourners carrying litters through the streets, chanting'Rama nama satya hai… Rama nama satya hai… taking the body to the river, dipping it in the Ganges. The random details that had caught my eye that first afternoon were part of an unvarying ceremony, re-enacted dozens of times every day. The mood was never sombre because the dead did not appreciate displays of grief. The man with the shaved head, dressed only in a white cloth, was the chief mourner. Having his head and eyebrows shaved was part of a ritual that left him suspended between the living and the dead. He led the other mourners five times around the unlit pyre, anti-clockwise (because, in death, everything is reversed). He was the one who poured sandalwood onto the pyre, before lighting it from a sacred fire that never goes out, that has burned since the world was created, here in Varanasi, at Manikarnika ghat, where it will end, except it will never end, any more than the journey from life to death will end.
It took hours for a body to burn. Near the end of the cremation the chief mourner cracked open the skull with a bamboo pole, releasing the soul from the body. Finally he tossed a pot of Ganges water over his shoulder – always his left shoulder – to symbolically extinguish the embers of the pyre. Without looking back, he walked briskly away. It was over. The soul had begun its journey to join the ancestors on the far shore. That journey would last eleven days, days of mourning and feasts. On the twelfth day, if all had gone well, if all the rituals had been correctly observed, it would arrive, safely.
The fact that the far bank was deserted made it easy to believe that the journey was more than a physical one. The reason the far bank was empty, a young boy with an old face explained, was that if you died over there you would be reborn as a donkey.
On this side, meanwhile, the area around the cremation ground was always dense with activity. The journey from life to death never stopped, and nothing stopped here at the urdeparture lounge. Funerals were always in progress, but there were always other things going on as well: arguments, kiteflying, card games, music
, yoga, bathing. A few yards beyond the cremation ground was Varanasi's leaning tower of Pisa: a temple that had collapsed or subsided in the mud of the river's edge. If it had once been painted Prayag-pink, now it was the dull, neglected brown of riverbank mud. From some angles it looked as if it sloped only slightly; from others it seemed on the brink of toppling over completely. I'd thought its vulnerability might have made it a particularly auspicious place to worship, but this, apparently, was not the case. It was, however, impossible to conclude that it had become entirely obsolete, that its power had been completely cut off simply because it had fallen on hard times. It was just an old temple that had gone on the wonk and was left to its own devices. Like a volcano which was somehow neither active nor extinct – nor anything in between – it still looked good in photographs. As such it remained viable, did its bit, brought something to the table. If it had a name, I did not know it.