Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

by Home

  The temple was only a ten-minute walk from the hotel, was painted bright red, was so unmissable that it was hard to believe it took so long to find it. Inside the temple compound a sign said that non-Hindu gentlemen were not admitted into the temple itself. That was frustrating, but I was assured immediately that it was OK, I could go in. All I had to do was take off my shoes. The person who told me this claimed he was one of the priests, a Brahmin, but he looked and acted more like a janitor. A janitor who had been sacked or made redundant years earlier, but kept turning up for work anyway because he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. Before showing me the inner temple, he took me into a small, foul-smelling shrine. Paste was daubed on my forehead. Then someone else appeared, another janitor-priest who, despite my protestations, insisted on draping a garland of marigolds around my neck – the source, I realized, of the foul smell. It was as if they had been marinated in urine and then allowed to rot for several days. For the privilege of having this rank thing hung around my neck, I was expected to pay, naturally. I had only a hundred-rupee note, but managed to insist on fifty rupees change – no small achievement in a situation where change is not simply unavailable but practically inconceivable. The two janitor-priest-hustlers indicated that I should place the garland on thelingam , which I was happy to do. I was glad to be rid of the stinking thing. They then began ushering me towards the actual temple but, eager to avoid whatever horrors and hassles awaited in there, I climbed into my sandals and fled.

  Everything about the experience had been revolting. The rotten smell of the marigolds clung to me – the smell, I thought to myself as I stomped back to Assi ghat, of a religion that was primitive, dark and dank. It was ridiculous to aspire to the mindset that made it possible to see these rituals as sacred. No, this was a phase through which the species would eventually pass. It was like entering some backward part of the human psyche. And if it seemed like that to me, now, how must it have appeared to the missionaries who arrived here bearing the message of Christianity – clean and bloody, dreary as a Sunday in Wales – in whichever century it was that they came? The idolaters with their mumbling jumbo and theirpuja must have seemed scarcely less horrifying than Apaches with warpaint and the scalps of pale faces hanging from their bareback saddles.

  At Vats Yaraj ghat was a sign that read ‘I LOVE MY INDIA.’ I often felt like calling out ‘Me too!,’ but after that visit to the Durga temple it just bugged the shit out of me. Literally. I had picked up some kind of bug and was always having to dash back to the hotel to use the toilet. It was nothing too serious, nothing compared with what some tourists were suffering. People in the hotel were dropping like flies. Actually, that's not the right expression at all, for the flies were thriving. And how could they not? In my teens there'd been a craze for offensive T-shirts and posters that urged you to ‘Eat shit – ten million flies can't be wrong.’ Maybe the posters originated here, for there was shit everywhere in the City of Light (as Varanasi had once been called). Every kind of shit: animal (monkey, goat, cow, buffalo, dog, bird, donkey, cat, goose), vegetable (the abandoned marigolds formed a stinking mush) and (last but not least) human. In certain auspicious places there was probably even god shit. Prahbu ghat, where the dhobis pounded their laundry into submission, also doubled as a default toilet ghat. It was horrible walking along there. The sight entered your eyeballs and the stench entered your nostrils. I felt like writing a sign next to the ‘I LOVE MY INDIA’ sign: ‘If you love it so much, then don't shit all over it.’ Surely it was in everyone's interest to introduce and enforce a law to prevent people from shitting on the ghats. Surely, however poor and ignorant people were, they could be educated not to shit in the middle of what was, effectively, the promenade. Before you could do that, of course, you had to make sure there were alternatives, that there were toilets for them to shit in. Surely nothing could be more important, more basic than that. (The number of times, in Varanasi, in a place where so little could be understood for sure, that one's thoughts – one's indignation, irritation and outrage – began with that word, ‘Surely’!) One way or another, however scrupulously one washed one's hands, held one's nose and kept one's mouth shut, one was destined to ingest shit. How had the connection between disease and excrement not been made? How could a culture with a horror of pollution be so indifferent to the most offensive form of pollution? However hard you tried to remain healthy, you inevitably fell ill. There was no avoiding it. Something was bound to have a bug in it – and how could it not, in a city where shit and animals and humans were heaped on top of each other? Magazines and papers were full of articles about the modernity of India – about the bars and clubs of Mumbai, about how Chennai was thriving, how Bangalore was the Silicon Valley of the east – but, aside from Internet cafés, there was little sign of that here.

  There were days when I felt like I was turning into the protagonist of Lal's reality TV idea, when I thought that Varanasi should be razed to the ground, built over in the name of health and safety, hygiene, progress. It was on one such day that I decided to take the bull by the horns. I walked to the edge of the river, undid my zip and pissed in the Ganges. That's right:I pissed in the Ganges. I was desperate, I had to piss, but it was also a protest of sorts, highlighting the ludicrousness of worshipping a river while simultaneously polluting it. Pissing directly into the river was more hygienic, all round, than pissing – and shitting – on the ghats and letting it drain into the river. It was early evening, there was no one around, but all the time I was pissing – it was one of those epic pisses that seem never to end – I was waiting for someone to notice and something to happen, for shouts followed by blows, or for blows unannounced by shouts. But nothing did happen. No one did anything. If people noticed – and they must have done; it's impossible to do anything in India without someone noticing – and took offence (as they must have done), they decided to let it go.

  If that piss had seemed never-ending, it was brief compared with the incessant, relentless, unstoppable demand for money. Every social exchange was a prelude to commerce. Some social exchanges consisted entirely of commerce. At its most rudimentary level, a child would say ‘One rupee,’ so that the demand for cash constituted a form of greeting. At the next level, one would be greeted –‘Namaste!’ – and then there would be a request for money, or the offer of a service. Other times, a few lines of conversation would precede the offer of services. Generally speaking, the more protracted the buildup, the more insidious the whole deal – and it always was a deal – would become. We would have a chat about things, a boat would be offered and the man would say ‘Come,’ even though a price had not been agreed. Occasionally it would seem that, for once, you were really having a conversation – about places of interest, about people to avoid, the bad people operating in the neighbourhood – until, eventually, the transactional motive kicked in. The masters of this art were like classical musicians, indefinitely extending thealap , elaborating and exploring theraga without precisely identifying it until its nature became clear – except, in this case, theraga was always the same:raga Boat,raga Rickshaw, both variants ofraga Rupee, one of the fewragas , perhaps the only one, not tied to a particular season or time of day. No, this great overarchingraga could be played constantly, at any time, and was suitable for all moods. It was so disappointing, the way one's relations always came down to the bottom line of people wanting your money, never more nakedly than in a temple. It meant you viewed any conversation, even those – for there were a few – conducted with no ulterior motive at all, with suspicion. I tried to extricate myself from conversations at the earliest opportunity, before the subjects of boats or visits to shops or factories came up. I tried to avoid having conversations at all. I avoided meeting people's gaze. I looked anywhere to avoid getting caught in the web of cash transaction.

  These frustrations were reminiscent of the time, in my thirties, when I made the mistake of moving to Oxford for a few years. There was, allegedly, a vibrant intellectual life going on somewher
e in town, presumably behind the walls of the venerable old colleges, but I never penetrated that scene and ended up languishing on the acid and vegan fringes of society. In Varanasi there must have been a world of poets, intellectuals and thinkers but, unable to gain access to – or even locate – this tier of society, I was left to play my part, grudgingly, in the eternaljugalbandi of tourist life: ‘Boat, sir?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Rickshaw, sir?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Very cheap.’ ‘No, thank you.’ East meets west. Fusion:Raga Rupee;Raga No Thank You.

  This phase of irritation and annoyance came to a head when I was queuing up to use the ATM in the lobby of a bank in the middle of town, just up from Dashaswamedh. The noise made queuing stressful. What made it all the more stressful was the way that, strictly speaking, it was not a queue at all; at the same time it was notnot a queue. A total free-for-all, a non-queue or scrum, I could have handled, but this was the worst of both worlds: a sort of queue in which the principle of the queue was neither completely ignored nor adhered to. Several times the tall German in front of me had allowed people to push in front of him. Just as ‘queue’ is not quite the right word for what was happening, so, neither, is ‘push.’ People didn't push. Somehow, they just got in ahead of him. There was a guard at the door, but he was doing nothing. Really, he was just a pillar in a blue uniform.

  ‘If you let people push in like this, we're going to be here for the rest of our lives,’ I told the German. He shrugged. I guessed that he had not been in India long. We had been standing there for another couple of minutes when an Indian man and his wife came and stood in front of him. The German looked at me and I tapped the man on the shoulder.

  ‘There is a queue,’ I said. ‘And you must wait in queue.’ He ignored me, of course. I changed places with the German – effectively I had pushed in ahead of him too.

  ‘There is a queue, and you must wait in queue,’ I repeated. ‘Behind me and behind this man and behind the people behind him.’ He smiled and shook his head. The guard was oblivious. His job was to be a guard and stand here in his blue uniform. His duties did not extend beyond that.

  ‘You will go to the back of queue,’ I said to the man who, having pushed in, had now taken his card out in readiness. ‘There is no point in taking your card out. Your turn has not yet come.’

  ‘I am in hurry, sir.’

  ‘Everyone is in hurry.’

  ‘I am in hurry, sir. I will be quick.’

  ‘Everyone is in hurry. Everyone will be quick. No one will be quick, if no one waits their turn.’

  He was still ahead of me. I shouldered my way alongside him. I was becoming angry. He was perfectly calm, smiling. I made sure my face was arranged in something that could be construed as a smile.

  ‘I am in hurry, sir.’

  ‘Everyone is in hurry, sir. You will not go in to this bank ahead of me.’

  ‘Sir, I am requesting you.’

  ‘But your request, sir, has not been granted. So you must go to back of queue.’

  ‘Sir, I am requesting you.’

  ‘And your request has been categorically refused.’

  In other circumstances I might have found this wearying, but I had been in India long enough, now, to realize that there is no limit to the number of times the same thing can be said. The fact that a point has been made does not mean that the same point does not need to be made again and again. There was scope, however, for enlarging and varying the point.

  ‘Furthermore, your request will never be granted,’ I said. ‘Never. Do you understand me?’

  At some level, he did not. The idea of absolute refusal with no scope for a special dispensation or exemption made no sense. He continued standing where he was. We were neck and neck. Physically, he was not ahead of me in the queue, and I was not ahead of him, but I had, by now, established a crucial psychological advantage. My rival was not interested in the etiquette or principle of queuing. He simply wanted to use the bank machine quickly. That was that. Whereas for me, my place in this queue – indeed the continued existence of the very idea and principle of the queue – was at stake. Nothing in my life mattered more to me than not letting this man in ahead of me. I had found a cause I could die for. Or kill for.

  ‘Sir,’ I said. ‘Look at my eyes.’ I took off my sunglasses. ‘Look at my eyes and listen to me.’ I had no idea how my eyes looked. I hoped the fact that they were blue lent the person glaring angrily through them an air of implacable purpose and unshakeable will. In a sense it did not matter, because the queue-barger was not looking at them. He was looking at the door to the bank and he was still smiling. My own smile had by now become a death's head grin, a rictus of suppressed English rage, the product of years of rainy summers, ruined picnics, cancelled trains and losing at penalty shoot-outs. ‘You are not going into that bank ahead of me. The only way you will go into the bank ahead of me is by stepping over my lifeless body. Do you understand?’

  The moment of crisis had arrived. The fleshy, sari-clad woman who had been ahead of us was emerging from the lobby. Before she was properly out of the door, my rival tried to move past her, but I wedged myself between them and shouldered my way in. When he tried to come in as well, I shut the door in his face. I had made it. Pumped-up and exultant, I pumped my fist like a man who has made his point, achieved his goal, won.

  I keyed in my PIN. My hands were trembling. Perhaps that's why the machine rejected my number. I must have keyed in the wrong PIN. I tried again, slowly, carefully, deliberately. The bank rejected my card a second time. And a third.

  Everything that happens in India is a parable, even if the meaning of that parable is unclear. In this instance I took it to mean that there is no such thing as a pyrrhic victory, there are only pyrrhic defeats.

  The fact of the matter is that I came out empty-handed, cashless. The man who had tried to get in ahead of me came in next, unperturbed, unrepentant and un-grudge-bearing. His wife was standing outside. So was the German, but he was not the next in line. Yet another person had managed to get between him and the door.

  ‘You are a fucking Kraut pussy,’ I hissed at the German, before striding off.

  I took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel. As we jolted and heaved through the jammed streets, I realized that, weirdly, the episode at the bank had restored my good spirits. I laughed aloud as I recalled the shocked expression on the face of the much-put-upon German as I'd abused him. I admired the way the man who had tried to queue-barge had stuck, smilingly, to his game plan, had refused to allow that anything was at stake other than his desire – to his credit, he had never attempted to make it his right – to get at his cash quickly. Viewed in a different light, everything irritating about India could become a source of pleasure and instruction with implausible speed. Suddenly I understood why there had been something strangely familiar, almost reassuring, about the irritation that had been assailing me for the previous weeks: it was how I felt all the time in London, the default setting for a life in which a constant drizzle of frustration, annoyance and rush-hour Tube travel was the unremarked-on norm.

  All around was honk and blare. The din, the dust, the noise were unbelievable, but wasn't it great that there was a place on earth where dust, din and blare thrived? What a clean and dull planet it would be if everywhere became a suburb of Stockholm, where citizens queued patiently and the cash machines dispatched crisp, high-denomination, fraud-proof notes, where there were no elephant-headed gods who rode around on mice, where there were no beggars waving their bandaged, pus-stained stumps in your face, no janitors claiming they were priests, no cows solemnly manuring the streets, no monkeys running riot and no kids scrounging rupees? And beneath all one's irritation and annoyance, in any case, was the knowledge that the demand for money was a straightforward expression of the inequality of economic relationships. We, the tourists, were immensely rich and they, the beggars and the boatmen, the masseurs and the hustlers, were unfathomably poor. The pestering was a persistent, but still voluntary, tax on luxury. Yo
u didn't have to pay. You could say no. This ‘No’ would be ignored, but if you kept saying it, if you said it over and over, then … it would still be ignored. But eventually, after the twentieth time, it would be accepted. Either that or it would have turned into a ‘Yes.’ Given the gulf between what you had and what they did without, it was a miracle, really, that you didn't get robbed every time you left the hotel, the compound, that your feet were not ripped off simply to get at your sandals, that you weren't torn limb from limb and eaten, or your liver sold for dog food.