Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

by Home

  It says something about our relationship that I told all this to Laline – it was actually she who supplied the anal-sex gag. We were friends; the idea was to keep each other entertained. She was extremely attractive, but we were just friends, in the same way that Darrell and I were friends – though not, it turned out, in the way that she and Darrell were friends.

  There are certain men who, without ever making any attempt to attract them, always seem to have beautiful girlfriends. It simply happens. I don't mean successful, ambitious men for whom getting what they want is second nature, who acquire women as part of a general rapaciousness. No, the kind of man I have in mind often lacks drive and ambition. That lack of effort, the absence of any kind of pushiness in either the worldly or romantic realm, is probably part of their attraction.

  Except on one occasion – so exceptional it had made me feel like a different person – I'd never had that ‘if it happens, it happens’ attitude that seems almost to guarantee that something will happen. Without the desire – or maybe ambition is a better word – to render myself attractive, without cultivating all the things that made me attractive to women, I was not attractive to women. And this holds true for most other men too. That leaves a tiny minority, laid-back, often good at yoga, not even particularly funny, usually completely lacking in vanity, whom beautiful women gravitate towards. Darrell was like that, with the considerable bonus of a GSOH thrown in. The one thing he lacked – a lack so crucial that it appeared to undermine this little idea of mine – was … a girlfriend.

  I found him easy to be around. I liked spending time with him. I enjoyed his company. I could see how, for a woman, this translated very easily into desiring him. And Laline could see this too. So I was able to observe my theory in the process of being proved right.

  If Darrell was a type of man I'd always been fascinated by, Laline was the kind of woman I had often fallen for. She was funny. She had long, dark hair. She made the cheap, nothing-special clothes she wore look like they were made by a designer whose name, a few years down the line, would be known by cool people in London and New York. She had a lightness of spirit. The way she treated everyone with whom she had any dealings – rickshaw drivers, waiters, other guests – was unfailingly considerate, patient. Her relation to the world was completely non-hierarchical. She remembered the names of all the boys working in the hotel, chatted with them in Hindi (that, she assured us, was nothing like as fluent as we imagined). She was beautiful, but I lacked whatever it was that might have attracted her to me, part of which was the urge to render myself attractive to her. One of the reasons for this was because she and Darrell were obviously attracted to each other.

  It is strange when two people fancy one another, when liking turns into reciprocated desire: it is tangible. You can see and feel it as a physical force, a kind of gravity. Even when they were talking, on opposite sides of the table, not touching, their arms were reaching towards each other. When they spoke, their lips were on the brink of touching, just through the words they used. I looked on. I didn't mind.

  The Ganges View had a good supply of Indian classical CDs, which could be played on the little boom-box in the dining room. Gradually Darrell siphoned this house supply of CDs onto his laptop – already well-stocked with Indian music – some of which, in turn, he transferred to my iPod. This was a breakthrough – and not only in terms of the amount of music to which I was exposed.

  Every morning on the ghats I came across people facing the rising sun, Indians and travellers alike, meditating, or doing yoga. No wonder yoga and meditation flourished here. It was an evolutionary necessity – a way of getting a bit of peace and quiet. The only place to go was in: you had to go in to keep the outside out, to keep it at bay. Tuning out meant you could be left alone for twenty minutes or so. And since those twenty minutes were so pleasurable, it was a logical next move to take it further and try to zone out forever, to regard the external world as no more than an irritating distraction and intrusion.

  Not being a meditator or a devotee of yoga, I started using my iPod to similar effect: listening to Indian music as a way of keeping the din of India at bay. It didn't always work. Walking along, insulated by headphones, deaf to the offers of ‘Boat?,’ meant that my attention had to be gained in other ways: by pokes, pulls and prods. In order to avoid getting asked if I wanted a boat, I took a boat. An hour-long journey: perfect for losing yourself in araga. But I was aware, after only a few minutes, of the boatman's lips moving. To ignore him was simply too rude. I took off my headphones. Every boatman, however limited his English, also wishes to serve as a guide. And so, pointing to the sign saying Jain ghat, he announced ‘Jain ghat.’ I smiled, put my headphones back on. The pattern repeated itself at every ghat. The sign was pointed out and its name pronounced. I gave up on the music, sat there on the boat I'd only taken in order to listen to music, letting him intone the many names of the ghats.

  When it worked, though, it was bliss, like inhabiting a campaign designed to expand the Apple brand into some as-yet-untapped realm of the global unconscious (i.e., market). As the boat drifted past the darkening ghats, I was caught in the ebb and sob of the sarangi. Sultan Khan was playing theraga Yeman. The current was strong enough for the boatman to do little but steer. Twilight was falling. Candles floated alongside the boat. The far bank had disappeared. Soon the stars would happen. The city curved along the western bank of the river. It could have been the coast of any popular tourist area – Amalfi, say – during a power cut, with just a few lights in homes equipped with generators, but with the unceasing fires of Manikarnika ghat in the distance. Tugged along by the sarangi and then urged on by the tabla, we passed a dead cat, floating in the water like a dark log.

  The state of the dogs of Varanasi was a source of constant, horrified fascination to all visitors. But in a city full of mangy dogs, one was unquestionably the mangiest, the worst in show. He hung out near Manikarnika and was covered in sores that rendered him incapable of sitting still. Instead he contrived ingenious ways to scratch various parts of his body. By ‘various parts of,’ I mean ‘entire.’ Even his tail was raw. Practising a form of kundalini yoga, he gripped his tail in his jaws and dragged it through his teeth as if trying to skin it. Head and ears he scratched with a back leg. His back he rubbed against the step behind him. His existence consisted of the awful Samsara of itching and scratching, itching and scratching. Fur had disappeared completely in places, leaving huge patches of pink, horribly human-looking skin. It was as if a botched reincarnation had taken place, as if the dog he were destined to become was still partly the human he had been – or vice-versa. And so his considerable physical torments came to seem the manifestation of what was obviously the far worse psychological malaise of being suspended between two lives, two species.

  The monkeys, by contrast, were perfectly at ease in their own skins, at one with their monkeyness. I was walking with Darrell and Laline, near Munshi ghat, when a gang of them came steaming along, like a mob of nightmares.

  ‘The wild bunch,’ said Darrell.

  ‘The dawn of the ASBO,’ I said.

  ‘The return of the repressed,’ said Laline.

  They were all these things. They were the opposite of gods, but one of them was a god. I had seen the orange blob of him, on the verge of abstraction, in his blue shrine at Munshi ghat. The three of us stood back, made way, while the monkeys bounded along, tore down some laundry that was hanging up to dry, and then leapt up the sheer walls of a building. It was as if the Grand National had been transferred to another species and taken to a vertiginous extreme. There were several fallers, but they all bounded back and continued their rampage.

  ‘It's likeSands of the Kalahari or something,’ Darrell said, but in a way it wasn't. Everyone agreed the monkeys were dangerous; no one ever suggested doing something about them, let alone wiping them out, exterminating the brutes. If it came to an all-out war, there could be only one victor; like this, in a guerrilla war, they were harassing us and
winning constant, small, usually banana-related victories. Although the monkeys had a bad reputation, I never saw anyone get directly harmed – attacked, scratched or bitten – by one. Apart from contributing to the general climate of disease, they livened the place up a bit – though, God knows, if there was one thing Varanasi didn't need it was livening up.

  Ever since I had first seen them trying to steal his sacred road atlas, the monkeys had been twinned in my mind with the holy man preaching by the film set. And now, a few minutes after the monkeys passed from view, we came across him again, at Tulsi ghat. He was having terrible trouble with his voice. He could hardly speak. Laline said this incapacity was probably the result of over-exerting himself in the course of the furious row she'd seen him involved in – about money, naturally – the day before. Whatever the cause, today he just rasped and croaked. Occasionally he coughed, an invocation to the soothing god Strepsil. The people listening to him could barely hear a word, but this didn't matter because he wasn't using words: he had gone beyond them to a post- or pre-verbal realm of croak, grunt and rasp. It didn't look like he was saying anything nice. Any enlightenment he was in receipt of and imparting to others seemed of a harsh, dark nature. The usual stuff, presumably: do this, don't do that. Or perhaps I'm being unfair. Maybe he was a storyteller and his stories were about being nice to animals and wives and not bearing a grudge lest you be reborn as a termite mound. Or perhaps he was telling the story of his own life, of what had brought him to this hoarse pass. A shadow of his former oratorical self, he was still a venerable figure, able to work the crowd, to compel attention in the face of competition, not all of it stiff.

  The crusties, for example, who, back at Assi, were treating anyone who was interested – and quite a few who weren't – to one of their so-called performances. The woman I sort of fancied – the woman who, if circumstances had been entirely different, I would have fancied – was part of the performance in some unspecified way, even if she was not actually doing anything. Her hair was tied back with a length of dark ribbon. She had a gold nose-stud, full lips, dark brown eyes. One of her friends was playing a three-stringed instrument that I did not recognize but which, evidently, was of such limited technical and expressive range that competence on it could be obtained in ten minutes, mastery in an hour. At one point, he asked her to pass him his bag. He used her name: Isobel. For me, this was the highlight of the performance, worth the price of free admission alone. The bag was embroidered yellow and black, decorated with dime-sized mirrors, which lit up, as she handed it to him, with flashes of hair, face, sky. Her fingers were long, ringless.

  Another guy was blowing a didge. A couple of others played drums of various kinds – though not the tabla, of course; the tabla is complicated. They had drawn a crowd but, in India, this is no sign of even rudimentary ability. It is simply to say they were in India, for Indiais a crowd. There were plenty of people around and, as long as their gaze was turned in the direction of the scruffs, they constituted an audience.

  So, Isobel…

  There were some proper concerts too. One of them was held in a large marquee behind Tulsi ghat, illuminated by white and green fluorescent tubes. Lal, Darrell and I sat down near one of these tubes and immediately wished we hadn't. The lights attracted a dreadful swarm of bugs. In anticipation of the concert, we'd all got stoned beforehand and this intensified the horror of the swarm-storm. We moved to more distant seats and then sat back and watched the next lot of unfortunates take their turn at being swarmed at.

  The audience could not have been more mixed: Indian and western, Sikh, Muslim and Hindu, men and women, young, old and unbelievably old, possibly even immortal. I spotted Ashwin and we waved to each other as if it were the nineteenth century and we were at La Scala for an opera. There was no sign of Isobel. Being stoned might have played a part in this, but I was conscious that this occasion was somehow significant for Laline and Darrell and their relationship. In several ways – all of them, apart from the unavoidable fact of their shared knowledge of Indian classical music, infinitely discreet – both were with each other more than either was with me. Earlier that day, as I was coming back from Manikarnika in a boat, I'd glanced up at the terrace of the Lotus Lounge and seen them there, arms round each other. As the boat skulked upstream, I looked up from time to time like some sad fuck in a Henry James novel, relieved that they'd not seen me seeing them.

  At the centre of the stage was a carpet, as thick with colour as the floor of a forest in autumn. More colour was provided by garlands of flowers and the paintings of Shiva on the backdrop to the stage, all bathed in the warm light of candles. The concert was preceded by a long series of speeches and tributes as various pandits and gurus were introduced to the audience. No one showed any signs of impatience to move on to the nominal purpose of the evening: to listen to music.

  When the musicians took to the stage, Laline – sitting between Darrell and me – warned that this should not be interpreted as a sign that music was in any way imminent. Just getting comfy took a while. The singer was wearing a dull green sari. She must have been sixty, was grand-looking, stern, hefty. She supervised the tuning of the tampura, sipped water without letting the bottle touch her lips, and waited. The sarangi was tuned (no small feat; learning to tune the sarangi takes as long as it does to learn to play most instruments), the tabla was tuned. Or at least that's how it seemed. But it wasn't the instruments that were being tuned, Laline whispered; it was the musicians, tuning themselves to theraga. Then the singer introduced the first piece.

  Within minutes of starting to sing, she was transformed. It was like hearing a girl, dark-haired and lovely as the gopis Krishna had spied on from his tree-top hideaway. I had no idea what she was singing about, could not even tell when the words stopped being words and became just syllables, gliding sound. Her hands reached into the air above her as if the notes were growing there and, as long as they were picked endlessly, over and over, would always be there. Music people talk about perfect pitch, but what her voice made me think of was perfect posture: hair as long and straight as a supple back; bare feet moving so lightly they scarcely touched the ground. Her voice promised absolute devotion; but then the note was stretched further still, beyond this, until you wondered what you would have to do to be worthy of such devotion, such love. You would have to be that note, not the object of devotion but the devotee. Her voice slid and swooped. It was like those perfect moments in life, moments when what you hope for most is fulfilled and, by being fulfilled, changed – changed, in this instance, into sound: when, in a public place, you glimpse the person you most want to see and there is nothing surprising about it; the pattern in the random, when accident slides into destiny. A note was stretched out as long as possible and then a little longer; it continued, somewhere, long after it was capable of being heard. It is still there, even now.

  * * *

  Laline and I were walking by Mahanirvani ghat in the fading light. The first candles were floating downriver. A cricket match was in progress. We stood and watched for a couple of overs, were about to leave when the batsman swiped the ball high into the air. It was coming in my direction, three feet above my head, towards the Ganges. I jumped up and caught it, one-handed. The ball smacked wetly into my fingers and stuck there. In the realm of myth, I had grabbed a blazing comet from the sky and stopped it in its tracks. Even now, on a Tuesday afternoon, in poor light, it was a spectacular catch. There were cheers and applause, from Laline and from the players and the scattered spectators. The batsman was clapping. I raised my arms to the sky, still holding the dirty ball, basking in the praise that was my due. Then I threw it back to the bowler and we continued walking to the Ganges View.

  I was glad Laline had been there to witness and corroborate my catch. It is not enough to perform a god-like action. It must be seen – ideally, by the gods. I wasn't sure of the extent to whichdarshan was a reciprocal idea. Of course the gods needed to be seen, but did they also like to watch? Were they spectators too?
Did they look at us with all the love and awe with which we – or some of us – regarded them? If that was the case, then the earlier comparison with Beckham and celebrity was faulty. For the one thing celebrities are not free to do is tolook. The sunglasses they are obliged to hide behind are the symbolic expression of the blindness to which they are condemned by always being lookedat. On my first day at the ghats I'd felt like a visiting royal and, increasingly in the weeks that followed, I'd been conscious of living like a celebrity, of being the object of constant curiosity and scrutiny. I may have despised them, may have done nothing to deserve such attention, but this was something I had in common with the crusties. There was lots to see, there was more to see in ten minutes here, in godly Varanasi, than there was in a week in ungodly London, but there were plenty of things and places one thought twice about doing and seeing because of the quite amazing commotion it generated. I am not being vain or deluded. There were occasions when even the simple task of trying to take a rickshaw caused a turf war of bidding. A visit to the Durga temple had made even routine sight-seeing seem more hassle than it was worth.