We reached Benares in late evening, at night really. The city seemed to have no suburbs, which normally prepare one gradually for the encounter with downtown; here one emerges all of a sudden out of the dark, silent, and empty night into the brightly lit, crowded, and noisy city center. Why do these people flock and swarm together so, clamber all over one another while all around, just beyond, there is so much free space, so much room for everyone? After getting off the bus I went for a walk. I reached the outskirts of Benares. To one side, in the darkness, lay the still, uninhabited fields, and to the other rose the buildings of the city, densely peopled, bustling, brilliantly illuminated, throbbing with loud music. I cannot fathom this need for a life of congestion, of rubbing against one another, of endlessly pushing and shoving—all the more so when right over there is so much free space.
The locals advised me not to go to sleep at night, so that I would get to the banks of the Ganges while it was still dark and there, on the stone steps that stretch along the river, await the dawn. “The sunrise is very important!” they said, their voices resounding with the promise of something truly magnificent.
It was indeed still dark when people began converging on the river. Singly and in groups. Entire clans. Columns of pilgrims. The lame on crutches. Aged virtual skeletons, some carried on the backs of the young, others—twisted, exhausted—crawling with great difficulty on their own along the asphalt. Cows and goats trailed alongside the people, as did packs of bony, malarial dogs. I too joined this strange mystery play.
Reaching the riverside steps is not easy, because they are preceded by a thicket of narrow, airless, and dirty little streets tightly packed with beggars, who nudge the pilgrims importunately all the while raising a lament unbearably terrible and piercing. Finally, passing various passages and arcades, one emerges at the top of the stairs that descend straight down to the river. Although dawn has barely touched the sky, thousands of the faithful are already there. Some are animated, pushing their way who knows where and why. Others sit in the lotus position, stretching their arms up toward the heavens. The bottom rungs of the stairs are occupied by those performing the purification ritual—they wade in the river and now and then submerge themselves completely in the water. I see a family subjecting a stout grandmother to the purification rite. The grandmother doesn’t know how to swim and sinks at once to the bottom. The family rush in and bring her back up to the surface. The grandmother gulps as much air as she can, but the instant they let her go, she goes under again. I can see her bulging eyes, her terrified face. She sinks once more, they search for her again in the murky waters and again pull her out, barely alive. The whole ritual looks like torture, but she endures it without protest, perhaps even in ecstasy.
Beside the Ganges, which at this point is wide, expansive, and lazy, stretch rows of wooden pyres, on which are burning dozens, hundreds of corpses. The curious can for several rupees take a boat over to this gigantic open-air crematorium. Half-naked, soot-covered men bustle about here, as do many young boys. With long poles they adjust the pyres to direct a better draft so the cremation can proceed faster; the line of corpses has no end, the wait is long. The gravediggers rake the still-glowing ashes and push them into the river. The gray dust floats atop the waves for a while but very soon, saturated with water, it sinks and vanishes.
THE TRAIN STATION
AND THE PALACE
If in Benares one finds cause for hope—a cleansing in the holy river, and with it the improvement of one’s spiritual condition, the promise of drawing closer to the infinite—Sealdah Station in Calcutta has the opposite effect. I arrived in Calcutta from Benares by train, a progress, as I was to discover, from a relative heaven to an absolute hell. The conductor at the Benares station looked me over and asked: “Where is your bed?”
I understood what he was saying but apparently looked as if I didn’t, for a moment later he repeated his question, this time more insistently:
“Where is your bed?”
It turns out that even the moderately wealthy, not to mention members of a chosen race like the European, travel the rails with their own beds. They arrive at the station accompanied by servants carrying rolled-up mattresses on their heads, as well as blankets, sheets, pillows, as well as, of course, other luggage. Once aboard (there are no seats in the train cars) the servant arranges his master’s bed, then vanishes without a word, as if dissolving into thin air. Raised as I was in the spirit of brotherhood and individual equality, this situation, in which one walks empty-handed while another walks behind, laden with a mattress, suitcases, and a basket of food, seemed offensive in the extreme, a cause for protest and objection. But upon entering the train car I quickly reevaluated my position, as voices of clearly astonished people resounded from every direction.
“Where is your bed?”
I felt idiotic to have nothing with me except my hand luggage. But how could I have known that I would need a mattress in addition to a ticket? And even if I had known, and had bought a mattress, I couldn’t have carried it by myself and would have had to engage a servant. But what would I have done with the servant later? Or with the mattress, for that matter?
I had noticed already that a different person is assigned here to every type of activity and chore, and that this person vigilantly guards his role and his place—this society’s equilibrium seems to depend upon it. One person brings tea in the morning, another shines shoes, another still launders shirts, an altogether different one cleans the room—and so on ad infinitum. Heaven forbid that I ask the person who irons my shirt to sew a button on it. For me, of course, raised as I was in the manner foregoingly described, it would be simple just to sew on the button myself, but then I would be committing a terrible error, for I would be depriving someone burdened with a large family and obliged to make his living by sewing buttons on shirts of his livelihood. This society was a pedantically, meticulously woven fabric of roles and assignments, classifications and purposes, and a great deal of experience, a profound knowledge and a keen intuition were required to penetrate and decipher the delicacies of its structure.
I passed a sleepless night on the train, for those old cars, dating back to colonial times, shook, hurled you about, rumbled, and you were even pelted with rain, which came in through windows that could not be shut. It was a gray, overcast day by the time we pulled into Sealdah Station. On every square inch of the enormous terminal, on its long platforms, its dead-end tracks, the swampy fields nearby, sat or lay tens of thousands of emaciated people—under streams of rain, in the water and the mud; it was the rainy season, and the heavy tropical downpour did not abate for a moment. I was struck at once by the poverty of these soaked skeletons, their untold numbers, and, perhaps most of all, their immobility. They seemed a lifeless component of this dismal landscape, whose sole kinetic element was the sheets of water pouring from the sky. There was of course a certain, albeit desperate, logic and rationality in the utter passivity of these unfortunates: they sought no shelter from the downpour because they had nowhere to go—this was the end of their road—and they made no exertion to cover themselves because they had nothing to cover themselves with.
They were refugees from a civil war, which ended but a few years earlier, between Hindus and Muslims, a war which saw the birth of independent India and Pakistan and which resulted in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dead and many millions of refugees. The latter wandered about for a long time, unable to find succor, left to their own fate, vegetating for a while in places like Sealdah Station before eventually dying there of hunger or disease. But there was more to this. These columns of postwar vagabonds encountered throngs of others along the way—the legions of flood victims evicted from villages and small towns by the waters of India’s powerful and unbridled rivers. And so millions of homeless, indifferent people shuffled along the roads, dropping from exhaustion, often never to rise. Others tried to reach the cities hoping to get a sip of water there, and perhaps a handful of rice.
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Just getting out of the train car was difficult—there was no room for me to place my foot on the platform. Usually, a different color skin attracts attention here; but nothing distracts the denizens of Sealdah Station, as they seem already to settle into a realm on the other side of life. An old woman next to me was digging a bit of rice out of the folds of her sari. She poured it into a little bowl and started to look around, perhaps for water, perhaps for fire, so that she could boil the rice. I noticed several children near her, eyeing the bowl. Staring—motionless, wordless. This lasts a moment, and the moment drags on. The children do not throw themselves on the rice; the rice is the property of the old woman, and these children have been inculcated with something more powerful than hunger.
A man is pushing his way through the huddled multitudes. He jostles the old woman, the bowl drops from her hands, and the rice scatters onto the platform, into the mud, amidst the garbage. In that split second, the children throw themselves down, dive between the legs of those still standing, dig around in the muck trying to find the grains of rice. The old woman stands there empty-handed, another man shoves her. The old woman, the children, the train station, everything—soaked through by the unending torrents of a tropical downpour. And I too stand dripping wet, afraid to take a step; and anyway, I don’t know where to go.
From Calcutta I traveled south, to Hyderabad. The south was very different from the north and all its pains. The south seemed cheerful, calm, sleepy, and a little provincial. The servants of a local rajah must have confused me with someone else, because they greeted me ceremoniously at the station and drove me straight to a palace. A polite, elderly man welcomed me, sat me down in a wide leather armchair, and was surely counting on a longer and deeper conversation than my primitive English could allow. I stuttered something or other, felt myself turning red, sweat was pouring down my forehead. The elderly man smiled kindly, which gave me some courage. It was all rather dreamlike. Surrealistic. The servants led me to a room in one of the palace wings. As the guest of the rajah I was to live here. I wanted to call the whole thing off, but didn’t know how—I lacked the words with which to explain that there had been some misunderstanding. Perhaps just the fact of my being from Europe conferred some prestige on the palace? I don’t know.
I crammed vocabulary words daily, doggedly, feverishly. What shone in the sky? The sun. What fell on the earth? The rain. What swayed the trees? The wind. Etc., etc., twenty to forty words daily. I read Hemingway, and in the book by Father Dubois I tried to make sense of the chapter on castes. The beginning actually wasn’t difficult: There are four castes. The first and highest are the Brahmans—priests, people of the spirit, thinkers, those who show the way. The second, lower down, are the Kshatriyas—warriors and rulers, people of the sword and of politics. The third, lower still, are the Vaisyas—merchants, craftsmen, and farmers. The fourth and final caste are the Sudras—laborers, peasants, servants, workers for hire. Here’s where the problems started, because it turns out that these castes are divided into hundreds of sub-castes, and these in turn into dozens of sub-subcastes, and so on into infinity. India is all about infinity—an infinity of gods and myths, beliefs and languages, races and cultures; in everything, and everywhere one looks, there is this dizzying endlessness.
At the same time I felt instinctively that that which I perceived all around me were merely external signs, images, symbols, of a vast and varied world of hidden beliefs, ideas about which I knew nothing. I wondered, too, whether this realm was inaccessible to me because I lacked theoretical, book knowledge about it, or whether there was a more profound reason, namely that my mind was too fully imbued with rationalism and materialism to be able to identify with and grasp a culture as saturated with spirituality and metaphysics as Hinduism.
In such a state, and further overwhelmed by the richness of the details I found in the work of the French missionary, I would put down the book and go into town.
The rajah’s palace—all glassed-in verandahs, maybe a hundred of them, which when the panes were opened allowed a light and bracing breeze to waft through the rooms—was surrounded by lush, well-tended gardens, in which gardeners constantly bustled, pruning, mowing, and raking. Further on, beyond a high wall, the city began. One walked there along little streets and alleyways, narrow and always crowded, passing countless colorful shops, stalls, and stands selling food, clothing, shoes, cleaning products. Even when it wasn’t raining, the streets were always muddy, because all waste gets poured into the middle of the street here—the street belongs to no one.
There are speakers everywhere, and emanating from them a piercing, loud, continuous singing. It’s coming from the local temples. These are small structures, often no larger than the one-or two-story houses surrounding them, but they are numerous. They look alike: painted white, dressed in garlands of flowers and glittering decorations, bright and festive like brides going to their wedding. The atmosphere in these little temples is somehow at once serene and joyful. They are full of people, whispering amongst themselves, burning incense, rolling their eyes, stretching out their hands. Some men (sacristans? altar boys?) distribute food to the faithful—a piece of cake, marzipan, or candy. If one holds out one’s hand a little longer, one can receive two, maybe even three portions. One must eat what one gets or place it on the altar. Admission to each temple is free: no one asks who you are, or of what faith. Everyone worships individually, on his own, without a collective rite, and as a result there is an atmosphere of ease, freedom, even a bit of disorder.
There are so many of these places of worship because the deities in Hinduism are infinite in number; no one has been able to make a complete inventory. Furthermore, the deities do not compete with one another, but rather coexist harmoniously and peacefully. One can believe in one or in several at once, even exchange one for another depending on place, time, mood, or need. The ultimate worldly ambition of any given deity’s followers is to erect a dedicated sanctuary, to build a temple. One can imagine the material consequences of this, bearing in mind that this liberal polytheism has lasted thousands of years already. How many temples, chapels, altars, and statues have been raised over the years, and how many have been destroyed by floods, fires, typhoons, wars with Muslims. If all the ones ever constructed were still to exist, simultaneously, they would surely cover half the surface of the globe.
In my wanderings I happened upon the temple of Kali. She is the goddess of destruction and represents the ruinous workings of time. I do not know if she can be propitiated, because after all one cannot stop time. Kali is tall, black, sticks out her tongue, wears a necklace of skulls, and stands with her arms outstretched. She is a woman, but into her embrace it is better not to fall.
The way to the temple leads between two rows of stalls selling pungent scents, colorful powders, pictures, pendants, all manner of kitschy bric-a-brac. A dense, slowly moving line of perspiring, excited people snakes its way to the goddess’s statue. Inside the sanctuary, an overpowering airless odor of incense, heat, darkness. A symbolic exchange takes place before the statue—you give the priest a previously purchased pebble, and he hands back another one. I suppose you leave the unconsecrated one and receive one that’s been blessed. But I’m not certain.
The palace of the rajah is full of servants. You see no one else, really, and it’s as if the entire estate had been given over to their absolute rule. Countless butlers, footmen, waiters, maids and valets, specialists in brewing tea and frosting cakes, clothes pressers and messengers, exterminators of mosquitoes and spiders, and many more whose duties and roles it is impossible to fathom, course continually through the rooms and salons, pass by along the corridors and on the stairs, dusting rugs and furniture, beating pillows, arranging armchairs, cutting and watering the flowers.
All of them move about in silence, fluidly, cautiously, giving a slightly fearful impression. But there is no visible nervousness, no running about or gesticulating. It’s as if a Bengal tiger were circling around here
somewhere; one’s only chance is to make no sudden movements. Even during the day, in the glare of the shining sun, the servants resemble anonymous shadows, moving about without uttering a word, always in such a way as to remain on the periphery, careful not to catch anyone’s gaze, let alone cross anyone’s path.
They are variously dressed, according to function and rank: from golden turbans pinned with precious stones to simple dhotis—bands worn around the hips by those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Some are attired in silks, embroidered belts, and glittering epaulettes, while others wear ordinary shirts and white caftans. They have one thing in common: all are barefoot. Even if they are adorned with embroideries and tassels, brocades and cashmeres, they have nothing on their feet.
I noticed this detail right away, owing to personal experience. It started during the war, under German occupation. I remember that the winter of 1942 was approaching and I had no shoes. My old ones had fallen apart, and my mother had no money for a new pair. The shoes available to Poles cost 400 złoty, had tops of a thick denim coated with a black, water-repellent paste and soles made of a pale linden wood. Where could one get 400 złoty?
We were living in Warsaw then, on Krochmalna Street, near the gate to the ghetto, in the apartment of the Skupiewskis. Mr. Skupiewski had a little cottage industry making bars of green bathroom soap. “I will give you some bars on consignment,” he said. “When you sell four hundred, you will have enough for your shoes, and you can pay me back after the war.” People then still believed that the war would end soon. He advised me to work along the route of the Warsaw–Otwock railway line, frequented by holiday travelers; vacationers will want to pamper themselves a little, he counseled, by buying a bar of soap. I listened to him. I was ten years old, and I cried half the tears of a lifetime then, because in fact no one wanted to buy the little soaps. In a whole day of walking I would sell none—or maybe a single bar. Once I sold three and returned home bright red with happiness.
Travels with Herodotus Page 3