by George Black
After Assi Ghat, there was only a broad mud flat, and then the Assi itself, once a river and now just a nullah that drained raw sewage into Ma Ganga. Later I met R. K. Dwivedi, the chief engineer for the city’s sewage treatment plant, a portly man in his sixties with a Cheshire cat smile. He was proud of his pumping stations. “From Assi Ghat to Raj Ghat, you will find almost nil flow coming into Ganga!” he exclaimed. “This is expected point of appreciation!”
“But what about the Assi nullah?” I asked. “It’s right at the head of the bathing ghats.”
He gave a nervous smile and looked at his shoes. “Question is difficult to answer,” he said.
* * *
I made a northward detour through the crush of the old city. Hundreds of pilgrims were lined up for admission to the Golden Temple, watched over by glowering soldiers in khaki fatigues who carried antique rifles and swished their bamboo lathis, nominally on the lookout for Islamist terrorists. An old woman was howling as one of the soldiers beat her around the head and shoulders. From the soldier’s shouts of “Mobile! Mobile!” it seemed that her offense was not to have surrendered her cell phone before entering the shrine.
Everywhere there were hand-painted signs on the walls. Places to eat, inspirational messages, services, and souvenirs.
BOWL OF COMPASSION CAFÉ
RAGA CAFÉ, SO NICE HOME
SALON DE THÉ VISHNU
PHULWARI RESTAURANTE & SAMI CAFÉ (MULTI COCINA) ESPECIALIDAD EN COMIDA MEDITERRÁNEA
HOTEL DIVYA/CHOICE OF BEST FOOD FROM TRANSPARENT KITCHEN
RECONCILE YOURSELF WITH OTHERS
GANGA IS SOURCE OF LIFE THANK YOU FOR LOVING AND RESPECTING HER
LOVE FOR EVERYONE
CLEAN MIND
NO. 1 SHOP IN TRIPADVISER/VARANASI REMEMBRANGES, CRYSTAL, ESSENTIAL OILS, MASSAGE, TEA MASALA, MALA’S GEM STONE, ORNAMETN
YOGA TRAINING CENTER REF: LONELY PLANET 2003, 07
* * *
Back on the ghats, boys were flying kites. Touts whispered offers of hashish. Men pissed against walls. Boatmen called up from the river, offering their services to the hordes of visitors. The tourists studiously avoided making eye contact with each other, as if they resented the obvious fact that they were not the only ones to have discovered this strange and wondrous place. The tourists in the boats held up their smartphones, framing the exotica for photographs they would post on Facebook. I thought of Charlotte, Viscountess Canning, wife of the governor general and an amateur watercolorist, who came here in 1860: “I now feel I have seen India,” she wrote. Perhaps that was what all the tourists were feeling, and perhaps, I had to admit, it was what I was feeling myself.
THE POETS OF BENARES
Before the hippies and the jet boaters, the Israeli draftees and the bungee jumpers and the Japanese package-tour groups, there was Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky. They arrived in Varanasi in December 1962, stayed a few days in the Cantonment, the old military district, and then rented an apartment for the next five months near Dasaswamedh Ghat.
The two men had spent several months in Calcutta before boarding the train to Varanasi, and after countless hours on one of Calcutta’s cremation grounds, Nimtala Ghat, Ginsberg had come away with three fascinations that bordered on obsession: naked sadhus, the various mesmerizing ways in which a human body could be turned into “blackened meat,” and the steady pulse of the river. As soon as they arrived in Varanasi, he went straight to Manikarnika and spent night after night there, squatting among the sadhus, legless from ganja, breathing in the smoke from the pyres, watching the sparkling reflection of the firelight on the water, writing down the sadhus’ names and their backgrounds in his journal and adding rapturous fragments about the variety of their genitals—wrinkled, pouched, or free-swinging—and their oiled and ash-smeared chests.
In the daytime, like any other visitor, he strolled for hours along the ghats. The palaces put him in mind of Venice. Looking north at the grand sweep of the river toward the Raj Ghat railway bridge, he was reminded of the Grand Canal. At other times, he wrote, he felt like an American in Paris in 1920.
* * *
They rented the apartment from a Brahmin priest, Gaurishankar Tiwari. It was on the third floor of his house, a large room with whitewashed walls and a black stone floor and a primitive toilet. There were shelves for Ginsberg’s books, and Orlovsky put a red pot-bellied Ganesha in one of the niches. Ginsberg hung a portrait of William Blake. Huge doors gave on to a balcony that was vulnerable to monkeys. There were views down to the ghats and the river in one direction; in the other, you looked down on a vegetable market. I’d strolled through this market more than once myself, and I imagined it hadn’t changed much over the years, with cloths laid out on the ground for the rows of vendors to display their cucumbers, eggplant, tomatoes, purple-pink carrots, beans, daikon radishes, peppers, red cabbage and red onions, spiky gourds and bitter gourds, potatoes, beets, cauliflower, garlic and ginger, coriander and turmeric. Ginsberg liked to make vegetable soup, which he cooked on the balcony over a kerosene stove.
Orlovsky spent a good amount of time tending to the starving beggars and lepers who clustered in a nearby alleyway, much as he’d done at Mother Teresa’s home for the dying in Calcutta. He fed them Ginsberg’s soup and brought water to the lepers, since, being unclean, they were not allowed to go down to the river. Ginsberg posed them for photographs.
He got sick a lot. Lying in bed, prostrated by bouts of diarrhea, coughing his way through the winter fogs, tormented by a kidney infection, he listened to the bright ringing of rickshaw bells and the calls of the ice vendor and the knife sharpener and the tinny clang of a sadhu with finger cymbals. When he was healthy, the nights were devoted to cremations, drugs, and sex, splayed out in bed with Orlovsky “in all this morphined ease” and then plunging into wild erotic dreams that involved women and sometimes even babies as well as the men who were his usual preference.
At Christmas, they made a side trip to visit the Taj Mahal and Vrindavan, the birthplace of Lord Krishna. Ginsberg went on his own to Bodh Gaya, where Siddhartha had attained enlightenment. But by May, things had turned sour. Ginsberg had come to India looking for answers, but India, in its usual way, had provided just as many new questions. Orlovsky had grown weary of stoned sadhus. He shaved off all his hair and moved out to a place of his own. Ginsberg, in a funk, packed up his belongings and slept on the floor with a blanket and an inflatable pillow and surrendered to a fresh round of morphine-fueled dreams. One morning, the priest’s son, Vijayshankar, came to wake him. Ginsberg rolled over, went back to sleep, and dreamed that the boy was climbing all over his body before finally settling “near my loins.” The boy was fourteen.
* * *
One evening, at Dasaswamedh, just after the Ganga Aarti had ended, I met Vijayshankar Tiwari, who was now a quiet, equable man in his late sixties and had long since assumed his father’s role as a hereditary pilgrimage priest, a tirth purohit. He was sitting on his platform under his concrete umbrella as he did every day, starting at eight in the morning with his worship of the river and then attending to the death rituals and other needs of pilgrims from families his ancestors had assisted for four generations. One of his two sons would eventually succeed him, but it wasn’t clear whether it would be the one who worked in a local hospital or his brother, who worked for a cell phone company. Like all the pundits, Vijayshankar had his assigned territory, and he traced its outline with his finger. The demarcation lines were strict, and there was less competition for business than there had been in the past. “In the 1920s and 1930s, there used to be bloody fights among the tirth purohits,” he said.
He poured me a thimbleful of chai from a plastic bag, and I asked him what he thought of all the foreigners who converged on Dasaswamedh for the aarti. He glanced at a young woman, German or Dutch perhaps, who was sitting on the steps puffing on a bidi and bopping to music from someone’s radio. “It is our fate,” he said philosophically. “Mother Ganga, all Hindus have f
aith in her, and the foreigner who comes here has faith in her also. On December 25, many of them come and distribute blankets and food to the poor people. I have not studied their Christian religion, but I know this is when their saint, Jesus, was born, and they decorate their churches on that day.”
“Tell me about Allen Ginsberg,” I said.
He smiled. “He had a beard and long hair, like dreadlocks almost. He was the only person my father ever rented our house to. I think with Allen he felt a sameness of mind. My father was deeply religious. He used to make shivlings out of Ganga clay and then immerse them in the river. I know Allen was a great poet. He has written a book even. He would bring his poems to present at Banaras Hindu University. Sometimes he would read them to people sitting at the chai stall at Assi Ghat. To me, he was a religious saint, like our poets Tulsi Das and Kabir Das, who also lived in this city.”
I told him that in America there had been another poet of that kind, whose name was Walt Whitman. He had poured out his emotions as if he were talking directly with God.
“Allen was a very quiet and peaceful person, a very spiritual person,” Tiwari went on. “He was often busy with his writing. Peter would spend more time down on the ghats with the beggars and the lepers. They would cook their meals on the balcony.”
“The famous vegetable soup,” I said.
He chuckled. “Yes, I remember Allen’s soup. It had no taste. But they were always so happy about it, because it was their Western food. Here in India, we don’t even eat soup! But one time I noticed that they were also feeding it to the lepers at Dasaswamedh. So I think the meal was not so special if he was offering it to the beggars also.”
Two shy young men in T-shirts had sidled over to sit on the edge of the platform and listen to our conversation. “I am a poet also,” one of them said to me. He recited one of his poems. It concerned a rickshaw wallah, how the unceasing rotation of the three wheels of his humble vehicle was a metaphor for the cycles of his life. I found it oddly moving.
“Peter came back once, you know,” Tiwari said. “It was around 1978, during one of the worst floods in the history of Benares. First level of the house was under the water; one elephant could be easily drowned.”
Peter had been rowed through the streets from Godaulia Crossing, a busy commercial intersection well over a mile from the river.
“He went up to the room where he and Allen had stayed, and everything was just the same. Nothing had changed, only some new netting on the balcony that kept the monkeys away. He brought a gift for my father.”
“What did he give him?” I asked.
He smiled again. “An alarm clock.”
“You know they had a problem in their friendship, just before they left Benares?”
“Yes, I know Peter was upset with Allen, so Allen went to see a famous religious person, Devraha Baba. The baba had a theory. He said to him, ‘Time will heal.’”
I imagined the tirth purohit as a fourteen year old, with Ginsberg and Orlovsky sprawled in bed upstairs, shooting up morphine, sated with sex. I realized that it must never have occurred to him that they were gay and certainly not that he had featured in the poet’s erotic fantasies, and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.
THE LOST BOY
Varanasi is a city of posters, leaflets, hand-painted signs, messages scrawled on walls. One day, a section of the ghats around Dasaswamedh was plastered with notices that said,
MOTHER SEARCHING FOR HER SON, MISSING SINCE 1986
There were two photographs. The first showed a young man, perhaps in his midtwenties, with an open, ingenuous expression. In the second, his hair was longer, and he was dressed in a coat and tie. Next to him was his mother, middle-aged and middle class, smiling for the camera, wearing a white jacket with black piping and a double row of pearls. Underneath the photographs, it said, “This man’s mother still believes he is alive and would like to see him if possible.” There was a mobile phone number and an email address that ended in .fr.
It’s not uncommon to see such notices in India. You find them placed where they are most likely to yield results. If the missing person is Indian, it’s more likely to be around the bus terminals and railway stations. In places like Varanasi and Rishikesh, the notices will be posted in the places where foreigners come for yoga or drugs or enlightenment or voluntary escape from their former lives.
In the Himalayas, my nomadic companion, Manto, had told me stories of the disappeared. “Most of them are low-budget tourists. They come here and they get lost with some holy man in Gangotri or Rishikesh or somewhere else in Uttarakhand. They become religious. They take a Hindu name. Sometimes they destroy their passports. Sometimes they throw away their money also. They say that now they will be on their own; nature will protect them. Sometimes their families or friends or relatives come searching for them. They put advertisements in the newspapers, but still they are never traced. Some of them are found after being lost for more than a year; they are found in the forest, or in some temple, some hut, some cave. There was a German woman who got impressed by one of the holy men, and she became pregnant and delivered a son. She tried to convince the holy man to move to Germany, but he thought his divine power would be destroyed if he crossed the ocean.”
The French boy would be in his fifties now. Perhaps he was with some swami in the high peaks, robed in saffron with his head shaved and a sikha topknot. Perhaps he had been robbed, murdered, and dumped in a ditch when he was still young and fresh-faced. You knew that his mother would never find him.
* * *
Near Manikarnika, somebody pressed a leaflet into my hand. It was printed on flimsy yellow paper with simple drawings of a man in various yoga poses and a text that read,
PATANJALI YOGA INATITUTE
TEACHING FACILITY OF ASTANG YOGA, HATH YOGA, RAJ YOGA, KUNDLINI YOGA, TANTRA YOGA & MASSAGE
WELCOME TO MAKE OURSELF HIGHLY CONSUSE AND HEALTHY ALSO TEACHERS TRAINING
The owner of the school, Arun Singh, was sitting on a blue patterned mat by the door, which opened directly onto the alleyway. At the far end of the room, another door opened onto a short flight of steps that led down to the river, past a stack of logs ten feet high, ready for the funeral pyres. There was a smell of smoke from the cremation fires.
Arun had a manner that was both diffident and mischievous, and he spoke with a slight speech impediment. He was one of those people you liked immediately. He was also a man of many parts: yoga teacher, classical musician, wood seller. He handed me a kulhar, a tiny cup of unglazed clay, which local potters turn out by the millions, and poured me some chai. The lip of the cup tasted of earth.
He said he had taken up yoga when he was fifteen, joining an ashram in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand state, which borders Uttar Pradesh to the southeast. “It was run by a baba who lived in a small cottage. A lot of disciples came to him and offered to make a big building for the ashram, but always he refused. He spent his whole life in that cottage or on the cremation ground. After that, I came to Varanasi, which was my parents’ hometown. Here I start first the wood business, but then yoga is in my inside, and slowly-slowly I start to teach yoga here. Many foreigners come to learn, to learn the energy of India.”
His next students arrived for their hour-and-a-half lesson. They were two Japanese girls who looked to be twenty at most. They were training to be geriatric nurses. We went up the narrow staircase to Arun’s yoga studio. The walls were painted lime green, and the shutters, which were pulled shut against the afternoon glare, were lipstick pink. There was a pile of tabla drums against one wall, and a sitar was propped up in a corner.
“First thing of yoga, always we speak truth, always we seek truth,” Arun said to the girls when they had settled comfortably on the floor mat. “First kind of truth we call outward truth. If we believe in something and we are not going to change, this is called outward truth. Many people believe in God. If someone says, ‘Show me God, where is God,’ you are not able to show. But you believe, so th
is is outward truth. You understand?”
The women nodded politely. His accent was quite strong, and it wasn’t clear that their English was up to the challenge.
“Second truth is called behavior truth. How we are behaving in our lives, what we speak, what we taste by mouth, what we smell by nose. Third truth we call imagined truth. We believe something, but maybe with time that will change. For example, you are both very good friends here. But after five years, will you be friends or not? This is imagined truth. Understand? Any question you have about truth?”
They said nothing, and Arun motioned them to stand up straight and breathe. First there is a mountain. One of the girls had a natural poise and elegance. The other was plain and awkward. Now Vrksasana, the tree. On one leg, foot to knee, hands steepled in the namaste, then raised above the head. The awkward girl toppled; they both giggled.
“All right, now we will take a rest,” Arun said after he had shown them a few more basic poses. “Second part, yoga philosophy. Just a small philosophy. If I am explaining all, it will take six, seven hours. Nonviolence is the very heart of yoga. Because more peace, more love on this earth. But how could this come, this more peace and more love? Because violence comes so easily in our minds. Sometimes we need to protect ourselves, and at that time we need energy. If we use that energy, it is not violence. But if we hurt any living creature intentionally, that is violence. Even animals, birds, insects, every creature has the right to live on this earth.”
They stood up again for some simple exercises. Posture and breathing. The awkward girl looked as if she would rather be somewhere else.
“In Western lifestyle, body is stiff, always you are sitting,” Arun said. “So I will explain to you what the different exercises are and for what purpose. So when you go for your job with old persons, you could use that exercise maybe. Understand? Any questions?”