Some Assembly Required (15 page)

Because of the fog, almost no flights and no trains for Varanasi were leaving Saturday morning, and it was like being in the chill in the Outer Sunset district in August back home, but one plane—ours—eventually took off after a four-hour delay. We sat near a young Israeli beauty and her Lebanese boyfriend, who both spoke English, and whom Bill anointed as the Mideast’s only remaining hope for lasting peace. They fell in love with him.

Varanasi was so
rungi-chungi-jilli-milli
-plus-plus that it made Old Delhi look organized; multilayered chaos and congestion and pandemonious beauty in the streets, with vendors, sadhus, rickshaw drivers, but mostly regular Indian families getting from one place to another. We checked into our hotels—I was staying at a nice one across the street from the river, Bill at a much cheaper one nearby (five dirt blocks away). We immediately headed for the Ganges, which was one block from my hotel, to the ghats of Benares. They make
up a stone thoroughfare that runs along the river beneath the temples and mansions that rise like cliffs above the steps and sidewalk. Every kind of person you could ever imagine in India—monks and priests and devotees, hawkers, ragamuffins, food sellers—was there. Mark Twain famously said that Benares “is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” My hotel was at Assi Ghat, the southernmost end, and we walked along the huge stone steps that create the embankment of the Ganges, beneath the mansions built for royal family pilgrimages. Men of all ages bathed in the river, and drank from it, the very thought of which, as the old hymn puts it, caused me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Women and men did laundry, laying hotel sheets out to dry; people were talking or praying, rowing, selling, begging, feeding their children; cows, oxen, and horses milled in the sand. The younger holy men looked like they could be from Bolinas or Woodstock. Small fires burned everywhere, for every reason. The river was the color of mist.

Bill pointed way down the embankment to the burning ghat, where cremation takes place day and night, but I couldn’t go there yet. I needed to eat and to get my bearings. You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home.

We went back to my hotel for dinner, but the dining room was too postmodern, too Louis Farouk, the ex–king
of Egypt whose taste ran to deep red velvet drapes and chair upholstery, Las Vegas, Versailles, Elvis. I couldn’t eat there. We walked through the crazy crowded street to Bill’s hotel, with me shouting “EnRaHa!” at the beggars, and Bill laughing at how it always worked.

I collapsed at the dining room table. Bill ordered a beer with his dinner, but when the waiter arrived and began to fill my glass first, Bill said, “My ex is an alcoholic. She can’t have any beer.” The waiter brought me a sweet lime drink instead.

We were on the Ganges at five in the morning, in a riverboat in the fog. One image that had called me to India for years, besides the Taj Mahal, was a dawn visit to the Ganges on a riverboat, for the sunrise.

All four mornings we were in Varanasi, our boat was socked in with fog. This morning’s riverboat man said, “Too much the foggy!” which I think captures all of human life. It was a thick, white pea-soup fog—a vichyssoise fog—and apparently we were not going to see any of the sights I’d assumed we would see, and in fact had come here to see.

But we saw something else: We saw how much better mystery shows up in the fog, how much wilder and truer each holy moment is than any fantasy.

Through the cold vapor emerged outlines of buildings, and the palaces and water towers painted with images of
gods, Shiva and Ganesh and Krishna, and boatfuls of other people who drifted by quietly, muted by the fog. What we saw was the river up close, because you couldn’t see anything that was far away: gloriously, giddily colorful disintegrating figures of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, made of straw and clay, painted and adorned with flowers; the lights of fires on the distant shore; and candles on leaves floating a few feet away in the murky river.

I asked Bill if we should go back on land, wait for the sun to come out in a few hours, and then return.

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun,” he replied. “We’ll swirl around in the fog and watch the dead bodies float by.”

It was so eerie. Spooky, in a strangely benevolent way. Annie Dillard said, “We awake, if ever we wake at all, to mystery.” You believe, in India, that the unseen, the unfathomable, is the bedrock, that the unseeable is the truer reality, which doesn’t work for me at all. I mean, I’m an American! I like to know where I am and what I am seeing and what it all means. On the other hand, I do like to shop. We bought trinkets from a rascal-eyed boatman who floated up beside our boat and then would not leave us alone. Bill lost patience. “Look,” he told the man, “you’ve got your deal, we’ve got our deal. Now let’s
all
move on to bigger and better things.” The rascal-eyed boatman looked askance for a moment or two, then smiled and paddled away.

We saw people bathing in front of certain ghats that are specific to their god. We saw Brahmans instruct—i.e., shove—their
reluctant sons and nephews into the freezing dirty water, and dozens of formerly fantastic, now deteriorating floating Saraswatis from a festival honoring her two days before. Of course they disintegrate, as we all do. They would be taken away by the river, into the Unseen, like the bodies we saw being cremated, becoming smoke and then merging with the fog.

Back on land, we walked for hours, and then went to our hotel rooms for naps.

Nothing could ever seem as gorgeous and bizarre as what I had seen that day; until my BlackBerry pinged, to indicate a text, from Sam:

“Come home, Mom! Jax can now do the pre-crawl, kind of scooch across the floor. Also, he can almost read, I swear to God. Or at least hold a book now for twenty seconds or so, like he’s reading it. Then he starts trying from various directions to eat it.”

I met up with Bill at sunset. He was sitting on the steps of Assi Ghat, flirting with an Indian family. He threw himself into my arms with extravagant relief when I walked up. “This is
her
,” he told them, and they clapped. “I told them, I can’t find my ex-wife. And they tried, with no success, to comfort me.” Bill and I walked down the ghats and joined a group of people gathered around a man with a small monkey. The man asked me if I wanted to pet it, so I did, and as I turned away, it leapt onto my head. I could have been killed, conceivably! But it was so hilarious, and the couple of dozen Indians
watching laughed in a very loving way. Everyone loves my dreads. The monkey played with them. Then he got his hands tangled up in them and tried to jump away, and almost succeeded, but the guy put him back on me because we had drawn a crowd, and therefore profit. When the man finally tried to unhook him, the monkey scratched my hand.

Instantly, all I could think of was Dustin Hoffman in
Outbreak
—the Ebola-infected pet monkey spreading it to Americans. And me without my Purell, which was back in my room, and is very effective against hemorrhagic viruses.

I went to the front desk of my hotel to ask if the person on duty had any emergency disinfectant, and the manager told me to go downstairs and see the hotel nurse. I found a beautiful Bollywood woman in nurse clothes, sitting with her Bollywood boyfriend, and I explained about the monkey attack and showed her my small scratch and asked for antiseptic or antibiotic ointment to prevent Ebola or Marburg.

Unfortunately, she did not speak English.

But the boyfriend spoke a little, and became our trans lator. I asked for Purell, demonstrating how calm and grown-up Americans could be. The boyfriend translated, but the nurse told him, No Purell. I rubbed my hands faster, to indicate dire urgency. She shook her head. I asked for rubbing alcohol. Nay, nay—no rubbing alcohol. Fine, I said sort of huffily, “Fine, let me use your soap and hot water.” Oh dear, no soap or hot water at the nurse’s station.

Now I was extremely frustrated, as the virus coursed
through my veins, and I was about to stomp off when the boyfriend said, “Wait! We have a veddy excellent cream!” He went into the secret nurse chamber and returned with a tube that said “anti-fungal” on the label. Veddy excellent, he assured me, and gave me a dab in a water bottle cap. I stared at it for a moment. I smiled, thanked them, and headed up to my room to use my own Purell, and then the antifungal cream.

The next day we ate our meals at the restaurant at Bill’s hotel, and then went to find our permanent boatmen, Ashok and Max. Ashok was delicate as a deer, Max much more Western, like Gomez Addams. Every so often Ashok would throw a handful of crispy dough bits from a bag into the water beside our boat, and the seagulls would descend screaming in a cloud to pick them off the river, inches from the boat. We walked among Brahmans and beggars of every age, and people selling food, and
batti
. This means “light”—the little flower boats with candles that you light for devotion and float on the Ganges. The Flower Boat Children descended on us like mosquitoes, and I EnRaHa’ed them all, except when Bill was distracted, in which case I furtively bought their
batti
. “Uncle, Uncle,” they beseeched him, and he waved them away, except for a persistent little boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt, whom even Bill could not resist. People carried bodies wrapped in cloth on litters, Papaji or Mamaji covered with
flowers, and headed to the fires, headed to the river. Bodies burn all day and night. You stop even noticing.

We knew a few people after a while—the nurse, the nurse’s boyfriend, Ashok and Max. Bill came upon the Israeli woman and her Lebanese boyfriend who had sat near us on the plane. We stood around together at the burning ghat. Bill asked the young Lebanese man if he read much, and he said yes, and Bill pleaded with him to buy all my books. Bill said that I was down on my luck and that he’d had to lend me money, but now he could see that there was no chance of getting it back. Plus, he added, he was too embarrassed to ask me for it. They commiserated with him. I smiled sheepishly. We all hugged and kissed good-bye, our eyes burning from the smoke of the bodies on the nearby pyres.

That night on our way to find Max and Ashok, I casually dismissed a boy who was trying to sell me
batti
, and near tears he cried out, “Auntie,” and ripped open his outer shirt. “I’m Spider-Man!” And indeed he was, the one Bill had not been able to resist. I splurged on his
batti
.

Tomorrow night Bill and I fly back to Delhi, and then Wednesday I take a car ride to Agra for the Taj. So two and a half more full days in India.

We took our nightly riverboat ride past the burning ghat to the evening prayer ritual, which involves Brahman priests and so much fire and incense and displays of light that it makes Catholic High Mass look like a Mennonite service. At least a thousand people were gathered at this ghat, reverential
and pumped, carrying torches and candles, and it made me think of the Tribal Council on
Survivor
. But then, it was also hypnotic and lovely, with the Ganges, mist, and the boats and white sand of the far shore across the river as a backdrop. Tonight a holy man came up to me and made a red powder
bindi
on my forehead with his thumb, like red Ash Wednesday ashes. When I got back to my hotel room, I went to wash and nearly cried out when I saw it, because I’d already forgotten it was there; my first thought when I saw myself in the mirror was that I was bleeding out from monkey Ebola.

By that time my scratch was slightly red and puffy; pre-hemorrhagic. I used lots of Purell and antifungal cream, prayed furiously, read the great novel of India,
Shantaram
, for hours, and slept well, and this morning most of the puffy redness was gone. It was a medical miracle.

Today was abridged; we were going to leave for Delhi at three. In the morning I walked alone along the Ganges, watched the mist rising, people doing their laundry on the rocks by the river, washermen and washerwomen laying out hotel sheets to dry. I passed the monkey man with the monkey on his shoulder and gave him a big thumbs-up.

It was International Annie Defies Bill and Gives Away Money to the Beggars Day. I gave an old beggar granny with big feet my Birkenstocks, and my socks that had a festive
moose print. I wondered what she made of them. I gave a begging mother my long-sleeved Gap T-shirt; next time I will pack only things I can leave behind. After I checked out of the hotel, I stood outside with my carry-on and forty ten-rupee notes (each worth about a quarter). I went to the ghat in front of the hotel. There were two nice, manageable beggar moms with little babies on the steps, all four crying to me, “Mama, Mama,” and pantomiming feeding themselves with a fork. I whipped out my tens, and gave one to the first mom, and one to the second, and then one to a third who had appeared, and then another to a grabby sadhu; and suddenly it was like when the seagulls roared in a cloud straight at us on Ashok’s boat. Dozens of beggars descended on me, calling, “Mama, Mama,” and “Auntie, Auntie.” I was handing out ten-rupee notes to all these hands that were tearing and snatching at me—and I was scared to fucking death. I felt like Tippi Hedren in
The Birds
. I was shouting, “Nay! Nay! EnRaHa! EnRaHa!” but boy, talk about closing the barn door after the horses get out. There were easily forty or fifty beggars surrounding terrorized, white, cringy me, and then some sort of security person from my hotel pushed into the crowd and starting shoving the mommies and babies and miscellaneous beggars away and rebuking them all, and another security man in a cap arrived, swinging at them with a stick, and he pulled me out of the vortex. I broke free and fell down, but caught myself. I sat down on the ground trying to catch my breath. I felt like a chick that had pecked its way out of its shell, lying there in the
wet plop of freedom, with security making batting motions at beggars and with the curious peering at me on my butt.