by Frank Kusy
He had travelled on to Varanasi on a train packed to the ceiling with boisterous Indians. Within his small 6 x 6 feet compartment, he had counted 17 people. Every inch of space had part of a human body wedged into it. Every bunk he could see had three people on it – a) the person who had reserved it, and b) two squatters who hadn’t even bought tickets. Each bunk was also occupied by a large heap of baggage. And each time the train stopped at a station, another crowd of people forced their way on. Kevin’s principal concern was not, however, suffocation. What he had been really worried about was the periodic downfalls of urine coming from a small baby sandwiched in the bunk directly above his head.
Four long hours after leaving Bombay, the ticket collector had finally shown up to kick all the squatters off the train. Then all the doors to the train had been bolted shut, to stop any more getting on at future station stops.
Reaching Jalgaon, Kevin had looked out onto the platform to note a large black cow flopping down to sleep on top of a pile of beggars. They had seemed used to this kind of thing, for they didn’t wake up. Kevin also noticed, near the entrance to this station, a pack of small black pigs busily engaged in eating cow dung. He had thought this rather strange. Though, having seen what the pigs got up to in Goa, he shouldn’t really have been at all surprised.
He had broken his journey at Jalgaon, meaning to follow in my footsteps and visit the Buddhist caves at Ellora and Ajanta. But then he had had second thoughts. He’d suddenly remembered how fed up he’d become of caves and temples – he didn’t want to see another one again, if he could help it. So he moved along that night to a small village nearby, called Bhusawal, and had a few beers to help him forget the close, suffocating heat, and to get some sleep.
The following morning, waiting for his train for Varanasi on Bhusawal station, Kevin spent an absorbing hour watching the behaviour of the local tribesmen, several of whom were apparently living on the platform, sharing an existence of dire poverty here with their animals. Smeared in dirt and excrement, and often wandering around completely naked, they reminded him of aborigines.
‘One chap I saw,’ he recalled, ‘was really enjoying the company of his cows. He was stroking their noses and talking to them like children. And he was sharing his food with them – they were eating from the same plate as him. And when he’d finished, he scooped up a handful of cow’s urine from off the platform and began washing his face with it. Another tribesman I noticed was sitting nearby with his legs wide open, playing with himself with a big smile on his face. This has to be the weirdest railway station I’ve ever been to!’
After a short rest, we went out to explore our surroundings. A rickshaw man with the unlikely name of ‘Om’ was lying in wait for us just outside the lodge. Om was a brush-haired, gap-toothed scoundrel who had a real way with words. He had got the psychology of working himself into tourists’ good graces down to a fine art. He saw Kevin’s mouth about to shape the words ‘No thanks’, and quickly intervened with an offer we couldn’t refuse. ‘Pay what you like!’ he said. ‘If you are happy, then I am happy!’ What a reasonable proposition. Of course it made Kevin very happy indeed. Which was most unusual. He normally had such a stormy relationship with rickshaw drivers.
Om was of course out to make lots of money from us, but he tackled his task with such skill and dexterity that we couldn’t but applaud his efforts. There was, for example, the huge public sitar and table music exhibition that he spent a whole hour persuading us to see. He really put his all into communicating his enthusiasm to us. By the time we got near the exhibition, he’d worked us up to such a lather of anticipation that we couldn’t think of anything else on earth we’d rather see. Which was unfortunate, as it turned out. For it wasn’t a public exhibition at all, and it wasn’t (as Om claimed) free. He came to a stop outside a grimy old building down a narrow back alleyway, and showed us into a small private room containing just one other occupant – a loquacious, heavily-bearded sitar player. This chap shook his head mournfully when we arrived, and apologised that the tabla-drum man was in hospital. Om withdrew discreetly from sight. Half an hour later, the sitar-man was still tuning up his instrument and waxing lyrical about how well he knew Ravi Shankar. It was only when we got up to leave that he proclaimed himself ready to play. And when he did play, he was very good.
After the performance, we located Om and told him we were ready to leave. He did not want to leave. The landlord had just passed him a full chilum-pipe of best hash, and Om was ready to relax. The very last thing we wanted, however, was a disorientated Om driving us back through Varanasi’s chaotic traffic. Even in his right mind, he was one of the most reckless drivers we’d yet come across. We therefore dragged him away from his ‘relaxation’, and he sulked the whole drive home.
March 15th
I was startled into wakefulness at five this morning by a voice ringing out in the darkness of the room. ‘You’ll never believe this, Frank!’ announced Kevin, ‘but I’ve just dropped my new toilet roll down the loo!’ What a vexing situation. Toilet rolls are horrendously expensive in India, and Kevin had contracted diarrhoea. He had got this by following the advice of an Indian friend he’d made called Mukul. Mukul had told Kevin that the local water, while unfiltered, was safe to drink. Mukul was constantly calling Kevin when he was out, and leaving urgent messages for him to call back. Maybe he was having second thoughts about that water advice, and was ringing to apologise.
It was fortunate that Kevin woke me so early, because we had booked a boat trip down the Ganges which required us to leave the hotel at 5.30am. We had to leave then because the sunrise comes early this time of year, and floating down the Ganges at sunrise is apparently a magical, unmissable experience for the foreign traveller in India.
Lots of other things floating down the Ganges were not half so magical. We had boarded a small rowing boat and were marvelling at the red, glowing orb of the sun rising over this holiest of rivers, when Kevin shook us out of our reverie by pointing to a couple of dead goats drifting past. Our guide told us that any animal that dies in the vicinity is simply tossed into the water. He then pointed out a small white cloth bundle on the side of the river’s bank, and told us it was a dead baby. Along with smallpox victims and priests, babies aren’t burnt on funeral pyres. Instead, they are wrapped in cloth, have a large rock tied to them, and are rowed out and dumped in the middle of the Ganges. The guide was most informative. He told us that they didn’t burn priests because priests are gods, and they don’t think it respectful to burn their gods.
Watching Varanasi’s sequence of ghats (bathing steps) coming alive with the dawn was certainly a fascinating sight. As our boat rowed slowly by, we viewed many Hindu devotees taking their ritual baths before going back up to the riverside temples for morning prayer; also men and women alike beating their clothes clean on the stones with quite desperate ferocity. There were old men expectorating jets of red paan juice across the waters, while the young men on the ghat steps were engaged in athletic contortions and exercises as part of their religious devotions. Elsewhere, in amongst the press of temples and shrines dotting the water’s edge, packs of wild dogs and pigs played and fought and rummaged around in the filth on the banks for food.
As we came to the main burning ghat, the Manikarnika, the guide told us apologetically that no bodies were being burnt this morning. He was sorry, but this was a slow time of year for funerals. Then he tried to recompense us for this ‘disappointment’ by pointing out boatloads of American tourists passing by. They were entirely surrounded by small rowboats full of insistent tradesmen trying to sell them tourist junk. These tiny boats had tacked themselves onto the American craft with long hooks, and stuck there with leech-like tenacity. To complete the scene, a large boatload of fake sadhus (holy men) came up and blocked their bows, denying the Americans further passage unless they made a cash ‘donation’.
Religion seemed to be real big business in this city, remarked Kevin. Only the day before, he had visited
a hotel in which every room was jam-packed with pilgrims. The rooms were bare and dirty, yet they were being let out at an extortionate price to poor people making a pilgrimage to this city. Entire family units of ten to fifteen people were crammed into each small room like sardines, the greed of the lodge owner turning their spiritual journey into a physical purgatory.
As our tour drew to a close, the guide pointed out some houseboats moored close to the banks. ‘Hippies living there,’ he remarked. ‘Also many mosquitoes.’ The dour tone of his voice suggested that he was not impressed by such Western residents. He later informed us that they spent most of their time taking morphine and other heavy drugs.
The tour ended with us passing a conga-line of American tourists (all wearing identical white shorts and carrying identical yellow lunch-boxes) and coming out on the high balcony of an old house, which afforded a good view of Varanasi’s famous Golden Temple. Seeing this reminded me of Tim and Jill, whom we’d met in Ooty. They had put up at the Yogi Lodge, very near to the Golden Temple. They had been woken in the middle of the night by what sounded like the house next door being demolished. Peering sleepily out of their window, they discovered that the house next door was being demolished. An illegal demolition crew had assembled in the dead of night – to evade police detection – and were busily engaged in reducing this building to rubble with hammers, chisels, shovels and mallets. The next morning, there wasn’t a stone left standing.
Back at the Garden View, we found Om waiting. How did he know we’d be there? Om was certainly living up to his name – not only omnipresent, but omniscient too. He took us to the State Bank in Varanasi’s chaotic railway station. The main concourse inside the station was absolutely packed with sleeping or resting Indians. Most of them were there waiting for trains, or escaping from the fierce heat in the streets outside. There were flies everywhere. There was one dozing on the nose of the bank’s security guard, who was also asleep. He sat outside the bank quite dead to the world, with his boots off and a double-barrelled shotgun propping up his chair.
Tonight we went to the cinema. There was a popular black and white Hindi picture showing. It was set in the Moghul era, the thin plot centring around the various struggles for power between exotically dressed and heavily bejewelled rajahs, princes and princesses.
The male lead started the ball rolling. He was middle-aged, extremely stout, and wore a look of impending tragedy on his noble features. Kevin, noting the huge helpings of rich, sumptuous food his part required him to eat, suggested that he was suffering a bad attack of wind. Either this, or he was trying to emulate the female lead, who was even more fat and grief-stricken than himself. Her high spot in the film came when she cantered up and down the palace battlements like a frisky elephant, singing a gaily pathetic song. The rajah, her father, had the good sense to haul her off the battlements and admonish her for making a spectacle of herself. His regal brows were creased in a deep frown throughout the picture. He had obviously read the script. His son, the rotund prince, laughed a lot in the wrong places. He had probably read the script, too.
The chaotic way in which the film had been edited suggested the work of either an irresponsible madman or an eccentric genius. It cut back and forth from one scene to another with frenetic, undisciplined energy, and no two consecutive scenes bore the slightest relation to one another. Kevin watched an hour of this in a state of suspended disbelief, and then fell asleep. He couldn’t keep up with it.
March 16th
Breakfast was an event this morning. The waiter finally managed to bring in both our cheese omelettes and our chips at one and the same time. We gave him a rousing round of applause. Later, however, he blotted his copybook by serving up a plate of stale, bone-hard ‘jam tost.’ Kevin stabbed the toast with the desultory, hopeless air of one who never expects a good wholesome meal ever again. He spent the remainder of the morning writing a long letter to his parents, begging them to have a large plate of burnt sausages, roast chicken and crispy bacon waiting for him the moment he landed back in the UK.
Today we walked into town instead of hiring a rickshaw. Nearing the ghats, we suddenly left the busy, noisy part of Varanasi and plunged into the old city. This was in complete contrast, being a maze of quiet, winding backstreets and narrow lanes, overshadowed by tall, ancient buildings. It was very dark here, the towering old houses blotting out the sunlight to the cobbled street below. Nearly every corner we came to had small shops and stalls selling bangles and beads, curios and old coins, coloured scarves and fly-whisks. A few of them were even selling toy plastic motorboats, chugging aimlessly about in washing-up bowls. In this part of town, you could buy practically anything One enterprising Indian was even making a living from selling cow dung for fuel. His ‘pitch’ was just a short high wall, on which the neat little pats of poo had been arranged in a careful, artistic pattern.
Walking through the dark and crowded backstreets of the old city, we noticed large numbers of ownerless cows, dogs and goats wandering in and out of the many ruined buildings. As for the human population, this seemed to comprise mainly ragged old men, tiny naked children and badly crippled beggars. The streets were caked with excrement, and the air was musty and sweet with the odour of decay.
We emerged at last into the broad light of day again, having reached the site of the ghats. Each ghat had a long series of steps leading down into the Ganges. At regular intervals, teams of young lads would appear with powerful water-hoses to blast all the rubble and filth which had accumulated on the steps into the river. From the banks of the river itself came the constant calls of boat-boys wanting to take us to ‘see the bodies burning’. This appeared to be the main tourist attraction.
Kevin really had it in for Indian salesmen today. Each time they came up to him offering to buy his dollars or take him to a silk factory, he glowered at them with undisguised loathing. One tout introduced himself as a ‘fellow tourist’, and pretended to be mortified when Kevin accused him of being ‘just another bloody salesman!’ He told us that ‘Varanasi is a holy place, yes, but not everybody here is a holy man. I wish only to make friends with foreigners, not to sell them goods.’ Kevin studied him with a cynical smirk, not believing a word of it, but allowed him to tag along after us. Sure enough, as we came to the edge of Manikarnika Ghat, this rascal’s conversation began to drift from inconsequential small talk to his uncle’s silk factory up the road...
I was just on the point of denouncing his treachery when an excellent photograph of the burning ghat presented itself. I stopped to size it up, allowing the others to move on ahead. What a mistake. No sooner had my camera clicked than I found myself in terrible trouble. An irate young Hindu appeared and began leaping up and down, shouting curses at me at the top of his voice. ‘You take photo here? Yes!’ he ranted. ‘It is strict forbidden, take photo of holy burning ground! You come straight away, see my father who is policeman!’ He continued in this fashion for some minutes, threatening to have my film destroyed and my camera dispossessed. I tried to explain that I didn’t know, that nobody had told me photographs weren’t allowed here, but he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything less than dragging me off to the nearest police station.
Or was he? Suddenly his frantic dance of rage petered out, and his stream of angry curses came to an end. He paused, and gave me an astonishing choice: ‘Either you come now to police station,’ he said, ‘or you give me twenty rupees!’
I stared at him in disbelief. ‘You mean,’ I told him, ‘that I have upset your gods by taking photo of your holy grounds, but that they will turn a blind eye to my offence if I pay you money? Don’t be ridiculous!’
This response didn’t please my assailant at all. He bared his teeth at me in a dangerous grin. ‘You don’t pay money, you try run away, my friends catch you, make you pay money!’ he challenged. Darting a quick look behind him, I could see them collecting together and advancing ominously up the steps of the ghat towards us.
Suddenly, I thought of a way out. Rooting into my shoulder-bag, I withdrew my pocket cassette-recorder and waved it about in the young Hindu’s face. ‘Right!’ I declared. ‘I’ve taped everything you said! Including your attempt to extort money from me by force! Now we go to police station. Now you will be the one who will be in trouble!’
This desperate bluff had the gratifying effect of stopping the young thug dead in his tracks. The short pause it took him to figure out my deception was just long enough for me to beat a diplomatic retreat and vanish back into the safety of the nearby backstreets.
March 17th
After breakfast, we set out to explore Varanasi’s old city and the ghats in more depth. Passing down a road fogged over by smoke from a road-asphalting works, we came out by a children’s playground in which there were more goats than children. We went over the rail station bridge, noticing the great number of paan-splattered public spittoons erected here, and weaved in and out of the crowds of cows and bullocks taking their ease on the pavements or in the middle of the road.
Swallowed up once again in the warm, dark stomach of the old city, we fought our way through an army of one-armed, blind and legless cripples, and were eventually belched out on the site of Gai Ghat. From here, we had our best view yet of the stately Malviya Bridge. A short walk later, we reached Panchganga Ghat, and came across a grisly scene. At the foot of the ghat, occupying a wide expanse of grey-mud beach, a flock of giant vultures had gathered. They were busily engaged in dragging some human remains out of the river. This kind of thing is pretty common, particularly near the burning ghats, since few human bodies are entirely consumed by the flames of the funeral pyres. In the case of wealthy corpses, someone comes along to fold the head and legs into fire, ensuring a total cremation. In most other cases, however, these parts of the body are simply tossed into the Ganges, to be fed upon by dogs, pigs and vultures who patrol the water’s edge in regular foraging parties.