Maya

by C. W. Huntington

  In Sanskrit the lingam is the male organ, and when Lord Shiva boasts that his lingam is everywhere in Banaras, he is not exaggerating. The city is littered with stone units. There’s a hard-on in the inner sanctum of his temples, a love pump tucked under every other tree or standing proudly outside the neighborhood chai stall. Pricks, dicks, schlongs, and dongs of various sizes are exhibited on street corners or poking up along the river, each one inserted into a stylized vagina—yoni, in Sanskrit—that strongly suggests at least one way of understanding the reference to “ecstasy.” There are thousands of them in Banaras, an estimated total of some 30 million such lingams in India.

  In classical Indian epistemology the word lingam also refers to the characteristic mark or sign of any object, evidence that a thing is what it is: smoke is the lingam of fire. For me Banaras was precisely that. Everything I had heard about Shiva’s city seemed to confirm my experience and stamp it with the imprimatur of truth. In Banaras, apparent dichotomies are immediately resolved, the relative and the absolute merge, sex and death, the sensual and the spiritual—bhoga and yoga—flow together like two mighty rivers joining in one great, swift current that bears on its shoulders all the joys, and all the sorrows, of this earthly life.

  7

  WHEN I STEPPED OUT onto the platform in Banaras, Ed’s hair, his moustache, and his tight synthetic pants were everywhere.

  My rickshaw departed from the station, bumping along the streets through markets where cows feasted on vegetable refuse, while troops of monkeys, fuzzy orange acrobats, swung through a tangled maze of electrical wires. It was early morning. Here and there men dressed in brightly patterned lungis stood idly massaging their gums with twigs from the neem plant. The smell of chai and incense and hot vegetable puri seemed to emanate from the earth itself. Razorback hogs and furless, skeletal dogs skirmished over heaps of garbage. Untouchable sweepers, their heads wound in grimy scarves that left no more than a thin slit through which they glared out at the world, waved their straw brooms in wide arcs, as if they were sorcerers who had conjured up this fantastic scene and could just as easily cause it to vanish.

  I carried with me Ed’s hand-drawn map showing the way to his flat. He lived not far from Shivala crossing, on the second floor of a three-story gray stucco building. The rickshaw stopped just across from Agrawal Radio, at the entrance to a narrow cul-de-sac that led to Ed’s house. Nearby a woman crouched at the knotted foot of pipal tree, holding what looked like a brass teapot cast in the shape of a cow’s head. She poured water into one palm and shook it over a smooth upright stone smeared black with sandalwood paste. On its surface two points of vermillion marked the eyes through which some primordial spirit, revered in this way for countless centuries, looked out from a deep silence upon our mortal labors.

  The entrance to Ed’s lane was marked by a granite bench with ornate, ponderous arms carved into the shapes of stems and leaves. A cow tied at one end fed placidly from a concrete urn, her long eyelashes flecked with straw. On occasion, over the years, I have chanced to pass by that bench, and every time I succumb all over again to the curious mixture of excitement and peace that I felt standing there on that first morning with Ed River’s map clutched in my hand.

  I paid the rickshaw-wala the fare we had agreed on at the station, and ignoring his appeal for more, stepped cautiously around a pile of fresh manure and walked down the lane to Ed’s door. I knocked, tentatively at first. Then, finding no response, I rapped a bit more loudly. From inside I could hear the delicate beat of tabla, a complex rhythmical cycle that flows like blood through the heart of every Indian musician. And then, the unmistakable slap of bare feet. A chain inside rattled, the wooden panels were pulled back, and I was confronted by a stout Indian woman in a muslin sari drawn up to just below her knees and tucked in at the waist. She looked me over for a moment before speaking in a matter of fact tone: “Aaiyay.”

  I stepped inside and she announced my arrival by hollering up the stairs, her voice loud against the concrete walls: “Dilli say aap kaa dost aa-gayaa hai!” With one hand she motioned for me to come inside, then closed the doors with a clatter and climbed up the cramped steps. I kicked off my shoes and followed along.

  The second floor rooms were set back from a walkway circling the periphery of an indoor courtyard that rose upward through the center of the building, allowing fresh air and light to enter. A large extended family occupied the bottom level; the clanging of pots and the sound of wet laundry slapping against the floor echoed up from below. My guide led me to a small room that adjoined the kitchen. This would be my quarters for the next few days. It was no more than a concrete cell, a monastic cave with a single small window opening onto a dimly lit alleyway. The air inside was damp and chilly. The only furnishings were a low wooden table, a single chair, and a rope charpoy like the one I had slept on in Agra. A plastic knob by the door controlled the bare electric bulb that dangled over our heads.

  I unpacked my bag and had just finished arranging my Sanskrit and Pali books on the table when Ed walked in. He was accompanied by a man about my age with shaggy blond hair and brown eyes. Both he and Ed wore checkered lungis.

  “Hey, Stanley.” He clapped me on one shoulder. “Welcome to Kashi. How was the trip?” He gestured in the direction of the other man. “This is Richard.”

  Richard flashed me a smile that made him appear both naïve and trustworthy. He had the kind of face you’d like to point to casually, from across a room, and say, that’s my friend. We exchanged greetings in the Indian fashion, palms raised together at the chest.

  “Ed’s told me all ’bout you, mahn. You being a Sanskrit scholar an all.” He ducked his chin just a touch. “Very cool.”

  The British accent was unmistakable.

  “Richard’s a sitar-wala. We share the rent.” Ed looked around as if he were unsure what to say now that the initial greetings were over. “Okay, then . . . how about we go up top where it’s warm.”

  He turned and led the way up another flight of stairs that opened onto a flat roof.

  It was exceedingly pleasant on the roof, a large open area with views of the city in every direction. We sat together on a cotton dhari, soaking up the bright winter sunlight. The same woman who had answered the door soon reappeared bearing a stainless steel platter on which she had arranged three clay cups of yogurt, a small bunch of bananas, and three glasses of milky chai. Over the next few days I discovered that this woman did everything but clean the floors—an unacceptable task for someone not born a sweeper. For that they hired a boy who came every morning for half an hour and waddled around like a duck, squatting on his haunches and waving a damp cloth over the floor.

  Ed and Richard did pretty much nothing other than practice their instruments and go to lessons. They had been living like this for some eight years, immersed in a world of music and friends and conversation, a world where time was measured only by glasses of chai, all-night concerts, and the slow revolution of seasons. In March, when cool winter days edged toward the intolerable heat of summer, they packed up their instruments and retreated to a hill station somewhere in Himachal Pradesh, returning to the plains in August with the monsoon rains.

  Despite its obvious appeal, this privileged life was—by European or American standards—an austere, ascetic existence. They owned nothing but their instruments and a few pieces of clothing, ate simple vegetarian food prepared over a single-burner kerosene stove, and slept on straw mats rolled out on the floor. Hiring a cook actually saved them money, since—as an Indian woman—she could purchase food in the bazaar at a fraction of what they would have paid if they did the shopping themselves.

  There was something else, however, about the way they lived, something not to be accounted for through any financial calculations.

  Though they practiced their instruments for hours every morning and went for lessons with their teachers in the afternoon, both Ed and Richard seemed to take it for granted that all of this considerable effort was heading precisely no
where. So far as I could tell, neither one of them hoped to gain any public recognition as a performer, nor did they appear to entertain any ambitions toward making a living from their music. Studying sitar or tabla was an act sufficient unto the moment. Like Lord Krishna’s childhood play in Vrindavan, their constant practice was a form of leela, an activity entirely devoid of purpose. Their life here was nothing more than an unchanging present—an illusion of time shaped by the repetition of complex patterns of sound that returned full circle, ending exactly where they had begun.

  This way of living was inconceivably remote from the world I had known back in Chicago, where graduate students and faculty were consumed in an unending struggle to prove their worth, to get the right job and hold on to it, to succeed. Observing Ed and Richard, everything I had done back there seemed to draw meaning only with reference to a future that never arrived. As a friend at the university once put it, “At this place you’re only as good as your next book.”

  During our conversation on the roof Ed and Richard became engrossed in a heated exchange concerning a movie they had recently seen at the Lalita Cinema. The disagreement had to do with the film’s musical score: was the raga pure Bhairav or a form of Kalingada? The technicalities of classical Indian melodic structure were beyond me. I listened for a while, then took my chai and walked to the balustrade, where I could look out over the city. The sky was a spotless aquamarine. Laundry hung drying on every rooftop, saris rippling on the lines like brightly colored sails unfurled to the winter sun. Tiny kites swooped high overhead, sharp points of red and yellow and green twisting and diving. Not far off a temple bell tolled for morning puja.

  From the perspective of my old life in Chicago, it looked like Ed and Richard had simply given up—collapsed into some kind of passive disengagement from the world. But this was clearly not Chicago, and from where I was standing at that moment, it seemed very much as if they had discovered here a freedom I had never before imagined possible. Agra had been an exotic hell realm. Delhi was too big, dominated by politics and industry. But that morning when I saw Banaras stretched out before me in a maze of crooked alleyways and broken-down temples and palaces, the ancient Indian center of literature and drama, music and philosophy and religion, I knew beyond doubt that this was what I had come halfway around the world to find. I was home.

  After breakfast I left Ed and Richard to their practice and struck out on foot to explore the neighborhood. I had no map and no clear idea where I was going; I knew only that I must see the sacred Ganges; I must receive Ganga darshan. Unlike Delhi, there were no sidewalks in Banaras, no motor rickshaws, and very few cars—none at all in the inner city, where most of the streets were too narrow to accommodate their passing. People got around on foot, or by bicycle or rickshaw, or perched atop the occasional horse-drawn carriage.

  The great, fluid body of the goddess was not far away. I could feel her power just as you can feel the power of the ocean reaching out and pulling you toward her long before the blue expanse of waves rises into view. Passing through Shivala intersection, I wound my way back along the constricted lanes and through the busy market south of Bengali Tola to where I emerged on Raj Ghat, high above the river. A vast, turbulent plain of water opened out before me: calm, almost motionless near the bank, farther out a slowly churning mass of liquid brown that surged north under Malaviya Bridge toward Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal. In the distance the far shore was white sand bordered by jungle, the gray trunks of palm rising up into a tangle of broad green leaves. A single stray dog prowled the water’s edge. The village of Ramnagar was barely visible in the upriver mist; silhouettes of shops crouched low along the crenellated walls of the maharaja’s palace. The sun was a medallion of yellow fire rising in the eastern sky. To my left and right the ghats followed the river’s curve in a steep crescent of stairs ascending from the shoreline up into weathered stone buildings punctuated by tunnels and gates and high, arched doorways, portals leading back into the city’s shadowy interior.

  Directly in front of me the stairs led down to a flat, open area where cows and goats roamed freely. Nearby, a glossy black water buffalo the size of a small truck stood placidly chewing a garland of marigolds, one cheerless eye turned in my direction. A string of blossoms dangled from her chin; the petals came loose and rained down in orange flakes of light. Monkeys and stray dogs scavenged for food amid the continuous coming and going of the city’s human population, here to offer themselves to the goddess Ganga-ji and to Surya the sun.

  The air was chilly, and the water must have been frigid, but still the river near the steps was crowded. I watched one enfeebled woman leaning into the arms of a younger man, the corner of her sari pulled to cover her head and face. The man helped her into the water to where she now stood waist deep, palms together in prayer. People ascended the stairs carrying pots filled with water for morning puja, a time when their household deities would be awakened, bathed, and dressed. I stepped carefully down the broad stone stairs and walked south along the river.

  Even before I saw the flames at Harishchandra Ghat, I was assailed by the acrid stench of burning human hair and flesh. This is where the journey ends. This is the ultimate destination of every pilgrim. The place of crossing over.

  Things are not in my control.

  I drew closer, unsure of the rules. At what I hoped was a discrete distance, I paused and watched. In all, there were three fires. A corpse lay near the water, still lashed to its bier and covered with a shroud of fine saffron-colored cotton trimmed in gold. The fabric was soaked from ritual immersion in the Ganga, and I could clearly make out the shape of the body beneath.

  I came of age in the 1950s, absorbed in my parents’ Life’s Picture History of World War II, turning from one glossy black-and-white photograph to the next, in thrall to the parade of mutilated human forms: bodies starved, bodies frozen, bodies gunned down and stacked in ditches along either side of the highways leading out of Paris. Later, in college, along with everyone else, I watched the Vietnam War on television. This was to have been my war; I escaped only through the luck of the draw—a draft number high enough that I was never called. For me, it was another war in pictures. All those pictures of death. Until this moment, though, the only actual human corpse I had ever seen was my grandfather’s. He died when I was in first grade.

  I remember the unsettling silence of the funeral home, the rubber soles of my Keds brushing against the deep pile of the carpet, my mother’s hand holding mine as we approached the casket. I was just tall enough to look over the edge. Inside was a gentle, familiar face, eyes closed, asleep in a wash of creamy satin. I was profoundly confused. I could not believe what the adults seemed to be saying, that this man I knew so well had simply vanished from my life. Was he not still here with us, sleeping? Would he not awaken, when he was rested, and invite me to sit and watch, once again, as he employed his old pocket knife to remove the peel from an apple in one long, winding strip of red and white? “You get a wish,” he always told me, “if the peel doesn’t break.”

  Shall I wish—on an apple peel, or a monkey’s paw—that we might live forever?

  I was a small child, struggling to understand. I could not see, then, that any effort to understand death is futile because death is nothing that can be grasped and held. Death is a blunt, unadorned absence, a black hole at the center of thought into which our hopes and dreams pour like light from distant stars.

  There were no caskets here at Harishchandra Ghat, no stiff carpeting, no funerary bouquets. Only sand and water and fire.

  As I watched, several men trudged up and down the stairs, each of them shouldering a load of split logs held firmly against his back by a woven strap that ran underneath the wood and up around his forehead. They were barefoot, dressed only in shorts and frayed t-shirts impregnated with soot. Their skinny legs were taut with muscle. Just above me, two men labored at splitting the knotted root of a mango tree. One of them held a wedge while the other swung an iron hammer that fell with a heavy
, repetitive thunk. In the midst of this activity the bodies of the dead reclined on their fiery beds, smoke billowing up around them and spreading out over the river in a dense haze.

  My eyes stung as I leaned forward, straining to see through air rippling with heat. Hidden in among the flames of the nearest pyre I could make out the contours of a human leg, the foot jutting out at an odd angle. Flesh bubbled and peeled away from the calf like blackened strips of bark. A man stepped forward from among the small group of mourners and approached the end of the fire farthest from where I stood. He gripped a stiff bamboo rod tightly in both hands. He paused and bent forward, staring intently into the flames. After a moment he seemed to find what he was looking for. He straightened up and planted his feet firmly in the sand. And then in a single motion he cocked back his arms and thrust the rod forward like a lance, plunging its tip directly into the crown of the skull, shattering bone, freeing consciousness from the burning rags of desire.

  8

  BACK IN DELHI, I dreamed of returning to Banaras and settling in there. I imagined myself living like Ed and Richard, meditating and reading Sanskrit in my own room overlooking the Ganges. But these fantasies were soon interrupted by plans that had been made weeks before, through the mail, to telephone Judith. We had agreed on two possible dates. My journal shows pages of contradictory notes on what I wanted to say to her, all of them infused with my apprehension at the prospect of talking again after being separated for so many months.

  Telephoning from India to the States was an ordeal. The call had to be booked for a particular time at least twenty-four hours in advance. As the designated hour approached I peddled through the purple dusk of early evening to the Fulbright office. Ambassador taxis crawled through the smog like beetles, finding their way among a riotous swarm of bicycles and motor scooters. I glided past four barefoot men hauling a cargo of long, rusty iron rods loaded precariously across a wooden cart, the ends extending so far out in front and back that they sagged almost to the pavement. On Ashoka Road, just north of India Gate, I came upon a Tata truck collapsed in the middle of traffic; its rear axle lay shattered under a towering cargo of sugarcane stalks. One of its tires had spun off the road, and someone had set the rubber on fire. Dense plumes of smoke billowed up from orange flames. A group of men, heads wrapped in woolen scarves, stood around it warming themselves, drinking chai and laughing.