Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

by Home

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said. ‘But tomorrow is my last day in Varanasi.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. I go to Hampi the day after tomorrow.’ I couldn't believe the cruelty of the timing, the way we had been here all this time and were only talking now, when there was no point in doing so.

  I was standing there, digesting the implications – the non-implications of all this – when someone called out her name, ‘Isobel!’ We both looked towards the river, where the voice had come from. A boat was passing by. In it, someone was waving.

  Ashwin.

  She waved back. At first I stood with my hands hanging by my sides, as I had when confronting the monkey who'd snatched my sunglasses. Then, to cover up my embarrassment, I waved too. Ashwin waved at me. Everyone was waving. We were all drowning in a sea of waves. Ashwin was calling out, asking if she wanted a ride.

  ‘It's OK,’ she shouted back. ‘I'll see you there. I have to stop off at my room first.’ There was a final flurry of waves and then Ashwin continued downstream towards wherever ‘there’ was.

  ‘So, you know Ashwin,’ I said. She said yes, smiled in a way that I had not seen before. ‘Nice guy,’ I added.

  We stood there a little awkwardly until she said, ‘I should go.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, I'm glad we at least got a chance to speak,’ I said, suppressing the urge to ask if Ashwin was going to Hampi as well. We shook hands and she turned to go. I watched her as she continued walking along the ghats. Then I climbed the steps to the Lotus Lounge. Leaning out over the wall of the terrace, I could just about see her – her thick locks and yellow T-shirt – disappearing into the crowd.

  I ordered a cappuccino and a pancake. As I sat there, looking out at the Ganges, I felt obscurely that my last chance – of what, I was not sure – had just gone begging. Gone begging: the phrase flashed through my head, like a sign on a shop door saying Gone Fishing.

  Not such a good idea, having that cappuccino. A few minutes after leaving the Lotus Lounge, I had a violent urge to take a crap. I started running, hoping I could make it to somewhere with a toilet. But it was impossible. Crouching down by a wall, I squirted vile-smelling ooze over a pair of old, sun-dried turds.

  Two time schemes co-existed in Varanasi. My days passed without direction or purpose. The city's calendar, meanwhile, was plotted and marked by a rigidly co-ordinated schedule of festivals. There were so many festivals, I had given up trying to keep track of what was being celebrated or ushered in. An abundance of weddings meant that even the days that weren't festivals were extremely festive. The childish longing, ‘I wish it could be Christmas every day’ (imprinted in my memory by Slade), had been pretty well realized by a combination of Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism. So it was no wonder that I began to drift free of the usual demands of time and dates. Unsure of precisely how long I had been here, I checked the visa in my passport – or would have done, if I could have found it. I rummaged through all the drawers and all the clothing in the drawers where I might have hidden my passport. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen it, the last time I'd taken it out. I'd had it with me during the altercation with the queue-barger in the bank, and I thought I had a memory of putting it away after that, but the more I thought about it the less sure I became if that was a memory or just the hope of a memory, and the more likely it seemed that I had taken it out with me on other unremembered occasions since then. Surely I'd had the sense not to take it out on the day we went bananas on bhang lassis? The more I thought about that, the less sure I became that I hadn't. I sat on the bed and did not know what to do, and then I decided that not knowing what to do was a form of knowing what to do, which was to do nothing, so that is what I did.

  On a day that may or may not have been particularly auspicious, Laline handed me a package wrapped in delicate pink paper, tied with red thread.

  ‘Present for you,’ she said. I untied the string and unwrapped the paper carefully. Inside was a copy of The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham. On the cover she had carefully painted out the ‘I’ in VEIL and squeezed in a slim ‘A’.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I kissed her, I was grateful. It was a lovely present, but I didn't read the book because reading books was no longer something I did.

  The weather grew hotter. Occasionally a line of thin cloud appeared in the sharp sky.

  Walking in the lanes behind the ghats, I came across a man pushing a barrow in which he seemed to be carrying some kind of gourd. Squeezing by him, I realized that what I had taken to be a pumpkin were actually his testicles. Swollen monstrously by disease, they had become unsupportable and it was his destiny to lug them around in a wheelbarrow. Everything in Varanasi was taken to a delirious extreme. In Europe we had the myth of Sisyphus and his stone. In Varanasi there was the fact of this man and his balls.

  I took a rickshaw to the museum at the Hindu University. It was a spacious, dusty place with calm statues of the Buddha and trancey bronzes of Shiva in the guise of Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. There was also an impressive array of Indian miniatures, some of which were actually quite big. I had no sense of the relative merits of any of the individual paintings, but one seemed particularly lovely. It was painted by Shivalal – the name meant nothing to me – in 1893, but looked, to my untutored eye, as if it could have been done two or three hundred years earlier. An expensively upholstered procession of horses and riders was crossing a flooded bridge or causeway, in single file, in the monsoon. Rain arrowed into the wet-look river, which had climbed up trees and into houses built, fatalistically, on the flood plain. In the background conical hills – one of them with a castle perched on top – blazed greenly. Clouds sagged. Lightning flashed – a gold snake wriggling through the soggy, indigo sky.

  Down at the actual river, the real, unpainted one, the funeral of a sanyasin was in progress. He was not cremated. His body was carried into the Ganges, weighed down by a stone and let go.

  So far, I'd not bumped into anyone from what I now regarded as my prior life – my previous incarnation – in London. Then, at Kedar ghat, I ran into Anand Sethi, who had given me the advice about not staying at the Taj Ganges.

  ‘You've got an explorer beard,’ he said. It was true. I hadn't grown a beard, I'd just stopped shaving – and, as a result, I'd become a man with a beard. The young Sikhs with their dark beards and the backpackers with their wispy goatees looked young, handsome; I looked like a slimmed-down version of Dougal Haston or Chris Bonnington. Anand was wearing a striped Paul Smith shirt and Prada slacks. He looked like a banker in a heatwave, which is what he was. That made me conscious of the extent to which I had gone, not native so much as ageing backpacker. I was wearing an old Rip Curl T-shirt and frayed shorts. My hair was long, uncombed, grey, like my beard.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I said.

  ‘Just yesterday. What about you?’

  ‘I've been here for ages. Since I last saw you, at that opening for Fiona Rae. I never went back. I've sort of taken root here. Are you staying at the Ganges View? I'm surprised I haven't seen you.’

  ‘No, the Taj,’ he said. ‘The Ganges View was full.’

  ‘I'm sorry,’ I said, trying not to smirk. ‘That's where I've been all this time. I've probably ended up taking your room.’ I suggested that we meet up for a drink or dinner, but he was leaving for Agra the following night. After that he was going to Bombay, to buy a painting by Atul Dodiya.

  As we parted he said, ‘You know, I'm really not sure about the beard. You look like a castaway. Or Terry Waite on hunger strike.’

  ‘You're right,’ I said. ‘I'm going to do something about it.’

  I walked straight to a place I'd long had a fondness for because of its name – the Decent Barber, on Shivala Road – to have my head, beard and eyebrows shaved. I asked the barber to leave a little pigtail at the back of the head, as I had seen on mourners. I wondered if he would object, if aping the ritual of bereavement in this way might be considered offensive, but he went ahead
and did it without question or complaint. Several people watched. There must have been a number of tiny nicks; my head stung afterwards. It felt white as an egg, as a skull. I could feel the sun boiling it as I walked back to Assi.

  On the way, I ran into Ashwin. I was as surprised to see him as he was surprised by me.

  ‘I thought you'd be in Hampi,’ I said.

  ‘No. Not… But, I mean, what's happened?’ he asked.

  ‘I am in mourning for myself,’ I said, reprising the old Chekhov joke. ‘My old self refuses to die. The new is struggling to be reborn. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’

  I had become almost a fixture at the hotel. Though I still enjoyed a laugh and a joke, I was no longer on the lookout for friends, for people I could eat dinner and make jokes with. Everyone I met was just passing through. They were simply guests, people who came and went. My attitude was like that of the staff, except that I was never faced with the final, definitive judgement, made on the day of departure, that overruled all previous feelings about how courteous or pleasant the guests had been: the judgement determined solely by the size of the tip. (I'd been here so long that my eventual tip must have been anticipated as though it were my last will and testament.) It was a relief to be free of the tyranny of my own likes and dislikes. How could it have mattered so much what I thought of X or Y? I mean, how could it have mattered so much to me?

  I don't want to sound like some kind of pseudo-sanyasin. We think of renunciation happening formally, definitively, possibly as a result of frustration, anger or disappointment (‘This world I do renounce …’), but it can happen gradually, so gradually it doesn't feel like renunciation. The reason it doesn't feel like renunciation is because it's not. I didn't renounce the world; I just became gradually less interested in certain aspects of it, less involved with it – and that diminution of interest was slowly reciprocated. That's how it works. The world stops singling you out; you stop feeling singled out by the world.

  Some people stop believing that happiness is going to come their way. On the brink of becoming one of them, I began to accept that it was my destiny to be unhappy. In the normal course of things I would have made some accommodation with this, would have set up camp as a permanently unhappy person. But what had happened in Varanasi was that something was taken out of the equation so that there was nothing for unhappiness to fasten itself upon. That something was me. I had cheated destiny. Actually, the passive construction is more accurate: destiny had been cheated.

  I remembered how personally I used to take everything. Two years previously, I'd been given tickets for the opening day at Wimbledon, Centre Court. It rained, off and on, all day. We kept waiting, looking at the sky, hoping. At three o'clock the covers were rolled back and it looked like play might commence. There was a big, soggy cheer, but within twenty minutes the covers were back on and the awful drizzle returned. We didn't give up hope. We kept looking at the sagging clouds. At one point it seemed to me that the sky was brightening up and growing darker at the same time. By the end of the day, not a shot had been played. It was as if there was a curse on me. No one else – not the players or anyone else in the stadium – suffered to the extent that I did. It was my day, my Wimbledon, my parade that was being rained on. The weather had come between me and what I wanted – which was to watch tennis. The pain and the rain were intolerable because they conformed to a broader climatic pattern: something was always coming between me and what I wanted. That afternoon at Wimbledon it was the rain; another day it was another thing. But there was always something. I realised now that that thing was me. I was in my way. I was ahead of me in the queue. I was keeping me waiting. Everything was a kind of waiting. When I drank beer, I was waiting for the glass to empty so I could have it filled and start drinking again. Rather than simply enjoying the high of cocaine, I was also monitoring it, to see if the effect was wearing off, so I could top it up, have more, start monitoring again … I really don't want to come on like someone who has gone through rehab or undergone a conversion or awakening. All I'm saying is that in Varanasi I no longer felt like I was waiting. The waiting was over. I was over. I had taken myself out of the equation.

  When I first came to Varanasi, like all the other tourists, I had treated the Ganges with extreme aversion. It may have been a sacred river, but it was a filthy one too, awash with sewage, plastic bags and the ashes of corpses: a sacred, flowing health hazard. Now I felt the urge to take a dip. I say urge, but that is not the right word at all. I had no desire to bathe in the way that I desired a cold beer – and I did still desire cold beers, just as I still enjoyed a laugh and a joke, especially now it was so hot. It was more as if I knew that one day I would bathe in the river and so there was no point not doing so. Dillydallying was just postponing the inevitable. Since there would come a time when I had bathed in the Ganges, not doing so made no sense: like trying to avoid doing something I had already done.

  Just after sunrise, at Kedar ghat, I took off my shorts and T-shirt and stripped down to my underwear. All my life I have been self-conscious about being thin, but surrounded by the endlessly varied shapes of Indians – fat as Ganesh, skinny as whippets – I felt quite comfortable. I walked down the steps and entered the water. Relative to the air, it was surprisingly cold. The sun patterned the surface with wriggles and sparkles of light. I was up to my knees in the water and had got used to the cold. Now the water felt quite warm, but other than that it did not feel like anything. It did not feel dirty and it did not feel sacred; it just felt like water. I waded a little further out, on tiptoes, to avoid the moment when the water touched my balls and stomach. Then I was in the water up to my chest. I could feel the push of the current, but there was nothing treacherous or dangerous-seeming about this slight exertion of its will. Now that I was in the water, I didn't know what to do. The sun was pounding down already, not causing any problems. It was quite nice being in the water, as it always is on a sunny day. On either side people were washing or praying or just standing. Some kids were playing, splashing each other, but they did not splash me. No one paid any attention to me. No one said ‘Good for you,’ or ‘You see, it's not as dirty as these fussy tourists always claim.’ I was the only non-Indian, the only westerner in the water, but I knew there were several on the steps behind me, watching. I gazed at the opposite bank, that empty world. It was easy to believe that if you swam there you would leave your present life behind.

  I felt something touch my leg and glanced into the water, fearing it was something horrible, a form of sewage, but it was just a sodden coracle with a few dead flowers in the bottom. The water may not have been clean, but it didn't look or feel dirty. I could hear voices, the voices of the people behind and beside me. The risen sun was in my face. After standing in the river for a while, I walked back to the steps and dried in the sun. I had not got any water on my face, not even a drop. I put my T-shirt and shorts back on. They felt warm and clean and it was nice to have sandals on my feet again too. I was not sure whether I'd had a wash or was now in need of one, but I was sure that the Indians regarded me differently, that I had made a significant move towards becoming one of them. As for my fellow-tourists, they probably thought I was showing off, reckless, stupid, but that, I realized now, was a form of fear and envy. When they saw me, they saw a rebuke to their own timidity.

  My cough had not got better, but I had grown so used to it that I scarcely gave it a thought. Coughing was just a form of breathing, a slightly noisier function of being alive. I had got into the habit of crapping, liquidly, after every meal. My asshole felt red as a monkey's. Living mainly on bananas again, I lost weight. Thought bore a curious resemblance to a headache. It was impossible to say whether these were the varied symptoms of a single sickness or a coalition of individual illnesses that had formed an alliance to do me harm. Either way, my whole system was under siege – from within. As happens, I adapted to these new conditions, got used to them. At first, I'd kept wishing I was better. Then, after
a while, my notion of what feeling better felt like grew a little hazy. I forgot there was even this state called wellness. Feeling well was indistinguishable from feeling unwell. If I felt only slightly ill, then I felt perfectly well.

  It grew hotter by the day. I may have said this already, but it kept getting hotter. The heat meant that every kind of bug and germ was well placed and perfectly adapted to thrive and multiply. On top of everything else, sun- or heat-stroke seemed a distinct possibility. To combat the heat, I bought a dhoti. At first I wore it only in my room, practising how to tuck it into itself so that my thighs were left bare. Then, on one occasion, I actually sat on the roof terrace wearing it, relieved that no one else came up. When they did – a French couple who had only checked in that morning – I was surprised that I felt comfortable, at ease. I said, ‘Bonjour,’ and gave them a smile, one of those slow, semi-guru smiles that people who had been here a while felt entitled to bestow on new arrivals. They remained on the terrace only a few minutes, just long enough to show that they weren't embarrassed by this skinny holy man, and then went back to their room and had audible sex. I even heard her saying, ‘Je viens.’

  ‘Stick it in and waggle it about,’ I thought to myself. And then, because thinking this phrase was so enjoyable, I said it aloud several times: ‘Stick it in and waggle it about!’ If I'd known how to translate it, I would have said it in French.

  A few days later I ventured out on to the ghats, wearing just the dhoti. As a teenager I had been so ashamed of my skinny legs that I played squash in jeans; now, skinnier than ever, I walked out in this bit of cloth, as skinny as Gandhi. My legs were perfectly white above the knees and deeply tanned below them. I look completely ridiculous, I thought to myself, but no more ridiculous than some of the other people around. What was the point in feeling absurd in a town where you could lug your testicles around in a wheelbarrow? There was no such thing as being ridiculous in Varanasi. The very idea was ridiculous. I was much further gone than any of the backpackers. They had dreadlocks and wore turbans made of sarongs, but no one looked as ridiculous as me. I didn't avoid their eyes, I met their eyes. The owner of one of these pairs of eyes, Micky, whom I'd spoken with a few times at the Lotus Lounge, was so obviously torn between his desire to ask what was going on and his fear of giving offence that, to put him out of his misery, I said, ‘So, what do you think?’