Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (34 page)

I had become almost a fixture at the hotel. Though I still enjoyed a laugh and a joke, I was no longer on the lookout for friends, for people I could eat dinner and make jokes with. Everyone I met was just passing through. They were simply guests, people who came and went. My attitude was like that of the staff, except that I was never faced with the final, definitive judgement, made on the day of departure, that overruled all previous feelings about how courteous or pleasant the guests had been: the judgement determined solely by the size of the tip. (I'd been here so long that my eventual tip must have been anticipated as though it were my last will and testament.) It was a relief to be free of the tyranny of my own likes and dislikes. How could
it have mattered so much what I thought of X or Y? I mean, how could it have mattered so much to me?

I don't want to sound like some kind of
pseudo-sanyasin.
We think of renunciation happening formally, definitively, possibly as a result of frustration, anger or disappointment
(‘This world I do renounce …’)
, but it can happen gradually, so gradually it doesn't feel like renunciation. The reason it doesn't feel like renunciation is because it's not. I didn't renounce the world; I just became gradually less interested in certain aspects of it, less involved with it – and that diminution of interest was slowly reciprocated. That's how it works. The world stops singling you out; you stop feeling singled out by the world.

Some people stop believing that happiness is going to come their way. On the brink of becoming one of them, I began to accept that it was my destiny to be unhappy. In the normal course of things I would have made some accommodation with this, would have set up camp as a permanently unhappy person. But what had happened in Varanasi was that something was taken out of the equation so that there was nothing for unhappiness to fasten itself upon. That something was me. I had cheated destiny. Actually, the passive construction is more accurate: destiny had been cheated.

I remembered how personally I used to take everything. Two years previously, I'd been given tickets for the opening day at Wimbledon, Centre Court. It rained, off and on, all day. We kept waiting, looking at the sky, hoping. At three o'clock the covers were rolled back and it looked like play might commence. There was a big, soggy cheer, but within twenty minutes the covers were back on and the awful drizzle returned. We didn't give up hope. We kept looking at the sagging clouds. At one point it seemed to me that the sky was brightening up and growing darker at the same time. By the
end of the day, not a shot had been played. It was as if there was a curse on me. No one else – not the players or anyone else in the stadium – suffered to the extent that I did. It was my day, my Wimbledon, my parade that was being rained on. The weather had come between me and what I wanted – which was to watch tennis. The pain and the rain were intolerable because they conformed to a broader climatic pattern: something was always coming between me and what I wanted. That afternoon at Wimbledon it was the rain; another day it was another thing. But there was always something. I realised now that that thing was me. I was in my way. I was ahead of me in the queue. I was keeping me waiting. Everything was a kind of waiting. When I drank beer, I was waiting for the glass to empty so I could have it filled and start drinking again. Rather than simply enjoying the high of cocaine, I was also monitoring it, to see if the effect was wearing off, so I could top it up, have more, start monitoring again … I really don't want to come on like someone who has gone through rehab or undergone a conversion or awakening. All I'm saying is that in Varanasi I no longer felt like I was waiting. The waiting was over. I was over. I had taken myself out of the equation.

When I first came to Varanasi, like all the other tourists, I had treated the Ganges with extreme aversion. It may have been a sacred river, but it was a filthy one too, awash with sewage, plastic bags and the ashes of corpses: a sacred, flowing health hazard. Now I felt the urge to take a dip. I say urge, but that is not the right word at all. I had no desire to bathe in the way that I desired a cold beer – and I did still desire cold beers, just as I still enjoyed a laugh and a joke, especially now it was so hot. It was more as if I knew that one day I would bathe in the river and so there was no point not
doing so. Dillydallying was just postponing the inevitable. Since there would come a time when I had bathed in the Ganges, not doing so made no sense: like trying to avoid doing something I had already done.

Just after sunrise, at Kedar ghat, I took off my shorts and T-shirt and stripped down to my underwear. All my life I have been self-conscious about being thin, but surrounded by the endlessly varied shapes of Indians – fat as Ganesh, skinny as whippets – I felt quite comfortable. I walked down the steps and entered the water. Relative to the air, it was surprisingly cold. The sun patterned the surface with wriggles and sparkles of light. I was up to my knees in the water and had got used to the cold. Now the water felt quite warm, but other than that it did not feel like anything. It did not feel dirty and it did not feel sacred; it just felt like water. I waded a little further out, on tiptoes, to avoid the moment when the water touched my balls and stomach. Then I was in the water up to my chest. I could feel the push of the current, but there was nothing treacherous or dangerous-seeming about this slight exertion of its will. Now that I was in the water, I didn't know what to do. The sun was pounding down already, not causing any problems. It was quite nice being in the water, as it always is on a sunny day. On either side people were washing or praying or just standing. Some kids were playing, splashing each other, but they did not splash me. No one paid any attention to me. No one said ‘Good for you,’ or ‘You see, it's not as dirty as these fussy tourists always claim.’ I was the only non-Indian, the only westerner in the water, but I knew there were several on the steps behind me, watching. I gazed at the opposite bank, that empty world. It was easy to believe that if you swam there you would leave your present life behind.

I felt something touch my leg and glanced into the water,
fearing it was something horrible, a form of sewage, but it was just a sodden coracle with a few dead flowers in the bottom. The water may not have been clean, but it didn't look or feel dirty. I could hear voices, the voices of the people behind and beside me. The risen sun was in my face. After standing in the river for a while, I walked back to the steps and dried in the sun. I had not got any water on my face, not even a drop. I put my T-shirt and shorts back on. They felt warm and clean and it was nice to have sandals on my feet again too. I was not sure whether I'd had a wash or was now in need of one, but I was sure that the Indians regarded me differently, that I had made a significant move towards becoming one of them. As for my fellow-tourists, they probably thought I was showing off, reckless, stupid, but that, I realized now, was a form of fear and envy. When they saw me, they saw a rebuke to their own timidity.

My cough had not got better, but I had grown so used to it that I scarcely gave it a thought. Coughing was just a form of breathing, a slightly noisier function of being alive. I had got into the habit of crapping, liquidly, after every meal. My asshole felt red as a monkey's. Living mainly on bananas again, I lost weight. Thought bore a curious resemblance to a headache. It was impossible to say whether these were the varied symptoms of a single sickness or a coalition of individual illnesses that had formed an alliance to do me harm. Either way, my whole system was under siege – from within. As happens, I adapted to these new conditions, got used to them. At first, I'd kept wishing I was better. Then, after a while, my notion of what feeling better felt like grew a little hazy. I forgot there was even this state called wellness. Feeling well was indistinguishable from feeling unwell. If I felt only slightly ill, then I felt perfectly well.

It grew hotter by the day. I may have said this already, but it kept getting hotter. The heat meant that every kind of bug and germ was well placed and perfectly adapted to thrive and multiply. On top of everything else, sun- or heat-stroke seemed a distinct possibility. To combat the heat, I bought a
dhoti.
At first I wore it only in my room, practising how to tuck it into itself so that my thighs were left bare. Then, on one occasion, I actually sat on the roof terrace wearing it, relieved that no one else came up. When they did – a French couple who had only checked in that morning – I was surprised that I felt comfortable, at ease. I said,
‘Bonjour,’
and gave them a smile, one of those slow, semi-guru smiles that people who had been here a while felt entitled to bestow on new arrivals. They remained on the terrace only a few minutes, just long enough to show that they weren't embarrassed by this skinny holy man, and then went back to their room and had audible sex. I even heard her saying,
‘Je viens.’

‘Stick it in and waggle it about,’ I thought to myself. And then, because thinking this phrase was so enjoyable, I said it aloud several times: ‘Stick it in and waggle it about!’ If I'd known how to translate it, I would have said it in French.

A few days later I ventured out on to the ghats, wearing just the
dhoti.
As a teenager I had been so ashamed of my skinny legs that I played squash in jeans; now, skinnier than ever, I walked out in this bit of cloth, as skinny as Gandhi. My legs were perfectly white above the knees and deeply tanned below them. I look completely ridiculous, I thought to myself, but no more ridiculous than some of the other people around. What was the point in feeling absurd in a town where you could lug your testicles around in a wheelbarrow? There was no such thing as being ridiculous in Varanasi. The very idea was ridiculous. I was much further gone than any of the backpackers. They had dreadlocks
and wore turbans made of sarongs, but no one looked as ridiculous as me. I didn't avoid their eyes, I met their eyes. The owner of one of these pairs of eyes, Micky, whom I'd spoken with a few times at the Lotus Lounge, was so obviously torn between his desire to ask what was going on and his fear of giving offence that, to put him out of his misery, I said, ‘So, what do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘This,’ I said, raising my arms, doing a slight twirl, as if showing off a new outfit from Topshop.

‘Looks good,’ he said. ‘But what does it, like, signify?’

‘You've heard of
sadhus
, right?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, this is my version of it. A sadd-o,’ I said, beaming as I made this feeble little joke. I walked on. I concentrated on rearranging the resting expression of my face. Habitually glum-looking, I kept smiling, hoping that my face would come to reside in this more upbeat style.

Looking like this – like a freak, frankly – served another useful purpose in that, while I attracted stares, I was pestered less frequently by hawkers and hustlers. I certainly didn't look like I was in the market for buying anything. At Harishchandra ghat a tourist with a German-sounding accent asked if he could take my picture. I said yes, certainly, and stood beaming by the yellow and black lifeguard's tower that was not a lifeguard's tower. We spoke afterwards. He wanted to know my story. I said I didn't have a story and he asked where I was from.

‘Where are you from?’ I said.

‘Switzerland,’ he said.

‘Switzerland?’ I said. ‘Then you must know my friend Isobel.’

He shook his head, no.

‘Man, I'd like to have got my spoon into that chick's pudding,’ I said. ‘Stuck it in and waggled it about! Anyway,
Switzerland. Neutral Switzerland. I once stood in front of the fountain at Geneva. I had my picture taken there, smiling with friends, the fountain behind us. An establishing shot. I was a Champion. You see?’

He nodded, but it was obvious that he did not see. He saw me standing before him, but he could not see. The notion of
darshan
meant nothing to him.

‘My story is your story,’ I said. ‘If you were from Swindon, then that is where I am from. It doesn't matter. There is nothing to choose between Swindon and Geneva. To me, they might just as well be Bourton on the Water. Have you been there?’

‘To Bourton on Water? I don't think so.’

‘If you had, you would know. A charming Cotswold village. I went there with my parents when I was a boy. There was a Tea Shoppe where we had teacakes. I remember my father's chin, how it was shiny with butter. The Tea Shoppe is now probably a cappuccino bar. In essentials, it is exactly the same as Geneva.’

The Swiss nodded.

‘Another time we went to Longleat, to see the lions of Longleat. A very hot day and, contrary to the instructions on the many signs, we unwound the windows of our car slightly, a sky-blue Vauxhall Victor. No more than a couple of inches, but I began to cry because I was frightened of the lions.

‘Have you heard of Mike Summerbee, the footballer? He played for Manchester City and went to the same primary school as me. Even back then, my father said that footballers earned too much money. More than anything, my father hated spending money, so holidays were a kind of torture for him and he preferred to stay home and concrete our drive or something like that. When we did go on holiday, we went to Weston-super-Mare or Bournemouth, but when we got there
it was always the monsoon and so we would have to go to the cinema. The only time we went to the cinema was when we were on holiday and it rained. It always rained and we always saw the film versions of our favourite television shows:
Steptoe and Son
, Morecambe and Wise in
That Riviera Touch.
We never went to see the great works of the medium: Antonioni, Satyajit Ray, Godard. We didn't even see
Thunderball
, but to be fair I did see
Where Eagles Dare
and
The Italian Job
, films that had a profound effect on my then-young mind. I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I know this seems hard to believe as you look at me now but, in my time, I was somewhat of a lady's man. Stick. Waggle. Speaking of stream of consciousness, have you seen
In the White City
by your fellow-countryman, Alain Tanner? It's one of the first films to use Super-8 footage, to exploit the curious way Super-8 seems saturated by memory itself. It stars Bruno Ganz. At the simplest level, he plays a sailor on leave in Lisbon, who jumps ship and just stays there, wandering around, but for me it is an allegory of the attractions of Bourton on the Water, the eternal village, in the holy Cotswolds. There is a bridge there, a crossing place, a
tirtha.
It is said that if you cross this bridge, you will come to an auspicious ice cream van – Mr Whippee – selling choc-ices and raspberry Mivvis. Let be be finale of seem.’