Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (28 page)

‘Sir,’ I said. ‘Look at my eyes.’ I took off my sunglasses. ‘Look at my eyes and listen to me.’ I had no idea how my eyes looked. I hoped the fact that they were blue lent the person glaring angrily through them an air of implacable purpose and unshakeable will. In a sense it did not matter, because the queue-barger was not looking at them. He was looking at the door to the bank and he was still smiling. My own smile had by now become a death's head grin, a rictus of suppressed English rage, the product of years of rainy summers, ruined picnics, cancelled trains and losing at penalty shoot-outs. ‘You are not going into that bank ahead of me. The only way you will go into the bank ahead of me is by stepping over my lifeless body. Do you understand?’

The moment of crisis had arrived. The fleshy, sari-clad woman who had been ahead of us was emerging from the lobby. Before she was properly out of the door, my rival tried to move past her, but I wedged myself between them and shouldered my way in. When he tried to come in as well, I shut the door in his face. I had made it. Pumped-up and exultant, I pumped my fist like a man who has made his point, achieved his goal, won.

I keyed in my PIN. My hands were trembling. Perhaps that's why the machine rejected my number. I must have keyed in the wrong PIN. I tried again, slowly, carefully, deliberately. The bank rejected my card a second time. And a third.

Everything that happens in India is a parable, even if the meaning of that parable is unclear. In this instance I took it to mean that there is no such thing as a pyrrhic victory, there are only pyrrhic defeats.

The fact of the matter is that I came out empty-handed, cashless. The man who had tried to get in ahead of me came in next, unperturbed, unrepentant and un-grudge-bearing. His wife was standing outside. So was the German, but he was not the next in line. Yet another person had managed to get between him and the door.

‘You are a fucking Kraut pussy,’ I hissed at the German, before striding off.

I took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel. As we jolted and heaved through the jammed streets, I realized that, weirdly, the episode at the bank had restored my good spirits. I laughed aloud as I recalled the shocked expression on the face of the much-put-upon German as I'd abused him. I admired the way the man who had tried to queue-barge had stuck, smilingly, to his game plan, had refused to allow that anything was at stake other than his desire – to his credit, he had never attempted to make it his right – to get at his cash quickly. Viewed in a different light, everything irritating about India could become a source of pleasure and instruction with implausible speed. Suddenly I understood why there had been something strangely familiar, almost reassuring, about the irritation that had been assailing me for the previous weeks: it was how I felt all the time in London, the default setting for a life in which a constant drizzle of frustration, annoyance and rush-hour Tube travel was the unremarked-on norm.

All around was honk and blare. The din, the dust, the noise were unbelievable, but wasn't it great that there was a place on earth where dust, din and blare thrived? What a clean and dull planet it would be if everywhere became a suburb of
Stockholm, where citizens queued patiently and the cash machines dispatched crisp, high-denomination, fraud-proof notes, where there were no elephant-headed gods who rode around on mice, where there were no beggars waving their bandaged, pus-stained stumps in your face, no janitors claiming they were priests, no cows solemnly manuring the streets, no monkeys running riot and no kids scrounging rupees? And beneath all one's irritation and annoyance, in any case, was the knowledge that the demand for money was a straightforward expression of the inequality of economic relationships. We, the tourists, were immensely rich and they, the beggars and the boatmen, the masseurs and the hustlers, were unfathomably poor. The pestering was a persistent, but still voluntary, tax on luxury. You didn't have to pay. You could say no. This ‘No’ would be ignored, but if you kept saying it, if you said it over and over, then … it would still be ignored. But eventually, after the twentieth time, it would be accepted. Either that or it would have turned into a ‘Yes.’ Given the gulf between what you had and what they did without, it was a miracle, really, that you didn't get robbed every time you left the hotel, the compound, that your feet were not ripped off simply to get at your sandals, that you weren't torn limb from limb and eaten, or your liver sold for dog food.

As we laboured along Shivala road, I saw Isobel, wearing a faded yellow T-shirt and jeans, about to cross the street as the rickshaw bore down on her. She looked up, startled. I waved, smiled – ‘Careful!’ – and she smiled and stepped back. It was the first time I had seen her on her own and the first time we had acknowledged each other's existence. In Hinduism karma builds up and unfolds over several lifetimes, but in my speeded-up, occidental mind it was impossible to regard this accidental encounter as a sign of anything other than instant
karmic payback. Two days ago – or half an hour earlier – I had been so at odds with the world that such a meeting could never have happened. Even if it had, I would only have grunted at her; if she'd noticed me at all, she'd have seen only a scowling familiar face bearing down on her from the orientalist perch of his rickshaw. But now, with my equanimity regained, I was a nice, smiling person obviously concerned for her safety.

We arrived back at Assi ghat. As I climbed off, the rickshaw driver tapped me on the leg and angled his foot back so that his sandal flipped down, revealing the sole of his foot. There was a raw hole in the arch of his foot, as if he had been crucified, except the hole was not bloody. It was white-ish, an ulcer of some kind, presumably. I gave him a hundred rupees, for which he showed no gratitude – and who can blame him? For someone whose job involved pedalling all day long, pressing down on his foot, this was a terrible affliction. But not a whole lot worse – quite a bit better, in fact – than some of the other ailments, injuries and illnesses afflicting people here. The amount of pain, discomfort and agony people were able routinely to bear without complaint, without any expectation of getting better (let alone cured), without hope even of the quantity of pain being lessened, was immense. Did this mean that it wasn't pain, wasn't anguish? Perhaps in the west our capacity for pain had been heightened as it had become more avoidable. Anguish was the expectation that whatever was ailing us could be reduced and treated. Anguish was the outrage that the expected outcome wasn't achieved immediately. Anguish was the delay in getting the right treatment, waiting for the medicine to kick in. Anguish was waiting.

And here in India we westerners rarely had to wait for anything. We moaned about the constant pestering, the
constant offers of ‘boat’ and ‘rickshaw,’ but when we wanted a boat or rickshaw we expected someone to be there, providing a boat or rickshaw immediately, at rock-bottom prices. Accustomed, at home, to the dismal wait for a bus, here we were slightly put out if we had to wait more than a minute. At some level, the poorest backpacker enjoyed the privileges and perks of the Raj.

I walked for a while along the ghats. A boy ran up alongside me.

‘School pen,’ he said. I smiled, continued walking. ‘School pen,’ he said again. ‘School pen.’ As it happened, I did have a pen with me, a high-quality roller-ball pen from London. I gave it to the boy, who ran off quickly. A holy man was sitting by the river, in the shade of a mushroom umbrella, looking at me nicely.

I came to the ‘I LOVE MY INDIA’ sign, was happy to see it.

Laline said, ‘What are you reading?’

I was on the terrace and had not heard her approach. She was barefoot, wearing very faded jeans and a T-shirt that looked white and clean-smelling. I held up the book:
Women in Love
, an old Penguin edition.

‘Strange choice.’

‘I only started it because someone left it in the hotel. But there's a lot of Lawrence here in Varanasi: the river of dissolution, the Ship of Death … ’ I ran out of steam. Lal pulled up a chair and sat down next to me, waited. Her toenails were painted pink and she had a silver ring on her little toe.

‘That's only two things.’

‘I know, but two can be a lot. In certain circumstances,
one
can be a lot.’

‘And zero, sir, can be everything,’ she said, Indian-wise. ‘Actually, to qualify as “a lot,” you need a minimum of three.’

‘You're right, of course.’

‘So, did Lawrence come to India?’

‘Sri Lanka. Ceylon. Which he hated. And he sort of inferred India from Sri Lanka. But it's a shame he didn't spend time here. It would have been a source of irritation, obviously. In terms of caste, he'd have seen himself as an Untouchable Brahmin. He'd have claimed that Gandhi advocated nonviolence because he secretly wanted to smash people's heads in with a hammer.’

‘Especially Nehru's?’

‘Exactly He got ill everywhere, but he could have got iller here than everywhere else combined. And he'd probably have written an Indian novel. In about eight weeks. Full of inaccuracy and wild speculation, but right in all sorts of strangely prophetic ways. He'd have seen that one day tandoori chicken would become the English national dish, that his hometown, Eastwood, would have several restaurants with the word Mahal in them.’

Laline had ordered tea. Kamal brought a pot on a gleaming tray and set it on the table. I put down my book and went inside to get a banana. Since getting a stomach upset, I had taken to eating mainly bananas.

‘You're living like a monkey,’ said Laline when I sat down again. ‘Next, you'll be stealing bananas from people's plates. Creating a commotion.’

‘One day, if I'm just an orange blob, would you still recognize me then?’ I said.

‘If you're just an orange blob? No, of course not. But I don't think that's going to happen. You're one of those men who get skinnier and skinnier. And you're not orange. You're kind of off-white, pinkish. You should put some sun cream on.’

‘You are denying the god in me,’ I said. ‘Bingo! That's a sort of Lawrentian idea: denying the god in yourself or someone else. I've got the three I needed to qualify as a lot.’

‘It sounds a bit general to me, but I'll let it go.’

Darrell appeared on the terrace and Lal waved him over.

‘Just in time,’ she said. ‘I was getting an interminable lecture on
Seven Pillows of Wisdom.
And you wouldn't believe what he just said. He called Ganga a river of dissolution.’

‘Did he tell you how he pissed in it?’

‘No!’ said Lal. ‘Blasphemer! Evil-doer!’

Darrell drew up a chair and sat with us. There were three of us now: enough to be a lot. Like Lal, he was wearing a white T-shirt. He didn't kiss her, but now that he was here, I saw that she had the glow of a woman in love. Darrell didn't glow in that way – men don't, especially men like him. But something else about him had become more pronounced (in an infinitely discreet way): the certainty that he could be relied upon, that she was not making a mistake. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the fact that he and Laline had become involved had no effect on their relationship with me.

‘How's your tummy?’ Darrell asked.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You know what they say. Whatever doesn't kill me makes me weaker.’

For a few days we were joined by Sayoko, a young Japanese woman. She was eating dinner at a table on her own and Darrell asked if she wanted to join us. She spoke very little English and so, when she had sat down at our table, he began speaking to her in Japanese – which, even by his standards, was pretty cool. Sayoko and I couldn't say much to each other, but she was easy to be around. Her way of being in the world was unlike anyone else's I had encountered. Having worked in London, in journalism, often interviewing artists,
I had pretty well accepted that the sole point of existence – especially for artists, but among journalists too – was to make a mark, a splash, to draw attention to oneself. Sayoko was the opposite. She moved through the world as though the idea was to have a minimum impact upon it. Like a skilful driver, she negotiated her passage through things without collisions or near-misses. In the context of Varanasi the comparison made no sense, but to be in her company was to be reminded of how relaxing it was not to be honking your horn and constantly expecting a crash, not to have your attention strained to breaking point. I wondered, naturally, if this quality was unique to her or if there was something distinctly Japanese about it.

There were a lot of Japanese in Varanasi, both the slightly idiotic-looking groups who photographed everything in sight and obeyed their tour leader unquestioningly, as if he were the Emperor, and the younger trance types, sometimes dread-locked and often wearing interesting T-shirts. Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first fire sermon, was one of the attractions for them. It was only six or seven miles north of the city and I don't know why I never got round to going. I should have gone with Sayoko. She was a Buddhist and went there on her own one day. She didn't ask me if I wanted to go, but there was no reason not to go, and it's not like I was averse to the idea or uninterested.

Sayoko was with us only a short time. We walked along the ghats a couple of times, had pancakes and coffee at the Lotus Lounge. On the way there we saw two dead rats, lying side by side on the promenade, the implication being that the Ganges was too filthy even for them. Once we were at the Lotus Lounge, we didn't speak. We'd hardly spoken before, on the way there, but while we were walking, seeing dead rats and stuff, it didn't matter. It didn't matter once we were
there either, waiting for our coffees and pancakes, but it was a new thing for me, sitting silently with someone, unable to speak, communicating only at the vibe level.

I barely got to know her and then she was gone, to Bodhgaya. I told her about the change, the ten per cent commission, but I'm not sure she understood. I was sad when she left, which was strange because, once she had gone, it was as if she had never been here.

An exhibition opened at the Kriti gallery: photographs by Dayanita Singh. We – Darrell, Laline and I – went to the opening along with Shashank and a few other guests from the Ganges View. Decorated in the international art style of plain white walls, the gallery would not have been out of place in London or New York. (This was it: the modernity found everywhere else in twenty-first century India
was
here in Varanasi after all!) Although the opening was quite crowded, it was very different to equivalent events in either city: there wasn't any free booze – or even a pay bar – so, once I'd eaten a few samosas and looked, in vain, for Isobel, there was nothing to do except concentrate on the art.