Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (31 page)

If there is one episode from my time in Varanasi that I would like to have on film, it is the one with the monkey and the sunglasses. I'd like to study it, to analyse it more closely. I was on the terrace, the only person there, reading Darrell's copy of Ginsberg's
Indian Journals
(I'd given up on
Women in Love).
My sunglasses were on the table, along with the remains of the soup and tea I'd ordered for lunch. I'd got over my stomach upset and was eating normally again, was no longer subsisting on bananas. There was a sudden crash on the corrugated iron of the roof behind me and a monkey leapt down onto the table. I jumped backwards, scared. The teacup fell to the floor and smashed. Unsure what to take,
the monkey grabbed my sunglasses and bounded off with them, over the wall, in the direction of the temple.

Relieved that I hadn't been touched, scratched or bitten, I walked over to the wall where the monkey had made his getaway. He was sitting a couple of feet away, holding my glasses in both hands. I thought for a moment that he was going to try them on, but he just sat there, on his haunches, clinging to a pair of sunglasses – they had prescription lenses – that were useless to him. We watched each other. He was holding my shades with just one hand now, waving them in my direction. It occurred to me that an idea was forming in his head, a more advanced notion than any he had yet conceived. He had snatched the sunglasses on impulse, because they were shiny and because they were there. But he had not stolen them, we both realised now; he had taken them hostage. Worthless in themselves, they nevertheless had considerable exchange value. I made a gesture I'd seen in statues of the Buddha: hand raised, dispelling fear.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Just wait.’

The monkey made no acknowledgement. I walked backwards, to the covered part of the terrace where there was a tray of fruit, a bunch of three bananas. I stuffed a couple in my back pocket and came out holding the third. I held it in one hand, at arm's length, ready to drop it if he rushed me, with the other closer to my chest, still raised in the
mudra
dispelling fear. The monkey was holding my sunglasses. Moving slowly, not taking my eyes off him, I put the banana on the wall separating us. When I had done this, I made sure that both my hands were visible, raised, palms facing him. He did not move. He just sat there, poker-faced or oblivious, it was impossible to say. I reached into my back pocket, took out a second banana and put it down beside the first. I retreated again, palms raised. The monkey looked away,
swatted at a fly with my glasses. He shook his head, a gesture that might have had no connection at all with my improved offer.

‘You really want to play hardball, don't you?’ I said. ‘OK, I'm through shitting around.’ I took out the last banana and put it next to the other two, forming a bunch. Keeping my eyes on him, I turned slightly so that he could see that I had no more bananas in my pocket. ‘That's my last offer,’ I said. ‘Take it or leave it.’ My hands were still raised, but now I crossed them over each other in what I hoped was a universal, trans-species gesture of finality, closure. I took a step back. If the offer was not accepted, if negotiations broke down, I had no intention of snatching the bananas back. It was a matter of honour now. The ball was in his court. I wanted my sunglasses back. Of course I wanted my sunglasses back, but I was conscious, also, of the historic importance of this encounter. In terms of the development of his species, the step the monkey was about to take – the step I hoped he would take – was on a par with Neil Armstrong's giant leap from the Lunar Module to the dusty surface of the moon.

‘It's down to you,’ I said. ‘You've got a straight choice. You can leave the sunglasses and take the 'nanas. In other words, you can start evolving. Or you can grab the 'nanas and make off with the glasses as well. But if you do that, you'll just be a fucking chimp for the rest of your days. And one other thing too. If you do that, I swear I'll hunt you down. Like a dog. So make your play’

In the course of this speech, my hands had gradually lowered. They hung at my hips now, like a gunslinger's, or an ape's. The monkey twitched slightly. Then he nimbly bounded over the wall and snatched up the bananas, quickly but carefully. He bounded off again, dropping – whether by intention or
by accident was impossible to say – my sunglasses on the table.

Events in Varanasi often assumed a kind of symmetry. The monkey and the sunglasses episode was still on my mind the next morning when I went up to the terrace for breakfast. Darrell was there already, eating porridge.

‘How are you, Darrellji?’

‘A bit discombobulated. Last night I dreamt I was attacked by a kangaroo.’

‘How weird.’

‘I know. It's the only dream I've had here, or at least the only one I can remember. And the only reason I remember it is because it's so ridiculous, so irrelevant. In the course of an average day here you see more animals than you do in a year in New York. It's a zoo and a city farm. Walking along the ghats is like going on safari.’

‘A kangaroo is one of the animals you can be guaranteed not to encounter.’

‘Exactly If they weren't practically extinct, I wouldn't be surprised to bump into a tiger. But what's a kangaroo doing, turning up in a dream and attacking me?’

I shook my head. I had no idea about the kangaroo, but he was right about the lack of dreams. Varanasi was surprisingly unconducive to them. You'd have thought that all the stuff encountered during the day – stuff that scarcely made sense in the normal run of things – would have felt quite at home in the crazed swirl of the unconscious, could have pasted itself in with little or no editing. But it didn't. You shut your eyes and slept, dreamlessly, and because you didn't dream it was not like being asleep.

‘I had a long nap here the other day,’ I said. ‘When I opened my eyes, it wasn't like waking up. It was like coming into
existence again. While my eyes were shut, I was not alive. I could just as well have been the chair I was sitting in, or the tile beneath the chair; or the foundations of the hotel, or even the mud, the earth it was built on.’

‘At least you weren't attacked by a kangaroo.’

‘I know. Maybe it's time for Hinduism to become more international, to reach out to Australia. A kangaroo god could be really popular. Ganoona could ride in its pouch, peeking out.’

‘Who is Ganoona?’

‘Ganoona is all that which is not anything else. But it's also that which is everything else.’

‘Ganoona?’

‘Yes. Nietzsche proclaimed the coming of the
ubermensch.
I proclaim the coming of Ganoona. In a kangaroo's pouch.’

I don't know where this idea of Ganoona came from. It would have made sense, in the context of a conversation about being attacked by a kangaroo, to have said that yesterday afternoon I had been involved in hostage negotiations with a monkey, but instead I had come out with this nonsense about Ganoona. I had never heard or thought of the name Ganoona before saying it, before it made itself said. But now that I had said it, Ganoona was a fact. It was real. It was Ganoona.

At the Nepalese temple near Meer ghat, just beneath the edge of the wooden roof, was a wooden frieze, decorated with erotic carvings. The figures were rounded, curvy, ambiguous. Sometimes it was difficult to tell exactly what was going on, sometimes you could see plainly: a woman masturbating a man while he caressed her breasts. Or a man fucking her from behind while one of her legs extended vertically, like a ballet dancer being stretched by a demanding trainer. Or his prick merging into her face. I knew about the famous erotic carvings
at Khajuraho, but had not expected to find such things here. They were like visions of a lost world I could only vaguely recall: the world of desire, of answered passion. Looking at them made me feel content and sad, homesick for a place to which I would never return.

That afternoon I lay on my bed and thought of sex. Or tried to. I have never had fantasies, only memories, memories that occasionally got slightly improved and embellished. But my memories of sex had become weirdly non-corporeal. I thought, guiltily, of Lal, of how her skin might feel beneath my hands, but could not make the idea tangible enough to feel aroused. My dick was not hard. I'd not had a hard-on in weeks. Perhaps I was losing the ability to get one. I tried masturbating, but found it difficult to concentrate. Images of Varanasi, the ghats, crowded in and blocked out everything else. It was a relief, in a way, to be free of the torment of sexual desire, but this lack was in itself a form of torment. What if this desire went away and never came back?

Such concerns soon appeared irrelevant luxuries. I'd had a slight cold and cough for weeks. Nothing unusual about that. Inhaling a mix of dust, pollution and the smoke of the dead meant that everyone who stayed here for more than a few days developed a cough. Once you were reconciled to that, walking along the ghats and hawking up green lumps of phlegm became one of the routine pleasures of life in Varanasi. I'd had a couple of bouts of diarrhoea but, considering all the things that could have gone wrong, they, like the cough, seemed nothing to worry about.

Then, late one afternoon, walking in the confused network of streets behind the riverfront buildings, I was involved in a freak accident. The lanes were tight and dark enough for the yellow, diamond-shaped phone signs – STD – to glow hospitably,
as if taverns in this area also provided opportunities – whether for treatment or contraction was unclear – of sexually transmitted diseases. Cauldrons of milk were being boiled and stirred to make sweets so sweet that dentists would caution against even looking at them too closely. I stepped into a quiet temple: green and cream walls, ochre pillars, mauve shrines. It was empty, just one other person there, sitting, not even asking where I was from. The presence of this single person made the temple emptier than if there was no one around.

A few yards from the temple I came to an intersection. The way ahead was temporarily blocked by a cow swaying down the lane that crossed the one I was on. Our eyes – one of its, two of mine – met. On its part there was no sign of comprehension, no evidence that my existence was even registered. Well, fine. The cow was in its cattle-trance and I was in my state of eager receptivity to everything that was going on around me, but there was room, even in this narrow lane, for all God's children, be they man or beast. The cow lumbered on. Its shit-caked tail was as drenched in shit as an artist's brush in paint. But just because I was me with a nice clean bottom and she was a cow with an ass caked in shit did not mean that I had not been her – or she me – in a previous existence. We could trade places in an instant. The value of your shares in the great Samsara-NASDAQ can go up as well as down. Still, all in all, a cow was a pretty odd thing to revere. I saw no reason to be cruel to them, had not eaten one for years, but apart from the fact that it was harmless, stupid and did not bite, a cow had nothing much to recommend it, or no more than a goat. Oh, well, live and let live. As I passed behind it, the cow flicked its tail, swatting me in the face with its tail, with its shit-drenched tail. There was a sharp intake of breath – mine – as my mouth opened in shock. I sort of shrieked. The cow must have heard me. It looked
back, its expression unchanged, and then lumbered on. I began spitting frantically, but not spitting as you usually do, using the tongue to propel spittle out of the mouth (that would have brought my tongue into contact with the slime). Keeping my tongue curled back in my mouth, I was blowing saliva out of my mouth, using my mouth like a whale's blowhole. There were a lot of people around, quite a few of them laughing. One old man even patted the cow on the haunches, as if to congratulate it. I pulled a wad of tissues from my pocket and scoured my nose and chin, all the time spitting and hawking. A kind woman pointed out a tap to me and I bent down to wipe my face properly, taking care to keep my mouth firmly closed so that whatever infection I may have picked up from the cow's shit would not be complicated by whatever infection I might pick up from the tap water. I walked on without saying thank you. I did not want to be ungrateful or rude, but in the circumstances I was worried about the hygienic consequences of forming words.

In the west, it's considered good luck if you get dog shit on your shoe, so, in Hinduism, getting swatted in the face by a cow's shitty tail might be regarded as super-auspicious. That was one way of looking at it; but another, more sinister possibility flashed through my mind. Did the cow know what it was doing? Was this an accident or was it a targeted assassination attempt, divinely bovine retribution for pissing in the Ganges? Impossible to say. Impossible, as well, to prove a connection between this incident and what happened later, but the fact of the matter is that, later that evening, I exploded.

I went to bed with my stomach tight as a drum. I farted horribly and often, farts that smelt as disgusting as other people's. I began to feel nauseous but, since I had taken my weekly and daily dose of malaria tablets only a few hours
earlier, resisted the temptation to throw up. Within half an hour it all came up, up and out, out and up. I was on my hands and knees, puking into the toilet, the smell of vomit instantly making me gag again. As soon as I had rinsed out my mouth, I was shitting yellow ooze into the toilet. There was barely time to flush the toilet before I was on my knees puking again. My body was engaged in such a frenzied attempt to get rid of whatever it was that had got inside it that it was in danger of tearing itself apart. I puked ten times in the course of the night and shat constantly. There was even shit on the bed sheets. It wasn't that I'd shat myself in the bed; my bowels had turned so watery that my asshole was not tight enough to seal it all in. I lay in my shit-spotted bed. Every hair on my head was a spike nailed into my skull. My stomach had a viper flexing around inside it. The taste in my mouth, from the vomit and, even worse, the malaria pills that I'd thrown up, was appalling. Anyone who has ever taken a dab of MDMA knows how unpleasant that taste is. My tongue tasted like I had sucked a lozenge of MDMA for several hours in order to make it last as long as possible. I had some Coke in the fridge and gargled with it. It made no impact on the taste and, within minutes, I was back on the toilet, splatting it out again.