Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (24 page)

It was an easy idea to grasp because of its secular equivalent, the worship of celebrity. The more celebrities were photographed, the stronger their aura of celebrity became. I'd once seen David Beckham step off a coach at La Manga in
Spain. Obviously, I'd seen photographs of him before and now the cumulative effect of having seen all those photographs was making itself felt. The flash of camera lights made him radiant, glossy, divine. I saw him in all his Beckhamness and Beckhamitude. Someone who had not seen the thousands of pictures, who was not familiar with the changes of hairstyle, the viral spread of tattoos (including the misspelt bit of Hindi on his forearm), would not have seen him in this way. But maybe the point of view of that hypothetical and implausible onlooker – the person who didn't know they were seeing David Beckham – was more revelatory, at the very least, more interesting, than that of the rest of us who understood exactly who and what we were seeing. Here in Varanasi, the ill-informed tourist did not see the same city that the thousands of pilgrims saw, the pilgrims who came here and the ones who lived here. But this was not to say that the visitor was not capable of his own form of
darshan.
Even if I didn't know what I was looking at, I could still see. And if ever somewhere was designed with the eye in mind – there was probably a Sanskrit term meaning exactly eye-in-mind – then Varanasi was that place.

Next morning there was nothing to see. The river, the ghats, even the sky, had disappeared. A dense fog obliterated everything except a few vague details: the blurred shape of the temple next door, dark figures moving in the street below. I dressed and went down to the ghats, heard people coughing before I saw them, a few feet away. Boat rides were still being offered even though, with nothing to see, there was no point in taking one. Then I did see something: a boat, emerging from the haze as if returning from the realm of the dead or the undead. There were two passengers, swathed in grey blankets. After a while they drifted away again and
merged silently into the larger, greyer blanket of fog. There were a few squares of colour – the yellow of a sign, the blue of a wall – but infinitely subdued and dampened, shadows of their usual selves.

The mist cleared, unnoticed, before midday, making the afternoon seem even brighter than usual. A kingfisher appeared on the wall of the Ganges View terrace, eager to be seen, to re-exist. The sky, when I went out again, was busy with kites. At Munshi ghat I noticed a small blue shrine, the size of an emergency phone on the side of a motorway. In the middle of the shrine, where the phone would have been, was an orange blob, a worn blur of a shape. Within the general roundness, it was possible to make out the lump of a body and the smaller lump of a head, but more rounded, less defined than a Henry Moore version of an Indian god. Who was it? Ganesh? It could have been any of them. There was not even a residue of definition, but this did not suggest that its power had been diminished or had shrunk; the sense was that its essence had become more concentrated. The feeling was not of erosion or diminution, but of withdrawal. The god, whoever it was, had retreated into itself. By reducing itself almost to nothing, by coming so close to that which could not be identified as itself, it had became more nakedly itself. I felt sure of this, even though I did not know who or what I was seeing.

‘Who is that?’ I asked a boy.

‘Hanuman,’ he replied instantly. Because he recognized the monkey god (because he could
see
that it was him?) or because he knew that this is what the blob was, because he knew that this blue shrine was the place – one of the places – where Hanuman lived? The questions were irrelevant. They were the same. This orange, blurry blob was Hanuman.

‘Very powerful god,’ the boy added. The fact that his identity
was not in doubt, that the boy had not hesitated to say his name, was proof of that.

I took a boat home. Kites flew over the city, like embers floating over a bonfire.

The fog reappeared the following morning, and the morning after that. In addition to the fog, temperatures had plummeted throughout northern India. Newspapers were full of reports about freezing temperatures – ‘as the mercury plummeted … ’ – and travel disruption. Flights were cancelled and there were severe ‘delayments’ to all destinations. Trains from Delhi arrived in Varanasi ten hours late. Kite-flying was adversely affected.

Once the fog had gone – after the initial novelty had worn off, I was glad to see the back of it – the volume of kites in the sky increased daily. There were kite strings everywhere. In their thin, resilient way, they had tied up the entire city. The oars of boats were wrapped in them. It was impossible to walk more than a couple of steps without becoming tangled in them. They flailed from every tree and dangled from every telegraph pole like broken wires.

I saw many of the same people, the same kite-flying kids, the same hustlers, the same boatmen. Older, more affluent-looking tourists stayed only a few days before moving on to Agra or Kerala. I rarely saw any of them two days running. The backpackers stayed longer, and the longer they stayed the more closely they conformed to an international standard of scruffiness. Quite a few had dreadlocks anyway, some – like Ashwin, whom I bumped into a couple of times – opted for turbans that had started out as sarongs. The women wore shawls to protect themselves from the daytime sun and the evening chill, and also as a concession to local standards of modesty. Most of these travellers were in their twenties, here for
enlightenment, yoga, charas-smoking, spiritual growth, liberation. They were apprentice seekers, and in Varanasi there were dozens – probably hundreds, possibly thousands – of gurus and guides to help them bust out of the prison of the ego or get fast-tracked to enlightenment or wherever else they wanted to go. Most would return home several pounds lighter (the weight and the currency), but otherwise vastly enriched by the experience; some would go seriously off the rails – Varanasi's reputation for sending people nuts rivalled its reputation for making them ill – and a few, in time, would turn into versions of the older guys who were here, guys my age, many of whom looked like they'd done a decade or more in Goa. They often had the slightly hardened look of men accustomed to spending evenings on their own, reading
Mr Nice
or selections from Gurdjieff. Like me, they were often to be found on the terrace of the Lotus Lounge, eating excellent pancakes, drinking cappuccinos (the best in Varanasi) or chai. We nodded at each other but, like blacks at an otherwise all-white cocktail party, tacitly avoided forming any kind of alliance because that would have exacerbated our mutual status as age-outcastes. Not that the young people were unfriendly – they were just young. Even that is not right; it's not that I felt they were young so much as I thought how old I must appear from their point of view. In their shoes, I would not have paid any attention to a man of my age. I'd have been concentrating all my energies on persuading the young girls in their T-shirts and shawls that there was no danger of my standards of modesty being offended by any behaviour, however licentious.

These young people may not have been here for sex, but they were certainly here for death. They were as keen to see corpses being burned at Manikarnika ghat as the next person – me, for example. I'd never seen a dead body before, but in Varanasi the procession of death was endless. I got
used to seeing mourners carrying litters through the streets, chanting
'Rama nama satya hai… Rama nama satya hai…
taking the body to the river, dipping it in the Ganges. The random details that had caught my eye that first afternoon were part of an unvarying ceremony, re-enacted dozens of times every day. The mood was never sombre because the dead did not appreciate displays of grief. The man with the shaved head, dressed only in a white cloth, was the chief mourner. Having his head and eyebrows shaved was part of a ritual that left him suspended between the living and the dead. He led the other mourners five times around the unlit pyre, anti-clockwise (because, in death, everything is reversed). He was the one who poured sandalwood onto the pyre, before lighting it from a sacred fire that never goes out, that has burned since the world was created, here in Varanasi, at Manikarnika ghat, where it will end, except it will never end, any more than the journey from life to death will end.

It took hours for a body to burn. Near the end of the cremation the chief mourner cracked open the skull with a bamboo pole, releasing the soul from the body. Finally he tossed a pot of Ganges water over his shoulder – always his left shoulder – to symbolically extinguish the embers of the pyre. Without looking back, he walked briskly away. It was over. The soul had begun its journey to join the ancestors on the far shore. That journey would last eleven days, days of mourning and feasts. On the twelfth day, if all had gone well, if all the rituals had been correctly observed, it would arrive, safely.

The fact that the far bank was deserted made it easy to believe that the journey was more than a physical one. The reason the far bank was empty, a young boy with an old face explained, was that if you died over there you would be reborn as a donkey.

On this side, meanwhile, the area around the cremation
ground was always dense with activity. The journey from life to death never stopped, and nothing stopped here at the urdeparture lounge. Funerals were always in progress, but there were always other things going on as well: arguments, kiteflying, card games, music, yoga, bathing. A few yards beyond the cremation ground was Varanasi's leaning tower of Pisa: a temple that had collapsed or subsided in the mud of the river's edge. If it had once been painted Prayag-pink, now it was the dull, neglected brown of riverbank mud. From some angles it looked as if it sloped only slightly; from others it seemed on the brink of toppling over completely. I'd thought its vulnerability might have made it a particularly auspicious place to worship, but this, apparently, was not the case. It was, however, impossible to conclude that it had become entirely obsolete, that its power had been completely cut off simply because it had fallen on hard times. It was just an old temple that had gone on the wonk and was left to its own devices. Like a volcano which was somehow neither active nor extinct – nor anything in between – it still looked good in photographs. As such it remained viable, did its bit, brought something to the table. If it had a name, I did not know it.

The far side of the river, with all its changes, formed the constant backdrop to my days. At first light it was pure potentiality. As the lava-lamp sun floated clear of the horizon and wobbled through the grey haze, it became insubstantial otherness. Gradually it was possible to make out the difference between the sandy foreground and the greenery behind it. At night everything disappeared. It made me think of the day when the sun first went down, when there was no guarantee that the earth would emerge again from the darkness that had descended on it. Even now, all these years later, with all the precedents for a tomorrow, it seemed that the other side did
not just reappear but had to be painstakingly re-created again overnight, day after day.

The
Hindustan Times
(Lucknow) was exemplary in its vagueness: ‘This year the festival of Makar Sankranti is being celebrated for two days due to some astronomical reason.’ The banks at Assi and other ghats were packed with people waiting to take a dip on these, the first auspicious days of the new year. The street outside the hotel was crammed with beggars and those dispensing alms to them. It was still chilly in the mornings but, because it was a holiday, the sun shone more brightly.

‘It's windier too,’ I said to the boy tagging alongside me.

‘Because is kite-flying day,’ he said. Of course. Just as every god had his or her vehicle, so there was no effect without a cause. Makar Sankranti was the climax of the kite frenzy that had taken over the city, but flying kites was only part of the fun. It was also about catching or capturing them, sometimes with the aid of a pole, or cricket bat – anything that came to hand. Kites were chased among the dozing, resigned, indifferent buffalos, content to chew on flowers or, failing that, to graze on their own shadows.

At Manikarnika, a kite flopped down onto one of the pyres and, not surprisingly, burst into flames. What was surprising was that it had come down there in the first place. Hot air was supposed to rise, but evidently the normal laws of physics were reversed here. Seeing an opportunity to break free of the endless ups and downs of its existence, the kite took the plunge, seized this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to crash and burn.

I looked at books about Varanasi, but there was more to learn than I could ever hope to take in. It was where Shiva had decided to live. It was where the world began. Crossing places –
tirthas –
were sacred, certain crossing places were especially auspicious, but the whole of Varanasi was a crossing place, between this world and the next. Basically, there was no place on earth more worth visiting even though, in a sense, it was not of this world. I had read somewhere that Lourdes is not Lourdes for the people who live there. The same probably went for Mecca: where did the people who lived there go for a pilgrimage? But it was not true of Varanasi. Varanasi made going anywhere else seem nonsensical. All of time was here, and probably all of space too. The city was a mandala, a cosmogram. It contained the cosmos.

And it contained me: the longest-residing guest at the Ganges View. I was the only person conscious of this status for the simple reason that no one else had been there as long. If you arrived on a Tuesday, say, you simply saw that a number of guests had already settled in by the time you arrived. You could not have known that I had seen them all arrive, even as you had now arrived, and would see them depart, even as I would see you depart, world without end.

I had been at the Ganges View long enough to see that Anand Sethi was right: it really was one of the great hotels of the world. The reason for this, as the owner, Shashank, explained, was ‘because we don't really know how to run a hotel.’ The idea behind most hotels, especially luxurious ones, is very simple: to leech money out of guests. Every desire and whim can be catered for in an instant – and comes with a whopping surcharge. In the course of my stay at the Ganges View I'd eaten dozens of lunches, breakfasts and dinners, had ordered endless juices, teas and dozens of bottles of water. Wondering what all this might be costing, I asked Kamal – one of the smiling, gentle Nepalis who worked here – if they were keeping some kind of record of what I'd consumed. No, I was supposed to have kept a record, but they had forgotten
to give me the piece of paper on which this record was kept. Kamal duly produced the relevant paper and said I could start from today. As he handed me the paper, I heard a rustling behind me. When I looked around I saw a rat scurrying out of sight, behind a wardrobe.