Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (32 page)

The doctor came in the morning. He gave me anti-nausea pills and antibiotics. I spent the day in bed, falling asleep, waking for a few horrible minutes and then drifting off again. It hurt to move my eyes even fractionally. My head pounded. After several days I got up and shuffled around like a patient on a drip. I couldn't eat anything. I drank water and took Dioralytes, shitting occasionally. I was between a rock and a hard place. I'd stopped using anti-mosquito spray weeks ago because it had made my skin erupt in a rash. I had thrown up my malaria tablets. I could
not start taking my malaria tablets again until the diarrhoea died down.

Gradually I recovered but, in a way, I never recovered. I'd always been skinny; now it seemed as if my bones were on the outside of my flesh – and they felt brittle as glass. My eyes still hurt if I moved them suddenly. Attacked by waves of dizziness, I was disoriented, altered. When I saw the goat I'd seen ages ago, the one with the clean white coat and the black socks, I thought he was going to start speaking to me. The sight of lentils made me nauseous. The smell of curry made me queasy. The thought of Indian food made me gag.

The evolutionary principle behind this aversion was obvious. Years ago, when we were plucking food from trees and had to learn which berries were edible and which were poisonous, it made sense if the body acquired its own infallible, instinctive memory, if, however hungry you became, you recoiled from the attractive, alluring red berry that had made you puke your soul up months or years earlier. A modern, teenage version of the same mechanism meant that I had stayed away from cider or Cinzano Bianco for thirty years. But how was I going to survive in India without eating Indian food? How was I going to put on weight again if I was living on water, Dioralytes and bananas?

Just outside the hotel there was a cute little puppy, shitting dark gouts of blood. There but for the grace of God …

I felt so weak after this bout of illness that I travelled more frequently by boat, especially if I was going all the way to Manikarnika ghat. As we rowed back from there, back to the hotel, I saw a water-bloated book floating in the river, being drawn to the small whirlpool created by the water-processing plant. Was this the most auspicious place for a book to end
up? Did this guarantee its author immortality of a kind that rendered critical acclaim and months or years on the bestseller charts irrelevant? Or was the book destined, as it began to move more quickly towards the whirlpool, never to be reprinted or reissued in new, contemporary-looking editions? Would it never be read again? I tried to make out the title of the book. It was written in English, but that was all I could see.

We continued rowing towards Assi ghat in the fading light. I had a terrible tickling in my nose. I jammed a finger in my right nostril and the tickling turned into a tingle. I thought I could hear a buzzing, in my nose. When I dragged my finger out I saw, amid a smear of snot, the still-twitching body of a mosquito. After a few moments my nostril began to itch. When the finger went in again, I could feel a small lump. I had been bitten in the nostril by a mosquito.

At a stall in the lanes behind Kedar ghat a little Hanuman had taken my fancy. It was hand-painted, orange, in a blue container that looked like a cross between a kennel and a sentry box on Horse Guards Parade. There was nothing special about it, nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the Indo-tat on offer in the neighbouring shops, but I bought it and set it up on the chest of drawers in my room. I didn't pray to it – didn't know how – but, at some point each day, I sort of
acknowledged
it. I put my hands together and … I can't say exactly what I did. I tried meditating but, because I didn't know how to do that either, I thought of sex. Or tried to. I tried imagining Isobel, naked, on her knees, with shampoo'd dreadlocks and expensively laundered underwear, but the sequence refused to cohere, became confused and dispersed. It took such an effort of will to concentrate that I gave up. There was not the faintest stirring of desire. Because I couldn't
think about sex, and did not know how to meditate or pray, I took, for a mantra, the only word I could think of. I intoned the name Ganoona. I said the name Ganoona, over and over, and by saying it over and over I was also asking for something – even if I did not know what that something was.

Near Lalit ghat, only a metre above the river, was a mauve-white shrine. Filled with the shadow-flicker of reflected sun and water, it was visible only from a boat. I knew that in the rainy season, when the Ganges was in full flow, the riverside temples sometimes flooded. I had seen the famous photograph, by Raghubir Singh, of a boy diving off the spire – he's completely horizontal, as if flying – of one such temple during an especially heavy flood. This particular shrine was so low-lying that it must have been completely submerged every year. Not that this stopped people paying homage to it. Daring boys dived down to offer
puja
, carrying torches in polythene bags. They swam down and shone the torches at the walls, murky through the silt-heavy water. The gods were still there, safe and sound, glad of the visit, amphibious, able to breathe underwater like fish or at least able to hold their breath for months. When the waters receded their abode would be stained, alluvial, cleanable.

I made another trip to the other side, this time from Manikarnika. I had got up even earlier than usual. It was night still, but the stars were pale in the sky, and day was at hand. The sun came up just as I passed Kedar ghat. I kept on walking. After spending an hour at Manikarnika, I accepted the offer of a boat, intending to return to the Ganges View for breakfast. The river was completely calm, flat as wrinkled glass. On an impulse, I asked the boatman to row across the river instead. The bottom of the boat was painted dull red
and leaked slightly. Halfway across I pointed to the inch or two of water sloshing around and asked if there might be a problem.

‘No problem,’ he grinned. He paused in his rowing, held up a tin mug – it was the size of a half-pint beer glass – and made jokey baling gestures with it.

The bank at the other side was quite steep. Walking over it was like cresting a low sand dune. As I did so, a dark bird flapped noisily into the air. To my right, in a small bay, two dogs were eating something at the river's edge.

A dead man.

Was being chewed by two dogs. One was eating his left forearm, the other his right wrist. The dead man was intact. He was lying face down. I could see his hair and one ear. He was wearing a filthy pale blue T-shirt, torn in several places, and shorts. The dogs looked up, looked at me, then resumed their meal. It seemed a strange place to start, the arms. Maybe they started there because it was easy to get their jaws around limbs.

I could not see the dead man properly, but I recognized one of the dogs.

I told Darrell about the body. He took a boat out to see it the very next day. (Laline didn't want to go, but she didn't disapprove of his desire to take a look.) The dogs were still eating the dead man, who was still largely intact. The dead man being eaten by dogs had become a tourist attraction. Darrell was shocked, but said he would have been still more shocked if the dead man was being eaten by dolphins. That, he said, would have been seriously weird shit, even by Varanasi standards.

On the third day I went to take another look, to see how things were progressing, but the dead man was no longer there. There were dogs, eating bits and pieces of something,
but nothing to indicate that this something – just a general mess – might once have been human.

I had been warned that the
bhang
lassis were strong, far more potent than the strongest grass, but because Darrel and Lal were having one I thought I'd join in. Things started weirdly, in that they were prepared for us not in a café, as one might have expected, but by a tailor who wanted to throw in a couple of suits for good measure.

For the first half an hour it was like being stoned, the early stages of a trip. The three of us walked with our arms around each other's shoulders, laughing at everything, at the river for instance, solid and grey as a motorway, busy with amphibious traffic. Then it was like being completely deranged. We weren't sure exactly where we were, but we had sense enough to stay away from Manikarnika and not to linger near Harishchandra where, in Darrell's words, ‘all the death could really bum us out.’ At one of the ghats we saw a thin man with a pale snake draped around his neck like a boa, like a feather boa, except this boa, plucked smooth, was a pet snake. The air grew so still it seemed about to congeal. Mountains of cloud swelled as if a storm were crouching over the city – only to disperse without a drop of rain falling.

Then it was like being a ghost. Darrell wandered off and it was just Laline and me on our own, wondering where he'd gone, and then I was wandering round on my own, wondering where Lal had wandered off to too. I was not unduly alarmed, but I wished they'd been around when I came across the baba with the road atlas and the wild beard. I thought something was wrong with my hearing, then I deduced that it was only him I couldn't hear and the reason I couldn't hear him was because there was something majorly wrong with his voice, in
that it had gone completely and he was completely inaudible. Because he had no words, he gesticulated wildly. Expressing himself solely through gestures, his method of communicating was a form of seated, silent dance. Watching closely I could make out, from these gestures, odd phrases, even an occasional sentence. As I watched I began to piece together parts of what he was narrating. After a while, without conscious effort, I was able to understand him perfectly. He had come here, he said, to find something he had lost. What was the thing he had lost? An umbrella, apparently. And several Biros. Did this strike us as absurd? It did, yes, but I took this as meaning that the things most of us cared about – iPods and favourite T-shirts – were scarcely more important than the things we routinely lost, things like brollies and Biros to which we attached no value whatsoever, useful though they were for keeping one dry in a storm or jotting down thoughts and phone numbers. I thought that's what he was saying, but then it dawned on me that this metaphorical interpretation was too literal, because although he thought he had come here on the pretext of finding his lost property, it dawned on him that what he had lost was precisely the reason for coming here, that he was here to find out why he had ended up here. He paused, sat motionless for a while, letting the complex simplicity of his message sink in, and then, in a superb bit of theatre, he picked up and flicked open an umbrella. But not just any old brolly. No, this was a very old, totally useless, busted flush of an umbrella. Entirely devoid of fabric, it was no more than a spindly metallic skeleton, incapable of providing shelter from rain or shade from sun.

Later, as the light faded, I saw the goat again, the one with the clean white coat and the cute black socks. The one I had thought was going to speak to me. As I passed by, he began walking beside me. He smelled a bit of cheese, goat's cheese.
I felt something touch my leg. He was butting me gently with his head. I looked down at his goat-face.

‘Sah, boat?’ he said.

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

‘Very cheap, sah.’

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

‘Sah want boat?’ the goat repeated.

‘I walking. No want boat.’

‘Very cheap,’ said the goat.

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

I had slowed down and the goat, sensing my hesitancy and interpreting this as a willingness to be detained, tried a different approach.

‘Sah, you think is nice being goat here in city? Life here hard for me. I have children. I offer you boat, but what I most want is to engage in conversation, a little philosophical discourse.’

I stopped walking so that I could give the goat the attention he obviously craved and deserved.

‘OK. What would you like to talk about?’

The goat paused and then said, ‘You take boat, sah?’

‘I thought you wanted a philosophical conversation.’

‘Joking, sah. What I want is ask what it is like, having thoughts in human head. How human consciousness different to goat consciousness?’

‘Well, that's a very difficult question. To answer it, I'd need to have a clearer idea of what it was like to be a goat. I'll be honest, I assumed you were just kind of lost in your goat-world.’

‘That is problem, sah. Because I am goat I do not have tools to explain what it is to be goat.’

‘Well, you see, that is probably the difference. The ability to articulate things. Language. Self-examination … ’ I didn't
know what else to say. It seemed that I was lacking exactly the qualities I claimed distinguished me from my interlocutor. The more I tried to articulate the difference between myself and the goat, the more we had in common. ‘You know, I'm really going to have to think about this. You've taken me by surprise. Also, to be frank, I'm somewhat past my philosophical best at the moment. Could we talk about it another time?’

‘Tomorrow, sah?’ ‘Yes, maybe tomorrow.’

‘One other thing, sah. Ganoona appear soon.’ ‘Ganoona? How do you know about Ganoona?’ ‘I know only that Ganoona will appear soon. In pouch of a kangaroo. But only those who are Ganoona will be able to see him.’ With that the goat turned and trotted off and I heard people calling someone's name. The name sounded familiar, but it took a while to cotton on: it was my name, and the people calling it were my friends, whose names, for the moment, escaped me.

‘Well, I don't think we'll be doing that again in a hurry,’ one of them (Darrell, that was it!) said the next day. He said it as though it was over and done with, but I suspected that part of me was still doing it.

In a way Laline had been proved right: I wasn't creating a commotion, but I was living like a monkey. It was nice, eating bananas under the dome of the sky, looking out at the river. The river flowed east, from right to left, but it didn't keep flowing to the ocean as any sensible river would. Here, at Varanasi, it changed its mind and returned to the source (another notion that I'd first encountered in a trance club in London). It turned back towards the Himalayas, where it came from, where the gods lived, where they had started out
from and gone back to and would never leave. That was where the Ganga was heading. Did this mean that it made sense to throw a plastic bag full of marigolds into it, as an offering? What was the point of that? Every day I saw people doing this. It was obviously a stupid thing to do. If everyone did nothing but throw plastic bags into the river, it would be nothing but a river of plastic bags and it wouldn't be so sacred then, would it? I had finished my banana. It had not looked that great but, taste-wise, it was one of the best bananas I had ever eaten, so I immediately unpeeled another and started eating that too, and it was every bit as good, almost, as the one I had just finished.