A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (28 page)

For initiation was difficult. There was no joining Hinduism in the sense that you could become a Roman Catholic with your name on a list somewhere, for there was nothing to join. No one ever suggested to another that he should become a Hindu.

Nor was it enough to read the books. So I had found for myself in the last cold winter of the war, inspired by a low diet and rash doses of Boehm and Eckhart, thinking myself on the way to becoming a mystic. It had been like trying to enter a theatre by the exit.

For us, the best time at Banaras was at dusk, in the labyrinthine alleys behind the ghats before the lights were lit. At this hour there were few people about and those who seemed unnaturally subdued. Even the small boys who make life hideous during the day with their ‘’ullos’ and ‘very well thank you’s’ had either departed to the land of nod or sat, drained of energy, at the doors of their houses.

Down these alleys, many of which ended in a heap of rubble where some buildings on the river front had collapsed, the darkness came while the sky overhead was still blue; but already the pigeons had ceased to wheel about the spire of the last of Aurangzeb’s minarets and the kite-fliers had hauled down their kites. Soon the sky faded and the long, pink, streamers left over from the sunset stretched across it.

Now the walls began to exude a dampness and the smells of sewage as it trickled down between the houses to the river became more pronounced. Here, smelling these smells, it was not difficult to believe that this was part of Banaras, itself the city with a higher rate of infant and adult mortality than any other town or city in Uttar Pradesh, with the highest mortality of all; but it was worth being there if only for the anonymity conferred by the partial darkness.

The only commerce at this hour was small wayside stalls where old women bent over their scales weighing out infinitesimal quantities of herbs for equally old and shrivvelled customers. In the shops of the charcoal vendors the merchants and the men who carried the charcoal for them were as black as the pits in which they stood waiting for customers. These and the scarcely human figures of the women who still continued to plaster the walls with freshly kneaded cakes of dung were the only ones to be seen. Everyone else had withdrawn to eat the evening meal leaving the rooms on the ground floor unlit.

But what it lacked in people was more than made up by the cows. They were everywhere, and the ground underfoot was slippery with their excrement. They were in the forecourts of the temples. They were tethered in the yards of the houses. They were free, lurching up gradients, and floating down the alleys as if they were levitated; or they suddenly loomed up like great, ghostly ships running under a press of sail with the vapour coming from their nostrils in the chill evening air as if it was cannon smoke. They never hesitated. They simply sailed serenely on, and it was for us to get out of the way or be crushed against the walls. They were the chosen animals and they knew it.
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They would never die a violent death, only more horribly, of old age, disease or malnutrition.

Now from the river came the sounds of the beating of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells struck with hammers and the rattling of a gourdlike instrument with some hard round object inside it. This was the committee of the Ganga Sava performing, as it did every night, at dusk, the Arti Puja offering the light of a five-branched candelabra to the river together with flour, milk and sweetmeats.

Further westward in the shopping lanes the lights were already lit: in Kachauri Gali where they sold Mukhbilash, betel nut dipped in silver; Esha Gol ka Bhusi – flaky crisp crimson stuff derived from the betel; Pulfgllifhiria, tobacco dipped in silver; Kashria Supan, betel with saffron, and Pan Khapa, all in round embossed tin boxes. They were lit in Vishwanath Lane, on the way to the temple where they sold religious objects: tilak powder, lingams, conch shells, incense, lat-i-dana, the white sweets used as offerings, Brahmanical cords, sandalwood and in shops selling more profane articles – false hair, stuff for reddening the soles of the feet, sweet-smelling oils, little packets of scented powders called chinasin-door, small, jewelled beauty spots made of plastic, erotic scents and scents so heavy they could only act as a tranquillizer, palankeens for weddings, little lacquered figures of highland soldiers with blue and white spotted bagpipes, gods, musicians and pop-eyed servants carrying plates of fried eggs. The lights had come on too in Kunj Gali where the silk shops were; in the Thatheri Bazaar where they sold hideous brass and copper objects and in the Narial Bazaar they were beginning to glow behind the curtains on the balconies of the brothels on the upper floors.

The peak time for bathing was between nine and one o’clock. By good fortune we met Bag Nath and Hira Lai, our boatmen, who had taken us down the river from Allahabad to Mirzapur. They insisted on taking us out to the Sangam in their boat. They said it had taken them eight days to tow it up from Mirzapur.

We bathed at the confluence where the long curving line of bathing platforms and boats reached out across the Jumna and the Ganges ripped across it.

It was one o’clock and the water was warm. Out in the stream dolphins came to the surface, sighing like steam engines. This was the meeting-place not only of the three rivers but of all humanity. All, together with the lepers, submerging and coming up spluttering, for this was the water that washed all sin away.

The Maharaja of Banaras went up the Jumna in his processional barge with a heavy bodyguard of policemen in rowing boats. Long lines of pilgrims were leaving now by boat or walking slowly up the bank of the Jumna, under the walls of the Fort. The sun broke through the clouds and the banners streamed against the sun.

The river was now more than three-quarters of a mile wide; and it looked big. The ebb was beginning now and it took us down close under the left bank, past decrepit nineteenth-century buildings in the district of Alambazar, some of which would have looked equally at home on the shores of Limehouse Reach or in old Portsmouth. The weed-covered steps that led down from them to the river were flanked by broken pillars, and up on the shore, in what had once been the riverside gardens, lay the skeletons of abandoned boats; while in the filthy water below the bank, among rotting piles with grass growing from their tops, an occasional solitary man or woman bathed, dressed in rags which might once have been white, but which were now the same uniform brown as the river itself.

We drifted down past these poor derelicts and past drab temples made of cement, and past inhuman-looking factories and rank neglected wastelands in which not even weeds flourished and past jetties and outfalls from which noxious effluents which were the colour of mulligatawny soup poured into the river.

The river was full of boats. Panswais far bigger than ours, and with far more energetic crews than our own, were being propelled upstream by six oarsmen, three on either side, who were plugging away standing up.

There were bigger boats called oolaks, with huge superstructures and balconies on their counters, which were havering about in the river with their single square sails empty of wind, slowly drifting down on the ebb which was beginning to run more strongly now. There were slabsided wooden lighters, loaded to the gunwales with sacks of sugar which were being guided rather than propelled by men wielding sweeps. There were huge rafts of bamboos which themselves constituted the cargo, floating down with raftsmen on board who were running from side to side, steering them with long poles. There were cargo flats built of steel, that were more than two hundred feet long, being hurried down river by tugs with yellow funnels. These great vessels with their corrugated iron roofs, each of which could carry seven hundred tons of cargo, were like floating dock sheds. Equally strange were the barges all going down on the ebb, piled thirty feet above the water with hay and straw which were like floating ricks. There were little fishing boats with ends that were so sharply upturned that only about a third of their total length appeared to rest on the water which was full of cabbage leaves, ashes, the heads of marigolds and little mud-coloured balls of jute, which had been thrown into it from the mills along the shore.

We came into the last big bend before the city. To the left there was a big power-station on the shore which dwarfed everything. Bamboo poles were planted in the river, and the ebb pulled at their tops which were pointing upstream. Here the wind came up, and the panswai went tearing away over towards the inside of the bend on the right bank.

The right bank was a weird, surrealistic place. Grass-grown jetties on the point of collapse projected into the stream; boats with broken backs lay half-submerged in the mud in forgotten creeks, on the shores of which engine houses stood roofless, open to the sky. What had been fine houses when they were built a hundred and fifty or more years ago were now either tenements, their façades obscured by lean-to sheds, or else completely abandoned and with pipal trees growing out of them and breaking them apart. There were endless boatyards where they were riveting the hulls of lighters which were supported above the foreshore on little piles of stones which were slipped in on the falling tide, and there were older yards where they were building wooden country boats, the ribs of which were golden in the sun. There were melancholy brickfields and places where the embankments were slipping slowly but surely into the river, and there were abandoned Victorian factories which had chimneys with cast-iron railings round the top of them, from which long green grass was sprouting; and then suddenly there was the great skeleton of the Howrah Bridge, rising out of the haze ahead.

Now the wind freshened still more and we raced down towards it, past the municipal burning ghats on the left bank in a river that seemed to be full of floating haystacks, all going down under sail towards the bridge which loomed three hundred feet above us, immense, silver and exciting, glittering in the sun. From it came the roar of traffic, the hooting of motor horns, the ringing of innumerable bicycle bells, outlandish cries and murmuring sounds like a swarm of bees, made by the thousands of people who thronged the footways, and from downstream the sounds of the ships’ sirens came booming up towards us. This was the East as Conrad saw it; the one which hooked many a young Englishman and made him an expatriate, fed-up and far from home.

We were through the bridge now and the captain was steering the boat in towards the left bank, happily anticipating an orgy of disputation. At twelve-forty-five we grounded some way off shore in the mud by the Armenian Ghat. We had made it.

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It is quite common for Brahmans to leave their all for the endowment of homes for aged cows.

IN THE WINTER
of 1983, in the early stages of a journey round the shores of the Mediterranean, we arrived in Venice, en route to Montenegro, to find the city swathed in fog.

Long before we stepped ashore from the steamer on to Riva degli Schiavoni, the great expanse of marble quay off which Slavs from the Dalmatian coast used to moor their vessels in St Mark’s Basin, darkness had added itself to the fog, creating the sort of conditions that even Jack the Ripper would have found a bit thick for his work down in nineteenth-century Whitechapel.

The fog dissipated what had seemed a romantic possibility when we left Chioggia but now seemed a crazy dream, that we might sweep into Venice from the Lido on the No. 11 steamer up the Canale di San Marco and see the domes and campanili of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute not as we had seen them once, coming in from the sea in the heat of the day, liquefying in the mirage, then reconstituting themselves again, something that would be impossible at this season, but sharply silhouetted, appearing larger than life, against the afterglow of what could equally well be a winter or summer sunset, with what would be equally black gondolas bobbing on the wine-coloured waters in the foreground. This was a spectacle we had enjoyed often, usually in summer, coming back after a long afternoon by the lifeless waters of the Lido with sand between our toes and stupefied with sun, our only preoccupation whether we would be able to extract enough hot water from the erratic hot water system in our equally decrepit hotel to allow us to share a shallow bath; and whether we could find another place to eat, in addition to the few we already knew, which was not infested with, although we hated to admit it, people like ourselves, fellow visitors to Venice who on any day in the high season, July and August, probably outnumber the inhabitants.

Never at the best of times a very substantial-looking city – even the largest buildings having something impermanent about them, due perhaps to the fact that they have not only risen from the water but, however imperceptibly to the human eye, are now in the process of sinking back into it – on this particular evening the fog had succeeded in doing what the mirage could only accomplish for a matter of moments – caused it, apart from its lights, to disappear from view almost completely.

Disembarking from the steamer, we turned left on Riva degli Schiavoni, passing the entrances to the narrow
calli
which lead off from it, Calle delle Rasse, where the Serbian material used for furnishing the interiors of the
felzi
, the now largely extinct cabins of the closed gondolas, used to be sold, and Calle Albanesi, the Street of the Albanians, down which some of our fellow passengers had already vanished. While walking along the Riva we just missed falling into what is, because it is spanned by the Bridge of Sighs, the best known and most photographed canal in Venice after the Grand Canal, the Rio Palazzo. This would have been a bore because besides contracting pneumonia (our luggage was already at the railway station), if we had inadvertently drunk any of it we would have had to rush off to the Ospedale Civile, San Giovanni e Paolo, in order to have pumped out of us a mixture the smallest ingredient of which was water. Then we crossed the Rio by the Ponte di Paglia, passing on our right hand the Palazzo delle Prigioni, from which the magistrates known as the
Signori di Notte al Criminale
used to look out at night for evil-doers,
malviventi
, arrest and try them, and if they were sufficiently low and common and criminal, sentence them to the
Pozzi
, otherwise the Wells, the cells at the lowest level of the
Prigioni
, which were reserved for the worst sort of common criminals.