Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (29 page)

The pictures were not big, about the size of LP covers, arranged in a single row around the gallery, and hung with Indian visitors in mind (I had to stoop slightly to look at them). They were black and white, but had none of the torsion, the psychological malaise and shock of Ackerman's Varanasi pictures. There were people in some of them, others were of empty rooms. Reflections. Shelves of things. The forecourt of a building at dusk. Cracked paving stones that refused to offer any sign of being a path. Light reflected in a swimming pool so that it looked like a tennis court under water. Gloves hanging on a rack. A death mask in a bell jar. Two white jackets, the sort worn by Nehru, hung up in some kind of display case.

The absence of people was not a universal principle. People were there or not there, there in some pictures and not there in others. A hand-out said that all the photographs had been taken in India, but there were no individual captions, nothing to tell you where anywhere was, or what anything was, or when it had been. There were just these pictures of places, pictures of places that were in these photographs. There was nothing to help you get your bearings and then, after a while, once you accepted the idea, you realized that you didn't need these things that you so often relied on, that there were no bearings to get. A given picture had no explicit or narrative connection with the one next to it, but their adjacency implied an order that enhanced the effect of both.

A curving row of cinema seats, or seats in a concert auditorium, gleaming slightly. From the seats' point of view, the cinema was always packed, even when empty; it didn't make any difference what was playing, or even if anything was playing. Windows in a tower. Light coming through windows. Without the pictures, until they were taken, you might have thought there was nothing in these places to see. Being photographed left them as they were, unchanged, altered. Did the idea of
darshan
come into play here? Was there a form of
darshan
in which there was nothing to be seen?

In the visitors' book on the desk someone had written out three lines of what I presumed was Hindi. I showed them to Laline, who read the lines out loud. They were from a poem by Faiz, she said, a Pakistani poet. Faiz had written in Urdu, but whoever had written the lines here had translated them into Hindi. Moving her finger along the pattern of flowing script, she translated them again, hesitantly, into English.

          ‘“All that will remain is Allah's name,
He who is absent but present too,
He who is the seer as well as the seen.”’

I stared at the incomprehensible pattern of words, letting their revealed meaning sink back into them. Lal said, ‘It might have been better without the first line.’

‘In this context, yes, we could have done without the context,’ I said. ‘But I like the rhyme: “remain” and “name.” Or near-rhyme, at any rate.’

People did not stay long at the opening – as with dinners at the Ganges View, the lack of booze was a powerful disincentive to linger. Once the gallery had thinned out, it was possible to see all the photographs at once – captioned now, by Faiz – arranged around the white room in a single line. A receding hallway, the wet floor reflecting doors and windows. A tower with surrounding sky. A grid of lights under water, like something that was a reflection of itself.

Two musicians came to stay at the hotel: a tabla player and a French guitarist. The guitarist was studying Hindustani music in Kolkata and his guitar had been modified by the addition of sympathetic strings, which gave it an Indian sound. The tabla player was Indian, from Mumbai, but lived mainly in Europe, in Germany. They did not know each other, but after dinner they jammed together on the small enclosed terrace at the very top of the hotel. It wasn't a public performance, but anyone from the hotel who wanted to could sit and watch.

Even if you listened intensely, it was impossible not to feel excluded from the little cocoon the musicians wove for themselves. Watching them play was like watching two lovers, attentive and responsive to each other's every move, and oblivious to everyone else. While they were playing they had ears and eyes only for each other, and when they were not playing they were not interested in anything, or only interested in talking about music. It was difficult not to envy their absorption. For years I'd earned my living as a journalist, even though
I hated writing. When I had a piece to write, there was nothing – nothing – that I would not rather have been doing instead: tennis, television, drinking, washing up, having a bath, reading the paper, even just staring into space. Anything was preferable. Perhaps it would have been different if I'd done my ‘own’ writing – whatever that meant – but I doubt it. It would still have been writing, something to be put off and avoided. Whereas all these two wanted was to play music. I'd hear them in their rooms, practising separately, going over stuff they'd hit upon together the night before or preparing some kind of structure they could improvise around later that evening. I wished there'd been something in my life like that. Convinced that there must have been, I tried to remember what it was. It took a long time to accept that the reason I was having such trouble remembering was because there really wasn't anything to remember. Tennis came closest, except by the time I got serious about it there was a limit to how much my body could take: three times a week, tops. If I played more than that, I got injured. What else? Going to parties, drinking, drug-taking. Drugs were certainly something I'd always looked forward to but, as with tennis, I was conscious that if I did them too much I'd get physically or psychologically injured. Besides, taking drugs hardly constituted a vocation, or not for me at any rate; it was just a leisure activity, a hobby, not something I could earn a living from. Perhaps the nearest I'd got to sustainable, all-consuming enjoyment was the life I was leading here, doing nothing. And it was sustainable, or could easily become so. By renting out my flat in London, I could continue like this indefinitely.

During my first weeks in Varanasi I'd checked email constantly, kept up to date with work-related stuff back in London. (By the time I read my piece about Varanasi on the
Telegraph
website, I'd begun to take as normal things that
had once made me feel like a package tourist from Mars.) Since then I'd let things slide, had failed to respond to various offers of work. Nothing was so urgent that it could not wait, and if you waited long enough then that which had been urgent became – by virtue of its urgency – irrelevant. Gradually the reciprocal momentum of email diminished, faded, petered out completely. The only thing I still kept up with was the football, possibly because there was no point in doing so. Without access to the games – without seeing the highlights on TV – they were irrelevant, might as well never have been played. The scores might just as well have been invented. (So what if Chelsea lost eight-nil to Watford?) But I still found it difficult to let it go, especially now that the European Championship had, allegedly, resumed. I didn't support a particular team, but I missed the support of football. It wasn't just the games themselves; it was the whole structure that football lent to one's life, the shared belief system, the stories and controversies that reinforced it.

I'd come to Varanasi because there was nothing to keep me in London, and I stayed on for the same reason: because there was nothing to go home for.

Darrell was on his way to a yoga class. I walked with him as far as Niranjani ghat, where I spotted the friendly-looking holy man I'd seen after the confrontation at the ATM. He was in the same spot, sitting in the shade of a mushroom parasol, looking out at the river.

‘Let me talk for a while with this philosopher,’ I said to Darrell, who hurried on. I'd said ‘talk,’ but since he had no English, I gave him fifty rupees just to look into his eyes. He was happy to oblige. We sat in the shade, cross-legged, facing each other. His head was framed by the brick red of the wall behind him – almost exactly the same red as the
tilak
on his
forehead, so that it seemed as if a hole had been bored straight through his head. At first I felt a little self-conscious, but soon I got used to just gazing at his kind, brown eyes. He sat and stared. It wasn't like that childish game of not blinking – though he did seem possessed of an uncanny ability not to blink. There was nothing aggressive about it. We just looked. He looked like he wasn't seeing anything. I tried not to have any thoughts, tried just to look. I'm not sure what I was looking for, what I expected to see – that's why I was looking, to find out what I was looking for. What I didn't see was any affinity between us. He was in his world and I was in mine. My world-view would never be his and vice-versa. That was what we had in common. What distinguished us from each other was that he had no interest in mine – it meant nothing to him – whereas I was intensely curious about his. What was it like to be him? I wished we could have changed places, for a while at least. If I looked closely, I could see my own face reflected in the dilated pupils of his eyes. It was as if I was there, a little homunculus. And then, after a while, as I concentrated on it, so that little image of me came to fill my vision. I zoomed in on it so that instead of seeing his face, all I could see was my own, staring back at me as from a mirror. That was one way of seeing it. The other was that I was actually seeing what he was seeing and, contrary to what I'd originally thought, there was no real difference between the way I saw him and the way he saw me. He saw what I saw, a man in his mid-forties, grey-haired, thin-faced, the mouth set in an attitude of some glumness. The face was not unkind, but there was a rigidity about it, the same rigidity that I had noticed among other travellers of the same age. It was not a stupid face, that was obvious, but, equally obviously, once you moved beyond a narrow idea of intelligence, an abundance or lack thereof counted for nothing. The face I saw, the face that was
my face, was full of something, trembling like a glass brimful of water, trembling like a whippet. Not out of fear, but out of the simple fact of being alive. To be a whippet was to tremble and to be me was to tremble like a glass full of water. What was it full of, this face, this face that was my face? I stared harder, straining to see, to know, and as I did this, so the face that I was seeing acquired a look of straining intensity. What the face was full of, I could see now, was yearning, desire, in this case a desire for knowledge, but it could quite easily have been a desire for chocolate or sex. This was the fundamental difference between myself and my new friend, the holy man. His face was free of desire. How had he got there? How had he managed that? Did he just happen to be that way? Unlikely. More likely it was a state he had acquired, worked his way towards through meditation, yoga, smoking charas or what-have-you. It seemed a great state to be in, to attain. But for the idea of desirelessness to take root, to set off in that direction, to try to free yourself of desire, surely that must manifest itself as a desire, a yearning, an urge. How, then, does desire transcend itself? As I was thinking this, so, without my intending it, my focus broadened. Having zoomed in on the pupil of my friend's eye, I zoomed out and the sight of my face, which had been full-frame, in tight close-up, receded and took its place as a single detail within the larger picture of his face. I saw his eyes and hair, the
tilak
on his forehead, the
tilak
that was the same red as the wall behind him. I saw his nose, his teeth and the gaps where his teeth were missing. He was smiling. I smiled back.

That night a concert was held on the terrace of the Ganges View. It was a clear warm night, full of listening stars. The terrace was lit by candles, flickering in a breeze that was hardly there. An audience of perhaps thirty people had gathered
to hear a middle-aged woman on violin, accompanied by a thin man with white hair and thick glasses on tabla. The tampura was played by a woman whose shy manner seemed perfectly adapted to her instrument. The violinist explained that they were going to play the
raga Malkauns.
I had heard it before, in several different versions, on my iPod, but I still did not know what made it the
raga Malkauns
rather than another, similar-sounding
raga.
The bits that I thought identified and fixed it in one performance were nowhere to be found – nowhere to be heard – on another.

Night had fallen hours before, but the violin was dusk-laden, twilit. I knew that the violinist was exploring the
raga
, bringing it into being, could feel myself becoming gradually immersed in a geometry of sound, but I could not identify it. But I did, at least, have an inkling of why I couldn't. Melody depends on time. Played a little faster or slower, it remains recognisably itself. Whereas here the heart of the
raga
, the melody in which it had its origins, had been completely taken out of time. An entire dimension of listening had been removed. I began to lose myself in the infinitude of something I could not recognise or understand.

This may have been music of the spirit, but there was no attempt to disguise the physical fact of how it was produced. In the midst of the most lyrical touches there was no fear of the rasp, the friction of the bow being drawn across the strings. It could be left behind, that rasp, at a moment's notice, but it never was, or not for long. Even as it soared free, it dug itself more deeply into the earth. The violin was as thick as the night lying over the river, indistinguishable from it. Every move forward was tugged backwards and yet, irresistibly, the music advanced and accelerated. A pulse was making itself felt. It was impossible to say when this pulse had started. I became aware of it – the return of time – only when it had
been there for a while, as if it had been there, inaudibly, imperceptibly, even before it was there. The stars lay on the river. At first something had taken shape; now it was coming to life. There was a feeling of brooding accumulation and of subtle realisation: melody could be made more lovely if it was not left to be itself. By being forced to leave itself behind, it would become more than itself and, eventually, more purely itself. The pulse had become stronger than anything else, so strong that it was generating a need – for rhythm – it was incapable of satisfying.