Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (20 page)

Anand was completely wrong about driving in Varanasi. The traffic is not terrible at all. It is beyond any idea of terrible-ness. It is beyond any idea of traffic.

The journey from the airport to the hotel was fine. It was terrifying, chaotic, dangerous, but it bore some kind of relation to journeys I'd experienced previously, in other places. The Taj was set in a verdant tropical park, complete with badminton and tennis courts. Other than that I noticed very little about it, just checked in, showered and changed. I was jet-lagged, full of exhausted energy, hungry, impatient to see the city. I ate daal and rice – I am capable of living off daal and rice for months, have done so, in fact, in London – in the hotel's India-themed restaurant and arranged with Jamal, my guide, to be driven into town. The car was one of those sturdy white Ambassadors, praised, in every article or book
about India, for their sturdiness, whiteness and reliability. For a few minutes after leaving the hotel all seemed quite normal – crowded, busy, noisy – but nothing more than expected. Then everything began to converge, contract and – this was the interesting part – accelerate. The roads shrank; the volume of vehicles increased. Through the window I saw what seemed to be a house built around a tree. Branches protruded through the windows. When I bought my flat in London the survey had warned that there was a tree growing on the pavement fifty feet away, that its roots might cause subsidence or interfere with the foundations. And here was a house whose entire living room must have been filled with the trunk of a big old tree, like something built by Frank Lloyd Wright, something that leaked in a downpour and became quite soggy during the monsoon. Jamal, meanwhile, was telling me about motoring protocol in the city.

‘You need three things if you are driving in Benares,’ he said. ‘Good horn, good brakes and good luck.’ He said it spontaneously, in an off-the-cuff style that had obviously been honed in the course of picking up hundreds of new arrivals.

‘A seatbelt might be handy too,’ I said. It was the last thing I said for some time because Sanjay, the driver, I realized now, had just been warming up, idling, girding his loins for what lay ahead. I am no stranger to the mighty traffics of Asia. I am a veteran of the perma-jams of Manila, the jihad of Java, the full-metal frenzy of Saigon, but this was something else. Cars, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, cars, bikes, carts, rickshaws, motorbikes, trucks, people, goats, cows, buffalo and buses were all herded together. The sheer quantity of traffic was the sole safeguard, the only thing that prevented a stampede. At one point we came to a roundabout and went round it, clockwise; others went round it anti-clockwise. Given the ability to do so, everyone would have done neither, would have just
roared over it. The din of horns rendered use of the horn simultaneously superfluous and essential. The streets were narrow, potholed, trenched, gashed. There was no pavement, no right of way – no
wrong
of way – and, naturally, no stopping. The flow was so dense that we were rarely more than an inch from whatever was in front, beside or behind. But we never stopped. Not for a moment. We kept nudging and bustling and bumping our way forward. Given the slightest chance – a yard! – Sanjay went for it. What, in London, would have constituted a near-miss was an opportunity to acknowledge the courtesy of a fellow-road-user. There were no such opportunities, of course, and the idea of courtesy made no sense for the simple reason that nothing made any sense except the relentless need to keep going. From the airport to the hotel, Sanjay had used the horn excessively; now that we were in the city proper, instead of using it repeatedly, he kept it going all the time. So did everyone else. Unlike everything else, this did make sense. Why take your hand off the horn when, a split-second later, you'd have to put it back on?

As we burrowed more deeply into the city, the nature of the journey changed again, taking on the quality and dimensions of a procession – especially once we entered the strip leading down through a market, heading to the river. The action on the road was first matched and then exceeded by what was happening on either side of it, by the blare and frenzy of display, of frantic buying and selling, loading and unloading. This particular phase of the journey – the driving phase – was coming to an end. Everything was piled up. Everything was excessive. Everything was brightly coloured and loud, so everything had to be even brighter and louder than everything else. So everything blared. There was so much of it, all blaring so loud and bright, that it was impossible to tell exactly what this everything was made up of, what it
comprised. It was just a totality of bright, noisy, blaringness.

Eventually the press of people, animals and cars became too much, even for Sanjay. Our sturdy Ambassador could have kept going forever, of that there could be no doubt. All it needed was the road, but it had run out of road. Even the road had run out of road. It was impossible to move. The noise, when I opened the door and squeezed out, increased markedly. Jamal was supposed to accompany me, but I insisted that I would be fine on my own, that he could wait for me here. With that I joined the throng of people flowing towards the river.

After the claustrophobia of the streets, my first sight of the mighty Ganges and the sky stretching over the opposite bank was a glimpse of another, more spacious world. The steps down to Dashaswamedh ghat were lined with beggars waving silver bowls, empty except for grains of rice and the odd coin. They were the lucky ones. Some didn't have bowls. They were the lucky ones too. Some did not have hands.

Beyond the jostle was what seemed like a view, across a narrow ocean, of an empty continent, desert-dry It was like arriving at the world's first-ever seaside resort. This resort, evidently, was in serious need of repair, but its popularity was undiminished. Whatever else had happened to Varanasi, it had never fallen into ruin – and never would. Even if every building in it collapsed, it would not be a ruin. The sky was holiday blue. Banners fluttered in the breeze. There was uncomprehended meaning everywhere, I could see that. The colours made the rainbow look muted. Lolly-pink, a temple pointed skywards like a rocket whose launch, delayed by centuries, was still believed possible, even imminent, by the Brahmins lounging in the warm shade of mushroom umbrellas. Were they imparting wisdom to disciples or just chatting with pals – India was losing to South Africa in a test match – about
the cricket? Enlightened or completely out of it? Both? Even the fake holy men – and I'd been warned, by Jamal, that many of them were wholly fake – were genuine. And everyone was so friendly. I'd only been here a minute and someone was wanting to shake my hand. It was like being a celebrity or a visiting royal. Except he didn't want to shake my hand at all. He wanted to demonstrate the massage he was hustling. He was kneading my hand and wouldn't give it back. While he was doing this, a woman was shoving her silver bowl under my nose so that I could sniff at the few grains of rice in it. A boy insisted I took a boat ride. Another insisted I took his boat instead. I was the tallest person around, towering over everyone like a radio mast, broadcasting the fact that I had just arrived in Varanasi, was new to India, had no idea how to cope. I was easy prey, fair game: the kind of person who could be taken for a boat ride, who was ripe for a massage. I got my hand back and walked on, trying to look as if I had been here for weeks, was no stranger to lepers, was in no hurry to see bodies being burned at Manikarnika ghat.

That's where I was hurrying, to see bodies being burned. (On arriving in a new place, it's no bad thing to simply do what everyone else does.) I could see the fires burning. From this distance they were just bonfires, as if a festival or party, though still in progress, had passed its peak. I made a note in my notebook:
Late afternoon. Flames in sunlight, by the river. Slow smoke. People drifting through the smoke, moving in sunlight. Behind all this, the spires of temples, one of them tilting precariously.

The whole operation at Manikarnika was really labour-intensive, like one of those Salgado photographs of peasants toiling on the mountainside – a mountainside, in this case, that had been so thoroughly worked over that it was no longer a mountain. There were great stacks of wood, higher than
houses, forever getting added to and denuded as logs were weighed out to fuel the never-ending need for fires. Barges arrived, crammed with logs that were carried up the shore, so big that only one or two could be carried at a time, slung like animals, stiff and heavy, over the shoulders of the men carrying them. The wood was stacked, chopped, weighed and carried down to the water again, probably weighed again. Each cremation required a ton of wood. Ton in the sense of a lot, not a specific unit of measurement. Smoke smudged the sky, blackening the temples and buildings crowded round the fires. Cows chewed on soggy marigolds, picking through the ash at the river's dark edge. The water was sooty and dark, burned. Some dogs were there too. Half a dozen fires were burning, tended by the men who worked here. People were standing around talking while, all the time, wood was lugged back and forth and fires were prodded with branches. It was like watching the dawn of the industrial revolution, as it might have occurred if there were no industry and a vast surplus of manpower, all employed in the service of death.

Jamal had told me that you were not allowed to take pictures but, beyond this, I wasn't sure about the general etiquette of the place, how close you could get to the fires. To the left was a large smoke-grimed house, from the balcony of which several tourists were watching. I'd only glanced up there when a boy in a tattered Planet Hollywood T-shirt was offering to show me the way, leading me there. By the time you have shown the first flicker of interest in doing, seeing or buying anything in India, someone will have read the signs and acted on them, will be trying to turn this wish – for interest is a wish, a desire, and, as such, constitutes demand – into a reality, to his or her financial advantage. I only learned this later. Now, when he said ‘Come,’ I followed.

‘No pictures. No cameras.’

‘I don't have camera,’ I said, making it clear that I was not a newcomer, not just off the boat, not Japanese. But I followed the boy's down-at-heel flip-flops up darkened stairs, to an empty room with a balcony where I'd seen the other tourists, who were nowhere to be seen.

‘View,’ said the boy, as if he were issuing a command the way he had earlier instructed me to ‘Come.’ Again, I obeyed. I had a good view of the fires, the river behind them, but I couldn't actually see any bodies, just piles of logs, flames, and the milling crowd – including the tourists who, a few minutes earlier, I'd seen up here. I looked around to see if anyone else was here now. Just the kid in his blue Planet Hollywood T-shirt, who joined me, looking out from the balcony at the cremation ground. And a couple of friends of his, who appeared on the other side, my left. Older than him, and rougher-looking. This was a hospice, one of them explained. A place where people came to die. I nodded and smiled and looked back at the river, and he said the same thing again.

‘That's good to know, but for the moment I'm happy living,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ It was the first joke I had made since being in India. The comment about the seatbelt had not been a joke and neither, really, was this, but it made a change from only saying ‘Hello’ and ‘No, thank you.’ The kid talking to me, an old-looking teenager, had something wrong with one of his eyes. It was like he was cross-eyed, but not in the normal way.

‘This is hospice,’ he said again. ‘People come here to die. People look after people who come here to die.’ I nodded, took a different tack.

‘That's good,’ I said.

‘Give donation,’ said his friend, clarifying the situation. For a hospice, the atmosphere was surprisingly threatening. I handed over a ten-rupee note and turned back to the river.
A corpse, wrapped in a red shroud, was carried down to the banks by mourners, chanting, chanting something, chanting. I couldn't understand what they were saying, chanting. They dipped the body in the river and … But it was no use, the guy with the wonky eye – both eyes were wonky, that was the thing, so they sort of cancelled each other out – was tugging at my sleeve. This time he had an old hag by his side and she must be given a donation as well, because she was a nurse, nursing the sick people who had come here to die. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a note. A hundred rupees – relatively speaking, a fortune. I handed it over and started to leave. Five rupees would have been fine, but the hundred had turned me into a mark. They were tugging at my sleeve again, the two older kids, and the kid with the Planet Hollywood T-shirt. There was another so-called nurse – and she wanted a hundred rupees too. Inflation in India can be instantaneous; suddenly a hundred rupees was the going rate. But for what? For being allowed to get out of here alive?

‘For nurse,’ said the other older kid, the one with nothing wrong with his eyes.

‘If she's a nurse, I'm Florence Nightingale,’ I said with a big smile. I had hit a rich vein of humour in this dingy place, but this was obviously not the occasion to mine it more deeply. I made for the exit, unsure what was going to happen. Nothing did. They made a symbolic attempt to bar my way, but did not try physically to stop me.

In the gloomy interior everything had felt quite sinister, but as soon as I was outside, in the angled sunlight, it was difficult to tell what, exactly, had been going on. Had the guys been threatening? Were the old women really nurses? Even if they weren't, they looked like they needed one.

By the river was a kind of viewing platform where
tourists – including the ones I'd seen earlier – were watching the cremations. I went and stood near them, feeling safe again. Everything was intensely ritualized and completely ad hoc. Head shaved, wearing only a length of white cloth, a thin man led a group round an as yet unlit pyre, sprinkling oil over the shrouded body. I assumed they were mourners, but there was nothing mournful about them. A few minutes later the wood was lit. The shaven-headed man and his friends stood around and watched, joking and chatting. No one could accuse Hindus of being killjoys. The only people with funereal faces were the tourists, us. A pair of charred feet were sticking out of a collapsing pyre. One of the
doms
chucked more logs onto the body of this ex-person and prodded the feet back into the flames. I was still unsure how close you were allowed to get to the pyres, but no one gave a damn, really. A Japanese woman moved almost as close as the mourners, as if she were the widow who, in a loyal display of grief, might join her dead husband by throwing herself on the fire. Her interest, actually, was quite disinterested. She just wanted to see, like the rest of us, only more boldly. Over her shoulder I glimpsed a head dripping fat into the flames. The skull became gradually apparent. There was more chanting. Another body was being carried down to the river. Cows munched the wilted remains of flowers. The ashes of earlier funerals were being raked through. Then they were shovelled towards the river. The body that was about to be burned, the one that had just been brought down, was being dipped in the river: an after-the-fact baptism – of fire.