Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (23 page)

I took off my sandals and stepped inside the temple. The tiled floor was wet underfoot. It was a dark, rather wet, not entirely clean-looking place. There was an assortment of gods tucked into little niches and an even larger assortment of kids eager to explain who they all were. Ganesh was there, draped with marigolds, with a black face and beady eyes, eyes made
of beads. Ganesh, one of the boys explained, was the god of good fortune – and it was easy to see why. He looked as if he couldn't believe his luck – half elephant and he still gets to be a god! That's the thing about Hinduism, though – everyone is in with a shout and there is always room for another god. Garuda (part eagle) was there and so was Hanuman, the monkey. Hinduism is the Disney of world religions. The gods all have their consorts, and the gods and their consorts all have their own private form of transport: Vishnu travels by eagle (Garuda), Shiva by bull (Nandi), Kartikeya by peacock … The list and the permutations of the list are endless, impossible to keep track of, but it seems safe to assume that even the ‘vehicles’ (whom one would have thought capable of taking care of their own travel arrangements) have their vehicles, that Garuda occasionally rides an owl or tortoise. And Ganesh, the elephant, how does he travel? By mouse, of course.

If there is one thing the great monotheisms have in common, it is the lack of a sense of humour. Is there a single joke in the Bible or the Qu'ran? Hinduism, I saw now, was a joke, but it was not just a joke; it was completely ridiculous. And it didn't stop there. It did away with the idea of the ridiculous by turning it into an entire cosmology! I didn't really know if this was true about Hinduism, but here, in this Hindu temple, the notion of the ridiculous became suddenly sublime.

It was only a small temple. My tour was soon complete. I gave some old rupees to the boys who had shown me round, stepped out into the remembered sun. My sandals were where I had left them. I was pleased to have them on again, to not be walking barefoot through the dusty, shit-splattered lanes of Varanasi. The invention and development of footwear was so obviously a good thing that my happiness, the spring in my step that derived from being comfortably shod, was
accompanied by a corresponding draining of enthusiasm. What, a few moments earlier, had seemed such a persuasive notion – that ridiculousness might be the animating principle of life – seemed, in the face of this more pedestrian idea of progress, abruptly … ridiculous. No sooner had I thought this, than I'd suddenly had enough of walking. I wanted to go back to the hotel, to play
Varanasi Death Trip
again.

I bought a can of Coke (to get more change) and struck a deal with a tuk-tuk driver (who had none). I hoped to avoid saying the name of the hotel – an immediate incitement to hyper-inflation – but did not know the name of any other landmark in the vicinity. So the Taj it was, or should have been – but after five minutes we lurched off the main road.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted. I wasn't angry, but I had to shout to make myself heard above the noise of the tuk-tuk and the other traffic. ‘Why are we going this way?’

‘Main road closed,’ he said. The main road may have been closed, but it was hard to believe it could have been in worse condition than these side roads. They weren't roads at all, just dusty lanes, unpaved, full of rubble, trash-strewn. We made another turning, into a smaller, even less roadworthy road, through what was evidently one of the poorest parts of the city. That's probably not true: there are endless degrees of poverty. Compared with some areas, this one might have been relatively affluent, desirable, even. A couple of happy-looking pigs were rooting through a mass of garbage. Some of this rubbish had been compacted down into a dark tar, a sediment of concentrated filth, pure filth, filth with no impurities, devoid of everything that was not filth. The layer on top of this comprised a mulch of rotting vegetables from which a suitably adapted creature could conceivably derive a vestige of nutrition. On top of this was an assortment of browning marigolds, bits of soggy cardboard (not automatically to be
discounted as a calorific source) and freshish-looking excrement (ditto). The whole thing was set off with a resilient garnish of blue plastic bags. In its way it was a potential tourist attraction, a contemporary manifestation of the classical ideal of squalor. I was quite excited by it, was tempted to ask the driver to stop so that I could have a better look, perhaps even take a picture. Before I had a chance to do so, he had stopped. Because the tuk-tuk was surrounded by a swarm of kids. There are plenty of dirty kids running around Varanasi, barefoot in ragged T-shirts, pestering tourists for rupees. But these kids, it became immediately clear, were worse off. Even by the standards of the penniless, they were poor. By the standards of the dirty, they were filthy, as filthy as the pigs nosing around in the garbage. It was even possible that what I had taken for a rubbish tip was actually their playground, perhaps even their kitchen. There was nothing charming about them, but they were kids, kids with teeth and eyes and thin arms, and, as such, there was – or could have been – something charming about them. They were hyena children, urban prairie dogs, wild, feral creatures. More accurately, they were like the detached, highly animated parts of a single swarming entity with dozens of eyes and multiple arms and hands, all of which were reaching into the tuk-tuk, grabbing at my bag, my camera, my arms, my pockets. The tuk-tuk driver looked frightened. Fortunately I'd had some small experience of this before, in Naples, when a gang of ten-year-olds had robbed me. Back then I hardly knew what to do; by the time I had figured out what was happening, they had made off with my wallet. Now, keeping my bag firmly between my legs, I lashed out as spitefully as possible, using elbows, fists and forearms to hit anything that came near me while taking care not to hit anyone in the face. It was unlikely that they had parents, but I did not want the
daddy of any of them to appear on the scene, wanting to know why this rich tourist had bloodied his little boy's snout. Swatting and jabbing, clutching my belongings and guarding my pockets, I ordered the tuk-tuk driver to keep going.

‘Drive on!’ I shouted with all the imperial authority I could muster. ‘Drive on!’ The engine fumbled into life. Hands were still grabbing and snatching. Unable to get anything more substantial, they resorted now to pinching my flesh. The tuk-tuk began to move. ‘Faster!’ I roared, never ceasing to punch and parry. ‘Run them over if necessary!’

We accelerated noisily away. A projectile – a stone or a brick, conceivably a lump of dried shit – thumped on the roof of the tuk-tuk, but we were in the clear. The driver said nothing. I said nothing. It was not clear whether he had deliberately, as they say in thrillers, ‘set me up,’ whether he was complicit in the ambush or as much the unwilling victim as myself. Certainly he had looked alarmed. Anyway, I was safe now. It occurred to me that a version of this incident could usefully get worked into the
Varanasi Death Trip
software. I twisted round and looked back. I could still see these hyena children by their patch of garbage. They were hopping round excitedly holding something aloft – something that flashed in the sunlight – as though it were a trophy, the spoils of a raid. I checked my belongings: I still had my camera, my iPod; my money belt was still around my waist. And then I realized: they
had
made off with something. The object I had seen them waving excitedly in the air was my can of Coke.

The next day I made another new friend – or at least had another conversation. A long flight of blue and white steps near Shivala ghat led up to the Mother Rytasha Bookshop and Café. At the top, sitting on one of two white chairs, was Andre Agassi. Not Agassi as he is now (or was a few years
ago, at the time of his retirement): shaven-headed, loveable; a duck-waddle Buddha with a two-fisted backhand. This was Agassi in his rebelliously marketable early twenties: long hair, earring, baseball cap, unshaven. I sat down on the other seat, unsure if he worked here or was simply a customer. A bit of both, it turned out. His friend Chandra ran the place and he came by and hung out and helped. He sounded American, his name was Ashwin, and the resemblance to Agassi – I could not help mentioning it – was not entirely fanciful. Like Agassi, he was of Persian descent.

‘But you're American?’

‘In this incarnation.’

‘How about previous ones? Do you know where you were from in them?’

‘From God.’

‘Sticking, for a moment, to this incarnation, where are you from in America?’

Ashwin was from California, had been in Varanasi four weeks. Right now he was just back from volunteering at one of Mother Rytasha's eye camps in Bangladesh, where inexpensive operations for cataracts and other easily curable conditions were performed. I had not heard of Mother Rytasha, so he fetched me an illustrated book about her. She had pale skin and looked like her nose had been worked on by the same surgeon who'd done Michael Jackson's. It was impossible to say how old she was. Obviously, she was a force for good. All of the money she raised went entirely on doing work for the poor. Ashwin had met her in Santa Fe, where she was doing some work on the rich, fund-raising. He had gone with all the usual scepticism, but when he had seen her, he had felt this emanation from her of pure love. Even so, he was not convinced. He went away. Then, later in the day, he came across her again. She was sitting with friends in a park,
under a tree, and once again she had looked at him and he had felt her love – not love for him, love for everyone, for the world, just love – filling his heart. Through his love for her, he had found God.

‘Which particular god?’ I asked. I did not mean to sound cynical, but we were in India, there were lots to choose from, and some kind of clarification seemed essential. He pressed his hands together and raised his eyes to the … heavens, I suppose you would call them.

‘The god of love,’ he said. It was a good, non-sectarian answer. I couldn't fault it, but at some level I did fault it of course. He told me more about Mother Rytasha and the things she did, all of which – there was no doubt on this score either – made the world a better place. Even so, there was something about the blissed-out look in Ashwin's eyes that made me think of heavy doses of Prozac or Zoloft. The love he was full of – genuine, absolute, unconditional, commendable, life-enhancing – was all that stood between him and the nervous breakdown that, like the night in Ackerman's pictures, lay in wait. The love would keep it at bay but, eventually, would leave him more susceptible to it. Part of me even hoped I might be here to see it happen.

Still, it had been nice drinking a Coke and hearing him talk. We shook hands, said we'd see each other around.

I checked out of the Taj and into the Ganges View. I called the airline, cancelled my existing booking and got confirmed on another notional flight to London a couple of weeks from now. I was in no hurry to leave Varanasi, but I was glad to be changing hotels. The excitement and noise of the daily journey to and from the ghats had become a chore – a commute – and I had grown bored with the sanitized comfort of the Taj. I was so happy to be at the Ganges View that I spent the whole of
the first day on the terrace, ordering lunch and drinks, reading. Or trying to.

I'd bought a pile of books on Hinduism from the Harmony bookshop – the shop I'd been to with Darrell – but found it difficult to concentrate on them. However hard I tried, I could not keep track of who was who and what was what. It was impossible to tell if the person in one part of a story was the same one in another part, a few pages later. Everyone was an avatar of everyone else. No one was just themselves. Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna – they were all each other. It was like a world in which Thor, instead of banging his hammer and turning back into frail Don Blake, was re-ignited as the Human Torch (who was also Doctor Doom) or – even more bafflingly – into a guest star from a rival mythological system: the Green Lantern, say, or Lois Lane. (A surprising oversight on the part of Marvel that the super-heroic potential of Hinduism was so under-utilized.) Even when they were not each other, they were always turning themselves into something else to punish a rival or get themselves out of a jam. Since their powers were unlimited, the jams in which they found themselves could never generate much suspense. The names were essential – nothing was more important than the names – but they were infinitely flexible, shared. Another problem was that the epic antics of these gods – all those yarns about eggs the size of planets, drops of water forming great lakes, the blink of an eye shutting out the sun, errands lasting tens of thousands of years – were exactly the kind of things I'd always had trouble reading. After a fling with Gabriel García Márquez, I'd come to detest even a hint of magic realism in fiction. As soon as I came to a passage in a novel where the trees started talking to each other, I gave up on the spot. Compared with what went on in the Hindu myths, trees talking to each other seemed like scrupulous reporting, documentary. This was magic
realism without any vestige of the real. Maybe you had to absorb it all as a kid, and just get lost in the fabulousness of the
Mahabharata
or the
Ramayana
, and then, as a result of that early exposure, your brain would be configured or formatted in such a way that it all made a kind of sense that was simultaneously allegorical and literal, fantastic and believable. For me, obviously, that possibility was long passed.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself, though, because I did learn a few things. Most of the books had glossaries, and although I didn't understand all of the terms, it was good to see where things like Shakti (the group formed by John McLaughlin, Shankar and Zakir Hussain in the 1970s), Rasa (the restaurant in Stoke Newington), Samsara (as in ‘Escape from,’ the trance club) or Surya (as in Surya Samudra, the resort in Kerala) derived their names.

Thanks to Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, notions of karma and dharma had become common currency, but words like
moksha, bhakti
and
rocana
were new to me. Terms like these didn't lend themselves to straightforward translation because they were ideas that did not have an equivalent in our limited western consciousness. One concept that did make sense was
darshan:
the act of divine seeing, of revelation. This was what Hindus went to the temple for: to see their god, to have him or her revealed to them. The more attention paid to a god, the more it was looked at, the greater its power, the more easily it could be seen. You went to see your god and, in doing so, you contributed to its visibility; the aura emanating from it derived in part from the power bestowed on it.