On the Ganges

by George Black

  * * *

  Downstairs, three twentysomethings were sitting on the floor playing guitars, a man and two women. Arun greeted them. The man gave me a surly look.

  I asked Arun if he thought the Japanese girls would make good students. He made a gesture that said maybe, maybe not.

  “A lot of students write in my memory book, I feel like you are my father-mother, and to read that is a great feeling,” Arun said. “Sometimes one, two students write bad things. Some people think yoga is gymnastic only. But that does not make me upset. I do not feel angry. Just I say better you forget yoga, learn more gymnastic.”

  “Your memory book?”

  He delved around in a cupboard that was cluttered with old ledgers and school exercise books and pulled one out at random. It was full of testimonial messages in Dutch, Italian, Czech, English, French, German, and they all said similar things. Thank you, Arun. You are a magic person, Arun. Arun, you changed my life.

  He leaned across to the young guitarist and said, “Do you speak Hebrew?” The man grunted and said, “Of course.”

  “I will tell you this story,” Arun said, ignoring his rudeness. “About twelve years ago, I had one Israeli student. He came to me with three, four friends. They all say he should learn yoga, but he has only one problem. He was a fighter in the Israeli army, and he had some steel wire inside his bone, his knee, and he meet with many doctors and they say, ‘No, impossible, your legs will always be like this, they will never move.’ And he said to me, ‘I will promise to stay longer, one month even, if you can make my legs move like your legs.’ That was a challenge, and I accept that challenge. That is some creation, some new thing I can give someone, just trying to flow the good energy. And in one week, what happens? He was able to sit in a half lotus.”

  GANGA FUJI RAGA

  On a raised platform in the Ganga Fuji restaurant, an old man was playing the sitar. He had long, snow-white hair like corn silk, and he wore it twisted up in a bun on the top of his head. The restaurant, tucked away in one of the narrow alleys of the old city, was one of the few places in Varanasi where you could order a beer, which the owner would provide under the table, sort of, for a price. There was the usual polyglot crowd of diners, and the accelerating rhythm of the raga, propelled by the tabla drummer sitting cross-legged next to the old sitarist, was just background music for their meal. The musicians reminded me of the string quartets you see sawing away at Mozart in the lobby of five-star hotels. The music was intricate and beautiful, but no one was listening to anything but their own buzz of conversation.

  It was a small room with eight tables, a couple of spastic ceiling fans, and dozens of messages from satisfied customers taped to the tiled walls, some of them with quickly scribbled cartoons of sitar players, kangaroos, the Taj Mahal.

  We ♥ your chai!

  Aussie, Aussie, Aussie—love, light, and blessings to you

  There were messages in even more languages than I’d seen in Arun Singh’s memory book: English, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, Latvian, and Estonian, even Tagalog from a Filipino visitor from Zamboanga del Sur.

  The owner of the Ganga Fuji was a stocky man with black-framed glasses and a thick mustache. His name was Kailash, for the Himalayan abode of Lord Shiva. The sign outside the restaurant offered “Chinese Indian Continental Japanese Food Spanish Food,” but when he stopped at our table to take our order, the only options he offered were vegetable curry or chicken curry, which came with an elaborate description of his special ingredients and cooking methods. We ordered the chicken. He disappeared into the kitchen.

  More than half an hour passed. We were on our second Heineken. The raga had ended, and the old sitarist was packing up to leave. Eventually Kailash returned and set two steaming plates on the table with a pile of garlic naan.

  “Chicken curry.” He beamed.

  I looked at the plate. It was a rough puree of vegetables. “This isn’t chicken,” I said.

  “Yes, sir, this is chicken. You will see. Inside there are pieces.”

  I stirred it around some more and held up a spoonful for him to inspect. It was entirely chicken-free.

  “This is chicken, sir.”

  I took a mouthful of vegetables. It was actually delicious. Why make an issue of it?

  Kailash came back later to clear away the dishes. “I hope you enjoyed your meal, sir. The chicken curry is our very famous dish.”

  * * *

  A couple of days later, I went back to see Arun Singh. I wanted to ask him about the reverse side of the leaflet about his yoga school. It said,

  LISTEN TO VERY NICE MUSIC CONCERT

  SUR SARITA THE MUSIC SCHOOL—BURNING PLACE—MANIKARNIKA GHAT

  “When I came to Varanasi, I start learning music also,” he said. “I learn tabla, also I know a little bit sitar. I teach yoga for a few years more, then I organize teacher for tabla and sitar, then at a small-small distance I meet Jugal Giri Baba, and I ask him to join my group. He is our sitar teacher. Thousands of people we teach, many thousands. But come, you must meet Giriji. He is upstairs.”

  Why was I surprised that Arun’s teacher turned out to be the sitar player from the Ganga Fuji? Although it has a million and a half people, Varanasi is in many ways a small town.

  The old man was slumped on a mat against the lime-green wall, apparently asleep. His bun was untied, and his white hair straggled across his shoulders. When he heard us enter the room, he opened one eye. It was impossible to judge his age. He might have been an old sixty or a young eighty, his features worn into crags and furrows by decades of austerity, musical discipline, and a diet of rice and dal.

  “Giriji has a little bit English, but mind communication he has very good,” Arun said. “One to one, translator he does not need, never a student has complained.”

  The old man came to life, tossed his hair, and laughed. “I have been learning sitar for forty years,” he said in Hindi. “I am still learning.”

  His right eye remained closed. Perhaps it was blind.

  He said he had been born in a small town in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a few miles from Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. “I was very religious from a young age. I was never in the worldly things. No weddings or ceremonies. I left home and went from temple to temple.”

  Eventually his wanderings had taken him to Allahabad. He remembered that it was the year Nehru died, 1964. At the great mela he was initiated as a sanyasi, a renunciant. “You meet with three gurus,” he said. “One is the guru of the langoti [the loincloth]. One gives you the necklace. The third one whispers your mantra in your ear. I wore the kanthi, the double-stranded necklace of tulsi [holy basil], which shows devotion to Lord Krishna.”

  “If you wear the rudraksha beads also, when you will die you will go to the realm of Shiva,” Arun added. “You will not be managed by Yama, the god of death. As on the earth you have different countries like India and England and America, so also we have different loks, the worlds of the gods, like Shivalok, Vishnulok, Brahmalok.

  “Giriji traveled all over India, followed all the main pilgrimage routes on foot. Gangotri, Kedarnath, Badrinath. He decided to stop cutting his hair. He wore only one woolen sheet, nothing else. He would walk ten kilometers, stop, and a devotee would always bring him bread with happiness.”

  Giriji looked up at me and smiled. “Here in Benares, also people give free food. Perhaps it would not be possible to travel like that in your Western countries.”

  I asked him if he had always been a musician. “Not until I moved to Mumbai. One day I went to the Mahalakshmi temple, where there was a devotee who was the secretary of Bal Thackeray”—the incendiary leader of the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement Shiv Sena. “He had a ticket to see Ravi Shankar play. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I was so touched by the music that I began to dream of sitar. Before that, I knew nothing of music. I knew only how to chant Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, in the temple. But Ravi Shankar was
a divine incarnation, like Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhiji used to wear just a small langoti and carry a stick in his hand. But he chased away the English.

  “In Mumbai, they always demanded money, forty rupees for a lesson. To learn for free, you had to come to Benares.”

  There was just one problem: his hair.

  “It was a big obstacle to playing, because it was so long. When I stood up, it touched the ground. So I used to tie it up over my head, but then my neck started hurting because of the weight. So one day I decided to cut it off and tied it in a cloth and went out on a boat into the middle of the river and immersed my hair in the water.”

  * * *

  In Varanasi, he found a new guru and music teacher, Pandit Shivaji Rao Kevaley, a master of the santoor, a kind of hammered dulcimer of Persian origin that was once favored by Sufi mystics. The pandit’s ashram was in the heart of the old city, in a neighborhood called Khalispura, not far from the famous Brahmeshwar temple. Giriji had lived there in a small room for more than thirty-five years.

  He perfected his art, rising at three each morning and practicing until five. Finally, he felt ready to teach others.

  “Plus minus fifteen years we work together here,” Arun said. “Most times it’s easy to teach the students, because they have a background in other instruments, like guitar. Giriji just gives them one sitar, he takes another. He plays, they copy. He doesn’t know how to write, so the student writes it down.

  “Ninety-seven percent of our students are foreigners; 3 percent are Indians. Some students are really serious, some are for fun only. It is divided like fifty-fifty. Sometimes it is a challenge, sometimes it is like we become magic people. Many different kinds of feelings we got in this way. Students from Germany and France, they are very serious. Some of them stay here for a long time, maybe five months. People from Russia and America, they don’t take time to sit down and really learn. In India, your teacher is more like a guru; you are very respectful. In those countries, they have a different system. ‘He taught me music, I paid him. The relationship is over. Bye-bye.’”

  I told Giriji how much I’d enjoyed his performance at the Ganga Fuji, even though it was sometimes hard to hear him over the chatter.

  He laughed. That was how it was. You had to accept reality. “Even if it is only background music for them, it is the serious music I have learned. Sometimes they are paying attention, other times they are loud, they are laughing, they are doing their own cultural thing. But I have to do this for the sake of living. I cannot survive on private lessons. So many music shops and music schools have come up. There is huge competition. At the Ganga Fuji, they used to pay me a hundred rupees, now it is a hundred and fifty.”

  I didn’t say so, but that was less than Kailash charged for a Heineken.

  “Also, in the hot months—May, June—and when monsoon starts in July, foreigners don’t come, so Giriji is completely out of work,” Arun said. “During that time, he must live on what he has saved. He lives all alone, makes his own food. A day living for him is sixty, seventy rupees.” A dollar.

  * * *

  “When a person is born, everything about him is written in a book,” Giriji said. “How you will live and what you will do. Your life is predefined. Play music, live a religious life, be a renouncer. This is what is written in the book of my life.”

  I asked if he would be playing at the Ganga Fuji again that evening.

  “No, tonight it will be the Brown Bread Café and German Bakery, tomorrow again at Ganga Fuji. These two places I play, one night one place, one night the other place. I play for one hour. If audience is there, fine. If audience is not there, fine. I can’t worry about a lack of respect. I am not Ravi Shankar.”

  Later that evening, I saw him shuffling through the darkened alleyways of Khalispura, heading for the German Bakery. His sitar was slung diagonally across his back. It was as big as he was.

  THE MOTHER’S LAP

  The election circus was in town, and invoking the sacred river had become a weapon in the propaganda wars. I made my way through the congested streets to Beniya Bagh, a few hundred yards north of Godaulia Crossing, where supporters of the underdog were assembling. Supporters of the favorite pelted them with eggs and black ink, and later, when the underdog appeared in person, switched to stones.

  Beniya Bagh was one of the few places in Varanasi that could legitimately be called a park, although now, in the long rainless months, most of it was trampled brown dust. The perimeter was marked off by palm trees with trunks painted in the colors of the Indian flag, saffron, green, and white. The park was in a heavily Muslim neighborhood, and many of the thousands who took their seats in front of the stage, all of them men, wore the knitted skullcap of their faith, the topi, and the all-white shalwar kameez.

  They fidgeted in the stupefying afternoon heat for several hours until the candidate, Arvind Kejriwal, finally arrived, well after dark. His campaign slogan was “River, Weaver, and Sewer,” which conveyed his allegiance to the Ganges, his commitment to cleaning it up, and his appeal to the Muslim community, which supplies most of the labor for the city’s famous silk-weaving and sari-making industry. Kejriwal’s harangues against official corruption had recently gotten him elected as chief minister of Delhi, although his first administration was a firework in the night, flaming out after seven weeks. (Later he would get a second crack at the job, which went a bit more smoothly.)

  Candidates for office in India can run in any parliamentary constituency they like; the idea of carpetbagging doesn’t raise many eyebrows. Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, who was also running to be prime minister and was the strong favorite, had chosen Varanasi. “Neither BJP has sent me, nor I have come here on my own,” Modi said when he made the announcement. “I am here because Ma Ganga has called me. I am a small boy come to the mother’s lap.”

  That evening in Beniya Bagh, Kejriwal attacked Modi for practicing “the politics of hate and of division,” and it was true that the campaign had its fair share of dog whistles. Campaign posters showed Modi’s face, smiling and resolute, against a backdrop of ghats and temples. Some of his supporters picked up the chant of Har Har Mahadev!, the traditional salute to Shiva, and turned it into Har Har Modi!, until their candidate took to Twitter and suggested that while he respected their enthusiasm, it was probably best not to say such things out loud.

  As Kejriwal was denouncing him that night in Beniya Bagh, Modi was hundreds of miles away in the town of Hiranagar, in the disputed border territory of Jammu and Kashmir, where radical Islamists had just attacked a police station, leaving six dead. Modi pointed out that the chosen instrument of the jihadis was the AK-47. So let his opponent, whom he reviled as an agent of Pakistan and an enemy of India, be known, for his initials and the pitiful length of his tenure in Delhi, as AK-49. Posters soon went up in Varanasi showing Kejriwal’s face photoshopped onto a portrait of Osama bin Laden.

  This was the kind of talk that can get people killed in India and frequently does, especially in Uttar Pradesh. About 20 percent of the state’s two hundred million people are Muslim—the proportion is even higher in Varanasi—and UP has an especially ugly history of communal violence, in which Muslims invariably take up most of the space in the morgue. The most notorious of all the mass killings occurred in 1992, when Hindu mobs tore down the Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya, eighty miles east of Lucknow, which had been built on the putative site of the birthplace of Lord Ram, the seventh avatar of Vishnu. That triggered riots all across India in which two thousand people died. Ten years later, Hindu militants from Gujarat, where Modi was chief minister at the time, traveled to Ayodhya, where they tried and failed to lay the foundation stone of a temple on the site of the demolished mosque. When their train returned to Gujarat, it was set upon by a Muslim mob. Fifty-nine Hindus burned to death, and more than a thousand Muslims were massacred in reprisal.

  Modi had never managed to shake off the accusations of complicity in the killings or to show
much regret about them. It was like being a passenger in a car that ran over a puppy, he said; what need was there to apologize?

  * * *

  In a back alley in one of the Muslim neighborhoods of Varanasi, I met a grave, white-bearded homeopathic doctor named Abdullah Ansari, who was regarded as a trusted elder among the weavers that Kejriwal claimed to speak for. He ushered me through a heavy steel door into a windowless office and sat down behind a desk piled high with papers. The room shook to the rhythmic whirring and slamming of power looms on the other side of the wall, which made it hard to follow his soft-spoken mix of Urdu and heavily accented English. To my surprise, he didn’t show any sign of anxiety about Modi’s ascent.

  “Muslims are twenty-five percent of population here,” he said. “Mostly they are weavers of Banarsi silk. Even in twelfth century there were some, although most came four hundred or six hundred years later. History says some Sufis came here, also soldiers from Central Asia, and this was how they found their livelihood.”

  By and large, the two communities rubbed along together. The rough division of labor was that the Muslims wove, while the Hindus supplied the yarn and did the sewing and ran the retail end. “And so there is an economical cohabitat,” the doctor said. Keeping the peace was a matter of mutual self-interest.

  Varanasi had largely escaped the horrors of Partition, he explained, and for the next quarter century “there was not any condition that any Hindu-Muslim riot takes place. Until 1972 only. Reason was the matter of Aligarh Muslim University. Government was planning to remove Muslim from this name. So there was some violence. But the same process was also to abolish for Banaras Hindu University.” He shrugged and smiled. In the end, both universities kept their names, and things quieted down for the next five years.

  “Then takes place more violence here in this neighborhood because of worship of goddess Durga by Golden Sporting Club,” he said. “When puja was over, images were brought to Ganga for immersion. But some Hindus wanted to go through a route where the local Muslims opposed that. Said you should follow the old road, and this became issue of riot. It was matter of pride, turning into chanting of religious slogans, then throw stone on each other. After that there have been many more, like in ’91 and ’92, but not mass killing.”