Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (22 page)

I peeked in a room, went back down the stairs and said I would take it. This was not strictly true. I intended flying back to London as planned, but my ticket was changeable and it is always a good feeling, keeping one's options open.
He wrote my name in the column – if I had understood things correctly – for Room 9, even though this did not mean I would definitely be in Room 9. I said I would see him on Tuesday and he nodded, Indian-style, by shaking his head.

I walked back along the ghats I'd passed earlier, on the boat. It was like strolling along the seafront at Hove, but there was more to see. A dog chewed what I thought was a chunk of wood but was actually the head of another dog, or maybe a fox. The dhobis had finished bashing their laundry. At several ghats the steps were covered in drying saris, the size of bright carpets on stairs. Whether they were cleaner now than before they were washed was difficult to say. Being damp, the dust clung to them. People kept asking me if I wanted a boat and I kept saying no. The man I'd seen from the boat was still there, praying, tranced out in the Ganges. He could have been there for weeks, years, even.

I was trying – partly for my own sake, partly as research for the article I had to write – to get a rough idea of the sequence of the ghats, what each looked like, what went on at which. Mahanirvani was easy: it jutted out in a large concrete apron and was the place where buffalo roamed. They mooched around rather than roamed and a boy whose job it was sometimes gave them a thwack with a stick. Being water buffalo, the proximity of the river was a big plus. They took it in turns to kneel in it, or sit, and there were some cows too. Probably they did not even know there was such a thing as grass. As far as they were concerned, this was the prairie, only inedible. It wasn't a prairie, though, it was a cricket pitch and a skinny boy was stationed on the boundary, in amongst the cattle, to stop the ball flying into the Ganges for a six. The ball was a tennis ball, mud-brown and soggy, and the kid bowling looked like he meant it, but the kid batting meant it even more, and there was quite a wait while the ball was
fished from the river by the kid who was meant to have stopped this happening. The whole scene was a persuasive essay on the decline of cricket in England.

Some of the buildings faced outwards, enjoying the view. The one at Dandi ghat had its back turned to the river, like the outside of a football stadium whose team, recently relegated, played in orange and pale blue. The palace behind Karnataka State ghat had the tragic grandeur of a disused bingo hall. The sense, on this stretch of the ghats, of hard times – of mass entertainment and faded glory – extended to Harishchandra, the cremation ground with the yellow and black lifeguard's tower. A couple of fires were smouldering and the golden trash of shroud and marigold at the water's edge appeared to have been there an age. The water looked left behind, lifeless.

I passed Kedar ghat, the temple with the pink and white stripes. The white stripes were actually pale blue, it turned out. The offers of boats had not stopped all the time I was walking.

Something was happening up ahead. A commotion, a crowd: the film shoot I had seen from the boat. Large screens and lights were being hauled into place. The camera was on rails. In the midst of all the activity it was difficult to tell who was part of the production and who were extras and who was just watching. Next to the busy work of the film set, apparently oblivious to it, a holy man sat in front of a small orange shrine. He had grey hair and a beard that looked like it was made out of the fur of a long-haired animal, mythical in origin, close to extinction and completely incontinent. A dozen listeners sat, cross-legged, on a blue tarp. Their teacher had before him a presumably sacred book the size of a comprehensive, if slightly out of date, road atlas. When I say slightly out of date, I mean from a time before there were cars, when
there were no roads – or atlases. The director called out instructions to his crew, his actors, the extras. More screens and lights were assembled. One of the actors was playing the part of a holy man. He was a healthier-looking, more expensively dressed version of the bearded holy man a few paces away. His hair and beard were obviously fake; they looked like human hair, but not the hair of this particular human. Red-assed monkeys swarmed and squealed over the building behind the shrine, clambered down on to its orange roof. One of them swung down and tried to grab the sacred road atlas from the guru. The monkey was quick, but insufficiently strong. The book dropped from his paw and the guru continued his instruction. As he did so he took, from a plastic bag, what looked like an old turd but was actually a very overripe banana and tossed it in the direction of the monkey. The monkey grabbed it and scampered back up to the roof of the shrine. The director called ‘Action’ and the monkey peeled and ate his banana directly above the head of the guru. The scene from the movie involved one of the actors standing still while, behind him, a young woman in a green sari slinked shyly past. The actor playing the holy man had nothing to do with this scene; he was just hanging around. The director said, ‘Cut.’ Fed up with his banana, the monkey dangled down and – there was no satisfying him – snatched one of the marigold garlands from behind the guru's head. It now began to seem that they were a double act, that instead of instructions in navigation some kind of lesson in evolution was being enacted. We began as thieves, swinging from trees and stealing whatever we could lay our paws on – books, bananas, marigolds. Then, over time, we learned to sit cross-legged and talk and listen, and the urge to pilfer and steal gradually diminished. In the larger scheme of things, the fact that some of us went on to make films or write poems called ‘Howl’
was irrelevant. The monkey was sat on the orange shrine, head cocked to one side, as if he might begin to see the error of his ways. He looked like he was listening, but he may have been taking the piss or wondering where his next banana was coming from. The director said ‘Action’ again and the same scene was shot again. The girl in the green sari slinked past. The male lead looked at the camera with a completely gormless expression on his face. The monkey grew bored and went ricocheting up the walls of the building. The holy man continued mumbling his instruction.

I took an auto rickshaw back to the hotel. We'd only travelled a few hundred yards when the driver stopped so that he could pick up a purple pile of tiny aubergines from a friend. Immediately something smacked into the back of us. I thought nothing of it, assumed it was a collision – a car or another tuk-tuk crashing into us – but it was actually a policeman, a traffic cop, whacking the back of our tuk-tuk with his baton: Varanasi's robust implementation of a red route. We roared off again. It was a different experience to being cocooned in a car. Travelling by Ambassador was like being in the armour-plated discomfort of a Humvee. This was a whole new ball game. Actually, it was more like a video game. I was too tall, obviously. Once I had folded myself into the seat, I could see almost nothing until it was within a few feet or inches of smashing us to pieces. In addition to everything else – the competing traffic, the oncoming traffic, the din, the fumes, the noise – the journey was also a steeplechase. We were always crashing over some kind of speed hump or into a trench. It would have played hell with the suspension, but since the suspension had been shot to hell years ago it made no difference. Nothing made any difference, so we rode roughshod over everything. Everything except a manhole,
completely uncovered. We veered round it in the nick of time even though the hazard was clearly indicated – by a half brick placed inches from the rim. Cars, buses and tuk-tuks reeled into view and shrieked past. I've never had any enterprising ideas, but it occurred to me that there was scope for a simulated version of this experience, a computer game called
Varanasi Death Trip
or simply – in homage to Scorsese and De Niro –
Tuk-tuk Driver.
The idea would be to travel from the Taj Ganges to Manikarnika without getting crushed, losing a limb or having your nerves shredded.

I ate dinner in the attained safety of the Taj and then had a beer in the bar: a Kingfisher with a slightly oily taste, from a clear bottle. There were only a handful of people there, no one sitting at the bar, no one to talk to. Perhaps with the solitary drinker in mind, the hotel had provided a selection of books about Varanasi. One of them was called
End Time City
, a book of photos by Michael Ackerman. It took some adjusting to: the buildings looked familiar, but the pictures were in black and white, and the most obvious thing about the place I'd spent the day walking round was its colour. It was probably the most colourful city on earth. To get rid of the colour was to create a place that, in some ways, was not a place at all but a stunned reaction to it. They were like pictures of the inside of the photographer's head while he was here, or later, while he was remembering it, or while he was asleep, sweat-drenched and dreaming about it. There were monkeys, sad-looking and thoughtful, aware, even if they did not yet know it, that if other things died then they would too. Sure enough, a few pages on, there was one of them, dead as a loved dog, coins scattered over it. People crouched, reading, behind the bars of a cage or temple. Normal life in a place where the idea of normal was as exotic as a monkey sleeping
on your shoulder. Streets in the sense of the gap between buildings where you could walk or chuck garbage or live, or not. A face evaporating in a fire. Shaved heads, a blur of animal. Things no longer alive, vultures the size of turkeys. Rags that must have been clothes. Cloth imprinted with the divine, stained. The pictures were stains. Time was a stain. I took a gulp of beer. They weren't there just to be looked at like photos, these pictures. They accosted you, lunged and reeled at you. Some were like daylight after emerging from a dark lane, others were as impenetrable as an alley after hours sightseeing in bright sun; the best were both. After looking at them for a while, the colours of the actual city – the pink and orange and vermilion, the blue of the sky – drained away, got forgotten, reduced themselves to the nothing glare of a light bulb, the white glow of cotton, the gleam of sun on water or an eye, gleaming, and the black of everything else, the night that never went away, that lurked, waited.

I went walking in those lanes the next day, in colour again. I had my neat little digital camera, but ended up not taking any pictures, even though everything was crying out to be photographed. Many of the lanes were only wide enough for two people to walk side by side, but bikes, motorbikes and cows managed to squeeze past too. That was something I was beginning to realise about India: there was always room. Even when there was no room, there was room. The sort of opposite was also true: however slender the lane on which you found yourself, there was always a narrower lane leading off to an even narrower alley. Eventually, when this stopped being true, there was a dead-end or an alley leading back to a lane that seemed, by comparison, the size of a major thoroughfare. It was difficult to believe that this web of lanes and alleys had ever been mapped. There was no need. Everyone knew
where they were going, and how to get there. Most people were there already. Women in red and yellow saris flickered by like load-bearing flames. Shops, stalls and people sleeping were squeezed into every cranny and shadow. Everyone was busy going about their business, even if that business was just sitting. Sitting or dusting – a waiting game, essentially. People who looked like they were lazing around, doing nothing, sprang into action the moment any kind of sale seemed possible. This was true even if they were asleep, using their arms as numb pillows. If they had carpets to sell, then it made sense to sit on a stack of them. Most of the trade came from within the community of stallholders. They were always buying things from each other: food, tea, sweets. One of the things they were always buying was money. No one had any change. So if a tourist wanted to purchase a souvenir or a fun toy for his kids back home in Washington or London, then a boy was sent off to another stall to buy some smaller denominations of note. In this way a minor transaction created enormous ripples of economic activity that spread through the whole neighbourhood, animating it, generating interest. I didn't yet have any hash to smoke – was not sure I would even want to – but I bought, on spec, a small pipe. The guy had dozens of them, several of which were completely blocked. I paid with a fifty-rupee note and – after a boy was dispatched – received in change a twenty that looked like it had been unearthed from the bottom of a compost heap. I loved that about India, the way that, in spite of everything, stuff retained its value. In another life, I could quite happily have worked here. There was something seductive about spending your time tending a stall that was both workplace and pub, the place you hung out with your friends, without your wife, without beer, and often without customers. If you didn't have a wife, it was less appealing, obviously. Then you had to rely more
on the solace of the newspaper. The spectacles worn by certain men – thick lenses, black plastic frames – lent the act of reading these newspapers a most scholarly air. Wherever a newspaper was being read, however great the surrounding commotion, there was the contemplative air of a reference library. Pages were turned. The sun was directly overhead. Spears of light made the shadows darker. Soldiers in khaki sweaters sat cradling rifles with wooden butts, the kind of weapons associated with the Second World War. Nearby was a large sunlit courtyard, where a game of badminton – doubles – was being played. It was surrounded, on three sides, by steep green walls where monkeys paid no attention to the game. They were interested only in bananas and there were no bananas to hand.

Shortly after this I found myself outside a temple – I didn't know which one, only that it was not the big one, Vishwanath, with all the airport security: metal detectors and searches. That's why there were so many soldiers around: because Vishwanath, the Golden Temple, and a mosque were practically on top of each other, goading the faithful, inciting them to live in peace. It was the old ‘neighbours from hell’ scenario, raised to the level of intense theological principle and proximity. There is no God but God, says the one place. There are millions of them, says the other. The fact that people were able to get along in harmony for years did not mean that, at the drop of a hat, they would not be at one another's throats. Hence the soldiers.