The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (26 page)

In her article “The Fabric of Pain,” the Bulgarian sociologist Emiliya Karaboeva came up with a set of statistics for the most commonly used words in necrologues:

Words expressing suffering occur in 39.56 percent: pain (12.82 percent), sorrow (9.34 percent), anguish (8.91 percent), grief (8.47 percent).

Words expressing loss are in 26.73 percent: want (10.21 percent), loss (5.21 percent), parting (2.39 percent), emptiness (1.73 percent), desolation (1.30 percent), deserted (0.21 percent), and expressions such as “She/He left us” (2.82 percent), “She/He is gone” (1.73 percent), “You are not here” (1.08 percent).

Words expressing love are in 35.43 percent.

Words expressing remembrance/respect are in 25.43 percent.

Karaboeva concludes: “The key words are love, pain, and sorrow, but the most important one is love.”

The English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer published a seminal essay in 1955 called “The Pornography of Death,” in which he claimed that twentieth-century Western societies have come to repress death in the exact manner that Victorians used to repress sexuality. It is a familiar argument today: the death taboo. An optimistic belief in progress and medical science has made us increasingly unwilling to face our mortality. Surrounded by technologies whose hourly upgrades seem to extend existence in perpetuity, we have forgotten that our own bodies cannot be loaded with 2.0 versions of life. The capitalist state, seeking to secure the obedience and productivity of its laborers and to guarantee the circulation of commodities, has sought to erase death from social memory.

Necrologues counteract these modern forces. There is something very primitive, almost masochistic, in such open displays of mortality, where private grief is shared by the whole community. Death is not only bared to the public eye; its image is continually reproduced, multiplied ad infinitum, like an Andy Warhol print. But this exhibition is not about celebrities anymore, not about Mao or Marilyn, but about the common folk, the masses. The dead do not disappear; on the contrary, they reappear simultaneously in all the places they used to frequent in life: the home, the local street, the marketplace, the workplace. The regular “Ivan,” a government clerk who spent seventy-eight years in total obscurity, suddenly has his name and picture pasted all over town. He is omnipresent, like a god, a minor pop star wearing his Sunday best. Death in Bulgaria is the most powerful publicity machine.

But being famous is not the same as being important. Using textual and visual templates, necrologues publicize death on a grand scale, but they also erase individual auras. Unlike the biographical obituary, with its inherent belief in personal identity, all necrologues look essentially the same. The sad faces blend into each other like the tapestry of victims of some vicious dictatorship—the Bulgarian
desaparecidos
—or the casualties of a colossal, endless terrorist attack, a 24/7 9/11.

Why must death be so memorable, so perfectly photogenic? What is the meaning of remembering so much pain? Freud was right: we need to decathect from the lost love object, or we run the risk of falling into melancholia, a state of “pathological grieving.” The museum of modern memory needs some blank walls and empty spaces. Maybe the time has come for death to go paperless.

FROM
Condé Nast Traveler

 

T
HERE WERE FIRES
, six, seven of them, rising through the winter fog. Groups of men, scarves wrapped around their heads, eyes blazing in the twilight, were gathered barefoot around the flames, edging closer. A near-naked man with dusty, matted dreadlocks down to his waist was poking at a charred head with a bamboo pole. There was chanting in the distance, a shaking of bells, a furious, possessed drumming, and in the infernal no-light of the winter dusk, I could make out almost nothing but orange blazes, far off, by the river.

How much of this was I dreaming? How much was I under a “foreign influence,” if only of jet lag and displacement? Figures came toward me out of the mist, smeared in ash from head to toe, bearing the three-pronged trident of the city's patron, Shiva, the Ender of Time. In the little alleyways behind the flames was a warren of tiny streets; a shrunken candle burned in the dark of a bare earth cavern where men were whispering sacred syllables. Cows padded ceaselessly down the clogged, dung-splattered lanes, and every now and then another group of chanters surged past me, a dead body under a golden shroud on the bamboo stretcher that they carried toward the river, and I pressed myself against a wall as the whisper of mortality brushed past.

It was hard to believe that just three days before I had been in California, marking a quiet New Year's Day in the sun. Now there were goats with auspicious red marks on their foreheads trotting around, and embers burning, and oil lamps drifting out across the river in the fog. Along the walls beside the river were painted faces, laughing monkey gods, sacred looming phalluses. The shops on every side were selling sandalwood paste, and clarified butter oil for dead bodies, and tiny clay urns for their ashes.

Imagine finding yourself in a Hare Krishna celebration as populous as Philadelphia. All around you, people are shaking bells, whirling, singing joyfully, though their joy has to do with death, as if everything is upended in a holy universe. At the nearby Manikarnika Well, the god Shiva is said to have met the god Vishnu, usually an occupant of a parallel world. The result of this propitious encounter is that bodies are burned in public there—as many as a hundred a day—and the most sacred spot in the center of Hinduism is a smoking charnel-ground.

 

On paper, Varanasi is a holy crossroads, a place of transformation tucked between the Varana and Asi rivers, along the sacred Ganges. It is, many will tell you, the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, as ancient as Babylon or Thebes. Because the city, now housing as many as 3 million (half a million of them squeezed into the square mile of the Old City), has never been a center of political power or historical conflict, it has been able to continue undisturbed, and fundamentally unchanged, as the most sacred citadel of Hinduism and a cultural hot spot. Bathe yourself in its filthy waters, devout Hindus believe, and you purify yourself for life. Die or be burned along its banks and you achieve
moksha,
or liberation, from the cycle of incarnation.

But if Varanasi means anything, it is the explosion of every theory and the turning of paper to ash. The heart of the city is a chaotic 3-mile stretch of waterfront along Mother Ganga on which there are more than seventy ghats, or steps, from which the faithful can walk down into the water. At the top of these steps stand huge, many-windowed palaces and temples that are all in a state of such advanced decay that they seem to speak for the impermanence of everything. At this very spot, the southeast-flowing Ganges turns, briefly, so it seems to be flowing back toward the Himalayas from which it came, and bathers on its western bank can face the rising sun. Varanasi's original name, Kashi, means City of Light, although millennia of dusty rites and blazing bodies and holy men showing no interest in normal human laws have also left it a city of shadows or, as the wonderfully obsessive Varanasiphile Richard Lannoy writes, a “city of darkness and dream.”

The son of Indian-born parents, I am (in theory) a Hindu, and though I have never practiced the religion, I was finding Varanasi to be more a mad confusion than the sublime order that a good Hindu would see. Yet in the months before I made my first trip to the city, everywhere I turned seemed to lead there, as if by magnetic attraction. Writing on Buddhism, I was reminded that the Buddha delivered his first discourse at Sarnath, 6 miles from Varanasi. Meeting a professor of Sanskrit in California, I was told that Shankara, the great Hindu philosopher, had accepted his first disciple in Varanasi and was said to have met Shiva there, in the disguise of an untouchable, more than a thousand years ago. This was where Peter Matthiessen began his epic Himalayan quest, recorded in
The Snow Leopard;
this was where Allen Ginsberg was shadowed by local intelligence and confessed, of the city's residents, “They're all mad.”

Varanasi seemed to mark the place where opposites were pushed together so intensely that all sense gave out. Its holy waters flow, for example, past thirty sewers, with the result that the brownish stuff the devout are drinking and bathing in contains three thousand times the maximum level of fecal coliform bacteria considered safe by the World Health Organization. Those old collapsing buildings along its banks, suggesting some immemorial pageant, are in fact not old at all, although they do confirm the sense that one has entered less a city than an allegory of some kind, a cosmogram legible only to a few. Everything is constantly shifting, flickering this way and that in the candlelit phantasmagoria, and yet the best description I found of twenty-first-century Varanasi—“There is movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed”—was penned by Mark Twain in the nineteenth.

 

A city that is truly holy is as contrary and multidirectional as any charismatic human, and draws people almost regardless of their faith or origins. So perhaps I should not have been surprised that the minute I landed following the fifty-minute flight from Delhi and set foot in Varanasi, which was shrouded in a miasmal early-January mist, I ran into a Tibetan incarnate lama, an American Tibetan Buddhist monk I know from New York, and a ninety-one-year-old Parisienne I'd last seen attending teachings of the Dalai Lama's in Dharamsala.

“Oh,” she said, unsurprised, “you are here too.”

The Dalai Lama, I gathered, was giving his only official teachings of the winter and spring in Sarnath, right there, that very week.

The living capital of Hinduism is home too to fourteen hundred mosques and shrines, and every religious teacher from Jiddu Krishnamurti to Thich Nhat Hanh has spent time here; it was here that Mohandas Gandhi entered Indian political life in 1916 (when, at the inauguration of the local Banaras Hindu University, he spoke out against the filth of the city's holy places), and it was here that the French explorer Alexandra David-Néel received lessons in yoga from a naked swami before heading to Tibet.

I got into a car and entered the swirling river of life that in Varanasi reflects and flows into its central symbol. India specializes in intensity and chaos—part of the governing logic of Varanasi is that it is crowded with traffic and yet there are no traffic lights—and very soon I was careening through the crush (a riot in search of a provocation, so it seemed). Here and there an elderly policeman with a mask over his mouth held out an arm, and cars, cows, bicycles, and trucks crashed past him, willy-nilly. Dogs were sleeping in the middle of a busy road—Varanasi's Fifth Avenue, it might have been—and men were outstretched (sleeping, I hoped) along the side and on the pavement. I dropped my bags at my hotel, the Gateway, and in the course of the twenty-minute ride to the river, I saw two more jubilant corpse processions and two parades of children—in honor, I could only imagine, of the God of Mayhem.

“This is a very inauspicious time,” my guide warned me from the front seat. “It is called Kharamas. Everyone stays hidden; no one talks about weddings, things like that. Everyone is silent. It is like a curse placed on the city.”

I could find no mention of any such observance, but if this was Varanasi at its most silent, I thought, I couldn't imagine it on one of its frequent festival days. “The curse lifts on January 14,” my new friend told me. “Then we celebrate.” This was not cause for celebration to someone due to depart, as I was, on January 13.

At a Christian church, we got out and joined the crush of bodies pushing toward the Ganges. We walked along the path to the riverbank, dodging the refuse and excrement of centuries, and passed an almost naked man, staring right at us, sheltered by a small fire inside a hut.

“He's meditating?” I tried.

“Everything for him is ashes,” came the reply. Philosophy is ceaseless along the Ganges, and usually causeless. Holy men sat on the ground under umbrellas, chanting and smearing paste and ash on their foreheads. “These sadhus, they like very much to live with cremation. They don't wear clothes as we do. They don't do anything like people who are living in the material world. They want to live in a world of ash.” To come here was like entering one of the narrow, winding old cities of Europe—my birthplace of Oxford, in fact—in which you are back in a medieval mix of high scholasticism and faith.

A huge, bloated cow floated past us, and we climbed into a boat as five handsome young boys in elaborate gold pantaloons held up five-armed oil lamps in a glossy fire ceremony along the river. Fires were blazing to the north and south, and the air was thick with the smell of incense and burning. “Only in this city, sir, you see twenty-four-hour cremation,” offered the boatman, as if speaking of a convenience store. In other cities cremation grounds are traditionally placed outside the city gates. Here they burn at the center of all life.

The next day, a little before daybreak, I walked out of the gates of my hotel to visit the river again. Only one man was standing there now, under a tree, with a bicycle-rickshaw—his eyes afire in his very dark face, and what looked to be a bullet hole in his cheek. We negotiated for a while and then took off into the penumbral gloom, the previously jam-packed streets under a kind of sorcerer's spell, quite empty.

To travel by bicycle in the dawn is to feel all the sounds, smells, and ancient ghosts of Varanasi; for more than a week the bicycle-rickshaw man would become my faithful friend, waiting outside the gates of the hotel, ready to guide me anywhere. The winter fog only compounded the half-dreamed air of the place, as figures loomed out of the clouds to stare at us and then vanished abruptly, as if nothing was quite substantial here, or even true.
“Unreal City,”
I thought, remembering a boyhood ingestion of T. S. Eliot.
“Under the brown fog of a winter dawn . . . I had not thought death had undone so many.”